Reading: Krugman on "graduates and oligarchs"

Paul Krugman has managed to tie a note to a rock and lob it over the Times Select firewall so the rest of us can read it. I'm adding it to the p3 Readings list in the sidebar.

Krugman's topic is the comforting argument that education is an engine that is, as one of its unwanted side-effects, contributing to the widening income inequality gap in America--a comforting argument, but alas, a false one:

The notion that it's all about returns to education suggests that nobody is to blame for rising inequality, that it's just a case of supply and demand at work. And it also suggests that the way to mitigate inequality is to improve our educational system - and better education is a value to which just about every politician in America pays at least lip service.

The idea that we have a rising oligarchy is much more disturbing. It suggests that the growth of inequality may have as much to do with power relations as it does with market forces. Unfortunately, that's the real story.

In the last three decades, the average earnings of college grads has all-but-stalled, while the average earnings of those people at the 90th percentile, and the 99th, and the 99.9th . . . well, you can guess (although you'll probably guess low). And, Paul being Paul, he's got the numbers to back the real story up.

(Update: And although the connection was obvious to me as I wrote, I neglected to mention my earlier post this morning about Republican looting of higher education at students' expense.)

Republican corruption by the numbers, Part 5: Education

Here's the final installment of the p3 Republican Corruption Index, drawn from the report on Republican corruption released last week by the Democrats on the House Rules Committee. You can read Part 1, on health care, here; Part 2, on energy policy, here; Part 3, on national security, here; and Part 4, on employment and the economy, here.

This one's a little thinner than the previous four, for a simple reason: The money that the Republicans spend on education is so paltry to begin with--compared to the eye-popping sums that change hands in national security, health care, and so on--that an index of the corruption numbers here is at a disadvantage to begin with. Count on the Republicans to throw their efforts where they can expect the greatest rewards.

$17,600

Average debt faced upon graduation by the two-thirds of all public college or university student who take out student loans.
------------------


$22,581

Average debt faced upon graduation by the 73% of all students at private colleges or universities who take out student loans.
------------------


$292,570

Total donations during the last election cycle from employees and lobbyists for private student lending companies including Sallie Mae, paid to the PAC of Republican Representative John Boehner, chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
------------------


1

Number of Boehner's daughters hired by a Sallie Mae subsidiary after Boehner mentioned her during a round of golf with the owners.
------------------

Bush : Conservatism = Stalin : Communism

This meme has popped up here and there, although I think Wolcott gets it best: The neoconservatives (and to a lesser extent, although Wolcott doesn't get into it, the fundamentalist right) are positioning themselves to cut loose of Bush and his ambitions for a "legacy," if it becomes necessary, by denouncing Bush as not a "real neoconservative" (or "real fundamentalist wacko," whichever).

(The fundamentalists are about to get their most fevered wet dream of the last thirty years--the evisceration, if not flat-out overturning, of Roe v. Wade--so they may not be ready to cut Bush adrift yet. Yet.)

But the "movement conservatives," always more loyal to the movement than to the utensil the president, can smell trouble: Iraq is spiraling into civil war; Bush's lame-duck status is becoming more painfully evident every day; and his approval ratings are sub-Nixonian, somewhere between one-half and one-third of Clinton's at the height of the impeachment froth. Rather than ride this particular stage coach over that particular cliff, they're more than ready to hop off and claim that Junior's failures weren't a true test of conservative principles, since he was never a "real conservative"--not a difficult argument to make, really, given that the empty-headed Governor had to be tutored on politics and economics by Rove and Rice before they could run him at the presidency, and that he's been one of the greatest champions that big government spending has ever known.

So brace yourself, in the months to come, for the sorry spectacle of the neocon rats preparing to desert the Bush ship.

Bill Kristol is mentioned often in Wolcott's post (Wolcott calls him "almost feline," although I might make a taxonomic quibble and describe him as "iguanian" instead), and his pedigree papers show why he's a true "movement man," not a "Bush man." But they left out the most important dues that he had to pay in his climb to the top: He was Vice President Dan Quayle's chief of staff, tasked with the unenviable mission of making his boss appear smart. Anyone who would be willing to make his bones by mucking out that stall is clearly in the movement for the long haul, not just for the sake of some upstart like Bush.

Update: Digby points out that this scenario also primes the pump for conservatives to launch a "restore our honor" revival.

Republican corruption by the numbers, Part 4: Employment and the economy

Here's the latest installment of quantified GOP depravity, as catalogued in the report on Republican corruption released last week by the Democrats on the House Rules Committee. You can read Part 1, on health care, here; Part 2, on energy policy, here; and Part 3, on national security, here.

Let's take a look at how things are going for people who actually work for a living:

5.2 million

Number of Americans who said in December 2005 that they wanted jobs but couldn't find one.
---------------------


30,000

Number of American workers to be laid off by Ford in connection with 14 plant closings.
---------------------


$250 million

Taxes saved by Ford during the same year, by routing offshore earnings back into the US under a loophole in the 2004 Republican tax bill, called the "American Jobs Creation Act."
---------------------


$1.6 million

Cost to multinationals such as Pfizer, Hewlett-Packard, and Altria for the lobbying that led to the passage of the "Jobs Creation Act" loophole.
---------------------


$3.05

Average hourly wage of a Chinese garment factory worker.
---------------------


$8

Average hourly wage of an American garment factory worker.
---------------------


234

Number of co-sponsors of a 2000 bill to prevent garments produced produced by foreign workers in labor camps in the Marianas from having a "Made in the USA" label and entering the US duty-free, before the bill was blocked by Republican Tom DeLay and Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
---------------------


$400 million

US taxes avoided annually by Tyco by moving its corporate headquarters, and nothing more, to tax haven Bermuda, under a legal loophole called "corporate inversion."
---------------------


$227 million

Amount of federal contracts received by Tyco in 2001.
---------------------


$1.7 million

Amount Tyco paid Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, through an intermediary who was a former member of Alberto Gonzales' White House Counsel staff, to lobby the White House for continuation of the tax break for off-shore corporations.
---------------------


$10 billion

Amount of a Homeland Security contract awarded to Bermuda-incorporated Accenture, another beneficiary of "corporate inversion," to screen visitors to the US, after passing on bids by two other American based, American tax-paying companies.
---------------------

Next: Education.

Sunday afternoon diversion

Imagine that you're on the subway, or the commuter train. Standing near the door is a middle-aged professional looking fellow, with his mp3 player going. Whatever the music is, the guy's deeply, deeply into it, and before long--although he's so totally in the groove that he's the only one on the car who doesn't realize it--he's playing air guitar. Then air drums. Air piano, too.

Little by little, eyes closed, face in deep concentration, he gives himself over to every 15-year-old's rock-and-roll fantasy performance. Chuck Berry. Eric Clapton. Jerry Lee Lewis-- whoever it is, he's wailin'. And none of the other passengers wants to interrupt him, because it'll break the spell and they're all dying to see how it finishes up.

Now imagine that instead of playing air guitar on the subway, he's juggling on stage.

I've seen a lot of jugglers in my time, and this guy's technique is dazzling, but conceptually he's just in a whole 'nother place. Shout out to James the Elder for sending me the link.

Timing is everything

Not that many people remember now--and too few gave it proper notice at the time--when Groucho Marx died, because he had the bad historical luck to die three days after Elvis. (You can look it up, at this hypnotically guilty-pleasure site.)

Darren McGavin had the same poor timing, dying the same weekend that Don Knotts sucked all the oxygen out of the Classic TV memorializing.

Expect an orgy of Knotts episodes of "Andy Griffith" and "Three's Company" to begin any moment on TVLand, if it hasn't already.

Well, here at p3 we're happy to leave Knotts' fans to sing his praises; we'll stick with McGavin any day. We're talking about:

• The original television Mike Hammer. Of his hard-boiled-and-then-some character, McGavin said, "He was the kind of guy who would've waved the flag for George Wallace."


• The star of the classic 1970s horror-and-camp fest "Kolchak: The Night Stalker." "Kolchak" was an inspiration for producer Chris Carter for the series that bumped it to the next level: "The X-Files." In fact, McGavin had a recurring part as a retired FBI agent who had discovered all those unexplained-phenomena cases long before Agent Mulder became obsessed with them.


• The actor who immortalized the line: "It's a major award!"

Take that, Mr. Limpet!

Varieties of moral dilemmas

Sometimes people think they're faced with a tricky ethical problem when in fact the problem is simply that they're dumber than a post.

From this week's "On Ethics" column by Randy Cohen (behind the Times Select pay-per firewall, unfortunately now available here):

Q: After I was scheduled for a job interview at a university, a member of the search committee Googled me and found my blog, where I refer to him (but not by name) as a belligerent jerk. He cancelled the interview. It was impolitic to write what I did, but my thinking him to be a jerk does not mean I would not be great at that job, and the rest of the committee might agree. Was it ethical of him to cancel the interview?

(Cohen's reply begins: "'Impolitic'? You let yourself off the hook rather easy." He then dignifies the interviewee's silly question with four paragraphs weighing the ins and outs of why academic search committees are the way they are, as if the vagaries of department politics were the root of the problem here, not this person's professional cluelessness. Cohen gets back on track when he sums up: You might contact the committee and make your case for getting a second chance, he writes, but "don't quit your day job.")

Republican corruption by the numbers, Part 3: Energy policy

More horror stories from the report on Republican corruption released this week by the Democrats on the House Rules Committee. You can read Part 1, on health care, here, and Part 2, on energy policy, here..

Today's topic: National Security (Just so you'll remember that the whole "Bush didn't know we secretly sold our ports to the terrorist-friendly UAE and oh, by the way, there are 21 of them in the deal not 6" business didn't come out of nowhere.)

$7 billion

Amount of Defense Department funds allocated for the war on terrorism for which Defense has, in the words of the General Accounting Office, "lost visibility."
-------------------


$9 billion

Amount of Iraqi reconstruction funds that the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) could not account for in 2005.
-------------------


$1 million

Total amount CPA official Robert J. Stein took in bribes and kickbacks, including real estate, cars, home improvement, and jewelry, not including the additional $2 million that Stein flat-out stole from the CPA., all while placed in a position of public trust after having served time in federal prison for fraud during the 1990s.
-------------------


$8.6 million

Amount in rigged no-work contracts that Stein and other CPA officials pushed through, in a scheme involving such quid-pro-quos as sexual favors and money laundering.
-------------------


$178 million

Amount the Bush administration had already spent on preparation for the Iraq war before Congress authorized any such spending.
-------------------


$2.4 million

Amount in bribes accepted from defense contractors by Republican former Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham while on the House defense appropriations subcommittee, not including $700,000 laundered through a real estate deal.
-------------------


5 hours, 54 minutes

Interval between 6:00pm December 18, 2005 (when the $3.8 billion appropriation for improving government preparedness for pandemics such as avian flu was passed by the conference committee without language that would indemnify drug companies for any deaths caused by avian flu vaccines they produced) and 11:54pm the same evening, when the report was officially filed (including 40 new and unvoted-upon pages of text, added by the Republican leadership of the House and Senate, exempting the drug companies from liability, not only regarding avian flu vaccine but other drugs having no connection to avian flu, even in cases of gross negligence on the part of the companies).
-------------------

Next up: The economy.

"You can make your own arrangements"

Oliphant pretty much seems to have captured the delicate interpersonal dynamic that's keeping the White House running these days.

Voter owned election repeal: Maybe not as dead as originally thought

The City Auditor's office announced today that the signature count for the drive to put public campaign financing to an up-or-down ballot measure had "technological problems."

As a result, the signature count--which originally came up short of the number of valid signatures needed to put the issue on the ballot, to the surprise of many--will be reviewed and recertified. It's too early to know how this will affect the outcome, only that the signature sampling process is going to require a do-over.

More on this as it develops; meanwhile, you can consider what the First Things First Committee, bankrolled by downtown business, might have spent that $350 thousand on instead.

Understatement raised to a zen art

In the Oregonian's front-page article today about the attempts by Paul Allen's Blazers to finagle some kind of "partnership" with state or local government to bail out the historically money- and game-losing franchise, there's this breathtaking bit of understatement:

The team is approaching state and local government when purse strings are tight and fan support is low. It also faces a public relations challenge in persuading government officials to consider giving any financial assistance to Allen, the seventh richest man in the world.

"Public relations challenge"--now that's a generous description if I've ever seen one.

It kind of makes you wonder about all those people who were so deeply offended by the comparatively insignificant public expense of financing city council campaigns while there were still un-filled potholes on their street: Will we hear them attack this corporate welfare scheme with the same gusto for its folly and chutzpah? Or will they decide that pouring public money down a rathole like this is actually a matter of civic pride?

Stay tuned.

How we got here, continued

Here's another excerpt from Hofstadter's classic collection, The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

File this, and the previous excerpt, under the general heading "How We Got Here."

After twenty years the New Deal liberals have quite unconsciously taken on the psychology of those who have entered into possession. Moreover, a large part of the New Deal public, the jobless, distracted, and bewildered men of 1933, have in the course of the years found substantial places in society for themselves, have become homeowners, suburbanites, and solid citizens. Many of them still have the emotional commitments to the liberal dissent with which they grew up politically, but their social position is one of solid comfort. Among them the dominant tone has become one of satisfaction, even of a kind of conservatism. [ . . . ]

The change did not escape Stevenson himself. "The strange alchemy of time," he said in a speech at Columbus, "has somehow converted the Democrats into the truly conservative party of this country--the party dedicated to conserving all that is best, and building solidly and safely on these foundations." What most liberals now hope for is not to carry on with some ambitious new program, but simply to defend as much as possible of the old achievements and to try to keep traditional liberties of expression that are threatened.

There is, however, a dynamic of dissent in America today. Representing no more than a modest fraction of the electorate, it is not so powerful as the liberal dissent of the New Deal era, but it is powerful enough to set the tone of our political life and to establish throughout the country a kind of punitive reaction. The new dissent is certainly not radical--there are hardly any radicals of any sort left--nor is it precisely conservative. Unlike most of the liberal dissent of the past, the new dissent not only has no respect for nonconformism, but is based upon a relentless demand for conformity. It can most accurately be called pseudo-conservative--I borrow the term from The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950 by Theodore W. Adorno and his associates--because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions, and institutions. They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word, and they are far from pleased with the dominant practical conservatism of the moment as it is represented by the Eisenhower administration. Their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways--a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive evidence both from clinical techniques and from their own modes of expression.

[ . . . ] Adorno and his co-workers found that their pseudo-conservative subjects, although given to a form of political expression that combines a curious mixture of largely conservative with occasional radical notions, succeed in concealing from themselves impulsive tendencies that, if released into action, would be very far from conservative. The pseudo-conservative, Adorno writes, shows "conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness" in his conscious thinking and "violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere. . . . The pseudo-conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition."

Who is the pseudo-conservative, and what does he want? It is impossible to identify him by social class, for the pseudo-conservative impulse can be found in practically all classes in society, although its power probably rests largely upon its appeal to the less-educated members of the middle classes. The ideology of pseudo-conservatism can be characterized but not defined, because the pseudo-conservative tends to be more than ordinarily incoherent about politics. The lady who, when General Eisenhower's victory over Senator Taft had finally become official in 1952, stalked out of the Hilton Hotel declaiming: "This means eight more years of socialism," was probably a fairly good representative of the pseudo-conservative mentality. So also were the gentleman who, at the Freedom Congress held at Omaha over a year ago, by some "patriotic" organizations, objected to Earl Warren's appointment to the Supreme Court with the assertion: "Middle-of-the-road thinking can and will destroy us"; the general who spoke to the same group, demanding "an Air Force capable of wiping out the Russian Air Force and industry in one sweep," but also "a material reduction in military expenditures"; the people who a few years ago believed simultaneously that we had no business to be fighting communism in Korea and that the war should immediately be extended to an Asia-wide crusade against communism; and the most ardent supporters of the Bricker Amendment. Many of the most zealous followers of Senator McCarthy are also pseudo-conservatives, although his appeal clearly embraces a wider public.

The restlessness, suspicion, and fear shown in various phases of the pseudo-conservative revolt give evidence of the anguish which the pseudo-conservative experiences in his capacity as a citizen. He believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been arbitrarily and outrageously invaded. He is opposed to almost everything that has happened in American politics in the last twenty years. He hates the very thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He is disturbed deeply by American participation in the United Nations, which he can see only as a sinister organization. He sees his own country as being so weak that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world--for instance, in the Orient--cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed. He is the most bitter of all our citizens about our involvement in the wars of the past, but seems the least concerned about avoiding the next one. While he naturally does not like Soviet communism, what distinguishes him from the rest of us who dislike it is that he shows little interest in, is often indeed bitterly hostile to, such realistic measures as might actually strengthen the United States vis-à-vis Russia. He would much rather concern himself with the domestic scene, where communism is weak, than with those areas of the world where it is really strong and threatening. He wants to have nothing to do with democratic nations of Western Europe, which seem to draw more of his ire than the Soviet Communists, and he is opposed to all "giveaway programs" designed to aid and strengthen these nations. Indeed, he is likely to be antagonistic to most of the operations of our federal government except congressional investigations, and to almost all its expenditures.

Richard Hofstadter, "The Pseudo-
Conservative Revolt--1954"

Next excerpt: Pseudo-conservatism and religion.

Critical Mass Portland, Critical Mass Manhattan

Tomorrow is the last Friday of the month, when Critical Mass--the dedicated cycling activists, fun-seeking hangers-on, and everyone in between--will take over the streets of downtown Portland (and many other cities) for an hour or two.

It's one of the things that can stir the coals of the on-again-off-again friction between cyclists and drivers in this town--although probably it does less damage to peaceful co-existence than recent Oregonian coverage, which seemed to be looking for ways to stoke the flames.

Portland, being Portland, has been handling it all fairly well for the most part, at least in the last couple of years. Both a partial cause and a symbol of that was the afternoon that newly elected mayor (and former chief of police) Potter made good on a campaign pledge and rode his recumbent bike with the rest of the Critical Mass riders in January 2004. It was a welcome olive branch in a town where police and public reaction to large, disruptive demonstrations--like Critical Mass but also including the several large anti-war marches that took place downtown during the previous year--had gotten a lot less tolerant.

Tomorrow's ride in Portland will almost certainly be peaceful. I can't say I'm as confident about what may happen in Manhattan, where confrontations between riders and police have escalated to the point where both sides are in harm's way. (Quite a comparison to the borough across the bridge, where Brooklyn police block intersections so the riders can get through more quickly and safely.)

BikePortland.org, has recent dispatches from Portland bicycle advocate Sara Stout, who's in NYC right now on behalf of the many, many cyclists who've been arrested there recently.

Meanwhile, back here in Portland, this morning's paper says it'll be 48 and partly cloudy tomorrow afternoon. Everybody be careful out there. Helmets and lights. You know the drill.

Republican corruption by the numbers, Part 2: Energy policy

More high--or low--points from the report on Republican corruption released this week by the Democrats on the House Rules Committee. You can read Part 1, on health care, here.

Today's topic: Energy policy. Serious number this morning.

$2.45

Average price per gallon to which gasoline is expected to rise in the US in 2006.
-----------------

16

Projected percentage increase ($195) in the cost of heating the average US home with oil this winter.
-----------------

24

Projected percentage increase ($178) in the cost of heating the average US home with natural gas this winter.
-----------------

40

The percentage increase in Mobil Exxon's profits (to a record-breaking $36 billion total) for 2005.
-----------------

14

The percentage increase in taxes paid by Mobil Exxon for 2005.
-----------------

$7 billion

Royalty payments the federal government will not receive in the next five years from oil companies for drilling on federal land, under a combination of lax Bush administration enforcement of regulations and "royalty-relief" loopholes.
-----------------

18

Number out of the top 25 Bush/Cheney campaign contributors from the energy industry who were invited to participate in Dick Cheney's secret "energy policy task force" meetings in 2001.
-----------------

0

Amount the Republican energy plan will reduce US energy consumption by 2015.
-----------------

$1.5 billion

Amount Halliburton makes annually on oil recovered using "hydraulic fractioning"--a process in which oil production is increased by forcing toxic chemicals into the ground--since the secret Cheney "energy policy task force" overruled environmental objections by scientists at the EPA.
-----------------

$400,000

Amount of deferred salary Cheney has received from Halliburton since 2001.
-----------------

123

US chemical plants located such that a toxic release might place over a million people in nearby population centers at risk.
-----------------

0

Number of those plants who enhanced their security after the proposal to require them to do so was killed by Karl Rove.
-----------------

$250 billion

Amount Congress has already given the Bush administration to pay for the Iraq war, not counting the extra $70 billion Bush has requested for this year or the extra $50 billion he's requesting for next year.
-----------------

1

Number of Hooters restaurants subsidized in Republican Congressman Billy Tauzin's district, in the 1100-page Energy Bill conference report in 2003.
-----------------

Tomorrow: National security

Republican corruption by the numbers, Part 1: Health care

The House Democrats have prepared a major report on Republican congressional corruption: America for Sale: The Cost of Republican Corruption. The report was formally released by the ranking member of the House Rules Committee, Rep. Louise Slaughter. You can download the .pdf here.

From the executive summary:

The United States Government used to belong to the people. Now it belongs to the highest bidders with the best Republican political connections. Congress is no longer a place where legislators work to make sure the government acts in the people's interest and uses taxpayers' dollars wisely. Instead, it has become a place where the Republican representatives who have the power to set Congress' agenda work to re-distribute as many of those taxpayers' dollars as possible to their special-interest friends in a massive "pay to play" scheme. It has become a place where the insurance and drug companies write our health care legislation, and the oil and mining industries write our energy policy.

For any news junkie, there's very little here that you won't already have heard about sometime during the last 5 years. What's stunning, though, is to see it lined up, end to end, one piece of sleaze after another.

This has it all, including the shady deals, the blocked amendments, the secret task forces, the hidden amendments, the sweetheart deals, the money changing hands, the golf games, the hookers, the embezzlers, and the government-subsidized titty bar

But for those who don't want to face down this 118-page pdf document in its entirety (as a frame of reference, though, my paperback copy of Advise and Consent is 760 pages long), p3 is happy to present the first installment of the Republican Corruption Index: Health Care.

6.2 million

Number of eligible senior citizens overcharged or turned away at pharmacies because their names weren't transferred into the privately-administered Medicare "Part D" system.
__________


$150 million

State funds allocated by California to pay for prescription coverage for Californians who lost coverage under the privatized "Part D" plan.
__________


1

Number of the total 59 proposed amendments to the Republican-controlled House version of the Medicare "reform" bill that didn't get ruled "out of order."
__________


Less than 1

Number of days the Republican-controlled House allowed for debate on the entire Medicare "reform" bill.
__________


$13 billion

Amount Goldman Sachs predicted that the Medicare "reform" bill would increase profits annually in the pharmaceutical industry. (Another independent analyst put the figure at $139 billion over the next 8 years.)
__________


$2 million

Annual salary of former Commerce Committee Chair, Republican Billy Tauzin, responsible for writing the Medicare "reform" legislation, after he became a top lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry.
__________


$134 billion

Difference between the cost of the Medicare "reform," as sold to Congress by the Bush Administration, and the actual projected cost, a figure known to the chief administration actuary who was threatened with firing if he didn't help conceal the higher-but-accurate figure from Congress.
__________

You can read Part 2, on energy policy, here; Part 3, on national security, here; Part 4, on employment and the economy, here; and Part 5, on education, here.

Somehow I find this comforting

One of the things that would be getting its proper share of concerned notice, if there weren't so many things higher on the list, is the increasing use of RFID--little radio-frequency ID doohickies that store information and give it up when scanned--meaning they can identify and help track anything from a package of disposable razors in a grocery store to CDs in a Wal-Mart to passports to hospital patients.

Fans of "The X-Files" are already imagining the potential for RFID to track private individuals like inventory. But it needn't get that baroque to deserve our concern; the main agreed-upon problem with their use, according to privacy and security experts, is that the chips, attached to consumer products, remain functional even after purchase--enabling snoopers to locate valuables within a house from a distance, or simply to poke their noses where they have no damned business.

Which is why I find a perverse satisfaction in the achievement of a group of privacy hackers in Germany: They've figured out how to cheaply and simply convert a disposable camera into a device that fries the RFID with high energy microwaves, making it useless.

I don't want to romanticize this too much: Some of the people interested in this are speculating about seriously disrupting supply chains, not just indulging in paranoid hobbyism. Still--they built it into a disposable camera. Not bad.

Net neutrality: The NYTimes checks in

Net neutrality--the principle that Internet service providers should not be able to shake down web content providers using the threat of limiting their traffic unless they pay tribute to the ISPs--is getting its time on the public radar screen.

Most recently, the editors at the Times have weighed in on this, calling it "an issue where the public interest can and should trump the special interests."

It has occurred to the service providers that the Web sites their users visit could be a rich new revenue source. Why not charge eBay a fee for using the Internet connection to conduct its commerce, or ask Google to pay when customers download a video? A Verizon Communications executive recently sent a scare through cyberspace when he said at a telecommunications conference, as The Washington Post reported, that Google "is enjoying a free lunch" that ought to be going to providers like Verizon.

The solution, as far as the I.S.P.'s are concerned, could be what some critics are calling "access tiering," different levels of access for different sites, based on ability and willingness to pay. Giants like Walmart.com could get very fast connections, while little-guy sites might have to settle for the information superhighway equivalent of a one-lane, pothole-strewn road. Since many companies that own I.S.P.'s, like Time Warner, are also in the business of selling online content, they could give themselves an unfair advantage over their competition.

If access tiering takes hold, the Internet providers, rather than consumers, could become the driving force in how the Internet evolves. It would be those corporations' profit-driven choices, not users' choices, that determine which sites and methodologies succeed and fail. They also might be able to stifle promising innovations, like Internet telephony, that compete with their own business interests.

Oregon angle:

Most Americans have little or no choice of broadband I.S.P.'s, so they would have few options if those providers shifted away from neutrality. Congress should protect access to the Internet in its current form. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, says he intends to introduce an Internet neutrality bill, which would prohibit I.S.P.'s from favoring content providers who paid them fees, or giving priority to their own content.

Attitude

While I'm working on getting some other things ready, I'll point out that Lance Manion seems to have woken up in a slightly somewhat maybe kinda cranky frame of mind today.

Which condition might not be so fun to be in, but it's pretty cool to watch. Go see.

Salesmanship

Here's what I think: As soon as you become one of the top donors to the Bush/Cheney machine, or get a presidential appointment, they take you to Nevada and photograph you in bed with a dead hooker. Then you get dropped off at home and get to return to your regular duties, knowing they've always got the pictures.

• If you're the incoming chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and you say that the country is mostly pro-choice so anti-choice Supreme Court nominees would be inappropriate, they'll get you to publicly publicly abase yourself and agree to consider anti-abortion nominees within two weeks.


• If you're an ex-cabinet official who says the Bush administration was looking for a way to gin up a war with Iraq from the first days of the presidency and you figure they can't get you because you're rich and retired, they'll still get you to recant your story within about a week.


• If you're their Director of the Office of Faith Based Initiatives, and you point out that the White House cares nothing for policy, only politics and the accumulation of power, they'll get you to apologize and express remorse within 24 hours.


• And even if you're a Bush Pioneer and a member of the Texas political royalty, and the Vice President has a beer or two with lunch and then shoots you in the face when you're quail hunting a little while later, they'll get you to apologize to the guy who shot you--and his family--within hours of leaving the hospital where you spent almost a week in intensive care.

That, to me, is the astonishing part: They don't just silence their former allies when they go public with damaging information, they force them through the humiliation of publicly recanting and expressing contrition.

Jonathan Chait offered more examples of the pattern a couple of years ago.

Fake left, go right?

It's just a puzzling world. The GOP invites Portland to submit a proposal to host their 2008 convention, but the Democrats don't?

Go figure.

Maybe the Repubs just wanted to get us to lower our guard so we'd go quail hunting with them.

Let them come to Portland!

If this were "The Daily Show," and I were one of its staff writers, this item would be like a memo from the producer telling me I could take the rest of the week off. It almost writes itself:

The RNC has placed Portland on the list of cities invited to make a pitch for the 2008 Republican National Convention.

No, no--really. The one where they nominate their presidential candidate. Here in Portland. I'm serious. They were serious. Stop laughing.

Of course, the RNC was just being methodical, showing due diligence, by extending the same offer to all cities of a certain size, including Little Beiruit the Rose City. At this point in the decision-making process, I'm sure Portland's . . . uhm . . . unique history with the Bush wing of the Republican party wasn't held against it.

The wickedest take so far on the whole astonishingly bad idea places it in context with . . . well, with another astonishingly bad idea:

In a conference call from his undisclosed location, Vice President Cheney told reporters this morning: "I think things have gotten so bad inside Portland, from the standpoint of the Portlandic people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.... I think it will go relatively quickly,... (in) weeks rather than months." He predicted that the usual left-wing demonstrators in town would not "put up such a struggle" and that even "significant elements of the Red and Black Cafe... are likely to step aside."

KGW.com (subscription required) predicts that Mayor Potter's response will be "thanks but no thanks."

(If you're curious what the minimum requirements for hosting an RNC convention are--if you're thinking about hosting it yourself, say--you can read them here. The yacht parties for these champions of government austerity would, one presumes, be billed separately.)

Voter-owned election: Update

Looks more and more like the effort by the First Things First Committee to put a challenge to Portland's clean money law on the May ballot is dead. The question both sides seem to be asking is: How did such a strikingly high number of bad signatures get on the signature sheets?

In a 2002 ballot measure to change Portland's form of government, the county found just eight duplicates in 4,000 signatures. That's 0.2 percent. In the random sample conducted of First Things First's petitions, the county found that more than 4 percent of the signatures were duplicates. Ted Blaszak's Democracy Resources gathered signatures for both campaigns.

"In talking with the secretary of state's office and looking at (Blaszak's) past track record, this is an incredibly huge number of duplicates. So there are some abnormalities, and we are looking into why," said Ellie Booth, a spokeswoman for the repeal effort. "There are some tidbits of hearsay from here and there that Ted has heard from his signature gatherers that we're looking into."

Reading: Hentoff on Bush's war on privacy

Added to the Reading list in the sidebar: Nat Hentoff has a great article reminding us how the colonial Committees of Correspondence--it's tempting to call them the Founding Blogs--that shared news of the assaults of the British monarchy on liberty in the several colonies, and "inflame[ed] the outraged Americans," providing the organizational roots of the Revolution.

It's not news that our liberties--centering around our right to privacy but by no means limited to that--are under assault, and it's no surprise that Hentoff is on it. He reminds us of something that, in the creeping Orwellization of our public discourse, we may well have lost sight of: Congress may be cowed by the presidential power-grab currently under way, but Americans have started sobering up from our post 9/11 security state bender and we don't like what we see. He quotes polster Zogby: This is a "public obsessed with civil liberties."

And not a moment too soon to be obsessed, either.

He finishes up with a question: "Will the Democrats become a truly serious opposition party before privacy disappears entirely?" To that, I'd add: If Bush clears the path to search and wiretap his warrantless way through Americans' private lives--and he's getting close--will an opposition party even be possible?

Clean elections: Initiative challenge may have come up short

According to Willamette Week, the well-funded petition drive to put a recall of Portland's public financed City Hall elections on this spring's ballot appears to have come up short. The signature sheets turned in by the lavish-spending pro-downtown business First Things First Committee contained 40,998 signatures (only 26,691 valid signatures were needed to get the measure on the ballot), but initial sampling indicates that there were too many unregistered voters and duplicate signatures on the signature sheets to qualify. A successful appeal sounds unlikely.

Appreciative nod to Loaded Orygun and Jack Bog's Blog for catching this item. I sympathize with Jack's belief that a referendum is a better way to establish voter-owned elections than a split City Council vote, and at p3 we're also pleased to note his grudging inclination to vote for clean money, had it come to the ballot (it probably still will, just not this time). If City Hall candidates don't have to make themselves utterly beholden to developers before they can even seriously compete, it might--might! maybe!--reduce the number of rim-shot-worthy projects around town.

Loaded Orygun has an interview with the only candidate who's currently qualified under the clean election law.

It's all about where you're standing (updated)

Americans who are shocked and dismayed that Cheney gunshot victim Harry Whittington has become the butt of humor from Team Bush itself must not have been paying close attention.

Bush and those he surrounds himself with have a long history of finding amusement in suffering--so long as someone else is doing the suffering.


1999: Tucker Carlson asked Governor Bush about a Larry King interview with Texas death row inmate Karla Faye Tucker.

King, Bush said, asked Tucker difficult questions, such as "What would you say to Governor Bush?"

What did Tucker answer? Carlson asked.

"Please," Bush whimpered, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "please, don't kill me."

2000: When candidate Bush was interviewed by David Letterman who'd just returned from heart surgery), Dave asked Bush about what it meant to be "a uniter, not a divider" (the latter's long-abandoned campaign theme)? Bush's answer:

"It means when it comes time to sew up your chest cavity, we use stitches as opposed to opening it up."

Letterman looked politely uncomfortable, and some of the studio audience actually booed.


2004: At the annual dinner Radio and Television Correspondents' Association where, by tradition, the president is expected to deliver a few self-deprecatory bits of staff-written humor from the podium, Bush amused the audience of political and media insiders with a slide show depicting himself looking around the Oval Office for the elusive WMDs that had been his administration's ragged excuse for invading Iraq the year before.

One pictured Mr Bush looking under a piece of furniture in the Oval Office, at which the president remarked: "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere."

After another one, showing him scouring the corner of a room, Mr Bush said: "No, no weapons over there," he said.

And as a third picture, this time showing him leaning over, appeared on the screen the president was heard to say: "Maybe under here?"

2005: After some delay in responding to the devastation Hurricane Katrina caused the Gulf Coast, Bush gave a press conference following a briefing by then FEMA director Michael Brown, and told the audience:

The good news is -- and it's hard for some to see it now -- that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch.

(And don't even get me started on his "dictator" jokes.)

Compared to Junior's idea of funny, which seems never to have risen far above his adolescent fondness for blowing up frogs, his dad's testy line "Read my hips!" now seems like the soul of gentle, Keillor-esque humor.

Ah, twenty-twenty hindsight. It's a killer, ain't it?


Postscript: I didn't mention this point because I figured it was self-evident, but Joe at AMERICAblog is probably right to assume that it should be made clear:

I expect Jon Stewart and Jay Leno to make jokes about this incident. That's their job. But, for Scott McClellan and Jeb Bush to make fun of the whole thing is just creepy and incredibly unseemly.

As the Repubs used to say in 1998:

It's not the shooting your friend in the face with a shotgun; it's the coverup.

Possible signal of distorted judgment

Haven't read this in several years (before 1998, at least), so I dusted it off a few days ago and started in. It's not a bad preliminary sketch of How We Got Here (and it has a pretty good opening sentence, too):

Although American political life has rarely been touched by the most acute varieties of class conflict, it has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds. Today this fact is most evident on the extreme right wing, which has shown, particularly in the Goldwater movement, how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. Behind such movements there is a style of mind, not always right-wing in its affiliations, that has a long and varied history. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. [ . . . ]

When I speak of the paranoid style, I use the term much as a historian of art might speak of the baroque or the mannerist style. It is, above all, a way of seeing the world and of expressing oneself. Webster defines paranoia, the clinical entity, as a chronic mental disorder characterized by systematized delusions of persecution and of one's own greatness. In the paranoid style, as I conceive it, the feeling of persecution is central, and it is indeed systematized in grandiose theories of conspiracy. But there is a vital difference between the paranoid spokesman in politics and the clinical paranoiac: although they both tend to be overheated, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression, the clinical paranoid sees the hostile and conspiratorial world in which he feels himself to be living as directed specifically against him; whereas the spokesman of the paranoid style finds it directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others. Insofar as he does not usually see himself singled out as the individual victim of a personal conspiracy, he is somewhat more rational and much more disinterested. His sense that his political passions are unselfish and patriotic, in fact, goes far to intensify his feeling of righteousness and his moral indignation.

Of course, the term "paranoid style" is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing entirely prevents a sound program or a sound issue from being advocated in the paranoid style, and it is admittedly impossible to settle the merits of an argument because we think we hear in its presentation the characteristic paranoid accents. Style has to do with the way in which ideas are believed and advocated rather than with the truth or falsity of their content.

A few simple and relatively non-controversial examples may make this distinction wholly clear. Shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy, a great deal of publicity was given to a bill, sponsored chiefly by Senator Thomas E. Dodd of Connecticut, to tighten federal controls over the sale of firearms through the mail. When hearings were being held on the measure, three men drove 2,500 miles to Washington from Bagdad, Arizona, to testify against it. Now there are arguments against the Dodd bill which, however unpersuasive one may find them, have the color of conventional political reasoning. But one of the Arizonans opposed it with what might be considered representative paranoid arguments, insisting that it was "a further attempt by a subversive power to make us part of one world socialistic government" and that it threatened to "create chaos" that would help "our enemies" seize power.

Again, it is common knowledge that the movement against the fluoridation of municipal water supplies has been catnip for cranks of all kinds, especially for those who have obsessive fear of poisoning. It is conceivable that at some time scientists may turn up conclusive evidence that this practice is, on balance, harmful; and such a discovery would prove the anti-fluoridationists quite right in the substance of their position. But it could hardly, at the same time, validate the contentions of those among them who, in characteristic paranoid fashion, have charged that fluoridation was an attempt to advance socialism under the guise of public health or to rot out the brains of the community by introducing chemicals in the water supply to make people more vulnerable to socialist or communist schemes.

A distorted style is, then, a possible signal that may alert us to a distorted judgment, just as in art an ugly style is a cue to fundamental defects of taste.

Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid
Style in American Politics (1964)

Oregon blogs are having a good weekend

Two good pieces; check them out:

At Loaded Orygun, Torrid has a good round-up of the state of play for clean money in Portland elections, a topic dear to our heart here at p3. A nice big slice of the kind of dig-deep blogging LO was designed for. Good on 'em.

And at BlueOregon, T. A. Barnhart muses on what drives otherwise sensible people to look for a Great Leader instead of pitching in to help make our current system of government work better. Read this, take a short walk to lower your blood numbers, and then take a look at Greenwald's recent post on "conservatism," if you haven't already.

Cult of Bush (updated)

Glenn Greenwald has a good piece--part meditation, part wall-nailing--on what it means to be "conservative" today. At least, what it means to "conservatives" to be "conservative" today. And what it means, says Greenwald, is this: Conservatism is unquestioning loyalty to George Bush and uncritical agreement with what ever he says today--even if it means ignoring what he said yesterday.

People who self-identify as "conservatives" and have always been considered to be conservatives become liberal heathens the moment they dissent, even on the most non-ideological grounds, from a Bush decree. That’s because "conservatism" is now a term used to describe personal loyalty to the leader (just as "liberal" is used to describe disloyalty to that leader), and no longer refers to a set of beliefs about government.

That "conservatism" has come to mean "loyalty to George Bush" is particularly ironic given how truly un-conservative the Administration is. It is not only the obvious (though significant) explosion of deficit spending under this Administration – and that explosion has occurred far beyond military or 9/11-related spending and extends into almost all arenas of domestic programs as well. Far beyond that is the fact that the core, defining attributes of political conservatism could not be any more foreign to the world view of the Bush follower.

As much as any policy prescriptions, conservatism has always been based, more than anything else, on a fundamental distrust of the power of the federal government and a corresponding belief that that power ought to be as restrained as possible, particularly when it comes to its application by the Government to American citizens. It was that deeply rooted distrust that led to conservatives’ vigorous advocacy of states’ rights over centralized power in the federal government, accompanied by demands that the intrusion of the Federal Government in the lives of American citizens be minimized.

Is there anything more antithetical to that ethos than the rabid, power-hungry appetites of Bush followers? There is not an iota of distrust of the Federal Government among them.

And he's got the goods. He's got the examples. He's got the archives. Don't miss the Update, covering the exhuberant willingness of Free Republic's fire-breathers to throw overboard some of their most cherished positions rather than disagree with Bush's PR Flavor of the Day.

It'll be in the Readings list on the sidebar. Check it out.

And don't miss Digby's tweak of Greenwald's fundamental argument: "It's not a Cult of Bush; it's a Cult of Republican power." Bumper sticker version: It Didn't Start With Junior.


Update: Greenwald provoked a lot of counterattacks after the above was posted. He addresses them pretty thoroughly today.

For those who like their irony applied with a trowel, the conservative pushback was filled with denunciations and dismissals of Greenwald as being a "liberal," as proven by his disagreement with Bush--which was, of course, precisely the pattern Greenwald was calling them on in the first place. Keywords to watch for: "Vibrant examples" and "Some things are beyond satire."

A detectable drop in the overall quality of network television

Tonight, FOX airs the last four episodes of "Arrested Development"--the network still insists, Scott McLellan-like, that this is only a "season finale," since the official death sentence may not be pronounced until fall scheduling decisions are announced in a couple of months.

(If your idea of a good TV review is when the writer steps on nearly all the jokes, but congratulates herself for not spoiling one or two, you'll appreciate this write-up from the Chicago Trib. If, on the other hand, you prefer to let art flow over you, you can just wait until tonight.)

Rumors persist that Showtime may pick up the series once it's officially cancelled. For what it's worth, those rumors rarely mention ABC as one of the interested suitors anymore. And another rumor has it that Justin Bateman has signed to be in this dubious-sounding project, which would affect his availability. So you never know. That's why they call them rumors: You can't count on them.

But enough fretting and worrying: Tonight, after a long drought, we drink from the fire hose. Four new episodes--rumored (dammit!) to be among the best in AD's three-year run--shown back to back. It's sort of like celebrating swearing off by going on a binge--probably not the worst possible analogy for a show like this.

In the unlikely event that you'll be watching the Olympic opening ceremonies tonight--although I suppose someone will have to--set your DVRs.

(Bonus opinion: My theory of the Olympics--that it's not really an Olympic sport if it takes a judge to tell whether you "won"--would have the whole business over in about three days. So much easier for everyone. Of course, that means that snow-boarding and floor gymnastics wouldn't be Olympic events anymore, but duplicate bridge might be, so I haven't got all the bugs worked out yet. But I still think I’m right.)

Fissures

Another Bush party-liner splits off from the monolith:

The Republican Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) has issued 51 questions to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on President Bush's warrantless wiretap program.

The letter, issued to Gonzales today and acquired by RAW STORY, demands answers to myriad legal questions on the program, which involved eavesdropping on Americans' calls overseas. Sensenbrenner has given Gonzales a Mar. 2 deadline to respond.

First Wilson, now Sensenbrenner.

Same rule applies for the Dems with either of these two, though: Make full use of the opportunity they're providing--exploit it to the fullest--but don't even consider trusting them. Sensenbrenner likes nothing more than to work up an appetite for breakfast by crushing a few Democrats' stones.

(Same with Grover Norquist, as long as we're on the subject.)

(Special bonus fissure: Michael "Heck-of-a-Job" Brown is now apparently willing to publicly shake down the president to save his own sorry, incompetent hide. Not as important as a defection by Wilson or Sensenbrenner, I would imagine, but pretty amusing all the same. I suppose, really, that's the advantage of being feckless but connected: Yes, you can get appointed to jobs you're utterly unqualified for and be exposed to the world as a buffoon, but when it really hits the fan and you have to find someone well-connected to threaten in self-defense, you're in a much more target-rich environment.)

Net neutrality (continued)

Following up on an earlier post about net neutrality, the Senate Commerce Committee, and the plan of Yahoo and AOL to charge bona fide commercial emailers a per-message fee to deliver messages to their users:

The Commerce Committee had its first meeting Tuesday, and this seems to be the gist of things so far:

Last fall, the House Energy and Commerce Committee released a 70-page draft proposal (click here for PDF) and held a lengthy hearing. It outlines rules for a broad set of technology services divided into three major categories: broadband Internet service providers, voice over Internet Protocol providers and broadband video providers.

Technology companies like Google and Amazon.com criticized that version, which they accused of failing to spell out a network neutrality mandate--that is, a requirement that companies that own broadband pipes don't favor certain content over others when transmitting it.

Barton gave no indication as to how that draft would change before its formal introduction on the House floor but said he was aiming to put a bill out for public review "very quickly." With respect to network neutrality in particular, he said, "it's pretty tough to determine what is right in my mind."

If the story advances from here--if Barton determines what's right in his mind?--I'll post it.

Reading: History refresher from Digby

I'm a little late in adding this to the Reading list on the sidebar, but better late than yada yada yada.

Digby points out that domestic bugging, dirty tricks, and ratfucking are not apparent anomalies of Bush's second term; They're the mother's milk that Karl Rove and his ilk were raised on in Nixon's GOP:

Remember: Watergate was about bugging the Democratic National Committee. The "3rd rate burglary" was to replace an illegal bug that had been planted on the telephones of prominent Democrats.

The lesson of Watergate for the chagrined Republicans was that they needed to be more forceful in assuming executive power and they needed to be more sophisticated about their campaign espionage. This is what they've done.

Anybody who even dreams that these guys are not using all their government power to spy on political enemies is being willfully naive. It is what they do. It is the essence of their political style. This is Nixon's Republican party and they have finally achieved a perfect ability to carry out his vision of political governance: L'etat C'est Moi. If the president does it that means it's not illegal.

There's more, including the education of young Karl, all leading to the point that what's being exposed now is nothing extraordinary for Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest; it's just business as usual. The only thing extraordinary is the exposure and the possibility of a political (and legal) price to be paid.

Scorpions (updated)

The Skirt, and some of my fellow PDX/DLers, have been mulling over Rep. Heather Wilson's call for Congressional investigation into Bush's domestic wiretapping. Skirt wrote me:

this gave me chills... I smell impeachment hearings... if not for this, then for one of BushCo's other offenses

It's interesting--okay, and darkly amusing--to watch the GOP begin to fracture as they realize that Junior has no coattails to ride on any longer. Karl can still bully them (like the Repubs on the Judiciary Committee), but only for a while longer.

Wilson and Bush, meanwhile, have been joined at the political hip from the beginning.

So, if she's willing to do the right thing now (i.e., call for congressional inquiry) but she's doing it for slimy reasons (i.e., she's got bad poll numbers and she needs some air freshener to cover over the stink she's picked up from Abrahamoff and Cunningham), then fine--the Dems should use the opportunity she's created, but never, ever trust her. That whole enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend business only goes so far.

Trust but verify.

Or, in a metaphor more appropriate to Wilson's New Mexico roots, always put crumpled up newspaper around the bed before you go to sleep and shake out your shoes before putting them on in the morning.

Update: Josh at TPM makes the spot-on observation:

Every position Wilson takes is finely calibrated to keep her politically well-positioned since she'll probably never have a truly easy race in her district.

He links to a great story I'd forgotten--the merry chase Wilson led her critics on when they tried to pin her down last summer: Did she support Bush's plan to privatize Social Security, or didn't she? And, as Kos reminds us, Wilson "expressed outrage at the Abu Ghraib scandal, then voted against efforts to investigate."

Democrats, shake out your boots in the morning.

A p3 guide to Great Caves of America

Carlsbad Caverns: An extensive range of geological formations near Carlsbad, New Mexico.

Overview (CCNP website): Carlsbad Caverns National Park contains more than 100 limestone caves that are unequaled in the profusion, diversity and beauty of their formations. The caves are the summer home for a world-famous colony of migratory Mexican free-tailed bats. The park contains 33,125 acres of rugged wilderness backcountry terrain.

Arlen Specter: Chair-to-be of the Senate Judiciary Committee, backs down on defense of women's right to abortion.

Nov 4, 2004 (Philadelphia Daily News): Specter, as presumptive chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, suggested that he would block any Bush nominee to the Supreme Court who opposed abortion rights. Reiterating his position that a woman's right to choose is "inviolate," he said overturning Roe v. Wade today would be akin to trying to reverse Brown v. Board of Education, the court's 1954 landmark desegregation decision.

Nov 17, 2004 (Fox News): After two days of appealing to fellow GOP senators, embattled Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania said he would make a public statement to assure Republicans at large he would not block anti-abortion judicial nominees from President Bush.

Arlen Specter, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, backs off pressuring Attorney General Gonzales on domestic surveillance revelations.

Dec 21, 2005 (Fox News): Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter said Wednesday he remains skeptical about a government surveillance program despite an explanation from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. [ . . . ]

"When a cannon hits you between the eyes, you take notice and I was immediately asked what I thought about it and I said, 'Well, it's a matter that requires a hearing,"' Specter said.

Feb 6, 2006 (Think Progress): Attorney Alberto Gonzales won’t be sworn in [before his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding the government program surveilling U.S. citizens], even though the last time he testified under oath he misled the committee about the program. Leahy noted he was sworn the other two times he appeared before the committee. Leahy appealed the ruling of the chair and asked for a roll call vote.

[Following the roll call vote, Specter fretted: "This is really not a very good way to begin this hearing."]

Ransom

It almost sounds like that urban legend that makes the rounds on the Internet every couple of years. You know: the one warning us that the Post Office is going to impose a 5-cent surcharge on every piece of email--and telling us to forward the warning to all our friends? That one?

From the p3 It-Would-Be-Funny-If-It-Weren't-True files comes this little gem in this morning's NYTimes:

Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain that their e-mail will be delivered to many of their customers.

America Online and Yahoo, two of the world's largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered. The senders must promise to contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely.

The Internet companies say that this will help them identify legitimate mail and cut down on junk e-mail, identity-theft scams and other scourges that plague users of their services. Thy also stand to earn millions of dollars a year from the system if it is widely adopted.

As I noted last spring:

From the beginning, the World Wide Web was a source of irritation to corporate America: There were all these people--millions upon millions of "web surfers" (remember when that's what they were quaintly called?) out there . . . and no one could figure out how to make a dime off of all this.

Well, no one except the ISPs, I should say. True, Google, PayPal, and Amazon have figured out how to use the web's resources to create specific services that drive sales. And with relatively secure ordering and payment systems, retailers have moved catalog sales and customer relations to the Internet without much trouble.

But the real money is to be made at the fundamental level of access itself. Which is why, for example, the telcos are fighting the idea of public WiFi and generally looking for legislative protection to monopolize access to the Internet.

As Paul Maud'Dib observed, whoever has the power to destroy a thing controls it. If AOL and Yahoo have the power to block corporate emailer's access to me, they control the internet. Period.

Now I'll grant you--a system that would cut down on the Herbals/Mortgage/OEM spam I get every day is something I'd greet with an open mind. Same--even more so--with phishing attempts (a rarely-used online account of mine was suspended not long ago because I didn't believe the renewal advisory notices from them were really from them).

But the price--at least in the AOL/Yahoo model--would be steep: Not only would the system filter out unsolicited bulk email be filtered out, but airline updates, order confirmations, catalog offers, etc., might be caught in the filter as well if they don't pay "postage"--which is, here, a polite euphemism for "protection." And that could escalate; as one analyst in the Times article points out:

As for companies that send e-mail, "some will pay, but others will object to being held to ransom," he said. "A big danger is that one of them will be big enough to encourage AOL users to use a different e-mail service."

The result of that scenario: Certain online services--let's pick one most people like, such as Orbitz or Expedia bargain updates--will only be available to people with the right email provider. And the Internet will have taken a big step toward becoming a limply regulated monopoly like the cable industry.

(Oregon angle: How's your cable bill lately?)

This is not the way we want the Internet to work.

Fittingly, the Senate Commerce Committee's hearings on net neutrality will be webcast live on Tuesday the 7th.

Blogger outage

Blogger.com had one of its not-infrequent-enough outages today, which made a lot of blogs inaccessible, and also caused some new posts--and comments, apparently--to disappear like your lap when you stand up.

Note to Trey: I got your comment about Willard Scott via email, although it seems to have vanished from the site itself. (The rest of you will just have to wonder what the hell that was about.)

Urgent advice to any blogger.com bloggers: Blogger doesn't automatically back up all your posts. If you're paranoid--or at least, if you're paranoid enough--you can find a hack here to help you make a backup of all your posts. Consider it. It's a little Rube Goldberg-esque, but it works. Isn't it worth 10 minutes to make sure you don't lose everything you've ever posted?

Weekend viewing

Moveon.org has a new TV ad, calling for a special prosecutor to investigate Bush's illegal wiretapping of Americans.

Visually very slick--the last word, so to speak, on the Bush-Nixon parallel.

Background, press release, and line-by-line documentation here.

The question no one but p3 dares to ask

Yesterday, of course, was Groundhog's Day. The media and curiosity-seekers from around the world gathered in Gobbler's Knob PA to watch as Punxsutawney Phil was brought out by his handler. Officials declared that Phil had indeed seen his shadow, and that we've therefore got six more weeks of winter to look forward to.

Groundhog's Day is an occasion for local entrepreneurs to cheerfully cash in on the publicity. And Phil's appearance this year was underwritten in part by corporate sponsors including Domino's Pizza, McDonald's, First Commonwealth Financial, and Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion (don't even ask).

Phil doesn't announce his forecasts himself, of course; he has an inner circle who speak for him. It's generally known that the inner circle prepares Phil's forecasts for him in advance, with the help of the national weather services, although by tradition the existence of this back-stage help is stoutly denied.

And about that prediction: Should we keep the winter clothes out another couple of months? Although his official web site claims that Phil has been 100% accurate for the last 120 years, National Climactic Data Center estimates Phil's accuracy rate since 1980 at about 59 percent, although other sources put that figure at somewhere between 28 percent and 39 percent.

All right, people--let's review:

• Punxsutawney Phil has no obvious credentials or qualifications for predicting the weather other than the fact that he has a job predicting the weather. He was put in the job by people who find it useful for him to front the operation. Under any other circumstances, the fact that people claim to rely on him for this job would be ridiculous.


• Even by the most optimistic estimates, he's been right only about 15 times in the last 25 years, not much better than flipping a coin, although his people have doctored the statistics to make it appear much higher. And actually, once you start digging, you quickly realize that no reliable data exist to evaluate how well he's been doing.


• The only reason he's gotten as many right as he apparently has is because he's got handlers--let's be blunt: a bunch of well-dressed middle-aged white guys--who do the actual heavy lifting for him.


• Independent professionals in his field don't take him seriously for a moment.
  


• His dismal accuracy record is generally overlooked, though, since no one ever really expected he could predict the weather anyway.


• He works, calculating generously, a few hours every February 2nd and takes the rest of the year off.


• Even so, he gets housing, per diem, and a staff (including a driver).


• Those around him know that the actual work he does is less important than the opportunity he creates for insiders and big corporations to make money off the hoopla.

So--is it me, or does Punxsutawney Phil sound an awful lot like a Bush appointee?

Won't someone please help those poor Republicans?

Apparently the Republicans, unable to abide the thought of any voting exercise untampered-with, and finding no other contests at hand to be jimmied, were driven to rig their own election this morning:

House Republicans are taking a mulligan on the first ballot for Majority Leader. The first count showed more votes cast than Republicans present at the Conference meeting.

Won't someone help those poor Republicans?

Apparently the Republicans, unable to abide the thought of any voting exercise untampered-with, and finding no other contests at hand to be jimmied, were driven to rig their own election this morning:

House Republicans are taking a mulligan on the first ballot for Majority Leader. The first count showed more votes cast than Republicans present at the Conference meeting.

Loaded, cocked, and aimed

Adding to the p3 blog list: Loaded Orygun, a collaboration in advocacy reporting by Carla from Preemptive Karma and Torrid from Also Also. Here's their story:

We're looking forward to telling Oregonians what's what in this state. We're out to give you the straight dope in an informed and intelligent way. We're looking under all the rocks and digging out all the skeletons..and then we're going to find out why the media isn't reporting it.

Non-Oregonians will just have to handle the multi-leveled pun in their title as best they can, but the rest of us can nod wisely.

So best of luck to LO, and hey, you two: Don't let the new blog be an excuse on first and third Thursdays--you hear me?

"I still do have some hope, but much less confidence"

SusanG at DailyKOS just finished up a six-part interview with Daniel Ellsberg, the Defense Department analyist who leaked the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers to the press, moving from safe house to safe house as one newspaper would publish several sections of the Papers until the Nixon administration obtained an injuction, then other newspapers would continue publication until they were hit with an injunction, and so on. (The White House, searching for information to use against Ellsberg, authorized the infamous "plumbers" team to break into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist.)

You really need to read the whole series, but this segment is damned good by itself--if by "good" we mean "smart and articulate but scary and depressing as hell."

How can we prevent this country being turned into a police state by this administration in the next three years? That's what I think is facing us and I have not talked in those terms at any other time in my life. We've already seen that the hope for tying up this administration in various ways prior to another 9/11 has been given us essentially by leaks. The Abu Ghraib leak, the secret prisons, NSA. Plus a demonstration of incompetence and corruption in Katrina. That's a major factor there.

I would say that with actually existing democracy, as it is right now, if there's a big terrorist attack, our actually existing democracy will not protect us against a transition to a police state. I don't believe we will be able to avoid that. I hope I'm wrong. even when I'm certain about something, I'm often wrong. Right now, I'm working with others in hopes of making that prediction wrong.

I think before a police state happens we do have enough to work with that we can have some effect on these other things. Really, I'm a hell of a lot more hopeful than I was four months ago. And the crucial aspect of that has been determined by leaks, and the public's response to them, limited and inconclusive as that has been so far.

Read his chilling list of what we get if another 9/11 happens while Bush is still in office.

From the segment quoted above, you can link to the earlier parts of the interview:

• Part I, January 20, 2006 - The Pentagon Papers and the Overlooked 1968 Leaks
• Part 2, January 21, 2006 - Judith Miller, the New York Times and Government-Controlled Press
• Part 3, January 22, 2006 - The Cult of Secrecy in Government and Its Undermining of Democracy
• Part 4, January 27, 2006 - Whistleblowing and Effective Activism
• Part 5, January 28, 2006 - Iraq/Vietnam Parallels and Other Foreign Policy Fiascos
• Part 6, January 29, 2006 - Bush, the Next 9/11 and the Approaching Police State