March 11, 2008
Details Don't Add Up in ABC Report of Eliot Spitzer Bust
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When banks and other financial institutions are suspicious about customer transactions, they are supposed to file "Suspicious Activity Reports" with the Financial Crimes Enforecement Network (FinCEN), a unit of the Department of the Treasury that is distinct from the IRS. FinCEN reviews the information and passes it along to the appropriate law enforcement agency.
FinCEN is not part of the IRS. This is a mistake on a par with saying the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section were a part of the FBI.
Someone in the loop here doesn't understand how money laundering and other financial crimes are investigated. Maybe it is ABC's Brian Ross. Or maybe Ross is just being a stenographer for his source, and his source was being sloppy.
Or maybe his source was one of those Regent University School of Law grads who infest the Bush Justice Dept., who have a better understanding of team play and party loyalty than they do of, well, the law.
If I were trying to misdirect people away from a politicized takedown of a powerful governor from the enemy party, I would want to get the details of my cover story right.
Tags: eliot spitzer prostitution corruption justice dept scandal brian ross irs fincen suspicious activity report sar public integrity section politicization
February 29, 2008
White House Aide Nailed for Plagiarism
 Tim Goeglein, Plagiarist image source: New York Times |
Blogger and former News-Sentinel columnist Nancy Nall discovered the forgery, a column that was largely lifted from an essay by Jeffery Hart that had appeared in the Dartmouth Review. A commenter in Nall's blog discovered another forgery, an column on Hoagy Carmichael that was lifted from a piece by Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post
Goeglein has acknowledged one of the forgeries, and the paper has pulled that column.
Goeglein was Karl Rove's right-hand man prior to Rove's departure, responsible for reaching out to conservative and Christian group on behalf of the White House.
It is not known how being unmasked as a plagiarist is going to affect Goeglein's status at the White House. His moral turpitude might appall ordinary Americans, but it is par for the course for the Bush Administration.
UPDATE: Goeglin resigns his White House staff position. (hat tip to David Kurtz at TPM)
(via Atrios)
Tags: tim goeglein karl rove bush white house plagiarism plagiarist scandal shame journalism nancy nall
February 22, 2008
The McCain-Iseman Scandal: It's the Influence-Peddling, Stupid
L to R: Charles H. Keating, Jr., John McCain, Vicki Iseman
Scandalmongers and their eager audience are focused on the hints of sexual hanky-panky between John McCain and lobbyist Vicki Iseman. As Mark Klieman points out, however, the real meat of the scandal shows up clearly in Libby Quaid's story that went out over the Associated Press wire yesterday:
In late 1999, McCain twice wrote letters to the Federal Communications Commission on behalf of Florida-based Paxson Communications — which had paid Iseman as its lobbyist — urging quick consideration of a proposal to buy a television station license in Pittsburgh. At the time, Paxson's chief executive, Lowell W. "Bud" Paxson, also was a major contributor to McCain's 2000 presidential campaign.McCain did not urge the FCC commissioners to approve the proposal, but he asked for speedy consideration of the deal, which was pending from two years earlier. In an unusual response, then-FCC Chairman William Kennard complained that McCain's request "comes at a sensitive time in the deliberative process" and "could have procedural and substantive impacts on the commission's deliberations and, thus, on the due process rights of the parties."
McCain wrote the letters after he received more than $20,000 in contributions from Paxson executives and lobbyists. Paxson also lent McCain his company's jet at least four times during 1999 for campaign travel.
In short, McCain intervened with federal regulators on behalf of a major campaign contributor — exactly the same as he did for Charles Keating a decade earlier. That contributor was represented on Capitol Hill by Vicki Iseman. The New York Times article coyly hints that, in McCain's confrontation with aides over his frequent association with Iseman, he "acknowledged behaving inappropriately" with Iseman. The tenor of the surrounding paragraphs implies that the impropriety was a personal one, but Libby Quaid's reporting makes it unambiguously one of quid pro quo influence peddling.
What's more, it's still going on. Today's Washington Post has a front-page story, The Anti-Lobbyist, Advised by Lobbyists, detailing the heavy-hitting lobbyist background of McCain's senior campaign advisors, at least some of whom are donating their time to the campaign.
Preaching fiery sermons of integrity and incorruptibility, while at the same time booking first-class seats on the gravy train, John McCain is the Elmer Gantry of influence peddling.
The illicit-sex angle of this scandal may be a complete red herring. In another post, Mark Kleiman quotes a lengthy comment from a female acquaintance who is very familiar with the corridors of power in Washington, D.C.:
It is equally plausible that the McCain-Iseman relationship played out differently: Iseman has a job to do so she cozys up to the Senator, they have a few drinks with a few telecomm guys. They get to know each other and like each other (think Hillary and McCain drinking vodka together and deciding the other is not so bad) — he likes having a cute young lady around who fawns over him, she likes the access.Now she's found her "in" and exploits it. He continues to like having her around. Both know theres a flirty kind of thing going on but nothing actually ever happens. She hooks him up with people she knows and the beat goes on.
The staff, however, have a different view. They don't care what the boss is actually doing, they're worried about appearance. So they make their move and get her out of the picture. This is problematic for her because access is what keeps her bosses happy. They want to know why they had him on a jet last week and this week she can't go to the office. ...
I'm just really concerned about automatically attacking a young woman who is successful (albeit in a shady industry) for doing her job, which is to get close to these guys. Now true, perhaps her intellect should be driving this equation, but she probably made the decision that she'll play the cards she's dealt. It's her brain that will get her through the situation, but if her brain in a cute dress is what gets her there, so be it. She has a job to do. This is the system that needs to be attacked, rather than attacking every single female blonde lobbyist in town for being a vamp and determining that they must be sleeping with the guy.
(via Matt Yglesias and TPM Muckraker)
Previously in As I Please:
NY Times: John McCain Possibly Romantically Linked to Lobbyist
NY Times' Adam Nagourney Whitewashes McCain's Campaign Finance Record
Tags: john mccain vicki iseman scandal bimbo eruption appearance of impropriety influence peddling politics campaign ethics keating five lies corruption
February 21, 2008
NY Times: John McCain Possibly Romantically Linked to Lobbyist
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Vicki Iseman image source: Alcalde & Fay |
The New York Times reports that Vicki Iseman, a lobbyist for the telecommunications industry, had been often seen with John McCain in the runup to his 2000 presidential campaign, visiting him in his offices, turning up at fund-raisers, traveling with him in corporate jets provided by her clients. The frequency of Iseman's presence with McCain led senior aides to suspect a romantic involvement. They warned Iseman away from McCain, and McCain away from Iseman. The Times reports that in one confrontation between McCain and his aides, McCain "acknowledged behaving inappropriately" with Iseman.
The Washington Post corroborates the story, citing a claim by former McCain aide John Weaver that he met with Iseman and told her to stay away from McCain.
Shortly after the Times broke the story, Iseman's staff biography disappeared from the Web site of Alcade & Fay, Iseman's employer. That biography remains on the Wayback Machine, however.
McCain's response to the story is his usual one to trouble: lying about it. Here is a statement from the McCain campaign:
It is a shame that The New York Times has lowered its standards to engage in a hit-and-run smear campaign. John McCain has a 24-year record of serving our country with honor and integrity. He has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists, and he will not allow a smear campaign to distract from the issues at stake in this election.Americans are sick and tired of this kind of gutter politics, and there is nothing in this story to suggest that John McCain has ever violated the principles that have guided his career.
Can anyone believe that John McCain would have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously? At least some of John McCain's violations of the public trust are a matter of public record. John McCain did some great big favors for Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings & Loan, and if that is not a special interest then the words have no meaning. The second paragraph has a seed of truth, however: Nothing in this story violates any principles that guide McCain's career, for the simple reason that he has none.
You cannot prove a negative. Hard evidence — incriminating photographs, say, or a strand of her pubic hair entangled in a used condom containing his semen — could conceivably indicate that McCain and Iseman had a sexual relationship; but no evidence in the world can show that they have not.
But there is a very simple thing McCain can do that would convince me that there was no such sexual relationship: If he claimed that he and Iseman had slept together, I could trust that he was lying as usual.
Previously in As I Please
Open Letter to Duncan Black
McCain's Baghdad Market Stroll Evokes Memories of the 1980s
NY Times' Adam Nagourney Whitewashes McCain's Campaign Finance Record
Does Possible John Glenn Endorsement Mean Hillary Clinton Prepares to Battle McCain?
Tags: john mccain vicki iseman scandal bimbo eruption appearance of impropriety politics campaign ethics keating five lies corruption
NY Times: John McCain Possibly Romantically Linked to Lobbyist
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Vicki Iseman image source: Alcalde & Fay |
The New York Times reports that Vicki Iseman, a lobbyist for the telecommunications industry, had been often seen with John McCain in the runup to his 2000 presidential campaign, visiting him in his offices, turning up at fund-raisers, traveling with him in corporate jets provided by her clients. The frequency of Iseman's presence with McCain led senior aides to suspect a romantic involvement. They warned Iseman away from McCain, and McCain away from Iseman. The Times reports that in one confrontation between McCain and his aides, McCain "acknowledged behaving inappropriately" with Iseman.
The Washington Post corroborates the story, citing a claim by former McCain aide John Weaver that he met with Iseman and told her to stay away from McCain.
Shortly after the Times broke the story, Iseman's staff biography disappeared from the Web site of Alcade & Fay, Iseman's employer. That biography remains on the Wayback Machine, however.
McCain's response to the story is his usual one to trouble: lying about it. Here is a statement from the McCain campaign:
It is a shame that The New York Times has lowered its standards to engage in a hit-and-run smear campaign. John McCain has a 24-year record of serving our country with honor and integrity. He has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists, and he will not allow a smear campaign to distract from the issues at stake in this election.Americans are sick and tired of this kind of gutter politics, and there is nothing in this story to suggest that John McCain has ever violated the principles that have guided his career.
Can anyone believe that John McCain would have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously? At least some of John McCain's violations of the public trust are a matter of public record. John McCain did some great big favors for Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings & Loan, and if that is not a special interest then the words have no meaning. The second paragraph has a seed of truth, however: Nothing in this story violates any principles that guide McCain's career, for the simple reason that he has none.
You cannot prove a negative. Hard evidence — incriminating photographs, say, or a strand of her pubic hair entangled in a used condom containing his semen — could conceivably indicate that McCain and Iseman had a sexual relationship; but no evidence in the world can show that they have not.
But there is a very simple thing McCain can do that would convince me that there was no such sexual relationship: If he claimed that he and Iseman had slept together, I could trust that he was lying as usual.
Previously in As I Please
Open Letter to Duncan Black
McCain's Baghdad Market Stroll Evokes Memories of the 1980s
NY Times' Adam Nagourney Whitewashes McCain's Campaign Finance Record
Does Possible John Glenn Endorsement Mean Hillary Clinton Prepares to Battle McCain?
Tags: john mccain vicki iseman scandal bimbo eruption appearance of impropriety politics campaign ethics keating five lies corruption
February 10, 2008
Did Maureen Dowd Mistake a Journalist for Michelle Obama?
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, roundly despised for the vapidity of her high-school-clique political journalism, is at the middle of a controversy about mistaken identity involving Dowd, another reporter, and Michelle Obama (wife of presidential candidate Barack Obama):
It all started when Michelle Henery, a columnist for the Times of London, penned a story about her experience in the press room after last week's Democratic debate in Los Angeles.Henery, who is African-American, wrote that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, "one of my journalistic heroes," approached her, "greeting me like a long-lost friend." Henery was flattered and shocked until "Maureen's sweet smile turned into embarrassed confusion and she scampered off."
The next day, Henery says she e-mailed her friends, who told her that Dowd must have confused her with Michelle Obama, the wife of presidential contender Barack Obama.
Dowd insists that this never happened. She has complained to the Times, and Henery's column has been removed from the Times' Web site.
Is Henery making the story up out of whole cloth? Did she mistake some other red-headed press corps Spite Girl for Dowd? Or is it the case that the Queen of Mean can dish it out but cannot take it, and is covering up her faux pas with a temper tantrum?
It's hard to tell whom to believe. On the one hand, Dowd insists she wasn't where Henery says she was — but Dowd has a past history of lying about where she has been. On the other hand, Henery describes Dowd as "one of [her] journalistic heroes." How can you take her seriously when her judgment is so egregiously bad?
(via Avedon Carol)
Tags: maureen dowd michelle henery michelle obama obama ny times london times mistaken identity journalism mean girl journalism politics race racism
January 18, 2008
Anti-Gay Bigot Wins Young-Adult Fiction Award
The Young Adult Library Services Association has awarded the Margaret A. Edwards Award to Orson Scott Card. Card publicly advocates the jailing of gay-rights activists.
According to School Library Journal, which sponsors the award, the specific body of work for which Card is cited — his novels Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow — do not explicitly reflect Card's views on homosexuality. Nevertheless, critics say that his public record of homophobia should have been a factor in the award jury's deliberations. David Levithan, author of gay-themed YA literature says:
“I would like to believe that the Edwards committee would not have honored someone who had written essays that were as racist or as anti-Semitic as Card’s are anti-gay. The charter of the Edwards award says that it “recognizes an author’s work in helping adolescents become aware of themselves and addressing questions about their role and importance in relationships, society, and in the world”—I think Card’s writings on homosexuality do the exact opposite of that.”
Anti-gay essays aside, one has to wonder what the award jury was thinking. The moral underpinnings of Ender's Game, in which the intent of the actor outweighs morally the outcome of the action, may well be important in terms of understanding how America as a culture can kill half a million Iraqis in order to bring them freedom and democracy. But recognizing the widespread impact of an evil idea is not the same as celebrating its goodness.
(via Farah Mendlesohn)
January 10, 2008
Howto: Hack a Diebold Voting Machine
The gap between polling and voting results in New Hampshire last Tuesday has suddenly made this picture more topical. Why settle for making just your own vote count?
How to Hack a Diebold Voting Machine
Originally uploaded by joshillustrates.
January 05, 2008
New Jersey Legislator Says US Blacks Should Thank the Lord for Slavery
Michael Patrick Carroll, a Republican member of the New Jersey state assembly, says that African-Americans should be thankful for slavery:
[I]f slavery was the price that a modern American's ancestors had to pay in order to make one an American, one should get down on one's knees every single day and thank the Lord that such price was paid.
Carroll made these remarks in expressing his opposition to a bill before the assembly that if passed would make New Jersey the first northern state to express apology for the institution of slavery. Alabama, Maryland, North Carolina and Virginia have passed similar apology bills, and another is being considered by the Georgia legislature.
Yes, thank the Lord for slavery, without which it wouldn't be true that in California a black man is more likely to go to prison than to a state college. Those poor bastards who died in shackles in the Middle Passage were just unlucky. Jim Crow, segregation, lynchings, drugs in the ghetto — Praise Jesus!
(via Mary Shaw)
January 02, 2008
RIAA: Nodding and Grooving While Wearing Headphones is Piracy
IPod-listeners beware. The Recording Industry Association of America aims to stamp out piracy.
The RIAA is taking the position, in its suits against alleged file-sharers, that making personal copies of music CDs onto one's own computer hard drive is unlawful. But sources close to the recording industry have revealed to As I Please's team of investigative reporters the next front soon to be opened in the RIAA's war against piracy: grooving to music in public.
 Is this music piracy? |
Some industry observers say that a music pirate on a subway, city bus, or even just walking down the street, must actually sing along or at least hum the tune for infringement, or "pirate performance" to take place.
But the RIAA holds that anyone who grooves to headphone music even silently is a pirate performer. "That's stolen music in the first place," says one source. "Even if the courts holds that some pirate performance is not music theft — and no court has yet said that it is not — the sort of scum who engages in pirate performance is in all probability grooving to stolen music in the first place. It's prima facie evidence of piracy. It's probable cause for police investigation."
Asked if cracking down on subway music listeners might be seen by the public at large as unfairly targeting people of specific cultural backgrounds, the source responded, "The RIAA has a zero-tolerance policy towards piracy. The problem keeps growing. We need to get the message out to the public: Pirates aren't cool. Piracy sucks."
July 29, 2007
Where White House Bipartisanship Comes From
What does it take to get the Bush Administration to reach out to congressional Democrats on matters of foreign policy?
As Steve Benen of The Carpetbagger Report tells us, Bush will do it when the Saudis order him to do it:
The Bush administration is preparing to ask Congress to approve an arms sale package for Saudi Arabia and its neighbors that is expected to eventually total $20 billion at a time when some United States officials contend that the Saudis are playing a counterproductive role in Iraq. ... The Saudis had requested that Congress be told about the planned sale, the officials said, in an effort to avoid the kind of bruising fight on Capitol Hill that occurred in the 1980s over proposed arms sales to the kingdom.
July 26, 2007
Weekly World News to Cease Publication Next Month
 image source: Wikipedia |
The Weekly World News shunned the usual tabloid fare of celebrity gossip. Instead, it focused upon the weird, the bizarre, the fake. Although somebody somewhere believed its accounts of the Batboy, half-human, half-bat, found in a cave as an infant, or of the presence of aliens in the Clinton-era congress, it was clearly not intended to be taken seriously. Hipsters would pass copies around at parties and solemnly declare how the WWN was an important beta-tester of every new version of Adobe Photoshop.
American Media's reasons for closing down the paper are not clear. Some people point to declining circulation; others cite AMI's more general financial difficulties. But as Paul Krassner famously said about his satire zine The Realist, it's tough to come up with plausible satire in a world where Spiro Agnew regularly makes the headlines; and it is especially tough to publish a paper full of preposterous news when anyone with an appetite for falsehood simply need to tune to Fox News or read Matt Drudge on the Web.
(via Scott McLemee at Crooked Timber)
July 24, 2007
Congress Has the Power to Arrest, Imprison Those Who Defy Subpoenas
While the criminal gang of hoodlums and thieves known throughout the underworld as the "Bush Administration" express their literal contempt of Congress by claiming that the legal offices held by some of its members renders the gang immune to prosecution or even subpoena, the fact remains that Congress has the legal power and the legal resources to arrest and detain gang members who defy congressional orders to testify before congressional committees:
Yet under historic and undisturbed law, Congress can enforce its own orders against recalcitrant witnesses without involving the executive branch and without leaving open the possibility of presidential pardon.And a Supreme Court majority would find it hard to object in the face of two entrenched legal principles.
That's Prof. Frank Askin, who teaches at the Rutgers University School of Law and is director of the Rutgers Constitutional Litigation Clinic, writing an op-ed in the Washington Post.
Askin reminds us that:
- Apart from requesting assistance from the US Attorney to prosecute those who defy Congressional subpoenas for contempt of Congress, the sargeants-at-arms of both the House of representatives and the Senate have the lawful power to arrest and detain those who defy those subpoenas.
- This power has been upheld again and again by the Supreme Court.
- The power of pardon constitutionally alotted to whomever holds the office of President of the United States does not extend to civil contempt. The President has no lawful authority to compel the release of a person arrested by Congress for defying a Congressional subpoena.
It is high time that Congress used this lawful power to enforce its subpoenas of those gangsters who infest the Executive Branch.
(via David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo)
July 18, 2007
SF Chronicle Writer Doesn't Know Dick About Porn
Jim Mitchell died of apparent heart failure last Thursday. He and his brother Artie comprised the Mitchell Brothers, San Francisco's reigning sex impresarios and pornographers. As such they were key figures in the city's history, from the late 1960s through the '90s, when Jim Mitchell shot his brother to death in 1991, and served a three-year sentence on a manslaughter charge. The murder and subsequent sensational trial was the climax of a rich and colorful history at the intersection of sex, commerce, law enforcement, the counterculture, and local politics.
Steven Winn of the San Francisco Chronicle looks back today at the Mitchell Brothers' history and legacy. He doesn't seem to like that history and legacy, and peppers his brief history with wags of his finger about the alleged social harm caused by pornography, both in the Mitchells' heyday and as available now over the Internet. But he gets his facts wrong:
Now, in a digital age where Eros has become irreversibly virtual on the Internet, Mitchell's death punctuates the end of an era that he long outlived. Today's aspiring versions of the Mitchell Brothers wouldn't dream of investing in urban real estate or relishing public dustups with local politicians. They'd be operating under the radar, selling their Web wares from some garage in Bakersfield or a back bedroom in Fresno.
Aspiring sex impresarios don't invest in urban real estate? Someone should tell Kink.com's Peter Acworth about it. Far from flying under the radar, Acworth purchased the San Francisco Armory, on Mission Street, last January and is using the space for video production for his erotic Internet empire. The purchase even included . Come on, reporters are supposed to have a clue about what happens in their town, aren't they?
That was Winn's second paragraph in which he made this egregious error of substance. It's hard to take seriously the rest of his fingerwagging and tut-tutting of the contemporary porn business when he shows so quickly that he obviously doesn't have a clue about its workings.
If you are interested in the remarkable history of Jim and Artie Mitchell's empire of commercial sex, I recommend David McCumber's book, X Rated: The Mitchell Brothers: A True Story of Sex, Money, and Death (Simon & Schuster, 1992), which covers Mitchell Brothers' story from their beginnings in Antioch, California, building their empire in San Francisco in the '60s and 70s, through the killing of Artie Mitchell and Jim Mitchell's subsequent trial.
July 10, 2007
Nebraska Governor's Censorship Endangers Nebraskans' Lives
Violet Blue calls our attention to how Nebraska's Republican governor Dave Heineman is putting his constituents' lives in jeopardy by silencing the Nebraska state health agency on matters of sexual health.
JoAnne Young of the Lincoln Journal Star reports that Heineman has muzzled the state Health and Human Services System, prohibiting it from using the words "sex" or "sexual," or including any "controversial content" in any public communication. All contraception is controversial, apparently. So is any mention that sexually-transmitted diseases are transmitted sexually. Apparently, unlucky Nebraskans are touched by the magic wand of the Chlamydia Fairy, at least insofar as the HHSS is able to communicate about the transmission of chlamydia.
Blue quotes from an email she received from a Nebraska Planned Parenthood worker:
My job as an sex educator is solely prevention and information. EVERY SINGLE DAY I talk to teens who are hurt physically and emotionally by the withholding of vital sexual health information. I have kids cry in my office because their parents, teachers, or other caregivers NEVER talked to them honestly about sex or healthy relationships. By the time one student made it to my office, she had two pregnancies, one of which was terminated because her much older boyfriend threw her down the stairs at 7 months pregnant. The other, a miscarriage at the age of 13...too afraid to tell anyone she bled profusely by herself. The mentor who brought her into my office later reported to me that she actually jumped up and down because she finally, FINALLY, had the sex talk with someone. This information served a good purpose, but how would her life been different if it had occurred years earlier????
Gov. Heineman asserts that his policy is motivated by his "pro-life" values. He asserts that Nebraska is a "pro-life state." His policy, however, jeopardizing citizen's lives by withholding from them information about life-and-death matters of public health, is more accurately described as "pro-death."
DOJ Attorney Speaks Out Against Corruption in His Department
John S. Koppel, a civil appellate attorney who has worked for the Department of Justice since 1981, wrote an op-ed for the Denver Post last week that is a scathing denunciation of the Gonzales DOJ:
As a longtime attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, I can honestly say that I have never been as ashamed of the department and government that I serve as I am at this time.The public record now plainly demonstrates that both the DOJ and the government as a whole have been thoroughly politicized in a manner that is inappropriate, unethical and indeed unlawful. The unconscionable commutation of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's sentence, the misuse of warrantless investigative powers under the Patriot Act and the deplorable treatment of U.S. attorneys all point to an unmistakable pattern of abuse.
In the course of its tenure since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has turned the entire government (and the DOJ in particular) into a veritable Augean stable on issues such as civil rights, civil liberties, international law and basic human rights, as well as criminal prosecution and federal employment and contracting practices. It has systematically undermined the rule of law in the name of fighting terrorism, and it has sought to insulate its actions from legislative or judicial scrutiny and accountability by invoking national security at every turn, engaging in persistent fearmongering, routinely impugning the integrity and/or patriotism of its critics, and protecting its own lawbreakers. This is neither normal government conduct nor "politics as usual," but a national disgrace of a magnitude unseen since the days of Watergate - which, in fact, I believe it eclipses.
Koppel is singularly aware of the risk he is taking:
I realize that this constitutionally protected statement subjects me to a substantial risk of unlawful reprisal from extremely ruthless people who have repeatedly taken such action in the past. But I am confident that I am speaking on behalf of countless thousands of honorable public servants, at Justice and elsewhere, who take their responsibilities seriously and share these views. And some things must be said, whatever the risk.
John S. Koppel is a hero. We need more people like him, both in public service and in the public at large.
July 06, 2007
Moonbats All Over Are Linking Universal Health Care to Terrorism
The reaction to Michael Moore's film Sicko must be scaring the guy at the keyboard of the Mighty Wurlitzer. All of a sudden wingnuts are popping up echoing the talking point that universal health care coverage fosters Islamic terrorism.
Here's Fox News' Neil Cavuto querying Jerry Bowyer, a flesh-and-blood sockpuppet manipulated by the hand of Richard Mellon Scaife:
Josh Marshall is on the case. He has found the talking point being flogged on MSNBC and in the New York Sun as well.
Of course, the link between national health care and terrorism is about as substantial as the case for sending US troops to fight the insurgency in Narnia. But that doesn't stop the Right-Wing Noise Machine. It's only a matter of time before talk radio hosts and Matt Drudge join the noisome chorus.
July 04, 2007
Sicko Galvanizes Audiences to Activism
A spectre is haunting movie theaters — the spectre of Michael Moore's Sicko.
Cinema Blend's Josh Tyler went to a theater in a suburban Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex mall to view Moore's documentary about the state of health care in the United States. When the film was over, this is what he found in the lobby:
[T]he theater was in chaos. The entire Sicko audience had somehow formed an impromptu town hall meeting in front of the ladies room. I’ve never seen anything like it. This is Texas goddammit, not France or some liberal college campus. But here these people were, complete strangers from every walk of life talking excitedly about the movie. It was as if they simply couldn’t go home without doing something drastic about what they’d just seen. My redneck compadre and his new friend found their wives at the center of the group, while I lingered in the background waiting for my spouse to emerge.The talk gradually centered around a core of 10 or 12 strangers in a cluster while the rest of us stood around them listening intently to this thing that seemed to be happening out of nowhere. The black gentleman engaged by my redneck in the restroom shouted for everyone’s attention. The conversation stopped instantly as all eyes in this group of 30 or 40 people were now on him. “If we just see this and do nothing about it,” he said, “then what’s the point? Something has to change.” There was silence, then the redneck’s wife started calling for email addresses. Suddenly everyone was scribbling down everyone else’s email, promising to get together and do something… though no one seemed to know quite what. It was as if I’d just stepped into the world’s most bizarre protest rally, except instead of hippies the group was comprised of men and women of every age, skin color, income, and walk of life coming together on something that had shaken them deeply, and to the core.
In all my thirty years on this earth, I have never ever seen any movie have this kind of unifying effect on people. It was like I was standing there, at the birth of a new political movement. Even after 9/11, there was never a reaction like this, at least not in Texas. If Sicko truly has this sort of power, then Michael Moore has done something beyond amazing. If it can change people, affect people like this in the conservative hotbed of Texas, then Sicko isn’t just a great movie, seeing it may be one of the most important things you do all year.
(via Boing Boing)
July 03, 2007
Gordon Brown Makes His Saving Throw
Gamemaster Karl Rove, "Gordon is the new PM in Britain. How do you react?"Several players confer. "We bomb him! We've got a couple of Drummer Girl car bombs — Mercedes packed with explosives. And, uh, an SUV we can set on fire."
Gordon comes to table, balancing several rulebooks, a pint of Guinness, and a plate of munchies, and whines, "I say, fellows, that's not cricket. I haven't even had a chance to finish rolling for power, status, and charm."
Terrorist gives him a long, disbelieving look. "Why are you talking like Bertie Wooster?"
"Weel, I'm trying me best. Taking lessons in deportment and eeelocution from some Sassenach. He said I should try to talk like Hugh Grant looks. Vapidly English, ye ken."
Terrorists laugh so hard one of them chokes on a Twinkie and has to be pounded on the back.
Gamemaster sighs loudly. "Well, Mr. Prime Minister, *sir*, don't worry about rolling for charm. This is a guaranteed way to get a lot of approval points fast. Just don't piss them away like Dubya there."
Dubya, drunkenly waving a whiskey bottle, "I'm a Paladin! Anything I do is right! Anybody doesn't approve, they must be the Ack-ack-axis of Evil."
Everyone ignores him.
The GM says, "To get back to reality, guys, Gordon needs to roll for damage. Roll three D20s."
"Yes! Yes! Total of four, you terrorist bastards! Hah, see what you get for attacking the British lion!"
Rove consults a chart. "Sorry, boys, your Mercedes car bombs don't make it. One gets towed, and the other is discovered and disarmed. But the SUV...."
Terrorists hold their breath.
"The SUV doesn't explode on impact, and when you set it on fire, you're caught and arrested. Now roll for damages from the flames."
July 02, 2007
Bill O'Reilly Warns Nation of Lesbian Gangs
Did Bill O'Reilly mistake porn video director Winkytiki's magnum opus, The Rebelle Rousers [NSFW] for cinema verité journalism? Or has he been smoking the stuff they sell in Amsterdam's "coffeeshops"? (For the record, I didn't see him there.)
Watch this video of O'Reilly on Fox News on June 21. It defies description. Tom Tomorrow does a yeoman's job of trying:
The things I learn from Bill O’Reilly
The new menace sweeping the nation is Lesbian Gangs which force unwitting teenagers into lesbian sex by threatening them with pink 9mm Glocks.
The preceeding sentence was not a satire of Bill O’Reilly, but rather, an accurate summary of the report I just watched.
(via Violet Blue)
June 18, 2007
Why Has Sonoma County Water Agency Imposed Water Rationing?
Michael Cabanatuan of the San Francisco Chronicle reported last Friday that the Sonoma County Water Agency was imposing a 15% mandatory reduction of water usage by its clients. Other Bay Area water agencies have expressed concern about the reduced snowfall this past winter in the Sierras, but so far have been expressing confidence about not needing to impose rationing this year. (If this coming winter's Sierra snowpack isn't adequate, however, things willl change next year.)
Why is the Sonoma County Water Agency imposing rationing when other water agencies and districts are more confident? Cabanatuan had this to say:
The Sonoma County Water Agency was directed by the State Water Resources Control Board on Wednesday to reduce its water diversions from the Russian River by 15 percent to protect the fall spawning of salmon. That order spurred Thursday's restrictions, which will be implemented by individual water districts and other entities that get water from the agency.While flows in the Russian River are down because of the dry winter, Sonoma's situation is complicated by reduced flows into one of its reservoirs, Lake Mendocino, because of changed federal licensing requirements for a Pacific Gas and Electric Co. hydroelectric power plant upstream.
Notice the tortured syntax of the sentence that makes up the second paragraph of that quote. Cabanatuan doesn't answer the basic questions of who, when, and why. Every journalist should have these drilled into their head early and often in their education and professional life.
Inflow into Lake Mendocino is down? Why? Because "federal licensing requirements" for a PG&E hydroelectric plant have "changed." What are these licensing requirements, how have they changed, and why do they result in less water being available for Lake Mendocino and the SCWA? Who changed them? Why?
In the context of the most corrupt federal administration since the death of Warren G. Harding, journalists should be naturally skeptical of blandly turgid description of federal rules changes that affect people's lives and livelihoods like this. It appears that the sickness in American journalism isn't just evident in the chumminess of the Washington press corps, but at all levels of the news media.
Michael Cabanatuan should drop what he is doing and read Ron Fournier's memo to Associated Press staffers and stringers about the imperative for journalists to hold government spinmeisters accountable, dig deeper, ask the next question, and not settle for predigested talking points. Then he should go back and dig deeper into the story of this PG&E hydroelecric plant and its impact on water availability in Sonoma County.
June 15, 2007
With a Friend Like Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby Needs No Enemies
Can't Paul Wolfowitz do anything right?
Sidney Blumenthal in Salon describes the letter Wolfowitz wrote to US Distict Judge Reggie Walton as a character reference for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Walton was about to sentence Libby after the vice-presidential aide's conviction for perjury and obstruction of the investigation of the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame.
Wolfowitz's letter is a prosecutor's dream, providing evidence that Libby knew that Plame would be in danger if her cover was blown, and that blowing her cover would in fact be a crime, notwithstanding Libby's protestations of ignorance in the trial.
Quoth Blumenthal:
According to Wolfowitz's account, Libby was an indispensable man in ending the Cold War, winning the Gulf War and waging the "global war on terror." But he was also, Wolfowitz writes, of "service to individuals."The leading example he offers is a stunning revelation, which does not reflect on Libby's charity, compassion and sympathy as Wolfowitz might imagine. The story about Libby "involves his effort to persuade a newspaper not to publish information that would have endangered the life of a covert CIA agent working overseas. Late into the evening, long after most others had left the matter to be dealt with the next day, Mr. Libby worked to collect the information that was needed to persuade the editor not to run the story."
Unintentionally and foolishly, Wolfowitz has hanged the guilty man again. Wolfowitz's defense of Libby is composed with the same care and skill that Wolfowitz brought to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, creating the opposite effects of what he desired. In this bizarre disclosure, rather than exculpating Libby, Wolfowitz incriminates him; for this story is damning evidence of Libby's state of mind — that he knew he was engaged in wrongdoing in leaking the identity of a CIA covert operative, Valerie Plame Wilson, to two reporters, Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matt Cooper of Time magazine, and in vouchsafing it to White House press secretary Ari Fleischer for the purpose of his leaking it to the press, which he promptly did. ...
If Wolfowitz remembers the story, and it's credible, so Libby must recall it too. Therefore, he must also have known that his defense was based on false premises contrary to what he understood to be right and how he had acted in the past. He sent his attorneys to court to make a case he consciously knew was wrong from his own prior experience of having protected a national security asset from exposure. One can only wonder if Libby ever told his lawyers the story that Wolfowitz has recounted or whether he misled them, too.
In science fiction fandom, we call this sort of thing "Gerberization," after Les Gerber, a fan active in the 1950s and 60s:
In his early teens, in the pages of CRY OF THE NAMELESS, Les defended someone so ineptly and to such excess that "to Gerberize" became the fannish verb defining this practice while "to be Gerberized" meant having the practice performed on you.
Poor Scooter Libby: Paul Wolfowitz thoroughly Gerberized him. With a friend like that, who needs enemies?
(via Avedon Carol)
June 13, 2007
NBC Video Shows Bush Removing Own Watch
A video on YouTube from NBC shows Bush's disappearing watch "disappearing" into his own pocket.
This Reuters page has the original video plus some stills at the end showing Bush putting the watch in his shirt pocket. The accompanying text story, though, says, Photographs showed Bush, surrounded by five bodyguards, putting his hands behind his back so one of the bodyguards could remove his watch.
They still can't get their story straight.
June 12, 2007
Bush's Watch Stolen in Albanian Crowd?
George W. Bush, flanked by Secret Service agents, worked the crowd at a public appearance in Albania. Fifty seconds into this video from Albanian broadcast news, we can see the watch on Bush's left wrist. A few moments later, surrounded by a forest of hands, he glances downward. Moments after that, his left wrist is bare.
Here, on a Dutch-language page, is a version of the video that is crisper than the crappy one from YouTube, and it also draws helpful circles showing the watch on Bush's wrist before and the bare wrist after.
(YouTube video via Kieran Healy; Dutch video via Mark Frauenfelder)
Update: Bruce Schneier writes about both the apparent theft and the various denials that the Bush camp is making: Bush put his arm behind him so a bodyguard could remove it. The watch fell to the ground and was recovered by a bodyguard. Bush took it off himself.
Nothing is proven — it isn't even clear that the watch was stolen — but the experience of various members of the Bush Administration not being able to get its story straight is a familiar one.
Update #2: Another video has emerged showing Bush taking the watch off himself.
June 01, 2007
Hate Group that Triggered LiveJournal's Moral Panic Has Ties to Terrorist Organizations
Warriors for Innocence, the group that goaded Six Apart managment into a moral panic over LiveJournal, indiscriminately canceling user accounts, turns out to be a Dominionist hate group with ties to Joel's Army and other Christian Patriot terrorists such as Eric Rudolph.
Dear Barak Berkowitz: Hate groups like Warriors for Innocence are explicitly barred by LiveJournal terms of service. Why are you letting them dictate LiveJournal policy to Six Apart? Apology aside, what action are you taking to prevent something like this from happening again?
(via Zillah975)
May 25, 2007
MacArthur Maze Reopened
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Our own true Patti Beadles reports that in the runup to the reopening of the span of freeway connector, traffic leaving San Francisco to cross the Bay Bridge came to a standstill while Caltrans workers uncovered the signs that had been covered while the section of the Maze was closed. All is well that ends well, however.
The re-opening of the MacArthur Maze means that contractor C.C. Myers will earn the full $5 million incentive bonus offereed by Caltrans. Myers' lowball bid was a bet that he could earn enough of the incentive to cover the construction costs. Myers' total payment will be more than $5.8 million; it is estimated that Myers' costs were in the neighborhood of $2.5 million.
May 22, 2007
Bush's Secret Plans for Massive Escalation in Iraq
Hearst Newspapers' Stewart M. Powell is reporting that the Bush Administration is developing plans to double the number of combat troops in Iraq by December:
Bush could double force by Christmas
Stewart M. Powell, Hearst Newspapers Tuesday, May 22, 200705-22) 04:00 PDT Washington — The Bush administration is quietly on track to nearly double the number of combat troops in Iraq this year, an analysis of Pentagon deployment orders showed Monday.
The little-noticed second surge, designed to reinforce U.S. troops in Iraq, is being executed by sending more combat brigades and extending tours of duty for troops already there.
The actions could boost the number of combat soldiers from 52,500 in early January to as many as 98,000 by the end of this year if the Pentagon overlaps arriving and departing combat brigades.
Separately, when additional support troops are included in this second troop increase, the total number of U.S. troops in Iraq could increase from 162,000 now to more than 200,000 — a record-high number — by the end of the year.
The numbers were arrived at by an analysis of deployment orders by Hearst Newspapers.
This additional escalation in boots on the ground in Iraq, despite the current overextension of American armed forces, will be obtained by further extensions of duty tours by currently deployed units and overlapping the tours of duty of the units rotated in to take their place. This approach to extending combat manpower is the moral equivalent of a big-box retailer like Wal-Mart juicing its cash flow by delaying payments to its creditors — who have no recourse if they wish to continue doing business with the giant customer on whom their own livelihood depends. It would be the moral equivalent, that is, if it weren't for the fact that more boots on the ground in Iraq means more American deaths for no good purpose except perhaps to gratify the President's ego.
May 19, 2007
Worst. President. Evar.
Quoth the Associated Press:
Carter: Bush 'Worst' in World Relations
Saturday, May 19, 2007
(05-19) 12:29 PDT Little Rock, Ark. (AP) --
Former President Carter says President Bush's administration is "the worst in history" in international relations, taking aim at the White House's policy of pre-emptive war and its Middle East diplomacy.The criticism from Carter, which a biographer says is unprecedented for the 39th president, also took aim at Bush's environmental policies and the administration's "quite disturbing" faith-based initiative funding.
"I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history," Carter told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in a story that appeared in the newspaper's Saturday editions. "The overt reversal of America's basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me."
May 17, 2007
MacArthur Maze Repaired Before Memorial Day?
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that C.C. Myers' construction company claims that it will complete repairs some time next week on the span of freeway connector in the MacArthur Maze that melted away in a tanker-truck fire on April 29.
C.C. Myers made a lowball bid on the contract, apparently intending to cover its expenses by finishing well before the target date of June 27 and collecting the $5 million maximum incentive payment. The company bid $867,075 on the contract. Finishing any time on or before June 2 will earn the maximum incentive.
Caltrans' own engineers had estimated that the freeway repair would cost $5.2 million, and they had allocated $20 million for the project.
Wow. I'm impressed.
May 16, 2007
James Comey's Testimony Limns Presidential Felonies
Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey testified yesterday before the Senate Judiciary Committee in its investigation of the growing scandal at the Department of Justice. Comey's testimony shed new light on yet another scandal that has been sitting on the back burner for years now: illegal wiretapping and eavesdropping by the National Security Agency at the direction of the Bush Administration.
By now all political junkies know about the dramatic bedside scene at George Washington Hospital where then-Attorney General John Ashcroft lay ill and under sedation. Comey testified that he and FBI Director Robert Mueller raced to the hospital to fend off Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card, who were on their way to secure Ashcroft's signature on a document that almost certainly was the finding that the NSA eavesdropping program was legal. Comey got there first and held the fort until Mueller arrived. When Gonzales and Card got there, Ashcroft roused himself from his stupor to tell the White House staffers where they could put that unsigned document.
But the drama appears to be distracting people from the real issue. Here's how Glenn Greenwald puts it:
Amazingly, the President's own political appointees — the two top Justice Department officials, including one (Ashcroft) who was known for his "aggressive" use of law enforcement powers in the name of fighting terrorism and at the expense of civil liberties — were so convinced of [the NSA eavesdropping program's] illegality that they refused to certify it and were preparing, along with numerous other top DOJ officials, to resign en masse once they learned that the program would continue notwithstanding the President's knowledge that it was illegal.The overarching point here, as always, is that it is simply crystal clear that the President consciously and deliberately violated the law and committed multiple felonies by eavesdropping on Americans in violation of the law. [emphasis in the original]
Greenwald and Josh Marshall are the go-to guys for this story. Go to them and read all about it.
May 15, 2007
The Transmigration of Jerry Falwell
Jerry Falwell is dead, alas.
Let's all queue up to shake God's hand.
(with apologies to Michael Bishop)
May 11, 2007
Pasadena Newspaper Outsources Political Reporting to India
PasadenaNow, a Web-only newspaper that covers local news in the city of Pasadena, California, placed an ad on the Bangalore, India, version of Craigslist: "We seek a newspaper journalist based in India to report on the city government and political scene of Pasadena, California, USA."
PasadenaNow's editor and publisher, James Macpherson, claims that intercontinental reporting of local Pasadena politics is possible because webcasts of city council meetings are now available over the Internet. "Whether you're at a desk in Pasadena or a desk in Mumbai, you're still just a phone call or e-mail away from the interview," he tells AP's Justin Pritchard.
The move represents a new threat to professional journalists, already beset on on one side from the tide of independent bloggers that some people might think make traditional reporting and punditry irrelevant, and on the other from the collapse of newspaper advertising revenues lost to online markets such as Craigslist.
It's hard to imagine how a remote journalist can cover the nuances of community politics. It would be tough to recognize when a city councilmember was skating around a local hot-button topic unless one had a good grounding in those hot-button topics. How would you cope with a press conference?
On the other hand, it would be truly sweet to see the look on David Broder's face as he learned his position was being outsourced to Bangalore.
(via Avedon Carol)
May 10, 2007
College Women Regret Titillating Picture, Steal Newspapers
Two women who attend at Framingham State College, in Massachusetts, are accused of stealing copies of the Gatepost, the school's student newspaper, allegedly because a color photograph on the front page made them look fat.
Chris Calzolaio/The Gatepost
The seven women wore brief tanktops and short pants, and had letters and signs painted on their bare bellies that spelled out "I (heart) N O O N A N." Noonan is the name of a player on the FSC women's lacrosse team whom the seven women were cheering on.
The picture appeared on the front page of Gatepost. Not long after that, copies of the paper began disappearing from racks.
The paper's faculty advisor, English professor Desmond McCarthy, says that students told him that women in the photograph thought it made them look fat. The Associated Press story has a quote from one of the two perpetrators, 18-year-old freshman Jennifer Carsillo, but does not directly quote her about her motivation. The other perpetrator is unidentified.
The paper's editor claims that a thousand copies were stolen; both McCarthy and Carsillo claim that fewer than two hundred copies were taken. Carsillo claims she returned the stolen papers to the campus police.
There's a lot to be said about fat-phobia here, whether this was the perpetrators' actual motivation or one that gossip has ascribed to them. At the same time, I just can't let go of Garance Franke-Ruta and the Kennedy doctrine of female regret. Evidently 18-year-old college women can regret the consequences of having their bare-bellied pictures taken at a sporting event, just as they can those of having pictures of their bare breasts taken at spring break. Raising the age of consent to participate in erotic photography is not enough. What do you think, Garance — should all photography of women under 21 who are not wearing modest dress be banned?
(via Joe Decker)
May 09, 2007
Garance Franke-Ruta: The Final Smackdown
The incomparable Digby gives Garance Franke-Ruta the coup de grâce:
Anyway, what jumped out at me when I read Garance's piece a few days ago was that it was the second time in the last month or so that I've heard the same startling rationale used in an argument about women's rights: that some women come to regret their decisions after they make them so all women must be protected from that possibility. The earlier version of this argument, of course, was in Anthony Kennedy's opinion in the "partial-birth" abortion case.
There is some good that can come out of this whole experience: it ought to give Franke-Ruta an intimate understanding of what it means to come to deeply regret a foolish indiscretion.
Garance Franke-Ruta: Misguided, Dishonest, and Wrong
Garance Franke-Ruta forgets the first rule of getting out of a hole one has dug oneself into: Stop digging!
She continues to defend her pathologically stupid proposal to raise the age of consent for erotic performance to 21 in a post at Tapped with the deeply ironic title "The Self-Correcting Blogosphere":
Current law does not punish those who are under 18 who participate in porn or streak at their high school football games (except to the extent they get fined for public indecency), and there would be no legal justification for punishing older teens who do so, either, in the unlikely event the age limit for participating in porn were raised.
I guess Tapped, the official blog of The American Prospect, does not have a fact-checker on staff. It didn't take very long for the "self-correcting blogosphere" to correct Franke-Ruta: Current law does indeed punish minors who participate in porn. Atrios posted examples of such prosecutions in recent news, and so did commenter rea at Matthew Yglesias's blog.
The same corrections of this fundamental error of fact that is crucial to Franke-Ruta's argument also appeared over and over again in the comments to her post at Tapped. Franke-Ruta replied to some of her commenters; but she studiously avoided either printing a retraction or acknowledging the fundamental error of fact in her response in the comments.
Franke-Ruta is not the stereotypical blogger in a bathrobe; she is a professional journalist, an editor at The American Prospect. Professional journalists should be held to professional standards, like checking one's facts before publishing, and correcting one's facts afterwards.
(NB: Ordinarily, I don't explain my references and jokes, but I think I ought to now: The title of this post is intended to echo the title of Gayle Rubin's essay "Misguided, Dangerous and Wrong: an Analysis of Anti-pornography Politics," originally written in 1986 and included in the book Bad Girls and Dirty Pictures: The Challenge to Reclaim Feminism, Alison Assiter and Avedon Carol, eds., Pluto Press, 1993. I am not a newcomer to the feminist examination of pornography; the immediate evidence suggests that I'm rather more familiar with it than is Franke-Ruta.)
May 07, 2007
One Macarthur Maze Connector Reopens
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the connector from the westbound Eastshore Freeway (I-80) to the southbound Nimitz Freeway (I-880) reopened at 4:30 AM PDT this morning. The connector was damaged in the tanker truck fire early on Sunday, April 29.
The connector that takes eastbound traffic off the Bay Bridge to the MacArthur Freeway (I-80 E to I-580 E) is still closed, and is expected to remain so unti roughly June 29.
May 06, 2007
Law Firm Withdraws Job Offer to AutoAdmit Officer
Amir Efrati at the WSJ.com Law Blog reports that law firm Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge has withdrawn its offer of a post-graduation job to third-year law student Anthony Ciolli as a response to Ciolli's unapologetic involvement with AutoAdmit.com, an online forum for law students.
AutoAdmit gained notoriety when the Washington Post reported that a number of woman law students couldn't find legal work after being named and had photos posted in AutoAdmit, apparently without their consent.
It turned out that the unmoderated discussion boards at AutoAdmit were a cesspit of antisemitism, racism, and sexism and misogyny. When confronted with this fact, neither its founder Jarret Cohen nor Ciolli (the site's "education director") would act in response, citing free speech concerns.
Jill Filipovic of Feministe, a law student herself, was named and harassed on AutoAdmit; and when she protested publicly she became identified by the site's posters as their public enemy, and a regular target for their vitriol.
Filipovic looms so large as a nemesis in the minds of the members of the AutoAdmit community that Ciolli blames the loss of his job offer on her:
My impression from the phone conversation was that this was the chronology:1) Jill Filipovic from Feministe tells WSJ that I worked at EAP&D
2) WSJ reporter calls EAP&D, and the firm says I had my offer rescinded.
3) WSJ reporter emails me saying they’re going to run a story on it tomorrow.
Believe me, the last thing I wanted was this to be public. I just want to be left alone.
Filipovic denies any involvement with either the Wall Street Journal or Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge. She says flatly that she took no steps to get him fired.
Even Chris Locke acted to take down the Mean Kids and Bob's Yer Uncle sites when the commenters got out of hand. Ciolli's and Cohen's desperate invocations of free speech don't hold any water. There are consequences to willfully giving hate a garden in which to grow. Losing a job at a prestigious law firm is naturally one of them.
True to form, the flying monkeys of AutoAdmit have been flinging their feces anonymously into the comments at the WSJ Law Blog entry with the story.
Anthony Ciolli showed extraordinarily poor judgment in his involvement with AutoAdmit.com, and the loss of his job offer is the well-deserved result of his poor judgment.
(via Lindsay Beyerstein)
May 05, 2007
Should We Raise the Age of Consent for Naked Pictures to 21?
Garance Franke-Ruta advocates that pictures of bare-breasted 20-year-old women be considered child pornography by the law.
To be fair, that is not what she says she wants. But it is the consequence of what she does advocate. (And I mean here the real immediate consequence, not some hypothetical taken to its "logical extreme.")
We let women sign up to join the Army and be killed in Iraq when they are 18 — the ultimate exploitation of their bodies. Why, then, should we stop them from accepting pay for displaying naked pictures at that age?
I have gendered my question, because the context is gendered: Garance Franke-Ruta thinks Girls Gone Wild is icky, and her remedy is to raise the age of consent for commercial erotic performance from 18 to 21.
I think Girls Gone Wild is icky, too, but the remedy is much simpler: Prosecute sleazeball Joe Francis for his failure to comply with 18 USC § 2257. Francis is already breaking the law, he is being prosecuted for breaking the law, and he is very likely to spend time in jail as a result. The law as it stands appears to be working here. Why change it?[1]
18-year-olds can sign obtain credit cards, mobile phones, and student loans under terms which, if they aren't extremely careful, can trap them in what amounts to indentured servitude. (If you are concerned about the sexual exploitation of women, keep in mind how often credit card debt is used to trap women into sexual slavery.)
In the face of the lawfully sanctioned occasion for youthful bad judgment on this scale, bartering an on-camera flash of tit for a baseball cap pales in comparison. And yet, it is the age of consent to flash the tit that Garance-Ruta wishes to raise, not the age of consent to burden oneself with crippling debt.
There's the other side of the transaction to worry about. Franke-Ruta, in her empty-headed ignorance of the consequences of what she proposes, is advocating that pictures of naked twenty-year-olds be deemed child pornography in the eyes of the law. Her ingenuous denial that personal photos would not be affected don't hold water. Child pornography laws do not distinguish between commercial and non-commercial use.
The penalties for breaking child pornography laws are draconian. To be convicted of possession of underaged nude images on one's hard drive is to be branded as a sex offender. The immediate prison sentences are severe, and, unlike lesser offenses such as murder or armed robbery, after a sex offender has served their prison time, they are required for the rest of their life to register with the local police, their names and addresses are published in Megan's Law databases, they get harassing anonymous phone calls in the middle of the night from their neighbors, and so on.
Garance Franke-Ruta's proposal would create with a stroke of a pen a whole new class of targets for the kiddie-porn witch-hunters: anyone possessing a nude picture of someone who is — or merely looks — under 21.
[1] To be fair, I believe 18 USC § 2257 and its implementation are badly broken and are in desperate need of fixing. Judging from her position on age of consent issues, though, I suspect that Franke-Ruta's notions of the fixes needed and mine are not the least bit consistent.
(via Atrios)
May 04, 2007
Caltrans Says 50 Days to Reopen Collapsed Freeway
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The California state transportation agency is soliciting proposals from nine construction companies over the weekend, in an expedited bidding process, and will award the contract on Monday evening.
The firms must repair the collapsed freeway by June 29 or face $200,000 a day in penalties from the state, reports the San Francisco Chronicle, citing what Caltrans director Will Kempton announced at a press conference. But should they finish the work ahead of schedule, they'll earn a $200,000-a-day bonus for each day they were ahead of the deadline.
On Wednesday, Gov. Schwarzenegger announced that the connector from westbound I-80 to southbound I-880 would reopen in roughly a week. However, the repair work on the I-580 span will require that the I-880 connector be closed from time to time, presumably at night.
Meanwhile, Caltrans has recommended detours around the closed freeway connectors:
East I-80 drivers coming off the Bay Bridge and headed to the Oakland, Hayward or Walnut Creek areas have three alternate routes to bypass the collapsed section of east I-580 and connect farther down the highway to east I-580 and east SR-24:
- Take south I-880, exit at Broadway-Alameda, stay in the off-ramp's left lane and turn right onto Seventh Street. Continue on Seventh Street and then turn left on Castro Street. Continue on Castro Street to the 12th Street on-ramp to east I-980 to the east I-580 junction.
- Exit at West Grand Avenue, turn left on Northgate Avenue, enter the on-ramp to east I-580.
- Take east I-80 and exit at Albany/Buchanan, turn left under freeway, left onto west I-80 and continue to east I-580.
West I-80 drivers coming from Richmond who need to bypass the closed I-80-to-I-880 connector and get on to south I-880 farther down the highway have at least one alternative route:
- Take east I-580 to west I-980 to south I-880.
Motorists going from the Bay Bridge to eastbound Highway 24 are also taking I-80 to Ashby Avenue ( Highway 13), following Highway 13 past the Claremont Hotel up to Tunnel Road, where it crosses Highway 24. Yesterday I was walking in my neighborhood in mid-afternoon, and saw that at roughly 2:30 PM, eastbound Ashby Avenue was a long, narrow parking lot. The recommended detour must be pretty bad if people think this is a viable alternative.
May 02, 2007
Los Angeles Police Fire Rubber Bullets Without Provocation at Peaceful Crowd
Officers of the Los Angeles Police Department attacked a peaceful immigration rights rally in MacArthur Park in downtown Los Angeles yesterday. Without any apparent provocation, a bullhorn on a police heliciopter ordered the demonstrators to leave the park. Immediately thereafter, police in riot gear fired rubber bullets and tear gas into the crowd, and then swept the park and surrounding streets clear of demonstrators, continuing to fire upon the crowd.
ThinkProgress has the video of CNN coverage of the police attack.
Brad Friedman at Brad Blog found this dramatic video, ten minutes long, taken by citizen journalist Jonathan Mann, who was taping the rally before the police moved in, and kept the tape rolling during the melee:
Update: The Peter Pregnaman of the Associated Press reports on the police attack:
Many caught in the melee were journalists.KTTV reporter Christina Gonzales suffered a separated shoulder, while camerawoman Patti Ballaz had a broken wrist and possibly a broken hand, said Fox Television Stations spokeswoman Erica Keane.
KPCC radio reporter Patricia Nazario said she was hit in the back and ribs with a baton, then hit her head and twisted her ankle while falling from a blow. She described an interaction with an officer who was hitting her.
KCAL-TV cameraman Carl Stein said that his camera was tossed and that he was thrown to the ground.
"I'm sore, and I'm sore about what happened," Stein told viewers. "It was like open season — take a whack, have at it."
(hat tips to Digby and Gramina)
DC Madam Scandal Highlights the Ethics of Sex Worker Confidentiality
Jesse Leavenworth at The Hartford Courant interviewed a number of sex worker advocates and former sex workers about the case of Deborah Palfrey, the so-called DC Madam.
The women Leavenworth quoted are in agreement: it is appropriate for Palfrey to release her records.
- "It does impact the trust that is important between clients and sex workers." But revealing clients' identities is "an obvious strategy for sex workers who are criminalized." — Carol Leigh, Bay Area Sex Workers Advocacy Network
- "I think the woman is alone. This is a very lonely occupation. We deal in a very isolated business and we have very little support, and now her finances have been cut off and she is facing total ruin. ... All I have to say to Deborah Palfrey is, 'Go for it, girl,'" — Robyn Few, Sex Workers Outreach Project U.S.A.
- Secrecy is important. But the federal government has pushed Palfrey to the edge. "If somebody is out to destroy you, you have to fight back." — Veronica Monet, author of Veronica Monet's Sex Secrets of Escorts
But some people with ties to sex work think Palfrey should have remained silent. Leavenworth finds this quote on the Web:
- "I know she's probably being swallowed up alive, and a lot of people can't take that weight on their shoulders, but she's naming names and that goes against my principles — I realized I'd sunk my ship, but I wasn't taking anyone with me." — Heidi Fleiss, the "Hollywood Madam," quoted in Radar Online
Because much sex work is illegal in most US jurisdictions, there are no special legal protections for either sex workers or their clients. There are no sex worker shield laws like there are for journalists. No sex worker/client privilege, analogous to attorney/client privilege, exists. While we expect privacy in the bedroom, we don't expect the sanctity of the confessional.
Ought there be? I could argue that by the intimate nature of a sex worker's services, there is an implicit expectation of confidentiality between the sex worker and the client, on a par with the explicit expectation of confidentiality between psychotherapists and their clients. (Therapy and sex work have a lot in common, for example the issues of transference and countertransference.)
At the same time, we aren't talking about an ideal world here where sex work is professionalized and respected; we're talking about the real world, where sex work is marginalized and despised. The system is set up already with a bias in favor of the clients. Sex workers are stigmatized and punished. Their clients, if they have sufficient class status or power, are routinely ignored. (This is clearly classed: Police vice squads routinely operate sting operations against clients of streetwalkers; but have you ever heard of an expensive escort service that turned out to be a front for a vice squad sting?)
In the real world, the deck is stacked against sex workers. Is it ethical for them to resort to desperate measures in the real world that would be unethical in an ideal one?
The ethical questions around a sex worker's client list are by no means clear, neither for the sex worker or for the journalist into whose hands it might fall. I am extremely interested in what someone like Lindsay Beyerstein would have to say about the matter.
(via Melissa Gira at Sexerati [NSFW])
April 29, 2007
Tanker Fire Destroys Freeway Interchange, Snarls Bay Area Traffic
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Pictures here. Video here and here.
The tanker truck crashed while on the connector from westbound I-80 (the Eastshore Freeway) to southbound I-880 (the Nimitz Freeway). The connector from eastbound I-80 to eastbound I-580 (the MacArthur Freeway) softened and melted from the heat of the fire, draping itself over the Eastshore-to-Nimitz connector.
The driver of the truck was able to walk away and hail a cab that took him to an area hospital for treatment of his burns.
The destruction and blockage of freeway connectors poses a disruption of traffic around the approaches to the Bay Bridge and through Emeryville and Oakland comparable to those caused by the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. The Bay Bridge is open and traffic can get from the East Bay to San Francisco, but major routes through the MacArthur Maze are closed. CalTrans is scrambling to route detours around the severed traffic arteries.
Update: Baconmonkey's video is now available on YouTube:
(hat tips to Lynn Kendall, Nick Mamatas, and baconmonkey)
April 28, 2007
English Channel Earthquake Rocks Kent
 source: BBC |
4.3 doesn't sound like much to Californians like me, but we live in a place where earthquake tolerance is built into the building codes. The quake damaged structures — chimneys fell and walls were cracked — and disrupted electrical power in the affected area.
Maureen Kincaid Speller lives in Folkestone, and provides an on-the-spot description of her experience:
There are definitely some injuries locally, no word on any fatalities. There is a lot of damage to buildings, with chimneys down and cracks in walls. ... We then went out and started walking round the ward. ... It's like a war zone, or the aftermath of a John Wyndham novel. I went to find as many people as I could that I knew and everyone seems fine, though literally and metaphorically shaken. But the ward has been very badly damaged.
Later in the day, Maureen gives us an update. Lots of fire engines have been brought to Folkestone from surrounding Kent. Many streets are closed, but the closures seem to have been due to fire brigades removing damaged and unstable chimneys.
April 27, 2007
Among Myriad Scare Stories, Real Terrorism Is Ignored
One of these things is not like the others:
- An instructor at the University of Maryland compared an Asian-American student to Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung-Hui and threatened to call the police.
- An Asian-American high school student in a Chicago suburb is arrested for writing a class essay that mentioned a school shooting.
- South Indian instructor at Shippensburg University leaves a box of recycling by a trash can, triggering a campus lockdown.
- At South Illinois University in Carbondale, a gym bag filled with sand for a student's class project provokes a security alert.
- In the parking lot of a women's heath clinic in Austin, Texas, a police bomb squad detonated an explosive device.
Only one of these, the clinic bombing attempt, represents an actual act of terrorist violence. And it has received minimal coverage in the news.
Quoth zuzu at Feministe:
We saw something similar with the Virginia Tech shooting — the campus police initially dismissed the idea that the gunman would be a danger to anyone else — even though they hadn’t identified or caught him at the time — because they saw a dead woman and just assumed that it was a “domestic incident” and there would be no further violence. Clinic bombings are treated as the equivalent of shrugged-off “domestic incidents” — hey, it’s just violence against women. It’s not like it’s going to affect real people or anything.
(hat tips to Elf Sternberg and Atrios)
April 25, 2007
Bush Boogies Down in the Rose Garden
Today is Malaria Awareness Day, and President George W. Bush marked the occasion with a ceremony in the Rose Garden. Performing at the ceremony were Senegalese performers from the West African Dance Troupe. The President and First Lady Laura Bush danced along with the performers. Melissa McEwan at Shakesville has posted a series of mindboggling pictures.
But wait! There's more...! The Huffington Post has the video, ganked from CNN. "It looks like the guy playing him on the Tonight Show," says a CNN commentator.
Yes, these pictures make crystal-clear the truth of what Laura Bush was quoted as saying this morning: No one suffers more than their President and I do."
(via Atrios)
April 22, 2007
Fired Prosecutor Probed White-House-Connected Law Firm for Corruption
Arkansas US Attorney Bud Cummins opened a corruption investigation of Missouri Governor Matt Blunt's use of law firm Lathrop & Gage to run a chain of satellite state licensing offices in May 2006, reports Brad Friedman of The Brad Blog. In June, he was removed as US Attorney, six months before the big December purge of the US Attorneys by the Department of Justice.
Quoth Brad Blog:
Lathrop & Gage is the powerful firm of Blunt's general counsel, and Bush/Cheney '04's national general counsel, Mark F. "Thor" Hearne.As BRAD BLOG readers know, Hearne is a top-level White House operative, a very close friend of Karl Rove's, and the co-founder of the currently-back-underground "American Center for Voting Rights" (ACVR), the mysteriously-funded group behind all of the GOP's phony "voter fraud" claims and the accompanying push for disenfranchising "Voter ID" restrictions at the polling place. (See our Special Coverage page on ACVR scam here...)
The first reports of Cummins's investigation into the Blunt/Lathrop Gage scandal were apparently released in May of 2006. Cummins was removed from his position just afterwards, in June of 2006 — prior to all the other firings which took place later that year on the same day in December.
He was replaced at that point by Karl Rove's personal aide Timothy Griffin.
Brad Blog's source for the information about the probe of Gov. Blunt and Lathrop & Gage is this story in the Springfield (Missouri) Business Journal.
A federal prosecutor opens an investigation of a Republican governor and a law firm with close ties to the Bush White House and Karl Rove. A month later, that prosecutor is gone, replaced by a Rove minion. It may be coincidence. But it has the smell of obstruction of justice, doesn't it? It's worth investigating by the relevant committees. Heck, I'd say it's worth the appointment of a special prosecutor, but don't hold your breath.
I'm surprised this angle of the US Attorney Purge story hasn't gotten more attention.
April 21, 2007
Poetry Manuscripts Panic Pennsylvania College
Kazim Ali, an instructor at Shippensburg University in central Pennsylvania, left a box of papers beside a campus trash can in front of the building where he taught after work, like he had many times before, so that they could be picked up and recycled. The box contained poetry manuscripts, left over from a contest Ali had judged.
The English department at Shippensburg shares a building with the ROTC program. An alert cadet observed a foreign-looking man leave a suspicious box on campus and drive away in a car with out-of-state license plates. The vigilant defender of American freedom called the local police, who in turn alerted the Pennsylvania state troopers. An emergency was declared, and the campus was shut down and evacuated.
Ali writes:
Because of my recycling the