Jeffrey McManus

Link: Where Have All the Leaders Gone?.

"If I’ve learned one thing, it’s this: You don’t get anywhere by standing on the sidelines waiting for somebody else to take action. Whether it’s building a better car or building a better future for our children, we all have a role to play. That’s the challenge I’m raising in this book. It’s a call to action for people who, like me, believe in America. It’s not too late, but it’s getting pretty close. So let’s shake off the horseshit and go to work. Let’s tell ‘em all we’ve had enough."

Link: Bush Advisers’ Approach on E-Mail Draws Fire

Political advisers to President Bush may have improperly used their Republican National Committee e-mail accounts to conduct official government business, and some communications that are required to be preserved under federal law may be lost as a result, White House officials said Wednesday.

Welcome to the 21st-century version of the 18-minute gap.

Link: Defending Iraq War, McCain Assails Democrats

Senator John McCain of Arizona today accused his potential Democratic presidential rivals of playing “small politics” in opposing the war in Iraq, saying withdrawal would lead to chaos across the Middle East, embolden Al Qaeda and expose the United States to “another 9/11 — or worse.”

Dear Senator Jackass: this isn’t about "politics," it’s about sending more Americans to die in a pointless war that has already been lost thanks to an incompetent and corrupt administration.

You of all people should appreciate that.

Link: Do We Have the National Will to Fight Cancer?.

"If terrorists unleashed a biological attack on American soil that started killing more than 1,500 Americans every day, as cancer does, wouldn’t we mobilize every national resource to find an antidote or a cure?"

In addition to being a bore, Garrison Keillor has some pretty messed-up ideas. Excellent deconstruction by columnist Dan Savage here. Savage has a dog in this hunt (he’s a gay parent who wrote a terrific and funny book about the experience). But he points out that the myth that only male-female parents are legitimate is deathly serious: in a world in which this kind of bigotry is permitted to fester, you see outcomes like the Michigan law which denies health benefits to families with same-sex parents.

Savage also flirts with, but doesn’t really expound upon, something that I wish would be brought up more often when we talk about how the government/church tries to control who we’re allowed to marry: the "nuclear family" is an Eisenhower-era invention. It’s not the natural state of human affairs. Throughout history we’ve always had a couple of parents (or not), eight or ten siblings or cousins, and fifteen crazy uncles and aunts lurking in the background. At no point was any child confused by this state of affairs.

Update: Keillor posted a rather mealy-mouthed apology which Dan Savage dismantles here.

The political purge that’s going on in the Justice Department is one data point, but I’ve also run across two mentions of Republicans-as-Soviets in the news just today:

• The Fish and Wildlife Service has forbidden its staff from speaking publicly on climate change. Says a former Interior Department official: "This sure sounds like a Soviet-style directive to me."
• The CIA is holding up the publication of Valerie Plame Wilson’s book.
  Wilson’s husband: "We just might have to sue them, and they will be reminded this is not the Soviet Union."

This is name-calling, sure, but it sure seems like it could have some legs in the election year, and the fact that liberals are able to get away with this kind of rhetoric for the first time since the Truman administration is delicious. The gang of faux conservatives running the show today definitely need some sand thrown in their eyes.

Link: Why Have So Many U.S. Attorneys Been Fired?

Carol Lam, the former United States attorney for San Diego, is smart and tireless and was very good at her job. Her investigation of Representative Randy Cunningham resulted in a guilty plea for taking more than $2 million in bribes from defense contractors and a sentence of more than eight years….In many Justice Departments, her record would have won her awards, and perhaps a promotion to a top post in Washington. In the Bush Justice Department, it got her fired.

So the humorous thing about this NY Times piece isn’t how Hillary Clinton’s Whitewater-era enemies can’t raise the funds to swift boat her in this election cycle. It’s the fact that one of them spent $200,000 on a stupid attack web site. $200,000? What the hell?

This is an amazing textual analysis tool by the NY Times that crunches the State of the Union addresses given by the current president. It shows frequency of word usage and lets you pick words and compare them to see how frequently he uses them. It would be neat to apply this tool to the speeches of prior presidents (i.e., those who suck less), but it’s still fun to see what #43 talks about — or what he doesn’t talk about.

Number of mentions of the word "internet"? Zero. That’s probably for the best. Mentions of "computer"? Just once in six years (in the context of computerizing health care records).

Number of times he mentioned the word "deficit"? Once and only once per year, every year (until this year when he mentions it three times). It’s almost like he’s saying to the Democrats, "This stinky deficit I’ve run up over the past six years? I’ve handed it off to you, suckos, now deal with it. Enjoy!"

Textual analysis of this kind is dear to my heart; in college I worked for a professor of German literature running books like Siddhartha through an optical scanner so he could apply database juju to the text and create tools like this, and when I decided to do a similar project on my own for my senior honors project it was my first serious attempt at database programming.

Whenever I’m asked to do something useless and time-consuming at the airport in the name of "security" (including taking off my shoes), it always drives me crazy. For the longest time I felt like I might have been veering off into tinfoil-hat-wearing territory with this, so it’s good to see pieces on the harmfulness of "security theater" make their way into blogs and mainstream media.

Here’s a quote from a great piece from Wired News that discusses how even the photo ID requirement (which I always considered to be fairly innocuous) is totally bogus:

Link: Wired News: The Boarding Pass Brouhaha.

Interestingly enough, while the photo ID requirement is presented as an antiterrorism security measure, it is really an airline-business security measure. It was first implemented after the explosion of TWA Flight 800 over the Atlantic in 1996. The government originally thought a terrorist bomb was responsible, but the explosion was later shown to be an accident.

Unlike every other airplane security measure — including reinforcing cockpit doors, which could have prevented 9/11 — the airlines didn’t resist this one, because it solved a business problem: the resale of non-refundable tickets. Before the photo ID requirement, these tickets were regularly advertised in classified pages: "Round trip, New York to Los Angeles, 11/21-30, male, $100." Since the airlines never checked IDs, anyone of the correct gender could use the ticket. Airlines hated that, and tried repeatedly to shut that market down. In 1996, the airlines were finally able to solve that problem and blame it on the FAA and terrorism.

Link: Saving the World, One Video Game at a Time.

Last year the MacArthur Foundation began issuing grants to develop persuasive games, including a $1.5 million joint gift to James Paul Gee, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin, and GameLab, a New York firm that designs games. Meanwhile the United Nations has released Food Force, a game that helps people understand the difficulties of dispensing aid to war zones. Ivan Marovic, co-founder of Otpor (Resistance) — the Serbian youth movement widely credited with helping to oust Slobodan Milosevic — helped produce A Force More Powerful, a game that teaches the principles of nonviolent strategy. And the third annual Games for Change conference in New York, held earlier this month, attracted academics and nonprofit executives, including several from the World Bank and the United Nations.

“What everyone’s realizing is that games are really good at illustrating complex situations,” said Suzanne Seggerman, one of the organizers of the conference. “And we have so many world conflicts that are at a standstill. Why not try something new?

There’s gotta be a connection between the way these kinds of games are engaging people in world politics and the way that The Daily Show engages people in national politics.

Interesting article in today’s NY Times about how the republicans are going to do cross-country town hall meetings to figure out what to do about immigration. Hmm, I wonder if these will be as representative as the town hall meetings that Bush staged on the campaign trail, where only people who were vetted by the party were able to attend and ask questions? The Times seems to think (and I concur) that this is just a ploy to delay immigration reform until after the 2006 election.

But what if this catches on? Let’s have some nationwide town hall meetings strategy in Iraq, why not? I’d have a few things to say in an open forum on the national debt, and I can imagine a few dozen other issues that I’d like to see the government take on the road.

On a related note, have I mentioned yet that we enrolled Kid #1 (as we are referring to her, using old-school one-based arrays) in a Spanish-English two-way immersion kindergarten? She’s already saying hola in burrito joints, so you know we are on to something.

The Senate is debating curbs on the onerous Patriot Act which will likely be meaningless in practice, but will act as an election-year fig leaf for those few Republicans who still pay lip service to the notion of freedom and privacy in this country.

The most brutal quote came from Republican senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky:

"Civil liberties do not mean much when you are dead," Bunning said.

How’d we get from "Give me liberty or give me death" to this?

Here’s a real gem:

WASHINGTON - The White House and senators are discussing the
implications of a Senate-passed ban on the torture of suspected
terrorists in U.S. custody and what part, if any, of the proposal the
administration might find acceptable, the Pentagon chief said Sunday.

I wonder how these discussions are going. "The administration finds the ban on putting lit cigarettes out on detainees’ bare skin acceptable, but we wish to have an exception from the ban on applying live jumper cables to peoples’ nipples and we absolutely positively must continue to have the right make people stand up and sing the star spangled banner while chained to a pipe in a dungeon without food, water, or sleep for 48 hours. Because when you get right down to it, gentlemen, our freedom is at stake."

God. Why is there even a debate about this? Setting aside the whole "Congress makes the laws and the executive is supposed to enforce them" angle, haven’t these twits considered the fact that there are many excellent reasons why you’re not supposed to torture prisoners? (Hint: it has nothing to do with being a candy-ass goody two shoes.)

"A series of clashes in the last year between American and Syrian
troops, including a prolonged firefight this summer that killed several
Syrians, has raised the prospect that cross-border military operations
may become a dangerous new front in the Iraq war, according to current and former military and government officials."

More (nytimes.com)

The NY Times reports that the Supreme Court is going to review a Vermont law limiting campaign contributions in its new term. Historically politicians have been able to lay the smackdown on such laws because the court has found that contributions are the equivalent of constituionally-protected free speech. This always seemed utterly bogus to me. (Would bribery be a type of protected speech, too?) Apparently the court may revisit this notion in the next year.

It seems like the problem with contributions isn’t how much people give, but the appearance of quid pro quo — favors in exchange for contributions, which we all know takes place, but we usually simply can’t prove (even in obvious and egregious cases like the Abramoff scandal). So what if we made it so there wasn’t even a possibility to engage in quid pro quo? What if there were a law mandating that all campaign contributions must be made anonymously, through a neutral third party? In the absence of such a law, what if a candidate decided to accept contributions this way unilaterally?

Update: Maybe I spoke too soon; house majority leader Tom Delay was indicted today in the Abramoff scandal by a grand jury in connection with alleged violations of Texas state campaign finance laws. Very interesting that Delay’s defense is that this a "political vendetta" mounted by a Democratic district attorney. Um, Earth to Tom? DAs don’t bring grand jury indictments, grand juries do.

  By jeffreymcmanus.

Snapped this over the weekend at Disneyland. It’s part of the now-repurposed theater that used to house "Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln" but now runs a documentary on Disneyland commemorating their 50th anniversary. (The documentary, by the way, is narrated by Steve Martin — definitely worth 15 minutes of your time if you happen to be visiting the happiest place on Earth.)

Aside from the fact that this display is somewhat decontextualized in the absence of Giant Robot Patriotism, it occurred to me that the average visitor might not know what the first four freedoms are. (I knew who came up with them, but I had to look them up to see what they actually were.)

The "four freedoms" is a speech that FDR made in early 1941 — the four freedoms are freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. The first two are pretty straightforward (they’re in the constitution, after all) but last two have gotten folks bent out of shape since Roosevelt spelled them out. The concept of a "fifth freedom" seems like a bit of conservative agit-prop right tucked away in a corner of the magic kingdom.

This came along at a really good time — I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how easily we demonize concepts like "maybe it would be a good idea if we don’t let people starve to death" while we take concepts like free speech for granted and don’t do much to actually further freedom. Is it really necessary for principles of freedom and progressive principles to be diametrically opposed?

Excellent quote from that man of the people, Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, in the New York Times this morning. He said:

"Terri Schiavo - like all Americans - deserves our protection and
respect. I will continue to call on the Florida Legislature to pass
legislation to honor patients’ decisions about end of life care,
protect all vulnerable Floridians, and spare Terri’s life."

I think that taking care of all Americans is a totally boss idea and I am glad that all these Republicans are suddenly expressing a desire to make it happen. How about we start first with the 43.6 million Americans who don’t even have health insurance? I realize that if we make this some sort of government handout, there’s a chance that vulnerable Americans like Terri might fall victim to the evils of "welfare dependency," so I’d be OK with requiring that people like Terri be required to get a job first. I think it’s the least we could do for our most vulnerable Americans.

How dare that shameful John Kerry dare to imply that President Bush said he wasn’t concerned about finding Osama bin Laden.

If you watched the Vice Presidential debates last night, you might have caught Dick Cheney refer viewers to a Web site called “factcheck.com” for more information on the crimes he committed while he was CEO of Halliburton.

He actually meant factcheck.org, a non-partisan site run by the University of Pennsylvania.

It isn’t surprising that a guy who lied about making bogus connections between Iraq and the 9/11 terrorists would not be able to discern the difference between a .com and a .org. I’m sure that Cheney is confused by the internets; he probably has his secretary send email for him. You can hear Cheney deliciously contradicting himself on this matter in a video ad (Windows Media or Real player). Ha ha, caught you, you big fat liar.

Cheney is paying the price for not having his facts straight on factcheck.org, though. The crafty owners of factcheck.com now redirect it to the site of progressive financier George Soros, which sports the headline “WHY WE MUST NOT RE-ELECT PRESIDENT BUSH.”

As if getting the address of the fact-checking site wrong isn’t enough, the real factcheck.org doesn’t paint quite a rosy picture of the VP’s actions while CEO of Halliburton:

Cheney wrongly implied that FactCheck had defended his tenure as CEO of Halliburton Co., and the vice president even got our name wrong. He overstated matters when he said Edwards voted “for the war” and “to commit the troops, to send them to war.” He exaggerated the number of times Kerry has voted to raise taxes, and puffed up the number of small business owners who would see a tax increase under Kerry’s proposals.