Me: Frank Lynch

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For something less spontaneous, I maintain The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page (over 1,800 Johnson quotes), with a weekly essay springing from one of Johnson's quotations.

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I wish you and yours a happy Thanksgiving, if you're observing. (You probably have better things to do tomorrow, so I send you these wishes today.) If your menu isn't set yet and the groceries haven't been bought, please remember it's about being thankful, and not about celebrating gluttony. You have plenty to be thankful for already without compensating for a lack by cooking food for three times as many guests as you'll really have. In spite of eroding standards of living, the United States has a history full of blessings. You probably do, too.
Link 1:09 PM Home

If the fat lady sang, just what was her song? We know Kerry conceded Ohio, but Edwards promised that every vote would be counted. Given questions many have had about procedures (such as which counties were given higher ratios of machines to voters, counting offices locked down under imaginary terrorist threats, and so on), it's good to see that the Ohio Democratic Party is supporting petitions to get a final count in Ohio.

"As Senator Kerry stated in his concession speech in Boston, we do not necessarily expect the results of the election to change; however, we believe it necessary to make sure everyone's vote is counted fairly and accurately," said the party chairman, Dennis L. White. The Democrats are not helping to pay for the recount but will keep close tabs on legal decisions that affect it and place observers in each of the state's 88 counties to monitor the tabulation.

The impending recount was initially spurred by a pair of third-party presidential candidates who said they were concerned that rumors of voter fraud in Ohio were not being addressed. President Bush won the critical state by 136,000 votes, according to unofficial returns. State law allows candidates to demand recounts if they agree to pay -- about $113,000 for a statewide recount. Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb and Libertarian Michael Badnarik, who won few votes in the Buckeye State, raised the money within days of announcing their plans to do so earlier this month.

I say it's good news: let's make it clear that there is scrutiny.
Link 8:37 AM Home

The Omnibus spending bill has been held up, due to the presence of language which allowed Appropriations committee leaders and their agents unfettered access to any citizen's tax records. No one wants to admit that they were responsible for it: the House blames the IRS for its insertion (although, of course, someone in the House had to accept the language), and the head of the IRS is pleading ignorance. The bill won't go to Bush for signature until both the House and the Senate have expunged the offending section.

One this is crystal clear, however: it wasn't the Democrats who did this. This is what happens when a single party controls all the branches of the government: it becomes very difficult for that party to escape guilt.
Link 1:17 PM Home

Don't go there, Peter, is basically what Clinton said to Peter Jennings when Jennings questioned Clinton's "moral authority." Over at Salon, Eric Boehlert recounts the willingness with which ABC covered all the leaks from Ken Starr's office. You do know, I hope, that the definition of conspiracy doesn't require coordination and shared planning, right? "A joining or acting together, as if by sinister design," says the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. It was vast, and it was right wing. (Read Sidney Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars for the lowdown, if you like...)

Seriously, it's amazing how frequently Jennings is listed as being among the liberally biased media. The Press's bias is to make money, and if the public is in the mood to think negatively of Clinton, the media will pander to it. The New York Times did the same with its Whitewater coverage, too.
Link 12:17 PM Home

U2 performed free in New York City yesterday, if you haven't heard. First they traveled from Columbia University to downtown on the back of a flatbed truck, singing songs from their new CD and taping for a video as they went along, and finally wound up on the Brooklyn side of the East River, doing a one-hour show in a park between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. You can read more at the New York Times, and watch the video of the BBC's report here (look in the lower right, for "BBC NEWS: VIDEO AND AUDIO.")
Link 11:36 AM Home

We ALREADY have a flat tax. Bush has put "simplification of the tax code" high on his list of priorities, and most pundits interpret that as meaning a move towards a flat tax: doing away with important deductions, and making the tax rates far less progressive. But the Daily Howler points to a new book which argues that when state and local taxes are considered, taxes are already flat. (Of course, in typical Daily Howler fashion, Bob Somerby's point is that the Press has yet to communicate this simple idea.)
Link 11:54 AM Home

How many Stanley Tucci characters are in the Department of Homeland Security? In the movie The Terminal, Stanley Tucci plays a security head at New York's JFK Airport, burdened with an international (played by Tom Hanks) who has no documented status because while in flight, his country had a revolution and the US doesn't recognize the new leaders. Tucci's character can neither let Hanks' into the US, nor can he tolerate him in his fief. Tucci's character goes through outrageous machinations to maintain his power over him, but would be happy if he just fell into the jurisdiction of some other government agency.

Four Iranian brothers in the US were swept up by US Immigration in the days following 9/11, and Homeland Security thinks they're terrorists. Nope, says INS, they're not, they should be released; no, they are terrorists, says Homeland Security, but if you really want to release them, just deport them home to Iran — where they're certain to be persecuted for supporting Iranian exile groups that want the current government toppled. Their fears are reasonable, says INS; too bad, says DHS. Read more about it here.
Link 11:06 AM Home

But shouldn't it have happened by NOW? Today, Sen. John McCain was on NBC News' "Meet the Press," and regarding troop strength in Iraq, had this exchange with host Tim Russert:

MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to Iraq. Here are the headlines. "Baghdad suffers a day of attacks, assassinations. Residents fear an insurgent offensive." We went into Fallujah, a successful military operation, but the insurgency seems to pop up all across the country, like one of the games if you hit it...

SEN. McCAIN: Whack-a-mole.

MR. RUSSERT: ...at the arcade...

SEN. McCAIN: Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT: ...it pops up someplace else.

SEN. McCAIN: Whack-a-mole. First of all, the operation in Fallujah was very successful. We killed over a thousand of these people and captured almost an equal number. It is a significant setback. We know that this was a base of operations, which we never should have allowed to form to start with. But to go in and do that was an absolute necessity. Now, we've got to follow it up to other places such as Ramadi and others because we've got to keep them on the run. And I don't know. It goes without--we all know but we have to always mention an incredible performances of these Marines and Army guys. It's just not believable, that they're so magnificent, and the loss of life is so tragic and we mourn for them. But having said that, they did a very efficient operation.

Does that mean everything's fine? No, you've got to follow them up. You've got to go to these other places. You cannot allow them to have sanctuary. The American people have got to know this is a very tough struggle, but I don't see how you could have had elections the end of this coming January if the enemy had a sanctuary particularly in a city the size of Fallujah. So this is a right step in the right direction, but it's very tough and we still need more troops. We still need more people there. I believe those reports of those young Marines that said, "Look, unless we keep a significant presence here, they're going to filter back in."

MR. RUSSERT: More American troops?

SEN. McCAIN: I've said that for--since a year ago last August.

MR. RUSSERT: How many more do you think we need, Senator, in all honesty?

SEN. McCAIN: I would say at least 40,000 or 50,000 more, but...

MR. RUSSERT: Where are you going to find them?

SEN. McCAIN: I think you can find them, but it's an enormous strain. We also have to plan on increasing the size of the Army and the Marine Corps. Among others, General McCaffrey is a guy I admire. He says the--you need to increase the Army by about 80,000 and the Marines by 20,000 to 30,000. I don't dispute that. He and others tell me that that's about the right numbers.

MR. RUSSERT: Not only putting down the insurgency, but the number of Iraqi children who are starving has doubled since the war began. We need troops and those support systems for a whole lot of reasons.

SEN. McCAIN: Yeah. Look, we made mistakes at the beginning of this conflict. We made mistakes at the beginning of World War II. Anybody who reads about the landings in North Africa. Every war, there are terrible mistakes made. The key is to fix them, and we can fix them, and I believe that we've done a lot of things better. We need to continue to do them better.

First, the idea of comparing the situation in Iraq to a fun arcade game strikes me as pretty repulsive. Just as it should be considered reprehensible to compare a screw-up like Bush to Hitler, there should also be something inside everyone that cringes at the idea of comparing the need to put down murderous insurgents to Whack-A-Mole. These people are killing our soldiers, and this is not a game.

Secondly, when Russert says there twice as many children starving in Iraq as at the beginning of the war, and McCain glibly admits "we made mistakes at the beginning of this conflict" before begging forgiveness on the basis of comparing this to WWII... Has anyone noticed that it's been two and a half years since we began this conflict? And almost three years since war planning began? At what point do you stop giving the administration a pass? If there were any competence in the administration, those "mistakes at the beginning" would have been rectified in six months; like I said, here it is two more years beyond six months.

And is McCain really comparing the complexity of invading Iraq (a country only the size of California) to WWII, with its various theaters and numerous countries on both sides? Is he really?
Link 5:15 PM Home

I'd have believed it when I'd seen it. James Kuhnhenn at Knight-Ridder has a brief list of items which didn't make it into the spending bill. One line caught my eye...

House and Senate negotiators eliminated:

-Language that would have restricted the Bush administration's attempts to privatize more federal jobs. President Bush had threatened to veto the bill if such restriction were included.

Bush has yet to veto anything in his four years thus far. This means of course that neither Congress nor the President is acting with the independence which the writers of the Constitution envisioned.
Link 8:09 AM Home

A peek at your tax returns, without justification. That's what people in the House of Representatives and/or their "agents" would get, under language surreptitiously inserted into a bill. Not for anti-terrorism, not for suspected criminality, but just for fishing. Josh Marshall has more on this.
Link 7:52 AM Home

I seem to have usability on my mind this morning. On the heels of the last post regarding the inconvenience of the new Beatles CD set, managing magazine subscriptions ought to be easier. This morning I wrote out checks to two different publishers, and for each of them it was for two subscriptions. For one of the publishers, I know we have more subscriptions we give, but the coupon was only for one of the flavors of their magazines. And I know there are magazines we get, ourselves, and other publishers whose magazines we give.

It would be really nice if the trade association could set up some kind of portal where I could go and manage all these subscription, bridging publishers and people... Allow me to add subscriptions, or months/years to existing subscriptions... Maybe suggest additional magazines... Please?
Link 11:02 AM Home

And now, for the Beatles wonks among you, Capitol has reissued a four CD set of the Beatles' first four Capitol albums. The idea of the set is to fill the "need" some fans feel for the songs ordered as they remembered them on the U.S. releases, and mixed as they were on the U.S. releases. For completeness' sake, they provide both the stereo and mono mixes for each. It's with the latter decision that I have a problem. Capitol has a right to make any business move it wants, and so I don't complain about the idea of the set — it's not for me, I won't buy it, don't want it, but it's Capitol's right. But in deciding to provide both stereo and mono mixes, they chose a path of inconvenience, in my view. Each of the four CDs has one album, first in stereo and then in mono. Combining the two on a single CD may facilitate comparisons of stereo to mono, but it makes the simple listening occasion more complex; you either have to do something special at your CD player (like setting the CD to start to play in the middle) or walk across the room to take it out early, or listen to the whole thing twice.

I strongly suspect that most people prefer one version or the other, and it would have made more sense to segregate the stereo and mono versions, maybe putting two albums' worth of music on a single CD (they were short, after all) instead of two versions of one album. Just another pain.
Link 9:39 AM Home

And so it starts: an irrelevant anti-abortion provision is getting tucked into an omnibus spending bill. This is how Lilly got special protection against lawsuits in the Homeland Security bill a couple years ago. It's called "Rally 'round the spoils." And it's disgusting. (I'm sure the President wants the line-item veto restored so he can veto just this sort of thing... I mean, it's for reasons like this that he's vetoed so many laws.)
Link 11:04 PM Home

War for thee, but not for me. The reality of war is something many Americans have sought to avoid, much like observing sausage stuffing and familiarizing themselves with the processes of the Bush administration. (Sorry, Bismarck, I paraphrased you.) Frank Rich notes a disturbing aspect associated with 66 ABC affiliates' decisions to not show Saving Private Ryan on Veteran's Day this year:

What makes the "Ryan" case both chilling and a harbinger of what's to come is that it isn't about Janet Jackson and sex but about the presentation of war at a time when we are fighting one. That some of the companies whose stations refused to broadcast "Saving Private Ryan" also own major American newspapers in cities as various as Providence and Atlanta leaves you wondering what other kind of self-censorship will be practiced next. If these media outlets are afraid to show a graphic Hollywood treatment of a 60-year-old war starring the beloved Tom Hanks because the feds might fine them, toy with their licenses or deny them permission to expand their empires, might they defensively soften their news divisions' efforts to present the graphic truth of an ongoing war?

The Pentagon has a huge public relations issue when it comes to war. The film of the American soldier shooting an Iraqi — the case is under investigation — has infuriated people of all stripes, some arguing it shows why we shouldn't be in Iraq, others arguing it shows why the press shouldn't be there. In discussing the "embed" relationship between the press and the military and how it came about, former Pentagon spokesperson Victoria Clarke described the point of putting soldiers in a positive light:

[CNN HOST PAULA] ZAHN: Based on what you just told me, what is your reaction to the criticism, the broad criticism that the Pentagon put this embed system into place -- it was your idea -- to sell the war to the American public?

CLARKE: It's more complex than that.

ZAHN: Is that in part true?

CLARKE: No. A tiny piece of it is true.

The embedding program was because of several things. It was a recognition that this is the right thing to do. The more information you give people about the military, the more you let them see just how incredible these young people are and how they perform so well under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, the better off we'll all be.

(CROSSTALK)

CLARKE: It is also reality. You know what? It is reality. In this information era in which stuff can just rocket around, rumors including, can rocket around at lightspeed, you want the eyes and ears of the news media there as much as possible, to point out the good things, for sure, but also be the eyes and ears on the bad things.

Most heavy news readers remember how different the coverage of the Iraq war was, depending on whether you were paying attention to U.S. news outlets or international outlets. Not just Al Jazeera, but European outlets gave a more concrete perspective, while Americans seemed to especially relish the theatrical toppling of a statuse.

War needn't be made worse than it is, but it shouldn't be sugar-coated either. The FCC should think hard about its role when its shadow is so intimidating that it stops Americans from seeing a movie like Saving Private Ryan.
Link 10:09 AM Home

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