Me: Frank Lynch

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A good idea, implemented badly. A few days ago I explained why I signed up for the New York Times' subscription service of columnists and archive access. (Really, as I said before, it's the archive access which makes it worthwhile to me.) The subscription ain't cheap, $50 a year. But if you have a few technical skills — and these are easily learned — it turns out you can get free access to the columnists. The routine was revealed by this blogger. It involves the not-very-difficult process of putting the url (the link address) into your clipboard, slicing off the extraneous material beginning with the question mark (that part is what people in the web business call "tags") and running the remainder through a well-known service to get a new form of the link. The "well-known service" is something bloggers have been using for years; it puts new tags onto links to ensure free and ongoing access to articles.

Now, I'm going to be very serious here. I think the Times should charge money for its offerings (although I wouldn't have sent the op-ed columnists to storm Omaha Beach). But it's really astonishing to me that they would have set this up in such a way that it would be so easily surmountable. However, two things to keep in mind: people like me, who would like to provide perpetually useable links to their columnists may be a very small part of theri traffic, and they may have decided that the trickle of a loss from people like me is too small to worry about. Alternatively, it may also be that the technological hurdles are too great, and they feel they need to rely on their lawyers to root out the workaround links.

I don't know. But as someone who used to work in this area, and as someone who wants to see compensation for content providers, and as someone who put out the $50, I'm very curious.
Link | | | 10:31 PM | Home

"Bustle." There's a wonderful passage in Boswell's Journal of A Tour to the Hebrides With Samuel Johnson, in which Johnson takes him down a peg:

We all got ready with dispatch. Dr. Johnson was displeased at my bustling, and walking quickly up and down. He said, "It does not hasten us a bit. It is getting on horseback in a ship. All boys do it; and you are longer a boy than others."

Years earlier, Johnson had written:

"There is no kind of idleness, by which we are so easily seduced, as that which dignifies itself by the appearance of business, and, by making the loiterer imagine that he has something to do which must not be neglected, keeps him in perpetual agitation, and hurries him rapidly from place to place."

Bush seems to be in overdrive now with his pointless trips to New Orleans. From today's Press Gaggle:

...And then after that, we're going to be visiting a recovering business in New Orleans. This is a business -- and it's considered OTR for now, so we'll get you more once we get there. But this is a business that has taken steps to get employees back to work and get those employees temporary housing.

Now, this is really getting to the point where Bush is engaging in bustle, acting like he cares. He's surely seen or heard the polls that his approval ratings have gone down in spite of his New Orleans speech last Thursday. We all know that his going to New Orleans repeatedly has about as much positive impact as President Ford's "Whip Inflation Now" buttons did back in the 1970s. Completely empty gestures. He should be in Washington shaking the trees; he doesn't need to be in New Orleans to learn how it's going, really: he should be listening and asking the difficult questions (oh, you know what kinds of questions I mean; like, "George, tell me exactly why you think it's a 'slam dunk'" kinds of questions) that will make people genuinely prepare for their briefings and know that they'll need to have substantive plans and answers.

I'm certainly appreciative of Bush's recognition that he screwed up the first days after Katrina struck — he certainly could have sent Cheney to talk about prescription drug benefits and to hand McCain his cake — but there comes a point when over-compensating really looks foolish. (Odd that he still hasn't gone to an military funerals...)

(I spared you all talk of Johnson on his birthday on Sunday, so I'm catching up...)
Link | | | 6:44 PM | Home

Whose interests at heart? You probably know the President wants to give federal contractors leeway in the wages they pay in the Katrina recovery: typically, federal contractors are required to pay the minimum prevailing wage rates, but Bush thinks that puts too much of a burden on the huge companies. Apparently the companies don't think that's enough: they're seeking protection against lawsuits. Hey, I'd like to be assured that if I screw people over I'll be protected, too. Of course, they've got the Bush Administration as a role model: early in 2002 the White House was arguing that the U.S. should be exempt from war crimes trials, too.
Link | | | 5:51 PM | Home

The truth is politically motivated. You know the drill: revelations about the looting of the unprotected al Qaqaa munitions dump in Iraq come out before the election, and the White House tries to downplay them as being politically motivated:

"And as the President said, in Ms. Keen's interview with him yesterday, he said, Senator Kerry has shown that he will attack for political gain, without knowing the facts. He puts politics above the facts. And it is irresponsible for Senator Kerry to draw conclusions without knowing the facts. These are wild accusations that he has made, and they just demonstrate that he will say anything for his own political advantage."

I guess we now know, though, that the GOP is pursuing a fairly aggressive political calendar, because they're characterizing Kerry's speech yesterday as being selfishly motivated:

Of the speeches delivered yesterday by the Democrats' 2004 ticket, Kerry's was harsher by far, and it drew a sharp rebuttal from the Republican National Committee's Tracey Schmitt. "Armchair-quarterbacking on tough issues has never been a problem for Senator Kerry," she said. "Such tactics haven't served him well in the past, and today is no exception."

Got that? Do not deal with the substance of the argument; do everything you can to brush it away as selfishly motivated. Do not let anyone think for a moment that Kerry may not be interested in serving himself so much as doing something for the country.
Link | | | 5:32 PM | Home
 

HERE's evidence about how bad the Federal government's response to Katrina was. Not that you may feel as if you needed any, of course. But Clinton was critical about it today. Generally, presidents shy away from criticizing their immediate predecessors and successors; it's kind of a filthy gentleman's agreement that sacrifices truth for politeness. For instance, when Clinton's portrait was unveiled, Bush was all smiles, although everything he'd said in his debates with Gore might have made you think Clinton had 666 tattooed on his forehead. When you're separated by a couple terms, like Jimmy Carter is, there seem to be more liberties.
Link | | | 11:17 PM | Home

An under-the-radar Republican smear. In the confirmation hearings for John Roberts, Senator Lindsey Graham said a very curious thing: that Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg advocates pederasty. Did you know she does? I certainly didn't. According to Timothy Noah at Slate, the remark went widely unreported, and he supposes it was because news outlets couldn't figure out what Graham was talking about. But not all news outlets were silent, Fox reported it without any explanation, and so Noah has done the admirable job of inoculating us all from the smear, should we hear. Worth a glance at least.
Link | | | 10:56 AM | Home
 

It's the 4th quarter, and the Gators haven't lost yet. That, on the face of it, says something about my experiences in the last ten years or so when I've told my family to get lost on a Saturday night while I watch my team. Even more remarkable, maybe, is that the Gator band has occasionally struck up Gustav Holst's "Mars, the Bringer of War" from his suite "The Planets." It's not just that it's classical music, but that it's in 5/4 time. Take away "Mission Impossible," and when was the last time you heard 5/4 on national TV?
Link | | | 11:27 PM | Home

Scenes from "The Grapes of Wrath." One of the thoughts that's crossed my mind about the Katrina evacuations is how they resemble the mass exodus from the Dust Bowl depicted in Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath." The mortgage foreclosures are reminiscent of how the bankruptcy "reform" lawmakers explicitly rejected provisions that would have required tolerance for victims of natural disasters like Katrina... Along the way, the Joads met with varieties of understanding and coldness; Barbara Bush herself has expressed both open-arms and coldness. And also, there's a period where the Joads are settled in a Hooverville, a make-shift village for refugees from the Dust Bowl, complete with difficulties and stresses of being in a village which is far from feeling like home. This last item also has a parallel: the Washington Post reports on a makeshift village for those who lost their homes to Hurricane Charley, how spartan it is, and all the stresses of living in what is basically a compound. To some extent, this is the realm of "what do you expect?" The photos in the Post article look like it's a pretty barren set up, no trees or anything. Yet, if minimum security prisons like Martha Stewart was sentenced to have shrubbery and pleasant surroundings, you would think that we might make some extra effort to make things a bit more pleasant for innocent victims of natural disasters? I concede that their makeshift village is only meant to be temporary, but seriously, take a look.

The other thought that has occurred to me is that I can't help but wonder if, with global warming, if we're not more likely to see another devastating Dust Bowl like Steinbeck wrote about. And how many times we need to be confronted with lessons like those from September 11 and Katrina before we learn them. A dust bowl won't be a sudden occurrence like those two events were, they'll creep in on cats' paws, but we still need to be ready to absorb the victims.

I, for one, can't get over the silence of the Democrats over the bankruptcy bill in this situation. The intransigence of the Republicans is a genuine problem, and it goes to show how out of touch with mainstream American values the Republicans are.
Link | | | 10:52 AM | Home

How to not "get" it. It's Monday morning, August 29, and Katrina has hit New Orleans; over the weekend, warnings from NOAA threatened of a looming cataclysm, in the gravest of terms. If you're Alan Chertoff, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, and responsible for the federal government's reactions, what's on your desk? Avian flu and immigration, of course. (Does this remind you of how on September 11, 2001, Condi Rice was supposedly going to give a speech on the threats to the nation, and include no mention of terrorism? How could anyone have imagined that the August 6 PDB would be relevant?)

The White House refused yesterday to release the full text of a speech Rice had been scheduled to give on Sept. 11, 2001, saying the speech had not been delivered. The Washington Post, quoting former officials who have seen the text, reported yesterday that the speech was designed to promote missile defense as the cornerstone of a new national security strategy, and contained no mention of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or Islamic extremist groups.

Well, at least Afghanistan's a plus.
Link | | | 11:35 PM | Home

Say what you want about the local authorities, but for most of us, our voices will have greater impact on the failures of the federal government. It's a solid fact that the voters of Louisiana and Alabama and Mississippi have more say on whether their local officials will keep their jobs. So forgive me if I spend a lot of time talking about the Feds (I also don't spend much time talking about the strengths and weaknesses of the officials in Belgium).

So, now that we're nearly three weeks into Katrina's havoc on the Gulf Coast, how are the Feds doing?

Nearly three weeks after Hurricane Katrina cut its devastating path, FEMA - the same federal agency that botched the rescue mission - is faltering in its effort to aid hundreds of thousands of storm victims, local officials, evacuees and top federal relief officials say. The federal aid hot line mentioned by President Bush in his address to the nation on Thursday cannot handle the flood of calls, leaving thousands of people unable to get through for help, day after day.

Federal officials are often unable to give local governments permission to proceed with fundamental tasks to get their towns running again. Most areas in the region still lack federal help centers, the one-stop shopping sites for residents in need of aid for their homes or families. Officials say that they are uncertain whether they can meet the president's goal of providing housing for 100,000 people who are now in shelters by the middle of next month.

And on and on it goes from there. Bush wanted a leaner government, and he got it; but it's not a more efficient government, better able to turn on a dime.

It's a good thing that Bush said he's responsible, because you know what? He really is.
Link | | | 11:29 PM | Home

If the election were held today... Don't you wish pollsters would ask off-the-wall questions once in a while? I mean, sinking approval ratings (Foxnews says Bush is at the lowest of his Presidency) and ever-lower consumer confidence figures are pretty good barometers, but nothing really drives it home like telling the President that if the election were held today, the counts would reveal what some of us have known all along: LOSER!

(I can imagine, though, the boy king's questions to his advisors: "How big is the margin of error? Three points? Well hey then my ratings might be as high as 44!)
Link | | | 11:06 PM | Home
 

Did it have to be this way? From the head of the CIA:

"Islamic extremists are exploiting the Iraqi conflict to recruit new anti-U.S. jihadists," Porter J. Goss, director of the C.I.A., told the Senate in February. "These jihadists who survive will leave Iraq experienced in, and focused on, acts of urban terrorism. They represent a potential pool of contacts to build transnational terrorist cells, groups and networks in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries."

Hell. I'd love to know who got us into this mess. Damn. Seriously. Maybe the wise souls at Horsefeathers can shed some light on this.
Link | | | 10:53 PM | Home

Fessin' up. You may or may not know that the New York Times is going to be putting its op-ed columns behind an online wall, they will no longer be free to anyone who hits their web site. It will no longer be an issue of registering, you'll have to pay to read Krugman, Brooks, Dowd and so on online. A lot of people are unhappy about this, although I couldn't dream of quantifying it.

But I will tell you that I gleefully signed up for the subscription. Here's why:

• Even though Paul Krugman is not enough to merit the $50 annual fee all by himself, there are other benefits.
   
• In addition to all the columnists, you get access to their archives: a hunnert articles a month. If you want to put things into context, or delve into the past, this is the part of the deal which is the great enticement.
   
• I've always felt that there is too much free content on the web. A natural opinion from someone who puts content out: I can't begin to tell you how many people come to my Samuel Johnson site for content and take the whole damned thing for granted. I forget who wrote "Being Digital," but I believe he referred to a lot of the Internet as the "gift" economy. Well, in the words of Dr. Johnson, "no man but a blockhead..." Anyway, this is a way I can compensate the New York Times for all they've given me all these years for free.

In all seriousness, I'd gladly pay $100 a year for online access to the New York Times: it's that good, and the "freeness" of Internet content has warped our senses of value. A lot of people have used the claim that "Information wants to be free." My retort, said many years ago, is this: "Information wants to be inert. It takes effort to move it." The New York Times deserves rewards.

(As an aside, I want you to know that I've never liked the "subscription" pricing model. I prefer a model based on page views, rolling back to the fees you pay your Internet service provider. The reason for this is that subscription models only compensate web sites where a consumer thinks they'll come back regularly; yet there is a lot of content on the web which is of specific value and yet resides on web sites where a consumer wouldn't imagine that it will be worth coming back to. Say, if you're doing a report on the agricultural history of beets. It would be better (I think) if your Internet service provider billed you according to the pages you viewed and site owners were compensated according to their traffic. I say this because I have the informed perspective of a content provider who has little repeat traffic. Yet I get about 8,000 visits a week. People like me deserve compensation.)
Link | | | 9:43 PM | Home

An old Bush laugher. While researching the post below, I was looking at the text of the Bush-Kerry debates, and ran across this line from Bush from the second debate:

First of all, we didn't find out [Saddam Hussein] didn't have weapons until we got there, and my opponent thought he had weapons and told everybody he thought he had weapons.

I don't recall this drawing much attention at the time (I don't think I wrote about it, either), but regular readers know that one of my greatest complaints about our war in Iraq is that we had inspectors on the ground, who were in the process of determining the status of WMDs in Iraq, and it was Bush who pulled the plug on them. He had this rhetoric going on about how "time was running out" (as if he was double parked or something) and setting an artificial deadline. So of course it was a lie for Bush to plead ignorance, since he himself created his state of ignorance by refusing to grant the inspectors the additional time they requested.

No, time was running out on Bush's case for war, and nothing else. Liar.

(As for that bit about Kerry also having thought there were WMDs there, well of course, everyone did. But no one, absolutely no one had such a prime opportunity to find out the truth as Bush did. Bush squandered an opportunity Kerry never had.)
Link | | | 6:49 PM | Home

About that Tora Bora assault... It's relevant, of course, because the Administration will want us to believe that it's capable of launching a massive reconstruction effort in New Orleans. From Sunday's New York Times Magazine, if you haven't read it yet, a few select passages (emphases mine):

Now, as the last major battle of the war in Afghanistan began, hidden from view inside the caves were an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 well-trained, well-armed men. A mile below, at the base of the caves, some three dozen U.S. Special Forces troops fanned out. They were the only ground forces that senior American military leaders had committed to the Tora Bora campaign.

...

It was only on the third day of the battle that the three dozen Special Forces troops arrived. But their mission was strictly limited to assisting and advising and calling in air strikes, according to the orders of Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, who was running the war from his headquarters in Tampa, Fla.

...

By now, the Taliban's stronghold in Kandahar had fallen or, more correctly, had been abandoned by the soldiers of the regime. The Taliban retreat from Kandahar was emblematic of the war. None of Afghanistan's cities had been won by force alone. Taliban fighters, after intense bombing, had simply made strategic withdrawals. A number of American officers were now convinced that this was about to happen at Tora Bora, too.

One of them was Brig. Gen. James N. Mattis, the commander of some 4,000 marines who had arrived in the Afghan theater by now. Mattis, along with another officer with whom I spoke, was convinced that with these numbers he could have surrounded and sealed off bin Laden's lair, as well as deployed troops to the most sensitive portions of the largely unpatrolled border with Pakistan. He argued strongly that he should be permitted to proceed to the Tora Bora caves. The general was turned down. An American intelligence official told me that the Bush administration later concluded that the refusal of Centcom to dispatch the marines - along with their failure to commit U.S. ground forces to Afghanistan generally - was the gravest error of the war.

...

Had bin Laden been surrounded at Tora Bora, he would have been confined to an area of several dozen square miles; now he could well be in an area that snakes across some 40,000 square miles.

Now let's be clear, we were ably assisted in our failure to get Bin Laden. But there's no question but that had we taken command and committed the appropriate and necessary levels of forces, OBL might well have been ours in December 2001. And since then, of course, our military has been even less able to concentrate its efforts not just on getting OBL (though it would take acquiescence from Pakistan, a pretty big hurdle) but in keeping the Taliban out of business. The same war which has kept the National Guard and key equipment away from New Orleans has kept us from really pursuing our goals in Afghanistan. (And it's not just OBL, of course: Omar is still missing, too.

Now, you might argue that Bush's failure in Afghanistan is no metric for judging how effective he might be in developing a vision for New Orleans. The two theaters are very different, of course. Except that Bush proclaimed himself a war president; and if his qualities in other spheres fall behind his qualities as a war president, then well, we're in a heap of trouble.

And would you be so kind as to tell me what positive acts Bush has been effective at?

I also wouldn't count on transparency here. As you know, in 2004 Bush spun his way out of Kerry's accurate descriptions of what happened in Tora Bora, claiming we didn't know OBL was really there. Yet at the Times' link you can read about how a Freedom of Information Act filing produced a memo which showed the Pentagon truly thought OBL was at Tora Bora.

New Orleans will be reconstructed with the government we have; we won't get to choose Kerry for this project. We just have to be really careful and keep the heat up on these guys: the bill will be huge (some say more than we've spent in Iraq), and we need to watch it with a close eye.
Link | | | 6:36 PM | Home
 

Smart marketing? The other night I came home with a DVD set of Bruckner symphonies conducted by Gunter Wand. It was labeled volume 1, and consisted of symphonies 5, 6, 8, and 9. That is, it didn't have Bruckner's two most popular, 4 and 7. At first, you would think that a boxed set would contain them; but then again, if you think that a boxed set will be bought by those who are really into Bruckner, you might as well target them with a set that has the really hard core ones... and figure you can get them to buy 4 and 7 when they're mixed in with a set of the lesser symphonies. That's just what I think.

By the way, a few of my buds will be over on Saturday night, and we'll be watching them all, and sampling some Austrian and Bavarian libations as we do so. I'll be live blogging the entire thing. I think this will be a first.
Link | | | 9:54 PM | Home
 

Your tax dollars at work. At today's important hearings to confirm the next Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Senator Coburn has his notes at the ready — and the crossword puzzle. Schmuck.
Link | | | 10:53 PM | Home
 

The price of not reading the newspapers. Remember when the President told FOX news' Brit Hume that he didn't read the newspapers himself, that he relied on his advisors to do the heavy lifting and pass on to him what he really needed to know, because he knew they'd be unbiased? Remember this?

Obviously, if you're intolerant about hearing bad news, you're going to build in your own special bias from your trusted advisors. I can't find the link, so don't trust me on this, but I recall reading a few years ago that people in the inner circle in the WH recognized the impact it might have on their career paths if they didn't give the President the candy-coated versions of event. Seriously, don't trust me, I couldn't find it.

Over at AMERICAblog, John provides a clean synopsis of a Newsweek article on how the President was unaware of the intensity of Katrina's attack for days — Katrina hit land on Monday, August 29, but Bush didn't understand its impact until Thursday, three days later. THREE DAYS.
Link | | | 10:26 PM | Home

Deaths from Europe's heat wave. Over at National Review's The Corner (their group blog), there's a recurring interest in minimizing the inefficacy of the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts by pointing out how many more people died in Europe's heat wave in 2003. For instance, here Jonah Goldberg points to 19,000 who died, with 15,000 in France. And here he introduces a tally that includes a link to a Wikipedia entry that totals the dead to 40,000. Brutal figures to say the least.

But Goldberg takes a really cheap shot in a stupid reference to the deaths in France, writing "and we all know how enlightened their policies are."

How stupid is this?

Well, let's start with the population of New Orleans. At about 500,000 prior to Katrina's onslaught, 10,000 deaths (the upper end of early estimates) represents about 2%. Even if it's half that, we're talking about 1%.

Now let's go to the CIA World Fact Book and check on the populations of these various countries. Let's start with France, 60.656 million people. Close to 15,000 people in France died from the 2003 heat wave (14,847 according to Wikipedia), 0.0245%. Okay, so maybe it's wrong to use the entire population of France as the denominator in this exercise. I'd buy that — after all, we're not using all of the US population to put the casualties from Katrina into context. How much should we cut it back? Well, let's put it this way: for the French casualties from the heat wave to be as high a percentage as the potential casualties in New Orleans (and let's use 5,000, not 10,000), well, to get France up to 1% from 0.0245%, you have to use a denominator that's about 1/40th as small as 60.656 million. Essentially, you need a denominator of 1.5 million people.

You just know that's not the right number to use, because Paris alone has a population of 11.5 million. I'm not going to take you through the math for the other countries, but clearly Jonah Goldberg needs to spend more time thinking about the denominators in this situation. This is akin to those people who pointed to the number of deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq in 2003 and said Iraq was safer than New York City. It's just so wrongheaded.

So look, don't buy this idea about the greater number of deaths in France showing how much better our response to Katrina has been. (And by the way, our relief efforts in New Orleans had a big advantage in terms of the more limited area of impact. In square miles, there's just no comparison between New Orleans and France.)
Link | | | 12:13 PM | Home
 

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