Ranting and Raving about This and That
One last debate point - did I hear right when Kerry argued that he believes freedom will always triumph and prevail, then Bush retorted that if America makes the wrong choice (i.e. doesn't elect him) "the world will veer off into tragedy"?
How optimistic is that?
One more thing. Tommy Franks mentioned how our problem in Iraq has been "our catastrophic success." Bush put it another way, talking about how we expected the enemy to stand and fight so we could kill them, but they melted away and we're only facing them later.
To hear these men talk, you'd think the words "tactical retreat" had never held currency in the English language. The tactic of feigning retreat in order to lure your enemy into a tactical disadvantage, in which you have him surrounded and rendered immobile is as old as Hannibal, who is recorded as history's first general to use the tactic. He feigned retreat, luring a Roman legion into pursuit, then surrounding and slaughtering it.
So, one might safely argue that it qualifies as "the oldest trick in the book." To hear a sitting President argue that such a tactic was unforseeable and unredressable, and to hear his top general reiterate such a pathetic defense makes me sick. It's their job to take such contingencies as "catastrophic success" into account. If they failed to do so, that can not be described as anything but a military failure.
1) I thought Kerry did a really great job tonight. Not with reference to the elusive "swing voter" that will decide this election. But with me. Kerry already has my vote locked up just by virtue of being an alternative to George W. Bush. But I have often felt that he doesn't "get it." Of course there were still answers which seemed less perfect than I would have given... but isn't that always the way with us pathologically self-righteous folks?... but on balance, Kerry made me feel much better about supporting his candidacy. I do have reservations and qualms, but Kerry's arguments struck me as clear, forceful and (most importantly) correct. He already had my vote, but Kerry won my esteem this evening.
2) I don't know what others will think of it, but I thought Bush was not at his best this evening. He seemed flustered and aggravated. I thought Kerry did a great job of taking the "flip-flop" criticism head-on and defusing it. I thought Bush did a mediocre job of acknowledging it. Kerry would claim, "there's no inconsistency here" and then articulate a critique of the president's policies which both acknowledged his apparent inconsistency, but made his argument comprehensible (something he often fails to do). I really liked his line, "I may have talked about the war poorly, but that's far different than fighting it poorly." Not only does this reverse Bush's m/o ("Hey, I may talk bad, but I lead good") it also directly acknowledged Bush's criticisms and defused them. But Bush kept levelling the same charge as if he wasn't even in the same room as his opponent. Maybe it's wishful thinking on my part, but I hope his failure to even engage the words of a man twenty-feet away from him highlighted the hollowness of his campaign's slurs against Kerry. Given a chance to prove himself, Kerry took the criticisms head on and faced them. Bush was left spinning his wheels. I may also consider that a metaphor for larger issues, but I hope it resonated and, as one of my fellow debate-watchers put it, "defused the flip-flop question."
3) Since I was watching through the marvels of TiVo (great service) I got to see various post-debate commentary as well. CNN was absurdly off-base, and by comparison Fox was a model of journalistic integrity. CNN provided a "fact-checker" who cited three Kerry "factual inaccuracies" but only one Bush inaccuracy. However, the "fact checks" were bizarre. One, for example, was "Kerry claims we're not searching for Osama bin Laden with enough manpower in Afghanistan, where he's likely to be, when in fact, he's in Pakistan." Now, if CNN knows bin Laden's whereabouts, then I want to know why they haven't told anyone else. Otherwise, I presume his whereabouts are unknown and the reason why we do have 20,000 troops in south-eastern Afghanistan looking for him is that we presume he might be there. Then, they got feedback from Mike McCurry for the Democrats and Karen Hughes for the Republicans. Hughes was perfectly miked while Mike McCurry couldn't be heard, and they were forced to abandon the interview and offer no Democratic counterpoint. Surely there was nothing more sinister than a technical error. But it was a technical error that shouldn't have been deemed excusable. They had a journalistic obligation to give both sides airtime, and just cutting off McCurry without finding a way to mike him so he was audible strikes me as inexcusable. Tommy Franks was given twice as much airtime as Wesley Clarke and asked several leading questions about his response to Kerry's charges of his own personal incompetence (a highly leading way of framing the question) by Wolf Blitzer. All in all, I found it outrageous.
4) By contrast, FOX seemed far more grounded in reality. Four commentators gave feedback, two Republican, two Democrat, all audible. Bill Kristol, not exactly a faux conservative was quite frank in his assessment of Bush's performance - "frankly, he can sell his policies better, and has in the past." Sure, there was spirited debate about the relative merits of each candidate's performance. But it was at least grounded in reality.
5) The Daily Show with Jon Stewart had a great post-election episode. I especially liked the interview with Rudy Giuliani, in which Stewart made the great, maddeningly unspoken point of the evening, as Giuliani talked about the need to "disarm Saddam." "Given he turned out not to have any weapons, wasn't he already, y'know, disarmed?" Giuliani's response was an outrage that makes a mockery of the very idea of reasoned democratic debate - "Saddam was a weapon of mass destruction." I'm sorry to break this, but when Bush argued that the threat of WMD from Saddam was so grave we were forced to invade immediately, nobody in their right mind believed he was talking about the blood in Saddam's veins. He was talking about nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Saddam was a madman who would have had to be dealt with eventually. But to say we "disarmed" him is to stretch the meaning of the term to the breaking point, then snap it in two.
Andrew Sullivan discusses the latest movement to out gay Republicans. I think he gets the parallel exactly right for this odious movement: "And so we are back to the 1990s, or the '50s, depending on whether it is J. Edgar Hoover or remnants of ACT UP destroying what's left of gay men's privacy."
Am I happy to live in a world where some men can still have their lives destroyed, especially those with political careers, for being outed as gay? No. But we do still live in such a world. And those hell-bent on exposing the "hypocrites" of the Republican establishment are doing so with the intent and purpose of causing just that form of destruction.
Talk about hypocrisy.
In the 1950's a gay man faced a horrible choice - betray yourself, deceive your friends and family, and live a closeted life of furtive discretion or forced abstention - or, be driven from the public sphere, denied employment and housing, derided in public and abandoned by your family.
We faced that choice because people demanded we fit some cookie-cutter notion of what it meant to be a person which did not fit us.
To destroy a gay man for being a "bad queer" is no different than destroying him for being a "bad heterosexual." Those who ruin the lives of closeted public figures out of cheap political motives are far greater enemies of gays and their rights than those who remain in the closet, either out of personal volition (say, a desire for simple privacy) or in response to the pressures against gay men that have not even nearly been eradicate.
"Outing" a public figure in order to destroy him is a weapon. We should be unloading it, not firing it.
A surprising number of people seem to find my site by googling up the term "gellin' like Magellan," a phrase coming from the Dr. Scholl's commercial I discussed in this post. Apparently, I'm far from alone in my concern for the ad's insult to language - though too many people for my taste don't seem to see the obvious link between gel and felons (for hair, not shoes).
But, it made me curious - "what else are they finding?"
Oddly, I've found two instances of "gellin' like Magellan" used as an actual expression.
The first, from MSNBC news observes without a trace of irony: "Gotti boys are gellin’ like Magellan". The meaning? "How do the Gotti boys get that gravity-defying hair?"
The second, much more perplexing suggests its a football term. "On the other side of the ball, we have a pretty decent O-line gellin' like Magellan, two seasoned QB's, but a set of receivers that have yet to prove themselves."
However, Best of Show gets awarded to McSweeney's for it's contest "How You Gellin?" which asked for reader feedback on "the specific manner in which Liberian President Charles Taylor might be gellin".
I think my favorite is
"Gellin' like a war crimes appellant"
Though, some honors are due for:
"As a leader who has consistently been wrapped up in imbroglios, insurrections, and questions of colonialism, I reckon that Charles Taylor is gellin' like Magellan. "
Textbook example of the Mind Control Meme at work today in Paul Krugman's column:
But as Adam Clymer pointed out yesterday on the Op-Ed page of The Times, front-page coverage of the 2000 debates emphasized not what the candidates said but their "body language." After the debate, the lead stories said a lot about Mr. Gore's sighs, but nothing about Mr. Bush's lies. ... The result of this emphasis on the candidates' acting skills rather than their substance was that after a few days, Mr. Bush's defeat in the debate had been spun into a victory.
I've often said to many persons how ironic it seems that those most imperilled by international terrorism are least likely to support Bush's efforts to rectify it. My thinking, based upon observation of (non-existent) security procedures at various vulnerable urban spots was that Bush both a) isn't very good at protecting people from terrorism; and b) the people most at risk know it.
Now, I don't have a heck of a lot of evidence to back me up on this. But I decided to take a look at the numbers underlying the Quinnipiac Polling Institute which specializes in several "Blue States" in the New England area.
I was surprised by what I found.
In Connecticut, 24% of respondents listed terrorism as a primary concern. But among all respondents, 48% thought Bush would handle terrorism better than Kerry while 41% felt the opposite. This in a poll that found Bush leading by 45-38!
In Pennsylvania, Bush is seen as better by 57-35 with 25% citing it as a primary concern. New Jersey is 55-38 with 30% considering it a primary concern. And New Yorkers, who weren't asked whether it was a primary concern, believe Bush would do a better job by a margin of 52-40.
Now, I don't consider this data set deep enough or clear enough to tell me what I want to know. But it does suggest that a non-negligible number of persons who support Kerry for president nevertheless believe that Bush would do a better job handling terrorism than Kerry.
Leaves me wondering: do they know something I don't?
I very much reviled his predecessor Gray Davis who I felt was a traitor to the principles of good-governance (placing the public weal above one's personal ambitions) - and to principles in general. But I didn't back the recall.
That said, I'm pleasantly surprised by Arnold's behavior in office so far:
In his first round of bill signings since the end of the legislative session in August, he approved a law requiring health insurance companies to extend to gay partners the same benefits they offer to unmarried heterosexual couples. He allowed the sale of clean needles to slow the spread of AIDS, and he approved an expansion of the state's hate-crimes law to protect transvestites.
Schwarzenegger has also fashioned himself an environmentalist, endorsing tougher auto emissions rules and signing measures to protect the Sierra Nevada and reduce cruise ship pollution.
He approved legislation banning the sale of high-powered .50 caliber BMG rifles over the objection of the California Rifle and Pistol Association. And he has paroled a record 48 murderers serving life sentences.
While Schwarzenegger has billed himself a social moderate from the start of his improbable political career, conservative activists are steamed that he has adopted positions at odds with the GOP orthodoxy.
"Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger must not be too troubled by what he's called `girlie men' because he's just signed a bill into law that maintains `sex' in California to include drag queens, cross-dressers and transsexuals," said the Rev. Lou Sheldon, a conservative activist and president of the Anaheim-based Traditional Values Coalition. "Schwarzenegger has sided with the homosexual and drag queen lobby in muddying the biological realities of male and female."
The governor's supporters say conservatives should not be surprised by any of this -- that his moderate views on social issues were well known during last year's historic recall election and that voters chose him mostly because of his promise to restore fiscal discipline in Sacramento.
"The governor enjoys very high popularity and can take some risks," said Mark Baldassare, polling director for the Public Policy Institute of California, whose latest poll shows 61 percent of Californians approve of the job Schwarzenegger is doing.
"But he is also a Republican governor who recognizes that most California voters are Democrats and independents," Baldassare added, "and to continue to receive high approval from public, he needs to reach out beyond the conservative roots of his party."
To be sure, no one is going to accuse Schwarzenegger of being a latter-day Jerry Brown.
He has also shot down bills raising the minimum wage and granting driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, and has come out against a ballot measure requiring employers to provide health coverage for uninsured workers.
Those vetoes and others led Steve Maviglio, a spokesman for the state Assembly's Democrats, to deride the former bodybuilder as "Pete Wilson with biceps" -- a reference to California's last Republican governor.
But that does not placate conservative activists, many of whom gathered on the steps of the state Capitol on Friday to protest what they billed as Schwarzenegger's repudiation of the conservatives who helped drive out liberal Democratic Gov. Gray Davis and sweep Schwarzenegger into office.
"It is sad and disappointing to pro-family voters and conservatives to see how the governor has infringed on free speech, promoted drug use, expanded the transsexual agenda, undermined marriage and is paroling a record high number of murderers into our neighborhoods," said Randy Thomasson of the Campaign for California Families.
In an interview, Chuck Michel of the California Rifle and Pistol Association called Schwarzenegger's ban on BMG rifles disturbing.
"Schwarzenegger coming into office gave a lot of hope to people, because we were dealing with Gov. Davis, who was becoming more and more extreme, signing everything in sight," Michel said. "Some of that hope was dashed."
For his part, Sheldon reminisced fondly about Schwarzenegger's speech at the Republican National Convention, where he praised Richard Nixon, slammed the United Nations and implied that only Republicans care about "terminating" terrorism.
"His speech at the GOP convention, as good as it was for the party, just doesn't carry the teeth," Sheldon said. "Everyone loves his image in the movies, but the movies are over and we're dealing with the reality show now."
For those who are interested in looking at the graphical historical breakdown, I suggest the following links: Odds and Polls
In the Tradesports exchange, Bush continues his ascent. The Bush Industrial Average (the price of one contract in every state) has now broken 3150 standing at 3157.5 this morning. This gives Bush a projected advantage of 7.8 million votes (a gross distortion endemic to extrapolating from odds). Here's the map of the odds:
It had been quite a journey to get to this point, to reach this place at this time in this manner. Not the kind of journey that journalists relate, travels of extraordinary length or travails of extraordinary hardship. No, the journey was as ordinary as a minor change in my daily routine. A transfer of trains where typically a disembarkment would be. Just like that, I had broken loose, dislodged from my life, and drifted away from the current of habits carrying me through time and space.
This new train, I’d never taken before. It carried me along below the skyscrapers and the hills, out upon the surface in a neighborhood unfamiliar for being neither rich nor poor. The people not at work rode this train, gazing as through a glass-bottomed boat at the midday ecology of these obscure blocks – the curious human shapes which found sustenance in, and in turn sustained, the lifecycle of these remote communities. Past Gramma’s Saloon and animal hospitals, instant watch repair and specialty gear, we were carried along by this train, steadily out to sea.
Mortality was forever with us upon this arduous voyage. My party, my fellow passengers, began the journey as a multitude. A car depleted of standing room when I boarded had seats to spare before we even struck the open air. As we snaked along, block by block, our numbers further diminished, until at last I remained alone, the hardiest pioneer-passenger of this express trip to oblivion.
When the train finally swerved, unwilling to follow its path to its logical consequence - a descent below the waves, I pulled the cord and brought the solipsistic caravan to a surprised and sudden stop.
I was not yet at the ocean, but I was close. I could smell the salt which travels in the ocean’s spray. It reached right into me to join and frolic with the memories of beaches past. I was near. Very near to the timeless space of surf and sand.
This place, this neighborhood, this community of coastal dwellers, was decidedly middle class. I was possessed of a paper cup, the detritus of my soy macchiato latte, of which I hoped to dispose. But this was not the sort of neighborhood with wastebins on the sidewalks. If you were here, you presumptively possessed a nearby trash barrel and could afford to wait to dispose of your refuse until your return home. Spying a bin beside a house door, I decided to trespass. I raised the latch on the stranger’s front-yard fence, ran up to the porch in an exaggeratedly self-conscious stride, and threw my cup into the nearest bin, the green one marked “Compost.”
Thus unfettered from my final chain, cast finally adrift from the fatality of an ordinary day, I ventured westward toward the angry waves.
Have I mentioned that the waves were angry? They were. The water of the world is jealous of the waters of the sky, and when the latter splatters the world, the former foams in frustration, churning and smashing furiously against the shore. It was this spectacle, the image of our world worked out of shape, into a dynamic topography of impotent rage, which had lured me away from the ongoing death of my day-to-day life.
The boundary between civilization and shore is a highway. Between the settled and the wild lies a slender ribbon of transit. I crossed this threshold with a minimal briskness in my pace, and found myself at last along the edge of ocean, a vast expanse of terrain angrily roiling against an implacably grey sky.
Behind me, north and south, stretching out of view, lay the human world, a pleasant façade sheltering a teeming multitude of singularities and secrets. Before me, the blank face of a superficial world. An angry surface beating upwards against the sky, jealously guarding its interior, hidden forever away from the turbulence and confrontation of public view. Beneath the churning waves, an army of mollusks and crabs, and schools of oblivious fish carried on in a life which could only be understood through conjecture.
Out upon the water, shrouded in the misty rainfall, a great freighter steamed out to sea, stacks of boxcars set against the sky like skyscrapers. Sullenly silently sulking out to sea, like a great segment of several square blocks, dislodged with disgust and slinking away from the city in secessionary protest.
Before this spectacle, I stood rapt, as wind and spray and foam whipped against my body, oblivious to my stillness. I was alone in my world of observation. But I was not unobserved… I was standing on a sodden sandy cliff, held together by the will of weeds, as the flats of the beach alternately emerged and vanished below me. But there were others. There were joggers along the roadside behind, savoring their own vigor and contemplating a surf divorced from observation of the sunken shore. There were stragglers along the beach, advancing against the ocean’s retreat, only to scuttle in disarray before its petulant surge. Though I saw none, surely there were others perched the same as I, straddling the space between these two scenes.
Why had my attention shifted? Lost as I was in the vastness of space and nature, how had I been dragged into observations and calculations of the positions and vectors of the human figures speckling this austere landscape?
The answer lay within me, an internal handgrenade of mundane meaning. I was possessed of the need to urinate. Here in the face of the unapologetic instincts of the natural world’s existence, I had been seized by an abashed urgency… an appetite of privation which suggested seclusion as a prerequisite for satiation.
My mind was abruptly wrenched from its contemplation of the sublime and brought to bear in the calculation of the obscene. If it must be done in public, and in this neighborhood so denuded of civilization’s niceties and necessities it surely must, then how was it to be done? If guilt could not be averted, how at least to elude shame, and assignable culpability for violation of social norms?
The solution to my dilemma was of necessity tucked within the folds and creases of the shoreline cliffs. Though it would be of greatest relief to obtain immediate release, here upon the cliff-top, it would be obvious to all. What profit is indulgence if interrupted by the indignation of the righteous? I could not do it here, in full view of all.
The notion of release directly into the waves, in a slightly Whitmanesque manner, was seductive, but likewise imprudent. The action would be observable by all the idiosyncratic souls along the beach, and surely objectionable to some.
No. Best to seek the seclusion of this liminal world, the sandy cliffs standing between shore and society. Somewhere the earth must generously twist into a secret lavatory.
Eventually, I found my sanctum. It was imperfect of course. But it was deep enough to drop from view of the pavement and road, and sheltered enough to obscure the expanses both up the beach and below. In this alcove, visible only to the tiniest sliver of surf, I absolved myself, allowing the waters of my body to mingle with the sky’s effluence upon the sand and swordgrass.
Ah… the sweet relief of surrender. When I was through, I shook myself and sealed myself and cast a glance across my shoulders. I had been observed.
She seemed young, though whether that was fifteen or thirty-five years young, I could not say. She was Asian and I found her as inscrutable as she was alien. A basset hound scratched her thigh, jealous of the newest object of her laser-like attention. She stared at me, straight into me, incontrovertibly aware of what I had just done and … upset? Understanding? Observant yet unconcerned? I cannot say. Only aware. That is the extent of the assertable.
I withered before her reprovingly unintelligible stare. Instead of strolling casually down to the beach and striding boldly off, I shrank inwards. I abashedly kicked some soil on top of the puddle of flattened sand my fluids had made. I started away from my silent accuser, scrambling awkwardly up the loose slope so as not to need to turn my face towards her. I stumbled at the summit, dropping a knee into the damp sand, momentarily mistaking the cause of its wetness, sliding slightly backwards. I lunged and crested, returning to the plain above the shore like washed-up flotsam No, more self-propelled than that. Like a crab come to breed upon the coast? No, that’s not it either. I bolted away from the ocean like one who wanted nothing more of it and its wan metaphors. I would return to my life, my monstrous routine. I would rejoin what I knew… noble squalor and public restrooms.
I crunched the data earlier this morning for this week's Horserace Update, but I haven't had the time to perform the rather meticulous acts of assemblage needed to blog it. I have received an email from a reader linking me to this article which is interesting and related to the Friday Feature.
The gist of the article is that surveys may be registering increasing levels of discrepancy because of changes in the ways Americans use their telephones. I broadly agree with the article's thrust - polls do not represent the totality of their purported object (the electorate), but rather a very broad subsection of that totality.
But conceding the point, I still think it's too soon to throw the polls out with the bathwater. First of all, they continue to measure a non-negligible slice of the American electorate. And secondly, watching the same poll week after week will still likely reflect actual movements within the thinking of that subset. It's possible that a telephone-based survey will reflect a broad movement among the phone-answering public which is not mirrored by those who block calls... but there's certainly no reason to suppose that those who are blocking calls are likely to move in a different direction than those who are not.
The article mentions disparities in answering skew demographics older, whiter, and maler than the population at large. But a reputable pollster should still be able to adjust his sample to compensate for that disparity. The fact of a skewed population is only a problem if like-to-like comparisons between demographics which are identical in all aspects save phone-usage patterns would yield large differences. For example, if call-screening black females were twice as likely to vote for George W. Bush as call-answering black females, then your poll would really start to become fatally compromised.
I think polls should always be taken with a grain of salt, especially as projections of ultimate totals. At root, they are little more than snapshots of an electorate in flux. Many do misread the polls as signs that one candidate does in fact have a one point margin over another, and I've seen many who find the whole concept of polls fraudulent because they often miss the winner of a race. The one is a fallacy of over-confidence in the poll's accuracy, and the other a fallacy of presuming that polls describe a future reality rather than the present one of the time the poll was conducted.
So, with regards to the Friday Horse Race, I'd like to point out that it should always and everywhere be taken with a grain of salt. But the wideness of the polled lead in a state, and the movement trends from repeat samplings by the same polling outfit DO yield information that is of value.
Anyhow, a good article, and well worth the read.
Not a surprise. The reason I have is a TV is that it's broken. But the point is that now it's broken and it doesn't work anymore. And that didn't used to be the case. It used to be broken but it still worked.
You see, many years ago when my older sister graduated from high school she was given a cheap combo TV/VCR as a graduation gift. Since she had received a generous admissions package at an East Coast school, she left the prized gift at home rather than risk shipping it across the country.
While it was at home, my younger sister placed a cassette into the VCR which wouldn't eject properly. After much manhandling, the cassette was removed (though destroyed in the process), but the poor innards of the television were hopelessly mangled. Now, whenever you turned the television on, it made a rather pathetic whirring sound, flashed the words "eject, eject, eject" on a blue screen, then promptly turned itself off.
And thus, it sat unused for many years. My sister graduated from college, moved back home, and after much enticement, came to live with me for a time in Oakland. One thing I lacked, and had lacked for several years, was a television set. So, she asked the menfolk of my family to try and repair her set so that she could bring it along with her.
This was the masculine fixation of my family when I arrived to claim my sister. Three brothers and my father each attacked the television set with a screwdriver and that most destructive form of male ingenuity. They probed, prodded, examined. Dismantled and rebuilt. Debated and consulted. But one by one, they resigned in defeat. Especially after one of my brothers was dealt a rather nasty shock by the tube.
Undeterred by such grim failure, I told my sister to bring the television set along anyhow. I figured somehow it'd turn out alright.
When we brought it to my apartment, I broke the TV in half, pulled out the circuit board with the VCR componenents, and randomly mashed a bunch of stuff around. I'd like to pretend there was science or technique to my method. But it was purely random. Figuring I'd smashed the damn thing beyond repair, I hastily crammed the innards back in, sealed the sides shut, and told my sister, like the Mad Hatter from Alice that it was "two days slow, that's the problem, it's two days slow." On a lark, I plugged it in, and voila! It was working.
It continued to work for nearly a year before it reverted to its former bad behaviors. Once again, I opened it up, examined the parts, then stuck them back in again. Not having done anything, I was again surprised to find that the television had mysteriously resumed operations.
And so it went. Eventually my sister moved in with her husband, and they left me the TV since I was the only one who could seem to make it run. Once every few months it would break. I would crack it open, do nothing much of anything, put it back together, and then it would work again.
The last time I opened it, about four months ago, I actually decided to do a little investigating. I found the circuit breaker which the VCR uses to cut power to the television. There appeared to be a little piece of metal, attached to the pins used to hold the magnetic tape against the reader, which would fall into place and connect the circuits when a tape was inserted. I figured, "this must be the source of the problem!" So, I adjusted the pins, the connection resumed, and the television became fully operational.
Until last week. Equipped with my new knowledge, I figured TV repair was going to be a cinch. So, I followed my own advice, adjusted the pins to connect the circuit, and reassembled the machine.
"Eject, eject, eject."
*click*
Well, I'll be damned. So I opened it up again. Reassured myself that I must have the right idea. Confirmed that the pin adjustment was working. Reassembled.
"Eject, eject, eject."
*click*
In the last week, I think I've probably given it a dozen goes. Clearly my solution was no solution at all. The last few tries have been a desparate attempt to reclaim the magic of my ignorance. I pull it out, try to replicate the aimless antics of my pre-gnostic days, and reassemble the television.
Nothing.
So, it must be dead forever and for good. I'm sure there's gotta' be a technical explanation. I just wish I didn't know it.
The following Disclaimer
Is provided for Poets
To be used or adapted
as appropriate.
The sentiments contained in this poem
Have been adapted from the original
To better fit the rhyme scheme.
This poem may cause nausea or heartburn.
If symptoms persist for longer
Than twenty-four hours
Readers should consult a physician.
The persons in this poem
Are purely generic
Any resemblance
To actual persons
Living or dead
Probably says something
about that person.
The violence contained in this poem
Actual or imagined
Is purely didactic.
The poet is in no way liable
For the depravity of his readers.
No dead horses were revived
From the beating they received
In the verses above.
-----------------------------
I wrote this. Original context. Geoff.
My apologies to the one or two fans out there. I've been reading much more widely than the news lately, and somehow convinced myself that it wasn't germaine to this blog. Bad assumption, I know. I don't have much to say, but I've been reading a lot of old history and digging through the classics at Bartleby, a website I can't recommend highly enough when you find yourself spinning your intellectual wheels.
I'd recommend this essay, a lecture on the "The Art of Reading" from Arthur Quiller-Couch. It's got a lot of great suggestions to make on aesthetics. If you can get past the stuffiness of Victorian rhetoric, you'll find him a refreshingly sympathetic observer of high culture and low who can cut through the crap of his period's cliches like a steak knife through butter. It takes some time getting acquainted with the issues of his day since they're not our own. But it's worth the read.
An Example - Quiller-Couch's response to the doctrine of Original Sin in children...
I know surely enough what must be in your minds at this point: I am running up my head hard against the doctrine of Original Sin, against the doctrine that in dealing with a child you are dealing with a ‘fallen nature,’ with a human soul ‘conceived in sin,’ unregenerate except by repression; and therefore that repression and more repression must be the only logical way with your Original Sinners.
Well, then, I am. I have loved children all my life; studied them in the nursery, studied them for years—ten or twelve years intimately—in elementary schools. I know for a surety, if I have acquired any knowledge, that the child is a ‘child of God’ rather than a ‘Child of wrath’; and here before you I proclaim that to connect in any child’s mind the Book of Joshua with the Gospels, to make its Jehovah identical in that young mind with the Father of Mercy of whom Jesus was the Son, to confuse, as we do in any school in this land between 9.5 and 9.45 a.m., that bloodthirsty tribal deity whom the Hohenzollern family invokes with the true God the Father, is a blasphemous usage, and a curse.
But let me get away to milder heresies. If you will concede for a moment that the better way with a child is to draw out, to educate, rather than to repress, what is in him, let us observe what he instinctively wants. Now first, of course, he wants to eat and drink, and to run about. When he passes beyond these merely animal desires to what we may call the instinct of growth in his soul, how does he proceed.
There are ten states which could presently be considered "heavily in play." However, some terrain is more favorable to the incumbent, and some to the challenger. I've grouped these ten states into 4 categories. "Strong Kerry" (blue) indicates a 30-40% chance of Bush winning the state, "Leans Kerry" (green) indicates a 40%-50% chance that Bush will win the state. "Leans Bush" (yellow) indicates a 50%-60% chance for Bush. "Strong Bush" (red) indicates a 60%-70% chance for the incumbent.
Here's the map:
Bush has really good chances in two of these states, Florida and Nevada. Florida contains 27 electoral votes making it a critical piece of any winning Republican coalition. Nevada only possesses five electoral votes, but if Bush lost it along with New Hampshire we could see a tie in the electoral college, making it important.
Bush's standing:
Florida: +4% (49.75%-45.5%)
Nevada: +3% (48.25% - 45.75%)
Kerry likewise has strong odds in two of these states. He has consistently led in polls of Oregon and New Jersey throughout the race, but both states are famously unpredictable and both have at various times indicated a strong possibility of a Bush victory. Oregon has 7 electoral votes and New Jersey 15 and it is almost impossible to imagine a plausible scenario in which Kerry wins without carrying both of these states.
Kerry's standing:
Oregon: +5% (43.3%-48.6%)
New Jersey: +0% (tied) (46.75%-46.75%)
Bush holds a decent shot of picking up Wisconsin in the 2004 election. The state holds 10 electoral votes. Kerry can "afford" to lose Wisconsin if he picks up some new states. West Virginia and Nevada together would compensate for the loss. Florida would easily offset it, and then some. Lately, Bush has been outpolling Kerry in Wisconsin, but over the course of the campaign the state has often appeared to be leaning Kerry's way. Bush's current standing:
Wisconsin: +4% (49%-44.6%)
Kerry is really going to have to fight to hold onto the five "ambivalently Democratic" states of New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Iowa. The states have a total of 47 electoral votes between them. It's possible Kerry could lose one or two (with the exception of Pennsylvania) and still eke out a narrow victory. But to have a chance he's going to need to hold all these states, and recent polls indicate that his lead over Bush througout the spring and summer has largely evaporated. Kerry's standing:
New Hampshire: +5% (44.25%-48.83%)
Minnesota: +4% (44%-47.6%)
New Mexico: +2% (45%-47%)
Pennsylvania: -1% (Bush lead) (48.5%-47.5%)
Iowa: -1% (Bush lead (47.5%-46.25)
So, that's the present state of play. In next week's installment of the Friday Horse Race I hope to provide a better sense of the shifts within these states.
The next group of states are solidly committed to one candidate over the other, but are believed to be, at least possibly, persuadable. Again, for categorical convenience, I've used Tradesports rankings to classify these categories. Thus, I have classified a state as "solidly Republican" if Bush is considered to have anywhere from a 70% to a 90% chance of winning it. I consider a state "solidly Democratic" if Bush is ranked anywhere from 10%-30%.
In this category, there are 8 solidly Republican states and 7 solidly Democratic states. Here is a map:
Bush's 8 states have a combined estimated population of 45 million persons. This represents just over 15% of the U.S. population. These states control a total of 85 electoral votes, which is also 15% of the college. Bush enjoys an average polling margin over Kerry in these states of +5.51%. This is the breakdown of where the average polls put each state:
Arizona: +15% (53.6% - 39%)
Tennessee: +7% (50.3%-42.9%)
Missouri: +6% (50%-44.25%)
Ohio: +5% (50% - 44.75%)
Virginia: +5% (49.75% - 45%)
West Virginia: +3% (46.3% - 43%)
Arkansas: +3% (48.4% - 45.75%)
Colorado: +0% (tied) (46.75%-46.5%)
Now, there are some discrepancies in this batch. Arizona gives Bush a commanding lead whereas Colorado puts him at a tie, yet they are in the same category. Part of this has to do with the time lags in polling and overall trends. Though a recent slew of polls showed a Bush blowout in Arizona, there have also been several times in the race where the gap between the candidates closed to within the margin of error. Colorado is currently showing a tie, but it hasn't been polled very much (so far as I'm aware) since the Republican convention so it's ranking may still reflect the late August rise in Kerry's fortunes. The consistent factor with each of these states is a regular tendency to poll strong leads for Bush with occasional outliers and fluctuations indicating a tight race.
Kerry enjoys the support of seven states of this type. These states have a combined estimated population of 38 million people, which is 13% of the U.S. population. They control a total of 70 electoral votes which is 13% of the total. Kerry's average polling lead over Bush in these states is 7.53% (Delaware is excluded from this calculation because no polls have yet been taken of the state). Here's their breakdown:
Maryland: +12% (41.75%-53.25%)
Illinois: +9% (41.75%-51%)
Hawaii: +9% (41%-49.5%)
Washington: +8% (43.25%-50.75%)
Michigan: +5% (43.5%-48.5%)
Maine: +3% (43.75%-41.17%)
As I mentioned, no polls have yet been taken for the state of Delaware, and considering its Republican history it's not sure how much of a given the state should be considered.
Let's begin with the Die-Hard States - those states in which one candidate holds a nearly unassailable position against the other. For the sake of convenience, we will use the Tradesports odds to determine membership in this category. If Bush is given a 90% or greater chance of winning a state, we consider it "Die-Hard Bush." If it gives him a 10% or lesser chance of winning, then we will consider it "Die-Hard Kerry".
Here's a map of the hardcore: 
Bush has 19 states in his pocket while Kerry has 7.
Bush's 19 states have an estimated combined population of almost 81 million persons. That's about 27% of the American population. They control a combined total of 157 electoral votes which represents about 29% of the electoral college. Within these states, Bush enjoys an average polling margin over Kerry of +23.04%. Here are there stats, in descending order of their preference for Bush:
Utah: +39% (65.5% - 26%)
Wyoming: +36% (65% - 29%)
Mississippi: +31% (61.1% - 30%)
Nebraska: +31% (61% - 30%)
Idaho: - +30% (57% - 27.5%)
North Dakota: +30% (62% - 33%)
Oklahoma: +29% (58.5% - 33%)
Alaska: +26% (56.5% - 31.5%)
Montana: +25% (56.5% - 32.5%)
Kansas: +24% (58.6% - 35.3%)
Indiana: +21% (58% - 36.6%)
Texas: +20% (56.75% - 36.5%)
Georgia: +19% (57% - 38.25%)
Louisiana: +17% (53% - 36%)
Kentucky: +17% (56% - 39%)
South Dakota: +16% (56% - 40%)
Alabama: +16% (54.5% - 38.75)
South Carolina: +10% (52.5% - 42.75%)
North Carolina: +9% (52.75% - 43.75%)
Interestingly, the state of Arizona is not in the "die-hard" category, despite the fact that Bush's average lead in the state is +15% (53.6% - 39%).
Kerry's 7 states have an estimated combined population of 57 million, which is almost 20% of the population. They control a combined total of 115 electoral votes, which is about 21% of the total. Kerry outpolls Bush in six of these states by an average margin of +16.56% (there are no polls available for DC).
Here are Kerry's strongholds in the same order as for Bush:
Massachusetts: +31% (29.3%-60%)
Rhode Island: +26% (27.5%-53.5%)
New York: +13% (39%-51.6%)
Vermont: +13% (38%-50.5%)
California: +10% (41.75%-53.25%)
Connecticut: +8% (39%-46.5%)
DC has not been polled, but it can be safely assumed that Kerry's margin would be closer to that of Massachusetts than of Connecticut. Also, Kerry is actually leading by a wider margin than Connecticut in three states where his odds are considered lower. Hawaii, Illinois, and Maryland all give Kerry strong leads (+9%, +9%, +12% respectively) and the state of Washington gives Kerry a +8% margin which is equal to Connecticut. However, like Arizona, these states are considered to be more "in-play" (though not very) despite the strong poll numbers.
I'm guessing that the distinguishing factor in such states is a greater volatility among the electorate, which makes a strong lead less reliable in the eyes of the market than in a state like California, which is pretty steady even if the margins are slimmer.
This week, I'm going to provide a lot more detail than is usual. I missed last week's Bush-upswing-entry, and as his meteoric rise in the electoral projections continues, it seems a fitting time to establish the exact "state of play" on the electoral maps. First, some housekeeping. Beginning with next week, I will be incorporating a new pollster into my weighted averages. The American Research Group (which tends to skew slightly high for Democrats) is now polling all 50 states. It would join Rasmussen and SurveyUSA as a regular pollster. I also use two other polling digests to calculate my averages (DC Political Report and David Wissing). I haven't decided yet if ARG will become a 5th column (so to speak), or if I should replace one of the digests (I rely on DC Political Report for the latest polls, whereas I use as a clearinghouse for recent independent polls).
OK, so enough about method. Let's first get the maps out of the way.
In the Tradesports exchange, Bush is doing phenomenally. The Bush Industrial Average (the price of one contract in every state) is at what is essentially a lifetime high of 3,137.6. The popular vote projection based upon these odds now has Bush leading nationally by a staggering 8 million votes, which is a pretty good indicator of how widely confidence has grown in Bush's chances. Here's the map of the odds:
Am I?
Congressman Cox (R-CA) is now urging for a Congressional Investigation into a factually inacurrate CBS report on CBS news. Leaving aside the blatant hypocrisy of this stance ("With respect to the facts underlying all of this, there was a book published by swift boat veterans. It ought to rise or fall on its own merits, just as with "Fahrenheit 9/11," which is loaded with factual inaccuracies."), ask yourself this: Should independent news organizations face Congressional investigations for no crime greater than a bungled story? Is such a scenario compatible with "freedom of the press?" Or would it indeed be an intimidating infringement of such freedom?
OK. Maybe I'm being unreasonable.
Let's be reasonable, and try not to invest any paranoiac assumptions into the story of two citizens arrested for trespassing on public property during an event open to the public.
Let us not worry about Florida's decision to disregard an injunction from the court and place a possibly illegal contestant's name on the state ballot because an impending hurricane might delay a final verdict.
Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that there's nothing wrong with a Speaker of the House charging U.S. citizens with crimes for daring to oppose their party's candidate's re-election.
If I were an unreasonable man, I might say that a prominent Republican Congressman passing laws to retroactively exonerate himself was a scandal. I might think that Republican governors issuing "secret pardons" to their criminal kin was a scandal. If I were a wild-eyed liberal lunatic I'd think evidence a House majority leader knowingly violated several state and federal laws in an effort to rig Texas' Congressional delegation was the sign of a quiet coup. Thankfully, I strive to use reason in all my thoughts. Not for me, these silly conspiracy theories of Congressional corruption hinging on intimidation and bribery.
Who cares if the Bush Administration and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth shared a lawyer? Why would common personnel imply any kind of organizational link?
If I were a nut, I might think that our blatant disregard for the 12 Amendment reflected an unhealthy disdain for the law. But I'm not a nut. I mean, it's not like the Bush Administration is some sort of hot-bed for outright treason or espionage. The world is full of facts, and we describe their coincidence as coincedences for a darn good reason.
None of this shakes my faith in America. For God's sake, people! We put sitting U.S. Congressmen in jail for stealing postage stamps, and for getting free suits, and even for unseemly home remodelling.
Surely if something were amiss in the machinery of my government, I could trust the party in power to set it right...
Or something very near to it. Listen to Cheney's remarks on the recent crisis in Beslan:
I think some have hoped that if they kept their heads down and stayed out of the line of fire, they wouldn't get hit. I think what happened in Russia now demonstrates pretty conclusively that everybody is a target, that Russia, of course, did not support us in Iraq. They did not get involved in sending troops there. They've gotten hit anyway. And I think people are back sort of reassessing now, in terms of what the motives may be of the people who are launching these attacks or using these kinds of tactics against our people.
The morning news has had footage for the last two days of a Texas Ranger ball player throwing a chair into the stands and breaking a woman's nose. Apparently someone near her had called him fat. Here's your story.
Memo to California: Don't Mess with Texas
Got an email from a friend of mine today that I think is worth sharing:
Once again, marriage is causing me to be rather confused...this time it is
"marriage by proxy". Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill into law
allowing military personnel stationed overseas in a war or conflict and
unable to appear in person to marry through a legal stand-in or proxy. The
gubernator made this California law on Friday and ushered in a new era of
weddings. So with a cell phone and a stand-in (I will return to this
later), any soldier can wed his American sweetheart whilst away killing
people.
...
Second point, this California bill was formed and pushed through by a single
family that happened to have the hook up to a federal judge who happened to
have the hook up to several state senators...etc...etc...and guess what,
they didn't push this through so that the two people involved could
celebrate a holy and sacred union (fitting for such a cornerstone of our
society...such a sacred institution...), but rather so that the wifey and
soon to be born baby (you heard me right, she is about to pop any day now)
can qualify for benefits under the military and, god forbid, the hubby dies
while at war, then they would qualify for death benefits. So the push to
make this California law was just a financial move to ease the cost of
childbirth and to secure monetary insurance for the likely event that the
new husband is killed. So even if we discount the whole marriage by proxy
idea as a perverting factor, then this must be counted as one...right? Oh,
wait, I forgot...even for the traditional marriage it is still a financial
merger with benefits not accessible to those not in the union. Though
perhaps when taken together...a marriage by proxy for financial
reasons...could that be one of those perversions set to destroy our world?
"It would help me out tremendously, not to mention it would alleviate a lot of stress for both Tommy and me," Arnold said in a prepared statement for the judiciary committee.
The 23-year-old San Diego County woman hopes to wed by the end of September, when she is scheduled to give birth to the couple's first child, Isabella Nicole Cogan.
"We both want our child to be taken care of if anything were to happen to him while over in Iraq," she said. "We both want this (marriage), and we both incredibly love each other."
Given recent news reports, I feel the American people deserve to know something.
If I were in the White House press pool:'
Q: Did George W. Bush specifically authorize either the invasion of Fallujah or the withdrawal several days later after the death of the four U.S. contractors in that city?
My bet is it would yield an interesting article.
P.S. to the readers. I missed last Friday's Horse Race (sorry, out of town without my tools). But, looking over the data, I'd advise panic now for any who hope to see Kerry win. He's starting to get routed across the map.
Found an old observation I'd made in April of 2003. My willingness to smash antiquities was controversial (and perhaps hyperbolic), but overall it's worth reading again:
Oh, the horror! The Horror!
Let it be said... I think it sucks that the National Museum in Iraq was looted and that the National Library was destroyed.
And I think there's credible evidence that we knew of the threat, we knew it was happening, and we had the resources to stop it. Yet we did not.
And I think that reflects poorly on us, as an occupying power.
But I also think people are getting a tad too histrionic about it.
Suddenly, I'm reading left and right about a museum that most people didn't even realize existed and hearing of "the horror." Everywhere I go, it's described in superlative, melodramatic terms. "A horror." "Terrifying." "Grief-inducing." "Tragic."
The tizzy over the loss of these artifacts, I will concede, is in many ways the evidence of the sad callousness of America's modern left. The artifacts were nice things. The nice things are gone.
I understand it's nice to have things to hate the Bushies over. And hey, it's there, it's convenient. But one's rhetoric speaks volumes about one's world-view. And the histrionics over this museum indicate a sad inability to put things in proper perspective. In the end, the things were things. Antiquities last a long time. But they don't last forever. They're nice to look at, they teach us things... but they're props in the theater of human life. They're less important than we are. They're really not the best source to vent our crocodile tears on.
If I had to choose, I'd obliterate the Great Wall of China, the Parthenon, and the Pyramids at Giza in a second, just to save a single human life. They're just objects. They don't notice their own destruction, and the sands of history which swallowed all their contemporaries haven't stopped in the twenty-first century.
I'll tell you something that's "horrifying, terrifying, grief-inducing, and tragic." That kid, Ali... the one we keep reading about in the press. He's got no arms and no family. In many ways, that's a big tragedy. Sitting back on my shore of the Atlantic Lake, taking a look at the wide picture, I can see that Iraqis have a more promising future ahead of them than they did two months ago. I'm glad for that. The worst might yet transpire, but frankly, they got more to hope for now than they did then. But from Ali's perspective... well, he doesn't have the luxury of the wide-angle. He's got no arms and no family. And that's what he's gonna be, from now to the end of his days. An orphaned double-amputee. After he's out of the news, and after the world's stage has moved on, that kid's gonna' have a hell of a life... the only one he gets. And... well, we did that to him.
I wouldn't take the war back to give Ali his arms and family back. I would take it back in an instant to salvage the norms and precedents of international law... but that's another issue altogether. In the end, the world is trade-offs. The lives of some will be shattered in the interests of others. It's a necessary consequence of action. Would you send hundreds of adults into Saddam's torture chambers, simply to make Ali whole again? No. But, but I'd choose those horrors to have history unfurl again in the course I thought wiser.
We can lie to ourselves, and make contorted efforts to turn the darkness into light... "Ali doesn't know it yet, but life as an orphaned double-amputee will be BETTER in a free Iraq than life with a family AND arms in an Iraqi slave state!" I've also seen sentiments like that expressed, and they're sickening. That kid's been royally fucked over by life. By the decisions WE made... Had I gotten my wishes, and had America not invaded Iraq... well, someone else might be getting anally raped with a poker in a basement of Baghdad for saying the wrong thing to Saddam. And THAT person's suffering would be a direct consequence of OUR choice. Start thinking in those terms, and it all seems pretty hopeless. People are royally fucked no matter what.
Fortunately, nobody sits you down and makes you decide in those terms. No waiter asks: "Before I serve you your ideology, would you like me to electrocute the genitals of a dissident, or chop off the arms of a child?"
But to those of you who supported the war, I hope you do recognize the tragedy of its consequences. To those of you who opposed it, I do hope you recognize the tragedy which would have ensued had the war not unfurled. None of us can point a blameless finger at history.
This war was big, and this war was immense. I'm not interested in hearing the dick-brained "whoopees" and "cakewalks" of the ideological victors... a river of blood will flow from your choice. And from those who didn't like it, I'm not interested in hearing the exaggeration of every little fuck-up into a tragedy of Homeric proportions. There was blood down the path we advocated too. Spilt by different person, for different reasons, at different hands, but blood nonetheless.
And I'm not really interested in the "tragedy" of some broken crockerware, however old it may have been. It was a fuck-up, pure and simple. It's to be deplored, and to the extent it was preventible, those who failed to prevent it should be held accountable. There's no good excuse for it, but it should be kept in perspective.
My blogging is likely to be quite light over the week, as I've been on a vacation at home. Among family, concerns drift inevitably to babies and dogs, brain tumors and divorce, and all the intimate private concerns of family. Of course there's the talking of politics, and if anything I'm grateful to my older brother for making the first compelling case for voting Bush that I can recall. Any such debate is, by necessity, and exercise in constant disavowal... how to justify supporting a candidate that you have no enthusiasm for? I guess I found the frank disenchantment to be a refreshing acknowledgment.
And, on the subject of acknowledgments, I have been given a small trove of books to read, one of which is On Reading the Constitution by Laurence Tribe (, the) and Michael Dorf. Haven't read it yet, but in reading the acknowledgments, prefaces, and introductions of my gifts, I found the following startling note:
We are grateful for the outstanding efforts of several very talented people. Robert Fisher and Barrack Obama have influenced our thinking on virtually every subject discussed in these pages.
Campaign Finance
"The Center for Responsive Politics monitors campaign contributions and it has estimated that 527s have raised more than $165 million this year. Democratic-leaning 527 groups have raised about $148 million of that, Republican-leaning groups the rest. "
Interesting. Eliminate the quid pro quo, and Republican party donations drop through the floor...
It's been an excellent week for Bush, as he continued to mark pre-convention gains against Kerry in both the polls and the projections. Interestingly, Bush has substantially narrowed his wide gap in the popular-vote projection. According to Tradesports, he would now narrowly beat Kerry in the popular vote, and according to the polls, Kerry would only win the popular vote by around 100,000 voters.
George Bush continues to gain favor in the Tradesports exchange. His election index, the price of a single contract for Bush in each state, now stands at 2967, which is the highest I've yet recorded. If each state were to deliver its votes in proportion to the odds (i.e., a state with a 98% chance of backing Bush were to deliver 98% of its votes), Bush would win the popular vote by 53.2 million to 52.1 million, which is a margin of 1 million votes (+0.98%).
Major movements since last week:
I'll have more to say on this later. I've been thinking alot lately about the political vision of Osama bin Laden. It's been leading to a mounting frustration with our abysmal failure to identify and combat the political agenda of our opponents in the so-called "War on Terror."
In that context, I think it pays to remember how very different the Middle East appeared a mere hundred years ago:
Check it out! He's a wonderful repository of factual information, but occasional posts like this make me wonder if he isn't just a gullible chump with a professorship.
He credulously shares the following note from "Clive Ausle" in Australia:
Molly appears to have omitted counting the number killed but unidentified pending notification of kin. Total US dead is reported at 1012 as at end of August (244 days of 2004 with 530 dead versus 482 dead in 2003's 287 days despite end of official war and return of "sovereignty").
Of at least equal concern is US casualties totalling 6987 as at end of August including a big jump of 1112 in the most recent month alone. Note that the wearing of bullet-proof vests means that many of these would have been deaths in earlier combats such as Vietnam. The vests have reduced deaths but greatly increased total incapacitation wounds such as brain injuries and limb loss. (Note that Pentagon has been trying to "spin" the number of wounded by only reporting "hostile" wounded since 1 April 2004).
If you assume that the 6987 wounded cannot return to fight and nor can the 4416 reported non-battle injury evacuations, the US loses 21.47 soldiers per day to injury (and 36 per day in most recent month) on top of the 1.9 average deaths per day (total 23.37 per day equals 8530 per year that this continues, more if rates escalate as they are currently). Too many years at this rate and the US military is severely depleted, not to mention the increased vet costs and resultant family impact back home.
Note also that most recent deaths have not been in Najaf, implying there is a largely unreported but much more effective uprising elsewhere in Iraq (Al-Anbar district seems to be where most deaths are still occuring). '
We list a number of people as unidentified pending notification of next of kin. We count people as soon as they get killed, while others wait until they are named. As of late April 2004 we counted three deaths [17 Jan 2004, 17 Feb 2004 and 02 Mar 2004] that were still unidentified, as well as over two dozen unidentified from April 2004. As of late August 2004, after rechecking and cross-checking the available data, this number was reduced to a dozen unidentified for April. In addition, eight casualties were still unidentified for May, two for June and seven for the month of July.In most cases we had pretty high-quality reporting at the time that these deaths had occurred, and in our experience it can take a week or ten days to notify next of kin and publish the name.
In other cases, it can take some time to dis-ambiguate separate and disparate reports of a single incident. April was the cruelest month, and by the end of the month the Pentagon had named 120 who had been killed, while we counted over 150 deaths. With closer analysis, we were able to conclude that some of the apparent 35 unidentifieds were probably multiple reports of single incidents.
Fascinating. Andrew Sullivan's got a post up discussing a communication between Iraqi dissidents (I think it's an open-letter). I've placed the letter in italics, with emphasis added:
He quotes one Mohammed Bashar Al-Faidhy, spokesman of the Association of Muslim Scholars. If you want to see how attuned these maniacs are to divisions in the West, read on:
To our brothers in the Islamic Army of Iraq. We wish to inform you that we totally understand the extreme rage that is boiling in your hearts regarding the French decision to ban the Hijab in their schools, and we share you your dissapointment. We officially condemned the French decision at the time... However, killing the two hostages without considering the grave consequences of such an act would be harmful to our cause and would isolate us from our international support... Our goal is to besiege the Americans politically in every spot of the world and this act is not serving that goal... You can see how the agents of the occupation are already using this incident against us... It is our duty as scholars to point out to our brothers what is wrong and what is right... France as an anti-occupation country has been helpful to our cause... You might say that the French stance is not an altruistic one and that they have their own political interests that caused them to disagree with the Americans, and I am not going to say that is not true but it is also our goal to turn them against each other to serve our cause so France has a strategic importance for us.
This is a fascinating and potentially important moment in the war on terror. If the Jihadists take the war to France now, we may get the Western unity that has so far eluded us. And that can only be a good thing.
Defenselink's fixed the glitch on its site.
August 2, 2004
September 2, 2004
That's 65 soldiers lost in Iraq during the last month, 54 of whom were KIA. 508 Wounded, Not Returning to Duty.
As psychotic thugs threaten to destroy a school full of Russian children, it's kind of a relief stumbling on the small miracle to counter the mass horror. It's not a happy story, but nevertheless tinged with good fortune.
Baby survives 5 days next to dad's body
Associated Press
AUSTIN - Certain that the baby he found next to her dead father had also died, Officer Blain Eiben began to back away. Then something made him stop.
"Something changed my mind, and I said 'no, I need to check her pulse,' " he said Wednesday. "I barely felt a pulse, and she barely kicked a leg."
Six-month-old Asia McCoy, who somehow survived alone for five days, was in critical condition Wednesday at Brackenridge Hospital. She was discovered Sunday on a bathroom floor near the decomposing body of Willard McCoy, 41. His death is being investigated but not as a homicide.
Eiben believes he witnessed a miracle.
"After thinking about it, I think God was in that house that day. How could a baby survive that? He had to be there," said Eiben, who describes himself as religious but no fanatic. "I definitely think it's a miracle."
Asia was discovered when police responded to a welfare call after neighbors hadn't seen her or her father for days.
"They were getting worried and calling his cell phone, paging him, going over to the door and he would never answer, until Saturday and Sunday they noticed a smell and flies," neighbor Angela Sales said.
Eiben and Officer Doug Drake found the odor so foul that they could not stay in the house without gas masks. Eiben spotted Asia between the legs of her father, encrusted with fluid.
"There are telltale signs that somebody is dead," said Eiben, an officer for nine years. "I stood there looking at her, her chest was not raising at all. Her eyes were glazed over."
Drake was outside the home, retrieving his gas mask.
"Officer Eiben enters with his gas mask," Drake said, "and less than a minute in there and he comes running out holding a baby."
He and Drake cleaned out the infant's nose and mouth, poured water on her and rubbed her back until she started making noise. "Come on baby, come on baby, breathe please," they pleaded in calm tones.
"Whatever we could, trying to soothe her, comfort her," Eiben said. "The baby had been through a lot, I can't even imagine what it would be like to lay there in that condition for five days. We were doing everything we could to soothe her and not to put any more trauma on her."
The Fire Department arrived and took over.
"They had things going real good," Eiben said. "They were giving her oxygen, they got some towels from a neighbor to warm her back up, raise up her body temperature. Those guys jumped right in."
Drake said he hasn't yet had a chance to sort out what happened.
"There have been several moments since that time that I stopped and thought about it," he said. "I don't think all the elements of that day have come together yet."
Child Protective Services has custody of Asia and will place her with a foster home at least initially, spokesman Aaron Reed said. The agency has identified family members who might be appropriate to take care of her, Reed said.
Asia was in CPS custody as a newborn but then a judge ordered that McCoy be given custody of her about three months ago, Reed said.
"It was not our recommendation that the child return home," Reed said. Another agency spokesman, Geoff Wool, said CPS was concerned about McCoy's ability to provide for the child.
Wool said Asia's mother was incarcerated when Asia was born.
CPS monitored Asia while she was in McCoy's custody.
"She was doing quite well," Reed said.
A caseworker visited Asia once a week for eight weeks and then once a month. The last visit was Aug. 14 and everything appeared to be fine, Reed said.
"Clearly this is a tragedy but it could have been much worse if this child had died," Reed said
I know, that finding stories like this credible is supposed to be the equivalent of believing the Vincent Foster murder conspiracy. But what can I say? Believing a sitting President is plotting murders strikes me as decidedly more lunatic than believing George W. Bush was about as bad as he claims. As a young man myself, a year older than Bush was in '72, I find the excuse for these stories ("he was young and stupid") to be truly disgusting. Much as people say that 30 years ago doesn't matter, I still believe it does. "The fruit doesn't fall far from the tree" as they say. How a man reputedly this terrible could morph into something better than his nature is a mystery to me.
Another clipping for the, "Why George W. Bush Really Does Bug Me" file:
Have you wondered this? Maybe not. Bundled with the landmark case Lawrence v. Texas was a similar case involving a Kansas youth by the name of Matt Limon. Limon, a high school senior just over 18, was having a gay relationship with a high school freshmen. The freshman's parents found out, and Limon was sentenced to a 17 year prison term despite the presence of a "Romeo and Juliet" law in Kansas applying to straight couples that severely reduced the penalty for statutory rape if the age difference between the partners was less than four years.
After Lawrence, the case was apparently remanded. This article tells us where it stands today:
Official justifies harsher penalties for gay sex
Says promoting traditional values is reason enough
Wednesday, September 1, 2004 Posted: 10:14 AM EDT (1414 GMT)
TOPEKA, Kansas (AP) -- The state can punish illegal underage sex more harshly when it involves homosexual acts, even if the only goal is promoting traditional values, a state official told the Kansas Supreme Court on Tuesday.
In a closely watched case, Deputy Attorney General Jared Maag said legislators have such broad latitude in setting policy that "any conceivable, rational basis" would justify the different treatment.
Maag argued in favor of upholding a sentence of more than 17 years in prison for Matthew R. Limon, convicted of criminal sodomy for having sex at age 18 with a 14-year-old boy in 2000.
Had the victim been a girl, Limon could have been sentenced to one year and three months in prison under a 1999 "Romeo and Juliet" law that gives shorter sentences to heterosexuals if the partners' ages are within four years and under 19.
His attorneys argued the different treatment represents discrimination against gays and lesbians and is unconstitutional.
But Maag said the different treatment is acceptable if legislators can argue there's a rational reason -- including promoting traditional values.
"If you admit there's a conceivable basis that's at least arguable, then that is enough to uphold the statute as constitutional," he said.
James Esseks, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney representing Limon, said the state has "fanciful justifications" for the harsher sentence.
Esseks said the state is basing its law on "private prejudice," which is constitutionally unacceptable.
The Kansas Court of Appeals rejected Limon's appeal in 2002. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Texas law criminalizing gay sex and returned Limon's case to the state courts.
But in a 2-1 decision in January, the Kansas Court of Appeals noted that the U.S. Supreme Court case involved consenting adults and sided with the state again. Limon then appealed the state Supreme Court, which could rule as early as October 15.
But instead, I'll settle for grateful.
Though it's outrageous for the DoJ to fuck up so tremendously, it's a reassuring brake on my cynicism that they are seeking to clean up the mess.
The headline, incase you're not a link-clicker is:
U.S. Seeks to Dismiss Terror Convictions
U.S. [DOJ] Asks Court to Dismiss Mich. Terror Cell Convictions, Says Prosecution Was Full of Mistakes
It's hard to really express my sadness over what's happening in the headlines today.
But this disappoints in a special measure, as it shows how effectively the Bush v. "bin Laden" (cf. "the many faces of")face off is polarizing and radicalizing the world community:
Mosques burn in Nepal as mob vents fury at execution of hostages
An indefinite curfew was imposed yesterday in Kathmandu after angry mobs stormed the city's two mosques, vandalised manpower agencies and attacked the offices of Qatar Airways and Gulf Air. Four deaths are unconfirmed but at least three people are known to have died in the violence which erupted after news of the slaughter of 12 Nepalese hostages in Iraq by an Islamic militant group, Ansar al-Sunnah, the largest number of foreign hostages to be killed at one time by insurgents in Iraq.
I confess, I don't watch much of the convention coverage. The speeches bore me (because of their overheated lack of content). Its the reaction to them that fascinate me.
And, I must say... I'm really enjoying Jason Zengerle's growing disdain for last night's speech by the Bush twins...
I'm still reeling from the utterly bad taste of the Bush twins' performance last night. Particularly offensive was how the daughters spoke about their father's top aides. Jenna got it started: "We've spent a lot of time at the White House, so when we showed up the first day, we thought we had it all figured out. But apparently my dad already has a chief of staff, named Andy." Then she added, "I knew I wasn't quite ready to be president, but number two sounded pretty good." To which Barbara replied, "Who is this man they call Dick Cheney?" And then Barbara kept the joke going: "We knew we had something to offer. I mean, we've traveled the world; we've studied abroad. But when we started coming home with foreign policy advice, dad made us call Condi."
"Condi"? How about "Dr. Rice"? The Bush girls were talking, respectively, about the White House Chief of Staff and the Vice President and National Security Adviser of the Untied States--and they managed to make them sound like the family servants. It's bad enough that Paris Hilton is a pop-culture icon. Do we have to celebrate spoiled rich girls in politics too?
