Thoughts on culture, politics, music and stuff by Eric Olsen, Marty Thau and Mike Crooker, who are among other things, producers.

 
Aloha From San Bernardino County
Here we are, holed up in the Ontario Airport Holiday Inn. I almost missed Saturday completely. After recording for seven hours at the radio station yesterday, I came back and did a little wind-down blogging: can't go into to vacation mode withut squeezing some blog juice out of the old brain.

Well, all of a sudden, it's was near midnight, and it was 2am before we got to sleep after finishing up the packing, repacking and rerepacking (Dawn did everything but the toiletries, which are my specialty - gotta have all the right pills and potions and whatnot). Then we had to get up well before 7 to be out of the house - five people including two teenagers and a 2 year-old - by 8 to park the car, take the shuttle to the airport and get out of Dodge by 10:15.

We were on Delta so we had to visit their hub in Cincy before the four hour flight across the amber waves of grain, mountains, deserts, and back to my hometown for the first time in four years. I've made maybe eight trips to LA since I moved (back) to Cleveland in '90, but most of those came in the first five years, so my connections are ever more tenuous. But once I'm here, it seems like I never left. Things change: this time we headed east on the "new" Airport Freeway, which has been there for about ten years now, but new freeways in LA is nothing jolting. When I was DJing in the '80s, I was still discovering "new" freeways as I roamed the Southland up until the time I moved back to Cleveland.

Traffic seems worse than ever, but that is nothing new either. Why Ontario, you may ask? Cheaper flight to Hawaii from Ontario - which is about 40 miles or so east of LAX - so here we are where the smog meets the mountains for the evening. We are all bone tired, but Dawn and kids are out at the pool beginning our vacation in earnest - it's not a summer vacation until you are wet outdoors - and I am in here struggling with the laptop.

The beginning of a trip, getting there, always seems like work; but we are decompressing nonetheless - Hawaii tomorrow!

Lily - the 2 year-old - didn't get enough sleep either and was fairly cranky at various points in the journey. At the Cincy airport she decided it was time to see her mommy when Dawn and the older two were off getting something to eat. Lily yelled at the top of her impressive lungs, "I WANT MY MOMMY," at least ten times in a row without breathing. We were right by the bank of pay phones: those people were not amused. When she calmed down, I asked her why she did that. She said, rather cheerfully, "Because me do that."

"Yes Lil, I know you did that. But WHY did you do that? What was the REASON?"

She paused dramatically - she is very good at that - and said........."Because me do that."

Even better than the parent-flustering "Because me do that," though," is a neologism she came up with today. When we finally got to the Holiday Inn here in brown Ontario and started to unwind, she suddenly blurted out, "Me go on an airplane yestertime"

"What Lil?"

"Me and Mommy and Daddy and Dis and Bo (she calls Chris "Dis," and Kristen "Bo" - it's a long story) went on an airplane yestertime." She knows what yesterday means - this meant something different. It means the indeterminate past. She knew it was earlier today, not yesterday. "Yestertime" - I like that.

We'll talk to you from Hawaii tomorrow.
posted by Anonymous at 11:59 PM

 
Lucky Am I
Gotta get back to (okay, start) packing and a bunch of other crap, but allow me to state once again that I am the luckiest guy in the world, and if every aspect of my life was as good as my relationship with Dawn, I would have it made indeed.
posted by Anonymous at 9:41 PM

 
Love/Hate With NPR
Few things are more satisfying than wailing on an NPR pledge drive. Matt Moore does it well here:

I love all the things that NPR uses to fill in the cracks. Neato little stories about guys that make fake street signs and call it art, biologists that play Barry White to sharks to get them in the mood, and Havrilesky on juicers and burritos. But I hate pledge drives (I do not, however, hate them as much as Eric Olsen). I especially hate last-minute surprise fund drives. Colorado Public Radio was evidently about to WorldBom so the last few days have seen an unprecedented wave of longform on-air begging. The tone of desperation was even more squealingly righteous than usual, making me think that some of the announcers thought they might lose their jobs.

Please stop berating me about my integrity, and stop whining about how I can't get this quality programming elsewhere on the dial. I know all that. I've given you money already this year, and I have the CD of reach-around interviews between Ira Glass and Terry Gross to prove it.

Matt admits he loves NPR, which is why he hates them - just like me!

More importantly, Matt had his ear to the ground and his nose to the grindstone and reported on NPR's change in linking policy, apparently handed down yesterday:

NPR encourages and permits links to content on NPR Web sites. However, NPR is an organization committed to the highest journalistic ethics and standards and to independent, noncommercial journalism, both in fact and appearance. Therefore, the linking should not (a) suggest that NPR promotes or endorses any third party’s causes, ideas, Web sites, products or services, or (b) use NPR content for inappropriate commercial purposes. We reserve the right to withdraw permission for any link.

Good job, Matty!
posted by Anonymous at 9:35 PM

 
Colon? No, Enema
Back to the Indians. Re the Colon trade, Plain Dealer beat writer Paul Hoynes is blunt:

The Indians have turned out the lights. They might not turn them back on until 2005.

General Manager Mark Shapiro last night forfeited the rest of the season by trading No. 1 starter Bartolo Colon to Montreal for three prospects and veteran outfielder/first baseman Lee Stevens.


The Indians included a player to be named in the deal. It's believed that player is former No. 1 pick Tim Drew, but he's not expected to join the Expos until after the season.

Stevens' inclusion in the deal may mean Jim Thome is the next to leave. Thome, before last night's game against Boston was rained out, said the Indians have not yet asked him to waive his no-trade clause.

Thome can veto any deal. He is a free agent at the end of the year.

Shortstop Brandon Phillips, 20, left-hander Cliff Lee, 23, and outfielder Grady Sizemore, 19, are the three prospects they received from the Expos. Lee was with Class AA Harrisburg against Class AA Akron last night.

The Indians figure they are history for the next 2 1/2 years:

The Indians' goal is to resurface as a contender by 2005.

Shapiro said the only way to do that is to acquire a group of young position players who will be ready to excel at the big-league level over the next three years. He expects Phillips and Sizemore to be a part of that revival.

The Indians decided in early May that they may have to break this club up and start over.

At least Shapiro is realistic:

Shapiro went into this season trying to rebuild and contend at the same time. He failed.

Now he's on Plan B. Blow it up and start over again.

What prompted the move?

"As a group we saw no reason that the pieces we had in place this year, or that the pieces we had coming, were enough to win this year or next year," said Shapiro.

The Indians are coming off a 4-7 trip. They haven't played .500 ball since June 2 and haven't been above .500 since April 29. After an 11-1 start, they've gone 25-40 and are seven games out of first in the AL Central.

"Understandably there will be a fallout from our fans," said Shapiro. "We realize that. We realize that our fan base will take a hit. But next year when we put the skeletal framework of our new team on the field, and we start identifying and developing our new players, maybe some of those fans will come back."

Columnist Bud Shaw is much less optimistic:

The trade of Bartolo Colon raises concerns on so many fronts. Where do you start?

The team that would build around pitching really only meant it would build around young (cheap) pitching ap parently. The team that never could buy a No. 1 starter or groom one finally did just in time to turn him into foreign currency in last night's deal with Montreal.

The Indians are suddenly talking about all the "potential" they have in farm system pitching. Well, Colon was part of that potential and it took him years to start realizing it.

Colon's departure is most troublesome because of the financial flags it hoists high. The full rebuilding mode it signifies isn't the worst thing the Indians can do. But Dolan will have trouble convincing people that the decision is borne of baseball common sense and isn't being made out of acute financial duress.

Bud foresees many an empty seat for the next few years - just like the old days.

I had no idea Douglas Dever (nice cigar, dude) of Society For the Preservation of Clue lives in Cleveland! He is among a small but elite cabal. We will have to associate upon our return from the Land of Hulas! Maybe an Indians game - oh, wait...

Anyway, the Cluemaster has these thoughts on our diminished Tribe:

The only pitcher we have that is worth a damn... it's a shame. We will end up trading away all of our talent for rookies in the hopes that our farm system pulls in 2010 what it did in 92. More likely, 30 years of empty seats. (Although, working in the Caxton Building next door to the Jake, it'll be nice to be able to grab seats by only planning 30 minutes in advance.)

Yep - just like the old days.
posted by Anonymous at 9:15 PM

 
Blogs and Books
Kevin Holtsberry has an interesting interview with Ken Layne about the relationship between authoring and blogging on his Addicted to Books blog:

Were/are you interested in blogging as a way to promote your book/other writing?

I started writing for the Web many years before I had a novel published. As for my journalism, it was more a convenience for me to assemble my clips online. Now most editors understand the Internet and accept clips by e-mail or by links to a journalist's Web site.

A month or two back, I decided to sell some leftover copies of the Australian version of my 2001 novel. It's a lot of work -- taking orders, signing books, packing them up, standing in line at the Post Office for a few hours a week -- but it's good to get that book to American readers and fellow bloggers.

posted by Anonymous at 8:49 PM

 
More Padilla
David Hogberg is back with further thoughts on the Jose Padilla case in response to my last post on the matter.

David's main thrust would appear to be that the administration can continue to push for rights restrictions on Padilla and similar "unlawful combatants" because there is a roadblock dead ahead that will stop them anyway:

First, look at the response of pundits to the actions toward Padilla. Even some conservative pundits are opposed to these actions, let alone the liberal ones. Further actions will only bring more denouncements from the punidtocracy. Second, the civil liberties lobby—most notably the ACLU—would kick into high gear, filing lawsuits and mounting vigorous PR and lobbying campaigns. It wouldn’t take long before the outcry would reach such proportions that the Courts and, most importantly, Congress would have to take some action to circumscribe the Bush Administration. In short, if the Bush Administration is looking down the “road to tyranny,” it probably sees a massive roadblock only a short distance away.

Indeed, I think the Bush Administration does see such a roadblock. This is reflected in their efforts to limit the violations of liberty to a few select cases. It is also reflected in how many hairs they have split trying to defend such violations: citizens vs. prisoners of war vs. enemy combatants vs. unlawful combatants. The Bush Administration, I think, realizes it can’t go much further down this path.

I am not sure we can stake out civil liberties on such optimistic thinking.
posted by Anonymous at 8:42 PM

 
Blog Gab
Quick! Catch new blogger Combustible Boy before he combusts. He attended the "Inside the Blogosphere" panel discussion at the National Press Club today, and reports back, beginning with what is perhaps the understatement of the week:

Though diminished, perhaps, by the absence of InstantMan, James Lileks, and even local boy Josh Marshall

Yeah, they only lost about 60,000 readers a day with that trio elsewhere, yet

the discussion included:
John Hiler of Microcontent News

Dennis Loy Johnson of Mobylives.com, a site about books and literature

Doug McLennan of Artsjournal.com

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web

In addition, The Idler's Laurence Jarvik and Alice Goldfarb Marquis took part.

Combutible also took photos. Despite the relative lack of bloggy starpower, C.B.'s report is quite compelling, and the event sounds like it was a success:

Hiler began the discussion by describing the pushbutton-publishing blog as the first format in which it is so easy to write -- and so addictive, with the instant gratification of seeing the written word published for all to read. Blogging is addictive for both the reader and the writer, Hiler said -- "I think that addiction is really important." From the reader's perspective, the tense wait for new posts to appear on a favorite blog, hitting the refresh button again and again until something new appears, only adds to the addiction; Hiler's research into pharmacological addiction taught him that addiction becomes even stronger when there is a pause between taking the drug and the onset of the high, and this is simulated by the wait for new posts to appear. All media is addictive to its audience, and blogs can hold their own on this count, Hiler opined.

Fascinating.
posted by Anonymous at 8:18 PM

 
Who? No!
Hey, I'm back. Six hours is a long damn time to be in a radio studio, but we are covered for the next three weeks. They won't have to run any cheesy repeat shows, thank God. Since I've literally been in a cave, I've missed a lot of action. I still can't believe the Indians traded Colon, but I'll have more on that later.

As you have probably seen below, I was saddened and surprised by the death of John Entwistle, but I assumed that this would finally end the ritualistic abuse of the Who name that has gone on for 20 years now. Imagine my horror and amazement when I arrived at the office to find this:

THE WHO AT CSU CONVOCATION CENTER FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 27, 2002

ON SALE RESCHEDULED FOR FRIDAY JULY 5TH @ 10AM

Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey of The WHO have today confirmed that their US tour is to go ahead despite the death of fellow band member, bassist John Entwistle. The Las Vegas show on 6/28 and the Irvine CA. 6/29 show will be re-scheduled for later in the tour. Details will follow shortly.

Both Daltrey and Townshend view the tour as a “tribute to John Entwistle”, and to the loss of an irreplaceable friend. The Entwistle family is in full support of the decision to continue and feel this is what John would have wanted. His son Christopher said today “ He lived for music and will always live within The WHO’s music. This is what he would have wished and our love goes out to the remaining band members and the entourage that makes up THE WHO family.”

Bill Curbishley
WHO Manager

Reserved Seats, $85.00, $60.00 and a limited number of gold circle seats, GO ON SALE FRIDAY JULY 5TH AT 10:00 AM at the CSU ticket office, all Ticketmaster locations

Everything I wrote last night about the Who not being the Who without Keith Moon: double it now without Entwistle. As I said before, the drums and bass were often the lead instruments of the band. The band will now be as big a joke as the "Allman Brothers Band."

I had hoped otherwise, but I guess greed really is the motivating factor here. At least have the courtesy to call the configuration the "Townshend-Daltrey Band," a la Page and Plant. Now I'm really sad. Are we going to see Jagger and Richards as "The Rolling Stones" after Charlie and Ronnie (barely a real Stone even now) leave or die? Perhaps Paul and Ringo should tour as "The Beatles." Why not?

As was correctly affirmed earlier by Glenn regarding Creedence, in a great group - even a group dominated by one member like Creedence - the sum is greater than the parts: that is EXACTLY THE DEFINITION of a great group.

Sometimes - basically by chance - a collection of individuals band together and something clicks: they create a unit that is indivisible. It isn't 1+1+1+1=4; it's 1+1+1+1=5. And that extra number is the magic that goes away when a member is subtracted. It was bad enough trying to make 1+1+1=5 after Keith self-destructed, but now you're going to try to make 1+1=5?? You don't have to be a mathematician to say that's impossible.

I understand that for touring, for sales, purposes, "The Who" is the magical name. A "Townshend-Daltrey Band" wouldn't be getting $60 and $85 a head, or playing in a large arena. But at some point - and that point has been long passed - you have to concede that the original unit meant something, and honor the reality by retiring the name. Please.
posted by Anonymous at 7:41 PM

 
Final Day of Preparation Pre-Hawaii
Not one, not two, but three radio shows to tape today in preparation for the Hawaii - a festive marathon. Back later. Sorry about the travel probs Glenn. Perhaps it wasn't meant to be.
posted by Anonymous at 10:25 AM

 
Two Words...

Lee Fucking Stevens?!?!?!?!

OK, that's three words... Hats off to Jim Thome, we've found your replacement.

UPDATE
Colon is gone, one more round, Colon is gone. "White Flag" indeed.
posted by tofu at 11:29 PM

 
Who's Left?
I'm pretty stunned to hear about John Entwistle dying. He was 57 and had been a rock star, an unassuming and businesslike rock star, for almost 40 years. Maybe that's why I'm stunned: when the normal guys - the business-like troupers with rational lifestyles - start dropping, you know we've turned another corner.

I love the Who, but as with the Stones, I have long since wished they'd shut up and go away. I stopped really loving the Who after Keith Moon died, soon after the recording of Who Are You in '78, and they just kept getting back together and touring over and over again. In fact I didn't even like Who Are You all that much. The Who By Numbers in '75 was the last great Who album, and here we are 27 years later. Damn.

Imagine still touring almost THIRTY YEARS after your last really good record. Was there a point beyond money? Ego? Boredom?Kenny Jones is a functional drummer, but he isn't Keith Moon (of course even Keith Moon wasn't Keith Moon by the end, but that's another story). What made the Who so special - besides Pete Townshend's songwriting for the ten years between '65 and '75 - was what made them such a bizarre ensemble: drums, guitar, bass, and singer, but the guitar was OFTEN THE ENTIRE RHYTHM SECTION.

Moon played the drums like a lead instrument: all syncopated energy, thrashing about with magically controlled fury, filling holes you didn't even know were there; while Entwistle - tall, reserved and stoic - stood there like a pillar moving nothing but his fingers, which flew over the frets faster than the eye could follow.

All of this frenetic motion from the ostensible rhythm instruments required Pete, on guitar, to hold down the rhythmic fort: percussively riffing, bashing out his windmill power chords, and keeping the songs moving forward while the others did their own things. Add to this the iconic ROCK STAR voice, looks, and swagger of Roger Daltrey, and you had one of the most magical live bands of all time. Listen to the holy metallic noise of Live At Leeds and come away converted.

I saw the same tour that Glenn Reynolds mentions here in '89, and I had seen them twice earlier in the '80s and they were all very nice shows: hearing the great old songs, the band still spunky, Roger still belting, Pete still with some hair, but Kenny Jones is no more Keith Moon than Warren Haynes is Duane Allman - some parts just can't be replaced.

Just to quantify this a bit: there is a terrific new 2-CD collection of the Who's best, The Ultimate Collection, that came out recently. All of the great songs are there: "I Can't Explain," "My Generation," "Substitute," "I Can See For Miles," "Magic Bus," on through classics from Tommy, Leeds, Who's Next, Quadrophenia, Who By Numbers, Who Are You, Keith's last. There are 35 songs in the collection. They really are THE BEST OF THE WHO. Only the final two songs - "You Better You Bet" and "Eminence Front" - were recorded after Keith Moon died.

Yet the band has been touring for 24 years now without Keith. I had just seen ads on TV the other night for the upcoming Who summer tour. Guess that will be called off. As much as I loved John, I'm glad the band is finally over. For good. Please stay down now - don't get up again. There hasn't been a real Who in almost 25 years, now let's finally allow the name to rest in peace along with the beloved Keith and John.

UPDATE
Ed Driscoll has a fine reminiscence of the band and the Ox. Brink Lindsey met Entwistle on a hazy night in Tokyo.
posted by Anonymous at 10:36 PM

 
Umm, What's Today's Date?
We've been running around like such loons getting ready for the trip to Hawaii (and LA on the way back) that Dawn and I both forgot our 4th wedding anniversary until 9pm tonight - guess we'll celebrate tomorrow. Happy Anniversary, though. Love, EO
posted by Anonymous at 9:26 PM

 
Say What?
It is clear that our self-directed culture is causing us difficulty in one critical area: the CIA and NSA are desperate for linguists:

James Bamford, an author and specialist on the highly secretive National Security Agency, which eavesdrops on communications worldwide, said lack of expert linguists was the NSA's greatest problem.

He wrote in the Washington Post that last September the number of linguists fluent in the main Afghan languages -- Pashto and Dari --could be counted on one hand "with fingers left over."

Loch Johnson, a University of Georgia professor and author of books on intelligence work, said the shift in resources and manpower after the Cold War went mainly to countering threats from weapons of mass destruction, and monitoring North Korea, Iraq and the Balkans.

....Johnson said he had been told there were probably only five or six Farsi [Iranian language] speakers at the CIA, and few if any had the ability to follow rapid conversations between native speakers.

"We are scrambling," said Johnson.

The intelligence agencies say they are trying to reverse the trend toward reliance on technical methods, like satellite images and monitoring the Internet, and preparing to send more operatives abroad with specialized language skills.

Experts note language skills are still essential for understanding and analyzing the mounds of gathered data.

This would be funny if it weren't so ridiculously tragic:

For example, U.S. intelligence services intercepted two messages the day before the Sept. 11 attacks that indicated an event was being planned the following day.

But the National Security Agency did not translate the messages saying in Arabic "Tomorrow is zero hour" and "The match begins tomorrow" until Sept. 12.

They say things are getting better:

The FBI and CIA said they have been steadily addressing the language problem by hiring qualified linguists and retraining officers and operatives.

CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said the number of people with Arabic language skills at the agency has tripled since 1998.

"Are we looking for more? You bet," he said. "We've made very significant strides in this area and we have every intent of continuing that."

Our futures would seem to depend upon it.

UPDATE
Claire Berlinski was kind enough to let us know about an article she wrote for The Weekly Standard on the subject late last year. The problem has been ongoing:

A RUMOR HAS BEEN CIRCULATING in intelligence circles that communications intercepted prior to September 11 referred in Arabic to a "Christmas gift" for the United States. What no one listening to these messages realized was that the same expression can mean "an unpleasant exploding surprise."

This anecdote may or may not be true. But the lack of trained linguists in our intelligence services is no rumor. Directly after the September 11 attack, FBI Director Robert Mueller issued an urgent appeal for Arabic and Farsi translators, posting a toll-free number for applicants on the FBI's website. But this is too little, too late: A critical shortage of linguists with security clearances has crippled American intelligence efforts for decades, and will take decades to remedy fully.

One intelligence failure after another has been linked to the lack of translators and interpreters in the U.S. intelligence community. Following the 1990 murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane in Manhattan, the FBI confiscated handwritten materials in Arabic from the assassin's apartment. No one translated them. The FBI also seized Arabic videotapes and bomb-making manuals from Ahmad Ajaj, a Palestinian serving time in federal prison for passport fraud. No one translated them. Prison officials made tapes of Ajaj as he described bomb-making techniques over the phone. No one translated them. After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, all of these materials were at last reviewed. They pointed clearly to the impending attack.

posted by Anonymous at 3:50 PM

 
Breaking News!
This just in: the Pledge of Allegiance has just ruled the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit is unconstitutional.

Politicians are cheering while legal scholars caution that the Court can appeal to the Declaration of Independence, or even take it all the way to the Magna Carta. One displaced judge was even heard to mumble "Hammurabi's Code" before flipping off a group of second graders reciting the Pledge.

UPDATE
Maarten Schenk, Live From Brussels, fears the dollar may be next down the unconstitutional toilet.
posted by Anonymous at 3:04 PM

 
Sweetness
You may not believe this, but I have a fairly delicate stomach, and I definitely ate something that has not fostered gastrointestinal happines all day long. BUT now Dawn has made my millennium with a tribute I don't deserve but certainly do appreciate. Thanks Love! Many other bloggers are celebrated as well - I think she's glad to have the anon buttplug identified and swept aside - as are we all!! Ding Dong anon is dead!!
posted by Anonymous at 2:25 PM

 
Unintended Consequences?
Ross at Bloviator, who is a health law professor, has a remarkable and troubling account on the threat to public health which may be an unintended side effect of the Homeland Security Act:

Part of Bush's Homeland Security proposal would transfer the responsibilities of several programs and departments of HHS and the CDC to the Homeland Security Office, including the Office for Public Health Emergency Preparedness, the Strategic National Stockpile, and programs housed at the CDC to help bolster local public health preparedness.

....it is clear that this proposal would likely help improve "public health preparedness" in cases of bioterrorism.

However, one of the problems with this act is that there is no definition within the act of either "public health emergency" or "biological event." Consequently, basic public health surveillance and treatment for things such as STD treatment, cancer incidence, flu outbreaks, the West Nile Virus, response to water contamination problems arising out of floods or other natural disasters, and the like, could theoretically come under the auspices of the Homeland Security office. This vagueness also complicates the means through which local public health agencies receive funding and oversight.

....Furthermore, there is the additional reality that the money coming into local public health departments is earmarked not only to bolster the public health system's ability to respond to a terrorist act, but also to help repair a crumbling U.S. public health infrastructure, by allowing for such things as upgrades of communication and surveillance equipment. These are known as "dual-purpose programs."

....Part of the problem of this act is the difference between Foxes and Hedgehogs. Bush is a classic hedgehog, and his administration is acting very hedgehog-like in its efforts to get the Big Picture things done, and paying scant attention to some important pieces that might not find an easy fit in the puzzle. Unfortunately, the end result of failing to pick up all the pieces could have long term detrimental effects on the nation's health and safety, no smallpox attacks necessary.

Ross has done an excellent job here. There is much more detail and analysis on his site - you owe it to yourself to read it all.
posted by Anonymous at 1:50 PM

 
Now This Is a Pleasant Surprise
I just received this note from the PD at my radio station. It would appear that Cool Tunes will remain on the Internet. I am very pleased. Next question: can we archive the show on our site?

Through a provision in our Corporation For Public Broadcasting grant, we have discovered an exemption for WAPS-FM to the US Copyright mandate of June 20th that had APPEARED to make it too costly for us to continue streaming our WAPS 91.3 The Summit's audio through our website, www.913thesummit.com. Though we initially cut our streaming audio at 5:00pm on Monday June 24th, we are happy to announce that the live Summit Internet Audio has returned at of 1:00pm on Wednesday, June 26th.

Thanks for hanging in there with us during this bumpy ride through the current upheavals in the world of internet audio; enjoy our live streaming Summit audio once again at www.913thesummit.com.

posted by Anonymous at 10:53 AM

 
Freedom Fatigue
Like Eric McErlain, who found this story, I have always liked and admired Martina Navratilova for her incredible skill, mental toughness, honesty, and the fact that she consciously made a point of "feminizing" herself while in the process of coming out about her sexuality.

While her game and resolve have always been tough as nails, she has also displayed an appealing softness in her personality. If all barrier-breakers displayed her grace and general lack of stridency, barrier-breaking might be an easier thing to do - maybe.

But now she has made a fool of herself by claiming

in an article for Die Zeit weekly that she believed free speech was being suppressed in the United States.

"The most absurd part of my escape from the unjust system is that I have exchanged one system that suppresses free opinion for another," said Navratilova, 45, who fled Czechoslovakia at the age of 18 to go to the United States.

..."The Republicans in the United States manipulate public opinion and sweep any controversial issues under the table," Navratilova said.

"It's depressing. Decisions in America are based solely on the question of 'how much money will come out of it' and not on the questions of how much health, morals or the environment suffer as a result."

I am prone to tread lightly upon, if not excuse Navratilova's statements because I think she suffers from an affliction common to many who flee repression for the good life in the U.S. of A.: freedom fatigue.

Upon exposure to the embarrassment of freedoms available here, it seems that the memories of truly horrifying repression recede and soften in the minds of some, and over time the inevitable results of the sheer exuberance of America's culture of freedom - consumerism, materialism, cacophonous speech - grate on those raised in a system devoid of such exuberance and turn otherwise intelligent, even brilliant people into babbling idiots.

I think an element of homesickness plays into this and the general human tendency toward nostalgia, but perhaps more importantly, what must first appear to be an open-ended romp through endless fields of freedoms and riches inevitably has consequences, ramifications, and limitations which become the trees through which some lose track of the forest.

We should particularly admire those who continuously renew their enthusiasm for the particularities of our system:

It has been quite a journey for the man who became an American citizen on July 4, 1986, when he was sworn in (by Chief Justice Warren Burger) at the Statue of Liberty. The immigrant who, in 1977, landed in this country with his parents and less than $100 in his pocket has grown to become a command performer at the White House, a respected comedic voice, cultural observer, and family man. As Yakov says, “What A Country”!

even if they are somewhat corny about it. I am pleased that our tolerance for corn has increased markedly since 9/11, and that many of us have renewed our admiration for, and commitment to core American values. Perhaps 9/11 has had the affect of shaking American culture in general out of its own version of "freedom fatigue."

UPDATE
Marty thinks I am naive:

EO,
Martina is absolutely correct in her statement about repression in the USA. Further, the USA's values are centered completely around money. Just take a look at how the biggest corps in the USA react to it. Money rules today. The stock market is a sham, the president constantly makes a fool of himself and the media is controlled by the right wing. Take a closer look my friend. Yesterday's surplus is today's deficit. Whatever happened to a prescription drug plan? Where are the results of the tax cut? Don't you think our civil rights have been tampered with? Bush is a born again cowboy. Everyone in the world knows this -- everyone but the dumb Americans who buy into all the shit that is fed to them.
MT

posted by Anonymous at 9:44 AM

 
He IS a Bad Dude - In a Good Way
As you may know, I take some pride in my ability to insult assplowing shit-for-brains cum-bubbles (no links, let your imagination wander), but this is the work of a man among men, a man of finely honed contempt, a man not afraid - nay some would say eager - to take a rather unpopular opinion. I take my hat off to Brian Linse and look forward to meeting him soon.
posted by Anonymous at 9:27 AM

 
Drive=Show Some Skin
James Morrow has found an interesting story and has some apposite commentary on same:

I'm more than a little concerned about a case out of Florida which involves a Muslim woman who claims that the state's refusal to give her a driver's license showing what she's got hidden under her veil (namely, her face) is a violation of her rights.

Now I'm pretty sure the woman, Sultaana Freeman, is not a member of an al-Qaeda terrorist cell. Considering the group's feelings about women, I doubt she would even be allowed to serve tea at the group's annual board meeting. But the woman's claim, that lifting her niqab, which covers everything but her eyes, is a violation of her rights to religious freedom is a stretch to say the least. Not only is there a clear and present need for people to be immediately identifiable by their driver's license photos (her lawyers claim that some sort of DNA or fingerprint identifier could be used, which would hardly be practical at a roadside traffic stop), but there are plenty of aspects of American life (legal alcohol, Britney Spears, etc) that a serious Muslim might hate, but they have to live with. License photos, sorry guys, are another one. Until Osama establishes a Caliphate in America, which will be sometime after hell freezes over, a Muslim living in America has to abide by the rules of America and American culture.

Good job, James. A happy and long life to the woman, but we don't take kindly to such quaint practices as "female circumcision" either. Show some skin or ride a camel.

UPDATE
James has an update including a picture of the woman: that isn't a veil, it's a toxic waste suit. How could she possible see well enough to drive in that shroud?
posted by Anonymous at 9:17 AM

 
Baseball Apocalypse
Although at the moment the Indians are leading Pedro Martinez and the Red Sox 4-0 on three home runs (I knew that shit couldn't last - now the Indians are behind 6-4, a simulacrum of their season), and even beat the Sox last night when Bob Wickman struck out Manny Ramirez to end the game, the Indians are still a pathetic, anemic, shriveling team that is going nowhere fast. So I haven't had much to say about baseball this year. Had I started this blog any other time in the last nine years, you'd be sick of hearing about the Tribe by now.

However, I just got through reading a state-of-the-game story that both renewed my base affections for the only game I have ever really been good at, and gave a painful blow by blow account of its problems. The title of Charles Pierce's literate, orotund opus is "The Decline (and Fall) of Baseball" and the subtitle, "The national pastime's obsession with economic woes is a coverup. Its real problem is irrelevance." Pierce really believes neither assertion, but spends most of the article trying to convince himself:

Even more securely than it attached itself to America, baseball enveloped itself in the mystique of the dawning American century. It caught the exact moment in which the United States of America became a singular descriptive, and it brought everything that had come before into that moment, when bucolic agrarian republic bled into industrial democracy, and the old money danced warily with immigrant labor.

Baseball was drunk on that moment, and look at it now, with the American Century a pile of dead-weight books on the coffee table. This is what baseball now says about itself: that it lost nearly a quarter-billion dollars in 2001; that anywhere from a quarter to a third of its franchises are complete wastes of time; and that it has adapted itself to new technologies as easily as a frog learns to play the clarinet. Look at me, says baseball, sickly and feeble. It wanders around in its pajamas and a three-day-old stubble, superannuated and panhandling quarters. The culture has left it behind, and it stands there, baseball does, befuddled, heedless of traffic swirling around it, unable to cross the road. Its time has passed. It can't keep up. It hates itself as it wanders, lost, bellowing at spectral enemies.

Pierce makes baseball sound like Islamic culture: born into a sense of exceptionalism, an exceptionalism codified by the Supreme Court antitrust exemption of 1922, always behind the times as a result of this sense of exceptionalism and entitlement, which in the face of losing its status as the clear-cut national pastime has now turned to self-loathing:

Baseball is never prepared. That's the one ineluctable fact of its history. Its status, nurtured in a simpler age before mass communications and labor unions, insulated it from the changes in the culture around it. Baseball, smug and oblivious, never saw anything coming, no matter how large and noisy it was. The huge evolutionary changes in the country and its culture left baseball behind, and it often seemed as though the ballpark was the last place anyone noticed.

Of course, baseball did not develop this exalted sense of its own importance by itself. It wasn't even developed completely by the heavily filigreed bunkum of its various chroniclers. (Wallop captures a particularly garish specimen when he quotes one newspaperman's febrile 1909 account of a line-drive out to the third baseman. It takes three paragraphs.) In 1922, the Supreme Court exempted professional baseball from the nation's antitrust laws on the grounds that baseball was a sport, not a trade. Writing for the court was Oliver Wendell Holmes, who once played amateur baseball and who had had better days on the Supreme Court, truth be told.

The antitrust exemption gave explicit sanction to the way baseball conducted its business. It created within baseball a penumbral exceptionalism that enfolded everything that baseball did, and within which, baseball grew fat and smug.

Moreover, it gave implicit sanction to baseball's position as the national sport, inculcating a sense of entitlement that blinded the sport to the necessity - and, thus, the inevitability - of any kind of change. It created within baseball a perilous tendency toward short-term thinking. Whatever its merits as law and as economics, and it has been upheld twice since it was handed down, the ruling worked within the game's history as a dangerous opiate. It has caused baseball to veer wildly between lordly entitlement and sudden existential panic.

Baseball was behind football and basketball in desegregation, behind in labor relations which kept players as indentured servants to a single team until the "reserve clause" was abolished by an arbitrator in 1974, behind in technology:

As late as 1932, all three New York baseball teams banned local radio coverage of their games, fearing that the broadcasts would cut into the live gate. By 1960, 87 percent of American households owned a television set. Baseball approached television as leisurely as it did anything else, its sense of entitlement preceding it, and a man named Pete Rozelle stole the country away simply because he could look farther into the future than baseball ever did.

Rozelle saw how perfectly television suited his National Football League, and he conjured up limitless vistas of profit if he could fit the economics of his game to the medium as well as the game itself did. As football commissioner, he knew he had to sell his sport in an increasingly competitive entertainment culture. He took nothing for granted. So Rozelle knuckled his owners into sharing almost all of their television revenues with one another, perhaps the most successful socialist enterprise in history. In devising this policy, Rozelle anticipated not only the rise in broadcast revenues but also the appearance of new revenue streams, most of which also would be shared.

Beyond economics, however, the primary venue for spectator sports was moving from the stadium grandstands to the living-room sofa, and Rozelle followed it there, adapting and tailoring his game to the demands of television, letting it be shaped as the nation changed. Football on the Lord's Day? Of course. Football on Monday night, in prime time? Why not? Over the next 40 years, the NFL replaced baseball as the national pastime, and it did so primarily on television, which changed the nation itself. The NFL allowed itself to become a television series.

Pierce blames the owners for the economic woes of the game: the greed of the reserve clause, their refusal to share broadcast revenues, their dishonesty as exemplified by the collusion of the mid-80s, all of which causes Pierce to say that baseball has "a management side exposed as (at best) duplicitous and a labor side with no earthly reason ever to trust it again."

A battle over 21st-century finance breaks out on a rhetorical battlefield left over from about 1959. Nothing's left for the management side except to try to bust a union that's had every reason to build up an impenetrable carapace of mistrust.

``They've gotten themselves in a kind of perpetual situation of surviving the next day,'' says Andrew Zimbalist, an author, Smith College economist, and a longtime student of the business of baseball. ``In terms of economics, they have anomalies. In terms of history and politics, baseball has a deeper problem. It's a crisis of governance, not a crisis of cash flow.''

It's also a crisis of perspective. So all the rhetoric is apocalyptic again, as if baseball's economic anomalies threaten the very existence of the sport, and as if the existence of the sport is somehow tied into the survival of the nation, and asif shouting from the housetops about its problems is the only way that baseball can recapture the eminence to which it long felt itself entitled.

``Baseball,'' former owner Bill Veeck warned nearly 40 years ago, ``has sold itself as a civic monument for so long that it has come to believe its own propaganda.''

Pierce believes commissioner Bud Selig is a liar and a dolt, and who doesn't?

The purported crisis is now ``competitive imbalance.'' Largely because of a disparity in local broadcast revenues, team payrolls ran from $28 million to $116 million last year. Of course, this was the situation that Pete Rozelle and the NFL avoided while baseball was too busy hanging on to its doomed reserve system to notice. Consequently, the issue of revenue sharing - the percentage of their local broadcast revenue that the owners will share with one another - is so inextricably bound up with nearly 40 years of retrograde fiscal strategy that the negotiation of a simple percentage figure seems beyond the capabilities of everyone involved. It's always been easier to cry economic havoc than to face the problem that the nation may simply have outgrown your sport.

But that is where the game itself comes to the rescue. Sure, as a percentage, the popularlity of baseball vis-a-vis other sports and other entertainments has dropped over the last 50 years, but much of that drop is simply due to the profusion of other sports and entertainments; just as say, network TV has dropped with the proliferation of cable, home video, computers, etc, etc.

But even as both baseball and network TV have had their near-monopolies chipped away by faster, hipper, more startling entertainments, we have also come to appreciate the value of each, not in spite of, but because of their differences from the upstart competition.

Pierce feels management should be emphasizing the importance of the 162-game regular season as a thing of beauty in and of itself, rather than emphasizing the importance of the playoffs and the fact that relatively few teams have much of a chance to win it all.

By making post-season success the sine qua non of his bargaining position, Selig implicitly acknowledges that baseball's primary aesthetic charm is obsolete. It's an admission that the short-term scrambles of the NBA and NHL playoffs, and the national holiday that is Super Bowl Sunday, speak more directly to the culture than does the long and languorous baseball season, no matter who makes what money and for how long. He demonstrates a gnawing unease that the problem is not that baseball necessarily is economically unsound, but that it's culturally anachronistic. More easily than anyone would have expected, he gives away the summertime.

It's a tough old bird, though, tougher than a lot of folks who profess to love it are willing to admit. There are signs of optimism, if you know where to look, signs that baseball can compete and survive in a hyperaccelerated mouse-click age.

And of course it will, despite the best efforts of the system currently in place - management and players - which seems intent on committing economic fratricide rather than promoting the virtues of the game itself, which is still the greatest game ever invented by man.

After all, back when it was a national pastime, baseball had owners who talked about going broke and had the good grace actually to do it. For example, there was Chris von der Ahe, the manic German saloonkeeper who ran the St. Louis Browns at the end of the 19th century. (One of his stars was a gifted outfielder named Tip O'Neill, who became the idol of a certain corner boy in Cambridge.) Von der Ahe failed so spectacularly that his stadium was burned to the ground and his creditors kidnapped him, spiriting him away to a hoosegow in Pennsylvania.

Through it all, though, through actual fiscal disaster, von der Ahe never doubted the place of his team in the world. When the Browns came into a city, he would hire a brass band and lead it through the streets. He took out ads in the local newspapers, announcing: ``THE BROWNS ARE HERE! THE COMING CHAMPIONS.'' Maybe that's what baseball really is searching for. Not an accountant or a human relations specialist. But someone, anyone - even a bankrupt, lunatic someone - who thinks baseball is still worth a parade.

posted by Anonymous at 8:57 PM

 
Just Words
It's amazing enough that leaders at a Muslim conference (per the J-Post) admitted they "risk being marginalized if they fail to close social and economic gaps between themselves and the developed world," but that doesn't mean they have the slightest idea how to go about accomplishing this:

Gathered in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, foreign ministers and top officials from 57 Muslim nations heard Sudan's president say there was no choice but to narrow the "historic gap" between them and the developed world to ensure a place on the world map.

"If we fail to do so, we will become even more neglected and marginalized than we are at present, and our future prospects will be shrouded in uncertainty," said Omar el-Bashir, who heads Sudan's Islamic government since coming to power in a 1989 military coup.

I am of the opinion that their future prospects are a little worse than "shrouded in uncertainty."

Abdelouahed Belkziz, the OIC's secretary-general, took the podium after el-Bashir and told delegates how Islam became "synonymous with terrorism in the West" following the Sept. 11 attacks. He urged Muslims to counter what he called Western campaigns to defame the Islamic faith.

Belkziz, a Moroccan, also said Muslims needed to be more in tune with today's world.

"We must listen to the voice of the contemporary world and adjust to whatever it has to offer that's beneficial and be in tune with the march of humanity," he said. "But we shouldn't, as we try to adjust, abandon our faith and Islamic civilization."

A couple of thoughts: What about the Islamic campaign to defame the Jewish faith? And attempts at cherry-picking from the fruits of Western civilization have failed miserably every time they have been tried. The fruits of Western civilization are part and parcel with a worldview even these "forward-lookers" reject out of hand. The grand "success" of the sphere, Turkey, has succeeded to the degree that it has by suppressing the "Islamic civilization" that Belkziz holds as sacrosanct.

The words are soothing, but the reality is that the Islamic world can never "be more in tune with today's world" unless it throws off the yoke of "Islamic civilization" that has assured its backwardness vis-a-vis the West for the last 600 years or so. Otherwise, it's all just words.

The final plaintive words of the article actually leave room for a sliver of hope:

Belkziz complained that OIC members have been ignoring his calls to establish a Common Islamic Market, preferring instead to pursue "unilateral" trade policies, and that member nations were running behind payments of annual dues.

"Pleeease pay your dues, and we aren't kidding. We won't be able to rent a hall for our next meeting." The small ray of sunshine comes from the fact that these countries obviously do not represent a monolithic bloc: they pursue their own individual trade policies and can't even get it together to pay their dues. Perhaps there is hope for additional Turkeys breaking off from the doomed pack.
posted by Anonymous at 5:08 PM

 
Deja Vu All Over Again
I once spent an evening doing exactly this:

I went home, shot some hoops and proceeded to the grocery store for some beer and dinner. It was one of those hot nights when no food really seemed appealing so I ended up sitting in my apt. drinking a few Sierra Nevadas (it's not my favorite beer.. i swear.. It is just the beer I like the most that you can get almost anywhere) and eating an entire pint of blueberrys. I cranked up the Velvet Underground Fully Loaded (CD2) and finished reading The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

What are the odds against this?? Of course I had this evening 20 years ago, and I played the record not the CD.
posted by Anonymous at 4:36 PM

 
Making Friends Wherever I Go
To the best of my sometimes spotty recollection, I was last in St. Paul in the early-'80s. So I don't believe this is an old girlfriend or anything, but use of the terms "sonofabitch" and "sperm count" in the same post leads me to wonder. Hmmm.
posted by Anonymous at 4:24 PM

 
Grift By Any Other Name
I had to drop out of a summer course in accounting back in the collegiate days because it gave me a skull-crushing headache. Now, accounting issues - especially accounting fraud - are in the news almost every day. Brother Arne sent on this little guide to the mess:

I was talking recently with a smart CFO who knows his way around one of the industries that has been hot with fraud lately. He explained that no matter how complicated the grift, deceptive transactions can accomplish only three things: moving earnings, usually from the future to the present; avoiding tax; or hiding debt. That's it. Look at all the book cooking in telecom, electricity, cable TV, and other industries, and it all comes down to those three things. See it like that, and the recent fraud fest looks almost orderly.

For example, consider objective No. 1, the most popular by far: moving earnings. Unrelated bamboozlings in a range of industries become just variations on a theme. In telecom, various companies sold one another those indefeasible whatevers, which convey the right to use a piece of the company's fiber-optic network for a certain period. The company that receives the money books it all at once as revenue, but the company that pays that very same money capitalizes the expense, spreading it over several years.

....A completely different version of exactly the same maneuver apparently happened at Adelphia Communications [assholes], the now nearly worthless cable TV company. In a remarkable form 8-K that reads more like an indictment than an SEC filing, the company confesses to many sins, including a scheme to jack up earnings. It agreed to pay its (unnamed) two main suppliers of digital set-top boxes an extra $26 per box. They agreed to pay Adelphia $26 per box for marketing support. Adelphia now admits it provided nothing you could actually call marketing support. The only point was to book the incoming $26 all at once and to capitalize the outgoing $26 over a number of years. Again, profits from thin air.

Writer Colvin sums it up in terms I can understand:

That's the thing about accounting fraud: The means change, but the ends don't. When executives get desperate enough for wealth, power, or respect, they'll try the same few tricks, just as they have for centuries. They're still getting away with it because they're more motivated than the good guys.

There's a theory that the only real deterrent is orange jumpsuits. When managers see their peers in prison couture, they get religion. There's even a theory that it happens in a 15-year cycle; after that much time, a new management generation finds its own way to the same old places. And it's true that the last time lots of high-profile business people became government guests was about 15 years ago, in the late '80s. Anyway, it's probably time for the jumpsuits to be taken off their hangers.

It isn't really very complicated.

posted by Anonymous at 3:57 PM

 
Dawn Spawn
She has only been blogging a couple of months, but Dawn has already spawned a new generation of bloggers, most recent of whom are the spunky Sulizano (check out the poem), and the worldly Shell (this one is about lubrication). Visit Dawn and her virtual spawn or they will come and pee on your lawn.
posted by Anonymous at 3:46 PM

 
Best Wishes
Joe Katzman has a very thoughtful post on Dawn's current travails:

You can be trusted, Dawn. You can deal with the truth, and the bedrock you've made for yourself will help you. There is no guarantee of success in this, and that's a truth spoken from experience. Success may come to you, but faithfulness to success is not the test here. The test is faithfulness to love, as I learned too late. Learn early, and whatever happens - pass.

posted by Anonymous at 3:19 PM

 
Nukes For Everyone? More On Anarchism
Leonard Dickens continues his valuable series on the precepts of anarchism here:

Now, I am a libertarian from the point of view of most people. I support the libertarian (and Libertarian) agenda pretty much without caveat. I also happen to think that anarchy will have a very libertarian politics supervening over it. But, I could be wrong about that. If push comes to shove (and it will, at least in tiny ways), I will take anarchy. As, for example, the RKBA example: a rights absolutist will have to admit that a thermonuclear weapon is not really different from an assault rifle, from the point of view of being "arms". Both are useful for the militia to deter the state. Now most people, even libertarians, would be uncomfortable with the idea of just anyone with a nuclear device. That's an ideological problem. To an anarchist, it's not, because "rights" as such, while convenient ways to think of what the system will produce, are not reified in the system. The protection companies (if that's what evolves) can easily decide to allow their clients to have guns, but not nukes. They are businesses and they don't have to be ideological.

How can a person espouse a system without knowing exactly what it will produce? Well, it's easy to me. I see that most people are generally good, at least publicly, and will fight at least a bit for justice. Give them freedom, and I think it is enough; over time they will create a system, whatever it may be, that will work pretty well. If they keep the simple axioms of liberty in mind, it will be a great system. If they don't, it will have problems, but it will still probably be OK. In this, I point to the current systems that have evolved around us. Sure, they are statist and ultimately unacceptable. They violate rights all over the place, are inconsistent and even dangerous occasionally. Nonetheless, they more-or-less work most of the time. That's not too bad for systems designed and/or evolved without a modern understanding of economics and human evolution. Knowing so much more, we can do even better. And we will.

And here:

Now, I think that anarchy will do even better than that. I have written before about the function of our current prison system as rapist factories. More generally, our current prisons are fantastic places to learn to be a criminal and not very good for anything else. So, reducing their throughput drastically would cut crime disproportionately. Another advantage of anarchy is that prisoners will work to earn their keep and to pay restitution to their victims. This would be a huge gain in financial efficiency, since currently incarceration costs an average of $20000/prisoner/year. Finally, I suspect that given a highly competitive market, protection agencies will not just "cut out fat" and get leaner, but they will invent whole new ways to police that we won't try today. As I said yesterday, liberty is like that - unpredictable. So the price may well come down even further. I can certainly imagine "free" policing that really poor people provide by themselves, for themselves, as a sort of militia system.

In short, currently the State spends surprisingly little on protection, especially given how much they steal in taxes. In anarchy, total spending will be less. It's affordable.

I'm not an anarchist yet, but at least I understand the theory better than I did before.
posted by Anonymous at 3:02 PM

 
National Palestinian Radio?
I am now receiving the "Not All Things Considered" newsletter on a regular basis. The writer - Seth Corey, MD Scientific Director, Pediatric Program in Stem Cell Biology and Therapeutics Co-Director, Program in Hematologic Malignancies, University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute - explains his campaign thusly:

I first became concerned about NPR's reporting with the first intifada (1988). Since that time, NPR listened has doubled to 20 million (which is 9 times the circulation of the New York Times).

Since that time, NPR has not only refused to address charges of anti-Israel bias, documented over and over again by CAMERA, it has complied with pro-Palestinian groups in the US by blacklisting Steven Emerson. The leading authority on domestic Islamic terror, Steven Emerson has been on NPR for all of two ten-second sound bites in four years! Even after 9/11. Who was the Vice President of News at NPR when Emerson was blacklisted? None other than Jeffrey Dvorkin!

One other culprit is the man who serves as NPR's Foreign News Editor - Loren Jenkins. Jenkins has compared Israel to Nazis in a 1983 Rolling Stone article (June 9, page 37) and was reported to say that Sharon was responsible for this "F------- mess" (about Sabra/Shatilla) (Robert Fisk, The Independent, 2/6/2001). Can one expect objectivity from such a Palestinian partisan? Not unexpectedly, NPR's bias against Israel has only gotten worse during Jenkins' reign as Foreign News Editor.

Because NPR is tax supported, because NPR audience is growing worldwide, because NPR provides 24/7/365 broadcasting, with more and more political talk, because NPR is supported largely by Jews, I have begun an NPR newsletter - "Not All Things Considered." To receive it, send a request to endnprbias@yahoo.com

Here is the most recent newsletter:

NOT ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, 6/25/02
1. ENOUGH SAID.
Prof of Literature EDWARD SAID, Member of the PNC Congress (when they had a Congress) got an 8 MINUTES 15 SECOND soapbox on NPR Sunday. NPR hosts Lynn Neary asked such probing questions as " Professor, you wrote an article which appeared in the Arab newspaper al-Ahram. It paints a very bleak picture for the Palestinian people. I want to quote from that article. Among other things you wrote, 'We have never faced a worse or, at the same time, a more seminal moment. The Arab order is in total disarray. The US administration is effectively controlled by the Christian right and the Israel lobby, and our society has been nearly wrecked by poor leadership and the insanity of thinking that suicide bombing will lead directly to an Islamic Palestinian state.' But you also write there's hope for the future and that you have to be able to look for it in the right place. Where is that place that the Palestinians can look for the future?"

Did NPR ask Said, who used to teach "Heart of Darkness" to Columbia students, ask what he thought of PA teaching children to blow themselves up?

When was the last time an unabashed Zionist got 8 minutes of NPR airtime? (For the entire TRANSCRIPT, send requests to endnprbias@yahoo.com)

2. BALANCE, NPR STYLE WBUR produces On Point and The Connection, which are carried by many NPR stations. Having lost $1 million in donations due to their Israel bashing, WBUR would have been more considerate of balance (something CNN has learned). We present two examples of balance.

Letters may be addressed to Jane Christo station manager: jchristo@wbur.org Of course, we have not received any responses from her...

a. Fear and Fury: Personal Perspectives on the Middle East (THE CONNECTION 6/24). Two guests: Peace Now activist Alice Shalvi and Palestinian activist Rema Hammami. At least the two were in sync when both condemned PM Sharon...

b. ON POINT. Following President's speech, NPR put together this show with the following guests. The score was 5:1 against Israel:
1. Bill Quandt, Fellow at the left-wing Brookings Institution, and author of "Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict since 1967." Husband of Helena Cobban, a long-time critic of Israel. Quandt has pontificated multiple times on NPR, giving a pro-Palestinian view. Quandt called on the show Segev a moderate, which the host agrees with.
2. Fawaz Gerges, Professor of International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies at Sarah Lawrence College in. An Arab who has pontificated multiple times on NPR, giving the Palestinian view.
3. David E. Sanger, White House Correspondent for The New York Times. New York Times has been subjected to boycott because of its anti-Israel views.
Not on your website were:
4. Tom Segev, a far-left wing Ha'aretz columnist and part of the revisionist post-Zionists, He has been on NPR multiple times giving his anti-Israel government diatribes.
5. Lewis Gordon, Professor of Africana studies, Brown. He agreed with Tom Segev, and criticized Bush and Israel. Gordon is not qualified to discuss the Middle East since he is Director of Afro-American Studies and Professor of Afro-American Studies and
Religious Studies, with courtesy appointments in Modern Culture and Media and Latin-American Studies, and Faculty and Board membership in the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. He is a specialist in Africana Philosophy and Religion, Philosophy of Human Sciences, Phenomenology, Philosophy of Existence, Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Education, Philosophy in Literature and in Film, and Semiotics.
6. Daniel Pipes. The one person who espoused a line not sympathetic to Palestinians but the moderator multiple interrupted him.

3. NPR REACHES OUT TO THE MUSLIM COMMUNITY (again)...
From the CAIR website:
Media requests: NPR seeks to Muslim Interviewees
National Public Radio is doing a long radio story on the concerns of Muslims about their civil liberties since 9/11. In particular, I would
like to focus on a few people (maybe a family) who are concerned that they will be questioned (or arrested or detained) because they are Muslim; concerned that the FBI might try to "infiltrate" their mosques and schools (particularly with the new Guidelines for FBI agents, which allows agents to go into public places without having probable cause of a crime); people who are concerned for their children.

If you would be willing to talk with me, please send me an email at: bbradley@npr.org

Barbara Bradley
Washington correspondent
National Public Radio


THIS IS WHAT CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) suggested:

MUSLIMS IN AMERICA POST 9-11
A major international news organization has requested suggestions for Muslim interviewees for an upcoming program on life for Muslims in America after the Sept. 11 attacks. Their wish list for ideal interviews would be:
Muslims who live in "small town" America and don't feel as though they fit in, for whatever reason.
A Muslim who's serving in the American forces + another example of somebody who feels very integrated into US society - e.g. a successful Muslim entrepreneur.
A Muslim activist at a university - somebody with radical political views.
A lively mosque with plenty of sound in an interesting location. If you are interested in participating and fit one of the above criteria,
please send an email to hhassan@cair-net.org

When was the last time NPR did a "LONG" REPORT on Jewish victims of torture? If privately-held CNN can respond to criticism, why can't tax supported NPR?

4. CAMERA ACTION ALERT ON NPR
On June 21, National Public Radio's Morning Edition once again employed distorting terminology in a report on a Palestinian terrorist attack. Forty-year-old Rachel Shabo of Itamar and three of her sons were slain when a terrorist burst into their home, shooting the family members. NPR introduced the story this way:
"Israeli officials say Palestinian commandos stormed a house in a Jewish settlement on the West Bank last night killing five people."

In fact, commandos are elite troops whose mission is characteristically to save lives -- not to slaughter defenseless civilians in their homes. In addition, of course, neither the Foreign Ministry nor Israel Defense Forces websites use any terminology but "terrorist" attacks to characterize the killing of the mother and her children. If NPR cannot produce actual "Israeli officials" who used the "commando" terminology, the network should retract its misleading language and desist from any further use of it.

The Random House Dictionary definition of "commando" is:
"1. (In World War II) a. any of the specially trained Allied military units used for surprise, hit-and-run raids against Axis forces. ...2. any military unit organized for operations similar to those of the commandos of World War II. 3. A member of a military assault unit or team trained to operate quickly and aggressively in especially urgent, threatening situations, as against terrorists holding hostages."

A mother and her children are obviously civilian targets, not military "forces." And the terrorists were not rescuing the mother and her children from other terrorists.

To its credit, NPR seems to feel it has nothing to hide. It has made transcripts available free of charge of its Middle East coverage dating back (as of now) to May 8, 2002.

In review: no one element of NPR's programming listed here is particularly egregious, but taken together the case for bias continues to be convincing. If you feature this then if you wish to be anything close to balanced, you should also feature that; and for whatever reason, NPR sorely lacks much of that. We must keep pointing this out.
posted by Anonymous at 1:51 PM

 
Cornfields and Civil Rights
Here's how much I like David Hogberg: the main focus of his blog is IOWA politics and media and if I cared less about either my head would implode, but I still read him almost every day. He is headed off today for a visit to San Fran and will be checking out the Giants at Pac Bell Park. He would like to see Jacobs Field here in Cleveland someday. CONSIDER THIS AN INVITATION. He also laments the fact that the Giants are only 10 games over .500 so far this year. My response: weep, look at the freaking Indians.

On to more substantive matters, I am extremely torn about the conditions of Jose Padilla's detention. These things are both true: Jose Padilla is: (1) In league with the al Qaeda terrorist network. (2) A citizen of the United States. Hence my deep conflict.

David argues well and persuasively for the continued denial of Padilla's civil liberties as a U.S. citizen due to his status as an "unlawful combatant":

"an unlawful combatant is a fighter who does not play by the accepted rules of war, and therefore does not qualify for the Convention's protections," the accepted rules being the ones laid down by the 1949 Geneva Convention. The Geneva Convention sets out the guidelines for "Prisoner of War" (see article 4). Needless to say, Padilla doesn’t fit the definition.

....it is also well established under American law that unlawful combatants do not have to be treated like ordinary citizens. As Julian Epstein, a former Democratic chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, argued in the Washington Post last week:

Pursuant to the Geneva conventions and ample precedent in U.S. law, the Bush administration is well within its rights to detain those properly determined to be lawful or unlawful combatants until the conclusion of the armed conflict, and only then to try them in a properly constituted military tribunal, a military court or in civilian courts. The apparent supervision of Padilla by a federal judge since his detention as a material witness and the availability of federal habeas petitions, should help check against arbitrary or pretextual determinations about his combatant status.

Hogberg also goes after those who would use the race card:

Nice try, but race has nothing to do with it. Lindh was allowed to be tried in a civilian court because the government determined that he had no valuable information about al Qaeda. If he did, he no doubt would have been treated as an unlawful combatant. Padilla, on the other hand, appears to be part of a terrorist plot. He may have information about that could prevent another 9/11. Thus, he must be treated exactly as an enemy captured during a war, because he is.

All well and good, but of course the real question here is whether the Padilla case

"amounts to 'alarming violations of fundamental rights,' and if we stay on this path 'we are on the road to militarizing the entire justice system.'"

Hogberg then argues, using Jonah Goldberg and others, that the Padilla case is singular and those who say otherwise are making a mountain out of a molehill. Yet even Goldberg concedes:

I can totally understand how people can disagree with me. What I'm at a loss to understand is their granite-like conviction that if we deprive Jose Padilla of his right to trial by jury, we'll become a totalitarian regime. Sure, I can see how it might bring us a teensy-weensy bit closer to a less free society.

So we finally come to the crux of the matter: is it appropriate to make ours "a teensy-weensy bit closer to a less free society" to detain Padilla indefinitely without charges, under military custody, in order to interrogate him as thoroughly as possible regarding the workings of al Qaeda, and/or future attacks? That is the nut I am having such a hard time cracking.

As the Star Telegram says:

the constitutional protections guaranteed for U.S. citizens are, in the case of Padilla, being ignored by the Bush administration.

The 31-year-old Padilla, who grew up in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago, is thought to be held in a Navy brig in South Carolina as an unlawful combatant. He has not been charged with a crime, although Justice Department officials say they have connected him to a planned "dirty bomb" attack on U.S. soil.

Prosecutors have yet to present to a judge the evidence they have against Padilla, and there is no plan for such an action to occur. President Bush approved Padilla's classification as an "enemy combatant" only after the feds failed to construct a case convincing enough to take to court.

The editorial writers concede:

Without question, the balance between due process and public safety is a delicate one during a time of threats to national security. But this country has a judicial system to handle citizens accused of a crime. That is rightfully where the case of John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban," will be heard.

The writers then make the traditional ACLU argument about the importance of defending the rights of the least deserving among us.

Robert Levy compares the cases of Padilla, Hamdi, Moussaoui and Reid in NRO:

Padilla, a.k.a. Abdullah al-Muhajir, supposedly plotted to build and detonate a radiological "dirty bomb." He is a U.S. citizen. Yet he's being detained by the military — indefinitely, without seeing an attorney, even though he hasn't been charged with any crime. Yaser Esam Hamdi is also a U.S. citizen. He, too, is being detained by the military — indefinitely, without seeing an attorney, even though he hasn't been charged with any crime. Meanwhile, Zacarias Moussaoui, purportedly the 20th hijacker, is not a U.S. citizen. Neither is Richard Reid, the alleged shoe bomber. Both have attorneys. Both have been charged before federal civilian courts.

What gives? Four men: two citizens and two non-citizens. Is it possible that constitutional rights — like habeas corpus, which requires the government to justify continued detentions, and the Sixth Amendment, which assures a speedy and public jury trial with assistance of counsel — can be denied to citizens yet extended to non-citizens? That's what the Bush administration would have us believe. Citizen Padilla's treatment is perfectly legitimate, insists Attorney General John Ashcroft, because Padilla is an "enemy combatant" and there is "clear Supreme Court precedent" to handle those persons differently, even if they are citizens.

He has grave doubts about the legality of Padilla's status:

When unlawful combatants are captured, they can be tried by a military tribunal. That's what happened to the Nazi saboteurs in Quirin. But Padilla has not been charged much less tried. Indeed, the president's executive order of November 2001 excludes U.S. citizens from the purview of military tribunals. If the president were to modify his order, the Quirin decision might provide legal authority for the military to try Padilla. But the decision provides no legal authority for detaining a citizen without an attorney solely for purposes of aggressive interrogation.

Even Hogberg concedes this is the purpose of Padilla's status.

Moreover, the Constitution does not distinguish between the protections extended to ordinary citizens on one hand and unlawful-combatant citizens on the other. Nor does the Constitution distinguish between the crimes covered by the Fifth and Sixth Amendments and the terrorist acts Padilla is suspected of planning. Still, the Quirin Court justified those distinctions — noting that Congress had formally declared war and thereby invoked articles of war that expressly authorized the trial of unlawful combatants by military tribunal. Today, the situation is very different. We've had virtually no input from Congress: no declaration of war, no authorization of tribunals, and no suspension of habeas corpus.

This is all troubling. Levy concludes:

In a nutshell, we cannot permit the executive branch to declare unilaterally that a U.S. citizen may be characterized as an enemy combatant, whisked away, detained indefinitely without charges, denied legal counsel, and prevented from arguing to a judge that he is wholly innocent.

That does not mean the Justice Department must set people free to unleash weapons of mass destruction. But it does mean, at a minimum, that Congress must get involved, exercising its responsibility to enact a new legal regimen for citizen-detainees in time of national emergency. That regimen must respect citizens' rights under the Constitution, including the right to judicial review of executive branch decisions. Constitutional rights are not absolute. But they do establish a strong presumption of liberty, which can be overridden only if government demonstrates, first, that its restrictions are essential and, second, that the goals it seeks to accomplish cannot be accomplished in a less invasive manner. When the executive, legislative, and judicial branches agree on the framework, the potential for abuse is significantly diminished. When only the executive has acted, the foundation of a free society can too easily erode.

No hysteria here, just troubling questions.

Gary Solis, a retired Marine who teaches the law of war at Georgetown University Law Center, is troubled with the designation of Padilla as an "unlawful combatant":

Until now, as used by the attorney general, the term "enemy combatant" appeared nowhere in U.S. criminal law, international law or in the law of war. The term appears to have been appropriated from ex parte Quirin, the 1942 Nazi saboteurs case, in which the Supreme Court wrote that "an enemy combatant who without uniform comes secretly through the lines for the purpose of waging war by destruction of life or property [would exemplify] belligerents who are generally deemed not to be entitled to the status of prisoner of war, but to be offenders against the law of war subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals."

But that description hardly fits Padilla; he didn't come to the United States secretly, he passed through no lines, and as a U.S. citizen he is not within a military tribunal's jurisdiction. The term "enemy combatant" is simply lifted from a Supreme Court opinion and applied to Padilla and Hamdi because it makes them sound like they ought to be held incommunicado, without charges and without representation. It is a term without prior legal meaning, manufactured from commonly used military words, "enemy" and "combatant." In the Padilla and Hamdi cases, the term seriously misleads.

....The Justice Department makes no secret of why it has not charged Padilla or Hamdi, nor why they are kept from their lawyers. The Justice Department wants to wring from them every whisper of information that may bear on the war, a reasonable enough goal. To charge them would require in-court arraignment, which would publicly cement their legal rights -- not something conducive to productive interrogation. To grant them a lawyer would lead to a similar informational dead end. Yet charges within a reasonable period and legal representation are what the Constitution guarantees every American citizen, bad, good or bomber. The Justice Department cannot credibly fight terrorism at the cost of basic constitutional rights. If Padilla and Hamdi may be held in isolation in the name of terrorism, with no opportunity to defend themselves, who else might be subject to similar treatment? If "enemy combatant" is an undefined criminal category invoked by government officials free of judicial scrutiny, who else might be so nominated?

Eugene Volokh responds to the same article:

My guess is that ultimately the best (though imperfect) solution is to require the government to prove to a standard civilian court that a detainee is indeed an enemy combatant, and once that's proven, to allow the government to detain him just as it could detain any enemy combatant seized on a battlefield (even if the person was a U.S. citizen seized within the U.S.). Alternatively (or perhaps supplementally), we might conclude that (1) certain rights (for instance, the right to a prompt trial, and to the aid of a lawyer at trial and before trial) should be broadly retained, even in cases where the defendant is accused of being an enemy combatant, but (2) other rights -- the right not to be interrogated after the subject says "no" or "I want a lawyer," or the right not to be interrogated at all post-arraignment when a lawyer is present -- should have an exception carved out for people who are credibly accused of being enemy combatants. The balance that the court have struck in, say, Miranda or their interpretations of the Sixth Amendment might make sense in normal crime-fighting, but not necessarily in trying to stop an armed enemy from deploying weapons of mass destruction.

But I may well be mistaken on all this; and much depends on just how such proposals would be implemented -- for instance, whether secret evidence would be admissible, how thoroughly the government would have to prove that the person is an enemy combatant (beyond a reasonable doubt? by a preponderance of the evidence? by clear and convincing evidence?), and so on.

I am comforted by the fact that even Eugene Volokh has unresolved questions about this case.

I want the government to wring every drop of possibly helpful information out of Jose Padilla, and I have no concern for him personally: a career criminal who has apparently turned against his own country in the worst possible way. The fact that he did not successfully carry out his mission is certainly not cause for any kind of leniency.

But, I also am concerned about the slippery slope question: in this case the appearance of impropriety or disregard of the Constitution is worse than whatever misfortune befalls the individual miscreant Padilla. Therefore, the Constitution must be heeded out of respect for the system rather than respect for the suspect, and the "technicalities" Volokh proposes should be followed to reassure the populace as to the government's good will toward the law of the land, even when dealing with the scummiest of "bad" men.

Oh, and David Hogberg have a good trip.

UPDATE
Via Glenn Reynolds, Jim Henley says "hell no" to the "preemptive" worldview:

Obviously, Unqualified Offerings picks the free society. Let's assume that keeping such liberties as we have and maybe, perish the thought, expanding them, treating the threat of stateless terrorism as a police and intelligence matter and state terrorism as a matter for deterrence and retribution, not "preemption," makes America somewhat less secure. Let's even say that the price of, oh, habeas corpus, a prohibition on torture and something akin to privacy is a major attack on an American city sometime in the next ten years. A tactical nuke or an epidemic that will kill people in the high five figures or low six. (These are realistic "worst case" numbers, as I've argued before.)

Would it be worth it? Hell yes.

Whoa. Glenn, while not dismissing all concern, rather neatly refutes the supposition upon which this argument is based:

If you buy the whole unstoppable-slippery-slope-to-tyranny worldview then, sure, you've got a problem. But if that worldview were true, the Alien and Sedition Acts would never have been repealed, slavery never would have ended -- and for that matter, neither would Prohibition, or the draft.

That doesn't mean that Henley's worries are entirely misplaced, only that I don't see things as being quite that grim. My nightmare scenario, in fact, is one in which the "war on terror" starts looking like the "war on drugs." Which is why I'm in favor of invading Iraq, giving the al-Sauds the boot, and in general fighting a genuine war rather than settling into long-term chronic-illness mode.

UPDATE REDUX
Ginger Stampley doesn't buy Glenn's perspective:

Mind you, I'm glad we got rid of the Taliban. I'm glad there's a new government in Afghanistan. We did the right thing. But defining what we did as a success against al-Qaeda and suggesting that repeating the experience will protect our civil liberties is like defining a buggy beta product as production-ready. If your job depends on calling it a success, you can call it that, but that doesn't make it one.

...No matter how you slice it, though, war on Iraq and Saudi Arabia isn't a palliative that will get the hawk-monkey busy and off our backs at home. And it won't guarantee that we won't see a suitcase nuke detonated in American city, either.

I don't want the administration to be able to label somebody an "enemy combatant" and throw him in the military brig in defiance of Constitutional principles. I don't want tens of thousands of Americans dead from a dirty bomb attack either. But I'm pretty sure I can help stop, or at least do something about, the former. How, realistically, do the hawks think a war will stop the latter?

posted by Anonymous at 11:45 AM

 
The Slugs Are Back, It Would Appear
The WaPo says

Government analysts have determined it is "highly probable" that Osama bin Laden's spokesman recorded an audiotape broadcast Sunday that threatened future terrorist attacks against the United States and said the al Qaeda leader and his top deputy are still alive, a senior administration official said yesterday.

The tape, broadcast over the Qatar-based al-Jazeera network, was said to have been made recently by Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, bin Laden's chief spokesman.

The government has tested the tape for the last two days and is "fairly certain" that it is legit. The troops are getting restless:

Analysts who have reviewed Ghaith's remarks view them as another effort to "boost morale of bin Laden's network" and "instill continued fear in the U.S." with his statement that al Qaeda plans to strike again, the official said.

Given the military setbacks in Afghanistan and a recent series of arrests of al Qaeda personnel in Pakistan, North Africa, the Middle East and Europe, U.S. analysts believe "morale among [bin Laden's] dispersed network has gone relatively low," the official said. "They are antsy."

All the more so, these threats make it imperative that we continue to take the fight to the enemy: the best defense in this case is a good offense.

The failure of either bin Laden or Zawahiri to appear publicly or on audiotape, as Ghaith apparently has now done, will keep rumors going that they are either ill or dead. But U.S. intelligence analysts also believe that they are saving their next appearance to coincide with some major future attack, one senior analysts said.

"They work on their own timetable," a senior official said.

Ghaith said that "al Qaeda is not a fragile organization as some might think" and threatened an attack on America will be "in a time we choose and the place we choose and the method we choose."

The more pressure we keep on these vicious slugs, the more we take choices out of their hands.
posted by Anonymous at 11:16 AM

 
Val Thinks He's a Perv
You know, like Amy Langfield said today:

Tony Pierce, who writes a great blog, announced a couple weeks ago that he's going to stop writing it. His loyal readers have been up in arms, and there's been different contests to see if Tony's fans can persuade him to keep up the good work.

But maybe Tony should stop. He's an incredibly smart and creative guy with loads of writing talent. If Tony stops the blog, it won't be long before he comes up with something completely new and provoking.

So I can see the opportunities available through such a revolution. If I want stability I can turn to the Middle East.

But if Tony stops doing things like this, I will be wicked pissed.
posted by Anonymous at 8:57 PM

 
Minding From Within
Once more to the referrer logs. I was scanning to see who has been sending visitors our way (still getting quite a few from what I assume was intended to be an attack - this is the sweetest of ironies) and saw a new name: OmbudsGod. What a great idea: keeping track of the activites of the ombudspeople with our nation's media.

For those who don't know, a news ombudsman

receives and investigates complaints from newspaper readers or listeners or viewers of radio and television stations about accuracy, fairness, balance and good taste in news coverage. He or she recommends appropriate remedies or responses to correct or clarify news reports.

Why should a newspaper or broadcaster have an ombudsman?

To improve the quality of news reporting by monitoring accuracy, fairness and balance.
To help his or her news provider to become more accessible and accountable to readers or audience members and, thus, to become more credible.
To increase the awareness of its news professionals about the public's concerns.
To save time for publishers and senior editors, or broadcasters and news directors, by channeling complaints and other inquiries to one responsible individual.
To resolve some complaints that might otherwise be sent to attorneys and become costly lawsuits.

And the OmbudsGod keeps an eye on them. He/she has intriguing posts on the NY Times, Boston Globe, The Times of London, a rondo on the word "gringo," and where I come in, NPR. Fascinating stuff if you have any interest in the workings of the media.
posted by Anonymous at 8:30 PM

 
6th Column
Bill Quick - he of the keen eye, strong spirit, and nose for news - has spotted the recurrence of an apparent form letter being generated from points unknown advising against war with Iraq. He provides damning examples.

One of the endless articles about blogging in the mainstream press said something like: "Yeah, well blogs are neat and all, but what about investigative reporting?" This is real investigative reporting - Bill Quick is invaluable.

UPDATE
A reader of Bill's has tracked down the source of the form letter, an organization called MoveOn. See the comments section too for some indignation from a pro-MoveOn blogger who calls the effort "old fashioned American free speech," which, indeed it is; and another who says

"Exposing" this view would entail using some type of facts that show this view to be false, rather than resorting to using loaded words to cast the whole thing in shadow

A few thoughts: Bill was "exposing" the fact that these seemingly independent letters came from the same source, which DOES cast them in a different light. Copying and slightly modifying a form letter is an ontologically different kind of action than composing something of one's own mind: copying vs. creating, and THAT is Bill's story here. Bill is legitimately "exposing" the fact that this assortment of nearly identical pieces come from a single source, and are part of an organized campaign. There are different levels of "grassroots" and should the thoughts expressed in these letters have arisen independently in the minds of individual Americans more or less simultaneously, THAT would represent an expression of the zeitgeist.

The fact that these letters came from the same source, were copied and disseminated for the express purpose of influencing public opinion, and were NOT the expressions of single minds in reaction to the world, is news in and of itself. The content of those letters is secondary and not the subject of Bill's report. We have now seen two levels of disingenuousness from this camp and its supporters.
posted by Anonymous at 8:03 PM