Via Error, French and Brazilian researchers have produced a treatment that lowers HIV levels by 80%. This might not be a total AIDS cure, but it does promise make the disease much less fatal.
Also, Slashdot reports that a paralyzed woman is walking again after being treated with cord-blood stem cells. The Slashdot comments devolve into a pro/anti-Bush flamewar, but absent all that, the future of formerly permanent paralyzing injuries becoming easily treatable is one step closer.
Making the rounds of the blogs recently -- most likely due to major media coverage of the required recount -- is a story about the apparent failure of a vote in the state of Alabama that would have amended the state's constitution to get rid of three segregation-era sections: one mandating segregation in schools, one allowing poll taxes (a Jim Crow law intended to discourage black voting), and one, added in 1956 after the 1954 Supreme Court decision banning school segregation, that essentially said that no education at all was better than integrated education: it declared that there was no constitutional right to an education at public expense.
Much fun is being poked at Alabamians for their apparent vote in favor of segregation and poll taxes. But the segregated-schools clause and the poll tax clause are unenforceable, and have not been enforced for decades. Much more important, and indicative of where the bitter end of Republican politics takes us, is the third section, which is still of active legal import and was affected by real campaigning. A generous observer might go so far as to say that Alabamans voted on this third provision, ignoring the unenforced first two. Ignore the argument for removing even unenforced segregationist language; this entry isn't going to be about race. The third one is different. And it's still awful. To understand how awful, we'll need some context.
It is September, 2003. Judge Roy Moore, the "10 Commandments Judge," is still making headlines and is just two months away from being kicked off of the bench by an ethics commission for his flagrant violations of American democratic principles. Alabama ranks last or near-last among American states in numerous important categories, not leat of which is the quality of its educational system. Its financial structure is a sight to behold -- companies which own a great deal of its land pay a tiny share of its property taxes, the government is rigidly constrained in its spending (92 cents of every dollar arrives at state coffers already earmarked for specific needs, making flexibility in the face of changing conditions almost impossible), and total tax revenues are quite low. It is a Republican's dream.
It is also a citizen's nightmare. Revenue collection is unfairly distributed and services are unfunded. The government faces a $600million shortfall in its accounts, and must reform its tax system or cut government to the bone, including such essential services as police and education. Leading the charge for tax reform, campaigning hard for a package on the ballot facing the people of Alabama, is Governor Bob Riley.
Riley is a real Republican. Besides laying out his economic case, he invokes Christian Scripture to remind citizens of their obligation to the neediest, including young children. He faces angry opposition from within his own party, especially from the rabidly anti-tax Club for Growth, a Republican wing that is more concerned with eating its own by supporting anti-tax Republicans in primaries than concerning itself with general elections. He lays his career on the line in full knowledge of what he is risking, believing that what he does is in the best interest of the people of Alabama.
He fails.
In the year since, I have been keeping an eye on Alabama. I have dry lists of figures which go on for pages describing the cuts necessary in program after program -- 50%, 75%, 100% eliminations of anything vaguely removable, like a botany museum or a musical enrichment program for kids. Bob Riley's courage -- real courage, as real as you can find off of a battlefield, risking his professional future for the good of millions of strangers he will never know -- is rewarded only in a few acknowledgements. I own one of those -- a copy of Governing Magazine's issue naming him Public Official of the Year. I drove from Texas to Pennsylvania and detoured through Montgomery, AL to get it personally autographed by Governor Riley, whom I will respect eternally for this act.
Today, Governor Riley is continuing to earn my respect by championing the measure that would have modernized Alabama's Constitution. (Another Republican, Rep. James Buskey, R-Mobile, sponsored it in Alabama's House.) Let us put derogatory humor aside for a moment, though -- any voters voting in favor of segregation were a tiny minority. The campaign was about the third part of the amendment, which would have struck the following language from Alabama's Constitution:
"... but nothing in this Constitution shall be construed as creating any right to education or training at public expense, nor as limiting the authority and duty of the legislature, in furthering or providing for education, to require or impose conditions or procedures necessary to the preservation of peace and order."
Campaign rhetoric from before the election can (as of this writing) still be found here and here. Why would anyone campaign against a declaration of the right to a free public education? This is still a burning question in the Third World (see the opening paragraphs); it shouldn't be in America. The answer lies, of all places, in taxes. From Alabama's Decatur Daily:
"While there was widespread support for removing language mandating segregated schools and imposing poll taxes — both long since left unenforceable — a section added by the Legislature stirred opposition from the Alabama Christian Coalition, former Chief Justice Roy Moore and anti-tax groups. ... The new part deleted a 1956 declaration that there is no right to an education at public expense in Alabama. Opponents said removing such language could allow a federal court to rule that education is a constitutional right and that Alabama must provide more funding through a tax increase."
Now we come down to it. Alabamians were persuaded to issue a majority vote against saying that a free education is a right in a first-world country... because it might mean higher taxes.
The talking heads that brandish moral values in our public discourse often tell us to be wary of the slippery slope. This is the slippery slope of shortsighted opposition to taxation purely for its own sake -- the oxygen supply is choked off to even the most essential of services, like education, and people come to accept this as normal. Damage is done to the voters' very ability to see that damage is being done, and in grasping for their wallets they release their hold on the future. When the anti-tax-and-no-other-policy contingent comes to your town, I hope you remember Alabama. I hope you can find the fire to fight this danger to your state's quality of life, and your nation's future.
Back before the American presidential election, I'd written about the election campaign in Ukraine. The short version of what happened over the past couple of weeks is that the initial election led to a runoff vote, as I said, and the campaign was about as ugly as I'd expected, albeit without any actual physical violence. They had the final vote on Sunday, and, well, yeah.
To make a long story short, once again, Yanukovych "won" the election despite the fact that Yushchenko clearly had more votes. Some of the highlights include at least one murder at a polling station, a semi-infinite amount of voter intimidation, the destruction of ballot boxes in areas populated by Yushchenko's supporters, and a strangely unanimous instance of 750,000 new voters in one region all voting for Yanukovych.
If you want to read an article or two about it, I'm sure I can accomodate you easily enough. This is everywhere and important news, guys; depending on what happens this will probably spill over Ukraine's borders into the world at large. You don't have any excuse to be ignorant of it.
So what's going on in Ukraine and behind that pile of links? We've got a few different things going on, so let's see.
This could go in a variety of different ways right now. Yushchenko could fold and Ukraine could fall back under an unelected dictator. Most optimistically, the protests could continue until Yanukovych folds or is pushed out, a Ukrainian Rose Revolution that would finally bring a CIS state into the democratic sphere. Most pessimistically, Yanukovych could try to suppress things by force and create either a new largescale repression - or a Ukrainian civil war. If you believe that a country in a position such as Ukraine's can have internal conflict without Russia, the EU, or both getting involved, then you need to take the red pill; Yanukovych could destabilize the whole region by forcing a fight out of this, with a very real possibility of anything from regional economic malaise to the first major European land war in a decade breaking out.
My own hopes are that Yushchenko's people do not back down on this, whatever (and I mean literally whatever) the cost; to every regime such as this, there comes a time in which people need to say enough! and mean it enough to force the issue towards the conclusion it could have.
This could get worse before it gets better, and probably will. It might not get better at all. What happens is essentially up to the Ukrainians; it's their election, despite the wishes of Putin and Yanukovych to deny them that right. Whatever happens, though, you should all be paying close attention. This one could be too significant to ignore, both for geopolitical reasons and for the simpler facts that a threatened democracy, no matter where it is, deserves your notice - especially in this day and age. So open your eyes!
Remember that US Marine who shot and killed the non-armed Iraqi insurgent in the mosque?
The cameraman for that incident, Kevin Sites, has a blog. And in his latest blog entry, he discusses shooting that footage and the ensuing hard decisions to be made. I'd like to excerpt some of that here.
Through my viewfinder I can see him raise the muzzle of his rifle in the direction of the wounded Iraqi. There are no sudden movements, no reaching or lunging.However, the Marine could legitimately believe the man poses some kind of danger. Maybe he's going to cover him while another Marine searches for weapons.
Instead, he pulls the trigger. There is a small splatter against the back wall and the man's leg slumps down.
"Well he's dead now," says another Marine in the background.
I am still rolling. I feel the deep pit of my stomach. The Marine then abruptly turns away and strides away, right past the fifth wounded insurgent lying next to a column. He is very much alive and peering from his blanket. He is moving, even trying to talk. But for some reason, it seems he did not pose the same apparent "danger" as the other man -- though he may have been more capable of hiding a weapon or explosive beneath his blanket.
But then two other marines in the room raise their weapons as the man tries to talk.
For a moment, I'm paralyzed still taping with the old man in the foreground. I get up after a beat and tell the Marines again, what I had told the lieutenant -- that this man -- all of these wounded men -- were the same ones from yesterday. That they had been disarmed treated and left here.
We all knew it was a complicated story, and if not handled responsibly, could have the potential to further inflame the volatile region. I offered to hold the tape until they had time to look into incident and begin an investigation -- providing me with information that would fill in some of the blanks.For those who don't practice journalism as a profession, it may be difficult to understand why we must report stories like this at all -- especially if they seem to be aberrations, and not representative of the behavior or character of an organization as a whole.
The answer is not an easy one.
In war, as in life, there are plenty of opportunities to see the full spectrum of good and evil that people are capable of. As journalists, it is our job is to report both -- though neither may be fully representative of those people on whom we're reporting. For example, acts of selfless heroism are likely to be as unique to a group as the darker deeds. But our coverage of these unique events, combined with the larger perspective - will allow the truth of that situation, in all of its complexities, to begin to emerge. That doesn't make the decision to report events like this one any easier. It has, for me, led to an agonizing struggle -- the proverbial long, dark night of the soul.
I interviewed your Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Willy Buhl, before the battle for Falluja began. He said something very powerful at the time-something that now seems prophetic. It was this:"We're the good guys. We are Americans. We are fighting a gentleman's war here -- because we don't behead people, we don't come down to the same level of the people we're combating. That's a very difficult thing for a young 18-year-old Marine who's been trained to locate, close with and destroy the enemy with fire and close combat. That's a very difficult thing for a 42-year-old lieutenant colonel with 23 years experience in the service who was trained to do the same thing once upon a time, and who now has a thousand-plus men to lead, guide, coach, mentor -- and ensure we remain the good guys and keep the moral high ground."
I listened carefully when he said those words. I believed them.
So here, ultimately, is how it all plays out: when the Iraqi man in the mosque posed a threat, he was your enemy; when he was subdued he was your responsibility; when he was killed in front of my eyes and my camera -- the story of his death became my responsibility.
The burdens of war, as you so well know, are unforgiving for all of us.
Read the whole thing. I don't do it enough justice with the excerpts.
And may God have mercy on us all.
(Hat tip to Plutonium Page on Daily Kos for pointing me to this entry.)
In this weekend before Thanksgiving, the House served up the Senate with a great big stuffed turkey called an Omnibus Appropriations Bill. This more than 1,000 page monstrosity was handed over to the upper house with just enough time to need to pass it right now or else the government would run out of money and shut down for a while, not that many of us would mind that much except for the fact we've got a war going on...
The stuffing is a whole bunch of little riders and line items tacked on in the hope that no one notices or cares enough to slow down the bill's passage. A more than 1,000 page must-pass-now bill is a great place to hide stuff you want Congress to vote for, but don't want Congress to know they're voting for. It's also a great place to tack on little funding riders to bring home the bacon for your district, such as the $11 billion in porkish amendments found by Arizona's Senator John McCain. However, sometimes someone actually tries to read the legislation and finds something they disagree with, and that's been the case a few times with this bill.
The rider that's gotten the most media attention would override federal and state rules that hospitals receiving federal funds have to refer patients who want abortions to someone who will provide them if they won't, and that health care plans have to pay for them. That change was tacked on by Illinois Representative Henry Hyde and Florida Representative Dave Weldon, who somehow managed to not become a national laughingstock when he accused his opponents of being "abortion advocates". It really didn't sit well with our Senator Barbara Boxer or San Francisco Representative Nancy Pelosi, with the latter denouncing "an extraordinary sneak attack on women's rights and a disgraceful display of ideology over health." This limited outburst of opposition from the Democratic Party's left wing quickly died down when Republicans promised them a vote on eliminating the provision by March.
What really riled up the Democrats for the first time since the election, and is hardly getting any press, is an addition from Oklahoma Representative Ernest Istook allowing some Senate committee chairs to demand anybody's tax return from the IRS and release it to the public. A few hours of ire and filibustering later, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist agreed to a technical maneuver which would allow Congress to vote for the bill but require the House to remove the line item before the bill is sent to Bush to be signed into law. Frist is now promising to LART Istook, which will probably get it into the news now.
The Democrats got their own riders in, of course, as one rider cuts funding for development of low-yield "bunker buster" nuclear weapons. Also noteable about the bill is a straight 5/6 of 1% funding cut for most programs not related to national defense. Finally, the bill passed 65-30 with Democrats evenly splitting 22-23, while most Republicans supported the bill with several notable exceptions including McCain. an AP report notes that Americorps funding was cut by an eighth, and EPA funding was increased by 3.5%, surviving the across-the-board funding cut. There are surely plenty more hidden surprises in the great ominbus spending bill. It's like this every year.
Riffing off of Oliver Willis' brilliant "Brand
Democrat" poster campaign, here's #4's contribution to the good work:
Remember, that's Democrat[tm] brand America.
From TPM:
DELAY: I have never participated in this politics of personal destruction. I think it's detrimental to the institution and to both Democrats and Republicans in the institution. It looks bad for all of us. And so I've never done it.
You know, this explains so very much about the House Majority Leader. Or mebbe the bug fumes from his first job have gone to his head...
Well now, as the man said... isn't this an interesting turn of events.
Iowa, one of the sought-after swing states in this year's presidential election, has elected an evenly divided Senate, 25-25. Unlike the U.S. Senate and some other states, Iowa's executive branch does not break the tie. The parties have decided to share power, with their Senate presidency -- and thus control of the Senate agenda -- by rotating parties, once per week. (They tried the notion of having the presidency one year at a time, but both parties wanted the election year, so scratch that.)
Neither party has much of a mandate to claim here. Republicans, who were in the majority before the elections, could claim that their majority mandate continues in lieu of any real defeat, while Democrats, who gained 4 net seats, could claim that their gains represent a call for change. Both are pretty weak arguments. What will the parties do? Will they refrain from attempting major initiatives and simply mind the store, careful not to make errors? (If so, will that experiment in libertarian government work out well?) Or will they try to push through the best agenda they can muster in the face of careful scrutiny by the opposition, and perhaps forge consensus on major issues in order to claim achievements as elections get under way next year? Or, will both parties accuse the other of obstructionism as their Senate dissolves into gridlock?
My prediction: the necessity of keeping the government running will force bipartisan consensus on something close to the status quo on most bills; ideas which might not have gotten an airing in previous years may stand a chance as politicians look for trophy bills to pass together. I intend to keep an eye on Iowa. This could be amusing, or it could set a good example of bipartisanship that the national parties could borrow from. (Any Iowans in our audience willing to give us an occasional view from the front lines?)
Living in RedStateVille (Redding, CA), I happen to be represented by Congressman Wally Herger, a Republican who represents the Second Congressional District of California. So, being a consitiuent of Congressman Herger I'm in a uniquely neat place.
Joshua Micah Marshall, of Talking Points Memo asked us to pose the question about how they voted on the DeLay Rule to our representatives.
Being an informed and concerned citizen, I called Congressman Herger's office. And I got the following response. "Caucus votes are kept secret." In other words, the man on the phone could not tell me how Congressman Herger voted on such a thing, and he told me quite honestly that this rule change brought them in line with the Democrats, which makes me suspect that Congressman Herger did indeed vote for the DeLay rule.
And then he asked me how I felt about it. And I said, "Well, it seems to me that we would want to be better than the Democrats."
He said, "That's a valid point of view, ma'am."
In the end, Congressman Herger chose to give his constituents a no-response. Why? What's he got to hide?
[UPDATE 10:52 PM -- The Daily DeLay is keeping a scorecard here. So if your rep is on the list of those who haven't been contacted, how about playing along? Just call your representative's Washington office, and ask the question "Did Congressperson such-and-such support the DeLay Rule in the GOP caucus meeting on Wednesday?" Report back here or on the thread for the Daily DeLay and let me know what happens.]
[UPDATE Friday 11:08 AM -- Called Congressman Herger's office again. This time, they took my contact information and promised to send me a letter. Hmmm. We'll see if we get anything back from that. Also called Congressman Ose and Congressman Doolittle (CA-3 and CA-4 respectively) who are from districts nearby, they couldn't tell me if Ose was there, and Doolittle said that votes are private and confidential and wanted to know why I was calling.]
You may have heard that someone set himself on fire in front of the White House today. Another politically motivated (attempted) suicide, like the guy who brought a shotgun to the WTC site? There's a lot more to it than that. The guy's an FBI informant who has already helped the feds nab a suspected Qaeda financier.
Andante reports this morning about the latest news from Washington -- four more Cabinet secretaries resign.
Powell is the most prominent of four Cabinet officials whose resignations are expected to be announced Monday, sources told CNN.The others will be Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, Education Secretary Rod Paige and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, the sources said.
That brings the total of officials who won't be returning for another ride on the Bush merry-go-round to six. Still no sign of Rumsfeld stepping down, but maybe that's too much to hope for. Powell was expected, as was Ashcroft, but did anybody else expect six folks to have resigned so far?
The worst part though, is that the Bush administration continues to admit that it doesn't care much about performance and competence and all that other stuff, because the person they're offering as the likely successor to Powell? None other than NSA advisor Condi Rice.
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice is the "likely" choice to succeed Powell, a senior U.S. official told CNN.Rice is "the president's choice," and an announcement is likely this week, another senior U.S. official said.
Nice to know that we're going to continue to live in Bizzaro World for another term, between this and the Gonzales for AG suggestion. Wonder what twisted picks Shrub's going to make for Commerce and Education and Agriculture and Energy -- they'll make sense in Bizzaro World, but not here in the real one we all have to live in.
We're all about the red state/blue state bit. When I get a chance, perhaps tomorrow, I'm going to talk about moving beyond the simplistic red state/blue state divide, but tonight, we're going to use that red state/blue state thing to bring home a point.
I was browsing the blog of one of my former professors at SIMS (hi Professor Tygar!) when I found this interesting article. The Times Higher Education Supplement has issued its list of the fifty top universitites in the world. This listing was neat simply because my alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, clocked in as the second best school in the world. Harvard is the only university to beat us out. Hey, we're highly ranked both in football and in academics!
But that's not entirely the point I was making. Tim Lambert noticed that twenty of the fifty schools in the list were in the United States, and he decided, just out of curiousity, to see what would happen if he plotted them on a map. The result is below.
Interesting, n'est pas? The only school not in the blue states is my colleague William's alma mater down there in Austin, Texas. Go figure.
Of course, you can discuss amongst yourselves what this might mean...
[Side note: After some hunting, the only copy of the list I could find was this jpg. (local copy) Also, I might point out, of the seven of us that have posting access here on the NFZ, four of us either attend or have graduated from a school on that list, and we might make it five next year.]
At a high school talent show in Colorado, some students sang a Dylan song. Unfortunately for them, the song contained these lyrics:
How much do I know to talk out of turn?
You might say that I'm young, you might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know, though I'm younger than you
Even Jesus would never forgive what you do.Let me ask you one question: is your money that good?
Will it buy you forgiveness? Do you think that it could?
I think you will find when your death takes its toll
All the money you made won't ever buy back your soul.And I hope that you die and your death will come soon.
I'll follow your casket through the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered into your death bed
Then I'll stand over your grave till I'm sure that you're dead.
Of course, the Secret Service had to be called in.
Even when heads of state or government last through multiple terms, it's not uncommon for the rest of their government - the legislature, the executive and the cabinet, and so on - to get shuffled around every few years. This is pretty much normal, of course, and few people bother to bat eyes at it. The American case this time around is no exception for this, of course; the US shuffles its internal affairs far more regularly than every four years.
You all have no doubt heard of the changes coming out of the cabinet, such as the nomination of Mr. Gonzales to replace Ashcroft as Attorney-General - Warrior Tang has discussed this a couple of times. Having so discourteously left me with little to say on that particular shuffle, he got me wondering about some of the other shifts going on in this administration. Today I'm going to be talking a little bit about the events in the CIA, and the patterns into which those events fit.
The outcome of the election, such as it was, will have a significant impact on internal government policies for Bush's second administration. Compared to his first term, he is in a far stronger position. Rather than coming into office under questionable circumstances with a small majority in Congress a fervent if uncertain base of popular support, in the 2004 election President Bush was returned to office under questionable circumstances with an enlarged majority on Congress and a fervent, majority base of popular support. While the political system is more polarized than it has been at basically any time short of the late 1850s - I leave considering the implications of that to the reader - Bush can make an attempt at laying claim to his "mandate." To put it into Canadian parlance, he feels free to govern as though he had a majority - and that's precisely what he is doing.
Now, the latter part of the president's previous term in office featured a, shall we say, slight conflict with the CIA over just about everything pertaining to the current war on Iraq. On just about every major issue - its plans for the region, its relationship with terrorist organizations, its possessions of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons - the US intelligence community was almost totally at odds with the public exclamations of the US government. Now, the CIA's take was dead on - Iraq wasn't gearing up for aggressive war, its connections with al-Qaeda were minimal to nonexistent (that Iraq supported Palestinian suicide bombers cannot be denied; this, however, is a far reach from claiming Iraq was the operations centre for the Islamist movement), and the WMD "stockpiles" discovered in country might have been sufficient to seriously harm a double handful of elderly asthmatics.
To announce or leak these facts during and after the war was politically embarassing, to say the least, though. Some of the initial plans to get back at the Agency over this were heavy-handed, to say the least, but these failed and were quickly withdrawn. It was, after all, election season; Bush couldn't afford to be too blunt. The election's past though - and, even better, the president no longer has to worry about whether he can get re-elected or not.
So now, it's payback time for the Bush Administration.
In the past day or so, some news sources have reported a lot of infighting, resignations, and general furballery in the CIA, hinting at a significant internal conflict since the appointment of Peter Goss a couple of months ago. On the heels of those reports comes the allegation that the White House is in fact preparing a purge of the CIA:
The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable sources.
"The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. "Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."
If this is true, it is not the beginning of a trend, but merely the latest shot fired in it. Combined with the president's other cabinet nominees (most notably Gonzales) and even comments from outgoing figures, such as John Ashcroft's condemnation of judges who "second-guess presidential determinations" when they happen to be questionable or illegal, we're already beginning to see the pattern for the new administration.
As I said above, Bush intends to govern as though he had a proverbial majority. Just what does this mean, for those readers who don't live in parliamentary systems? Essentially, in a system like the Canadian or British government, when the government's party has a majority of the legislature, they almost have carte blanche to behave as they will. Short of pushing things too far and provoking a revolt within the governing party itself, the wishes and expectations of everybody else become totally optional.
This is the attitude the current administration is going to take: one in which loyalty to the man is more important than the integrity of the government's institutions. The Justice Department is on the verge of becoming the personal property of the President (even moreso than under Ashcroft!), and the administrative havoc in the CIA implies that the intelligence community is bound for the same fate. Congress is Republican - obviously - and with the potential for the Supreme Court getting multiple nominees over the next few years, the bulk of that high court will effectively be so as well.
Now, bodies such as the state legislatures are still going to be fairly independent - they're more introverted, and on that level the Republicans got their ass kicked in the elections - the general population is going to swing wherever they swing regardless, and other factions such as the military still have something of independence despite their generally-Republican leanings. Through all this, however, we've got a problem: a large and growing amount of the institutions in the United States have become, or are about to become, manned by personal loyalty to the President - the current President - and not to their tasks or the larger institutions of the country.
The next four years are not going to see much, if any, bipartisanship to speak of. President Bush has his mandate - or he thinks he does, which is the same thing - and he is going to (ab)use it freely for the next little while. I want you all to think for awhile about what this might mean in the administration of a president who no longer has to fear the electorates' reaction come the next general election.
It's not hopeless, of course, just dangerous. Even a majority government in my own system can be brought down if the leader overextends himself, or the opposition convinces enough of their opponents to turn on the government. This is possible, if difficult, but the United States isn't currently Ukraine, with the rather more active moves by the government to put down any attempts at opposition.
In the meantime, though, Bush thinks he has a majority, and he's going to govern as though he does. You might want to brace yourselves.
I had thought it might merely be a symptom of laziness or overwork when my local newspaper headlined the Gonzales choice with "Latino Named As Ashcroft's Successor". There are many ways they could have headlined this -- "Torture Supporter Named...", "Bush Names Own Lawyer...", for a couple of examples -- but instead, the Pee Dee seemed to feel the most important thing they needed to tell their readers about Gonzales was the fact that he is Latino.
This morning, the Pee Dee has an editorial praising Gonzales's virtues of being Latino and unspecified "plans for making the Justice Department more effective and less invective". They're also calling him a "moderate", just as all of this Administration's appointees have been quickly dubbed by the media following their appointments, and they're minimizing his influence and involvement in the military torture scandal, which itself has been minimized by the media to the point where it's not an issue anymore.
When we have one of the architects of the policies that led to Abu Ghraib given a promotion, the mainstream media can't be bothered to take some time out of their coverage of Scott Peterson (who deserves about as much time as they gave Evelyn Hernandez) to remind people of what "mild, physical contact" looks like as interpreted by the Bush administration. Many outlets failed at all to cover the reports of torture in Afghanistan, Cuba, and the rest of Iraq, where prisoners not known to be enemy, in some cases people arrested only for being family of suspected enemy leaders, have been beaten, sometimes to death, and raped as a matter of policy.
From what I've seen, the Pee Dee is just going along with most of the media in not being concerned about the nomination of Gonzales. On the pro-Bush side, The Dallas Morning News says Congress should confirm Gonzales because it would make his mother happy. By all appearances, Congressional Democrats are going to follow the media and roll over again and let this pass without a fight.
So...technology is everywhere these days. Everywhere you turn, you find yourselves confronted with ever more gadgets for all sorts of purposes -- both beneficial and malevolent. Now, don't get me wrong, I like technology. I'm sitting here typing a blog entry on the Internet, for heaven's sake.
But I do think there's times we go overboard on the technology ideas. Like, for example, here's a suggestion Dave Del Grande makes in his latest column ("No BS, BCS keeps interest up"):
It was reported at the meetings that QuesTec validated 93 percent of all calls on balls and strikes. This was supposed to be a good thing.I look at it this way: Over the course of your average game, the umpire behind the plate made about 20 mistakes. Basic stuff, like deciding if a pitched ball crossed the plate between the knees and numbers.
There would be no mistakes -- none -- if Major League Baseball got into the 21st century and created a magnetic field rising from home plate, tailored to the exact measurements of each hitter.
The ball intersects the zone? Strike. It doesn't? Ball.
Perhaps baseball would consider it ... if half its teams didn't have their hands over their ears.
Now, while the columnist is ranting about the stupidity of major league owners, a point I can understand, I'm more interested in the technological idea encased here. Now, it seems heavenly to have a system proposed like the one above. No more squabbling over balls and strikes -- it simply is or is not. At first glance, it seems like a brilliant idea. More accurate, more fair, easy to use, makes sense...
But baseball is a game of tradition. There are still people who spit upon the designated hitter rule, and that's been de rigour in the American league for over thirty years now. When it comes down to it, who cares that a human umpire might make mistakes? They generally end up balancing out to both teams over the course of a game, and the human umpires are getting it right at a 93% clip, so...why take away the soul of the game for more accuracy?
One could make a similiar argument with voting machines, I suppose. A machine that at first seems brilliant, but then has, if you're thoughtful about the whole process, many flaws in it.
I still need to write my post on stupid pollworker stories, I've just been bouncing between busy and sick, so I'll get to it soon. I promise.
I just wanted to point out that technology isn't the be all end all that some of its promoters would make it out to be.
Ever play bughouse? It's a chess variant in which two teams, each taking both colors on two boards, play each other. Pieces captured on one board can be placed on the other board in lieu of a move. Our boards today are the Attorney General nomination, and a set of Supreme Court nominations starting with the possibly-soon retirement of Chief Justice Rehnquist. These two fights are closely related, and the Democrats have little political capital to spend. However, if we play carefully, we might be able to capture some from one fight and make a strong stand in the other.
Let's take a look at the circumstances of each fight.
The Attorney General nomination is definitely open. The leading contender is clear: Alberto Gonzales, author of the infamous terror memos which opened the door for the practices at Guantanamo shortly thereafter repudiated by the (current) Supreme Court. This memo can persuasively be argued to have struck a tone of cavalier disregard for Constitutional and human rights which set the example for Abu Ghraib. The last thing I would want is someone like this influencing national law, so the image of him as Attorney General isn't pretty to me. Conservatives, oddly enough, are also uncertain about him -- he's said to be iffy on abortion (that is to say, he's not strongly pro-life and may in some circumstances be pro-choice) and may be accepting of affirmative action. On these issues I (disagreeing with, if I understand correctly, most if not all of the rest of the Nuke Free Zone) am pro-life and not in favor of affirmative action. In other words, I get face-slapped coming and going.
I really don't like Alberto Gonzales.
The Attorney General nomination has several threads connecting it to the Supreme Court nomination(s). One is the possibility that Mr. Gonzales is being put in the Attorney General slot to boost his credentials for a Supreme Court nomination. On the one hand, this would mean two confirmation hearings in short order, leaving very little to be said in the second if he passes the first, so that a second confirmation would almost certainly be smooth sailing. On the other hand, Mr. Gonzales has long had the Attorney General post as a career ambition, and it's not a traditional spot from which to name a justice. If he's named as a Supreme Court nominee, he's not likely to be the first one this term.
Another connecting thread is the consideration of political capital. As one of the first moves after President Bush's re-election, this comes at a time of political strength for the President. He will not want to be defeated in such an early, important act, and this act will make a first impression on the new term. Therefore, any serious filibuster threat, even if the Democrats can maintain party unity and hold the line on defections, would be instantly met with blistering charges of obstructionism. This would draw down the bank significantly for future actions.
On the Supreme Court front, nominations are not necessarily soon or immediate. However, several justices are well past retirement age and Chief Justice Rehnquist has recently been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, so posts on the Court are very likely to open up within this term, possibly before the mid-term elections. Front-runners are foggy. Though Mr. Gonzales has been mentioned, a repeatedly-suggested candidate for the first vacancy is J. Harvie Wilkinson III, of the federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia. A federal appeals court is a much more traditional place than the Attorney General's post from which to draw a Supreme Court nominee. A bit of research on my own comes up with a couple of books he has written, including One Nation Indivisible: How Ethnic Separatism Threatens America, which jibes well with my views on such social phenomena as race-based gerrymandering and self-segregational tendencies. The New York Times has Wilkinson described as "opposed to abortion," but with a "strong environmental and First Amendment record" that Democrats may find acceptable. For me, of course, all three are positives. Though I'm not enough of a legal scholar to dig through Judge Wilkinson's decisions to analyze how he might rule on the issues surrounding Guantanamo, someone who despises racial categorization and stands up for the First Amendment strikes me as someone who would continue the current Court's stance of laughing out of the building the Administration's feeble attempts to justify using the Bill of Rights as toilet paper.
I really like J. Harvie Wilkinson III.
So where does all this lead? Here's my suggestion for a strategy the Democrats could follow in playing bughouse with the Republicans: when Alberto Gonzales comes up for Attorney General, don't filibuster. He's an unprincipled lawyer that may well be significantly responsible for the torture and abuses that have painted the United States so blackly in the eyes of decent people, but a filibuster threat would be too expensive. If he's so bad, try to get moderate Republicans to agree with you. Leash him so tightly to Abu Ghraib he might as well have been taking the pictures himself. Call for Republicans to cross the aisle and vote against a nominee for our nation's top lawyer that plays havoc with fundamental American ideals of justice. Give the torture memos every second of exposure to the light of day that you can squeeze out of the hearings. Try to make strange bedfellows with hardcore conservatives that are leery of his record on abortion and affirmative action. Save your strength for the Supreme Court fight -- as Attorney General, he would only be doing the same thing the Administration is currently doing, except perhaps a bit more enthusiastically.
Then, if and/or when Mr. Gonzales is nominated for the Supreme Court, filibuster like the nation depended on it (because maybe it does). Point out that you were kind enough to leave off a filibuster, state your piece, and bring him to a fair up-or-down vote in the Senate when the President wanted him as Attorney General, but now it's important, because the Supreme Court has been telling the Attorney General what to go do with himself about all these violations of bedrock American rights and they're the only one that can when the President doesn't. Hold out a real alternative so that you're not seen as obstructionist: Judge Wilkinson, who has pledged allegiance to Constitutional rights and who is acceptable to the President's base was well as to moderate Democrats. If he gets appointed, and Gonzales comes up later, have another alternative ready. Even if something unexpected happens, you'll have hoarded the political capital to be prepared to demand a Supreme Court Justice with respect for the Bill of Rights as your first priority. If events do run their course even roughly as predicted, you get a guy on the Court who will continue their drive to keep the Administration's excesses in check and will have successfully used your minority influence to tilt national affairs without breaking the prerogatives of the majority. If absolutely everything else goes wrong, you will have stood up for real American principles at every step of the way.
If it's not too soon to look at midterm elections, that's not a bad record to have.
First of all, you may have noticed the shiny new page design. For those of you who are reading this via the LJ feed or other feed methods, come check it out. And after you're done, give much fame and money and kudos and other things to the NFZ's own Fourth Man, who slaved over a hot computer to bring us this new design. It's not what I expected when I gave him the keys to the kingdom, but wow, I'll take it. :)
Second, we've installed MTBlacklist 1.6.5, which means I was able to find and clear most of the spam that's been hiding in crevices where I just haven't noticed. The only annoying thing about cleaning out the spam is that there's (a) no way for me to even somewhat automate the process and (b) I seem to be getting hit by folks who aren't on the blacklist on MTBlacklist's page.
Third, there will be some rennovation going on around here as I get my act together. I'm going to place trackbacks in the entry archives, much like it is at slacktivist's blog. I'm going to make categories more useful than what they are now (we've been generating category archives all along -- probably ought to do something with them), and I am going to do something with the list of authors Fourth Man so thoughtfully put on the sidebar. :)
Fourth, we've added a few more sites to the blogroll. So give all those blogs in the sidelinks a look, most all of them are worth your time and attention. And if you have an idea for another blog to add to the list, tell us.
Oh yeah. And to those of you who have something you want to get out to the entire readership of the NFZ, we do guest posts. Just come hunt me (that's katster) down, either on IRC or via email (katster at nukefreezone.net will work) and toss your proposal at me. More often than not, I'm more than willing to put up guest posts. :)
Other than that, use this thread to talk amongst yourselves about the world and what's in it, or just give Fourth Man the kudos he deserves for such a kickass site design.
[Edit 11:30 PM: Ouch. Aris just caught a nasty bug that prevented people from commenting. Luckily, it was an easy fix, and comments should be working again now. If they aren't, or something else is really badly broke, email me or catch me somewhere and let me know so we can get it fixed.]
Doubtful, of course, but in that case we're seeing a splendid example of similar thought processes: his column recently at the New York Times says many of the same things as a recent article here at the Nuke Free Zone, albeit with a good deal more experience in public life and the resultant authority. Here's one of the paragraphs that most closely echoes the Zone's main points:
Declarations of "faith" are abstractions that permit both voters and candidates to fill in the blanks with their own religious beliefs. There are two dangers here. One is the merging of church and state. The other is rank hypocrisy. Having claimed moral authority to achieve political victory, religious conservatives should be very careful, in their administration of the public trust, to live up to the standards they have claimed for themselves. They should also be called upon to address the teachings of Jesus and the prophets concerning care for the poor, the barriers that wealth presents to entering heaven, the blessings on the peacemakers, and the belief that no person should be left behind.
Or, like the Zone said,
...the listener is intended to hear the statement "I am a man of faith" -- which is meaninglessly broad when spoken to millions of people at once -- and fill in the gaps in the way that that particular listener finds most personally favorable. ... challeng[e] a Republican who seems ready to claim a monopoly on Christian values on the specifics of the articles of faith they would bring to the table in governing. Employing such a response also affords an excellent opening to speak of one's own principles, especially those derived from one's own faith.
So it looks there's growing agreement: don't let them get away with pretty nothings. Drag the face-off back to real principles.
Good. Maybe the stage is set to start examining some of those principles.
Birdhouse notes an odd election result in Orange County, where an unknown candidate who didn't campaign at all won a school board seat over a PTA president and Boy Scout volunteer. This being Orange County, it's possible the PTA guy lost because he has a Latino name. A more comfortable explanation is that the loser's job description, "park ranger", was less evocative of an appropriate background for a school board member than the winner's "writer/educator", even as it's not apparent the winner has held either of those occupations.
Bush found someone worse than Ashcroft to take over the Attorney General's post. Ashcroft was just an ultrafundie loon, but Gonzales appears to be partisan to as great a degree as anyone in the Bush administration. Ashcroft could go off on his own tangents. Gonzales, I expect will take orders and gladly ignore the law when it suits the Party. He's also one of the guys ultimately responsible for the widespread torture conducted by the US military under Bush, having sent around memos declaring it acceptable back around the Afghan campaign.
Here's an informative article about Gonzales.
Tapping Gonzales for AG means that we'll probably see an attempt to put Miguel Estrada on the Supreme Court. Like Gonzales, Estrada lets the Republicans play the race card and accuse anyone opposing him for his deeds of opposing him for being Hispanic, something they already did with great success when they floated Estrada for the DC circuit. Estrada has two other attributes which make him likely to slide into the Supreme Court with little effort.
First, he has very little background on which to judge him. I've mentioned the time he took up a case against a union and argued that the Seventh Amendment shouldn't be respected. Other than that, there's not much else in the way of information on Estrada, pro or con. It's difficult to read him other than to hear Ann Coulter promise that he'll use his powers to destroy everything that liberals have ever believed in.
Secondly, Estrada has relevant experience working as a staffer for Justice Kennedy. He's been in the building, which is a big step forward in getting the post. I've heard that his job was to filter out liberal arguments so that Kennedy would never have the chance of reading one where he might accidentally agree with it. I'm a little too busy to dig us anything on it right now.
...we don't need him as our Attorney General!John Ashcroft resigned today, citing as his reason that there is no more crime or threat of terrorism in the United States today. Really: "The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." That must be why he was concentrating the FBI's resources on fighting interstate pornography.
I wonder what effect this will have on the Plame Affair investigation, which was said to actually be heading forward under Ashcroft's FBI. If Bush appoints a partisan replacement (not merely extremist), that'll be bottled up like the CIA under Goss, which wasn't able to leak a said-to-be damaging Sep11 report before the election. As for the real reason Ashcroft "resigned", I expect it has to do with the failures of most of the antiterrorism trials due to his Department's overreaching and routinely violating suspects' rights. In addition, Ashcroft's extremism relative to Bush (!) makes him political dead weight. With him gone, Bush can go back to being a "compassionate conservative" again.
Also gone is Commerce Secretary Don Evans. I'm afraid I don't know that much about him or why he'd be invited to give the axe to himself. My notes say he's the source of one report that Bush thinks he's the Messiah, but that was a while ago (I haven't kept notes for close to a year) and isn't really a big enough deal for him to be gotten rid of now and not then. If anyone knows something about what Evans might have done to tick off the top, post it in comments.
Evans has been a close friend of Bush for decades. What the heck is going on? Nobody ever gets fired from organizations like this Administration; everyone always retires for "personal reasons". It's entirely possible that Evans might really be retiring for personal reasons, but I'd like to hear about any possible controversy in this dearth of information. I recall that the last best friend of Bush was Ken Lay..
Many of us expected to see mobs of rampaging partisans running down the streets and dragging people from their homes in the days after November 2nd. Of course, we expected to see that here in the States after the election results came out, not halfway around the world in Cote D'Ivoire as their civil war flares up again.
The last flare-up, which ultimately left the country divided in half, happened two years ago. As I recall, the rebels were led by soldiers citing upset at a cut in their benefits while the government said it expelled the soldiers because they were considered a possible threat to rebel. There was obviously a lot more to it that never made it into the papers. The government blamed immigrants from Burkina Faso of inciting the rebellion, which inflamed street violence, leading France to send troops to defend European and American civilians in the country. France soon teamed up with the government against the rebels, then acted as mediators to produce a ceasefire. The government agreed to a ceasefire but didn't actually stop its assaults until the West African Union sent forces to oppose them. Meanwhile, France became the hated enemy of both government and rebel forces for standing in between them.
The recent flareup began as the government bombed several targets in a rebel-held city, a few weeks after the rebels refused to disarm by a deadline, a few weeks after the government refused to pass legislation favouring the rebels by a deadline. Then the government bombed a French position, killing nine Frenchmen and an American. France wiped out Cote D'Ivoire's tiny air force in retaliation, causing the government to cancel its assault against the rebels and instead send fascist lynch mobs against white civilians in the cities it controlled. France has occupied the cities to stop the violence, and the UN Security Council has passed a resolution giving France carte blanche to forcably reestablish a ceasefire between the government and the rebels.
The BBC has timelines of long-term and recent events. For more information, see also The Scotsman on French troop movements, a VoA interview with Human Rights Watch, a VoA report on UN diplomatic activities, and Google News. This may not be related, but days before the attacks, the World Bank placed Cote D'Ivoire's loans in non-accrual status, implying that they don't expect Cote D'Ivoire to pay them back on time.
I've been reading a lot of political blogs, attempting to make sense of things. One of the brightest spots on this journey have been the blogs of Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden's blogs.
And deep in the comments section on Teresa's blog, I found this wonderful summation of what the Democrats can offer by Bruce Baugh. And reading it -- well, it's a lot of the reasons I'm a Dem.
After the contempt Bush showed for the American people in his few unscripted public appearances, his spokesmens' everyday inability to answer straight questions, his refusal to release the Reagan records as required by law, his political alliance with the terrorist-friendly Islamic Institute, his instructions to China to develop more nuclear weapons if it makes them feel safer living with his belligerence, the torture-justifying memos circulating between the Pentagon, the Justice Department, and his own lawyer, the unchallenged breakdown of disarmament talks with North Korea, his backing of the coups in Haiti and Venezuela, his judicial appointments so politically activist that one submitted an argument against civil defendants' Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial just to be on the side opposing a union, his Justice Department's total surrender in the already-won Microsoft antitrust case, the littany of his own advisors resigning in protest and urging the people to vote for anybody but Bush, the similar resignations of experienced military officers and the Joint Chiefs' glum refusal to applaud during his State of the Union address, the resignation and subsequent martyrdom of O'Neill, the mysterious suicide of a State intelligence analyst specializing on Iraq, his refusal to condemn the lying "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth", and so many other of Bush's scandals that it would be a strain on jrenken's bandwidth to list them all, people still turned out in the tens of millions to vote for him.
Many years ago it was a career-ending scandal for President Harding when his Secretary of the Interior opened up the Elk Hills and Teapot Dome federal oil reserves to private drilling. Many still consider him the worst President ever. The current crew came into office pledging to allow private drilling in the Alaska Wildlife Refuge. The eternal vigilance demanded by a free democracy as the price for its continued survival is much in arrears, and there is little evidence of the people's will or ability to make future payments.
There is much more that I can say about the federal results, but the rest of this piece will concentrate on what the election means for California. This is a state which can flip between being Jerry Brown liberal and Ronald Reagan conservative at the drop of a hat. The initiative results and the general trend of the past few years suggest that California is a burgeoning Red State that only votes for Democratic officials out of habit.
Some background on the political state of affairs in California:
The media in California is much the same as in the rest of the country. Talk radio out of San Francisco, with the exception of Bernie Ward's God Talk program and a new Air America station, is all Limbaughism. The newspapers either try their best to be "balanced" by adding pro-Republican propaganda to offset damaging facts about the Republicans, or in some places are plainly pro-Republican. The national television networks are, of course, the same as anywhere else.
The California Democrats' big initiatives of recent years have been to give more powers and favours to the state's illegal immigrants and to promote the building of more nominally Indian casinos. Neither is a winner in the people's eyes, and the latter is a bigger loser because the Nevada gambling interests that the Democrats were courting have jumped on board the Schwarzenegger bandwagon, leaving the Democrats with all of the political costs and none of the power. Symptomatic of the Democrats' disconnect with the people was the proposal of my own state Assemblyman, Joe Nation, to ban pigeon hunting because the dove is the bird of peace. Really. And yes, that is his real name.
The Republicans faced no negative repercussions when a member of their state Central Committee was accused of being a Chinese spy who stole nuclear secrets from Livermore and set up Wen Ho Lee as a patsy. Governor Schwarzenegger is loved by most of the population, and the media hasn't been able to find a bad word to write about him from the start of his campaign when he boldly supported the root causes of the California blackouts to his actions in office when he issues press releases about how hard he's working in Sacramento on days he's vacationing in Hawaii, and calls opposing legislators faggots undeserving of his attention because they don't carry any political power in the state anymore.
Unless the California Democratic Party changes its tactics, Schwarzenegger's going to be right about not needing to listen to them since they're not going to be a force outside of the San Francisco Bay Area for much longer.
Now for an analysis of the initiative results, sorted into their liberal/conservative tilt adjusted by their support by/for the party machines:
| Alignment | Prop. | % For | % Against |
|---|---|---|---|
| Most Conservative / Republican | 64 | 58.8 | 41.2 |
| 69 | 61.8 | 38.2 | |
| 65 | 37.5 | 62.5 | |
| 60A | 72.9 | 27.1 | |
| Conservative / Republican | 1A | 83.6 | 16.4 |
| Neutral / Just Plain Stupid | 70 | 23.9 | 76.1 |
| Liberal / Democratic | 67 | 28.1 | 71.9 |
| 63 | 53.5 | 46.5 | |
| 66 | 46.8 | 53.2 | |
| 61 | 58.1 | 41.9 | |
| 71 | 59.2 | 40.8 | |
| 62 | 45.7 | 54.3 | |
| 60 | 67.3 | 32.7 | |
| 68 | 16.3 | 83.7 | |
| 59 | 83.2 | 16.8 | |
| Most Liberal / Democratic | 72 | 49.1 | 50.9 |
The "Neutral" Prop 70 would have given Indian casinos the power to unilaterally break their contracts with the state and demand new, more favorable contracts which would be backed by the power of the state Constitution for the next 99 years. You've seen my opinion of it.
With that out of the way, I'll go over the conservative propositions. The only one to fail was Proposition 65, a clumsy bludgeon which would have forbidden the Legislature from doing a slew of things to interfere with local government. Prop. 65 failed because its backers urged their supporters to vote against it and vote for Prop. 1A, a better alternative they'd developed in the meantime. It still got 37.5% of the vote. People are very upset at how the bankrupt State has been unilaterally skimming money from the also and already bankrupt local governments. Prop. 1A had the support of the Democratic Party, but was really driven by Schwarzenegger's Republicans. It was the elections's biggest winner, with 83.6% of the vote.
Prop. 64 bans private lawsuits against law-breaking monopolies, leaving it up to the State to choose whether to enforce the law or let favoured businesses have an unfair advantage. It should be obvious how much of a bad idea this is, but 58.8% of the state voted for it. Prop. 69 forces felons to surrender DNA samples to a police database, an expansion of State power that doesn't sit well with me.
Wrapping up the conservative propositions, Prop. 60A requires all money from the sale of "surplus state property" to be paid on the loans Schwarzenegger took out to cover the deficit this year. In other words, it gives Schwarzenegger the political power to demand the pillaging of public property while accusing his opponents of being big spenders who are causing big deficits and harming California's future. Anything that Schwarzenegger wants to sell off will become "surplus property" without question from the media whether it is really surplus or not, and the argument that we won't have the stuff to sell again next year will be smeared as liberal big spender thinking even as I'm paraphrasing the words of conservative State Senator Tom McClintock. This is what a supermajority of 72.9% of California, every county in the state, agreed to see in the headlines for the next few years.
Now for the results of the more liberal propositions, which were generally less successful. Prop. 67 was a set of convoluted changes to medical and welfare laws which was being promoted by its backers as a bill to reduce 911 emergency phone line response times. Its detractors won out on a nearly 3-1 margin by scaring the people about a 400% tax increase on a tax measured in pennies per month. I voted against it just because I couldn't tell what it would do.
Prop. 63 simply spends more money to expand mental health services, something that has been underfunded since Reagan was governor. It passed on a slim margin.
Prop. 66 reforms the "three strikes" mandatory sentencing laws. It also makes the law harsher on child molesters, introducing mandatory sentencing for first time offenders and going back on the basic idea of leaving sentencing up to judges and juries. It failed on a slim margin.
Prop. 61 is the classic "It's for the children!" bill, granting a few select childrens' hospitals access to state funds for capital improvements. It sets access requirements that pretty much forbid any other hospitals from the funds, but with a limit that someone snuck in to keep it from being too much of a pork bill, doesn't allow any hospital to take out more than $74 million. Prop. 71 is another medical spending bill, calling for the state to fund stem cell research since the federal government isn't doing it. Troublingly, it "established" in the Constitution a right to conduct such medical research, rather than recognizing such a right. Both propositions passed by comfortable margins.
Prop. 62 is the Democrats' attempt to lock out third parties from elections by only allowing the two highest vote earners in the primaries to participate in the general election, and to keep right-wing Republicans off the ballot by allowing open primaries. It failed on a slim margin. Prop. 60, a direct response which states that any candidate winning a party primary may participate in the general election, won on a 2-1 margin.
Prop. 68 aggressively demands the Indian casinos agree to comply with state environmental and labour laws and give more of their profits to the state or else California will allow existing licensed non-Indian casinos to install slot machines. It was the biggest loser of the season, only getting 16.3% of the vote.
Prop. 59, a big winner with 83.2% of the vote, enshrines in the Constitution the people's right to see the records and minutes of their elected officials. It will soon see its first test as some smartass sued Schwarzenegger to see his appointment book.
Prop. 72, also known as the Wal-Mart Bill, requires large businesses provide full health care to their employees and small to medium businesses provide limited health care. It failed on a slim margin.
In summary, we've seen the strong to overwhelming success of 3 of 4 conservative bills, and the other fail only because its backers told the people to vote against it -- and more than a third voted for it anyways. Meanwhile, only 5 of 10 liberal bills passed. 3 of those were simple medical spending bills which generally get broad support in this state, one was intended to rebut the Democratic agenda, and the final winner was populist and nonpartisan. The ones the Democrats wanted passed, 62 and 72, both failed.
Here we see, perhaps, a window into the future of the state.
The general consensus among Democrats is a long way from settled yet, but one camp is emerging with the shared conclusion that the Republican Party has steadily been out-communicating us, reaching Midwestern, Southern, and rural voters with its core principles by conveying them on a powerful vehicle of religious motivation that works through local churches while Democrats have relied on a more amorphous information network that works best in the tightly interconnected cities.
If the Democrats' network has any real center, it is probably universities, where college students and academes have the best access to the diverse range of primary factual sources and communications channels. But churches touch many Americans' lives with an immediacy that universities do not. Perhaps more importantly, the complexity of raw data is difficult to convey quickly and accurately, a trait at a premium in political campaigns where millions of minds must be swayed.
I am a mathematician by training. It's not immediately obvious to many outsiders, but our job is in many respects the spotting of patterns and the distillation of a multitude of cases into unifying principles, the simpler the better. It's what we call elegance. So I'd like to think I have something to contribute here. This article is the first of an occasional series on the Republican communication machine, and what the Democrats can learn from it.
Faith. It's one syllable, and it encodes a baffling array of information. In fact, it encodes some mutually exclusive information, both within a single voter and among voters. Many individual voters in American Christian traditions learn about the concept of "mysteries," apparent paradoxes in any given branch of religious faith which appear so difficult to answer that their incomprehensibility (at least to living, human minds) is itself taken as an article of faith. Between multiple voters, there also arise doctrinal differences between different denominations. I speak largely of Christian denominations; the use of faith in political venues to speak to other voters is a far less common thing. However, Christianity has over the course of 2,000 years accumulated a body of thought and interpretation so varied that nearly any position not contradictory to its most fundamental tenets can find support somewhere therein. It is not lightly that our civilization begat the aphorism, "The Devil can quote Scripture to his purpose."
At first glance, this vagueness and contradiction might be taken as a weakness if one wanted to use faith as a vehicle for a political message. Surely a political message should be as clear as possible, right? I argue that, in the case of faith, the opposite is true, and I'd like to explain at this point a one-off line that I dropped into my last post.
No human being is completely without faith in something unless in the grip of a hopelessness so deep as to be, in my unmedical opinion, pathological. For many Americans, their faith is an integral part of their lives, so integral that when it is spoken of the hearer makes a vast set of assumptions attributing to the speaker's faith the characteristics of the listener's own faith until and unless those assumptions are upset. In other words, the listener is intended to hear the statement "I am a man of faith" -- which is meaninglessly broad when spoken to millions of people at once -- and fill in the gaps in the way that that particular listener finds most personally favorable. Though the statement could be given meaning by introducing specific tenets of the faith adhered to by the speaker, and the specific principles of that faith they found important and applicable to governmental decisions, such specificity does not serve a politician, because the statement is not meant to convey information. It is meant to leave a positive impression.
George W. Bush often speaks of his faith... has communicated effectively in terms of faith with millions of evangelical Christians... has introduced governmental policies motivated by that faith, at the very least in programs like his Faith-Based Initiative. His first-term Attorney General, John Ashcroft, has spoken of his faith and made the news on several occasions because of acts he undertook directly stemming from that faith. Consider this question, for both men, separately. Try to answer it without Googling.
What's his actual denomination?
If you were able to answer it without looking up the information, especially for both men, you're notably well-informed. Many people wouldn't have been able to. A politician speaking of his faith would be foolish to go into any specifics. You don't win votes by pointing out your belief that the Seventh-Day Adventists have the right idea, while Berean Baptists are sadly deluded, or that Episcopalians know the truth but Methodists have serious doctrinal problems. The limits of a politician's embrace of religion in this country are largely limited to Judaism, Mormonism, Catholicism, or "other Christian." And Jews, Mormons and Catholics all suffer from the baggage that comes with their specific label.
We must take a moment to be impressed at the utility of the theme. Such a self-customizing message is not easy to find. The nature of such usefulness does open a line of response Democrats might consider: challenging a Republican who seems ready to claim a monopoly on Christian values on the specifics of the articles of faith they would bring to the table in governing. Employing such a response also affords an excellent opening to speak of one's own principles, especially those derived from one's own faith. There remain open questions, though: how did the Republican Party seize the upper hand on using religion as a tool of persuasion? Is there a similarly fill-in-the-blanks message still available for Democrats to consciously choose to use? Would they even want to use such a message, or would Democrats by preference seek a communications vehicle of similar immediacy without resting on semi-untruthful vagueness? Does such a message exist?
These aren't cute rhetorical questions to which I have an answer right now. The analysis continues.
I wanted to share with you the first real laugh I've had since finding out about Tuesday's debacle.
Fred Clark, of the blog Slacktivist, is one of that rare breed of liberal Christians, and he's been talking about the intersection of mainstream Christianity and politics, and desparing how it seems to have been hijacked. He's also the guy that's been putting together the analysis of the Left Behind books, which is how I found his blog. Now he's a daily read.
Anyway, today he posted this gem. It made me laugh. Go. Read. Now.
And keep in mind, while the Right may have the House and the Senate and the Presidency, it's still the Left that has the sense of humor. And we are organizing for 2006.
I'm obviously not happy. I don't think any of us are. It took two anti-anxieties to get my brain out of the nasty cycle it got stuck in after spending a fifteen hour day at the polls, and manhandling voting machines at the end of it. But I'm a bit more coherent today, I think.
I'm still angry. I'm still upset. I'm still confused. I am all of these things, and trying to tackle the presidential election directly will get me saying something much the same as what the Fourth Man ended up with after another set of elections -- I'm not recalling if it was 2000 or 2002 now, but it was one obscenity repeated a thousand times, or something like that.
So I'm trying to find little pieces of hope that help in keeping me somewhat sane. Here's a partial list of some of the thoughts that have helped today.
We'll see how it plays out. In the end...well, it's going to be nasty and not much fun to live through, but we endure. We keep fighting. This is how the Republicans felt after Goldwater's defeat. Look where they are now. It's our turn, dammit.
When I joined the crew of the NFZ, I knew that I had a tendency to focus my use of the forum on a specific goal -- electing Kerry President -- and thus allowed that, come Nov. 3d, I might decide to quietly fade off the writer's list, regardless of who had won.
Sod that.
There's still work to be done. I'm facing a personal realization, the kind that comes with knotted stomach muscles, about how you can sacrifice real things (from money to progress toward a doctorate, let alone all the time, work and emotional investment) and do your best (by the objective measure that my state went blue, thank you very much), and still, for one reason or another, not get the final prize. It's surely not pleasant, but it comes with the territory in team efforts and competitions. It also gives me something to stand on in the flood, and by God if we need to rip apart the deck planking to patch the hull, pass me a hammer.
And if I'm going to get to patching, I need to identify the problem to patch. We'll hear a lot of post-mortems on the election in the upcoming days and years, but before the talking heads get theirs in, here's my first stab at a conclusion. Polling data was saying that, if your top priority was "moral values," whatever that means (it means "are you loud about being Protestant," if you want to be cynical), you voted by wide margins for the President. If you lived in one of the 11 states which had state-constitutional amendments on the ballot to legalize discrimination against queers -- I mean, defend the sanctity of marriage -- you now have this amendment in your state constitution, because all of them passed with surprising margins(in Oregon, "pass" is surprising). Those amendments were on the ballot in large part to motivate evangelical Christians to turn out, because they, by wide margins, voted for the President.
Why? Why does gay marriage connect to moral values connect to Republicanism, motivating voters in the face of a war and an economy and plans for important issues like health care on which they themselves say they disagree with the incumbent, to vote for him and not the challenger? My first, day-after musing is this: the Democrats (at least in comparison to the Republicans) have failed to crystallize and communicate a motivating core of values. They have them -- at the core, the Democratic philosophy is largely the philosophy of the Western Enlightenment. But the tenets of behavior that have agglomerated around Christianity over 2,000 years can be sound-bited into one syllable, "faith," that can be machine-gunned off, faith - faith - faith - faith - faith - faith - faith - faith - faith, hitting every voter with a different, personalized bullet that they like because they made it themselves, because they all assume that of course the President's faith is the same as theirs.
Honestly, how is "every man's got to weigh the facts fairly and make his best, most rational decision known to his fellows, and since men are on average decent folks and sane people the best choice is probably the one they come up with after hashing it out a bit, oh and there's some stuff about the value of every human being" supposed to compete with that?
Well... we've got a couple of years to work that out. We can try a draft in two. And if the Democratic Party is going to be working out its values, I know what I want to contribute to the process. No, not in this post, it'll take a while at first. Pass the planking.
Okay, so this one is over, and the People have chosen the smirking cokehead over the decorated veteran. Thus ends the 225 year run of the First Republic, not with a bang but with a whimper.
But the war continues. It's going to be a rough couple of years, but we'll make it through. There's 55 million people in the US, and a hell of a lot more all over the world, who have our backs, we just have to be willing to stand our ground.
The First Republic is dead.
Here begins the Second.
We're in mourning here at the NFZ, for our Kerry overlords have lost.
So we've changed the site colour black.
We'll have more to say about the election once the shock is over.
Steve Gilliard says it better than I ever could, but I'll add this bit here:
"Hold your ground! Hold your ground! Sons of Gondor, of Rohan, my brothers. I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day. This day we fight! By all that you hold dear, on this good Earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!"
I dunno where this is going to end up, but we can't crumble now. As I write John Kerry hasn't given up yet. He's still got our back; we need to get his.
It's going to be a long day, so I'll keep this one short and simple.
The philosopher Edmund Burke once said, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
So, let's do something.
That's it, we'll be back once the game is over.
When I get home tonight, or maybe tomorrow, I'll have the second part of this done about my experiences today. But for the moment, I just have this to say.
If you haven't already, vote. If you have, good for you. When you go out to vote today, be extra kind to your pollworkers -- without them, we couldn't have an election. They're overworked (they'll be at the polling place for fifteen hours today, from six am to past eight pm, probably close to nine pm here in California), underpaid (you make $100 in this county for pollworkers), and yet they do this because it's important for the democratic process. I guess you could call them the foot soldiers of democracy. But be nice to them, they're doing a hard, high stress job. And I'm not just saying this because I'm pollworking today.
Obviously, we here at the Nuke Free Zone want you to vote for John Kerry, because we believe him the best of the many candidates for president. And we believe that Bush is the worst. But you know, in the end, it comes down to what your conscience declares you vote. So if you're going for Kerry, Bush, Badnarik, Cobb, Petrouka, Peltier, or whomever else, do it. Even if your conscience demands you vote for Ralph Nader. :P ;)
Besides voting, do something excellent for somebody today. The country is heavily polarized over this thing, and we have to come together after this and be ready. So do something excellent, 'cause random acts of kindness go a long way. 'Cause the answer November 3rd, no matter what happens today, isn't "kill all the [right wing nutjobs|left wing radicals|liberals|conservatives]." We're all going to have to get along here together for the next few years. So no matter what part of the political spectrum you hail from, do something nice for somebody today.
And hopefully we'll find out who our next leader is tonight, maybe even by the time I finally get home.
Have a good day and go vote.
Well, now. If I didn't know any better, I'd say election was in the air over the past few days, and likely for the next several.
Oh, it is? Well, I suppose that means there's some kind of reason for the vague discomfort flitting through my head lately. There's actually a few reasons for that, though, and I'm going to be talking tonight about one that's been off most peoples' radar - the general election campaign currently being all too literally fought in Ukraine.
This campaign in eastern Europe isn't simply a standard election campaign like those which most countries engage in every couple of years. It is, and I apologize for the overly dramatic language, a battle between two powerful personalities, two different long-term aims, and two different kinds of campaigning. The outcome of this campaign will determine more than who the next leader of Ukraine is going to be; it will determine the direction in which the country turns in many different ways.
Oh, you hadn't heard? Well, make yourself comfortable and recieve a little bit of a history lesson.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the transition from communist governments to more representative forms was of course not the smoothest thing. With the exception of the occaisional high-profile guys on the very top who went in the collapse, each of the new CIS republics was left with a cadre of senior officials from the previous system who quickly found themselves possessing enormous amount of influence as formerly nationalized businesses, media, and so on. End result? The democratic, post-Soviet systems each have a small number of big people with enormous influence. Ukraine dealt with this 'blessing' as much as any other CIS state.
During his tenure as president of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma had something of a hard line - to say the least - towards the very idea of speech in opposition to him, and came down hard to suppress critical media voices. The low point of this policy came in September 2000, when it was revealed that Kuchma had ordered the murder of an opposition journalist who had been placing him in took awkward a position. With Kuchma finally bowing out of Ukrainian politics, the presidential race has opened up. The two main candidates are Viktor Yanukovych, the prime minister and - in most peoples' eyes - the picked successor to Kuchma, and Viktor Yushchenko, the opposition leader. (There are about twenty other candidates, but they're flashes in the pan on a good day.)
Yanukovych is an example of one of the post-Soviet oligarchs: a somewhat authoritarian leader in control of most of Ukraine's primary media, and willing to use it. Election coverage in Ukraine has essentially been entirely focused on - and favorable of - Yanukovych as a result of this control, with the one television channel willing to provide positive coverage of Yushchenko currently facing a shutdown battle, and any critical radio stations having their licenses withdrawn. Coverage is, then, fairly one-sided for the prime minister, who favors a closer relationship with the Russian government and is in turn promoted highly by Putin.
Yushchenko, on the other hand, is a considerably more pro-Western, pro-reform character, promising closer ties to the European Union and generally standing against the authoritarian, abusive style of Yanukovych's politics. Very oddly for CIS politics, Yushchenko is also essentially pristine politically - nobody's been able to effectively attach any scandal or corruption, or the hint thereof, to him, short of Yanukovych's smear campaigns labelling him as a terrorist or worse. Just on the off chance that that wasn't enough, Yushchenko has survived one - possibly two - assassination attempts in the past several months which seem suspiciously tied to Yanukoyvch.
Despite these disadvantages - the neverending smear campaign, voter intimidation, outright uses of violence - Yushchenko remains practically bulletproof in the polls, and was running neck and neck with Yanukovych to within a percent or so. In a highly unequal race with so many candidates, it takes a truly obscene level of popularity for the underdog to put up this much of a fight.
And, of course, when the actual vote came down, there were Irregularities to say the least. CBC's take on it was particularly interesting - while everyone else was basically saying "OMG TEH V0TE IS H4X0R," CBC simply noted that Yanukovych won the initial election in the official numbers - despite the fact that Yushchenko obviously got more votes cast. Yeeeah. The official numbers ended up coming incredibly close together - the Guardian quotes a difference of less than one percent between them still despite what has been described universally by monitoring groups as an attempt to rig the vote. Round two is November 21; get your bunkers ready.
What we're probably going to see in Ukraine for the next few weeks is an extremely vicious - possibly in a more physical sense - campaign as each side is throwing allegations of vote tampering to and fro, albeit with one side being rather more suspect at it. If Yanukovych wins - or even "wins" - Ukraine is going to remain a relic of the post-collapse system, with its lack of freedoms, authoritarian nature, and general corruption. If Yushchenko wins, as it seems he might considering his popularity even through the media-induced haze, things just might be different. Many of the post-Soviet states are in nasty conditions lately; just to the north of Ukraine lies Belarus, living under the rule of Aleksandr Lukashenko, also known as "Europe's Last Dictator"; the central Asian and Caucasian republics are of course more basket cases than optimistic worlds of future progress, although Georgia has been showing progress since their revolution.
The election in the US stands on a bit of a precipice itself, with the direction in which this race - also ludicrously close - goes determining what not just the US but the world is going to look like for the next four years or more. The parallels between the American election and that of Ukraine are fairly limited - aside from the close race and the significant amount of dirty tricks being used by the incumbents in each of them. However, we've got the advantage in that Ukraine's election happened first, so we get to see an example of a near worst-case scenario in an election playing out over in Europe - for those of us paying attention, at least. There is violence in the country right now, but it is limited, not least due to the massive military presence in the cities Yanukovych commands - and the force of Yushchenko's personality, which seems to be holding his own supporters at bay.
I'm not sure what things are going to be like down south tomorrow. Presumably safe if eventful, but there's a nagging corner of my mind wondering just a little too loud what will happen if one of the "challengers" in Ohio tries to force the issue, or if something is tried anywhere else across the country. Short of hoping people make the right choice in their vote tomorrow, about all I can tell my American readers is to be careful, understand your rights with regards to your franchise, exercise the damn thing, and glance about the rest of the world now and then to see how things might turn out. It can happen here, for any particular values of "it" or "here," and denying that is the first step on the road to making it happen.
So tread carefully and wisely tomorrow. You could all do far, far worse, and little better.
