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Politics and law from a British perspective (hence Politics LAW BloG): ''People who like this sort of thing...'' as the Great Man said
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Friday, December 31, 2004
The Southern bolt from labour further explainedIt was only on December 19 that I was talking about the essential role of senators from the Confederacy (Theodore Bilbo the only absentee) in overriding Truman's veto of Taft-Hartley. Now, I come across a 2001 paper (PDF) The Southern Imposition: Congress and Labor in the New Deal and Fair Deal by Sean Farhang and Ira Katznelson which describes the process of which that Taft-Hartley roll call was the culmination. Since it's the only thing I've read on the subject, I'm naturally not best placed to judge the piece: but its argument accords with my limited knowledge of the period, and it contains plenty of fascinating corroborative detail whilst being in no way a bald and unconvincing narrative! For instance, it tracks the exclusion of agricultural work from the scope of labour laws from the NIRA onwards. Southern labour was disproportionately agricultural as well as disproportionately Negro; Northern Democrats colluded with their Southern colleagues thus to deprive large swathes of Southern Negroes of labour rights as a quid pro quo for Southern support of the New Deal legislation (p20). Once the Southern block had definitively broken away, the arrangement fell away - with Dennis Chavez's 1946 FEPC bill (p39). The breaking-away process is fascinating: although the Republicrat coalition was supposed to have been in place by 1938, following the court-packing business, the piece notes that Southern Dems were still on board with the New Deal sufficiently to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, despite the threat to racially based wage differentials offered by its minimum wage provisions. But this support was posited on an agricultural exclusion and a union organising effort that, during the 1930s, had remained largely ineffective in the South (p33). The retreat started soon afterwards: Howard Smith [1] chaired the 1939 House Special Committee to Investigate the National Labor Relations Board which produced a bill curbing the Board's powers which passed the House with Southern Democratic support but failed to reach the Senate floor (p35). And that just a year or so after the FLSA went through. By the end of the war, whose requirements had sucked from the South millions of its Negroes, the climate was much more favourable to unionisation, and the notorious Operation Dixie put the wind up a South already contending with returning Negro servicemen, an unfavourable Supreme Court ruling on white primaries, the odium-by-association of Nazi race policies and a general sense that Jim Crow was on borrowed time. Now, race trumped everything; and the 1946 mid-term results were providential in supplying the numbers to carry an anti-union bill over Truman's inevitable veto. (Keith Finley's thesis Southern Opposition to Civil Rights in the United States Senate: A Tactical and Ideological Analysis, 1938-1965 - previously praised here - is still available, I see.)
| Thursday, December 30, 2004
Iraq and Vietnam mortality rates comparedAn interesting Slate piece suggests that, as a measure of the intensity of the two wars, the rates are alarmingly close - using 1966 as a marker and taking into account the much higher ratio today of non-fatal casualties to deaths and the size of the force engaged. Also, the families of KIAs tend to be more concentrated: nearly one-quarter of U.S. combat dead in 2004 were stationed at Camp Pendletonin Oceanside, CA. A point not made is that it is wrong to weigh the decrease in lethality of injuries as an unmitigated blessing: apart from the financial cost of caring for wounded men over, in many cases, decades, there is also the emotional burden for the families of these men. To use Tony Blair's favourite expression, they cannot move on as, in time, they might following the death of their loved ones. | Wednesday, December 29, 2004
Uribe goes for scrapping the eunuch clause?Currently, the Colombian constitution allows any individual just a single term as president. But, it seems, the incumbent, assiduous Bush client Álvaro Uribe, is close to scrapping that little rule - with a view to running for a second term himself. Very far from blowing my skirt up as yet (Christmastide lethargy may have something to do with it!); I'm rather surprised Slate found room for the story. But, on the other hand, it's developing... (The latest is that Uribe has signed the law containing the constitutional amendment: it now awaits the imprimatur of the Corte Constitucional, which is expected to be forthcoming.) MORE The eunuch clauses that applied in some Southern states were, I believe, rather different: they only barred consecutive terms. There are eunuch clause stories I seem to recall telling before concerning Lurleen Wallace and Earl Long, for two. | Thursday, December 23, 2004
Shredders running white hot in WhitehallThe Hutton Inquiry and the Blunkett farrago showed just how inconvenient written records could be to civil servants and ministers. With the long-delayed Freedom of Information Act shortly to come into force, it seems that bureaucrats are making sure there's as little information as possible to be free with. | Exquisite shot of dirty pool over the hunting billCliff Notes: the UK government has been trying to avoid implementation of a 1997 kinda-sorta pledge to ban fox-hunting - which is strongly supported by large swathes of his parliamentary party. Eventually, a bill was passed, using the provisions of the Parliament Act 1949, for a ban to commence in February 2005. Now, it turns out that hunt supporters are mounting a challenge to the effect that the Parliament Act 1949 was not validly passed, and requesting an injunction to delay the ban until the issue is resolved. Not utterly unprecedented, I suspect: last-ditch, doomed attempt at stopping the inevitable. Except that, in this case, the government has said it will not oppose granting of the injunction! And the strong suspicion is that everyone (who mattered) knew this all along. Anyone would think that even Teflon Tony might think he needed to goose his supporters at a time like this: election this May, if not earlier, and a key minister (Blunkett) just out on his ear. On the contrary: Blair waves two fingers at the comrades, leaving one on which they are invited to swivel. | Remembering Ingrid BetancourtThe release of Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot has brought namechecks [1], if nothing more, to the former Colombian presidential candidate now prisoner of the FARC for three years. I was last with Betancourt on May 12 2003 in the wake of a failed rescue attempt. Very easy to sermonise on the folly of a bourgeois white woman venturing into the shark-filled waters of Colombian politics in a foredoomed piece of extended sermonising. (Too late...) Loads of her little brown brothers are known to have met stickier fates [2] at the hands of the FARC, the ELN, the AUC and other alphabet-soup combinations with which my slight knowledge of the country has failed to acquaint me. So far as I can see, the poor cow is fucked. President Uribe is pursuing a policy of tout sécuritaire against the FARC (unlike his cosying up to the paramilitary AUC). His successor (elections due in 2006) is unlikely to take a markedly different view. Betancourt and Bush are object-lessons in keeping fantasy out of politics; Bush's come-uppance will be slow, indirect and inadequate since he wisely kept 6,000 miles away from the nasty stuff - Betancourt's is inhumanly excessive, because she didn't. | Tuesday, December 21, 2004
Unguessable factoid #94: the steam/electric quick-change at HarmonOld Alfred Hitchcock was making the most of the end of the era of rail when he featured the Twentieth Century Limited in his 1959 flick North by Northwest [1]. Curious, I do a little online mooching, only to find one of those essentially unguessable facts that make the activity such a delight: a train heading north from Grand Central Station on the New York Central would be hauled the first part of the way by an electric locomotive; at Harmon, NY, around 40 miles away, that locomotive would be uncoupled and a steam or diesel locomotive substituted [2]. No doubt there were good economic reasons for this procedure. I'm not aware of other examples, though.
| Monday, December 20, 2004
Reverse Jim Crow triumphs in MinnesotaMore stupid white men at work. The Star-Tribune, one reads, has determined it needs to do kow-tow for the language-crime of one its reporters: David Chanen, a police reporter, told editors that he used the term "colored officers" in an e-mail sent Wednesday to Minneapolis Police Inspector Donald Banham, who is black. An old-fashioned expression, and one not sanctioned by today's style-books. But, in an email, surely no big deal. Banham disagreed. He decided to exploit the situation to the maximum. His attitude may be gauged from this pair of grafs: Star Tribune Managing Editor Scott Gillespie sent a letter Thursday to Minneapolis Police Chief Bill McManus saying that the newspaper "owes you and your department a deep and sincere apology" for the language used in the e-mail. A definite Sharptonesque tone there, I fancy. The Strib's grovel was clearly insufficiently abject. As for Chanen, he must have had a decent spell in Room 101 to come up with the following cringing lines: [I] was shocked to learn I had written language ... that is terribly offensive. I was writing the e-mail in haste, but that's no excuse, and I deeply apologize for what I did. Now, Banham's online footprint is amazingly small [1], and gives little clue to his gleeful pouncing on the hack's error. The piece helps us out a little: Chanen said he wrote the e-mail because Banham had sent a letter to the newspaper criticizing Chanen's Dec. 11 story about the replacement of Lt. Mike Carlson as head of the homicide unit by Lt. Lee Edwards. Carlson is white and Edwards is black. Banham is in charge of the 4th Precinct - and, I assume, not in the chain of command for the homicide unit. Yet he had chosen to intervene. The earlier piece of Chanen's reads like the notes of a writer's meeting on a TV cop show. Among the potential plot-lines is a suggestion that the Carlson-Edwards switch was part of Chief Bill McManus' commitment to further diversify top positions. Plenty of conflict in which a journo on the crime beat might get enmeshed. Sad - but in no way shocking - to see the paper's management take the line of no resistance. The rag is owned by the McClatchy Co of Sacramento, which boasts Building on a 147-year legacy of independence, the company's newspapers and websites are steadfast defenders of First Amendment values and advocates for the communities they serve. The email isn't a First Amendment case, of course - no state action. But the mentality of Strib management hardly gives one much confidence that any First Amendment controversy, especially one involving race, will be vigorously defended.
MORE A companion piece from the black - even the newspapers are Jim Crowed! - Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder fills out the detail. The lede: At least one prominent Black Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) officer has indicated to the MSR that they are questioning whether or not a perceived increase in crime is simply the result of a backlash against their promotions by disgruntled White officers. That facially outrageous claim wouldn't have come from Banham by any chance, would it? | Ben Tre Bollocks: a mystery solved?I see that I first referred to the well-known quote back on March 22 2003: It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it. I appended the note Did anyone ever identify by name the actual guy who said that to Peter Arnett?- the issue flagged as worthy of further research, at least. Then, on May 8 2004, another reference, and the question Is the quote kosher? From Mr Google, I see different formulations, different ranks for the officer... For another time. Since I stumble just now on materials bearing on the point, now turns out to be that time. A column by Mona Charen dated April 1 2003 slagging off Arnett (who had just been sacked by NBC for giving an interview on Iraqi TV) refers to the Ben Tre [1] quote: she says it was wrong. According to this note, one BG Burkett [2] (in his book Stolen Honor) says that Ben Tre was destroyed by the Vietcong, not the Americans, as the quote implies. And that Arnett's reporting including the quote was made on February 7 1968. This piece, and a comment at Daily Pundit are the only web pages to identify Major Phil Cannella as having spoken to Arnett after the battle. The comment says Cannella told him that it was a shame that some of the town had been destroyed during the seige. Fairly skimpy sourcing, to put it mildly, for Cannella as being Arnett's source. And there's more: according to a 1978 paper in the Air University Review by Capt Donald Bishop The Press and the TET Offensive, the source was quite different. In a list of media misconceptions about Tet is included The characteristic American response was to destroy city districts and villages with overwhelming, indiscriminate firepower. This misconception was fueled by the ill-advised comment of an Air Force officer at Ben Tre that "we had to destroy the town to save it" and by television clips focusing on urban damage. Now, the ARVN could have had a USAF major as an advisor - I am not qualified to comment - but I note that there is a retired member of the USA rifle team called Phil Cannella [3]. Cannella is not the only name associated with the quote: according to a piece on Tet by Steven Hayward, Arnett refused to identify the source of the quote, but later revealingly referred to his source as "the perpetrator." The New Republic identified the source at the time as Major Chester L. Brown. An AIM report in 1977 gives the quote from Arnett's AP dispatch of February 7 as 'it became necessary to destroy the town to save it,' a U.S. major says. And quotes from the book Big Story by the Post man Peter Braestrup [4]; Braestrup says that the quote was cited, paraphrased, reshaped, misattributed, and used for years as an all-purpose description of the war On the attribution to Chester Brown, The New Republic reworked the quote and attributed it to Major Brown: 'Helicopter and bomber attacks on Ben Tre were directed by Maj. Chester L. Brown of Erie, Pennsylvania, who said to the Associated Press that 'it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it' and 'a pity about the civilians.'" Arnett's quote was fingered as dubious fairly soon after his piece was filed: William Touhy of the Los Angeles Times wrote a story six weeks later in which he said: "Only 25% of the city-rather than the reported 80%-was actually destroyed by the Vietcong attack and the Vietnamese artillery and U.S. air strikes that followed. And the U.S. advisory group doubts that the (Arnett) statement was actually made in that form. 'It sounds too pithy and clever to have been made on the spot,' says one U.S. civilian advisor. 'It just rings wrong.'" Braestrup quizzed Arnett at the time on the identity of his source, to be told I will keep my silence until I run into him again and get his clearance. The Post considered running Touhy's story, but decided not to. Not wholly without interest that a site like Military.com should take the quote at face value. The site has a description of action during the Tet offensive involving Chester Brown: The fighter-bombers again returned. U.S. Air Force Major Chester ("Chet") Brown from the MACV compound was acting as the FAC [forward air controller] for them in his little Cessna L-19 observation plane. So, whodunnit? Was it Cannella or Brown or a third man? Ought such a detail not be established by now?
| Shafer not apoplectic over hacks in clinkA somewhat hysterical Dionne op-ed in the Post leaves Jack Shafer underwhelmed. I've had occasion (on June 2, in fact) to mention Humbert Wolfe's famous lines: You cannot hope to bribe or twist On the evidence of the last four years, there is no need for USG to have journos put in jail in order to get coverage which, through negligence if not intentional fawning, secures pretty much all its objectives PR-wise. What odds on the Thomas Dewey-style prosecutorial prancing of Patrick Fitzgerald becoming old in rather short order? (As I understand it, if the grand jury disbands before the Supremes have the chance to decide an appeal in the Judith Miller/Matthew Cooper case, or to decline certioriari at least, the contempt becomes moot (if that's the word).) Are there Bernard Kerik-style skeletons in Fitzgerald's cupboard? Does the White House have a clue on the subject? | Sunday, December 19, 2004
You wouldn't read about it!An unexpected twist in the Blunkett bastardy case: there is a Third Man! Now, given the Clinton-sized libido of the woman in the case, Kimberly Quinn (aka Kimberly Fortier, and who knows what else), scarcely surprising in itself. What is truly piquant is that the guy is none other than well-known political hack for the Guardian, and ubiqituous on the BBC, Simon Hoggart. Like Blunkett, far from being Love's Young Dream. But one who has written a good deal - a sample - on the Blunkett/Quinn case - without letting on to the Great Unwashed that he, too, had dipped his wick where Blunkett's had been before. The News of the World broke the story earlier today. The piece says that, during a radio interview a month ago, Hoggart, referring to the sexual shenanigans already then known involving personnel at the Spectator (editor Boris Johnson, hack Rod Liddle), said "Why aren't I getting some of this Sextator action?" Quinn happens to be the Spectator's publisher. Hoggart's position is all the more delicate for being in the middle of promoting his Christmas book, The Cat that Could Open the Fridge (don't ask). No doubt, some colleagues interviewing him knew all about his dalliance with Quinn: others may feel less than charitably disposed. There will be plenty of Nexis work going on to ferret out the most embarrassing if only we knew then what we know now snippets from both Blunkett and Hoggart. A 2001 Daily Telegraph piece which looks at the marital record (dismal) of the then British cabinet links to a 2000 piece on an educational initiative taken when Blunkett was in charge of English schools: Children are to be taught to cope with divorce, separation and "re-partnering" as part of the new curriculum, it was disclosed last night...David Blunkett, the Education Secretary, is understood to have wanted greater emphasis on traditional households. Did the proposed guidelines give advice on the case of a mother who is indeed married, but whose amorous activities have resulted in a laundry-list of potential fathers for her child? | Small World II: Eliot Ness and DieboldThat's the real McCoy: Eliot Ness of the Untouchables. And, according to this, once he'd stopped being a Fed, they made him chairman of Diebold Corporation. Now, I've heard and seen Diebold slammed a thousand times by Dems in the last few months - for their supposedly easy-to-fix voting machines and their current chairman Wally O'Dell's saying - quoted here - that he was committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year. But no parenthetical mention of the iconic G-Man Eliot Ness. Strictly speaking, irrelevant to the issue, certainly. But, Jesus! - wasn't the campaign itself mostly - and, from the Bush viewpoint, gloriously - irrelevant? The fact the Ness/Diebold connection didn't crop up - so far as I'm aware - somehow just seems...un-American. | Small world: Ocean Hill-Brownsville, race relations and Murder IncStrange how almost everyone's heard of Rosa Parks, and almost no one's heard of Fred Nauman. Not so strange at all, of course: despite being a denizen of the largest Jewish city on the planet, Nauman is the wrong colour to get much recognition in Al Sharpton's rotten borough. (The story of the 1968 strike over Nauman's professional ethnic cleansing I discussed - off a interesting paper on the subject - on November 2 2003.) Now, I read about Murder Inc that Most of the killers were recruited from the gangs of the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Ocean Hill, Brownsville and East New York. The Murder Inc killing machine had been over for a decade before the strike, according to this PBS history. And I'm sure it never crossed those nice teachers' minds to distribute gifts of horses' heads amongst members of the school board... | The Senate roll call on Taft-HartleyIn internet terms, 1947 is 10,000 BC: available only in the form of archaeology, an eclectic selection of fragments [1]. One unexpected nugget comes from Alexander Cockburn in a piece from September How Many Democrats Voted for Taft-Hartley? As an hors-d'oeuvre, he quotes from The Third Party, a 1948 pamphlet by Adam Lapin [2] which inveighs against the Republocratic cabal which ruled [the 80th] Congress This cabal needed a two-thirds majority in both houses to overturn Truman's veto [3]; since the nominal state of the parties in the Senate was 51:45, several net Dems would have to vote for the override. In the event, Cockburn tells us, 24 Dem senators did so [in fact, that number must be 20, as per his list, in order to avoid making the total come to more than 96!]. Of the 22 from the Confederacy, his list gives the names of 17 as voting to override (including Arkansas' Jim Crow liberal William Fulbright and Texan figure of fun Pappy O'Daniel). Both Maryland senators [4] and Carl Hatch of New Mexico joined them. In support of the veto were 22 Dems - mercifully, Cockburn lists 22 names here. From the Confederacy, both Lister Hill and John Sparkman of Alabama; Olin Johnston - Olin the Solon - of South Carolina and noted liberal Claude Pepper of Florida (earlier Plawg pieces). By my count, one rebel is therefore MIA. On the GOP side, the name of Wayne Morse of Oregon stands out: one of the last - I'm thinking - of the Western insurgents of the LaFollette stripe, he eventually switched sides, only to be an early and vociferous opponent of Lyndon Johnson's escalation in Vietnam [5]. The vote, so far as one can tell, went as follows: For the over-ride: 20 Dems and 48 GOP Against the over-ride: 22 Dems and 3 GOP Not voting: 2 Dems Guess who the missing senator is? Theodore Gilmore Bilbo, that's who. A name of such notoriety that you'd have thought a political journalist might have seen fit to mention it. (Except a hack with the snafu record evident in the Cockburn's piece, perhaps...) Bilbo, according to the bio, did not take the oath of office in 1947 at the beginning of the Eightieth Congressand died on August 21 of that year - so never had the chance to give (and here I channel the great man!) the Commie faggot Jew Deal nigger-lovers a kick where their balls never where [6]. Bilbo's seat was eventually won later in 1947 by John Stennis - whose rather more nuanced approach to preserving the Jim Crow South I discussed on December 9 and December 10.
MORE A 2000 TomPaine piece Antisemitism in American Politics. The Bilbo anecdotage is considerable: The story of his absence from the Senate in 1947 is explained thus: In late July 1947, the Senate adjourned for the year without resolving a serious complaint against one of its members. Seven months earlier, facing charges of personal corruption and civil rights violations, Mississippi Democrat Theodore Bilbo presented his credentials for a new Senate term. Idaho Democrat Glen Taylor immediately demanded that the Senate delay Bilbo's swearing in until it could review the recently received findings of two special investigating committees. Angry at Taylor's action, several of Bilbo's southern colleagues launched a filibuster, which threatened to block the Senate's efforts to organize for the new Congress. They argued that the Mississippi senator should be allowed to take his seat while the Senate looked into the matter. A day later, on January 4, Senate Democratic Leader Alben Barkley temporarily broke the impasse by announcing that Bilbo was returning to Mississippi for cancer surgery and would not insist on being sworn in until he had recovered and returned to Washington. What this account doesn't explain is the role of Senate Secretary Leslie Biffle. Senate Rule I (which appears to be the same now as then) says that In the absence of the Vice President, and pending the election of a President pro tempore, the Acting President pro tempore or the Secretary of the Senate, or in his absence the Assistant Secretary, shall perform the duties of the Chair. However, according to an oral history interview (PDF) with Dorothy Scott, this was the first time (p26) that a Senate Secretary had taken the chair - and it would have to be for a rumpus over seating Bilbo! (The post is (was?) a patronage one, and Biffle resigned shortly after the senators were seated.) An oral history interview with Leonard Ballard of the Capitol Police reveals (p3) that Bilbo was the reason why there were no Negro policemen in the Senate detail in his time (there were some in the House detail, John Rankin notwithstanding!) And the first Negro joined the detail only in 1961 - thanks to erstwhile Klansman Robert Byrd! Away from the Capitol, a piece on the Mississippi Historical Society site asks Was Mississippi a Part of Progressivism? Governor Bilbo is credited with, inter alia, improving Mississippi's roads and starting a charity hospital. And there's a name-twinning one wouldn't expect to see: Bilbo and Medgar Evers. Apparently, When [brother Charles] Evers was young, Senator Theodore Bilbo, at the Newton County Courthouse, saw Charles and Medgar Evers in the audience. The senator warned the crowd, saying, "You see them two little niggers sittin' down there? If you don't stop 'em, one of 'em will be up here on these steps one day trying to go to Congress." Medgar looked at Charles and said, "That's not a bad idea." In 1969, Charles Evers became the mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, making him the first black mayor of a biracial town since Reconstruction. He was winkled out after a while, it says. Sundry Bilbo stuff here and here. Earlier Plawg pieces on Bilbo. | Friday, December 17, 2004
The Mormons strike again!Following recent shenanigans at Arizona State University and Brigham Young University (November 29), there seems to be a bit of political cleansing in progress. According to Cliopatria, a leftie prof, Stephen Roberds, at Southern Utah University has been denied tenure in dubious circumstances. Of itself, it's a pretty thin tale - there was apparently a classroom incident in which Roberds swore at a student: looks more like a pretext than a reason for the guy getting bumped. Far too many jury questions to interest me in the particular case. Its significance is being another in a modest but growing list of Mormon-related academic freedom cases. Of course, with political cleansing of conservatives tending towards the norm elsewhere in the Union, it's hard to balk at the right-wingers having one state with pinko-free college faculties. | The Ellen Rometsch strategyAs I've mentioned umpteen times, in my slight experience, net knowledge tends to come from serendipity rather than search: for search, you usually pretty much need to know the answer before you can frame a search that stands a chance of finding it. Above all, proper names - people, places, events - are the Open, sesame! I start with a 1998 Slate piece by Emily Yoffe Fiddling Around: How the media (reluctantly) came to report on Clinton's sexual behavior. Yoffe's claim - that the media gave the Great Fornicator a free pass for his Arkansas shenanigans - I'll leave aside for the moment [1]. But she mentions in a compare and contrast John Kennedy and his string of floozies - including Ellen Rometsch. Name sounded familiar. And it boomerangs back to Clinton: the third item on a search of the woman's name comes up with a filing in the DC District Court headed Motion for an Emergency Order Compelling the Deposition of George Stephanopoulos. And why? On February 8 1998, GS was interviewed on the ABC show This Week with Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts [2]: GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS ...there's a different, long-term strategy, which I think would be far more explosive. White House allies are already starting to whisper about what I'll call the Ellen Rometsch strategy... This was way before I was taking notice of the minutiae of DC doings - but, though GS speaks of Clinton and his White House with same detachment he might have used for Thomas Jefferson, I seem to recall that, officially or unofficially, he was pretty damned close to the action there himself most of the time! The motion for GS's deposition was filed by Judicial Watch, an outfit supported by, amongst others, emanations of the Scaife family, in the case of Alexander et al v FBI (96-2123) (list of documents), better known, I believe [3], as Filegate. The motion was granted, and GS was deposed (twice) - discussion of the Ellen Rometsch strategy starts here. At some stage, GS walked out of the deposition(s); he claimed reporter's privilege (topical note!). My interest has yet to be piqued sufficiently to do anything remotely resembling research: interesting, though, that Paul Begala, in his deposition in the Filegate case, was taxed with extracts from Seymour Hersh's book on Kennedy The Dark Side of Camelot which had its problems sorting fact from fiction [4]. In 1964, one Clark Molenhoff had written a piece alleging connections between Rometsch and the JFK White House (Q405) '...which was, in fact, incorrect,' [Bobby] Kennedy said. 'I looked into the files,' he added, with obvious indignation, and 'she had been tied up with a lot of people at the Capitol. I got all of the information she had and it got to large numbers on both ways, Democrats and Republicans.' His concern, Bobby Kennedy added, was for the reputation of the United States. 'I thought it was very damaging, and I spoke to the President about it. It didn't involve anybody at the White House, but I thought it would just destroy the confidence that the people in the United States had in their government. Some of the senators had Negro girlfriends and all kinds of things which were not very helpful.' The 'President' was of course Lyndon Johnson, with whom RFK maintained a burning mutual loathing. And Rometsch was a whore pimped by none other than that Figaro of the US Senate, LBJ's right hand, Bobby Baker [5]. (Begala said he'd never heard of Rometsch, by the way.) Which senators had Negro girlfriends? Strom Thurmond had Carrie Butler's skeleton in his cupboard, of course, and was still a noted womaniser. If the list of brown sugar devotees included a disproportionate number from Dixie, one wouldn't be surprised. All the more piquant that this was the year in which the Civil Rights Act was passed with great difficulty, and over Thurmond's record-breaking filibuster. Clinton certainly wasn't the only pol to compartmentalise...
MORE Searching Mr Google on various combinations (singular and plural) of senator's girlfriend comes to no more than three dozen items or so, including dupes. While "senators' negro girlfriends" and "senators' black girlfriends" produce nada. And "senator's black girlfriend"produces - a review of Bulworth. Is it plausible that, in a Southern town like Washington, with characters like Bobby Baker - today's equivalent? - able to supply the powerful with any kind of action they desire (I'm thinking), inter-racial Senatorial sex should have left so small a footprint on the online world? In case you're curious, senator "black girlfriend" wonkette produces precisely one off-topic item - and not even from the flame-haired temptress' own site! | The Dodd journalist shield bill, etcThe bill, S 3020, the Free Speech Protection Act of 2004, was dead before it was written, but is not without interest. The core provision, §3(a)(1), privileges a covered person in respect of the source of any news or information procured by the person, or any information that would tend to identify the source, while providing services for the news media, whether or not the source has been promised confidentiality; A covered person is defined as a person who-- And news media as, inter alia, any printed, photographic, mechanical, or electronic means of disseminating news or information to the public. That seems to cover the common or garden political blogger: there is no requirement that the activity in which the information sought was obtained should constitute any sort of business or profession, or have been done for profit [1]. (The Valerie Leggett problem would, it seems, not arise with the Dodd shield.) I'm sure the Dodd bill will reappear in some form in the 109th. Meanwhile, I've added some materials on reporter's privilege/journalist's shield to those listed in my October 12 piece.
| Thursday, December 16, 2004
Buenos Aires: cheapest European city, apparentlyI've never visited; but the impression one always had was that, juntas apart [1], BA was one of the most desirable residences in the Americas. A mixture of Spanish, Italian and English influences, climate, beaches, women... I'm back. Now, one reads that internet penetration is now up to 23% - which doesn't sound much, but given the horrendous 2002 slump [2] in the aftermath of which poverty levels are back around those experienced in the late 1980s at the time of hyperinflation, matches up pretty well against the numbers of around 40% in France and 58% in the UK. And Buenos Aires, which pre-slump was absurdly expensive - 18th most expensive in the world, in fact - is, in 2004, ranked just above such arseholes of the universe as Harare and Kathmandu at just over half as expensive as New York City. (London comes out at 25% more than New York.) Real estate investors, start your engines!
MORE A real live example of the hi-tech Argie in action! It seems that a woman who was being kept prisoner by an ex-boyfriend who was promising to rape her managed to summon the cops by texting her friend! And take a look at this for a defence: el hombre detenido relató ante los investigadores que su ex pareja concurrió por su voluntad al local para mantener relaciones sexuales, pero como no pudo mantenerlas, la mujer se enojó y por despecho inventó la historia del abuso. Now that's what I call a girly-man! | Kerik shows Bush's bad judgement? Who's not been paying attention?The Post's Mike Allen, apparently: questions about Bush's judgment have escalated because of a cascade of damaging details about Kerik's business and personal lives that White House vetters either missed or ignored. Can you say Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US? | It's the email, stupidWhen will they ever learn? Was the Hutton Inquiry not enough to hammer into the heads of government officials to write nothing in an email that they wouldn't be happy to see on the front pages of all the newspapers? Do burglars go about their business in stripy shirts with bags labelled Swag in six inch high letters? Jesus! (There are alternative explanations: for instance, that the officials concerned did not think they were doing anything potentially embarrassing; or that they were setting Blunkett up. Unlikely, but not inconceivable.) Blunkett read the email that Sir Alan Budd found (is this a first for a closed-door Whitehall inquiry?) and wept - on TV. Perhaps, next time, they'll use the phone... (One might noodle on the comparison between Blunkett and Ramsay MacDonald - working-class boy, terrible childhood [1], youthful firebrand, who turned in office to something of a poodle. And an admirer of duchesses. Kimberly Quinn (or Kimberly Fortier, as she was when Blunkett started knocking her off) is not quite a duchess but is a Vassar girl (that's pretty close, surely?), and apparently characterised herself as a New York debutante who didn't even know how to use a washing-machine" It seems that In America, she sometimes went to work in the morning in her "ballgown" after a night out partying. Her nickname [2] is apparently Network South East - her little black book supposedly rivals War and Peace, length-wise.
MORE UK government emails get permanently archived these days. | Wednesday, December 15, 2004
The Germans hate the idea of the Turks as EU members, tooConformism may not be such a religion in western Europe as it is in the US, but there has certainly been a lot of it about. Leaving aside the dictatorships of the inter-war period and the quisling regimes of those parts occupied by said dictatorships during World War 2, the instinct to go along - or, at least, to confine civil conflict within bounds - has been a powerful one. A paradox, for instance, exists in the post-war history of France: a large Communist party mobilising labour, ministers in government, pre-war Popular Front dreams coming belatedly true for the Reds, it seemed for a while. Then the double disaster of Indo-China and Algeria, the 1958 military coup, rampant inflation - foreign correspondents looked like Christmas tigers with continuous head-shaking as disaster succeeded disaster. All the while, the foundations for the successful post-war economy were being built and society was generally hanging together. Even when, in May 1968, the Renault workers from the plant at Boulogne-Billancourt joined the revolting students in Paris, the country was scarcely in a pre-revolutionary state [1]: most people had far too much to lose [2]. Over this period was consolidated the infamous political class to which a curious sort of deference was generally paid. These chaps, legitimised by the freemasonry of the ENA and the success of the colbertiste brand of capitalism which énarque methods brought, adopted an Olympian attitude to their electorate. A large element of corruption was factored into the price, a price that most seemed prepared, if not happy, to pay. There can have been few French monarchs with the visceral appreciation of a divine right to rule that was apparent in François Mitterrand; yet the guy was re-elected by the lower-beings to serve a second seven year term. His reign over the EU in tandem with Helmut Kohl involved scarcely more humility on Mitterrand's part. One marker of the extent to which their methods and attitudes persist is not only the relative ease but also the utter lack of shame with which both France and Germany have flouted the budget deficit limits imposed on Euroland members. (I seem to recall that Portugal was hammered for committing the same offence.) Some sign that Turkey is the bridge too far. I mentioned yesterday the opposition that Jacques Chirac is facing amongst his people to his Turcomania. Now, it seems that the Germans are balking at Turkish EU entry too [3]: An opinion poll this morning for Die Welt newspaper shows that...[s]ome 62% of Germans are against Turkish membership, with only 33% in favour. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is, of course, on board in principle: but is talking about negotiations lasting ten to fifteen years. And Helmut Kohl has declared himself opposed to Turkish membership. And even Chirac is contemplating a fallback position: the partenariat privilégié, what looks like a gold-plated version of the free-trade zone they have already. Naturally, the Turks reject this out of hand. Chirac is making a TV address tonight...
| Prospect reaching on Bush's Iraq invasion blowbackBoth the current and immediate past Leaders of the Free World (God help us!) have swept aside the UN Security Council and treated themselves to an illegal war - Clinton's humanitarian intervention in Kosovo teed up Bush's invasion of Iraq. The US expects international impunity - and it's no fun if you don't push the envelope. The Nuremberg trials established that waging a war of aggression was a war crime; but recent US doctrine has been that war crimes laws are for losers [1]. A piece in American Prospect suggests a little poetic justice is coming in the form of the upcoming trial of Saddam Hussein. I suspect it's pure druther. The nub is this: the trial will take place before the Iraqi Special Tribunal, which operates under its own Statute, signed into law on December 10 2003 by unlamented Gauleiter Paul Bremer. The Prospect piece, in a Greg Palast tone, leads one to suppose a gotcha at the expense of Uncle Sam: When presented with the draft statute, Salem Chalabi, then the president of the tribunal, insisted that the final version include a catchall provision for crimes recognized by Iraqi national law. This is not uncommon in international criminal law; the statute of the Special Court for Sierra Leone contains a similar provision. I've not had sight of the travaux préparatoires of the Statute. But its final state lends no credence to such a tale. Far from being legislated for by reference, the provision relating to aggressive war is plain and explicit on the face of the Statute (Article 14): The Tribunal shall have the power to prosecute persons who have committed the following crimes under Iraqi law: That looks like a highly specialised provision sufficiently different from the Nuremberg version of wars of aggression as to deprive any decision against Saddam on that ground of any precedential value for the Nuremberg version. (That is, of course, to the extent that, in relation to international criminal law, one may properly talk of precedent at all.) From the surrender-monkey states, we get a diametrically opposed interpretation of Art 14(c): a July 2004 piece in the German Law Journal explains the provision as [50]...While Articles 14(a) and (b) appear to be specific to Iraq the most important provision is Article 14(c). This is because Article 14(c) recognizes the crime of aggression albeit from a domestic perspective. This approach therefore begs the following questions. Why has the crime of aggression been listed under violations of stipulated Iraqi Laws? Why was it not addressed as a separate and independent provision? Hardly an exhaustive search of the authorities on the question: but what there is of it suggests that a conviction of Saddam for Art 14(c) crimes would be little more than a footnote in the long litany of political embarrassments suffered by USG before, during and after the Iraq invasion. It would not the first time that the left had suffered a prematurity problem about the law and the invasion: the fatuous CND challenge in the English courts, for instance [2].
MORE On the subject, we have (all PDF): a 2005 (!) Wayne Law Review article by Andreas Paulus Peace Through Justice: The Future of the Crime of Aggression in a Time of Crisis and a February 2004 NGO paper on redress for Saddam torture victims. STILL MORE A page of useful links to various constitutional documents, articles, etc relevant to the Special Tribunal. | Tuesday, December 14, 2004
Turkey: The Madness of King JacquesThe last European leader to go ga-ga over the Turks was Kaiser Wilhelm II - and one can, in the abstract [1] see the attraction. The Ottoman Empire was indeed a dagger (a sharpish stick of celery, then) pointed at the heart of the British Empire. But Jacques Chirac's mania about the place? I've not looked into the issue from the fond hope that the lunacy will not happen. The French public, for instance, hate the idea: in a Figaro poll, fully 67% oppose Turkish entry into the EU: 39% d'entre eux expliquent ce refus par le fait que «les droits de l'homme n'y sont toujours pas respectés» et 34% parce qu'il «y a trop de différences religieuses et culturelles».though 54% des sondés sont favorables à l'ouverture des négociations d'adhésion. The French, being natural diplomats, know the benefit of playing for time! Even his minions in Jean-Pierre Raffarin's government are happy to call Chirac completely barking - albeit by implication: «Ceux qui prétendent que la Turquie va inévitablement, dès demain matin, entrer dans l'Union, mentent», a ainsi déclaré le ministre des Affaires étrangères, Michel Barnier, lundi dans le quotidien Le Parisien. The first round of the next presidential elections are in April 2007, which Chirac needs to win to preserve his presidential immunity from criminal prosecution; before then, there will be a vote on the EU Constitution. With Stanley Holloway's little bit of luck, his colleagues may succeed in persuading him to dump his Turkish fantasy - can you say Berlin to Baghdad Railway? - in favour of a bit of party unity and a highly self-serving renewed mandate. Napoleon, of course, had fantasies about Egypt; but, then, like Jimmy Durante's Uncle Louie, he was mad! (Disappointingly, a cursory search lets Bonaparte off the hook. But we haven't had Uncle Louie for ages...) Bottom line: Turkey is Asiatic, the European Union is - European. The promise of entry negotiations to the Turks in the early 1960s was made to a glorified banana republic at a time when the Cold War was in a period of some frigidity: the pols who made the offer could not remotely have expected European leaders would have to make good on it in their grandchildren's lifetime. Precisely the sort of rash promise that diplomats are paid to find elegant ways of wriggling out of. Fortunately, we have a back-stop: it wasn't long ago that the Mitterrand-Kohl axis thought in terms of dicatorship. Where matters had to be put to the vote in a referendum in various states, recalcitrant electorates would just have to vote and vote again until they gave the right answer. Now both Denmark and Sweden have flipped the bird to their goverments over the Euro, and Blair has been far too frit to test the question in Britain, there's some reason to hope that common sense on the Turkish question will be supplied, if need be, by the EU's voters. Of course, a series of vociferous interventions from Dubya and Aunt Jemima would go down a treat...
| NBC plays Uncle for the race policeRousseau said Man was born free and is everywhere in chains. Similarly, in the US, speech is constitutionally free and is everywhere crushed by self-appointed organisations of shakedown artists and bullies. Brent Bozell and his Comstock Choir are well known in these parts for their sterling work in this field. But the American house of conformity has many mansions. College adminstrations across the land stifle campus comment in the cause of a quiet life and avoiding offence to moneybags. A particularly putrid example in another area from the Baltimore Sun today, with this chilling lede: After meeting with NBC News President Neal Shapiro to discuss concerns about anchorman Brian Williams and the newsroom's attitude toward diversity, the National Association of Black Journalists yesterday issued a statement expressing confidence in the network. NBC anchor Brian Williams was so unwise as to comment for an in-flight magazine (throwaway, therefore a false sense of impermanence of content) in the following exchange: "There are few women and people of color in top jobs at news organizations. How do you address that lack of diversity?" Uh oh. Rank failure to prostrate himself at the feet of the Great God Affirmative Action! The shakedown machine duly cranked itself into action, resulting in the meeting mentioned above. I've commented before on the fact that the enforcement of racial etiquette in the Jim Crow South was largely secured not by lynching (judicial or regular) nor even by non-lethal violence (though there was plenty of that, of course) but by a complex mechanism of everyday intimidation and submission; where the rules were kept fluid enough to keep the Negro in doubt whether he was about to transgress all the time he was in white company. Where the Negro was, in the Stephen Potter, phrase, perennially one down, and the white man one up. Without stretching the analogy to breaking-point, it seems to me something of the sort now applies in reverse: there is a mortal dread on the part of every sort of organisation of being tarred by the shakedown guys as racist. All sorts of indignities are deemed worthwhile if only the tag can be avoided. (Since the object of this kow-towing is protection of the interests of stockholders, it would need, by definition, to be of a token nature: when margins are fat, a little padding of the payroll would do no harm, redistributive largesse on a grand scale - Mark 10:21-like - for the benefit of the less favoured races would clearly be out of the question!) And just like the more violent measures of popular racial discipline in the old South, the object was educational. Lynch one, cow ten thousand. No doubt Brian Williams was 'spoken to'. I can find no reference to him undergoing any sort of Pol Pot-style re-education on racial matters, but I wouldn't be surprised if he did. And the furore will act as a reminder to news folk behind and in front of the camera: Careless Talk Costs Shareholder Value - not to mention jobs... The mechanism intrigues me: once upon a time, there was a jazz pianist called Nat 'King' Cole who found he sold better as a singer, and crossed over easily at a time (early to mid-1950s) when white folks listened to race music surreptitiously, if at all. So popular did Cole become that a TV network decided to give him his own show. That network would just have to be NBC, of course. The Peacock persevered with the show; but corporate America mostly would not touch it. The fear factor went the other way: few wanted to be brave even so far as endorsing this most white-friendly of acts. (In the bad nigger/good nigger iconology of the time, Cole was clearly in the latter class: but he duetted with white women - and Southerners (and plenty in the North too, I'll be bound) found that altogether too great a liberty.) Somewhere between 1957, when The Nat King Cole Show lost its slot to a Western series, and 2003, when corporate America produced an avalanche of cringing amicus briefs in the Michigan University affirmative action cases of Grutter and Gratz, the whole thing flipped 180 degrees. Now, the fear factor militates in favour of a vigorous embrace of multi-cultiness (or, at least, the appearance of it). I'd be fascinated to see an analysis of how and why the flip happened; partly, it'll be legal and regulatory changes, but I doubt that that provides the full explanation. In broadcasting, regulation means FCC; notably (but not so as I had noticed, until just now!), in 1998, the DC Circuit Court threw out the then Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) rules in Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod v FCC [1]. I gather that the process of making replacement rules has been somewhat tortuous, and auditing under the replacement rules of broadcasters' compliance has only started in the last few months. My supposition, therefore, is that only a small part of the potency of the threat of the NABJ to NBC lies in its ability to stir the FCC to enforcement action against NBC. But a good deal more research would be needed to test that supposition. This is yet another tentacle of the FCC octopus that I had not imagined existed [2]: how many more?
| Monday, December 13, 2004
Memo to rogue states: now's the time to chance your arm!The Dear Leader in Pyongyang, the Supreme Leader in Tehran, are surely too sensible to lay down a military challenge to the US. Aren't they? Perhaps, listening to the cracker-barrel philosopher Donald Rumsfeld firing off a zinger in response to Thomas Wilson's famous question, and reading Jonathan Weisman's (A1) piece today in the warmongering Post [1] - The war's length and intensity has clearly left the Army winded.- crackpot dictators everywhere may feel that home field advantage plus a US military systemically frazzled by a commitment of a mere 150,000 or so troops in one theatre gives them a fighting chance of pulling Uncle Sam's beard and getting away with it. A piece by Michael O'Hanlon in the US Army War College's Parameters (Autumn 2004) The Need to Increase the Size of the Deployable Army looks at the current efforts to reshape the US Army for the roles in which it is likely to be used [2] - but concludes, as the title suggests, that more bodies will be required - O'Hanlon says 40,000 more. Which, to this layman, seems rather on the paltry side, given the current amount of overstretch, and the long list of potential further trouble-spots the flaring up of any one of which would make that overstretch a whole lot worse. One has to beware of Pentagon brass talking with forked tongue: essential lubrication for the military-industrial gravy train, after all. (The cost of O'Hanlon's 40,000 is only around $10 billion a year. And, unlike a weapons programme of similar cost, there are no arms company profits to kick back to the pols who approve the deal.) But the problems caused by the Iraq deployment seem real enough - and, in weighing the assessments of brass and pols, the case of Eric Shinseki (March 3 2003) is naturally uppermost in one's mind. What's striking from O'Hanlon's piece is the Rubik's Cube-style shifting of forces that making the numbers in Iraq has required or may require in the future: for example (p3), the Iraq invasion has meant reducing the Marine Corps presence in Okinawa; it also means asking marines to accept a temporarily higher global deployment pace themselves. (Even though their personnel are not perfect substitutes for marines, the Navy and Air Force could increase certain deployments in East Asia and elsewhere temporarily to compensate for a reduced Marine Corps presence.) For a military which is calling up grandmothers from the Reserves, deploying the navy on dry land really doesn't seem too much of a stretch. (A 1996 piece by O'Hanlon under hed Ready for Action is distinctly Pollyanna-ish. He says that The United States Could Probably Win Simultaneous Wars in Korea and the Gulf.And ventures to suggest that rather than bank on future spending increases, the Pentagon might be wiser to reduce force structure in order to buy equipment. That was then...)
| Sunday, December 12, 2004
The Hutton Whitewash - not the WMD intel after all?What got everyone exercised about the death of David Kelly was the questions of intelligence (or fairy-story) handling in the matter of Iraqi WMD. The ex post facto assumption was that, when Lord Hutton issued his all for the best in the best of all possible worlds report on the intel question, that was the mission he was there to accomplish. The primary question that he addressed, of course - the question raised in his terms of reference - was to enquire into the circumstances of Kelly's death, to which end there was some evidence in relation to the death itself. Grisly and beside the point, so ignored (by your humble blogger, at least). The Vince Foster question was raised; but the boon done to governments everywhere (in the Free-ish World, at least) by that poor chap's demise is to throw a sopping wet blanket over any theory that the apparent suicide of someone involved in politics might have been murder. It died the death. Now, in the Observer today, the paramedics who attended the scene step forward to point out that the facts on the ground that they witnessed were inconsistent with the accepted theory of suicide by the slashing of wrists. To save your breakfast, let me summarise: Not enough blood at the scene. These may be a couple of low-level sad sacks in search of their own fifteen minutes followed by a career in cheesy reality shows. Or perhaps not. Elephant-memoried readers will note that this is not the first time that health professionals have queried Lord Hutton's suicide verdict on Kelly: on February 12, I mentioned the letter to the Guardian of six doctors which said that Hutton's verdict is at variance with documented cases of wrist-slash suicides; and does not align itself with the evidence presented at the inquiry. Note that the Hutton Inquiry was held in lieu of a coroner's inquest. Now, inquests are highly flawed mechanisms for getting at the truth; but perhaps a little less so than a made-to-government-order kangaroo court. We'll need a lot more to make an impression in Blair's Teflon coating. But every little helps. | Race: the tipping-point and the comfort zoneAs I've mentioned before, America started out as a place where a persecuted religious minority could carve out a plot for itself alone, in which it might purify its particular brand of fanaticism and persecute those from other sects unwise enough to stray from their own sects' plots. And the maintenance of this diversity-with-separation is a powerful element (one of many) in the continuing development of the nation. Less melting pot, more oil and water. (My theory, at least.) Thus, the phenomenon of white flight from a neighbourhood, supposedly triggered by the proportion of incompatible ethnic groups (it was Irish before it Italians, Poles, Jews and Negroes) reaching the tipping-point. The tipping-point is apparently a constant, regardless of the ethnic groups concerned: around 8% [1]. (This uniformity strikes me as odd. One would expect the percentage to vary according to the acceptability of the incoming groups to the existing population: perhaps the data on, say, influxes of Japanese-Americans does not exist; or perhaps no statistically measurable influx has every occurred in a white area (is this credible?). You'd expect the equivalent of a brown paper bag test - as fleshed out by socio-economic considerations. Walter White yes, Jack Johnson no, as it were. When it comes to the issue where personal preference is most strongly present, the choice of marriage partners, there is no uniformity: in a 1997 paper Structural and Assimilationist Explanations of Asian American Intermarriage, a table of intermarriage stats for various Asian-American ethnic groups (p9) shows a wide divergence, between groups, and between genders within groups, in marriage with whites. Why a similar diversity does not apply to the tipping-point escapes me for the moment. (An interesting 1998 WaPo piece on Anglo white flight (from Hispanics) in Miami-Dade to Broward and Palm Beach.) Whatever statistical model (if any) is appropriate to describe it, white flight happens, it seems to bear a stigma of immorality [2] - similar, perhaps, to that of divorce in the 1950s. Compare school desegregation: supposedly, black students also have a sort of tipping-point, a percentage of the enrolment below which they do not feel comfortable [the URL for a paper on this disappeared when the machine crashed, dammit!] - and the suggestion is that the maximum black percentage acceptable to the parents of white students - say, around 10% - is way below the percentage at which the black students are comfortable - say around 30%. Not hard to see - no evidence, so take as my hypothesis - that, in many media outlets, the desire for a comfortable percentage on the part of the blacks would be portrayed as legitimate, whilst the similar desire on the part of the whites would not. A piece on an activist site by a white parent of a son just graduated from the Richmond, VA schools system talks about his (apparently favourable) experience at the wrong end of a 90:10 racial split. To judge from the piece, the writer is clearly an integration zealot (otherwise his children would have gone to private school!) - he talks about having had to confront in our family the insecurities, fears and pressures which drive so many decisions in the white community. I can't see many white converts to public education in Richmond coming from that sort of guilt-tripping - the tone and the futility remind me of the product of the constitutional queer-bashing religious right or the kill abortionists for Jesus crowd. Pure fanaticism was where we came in...
| Saturday, December 11, 2004
US colleges as the People's Republic of AcademiaIn the Founding Fathers' house are many mansions: whilst Bush and his conservative friends have taken over some (via the K Street Project and talk radio, for instance), others are in the hands of his ideological opponents [1], in particular, college faculties. This one reads not on Rush Limbaugh's site but in a piece Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual in the Chronicle of Higher Education by one Mark Bauerlein, described as a professor of English at Emory University and director of research at the National Endowment for the Arts.Not your average Dittohead, then. Bauerlein's piece looks at how the bias is sustained: a club that recruits new members based on how well they will fit in with the existing membership; something like Japan's 1635 Closed Country Edict keeps the ideology pure; the False Consensus Effect allows MLA-Speak-spouting Marxists to suppose that they represent the true interest of the People; the Law of Group Polarization skews the views of this closed coterie towards those of the most extreme of its membership. Bauerlein does not show how the Left managed the takeover of academic institutions; it clearly wasn't in charge during the 1950s when it was fellow-travellers, not Republicans, who were were liable to be purged. Perhaps it was the Vietnam generation whodunit, and the story is too well-known for him to summarise. The other question - not within Bauerlein's remit - is how the Marxist takeover of American college faculties could have coincided with a rollback of the left in the wider society: the atrophy of the unions, for instance, the lack of whose GOTV abilities the Democratic Party so grievously feels. Generations of students have imbibed at the multi-culti fountain, yet many go on to vote Republican: how does that happen? (Clearly, pace Janeane Garofalo, GOP electoral success nationally cannot entirely be attributed to the crackers.) Bauerlein has no solution: quite rightly, he rejects affirmative action for conservatives. But surely, in consumerist American, it's up to the customers to make their views felt. If conservative faculty are few and isolated, conservative students are many and able to organise: they should be mad as hell: perhaps when they are, we'll get some movement. [The Bauerlein piece I got from the folks at Crooked Timber - who are, some of them, no mere kibitzers of the game. It's a whole big thing - even George Will gets in on the act. A lot more erudition on the subject at CT - without the offer of an actual solution. Perfect meta, in fact.]
MORE Stennis to SC legislator William Winter following Brown I (p7): I still believe there are many counties in Mississippi, including your own and my own, in which the white people and the colored people could meet and work out a plan satisfactory to both. This agreement plan would perhaps work for 15 or 20 or 25 years in many of these counties. Fanciful, once the Brown bombshell had been unleashed. But - in the counterfactual I suggested yesterday, with a Chief Justice Vinson rejecting the Dred Scott approach in favour of continuing to plough the separate but equal furrow, some sort of gradual emancipation might have been a runner. | Plagiarism in media: the garden varietyThe Rake (Twin Cities equivalent of the Boston Phoenix and Washingtonian, I gather) has a piece on yet another instance of journalistic inspiration: We were surprised to open up Monday's Minneapolis Star-Tribune to see Jon Tevlin's article on religion in the workplace. Surprised, because it was very similar to a feature story that was on the cover of the New York Times Magazine about a month ago. We'd noticed Russell Shorto's feature, not only because it was a compelling cover story, but because its main subject was a small bank in outstate Minnesota. There's something about journalists which makes it almost impossible for them to admit inspiration from the work of colleagues. By comparison, academics are equally prone to professional jealousy, turf wars and personal vendettas - but at least there's a rule (however often flouted) that such inspiration must be referenced, and sanctions of some sort (on occasion) attach to those who break the rule. Getting a journalist to fess up in print to getting his story idea from another hack is harder than wringing an apology from the Fonz: they just can't get the words out! The prime example was the Toledo Blade and their Pulitzer-winning marquee series on the activities of the Tiger Force in Vietnam. The Blade story was largely ignored elsewhere in the press; later, the New York Times ran a piece (reprint) on the subject, quoting from the Blade series, and, largely on the say-so of a student, rubbishing its discoveries as commonplaces (my piece of May 5 and one in the Nation). If Isaac Newton had been a journalist, the Times would still be writing up gravity as if it had been discovered at West 43rd Street! On a spectrum of dishonesty, this form of journalistic plagiarism hardly rates with the Times' decision to peddle Chalabi's WMD lies to avoid the crimp in the share price a war with USG might have led to [1]: but it makes up in sheer ubiquity. Upside: a story that's been pinched should run less chance of containing factual errors. Do you think?
MORE Regular readers will recognise that I myself pinched the Rake story from Romenesko - his sidebar, in this case. A working assumption that all media stories here are similarly sourced (directly or indirectly) would rarely send you astray. Of course, I'm thinking he couldn't produce material with the depth and breadth of focus he does without one or two sources of his own, who tend not to get a namecheck. As the man said, Rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men. | free website counter 
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