Minor Links Changes

You might notice I made a few changes in the Links section, besides adding There Is no Crisis over there. A few links weren't really good anymore. But do go check out There is no Crisis.

I Think the Answers Yes

For those who do not know, there is a new movie about Ann Coulter, entitled "Is It True What They Say About Ann?” Check out the DVD case right here.



All the graphical splendor one might expect of bootleg video tapes at the local swapmeet.

The DVD "Is It True What They Say About Ann?" also discusses Anns love for the Grateful Dead and the Ramones. "Friend of the Devil" perhaps?

Anyway, I've said that Ann is nuttier than three squirrels, so I guess this video will tell you whether or not that is true. But for my guess on the answer to this particular question, check out the title of this post.

Oh and for those of you who are curious, my favorite Grateful Dead song is "Uncle John's Band," off of Workingman's Dead.

Down in the Subway

Here's another website you might find interesting. One set up by the University of Kansas Young Democrats. In particular this post contemplating what the future of the Democratic Party ought to be is particularly good.

Round the Horn

Here we are for anther session of Round the Horn

Kick the Leftist is back after a hiatus, and are rededicating themselves to finding the lighter side of politics.

If you can't get enough Liberal Coalition (and lord knows I can't), Bark Bark Woof Woof also does a Friday Blogaround of the entire Liberal Coalition. For which I salute him. Also he has some thoughts on listening to the elections and the cliche factor.

Iddybud also watched the inauguration and has some questions about President Bush's use of the word Freedom.

Sooner Thought has an article by Greg Palast on inauguration day.

Speedkill has some thoughts on the idea that Hip-Hop will unite the Masses.

Scrutiny Hooligans has the story that Jerry Corsi, who was involved with the Swift Boat Liars, is apparently considering running for Kerry's seat in the Senate.

The Fulcrum covers the outgoing Attorney General's contention that the Patriot Act got a bum rap. I had a bum rap once, but the doctor gave me some ointment and it cleared right up.

The Invisible Library has a post on writing and the changes an author must sometimes make to make his work work.

Trish Wilson's Blog has some commentary on the apparent practice of proselytizing in the digital world of Laederon. Otherwise known as World of Warcraft, one of my current addictions.

Well that's it for another edition of Round the Horn. We will have our spotlight of a new or small blog shortly.

Happiness is a Trap

At least that seems to be the opinion of Daniel Gilbert (Harvard professor of Psychology), as expressed in this editorial at the New York Times. Gilbert's article is on how we Democrats are reacting to President Bush's inauguration. Basically his thesis is that most people have developed coping mechanisms to deal with these kinds of disappointments. We will find the silver lining.

Of course he suggests we will find the silver lining in pettiness and low-grade hypocrisy.

So when President Bush puts his hand on the Bible today and begins his second term, Republicans will not be the only ones thinking about how lucky they are. Democrats will surely remind one another that the dollar is down, the deficit is up, foreign relations are in disarray and the party that presides over this looming miasma may well have elected its last president for decades to come.

At the same time, Democrats will tell themselves that they did everything they could - they wrote more checks and cast more ballots than ever before - so if the president and his party insist that Democrats now enjoy a fat tax break, then why feel guilty?

The funny thing is, this is something I've said (well not the part about the Tax Cuts) a few times. The country is kind of a mess, and President Bush and the conservative philosophy he espouses should be presented with the bill for that mess. But now that I see the idea in other words it does strike me as a little petty. President Bush isn't really going to have to pay much of a price, compared to the working class in this country or the soldiers in Iraq.

I also don't know what to make of the end of Gilbert's essay. ". . . tomorrow it will be a nation - and not a party - that faces the dire problems of war, terrorism, poverty and intolerance. Perhaps over the next four years we would all be wise to suppress our natural talent for happiness and strive instead to be truly, deeply distressed." Is Gilbert suggesting we need to get distressed at President Bush and hold his feet to the fire? Or is he suggesting we need to get distressed at the problems America is facing and stand with President Bush to solve them (which would kind of ignore the fact that some of these problems were, more or less, created by President Bush)?

At any rate, I think we should be distressed about where President Bush has taken and is taking our country. I think we should be upset. I think that even anger is a not inappropriate response to some of the actions President Bush has taken. But we can't let our anger consume us. We can't simply rail against the injustices of the Bush administration, against a foreign policy built around belligerence and a domestic policy built around helping those who need little help and hurting those who are already hurting. Instead we need to discover and present a different vision for America. We need to discover America again, not just in our capital, but in our states, in our cities, in our communities and in our homes. That's really the only long term way to counter this current political climate.

FDR and GWB and possibly other letters

I don't watch commercials all that much, so I've missed a few here and there. In particular I've missed this political nugget in which President Frankly D. Roosevelt's courage in setting up Social Security is compared to President George W. Bush's courage in dismantling Social Security. Joe Conason, however, has some accurate commentary on the weakness of the argument.

The ad's not-so-subliminal suggestions are that George W. Bush equals Franklin D. Roosevelt, and that Mr. Bush seeks to honor Roosevelt.

While that reassuring ad was still running on the cable networks, a confidential White House memo got leaked to the press. Written by Peter Wehner, an aide to political boss Karl Rove, the memo outlined the President's strategy for pursuing changes in Social Security. After explaining why the White House must create a sense of crisis about the system's future, and arguing that there should be sharp cuts in benefits, Mr. Wehner touted the true ideological aim of this campaign.

"For the first time in six decades," he wrote, "the Social Security battle is one we can win -- and in doing so, we can help transform the political and philosophical landscape of the country." Of course, the last time Republicans "lost" the Social Security debate was in 1935, when they tried to block the program's creation. They lost again in 1964, when their Presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, wanted to abolish the system and lost all but six states in an historic landslide. Mr. Wehner's remarks raise the suspicion that he means not to protect but to overturn Roosevelt's landmark achievement, which remains the most successful social program in American history.

There could hardly be any tactic more deceptive than appropriating Roosevelt to undo his legacy, but that ad man's lie represents the pervasive fraudulence of the White House sales effort.

The ad was created by a group called "Progress for America" who also reprints various articles calling for the Phase Out / Privitization schemes of the Bush White House. One of them, from the Wall Street Journal, contained this interesting passage. "Defenders of the 70-year-old status quo cry that the system isn't broke. It isn't, but only because of past increases in the payroll tax. The Bushies respond that another such fix will be necessary to keep it solvent in a few years, so why not go for a permanent solution?"

I suppose eliminating Social Security could be seen as a permanent solution to the Social Security Problem. Also I'm not sure who the author of the previous article is referring to when he mentions the Bushies, but obviously there are those on the right wing who would like to see him talking more openly about eliminating social security.

Happy Inauguration Day!

Today President Bush is being inaugurated for his second term. This feels me with a sense of foreboding and concern, perhaps even a little anger. President Bush and his supporters are entitled to their celebration. They won the election and all. So calls for them to not have an inauguration based on the Iraq War or the Tsunami don't seem very just to me. We would have had our party had Kerry won.

That said, Ann Coulter's latest screed on this very issue shows her continuing lack of clarity whatsoever. Basically, she brings up the terrible events that happened in the winter of 2003 (President Clinton's first inauguration), and makes the comparison. The difference is that Ann can't really make a death toll in 1993 even compare to the death toll in the recent Tsunami.

She shoots herself in the foot by noting the initial skimpy (even stingy) amount proposed by the Bush Administration (less than half of the cost of the Inauguration).

And then there's this paragraph, with characteristic and breathtaking meanspiritedness.

The spokesman for Clinton's 1993 Inaugural Committee said the inaugural events would cost about $25 million - largesse exceeded only by the $50 million Ken Starr was forced to spend when "Clintonland" turned out to be populated with felons. Think of all the starving children in Angola, Somalia, Bosnia and elsewhere that $25 million could have fed! And don't even get me started on Michael Moore's "on location" food budget!

OK. First of all, $25 Million is half of what President Bush is spending (according to the Conservative Washington Times, which pegs it at $50 Million, not counting security), so why would you noted that? Secondly why are you obsessed with Clinton Ann? He's been out of office four years, you still gotta bring up Ken Starr and his witch hunt? And of course mentioning Michael Moore's weight is irrelevant (although I'm sure it gets big laughs out there in her audience.

She then takes on Hollywood liberals, intimating that they should abandon the oscars, golden globes and so on and send the money to Tsunami victims. Of course she ignores the fact that many Hollywood liberals have donated large chunks of money to help Tsunami victims. But why strive for accuracy when you are on a roll?

The truth is that the initial offer by the Bush Administration was pathetically small, a fact that even the Bush Administration seems to have grasped. It was a figure that was not worthy of this great nation. It was a figure that was not worthy of the generous American people. And it was a figure wholly inadequate to the problems at hand. If comparing it to the planned inauguration festivities loosened the Bush administration's fingers, than I wholeheartedly support that comparison.

That said, and to return to the initial point of this post, they did have their fingers loosened, and have since pledged a far more appropriate amount (although there is some legitimate concern over whether the Bush Administration will actually send the money). So I wish the Bush administration and their supporters a happy inauguration.

Of course tomorrow and the rest of the term I'd expect a more belligerent stance from this website.

Social Security information

For those of you who are interested in the forthcoming Social Security Crisis, you might check out this website, entitled "There is no Crisis." I've also added this Blog to my links over there at the right.

The truth is that, in this debate, Republicans are trying to scare Americans into accepting their solution. This might work. So the response is to say that there isn't a Crisis. Unfortunately that leaves an easy attack line for simple minded Republicans. "So you are saying there are no problems with Social Security?"

No we aren't saying that--there are problems. It's almost like some Conservatives can't envision anything between perfectly calm waters and total devastating hurricanes.

Confounded Women!

Once again we are pleased to present commentary by Mr. Irwin J. McIckleson (fictional plutocrat from the 1910s) on the issues of the day.

I was reading in my newspaper the other day, and, as usual, this strange future world gets my dander up. Apparently, the President of Harvard was making a point on the sphere in which woman excel and those spheres in which biology has conspired to make a woman ineffective. Woman are not as able to rotate objects in their mind for example, and thus are clearly unable to become scienticians or mechanists. This is also why Woman should not be allowed behind the wheels of the nation's automacars.

Apparently the view that women belong in their proper place and in no others is frowned upon in this strange future world. Indeed, one female professor (the concept astounds) apparently got up and left the room. Presumably she (her name will be withheld out of deference to her family) was crying or some other such womanly response. After all a woman could hardly be expected to consider leaving as a mark of disapproval against the President of Harvard. Woman do not have the inherent dignity that men do, as all acknowledge.

Fortunately, there are some in your society that understand the proper place of woman. Jonah Goldberg, for example, points out the inherent weakness in this female professors actions, and how we all assume that they were the result of female hysteria. Mr. Goldberg points out a few other salient details. For one thing this President of Harvard is an Economist. That certainly qualifies him to talk about human biology. He also points out that woman have babies, which is something we believed in our day and we still believe in this strange future world! So it's not like we in the first decades of the 1900s were wrong about everything. And we were right about woman's inability to perform science as well. And about Joe Chinaman.

Once again we'd like to thank Mr. McIckleson for providing commentary. Those of you who would like a more modern approach to this subject please check out Echidne of the Snakes work on this subject (here, here, and here).

This is Not a Post

As some of you know I read This Modern World (both the political comic strip and the the blog) pretty regularly. And I've noted before Mr. Tomorrow's awkward position on blogging. Well, today he responded to this article in the Philly on the power of Blogs, which references the role bloggers played in keeping the Trent Lott scandal (in which he praised Strom Thurmond and wished that he had won in his presidential bid) alive in a post named "Pissing in the Wind."

Tomorrow passes on the claims of the Philly, and then notes that this account;

leaves out one significant detail: this site's small but crucial role in the whole matter. As some of you may recall, the balance was apparently tipped when footage surfaced of Trent Lott making the same comments about Strom Thurmond a third time. And the reason that footage became public was that a reader of this site had caught it on C-Span several years prior, grasped the significance, and saved the tape. He emailed me and I put the information up on my site, where it was ignored by pretty much everyone. I then called up a producer I knew at MSNBC, which ran with the scoop, albeit without acknowledging the source. Soon it was all over the networks and Fox pundits were speculating that the DNC must have had an army of interns poring over old footage.

Short story: the Lott thing is not quite the Triumph of the Blogs tale that myth has made it. The story gained momentum because of the blogs. And if I hadn't been blogging, the reader who had the tape might never have contacted me. But what finally brought down Trent Lott was primarily a guy, I believe in the Midwest, with an old videotape and a long memory, and secondarily, the fact that I had a friend working at MSNBC. (Since I called him on the phone, you could just as easily credit the telecommunications network as the blogs...)

...just so we're clear, I'm not that worried about getting "credit" here--I was really little more than a conduit. I'm just tired of seeing this triumphalist myth repeated over and over, when I know for a fact that the blogs were only part of the story...

This is a bit strained, to say the least. Tomorrow was running a blog during this period, and that because of his blog he received information from somebody in the Midwest, which he posted the essentials of on his blog, and then passed on to a TV news station. And this somehow proves that blogs aren't really all they are cracked up to be. Seems like this story could easily be used to demonstrate the value that Blogs can provide to our media culture, but Mr. Tomorrow isn't interested in proving that Blogs have value. He's interested in denying that blogs have value. Or, at the very lest, in denying that blogs have excessive value.

It's kind of unclear what role Mr. Tomorrow thinks Blogs should play, exactly.

As I've said before I think the root of Mr. Tomorrow's (and others) problem's with the practice of blogging is this simple preposition. If everybody gives their opinion and each opinion is valued equally, than opinions becomes worthless. Mr. Tomorrow might see the value in an Atrios or a Joshua Michah Marshall having a blog. These people have proven their bona fides. But do most blogs have this caliber of individual behind them? Should you really compare what those two sites offer with the majority of Blogs?

More to the point can you really compare even what those blogs offer with say, the New Yorker Magazine. Or the New York Times?

My personal response to this might be that good writing and valuable and meaningful ideas will rise. While certainly magazines and newspapers have little to fear from the Blogs, if the Blogs provide valuable information or insights than why shouldn't they contribute to the national discourse?

Stop Me if You Think that You've Heard this One Before

I am listening to "Founding Brothers" by Joseph J. Ellis, which is about the Evolution of America right after the American Revolution. In it Ellis takes six key events in the early history of our nation and unpacks them, talking about the personalities and the philosophies involved (I'm pretty sure I wrote about this the first time I listened to the book, but I'm doing it again).

It's interesting to consider the very real differences that occurred in the Revolutionary era. It's also interesting to note that the great split in the revolutionary era (between Federalists and Democratic Republicans) is such that each modern party can claim a bit of each legacy. The Federalists for example believed in a strong federal government that would exert its influence to solve problems facing the American people. That sounds like something the Democratic Party would agree with. On the other hand, the Federalists were also closely aligned with financiers and manufacturing interests, and were seen as protecting their interests over the interests of the American Farmers (the working class of that era).

George Washington was federalist. The book makes the point that the experience of the Revolutionary War guided President Washington throughout his life. In order to win the war, Washington had to hold his army together. In fact, that's more or less the only thing he had to do. As long as the Continental Army existed, the British couldn't win the war. By the same token, the United States had to hold together. It's not hard to imagine separate colonies being subsumed back into European empires if they had not stayed together. So Washington, on the occasion of his departure from the public stage, wanted to ensure that the nation would continue to stay united.

I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.

This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.

Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.

It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.

Something to consider, in these days when we are pitted against each other by powerful political forces who have a lot to gain from our mutual antagonism.

Back to Social Security

There are two arguments that seem to be being made about Social Security right now. Argument number one is that the Social Security program is heading for an iceburg and so needs to be fixed now. Well, that turns out not to be entirely the case. Certainly there are some course corrections that could be made, but they aren't grabbing the wheel and turning it 180 degrees so we are going back the way we came.

The second argument, the one that President Bush is hoping that we don't have, is the one about whether or not Social Security in it's current form should exist at all. President Bush and Karl Rove and others would prefer to duck that issue because it would rile up the seniors and create an uproar among many others as well. College students not so much (it's hard to care all that much about something you've been told your whole life you won't get anyway (even if it turns out that was, more or less, a lie)). But a lot of Americans know people who depend on that Social Security check, so President Bush is happy not to have that particular discussion.

Still for those of you who question the value of Social Security, I'd point you to this article at the American Prospect.

The elderly used to be an age group with an especially high rate of poverty. One of the signal achievements of Social Security, hardly noticed today, is that poverty has fallen dramatically among Americans over age 65 to just 10 percent, lower than the 12-percent rate for the population as a whole. For millions of the elderly who would otherwise be poor, Social Security is the single biggest source of income, the ?nancial bedrock of their lives. Indirectly, their working-age children are bene?ciaries of the program because the elderly no longer have to move in with them. People under age 65 also bene?t from two other elements of Social Security that often get forgotten: bene?ts during long-term disability and survivor bene?ts for dependents if a worker dies before retirement. These are also important anti-poverty programs that don’t carry the stigma of welfare.

Social Security was never expected to be the sole source of retirement income for the middle class, who ideally also have employment-based retirement plans and personal savings. But if one thinks of these various sources of income as making up a “portfolio” of retirement assets, Social Security’s distinct value is even clearer. While other assets typically erode or become exhausted with advanced age, Social Security pensions keep their value because they have an annual cost-of-living adjustment. Moreover, as many employers convert from pension plans with a de?ned bene?t to 401(k) and other plans with uncertain payouts, workers are already bearing more risk for retirement. In that context, Social Security provides a valuable hedge against the ?nancial markets.

I have to admit I hadn't thought of the potential finanical drain of the elderly on many families if Social Security didn't exist. Anyway something to consider.

New Quote

It's a new quote but not a new format, because I'm moving to an every other week scenario on the new format.