Stenography

Returning to our usual "lazy Beltway media" trope is the implication from Martha Raddatz that some of her colleagues might be little more than stenographers. Oh noez!!1!1

Needless to say, this wasn’t taken well by some of those she sits with in the White House briefing room. So I reached out to a few reporters to see if anyone would go on the record to discuss Raddatz's quote.

I touched based[sic] with the Houston Chronicle’s Julie Mason, who responded via e-mail:

It's only stenography if you make it that way. The White House is a very controlled environment; it can be quite opaque and yeah, very frustrating. I imagine it must be very disorienting after a war zone, or the Hill. But with apologies to Martha, who I respect and like, it's lazy to dismiss the beat as merely steno work. There are many reporters at the White House doing serious, important work in spite of the limitations. There is also a lot of humor and pathos in covering the president, and to call it merely stenography misses something. For reals.

"For reals"? What the hell does that mean? It works neither straightforwardly nor as some sort of deflecting snarkasm. The fact that she considers the "humor and pathos in covering [Junior]" as having intrinsic value does not reinforce her defense; it undermines it. This is the problem with these people -- they have convinced themselves that their job is giving us a "sense" of what it's "like", what Fredo's mood or demeanor happens to be when he's lying to them and evading their questions. Their job (and really, no matter how many times I do it, I still can't believe I have to say it in the first place) should be piercing that opacity Mason mentions, stripping it bare, confronting non-answers and evasive denials with more penetrating follow-up questions. Some do, but most seem not to. And they get pissy when called on it.

CBS News White House correspondent Mark Knoller also sent an e-mail along, writing:

Sure, I view it as an insult if someone calls me a stenographer. Yes, I take careful notes on everything the President says. But my reports are far more than mere transcripts of those remarks. As a reporter, I boil his comments down to their essence, put them in context and challenge them for veracity.

If Raddatz gets cabin fever covering the President from the White House Press Room, I can understand that. But there’s important reporting to be done here by those willing to endure what can, at times, be a tedious beat. But it’s important work. Does anyone think we’d be better off if reporters didn’t record, analyze and report what the President says and does. Taking accurate notes is part of our job, but that doesn’t make us stenographers.

Well, maybe it's things like this that give off that impression.

Q I want to discuss Iraq at some length with you, but I don't want to rush you on that. So let me get a few other issues out of the way that we haven't spoken with you about in a couple of months. Do you want Attorney General Gonzales to keep fighting to keep his job?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I do. I'm a big fan of Al's.

Q Does he need to clarify his testimony?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I'm not going to get into the specifics of it. I think Al has done a good job under difficult circumstances. The debate between he and the Senate is something they're going to have to resolve. But I think he has testified truthfully.

Q How do you answer even those Republicans like Senator Specter and Congressman Shays who say that in their view the Attorney General's credibility has been damaged?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I don't agree with them.

Q Can he remain Attorney General if the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Pat Leahy, says point blank he doesn't trust the Attorney General?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I've had my differences with Pat Leahy. I think the key is whether or not he has the confidence of the President, and he clearly does.

Q We haven't spoken to you in a hard-news interview since the verdict was rendered in the Scooter Libby case. Let me ask you, have you spoken to your former top aide since his verdict?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I have.

Q And can you tell us anything about that conversation?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I've seen him socially on a number of occasions.

Q Do you believe the commutation that President Bush gave Scooter Libby for his prison term was enough, or if you had been President, would you have granted a full pardon?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I thought the President handled it right. I supported his decision.

Q Did you disagree with the guilty verdict in the case?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I did.

Q Even though the President said he respects that verdict?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I still -- you asked me if I disagreed with the verdict, and I did.

Q Do you think Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald went too far in pursuing a prosecution of Scooter Libby?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't want to go beyond where I have already. The matter is still pending before the courts. There is an appeal pending on the question, and I don't want to elaborate further.

Q Another issue, why did your office stop filing reports about your handling of classified material with the National Archives?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, there's an executive order that covers that, that was issued in 2003 that makes it clear that the Vice President is to be treated the same as the President, and neither one of them is to file those reports with the National Archives.

Q There's no cover up?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Nothing to cover up.

Q There was an aide in your office who said that one of the reasons you weren't abiding by that executive order was that you're really not part of the executive branch. Do you have -- are you part of the executive branch, sir?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, the job of the Vice President is an interesting one, because you've got a foot in both the executive and the legislative branch. Obviously, I've got an office in the West Wing of the White House, I'm an advisor of the President, I sit as a member of the National Security Council. At the same time, under the Constitution, I have legislative responsibilities. I'm actually paid by the Senate, not by the executive. I sit as the President of the Senate, as the presiding officer in the Senate. I cast tie-breaking votes in the Senate. So the Vice President is kind of a unique creature, if you will, in that you've got a foot in both branches.

Q But you are principally a part of the executive branch, are you not?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I suppose you could argue it either way. The fact is I do work in both branches. Under the Constitution, I'm assigned responsibilities in the legislative branch. Then the President obviously gives me responsibilities in the executive branch. And I perform both those functions, although I think it would be fair to say I spend more time on executive matters than legislative matters.

....

Q Okay. Mr. Vice President, on the issue of Iraq. In a speech last month you said the U.S. must stay in Iraq until we win. Isn't that the kind of open-ended commitment that could keep the U.S. there for years and years?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I think it's absolutely essential that we succeed in Iraq. And the commitment we have made is to complete the mission, in effect, to get the job done, to establish security and to give the Iraqis an opportunity to be able to set up a functioning government -- which they've done -- and to be able to deal with the security situation themselves, which they're on their way of doing.

Q A draft of the joint campaign plan says the U.S. would have to remain there at least through 2009. Does that sound right to you?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't want to make those judgments. I think those really turn more on the kind of advice we get from the military. We're all waiting to see what General Petraeus produces by way of his report back, in September. But in terms of achieving our objectives, I think it's very important that the United States not withdraw from Iraq, not adopt a posture of some of our friends on the other side of the aisle who are calling, in effect, for accepting retreat as the outcome. I think that would be totally inappropriate. I think it's not necessary. I think we can prevail in Iraq, and I think Dave Petraeus and the troops that are there now are doing a very good job.

Q How long will the surge last?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, that depends on how long it has to last. It's set up so that it kicked in, really, this summer. We began to deploy the additional troops in the spring; the final deployment of additional troops occurred in late June, early July. And so the surge right now is at its maximum peak. How long that continues will be a decision the President will make based on advice he gets from General Petraeus.

You get the idea. Knoller can simply tell himself that hey, he asked the questions, it's not his fault if Big Time chose to respond in the usual boilerplate.

Then there's this:

I’ve got to admit I was stunned by the nature, depth and fury of the responses to my blog post yesterday (below) about the Bill Moyers Journal report on the news media and the War in Iraq.

....

Look, all I was saying was that reporters were not willing dupes of - or accomplices to - the President’s decision to go to war in Iraq.

Most of us try to report honestly and fairly on Administration decisions, intentions and statements. If there were doubts and reservations about those matters, it got reported too.

Clearly, many of you disagree. So at the risk of poking an angry lion – let me try this.

YOU be the reporter!

It’s March 6, 2003. Pres Bush is moving closer to ordering an attack on Iraq.

You’re in the East Room for his primetime news conference – and he calls on you.

What do you ask?

What finely-crafted question do you pose that both serves the public interest and will get a meaningul[sic] response?

Almost to a person, anytime a professionamal journamalist gets their panties in a wad over criticism of their form and function, it is directed at their (putative) customers -- you know, readers, viewers, that sort of thing. Not the editors who change or squash their stories if they're deemed unsuitable for popular consumption, not the politicans who yank their chains on a daily basis, not the clown at the top who routinely makes them the butt of his little jokes. And keep in mind that Knoller's defensiveness here is from seven months ago, way after the usually acceptable "if I knew then what I know now" line. They can't handle it, the notion that Bill Moyers and an informed chunk of the American public might know what they're talking about.

I'm actually inclined to give people like Knoller something of a break, simply because it's all an exercise in futility. Here's the thing -- every White House correspondent could conceivably, on the eve of aggression, asked unrelenting series of incisive, probing questions, and gotten to the real heart of the matter. And it wouldn't have mattered; these people were not going to be stopped by mere trivialities of facts, truth, morality, or any of that. They signaled their intent to invade Iraq with Bush's speech at West Point in June 2002. Everything after that was pro forma positioning, timing the marketing campaign, going through the motions of giving inspections a chance.

The only question I have for Knoller -- since he brought up March 6, 2003 as some sort of critical date -- or any of the rest of the WH press corpse, is what question do they wish they had asked on that fateful day, knowing then what they know now, and more importantly, what good do they really think it would have done. What good do they think they're doing now, knowing what we all know, doing absolutely nothing about any of it, wringing our hands as if some deus ex Obama will lift us out of our own muck?

The media's role is hopelessly debauched for a variety of reasons -- institutional laziness and cowardice, herd mentality, corporate priorities, the knowing gall of politicians, and our own expectations that someone else do something about all this, while we go deeper in hock to shop our way to orgasmic bliss. But if folks like Knoller want to know where to start, a hint is that it's not the thousands of ankle-biters who call him naughty names, but the Armani-suited motherfuckers who use him and his colleagues to circulate lies and burnish their credibility.

Getting Drafty

Probably a breach of netiquette, but I found a couple of recent drafts that hadn't been posted for whatever reason, and posted them as is under their original dates. This time of year I'm always crunched for time even more than usual (as are we all), and I actually ended up punting more drafts into the ether than I kept. Shit happens. I'm adding to a final one from last weekend, which will be up shortly, in current time given the added text. I'm sure this will cost me my press pass, and I'm not about to go the Jeff Gannon™ route, but them's the breaks.

Love Is Not A Big Enough Word

In which we did up the turkey right (brined and barbecued), watched Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, and remembered to be thankful, and recognize what we appreciate about life, instead of worrying about all the other stuff.

Hopefully your Thanksgiving was a good one as well. Boycott Black Friday.

Writing Versus Typewriting

Not to go all English-teacher on what is probably some intern scraping a few college credits and a couple bucks for pud work, but I see a lot of this these days in the so-called professional media. It's tempting to do a close line-by-line reading, because there's something in practically every sentence here to quibble with, but I'll just hit a couple of highlights.

"It's kind of a shock when that kind of stuff happens with a teacher," Richland High School Senior and neighbor of Eve, John Clearly said. "Especially at Richland because you don't think that that kind of stuff happens that much."

Cleary is a student at Richland High and Eve's neighbor. He heard rumors, but cops said the scandal all started when a student came forward.

She had lurid stories, claiming Eve was teaching more than just how to read music. Those claims led police to find two other potential victims.

"He seemed like a teacher, I mean, he seemed like everybody else," Cleary said.

Fundamental errors all over the place, starting with the repetitive nature of the neighbor/student's (whatever his name actually is, "Clearly" or "Cleary") comments (which add nothing to the story; it's as if someone still thinks this obvious "he seemed like such a reg'lar guy" shit is anything more than a rote cliché). The repetition occurs again in describing who Clearly/Cleary is in subsequent paragraphs. And the "teaching more than just how to read music" bit sounds like a Dateline lede, which I suppose is actually a good thing for this sort of sensationalistic journalism.

"He was there for a long time," Cleary said. "Everyone said he was there forever."

The school put Eve on paid administrative leave last month to begin their own investigation. Eve stepped down shortly after that. He's been with the Richland schools for 15 years.

It's a redundancy within a redundancy; not only are Clear(l)y's parting comments redundant between themselves, but both are made completely useless by the next paragraph's accurate tabulation of Eve's tenure at the school.

It ends with a burp, rather than a whimper or a bang:

Eve's wife was there to see the arrest go down, but she didn't want to talk to Action News.

Love the Mod Squad lapse into the vernacular -- "go down", man. Some heavy shit, bro-ham.

These are small, nit-picky things, and I suppose I'm a small, nit-picky person for pulling a random article out of the ether for the red-pencil treatment. But I read too many articles these days about students arriving at college campuses and immediately having to take remedial math and English classes. How the fuck do they get in in the first place? Don't they have tests for that shit? Why do my tax dollars go to coddle college students who didn't bother learning high-school skills?

Also I confess some fascination with people who are incompetent at their jobs, especially jobs in the entertainment industry (which is what news, even local news, really is), which people do because they want to be in that line of work. It's one thing to be indifferent to the rigors and conventions of a job you work out of necessity, quite another to be ignorant of even the fundamentals of your chosen profession.

Local news is particularly bad about that anyway, but it filters up into the national levels more frequently than most people would think. Misspelled chyrons on CNN are not uncommon, and go hand-in-hand with sloppy analysis and poorly-researched commentary. Everyone makes typos, and lots of people make fairly simple spelling snafus; what I'm getting at is when the lack of attention and skill are glaringly obvious. I dunno, some days it really grinds my gears, dammit.

Fuck These People

Seriously. Fuck that puckered asshole of a country.

A court in the ultra-conservative kingdom of Saudi Arabia is punishing a female victim of gang rape with 200 lashes and six months in jail, a newspaper reported on Thursday.

The 19-year-old woman -- whose six armed attackers have been sentenced to jail terms -- was initially ordered to undergo 90 lashes for "being in the car of an unrelated male at the time of the rape," the Arab News reported.

But in a new verdict issued after Saudi Arabia's Higher Judicial Council ordered a retrial, the court in the eastern town of Al-Qatif more than doubled the number of lashes to 200.

This is not an indictment of Islam -- these pukes are "Muslim" like the Ku Klux Klan are "Christian", and this is a conflict between economic and social classes as well -- but perhaps the civilized world could figure out a way to repudiate these creeps, without of course compromising our access to the precioussss.

When it comes to finding reasons to conserve, and to develop alternate sources of energy, there are moral imperatives other than salvaging the environment. Disempowering these closet-case scumbags ranks pretty high as well.

TV Nation, Part 2

Last week, I took a cursory look at a more devil's advocate side of the WGA strike that is roiling the schlock merchants of Hollywood. Kung Fu Monkey's John Rogers, an actual writer and a good one, brings some well-reasoned and much-needed insider's perspective to the proceedings:

Listen, before you spout off the usual "The free market will out" along with "Hey, I'm smart enough to negotiate my own contracts, why aren't you?" with a side order of "just go somewhere else if you don't like it", you need to understand some things. If you don't, then every argument you make is without merit. Period. It's like trying to discuss the Middle East without the fundamental understanding of the difference between Shia and Sunni.

There is no free market in Hollywood. In television for example, with the dissolution of "finsyn" rules in 1995 almost every independent producer has been either absorbed into one of the big media companies or dissolved. We've gone from 40 producers in television to the big Six.

Six. Six companies control almost all mass media in America. They control all, and I mean all, the standard distribution channels in America. They are also negotiating as a single entity, the AMPTP. If you've read your Adam Smith, you know that this is actually one of the situations he notes in Wealth of Nations which will indeed break the fingers of the invisible hand.

....

This is where I'm always amused at libertarians, because they so love markets but never seem to understand how business actually works. If you, my fine libertarian friend, decide to forego the union and negotiate your own contract vis a vis residuals (or pretty much anything else), you will find that unless you are one of the maybe eight out of 12,0000 most famous and profitable writers in Hollywood, you will get exactly the same deal from each studio, or slightly worse. Because what possible motivation would they have to share their profits, relative to each of the other five competitors? That's just common sense.

Indeed. The vertical integration of the media conglomerates, the incestuous subsuming and cross-promoting of each other's entities and doo-dads, is the corporate smoke blown out the ass of the people's airwaves. And if the execs can shave a couple points here and there and get their incompetent nephew a gofer credit at someone else's expense, well, if you don't like it there's thirty other people who'll blow Harvey Weinstein in a Sunset Strip phone booth for the opportunity.

Read the whole thing, it's pretty excellent. These studio weasels are shameless; they'll try to fuck anything that stops moving long enough, whether you're the newest schmuck off the bus or Peter Jackson. I still agree with Fake Steve that the content producers (the writers) would be doing themselves an enormous favor by getting a jump on the new model.

Look, I get why writers for well-crafted ensembles such as 30 Rock or The Office, or any of the nightly talk shows, would try to hold their ground and protect their nut. But if you're a fuckin' reality hack, what do you have to lose, really, except that sense of embarrassment that follows you around like a brown cloud. "What do you do for a living?" "I'm a writer for Dancing with the Stars." It's like recording wocka-wocka vamps for porn channels and telling everyone you're a "musician".

Anyway, Rogers' basic point rings true -- it's a business run by unethical, nepotistic sharks, and the little fish need whatever protection they can get. And of course the corporations are in a much better negotiating position -- they've got shows in the can, and they can ride this out for longer.

But it could also be the signal of a shift, a potential disintermediation of one or even both sides. People have a lot of alternatives, and the proliferation of cheap-ass copycat shows indicates that they're looking for knuckle-shuffle distractions over entertainment they give a shit about. This is particularly true for their money demo, who have X-boxes, iPhones, and all sorts of shit to channel their ADHD spans into. It's very self-defeating, it seems.

Of course, I don't have enough profound knowledge about what makes the business or its customers tick; I have no fucking clue how movies such as Fred Claus or Transformers even get made, much less who over the age of seven watches them. Marketing is not my strong suit.

But I can spot a trend from time to time, and this one seems ripe for the running. It's another hollowed-out dinosaur production-revenue model, accelerating its own change, and probably substantial loss of market share.

Translating Nospeak

Let's, I say let's mosey on down to the Tumbleweed Farm, there in the middle o' Petticoat Junction, and examine closely just one (1) paragraph of Mister Man's important pronuncimatin' on matters of some seriousness, to wit, Pakistan.

First, the question, just to put things in context.

Are you at all concerned that General Musharraf may not live up to the promises that you said he's made to you? And are you concerned, as Secretary Gates suggested yesterday, that the distraction, the internal turmoil in Pakistan is actually -- or could have an effect on the effort in Afghanistan? Thank you.

Not too complicated, right? Right? Well, let's see if we can parse the non-answer:

I take a person for his word until otherwise. I think that's what you have to do. When somebody says this is what they're going to do, then you give them a chance to do it.

This is the usual aphasic boilerplate he probably mumbles in his sleep; you can tell because it's practically in iambic pentameter. He genuinely seems to think that, for example, his good buddy Pooty-Poot hasn't worked him over like Rosie O'Donnell on a box of Devil Dogs. Nor is this dispositive factoid applicable to much else in the way of volatile areas of foreign policy. You don't take anyone's word for it.

But even in this case, with Musharraf, it is becoming apparent, even to someone of Bush's intellect, that Musharraf cannot be trusted anymore. He's played both sides for too long, and this is not a situation where hydrostatic tension can be held indefinitely. And Musharraf himself has propelled the crisis forward with a series of autocratic maneuvers which may cement his position with the military which really runs that country, but also secures his popular perception as Our Man in Islamabad. This "give them a chance" bit, hilarious. Musharraf has had six years and $11 bn to do something. There are extenutaing circumstances, there always are, but the results are not there, bottom line, and Pakistan is now on the verge of a political meltdown.

I can tell you this, that President Musharraf, right after the attacks on September the 11th, made a decision, and the decision was to stand with the United States against the extremists inside Pakistan.

And this year has been the deadliest for troops in Afghanistan. How do those two things square and again, how many years are these decisions and policies supposed to be exempt from review just because you invoke 9/11 over and over again?

In other words,....

I get that he has to regurgitate this shit in the same way it was explained to him, but this is the most shopworn rhetorical crutch he employs, by far. It's too bad they can't fit him with a shock collar that goes off every time he spins his wheels with this utterly stupid time-waster of a phrase.

It's the absolute worst sort of intellectual abuse, to constantly recycle this simplistic crap, under the pretense of elaborating on obvious points, while actually obfuscating them further. Everyone talks a good game about Orwell, but this was exactly the thorn in Orwell's side, language being used to conceal rather than reveal. This is Bush's stock in trade.

....he was given an option: Are you with us, or are you not with us? And he made a clear decision to be with us, and he's acted on that advice.

But he hasn't done those things, certainly not to the degree one might expect from the blank checks we've written him the past half-decade. He's helped track and kill several #3's, good. But he's also consolidated his power, signed treaties with Taliban leaders, used our money to buy weapons that appear to be more well-suited for a conventional war with India than for flushing out terrorists, and trampled the institutions of his country, which redounds to us as far as the seething populace is concerned. Meanwhile, no viable successor or opposition has been cultivated, which means the next best plan is to bring back a populist kleptocrat, whose father was deposed and hung. And you thought American politics was a sideshow.

Bush keeps talking about the "goals" he shares with the Pakistani people, but that can't possibly be true. They want Musharraf out -- now. They may decide they want to keep using Afghanistan as a proxy buffer in their ongoing bullshit with India. That too is at cross purposes. Once Musharraf eventually leaves, it is entirely possible that the jihadis and madrassa thugs gain political potency.

Thus that entire paragraph, much like most things Bush has said over the years, literally has almost no meaning.

The Price Is Right

Funny how our beloved senator, fresh from caving on Surfin' Mike Mukasey's AG appointment, wasted no time in running out here and assigning blame to the Coast Guard (whose response was admittedly unacceptable), while mentioning precious little about the new crew on the Cosco ship which collided into the Bay Bridge. Can it be that her husband still has "consultant" dealings with that company these days? I'm sure it's just coincidence. It always is.

Cops and Mobbers

Rude Pundit's right about this guy's hair -- it's like Eddie Munster taking on Count Chocula. All you need is Fred "Franken Berry" Thompson to complete the picture.

Rudy Giuliani stakes his presidential bid on his record of cutting crime in New York - but the union representing the city's 30,000 police officers won't support his run for the White House.
"The New York City Patrolmen's Benevolent Association could never support Rudy Giuliani for any elected office," PBA President Patrick Lynch told The Post.

Lynch also claimed that "Rudy Giuliani has no real credentials as a terrorism fighter."

So let's see -- cops don't like Rudy, but well-oiled loon Marion Robertson and his retard followers do. Any more questions?

Four Weddings and a Douchebag

Grampa Simpson has a miraculous come-to-Rudy moment on moralizing pronunciamentos regarding candidates' marriages and fidelity. Interesting timing.

As recently as two months ago -- Sept 6, 2007 -- Broder wrote that the Clintons' marriage was the most important political fact about Hillary. "Her marriage is the central fact in her life, and this partnership of Bill and Hillary Clinton is indissoluble," Broder wrote. "She cannot function without him, and he would not have been president without her. If she becomes president, he will play as central a role in her presidency as she did in his. And that is something the country will have to ponder."

Well, no shit, Sherlock. There are some -- inside the Beltway even! -- who swear anonymously that the Return of the Clenis is part of Hillary!s dynastic inevitability. Apparently (and don't tell the current occupant about this phenomenon) a certain number of mopes find it easier to simply renew their subscriptions than check out different magazines, or even a book. Broder should be thrilled to draw a paycheck for such tedious observations, since an average fifth-grader could come up with them for nothing.

But let us put Broderella's latest case o' the vapors in context.

On May 25, 2006, Broder devoted nearly a whole column to that notorious front-page piece by Pat Healy in The Times that documented the state of their marriage in almost comically absurd detail. Broder was very sympathetic to the piece, saying that it showed that "the drama of the Clintons' personal life would be a hot topic if she runs for president." If Broder thought the Clinton wasn't fair game here in any way -- or disapproved of the level of attention The Times gave to the Clinton marriage in that piece -- he certainly didn't say so.

And back when it really counted -- when the GOP tried to impeach Bill Clinton over his affair -- Broder thought the Clinton marriage was completely fair game. He wrote multiple columns at the time arguing that his affair threw his entire character and even fitness for the Presidency into question.

They all did. Some of them even had a point -- getting blowjobs from the help is something you expect from Guns 'n' Roses, not the occupant of the West Wing. It was tawdry and off-putting, if completely unworthy of reproaches as serious as impeachment, and effectively grinding government to a halt for the remainder of Clinton's term.

But they went on and on and on about it, each one-upping the last with more and more ponderous verdicts, heedless of the practical consequences, long after there was any point to any of it. And now we are where we are, because these pud-whackers can't stop with their knuckle-shuffle. And we can't get enough of it.

Suddenly a candidate who is running overtly on issues of character and judgment is blessedly exempt from scrutiny in those things. He made a point of embarrassing his second wife; his best buddy was a mobbed-up prick who apparently felt entitled to stick his cock in everything within a hundred yards. His own children don't speak to him and won't vote for him. Does this tell you something about how he does things, is there a pattern worth noticing here?

On the one hand, we don't really want to keep up this habit of digging through the neighbor's garbage, trying to dig up something ugly while acting all Simon-pure. On the other hand, this is all already public knowledge. Now Broder wants to take the high road and avoid all that. For now, anyway; he knows as well as anyone that his profession is that of the herd, and that if he doesn't stroke the cheating asshole issue everyone else will be happy to leave him behind.

And in a profession where the appearance of relevance is the real currency, the only thing that matters when the rest of the kewl kidz pull out their Members Only jackets is to follow suit.

Silver and Blecch

Christ, this is getting old. And enough of the big "debate" over whether to throw the kid in the deep end. The season's done, so there's nothing to lose, but the o-line blows, the receivers are slow and don't bother to get open, and the defense plays stout for the first 55 minutes, then reliably finds a way to give it back. (Of seven losses, this is the fifth one where they blew a 4th-quarter lead. In nine total games. Big pattern there.) It's one thing to give a new guy some hands-on experience, but another to just dump him into a situation beyond his control.

They did contain Devin Hester's returns superbly, but the score was still 17-6 at the end. You could have yanked any eleven drunken goons from the stands and put up six points and 180 yards of offense.

Only the Raiders could have given Rex Fucking Grossman his job back. That's how rock-bottom this team is in almost every phase of the game.

Weekend at Bernie's

Giuliani's judgment speaks for itself quite clearly. There is no sensible, rational reason to support his bum-rush to the balcony, so it makes sense that the people most in support of Rudy are neither sensible nor rational.

Where Chuckie the K intersects with Count Chocula and Marion Robertson, albeit more quasi-intellectually, is in the transcendent belief in will to power. And they know that the limbic trolls that populate their respective fanclubs all possess the same gene. There's no mystery there.

Now, whether Rudy Walnuts can make people believe that his experience at rousting squeegee men and street derelicts translates into the warm pink blanky they crave, and that his sidekick Fat Bernie Gambino's troubles aren't simply a direct product of the very institutions they emanated from, that may be a different story.

But I'm betting not. I always figured Mencken for an optimist.

Gratitude

First, a hearty and sincere thanks to all who served then and now. Veterans' Day should one of the few days where we can all be on the same page, even if some goofy bastards don't seem to be in the same library.

But what the hell?

Veterans make up one in four homeless people in the United States, though they are only 11 percent of the general adult population, according to a report to be released Thursday.

And homelessness is not just a problem among middle-age and elderly veterans. Younger veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are trickling into shelters and soup kitchens seeking services, treatment or help with finding a job.

....

Advocates worry that intense and repeated deployments leave newer veterans particularly vulnerable.

“We’re going to be having a tsunami of them eventually because the mental health toll from this war is enormous,” said Daniel Tooth, director of veterans affairs for Lancaster County, Pa.

I don't care what political stripe you claim to paint, that's unacceptable. The parades and ceremonies are all well and good, but what matters is taking care of people, rewarding their sacrifices, and ensuring that they don't fall through the cracks. I don't know when that became too much to ask. But since our geniuses at the top didn't plan for much of anything, it makes sense that they didn't count on thousands of discharged five-tour vets coming home to a desiccated life.

Mother of the Year

For a second, I just assumed that there was an up-and-coming rapper -- or maybe just one of Fifty Cent's hangers-on -- by the name of Red Light. It's not exactly a stretch.

Hsu Fetish

As with the rest of the pack of 'tard hyenas clogging up what passes for respectable political discussion, most of Malkin's bluster goes right by me. I suppose it's hard not to notice when a minority pokes at fellow minorities, but obviously it's all of a piece, that of poking at "liberal" orthodoxies, "political correctness" in particular. Ho hum. It's like finding out there's still a niche demographic of people out there listening to Mambo #5 and practicing the Macarena. Whatever floats their leaky boat, I guess.

What interests me more is what sort of follow-up is being done to confirm or refute Malkin's allegations of "straw donors".

One Asian donor admitted to the Los Angeles Times "to lacking the legal-resident status required for giving campaign money." Another, Hsiao Wen Yang, told the New York Post she was reimbursed for her $1,000 donation - setting off clear alarm bells over yet another possible straw donor scheme on the heels of Norman Hsu-gate.

Does anyone really want another raft of "Chinese bagman Johnny Huang" stories coming down the pike? They are tiresome precisely because of their distracting angle on race, though it is certainly noteworthy if any candidate is getting contributions laundered through illegal immigrants.

But again, we need to address the root cause here. Whatever the ethnicity and/or legal status of a straw donor, it is yet another indication of the system failing utterly. Rather than wasting time on the lame snarkasm from a predictable blowhard, we're better off simply paying attention to the story, which is as old as the notion of organized political machinery. This "don't ask, don't tell" system of encouraging laundered donations through phantom entities and shady ward-heelers, possibly originating in profits from organized crime, gambling, human trafficking, etc., is unacceptable.

On the one hand, this is simply how the machinery of politics seems to grind along, particularly in ethnic enclaves, but on the other hand, maybe it's time to look for other ways besides suspicious-looking "bundling" strategies.

Liar Liar

Why is anything this wretched coot has to say anymore even worth mentioning, much less given the veneer of credibility?

“Do they want to bring back Saddam Hussein, these critics?” the elder Bush told USA TODAY in a rare interview. “Do they want to go back to the status quo ante? I don’t know what they are talking about here. Do they think life would be better in the Middle East if Saddam were still there?“

....

In 1996, Bush Sr. wrote, “Removing [Saddam] from power might well have plunged Iraq into civil war, sucking U.S. forces in to preserve order. Had we elected to march on Baghdad, our forces might still be there.”

In Jan. 1996, Bush delivered an eloquent speech, arguing the “reason we didn’t go after Saddam is that our forces could well have bogged down in an urban guerrilla conflict in the streets of Baghdad.” “We would have instantly handed Saddam a victory out of the jaws of a humiliating defeat,” he said.

I never could stand this man, but this is beyond even what I would have thought he was capable of. Does any person seriously think that had Bill Clinton spear-headed this clusterfuck, that Poppy Bush wouldn't have come out of the woodwork, early and often, to chastise him for wooly-headed idealism meeting the constraints of realpolitik, of a bunch of draft-dodging dummycrats fucking up his, Poppy's, masterful compromise, of needlessly squandering American lives and American treasure, American credibility?

I mean, really. There's defending your idiot progeny, no matter how badly he fucks up the proverbial baked potato. And there's trying not to undermine the "leader", who or whatever that may mean. But this is completely indefensible. He did not change his mind out of honorable intentions; everything he (and Cheney, incidentally) predicted over a decade ago has come to pass. Frankly, it's nauseating, and shameful. I don't know how the man lives with himself, but I do wish he'd piss off already, and at least have the common decency to tell the rest of his ridiculous dynasty to go away. ¡No mas Arbustos!

I Ain't Superstitious

Desperation and stupidity, being kissing cousins, tend to produce some pretty funny-lookin' offspring:

ATLANTA - What to do when the rain won’t come? If you’re Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, you pray.

The governor will host a prayer service next week to ask for relief from the drought gripping the Southeast.

“The only solution is rain, and the only place we get that is from a higher power,” Perdue spokesman Bert Brantley said on Wednesday.

On the off chance that don't work, Perdue has planned to sacrifice a chicken on the steps of the Capitol, and stick pins in his Algore voodoo doll.

Nice to see PMSNBC turn into The Onion. I swear I thought this was a parody at first.

[link via TBogg]

Oops, I Did It Again

I actually kinda feel bad for Britney's mom, believe it or not. It's gotta be difficult to just sit and watch a very public, slow-motion train wreck, and trying to figure out what your own responsibility in it all is. Knowing that your kid is a short step from holding up liquor stores and/or getting a sex tape leaked just adds to it.

Still, I couldn't help but laugh at the very last bit.

Lynne, who is currently working on a revealing book about parenthood, says the tome will have a spiritual side.

She explained: "I am working on a parenting book that is going to have faith elements to it."

I'm not sure what's funnier, that Britney Spears' mom thinks that she should write a parenting book with "faith elements" to it, or that people will actually buy it, because their favorite pastime is rubbernecking.

TV Nation

Beyond the polemics, Fake Steve has some good points, per usual. Other than Barry Ritholtz, I don't know of anyone else who can discuss the fairly arcane, wonky subject of disintermediating content-revenue models in a genuinely entertaining style.

Up here in Silicon Valley we are busy building the next system and we are laughing our asses off at you guys. We all know you're going away. It's only a matter of time. You're latched on to a dying system like so many fat babies sucking on so many big fat Hollywood fake tits. Now the tits are drying up. That's what this strike is really all about. It's the beginning of the death throes of the network system. At some subconscious level you clueless fuckwits have begun to realize that the future has nothing to do with the system to which you're attached.

Obtain a clue, people. You're sitting there fighting over residuals and terms of this and that when what you should be doing is leaving the system altogether and helping to build the next one. But you can't do that because you can't get off the heroin of network money. You're hooked to a lifestyle. For all your groovy talk and hip little soul patch beards, you're the most risk-averse people in the world. You're lifers. I mean, you belong to a fucking union! How fucked up and 20th century is that?

Listen, Hollywood TV writers. For fifty years you've had a nice little gig going for yourselves. You've unionized and set up all these stupid rules and you've created a closed-off little club and you've done all you could to keep other people out of the club so you could make ridiculous amounts of money just for pumping out piles of shit content. Now guess what? The Internet blows that up. The Internet is anarchy. There's no writers guild. There's no limit on the number of channels. The writers and actors and directors who've been shut out of your club are creating their own alternate universe. They don't want to be in your club. Worse yet for you, they don't want you in their club, either. They don't need you. They don't give a shit about what you do. They view you as a bunch old, fat, stupid, overpaid hacks. Which you are.

Well, good luck with that strike, assholes. And seriously, thanks. I mean it.

He's right about the impending death throes, and the complete inability for either the networks or the writers to coherently navigate the shifts. That's part of the problem, they're just trying to figure out how best to ride the wave. The networks, just like the thrashing dinosaurs of the music industry or the old media, are frantically trying to cover their nut. And it's not working, and it reeks of desperation, increasingly so.

They're kept in place for now simply because of the scope of their operational oligarchy. It's not a carefully imploded Vegas casino, more of a sprawling, ancient edifice crumbling here and there, but faster and faster. Some of them have gotten better at diversifying and spreading to niches to make up the difference; Fox's FX Channel is a very good example of that, with smarter, racier, more HBO-style fare than they can run on the main network. But even they, like HBO, seem to be having more difficulty developing fresh material and making it stick; FX's flagship show, The Shield, will broadcast its final season next year, and like HBO with The Sopranos, there's no contender waiting in the wings to keep the pace. Rescue Me and The Wire, on those respective networks, are both superb shows, but each is also winding down, with the latter braodcasting its final season in January, and the former probably not having more than another season or two left in the tank.

So it's diminishing returns, and an attenuated content development setup, because it's so much easier and cheaper to just round up a dozen random candidates for forced sterilization and cobble an interminable piece of "reality" crap around them. And their first instinct when the ratings and revenues drop is more commercial time. As if paying $60+/month for fifty shopping channels and about five channels with watchable shows wasn't enough, now commercial breaks are even longer and more frequent. I've seen some shows with what appears to be roughly a "7-4" run -- four minutes of commercials after every seven minutes of content. (FX is even more insidious with its hour-long shows -- they'll suck you in with a 15-20 minute block, then 7-4-7-4 for the rest of the hour.)

So what it has devolved to, in the aggregate, is reeling in potatoes who don't mind watching other potatoes play guessing games with suitcases, or some D-list doorstop try to dance. That chases as many people away as it attracts, hence the dwindling shares. There's just too much else out there, and for me the kicker is the shorter DVD cycle time these days. I already rarely go to the movies as it is; it's expensive and noisy and there's a half-hour of promos before the fuckin' movie starts. I don't mind waiting three months to Netflix the DVD.

Lots of other people have gotten the same idea, and it was only a matter of time before they also realized that it's not a big deal to wait a few months for most series, especially with all the extras they throw in to please the die-hard fans. Seriously, other than The Daily Show and football, I don't really give much of a shit, and most of TDS is available on the website. Why do I want to spend $750 per year to watch the same mind-numbing commercials in Pavlovian repetition? Why would anyone?

I'm not quite as down on writers or unions as FSJ comes off as being; there are many good shows out there too, and it's hard work accomplished in an environment run on muscle and gall. They would get rolled without some protection, and they can't really make the jump as individuals just yet, though like lemmings, once one does, they all will. But FSJ is correct in spotting the institutional inertia at work here; the writers are too scared to make the intuitive leap to start getting their arms around this new media thing, and the networks will only do it in a manner that sustains the rest of their rotting carcass oligopoly.

And that's the thing that really oughta scare both sides in this, that they have so steadily eaten away the value of their product that a lot of people won't bother coming back. There's too many other distractions now; they don't have to settle for the umpteenth iteration of Survivor or whatever. The vegetable market will always be there, and always go back for more, like Bush's 25% core. You can always count on a moron to do what morons do.

But you can't always build and keep a solid revenue model around them. I couldn't care less about the teevee aspect of it; what intrigues me is the slow-motion crumble, and what could come out of it.

Casino Economy

It's nice to know that this is all just a giant slot machine.

Analysts say that the oil market looks overheated, and a number of factors could puncture the price bubble. Most important, speculators have played a key role in driving up crude prices this year, and if the trend reverses they'll get out fast. Certainly, global demand remains strong for now. But a number of factors—technical indicators, an economic slowdown, lower demand—could prompt investors to exit en masse.

"Oil prices are in uncharted territory," says Peter Fusaro, co-founder of the Energy Hedge Fund Center, which tracks commodities hedge funds. "My worry is that if the market tanks, everyone will want out at the same time. The market would collapse, and who knows what the bottom is."

Speculators have played a growing role in the oil market in recent years (BusinessWeek.com,1/17/07). There are 595 hedge funds that engage in at least some energy trading now, more than triple the 180 funds involved just three years ago. Fusaro estimates the assets involved in such trading total more than $200 billion, up more than 60% from the beginning of the year.

It's tough to get a firm handle on the speculation. A large portion of trading takes place in the unregulated, over-the-counter market. Still, some of the trading in crude oil takes place on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), and there the market is approaching a record in terms of the number of crude oil contracts that predict a price rise. Traders have committed to 135,000 contracts—each representing 1,000 barrels of crude—betting that prices will continue to rise. That's just shy of the record 155,000 contracts reached this summer.

Some analysts say that if the number of contracts rises sharply, oil prices could fall. "The exit signal for investors could be breaking through the 150,000 or 160,000 contract barrier," says Joel Fingerman, president of OilAnalytics.net, an energy consulting firm. "At that point investors could feel they're using all their bullets."

In the meantime however, investment continues to flood the crude oil market, as well as commodities in general. "The mentality now is very bullish," says Fingerman. "As long as money keeps flowing in, people will keep buying [oil] as though it's going to go to the moon."

The optimism has helped the stocks of the oil majors. ConocoPhillips (COP) is up nearly 40% (BusinessWeek.com, 10/26/07) over the past year. ExxonMobil (XOM), Chevron (CVX), British Petroleum (BP), and Royal Dutch Shell (RDSA) have posted similar if somewhat smaller gains.

So speculators and hedge-funds, not exactly discouraged by the oil companies themselves, have overvalued oil futures to their own benefit. Real supply is probably either peak or past-peak, and China's demand (and ours, of course) is only accelerating. Since oil companies have profiteered handsomely this entire time, once future specs do correct themselves and drop (assuming they do, which is no guarantee, given demand and supply issues), they're not going to let their own valuations be adversely affected. They'll find other modes of price support if they have to.

Trickle-down enthusiasts informed us, usually as condescendingly as possible, that if the people at the top made money, the people at the bottom would also make money. What they never want to admit is that not only is the profit-taking never commensurate with labor input, thus enhancing income disparity, but that since it's their casino, they also make money even when (frequently because) we don't.

The house always wins.

Traveling Lightly

Anne Applebaum vents her irritation with mischievious political activists.

In fact, for the malcontents of Hollywood, academia, and the catwalks, Chávez is an ideal ally. Just as the sympathetic foreigners whom Lenin called "useful idiots" once supported Russia abroad, their modern equivalents provide the Venezuelan president with legitimacy, attention, and good photographs. He, in turn, helps them overcome the frustration John Reed once felt—the frustration of living in an annoyingly unrevolutionary country where people have to change things by law. For all his brilliance, Reed could not bring socialism to America. For all his wealth, fame, media access, and Hollywood power, Sean Penn cannot oust George W. Bush. But by showing up in the company of Chávez, he can at least get a lot more attention for his opinions.

As for Venezuelan politics, or the Venezuelan people, they don't matter at all. The country is simply playing a role filled in the past by Russia, Cuba, and Nicaragua—a role to which it is, at the moment, uniquely suited. Clearly, Venezuela is easier to idealize than Iran and North Korea, the former's attitude to women being not conducive to fashion models, the latter being downright hostile to Hollywood. Venezuela is also warm, relatively close, and a country of beautiful waterfalls.

Oh, dear. Well, let's have a look at Chàvez' depredations to humanity and civil liberties. There is one allegation from 2004 of 9 protesters being killed, and two dozen more detained and beaten, which should not be minimized or ignored. But the rest? Packing the court system with reliable cronies and rubber stamps; attempting to suspend due process; various methods of harassing unfavorable media entities. Sound familiar?

Look, Chàvez is a preening buffoon, no doubt about it. Penn and Glover obviously share anti-Bush (as opposed to, you know, anti-American, which is really what Applebaum's imputing here) sentiments, along with roughly 90% of the world and two-thirds of the American public on an average day. A useless slice of ass like Naomi Campbell undoubtedly has common cause with anyone who thinks other people are simply to be used to further one's own interests and whims. Not a huge deal; indeed, hardly worth mentioning at all.

Of course Chàvez, nursing a permanent grudge from this administration's aborted attempt, is always going to take advantage of any and every opportunity to tweak El Pendejo's nose. The degree to which that feeds into this or that celebrity's urge to appear profound is obviously open to speculation, but why even bother?

Is this really any more obnoxious or offensive than, say, Chuck Norris writing a regular column of retrograde political chunder? How about Fred Thompson moseying for president (or at least raising money by acting like he's running)? Celebrities use and misuse their status all the time, often for much worse causes than playing grab-ass with a clownish South American autocrat. I haven't heard of Chàvez torturing (or even "debating" false denials), nor has he destroyed a country and ruined millions of lives to show his dad how tough he really is. People who worry about Chàvez seem to have completely forgotten what sort of monsters roamed that continent not so very long ago.

Hell, with the ever-progressing confluence of journalism and celebritainment, you could even make an argument that journalists themselves, especially teevee journamalists, have been at least as irresponsible about whom they are seen with or tacitly endorse. Penn and Glover at least make no pretense to objectivity as far as partisanship, whereas staid sensible types such as Dean Broder literally stenograph the RNCC's sales pitch and pronounce it "moderate".

Compared to that sort of thing, archaic epithets such as "useful idiot" and "fellow traveler" have essentially lost whatever sting they may have genuinely possessed, seeing as how all manner of unimaginable cruelty, around the world and for decades, has been given a pass simply by waving a flag and telling people what they want to hear.

Fairytale of New York

In what appears to be a perfect symbiosis, America's Mayor picks up the coveted endorsement of the cultural equivalent of its wacky neighbor.

Let's make sure we have all this straight -- a man who has been historically pro-gay rights and pro-choice, and whose single issue is 9/11, is being endorsed by a raving loon who, in agreement with Jerry Falwell, declared that America got what it deserved on 9/11....because of its tolerance of gay people.

Are these fuckin' people trying to make everyone's heads explode, or just another case of douchebags of a feather flocking together?

Update: Roy draws the parallel more clearly, in that the common element between humps like Giuliani and Robertson is, naturally, straight-up authoritarianism. That each likes his served up with a healthy dollop of institutionalized corruption -- Robertson in his gold-mine dealings with various African thugs; Giuliani with Vic Mackey wannabes like Bernie Kerik -- only sweetens the deal for them.

But it also helps blow the lid off of what really makes the remaining stripe of limbics tick. Beyond protecting their chedda from groping do-gooders and hoping to win the lottery, what these numb fucks really really want is to be told what to fuckin' do. It trumps everything, lays bare all the notional fambly-valyews whinges, overrides everything from serial philandering to cross-dressing to Mormonism. Once Romney internalizes that -- and he already has to some extent -- he has the money to keep running with this theme, and this is a static demo that's just waiting for someone they perceive as viable. All these idiot talking points about "electability" are now officially worthless; the core demo has made its priority abundantly clear.

They seem to think that they're choosing between dying on their feet and living on their knees, but they're really just dying on their knees, and apparently can't wait to do so. That it manifests itself in the incoherent alignment of Giuliani and Robertson should signal bad tidings for Giuliani's campaign, and for the fortunes of the Republicans themselves. Creepy douchebag, or empty rich suit? Your call, geniuses.

Eighth Continent

So there's this gargantuan mass of garbage, twice the size of Texas, conglomerated out in the Pacific Ocean.

The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man's land between San Francisco and Hawaii.

Marcus Eriksen, director of research and education at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, said his group has been monitoring the Garbage Patch for 10 years.

"With the winds blowing in and the currents in the gyre going circular, it's the perfect environment for trapping," Eriksen said. "There's nothing we can do about it now, except do no more harm."

....

"At this point, cleaning it up isn't an option," Parry said. "It's just going to get bigger as our reliance on plastics continues. ... The long-term solution is to stop producing as much plastic products at home and change our consumption habits."

Parry said using canvas bags to cart groceries instead of using plastic bags is a good first step; buying foods that aren't wrapped in plastics is another.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Looky here, Wavy Gravy. It's in several books of the Bible that God wanted us to use disposable plastic bags at the supermarket. Dude, why do you hate America and God?

More seriously, I don't see how consumption patterns will ever change until lifestyle patterns change, chief among them the use and distribution of water:

One day last June, an environmental engineer named Bradley Udall appeared before a Senate subcommittee that was seeking to understand how severe the country’s fresh-water problems might become in an era of global warming. As far as Washington hearings go, the testimony was an obscure affair, which was perhaps fitting: Udall is the head of an obscure organization, the Western Water Assessment. The bureau is located in the Boulder, Colo., offices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the government agency that collects obscure data about the sky and seas. Still, Udall has a name that commands some attention, at least within the Beltway. His father was Morris Udall, the congressman and onetime presidential candidate, and his uncle was Stewart Udall, the secretary of the interior under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Bradley Udall’s great-great-grandfather, John D. Lee, moreover, was the founder of Lee’s Ferry, a flyspeck spot in northern Arizona that means nothing to most Americans but holds near-mythic status to those who work with water for a living. Near Lee’s Ferry is where the annual flow of the Colorado River is measured in order to divvy up its water among the seven states that depend on it. To many politicians, economists and climatologists, there are few things more important than what has happened at Lee’s Ferry in the past, just as there are few things more important than what will happen at Lee’s Ferry in the future.

The importance of the water there was essentially what Udall came to talk about. A report by the National Academies on the Colorado River basin had recently concluded that the combination of limited Colorado River water supplies, increasing demands, warmer temperatures and the prospect of recurrent droughts “point to a future in which the potential for conflict” among those who use the river will be ever-present. Over the past few decades, the driest states in the United States have become some of our fastest-growing; meanwhile, an ongoing drought has brought the flow of the Colorado to its lowest levels since measurements at Lee’s Ferry began 85 years ago. At the Senate hearing, Udall stated that the Colorado River basin is already two degrees warmer than it was in 1976 and that it is foolhardy to imagine that the next 50 years will resemble the last 50. Lake Mead, the enormous reservoir in Arizona and Nevada that supplies nearly all the water for Las Vegas, is half-empty, and statistical models indicate that it will never be full again. “As we move forward,” Udall told his audience, “all water-management actions based on ‘normal’ as defined by the 20th century will increasingly turn out to be bad bets.”

We fancy ourselves as free-marketeers, living Adam Smith's centuries-old exalted dream. But that's silly -- not Smith's dream, which is still intact at least in principle, but that we embody that dream. Instead, we seem to be living on magical thinking, not just the basic idea that we can get something for nothing (as the burgeoning casino and lottery industries can attest), but that infrastructural concerns either resolve themselves or simply run on good thoughts and fairy dust.

Magical thinking is in every Hummer, Excursion, Yukon, etc., that clogs our already saturated highways and cities. It's in every new strip mall carved out of prime agricultural land. Such vehicles and structures implicitly presume that something will come along, in terms of scarce fuel and parking space, because something always has.

That is, quite literally, the way children operate. Externalities are someone else's problem, and anyway, no one else is curtailing their behavior, so why should I? Conversely, if everyone else does curtail their behavior, that frees up enough room for me to self-actualize via toys and doodads, shit I don't really need or even want, bought with money I don't really have.

With that prevalent mindset, it makes sense that water scarcity and usage is a growing issue, that the oceans and waterways are dumps, that various types of seafood have been rapidly overfished in some places, hopelessly polluted in others.

Udall suggested that I meet a water manager named Peter Binney, who works for Aurora, Colo., a city — the 60th-largest in the United States — that sprawls over an enormous swath of flat, postagricultural land south of the Denver airport. It may be difficult for residents of the East Coast to understand the political celebrity of some Western water managers, but in a place like Aurora, where water, not available land, limits economic growth, Binney has enormous responsibilities. In effect, the city’s viability depends on his wherewithal to conjure new sources of water or increase the output of old ones. As Binney told me when we first spoke, “We have to find a new way of meeting the needs of all this population that’s turning up and still satisfy all of our recreational and environmental demands.” Aurora has a population of 310,000 now, Binney said, but that figure is projected to surpass 500,000 by 2035.

I asked if he had enough water for that many people. “Oh, no,” he replied. He seemed surprised that someone could even presume that he might. In fact, he explained, his job is to figure out how to find more water in a region where every drop is already spoken for and at a moment when there is little possibility that any more will ever be discovered.

It doesn't necessarily have to be global warming that gets us; waste and ignorance are chugging along just fine.

Free Fall

Great article in New York magazine, encapsulating some of the financial topics we hit from time to time -- the collapse of the derivative-bundling bookies, accelerating the subprime lending catastrophe; excessive debt consumerism; a plummeting dollar; and a world backing slowly away from our self-destructive tendencies, looking around nervously for a plan B.

Here's the (ahem) money quote:

Here’s why catastrophists see that as a major problem: About 25 percent of our government debt is held by foreign governments, with the major holders being Japan ($610.9 billion), China ($407.8 billion), the U.K. ($210.1 billion), and our friends in the Middle East, the oil-exporting countries ($123.8 billion). When the current Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, cuts rates to soften the housing blow for Americans, he also weakens the dollar by making dollar-based investments less attractive. And when the dollar weakens, so, too, does the value of these gigantic positions held by the foreign governments. At some point, they’re no longer going to tolerate the losses we inflict on them by lowering rates, and if that happens and they start dumping dollars, watch out for the peso.

The bulls will tell you that foreign governments understand the American economy is the key to global economic health, and that they’ll suck it up and take it when we devalue their debt. To which Schiff offers another analogy. Imagine if five people were washed up on a desert island: four Asians and an American. In splitting up their duties, one Asian says he’ll fish; another will hunt, another will look for firewood, and another will cook. The American assigns himself the job of eating.

“The modern economist looks at this situation and says the American is key to the whole thing,” says Schiff. “Because without him to eat, the four Asians would be unemployed.” The alternative: Without the American, the Asians might eat a little more themselves and even spend some time building a boat. This is happening as we speak: With the rise of the Chinese consumer class, the local citizenry is now spending, and the country is no longer totally dependent on exports. Which means they’re no longer totally dependent on us.

Readers of the financial press are surely familiar with the buzzword of the moment, decoupling. It’s used to describe how U.S.-Europe and U.S.-Asian trade relationships are becoming less dependent at the same time as European-Asian ties are growing. Most Asian nations, including China, are seeing more rapid growth in exports to Europe than to the U.S. And the U.S. now accounts for a declining share of European exports. The bearish interpretation: that the longtime global embrace of the dollar is loosening.

I would add to all this that a prime symptom of the impending economic unease (if not malaise) is the sheer disparity of it all. The bulk of the benefits are accruing to the have-mores, while the rest of us scramble for the scraps. This is not to advocate for a redistributive overhaul, merely an observation of a historically fatal flaw in many societies. Much as they may try (and succeed to a certain extent), the 1% cannot entirely divorce themselves from the rest of society, without some consequences playing out somewhere along the line.

I don't necessarily buy that what's happening is unavoidable, nor as catastrophic as many are prophesying. It won't be pretty, and indeed is already getting ugly for many. We'll see how the Happy Birfday Jeebus shopping season goes. And as the article itself points out, it's a slow-motion train wreck, thus implying that there's still time to redirect some of the momentum and the consequences -- which naturally means to park it on the backs of the working class as much as possible, but it doesn't have to be that way, obviously.

And of course economic data is largely interpretive, so it behooves us to observe the contexts in which it's discussed. "Optimists", for example, talk up the Dow or the low unemployment rate, but fail to point out that the Dow is artificially inflated right now because of the devalued dollar and lowering interest rates. At some point (very soon) oil will hit $100 or so, which could price out average (comparatively) portfolio owners, leaving the boutique whales to whip out their dicks and get the price even higher. Or, everyone converts their oil holdings over to euros, and then we're royally screwed.

What's most galling is that everyone's lives and livelihoods are directly affected by what a bunch of bookies and percentage-point diddlers in Manhattan are doing. The "value" they are adding and cashing in on is phantom, ephemeral, supported only by an arcane system of international bond-holders. It's a Ponzi scheme, and they all know it, but the game is predicated on everyone clapping their hands and believing in fairies.



And when gravity finally kicks in, it won't be the numbskull bookies who bear the brunt of the impact. It never is.

Face in the Crowd

Shorter Broder:

Eminent moderates agree that Republican pragmatism is just like Democratic pragmatism.

Super. Bobby Jindal is heralded here as the GOP's answer to Barack Obama, which is not the most imaginative parallel to draw. And his success story is impressive, to be sure. But Broder gets all swoony over Jindal's stated agenda.

Jindal campaigned as a conservative reformer, saying he wanted to pass strict ethics rules for the notoriously out-of-bounds Legislature but vowing also to spur business growth and open classrooms to the teaching of creationism as an alternative to evolution.

Hoo-boy. Look, aspiring to clean up the notorious swamp of Loozeyanna pollyticks seems like it should be ambition enough for one administration. And spurring business growth there probably means grifting federal dollars for developers to continue to gentrify post-Katrina New Orleans.

And I doubt the creationism bit is just cynical red-meat; Jindal is a renowned dogmatist, who voted against repealing restrictions on federal spending for stem-cell research. Indeed, Jindal -- when he does vote, which is about 75% of the time -- is as reliable an ideological water-carrier as one could hope for.

People like Haley Barbour I get -- they're grifters, cronyists, lifelong party hacks, because that's where the money is. But Jindal seems to be a true ideologue, one who has openly, passionately, and unapologetically proselytized on the innate primacy of Catholicism. He's a new face for the Republicans in that he's browner, but in terms of policy and ideology, he's indistinguishable.

Made Men

Ladies and germs, your GOP front-runner, Rudy Walnuts:

In 2000, more than half the mayor’s cabinet had opposed Mr. Kerik’s appointment to be police commissioner. His detractors had noted, among other concerns, that Mr. Kerik did not have a college degree, a department requirement at the time for captains and above.

Mr. Giuliani waved off the dissenters. “I believe that the skill I have developed better than any other was surrounding myself with great people,” Mr. Giuliani wrote in his 2002 book, “Leadership.”

“Too many leaders overlook candidates with unusual résumés because of a failure of nerve,” Mr. Giuliani wrote. “By the time I appointed Bernie Kerik, I had hired so many people that I was immune to such criticisms.”

And what of Big Pussy Kerik, anyway?

Mr. Kerik earned $150,500 as commissioner but pleaded poverty. He turned to Lawrence V. Ray, a friend of a few years, who had an engaging manner and a big bankroll.

In 1998, Mr. Ray was the best man at Mr. Kerik’s wedding — and paid for much of the event. Weeks later, Mr. Kerik recommended Mr. Ray for a $100,000 job with Interstate Industrial Corporation, a New Jersey-based construction firm with tens of millions of dollars in city contracts.

Two years earlier, the owners, Peter and Frank DiTommaso, had paid more than $1 million to buy a transfer station from Edward Garafola, a mob soldier, and hoped to obtain a city operating license. But city investigators had found that the company employed mob figures and used mob-controlled trucking firms.

The DiTommasos, who adamantly and repeatedly have denied any ties to organized crime, hoped Mr. Ray could help resolve their problem with the Giuliani administration. Soon after being hired, Mr. Ray took Frank DiTommaso to meet with his friend the correction commissioner.

Mr. DiTommaso recalled the moment for city investigators: “Mr. Ray walked into the office, unannounced, just walked right in; Mr. Kerik got up and came around the desk and give him a big hug and a kiss.”

Within months, Interstate had hired Mr. Kerik’s brother and the commissioner had begun lobbying behind the scenes for Interstate.

One night in July 1999, he sat in Walker’s, a bar in downtown Manhattan, defending Interstate to Raymond V. Casey, a cousin of Mayor Giuliani who was chief of enforcement for the city commission that was reviewing Interstate’s license application. Later that year Mr. Kerik telephoned an assistant commissioner at the Department of Investigation to say that Interstate’s owners, as far as he knew, were clean of mob taint, according to a person familiar with her account.

And that September he had city detectives investigating the company meet Mr. Ray in his city office, a location that underlined for the men that the company had powerful friends.

The lobbying stopped on March 2, 2000, when Mr. Ray and Mr. Garafola, the mob soldier, were indicted on federal charges in an unrelated stock scheme. Top Giuliani officials suspended Interstate’s $85 million in city contracts.

Three weeks later, Mr. Kerik sat down for a nearly two-hour interview with top officials at the Department of Investigation. He talked about his relationship with Mr. Ray and the DiTommasos, about the hiring of his brother and the meeting at Walker’s.

He neglected to mention a key fact: Interstate was paying for $165,000 worth of renovations on his new apartment in the Bronx.

I still think the funniest part was Kerik's Ground Zero fuck-pad he had for his trysts with Hurricane Judith Regan. It's going to be fun watching Rudy run, hunched over in his Count Chocula posture, from the Mrs. Doubtfire schtick, and more seriously, from Fat Bernie's little butterball of corruption.



Yup. I can see why all those suckers paid good money to hear this clown yap about leadership and management and people skills, 'cause he clearly had them in spades. Every time this hump pulls some "Bernie who?" crap, that pic is going up. It's going to be a fun year. Run, Rudy, run!

Update: Almost forgot:



Hey, look! Rudy's got a new dress!

Like a Cheap Accordion

I swear this is true -- immediately after reading the list of Judiciary Committee members (Whitehouse, Durbin, Kerry, Kennedy, Leahy) who had declared their opposition to Mukasey's nomination, and looking over the remaining Democratic names, I locked on Feinstein and Schumer. I point this out not as verification of my prowess, but as an indicator of how tiresomely predictable they really are.

While acknowledging serious concerns about his views on interrogation techniques, Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California and Charles E. Schumer of New York said they would vote to confirm Mukasey when the Senate Judiciary Committee takes up his nomination to succeed Alberto R. Gonzales on Tuesday.

In separate statements Friday afternoon, the lawmakers praised the 66-year-old New Yorker for his legal heft and independence and said they believed he would be a powerful antidote for the Justice Department, still reeling from Gonzales' two-year, politically charged tenure.

"First and foremost, Michael Mukasey is not Alberto Gonzales," Feinstein said. "Rather, he has forged an independent life path as a practitioner of the law and a federal judge."

Jesus Christ, lady, no one asked if he was a ball-gagged leather-slave like Abu G. The question was whether he countenanced the wink-and-a-nod policy toward a technique for which people were tried at Nuremberg. That Bush was going to nominate another butt-boy was never in doubt; that he's a more qualified butt-boy than Gonzales is largely irrelevant, not that Gonzo's lack of quals stopped him in the first place.

Implicit in Feinstein's assurances is that if they knew then what they know now, they would never have voted to confirm Gonzales. Okay, fine. Here's an opportunity to prove that, and what do you do? You capitulate, once again, without even trying, happy with some closed-office concession from Mukasey that means practically nothing.

"Judge Mukasey is not my ideal choice," Schumer said. But, he said, Mukasey was "far better than anyone could expect from this administration."

But that's only because this administration would dig up John Wayne Gacy and make the Democrats suck on it if they could. Look, I can empathize with Schumer's dilemma, and his point. How many of them would now confirm a bird-brain like Harriet Miers, just to avoid Strip Search Sammy Alito? Mukasey is almost certainly the best-foot-forward nominee here; after that they'll dig up some inbred psychopath to tell us we can't handle the truth.

And hell, maybe they're right about that. Suddenly this inane argument over whether we torture or not has consumed what passes for the public debate, as if we hadn't coddled and bankrolled utter monsters for decades in the name of anti-communism. Just because we used to be more circumspect about subbing out the wet work doesn't absolve us from turning a blind eye to what our proxy torturers and dictators did to their dissenters for many years.

But now we're getting a conscience about it. Give me a fuckin' break.

"This is an extremely difficult decision," he said Friday. "When an administration so political, so out of touch with the realities of governing and so contemptuous of the rule of law is in charge, we are never left with an ideal choice."

And that's why we keep getting stuck with incompetent assholes, meat-puppets installed to maintain the administration's will to power, and only that. Instead of growing a pair and telling Bush that they will unceremoniously squash every toady he trots before them -- because, see, they're the majority party with all the committee chairmanships, and he's a 30% loser with a short-bus fan base and a year left in office -- they meekly offer bromides about compromise and bipartisanship. And gosh, Mikey told Chuckie in private that he'd never put up with gambling at the casino. I assume they BFF'd each other's binders and went back to class after that, with only a shit-eating smirk between them to let on about their dirty little secret.

Very well. Again, no surprises here. Nobody in this administration was ever going to be prosecuted by an American legislator anyway, retroactively or otherwise. Perhaps some enterprising judge in Spain or France may eventually make a post-Pinochet stab at it, but even then it seems unlikely.

Stuffing the Box

Okay, so who do ya gotta fuck to get nominated for these things anyway? I mean seriously, the Ole Perfesser for Best Individual Blogger? Malkin and Special Ed and fucking ClownHall in the running for Best Blog? What, no PowerLine? Shortest Bus, sure, but Best Blog? Must be a practical joke.

Feh. Whatever. Write in someone from the blogroll there on the right, or me, or no one at all. (Or, you know, me. Validate me, damn youse!)

Expert Opinion

The Senator once again prepares to use the only tool in his box. Bob Schieffer is pretending to be surprised and/or interested.

When he's not fantasizing about being the Miracle Whip in a Coco Crisp-Yorvit Torrealba manwich, or trying to out-butch Larry Craig and Mitch McConnell, confirmed bachelor Huckleberry Graham can be found shamelessly burnishing his foreign policy credentials at the end of the administration's knob.

I think Russia's sending all the wrong signals to Iran. When the Russian president goes to Iran and does a news conference with the Iranian president, embraces him, calls for other nations not to consider attacking Iran, it sends the wrong signal. I think the United Nations efforts to sanction Iran have been pitiful because of Russian --Russia and China vetoing a resolution. The European Union has some sanctions; they're fairly weak. We're having stronger sanctions, but they're unilateral. So in this regard I agree with the following, that the diplomatic efforts to control Iran need to continue, they need to be more robust, but we're sending mixed signals. The UN is becoming ineffective when it comes to regulating rogue regimes, and Russia is sending all the wrong signals as far as I'm concerned, so I understand why the president had to do what he did unilaterally.

Yeah. Gee, if you didn't know better you might start to think that Russia and China have actively cultivated a geopolitical stance that conforms more to their interests than to ours. Indeed, you might even say that these interests are at cross purposes to ours.

The rise of a powerful and wealthy resources-based corporate state in Russia ("sovereign democracy"), its rapidly expanding control over global strategic resources, and the resultant loss of leadership and control of the global oil market by the West's oil majors are developments that move directly against the very foundations of the US-led oil-market order and the wider US-centric global economic order. This is because Russia is quite literally fueling the rise of the powerhouse economies of the East and helping to achieve a new global center of economic power in the East.

It was also Russia that fundamentally led, along with its key partner China, the opposition to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. It has been Russia first and foremost that has taken leadership among its strategic partners since then to continue to stand firm inside and outside the United Nations in a hugely successful strategy to force the full and mounting geopolitical, economic and military burdens of Iraq on to US and British shoulders alone.

Thereby, Russia has taken the lead in proving that the US-dominated geopolitical order can be successfully opposed. Consequently, it has clearly been primarily under Russia's leadership that the US-dominated global oil-market, global economic and geopolitical orders are being transformed, circumvented and opposed by growing numbers of the world's nations.

So Graham is either woefully unaware, willfully obtuse, or just being a cynical jerkoff here. Putin is sending the exact signals he means to send; whatever dispute there may as to the goodness of his soul, the man is reputed to be a master chess player, and seems temperamentally disinclined to leave much of anything to chance. He is sending us signals, and only a complete donut-head would fail to notice that. He did not go to Tehran to shake down the Iranians by embarrassing them with the threat of sanctions; he went to let them know that he can do bidness with them, and deal with us on his own terms.

Now, we are all in agreement that mullahs with nukes is an immensely undesirable situation. But setting aside Ahmadinejad's cartoonish anti-Zionist rhetoric, the fact is that Iran is surrounded by unstable and/or hostile neighbors, several of which (Pakistan, India, Russia, and of course Israel) have nuclear arsenals. So of course they're going to want the capability, partly for the symbolic effect of deterrence, but also as a symbol of national achievement, and again keeping pace with unreliable neighbors.

And we wring our hands with lurid tales of crazed mullahs lobbing their new toy at Tel Aviv or the Eiffel Tower, but maybe Vladimir Putin knows something that Huckleberry Graham (he of the "five rugs for five bucks" Iraqi marketplace shopping spree) doesn't. After all, as much of a nuisance as we regard these guys, they're in Pooty-Poot's backyard. And with a weakening dollar and oil pushing past $90/bbl, unilateral sanctions have very little real leverage.

What's the answer? I don't know, and neither does Graham. I do know that, even if air strikes were somehow insanely decided to be the best course of action, I'd rather have Keifer Sutherland drive back from a bender at Scores than give the Cheneyites any more tasks involving people's lives.