Me: Frank Lynch

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These are my mundane daily ramblings.
For something less spontaneous, I maintain The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page (over 1,800 Johnson quotes).

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Let's reiterate, when enemies evince no plans to surrender and continue to cause death and destruction, it's a good thing when they're taken out. Is that clear? I have no problems with al Zarqawi dying in combat; for the sake of the Iraqis and our troops, this is a good thing. This terrorist had no intention of letting up, and was set on killing many more.

That having been said, let's remember to put this small triumph in context. We did not invade Iraq for the purpose of killing al Zarqawi. I have pored over all the statements from Bush and Blair and Powell and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice and Wolfowitz and Perle and I don't know who-all, and so far as I can tell no one said this was why we were warring against Iraq. So measure his death against the importance the Administration (or Coalition of the Willing, if you prefer) placed on it in advance, not the value they emphasized afterwards. There were 512-some odd reasons given for invading (80% of them after no WMDs were found, like, "to pull out now would do an injustice to all those who have already died"). But al Zarqawi? His death is not a watershed: it may be a stepping stone, but there are other events and goalposts which matter much more.

Meanwhile, if you think I'm being divisive, read this stupid attempt at either a) humor, or b) preempting those who downplay the capture. Let's be clear, I don't think anyone isn't glad that al Zarqawi is out of the picture. Some of us are from Missouri, is all.
Link | | | 11:15 PM

One cup NIMBY, one cup anti-Papism. Stir well. The people at Brownstoner (a local real estate blog) crossed a line today, but perhaps that's in keeping with Ann Coulter's outrageous remarks on the Today Show and NY State Comptroller Alan Hevesi suggesting that Senator Schumer wanted to put a bullet in Bush's forehead. Sure, Tuesday was 6/6/06, but it seems as if there were run-ups and slow bringdowns. Brownstoner's egregious offense was in suggesting some odd "Da Vinci code"-like conspiracy between the Catholic Church and the City of New York, in converting a priests' residence in Fort Greene into a juvenile home.

As an ex-Catholic (Laurel once told me that calling yourself an ex-Catholic was like calling yourself an "ex-Black," by the way), I've never been one to rush blindly to the Church's defense, but I was really surprised by the tone in this post. Yes, the NIMBY attitude was odiferous, but on top of that, I couldn't help but wonder whether was some additional benefit to juveniles being in a neighborhood like Fort Greene. Fort Greene is an attractive neighborhood, and it's middle class enough that these kids might recognize an attainable goal if they turned their noses in a different direction.

Anyway, I rushed to the post to protest, but found I'd been preceded by about a hundred others.
Link | | | 10:53 PM | Home

Good news. And long overdue. With al Zarqawi's death, Iraq has more opportunity to move ahead. It's good news to have this one behind us. And naturally, we hope no similar leader can fill his shoes. But this is not a victory without druthers: we knew where he was before we went to the U.N. to argue for an invasion, if you believe Woodward's Plan of Attack (pages 300-301); we could have taken him out then. The Bush Administration may have chosen not to in order to better the argument for war. That is, many many people may have died unnecessarily as a result of Bush maneuvering.
Link | | | 7:20 AM | Home
 

Here's a grassroots campaign with a big payback. Let's everyone, all of us, write Katherine Harris and tell her how proud we are that she's holding on to her vision. This is a win.
Link | | | 11:07 PM | Home

I miss Billy Preston already. (RIP) . Billy Preston's musical career was certainly on the sidelines, but when he stepped into the spotlight, he sure did shine. His keyboard solo on the Beatles' "Get Back," his stunning "That's the Way God Planned It" at the Concert for Bangladesh, his two really wonderful singles, his incredible rendition of Harrison's "Isn't It A Pity" at the Concert For George. And as wonderful as all these were, I think what really impressed me was what one of the Beatles (Ringo?) said in the documentary footage of Beatles Anthology: when they were making Let It Be, they all squabbled, but when Billy showed up, no one wanted to misbehave: not out of any kind of coercive power that Preston had, but no one wanted to seem like a jerk in front of such a nice guy.
Link | | | 10:59 PM | Home
 

Scariness from the ACLU. Completely imaginable, based on what I know about marketing. Click.
Link | | | 9:09 PM | Home
 

The Gore-bashing continues. All the silly bashing of Gore which the press did in 2000 apparently wasn't enough. When you have Jonah Goldberg parsing Gore's statements about a summer vacation as a teenager — as if it's something of nearly as much import as global warming, against which Gore is currently campaigning — it just reminds you of those horrid days when people obsessed over his khakis or his rouge during one of the debates against Bush. NEVER MIND that Gore is being proven right about global warming, NEVER MIND that he spoke the truth when he warned that we didn't need to war against Iraq and that it was an unwarranted distraction from capturing OBL. Oh, never... mind...

But today ABC's Claire Shipman brought us back to those days, in a stunning re-enactment: following a taped interview of Gore with ABC This Week host George Stephanopolous, wherein Gore had denied he was planning to run for President in 2008, Shipman pronounced her skepticism: "Just look at his face." Now that's an open mind, I tell you: she can look at Gore and know he's lying. (Anyone know if she's used similar powers of divination on the President??)
Link | | | 6:49 PM | Home

Pajamas Media Exposure. Pajamas Media, if you don't know, is an aggregation of a fixed set of bloggers, the vast majority of whom are right wingers. There was lots of guffawing during its beginning, as they couldn't decide on a logo, and then adopted one that was a bathrobe, before they realized, uh, maybe pajamas would be more appropriate.

I presume that those who participate feel it's some sort of honor to be invited, and they enjoy the additional exposure. It sure beats trying to drum up readers by leaving comments at Little Green Footballs and just hoping someone might be so otherwise idle that they'll click. But when you're a bloviator like Horsefeather's Stephen Rittenberg, it could lead to problems. Like, if your foolishness is noticed by James Wolcott. Horse Hockey, he calls it, and something else horse-related elsewhere.
Link | | | 5:30 PM | Home
 

The problem was, Saddam Hussein had electricity. (Hat tip to Atrios.) Today on CNN, John Roberts said the reason we went beyond sanctions with Iraq and invaded was "to get rid of what it was that they had":

"And then, of course, there is the issue, if they do get sanctions leveled against Iraq -- leveled against Iran, are they going to work? Don't forget, Iraq endured 11 years of sanctions, and, you know, we still had to go to war to get rid of what it was that they had."

Now, Media Matters (the link) takes its usual extremist view and points out that there were never any WMDs found. But, thanks to their partisan blindness, they can't think of alternative explanations for what was on Roberts' mind. They assume he was talking about WMDs. A good way to figure out the alternatives is to look at what is no longer in Iraq since our invasion. Like, a stable power grid. Iraqis can no longer count on electricity. So maybe that was what was really on John Roberts' mind. We invaded Iraq so that the power grids would be de-stabilized.

Shame on you, Media Matters, for being so blind!
Link | | | 12:33 AM | Home
 

Well, it's clear the GOP can't run on "Iraq" come November. America clearly understands what a boondoggle Bush got us into, and what reelecting him has meant. (Note to pollsters: when will start asking "do you regret voting for him in 2004?" Seems to me that will help us understand how bad an alternative Kerry was - remains? - in voters' minds. But I digress.)

Wouldn't it be great if the GOP started talking about the economy and what wonders the tax cuts have done to fuel growth? If you haven't heard, today the May jobs figures came out, and the 75,000 new jobs were well below the expected 170,000. In addition, as if the May news wasn't bad enough, prior figures were lowered:

Adding to the weakness in the payroll picture: job gains for both March and April were lowered. Employers actually added 126,000 jobs in April, instead of the 138,000 previously reported. For March, employment grew by 175,000, rather than 200,000.

In other economic news, the Commerce Department reported that orders placed with U.S. factories fell 1.8% in April, another sign the economy was losing momentum in the spring.

Interestingly, this May's figure of 75,000 is almost exactly the figure for May of 2005, 78,000. This time last month I tallied the job growth performance for the previous 12 months, and noted that the tendency was for the figures to fall short of expectations (7 times under, 5 times over). While the tilt was towards the unders, it wasn't as strong as I'd led myself to believe. This month's makes it eight and five. AND, if the March '06 figures currently reported (175,000) had been reported that way when first released, March would have been another under. (April was already an under, and remains so.)

So please, GOP, run on the economy. Please?
Link | | | 11:51 PM | Home
 

Cards on the table, there is no war on terror. That's the only conclusion you can draw from the foolish way in which anti-terrorism funding for New York City was slashed by the Department of Homeland Security, with steeper cuts than many other cities. I think there's a probably a lot at work here, and I'll enumerate my thoughts in no specific order here (and to accommodate that no specific order, I'll use the html code for an unordered list, bullets instead of numbers):

• There probably isn't a linear relationship between the number of people in an area and the heightened risk. I doubt a hamlet of 200 is twice as likely as one of 100 to suffer a terrorist attack. Rather, it could be somehow exponential. In non-mathematical terms, the likelihood of an attack increases at even faster rates when the population increases.
   
• But do you need to spend in the same proportion to the escalated risk? To my layman's thinking, a surveillance camera protects square feet, and doesn't give a whit whether there are 50 people in its view or 200. I imagine there comes a point where throwing more dollars at something that's already well-surveilled amounts to a waste of money.
   
• But as Kroeter, huh? reminded in an argument the Haditha scandal is infinitely worse than Abu Ghraib, the corollary is that Abu Ghraib was infinitely better. So if there's an exponentially-growing risk of terrorism as populations increase, does that mean that risks get infinitesimally smaller with lower populations? And is there a threshold where the government says, ah, screw 'em, the people in Brookline never vote for us anyway. That is one of my unexamined ideas: is this all part of some pork-barrel project to increase spending in areas where Republican Congressional seats are more vulnerable for these upcoming 2006 elections, using newly "liberated" funds from Blue States like New York? Again, I haven't given this a lot of thought or investigation, but as Eric Alterman has often reminded us, every time you think you've been too cynical in judging the machinations of this administration, they go and prove you wrong.

So where are we? I'm not so jaded as to prevent my wondering whether there aren't some 2006 congressional efforts at work here, honestly. But there are some aspects which are very laughable, and do a great job of painting the feds as incredibly inept. One aspect of the spending formula is supposed to consider whether or not there are national icons which would represent glory targets for terrorists. Apparently the brainiacs at DHS couldn't think of a single one in NYC. Not the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Citicorp Tower (hey! remember when that baby was listed as a scoped out terrorist target and the city went under brief political lockdown? Well, unbeknownst to us all, it's now only 15 stories tall, and all the companies inside do Chilean crafts, nothing having to do with world finances).

Another unorganized idea: do portions of America suffer from "tragedy envy"? There have been points post 9/11 where we've seen victims of other incidents seem to cry out for their "fair share" of attention, in a "don't forget about what we went through" motion. People who went through the first bomb attempt in the WFC, for instance. People died then, too. Also victims of the Oklahoma City bombing (sorry, your pain is not felt, your antagonists were upstanding white Americans; perhaps if you'd had the sense to have been in the way of the anger of crazed Islamo-fascists, America would care more. Your bad).

Another possible manifestation of this was the throngs who descended on a two-block area of Broadway, walking past the memoria hung in the fences of St. Paul's Chapel. I swear, there seemed to be a collective desire to feel our pain; curiously, we here in NY were more interested in picking ourselves up and getting on with our lives at the same time as we wanted a hard, persevering pursuit of the perps. The Prez with the bullhorn sure let us down with that one; thanks for the photo op, George. (As an aside, I remember that one point after it had gotten so thick with visitors coming to mourn, that someone posted a sign saying "U.S. out of NYC!!")

So my hypothesis continues: out of this desire to join in the collective post-9/11 mourning, has an overblown fear developed, a "what if it happened here" element? And what areas to better buy in to this fear than those areas that re-elected the Pharaoh (thanks again to Bob Wilson for the reference) on the basis of security fears? And to better appreciate the additional funding for their hamlet, and re-elect their nice Republican to the House of Representatives, the guy who tucked funding for a new Hooters into the National Security bill?
Link | | | 9:35 PM | Home
 

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