Well, that was different, as far as elections go.
I've been holding off on my commentary since Monday's poll for a couple of reasons. The main one was that the election was so insanely close in some ridings that recounts were necessary; the other reason is that I wanted to see how the various parties and party leaders were going to react to things.
So what do we have here? We've got a minority government - but not just any minority government.
Because of the recent redistricting, there were 308 Parliamentary seats up for grabs in this election for the House of Commons. With this count, the Liberals needed 155 or more seats to secure a majority government, which they've enjoyed in the previous three mandates since the fall of the Progressive-Conservatives in 1993. The problem is, going into the election the Liberals were hurting badly from the sponsorship mess, and as a result were expected to get at best a minority government, with the worst case being a Conservative minority or majority. In the event of a minority, the Liberals would likely buddy up to the New Democratic Party, the closest party to the Liberals ideologically, to take on legislation. This would mean two things: one, the Liberals could stand up against the potential odd counter-coalition of the Conservatives and the Bloq Quebecois, and two, the NDP could use the threat of withdrawn support to force through a number of their own social programs.
In the end, this was the seat count:
Going into this election, the Liberals expected to lose ground but were confidently predicting a majority. The Conservatives were expecting to gain a great deal, and were confidently predicting their own majority. Both parties edged towards predicting a minority later in the campaign as they eroded their public support.
What ended up happening was that the Liberals lost many seats and ended up getting handed a big minority government. The Conservatives, however, stayed under the hundred-seat barrier, were mauled badly in Atlantic Canada, and failed to break into Ontario. In this effect, the election was a devastating defeat for both major parties, something each leader has acknowledged. Martin, still the prime minister, noted that the election was a time for voters to "pass judgement," and interpreted the election not as a mandate but as a rebuke and cautious permission to continue to exist. Harper spun his results as a victory - hell, the man's post-election speech made it sound like he thought he got a majority - but he's currently making noises about stepping down as Conservative leader to fall on his sword over the whole thing.
So both parties got smoked, and we're left with a minority government that's probably Liberal-NDP versus Conservative-BQ. But what do we have here? 135 plus 19 equals 154, or exactly 50% of the House of Commons. Not only do we have a minority government, but the coalition is a minority.
The picture for the other parties and smaller players is pretty surprising. Strategic voting showed its head quite a bit in this campaign, particularly for the NDP. Towards election day, people were increasingly convinced a Liberal minority would be the result, and undecided voters began to swing left to try and create an NDP-based counterbalance to the government. Traditionally, the New Democrats have served well in that role, both as a voice of opposition and as someone for the Liberals to pass off popular but controversial programs onto. ("Blame them!" "Blame us!") As a result, the NDP's support took a significant jump: their popular vote increased by roughly a million of the 13.5 million citizens who voted in this election, and their seats jumped from 12 to 19, almost making good their losses from the 2000 campaign.
Meanwhile, the BQ took people by surprise and essentially swallowed rural Quebec whole. Increasing their seat count by 50%, the Bloq is more powerful than it's ever been, and in a position to exert quite a bit of influence on things. The BQ is a social-democratic party like the NDP, though their sovereignty platform towards Quebec and language issues puts them very much at odds with the Liberals. And, of course, as French-speaking, socialist, seperatist, eastern, largely-Catholic politicians, the BQ is largely an affront to the existence of the Conservatives, who are their opposite in just about every way. However, the two are alike in one way: they both want a weaker federal government, and as a result there is going to be an extremely uncomfortable coalition working together against the Liberals. The fact that the Conservative-BQ coalition totals 153 seats - the one independent is one of the many refugees from the Alliance-PC merger who isn't fond of his former party - shows that not only do we have a minority government and a minority coalition, but even the opposition can't put together enough support to guarantee a topling.
What's a result of this? Essentially, Paul Martin is still the Prime Minister. (This is also the first time since 1908 that a party was handed four consecutive mandates.) However, all three other parties - and the independent - have enormous, government-destroying amounts of power and influence to threaten with. If the Conservatives and BQ close ranks and two MPs from the other side ally with them - or simply aren't in Commons that day - it would be possible to bring down the government. Alternately, the NDP could threaten to hold out its own support of Martin's party in exchange for some political goodies, also leaving the threat open. As well, something odd could happen like the BQ caucusing with the Liberals, which would be devastating for the Conservatives. In the middle of it all, there's one independent of a not-quite-ambiguous position, able to force or break a tie.
For all practical purposes, Canada has something between two and five prime ministers right now, depending on the mood of the Parliament. Augh.
So what's going to happen with all this? We're going to see a pretty shakey government, unless some lucky byelections give the Liberals or NDP one or more seats in the next few months. We're going to see some pretty rigid party discipline on the part of the Liberals, and probably the NDP, for any even vaguely-important bills, and a lot of tussling with confidence measures like national budgets. The Conservatives and BQ are going to buddy up against the Liberals, which will form one of the most uncomfortable alliances in Canadian political history, unless the BQ allies with the Liberals on some issues.
The NDP is going to be putting a lot of support behind the Liberals - in exchange for favors. Most of these favors will be of the type which will be amenable to the Bloq Quebecois' more liberal policies, most likely, so chances are the NDP is going to have a fairly easy time getting their own policies across - far moreso than the Liberals will.
The Conservatives' call for free votes on everything might as well be forgotten now. In the interest of trying to weaken the Liberals more, they're going to have to either pull out all the stops or act even more divided and ambiguous than they had during the election. This will make the Liberals look strong, the Conservatives weak, and more than likely bounce the Liberals back to a majority government in the next election.
There will probably be a lower-than-usual amount of Controversial Party Positions this election; the Liberals will be worried about having something go wrong and backfire against them later on. There'll probably be a slightly more leftward than usual tilt to things, though; expect Parliament to finally form a formal opinion on the gay marriage issue (for), marijuana and other soft drugs (pro-decriminalization or legalization), and probably some semi-sticky issues on subjects like genetic engineering (where the stance will be vaguely Green or NDP in standing). Constitutional issues and major regional policies probably won't show up, although I could be surprised.
The next election will happen in the next year to eighteen months - you've heard it here first as I call December 2005. It will happen for one of two reasons: either the Consevatives and their allies (or a rebelling NDP, or a backbencher Liberal revolt, or someone being out of town on a major vote) will defeat the Liberals on a confidence vote, forcing an election which will probably lead to a Conservative minority or majority, or the Liberals will pull a Chretien 2000 and call an election at a moment of major Conservative weakness, rebounding to their fifth mandate as a majority.
Some other interesting things about this election:
That's that for now. Appropriately enough, I'm off to Canada Day debauch - uh, celebrations for the bulk of July 1. Should I survive, I'll be back posting tomorrow or the day after. If not, of course, you are all required to avenge my death.
Many in the media are trying to position the upcoming documentary film America's Heart and Soul as a counterweight to Fahrenheit 9/11. I had written a couple paragraphs on how ridiculous this position is before finding out that the same public-relations firm trying to get F9/11 banned is promoting AH&S as an antidote to F9/11 and that Disney invited the group Move America Forward, formed in response to Moore's movie, to an early private showing of AH&S. This totally validates what the earlier draft had called Michael Moore's paranoid ranting about "Disney joining forces with the right-wing kooks who have come together to attempt to censor Fahrenheit 9/11".
There appears to be nothing against Fahrenheit 9/11 in America's Heart and Soul, only in its marketing. As near as I can tell (having not seen it yet), AH&S says that there are many great things about the United States that Americans should be proud of. F9/11 says that the Bush administration is not one of them. There is no conflict between these two opinions. The only people claiming that AH&S showcases only Republican Party values are the Kaloogian extremists in the Republican Party and the mainstream media which gladly and uncritically echoes them.
The movie which comes closest to being the opposite of Fahrenheit 9/11 is DC 9/11: Time of Crisis (aka The Big Dance), the Showtime special whose script is based on the White House's official version of events specially provided to the producers. I've never seen it, but I've heard that its tenuous connection to the facts challenges the worst that anyone has had to say about F9/11.
The handover of Iraq was completed two days early, but at the pace us slackers are going, we might not notice until June 30th. ;) So, I'll throw some quick thoughts up.
First, on the execution. It's a brilliant maneuver to screw up any plans the terrorists might have, but part of me doesn't like how they allowed fear of the terrorists to change their plans. I think the good outweighs the bad here.
Secondly, on the symbolism. The new government is pointedly not flying the Almost-Israeli Crescent that their benevolent American overlords designed for them. They're not flying the pre-Saddam Iraqi flag either. Instead, they fly Saddam's flag, symbolizing the merger of Iraqi government with Islam. Expect a fundamentalist government.
Thirdly, on the obvious. Let's watch the new government seize the oil fields and give US forces a week to leave the country, and we'll see how "independent" and "sovereign" they really are.
Who do I give the kudos to? It's widely reported that Bush had to be informed that it had already happened. Who's in charge here? One rumour says Allawi, the ex-CIA Iraqi PM, is behind it.
While I'm mongering rumours, I hear but can't come close to confirming that the US is maintaining control over Iraq's oil fields and issued a last-minute pardon to all soldiers, mercenaries, and civilians for any war crimes they may have committed.
Hopefully, the new government will serve the people well enough that nobody will want to join anti-government groups. The way to fight a populist movement is to make the population detest it, or at the least, find it unnecessary. The handover is a big step in the right direction, and free elections will push the process forward (so should be held before people get disgruntled).
Via Eschaton at the last minute, we see the US jailing a man that Iraq's court system ordered freed. So much for Iraqi sovereignty. It was fun while it lasted.
1) Tomorrow at about this time I expect to be celebrating the successful orbital insertion of the Cassini-Huygens mission into Saturn orbit. So far everything seems to be going well with the probe, and the pictures takes so far have been incredible.
2) Industry and public interest is slowly but surely growing for the concept of the space elevator. We're now seeing articles about the possibility of elevators becoming a reality more than once a year, which means that somebody has decided that this needs to enter the public consciousness. In any case, the elevator project is building a slow but steady head of steam. Here's hoping that it gets somewhere.
Today, the Supreme Court of the United States did what courts are supposed to do: it reaffirmed the rule of law and took an incremental, solidly supported step toward the greater goal of equal justice for all. One headline making the rounds claims that the decisions handed down today supported President Bush's claims that the President has the power to (A) arrest and (B) hold people, (C) indefinitely (D) without charges (E) without lawyers (F) without process to challenge their state (G) outside U.S. soil and (H) and question them (I) without protection of international conventions on prisoners, (J) simply by making an executive declaration that the prisoner is an "enemy combatant." In my reading, no such decision was handed down.
Three decisions were made today; each addressed a narrow question, essentially point (F) above, regarding whether a detainee in such a state in fact does or does not have process available to challenge their detention. The Court, in all three cases, basically replied that, yes, he does, showing its understanding of the weight of its decision and the values with which it was most concerned in a statement in Hamdi: "It is during our most challenging and uncertain moments that our Nation's commitment to due process is most severely tested; and it is in those times that we must preserve our commitment at home to the principles for which we fight abroad." It is with faith in the American legal system and clear-eyed determination to elect a President who will work toward the realization of this faith that I hold the hope of a swift blow to this Administration's remaining claims of such extraordinary authority.
For your benefit, the three decisions and their areas of applicability are discussed below. The documents cited here are all available at www.abanet.org (for the briefs) and www.supremecourtus.gov (for the decisions).
Hamdi v. Rumsfeld
This case addressed one basic question:
Whether the Constitution permits Executive officials to detain an American citizen indefinitely in military custody in the United States, hold him essentially incommunicado and deny him access to counsel, with no opportunity to question the factual basis for his detention before any impartial tribunal, on the sole ground that he was seized abroad in a theater of the War on Terrorism and declared by the Executive to be an "enemy combatant."
--from "Questions Presented," page i, Brief for Petitioners, No. 03-6696, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld; available from abanet.
Note Hamdi's status. This case covers situations similar to Hamdi's: American citizens arrested abroad and held as "enemy combatants." Hamdi has not been held at Guantánamo, but rather in a military prison in the United States.
Hamdi's brief essentially argues that he claims not to be an enemy combatant, and should have the right to contest this status; and that furthermore, the courts provide an appropriate vehicle for this. The government's response essentially argues that he is an enemy combatant and because he is an enemy combatant, due to military concerns, he should not have access to the courts. Note that the government's argument rests on the contested fact.
Justices Rehnquist, O'Connor, Kennedy, Breyer, Souter, and Ginsburg agreed that a previous decision supporting the Administration's position should be overturned. Justices Scalia and Stevens dissented from the majority's reasoning but also voted for the same order to be given; Justice Thomas dissented entirely and voted to let the detention stand unchallenged.
The core argument of the majority: "due process demands that a citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant be given a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for that detention before a neutral decisionmaker." (further quotes from SCOTUS decisions can be found in full context at the SCOTUS site.) In addition, "We therefore hold that a citizen-detainee seeking to challenge his classification as an enemy combatant must receive notice of the factual basis for his classification, and a fair opportunity to rebut the Government's factual assertions before a neutral decisionmaker ... at a meaningful time and in a meaningful manner."
To the question of whether the government can detain a citizen as an enemy combatant, the Court found that Congress' Authorization for the Use of Military Force provided the President with the authority to detain: "We conclude that the detention of individuals falling into the limited category we are considering [individuals who fought against the United States in Afghanistan], for the duration of the particular conflict in which they were captured, is so fundamental and accepted an incident to war as to be an exercise of the 'necessary and appropriate force' Congress has authorized the President to use." ... "There is no bar to this Nation's holding one of its own citizens as an enemy combatant." In summary, the recognition and detention of enemy combatants is permissible. Souter and Ginsburg dissent with this while concurring with the judgment in general, saying that Hamdi's detention is unauthorized under the circumstances and he should on the balance of principles be released.
But for how long? "Hamdi objects [to] the indefinite detention to which he is now subject. ... the national security underpinnings of the 'war on terror,' although crucially important, are broad and malleable. ... The prospect Hamdi raises is therefore not far-fetched. It is a clearly established principle of the law of war that detention may last no longer than active hostilities. (decision of the majority)" In short, the Court suggests that Hamdi's detention might be permissible no longer than active combat continues in Afghanistan (which could still be a long time, and admittedly leaves open the question of Americans detained as enemy combatants at home without active combat).
In summary, an American citizen detained abroad can be held as an enemy combatant, but is entitled to due process to challenge his detainment, presumably addressing points (E), (F), (I), and (J). This case does not address the further particulars regarding the nature of that confinement in duration, location, or activities. It is my hope that the process provided the detainees will do so.
Rasul v. Bush (and al Odah v. United States)
The question posed to the court in Rasul and al Odah, as based on their petition to the Supreme Court, was narrowly
whether United States courts lack jurisdiction to consider challenges to the legality of the detention of foreign nationals captured abroad in connection with hostilities and incarcerated at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba.
--from "Question Presented," page i, Petitioners' Brief on the Merits, No. 03-334, Rasul v. Bush; available from abanet.
This case addresses foreign nationals arrested as enemy combatants, and asks whether they, like Hamdi above, have recourse to any legal process to defend themselves. Rasul essentially argued that basic legal principles imply that they should. The Administration argued largely based on a previous decision, Johnson v. Eisentrager, that no such rights existed.
In a much shorter 6-3 ruling than Hamdi (Kennedy concurring, Rehnquist/Thomas/Scalia dissenting), SCOTUS held that the courts do have jurisdiction. They pointed out that Eisentrager's detainees had had a previous hearing, and the facts of their case had been aired. Now, that hearing was a military hearing, which gives tacit support to the Administration's plan to use military tribunals to try enemy combatants; but this is an indirect support and thus I hold hope that the situation is still remediable. Indeed, the Court concludes the majority opinion with "Whether and what further proceedings may become necessary after respondents make their response to the merits of petitioners' claims are matters that we need not address now." This seems to suggest that the petitioners' claims deserve such hearing, and we ourselves can work to see that the national atmosphere is conducive to such a hearing rendering proper respect to fundamental rights.
The Court also pointed out that later developments in the law had clarified and extended a gap in the law that existed at the time Eisentrager was handed down. The Court further rejected the Administration's argument that Guantánamo was somehow exempt from jurisdiction, saying "Aliens held at the base, no less than American citizens, are entitled to invoke the federal courts' authority...".
In summary, both Americans and foreign citizens must be permitted their day in court. The past is prologue, my friends; now that the question is to be asked, we must see that it is answered rightly.
Rumsfeld v. Padilla
Both the Government and Padilla spend much of their briefs arguing the details of whether Padilla's military detention is legal and the the conditions of his incarceration constitutional. A small extra piece on both briefs refers to the question of whether the district court from which the matter arose is the correct court. It is a great pity that this latter argument holds sway.
At first glance, the decision looks like Padilla needs to refile on a technicality (a lower officer than Rumsfeld to be the respondent). The majority consisted of Rehnquist, Thomas, Scalia (Thomas siding with the administration in the other two cases, and Scalia and Rehnquist with the administration in Rasul), Kennedy, and O'Connor. Another interpretation might point out that if the Court held that a different lower court had jurisdiction, it would mean that some court had jurisdiction; however, this question is avoided with preference to the question of Rumsfeld's replacement.
Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer dissented to this decision and pointed out that the Administration played time games with filing deadlines, hence the technicality should be overlooked: "The departure from the time-honored practice of giving one's adversary fair notice of an intent to present an important motion to the court justifies treating the habeas application as the functional equivalent of one filed two days earlier." However, a dissent not having the force of precedent, this stands merely as (to my mind) yet another example of the disrespect this Administration has for the principles that underly our system of laws.
In final note, I find today's decision heartening. There were flaws, but the fundamental position taken was that detainees have the right to challenge their detainment. I'll take that ground and get ready to fight for more.
First of all, and all the comment spammers that read this blog regularly might want to note this, I've closed off all comments threads before the end of March. And every couple of weeks, I'm going to come through and close out comment threads so that we're maintaining a 90 to 120 day rolling window on when comments are open. At least until I figure out how to cron a perl script to do it automatically and keep us closer to that 90 day feature.
[UPDATE: Err. jrenken and I were trying to figure out how to implement cron jobs and managed to break something. Comments are going to be a bit wonky over the next few days as we try to fix it. In the mean time, I think I'm going to try to open comments by hands on the last two weeks worth of entry. And trackbacks are busted too...whee! We're fixing it.]
[UPDATE #2: Well, we got ourselves back to where we were at the beginning of the night, which means that I'll just be running the script by hand. Ah well.]
Second of all, I'd like to welcome JesseLMan and William to the Zone, upping our total of bloggers that hang around here on a somewhat regular basis to seven. (Yes, I know, they've both been around for a bit, but I was slacking on administrative business.)
Third, I plan to dig out an old mail from Kieran (whom I never properly thanked -- hopefully he'll consider this late but sincere thanks) over at Crooked Timber and implement individual author archives, so that if, for example, you're a huge fan of our very own Fourth Man, you can find his posts without having to deal with us lesser mortals. ;) But that's a project I'm not getting into until I've had some sleep. Which is what I'm off to do now.
See you all next daycycle, citizens.
As most of the regular blog readers know, I'm a recent graduate of the School of Information Management & Systems (SIMS) at the University of California, Berkeley. And with the shiny new master's degree I earned last month comes some interest in information technology.
This was brought home when I found and was reading a rather interesting article on the changing fortunes at McDonalds (registration required). The whole article is worth a read, because McDonalds has been slumping, and they're trying to turn it around, despite the one two punch of having one CEO die from a heart attack and his replacement getting diagnosed with colon cancer.
But the part of the article that struck me as interesting, with the interest in IT that I have, was the following quote:
And Cantalupo touched on a major move he knew would shake the system. He had decided to kill one of Greenberg's pet projects, a $1 billion investment in technology.Bell recalls that he and most top managers had supported the computer project when Greenberg launched it two years earlier. He was skeptical when Cantalupo suggested killing it. But ultimately, Bell said, it was the right call.
"Given where the business had gotten to and where we needed to focus, it was time to jump off the train," he said.
Now, as somebody looking for a job in the field, I'm supposed to support IT projects wherever I see them, right? Well, that's not quite the case. Sometimes you have to step back and look at the bigger picture, and by reading the whole article, it's quite clear the bigger picture had been ignored by focusing on this IT project.
One of the big problems in the world today is that everybody assumes that computers and the Internet are the be all end all of life, and the truth is that it's not. It's a useful and somewhat important piece, yes, but sometimes there are bigger problems and going with newer and better IT doesn't always mean a faster and leaner company.
It's something that bothered me with some of my classes, this sort of one true way, and how [XML|multimedia|information strategy] will set us free. Truth is, nothing is that simple. It's a complex world and there's more than one solution.
Well, it looks like the Greens, thankfully, did not nominate Ralph Nader. They instead nominated David Cobb, a California lawyer. There was a huge split in the Green party over that.
While I'm thankful that Ralph Nader won't have that platform to damage our chances of getting rid of Bush, I did find the last two paragraphs of that article to be somewhat interesting in terms of comparing and contrasting. Maybe you can spot it too.
"This is a dark day," said Robert Nanninga, a delegate from Encinitas, Calif. "We've just nominated a white lawyer with a car salesman's smile. It might as well be a Republican. This is going to be remembered for years to come."Earlier this year, Nader was endorsed by the Reform Party, which gives him ballot access in seven states, including Florida, Colorado, and Michigan.
I'm not trying to disparage Greens, but the fact Nader's been endorsed by the *Reform* Party -- a party to the right of the Republicans -- and yet you think the lawyer from California might as well be a Republican? *sigh* And we wonder why the Greens are never taken seriously.
Don't have much for you today, but this one is a Good News story in ways that we haven't really seen in a long while.
Via Worldchanging we get this story from the New York Times about how employees of Afghanistan's Central Bank managed to protect 20,600 pieces of Bactrian gold jewelery from the Taliban:
Armed men ordered a Central Bank employee to open the vault in the Arg and brought a gold merchant from southern Afghanistan to inspect the bullion. But they knew nothing of the Bactrian gold lying just yards away, said one bank employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Then as they left at that time and the bank official locked the massive safe door, he snapped off the key in the lock, which successfully frustrated further attempts by the Taliban or anyone else to enter the vault.
A lot gets lost in war, through maliciousness or carelessness. We've seen pretty good examples of both during the Iraq debacle. Still, it's nice to know that we haven't completely managed to destroy all of our cultural heritage.
Welp, I'm back on the platform kick again. Today we're going to be talking about the platform of the New Democratic Party. Said platform is available (in PDF form) here, or here for the HTML version. In terms of the text, both are essentially identical.
Of the platforms so far, on a basic "read this without pain" level, the NDP platform is my favorite, and when I'm king of the future political platforms will have to be written according to its style. Each policy area the platform discusses is clearly laid out, with a bulleted list of specific promises, followed by one or two items in each category comparing their plans to the Liberals' performance. As a result, it's possible to quickly read and comprehend the whole thing without too much focus on buzzwords or mudslinging. Whether you like the statements in it or not, this is how this sort of document should be written. This is also one of the denser platforms I've read - the signal to noise ratio is extremely high, and as a result the sixty-six pages of this document have far more information than the similar-sized Liberal platform, or the smaller Conservative one. As a result, this look at the platform will just.. keep.. going. Skip to the bottom for my basic impressions if you value your eyes.
The first major section of the platform, "Building the Country we Want," talks about a general unified plan for improving the state of things. Making note of the resources currently available to the country - and, in a sense, implicitly saying the Liberals didn't do that poorly lately - the NDP talk about "embarking on the great project of building the country we want" (yadda yadda, you know the spiel), making comparisons with previous largescale tasks like the 19th century railroads and the 20th-century public health system. "Building" is divided in turn into six subsections: municipalities, public pensions, education, children and families, health care, and trust in the national institutions.
"In the 21st century, we can't disconnect problems," the platform begins at this point, before launching into a list of improvements to municipal Canada. These involve a number of projects and suggestions, from a national housing program to increase affordable housing to providing tax benefits to employers who provide public transit costs to their employees. Much of the focus is on affordable housing and environmental concerns, with a large focus on improving transit. From here, the platform blends into the pension and environmentalist sides of the platform more, by proposing a national retrofit program for buildings to promote energy efficiency (starting with low-income housing) and using broader representation to defend the Canada Pension Plan.
Education! As a student aiming for the teaching profession, this is obviously one of my Big Issues, although there's also the fact that I generally see it as the most important thing a government can promote anyway. For education plans, the NDP has a fairly long list of proposals, including a national tuition freeze to combat the skyrocketing university costs, crediting graduate students' loan interests against their income taxes, working to prevent the creation of for-profit universities, and improving research funding to "half the privatization of research on campus, allowing science to be examined on its merits, not vetted by the funding corporation." (I particularly like the first and last items here.) In a somewhat related topic, the platform discusses children and families, particularly the growing income gap (or poverty gap) among younger families in the country. Plans here include - much like the other parties - a large-scale national child care program in the next few years, eliminating income tax for Canadians with an income below $15,000/year, and trying to improve the aboriginal situation to something which doesn't make Third World nations look affluent.
The major issue this election - unless you're a hyperspecialized homophobe or gay-rights activist - is health care, which bounces between the NDP and Liberals to see who gets to have the most say about it most years. A great many things are proposed in this part of the platform. Some examples include a bulk-purchase program for drugs ("as Australia uses") to reduce costs, as well as outlawing several practices which delay the introduction of cheap generic medication. One interesting thing the party seems to be doing is de-emphasizing hospitals in favor of home or near-home-based care ("illnesses are treated through drugs, not hospitals") by improving coverage for outpatient or home-patient medications and implementing non-profit-based home care, citing Manitoba's model. The NDP oddly links up with the Conservatives in its support for a CDC-esque national health system in the wake of recent disease outbreaks, but shows itself as the only party to explicitly use the term "abortion" and be in favor of its legalization.
The next part of this first section discusses general damage control to the national reputation internally. There've been a lot of scandals, broken promises, and longstanding Issues with domestic goings-on for awhile, and each of the parties has their own take on these. The NDP discuss the Quebec situation by mentioning "flexible federalism," implying a devolution of powers to the provincial level and providing Quebec with an opt-out clause for federal programs. This form of federalism also talks of "respecting successful programs that may already exist in some provinces ... rather than imposing new one-size-fits-all federal programs," which strikes me as unredundant enough that it almost makes no sense in the Canadian system, but I like it. To improve the trustworthiness of the federal government, the NDP call for long-term predictable funding programs rather than situations which can come and go each fiscal year. Most interestingly, the NDP wish to recognize aboriginal right to self-governance as a primary component of modern federal politics.
A whole section of the platform - "Building the Planet we Want" - is devoted to - well, it should be obvious. Talking about major global and environmental commitments, this section is a combination of environmental and global-justice concerns with the stated goal of creating a cleaner and more egalitarian world. This takes the vaguely risky step of saying there are federal responsibilities to the entire planet, although even the Conservatives have taken a few pieces of this plank. This area is divided into seven major sections: green energy and transportation, environmental sustainability, clean water, biodiversity, global egalitarianism and the AIDS battle.
The green plan is sweeping even by NDP standards: they pretty openly want to ditch oil, coal, and nuclear (bah!) power to segue into more renewable forms of energy. To this end, the NDP wish to establish a new Crown corporation devoted to renewable and alternative energies by establishing solar, tidal, wind and geothermal power centres across the country - when possible, located near fossil fuel centres to ease transitions. Such forms of energy would be generally subsidized, with heavy fines for polluters. Foreign ideas would be borrowed as well, particularly Alaska's growing success with alternative energy sources (the north, as the Liberals discovered, is wind-power-friendly), and so on. During such a transition, workers in the oil and coal industries would recieve assistance to help shift them into the new economy, rather than the implicit dropping-on-the-sidewalk many other renewable-energy advocates seem to like. In transportation, the aforementioned promotion of public transit shows up, as well as adopting California-style emissions standards and general tax credits on cleaner or alternative-energy vehicles. Kyoto would be heavily supported, and other air-cleaning measures would be established, particularly the idea of high-speed rail links between major urban centres like Quebec City and Windsor.
Some of the other environmental concerns are more commonsense, such as pouring money into the Sydney Tar Ponds like the other parties are promising, and proposing a ban on the export of fresh water in bulk. Funding for further cleanup efforts (and prevention of future ones) would be achieved through severely jacking up fines on polluters (ow) and requiring chemical manufacturers to "produce scientific evidence of a chemical's safety" before it can be used in the environment. On the biotech front, they support the usual initiatives such as labelling genetically-engineered food and placing a moratorium on gengineered wheat until biotech companies (Gee, I wonder who they have in mind there?) can demonstrate their safety. There's little new here to folks who know the memes.
In the area of global equality, things are once again fairly standard NDP fare. Improving international development aid to 0.7% of GDP, cancelling debts to some developing countries, promoting leapfrogging developing nations to sustainable energy and striking down NAFTA and the WTO are major planks. As well, funding to the Global Fund for AIDS relief would be tripled(!), and access to generic drugs would be improved. Strikingly, the platform pretty much already recognizes Palestinian independence.
Our next major chunka NDP platform, "Respecting Who We Are," is a general freedom-and-equality system, espousing the standard F&E values: women's equality, rights of aboriginal peoples, multiculturalism and equality, and so on, accompanied by a proposal for democratic reforms. The first four of these blur into one another, as well as into most of the first section of the platform. Pay equity laws and more stable maternity benefits are the main points for women, combined with much of the health platform. For aboriginals, an extensive list shows up, including supporting the training of thousands in the health and educational fields, settling land claims issues, prioritizing reservation land for housing improvements, and creating specifically-aboriginal seats in Parliament, citing the example of New Zealand. On the one hand, I like this idea since they deserve a voice; on the other hand, I don't like the precedent of specialized Commons seats, and it would only be a matter of time before they found themselves under the discipline of one party or another anyway.
The diversity section is primarily focused on immigration issues - "[w]ith communities in need of family doctors and our environment in need of solutions, physicians and engineers shouldn't be driving cabs. They should be helping to build the country we want." To improve the multicultural situation, the NDP would allow a rise in immigration levels to roughly 350,000/year to begin with. As well, a once-in-a-lifetime provision allowing citizens and permenant residents to sponsor one relative would be enacted, to help reuniting families. Foreign qualificiations would be more respected (this is strewn across each of the parties' views, thank goodness), and eliminating the de-facto head tax on immiogrants to Canada.
Equality is another major part of the NDP platform, and one which the NDP is actually fairly angry about for a change. Citing the increasing pressure against peaceful protests, growing anti-Semitism, and national homophobia, the NDP seem to be operating more on a backlash here than anywhere else. The main examples from this part of the platform include extending full marriage equality to same-sex couples, repealing the Anti-Terrorism Act (replacing it with legislation "that respects peaceful protest, freedom of the press and civil liberties"), and introducing legislation banning racial profiling.
The last two sections of this policy area have to do with democratic and cultural issues. The NDP's main plank here is a switch to proportional representation; I'm torn on this, because it is significantly more democratic, but it also dooms the country to minority governments. The NDP goes a step farther than the Conservatives(!) by actually wanting to abolish, rather than reform, the Senate, and also wishes - perhaps even more ambitiously - to lower the voting age to 16. On the cultural front, the NDP wish to increase funding to the CBC, provide tax credits and grants to artist and writers, and enacting strong anti-monopolist legislation by preventing media owners from having a greater than 20% market share in the national market. (I endorse this product and/or service.)
The next major section, "Protecting Who We Are," gets into some controversial territory as it discusses Canada's increasing integration with the United States. Sovereignty is the main focus of this section politically, culturally, and economically. The main sovereignty-focused planks include requiring Parliamentary consent before any troop deployments, keeping Canadian troops out of foreign command structures should Parliament not support a deployment, prioritizing the military for peacekeeping duties, and discarding agreements which permit American military to enter Canadian territory automatically during emergencies.
For economic sovereignty, the NDP wishes to renegotiate NAFTA in a way that prevents the constant US sanctions (such free trade that is) against Canadian industries, and flatly refusing to acknowledge any trade agreements which overturn democratic decisions, such as NAFTA's Chapter 11. A number of promises are given with regards to job protection too, mostly with the heavy industries such as steel and manufacturing. Most of this covers areas I don't understand well enough to comment on, although three things stuck out: regulating the amount of foreign ownership in major national industries, annual increases of the minimum wage tied to the economic growth rate, and protecting national film and television industries. Agricultural workers are going to get some protection under the NDP plan as well; a combination of protective economic laws and subsidizing of the agricultural industry will, it is hoped, maintain the current levels of agricultural workers for awhile. For those who are already unemployed for one reason or another, the EI system will get some backing up; one of the main significant suggestions here is allowing retraining to occur while recieving benefits, making it easier for people to find new work.
The last major sections in "Protecting" involve national security and the criminal justice system. The NDP theory on national security is that security is directly tied to world development; they see direct links between human rights, development and security, and much of the national policy is aimed at attacking the cause, rather than the effects, of global instability. As such, part of the security platform is aimed at development aid abroad, peacekeeping, and working towards arms reduction. The Forces are implied to get some funding increases as well, with pay raises for soldiers and acquisition of equipment which is actually younger than the country. Things like the Anti-Terrorist Act and national ID cards are vigorously opposed domestically.
On the crime front, the NDP comes right out and says that "job creation, investing in children and fighting poverty [are] the best anti-crime plan[s] available," which is pretty much right up my alley. Aside from this preventative measure and party-specific issues like marijuana decriminalization and banning assault weapons, the NDP's positions is fairly standard: a combination of preventative measures and restorative justice on one end, while coming down on serious or repeat offenders like a dynamited building on the other.
Finally, we trundle into the last section, "Clear Choices on How to Get There." The NDP are claiming that juggling fiscal freedom and national development is a zero-sum game, in which we cannot do both. This section covers consumers' rights, job creation, taxation and debt reduction.
The consumer side of this area involves creating a Consumers Bill of Rights to protect consumers - particularly those in impoverished areas - from abuse, mainly by banks and credit card companies. This involves regulating credit card rates, maintaining bank presence in poorer neighbourhoods and rural areas, a do-not-call list, and coming down on cheque-cashing companies which tend to get people trapped under 60% interest rates.
The job creation platform focuses on two main methods - supporting small business and promoting R&D to allow new fields of employment to come out. Small businesses get a hands up through a mix of tax credits or exemptions, mainly. Industry-specific assistance shows up in the platform as well - for example, a national shipbuilding policy for coastal communities. With regards to new technologies, renewable energy comes up a lot, as do plans to promote national development in general. In fact, the NDP wish to combine six infrastructure and development portfolios into a single Department of Canadian Development and Infrastructure. I'm not sure if this would be a good idea for the streamlining involved, or a bad idea for the overload on a single minister.
Next, we have taxes! Everyone who isn't voting NDP really hates their tax policies; I recently got a Conservative ad carefully designed to look like an NDP ad which crowed about taxation of the rich as though it were a horrible thing (whoops, did that slip out?). Either way, the NDP's tax platform is their most controverisal stance at any given time, so let's see what we've got. I'll make a change and look over this in a bit of detail, rather than brezing through the platform. These are by no means all the promises:
That's about half the list, but provides the general idea. I'm surprised myself, as it generally looks like a tax reduction for most things aside from corporations. Tax revenue will be increased through the increase of corporate tax, though it seems primarily through the closing of a number of tax loopholes and cancelling treaties with tax havens.
Finally, we have the NDP stance on debt reduction. This one's kinda ambivalent; they support balanced budgets and claim a passable record at same, but at the same time oppose "debt reduction for debt reduction's sake." I understand the reasoning for this; the NDP mainly wish to try to avoid increasing the thing, but at the same time don't seem in favor of making feelgood statements about reducing the debt while student loans are flying through the stratosphere. I happen to like reduced debt, but I'll live for a lack of increase, unlike the Conservatives' implicit promise to increase the debt through deficit spending. This is in fact the main plank of the debt platform - avoiding these massive spikes in the debt through large, arbitrary tax deductions, citing Ontario, British Columbia and the United States as examples. Fiscal handling would involve prioritizing infrastructure, implementing balanced budgets (barring disasters) and holding debates over what to do with unexpected surpluses, which have traditionally been dropped on the national debt.
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So, what are my overall impressions?
First of all, I have to admire the fact that this thing was put together so well. There's very little digging involved to figure out exactly what the NDP wish to do on any given issue; that's something I can respect, even for the aspects of the platform I don't necessarily agree with. The overall tone is something I approve of as well; there's an air of optimism about the whole thing, implying things are good and can be improved rather than broken and in need of repair. It's a constructive attitude which shows up even more than in the Liberal platform and vastly more than the Conservatives' pessimistic platform. There were some tactless bits to it, however, particularly the implicit refusal to recognize Bush as president of the United States throughout. However, there were some tactless bits I liked, too; I've not seen the word "abortion" show up in any other party statements in the US or Canada lately, always hiding behind euphemisms instead. As far as saying what they mean, either way, the NDP seem better at that than the other two parties. This marks them as more honest, but it also marks them as more fringe, so it will both help and harm them.
As to the substance itself, the NDP's platform is extremely ambitious. A lot of the promises - for instance, not using a national ID card or trying to strike down the Anti-Terrorism Act - are acts of legislation rather than huge fiscal concerns. Others, however, like the health and education platforms, are going to Cost. One of the main faults with the platform itself is that dollar figures rarely come up (you can view the cost-analysis document here [PDF], though I haven't had the time to look at it in detail), so we're left deciding whether to take Layton's word on it whether or not budgets can be balanced amidst these goals. These are areas where money needs to be spent, for certain, as some of the most important parts of the national structure, but I'm uncertain about the ability of the NDP to perform all this while maintaining a surplus or a balanced budget. Perhaps they can do it; the NDP have never had a chance in Ottawa, so their record is clean on that level.
I found the foreign policy section of the platform wanting in a few ways. I'm generally concerned about the state of the Forces, and while the NDP made two specific statements - replacing the Sea Kings and improving pay for enlisted personnel - there was fairly little said about other equipment, the manpower situation, and force readiness. This has become more of an issue in the past few years, and it was perhaps a bad choice to neglect this. Some other things slipped under the radar here and there, but I found specific foreign policy and national defense plans to be the main things wanting.
Overall, however, I'm impressed with the platform. It's ambitious, progressive, and optimistic, without too much in the line of attacks (one, sometimes two, per list of promises generally) and shows a grasp of some issues I'm interested in, particularly world development and new technologies - which surprised me coming from the NDP, since the left has become increasingly technophobic these days. Who'm I voting for? "Not the Conservatives" is the obvious answer, but I'm finding enough in the Liberal and NDP platforms right now that I can't quite decide which way to go.
That's my impression on this, the third of the major party platforms. I might try to get some sypnoses of the minor ones out tomorrow, but don't hold your breath as I'll be busy. Stand by for news on what actually happens on Monday's election by Tuesday, though!
Almost done the NDP platform, which'll be up tomorrow afternoon. First, however, this from the CBC.
The Conservative Party in the current elections up here has been busily endearing itself to the populace by talking about its enmity to basic constitutional freedoms for a couple of weeks now. Since Harper and Layton(!!) both tripped over their own sensibilities with the "hiding behind the Charter of Rights" incident during the debate, it's become open season on one of Canada's fundamental legal documents.
In the article, we'll see the face of the Conservative Party - not its leaders or PR flacks, but its backbenchers, who are somewhat more indicative of the type of person who will vote for the party. Conservative MP Randy White puts it succinctly:
It's time that we started to exert our responsibility as politicians in the country. If the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is going to be used as the crutch to carry forward all of the issues that social libertarians want, then there's got to be for us conservatives out there a way to put checks and balances in there.
I think that's pretty clear - we've got a member of Parliament in the Consevative Party, with more than ten years' experience as an MP, openly stating his disdain for the Charter and hoping it be weakened or repealed, or else we might have to do something evil like give gay people rights.
A lot of MPs - Conservative or otherwise - are, simply put, loonies. The backbenchers in any of the parties will occaisionally say something stupid; the Conservatives are good at infuriatingly stupid, and the NDP are masters of entertainingly stupid, etc - and so we get to see party leaders trying to perform damage control when some obscure elected member or candidate says that, say, men are intrinsically better-suited than women to leadership roles. This happens. However, Randy White is not a newbie, as a look at his extensive and frankly admirable political career shows. This is a major member of the party showing this kind of disdain for rights and freedoms.
Just another reason I'd like to see them go down in flames on Monday.
So, I went to see Michael Moore's new picture Fahrenheit 9/11 this evening.
First off I'd like to report that the theater was packed and, for a farily conservative part of the country, highly supportive of the film. A number of points got lots of applause, and there were only two points when I heard a lone voice make any sort of heckling noises. All in all a lot better than I had been expecting.
Anyway, to the film. I don't think that I have to give you a synopsis, so I'll just move on:
This film really is George Bush's movie, not Michael Moore's. Moore does the narration of course, and he does have some screen time, but for large stretches of the film Moore lets Bush and his administration do the talking, apparently on the axiom that if you give a man enough rope he'll hang himself. And Bush indeed hangs himself, or gets to the point where all he needs is a good hard shove. Case in point, Moore manages to procure a number of press conference clips from the pre-9/11 Bush Administration where all the leading lights are quoted as saying there are no WMDs of any type in Iraq. Very fascinating to see how the rhetoric whiplashed.
Moore does like juxtaposition. And it works pretty well, too. Cutting from an (apparently) al-Jazeera interview with a woman whose house had been bombed, who's screaming and crying and begging God to visit vengance on the people who Did This, to Brittany Spears' vacant face telling Americans that they should support the President... it's very unsettling. Almost zombiesque.
The film does not pull any punches. Seriously. It's not as gore-intensive as, say, Passion of the Christ, but there are some deeply unpleasant images flashed on the screen. We as Americans have really been sheltered from the brutality of this war, and seeing some of these images - happening both to Iraqis and Americans, I might add - really brings the message home.
The one punch that was pulled wasn't on the part of Michael Moore. It was on the part of Lisa Lipscomb of Flint, MI, whose first-born son was killed in Iraq. Near the end of the film, she vists Washington DC and decides to go to the White House. Exchanging some words with an anti-war protestor sitting outside, Mrs. Lipscomb is accosted by a woman who tells her not to listen to the protestor. I didn't quite catch everything the woman said, but judging by the feral snarl that went through the rest of the audience, it must've been something truly callous. I suspect that if Mrs. Lipscomb had decked that woman, there would've been a standing ovation.
Moore ends the movie with a quote from Orwell's 1984 on the nature of War, and a musing of his own. The Orwell I'll leave for others to discover; Moore's last thought (and I'm paraphrasing from memory here, so YMMV) goes something like this: "That the people from the worst parts of this country are the ones who volunteer to defend it so the better-off don't have to. What a gift they give us, and they only ask in return that we do not send them into harm's way without a very good reason."
Res ipsa loquitor.
#4 gives it **** out of ****
While reading Webcomics this morning, I happened upon a link to some very interesting information about American Express. Apparently, for at least a year, they've been calling customers with Muslim names and demanding that they provide extensive financial documentation in order to keep their accounts open. Here is the note from one customer that I found; it links to these earlier articles at City Limits, alt.muslim, and ABC News. This looks like a textbook case of unjustifiable racial profiling.
Personally, I'm not at all surprised; my experiences with them have been very negative. I used to accept American Express cards for my business, and was repeatedly sent incorrect or misrouted paperwork, often including sensitive information that was intended for other merchants. At the time I was accepting AmEx, I was also receiving a large volume of fraudulent orders, and dealt with them by asking the card issuers to verify customers' information and/or flag their accounts for fraud. About 80% of the time, AmEx representatives flatly and rudely refused to do anything at all, even to verify the customers' phone number so that I could call and warn them myself.
I strongly recommend that American Express cardholders cancel their cards and find a better company to do business with. It's been a long time since AmEx was the card of the "elite." They're obviously counting more and more on their old reputation, and less on proper or even acceptable business practices.
In an election year, it is common for candidates to shift positions on various issues, attempting to appeal to persons, usually uncommitted political moderates, who have no particular image of the candidate from their previous actions and are now paying attention to politics as the race gets underway. If this sounds like a bald statement of the obvious truth, bear with me for a moment.
The people being approached with such acts are exactly the ones candidates need to win, beyond their core constituencies, if they hope to win an election. It is vital, therefore, that those of us interested in swaying that portion of the electorate be alert for sudden changes of position which appeal to the target group and be ready to make strongly the argument that such acts, besides being cynical presumptions of voter ignorance, do not represent a stance the candidate can be reliably expected to support once the election is past.
This holds doubly true for President Bush this year; not only are the political operatives of this Administration legendary for their mastery of the tactic of false claiming moderation for extremely immoderate principles and activities (from "compassionate conservatism" to the transparent "coalition of the willing"), but a second-term President faces no future election and this President's Vice President has no stated Presidential ambitions, thus removing almost any constraints of public opinion on the office. A second-term Bush would not even have a fourth-year election for which to wear an ill-fitting costume of moderation.
An article in today's New York Times (here, registration required) gives us an early, clear indication of this tactic. The President recommended condom use in a speech on AIDS prevention, citing the three-prong "abstinence, fidelity and condoms" approach of Uganda, which has an AIDS-control program considered one of the best in Africa.
If this seems like a bald statement of the obvious truth... you haven't been listening to Bush for the last few years.
As a Presidential candidate, Bush said, "It seems to me like the contraceptive message sends a contradictory message. It tends to undermine the message of abstinence." (Richard Whitmire, Gannett News Service, Dec. 20 1999: "Many Schools Embracing Abstinence-Only Sex Education."; see also http://www.naral.org/facts/loader.cfm?url=/commonspot/security/getfile.cfm&PageID=3671, a .pdf file) Apparently at this time he thought that American teens were not quite sharp enough to grasp the intricate message that abstinence was safer than safe sex and safe sex was safer than unsafe sex.
More recently, the President's 2004 State of the Union speech (http://www.sacredchoices.org/News_Tracker/Bush_advocates_abstinence-only_education.htm) lauded abstinence-only programs, which refuse to promote condom use and are only allowed speak of contraceptives in terms of their failure rates. He put his money where his mouth was: he called for $270 million in annual funding for abstinence-only education, nearly triple the amount of his first year in office.
So, consider. Has President Bush had a change of heart? Does he now share your values in this matter? If elected, would he cease throwing money at scientifically unsupported abstinence programs and encourage a layered approach to preventing HIV transmission? An informed observer should almost certainly come to the conclusion, no, of course not. But to research and put together this article took over an hour, not an hour most observers will spend.
Indeed, it's not an hour the author can spend every time Bush makes a stunningly reasonable pronouncement. Another article just as long as this one could have been written on Bush's North Korea diplomacy, wherein the latest diplomatic overture is remarkably workable... and probably due in large part to the twin facts that surrounding Asian countries were quietly ignoring America's hard line and "beginning to negotiate a separate peace," while Senator Kerry's charge that America's security from North Korea's nukes was suffering while the Administration obsessed about Iraq "was noticed in the White House," according to a senior State Department official quoted in the article. Things a President will do while an electoral gun is held to his head will not represent future positions should he get back in to office.
This is one of the most immoderate administrations under which this country has ever had the misfortune to suffer. Whoever wins this election will need the moderates. They will need the non-wonks. They will need to convince the middle that their candidate shares the middle's important values, and they can do it either with truth or with distortion. I've come to the conclusion that Kerry can do it with truth, while Bush will have to rely on distortion. And whenever distortion exists, opportunity exists for anyone with a Web browser, a dedication to the truth, and a free hour or two.
If you hear the President say something, and think to yourself, "Gosh, that sounds uncommonly sensible of him," remember that someone else probably didn't include "uncommonly." Ask yourself whether it is likely to represent his real thinking -- something that would be expressed should he gain another term -- or if it's more likely to be a pitch for the middle. If you think it's the latter, hit Google and find out; and if you're right, let people know. Money's always nice, but legwork is an even more valuable contribution.
Newsweek journalist Michael Isikoff is currently the subject of a two-minute hate on Eschaton for reviewing Clinton's book and summoning latent Democratic ire from back when Isikoff would publish reports harmful to Clinton's image, and shortly thereafter getting some facts wrong in a review of Michael Moore's new movie, Fahrenheit 9/11.
Michael Isikoff has written too many reports too critical of the Bush administration for me to believe the line that he's a Republican partisan. His record includes:
While I don't know enough about the facts to comment on the veracity of Isikoff's reports regarding Clinton, it seems clear to me that he isn't a Republican Party shill, but he does owe Craig Unger an apology for misquoting him (unstable link).
I'm a bit more zoned than usual, so you guys are going to be a bit less Zoned than usual tonight. Just a few bits and pieces from here and there running through the news:
First off, some recent war games between the United States and India seem to have some Implications for the quality of US air superiority. I'm not enough of an afficiando of more esoteric military stuff to know for certain just how legitimate the results were - the US planes were apparently handicapped somewhat - but the implication that the USAF is challengeable is clear. This will probably spur the development of the successor aircraft like the F-22 and F-35 more than current trends already have; on the other hand, I'm not sure how much I can see them being useful yet. All of the major powers - yes, even China these days - powerful enough to put up the pretense of a fight against the US are on at least correct terms with Washington. On the one hand, sure, you're losing a war game - but on the other hand you're losing it to someone you have good enough relations to wargame with. I dunno.
In the wake of the Columbia accident, the crew of the International Space Station is being forced to take increasingly drastic measures to keep the thing from plummeting back into the atmosphere. The kind of spacewalk being planned for this goes beyond the standard "merely" difficult traditional ones into something truly outlandish and, indeed, legendary by the standards of spacewalks. Mike Fincke and Gennady Padalka are officially on the Better Than Me List, which is growing depressingly long. "This is going to be fun," Fincke says. Aiee.
As the election increasingly begins to imply a minority government after the June 28 election, discussions of a coalition government are being firmly tossed into the circular file by Prime Minister Martin. This is making one of those odder moments, where Harper accuses Martin of not being willing to compromise by forming such a coalition even as he refuses to form a coalition with any of the other parties anyway.
Don't smoke, dumbass. This has been a recording.
Blaring across a number of news services' headline is news of the abandonment of ICC immunity resolutions by the United States, which has been flinging them around for a couple of years now. There's a vague, vague threat of hamstringing peacekeeping operations more than Washington already has been, but we'll see what happens. Their abandonment of the attempt to get extraterritoriality is particularly critical at this time, when a number of US troops are fairly plainly documented taking part in war crimes in Abu Graib and Guantanamo Bay.
This one from Demagogue; the Bosnian Serb government has acknowledged responsibility for the Srebrenica massacre in the nineties. With luck, maybe the Sudanese government, which has just claimed to have ordered a forceful disarmament of the Janjaweed, be taking notes. Unless, of course, the disarmament order is a sham, which it might well be.
Or perhaps it almost certainly is, going by this interview with Physicians for Human Rights' John Heffernan, which reports attacks on the refugee columns by the Sudanese air force (unless the militias can field Antonov bombers)...
In the wake of the X-Prize competition approaching a state of having-a-winner-ness, NASA is considering prizes for further private spaceflight milestones, with the example of a $200 million(!) prize for the first private mission to actual orbit. I could live with seeing this sort of thing get more popular, at least with more outlandish goals (say, establishing a viable industry in orbit), though I'd be equally happy with NASA getting a significant budget increase...
Anyway, that's that for now. I'll try to have the NDP platform up tomorrow, and then do a multi-topic post on the weekend to get together the last ideas about the parties and my other general impressions for the Canadian election.
Well, yesterday was certainly quite the good day for some of my visions. I'm not simply talking about things like the Conservatives being down in the polls up here for change, although that's really nice too. What I'm talking about is something of rather higher importance, if you get the pun.
Of course, I'm referring to Mike Melvill's flight of Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne yesterday in and far over the Mojave. I'm not even going to bother providing links this time around, since the story's widespread enough that I could provide one for every letter in this post, and that's a whole lot of <A HREF=""> tags, so I'll space you.
So. What's the significance of all this?
Well, first we've got the obvious stuff: we've got the first civilian astronaut hitting an altitude of 330,000 feet or 100 kilometers, the internationally-accepted boundary of space. (It was funny watching Melvill and Rutan's reactions when the FAA representative presented Melvill with astronauts' wings; it was somewhat obvious that neither of them particularly have the look of folks used to heavy media attention, and it caught them totally off-guard). We've got a rough draft of a spaceplane that cost $20 million to get off the napkin and up to fifteen flights, a truly insane level of cost-effectiveness considering what's come out of it. We've also got this first civilian spaceflight project clearly being only part of Rutan's larger plan - SpaceShipOne is something only described as Tier One in that scheme.
It's that last part that gets me wondering. Rutan's implied rather strongly that the SpaceShipOne flight is merely the first step in a far larger plan:
I strongly feel that, if we are successful, our program will mark the beginning of a renaissance for manned space flight. This might even be similar to that wonderful time period between 1908 and 1912 when the world went from a total of ten airplane pilots to hundreds of airplane types and thousands of pilots in 39 countries. We need affordable space travel to inspire our youth, to let them know that they can experience their dreams, can set significant goals and be in a position to lead all of us to future progress in exploration, discovery and fun.
One of the main things I'm hoping Rutan and company manage to accomplish is at least start killing the black cynicism that's lain over anything to do with spaceflight for pretty much my entire lifetime. There's a combination of pessimism and disdain for anything complex, largescale or risky these days; ten years ago, the idea of a privately-designed and launched suborbital craft would be dismissed as mere science-fiction (as though comparing something to speculative writing disproved it). Hell, ten years ago SpaceShipOne would be contraband, as private space launches were forbidden under American law until shortly before the X-Prize was announced. A whole lot of other things were impossible ten years ago and common now, on the other hand.
I'm finding myself hoping this means a lot of the current trend of "impossible" tasks - technologies like a proper human space presence made affordable, improved applications of genetics towards better ends, molecular assemblers, and so on - will become routine in time too.
The technical world in general has given the impression of coming out of a long coma in the past three or four years. That's an unfair metaphor, of course; amazing things are being done all the time. However, there's been more of a tinge of acceptance and even hope surrounding events of the past few years. Things like yesterday's launch are the icing on a large and subtle cake, which the general public is finally starting to taste.
What could come out of this? Any number of things, from simple fare like semi-affordable tourism, to significant things like space elevators, to tremendous and ambitious things like orbital industry or even colonization, with an order of magnitude or three stripped off the bill. Pretty much all of these are absolutely necessary in the long view of things, and I could go for seeing some work on each of them in my lifetime - not just planting a flag, but doing something productive on top of it.
What will come out of this? I don't know. It depends on a great many things, such as the luck of the engineers, further incentives or support from government and corporations, and whether or not there's a backlash against all of this which results in the There Oughta Be A Law meme popping up again. Even if those tend towards drying up as is, however, we've just had some capability demonstrated. Because of Burt Rutan and his guys, we know that some steps towards great things can be done with a trivial amount of resources.
That's not good enough for me as an end goal, of course. But as far as a first step goes, it's pretty damn good.
Tomorrow or Thursday: the NDP party platform, which was downright pleasant to read.
"Terrorists are bad" is not news, but recent actions by al Qaeda and its allies exhibit an unparalleled bloodlust, shocking for their inhumanity. Despite the best efforts of Jim Inhofe et al, the terrorists continue to show that we are still better than them. I hope that such actions will only drive away their recruitment base and turn the Arab people against them. For all the technological strength of the U.S., it is the people of the Middle East who have the power to reject the terrorists, to arrest them and throw them out of their societies. It is only a matter of will.
I only caught the end of it on TV (transcripts should be out in the next few days), but Bill O'Reilly apparently called for a Jihad against U.C. Irvine. What did the University do to incur O'Reilly's wrath? Nothing at all.
Several graduating Muslim students wore sashes with the words La Ilaha Illallah, Muhammadun Rasul Allah: "There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is the messenger of Allah" This prayer is the Shahada, which is like the Muslim version of the Lord's Prayer or the Sh'ma. A few underinformed Jewish groups misinterpreted that as "Shahid" and paniced, and the panic spread. In O'Reilly's words, the sashes are "apparently signifying their support for the terrorist group Hamas and for suicide bombers in general". Part of many reports is a further misconception that green is the colour of Hamas, when it is the colour of Islam. Just see the Libyan flag. Muslim Wakeup has an article that makes sense of the whole situation.
Irvine's apparent wrongdoing was in refusing to ban the sashes without knowing what they said before remembering that the law says they'd have to allow it even if the students were wearing swastikas (not a stable link). Think long and hard about those who so quickly call for censorship. Many independent (bloggers, etc) reports echo this alert from Stand With Us, a pro-Israel group, which calls for condemnation rather than censorship. Also suckered in by the whole deal were Frontpage Magazine (twice!), World Net Daily, the Irvine Review, and the American Jewish Congress (which has a disreputable history). Googling around, I found a blogger who issued a correction, so I'll link to them for props, and Juan Cole has words on the matter. In an ironic twist, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (which has been accused of being a front for Hamas) has issued a complaint against the Jewish groups for creating an atmosphere that endangers the lives of Muslim students.
Jimmy Shubert on Comedy Central has a great routine about how one terrorist was caught with a bomb in his shoe, and now everybody has to take off their shoes at the airport:
So what happens when a terrorist hides a stick of dynamite in his ass and he gets caught? Then you'll go through security and there's a guy with a glove and a big vat of K-Y jelly...
"Have you been in control of your ass the entire time?"
"Yes, I've been in control of my ass the entire time."
"Has anyone else been packing your ass?"
"You sick son of a bitch!"
I've seen a couple of political documentaries lately, so let's write some reviews. First, "The Corporation". As a documentary, it's not the best. For instance, it places the first corporations with freedom to do anything with their money at about the Civil War, while the Manhattan Company was founded with that freedom nearer the turn of the 19th century. However, it does present a decent overview of how corporations have accumulated such powers. Where "The Corporation" does well is in clarifying specific issues. They found actual video footage of the Congressional hearings from the forgotten 1934 pro-Hitler coup, explain the IBM/Nazi connection by alleging that the punchcards the Nazis needed throughout the war were only produced by IBM plants in the United States, point out that the Akre/Wilson BGH firings involved not just the lone Florida station but were led by Fox News headquarters, and show that privatization of third-world water services includes not only the water system but also gives corporations monopoly rights on rainwater.
"The Corporation" is clearly a propaganda piece calling for more regulation on corporations, devolving at the end into a more general left-wing propaganda piece. Leftie documentaries often use the "baffle them with bullshit" tactic, splicing together microscopic clips to throw stuff at the viewer so fast you don't have time to critically analyze what's going on and can't tell if the sources actually support each other or not. Here, while there's a voiceover about people doing good and happy things (I forget the specifics), a bunch of video clips are spliced together and one is of a Greenpeace boat. What are they doing? Who knows? It had no connection to the rest of the movie, but you're supposed to pick up that Greenpeace is good without any reason why. When "The Corporation" relies more and more heavily on quotes from the love-him-or-hate-him Michael Moore, it becomes evident the producers have failed to create a film to persuade people who aren't already in line with their views. On the whole, I'll give it a mild recommendation.
Next on the list is "The Fog of War", filmmaker Errol Morris's interview with Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Since I liked this film, I'll start off with its faults. There is a lot of splicing in this film as well, but given that McNamara hasn't come out and condemned it, we might be safe to assume that Morris only cleaned up pauses and unnecessary words while keeping the original meaning. A lot of stock war footage is used out of context where it doesn't seem to make sense. Also, for being 56, Errol Morris sounds like a 20-year-old college student, which actually takes away from the film's impact. Every so often, you hear a disembodied young voice leading McNamara on, telling him to say the Vietnam war was bad and such things.
To his credit, McNamara doesn't let himself be led on, but says what he means to say, and there's where the movie is good. McNamara has a very intelligent, convincing personality and his stories hold your interest. The film doesn't center on Vietnam, though it cannot help but concentrate on such an important part of McNamara's life and career. We also hear about McNamara's experiences in World War 2 and the Cuban Missile Crisis, as well as his time at Ford. However, this isn't just a biography. "The Fog of War" is arranged around eleven guiding practical principles, many of which can apply not only to war and foreign policy but to life in general. Through McNamara's experiences, we see how these principles have been applied and how they have worked. Strongly recommended.
John McCain and Bill Clinton continue to defend Bush's handling of Iraq using an ends-justify-the-means argument to find the means morally acceptable (although Clinton shows a little concern). We have exchanged the loss of a middling dictator for the loss of one of the highest international peacekeeping principles, that national sovereignty must be respected and may only be violated in response to a similar violation, a casus belli -- or as the principle was later amended in the 20th century, in case of genocide. Even Saddam's conquest of Kuwait followed these principles as Kuwait's slant-drilling across Iraq's border constituted an invasion of Iraq. Not just we the United States lost this moral grounding, but we all humanity as no one dared use their armies to stand up to Bush, and it is clear to all that this principle no longer exists.
Civics according the the media: In addition to being Commander in Chief of the civilian populace, the President of the United States is also Prime Minister, King, and Pope. Time for a reread of Article 2.
Trouble at a small freebie paper you've probably never heard about: Weekly columnist Rory O'Connor was fired from amNewYork for chastising New York Times columnist David Brooks and pointing out that what's good for the Israelis isn't necessarily good news for the Arabs. It's not an anti-Israel column, but amNewYork publisher Russel Pergament saw it that way and refused to run it. O'Connor blew the whistle and was fired. Actually, she wasn't fired -- she was told that she had officially resigned.
Speaking of Brooks, here's an attack essay which lambasts David Brooks. I only glanced at it, but it looks interesting. The Amazon ad for one of Brooks's books is amusingly out of place.
Some of Josh Marshall's best columns are where he explains how the Bush Administration lies through its teeth while still believing they're not lying. While Marshall's on vacation for a week, others are stepping up to the job as the White House lets loose a storm of spin. The subject this time? The Sep11 commission's unequivocable conclusion that there was no cooperation between Iraq and al Qaeda, which has led the Bush Administration to equivocate furiously. The issue is Bush's spokesman's claim that Iraq and al Qaeda had contacts "going back decades". Slacktivist tears about the "going back decades" part of the phrase, while the Daily Howler takes on the meaning of "contacts". Also, Billmon dissects the White House talking points and Atrios catches Condoleezza Rice lying about what the commission said.
A few years ago, there was a little 2-paragraph bit in the local paper about the ACLU suing a government-run childrens' school for having mandatory Christian prayer sessions in violation of the US Constitution. This summary, from the Associated Press, said that the ACLU did not believe schoolchildren should be allowed to privately choose to pray on their own.
That was my personal introduction to what has become a much more visible trend (to me, at least): the mainstream media spreading information that is outright false and carries a right-wing partisan agenda.
As a more recent example, Susan Schmidt of the Washington Post writes that Ashcroft's "hard-line approach to the war on terror has made him a lightning rod for criticism from civil libertarians", the implication being that civil libertarians don't want to fight back against al-Qaeda. Of course, it is Ashcroft's hard-line approach to weakening the law and violating civil rights that has civil libertarians upset, not his wanting to stop the terrorists.
The Reagan eulogies provide many fresh examples. It is customary that when a powerful and popular man dies, especially a twice-elected President, people will find good things to say about him. However, those seeking deification of the man have concocted false and disputable memes which have now spread into the popular unconciousness and become generally accepted by those not paying attention: that he was the most popular President of recent times, when Johnson, Bush Sr., and Clinton had higher average approval ratings and Nixon had won in '72 by a larger margin (60%-37%) than Reagan beat Mondale with (58%-40%); that he cut spending when he didn't; that he cut the size of government when he didn't; that he ended the welfare state when he didn't; that Reagan's economy had the longest period of expansion in US history when it was the third longest after the Bush/Clinton and Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon expansions; and many more.
CNN, the ultraconservative news outlet derided as "liberal" by its even more right-wing competitor Fox News (a single hour of which would produce more examples than are in this post, so I'm not bothering with it), is far from immune, as CNN's history of working with Army Psy-ops to promote the US government's views would suggest. More recently, Kelli Arena proposed that "al Qaeda believes it has a better chance of winning in Iraq if John Kerry is in the White House". And if al Qaeda is Iraq, guess who CNN says we are fighting in the War on Terror? According to a CNN Headline News report run the Saturday before last (June 5th), the United States and France are "opponents in the War on Terror". I had trouble believing they'd said this, but I caught a repeat of the segment to confirm it. CNN has also hired Republican propagandist Dinesh D'Souza as a news analyst, a man who built his career on blaming blacks for any racism against them and denying that slavery was bad for blacks.
How about the New York Times, popularly seen as the voice of the Democratic Party to oppose the Republican-tilted Wall Street Journal and New York Post? The Times's reports on John Kerry are all about how he can't possibily win, appearing like an attempt to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of Kerry's electoral failure. They did the same thing to Al Gore in 2000, and it worked. The NYT under Howell Raines was part of the crusade to bring down Bill Clinton [PDF link], and of course, they are the home of the Judith Miller scandal.
When Al Gore spoke on how honour must be earned and how Bush, in his opinion, hasn't earned it, the media rushed to distort the message of Gore's speech. Ben Brackley's post in the Eschaton comments section dissects this (slightly edited for appearance):
Al Gore's speech has been the worst covered event of the week. It provides a Rosarch test for the media enabling them to read into it whatever they want regardless of what Gore actually said.
Andrea Mitchell tells us that Gore said things he never said.
Gwen Ifill tells us that "Al Gore staked out the far left position" in his speech.
Juan Williams says Gore's speech demonstrated he is a "loose cannon." (click Day to Day audio)
- Explanations:
- The media couldn't be troubled to learn what the winning popular vote candidate in the last election actually said.
- The media believes it can dump on Gore with impunity because they perceive he doesn't have power enough to challenge them.
- Dumping on Gore and his speech provides an easy way to look like they are "fair and balanced" journalists.
- Gore's prescience on the Iraq war embarasses the media and reminds them of their own failings and what might have been if they had done their job in 2000.
- They want to kill any future political aspirations of Gore and don't even want Gore to emerge as a respected and influential senior statesman (at present, this country certainly has a dearth of them).
With a cowed and complicit mainstream media, we sometimes find ourselves relying on the right-wing media, generally considered safely in the Republican Party's pocket, to speak up for the truth when the mainstream will not for fear of being charged with liberal bias. It took the Wall Street Journal to refer to the US military's torture of prisoners as "torture" rather than "abuse", and the Washington Times to refer to the "March for Womens' Lives" protesters as "pro-abortion rights" instead of the meaningless "pro-choice" or slanderous "pro-abortion".
Obviously, we can't rely on the right wing media to be their own party's watchdog, but there are other groups which keep an eye on things. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has tracked bias in the media for over a decade, though it sometimes shows a leftist bias of its own. The Daily Howler weblog has also been at it for years, finding something in the media to be outraged about every day, as the name suggests. Media Matters for America is a new group with an anti-Republican slant led by David Brock. Spinsanity is a fairly evenhanded group that has done well, though I disagree with some of their analyses from time to time.
Be warned: right-wing partisans have set up false "media analysis" organizations such as Accuracy in Media and the Media Research Center to push right-wing propaganda. These groups are part of the problem, not the solution. The MRC, for instance, is the Conservative News Service (later renamed to Cybercast News Service so Fox News et al could refer to them as an unbiased mainstream news source), an organization founded upon bias and propaganda, while AIM has a history of right-wing activism unrelated to media and is funded by Scaife and a bevy of Big Business names.
It must be noted that there is also left-wing bias in the media, though it is not nearly so pervasive as right-wing bias. Frank Eltman of the Associated Press, writing about illegal immigrants specifically (not immigrants in general) in yesterday's morning paper, says "They're the ones subjected to derision or worse, because of their skin color, language, or some perceived notion that they've come to take jobs away". Although he is writing about a film which draws attention to the racial and cultural derision faced by illegal Latino immigrants (and many Latino Americans), there are real and legitimate concerns about the social stresses of an influx of impoverished people and the weakening of the labor force by the addition of people who are not legally allowed to work, not just "some perceived notion".
What can be done about the media? Some wait and hope for some fairy godmother to appear and create a perfect, unbiased, ideal news source. In the case of Air America, a shamelessly biased left-wing media source was created instead. Some, seeing how the BBC works and how PBS used to work until it needed to be supported by advertisements, call for more government-run media, but you can look at the Chinese, Iranian, and old Soviet media for counterexamples. Some people take to trusting foreign news sources like the BBC, Al Jazeera, and Agence France Presse, or even trusting random people on the internet for their news. Getting your news from a multitude of sources is a good idea, but you have to measure the trustworthiness of your sources and be sure they're not all reading from the same script. In times like this, I recall my grandmother's cynical advice: don't believe anything you hear and only half of what you see.
Just something of a quickie, because I'll be heading out the door for the afternoon here in a bit. This, from CNN:
W. Africa to create 'rapid response force'
ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) -- West African defense chiefs have agreed to create a 6,500-strong standby multinational force charged with responding to "crisis and threats to peace" in the civil war-ravaged region.The core of the force will be 1,500 "highly trained and equipped" rapid response troops along with 3,500 backups; the remaining 1,500 will form a reserve, the Economic Community of West African States said in a statement late Friday.
Now as far as regional stabilization goes, I like hearing about this sort of thing. It's sounding more and more like the larger-scale plans, like the African Union planning a fairly large force to intervene in situations like the Rwandan or Darfur debacles, have fallen through over time. I'm wondering if this could be the start of a trend towards smaller coalitions of countries getting intervention forces put together in their own regions.
It's a pity the cost these things seem to come by, though. The creation of these forces is a sign of a growing resentment of the current situation in the United Nations, where any humanitarian situation which doesn't directly impact the interests of a major power is not just irrelevant, but something to be actively ignored lest someone go in to try and fix it. As a result, serious attempts at ending things like the Rwandan genocide were hamstrung by the Security Council.
On the other hand, I wonder how much leeway such forces would have. Intervention by foreign troops to cope with things like natural disasters or peacekeeping purposes are one thing. Intervening to forcibly prevent acts of genocide or otherwise bring an end to major conflicts will be more a matter of national resolves.
In West Africa, a lot of the countries are certainly more into intervention, having had some at least mildly positive experiences at the hands of the UN while also being fed up with the past several years' worth of instability. But in other parts of the world, where we see governments denying there is even a problem in their territory, a more forcible intervention carries the risk of blowing open into a full-scale war. That brings up the question of whether it's worth it to actually throw the W-word around in situations like this. I'm inclined to think it is; rampaging militias tend to back down after "stop or we'll shoot" is backed up with the breaking of heads, especially in the light of the greater costs of inaction. On the other hand, few people these days seem to be able to come out and say that.
On June 15, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to abandon the World Baptist Alliance, a union of over 200 Baptist denominations that had been founded in large part by the Southern Baptists almost 100 years ago. The Southern Baptists claim that the World Baptist Alliance is failing to take their theology seriously and is even "anti-American". Is there any backing to their allegations, or are the Southern Baptists just being a bunch of dips?
Unfortunately for the SBC, it looks like the latter. The real reason for the withdrawal, according to many analysts, is the
