There seem to be some problems with the calendar and archive links on this page. Links to some months and days are missing. The entries themselves seem to be present. I’m investigating, and hope to have links working again soon.

Update: Fixed it. One post got filed out of order, confusing the programs that generate the links.

5:59:30 PM  #  
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Well, whatta ya know? The Sinclair Broadcast Group will not block tonight’s episode of Nightline, honoring American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Nightline aired a similar program last year, Sinclair banned it from their stations, including the ABC network affiliate here in Columbus, Ohio.

This year, Sinclair “applauds” reading the names on Memorial Day, “a day set aside to honor our fallen heroes.”

“Unlike Nightline’s reading of the names last year, which coincided with the start of the May ratings sweeps, we feel that this year’s Memorial Day selection is the appropriate setting to remember those who have sacrificed their lives to keep all Americans safe and free,” the Sinclair statement said.

As every American knows, each year on Memorial Day, we honor those who’ve given their lives for our country. The rest of the year, we just shut the hell up about them.

Sinclair also refused to air Saving Private Ryan last year on November 11, Veterans’ Day.

When they banned the Nightline tribute last year, Sinclair didn’t say anything about the ratings sweeps period. Rather, they said Nightline’s tribute “appears to be motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq.”

The former Washington bureau chief for Sinclair, Jon Leiberman, was fired after publicly criticizing Sinclair’s plan to run an anti-John Kerry documentary days before last year’s election. For his stand, Leiberman received the Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism earlier this month in Eugene, Ore.

Well, this year, it’s not about politics. It’s all about profit. The controversy over Sinclair’s ban last year gave a substantial boost to Nightline’s ratings. Maybe the higher ratings would be good enough even for sweeps month.

I’m sure glad those guys aren’t on my side.

5:25:23 PM  #  
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Via this site, here’s Richard Feynman on discovering new laws of physics:

First you guess. Don’t laugh, this is the most important step. Then you compute the consequences. Compare the consequences to experience. If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is. If it disagrees with experience, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.

11:20:42 AM  #  
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Via This Modern World, Editor and Publisher discusses a double standard:

Where, in the week after the Great Newsweek Error, is the comparable outrage in the press, in the blogosphere, and at the White House over the military’s outright lying in the coverup of the death of former NFL star Pat Tillman? Where are the calls for apologies to the public and the firing of those responsible? Who is demanding that the Pentagon’s word should never be trusted unless backed up by numerous named and credible sources?

Where is a Scott McClellan lecture on ethics and credibility?

…

Patrick Tillman Sr., the father -- a lawyer, as it happens -- said he blames high-ranking Army officers for presenting “outright lies” to the family and to the public. “After it happened, all the people in positions of authority went out of their way to script this,” he told the Post. “They purposely interfered with the investigation, they covered it up. I think they thought they could control it, and they realized that their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a handbasket if the truth about his death got out. They blew up their poster boy.”

“Maybe lying’s not a big deal anymore,” he said. “Pat’s dead, and this isn’t going to bring him back. But these guys should have been held up to scrutiny, right up the chain of command, and no one has.”

Mary Tillman, the mother, complained to the Post that the government used her son for weeks after his death. She said she was particularly offended when President Bush offered a taped memorial message to Tillman at a Cardinals football game shortly before the presidential election last fall.

The problem isn’t really a double standard. The current administration is above all standards of conduct. That leaves them free to pound on the table about the failings of others.

2:23:20 AM  #  
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From PERRspectives Blog, the Bush Mea Culpa Watch:

With the White House and its conservative media goose-steppers pressuring Newsweek for an apology, I thought I might help President Bush keep track of his own:

4:12:27 PM  #  
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It’s not enough for wealthy corporations that their money ensures their message is heard, loudly and clearly. As Think Progress observes, Morgan Stanley and British Petroleum want to leverage their wealth to silence other voices:

Both financial services powerhouse Morgan Stanley and global energy powerhouse British Petroleum, two giants of their respective industries, recently “informed print publications that its ads must be automatically pulled from any edition containing ‘objectionable editorial coverage.’” In the case of British Petroleum, ad-accepting publications are now required to “inform BP in advance of any news text or visuals they plan to publish that directly mention the company, a competitor or the oil-and-energy industry.” These are not empty threats. As one veteran of the magazine industry put it, “magazines are not in the financial position today to buck rules from advertisers.”

A comment at the site says, “It has always been thus,” and I suppose that’s true. But in bygone days, there were real journalists who put their careers, and sometimes their lives, on the line in order to get the full story out. There were publishers who had chosen to be publishers, and who would be ashamed to knuckle under to pressure from big business or big government, unlike today’s “managers of media corporations.”

As citizens, we need to spread the word about these corporate strong-arm tactics. We can’t rely on news media, beholden to big advertisers, to do it. Don’t be deceived: the forces that try to prevent us from learning the whole truth on matters of public policy are our enemies. Their assault on our right to know deserves lots of publicity. Our outrage must become more costly to them than the truth is.

3:42:49 PM  #  
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The New Yorker on the Bush Administration’s attempt to blame Newsweek for our deteriorating stature in the world:

Is it really necessary at this late date to point out that the problem is torture and abuse, not dubiously sourced reports of torture and abuse? If the allegations in the Newsweek story seemed credible on their face, not only to its editors but also to government officials (such as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who quickly assigned a general to look into them), perhaps that is because of the long, dismal history of horrors that have already been documented—in many cases, by investigations conducted within the Armed Forces themselves, which are full of men and women who recognize that the honor of their service is at stake.

8:45:23 PM  #  
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In preparation to see Revenge of the Sith sometime soon, I’ve dug out the old DVDs and watched them.

Yikes, is The Phantom Menace ever a rotten movie!

If anyone ever tries to tell you that good special effects make a good movie, sit him down and show him — oh, Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights — back-to-back with The Phantom Menace. And the next time he dares to open his mouth to say something about movies, say two or three years from now, offer to show him those two movies again.

Attack of the Clones is much, much better, but it’s not very good, either.

Years ago, when Return of the Jedi came out, and I saw those adorable Ewoks, I knew that whatever George Lucas’ original vision might have been, the movie had been tailored to sell teddy bears. And when I first saw The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, I knew those movies were not so much written, as designed — built around ideas for video games.

There was one glimmer of a thought in Attack of the Clones: that it’s possible to feel completely justified in doing something terrible, but that sense of justification does not excuse the terrible deed. The new movie is getting a lot of attention for commenting on current events, but I think that started here.

Nevertheless, I was ready to skip Revenge of the Sith entirely, but I won’t. The reviewers have been mostly positive, and surprised.

Andy Ihnatko likes it:

Unbelievable. Unbelievable!

“Revenge Of The Sith” is clearly the best of all the Prequels, but that sounds like faint praise at best and sarcasm at worst. It’s better than “Return Of The Jedi” and I have to ask myself if it isn’t better than “A New Hope,” too. When I come down off the endorphin buzz, I’ll probably conclude that no, it isn’t, but the fact that I even have to consider such a question says a whole hell of a lot about this movie.

So I’m going to see it soon. I hope I’ll like it, too.

11:52:06 PM  #  
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Doctor Faust — er, Frist — seemed disappointed that a last-minute compromise prevented him from blowing up two hundred years of Senate tradition with his innovative nuclear option. But he needn’t feel that he’s accomplished nothing. Even without pulling the nuclear trigger, Senator Frist has poisoned the atmosphere in the Senate in a way that can probably never be undone.

The Constitution of the United States says “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings,” and over the years, the Senate has accumulated a long list of rules, including rules defining how those rules may be changed. The current rules require a three-fifths majority to cut off debate on an issue. Even larger majorities are required to change the rules. The idea is to avoid precipitous and foolish changes to serve the passions of the moment.

Some of those rules were inconvenient to Doctor Frist, so he proposed his diabolical innovation: that the Vice-President can dictate what the rules of the Senate are, so long as he has fifty like-minded Senators to uphold his decrees.

It doesn’t matter that Bill Frist didn’t get to pull the nuclear trigger today. The idea, once thought, can’t be unthought. From now on, until the U.S. government itself has crumbled into dust, any time the Vice-President and half the Senate wish to dictate the outcome of any deliberation, that devilish Fristian bargain will be there, tempting them.

The nuclear genie isn’t going back in the bottle.

5:40:43 PM  #  
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From the PBS program NOW, here’s Jan LaRue, Chief Counsel of the right-wing group Concerned Women for America, on the topic of an official government religion:

Well, you know the interesting thing is, at the founding of our country, there were state churches. That’s what it’s all about in a country where the people get to rule. And if you’re in a state you don’t like, you get to move to another state.

You may notice I called Concerned Women for America a right-wing group, not a conservative group. Their vision for America is a radical one. There’s nothing conservative about them.

6:00:28 PM  #  
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Bob Harris at This Modern World:

When I was a kid, I remember reading about how democracies ended. What surprised me was how often it was a peaceful takeover. Fascists took power in many places not through force, but through rigged elections, broken rules, and consolidation of power, all hidden behind flags and God and promises of glory.

Today, the fanatics who have seized the GOP are beginning their attempt to flagrantly defy a half-dozen Senate rules which have existed for generations in order to install federal judges more interested in ideology than legal precedent.

If this “nuclear option” works, they will very likely soon also begin stacking the Supreme Court as they wish… The character of the very laws of our nation itself could soon be under the fundamentalists’ control.

It’s happening right now.

3:19:56 PM  #  
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I guess I wasn’t the only person to note the 1,347 day milestone. I haven’t seen it mentioned in the mainstream media, except for this column by Randall J. Larsen in the Washington Post:

I find it difficult to understand why, 1,347 days after the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States remains inadequately prepared for the two most dangerous threats facing it: biological and nuclear terrorism.

Why 1,347 days? That was the number of days between Pearl Harbor and V-J Day -- a reasonable measurement of progress. Starting from an abysmally unprepared posture, the United States required only 1,347 days to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. I do not expect a World War II-style victory in the war on terrorism, but after 1,347 days it is reasonable to ask: Who is in charge of defending this nation against what most experts agree are the only two existential threats we face -- biological and nuclear terrorism? The disturbing answer: no one.

It seems most of the people who noticed the milestone were bloggers. Ed Fitzgerald:

I’m not claiming I’m the victim of any kind of post-traumatic stress disorder: I’ve been able to go about my life fairly normally in the past four years -- but, on the other hand, I’m still not “over it” completely either. And nothing, not one single blessed thing, that the Bush administration and their neo-con and religious right allies have done since that day has made things any better, for me or for the rest of the world. Instead of using that awful event as a springboard to something good, a potential revolution in the way the world works, they seized on it as a convenient catch-all excuse to put across their warped agenda of rights rollbacks and tax giveaways to the rich and powerful, and leveraged it to reinvigorate the right-wing’s culture war against rationality and secularism.

Another blog, called Bush Lied Again, contrasts Bush’s Mission Accomplished declaration with the end of World War II:

US troops encircle Germans in the Ruhr, Allies liberate Buchenwald and Belsen concentration camps, Roosevelt dies, Truman becomes president, and on May 7, Germany unconditionally surrenders. In August, the US drops an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and another on Nagasaki 3 days later. Japan surrenders unconditionally.

Mission Accomplished. (Really!)

Another blogger, Angry Bear:

But this milestone does provide the opportunity to compare the effectiveness of America’s responses to both crises. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, America came together, and with determination, shared sacrifice, and the effective and focused leadership of FDR, George C. Marshall, and many others, America and her allies were victorious.

After the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, America once again came together. However, within months of 9/11, the Bush Administration lost focus and never clearly defined a winnable [Global War on Terror].

3:22:29 PM  #  
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V-J Day, marking victory over Japan and the end of World War II, came on August 15, 1945 — 1,347 days after the United States was drawn into the war by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Today, it’s been 1,347 days since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The war that began that day has now lasted as long as U.S. involvement in World War II. How have we used that time?

When Pearl Harbor was attacked, we were ill-prepared for war. Americans across the country rushed to volunteer, and the military draft brought in more. There weren’t enough guns, so recruits drilled with broomsticks, or with dummy wooden rifles.

Taxes were levied to pay for the war, and money was borrowed through the sale of War Bonds. Old factories were converted to wartime production, and new factories were built. We built ships, planes, jeeps, trucks, tanks. New designs moved swiftly from the drawing board, to the factory floor, to the field of battle.

Soldiers, sailors and pilots were quickly trained to use the new weapons. Our British allies had invented radar, and we learned to use it. We sought and exploited countless advances in science and engineering.

The German army was the best in the world. U.S. soldiers were mauled in their first major encounter with crack German troops at the battle of the Kasserine Pass in north Africa. We understood we weren’t yet good enough. We learned from our failures.

We fought massive naval battles and fierce island battles across the Pacific, demolishing the Japanese navy and closing in on the Japanese islands.

With our allies, we captured Sicily and landed on the Italian mainland. We fought German and Italian fascist forces as we drove up that country. We landed at Normandy in northern France on D-Day, the largest amphibious assault in history. We liberated France, driving the once unbeatable German army of occupation back mile by brutal mile. We suffered Germany’s devastating counter-attack in the Battle of the Bulge, and we surmounted it.

At home, women worked factory jobs to replace men who had gone to war. Scarce resources were rationed. There were scrap metal drives. Nearly every American made sacrifices to help win the war. In secrecy, tapping the talents of European scientists who had fled Nazi oppression, we developed the atomic bomb.

Americans, British, Canadians, Russians all pushed into Germany. Hitler, trapped, killed himself and the German government capitulated. In the Pacific, Japan’s empire collapsed. American forces were poised for invasion. Russian forces were expected to join the assault, too. Atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Tokyo, a military coup was attempted to prevent Emperor Hirohito from surrendering. It failed. The war ended.

World War II was a hard struggle, and the path was not always as clear as it may seem now in hindsight. But we saw what needed to be done; we didn’t seek diversions. We did not seek dominion; we knew we couldn’t win without our allies. We shared sacrifices; the wealthy were not exempted. Congress investigated reports of war profiteering. The government made post-war plans to bring our defeated enemies back into the community of civilized nations.

All in 1,347 days.

Have we made good use of our 1,347 days?

3:46:01 PM  #  
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Too good to ignore, from Newsweek's Perspectives:

"That's unconscionable ... I believe in family values." —Seminole County (Fla.) Republican Party chairman Jim Stellings, testifying in the defamation suit he filed against a political rival who he says falsely accused him of having been married six times. The correct number of marriages is five.

Buy five, get one free?

1:29:13 PM  #  
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George Lucas knows how to get people talking about his movies. A right-wing website has added him to its long list of boycotted entertainers. (The website demands “Please name one liberty we’ve lost, Mr. Lucas,” right under their online petition asking the Attorney General to charge Michael Moore with treason.) Hey, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. From the New York Times:

For sheer lack of subtlety, the light-saber-wielding forces of good and evil in George Lucas’s “Star Wars” movies can’t hold a candle to the blogging, advertising and boycotting forces of the right and left. (Or left and right.)

More a measure of the nation’s apparently permanent political warfare than of a filmmaker’s intent, the heroes and antiheroes of Mr. Lucas’s final entry, “Episode III - Revenge of the Sith,” were on their way to becoming the stock characters of partisan debate by mid-Wednesday, hours before the film’s opening just after midnight:

µThe liberal advocacy group Moveon.org was preparing to spend $150,000 to run advertisements on CNN over the next few days … comparing Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, to the movie’s power-grabbing, evil Chancellor Palpatine, for Dr. Frist’s role in the Senate’s showdown over the confirmation of federal judges.

µConservative Web logs were lacerating Mr. Lucas over the film’s perceived jabs at President Bush - as when Anakin Skywalker, on his way to becoming the evil Darth Vader, warns, “If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy,” in an echo of Mr. Bush’s post-9/11 ultimatum, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

µA little-trafficked conservative Web site about film, Pabaah.com - for “Patriotic Americans Boycotting Anti-American Hollywood” - added Mr. Lucas to its list of boycotted entertainers…

µEven the Drudge Report Web site got into the act: beneath a picture of Darth Vader, it compared the White House press corps to the vengeful Sith, after reporters peppered a press secretary for pressing Newsweek magazine to “repair the damage” in the Muslim world caused by a retracted report about desecration of the Koran.

12:11:20 PM  #  
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Think Progress reports that Bill "Nuclear Option" Frist sorta melted down on the Senate Floor this morning:

This morning on the floor of the Senate, Sen. Chuck Schumer asked Majority Leader Bill Frist a simple question:

SEN. SCHUMER: Isn’t it correct that on March 8, 2000, my colleague [Sen. Frist] voted to uphold the filibuster of Judge Richard Paez?

Here was Frist’s response:

The president, the um, in response, uh, the Paez nomination - we’ll come back and discuss this further. … Actually I’d like to, and it really brings to what I believe - a point - and it really brings to, oddly, a point, what is the issue. The issue is we have leadership-led partisan filibusters that have, um, obstructed, not one nominee, but two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, in a routine way.

Frist himself has supported a filibuster against a Clinton judicial nominee. Now he wants the practice declared unconstitutional. These guys always want to play by their own set of rules.

7:53:18 PM  #  
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Cartoonist Ruben Bolling on The Nuclear Option.

As before, you’ll probably have to look at an ad to get access to the site. Click for a Site Pass. After you’ve endured the ad, you can browse the entire site all day without facing additional ads of that type. While you’re there, you might as well look around.

Bolling and Tom Tomorrow are shedding light on creationist revision of science.

Tom Tomorrow exposes a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. He says Republicans Believe the Darnedest Things. He’s got artistic range, too. He can do film noir.

Salon.com isn’t all funnies. Here’s their primer on the nuclear option:

Unless somebody blinks first, we’re in for a mind-warping set of unprecedented Senate maneuvers that could put Dick Cheney in charge of deeming the filibuster “unconstitutional” -- without a word from those folks in black robes across the street -- and grease the way for each and every right-wing extremist George W. Bush ever cares to put on a district court, an appellate court or the U.S. Supreme Court.

12:58:56 PM  #  
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A little more than ten years ago, I was summoned to jury duty. It was an endlessly educational experience.

A jury throws together people who don’t often mix in modern America. My fellow jurors came from many walks of life. We each saw and understood things from our own perspective. When another juror’s perspective was very different from mine, I was tempted to see that perspective as a bias. I suppose my own perspective may have looked like a bias to other jurors. All the jurors took their duty seriously, and we all found ways to get along while we were stuck together.

I was there for three weeks, and sat on two juries, each trying a civil lawsuit. A lawsuit that reaches a jury is unlikely to be a simple open-and-shut case. Those cases are usually settled out of court.

These were not celebrated cases, so there was no thought of sequestering the juries. We wandered around downtown during the long lunch breaks, and went home every evening. But each day the judge gave us “the admonition,” reminding us not to discuss the case with anyone, including our fellow jurors. We talked about sports, music, movies — anything but the case.

There were ten of us in the jury box during the trials: eight regular jurors and two alternates. At the end of the trial, the alternates were sent away, and only the eight regular jurors participated in deliberations.

We were given a series of questions, called interrogatories. Had the defendent done this specific act? If not, we had to return a verdict for the defendent. Had the plaintiff suffered actual harm from the act? If not, we had to return a verdict for the defendent. Had the plaintiff taken reasonable care to avoid that harm? And so on. We discussed each question and voted on it. A jury in a criminal trial must reach unanimous agreement. In our civil cases, we needed 75% agreement to answer each question.

A friend asked whether I had more or less confidence in our system of justice after my three weeks of jury duty. It wasn’t an easy question to answer.

I worried about the biases I had noticed. In each jury I thought there were one or two jurors with a predetermined bias against the party with more money. In one case that was the plaintiff, in the other case it was the defendant. There was a different juror who didn’t seem to understand some particular rule of logic. There were disagreements about the meaning of terms like “reasonable care.”

But those disagreements and rough edges were good, too. Because we jurors saw things from different perspectives, we collectively saw and understood more than any one of us alone would see.

What smoothed out the rough edges was this: we couldn’t reach a verdict without a 75% majority. If half the jurors held a wrong-headed bias, they had to persuade not just one, but two other jurors to join them. If they could do that, maybe they weren’t wrong-headed after all. My confidence in the jury system is based very much on its requirement of supermajorities.

You know, there once was a time when the Senate commonly approved federal court nominees unanimously. That wasn’t because the Senate thought its constitutional duty to “advise and consent” was to rubber-stamp all the president’s nominees. No, it was because presidents understood that federal judges serve for life, and make life-and-death decisions from the bench. They nominated people with excellent credentials, with impressive records of achievement, and without extremist ideologies. It wasn’t too hard to get unanimous approval of nominees like that.

We have a different kind of president now, sending a different kind of nominee. We have a different kind of Senate, too, weighing a “nuclear option” to let them ram through judicial extremists on a straight party-line vote.

How do I know the nominees are extremists? The Republicans can’t find five Democrats to join them to vote for cloture to end a filibuster and bring the nomination to a vote.

How do I know it’s not just the Democrats being partisan? Because they’ve tried to block only ten of Bush’s 214 federal court nominees.

Judges with life-and-death power. Serving for life. Approved by strict party-line votes, over all objections. If you want to undermine confidence in the government of the United States, that’s the way to do it.

11:54:32 AM  #  
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One of my brothers called me this morning and asked whether I’d seen Bill Moyers’ speech to the National Conference for Media Reform, broadcast on C-SPAN. I hadn’t, so he helped me find the prepared text and an MP3 audio file of the speech online.

The speech is one hour and four minutes long, and I really think you should take the time to listen to it. It’s one of the best things I’ve heard in a long time. (The prepared text differs in places from Moyers’ spoken words. The quotes below are mostly from the prepared text, with only one or two changes, by me, to reflect the version as delivered.)

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Moyers helped create NOW, a PBS news magazine program featuring voices not usually heard on traditional news programs — not just people from across the political spectrum, but poets, scientists, philosophers, and ordinary citizens who could not be characterized by something as narrow as a political spectrum. From the start, Moyers became a lightning rod for right-wing wrath.

Let me assure you that I take in stride attacks by the radical right-wingers who have not given up demonizing me although I retired over six months ago. They’ve been after me for years now, and I suspect they will be stomping on my grave to make sure I don’t come back from the dead.

…

Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control, using the government to threaten and intimidate. I mean the people who are hollowing out middle-class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class in a war to make sure Ahmed Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq’s oil. I mean the people who turn faith-based initiatives into a slush fund and who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets. I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy.

That’s who I mean. And if that’s editorializing, so be it. A free press is one where it’s OK to state the conclusion you’re led to by the evidence.

The Rules of the Game

One reason I’m in hot water is because my colleagues and I at NOW didn’t play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.

…

These “rules of the game” permit Washington officials to set the agenda for journalism, leaving the press all too often simply to recount what officials say instead of subjecting their words and deeds to critical scrutiny. Instead of acting as filters for readers and viewers, sifting the truth from the propaganda, reporters and anchors attentively transcribe both sides of the spin invariably failing to provide context, background or any sense of which claims hold up and which are misleading.

I decided long ago that this wasn’t healthy for democracy. I came to see that “news is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity.” … I realized that investigative journalism could not be a collaboration between the journalist and the subject. Objectivity is not satisfied by two opposing people offering competing opinions, leaving the viewer to split the difference.

I came to believe that objective journalism means describing the object being reported on, including the little fibs and fantasies as well as the Big Lie of the people in power. In no way does this permit journalists to make accusations and allegations. It means, instead, making sure that your reporting and your conclusions can be nailed to the post with confirming evidence.

Orthodoxy Can Kill a Democracy

In Orwell’s 1984, the character Syme, one of the writers of that totalitarian society’s dictionary, explains to the protagonist Winston, “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only on partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda, is less inclined to put up a fight, to ask questions and be skeptical. That kind of orthodoxy can kill a democracy — or worse.

Moyers talked about the original concept behind NOW:

I told our producers and correspondents that in our field reporting our job was to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth. This was all the more imperative in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. America could be entering a long war against an elusive and stateless enemy with no definable measure of victory and no limit to its duration, cost or foreboding fear. The rise of a homeland security state meant government could justify extraordinary measures in exchange for protecting citizens against unnamed, even unproven, threats.

…

I also reminded them of how the correspondent and historian Richard Reeves answered a student who asked him to define real news. “Real news,” Reeves responded, “is the news you and I need to keep our freedoms.”

NOW was praised by reviewers. Moyers cites the Baton Rouge Advocate, which said NOW draws on “a wide range of viewpoints which transcend the typical labels of the political left or right.”

The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican Party became. That’s because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth.

This is the point of my story: Ideologues don’t want you to go beyond the typical labels of left and right. They embrace a world view that can’t be proven wrong because they will admit no evidence to the contrary. They want your reporting to validate their belief system and when it doesn’t, God forbid.

Our reporting was giving the radical right fits because it wasn’t the party line. It wasn’t that we were getting it wrong… The problem was that we were telling stories that partisans in power didn’t want told … we were getting it right, not right-wing.

I’ve always thought the American eagle needed a left wing and a right wing. The right wing would see to it that economic interests had their legitimate concerns addressed. The left wing would see to it that ordinary people were included in the bargain. Both would keep the great bird on course. But with two right wings or two left wings, it’s no longer an eagle and it’s going to crash.

The Flag in the Lapel

One night Moyers put an American flag pin in his lapel and sent the right wing into a fury by talking about it:

I wore my flag tonight. First time. Until now I haven’t thought it necessary to display a little metallic icon of patriotism for everyone to see. It was enough to vote, pay my taxes, perform my civic duties, speak my mind, and do my best to raise our kids to be good Americans.

Sometimes I would offer a small prayer of gratitude that I had been born in a country whose institutions sustained me, whose armed forces protected me, and whose ideals inspired me; I offered my heart’s affections in return. It no more occurred to me to flaunt the flag on my chest than it did to pin my mother’s picture on my lapel to prove her son’s love. Mother knew where I stood; so does my country. I even tuck a valentine in my tax returns on April 15.

So what’s this doing here? Well, I put it on to take it back. The flag’s been hijacked and turned into a logo — the trademark of a monopoly on patriotism. On those Sunday morning talk shows, official chests appear adorned with the flag as if it is the good housekeeping seal of approval. During the State of the Union, did you notice Bush and Cheney wearing the flag? How come? No administration’s patriotism is ever in doubt, only its policies. And the flag bestows no immunity from error. When I see flags sprouting on official lapels, I think of the time in China when I saw Mao’s little red book of orthodoxy on every official’s desk, omnipresent and unread.

But more galling than anything are all those moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapels while writing books and running Web sites and publishing magazines attacking dissenters as un-American. They are people whose ardor for war grows disproportionately to their distance from the fighting. They’re in the same league as those swarms of corporate lobbyists wearing flags and prowling Capitol Hill for tax breaks even as they call for more spending on war.

So I put this on as a modest riposte to men with flags in their lapels who shoot missiles from the safety of Washington think tanks, or argue that sacrifice is good as long as they don’t have to make it, or approve of bribing governments to join the coalition of the willing (after they first stash the cash). I put it on to remind myself that not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what Bin Laden did to us. The flag belongs to the country, not to the government. And it reminds me that it’s not un-American to think that war — except in self-defense — is a failure of moral imagination, political nerve, and diplomacy. Come to think of it, standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country.

Powerful Republican politicians started to demand that Moyers be silenced.

As rumors circulated about all this, I asked to meet with the [Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)] board to hear for myself what was being said. I thought it would be helpful for someone like me, who had been present at the creation and part of the system for almost 40 years, to talk about how CPB had been intended to be a heat shield to protect public broadcasters from exactly this kind of intimidation.

…

I thought the current CPB board would like to hear and talk about the importance of standing up to political interference. I was wrong. They wouldn’t meet with me. I tried three times. And it was all downhill after that.

I was naíve, I guess. I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out for the White House. But that’s what Kenneth Tomlinson has done.

…

Only two weeks ago did we learn that Mr. Tomlinson had spent $10,000 last year to hire a contractor who would watch my show and report on political bias. That’s right. Kenneth Y. Tomlinson spent $10,000 of your money to hire a guy to watch NOW to find out who my guests were and what my stories were. Ten thousand dollars.

…

That would have bought five tables at Thursday night’s “Conservative Salute for Tom DeLay.” Better yet, that ten grand would pay for the books in an elementary school classroom or an upgrade of its computer lab.

But having sent that cash, what did he find? Only Mr. Tomlinson knows. He’s apparently decided not to share the results with his staff, or his board or leak it to Robert Novak. The public paid for it — but Ken Tomlinson acts as if he owns it.

In a May 10 op-ed piece, in Reverend Moon’s conservative Washington Times, Tomlinson maintained he had not released the findings because public broadcasting is such a delicate institution that he did not want to “damage public broadcasting’s image with controversy.” Where I come from in Texas, we shovel that kind of stuff every day.

The Big Donor and the Widow’s Mite

In his op-ed essay this week in Washington Times, Ken Tomlinson tells of a phone call from an old friend complaining about my bias. Wrote Mr. Tomlinson: “The friend explained that the foundation he heads made a six-figure contribution to his local television station for digital conversion. But he declared there would be no more contributions until something was done about the network’s bias.”

Apparently that’s Kenneth Tomlinson’s method of governance. Money talks and buys the influence it wants.

I would like to ask him to listen to a different voice.

This letter came to me last year from [the widow of a New York City fireman killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks], five pages of handwriting. She said, among other things, that “… since I lost my husband on 9/11, not only our family’s world, but the whole world seems to have gotten even worse than that tragic day.”

She wanted me to know that on 9/11 her husband was not on duty. “He was home with me having coffee… But my Charlie took off like a lightning bolt to be with his men from the Special Operations Command. ‘Bring my gear to the plaza,’ he told his aide immediately after the first plane struck the North Tower. … He took action based on the responsibility he felt for his job and his men and for those Towers that he loved.”

In the FDNY, she said, chain-of-command rules extend to every captain of every fire house in the city. If anything happens in the firehouse — at any time — even if the captain isn’t on duty or on vacation — that captain is responsible for everything that goes on there 24/7.”

So she asked: “Why is this administration responsible for nothing? All that they do is pass the blame. This is not leadership…”

And then she wrote: “We need more programs like yours to wake America up. … Such programs must continue amidst the sea of false images and name-calling that divide America now. … Such programs give us hope that search will continue to get this imperfect human condition on to a higher plane. So thank you and all of those who work with you. Without public broadcasting, all we would call news would be merely carefully controlled propaganda.”

Framed above my desk at my office is [a copy of] the check she made out to “Channel 13—NOW” for $500. When I go discouraged or need to remind myself that public media truly matter, I look at that check, and think of the woman who wrote it, and the husband who did his duty, and their belief in us. And I will take — over the big check that Ken Tomlinson could have gotten from the demanding right winger — I would take the widow’s mite any day.

Go listen.

6:35:44 PM  #  
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I’ve been watching HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher for about a month now. Even though it sometimes makes me cringe, it seems there’s something good on there every week. Now the show is going on summer vacation, so this blog may not have so many quotes from comedians and foreign dignitaries for the next few months.

Bill Maher on liberals:

We don’t hate America. We love America. We just want it back from the cretins who’ve taken it over.

Al Franken on the people who opposed having a paper trail on electronic voting machines:

If they wanted people not to have conspiracy theories, they would have a paper trail. So, if they wanted to actually play this clean, and not get people doubting — if you really believe you’re gonna win, you don’t want people doubting that you won. You want the certainty.

The Republicans don’t mind a little doubt, so long as they have the power. If they can make the doubters look paranoid, then heck — that’s just a bonus.

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I guess I’m not the only person who’s noticed that the Dark Side of the Force looks a lot like the Bush Administration. Here’s Dan Froomkin in the Washington Post:

“Revenge of the Sith,” it turns out, can also be seen as a cautionary tale for our time — a blistering critique of the war in Iraq, a reminder of how democracies can give up their freedoms too easily, and an admonition about the seduction of good people by absolute power.

Some film critics suggest it could be the biggest anti-Bush blockbuster since “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

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A. O. Scott’s review of Revenge of the Sith in the New York Times is fun to read:

This is by far the best film in the more recent trilogy, and also the best of the four episodes Mr. Lucas has directed. That’s right (and my inner 11-year-old shudders as I type this): it’s better than “Star Wars.”

“Revenge of the Sith,” which had its premiere here yesterday at the Cannes International Film Festival, ranks with “The Empire Strikes Back” (directed by Irvin Kershner in 1980) as the richest and most challenging movie in the cycle. It comes closer than any of the other episodes to realizing Mr. Lucas’s frequently reiterated dream of bringing the combination of vigorous spectacle and mythic resonance he found in the films of Akira Kurosawa into American commercial cinema.

…

“This is how liberty dies - to thunderous applause,” Padmé observes as senators, their fears and dreams of glory deftly manipulated by Palpatine, vote to give him sweeping new powers. “Revenge of the Sith” is about how a republic dismantles its own democratic principles, about how politics becomes militarized, about how a Manichaean ideology undermines the rational exercise of power. Mr. Lucas is clearly jabbing his light saber in the direction of some real-world political leaders. At one point, Darth Vader, already deep in the thrall of the dark side and echoing the words of George W. Bush, hisses at Obi-Wan, “If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy.” Obi-Wan’s response is likely to surface as a bumper sticker during the next election campaign: “Only a Sith thinks in absolutes.” You may applaud this editorializing, or you may find it overwrought, but give Mr. Lucas his due. For decades he has been blamed (unjustly) for helping to lead American movies away from their early-70’s engagement with political matters, and he deserves credit for trying to bring them back.

7:40:14 PM  #  
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The Hubble Space Telescope marks fifteen years of service.

4:09:46 PM  #  
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Can a thing that has been used to do evil be turned to do good? The filibuster isn’t the problem. Like a hammer or a knife, it’s just a tool. What is the tool being used for? Richard Cohen in the Washington Post:

The president claims he should have the judges he wants because he won the last election. He has a mandate, he alleges, but if so, it is an insubstantial one — a bit more than 2 percent of the popular vote. When you compare that with recent second-term victories — FDR, who won by 24.3 percentage points; Ike, by 15.4; LBJ, by 22.6; Nixon, by 23.2; Reagan, by 18.2; Clinton, by 8.5 — it becomes clear that Bush’s mandate is, like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a figment of his imagination. His mandate, such as it is, should be to realize he ain’t got one.

I concede that I was not always so kindly disposed toward the filibuster. There was a time when it was used to thwart civil rights legislation and other legislative acts of basic decency. Now, though, it is being brandished to block a handful of prospective judges from narrowing those hard-earned rights.

3:22:57 PM  #  
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Amy Sullivan in the Los Angeles Times:

Maybe my Bible was just a different translation from the one used by Pastor Chan Chandler. Chandler was the minister of East Waynesville Baptist Church in North Carolina who told members of his flock that if they voted for John Kerry, they needed to repent their sin or resign from the church.

Calling himself “merely the spokesperson” for “the most high,” Chandler charged that Kerry was an unbeliever…

The New Republican Standard Version of the Bible has been gaining popularity among evangelicals and Catholics. Just a few weeks ago, conservative political and religious leaders lined up on their so-called “Justice Sunday” to charge that those who oppose the ideologically extreme judicial nominees whom they support cannot be true people of faith.

Some members of the American Catholic clergy told Catholic voters last year that a vote for the pro-choice Democratic nominee would be punishable by exclusion from the sacrament of Holy Communion.

This is a shift — however slight — in conservative rhetoric and tactics.

The charge used to be that Democrats were godless, a party of secularists run amok. That changed somewhere around the time when Barack Obama boomed, “We worship an awesome God in the blue states!”; progressive minister Jim Wallis became one of the best-selling authors in the country; and Americans began to reconnect with their history, including centuries of religiously motivated political causes such as abolition, women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement.

So having failed to prove that Democrats are all secularists, conservatives now assert that liberals are not religious enough…

This is a debate that conservatives are going to lose. Because you don’t have to be liberal or conservative to be offended by the idea that a political or religious leader can decide whether your faith is good enough.

Somehow, it’s always about who will be the judge.

12:22:34 PM  #  
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It’s been a while since George Lucas has had much worth saying, I think. But I’ve read about a scene in the new Star Wars movie: the Galactic Senate cheers when the Emperor declares the end of the Galactic Republic, “for a safe and secure society.”

Senator Amidala says, “This is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause.”

Rats. I wasn’t going to see the movie. Now I’ve gotta.

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This is a fairly old story, from earlier this month: Ken Tomlinson, Republican Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, reportedly told PBS officials to make sure their programming reflected the Republican mandate.

He hasn’t denied that he said it, but says he was kidding! Sheesh, can’t you take a joke?

Gosh, I suppose I should lighten up. So here’s a cartoon from Mark Fiore, introducing the new PBS.

10:51:13 PM  #  
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I bought my first computer 22 years ago today, on May 11, 1983. Changed my life.

It was an Apple IIe, a minor 1983 update to the classic Apple II that had been introduced in 1977. The pace of technological change has accelerated since then.

The central processing unit (CPU) in my Apple IIe was a 6502 chip running at 1 MHz, just like the original Apple II. When I tried my hand at typing in programs in the built-in BASIC language, I was astonished at the speed of the machine. Error messages might flash by too quickly for me to see. My daisy-wheel printer could hammer out about 12 characters per second — very impressive compared to my own halting manual typing.

The computer I’m using right now has two CPUs, each running at 2GHz — 2,000 times the clock speed of my first computer. The CPUs are of a different design: they can deal with data in bigger chunks than the 6502; they use a RISC instruction set that operates significantly differently from the 6502. My new computer might be many thousands of times faster than my Apple IIe, or it might be only about 1,000 times faster. I’m sometimes frustrated that some operations seem to take too long. My expectations have changed during the past 22 years, but I’m also doing things with this computer that I never would have imagined doing with the Apple IIe.

My Apple IIe came fully loaded with 64K of RAM memory, the maximum amount of memory that could be directly accessed by the 6502 CPU. The Apple Writer word processor fit into a lean 16K, leaving ample memory for documents of about twenty pages. Longer documents could be saved in a series of files. Having plenty of RAM, I got spoiled. I’ve stuffed my current machine with 2.5 gigabytes of RAM — more than 40,000 times as much memory as my Apple IIe. When that’s not enough, the operating system on my current machine can use virtual memory to make it seem as if I’ve got even more memory.

My Apple IIe had two floppy disk drives, each capable of holding 144K of programs and data. A few programs were too complicated to fit in the machine’s 64K of RAM, so it was often a good idea to leave the program disk in one drive so segments of the program could be loaded as they were needed. The other drive could be used to hold any files I might create while running the program.

My current computer has two hard drives, totaling over 400Gb. That’s a little less than 1.5 million times as much storage as I got with my first computer. I have most of my CD collection instantly available on my computer. I can edit video clips and burn DVDs. Every now and then I look into adding more disk space.

I can’t prove this, but I feel fairly confident that when I bought my Apple IIe, I owned more computer power than existed in the entire world at the end of World War II — more than was used by the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb, more than was used by the code-breakers at Bletchley Park to crack the German Enigma codes, more than was possessed by all the governments on both sides of the war.

It’s nice to have the latest and greatest hardware and software, but a fast computer is no substitute for a good brain.

10:38:29 PM  #  
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More news from the Republican jihad:

For many residents of this hamlet nestled in the Smoky Mountains, nothing is as important as church. That’s why nine longtime members of East Waynesville Baptist Church are so devastated after being kicked out of the congregation for, they say, supporting Democrat John Kerry’s presidential bid.

The minister delivered his fatwa in a sermon last October:

But the question then comes in, in the Baptist Church, how do I vote? Let me just say this right now: If you vote for John Kerry this year, you need to repent or resign.

Oh, yes. He’s going far in today’s GOP.

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Frank Rich on the sycophantic White House press corps:

It was only too fitting that Mrs. Bush’s performance occurred on the eve of the second anniversary of the most elaborate production of them all: the “Top Gun” landing by the president on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. The Washington reviews of her husband at the time were reminiscent of hers last weekend. “This president has learned how to move in a way that just conveys a great sense of authority and command,” David Broder raved on “Meet the Press.” Robert Novak chimed in: “He looks good in a jumpsuit.” It would be quite a while before these guys stopped cheering the Jerry Bruckheimer theatrics and started noticing the essential fiction of the scene: the mission in Iraq hadn’t been accomplished, and major combat operations were far from over.

“We create our own reality” is how a Bush official put it to Ron Suskind in an article in The Times Magazine during the presidential campaign. That they can get away with it shows the keenness of their cultural antennas. Infotainment has reached a new level of ubiquity in an era in which “reality” television and reality have become so blurred that it’s hard to know if ABC News’s special investigating “American Idol” last week was real journalism about a fake show or fake journalism about a real show or whether anyone knows the difference — or cares.

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Today is the sixtieth anniversary of V-E Day, celebrating allied Victory in Europe at the end of World War II.

That’s one reason I’m free to get worked up today about the Kansas Board of Education offering “a new definition of science that does not rely only on natural causes.”

There will be no Victory in America Day, because the battle for liberty does not end.

Sixty years ago, this country’s commitment to liberty was more than mere lip service. Whether we are so committed today is in our own hands.

5:08:00 PM  #  
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Kim Campbell, briefly Prime minister of Canada, on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher:

Paul Krugman… wrote that he read Henry Kissinger’s PhD thesis, which is about what happens in a stable system — this time Europe at the time of the French Revolution — when one of the players is a rogue and doesn’t play by the rules. And he talks about all the rationalizations that people make, why they’re doing this. You know: “Well, they have to play to their supporters, and they’ll come on board soon.” And Krugman says as he’s reading this, he thinks “My God, I’m reading about the Bush Administration.”

I think when we face radicals — people who actually don’t accept the rules, who don’t accept the historical consensus of the separation of church and state, who have no respect for the notion of what science is, all of these kinds of things — it is so mind-boggling that people are kind of paralyzed. They don’t know what to do. And so they keep thinking, “Oh, it’s just a marginal thing, they aren’t really this focused at changing things.” And yet they are.

The discussion of Henry Kissinger’s thesis is in Paul Krugman’s book The Great Unraveling. I recommend it.

Revolutionaries depend on the incredulity of the rest of us. If you believe radical right revolutionaries mean to stop somewhere short of trampling on your rights, then they’ve won, you’ve lost.

3:28:28 PM  #  
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A few days ago, griping about the media obsession with “runaway bride” Jennifer Wilbanks, I wrote:

Have we forgotten how to say, “It’s none of my business?”

Since then, I’ve realized that we say it a lot. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard, “I know it’s none of my business, but…” Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of minding our own business.

This blog doesn’t get much traffic, usually. But in the last 24 hours, there have been about fifteen times as many visitors as on an average day. Almost every one of them found the site by Googling for “Jennifer Wilbanks.”

So tomorrow I’ll be posting my stunning exposé on Britney Spears’ pregnancy. It’s all the news you need to know!

That should run up the hit counts a little.

1:11:29 AM  #  
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Janeane Garofalo on the PBS program NOW:

The right wing noise machine over the last forty years has spent an enormous amount of money and time convincing the people that the truth is a liberal bias.

…

The mainstream media has now given fact and spin equal weight in a “he said, she said.”

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I saw Jon Stewart performing live earlier today. He’s a funny guy. The audience laughed and applauded throughout the show.

Ohio was a “swing state” in last year’s election. Jon asked whether we’d enjoyed having presidential candidates visit every few days to tell us how much they loved us. He asked whether we’d seen any of them since the election. They used us, he said, then threw us away “after they’d done their dirty, dirty business.”

It wasn’t all politics. He talked about buying a new computer that the salesman assured him was “more powerful than the computers NASA uses to launch the space shuttle.” Jon said his shuttle was just sitting in the driveway at home because his old Tandy computer wasn’t powerful enough to launch it.

Mostly, though, there was a political edge. Paraphrasing very loosely, he said this:

The divide in America today is not between religion and science. It’s not between conservative and liberal, or Republican and Democrat, or red states and blue states. The divide in America today is between moderates and extremists.

We’re all moderates here. We’re not shouting slogans. Nobody here has their mouth taped over with the word “Life.” Nobody here is carrying around a can of red paint just to throw on somebody.

You don’t see moderates standing in front of a building chanting, “Let’s be reasonable!” You know why? Because moderates have stuff to do. They’re too busy to travel around the country staging vigils for the TV cameras. That’s why the extremists seem to be winning. Moderates have stuff to do.

We’ve had a lot of presidents—some really good ones, and some really bad ones—and our government has survived through all of them. It will survive through these guys, too. They may try to bring it down, but they’ll fail, and here’s why: when things get bad enough, all those busy moderates—the ones with stuff to do—are going to say, “You know, this stuff can wait ’til tomorrow.” And they’ll rescue the country from the extremists.

But he said it better than I did.

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One of the tough things about being absolutely certain you have the one literal, immutable truth must be learning something like this:

Satanists, apocalypse watchers and heavy metal guitarists may have to adjust their demonic numerology after a recently deciphered ancient biblical text revealed that 666 is not the fabled Number of the Beast after all.

A fragment from the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament, dating to the Third century, gives the more mundane 616 as the mark of the Antichrist.

That would be embarrassing, I should think, especially if you were accustomed to making fiery denunciations of your enemies based on the Book of Revelation.

Dr. Aitken said, however, that scholars now believe the number in question has very little to do the devil. It was actually a complicated numerical riddle in Greek, meant to represent someone’s name, she said.

“It’s a number puzzle -- the majority opinion seems to be that it refers to [the Roman emperor] Nero.”

Revelation was actually a thinly disguised political tract, with the names of those being criticized changed to numbers to protect the authors and early Christians from reprisals. “It’s a very political document,” Dr. Aitken said. “It’s a critique of the politics and society of the Roman empire, but it’s written in coded language and riddles.”

Oh, so using God’s name to justify your own agenda isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s a time-honored tradition. I guess I owe an apology to all those currently taking the Lord’s name in vain.

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During World War II, we had rationing, scrap metal drives, housewives working in defense factories. Soldiers faced death on the front lines, but every American was expected to make some sacrifices to help the war effort.

We’ve made a lot of progress since those days. Now the president can ship our boys and girls in uniform off to fight and die whenever and wherever he wants to. The American people—well, except for the boys and girls in uniform, of course—can sleep easy, knowing they will never be asked to make any sacrifices for the war effort.

So, how dare Ward Sutton suggest that home-front patriots who have already gone above and beyond the call of duty should do even more?

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When Ohio State University president Novice G. Fawcett retired in 1972, the Ohio legislature changed the law so that a new campus building could be named after him. Before that change, a state government building couldn’t be named after a living person. Politicians were left to hope that some later generation might see fit to bestow such an honor. After the law was changed, later generations became irrelevant. A sitting politician could place the laurel wreath upon his own brow.

No Ohio politician was more honored by naming buildings after himself than James A. Rhodes, governor from 1963-1971 and 1975-1983. I haven’t been able to find a complete list of state buildings named for him. There are at least three right here in Columbus: the state office tower just across the street from the State House, a hospital building at the Ohio State University Medical Center, and a building at the state fairgrounds. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that I’ve missed some.

The capper to Rhodes’ remarkable career of self-congratulation came on May 4, 1982, when he pushed authorization to build a monument to James A. Rhodes through the legislature, as a rider on a prison construction bill.

I called my state representative to protest. He said he had voted against the monument, but the prison bill was badly needed, so he had to vote for it. My question: Why did it have to be passed on May 4th? Why not May 3rd, or May 5th?

On May 4, 1970, thirty-five years ago today, National Guardsmen sent by Governor Rhodes killed four students and wounded nine at Kent State University. Rhodes was seeking a Senate nomination, so the day before the shootings he cranked up the heat, calling anti-war organizers “the worst type of people we harbor in America.” The killings thrilled a certain strain of conservative voter, so Rhodes never publicly breathed a word of sorrow or regret over the students gunned down on their college campus.

When Rhodes died in 2001, the Associated Press said:

Those close to him said he was saddened by the tragedy but blamed the turbulence of the war era and believed his action was necessary.

There is such a thing as coincidence, but human beings control legislative calendars. If Rhodes had been “saddened by the tragedy,” he wouldn’t have pushed for his monument to himself on the anniversary of the killings.

After Rhodes’ death, the sculptor who built the monument, a cast-metal statue of Rhodes, said he had engraved the names of the four dead Kent State students inside the hollow statue. It’s not enough. Not nearly enough.

In Memoriam

Allison Krause
Jeffrey Miller
Sandra Scheuer
William Schroeder

Four Dead in Ohio.

Update: Via a recent email message, here’s a Kent State scrapbook.

4:57:03 PM  #  
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The Washington Post has a story titled Doubts About Mandate for Bush, GOP:

As the president passed the 100-day mark of his second term over the weekend, the main question facing Bush and his party is whether they misread the November elections. With the president’s poll numbers down, and the Republican majority ensnared in ethical controversy, things look much less like a once-a-generation realignment.

On November 4th last year, in an entry called Political Capital, I wrote:

You’ve spent your political capital, George. You’ve blown through it just like you blew through the budget surplus you inherited from the Clinton Administration.

You’ve got a deep deficit, George. You owe us.

So I feel like I’ve been ahead of the curve on the mandate issue.

3:57:29 PM  #  
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From HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher:

Confronting an assertion that the new Republican budget, cutting $10 billion from Medicaid and adding over $100 billion in tax cuts for the rich, was a necessary setting of priorities to cut our huge budget deficits, Martin Short asked:

Would you say that the rich have gotten poorer under George Bush?

Discussing new polls showing George W. Bush’s approval rating at only 44%, Bill Maher said:

The American public always wanted to vote for a guy—and Bush was the perfect guy—who they’d want to have over for pot roast. And George Bush is that guy. He does that well. You’d like to have him over for pot roast. He reminds you of yourself.

Well, now he’s been over, he’s had the pot roast, but he’s getting drunk, and now he’s talking about stem cells and Terri Schiavo and gay marriage, and now he’s the guest that won’t leave.

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Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

President Bush’s favorite Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia:

government—however you want to limit that concept—derives its moral authority from God. It is the “minister of God” with powers to “revenge,” to “execute wrath,” including even wrath by the sword

…

The reaction of people of faith to this tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government should not be resignation to it, but the resolution to combat it as effectively as possible.

I kinda suspected Bush and his pals had a problem with democracy.

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I’m a boomer. There was a time when I was proud of my generation. No more. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof explains why:

As a baby boomer myself, I can be blunt: We boomers won’t be remembered as the “Greatest Generation.” Rather, we’ll be scorned as the “Greediest Generation.”

…

As of 2003, the share of elderly below the poverty line had fallen by two-thirds to 10 percent - representing a huge national success. Retirement in America is no longer feared as a time of destitution, but anticipated as a time of comfort and leisure.

On the other hand, the proportion of children below the poverty line is still 18 percent, the same as it was in 1966. And while almost all the elderly now have health insurance under Medicare, about 29 percent of children had no health insurance at all at some point in the last 12 months.

One measure of how children have tumbled as a priority in America is that in 1960 we ranked 12th in infant mortality among nations in the world, while now 40 nations have infant mortality rates better than ours or equal to it. We’ve also lost ground in child vaccinations: the United States now ranks 84th in the world for measles immunizations and 89th for polio.

With boomers about to retire, I’m afraid that national priorities will be focused even more powerfully on the elderly rather than the young - because it’s the elderly who wield political clout.

9:45:10 PM  #  
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There’s always a poll of some sort, called “QuickVote,” on CNN’s website.

A few days ago, they were asking whether the space shuttle was safe to launch. I didn’t vote in that one, because I don’t have the skills or the knowledge to make anything more than a wild guess. I’ll bet if I’d watched CNN’s reporting on the planned shuttle launch, I still wouldn’t have the skills or the knowledge to answer the question.

Yesterday, they were asking whether John Mason should marry his runaway bride, Jennifer Wilbanks. I didn’t vote in that one, either. I don’t know either of the people. I don’t know what’s been happening in their private lives. If you told me all their deepest, darkest secrets, I doubt it would shed any light on anything I should be worrying about.

Have we forgotten how to say, “It’s none of my business?”

North Korea is test-launching missiles. American soldiers are still being blown up in Iraq. We’re running up monstrous budget deficits. The economy is starting to sputter. Polar ice is starting to break up due to global warming. Uninsured Americans get sick and face financial ruin. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are still out there, making plans.

The media should be shedding light on things we have a right to care about. Instead, they wallow in stories that are none of our business.

5:33:12 PM  #  
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Now, here’s an interesting way to make America safer: not satisfied with just carrying a concealed weapon? In Florida, you can shoot first and ask questions later. The NRA promises to bring old Dodge City to other states, too:

A retired police officer in St. Petersburg, writing in the St. Petersburg Times, described the legislature’s bill as the “citizens’ right to shoot others on the street if they feel threatened” and asked, “Are they nuts?” That, we cannot answer.

We do, however, recognize a bad law when we see one, and any measure that increases the possibility of innocent people being killed or injured is a threat to public safety and does not belong on the books. This law, first of its kind in the nation, encourages people to be quick with guns, knives or fists. That’s scary. According to the Florida Coalition to Stop Gun Violence Inc., there are already “6 to 7 million untrained gun owners in Florida.”

Telling them that they need only feel threatened in a park or a hospital or a stadium or a domestic dispute to start pulling the trigger is tantamount to turning Florida into Dodge City.

That’s so macho!

2:19:27 PM  #  
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Just by chance, today I heard Barack Obama’s keynote speech from last year’s Democratic Convention. It’s a good speech. If you missed it last year, give it a listen:

Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our Nation — not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

That is the true genius of America, a faith — a faith in simple dreams, an insistence on small miracles; that we can tuck in our children at night and know that they are fed and clothed and safe from harm; that we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door; that we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe; that we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution, and that our votes will be counted — at least most of the time.

This year, in this election we are called to reaffirm our values and our commitments, to hold them against a hard reality and see how we’re measuring up to the legacy of our forbearers and the promise of future generations.

And fellow Americans, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, I say to you tonight: We have more work to do

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If there is a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there is a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for their prescription drugs, and having to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandparent. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties.

It is that fundamental belief — It is that fundamental belief: I am my brother’s keeper. I am my sister’s keeper that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family.

11:22:09 AM  #  
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