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Thursday, March 31, 2005
Will the Schiavo KKK get nullification from Florida juries?Thanks to Ringmaster DeLay, Clown Bush and the rest of the circus exciting the crackers to fever pitch, Michael Schiavo and Florida 6th Circuit Judge George Greer have targets on their back the size of the Okefenokee. Already, at least one cracker has threatened Michael Schiavo's sister-in-law. And another, one Richard Alan Meywes, was arrested for offering fellow crackers $250,000 for clipping Michael Schiavo himself. And why not? The crackers have already seen their supposed betters in the Congress and the White House jettison the rule of law to pander to their onanism. Why should the man who sends Michael Schiavo to hell not expect at least one Florida juror to be a born-again disciple of 'life' like himself? Glory Hallelujah! Sometimes I think the worst thing Hitler ever did was to blacken the name of eugenics. If Bush was choosing the criteria - disaster, natch. But if it had been Eisenhower or Kennedy doing the weeding - I might spin that wheel... MORE Dan Kennedy's piece on media pandering to the GOP's pandering set me off. STILL MORE In chat in the Post on the death of Terri Schiavo, journo Manuel Roig-Franzia says Fr. Frank Pavone, spiritual adviser to Schiavo's parents, called what happened this morning "a killing." A man with blood on his hands, if he's not very lucky. How friendly with the altar-boys was this guy, by the way? | Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Post acting guilty over 'fake' GOP Schiavo memoThe right of the 'sphere is claiming Rathergate II for the wretched paper (March 21) [1]. The CJR guys highlight Howard Kurtz's strange explication of the Post's effort. It's thin and fishy: ABC and The Post say their reports on the Schiavo memo were accurate and carefully worded. With a view to mislead? Kurtz says Neither report said Republicans had written the memo, although they may have left that impression You don't say. And scribe Mike Allen is quoted thus (emphasis mine): We simply reported that the sheet of paper was distributed to Republican senators and told our readers explicitly that the document was unsigned, making clear it was unofficial. We stuck to what we knew to be true and did not call them talking points or a Republican memo. The document was provided by an official who has a long record of trustworthiness, and this official gave a precise account of the document's provenance, satisfying us that it was authentic and that it had been used in an attempt to influence Republican senators." Allen said that under the journalistic ground rules, he could not say whether the source was a Democrat or a Republican. Reference to the text of his piece shows that Allen emphatically did not mak[e] clear it was unofficial: he left the reader to draw that inference from the statement that the memo was unsigned! Now, I take a certain interest in matters Congressional; but I have no idea what the practice is with circulating a memo like this. Why, for instance, would it need to be signed if it were being distributed by hand by an individual known to all 55 GOP senators? The piece says the memo is unsigned but not, for instance, that it does not bear some other identification suggesting authenticity to its intended recipients. Yet, somehow, the Post reader is meant to know that unsigned implies provenance not guaranteed. The Big Lie of journalism is that what appears to be plain English is in fact code. But unlike the code you read in the JAMA or the Harvard Law Review, a layman reading a newspaper may easily persuade himself that that he is reading plain English. The query-Republican query-memo is a classic example of this. Note, by the way, that, in his quote, Allen is doing what he did not (according to the code he was writing in) do in his own piece: vouching for the authenticity of the memo. But, if Allen thought the memo was genuine, and not merely a piece of paper to be described in non-committal terms, why was he non-committal in his own article? (At least to those capable of reading his code.) Some time back, there was a hoo-ha about print journalists going on TV and providing a goosed-up version of stories they'd written which would never have got past their editors. Allen seems to have found another way of doing the same thing. (Because, no doubt, if the memo is proved to be a fake, the Post honchos will say the paper is not bound by what Allen told Kurtz because Kurtz is a media article, not a politics article.) Media bias is not liberal or conservative, it's artefactual. The editor can't help it... | 1956 Civil Rights Bill - there may be enlightenment......but not available to the Great Unwashed. The volume to acquire is, it seems, JW Anderson's Eisenhower, Brownell, and the Congress: The Tangled Origins of the Civil Rights Bill of 1956-1957 from 1964 [1]. There is plenty to cover on the Administration side - Brownell, according to the Russell Riley book (p184ff) I mentioned on February 22, Brownell went out on a limb to misrepresent his beefier proposals on civil rights as those of the Administration itself - or (Riley is not clear on this) at least Brownell was playing good cop as part of a sanctioned monkey-shine. The Senate story is in Caro and the Keith Finley thesis. What I thirst after is the House-side story of the abortive 1956 bill that passed in the House (piece earlier today). How much space Anderson devotes to this, I obviously don't know. The search continues...
MORE While the URL is to hand: a publication of the Eisenhower World Affairs Institute has pieces by Dr. Terrence J. Roberts, one of the Little Rock Ninedescribing his experiences, and by DDE assistant Rocco Siciliano [I kid you not!] on a 1958 meeting Ike had with Martin Luther King and other Negro leaders. | Neutral reporting privilege lottery: Supreme Court ducksJudith Miller and Matthew Cooper beware! The repetition rule in defamation law means that, in general, a newspaper that prints an allegation made by a third party is liable as if it had made that allegation itself. In some US jurisdictions, there is an exception to that rule for reports of [1] serious charges of a public official involved in an ongoing controversy and concerning other public officials irrespective of the publisher's belief as to the falsity of the charges, provided that the report does not espouse or concur in the charges and in good faith believe (sic) that the report accurately conveys the charges made. Despite an amicus brief from leading media organisations urging the US Supreme Court to grant certiorari in Troy Publishing v Norton in order to establish such a rule [2] nationwide, it has declined. There is not, I think, a circuit conflict on the point - the cases cited by the Penn SC as supporting the privilege (SC, DC, CA) are all District Court decisions. But, trivially, SCOTUS could have taken the case if it had felt strongly enough on the issue. In many cases, media organisations escape liability in such cases under the New York Times v Sullivan rule; in Norton, the trial judge had not heard evidence on the existence of actual malice in the newspaper [3], and the plantiff's appeal allowed by the Penn SC had been for a new trial in which such evidence could be heard. Clearly, the more outrageous the allegations, the more likely a court will find that the publisher has been reckless in printing them without independently reporting them.
| Pitching a perfect game, Schiavo judiciary surrenders a walkThe 11th Circuit have agreed to consider a late appeal for an en banc rehearing. Why would they do that if they weren't going to grant the rehearing? The court's reasons for their decision aren't available online (that I can see): Howard Bashman suggests the parents may require a waiver of an applicable procedural rule. | Powell Amendment: more intriguing possibilitiesTrouble is, the sources with which to explore them are somewhat lacking! Following up my March 27 piece, I've been gathering together the stats for the three Civil Rights Bill votes and making a comparison with the three votes (amendment, recommit, passage) relating to the Powell Amendment (spreadsheets). One clear area of interest lies in the members who switched their votes between the vote on the Powell Amendment itself and that on passage of the Civil Rights Bill: no fewer than 76 members who opposed the Powell Amendment voted for the Civil Rights Bill; and 13 members switched their votes in the opposite direction [1]. Why? Numbers can only pose the question. For example, the 13 appear to be sprinkled liberally around the non-slave areas (North, Midwest and West - one (Short - MO) from the Border), but all but one (Tumulty - NJ) is Republican. Of the 76, the Dem/GOP split is 42-34. Two GOP (TN) switched, as did a certain Byrd (WV). Udall (AZ) went with him [2] The trouble with the wretched Powell Amendment is - so far as I can see - that it has taken up by polisci profs as a sort of parlour trick (as an example of cyclical voting), with a heavy emphasis on the maths [3]. And little or no grunt work has been done, district by district, to explain the votes on regular, non-numeric grounds. That's the problem with Voteview: it carries you much further than you expected, then kicks you out of the car somewhere in northern Quebec.
| Jesse Jackson joins the Schiavo CircusJust a note for the file: Mr Shakedown - never knowingly outpandered - flies to the Schiavo bedside to offer the comfort he provides the best: litigation is in the offing, and on-camera antiphonising is one service the average ambulance-chaser cannot provide.... | Not Bumiller, KellerBob Somerby goes for the low-hanging fruit with the latest edition of Elisabeth Bumiller's White House Notes. You mean they still print that crap? Yes, indeedy. Bumiller is on fine form - not exactly a hard news lede: George W. Bush has been acting like a man liberated from the American presidency. Mused. Chuckled. Surely, you say, this is satire: Tracy Samantha Lord writing - drawling - for Spy magazine on the quaint habits of Pennsylvania Avenue, poking fun at the pretensions of the Inhabitant and the fawning of the lackeys who 'report' his doings. I somehow doubt that this is the intention. But, whilst Somerby says that she didn’t initiate this sort of work at the Times; this is exactly the way Frank Bruni treated Bush during Campaign 2000.the fact that only Bumiller is namechecked (in relation to current output) might suggest he thinks that she alone is responsible for its appearance in the Times each week. Of course, she is a mere hired hand, directed to dish up this sophomoric goo by executive editor Bill Keller, via his editorial chain of command. He says You can’t get dumber than Elisabeth Bumiller. Nor can you be a more faithful courtesan. She may be dumb, but one can't infer as much from her Times work [1]; she's certainly smart enough to follow orders, and is no doubt handsomely rewarded for it. And why should Keller and his editors want nonsense like Bumiller's in their rag? Presumably, someone influential likes to read the stuff, and pandering costs (next to) nothing. We know the White House motto with the media is Treat 'em mean to keep 'em keen - it's not necessarily missing scoops that the Times is concerned with, I'd reckon, it's more the risk of losing the kudos of being Number One, and the consequential cost of that loss of prestige in its relations outside the White House. A little lollygagging is a small price to pay. Meanwhile, let's be grateful the Times hasn't helped start any wars recently...
| Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Should you trust the article when the photo-byline is lying?Does it matter to the news-reading public that your entrepid correspondent is a Venus (or Adonis) or a complete two-bagger? Surely not, you cry: the content is the thing - pandering to TV news values [1] is unnecesary in the printed medium, as well as being flat wrong. Why do some hacks insist on a photo-byline, then? (Or - equally, if not more, likely - their editors insist on them having one.) Vanity, service to curious readers, whatever. But, if there is a photo-byline, shouldn't it be as truthful as photography can ever be? In particular, shouldn't the snap be recent? I'm put in mind of this by an April 2004 piece by Geneva Overholser (linked from Jay Rosen, I think - I got sidetracked) accompanied by a fairly youthful-looking pic. An image search on Google turns up this pic on Overholser in oratorical flight [2] - in which the woman seems, not to be ungallant, to have aged a good twenty years since the Poynter snap [3]. Happens to us all, of course; and older women put themselves and their cosmetic surgery in front of the camera all the time (Hillary Clinton, if she runs, will find every 61 year old [4] pore and wrinkle exposed to the public gaze - the VRWC will be hot on the case, I'm sure). But the photo-byline evidently carries a message (the journo is saying, I want to make a personal connection with my readers, satisfy their curiosity, invite their trust in me as a person (rather than in my copy)) - and when that photo is years out of date, that message is necessarily a false one. (What if the journo resorted to surgery? Is that not as much a deception of the reader as an out-of-date byline snap? The mens rea is arguably worse since the cost of surgery - financial and physical - implies a desperation to deceive the reader going way beyond merely resorting to an untruthfully youthful snap.)
| FCC and indecency: hope lies in the courtsThe appointment of Kevin Martin has caused a flurry of interest in the issue. The CJR blog flags some pieces on the subject- durable URL to the NYT piece. There is action in Congress; as in the 108th, the best chance is to see the houses at loggerheads, in conference or, better still, acknowledging the impossibility of reaching agreement without bothering with a conference. To this end, we have the Rockefeller bill (love these Dem Comstocks! Not) S 616: the Indecent and Gratuitous and Excessively Violent Programming Control Act of 2005. S616 is stuffed with goodies absent from the corresponding House bill. Here's hoping... A lasting solution lies exclusively in the courts, however: only by a finding that the indecency and profanity elements of 18 USC 1464 (still stuck in the memory!) are unconstitutional will the cancer be excised. Some broadcaster has to step up and litigate. Simple as that. (There's been an excellent showing of independence from the judiciary in refusing to pander to the elected branches' Schiavo circus, one might point out...) | Mein Kampf a sudden best-seller in Turkey, apparentlyI'm disposed to doubt it: but the Guardian says today that Its publishers believe that more than 100,000 copies have been sold in the past two months. The Turko-German connection is a long one: well before the Berlin-Baghdad railway project, or even the siege of Vienna in 1683, I believe. The Turks have their führer (in Kemal Ataturk) and their genocide (of Armenians). Plenty of dots to connect - as no doubt one is intended to do. I'm inclined to give the Turks the benefit of no doubt, especially in a matter which may help keep this Asiatic nation out of the EU of which it has no business being a member. But this just sounds a little too neat. Now, 10,000 copies, I might have believed... | FDR's cotton subsidy circus gives good roll callI had to see whether Voteview had anything on the 'twelve cent loan' business (earlier piece). Not a sure thing - so much passes on voice votes in the Senate (like the putrid Schiavo bill, of course). But this time we're in luck. (I'm assuming that anyone reading this far is a sucker for this kind of thing, of course!) We have RC 131 on August 24 1935 (spreadsheets) described as follows: To suspend the rules of the Senate so as to consider a general legislation amendment to H.R. 9215, a bill making supplemental appropriations. The amendment being added would have directed the Commodity Credit Corporation to make loans to farmers at the rate of 12 cents per pound on cotton, when such loans are secured by cotton stored in warehouses approved by the C.C.C. The sectional breakdown is fascinating: the Confederacy is almost solid, voting 20 of 22 senators. The MIAs? Glass and Byrd of Virginia! (Whoda thunkit.) The border states put most shoulders to the gin; but Maryland for the Dems (Tydings and Radcliffe) and Delaware for the GOP (Hastings and Townsend) go so far as to vote against their erstwhile fellow slaveholders. The Dems in the other sections were also split: the Midwest supported Dixie 4-2; the North by 5-3; the West by 12-2. A similar pattern among the GOP; most notably, the Sons of the Wild Jackass (the insurgents in the Hiram Johnson/Robert LaFollette Sr tradition) are split: Johnson, Borah, Nye and Frazier support cotton; Norris says Nay. The log-rolling, bribery and arm-twisting that gave rise to this pattern of voting is, I suspect, a closed book to online truth-seekers (tight-fisted browsers such as your humble blogger, at least). But the Serendipity Fairy might come through: she's done so before (as with the Black Mafia article of a few days ago). | Monday, March 28, 2005
Are Dems Macavity or falling down on the job?Macavity is TS Eliot's feline variation of Conan Doyle's Moriarty, of course: the bafflement of Scotland Yard, The Flying Squad's despair: The Democrats' task is not to avoid detection after committing a crime but avoiding a stiff sentence for a crime they did not commit: killing Terri Schiavo. And the weight of the evidence seems to be that a Conventional Wisdom has crystallised to the effect that, in order for the Dems to achieve their goal, making themselves as scarce as Macavity was the Right Thing to Do. The mendacious Swift Boat Veterans showed (as if it needed showing) that mud sticks; that the Big Media will report gums that flap loudly enough even given a lack of evidence or credibility or any worthwhile support for the story told. It's a little depressing to think that Dem wise men are afraid of repeating the pisspoor performance of the Kerry campaign in dealing with the Swifties' fairy tales; but no doubt, after three botched campaigns on the trot (2000, 2002 and 2004), no one wants to take chances. But was that the only way to go? First, it's not a parliamentary system: there are 535 parties represented in the Capitol, and one or two of them, in the Senate, could have made a stand, surely, without staining the party [1]. Senators like Barbara Boxer who are (I'm surmising) not planning to run again; old lags like Ted Kennedy. Registered wackoes control of whose actions the leadership might claim plausible deniability. Second, how will this play with the Dem base into 2006? The Dems in the Senate have sat on their hands on nominations, on the tort reform bill, on the bankruptcy bill and now on Schiavo. We'll know by then whether this was masterly inactivity or dither and funk, I suppose: but a few lower court judges filibustered may be a hard sell as success. Judicial appointments are speculative - the damage a judge can do depends on the cases he gets, the panels he sits with and - as Republican presidents have found in particular - on whether the judge proves to live up to his ideological rep. On the other hand, the bankruptcy bill (S 256) alone - discussed several times here - will do real damage to American working people (oops, middle class, that should be...); the case against that bill was in the Democratic wheelhouse - it was a chance to revisit those New Deal glory days, and get a genuine Big Tent movement against the money interests. And the Dems deliberately decided to pass by on the other side. Moreover, I'm not clear that keeping their powder dry does anything for Dem chances of balking those judicial appointments anyway: surely, what is needed is high morale born of victories, not the frustration of inertia and eternal promises. Besides, these days, a filibuster does not generally involve hi-jinks of the Huey Long sort: senators can stop a bill in its track with a hold implicitly threatening a filibuster without the need to follow through [2]. My hypothesis is that, if they really wanted to, Senate Dems have much more leeway to screw up GOP legislation short of shutting down the government than they would like folks to believe.
| Schiavo and Medellin: what is a pandering President to do?The polls - as this ABC poll - show the Schiavo Circus (ringmastered by genial Tom DeLay) has split the GOP base. And now, it seems, there's trouble in Texas from a clumsy attempt by Bush to pander to the Hispanic vote: Various Mexicans were sentenced to death in Texas without access having been granted to consular officials. On February 28, Bush intervened to say, in effect, that he would take care of the case. Citing his constitutional power to set the nation's foreign policy, he issued a "determination" instructing the Texas courts to comply with the ICJ's ruling by holding a hearing for one of the Mexicans, Jose Ernesto Medellin, a Houston gang member convicted in 1994 of raping and murdering two teenage girls in Houston. The US Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments today (Medellin v Dretke), and Texas is pushing back: "[T]he claimed authority is all the more extraordinary in that it commandeers state courts and directs them to set aside state criminal statutes in deference . . . to an ICJ decision that the Executive has simultaneously recognized misinterprets U.S. treaty obligations," Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott wrote in a brief filed March 15 at the Supreme Court. Uh, oh... (I pause to wonder: why should a (I'm assuming) purely cosmetic exercise in favour of murderers be of interest to hard-working, law-abiding Hispanic voters [1]? Doesn't this pander to the Anglo stereotype that Mexicans are all bandits at heart?)
| Sunday, March 27, 2005
Powell Amendment and the 1956 Civil Rights BillI'm butting up against the lack of depth in, as well as the extent of, online coverage of the Powell amendment votes (earlier piece on March 17). Rather like a cowboy movie set, it's shop-fronts and nothing behind them [1]. So I'm contemplating opening up a second front by bringing into consideration HR 627, the civil rights bill passed by the House in 1956 [2]. And, before hitting the spreadsheets, turn to Caro's Master of the Senate (p779ff) for background. Mirabile dictu, HR 627 was a Republican bill - 1956, as Democrats would prefer to forget, was the year of massive resistance and the Southern Manifesto. The leading Congressional Negro, Adam Clayton Powell, endorsed Eisenhower for President. And - I learn from Caro (p780), Attorney-General Herbert Brownell was batting for civil rights while Saint Franklin Roosevelt was shuffling over the 1930s Federal antilynching bills: as member of the New York State Assembly (New York County 10th District), he advocat[ed] a compulsory Fair Employment Act with enforcement powers strong enough to ensure compliance The bill he drafted included provisions desegregating public accommodations, as well as others bolstering Negro voting rights. It duly passed the House. The movie-genic action, as ever, takes place over at the Senate [3]. Not only had the Southern Manifesto been signed, but Southern - that is, Democratic - defences had been strengthened by the appointment of James Eastland to the Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee [4]. And there was a national convention coming up, at which Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson fancied himself a contender. The bill could be blocked, no problem; the trick was to block it without making waves: to get it safely into Eastland's clutches without giving liberals the opportunity of any floor action. (Finley describes the shenanigan (p22a).) I'm minded to back the cart up, and have a look at the less glamorous House proceedings on HR 627. As with the Powell amendment, there are three roll call votes, RC 134, 135 and 136: the first, a dilatory motion (lost 104-290), the second, to recommit the bill for further strengthening (lost 131-275) and the vote on passage (279-126). These votes took place on July 19 1956 (RC 134) and July 23 (the others), only a fortnight or so after the Powell amendment votes resulted in the loss of the school construction bill HR 7535. Some explanation is in order: why the sudden embrace of civil rights? Of course, House members voting for HR 627 knew it stood not a snowball's chance in hell of passing the Senate. But the same applied to HR 7535 with the Powell amendment. Meanwhile, Caro has a nice quote from Eisenhower (p780): Cautioning Brownell "not to act like another Charles Sumner" when he testified [to the House Judiciary Committee], Eisenhower illustrated the dangers in stirring up racial emotions with a jocular remark [5]: a southern Negro had recently remarked: "If someone doesn't shut up around here, particularly those Negroes from the North, they're going to get a lot of us niggers killed." Point to note: Eisenhower told the nigger-joke - Johnson appointed Eastland to Judiciary and organised the trick to kill Ike's civil rights bill. Beware Democrats wielding airbrushes...
MORE I now have my very own Yahoo Group - snappily named Lincoln Plawg Stuff - to stow things like spreadsheets, photos and other stuff I refer to here, but for which Blogger has no house-room. The Powell amendment spreadsheets (as XLS files - though I work in Open Office) are here. (Why I never thought of the device before, I know not. Very useful as a blog add-on...) | Friday, March 25, 2005
Some words of wisdom from Adam Clayton PowellI've been tinkering at the Powell amendment votes I discussed on March 17. However, since what appear at first to be stunning aperçus usually turn out to be spreadsheet error, I'll hold my fire on the subject for the moment. As I mooch round the subject, however, a typically flamboyant quote from the man turns up in a teaser [1] from a Commentary article from January 1966: Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, colored men looking for loans, and whites who understand the Negro. And a Nation archive teaser from September 1956 is piquant from two perspectives: First, this from the abstract: The heretofore muted voices of thousands of African Americans are going to find expression this November in the Northern cities of the U.S. The anachronism of the present tense used with today's PC label (euphemism?) jars the sensibilities (it does mine, at least). I don't know when African-American was invented as a kow-tow term, but it certainly had little currency, even among Nation readers, in 1956! Powell, the robust legislator, says [2] colored men; I suspect that, back in 1956, the Nation style-book would have specified Negro. But, even writing (why?) in the present tense, as if contemporaneously with the original article, the author of the abstract can't bring himself to use either colored or Negro, the correct usage of the time. Second, the article is about Powell's Negro colleague in the US House, William Dawson (IL): grandson of a slave, he is now the vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee and of the Cook County Democratic Committee. The title of the piece, Dawson of Illinois: What Price Moderation?, suggests disenchantment! And unsurprisingly: Dawson opposed the Powell Amendment! (Though, after the amendment passed, he voted for the bill on passage.) Dawson, to judge from a cursory search, is an interesting guy: well worth a second look, I think.
MORE Dawson seems to have participated in the criminal connections enjoyed by the Cook County Democratic organisation: it's suggested, for instance, that Dawson ran the Negro neighbourhoods on behalf of Sam Giancana and the rest of mob. And, the piece says, In 1948 Dawson was charged with defending racketeers by Congressional committee to which Dawson replied that he would defend any man of anything, anywhere. Mobster or otherwise. Needs checking, obviously. There is what looks like an excellent article The Black Mafia: African-American organized crime in Chicago 1890–1960 namechecks Dawson a dozen times. On Dawson's methods of controlling the vote in his areas, there is this - for what it's worth. This page Race and Politics, 1940 to 1959 is part of a Roosevelt University history of Chicago that looks worth having. A suitably sardonic tone is adopted. For instance (emphasis mine), The county elections of 1950 went badly for the Chicago organization. The slating of Captain Daniel Gilbert, reportedly the richest police captain of all time, for sheriff dismayed many voters. Gilbert as chief investigator of the state attorney's staff, had openly consorted with underworld figures; during his twenty years in office not one of the 188 gangland slayings had been solved. Over 1,000 other murders in the county remained unsolved. Gilbert received only 44% of the votes and became the first Democrat to lose the city since 1928. That, mark you, is the party that's bellyaching about Tom DeLay! There are various reviews of Cohen and Taylor's Richard Daley bio American Pharoah - this and this from the New Republic. There was an organised author/reviewer artillery duel in Slate. STILL MORE Reading the Black Mafia piece, I come across (p4a): the First Ward political machine of “Bathhouse” John Coughlin and “Hanky Dink” Mike Kenna Oh dear. It's Hinky Dink, of course. Distinctive, I'd have thought. Perhaps not... (And, under the heading of spooky coincidence, the piece namechecks (p6a) a pair of Chicago brothel-keepers, the Everleigh sisters - Minna and Ada. Surely, I wondered, a certain duo of clean-cut boys could not have been given an ironic stage-name in memory of this wicked ladies? No. Don and Phil Everly are birth names. Phew!) | Thursday, March 24, 2005
Hack Franken and the Social Security Trust FundOne comes across an honest politician as often as a tone-deaf opera singer headlining at the Met: as Sir Humphrey Appleby almost said [1], You can have honesty or you can have politics. So it is in no way a surprise to find presumptive candidate Al Franken persisting in lying his head off on the question of the Social Security Trust Fund. Why he finds it necessary to lie, I know not: there are enough holes in the Bush privatisation case to pick until Doomsday, surely? (Or January 20 2009, at least.) However... The statutory basis for the so-called trust fund is 42 USC 401. The first sentence of §401(a) is instructive: There is hereby created on the books of the Treasury of the United States a trust fund to be known as the ''Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund''. The game is given away straight away: this so-called trust fund is created on the books of the Treasury It is, one surmises, a mere accounting entry; and that the ownership, legal or equitable, in no property has been transferred. The provision goes on to say The Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund shall consist of the securities held by the Secretary of the Treasury for the Old-Age Reserve Account and the amount standing to the credit of the Old-Age Reserve Account on the books of the Treasury on January 1, 1940...and, in addition...amounts equal to the various species of payroll tax collected by the Treasury ever since. §401(b) sets up the Federal Disability Insurance Trust Fund; and §401(c) deals with the trusts of these two 'funds': the first duty specified is for the Board of Trustees to Then §401(d) requires the Managing Trustee to invest solely in interest-bearing obligations of the United States or in obligations guaranteed as to both principal and interest by the United States. This at least gives the semblance of a real trust; but what to make of the stipulation that Payment from the general fund of the Treasury to either of the Trust Funds of any such interest or proceeds shall be in the form of paper checks drawn on such general fund to the order of such Trust Fund. What exactly are these paper checks? On which bank are they drawn? Or are they checks (or cheques) at all, or merely internal accounting dockets [2]? And §401(l) allowed inter-fund borrowing - which would be totally inconsistent with the existence of the trusts concerned as more than book entries. Compare these so-called trusts with the well-known device of the private trust: the first responsibility of trustees is to assure to themselves bare legal ownership of the trust property, separate from their own, beneficially owned property, and from property contained in others trusts; the second, to use such property for, and only for, the benefit of the beneficiaries of the trust, according to the terms of the trust. If a private trusts invests in obligations of the US (T-bills, say), the registered owner of such obligations will be the trustees, or one of them as representative. The US Government will as a result legally owe a debt to the trustee or trustees registered. The trustees of the social security trust funds do not, in that capacity, have bare legal title to any investments. They are not trustees in any real sense at all. As the Clinton administration helpfully point out on page 332a of the Fiscal Year 1999 Budget Analytical Perspectives report (PDF), in reference to the trust fund balances [3] (emphasis mine): These balances are available to finance future benefit payments and other trust fund expenditures—but only in a bookkeeping sense. Unlike the assets of private pension plans, they do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits. Instead, they are claims on the Treasury that, when redeemed, will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing from the public, or reducing benefits or other expenditures. The existence of large trust fund balances, therefore, does not, by itself, make it easier for the Government to pay benefits. Meanwhile, Hack Franken was trotting out the trust fund lie a couple of days ago in an interview with TPM's Josh Marshall [4]: Marshall mentions 2018 as the year when it's estimated that current social security outgoings will exceed current revenue: from that year, trustees will have to dip into the trust fund to pay the difference. Franken says that a reason why privatisation supporters say 2018 is important is because they say there is no trust fund Marshall, who has recently devoted his blog efforts to disentangling fact from fiction in this area replies Correct. Er...y'know...What can you say about that? I mean most people think that Treasury bonds are...and chuckles. Franken deploys his shtick: See, I don't know whether you heard this, but I made this offer on the show to anyone who thinks those are worthless - and evidently everyone who makes this point about 2018...anyone who thinks these are worthless IOUs - that's what they say - that's what they call 'em, right? - that's the term of art...[] Anyone who has Treasury bonds and thinks they're worthless, I will take them off your hands at ten cents on the dollar. And Marshall stooges That's a great deal This is, of course, three-card monte, demonstrated so to be by the Clinton budget report quoted above: the social security trust funds do not consist of real economic assets These trust fund 'assets' are mere bookkeeping entries [5]. Transfers between the trust funds and the Treasury are like a guy transferring cash between his left and right pockets. No legal effect. I can understand why Hack Franken might perpetrate his shameless attempt at deception; why Marshall should second-banana him, I've no idea.
| The spirit of Jayson 'Lay-Z-Boy' Blair lives onI've seen the suggestion in DEWDROP circles that the difference betweeen the volume and intensity of the coverage of the slaughter at the high school on the Red Lake, MN Chippewa reservation and that of the 1999 shootings at Columbine is explained by race: dead Indians don't cut it is the charge. The Chicago Tribune has a different explanation: what also made Columbine stand out--apart from the death toll of 13 (not including the two killers)--was that it played out, at least partly, on television. The story broke just after noon Central Standard Time on a Tuesday in late April in a major metropolitan area (Denver). Now, Mapquest says that the distance by road from Chicago to Bemidji is 634 miles and estimates around 11 hours travel by road. But the Tribune hacks didn't need to hit the road: the company could have hired a plane. Or a helicopter. (Do these people actually read what they write before printing it?) The piece goes on: So accustomed have we become to seeing video--the Rodney King tapes; Timothy McVeigh's truck bomb; astronauts in space; an escaped criminal fleeing the rabbit's warren of court buildings and parking garages in downtown Atlanta; airplanes crashing into the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center--that we almost take for granted that it will be there. And we become irritated and suspicious when it is not. Not quite as irritated and suspicious as when reading hacks making dumb excuses for their rags' pisspoor performance! MORE Not much effort 'uncovers' Bemidji-Beltrami County Airport, which offers a 6,500 feet runway that might have helped journos intent on getting to the scene ASAP. | Unholy alliance for reverse euthanasiaI mentioned (March 23) Tom Harkin's role as a mouthpiece for the disability industry in aiding and abetting Tom DeLay's Schiavo circus. (The Dem House and Senate performance has, so far as I can tell, passed relatively unscathed by DEWDROP criticism.) The Boston Globe has a piece on their forging an alliance of fanaticism with the religious right. Harkin gets his name in lights: Harkin is a longtime ally of disability groups and a coauthor of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. Last week, he worked with Senator Mel Martinez, Republican of Florida, and Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, on legislation allowing federal review of the Schiavo case. How much of the Senate Dem no-show on S 686 was down to the Harkin deference factor, I wonder? The disability industry shares the religious right's rejection of pragmatism and common sense in rejecting the widely held (even in majority-creationist America!) beliefs about quality of life that are informing current poll majorities against the Schiavo circus, whilst at the same time Disabled-rights supporters ''as a whole lean toward being prochoice" They would, one suspects, prefer abortions to be performed for purely social reasons than on the grounds of fetal abnormality - if, indeed, they would accept the validity of such a term! I wonder whether this alliance wouldn't make the politics of holding the line against increased government interference in end-of-life issues a little easier: a pair of extremist camps, offering ample opportunities to drive wedges between them. If only there were leaders in Congress with the nous and determination to manage the job... | Schiavo: sanity from the Florida Senate, of all placesYou might expect Maximum Bob. But, as if to give a lesson to their more exalted colleagues in Washington, Florida senators have declined to add a sideshow to the Schiavo circus. Sen Daniel Webster's SB 804 [1] was rejected on passage by 21-18. Now, the state of the parties in the Florida Senate is 26-14 in favour of the GOP [2]. Of the Dems, 12 voted against the bill, one - Al Lawson - voted for, and one did not vote. Republicans racked up 9 votes against: Alexander Argenziano Bennett Carlton Dockery Jones King Lynn Saunders More joy in heaven... Meanwhile, the Governor has another stunt: Jeb Bush and the state's social services agency filed a petition in state court to take custody of Schiavo and, presumably, reconnect her feeding tube. It cites new allegations of neglect and challenges Schiavo's diagnosis as being in a persistent vegetative state. The request is based on the opinion of a neurologist working for the state who observed Schiavo at her bedside but did not conduct an examination of her. Better than Frist's VT diagnosis technique, but...
MORE A flavour of Tallahassee in a time of Schiavo. | Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Schiavo: Frist's vote of thanks to DemocratsI don't trawl the Congressional Record - and no doubt miss loads of unreported gems as a result. The debate (ha!) on the Senate floor (March 20) on passage of S 686 is not entirely devoid of interest, for example [1]: Frist makes a motion to proceed (carried with unanimous consent, natch); there's an exchange with Levin about the dropping from earlier bills of a requirement on the Federal judge to issue a TRO and a speech from Warner on why he opposed S686. This takes around 1,000 words. Then Byrd launches into a 3,700 word excursion on the use of the filibuster way back when he was Majority Leader (when Pontius wasn't even a pilot yet). And that's almost it. The bill passes. And Frist wraps. His final graf: The level of cooperation and thoughtful consideration surrounding this legislative effort on behalf of my colleagues has truly been remarkable. I thank Senate minority leader HARRY REID for his leadership on this issue. He and I have been in close contact throughout this process. I also thank my Democratic colleagues who expressed their concerns but have allowed us to move forward. In particular, I thank Senators MEL MARTINEZ, RICK SANTORUM, TOM HARKIN, and KENT CONRAD for their dedication in shepherding this legislation. This is bipartisan, bicameral legislation. Is Frist lying? I'd thought the Dems were lying low through a combination of cowardice and better let them hang themselves without our help calculation. The way Frist tells it, old Harry was in the vanguard leading the charge! We clearly need a second source here. And - lo and behold! - we have one: Old Harry himself. A statement dated March 17 (last Thursday) from the Senate Democratic Communications Center. (Wow! He's got the snappy name going, at least - like the NSA or something...): I am pleased Senator Frist and I were able to pass the bill that protects the life of Terri Schiavo by allowing her parents to go to federal court. Yup, the Schiavo circus is the Bill 'n' Harry Show [2]. Harkin is more bad news, representing a Second Front for the forces of reaction. Whilst most Democrats are hostile to a fundamentalist message [3], they are suckers for grievance groups (being themselves principally a coalition of grievance groups): Harkin appears to represent the disability lobby [4], one of the more powerful. What Conrad's angle was, I'm not sure: this has him meeting in close conclave with North Dakota religious leaders: Conrad said it was Schiavo's responsiveness that motivated him to halt debate on the Senate budget resolution Thursday to allow an emergency voting on Schiavo's bill to take place. Frist notoriously diagnosed Schiavo from tapes shot by her parents - does that get him disbarred from ever practising medicine again? - did Conrad even qualify as a physician? Conrad is up for re-election in 2006, ND is deep red state (Bush beat Kerry 2:1) and [5] 30% Catholic. My guess: he's keener to pander to his crackers than DeLay and Co are to pander to crackers at large. Race apart, the resemblance between the present Congress and DW Griffith's tableau of the Reconstruction South Carolina legislature in Birth of a Nation [6] becomes more striking by the day!
| Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Affirmative action: in the newsroom, and on the wrestling-matThere's been rumblings, following (I seem to recall) a Michael Kinsley piece on girls and boys on the op-ed pages - too few of the former, supposedly. Romenesko, who's followed the controversy, now has a nicely paradoxical conjunction to link to: the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (or Strib to its friends) has hired a girl to write op-eds: Katherine Kersten, who has previously taken a stand against - affirmative action! And - believe it or - mixed wrestling in schools, mandated by the sports equivalent of the Terminator, Title IX. You'd have thought that wrestling, being a contact sport, would have been low down on the list for the unisex treatment. Not so, it seems. Kirsten leads her piece with the sad tale of one lad a promising Minnesota high school wrestler had to wrestle a girl at his sectional meet in order to proceed to the state tournament. His school, a private Christian institution, generally requires its wrestlers to forfeit to girls, thereby incurring a loss for both the wrestler and the team. The young man clearly didn't want to wrestle the girl. But given the stakes, after consulting with his father and his coach, he decided to proceed. Clearly, there's a documentary just crying out to be made on the topic. For instance, how the boys deal with a particular consequence of mixed-sex rough and tumble with which their gender alone is cursed... (My hypothesis would be that there was a whole lot of protesting too much going on. Surely girls aren't forced into wrestling, rather than swimming or tennis, say: and they probably know that full body contact with sweaty jocks is involved before they sign up. It's a licence to trangress - which teens tend to like doing, I dimly recall. And with the opportunity for groping, too. As for the boys, I'd have thought the major problem was the risk of suffering the shame of losing to a girl. Now that might well cause locker-room tears!) MORE On Minnesota girls wrestling. One MN legislator Rep. Sondra Erickson, R, Princetonwas sufficiently moved by, or obsessed with, the problem as to introduce a bill giving a local option to ban mixed wrestling in the state's schools. It died, against its author's prediction, with a little help from Hubert Humphrey's team, it seems, in the form of Rep. Mary Jo McGuire, DFL-Falcon Heights What is it with the Gopher State and mixed wrestling? All those sub-zero nights in winter, perhaps... | Georgia: GOP revenge for horrible Dem redistrictingOne need not be an expert to see at a glance that the gerrymander perpetrated by the Democratic regime in Georgia following the 2000 Census [1] was utterly putrid - as bad, if not worse, than anything that Tom DeLay's Texan friends managed. Scarcely suprising that, with the reversal of fortune last November, the compliment has been returned. HB 499 has passed both houses of the Georgia legislature; and a glance at the new map (various maps here) suggests that the GOP effort is a damned sight less offensive. Obscene gouges and protuberances have largely been eliminated. No doubt, the redistricting is as partisan as hell; but, unlike the Dems, one does not have the impression that the GOP crossed a ten-lane highway to poke us in the eye! Now, it seems that, in the fine tradition of the state, the Dems have started hollering nigger. A return to Federal court is inevitable, of course. And pols complain that no one trusts them... I was alerted to the gladsome tidings by a TPM piece - which seems posited on the assumption that gerrymandering was hitherto solely practised by the Republicans. I've commented before on the way some (most?) Northern Dems seek to minimise their shame at their predecessors' having supported slavery and segregation by referring to the then Southern wing of the Democratic Party as Dixiecrats, a different party altogether. Not that Calhoun or Bilbo had any reason to think they weren't Democrats at the time, of course...
| Schiavo: Whittemore ducks S 686 constitutionalityIt's sound judicial practice to rule on the narrowest basis possible - the opposite of the infamous Dred Scott ruling of Roger Taney, of course - and that's what District Judge James Whittemore (Florida Middle District) has done in Schiavo v Schiavo today (PDF). Whittemore cites Benning v Georgia for the proposition that for the purpose of temporary injunctive relief, the act is presumed to be constitutional But that must be flat wrong: I'm looking at the order granting a TRO to PPFA by Judge Hamilton of the California Northern District in the partial birth abortion case (PPFA v Ashcroft). And that TRO was granted on the basis that the plaintiffs would probably succeed in showing the act was unconstitutional! (I can't find the defendant's papers online, so perhaps Whittemore was never asked to pass on its constitutionality - the plaintiffs are here and here. The Benning case PDF does not work, either on the 11th Circuit site or via Findlaw.) | DeLay: Schiavo is God's campaign contribution to GOPYou know he thinks it. But, it seems, so great is the reptile's hubris that he actually said it out loud. In public. On the record. Before a horde of adulators, trading as the Family Research Council: One thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo... Pretty soon, you feel, they were knee-deep in slobber. Or bodily fluids of some kind... All this, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with TRMPAC, Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle or any Texas grand jury that might be sitting right now. | Monday, March 21, 2005
Schiavo: those GOP talking pointsABC have provided (what they say is) a memo listing talking points on the Terri Schiavo case [which] was circulated among Republican senators on the floor of the Senate. This is an exact, full copy of the document obtained exclusively by ABC News and first reported Friday, March 18, 2005, by Linda Douglass on "World News Tonight with Peter Jennings." (There is no relevant S 529, per the memo's heading [1]: S 539 is one of the many Schiavo bills that fell by the wayside.) The bill signed into law was S 686. I'm listening to Randi Rhodes - for once - and she said (something to the effect that) ABC released the text of the memo only after she badgered the producer of a segment on Schiavo she was supposed to be in.
| Senate Dems AWOL on Schiavo, natchReference to the roll call page will find it innocent of any vote on the Terri Schiavo bill S 686. In order to achieve passage in the Senate, several filibusterable motions needed to pass, and were passed with unanimous consent. Not to mention the votes on the bill itself, which passed with voice votes. So far as I'm aware, no Democratic Senator made any attempt to impede passage of this odious bill. The justification, it seems, for the Democratic leadership's strategy of masterly inactivity on the Schiavo circus is that the Republicans are on the wrong side of public opinion, and that, by eliminating one potential GOP line of defence, the absence of Dem politicking now will make their ultimate fate all the direr. One can see why this strategy would appeal to anti-abortionist and serial doormat Harry Reid, the Democrats' (I laughingly call) 'Leader'. But surely one or two maverick Dem senators could have had a bash: Barbara Boxer, for instance, who I suspect has decided to not seek re-election. And the eminently conservative arguments - on states' rights, for instance - would be piquant for a liberal to run. Under Rule XXII, the Easter break would have counted against the Barnums: Frist would have needed 60 votes for cloture however few Dems were in the trenches on the other side. (Compare the Ohio shenanigan at the start of the session: that was clearly going to achieve nothing but slight annoyance; whereas it's conceivable that the Senate could have been tied up long enough for the Schiavo bill to become moot.) One certain way of reducing the surplus population would be for every American to hold his breath until the Senate Dems did the right thing for once. The strategy for the session seems to be to wait for a suitable judicial confirmation as the occasion for launching an all-out Dem attack [1], and to keep up morale by pointing at the administration's social security difficulties. Meanwhile all sorts of legislative obscenities more or less sail through. Now, I yield to no one in cynicism about politics; and I've learned that some things that just seem dumb (the Federal homo-marriage amendment, for instance, or the Swifties' travesty) find paydirt. So, if Reid's strategy were to result in the return of the Senate to Dem control in the 110th Congress [2], I would not exactly be dumbstruck. Just to note that the opportunity costs in atrocious bills passed (eg the bankruptcy bill S256) that might have been delayed will have to be reckoned, too.
| Saturday, March 19, 2005
Obscene Congressional Schiavo circusOnly in America? Ayatollah Tom DeLay and his HR 1332 ghouls produce surely one of the most nauseating public displays outside the Confederacy since Topsy the elephant was electrocuted on Coney Island for the viewing pleasure of the free and brave back in 1903. I happened to see a rebroadcast of Friday's ABC nightly news, and they were intercutting GOP Congressmen spouting cracker-talk and a doctor flatly contradicting them. Peter Jennings' body language was the equivalent of eye-rolling. It was almost as if ABC's reportorial authority was being placed in the balance against the grotesque legislative pandering. Sign of life or artefact of PVS? But let's celebrate another opportunity for courage missed by Congressional Dems: both HR 1332 and S 653 passed on voice votes. No doubt everyone had places to be, and, if they didn't, they damned well would have if a roll call was in prospect. Often, of course, the better part of valour is skedaddling; and it would have been a shame to spoil the effect of all that goosing of anti-abortionists by Hillary, Dean and the rest. | Friday, March 18, 2005
Defining journalistic ethics into submissionJournalism, like politics, is a necessary evil. And, like politics, it is every bit as evil as it is necessary. One aspect of this evil is that, unlike other callings - plumbing and interior decoration, for instance - both journalism and politics have as core activities the manipulation of message [1]. And both - but journalism more stridently - deny that very plain and obvious fact. But they have fall-back positions. When admissions prove impossible to avoid - Jayson Blair, for instance - they are carefully tailored to limit the damage, and, at all costs, protect the citadel [2]. Armstrong Williams is Jayson Blair II. Another Bad Nigger whose vice was not leisure but lucre; a Victorian melodrama villain in garish slap. And didn't the DEWDROPs boo and hiss like goodun's? All misdirection, of course. Consider motive and method: The motive of media companies is profit (we know that the business of America is business - they are merely avoiding being un-American!) and subservience to USG (of whichever stripe [3]) is best for growing shareholder value. The main motive of journalists is career progression: there are plenty of outlets for strenuous opposition, but most political journos aspire to the Times or the Post. To be identified as an oppositional hack not the best thing, since both rags are trying to narrow the bias target presented to their enemies. But avoiding a Brent Bozell-style barrage of orchestrated complaints also counts for something (even Dana Priest mentioned complaints in the Michael Massing piece of two years ago). As to method, the toolbox for dealing with inconvenient news a paper simply can't ignore is jam-full: burying inside is a favourite; putting inconvenient elements in the inside jump; surrounding with a bodyguard of anonymice; false equivalence; semantics. The most powerful tool is the foremost artefact of news: with time, it stops being news. It's not only old men who forget. If the story drops off the front page, then ipso facto it has ceased to be a story. It has been buried literally - in the morgue [4]. (The strange death of the bankruptcy bill as a story is notable.) The fact that journalism can be radically corrupt with nary a brown envelope changing hands is not something the media would be delighted to have widely believed. When some day it may happen Can some day be long postponed?
MORE The foregoing inspired by a Philly Inquirer piece. | Thursday, March 17, 2005
West 43rd Street: the colon that keeps givingThe New York Times excels itself with an editorial that combines the humility of Donald Rumsfeld with the condescension of Marie Antoinette. On the subject of USG VNRs, the Gray Lady's long bony finger is wagging furiously at the weaker brethren of the media parish: If using pretend news is one of the ways these stations have chosen to save money, it's a false economy. If it represents a political decision to support President Bush, it will eventually backfire. This kind of practice cheapens the real commodity that television stations have to sell during their news hours: their credibility. The difference: these sad sacks only wanted to fill some dead air: whilst the pandjandrums at the Times - Sulzberger, Raines and Co - decided to help George Bush start a war by offering their readers as gospel truth the USG-tailored Iraqi WMD fantasies of notorious felon Ahmed Chalabi. Motes and beams, methinks... | AP: hard news just got a little mushyRegular readers know I spit (electronically and, thus, hygienically) on the conventions of American journalism as an essential mechanism of the manipulation machines of all US presidents (amongst others) since the before the high-button boots went out. Strange to report, one of the news organisations with the promptest click of the heels to official diktat, the Associated Press, should have broken the mould by offering - shock horror! - a choice of news and feature ledes to its most popular stories. (The feature lede example given is really horrible, by the way.) [Romenesko (time-dated 3/16/2005 12:05:55 PM) has the AP memo to clients.] More useful for AP to promise to fact-check politicians' statements as a matter of course, and juxtapose its findings with the Great Men's words: but that would be genuinely useful, rather than a gimmick... | The Powell amendment gameIt's a truism (or it should be) that, if one could have combined in one guy the then reputation of Colin Powell with the looks and charm of Adam Clayton Powell, one might have had a viable black presidential candidate back in 2000 - though for the Democrats, obviously. The elder Powell later in his career was notorious for his loose living - a Negro Bao Dai in some ways. But in 1956 he was a maverick with some clout [1] and unafraid to cause 'trouble' in a legislature where his own party was hardly universally supportive of his aims! Thus, for instance, he endorsed Eisenhower for president that year. And moved an amendment to a school aid bill conditioning receipt of Federal funds on compliance with court rulings. The Powell amendment was, I divine from Voteview, made to HR 7535 (School Construction Aid Bill), and voted on as RC 122 on July 5 1956 (which was passed 225-192). Together with subsequent votes on the bill, it is, I learn, a polisci classic, for which many a tree has gone to an early pulping. And for good reason: it's great craic. There is no in-depth online treatment - none that I have come across, at least. I first took notice of it in the Analyzing Congress book I mentioned recently (Ch 1 p33ff). The closest to detail I've got to is these lecture notes [2]: Bill was HR 7435 (sic) (the Kelly Bill) to provide $1.6 billion in federal aid for local school construction over four years. The bill was backed by Eisenhower but opposed by Republicans in the House who opposed federal involvement in local issues. The interest for polisci types is ascertaining whether the votes on the amendment, and the amended bill, provide evidence of sophisticated voting - that is voting to achieve a desired end-point, even when that vote is ostensibly against the legislator's (or his constituents') principles. Thus, Northern Dems (favouring both school aid and desegregation) would have voted sophisticatedly if they had voted against the Powell amendment, and thereby defeated it - because the bill, shorn of the amendment, would have passed with Southern Dem votes: they would have been 1-2, which is better than the 0-2 they ended up with [3]. Apparently (Analyzing p42), The House Democratic leadership enlisted the aid of former-president Harry Truman, whose credentials in opposition to southern segregation were secure, to appeal to Northern Democrats to oppose the Powell amendment. In the end, some liberal Northern Democrats did vote against the Powell amendment, in all likelihood because the appeals to sophisticated voting worked. (There also is evidence that some very conservative Republicans, who were in fact prosegregation, voted for the Powell amendment, to kill the overall bill.) That more did not vote in a sophisticated manner represents practical problems with sophisticated voting. In particular, for a liberal Northern Democrat, who had taken a strong stance against segregation, to oppose the Powell amendment would have required that Northern Democrat to explain his actions to his constituents. From the pieces I've dredged up online, some fairly heavy-duty math (ie beyond my ken) has been deployed in explicating voting on the Powell amendment at a macro level. But there seems to be a fair amount of interest in combing the roll call results without the math. In addition to the vote on the amendment itself, we have RC 123, also on July 5, a motion to recommit [4] which was lost 158-262; and RC 124, also July 5, by which HR 7535 was rejected 194-224. The bare analysis of voting seems to have promise: for instance, of those who voted in all three roll calls, and voted Yea just once, the numbers are these: Nay-Nay-Yea: 45 Nay-Yea-Nay: 23 Yea-Nay-Nay: 19 And there seems no very clear pattern in party or section which demarcates the members who selected each one of these three voting strategies. There must, however, have been a reason why votes were cast the way they were: worth an exploratory examination, at least. It's a sort of political Rubik's cube, I suspect: the fascination comes in the trying, rather than the succeeding! (It doesn't help that I recognise almost none of these guys' names - nowhere near such a problem with the Senate during the 84th Congress.)
MORE (March 27) I have a file of spreadsheets analysing the three roll calls at the snappily named Yahoo Group Lincoln Plawg Stuff. | Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Government-sponsored gang warIt makes Catch-22 seem like sound policy. American barrios are, it seems, swarming with Central American hoodlums who are licensed by government to practice organised crime: One problem with dealing with criminal illegal immigrants, law enforcement officials say, is that cities like Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami and New York have either written or understood "sanctuary" policies that prohibit their law enforcement officers from asking a suspect about his immigration status. This makes it difficult for police officers to work with federal immigration authorities until an illegal immigrant commits a crime. You don't say... | Youth favours government control of the pressNot even Bush goes quite so far. The ombud at the Oregonian marks Sunshine Week with a straw poll of high-schoolers which match the disturbing findings of a Knight Foundation report (PDF) of January: about one-third of students disagreed with full freedom of the press -- twice the rate of adult readers (The Knight survey found (p6a) that with the question Newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of storiesonly 51% of high-schoolers polled were in agreement [1].) Unfortunately, the Knight study provides no longitudinal information, that I can see. Are these numbers more or less pro-censorship than, say, during the post-war Red Scare; or at the height of the movement against the Vietnam War? Why should teenagers - a stage in life noted for antipathy to curbs on personal freedom - be more supportive of repression than their parents? Were said parents equally authoritarian-friendly when they were their children's age? (Perhaps an actual reading of the report - which I'd ducked altogether first time around - may have some answers.)
| Video news releases: some basic informationA NYT piece (discussed yesterday) mentioned an OMB/Justice Department memo opposing last year's opinion on the HHS VNRs (Karen Ryan reporting...) from the GAO. I have now found the memo (PDF) which is a response to a memo dated February 17 (PDF) from the Comptroller-General on the subject of VNRs and the propaganda rider commonly attached to appropriations bills. The OMB memo (March 11) is a covering note for a memo (March 1) from the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel (of Bybee torture memo fame) referring Federal government agencies to an 8,500 word OLC opinion dated July 30 2004 (of whose existence I was unware) written in response to the original GAO rulings on the HHS VNRs. The difference between the OLC and the GAO comes down to this:
From an initial read-through, the OLC opinion on the scope of the rider seems preferable. The opinion also points out that the GAO and the Comptroller-General, as parts of the legislative branch, have no jurisdiction over the executive branch (it cites Bowsher v Synar, a 1986 case arising out of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act). Their views are welcome, but not binding. Bolstering its legal case with a little partisan finger-pointing, the opinion refers to the use of VNRs by the Clinton Adminstration - HHS created two VNR story packages in 1999 setting forth the Clinton Administration's position on prescription drug benefits and preventive health.- and the use of VNRs and the audio equivalent of VNRs - radio actualities - by members of Congress (who are also subject to the propaganda rider). (And who should be fingered as one of the radio actuality users but the Creditor's Friend, Stabenow of Michigan. Must be coming in handy right about now...) To be fair, members of Congress would only be subject to the rider if they used taxpayers' money to pay for their VNRs or actualities; but, I'm thinking, use of other sources (brown envelopes from credit card companies, for instance) would be illegal under other statutes. I'm letting that one lie for the moment, though. | When was journalism? againThere is a lively discussion going on [1] on the so-called decertification of the press by the Bush administration, in which the history of White House/press relations provides necessary comparators [2]. I favour the null hypothesis: that, in trying to control his message, Bush has repressed and manipulated the media no more than his predecessors did (controlling for technological, commercial and other differences). One problem in making the comparison is calibrating how much scope a particular previous administration allowed to journalists, and the extent to which they exploited it. (There is potential interaction between those two factors, of course: a White House dealing with a supine press can be relaxed, in the knowledge that any unfortunate revelations will be stifled by self-censorship.) The Vietnam War as a period for comparison I come back to regularly: loads of great material on goverment-media relations [3]. My hypothesis is that, throughout the Kennedy and Johnson administrations up to the decision to escalate the war to the point of deploying combat troops in March 1965 [4], the senior management, editors and journalists concerned with Vietnam coverage in the top papers [5] had reason to know or believe that the administration was failing to be candid with the US public about the current and likely future state of South Vietnam and US policy towards it. And that, for reasons of Cold War ideology, commercial surival and - even - patriotism, they suppressed or handled information with a view to ensuring that that the path to combat involvement was not blocked [6]. An example of the treatment of the escalation story comes in Theodore Draper's 1967 Abuse of Power, from the period between the Tonkin Gulf Incidents, and the bombing raids mounted in retaliation, and the decision to deploy combat troops (p73ff): On August 15 1964, William Bundy - ASS for Far Eastern Affairs - was asked whether the United States might decide to interdict supply routes in North Vietnam. First, he replied that 'we want no wider war.' Then he added, still sticking close to the old line but not excluding a new one: 'We have made it clear that we cannot exclude the possibility that wider action against the North might become necessary, and we have carefully studied what might be involved, and all the rest, but I think it is clear enough that anything in the nature of attacks on North Vietnam of a systematic character by the South Vietnamese or by ourselves would involve very grave issues and we would, therefore, prefer to pursue the policy we are now pursuing of maximum assistance in South Vietnam.' And then, on September 29 1964, he delivered a major address in Tokyo in which he again obliquely referred to the possible expansion of the war.Expansion of the war outside South Vietnam, though not a course we want to seek, could be forced on us by the increased pressures of the Communists, including a rising scale of infiltration. It is surely impossible that Bundy was freelancing in making these comments. No wider war was the soundbite in Lyndon Johnson's post-Tonkin broadcast on August 4, and in his August 5 Message to Congress asking for what became the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Bundy's spin would have been picked up by any seasoned journo on the beat who was paying attention. And Draper has a name: This, and similar official views, privately expressly, apparently aroused the suspicions of James Reston, the noted Washington commentator of the New York Times. On October 2 1964, he reported thatSo Reston seems to be telling his readers not only that Bundy was freelancing, but that he was far from the only adminstration official doing so. According to the picture sketched by Reston, LBJ ran the sort of madhouse that Franklin Roosevelt notoriously favoured as a style of management - which he didn't.it is difficult to understand why prominent officials, a few weeks before a national election, should be talking so openly about expanding the war, and not only advocating it but almost lobbying for such a course of action. On what page did the Reston piece run, I wonder? (Draper doesn't say.) My guess is that it ran well inside the Times, and that the paper's news coverage of Vietnam was kept scrupulously clean of any taint from it. From the Administration's viewpoint, Reston's piece is a tad embarrasing: the suggestion of policy souk implies weak governance by the President, which not doubt would not have gone down well. But not much more: Reston is not saying that escalation towards bombing the DRV or deploying combat troops is official policy, and certainly not (in the extract) linking such further escalation with the existing policy of gradual escalation of which the OPLAN 34A raids formed a part. No doubt many readers would have taken the story as Washington gossip fuelled by competing flunkies. Pieces like Reston's might be said to inoculate the underlying story by trivialising it. And, of course, the Times can tick the box to say that it has drawn the information it has on escalation to the attention of its readers. Johnson notoriously told Reston to get on the team [7] - but there's not much in Reston's October 2 piece for the old goat to complain of, I'm thinking. For reasons of culture and ideology, it was, at that stage, practically impossible for the Times to propose a US withdrawal from SVN, even had Daddy Sulzberger, Catledge, Reston and all the other wise men at the paper thought withdrawal was the wisest course. Even to suggest it as an option for consideration would have been beyond the pale. (One might compare the Times today producing an editorial in favour of a single-payer health system. Or abolishing the electoral college.) Was the Johnson Administration more or less contemptuous of the media than Bush II's? Was the media then less contemptible then than now?
MORE I don't address above the question why Bundy made the statements quoted for the very good reason that I don't know, and can't easily find out. I have George Kahin's Intervention to hand, but its chapter (p236ff) on the post-Tonkin period provides no direct explanation. It does, however, suggest a reason why USG might have been flying kites about escalation: the parlous state of the Khanh regime in Saigon (subject of an attempted coup on September 13 1964). The thought that US options might be foreclosed by an irreparable implosion of their glorious allies in SVN preoccupied counsels in the Adminstration. The risk was a reason/pretext for passing on bombing the DRV in retaliation for the November 1 attack on Bien Hoa, for instance. Daniel Hallin in his Uncensored War - it's not to hand - has a passage on the conflicting messages that USG was obliged to send to 'satisfy' its different audiences: to the DRV, it was We'll pay any price; to the regime of the week in Saigon, it was Shape up or we're shipping out; to the US electorate, it was Nothing to see, move it along. Clearly, to avoid total confusion, and hence failure, of such a propaganda strategy, a large element of doublespeak was required. But the structure of the American news product - segregation of 'hard' news from analysis, for instance - fitted the strategy like a glove: if the President said X on page 1, guys like Reston could say X was untrue as much as they liked on page 17, and it wouldn't affect his message much. | free website counter 
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