A Hitchhiker's Travels

For the few people that might actually read this, I've quit my job and I will be traveling from the end of the month until mid-August. I expect I will not be posting very frequently, even now, as I get my life in order and pack up everything I own into little boxes. On my trip though, I will be blogging at A Hitchhiker's Travels if you care to see.

But some time in mid June, there should be a detailed post on the Creationist Museum in Kentucky, as I go behind enemy lines. Despite jokes to the contrary, I will not carry matches, a lighter, or a flamethrower. As a future lawyer, arson is not in my best interests. Though I may pay admission with a fake $20 bill if I can.

And in later in the summer: Hitler on Ice, a Viking Funeral and Jews in Space!

The Anything But Courageous Debate

I missed the debate Wednesday night. I'm very happy about that, because my TV still works, and I cannot guarantee it would not have had a large hole in it afterward. So, I wake up the next day to check the politics reddit, just to see what some people are saying, and all of the top ten (12 of the top 15) links were separate complaints about the debate. It was shocking how unified everyone was writing about the horrible lack of substance and stampede of right-wing attack that passed for a debate on ABC. Glenn Greenwald bats leadoff here, as always in dealing with media nonsense:

My favorite (unintentionally revealing) media commentary about the debate is from The Washington Post's Anne Kornblut and Dan Balz, who devoted paragraph after paragraph to describing the substance-free "issues" that consumed most of the debate -- Obama's "remarks about small-town values, questions about his patriotism and the incendiary sermons of his former pastor . . . gaffes, missteps and past statements" -- and, at the end of the article, they added:

The debate also touched on Iraq, Iran, the Middle East, taxes, the economy, guns and affirmative action.

It's just not possible to express the wretched state of our establishment press better than that sentence does.

And over at Kos, Hunter presents the idea that this sham of a debate was just as historic as Obama's speech on race, but in a much more sinister sense:

What a contrast. Only a few weeks ago, we were presented with what was considered by many to be a historic speech by a presidential candidate on race in America -- historic for its substance, tone, delivery, and stark candor. Last night, we had an opposing, equally historic example -- and I sincerely mean that, I consider it to be every bit as significant as that word implies -- of the collapse of the political press into self-willed incompetence. You might as well pull any half-intelligent person off the street, and they would unquestionably have more difficult and significant questions for the two candidates. It was not merely a momentarily bad performance, by ABC, it was a debate explicitly designed to be what it was, which is far more telling.

Read the whole thing. I'm tempted to agree. There was such outrage than even Howie Kurtz, media critic extraordinaire, decried it, not just the lefty blogs. Maybe this embarrassment to the profession will be a wake-up call to the traditional media. Maybe they'll start to realize people care, and we can begin the healing process. The cynic is me still doubts.

And for a bigger sampling of the outrage, here's a summary from AMERICABlog.

Musical Mario Car

One of the coolest things I've seen in a while.


http://view.break.com/487616 - Watch more free videos

Man, it takes me a day just to figure this out on piano. Can't imagine the effort that went into this.

Media hatred isn't new.

This is a really interesting post.

But the right wing talk brigade doesn't exist just to build up their own or tear down Democrats. They have, from the moment they first rolled onto the air, existed to tell you that traditional news organizations are no good. The Washington Post? Inside the beltway losers out of touch with real America. CNN? The Clinton News Network. The New York Times? Please. Do you really have to ask?

Punditry has always aimed as much artillery at the people who deliver the news as it does at those who make it. There's a very good reason for this. Before you can convince someone of a lie, you need to make it more difficult for them to check your information. If you establish from the start that NPR is communist, MSNBC and CNN are slanted, and every newspaper this side of Journal's editorial page should be printed on pink paper, then any exaggeration you deliver becomes the de facto standard. Impugning the validity of other news sources is the first job of a successful pundit. They don't seek to be your sources of information by passing along reliable news. They do so by constantly assailing the legitimacy of other sources until you're left shaking your head at the absolute ignorance of everyone but Rush/Bill/Sean/Ann.

...

The myth of the "liberal media" came long before the blogs. Discrediting the "nattering nabobs" of the press is not a game that originated with bloggers. Every blogger I know is fully aware that we could not survive without the legwork done by hardworking, professional reporters. Bloggers are not competition to the traditional media -- though they do, hopefully, act as an occasional check on its excesses. However, even if the Internet were entirely dedicated to the downfall of existing media, it would be only one popgun in a chorus of cannons. A large part of the traditional media is dedicated to nothing less than making war on the rest.

Suffering the wounds from that war, the media might have chosen to hold to strict standards and fought back by dissecting the falsehoods being directed against good reporting. Instead, that job has been left, almost without exception, to the very bloggers Keen blames as the cause. The reaction of the traditional media was quite different.

In response to the assault from less factual sources, media both accelerated the already existing trend toward mingling news and entertainment and -- in the most twisted move imaginable -- sought to imitate the mudslingers. They joined the war not by upholding their standards, but by dismissing them. And again, they did so for the reason that Keen indicates as the break between amateur and professional: the perception that there was more money to be made on the less truthful side of the aisle.

It's a good point, I think, that blogs are not new in that regard. But how do we reestablish that facts are indeed important and reshape the news? Glenn Greenwald, in this interview, suggests mudslinging MAD:

The point isn't to start lowering oneself to that level and copying the worst parts of the Right's behavior. The point is to neutralize what they do so that it's no longer one-sided. If one country possesses nuclear weapons, a rival country wants to obtain them not to use them, but to render their use irrational, impossible. That's what Democrats and liberals must start doing with these election rituals.

Maybe that's the answer. But, as they suggest about Iran, I'm not sure the Right is rational enough for MAD to work as a deterrent. We probably need regulation of what qualifies as press, as I've suggested in the past (last few paragraphs, post-rant).

CNN calls Obama elitist

I just do not know where to start on this one. I once again had the profound misfortune of watching CNN while at the gym. And once again, I came away with anger.

So, here's the deal. Yesterday, at San Francisco fundraiser, Obama said the following:

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Daily Kos has the summary of the back and forth between campaigns here. Personally, I don't believe the comments are that big a deal, maybe just a little accidental slippage of the truth. But that's not even what I care about here. CNN, and Kitty Pilgrim in particular, very Seriously, and responsibly, charged into the fray to make sure we understand "Senator Obama's political attack on small-town America". She wanted to make sure we knew about the "outrage" at the "stunning comments". CNN wanted to make sure we judged for ourselves the last to last night's poll: "Do you believe that Senator Barack Obama's comments reveal his elitist attitude toward every hard working American?" Just like Fox News, that poll question is exceedingly fair and balanced, isn't it?

At points during the program, Pilgrim asks several correspondents for reactions, and they seem to be trying to offer the idea that it's not nearly as condemning a moment as she wanted.

PILGRIM: Words are being parsed very, very carefully. This is quite a statement. Errol, your thoughts on this?

ERROL LOUIS, "NEW YORK DAILY NEWS": I think this is a problem Barack Obama should have anticipated and could have easily avoided which is he's walking on a tight rope every time he goes and speaks. Every place I've seen him campaign, in every state, he does something that politicians don't usually do, which is to ask people to be better than they are.

And to sort of delve into it and to say for this nation to work we all have to be better, we have to be more understanding, we have to be more generous, we have to be a little less narrow minded. It's very different from what politicians normally do.

And Roland Martin:

Wow. Politically dumb because he actually told the truth. At some point we have to accept the reality that there are people in America now who are angry and are bitter. And we do blame other folks for certain things.

Basically, Kitty Pilgrim and her producers were trying to shove the storyline that this was a huge gaffe down the throats of their correspondents and viewers, with phrses like the "very important controversy". Instead, you see them call her out. Here's another exchange: Pilgrim says she'll put the remark up, but then she puts Obama's response statement, and Clinton's remarks, never actually showing what Obama said. After:

PILGRIM: What strikes me about that remark, Roland, is that Senator Clinton is using this as an occasion to talk about being presidential. Did Senator Obama do himself a disservice in this remark in not coming up with a solution in siding with the problem instead of the solution?

MARTIN: Well, first of all, we don't have -- do we have the full tape of what he said after that, as well? Or do we just have that?

Even Roland Martin on the show was trying to get her to be a little fairer, just in case, maybe the remarks are being distorted a bit. The good news is that while Pilgrim was stuffing the anti-Obama spin down our throats, CNN correspondents fought back on both her show and on the Situation Room, surprisingly enough.

I hate CNN, but maybe, just maybe, there's a small chance it won't be too bad this time despite the MSM trying it damnedest.

UPDATE: It gets so much better. I honestly can't remember the last thing Hillary attacked on that she didn't also do or that Bill didn't do in his 1992 campaign. It's hilarious.

Eminent Domain for Intellectual Property?

So, I've now seen two weird cases in the news that seem like patents are infringing on the public good.

Voting machines:

A Sequoia executive, Edwin Smith, put Union County Clerk Joanne Rajoppi on notice that an independent analysis would violate the licensing agreement between his firm and the county. In a terse two-page letter Smith also argued the voting machine software is a Sequoia trade secret and cannot be handed over to any third party.

Stray satellite:

In the face of unrelated legal battles between the current patent owner Boeing and the satellite's owner SES Americom - any efforts to salvage AMC-14 have been cast aside.

Primarily this is because SES is currently suing Boeing for an unrelated New Skies matter in the order of $50 million dollars - and Boeing told SES that the patent was only available if SES Americom dropped the lawsuit.

Doesn't this seem wrong? Isn't intellectual property subject to eminent domain? SCOTUS said so back in 1912. Voting transparency is fundamental to our society, so I feel eminent domain definitely applies in the first case. It's a tougher argument for a privately owned satellite, but space research has been said to be good for advancement of mankind before, so maybe it applies. More likely to apply is a principle in tort law where if one party has a minor inconvenience in order to solve the entire dispute, they are made to swallow it. I feel $50 mil is a minor inconvenience compared to a likely multi-billion dollar satellite. Then again, I don't know for sure.

Fox News Documentary

I wasn't going to say anything more about Fox News specifically, because most people know how absurd it is, and I've long since given up. But this, from the Daily Show last night, is just hilarious and says it all.

Bill can also lie to be a loyal husband.

I thought he was supposed to be a master politician. The polls were just starting to turn back slightly in Hillary's favor, implying that the damage from Tusla was starting to wear off. So why, Bill, do you bring it up again? And that you manage to lie 4 times in about a minute doing so is not only poor ethics, but poor strategy at this point, no?

UPDATE: Whoops, 8 times total.

Slot Machines vs. Voting Machines

Tables are usually good for getting a point across. A greater point that this illustrates is that it is not the concept of e-voting that is the problem, merely the implementation - the lack of any oversight or security. Like everything else in society, moving towards computers in inevitable, really - we just have to work on making it incorruptible.

Duties of a Citizen

This is a problem that I'm sure we've all known about for some time.

I make it clear to my students that it is not only their right but their duty to arrive at their own conclusions. They are free to defend rendition, waterboarding, or any other aspect of America's post-9/11 armamentarium. But I challenge their right to tune out the world, and I question any system or society that can produce such students and call them educated. I am concerned for the nation when a cohort of students so talented and bright is oblivious to all such matters. If they are failing us, it is because we have failed them.

...

As a nation, we spend an inordinate amount of time fretting about illegal immigration and painfully little on what it means to be a citizen, beyond the legal status conferred by accident of birth or public processing. We are too busy building a wall around us to notice that we are shutting ourselves in. Intent on exporting democracy — spending blood and billions in pursuit of it abroad — we have shown a decided lack of interest in exercising or promoting democracy at home.

This ties into a discussion I had a while back. I think, on a moral level, voting should be mandatory. It is more than a right, it is a duty. The problem comes when you try to actually make it policy. Voting day is not a national holiday, workers are not guaranteed time off, voting credentials are constantly questioned inappropriately, etc. Also, how do you enforce it? Economic penalties? A large portion of the people that aren't voting for all these reasons are doing so because they are already poor. Several other countries do levy a fine for not voting, even absentee, but I'm just not sure that's fair, given our country's current makeup. And I suppose voting is useless if the voter is uninformed, so Gup's perspective may have more relevance. We are in complete agreement in that democracy requires participation - if there is no will to participate, how can we hope to control our own fates?

Did the General betray us after all?

I've been willing to give General Petraeus the benefit of the doubt so far. I didn't watch this last testimony, but read that he was making an effort to remain intellectually honest, and preserve his role as a general and non-politician. And he was put in an impossible position of trying to "win" a war he didn't start. I didn't see great evidence (though I didn't look all that hard) that he was a loyal more to Bush than at least what he sees as the truth, and to me, it seemed that most of the bloggers saying that were dismissing Petraeus's statements based on that assumption, rather than checking their veracity. And mostly, I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, and try to reserve my opinion, because the guy's son was a college teammate of mine, and it just felt wrong badmouthing the guy's father.

But this is just inexcusable. This is knowingly lying about the actual conditions in Iraq to further the story that the surge is a "success." This is precisely what all the bloggers were claiming he was doing! I had faith that he could be a stand-up man, resistant to pressure of the Bush administration and really just trying to do what is best for our military. But he knows as well as us what happens to people that tell Bush something he doesn't want to hear. And being replaced is unacceptable with his particular political ambitions. It seems MoveOn was right all along, not that I would have doubted if I had cared to look.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan gives a reader's take. It's an interesting idea that if Petraeus were to stand up to Bush, he'd just be replaced, so he might as well do the best for his soldiers but giving Bush what he wants. And I do essentially argue that the first part is true above. However, Bush trusts Petraeus to the occasionally subverting the chain of command. Thus, doesn't it make sense that in this particular case, if Petraeus both actually believed what was best is different from what Bush wants to hear (as evidenced by his manipulating the graphs), he has an obligation to say so to Bush as an honorable man and general? Isn't there a good enough relationship there to not necessarily assume he will be discarded and to do what's right? I guess not, if he perceives his own future presidency is at stake.

UPDATE 2: Petreaus says, pretty definitively, that he will never hold public office. So then, why is he lying at all? Does he think we have to believe things are going well for the army to get it's job done? Is he blind to the very idea that withdrawal might be right? Seriously, if he's not gonna run for office, then really, why not tell the truth? He may be the only person Bush will listen to.

Botnets = Dirty Bomb?

Raise your hand if you understand computer security well enough to comprehend how a massive online attack shutting down our communications and financial networks might work. Anyone? Anyone at all? Perfect, then that's the right claim for the next round of fear-mongering.

It's also reportedly just the first step in having the nation's most powerful spy agency begin to take over information security responsibility for large chunks of the net. In January, President Bush signed an order, National Security Presidential Directive 54, that begins that process. The details are murky, since the order itself is classified.

To sell the plan to the private sector, Chertoff and other officials will likely talk about Chinese hackers infiltrating the military's most secure unclassified servers, and perhaps offer another iteration of the claim that a serious computer attack against the United States would deal an economic blow that makes the September 11 terrorist attack look like a parking ticket.

Beyond the hype, of course, there are some serious threats that will go under the microscope at RSA -- most prominently the pernicious influence of botnets, the large collections of compromised Windows machines that are used for online crime ranging from spam to phishing. The largest of these are estimated to be hundreds of thousands of computers strong.

But in keeping with the tone set by the United States, botnets are being recast as the equivalent of a dirty bomb. Consider the title of one panel on the malware: "Protecting the Homeland: How to Win the BotNet Battle?"

THREAT LEVEL's been on this for a little while. It seems that the fear from the War on Terror is wearing off, and we need a new threat so that we can entrust the government with more spying powers over Americans. That's really what is always comes down to isn't it?

The sad thing, as the post mentions, is that there are real security issues that will be overlooked by our government in their quest for even more sweeping powers. Sound familiar?

Let's give this an Orwell rating of 3, for inventing a new war, and attempting to further implement Big Brother directly. A 4 rating would have to be a successful sweeping change, and I'm not gonna bother with rating an event like the creation of Newspeak - that would be beyond 4. I'll give a full rationale for the ratings soon.

Ah, conservatives

We must end this occupation! (via Atrios) If nothing else, conservatives are sometimes good for a laugh.

Oh, and here's Digby on what led up to that comment. Also pretty funny, but more pathetic funny than "haha" funny.

What our Media is and isn't reporting

I haven't been doing this very long, and I'm already tired of writing about how terrible the media is. Or maybe I'm just feeling lazy today. Either way, I'll just pass on two links that illustrate fun new media complaints. They really are dangerous.

Greenwald:

I just received the following statement from the Vice Chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Rep. Lee Hamilton, in response to my inquiries last week (and numerous follow-up inquiries from readers here) about Attorney General Michael Mukasey's claims about the 9/11 attack and, specifically, about Mukasey's story that there was a pre-9/11 telephone call from an "Afghan safe house" into the U.S. that the Bush administration failed to intercept or investigate:

I am unfamiliar with the telephone call that Attorney General Mukasey cited in his appearance in San Francisco on March 27. The 9/11 Commission did not receive any information pertaining to its occurrence.

That's the statement in its entirety, and it's hard to imagine how it could be any clearer...

In light of Hamilton's amazing comment, could journalists possibly now report on this story? One of two things is true about Mukasey's extraordinary claim about how and why the 9/11 attacks occurred. Either:

(1) The Bush administration concealed this obviously vital episode from the 9/11 Commission and from everyone else, until Mukasey tearfully trotted it out last week; or,

(2) Mukasey, the nation's highest law enforcement officer, made this story up in order to scare and manipulate Americans into believing that FISA and other surveillance safeguards caused the 9/11 attacks and therefore the Government should be given more unchecked spying powers.

Either way, isn't it rather self-evidently a huge story?

That's was the media is not reporting on, and here's what it is (from Digby):

Mitchell interviews Ann Kornbluth, a WaPo reporter who recently wrote a story about the anecdotes Clinton tells on the campaign trail which apparently got the attention of a hospital in Ohio. The hospital then decided to go on the record denying the veracity of this woman's story...Mitchell and Kornbluth both agree, however, that it doesn't matter whether the story is true or false (or that there are millions of similar examples of people dying for lack of insurance and proper health care.) None of that is relevant:

Mitchell: The Clinton campaign finds itself in another credibility gap, this time over a heart tugging health care story. Senator Clinton has been telling this story for weeks now out on the campaign:

Video:
Clinton: The doctors and the nurses tried hard, but they weren't able to save her baby. For fifteen days doctors and nurses worked heroically. But she died.

It is so wrong in such a good great and rich country that a young woman and her baby would die because she didn't have health insurance or a hundred dollars to get examined.

Mitchell: Well, it turns out it's not true. After reading about the story in the Washington Post, hospital officials demanded that the Clinton campaign stop using that anecdote. They say there is no indication that this woman was denied medical care, that in fact, she did have insurance.

...

Kornbluth: Well, this deputy sheriff, Brian Holman, met with her during a regular campaign stop. She had Chelsea with her and Ted Strickland the governor. He told this story, it was almost exactly as she repeated it, in the clip that you played. Uhm and she went on and started using it on the stump. And you know we all sort of hear these stories, and she doesn't use any names, so it's difficult to check it out but, but a couple of weeks ago I wrote a story about stuff she says in her speeches and started to write about this woman...the central question is, should the campaign be vetting things before Senator Clinton says them on the campaign trail, especially given her recent problems with the story from Bosnia.

Mitchell: And that is the problem isn't it? That this contributes to a perception, fair or not fair, that she's got a problem telling stories that are accurate. Not to put too fine a point on it, it does damage her credibility.

Kornbluth: And we've seen this movie before. When Al Gore, the first time he was quote unquote caught saying something that wasn't entirely accurate, again, fair or unfair, it became a storyline. After that, going forward, he was under extreme scrutiny for that.The same thing happened with John Kerry, when he was seen as being for something before he was against it, constantly looked for flip-flopping in his stories.

So I think Senator Clinton has discovered that there is something out there that she has to be really careful about and it's the facts of the stories that she tells, whether that's fair or not.

Notice the passive voice: "whether that's fair or not." The press apparently have nothing to do with determining whether it is fair, setting the record straight or getting the facts. It's all about "perception" --- perception that is directly caused by lies they publish, spin they present as truth and "storylines" they create.

...

You may hate Clinton with everything in your being, and that's fine. But this kind of journalism is what's killing our political system and what gets people like John McCain and George W. Bush elected. Clinton was repeating a story about bad health care which she heard on the campaign trail from an American citizen. She wasn't tooting her own horn or putting down her opponent in the telling of it. She was illustrating the plight of the uninsured in this country, which even if it turns out to not be specifically correct in the details, is certainly not something that doesn't happen every day to somebody in this country.

In fact, I suspect this particular "gotcha" is being done to degrade the argument against universal health care as much as to embarrass Senator Clinton. The Clinton Rules state that if any part of a story is proven true, the entire story is true. The corollary is that if any part of a story about a Republican is proved to be false then the entire story is false. The same concept is at work with health care here. If any detail about bad health care in the US can be shown as false, then notions that our health care system is screwed up are also false. Get ready for more of this. I don't know if it will work, but if they can get the media to play it like this, then the subliminal subtext going out there is that Democrats are lying about health care. They don't have to convince everybody, just a few.

Ladies and Gents, our Fourth Estate.

Greenwald nails it again.

The U.S. establishment media in a nutshell.

In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to "domestic military operations" within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

"Yoo and torture" - 102

"Mukasey and 9/11" -- 73

"Yoo and Fourth Amendment" -- 16

"Obama and bowling" -- 1,043

"Obama and Wright" -- More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)

"Obama and patriotism" - 1,607

"Clinton and Lewinsky" -- 1,079

"Abortion" is not a fruitful search.

If you can't overturn Roe v. Wade, why not just put out an all encompassing health services search engine that simply pretends abortion doesn't exist? Again, if you don't know it's there, you can't even think of doing it.

I think we need something like the Washington Post fact checker's Pinocchio rating, but rather an Orwell rating to grade each event's relation to our slow slide into 1984. This would maybe be a Orwell rating of 2 (out of four, since I'm using the Pinocchio scale). Not sure what exactly this rating means - perhaps I need to flesh it out more. But 2 sounds about right.

UPDATE: They apparently reversed the censorship the same day. At least someone had some common sense.

Michigan Preiew Weekend

At Michigan's Preview Weekend now. Strangely not too many people here right out of college - most seem to have worked two years or so. And lots of people also want to do good things in the world, for many independent and interesting reasons, too.

I've already begun to establish my reputation as a gregarious, loud, and fairly opinionated person, who's hopefully at least entertaining amidst the many rants. Though I suppose it's a good sign that within a few hours I had someone tell me they'd vote for me if I run for office. Anyway, I have a mock torts class tomorrow and a real Con Law class, so hopefully I'll have a good idea for a blog from it - I'm already a couple ideas behind. I should quit my job or something... Oh wait.

Interesting Post on Prisoners' Rights

The Debate Link discusses voting rights for prisoners. I recently had a similar discussion about Justice in the context of whether, even given Bush's war crimes, he should, or in fact must, be given the death penalty if convicted.

The main justification for the death penalty in this case is that no one person has committed crimes the level of his in the history of the USA, and since we are willing to put some people to death, how can we justify not doing so to a war criminal? Though the death penalty is an extreme and irreversible punishment, and exercising mercy in a capital case would not necessarily undermine our entire system of justice, especially if length of time in jail is the standard metric, as David suggests.

Schools Training Americans to be Subservient

We all know school is as much about training kids to respect authority and function in a hierarchical society as it is about math, science, social studies, and language arts. But lately we've seen a few cases where school teaches us that authority is absolute and can do whatever it wants with regard to students' rights. We've seen unauthorized locker searches be justified, but strip searches of 13 year old girls? With no real cause?

When Wilson ordered the search, the only evidence that Savana had violated school policy was the uncorroborated accusation from Marissa, who was in trouble herself and eager to shift the blame. Even Marissa (who had pills in her pockets, not her underwear) did not claim that Savana currently possessed any pills, let alone that she had hidden them under her clothes.

Savana, who was closely supervised after Wilson approached her, did not have an opportunity to stash contraband. As the American Civil Liberties Union puts it, "There was no reason to suspect that a thirteen-year-old honor-roll student with a clean disciplinary record had adopted drug-smuggling practices associated with international narcotrafficking, or to suppose that other middle-school students would willingly consume ibuprofen that was stored in another student's crotch."

Does anyone still wonder why no one is in a major uproar about wiretapping and an authoritarian state? We're being taught that this is how it's supposed to be at the earliest levels. Or am I mixing up cause and effect - are they teaching it because it's become the norm in society? I hope so - at least that might be more quickly correctable.

Anti-Intellectualism II

Jessica Hagy makes my point in the equivalent of 1000 words.

Fixing the MSM

Yesterday I blogged about the Responsible Plan to End the War, and to me the most striking part of it is that they do take the media to task for not doing their job. However, the Plan is fairly limited in suggestions for how to fix the MSM, and so I wanted to reprint an idea I had that was buried in my longest post ever.

The real difficulty in disseminating truth lies in the reality that most people out there do not read blogs. Television news and print journalism are not going to go away for a long time, if ever. A great many people like their news fed to them passively, so I don't think the blogging community will overtake the MSM completely any time soon. Also, there are a great many blogs with no editors - some will be heard, some say truly inane things, and some will just be lost in the shuffle. Only our readers' willingness to fact-check gives us credibility. If the MSM were somehow just replaced by blogs everyone would go deaf with the noise. We need some sort of hybrid of the two.

Here's an idea: The government could establish a national Ombudsman department, under either the FCC or DOJ, with subpoena power. Hopefully they could be independent, just as we hope in the future the DOJ will also be. The department's first task would obviously be checking on the government's behind the scenes connections to the media and finding ways to sever them. More generally, they'd be checking that national media outlets were living up to some journalistic standard, and would perhaps air a 30 or 60 second report on each news program with their most current accuracy rating and breakdowns of how their news reporting time is spent. Maybe the report could include a "breakthrough score" to indicate how well the station does on investigative journalism - to bring that back into style.

With enough media outlets to choose from, this could actually be a sort of free-market, competition-based media solution. The news stations would stop telling us what we want to see, and instead, we choose to watch the stations that we want to watch, complete with ratings and reminders about how accurate and relevant they are. The stations will be forced to tailor their content to compete. Right now, there is not enough competition in the media to make this work, and people are forced to watch or read something. But that's where the blogs come in. Television and internet are converging, and soon the playing field between the MSM and the blogs may be leveled. To help that goal, along with the creation of the national Ombudsman, if it is possible to lower the barrier to entry further to allow blogs to catch up to the MSM in production capability, that will foster the competition needed to hold the news accountable. Maybe, for example, the government could create low-interest loans to start a new national news station, and limit what the distributors could charge for a good news station (remember, there are ratings now). I'm sure this is not the perfect solution, but maybe between the Ombudsman and competition, or some other method, we can fix the MSM, and make sure that we are not lied into an unnecessary war again.

The Responsible Plan talks about FCC regulation of media ownership. It seems the idea of killing off the oligopoly is the one they want to take. But they are talking about new ownership, not dismantling the current model like Bell Telephone. I think if we could find a way to break the current national media oligopoly, it is another alternative. Though we can't do it based on region like Bell. We have local news already, and it serves a different purpose. Anyway, I'm guessing that reducing barrier to entry further will create the same effect if not give better results, and may be inevitable given technology, but I'd be willing to explore either option.

War Criminals

Is John Yoo a bigger war criminal than Bush or Cheney? He certainly gave them the license to torture.

A New Contract with America

The Responsible Plan to End the War. It's got a nice ring to it, no? It's purpose: to take us back to the most fundamental, perfectly idealist view of how a Republic should work, using a purely progressive agenda as a platform. It's a thing of beauty. Honestly, in order to really appreciate this, two things need to happen. One, you just need to read the document. Two you need to see how many Congressional candidates have signed on. Hell, even the Washington Post picked it up.

First the document itself: In 22 pages, the Responsible Plan calls for the following items: End U.S. military action in Iraq, using U.S. diplomatic power, addressing humanitarian concerns, restoring our Constitution, restoring our military, restoring independence to the media, creating a new, U.S.-centered energy policy. The first three deal with fixing what we created in Iraq. The gist of it is that it is nation-building we need, not military occupation. We need to build up their infrastructure and economy or their government will not be worth much, and may collapse. "The Departments of State, Agriculture, Commerce, Transportation, Justice, and Treasury must be directly engaged in creating this solution," the document says, as well as asking for a higher level of international cooperation. I agree completely with the sentiment, and they go further in demanding this not be a leverage point for oil, but that we focus solely on the stability and health of the country.

I am even more excited by the second half of the document, titled "Preventing Future Iraqs". The biggest problem with this whole debacle is not that the Bush Administration made a mistake, or even that they lied once. It's that, as a nation, we were not prepared for the possibility of an out-of-control executive and thus could not handle it. Our Constitution, our checks and balances, and our media failed us and as nobody stood up, it only got worse. Right now, it addition to fixing the mess we're in now, we must reinforce our safeguards so that this can never happen again. When the ship is sinking, you must both bail the water and fix the leak. This is what the second half of the Responsible Plan demands - fixing our government's leak. If ratified by election of the supporting candidates, it is a formal mea culpa from the people of the United States for our complacency, and a resulting acknowledgement that all we can do now is ensure that it can never happen again. This is the only way the ideal of America can survive.

The second point that makes Darcy Burner's creation so amazing is that getting candidates (in addition to Gen. Eaton, Brig. Gen. Johns, Dr. Korb and Cpt. Seaquist - some orignal endorsers) to sign on creates a direct mandate from the American people. If we manage to vote these people into office, they will all clearly be required to advocate this plan, and since so far 42 candidates (38 House and 4 Senate) have signed on, they will have the power to do so. That is nearly a tenth of Congress, and seeing the effectiveness, more sitting senators and representatives will surely sign on. The progressives are angry, and we're taking back our country by using the very ideal our government set forth. We're writing a new Contract with America, and this time, America actually gets a say first.

American Anti-Intellectualism

Anti-intellectualism is the root of all evil. Or at least the root of all willful stupidity and ignorance. Anyone got suggestions on how to correct this? Will it self correct? Do we have to get to the point where America falls behind the rest of the world before we remember that trying to be the smartest is what got us on top in the first place?

From Singapore to Japan, politicians pretend to be smarter and better- educated than they actually are, because intellect is an asset at the polls. In the United States, almost alone among developed countries, politicians pretend to be less worldly and erudite than they are (Bill Clinton was masterful at hiding a brilliant mind behind folksy Arkansas sayings about pigs).

Alas, when a politician has the double disadvantage of obvious intelligence and an elite education and then on top of that tries to educate the public on a complex issue — as Al Gore did about climate change — then that candidate is derided as arrogant and out of touch.

Maybe when we elect Obama, it will signify the end of it - he is a Harvard-educated policy wonk. Though he'll likely be elected in spite of that. As long certain talk show hosts feed the hatred of the educated, intelligent, and informed liberal, I'm not sure how to fix anti-intellectualism. I'm not sure there is a way. This might be the one issue I'm really not optimistic about. It's going to take more than an ad campaign. It might take a realization that evolution-doubting, UFO seeing, "elitist"-hating America has suddenly become a second citizen in the world. By the time we stop being anti-intellectual, the world may be so fundamentally changed that the best we can hope to climb back to is not dictating world affairs, but being a good world citizen. Hell, maybe that's a good thing for all of us.

When did "elite" stop meaning something to strive for, and begin meaning something to despise?

Feel Good Story of the Day

I wish I saw more stories like this in the news.

Clinton skipped right over "too far" and has now switched sides.

There's so much here to hate. But this is no longer about which candidate you prefer. This is about the fact that she has completely switched sides:

Drudge. Limbaugh. The American Spectator. Richard Mellon Scaife. What exactly is it going to take before Clinton campaign staffers recognize that they are, in essence, now working for the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy?

What the hell is this? You can position her absurd arguments for the delegates as desperation - even trying to convince superdelegates to vote based on the big states popular vote electoral college or telling us the pledged delegates should be fair game. I might even be tempted to excuse her big donors' extortion attempts and vote-buying attempts, since they were just her donors, not her campaign. But this is really just too far. She's switched parties. She's even taken to calling Obama a "liberal" as if it were a dirty word. This is absolutely absurd - it no longer matters if you favor her policies. If you're a Democrat, how can you be ok with these tactics and associations? She's really no longer running as a Democrat at all!

Oh, and in today's column, Nicholas Kristof hits on something I've been thinking for a few days. Clinton, may in the end, be remembered with the same fondness as Nader. Nader did lots of great things for this country before delivering Bush. No reputation is safe from this kind of backlash.

Man, I miss the days when she was just trying to cheat by seating MI and FL after the fact. They seem like so long ago.

UPDATE: I should point out that the extortion of Pelosi does have other, disastrous effects, so it's not as easily shrugged off as I suggest. However, I seriously doubt they would follow through on that, so I can ignore it as a bluff for now.

New Goal For the Blog

Become big enough so Billo calls me a fascist.

How do we fix the horribly broken Media?

This Glenn Greenwald post is long, but one of the most important points I've heard anyone make about our society as a whole right now, and really needs to be read/watched (And here's the earlier post on the subject):

The significance of the interview lies as much in what it says about the American occupation of Iraq as it what it illustrates about the American media. In the American media's discussions of Iraq, when are the perspectives expressed here about our ongoing occupation -- views extremely common among Iraqis of all types and grounded in clear, indisputable facts -- ever heard by the average American news consumer? The answer is: "virtually never."

I wish I could scream this from the rooftops, but posting in this blog is the closest thing I can do right now. The reason our country has taken so long to realize the disaster of this war is because the media is only airing one side of the debate. The reason I hear some of my coworkers talk about defending ourselves from the terrorists as justification for the war, and saying so confidently, is because the media is only airing one side of the debate. The reason that we were able to be lied to in order to go in, that no Presidential candidates will discuss impeachment, that Pelosi took it off the table, that we can't seem to remember the simple tenets of the Fourth Amendment on FISA and Real ID, and that we accept NSA monitoring and a Surveillance State and no-knock warrants is because the media is only airing one side of the debate.

Political dissent was the point of the Fourth Amendment. That is really what the dangers of warrantless wiretapping are. But I would argue that as previous suppressive regimes have proven, it is much easier to suppress the will to dissent and get away with it, and the easiest way to do that is by controlling what the public hears and reads. In China, they are not subtle about this - they censor what can be seen and political dissent is punished. We, in America, rightfully would rail against such obvious tactics. However, when the media presents one side of an issue with minor differences, but presents it as a real debate about the issue, we can be satisfied that we have heard all sides before figuring out our answer. Our dissent-welcoming American minds are kept fat and happy when fed this junk food debate, the cake being fed to us by the Marie Antoinettes behind the corporate-controlled media because they cannot afford the political ramifications of giving us the bread.

It is ideological Newspeak. If we have the "right" and "left" set for us, then no position outside that narrow gap can even be thought. And you know what? It works. A presidential candidate like Dennis Kucinich, whose distinctly non-radical views (gay marriage, impeachment, single-payer health care, etc.) more closely fit with the progressives than any other candidate, is dismissed by both the right and left and a fringe candidate. Conservatives didn't bother attacking him, just dismissing him as the "loony left" with a wave of their hands, comfortable in the knowledge that Democrats and the press would do it for them. And we did. Not that, given this environment, it was wrong - I supported Obama back in July because I thought his leadership and coalition-building would actually do more good for the progressive agenda overall, but I agreed in principle more closely with Kucinich. I just thought he'd never be able to accomplish what he said anyway, because it was outside the incredibly narrow allowed range of views in this country's public discourse.

The problems of the media are not restricted to only airing one side of the debate. But rather, through lack of independence, and a desire for power that has completely reversed the traditional adversarial roles and killed investigative journalism, they shape the election to benefit a candidate that will be good to them. In his March 10th post, Greenwald writes that Tucker Carlson accidentally revealed the role of the American media:

A journalist should never do anything that "hurts" the powerful, otherwise the powerful won't give access to the press any longer. Presumably, the press should only do things that please the powerful so that the powerful keep talking to the press, so that the press in turn can keep pleasing the powerful, in an endless, symbiotic, mutually beneficial cycle.

Between that sick media desire for power, and a desire for ratings, we have all our election coverage. The reason that most people seem to think that primary election is close is because the media is telling them that. The reason that most people now believe the general election should be close is that the media is telling them that. No one in the MSM questions the expertise John McCain has "in the bank", even though they know they give McCain a free ride.

This is not new. We all know we have significant problems with voting security - electronic voting and Diebold, for example (another debate that is lacking in the MSM). Bush was handed the Presidency in 2000, and there is certainly evidence to suggest that the 2004 election was stolen in Ohio. There were whisperings about a stolen election in Ohio immediately after the election. The thing is, none of that matters if the media moves the vote to get their candidate! Kerry conceded very early, and the reason he did so was pretty clear - Bush had won the popular vote! Much as they are doing with this election, the media shaped the last two by repeating the good things about the Republican's image (cowboy, guy you could have a beer with), and smears about Gore (boring, "invented the internet" - something he never said) and Kerry (flip-flopper, Swift Boat lies - which I still hear repeated by some people to this day). The media shaped that election and gave us four more years of Bush. They certainly gave Bush the popular vote in 2004, and in so doing, lost us the ability to challenge the outcome.

A couple days ago, I saw this piece by Howell Raines, (via Andrew Sullivan) on the potential future of the New York Times. Soon after, I started really worrying about our society's access to uncorrupted information. Raines says:

As a reader, I believe a Murdoch takeover of our last independent national newspaper would be a disaster for the trustworthy reporting on which our civic life depends.

The destruction of the New York Times' credibility has two problems associated with it. For one, as Raines discusses, it is the most widely circulated paper in the country, and the last news source with a national subscriber base and no corporate control. It is independent, and it has a very trustworthy reputation. To lose that would be a dagger in the heart of the journalism institution. We would have no hold left in the fight against propaganda, and the job of disseminating the truth would all rest on the thousands of tiny shoulders of the blogosphere. The second, related problem is perhaps more devastating. Hundreds of thousands of people across the country will not realize. Oh, they'll read about the sale of the New York Times, and I'm sure CNN would report it, but what are the chances the Times or CNN also talks about the lasting effect on the credibility that its sale to a hedge fund or say, Time Warner, or even Murdoch himself has?

As Greenwald's evidence that I referenced in the beginning of this post makes clear, this would really be only the last straw in a media that is already so corrupt that it still cannot afford us a true debate on something that has already killed 4,000 Americans and at the very least 89,000 Iraqis (a study in 2006 said over 655,000). We already have a media hijacked for propaganda. So what can we do about it? What will prevent us from thinking we were always at war with Eastasia? Well, blogs, Google, and YouTube. Citizen journalism. We already have the tools to find out what's really happening. As this election is making clear, the MSM is trailing behind the blogs in getting information, but eventually they do. YouTube has very much changed what we're willing to swallow wholesale.

The real difficulty in disseminating truth lies in the reality that most people out there do not read blogs. Television news and print journalism are not going to go away for a long time, if ever. A great many people like their news fed to them passively, so I don't think the blogging community will overtake the MSM completely any time soon. Also, there are a great many blogs with no editors - some will be heard, some say truly inane things, and some will just be lost in the shuffle. Only our readers' willingness to fact-check gives us credibility. If the MSM were somehow just replaced by blogs everyone would go deaf with the noise. We need some sort of hybrid of the two.

Here's an idea: The government could establish a national Ombudsman department, under either the FCC or DOJ, with subpoena power. Hopefully they could be independent, just as we hope in the future the DOJ will also be. The department's first task would obviously be checking on the government's behind the scenes connections to the media and finding ways to sever them. More generally, they'd be checking that national media outlets were living up to some journalistic standard, and would perhaps air a 30 or 60 second report on each news program with their most current accuracy rating and breakdowns of how their news reporting time is spent. Maybe the report could include a "breakthrough score" to indicate how well the station does on investigative journalism - to bring that back into style.

With enough media outlets to choose from, this could actually be a sort of free-market, competition-based media solution. The news stations would stop telling us what we want to see, and instead, we choose to watch the stations that we want to watch, complete with ratings and reminders about how accurate and relevant they are. The stations will be forced to tailor their content to compete. Right now, there is not enough competition in the media to make this work, and people are forced to watch or read something. But that's where the blogs come in. Television and internet are converging, and soon the playing field between the MSM and the blogs may be leveled. To help that goal, along with the creation of the national Ombudsman, if it is possible to lower the barrier to entry further to allow blogs to catch up to the MSM in production capability, that will foster the competition needed to hold the news accountable. Maybe, for example, the government could create low-interest loans to start a new national news station, and limit what the distributors could charge for a good news station (remember, there are ratings now). I'm sure this is not the perfect solution, but maybe between the Ombudsman and competition, or some other method, we can fix the MSM, and make sure that we are not lied into an unnecessary war again.

Global Warming

Not that anyone reading this is a global warming denier, but here's the latest.

Resumé embellishment is so last election cycle.

This is really the year of the YouTube campaign. Key insight:

What makes this a YouTube campaign moment isn't that someone caught Hillary Clinton in an unguarded or reckless moment and posted the video on YouTube for all to see. No, what makes this a YouTube campaign moment is that the video from 12 years ago has ended up on YouTube to show that Clinton is completely wrong in almost every one of her assertions about that visit to Tuzla.

Maybe we'd move into New Politics even without Barack Obama. Maybe it was the times and political environment that demanded a new kind of politican. Transparency, thy name is YouTube.

World Court rulings are now not binding on States

Interesting case:

It seems to be a case where Bush actually wanted to comply with international law, but because we haven't ratified it, the Supreme Court stopped him. But then there's the question of whether World Court ruling is binding by international law, which we agreed to be bound when ratifying the UN Charter. I dunno the answer - maybe this is why I'm going to law school. Interesting stuff.

CNN Fun!

CNN Fun:

Sen. Hillary Clinton said she "misspoke" last week when she gave a dramatic description of her arrival in Bosnia 12 years ago, recounting a landing under sniper fire.

and

Clinton has mentioned the sniper fire at least twice earlier in the campaign, including in December in Dubuque, Iowa, before the caucuses in that state.

The word "lie" or any variant thereof, is never mentioned in the article, yet "misspoke" is prominently featured in the headline. I suppose this isn't CNN's fault, but just the attitude of the MSM. However, if anyone still thinks Obama is getting unfair treatment in the media, here's another instance of the other way around. And 25 more... A summary from that post:

Even when Obama's coverage is more positive than Hillary's it can still be biased against him. If Obama earns an A, the media give him a B -. If Hillary earns a D, the media give her a C+. No matter what McCain does, he gets an A++++.

But the media goes and says, "Gee, we gave Obama a B- and we gave Hillary a C+, let's now wring our hands about how awful we are to Hillary." But grading on a curve, or false equivalency, or "even-steven-itis" is profoundly biased against a candidate like Obama who has been beating tremendous odds and run a nearly flawless campaign. Even if Obama sometimes gets better coverage than Hillary does, his coverage is consistently more negative than his actual performance and Hillary and McCain's are consistently more positive than their actual performances.

Mostly, I'm just really really tired of the media blithely repeating the Clinton talking points, especially the one about him getting unfair coverage. Maybe with the Wright thing, they'll stop saying it, but I am still not hearing calls for her tax returns from anyone in the MSM.

The Elegant Universe - Online!

When I was in high school, I read a book that steered me to what I was certain would be my profession - theoretical physics, specifically string theory. The book was The Elegant Unvierse, by Brian Greene. Now of course, my interests have changed somewhat, so by sophomore year of college I had abandoned that career path, but I still cannot recommend this book enough.

Brian Greene has the amazing ability to break down string theory, one of the most complicated and difficult to understand physics theories there is, to the lay man, in a way not seen since Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. You do need a very rudimentary understanding of physics to appreciate it, but again, I read it in high school.

I could write about string theory, tell you what the book's basically about, but I'll let the author do it himself , since he's better at it. On the title, he says:

Physicists often use the term elegant to describe a solution to a problem that is as powerful as it is simple. It's a solution which cuts to the heart of an important problem with such clarity that it almost leaves no doubt that the solution is either right or at least on the right track. And string theory is just that kind of solution. It provides the first way of putting quantum mechanics and general relativity together -- that is, merging the laws of the small and the laws of the large -- and it does it in such a sleek manner that it is quite breathtaking. And the term elegant really describes that kind of solution.

Anyway, NOVA turned it into a three hour mini-series back in 2003, and now it's online. So if you're too lazy to read the book, at least watch this. Seriously, it changed my life.

RIP, Gary Gygax.

I love my school. The nerd-factor cannot be topped.

A Mosaic: 4,000 Americans Dead

Wow. You just have to see it.

More Police Creating Criminals

Don't we have enough criminals already, that we should focus on catching, without the police, or in this case the feds creating more? Between this and Operation Lucky Bag, how will the police even have the time to lock up all those dangerous pot smokers?

DHS Blinks

Love it:

The information the government wants the states to keep and share in Real ID is ripe for abuse, despite the government's privacy and security promises, he said.

"They tell us our data is safe," Schweitzer said. "You tell that to the passport people"

Brian Schweitzer, you are my favorite person for the day.

Dems in Congress

Honestly, given what we've seen, it's never a surprise when they do capitulate to Bush. It was more of a surprise when the House actually stood up to the President's bullying on FISA. Anyway, what seems odd to me is how inept they are at political strategy. Here's the latest point on this, and I agree completely. Greenwald also mentioned this phenomenon in regard to FISA before they eventually did show a little backbone. That time they did seem to get the point after a while. Will they now?

Love him or hate him, Obama's not just another politician.

I'm not sure how many times I've had to say it, but a lot of people not in Obama's camp seem to feel one thing about Obama that I'd argue is just wrong - that he is just another politician, and can't mean what he says. And to suggest otherwise is to be naive. But maybe Charles Murray, a conservative over at the National Review of all places, can convince someone, since he's caught on to this. He won't vote for Obama on ideological grounds, but he at least realizes he's the real thing.

The thing is, it takes a certain circularity to believe that he's just lying about all of this. If you assume Obama is just another politician, then anything he does can easily be doubted, and that conclusion is used as proof that he is, as one friend remarked, a "Teflon-coated hypocrite". His race speech is a perfect example. "Of course he is hiding his real views and agrees with Wright" , you might say. "How conveniently timed," you might say, while sweeping away the whole point of the speech because it served a political purpose. Yes, it was given because race had gotten out of hand in the campaign, and was going to be damaging. But it would damage not only to the campaign, but also national public discourse. Obama wanted to correct both problems, and I'd say the second more than the first. The speech may have hurt him in the general election, and he's all but wrapped up the nomination, but he had to give it because it was right. Of course, if it works out, it could have also just been a really good political move, according to the cynics.

Other examples come from the times he has to play defense in the campaign. The negative ads, the delaying in Michigan to enforce the rules. But he didn't start the negative ads, and he's damned either way with them. If he responds, he's "just as bad". If he doesn't, he can't answer the phone at 3AM. With MI, he is playing politics by delaying, but it is because he played by the rules before, and Clinton completely did an about-face when it seemed she was going to lose.

He's not perfect (he seems to be either misguided or pandering on ethanol subsidies). And since he has to fight back on Clinton's negative attacks, it's easy for those who assume he's just as slimy as she is to point out one or two things and take is as equivalence. But he's a lot better than the alternatives (he's really the only one trying to be honest), and again it's circular to believe otherwise. The assumption of his hypocrisy is the only basis that hasn't been proven false by facts. Whereas there is real, hard evidence that other candidates are just willing to lie to get your votes.

Someone tell the media: We are a racist country. Now let's fix it.

Since Obama asked the country to have an adult conversation on race, some people feel free to start commenting on race, when they're clearly not ready for an adult conversation.

Glenn Greenwald has a long post on it, which is definitely worth reading. The main point:

While the dominant political faction in the United States built itself and continues to feed and nourish itself with this sort of endless exploitation of racial resentments and grievances -- and while it openly embraces far more powerful religious fanatics who espouse ideas at least as radical and repugnant as anything Jeremiah Wright has ever said -- let's spend the next eight months talking about the controversial comments of a single, comparatively powerless black preacher and have our presidential election decided by that.

Cat's outta the bag. We are a racist country. Now the media needs to get in and shame all those that would write stuff like this (not safe for the easily offended), so that we can both take the crazy, outwardly racist section of the right out of power in this country, and begin to actually have that adult conversation in order to purge the more subtle racism too.

Law School!

Well, now that I've told my boss, I can put it in the blog.

I'm going to law school! It's looking like the University of Michigan, but other possibilities are Columbia, NYU, and Georgetown, depending on what the postal service brings me. I want to go be a constitutional or civil rights lawyer, to work on more issues than I can count, but two really big ones for me are voting rights and reform and and media accountability. Generally, I want to bring more power to the public to make the change they want to see, by giving everyone access to the right information and then making sure their votes count. We need to make sure the US government cannot abuse power like they have the last eight years (and more), and that is what I hope to help do.

An added bonus is that I'll be able to bring more legal insights and other ideas to the blog, which will be fun, at least for me. Not to mention a little more credibility so someone might actually care what I have to say. Anyway, that's where I am - I am now truly a recovering engineer.

Oh, and speaking of voting reform, I'd love to help with this if it's still going when I get there. It's a fascinating idea.

Obama's passport file and the Surveillance State

Since January, Barack Obama's passport file has been illegally accessed at least three times by employees of the Bureau of Consular Affairs, each time triggering an automatic investigation that can easily be leaked and turned into a media story. In fact, this is exactly what happened in 1992 with Bill Clinton. If this is a political move and not just employees' foolish curiously - given the administration's extreme disrespect for the law, I don't doubt it for a second - this is incredibly disgusting. But it's just the latest trend and not at all out of line with what we've seen from King George's Surveillance State.

...incidents like the snooping into Obama's passport file are not the exception, and are not even merely the rule, but are the pervasive and inevitable outcome of allowing government officials to spy on Americans without real oversight.

Yeah...

UPDATE: What on Earth is going on here? Does anybody actually believe it was harmless curiosity when it happened to both campaigns?

UPDATE 2: Make it a trifecta. Am I being too cynical to think they did it to McCain too to remove suspicion that it was political? I'm sure they would have known that the time this happened in 1992 would be uncovered, and that it'd be spun oppositely now, right? Wow, I sometimes amaze myself at how readily I can accept certain conspiracy theories with regard to this administration. But at this point, they've almost all turned out true, and just when you think it can't get worse, it turns out their imaginations are better than yours.

Richardson Endorses Obama

Daily Kos has it here.

Richardson's endorsement may be the beginning of a concerted push to pressure Clinton to acknowledge that she has fought a tough campaign but has come up short, that the race is over, and that it's time for her to recognize that our nominee for President will be Barack Obama.

Like I said before, the speech marked the end of the Clinton campaign.

Have I mentioned I dislike CNN?

Media adulation of Senator McCain has turned into manipulating the news to convince us he's better. Great.

Guilt by association is Old Politics.

I keep referencing this post in real life discussions, and the follow up is here. In them David Schraub gives an excellent framework for understanding how Obama's politics differ from his pastor, Rev. Wright's. Once you consider that this framework already exists, it is easy to see that Obama hears Wright's views as a familiar refrain, and can group them as a general viewpoint he does not agree with. Another, lighter, example would be if two friends agreed on most everything, but one was a vegetarian and one was not. In this case, one friend will hear the arguments for being a vegetarian (killing animals, environment), and nod and say "I know", but I just don't agree. Both examples involve a familiar refrain, and can thus be categorized as an opposing view that a friend holds, one on race, and one on vegetarianism.

More generally, one of Obama's persistent themes to his actions is the dismissal of the notion of guilt by association. He believes, and I agree completely, that everyone has something good to bring to the table, and a person can associate with others for that good, while not absorbing the bad. We've seen this repeatedly throughout the campaign, with "gaffes" such as hiring Donnie McClurkin, the "ex-gay," homophobic gospel singer, Tony Rezko, who he was never even accused of wrongdoing with, but went with him on a land deal, and now his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

Senator Obama feels he can associate with these people freely for their good attributes (being a good singer, giving him a good deal, or being a spiritual leader, etc.), as any person not in the public sphere would do. The reason for this is not naiveté, as some people would have us believe, but it is tied into his idea of rising above the old politics. He certainly knows that people see things differently and expect different things out of leaders and icons, but at the same time, his ideas of openness of government and honestly in politics suggest to us that he believes America is ready to accept that its leaders are human and have foibles. Moreover, he believes that we should all be able to see the good in each other and come together to solve problems despite our differences. His speech on race suggests the same thing - he's trusting in America to look at the actual issues that are important, and to believe that he will tell you his views, because he believes that he finally can.

Transparency, rising above the old politics, elimination of guilt by association, and voting on the issues rather than sound bytes are all tied together, and together they make up the message that Obama has been speaking about the entire campaign. His campaign is not primarily about any one traditional issue, but rather about rising above the old politics, and bringing public discourse to a new, more mature level. This is what he means.

CNN further misses the point.

This morning CNN had a poll asking whether after the speech, Obama (a) either still had more explaining to do, or (b) could put the matter behind him. Given those two choices, it's great that 68% of people voted for (b), but the choices themselves show CNN simply does not get it. This speech was not a rebuttal to a controversy, it was an address to a nation to solve a problem that plagues us. He cannot "put the matter behind him", and that's not the point. That's what everyone trying to declare we've solved racial issues has done, as it's gotten worse. The point is that none of us should put the matter behind us - we need to stand up and make it right.

A More Perfect Speech

Obama's speech on race: "A More Perfect Union"



I'm a little late to the game (I was at work), and this speech has been reviewed to death now. However, I'm just going to add my two cents anyway.

First, let me say that if you have not watched it yet, you absolutely need to do so. Your kids will be watching it in history class in the future.

This was not a campaign speech, it was a call to duty, both for him and from him. Obama saw the dangers in the racial campaign wars, and how the discourse itself was damaging the very idea of unity his campaign is beginning to sow. He felt this speech was his duty. As Americans, it is our duty to remember the spirit of the civil rights movement that we all celebrate each year with Dr. King's birthday and Black History Month. There was plenty more work to do when Reagan almost singlehandedly suspended the Civil Rights Era by polarizing the country along racial lines to get elected. Senator Obama today asked us to pick up where we left off, to get back on track fighting for what the Constitution already guarantees - true equality.

I also believe the reactions to today's speech are some of the biggest windows into the current hearts and minds of America. CNN did its best to illustrate how vapid the entire MSM is. During the speech and soon after, two headlines from CNN were "Obama speech: Former pastor 'like family to me'" and "Obama: Constitution stained by 'sin of slavery'". Neither title even suggests the scope or the purpose of the speech. This speech was not just a reaction to the media's attention on Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. That may have influenced the timing, but unlike the first headline suggests, this was not a speech about him. This was not a speech about how the Constitution is wrong, as the second headline suggests, but rather about how because of the guarantee that all men are created equal, we're still not where the Constitution needs us to be. The speech is about the fact that America has the ability to get there, and he knows that we have made some progress, and can make much more. It's about so much more than any one of the lines in his speech - it's about the very faith in a better America that is pushing him toward the White House. The very same faith that we all share when we go out in droves to support him, to hear him speak, and to cast our ballots.

Sadly, this brings me to Senator Clinton. If she can resist this tidal wave and somehow not immediately step down, realizing that she's now the foil in the way of history, I'm not sure what to say. A friend and Clinton supporter said to me today: "Eloquent as usual, but where's the substance?" after he watched the speech. This scared the hell out of me. Clinton's supporters have seemingly become so poisoned that they immediately equate eloquence with emptiness. I fear for the damage she has already done the the people that support her. The speeches we remember throughout history - King, Kennedy, FDR, were remembered because of their message and their delivery. This speech will join that list in the future.

The same Clinton supporter suggested that he only gave the speech because his poll numbers said he should. That certainly would have been Clinton's motivation, but I'll say it again: this was not a campaign speech. If he had wanted a campaign speech, he would have more directly addressed the attacks on Wright and left it at that. He might have used the time to talk policy, but then the speech would have lost its entire purpose. It would have become just another speech on the campaign trail. No, instead he used this opportunity to say what many people have been waiting years for a respected, powerful, black person to say on the most public of stages. This was not just a campaign speech. This was history.

The most important point in all this is that it does not matter that he was running for president when he gave this speech. He spoke about a pandemic that has infected this country since its inception, and that as a public, we seem to have forgotten our mission to cure it. These words simply needed to be spoken. I just consider myself fortunate that I can now cast a vote for the man who said them in the next presidential election.

UPDATE: I meant to flesh out the Clinton stepping down bit, since I really believe this speech drew the party together around Obama and marks the true end of Clinton's candidacy. But this comment on Glenn Greenwald's post about the speech (also worth reading as always) makes my point perfectly for me.

The Bear Stearns Collapse: Triage and Opportunity

It wasn't really a bailout for them. It was good for all of us that the economy didn't collapse.

No one who owned Bear stock was protected. This was to protect the small guys who don't even realize they were at risk. To decry this deal means you just don't get how dire a mess we were almost in. It is all well and good to be rich or a theoretical purist and talk about how the Fed should let the system collapse so that we can have a "cathartic" pricing event. Or that the Fed should just leave well enough alone. But the pain to the little guy in the streets who did nothing wrong would simply be too much. The Fed and other regulatory authorities leaving well enough alone is part of the reason we are where we are. First, get the water out of the boat and fix the leaks, and then make sure we never get here again. (Emphasis mine)

When it's an issue of total economic collapse, we do not have the luxury of a moral judgment, to see that the people making the risky decision get what they deserved. The moral facts of another Depression are just too much worse.

And in a related note, from Salon's Andrew Leonard:

Liberalism is no longer a dirty word, [Krugman] thunders; it's high time for government to get back in the business of governing. He might be right. As we review the wreckage created by Wall Street's finest minds, it is tempting to entertain the possibility that the impulse to deregulate and privatize and "trust" markets to be their own best guardian -- that epochal reimagining of government launched by Ronald Reagan -- has finally run its course.

And this:

But whether or not the current ills afflicting the economy do bloom into something much worse, it's hard to argue with the thesis that the rhetoric of market fundamentalism hasn't looked this threadbare since Ronald Reagan won office in 1980. Deregulated markets were given their chance. They didn't work, or, at least, they now look to be in need of serious overhaul. The question is whether Americans will seize the opportunity to rethink and reshape how government manages the economy. But will a President Clinton or Obama or McCain seize the day?

Finally, for the first time since Reagan, we have a chance to alter the discourse significantly. This crisis has finally woken us up to the fact that Wild West, top-down economics doesn't work, and now it's up to our leaders to reshape the discourse to something much more responsible. Senator Obama understood this very well when he called Reagan an agent of change - he profoundly changed the very way we think about economic regualtion and taxes. We need a movement to change it again. I can only hope we get that.

Divorcing Drug Development and Distribution.

I like alliteration.

Anyway, this is an interesting and creative idea - I want to read more about it.

However, there's a major catch-22 in the way here. This is a proposal to keep the politics out of drug making, but the current drug makers control the politics and will be out a lot of money, so it'll never get passed. And once again this brings us to a government not controlled by the drug companies - maybe it is possible, if we get that.

Bursting the Bubble of Racial Tension In the Campaign?

This is big news. The racial tension has been building, and the media and Clinton campaigns are getting away with too much. Hopefully a speech on the issue will diffuse what's been bubbling under the surface (if not actually the sticky stuff that's coating the surface) for this whole year so far.

Murdoch owns the entire Fourth Estate

The MSM is basically one unit, and its smears start with Fox. I'd say Fox needs to be shut down, but in reality, at this point, the virus has spread, and the MSM just needs to be ignored.

Transparency in action

He released his tax returns, unlike other candidates. He released all his earmark requests, unlike a certain other Democratic candidate, and now he's explained the questionable associations he's had, even with a land developer in connection with he was never even accused of any wrongdoing. Most remarkable about the last interview is that he went in to answer all the questions he would be asked, and he did exactly that. When Obama talks about the need for transparency, he is showing it by not hiding from the truth in this campaign.