Copyright © 2007 Frank Lynch.
Copyright © 2007 Frank Lynch.
Me: Frank Lynch Home These are my mundane daily ramblings.
Email: |
Ouch, that was Rush's WALLET!! Limbaugh, in a bit of a snark over receiving a letter from Democratic Senators protesting his reference to soldiers who object to our involvement in Iraq as "phony soldiers," Limbaugh decided to put the letter up on eBay and match its winning bid in a donation to charity. He figured the letter might go for a cool mill. Oops: it went for $2.1 million. Pony up, Rush: people hate your hate like there's no end in sight, Mr. "I won't be their water bearer any more" guy. Next up, Ann Coulter autographs paintings of Jews perfected
during the Spanish Inquisition and puts them up on eBay.
But only to fund something like an alien laser beam on the new NY
Times building.
What rhymes with 'amphetamine'? A
Joycean moment: my wife's book club is over, and one of the group
said, "...in her head, I mean." (Start your notebooks,
now.)
War president, war nation. Bush declared himself a war president; and as the leader of our nation, that essentially meant that we became a war nation. Can't have one without the other, now, can we? This context is important when thinking about Bush's complaint today that Congress hasn't done much this term. The facts, of course, are these: we're stuck in a war we didn't need to get into, thanks to our war President; the cost of the war in treasure, dollars, and lost opportunities for better use of those expenditures, are immense; the Senate and the House have recognized that we are a War Nation and have addressed these issues, but votes have been blocked by the GOP in the Senate (votes don't happen unless 60% of the Senate allows it to come to a vote). If the War President wants stuff to happen, he needs to change the priorities of the nation, and allow us to think beyond Iraq. Thinking beyond Iraq means solving it. Stay the course and hand it off to someone he probably thinks of as his succeeding "chump" is most definitely not a path to clearing the agenda. Bush, again, is acting like it's not his fault that
everything is broken. The nation knows it has to be cleaned up,
but Bush wants us all to ignore the rubble.
Should we be skeptical about Republicans who switch parties? Atrios alerts us to a transcript at Colorado Confidential that a Republican member of the Colorado House, Debbie Stafford, has left the GOP and joined the Democrats. Not sure why this rises to Atrios's attention, seeing as how he is astute enough to recognize that local news stories get too much attention on outlets like CNN. But be that as it may... Her stated reasons for the party switch center on her having been hung out to dry by the GOP when she voted for her constituents' interests on an issue which was in conflict with a major party contributor. I can certainly see how that would make you reject your party, but I'm not sure why that would make you embrace the opposition. She could have followed the Jim Jeffords model and just gone independent, thus signaling to her constituents that she had their interests in mind and wasn't doing a complete 180 as she did so. In that sense she could have maintained the interests of a lot of party loyalists. But seeing as how I don't know noodles about her district, I'm sure there are other explanations. It's entirely possible, for instance, that you can't maintain a spot in the state house without party support, and declaring yourself an Independent is akin to jumping the shark. Is there room for a cynical hypothesis here? With a different party in ascendency, and the titular head of the GOP (Bush) continuing to front an unpopular war and vetoing popular proposals for health insurance, the cynical hypothesis would be that these are not easy times to be a Republican office holder. There is certainly room for opportunism in such a move, although Stafford could be completely innocent. Political winds have shifted before, and will shift again. And some will find their wind vanes shift with them. In his biography of John Dryden in The Lives of the Poets, Samuel Johnson saw how you could question Dryden's motives in changing his religion, but still saw alternative explanations: "That conversion will always be suspected that apparently concurs with interest. He that never finds his error till it hinders his progress towards wealth or honour, will not be thought to love truth only for herself. Yet it may easily happen that information may come at a commodious time; and as truth and interest are not by any fatal necessity at variance, that one may by accident introduce the other. When opinions are struggling into popularity, the arguments by which they are opposed or defended become more known; and he that changes his profession would perhaps have changed it before, with the like opportunities of instruction. This was the then state of Popery [soon after the ascension of King James]; every artifice was used to show it in its fairest form; and it must be owned to be a religion of external appearance sufficiently attractive." Aah, but that never happens these days. Giuliani has always
believed what he believes, and the same with Romney. Nobody
really blows with the wind. Right?
Babies, bath water, and boycotts. Yesterday I suggested we boycott all of Crown Publisher's books, due to the fact that they publish Ann Coulter's "books." My argument for a boycott is that Coulter argues for ideas that are some eight hundred years out of date: this week she's said that Jews need to be "perfected" and become Christians; that women shouldn't have a vote, because that's how we get Presidents who are Democrats. She has also suggested that we'd be better off if homegrown terrorist Timothy McVeigh had targeted the offices of the New York Times. The simple fact is that Coulter is a horrible influence, and publishers shouldn't be making money off of her. And for that, I say we should boycott Crown. When I put that forth yesterday I knew that Ann Coulter isn't the only author they publish, and others would be hurt by such a boycott. Glenn Greenwald is published by Crown, for instance. And so is Dave Barry. And I love reading these guys. But you know something else? They make money from a publisher who publishes Ann Coulter. Maybe they'd take a 15% hit if they had to find another publisher — but at least they wouldn't be under the Ann Coulter umbrella. Yes, I still say we should boycott Crown.
Book notes. Chris Matthews has been known to defend having Ann Coulter on his show because "she sells books". Well, since the media hosts don't seem to be shy about having her on their shows, maybe it's time her sales went down? With her remarks this week that "Jews need perfecting," and earlier remarks that in her ideal world women wouldn't get to vote (it's because women can vote that we have put up with Democrats as presidents, she says), maybe it's high time that she lost her publisher? Her books are published by Crown; if Crown has distanced itself from her remarks, it's not in their search engine. So, I say we start a boycott of Crown. Not just on the Coulter books, but on everything they publish. Everything. Buy nothing from Crown. Nothing. Elsewhere in book publishing, James Fallows alerts us that
Norman Podhoretz's recent appearance at a B&N on the Upper West
Side didn't go so well: apparently people in his old neighborhood
aren't crazy about the idea of bombing Iran.
The plot sickens. OK, the FISA wiretapping thing. Bush was breaking the law by wiretapping without judicial oversight, and Congress recently gave him coverage, not just a "do over," but a change in the rules to allow him to continue doing what was formerly illegal. This week, Congress tried to take some of that turf back (too late, in my mind, more here and here). The Bush argument against the "stricter" amendment was that it didn't give amnesty to telecommunications companies who had cooperated. Bush wanted them to get a free pass, too. Whenever you see someone in the know arguing for amnesty for their cronies, that can only mean one thing: the cronies broke the law. Sometimes it also means that the cronies know stuff about you which you don't want to come out. This morning's Washington Post brought us the news that, according to the former executive of Qwest Communications, the Feds wanted Qwest to start providing info which Qwest thought it couldn't legally provide. And this was before 9/11. And when Qwest demurred, the Feds retaliated. Fewer contracts and such. So let's connect the dots: Bush et al reject FISA restrictions because they don't provide amnesty for those who went along with their illegal activities. Meanwhile, a company which toed the legal line was retaliated against, before 9/11. It has all the earmarks of a vast conspiracy, doesn't it? Pre- 9/11, "before"the world changed, the Bush administration was already acting like a B-movie police state. Oh, thank God 9/11 happened, because it gave them cover for all the power grabs they'd already been doing, strong-arming telecom companies like Qwest. (As an aside, it is kind of funny — maybe it calls the Qwest exec's assertions into question — an admin which famously did nothing in response to the famous August 6 2001 Presidential Daily Brief... "Bin Laden determined to strike in America"... was already strong-arming companies to open their files?) On a slightly related note — related in the sense that security investigations don't follow strict procedures — the Pentagon has not expressed much satisfaction over the way it's gone about getting American banking records. I didn't even know this was part of the Pentagon's purview. Did you? And I think of myself as being a fairly well-informed citizen. Who's running this ship? A well-informed citizenry is of course the cornerstone of our country, but I think it's high time we had a 90 minute television show, on all four, five, six, seven networks, comparing and contrasting what the Constitution says our government does and what our government is doing. George Clooney would get ratings.
You don't LIKE computers, Joel? We're your FRIENDS. Oy. Long time visitors know I lost an external hard drive in January, with loads of photos on it, and that the initial estimates to resuscitate it were in the range of $1800. Some of you even contributed some cash in that direction — for which I'm grateful — and a local service was able to restore some of it but not all. (I couldn't afford to send it off...) Anyway, I did buy another external hard drive, and for the sake of redundancy (important!) I picked up a second external hard drive. Sensible. But a big chunk of the day has been spent getting practically
nowhere: Windows sees this external USB storage drive, but won't
assign it a "letter;" and the backup software won't see it as a
destination for the backups. Grrr!!
As IF!!! You may know about Graeme Frost, the 12-year old who the Democrats brought out to pitch S- CHIP, a health insurance program whose expansion Bush vetoed in spite of it having bipartisan support in both houses of Congress and the majority of Americans. And you may also know that some conservative bloggers smelled a wedge issue which had to be put down: a poster at Free Republic introduced a superficial reading of Frost's home circumstances (he attends an expensive private school, for instance, and therefore his family can afford health insurance — oblivious to the fact that the boy is in that school on scholarship). I won't go into all the details, the questions of Frost's family's need are answered here. The attacks are baseless. The astonishing to me is the fervor with which the Frost family has been attacked by the likes of Michelle Malkin and Rush Limbaugh. No responsible government bases its policies on one case, and the Democrats would be silly to put young Graeme forward if he were merely a special case. Some on the right, however, think that in order to quash a bill with bipartisan support they need to delve into the family's details. Nope: if you want to argue that Bush is correct in vetoing S-CHIP, and you believe that government has limited powers and that private charity should fill the breach, well, you don't gain the moral high ground by stalking the Frost family. If you want to be effective against the Graeme Frost appeal, you express sympathy with what his family is going through, and you make a plea for the communities to help. And then you delve into the statistics, but you don't stalk his family. (The obvious implication in these cases, of course, is that
otherwise they have no argument; or why would they be in such a
desperate fever pitch to discredit the Frost family?)
|
|
