This morning, Brutal Hugs made the move from Blosxom to Movable Type. Things might be a little strange for a day or two, but everything should be normal very soon.
One unfortunate aspect of the move is that permalinks pointing to the old blog aren't going to work perfectly. They'll end up pointing to all the posts for an entire day instead of just one entry on that day. This will be a minor inconvenience, but it's quite annoying. We're working on a solution, but don't have one yet and maybe never will.
MT will be my fourth "blogging" system. I started hand-coding links in the mid-nineties, moved to a hand-rolled content management system in 2000, then to Blosxom about a year ago. Each system has had its advantages and problems, and I'm hoping something as established and polished as MT will be my last move for a good long while.
I often wish I had those old entries from back in the day. They wouldn't be interesting to anybody but me, and surely most of the things I linked to no longer exist, but it would be like going through an old box of photos, remembering the places I've been and the things I've seen and done.
Much thanks to Rael Dornfest for gifting Blosxom to the open source blog community. MT is free as in beer, but Blosxom has the true open source spirit of *nix coding ingenuity. I have a parting give-back for the many people that have contributed code, hacks, plugins, templates and help to Blosxom bloggers. It's the mtexport plugin I used to export all my entries and writebacks so MT could read them.
Peter Jennings, who reported on flawed ecstasy research last year, is said to be doing a show on the rise of ecstasy use and government attempts to curtail it. I write "said to be" because the show is supposed to air April 1 and the "press release" contains none of the usual elements of a press release. Still, I emailed ABC news in hopes they really are doing a show that asks "Has the government been its own worst enemy in the fight to stop the drug's use?"
Even though ABC probably is not doing this report, they should be. I sent them the press release and urged them to do the show it describes. You can do the same.
Here's the text I was sent:
The rise of Ecstasy is a major event in drug history. If current trends continue, 1.8 million Americans will try Ecstasy for the first time in 2004; only marijuana will attract more new users. Overwhelming, positive word of mouth has made Ecstasy a nightmare for drug controllers. On a special edition of 'Primetime Thursday' Peter Jennings tells the epic story of Ecstasy that has never been heard.
'Peter Jennings Reporting: Ecstasy Rising' airs THURSDAY, APRIL 1st at 10pm EST, 10pm PST, 9pm CST and 9pm MST on the ABC Television Network. In the 1990s, Ecstasy seemed to come out of nowhere to join marijuana, cocaine and heroin as one of the four most widely used illegal drugs in the country. No other drug has ever spread so fast. To halt its spread, the U.S. Government has spent millions of dollars making a dramatic case against Ecstasy as a dangerous drug. The headline of this campaign has been that Ecstasy causes massive brain damage.
But this is a claim based on flawed science, and many Ecstasy users now feel their government has no credibility. What do we know about the real risks of Ecstasy? Has the government been its own worst enemy in the fight to stop the drug's use? Peter Jennings Reporting: 'Ecstasy Rising' takes viewers through the seminal events in this story and introduces all the major players -- from Alexander Shulgin, the famous chemist who was the first person to report the effects of Ecstasy, to Michael Clegg, the Dallas businessman who gave Ecstasy its name and turned it into a recreational drug, to the drug enforcement officer who led the fight to make Ecstasy illegal, to the DJ who brought Rave to America. This special tells the definitive story of how an obscure compound, discovered in 1912 and all but forgotten for over 60 years, became the drug of choice for a generation.
Update: Not an April fool's joke! And a really good show! It actually presented ecstasy as a mix of good and bad, with benefits as well as risks. It told the story of the failed attempts to control ecstasy and the downsides of a policy based on lies. Kudos to them.
Polis | 4 Writebacks | #
An economist at UNC has just published a study examining how much file sharing impacts music sales. The conclusion: not much impact at all, and in some cases a positive impact.
Professor Koleman Strumpf, who has connections to the Cato Institute, concluded that
Even in the most pessimistic specification, five thousand downloads are needed to displace a single album sale...high selling albums actually benefit from file sharing.
If this is true, does the RIAA back down and stop suing 12-year-olds? Of course not. The issue for them is not that they might lose money if downloads compete with CD sales. The issue is control. The RIAA doesn't want to stop downloads, it wants to control them and tax them. Regardless of whether downloads hurt or boost CD sales, the RIAA sees a lot of file sharing and wants a piece of the action.
Via Boing Boing.
Polis | 2 Writebacks | #
April 25 is the March For Women's Lives in DC. It will be a public demonstration about some so-called women's issues (mainly reproductive freedom, health and justice issues, and family planning). It is organized by well-respected, organizations of long standing and much respect (American Civil Liberties Union, Black Women's Health Imperative, Feminist Majority, NARAL Pro-Choice America, National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, National Organization for Women and Planned Parenthood Federation of America), and it promises to be a large rally with a lot of good speakers.
I'm going because these issues have a huge impact on the daily world I live in. I hope many of you are going too. Check the website
I have managed to cadge my way onto a busload of Columbia students headed down. A couple burners are going with me. If anybody wants to meet up in DC, use the comments.
There will be some poster-making parties in the next couple weeks. I've been brainstorming pro-choice slogans for posters, but I've discovered that making pro-life slogans is a lot more fun. I can't think of anything that rhymes with "fetus" except "eat us".
Polis | 7 Writebacks | #
The 5th Circuit has upheld the warrantless search of a suspect's home. This has several bloggers up in arms, including Silent Majority Smallest Minority, Publicola, Say Uncle, and Castle Argh. These are not, I believe, chicken-little bloggers, but they all believe that the 4th Amendment has come crashing to pieces around us. Thankfully, they're all wrong.
All these bloggers are horrified because police conducted a search in somebody's home with no warrant or even probable cause. And when you put it that way, it sounds like a terrible violation of the 4th Amendment. But that's not really the whole story.
4th Amendment protections can be compromised in certain situations. If police have a "reasonable suspicion" that you have or are or are about to commit a crime, they have the authority to briefly detain you and ask you questions (you don't have to answer most of those questions). This is called a Terry stop after Terry v. Ohio, the Supreme Court case that established this area of law.
Unfortunately, detaining suspicious people can be dangerous. To reduce that danger, police may conduct a cursory search of the detainee and the immediate area around him to check for weapons. This is a limitation on the 4th Amendment, and it's reasonable except that it has gotten expanded to allow police to search areas that couldn't possibly contain weapons reachable by the defendant. Regardless of whether that expansion is good, bad or unconstitutional, it is the current state of the law.
In this case, the police had a tip that a man was planning to kill some local judges, that he had a felony record and a reputation for violence. I question how they could know his reputation, but the tip is enough to create reasonable suspicion if not probable cause to arrest.
The police went to the suspect's home (a 14x16 foot trailer) and entered at the invitation of the suspect's roommate. They were told the defendant was in the bedroom, so they go to the bedroom to conduct a Terry interview. Once in the bedroom, they discover the defendant is missing. So far, so good. They've done nothing wrong. Here's where it gets contentious.
The police then check the immediate area to make sure the defendant isn't hiding in the closets or under the bed because they fear he might jump out and harm them. In the course of that search, they find a couple rifles, but they left them there. The cops ran outside and found the suspect hiding in the woods (guess he jumped out the window). They questioned and arrested him, got a search warrant, and come back to seize the rifles.
The issue here is whether the police were allowed to look under the bed and in the closets to protect their safety. To me, this is a limited search of the immediate area to figure out if the suspect was a present danger. Given that the roommate said the suspect was in the bedroom, if they enter the bedroom and don't see him, it's not a complete fantasy to think he might be hiding. They only looked in places large enough to contain a person (under the bed and in the closets). They didn't search his drawers or look in the pockets of his clothes or anything like that. On the record, they did what they needed to do insure their own safety after being given a pretty good reason to fear for their safety.
The bloggers howling in outrage think this was a warrantless search of a person's home, and they're right, but the warrant requirement is limited during Terry interviews by the need to protect police. And in this case, that required peeking under the bed and in two closets to make sure there was nobody dangerous there.
One outraged blogger says "should an officer approach my home for any reason, since I'm a known gun collector, I could be subject to a warrantless search", but this simply isn't true. Police might want to search your home, might even claim to have that authority, but no court will (yet) give that to them in such an instance. The police in this case searched just a bedroom, not the whole home. Without a reason to fear the rest of the home, a search would be limited to your person and your immediate area.
This has been litigated and settled many times over. Even when the police have a warrant, they can't search the entire home. They can only search the area authorized by the warrant. The Hell's Angels got a lot of evidence suppressed on those ground when law enforcement found evidence on the 2nd floor of a building of which they were only authorized to search the first floor.
I wonder what these bloggers would have had the police do differently. Given the lack of a warrant, once they reached the suspect's bedroom and found him missing, do they sit and wait for him to spring from hiding? Do they back out slowly with guns drawn in case he pops from the closet?
I know some of the upset bloggers believe police will manufacture reasons to be afraid to justify searches of the entire home. That's a real danger and that's one of the good arguments for bright-line rules, but that's what courts are for. I don't think we're in more danger of cops lying to cover up illegal searches now than before the case came down.
The sky isn't falling. I'm a pretty big fan of the 4th Amendment and think it's been eroded quite a bit by the courts. This case, though, does not strike me as an extension of the law. Let's save our energy and outrage for truly egregious cases.
Update: Lean Left agrees with me.
Polis | 17 Writebacks | #
The latest from Ron Bailey is an essay on the relationship between courts, the military, and killing terrorists. He starts out by explaining that we have a court system so people have recourse to justice that doesn't involve vigilantes and blood feuds. When somebody does you harm, you don't kill them, you sue them or have a court sentence them to jail. Because the courts are somewhat neutral third parties, the decision to take a transgressor's property, freedom or their life has some legitimacy.
Terrorists, according to Bailey, usually justify their violence by pointing to past injustices, which aren't addressed by the judicial system. With no recourse to justice within the system, they take it from without and engage in what Bailey calls "extra-judicial killing". Likewise, when Israel killed Sheikh Ahmed Yassin or if America had killed Osama Bin Laden, those would also be extra-judicial killing because neither of those guys stood trial.
Bailey argues that because courts give legitimacy to punishments, we rightly condemn the terrorist's extra-judicial killing. From there, he argues that we should give legitimacy to our assassinations of terrorists by trying them in absentia to bring their killing into the system and wash the blood from our collective hands.
The essay is an interesting read, even if trying people in absentia doesn't really confer much legitimacy. The concern he's trying to address, though is real. If our government is going to go around assassinating people, we want some assurances that the decision on who to kill is made properly, clearly, and with some accountability. Currently we have none of that, and Bailey's article opens a discussion America needs to have, lest we approach that which we hate.
As a small contribution to that discussion, I would note that most terrorists do not kill for revenge. They kill to obtain some future gain-- territory, freedom, destruction of one's enemies, and the like. Similarly, when countries assassinate terrorists, justice plays a role, but the greater concern is preventing future attacks. America's pre-9/11 desire to kill Bin Laden was not because he was a bad guy that deserved killing. We wanted to cut the head off the snake before it bit us again. Justice and legitimacy, therefore, are not the only concerns, and I would guess that most people would happily stand an unjust killing if it prevented future terrorism.
Polis | 1 Writebacks | #
Given the ubiquity of remixing and sampling in much of today's pop music, you might not be aware that releasing those songs requires getting copyright permission from each artist sampled for every song. Many songs take samples from several sources. On an album's worth of songs getting all those permissions can add up to a prohibitive level of effort and cost. P Diddy can afford these costs, but smaller, less established artists often cannot.
A lot of artists (and their fans) want the rules changed to help lower the financial burden and bureaucratic hassle of getting remix rights. They want mixing to be done under a fair use regime or by mechanical license. If sampling were fair use, musicians could grab sounds without seeking permission and without paying any fee. Under a mechanical license, a system would be set up that allows artists to get the needed rights from a central source and for relatively little money. The rights holder wouldn't be able to refuse permission and the fee would be set by Congress. This would streamline the process of acquiring rights enough to allow many musicians to comply with the law.
The purpose of these plans is to recognize that when you release music into the world, it becomes part of the cultural landscape for others to build upon. The Beatles oeuvre is property in and of itself, but it is so widespread and had such an impact on the world that it is also cultural property. It's wormed its way into so many experiences that it has become a building block of other music, an element to be recombined for new artists and new ears. Fair use and mechanical license plans allow that recombination to happen legally.
Under current law, people still build on each other's work all the time. It happens less often and it happens illegally. These songs can't get commercial distribution, so they never make it to your local record shop. What's worse, these songs are illegal to copy and usually illegal to possess. They expose the artists and listeners to lawsuits. These songs are banned music, illegal art.
And some of these songs are quite good. Danger Mouse's Grey Album is particularly good. It's Jay-Z rapping over a surreal soundscape composed entirely of sounds from the White Album.
The Beastie Boys have produced their share of illegal art, including a song called "Rock Hard", which features them rapping over AC/DC's Black Flag. It's a great piece of early Beastie's rock, but AC/DC refused to let them release it, and it only survives on bootlegs, an out-of-print LP from 1985, and of course MP3. Their seminal album, Paul's Boutique, which was one of the first wide-release ablum to show how samples could be used to create completely new music, only survives because it is a masterpiece-- if it weren't so amazing as to attract huge sales, clearing the rights to sell it would be prohibitively expensive.
Then there's the Kleptones, who recently came out with Yoshimi Battles the Hip Hop Robots. It's worth a listen, particulary "Are You A Visionary", which mixes Martin Luther King, Public Enemy and the Flaming Lips to great effect. The Kleptones have been remixing for years, and if you thought remixes were confined to hip hop, check out their new EP, Meet the Beatles. It's more sound collage than music, but it shows another dimension of what people are doing in this area of music. If you prefer music you can actually listen to, grab the last three songs off Never Trust Originality. The jazzy Potato Salad stands out in particular.
These musicians aren't just a bunch of criminal punks who refuse to pay off record labels. They're artists who want the freedom to create. They're also political actors trying to change the way people think about copyright. To that end, the copyfight community has come up with a few websites to help distribute this illegal art. Banned Music lets you download via Bit Torrent as well as directly. Illegalart.net has bootlegs and remixes, as well as art in other media.
These websites aren't just about distributing music. They're about raising awareness of the way current copyright law stifles the creation of an entire class of music. We need to adjust the law to allow this music to flourish and at the same time come up with a fair system so the sampled artists get their due.
Polis | 9 Writebacks | #
Robert Hardaway makes the usual arguments against the racist drug war, but he makes them especially well. Here's the talking points for busy people:
- Illegal drug use causes just 3,562 deaths in America every year. By way of comparison, tobacco kills 400,000 Americans and alcohol takes down another 110,640 each year. Alcohol is also a major factor in most homocides, rapes and assaults as well as a third of all suicides.
- America spends $80 billion every year to arrest and incarcerate hundreds of thousands of people in an attempt to stop those 3,562 deaths.
- America conducts thousands of raids, searches and wiretaps on American citizens to fight the drug war.
- America forfeits billions in potential tax revenue to organized crime. By ending prohibition, we could cripple organized crime and terrorists while lowering our taxes. By refusing to end prohibition, we give that money to gangsters and terrorists who use it to commit violent crimes and attack society.
- Back when drugs were legal in America, alcohol was still a much larger problem than drugs. So much so, that opium was often prescribed to treat alcohol addiction.
- Many drug deaths are caused by the low quality of black market drugs and would be avoided if prohibition were ended. Legal, regulated and inspected drugs would reduce deaths by allowing for standard doses of high quality drugs.
- More than half of all federal prison inmates and a fifth of state inmates are serving drug-related sentences. The drug war has caused prison overcrowding and overburdened our judicial system, necessitating the early release and light sentencing of violent criminals.
- Drugs and drug profits have led to much corruption, particularly in law enforcement and at the local level.
- Almost all the crime associated with drugs is a result of the lawlessness that accompanies any high-profit, black market commerce. If drugs were sold by Walmart, there would be no street-corner shootings or turf battles.
Polis | 4 Writebacks | #
Brian Doherty opines in Reason that Kerry and Bush are more alike than different. He recites a litany of issues on which Bush and Kerry have same or similar positions. When Raplh Nader said the same about Bush and Gore in 2000, he was ridiculed by all and sundry, from the right, left and middle. I await the howls of outrage.
Polis | 2 Writebacks | #
Later this year, the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban will sunset, and I've decided that that's OK, even if you're for gun control. The assault weapons ban deals with semiautomatic rifles, but doesn't actually ban them. It just limits the number of nifty features these guns can have, which is pretty useless when it comes to preventing crime or deaths. The ban lists a bunch of features and then says a semiautomatic rifle can only have one of them.
At first, this sounds pretty reasonable. The intent here appears to be banning the more deadly guns, the ones more likely to be used in crimes. But if you look at the features listed, you can pretty easily see that the law didn't manage to accomplish this. Here's the list:
- a folding or telescoping stock
- a pistol grip that protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon
- a bayonet mount
- a flash suppressor or threaded barrel designed to accommodate a flash suppressor
- a grenade launcher
The only two things listed there that actually make a gun more deadly are the bayonet mount and the grenade launcher. But grenade launchers are illegal under a separate law dating back to 1934, and bayonet killings aren't really a widespread problem in America.
As for the other features, I don't really see them making the guns more deadly or prone to criminal use. And if those features really are so bad, why not ban them outright? If pistol grips are so bad, it makes no sense to ban them only when they're combined with bayonet mounts. Either they're a problem or they're not.
The Assault Weapons Ban was a good-faith attempt to prevent gun deaths and crime. It's pretty obvious that attempt failed, and we should let the ban die. Spending good energy on bad laws isn't going to solve the problems gun control advocates are concerned with.
It comes down to this: even if you think semiautomatic rifles are bad, the ban doesn't do much to make them less available or less bad. The DC sniper, for example, reportedly used a semiautomatic rifle that complied with the ban's limits. And even if his gun hadn't complied with the law, he would have been no more deadly.
Thanks to Say Uncle for making a really clear and credible argument on this one.
Polis | 9 Writebacks | #
Another point on Michelle's "they all look alike to me" post. Michelle writes that Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, the PLO, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Abu Sayyaf, the Taliban and Hamas all have in common "a great desire to [see] ... the Satanic entity that is America bow before Allah and face Mecca."
An important detail that frequently gets lost in the big-brush attacks on terror is that not all Arab terrorists are driven by religious fervor and hatred of America. The PLO is secular. Hussein was the head of the Ba'th Socialist Party, and he ran a very secular state whose main support came from the Soviet Union. His politics start from pan-Arabic nationalist socialism, not the Koran. The Ba'athists once wrote
"the way to fashion Arab culture and Arab society is by creating an Arab socialist who believes that God, the religions, feudalism, capitalism, imperialism and all the other values that had controlled society in the past are no more than mummies in the Museum of History."
Then there are the guys that are religious but aren't trying to destroy America. Abu Sayyaf surely has no love for our flag, but its priorities are all about the Philippines. They're fighting to establish an independent Islamic state. They got their hands full without plotting to sink Manhattan. The same goes for Hamas and Hezbollah-- thye don't want to destroy America. They want to hold fund raisers here and get political support to beat down Israel.
All these guys pay lip service to Islam in much the same way American politicians pay lip service to Christianity. All of these guys play on religious sentiment for popular support, just like Americans do. Some are actually that religious and some are demagogues. And just like in America, even when their policy views accord with their religious views, it doesn't mean those views are motivated by religion.
Polis | 2 Writebacks | #
Michelle over at A Small Victory has recently posted a lot about the terror fight having two sides. On the "With us" side are the victims and targets of terror anywhere in the world. On the "Against us" side are terrorists and anybody who helps terrorists and even those who simply tolerate terrorists. Under this view, a strike at terrorists anywhere is a strike at terrorists everywhere, and a blow to those who coddle terror is as justified (and often as effective) as a blow to those who commit terror.
In her most recent post, Michelle writes that Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, the PLO, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Abu Sayyaf, the Taliban and Hamas "are all working under the same umbrella." That umbrella is "called annihilation and it's aimed at you."
To her, these people form one enemy because some of them want to kill us, some of them are helping the killers kill, and some of them deal with the killers in ways that have nothing to do with killing us. It's "the friend of my enemy is my enemy" logic, and it makes a certain amount of desperate sense. When the bullets are flying, you figure out who is with you and you kill the rest.
The problem with Michelle's view is that it only works at a high level of generality. Once you get into specifics, lumping our enemies together doesn't give us any useful information. Sure we can agree that Hussein, Bin Laden, and the Taliban are all in the "enemies" column. To the extent that they contribute to the global terror threat, each is a dangerous enemy.
But there's a lot of meaning smuggled into "to the extent that". All of these threats are not equal in their desire or ability to harm America, and our response to them should reflect that. Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are the terror threat. Hussein, on the other hand, wasn't exactly the Kaddafi of the '80's, and the Taliban was an incidental target in our attack on Al Qaeda (if they'd handed him over, we wouldn't have invaded).
But having labelled and grouped our enemies, Michelle has obscured the differences that she should be elucidating. Unlike Al Qaeda, the PLO has no plans to bomb the Brooklyn Bridge. The PLO is a secular organization who is politically allied with more religious organizations. They're hardly fanatical Muslims bent on destruction of America. While Hamas was celebrating in public on 9/11, Arafat was condemning the attacks in the press. I'm not saying Arafat's ready to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. I'm just saying he doesn't dream about burning the White House the way Bin Laden does.
Michelle would say these differences are too false or small to be meaningful, but she's wrong. If we only have one bullet, we should use it on Bin Laden, not Arafat. Arafat doesn't want Michelle dead anymore than Gerry Adams or Abdullah Ocalan wants her dead. These people don't have much love for America, but to say they pine and scheme for our destruction is simply untrue.
And that is the crux of most people's objection to invading Iraq as part of the war on terror. Hussein's a bad guy and got what he deserved, but that doesn't justify the war, which was sold as a piece of the fight against terror. While most people agree we've helped Iraq, not many people think we've helped America. We're getting a lot of Americans killed and spending a lot of money and political energy on something that really doesn't make us much safer.
Polis | 3 Writebacks | #
Massachusetts has taken the first step toward passing a Hate Amendment to its constitution. Before it takes effect, it has several hurdles to clear, including repassage in 2005. That means this November is Vote The Rascals Out Month. Make them pay at the polls, and the measure fails in 2005.
Polis | 2 Writebacks | #
From somebody I assume is a member of the hysterical anybody-but-Bush crowd (to be distinguished from the rational, reasonable, sane anybody-but-Bush crowd, of which I am a member) comes a new criminal accusation: "George W. Bush’s website is in violation of the United States Code, Title 4, Chapter 1, Section 3."
That sounds serious! When you follow the link, though, you discover that the violated law is a misdemeanor statute effective only in D.C. that supposedly prohibits "the use of the flag in advertising for any means". The website opines that Bush owes "$100, or thirty days in jail." So even if Bush is guilty, it's a pretty minor offense, barely worth our attention.
But of course, when you read the statute, you discover that the law doesn't actually prohibit the use of flags in advertisements. What it prohibits is defacing the flag. And of course, Spence v. Washington and US v. Eichman make it absolutely clear that laws punishing the defacing and burning of the flag violate the 1st Amendment. (BTW, the Congressional Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee have a great flag desecration legal timeline.)
Let's recap. The supposedly violated law is a petty little thing of little importance. The law is misread. The law is not actually violated in letter or spirit. The law is unconstitutional.
Lots of people want Bush rejected in November for a lot of good reasons. Crying wolf about him breaking petty laws is surely not the way to unseat him, and all the bad, easily discredited arguments against Bush suck the air from the good ones.
Polis | 4 Writebacks | #
The American Museum of the Moving Image has an online exhibit called "The Living Room Candidate". It's an archive of all the presidential campaign commercials going back to 1952. The exhibit is compelling testament that selling candidates as commodities is not a new development.
There's a lot of fascinating artifacts from the early years of television-- cartoon singalongs about Ike and Stevenson, Harry Bellafonte endorsing JFK, racism, sexism and more. It's clear from the commercials that if viewers were less cynical then, the ads certainly were not. Negative ads were the norm from day one.
As you page through the years, the commercials get more complex. They jam more images and ideas into less space. You see more testimonials from actors dressed like regular people and fewer scenes of the candidate speaking directly to the camera. When you hit the 1980's, things get a little more impressionistic, a little more jaunty MTV, where visual images start playing a larger role than words.
Other commercials are just artifacts of their time. There's a really creepy 1968 commercial that has no words. It's just pictures of Hubert Humphrey pasted in with images of national strife, Viet Nam and poverty. A marching band plays patriotic music with trippy space-alien sound effects layered in. I couldn't even tell who the commercial was touting until the tag at the end: "This time vote like your whole world depended on it. Nixon." It's sort of like "Voting for Humphrey is voting for the world to end!"
The big constant in all these commercials is the themes. Experience, trust, intelligence, fear. Sure they get into specific issues (Nixon on school bussing is a must-see), but every campaign attempts to portray its opposition as a coward, a fool and a liar. It's a shame, but many people get most of their impressions of a candidate from these negative commercials. We should try to remember that it's all lies and branding, even the ones we agree with.
Polis | 2 Writebacks | #
The New Yorker recently did a bit on the Baylor student paper's pro-marriage editorial. As expected, the magazine sides with the student editors (who are under fire from their religious school's administration), but also makes the more interesting point that, even among conservative Christians, younger folks are more willing to accept non-discriminatory marriage. The New Yorker notes that this age gap appears in every poll:
One particularly striking CBS News/New York Times poll, taken last year, asked respondents if they would favor or oppose "a law that would allow homosexual couples to marry, giving them the same legal rights as other married couples." Among adults under age thirty, 61 per cent said they would favor such a law and 35 per cent said they would oppose it; among sixty-five-year-olds and up, 18 per cent were in favor and 73 per cent opposed. The numbers vary from poll to poll, but the huge age gap is always there.
So have hope and keep the faith. It might take 20 years, but it will happen.
Polis | 3 Writebacks | #
Damn Foreigner has a good summary of recent marriage news. It's a fairly copmlete list of all the goings on around the country, including the news that the party in San Fran is over. On the plus side, San Jose has announced it will recognize Frisco marriages.
Polis | 2 Writebacks | #
Some dogs you can whip whenever you want, beat them savagely over and over, and they won't run away. They'd rather get beatings and worthless table scraps than seek a loving home somewhere else. So they wag their tails faster and try ever harder to beg and plead for better treatment. Those Log Cabin Republicans are a bunch of miserable curs.
Interestingly, and on a different topic, the article says there were 1mm gay Bush-voters in 2000, and this amounted to 25 percent of the gay vote and 1 percent of the total electorate. So the total gay vote is 4 percent of the electorate.
Republicans are pretty up front about courting Hispanic voters, something they didn't bother with in 2000 because back then Hispanics only made up 6 percent of the electorate. But now Hispanics hold 9 percent of the votes and are heavy swing voters. My suggestion to Log Cabin Republicans and Pink Pistoliers is, if you want to stop being abused by the GOP, push hard for adoption rights and start recruiting and indoctrinating. When things like this happen in every state and every election, the GOP won't have gays to kick around anymore.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
Matthew Yglesias writes that we don't know whether to blame ETA or Al Qaeda and notes that nobody has claimed responsibility for the terrible attacks in Madrid. Now that ETA has denied responsibility and Al Qaeda has admitted responsibility, I think that largely eliminates the uncertainty.
In the end, I'm not sure it matters all that much who specifically attacked Madrid today. Can we condemn Al Qaeda any more strongly than we have? Aren't we already making maximum effort to destroy Al Qaeda? And shouldn't we do the same for ETA? Regardless of the attacks and who is behind them, if we can do more to stop terrorism, then we should already be doing so.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
Bush partisans are upset because John Kerry called his opponents "the most crooked, you know, lying group I've ever seen." Their indignation would play much better if they weren't both incredibly crooked and a bunch of liars.
As pointed out by Pacific Views, their indignation would also play better if Republicans hadn't pioneered the art of coordinated name-calling in the early 1990's. Here are the words Republicans adivsed each other to apply "to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party":
decay... failure (fail)... collapse(ing)... deeper... crisis... urgent(cy)... destructive... destroy... sick... pathetic... lie... liberal... they/them... unionized bureaucracy... "compassion" is not enough... betray... consequences... limit(s)... shallow... traitors... sensationalists...
endanger... coercion... hypocrisy... radical... threaten... devour... waste... corruption... incompetent... permissive attitudes... destructive... impose... self-serving... greed... ideological... insecure... anti-(issue): flag, family, child, jobs... pessimistic... excuses... intolerant...
stagnation... welfare... corrupt... selfish... insensitive... status quo... mandate(s)... taxes... spend(ing)... shame... disgrace... punish (poor...)... bizarre... cynicism... cheat... steal... abuse of power... machine... bosses... obsolete... criminal rights... red tape... patronage
Rick Santorum, whose name many would consider disgusting and profane, descried Kerry's comments as "outside the bounds of where people who want to hold the highest office in this country should be making." As Josh Mashall points out, Santorum seems to forget the time Bush called a reporter from the NY Times "a major-league asshole".
Meanwhile, the corruption continues and continues. Somebody should tell these guys you have to let go of the cookies to get your hand out of the jar.
Update: Kerry, the fighter who vowed to "keep pounding" them, is backing off. Hasn't the guy with all those Viet Nam medals ever heard of "No guts, no glory"?
Polis | 1 Writebacks | #
The New York Times covers one Georgia State Representative's fight against a Hate Amendment. The money quote from the gay rep: "They say, `It's not about you,' and I respond, `How can it not be about me?' I try hard to make them see that it's just as personal as can be when they're looking at me."
Polis | 2 Writebacks | #
A Tennessee couple tried to bring their San Francisco marriage home with them. They went to the DMV to have the names on their licenses changed to reflect their new marital status. The DMV refused, so now it's a lawsuit. The fight has only just begun.
On the bright side, "The openly gay couple say they have encountered no criticism or ugly reactions to their February 23rd marriage or the publicity they have generated." Does anybody really believe marriage won't soon be open to all?
Read the whole story.
Via Say Uncle.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
Most people would say that Karim Garcia has it made, but I think he's jinxed. True, he's a Major League baseball player, former Yankee and now starts for the Mets in right field. Also true that he shares this position with his good friend, Shane Spencer. But Garcia can't seem to avoid trouble. Herewith, a recent ugly run of violence and bad luck plaguing this major leaguer:
During Game 3 of last year's American League series, Garcia got entangled in a fight with a Red Sox employee. He's facing possible criminal charges in Boston as well as a potential law suit. It should be noted here that this fight occurred in the bullpen during the game. It should be further noted that Garcia is not a pitcher.
Fast forward to last week, when Garcia and Spencer got into a shouting and shoving match with some Floridian pizzeria employees and patrons. The guy lives in New York. What the hell was he thinking getting pizza in Florida?! Again, he faces potential criminal charges and a likely lawsuit.
Even when Garcia is behaving, nobody's safe. Yesterday Garcia hit a homer that beaned a fan, who was removed in an ambulance.
Garcia's ugly run is not limited to interpersonal violence either. A few minutes after Garcia smashed a homer into a fan's head, fellow Met Jose Reyes hit a homer of his own. It smashed the rear window of Garcia's Hummer.
I'm not a huge Met fan (my loyalties belong in a different borough), but, please, somebody help this guy before he kills somebody or ends up in jail. Maybe there's a reason he's never played for a team for more than one season.
If you read yesterday's White House Press Briefing and the morning Gaggle that preceded it, you'll see the press pound Scott McClellan on the issue of Bush only agreeing to give one hour to the 9/11 Commission. It's pretty clear that Bush is sticking to his one-hour limit and that McClellan doesn't want to have to justify this limit.
So why is CNN reporting, "Bush open to more time with 9/11 panel"?
What happened was the press played with McClellan's slippery refusal to talk squarely about the one-hour limit. Every time they asked about the limit, McClellan responded with rhetoric about unprecedented cooperation and Bush's commitment to answering every question the commission might have.
The press took that asserted willingness to answer every question at face value and reported that if answering all the questions requires more than an hour, Bush is willing.
What's amazing about this is not that the press is turning McClellan's refusal to speak clearly against him. What's amazing is that they did this despite McClellan clearly saying that he wasn't signalling any new flexibility on the one-hour limit:
Q: Scott, since now seems like the time is negotiable, the President will now answer for as long --
McCLELLAN: I didn't say that. (Laughter.) Obviously, you work with the commission and you come to an agreement on the format and the setting for it. But I'm just stating a fact -- the President will answer all the questions they want to raise.
Q: I'm sorry, we all think you said it, so you said it. Okay? Is that a deal?
McCLELLAN: Putting words in my mouth? Just report what I said, is what I would appreciate.
McClellan said he never meant to imply new flexibility in the limit, and the press corps laughed at him.
This is probably an example of bad journalism, but it's not limited to CNN. Newsday, Reuters, several smaller papers, foreign papers and TV news, are all reporting Bush's shift, some in more strong language than others. The press just decided that the Bush White House has so squandered its credibility that even when McClellan is right, he's still a liar. And as a result of all these news articles, Bush will probably cave and sit for more than an hour.
It's going to be a tough election year for Bush if the press corps is making White House policy.
Polis | 3 Writebacks | #