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Principle vs. Pragmatism at Justice

There has been a steady tension in the executive branch since Barack Obama took office between the principle of prosecuting what have become obvious crimes committed by the previous administration and the pragmatic political effects of such a prosecution on the president's agenda. It's an unfortunate reality of polarized Washington that a prosecution will be played by Republicans as a blatantly political act, and in an administration that is still seeking to work with Republicans on Capitol Hill, that act would likely poison the waters and finish off any semblance of cooperation.

So far, it seems that the pragmatic imperatives of passing the ambitious and incredibly important agenda that Obama has set forth (attempting to deal with health care, energy policy, education, and the economy all at once would be no mean feat even if the Republican party hadn't decided its narrow political interests would be best served by doing everything they could to wreck his plans). At several turns, the administration has come down on the side of at least deferring, if not completely ignoring the crimes they should by rights be at least investigating, and probably eventually prosecuting.

This has been a source of considerable frustration for those of Obama's supporters who wanted the president to add one more task to his plate, that of moving the USA back toward being a constitutional democracy which holds the bill of rights as a sacred document.

I'm one of those supporters, and I realize that this post's assumption of the prior administration's guilt sounds a little like the old western movie line about how "we're going to give you a fair trial, followed by a fist class hangin'", but it really isn't. At several points, officials of the previous administration have admitted openly that they committed acts which by any fair reading are violations of both US and international law. They assert (on the basis of very little evidence) that the national security interests of the country were served by doing so, and that they were empowered to break US law by their constitutional mandate, but most constitutional scholars have dismissed that as a wholly specious claim.

What remains is to see if that claim carries any more weight in court than it does in the academy, and to establish who was involved in making the decisions to carry out such acts as torturing people, detaining them indefinitely without a hearing, invading the privacy of American citizens without any restrictions, misinforming Congress about all of the above, and a variety of other crimes and misdemeanors. So far, the administration has been moving very slowly to investigate those matters and act on what they find, and the frustration about that pace that's welling up among those who hold the Constitution dear isn't because we don't understand that there may be a cost to pressing forward with investigations, it's because we think that cost will be worth paying to preserve what we hold dear about our country.

For some of us (myself included), it's also a matter of practical political calculation. If Democrats don't stand up for principle in this case, Republican policymakers will have no reason to respect either the law or their opposition, and the voters who have to choose from among them will have no reason to respect Democrats' spines either. If the voters don't believe Democrats will stand up for principle, they won't trust them to make policy, and the sacrifice of principle for pragmatic political considerations will have been wasted.

All of which is why I was very heartened to read this Newsweek piece by Daniel Klaidman, which describes the dilemma being wrestled with by Attorney General Eric Holder. Holder too is mindful of what the effort to investigate might cost, and is suitably worried about endangering all that the Obama administration needs to accomplish. Fortunately, he has apparently also been as aware of the damage the previous administration did to the rule of law, and has enough respect for that rule to find it unpalatable to let that damage go unremarked.

The irony here is that if an investigation is to go forward (and it should), the best practice will be for it to proceed as speedily and independently as it can; to quote Lady Macbeth, "If t'were done, t'were best done quickly." (another irony may be quoting Lady Macbeth in a post about the excesses of state power, but I digress...) The more the administration is seen to be agonizing over this decision, rather than letting the law take it's course, the easier it is to paint the whole thing as a political exercise, something the Republicans will attempt to do regardless.

In addition, it has become clear that the Republican leadership is committed to a course of obstructionism that makes it a fool's errand to keep going hat in hand to the minority to try to develop a governing consensus. They're just not that into you (or governing, something that should come as no surprise to anyone who has lived through the last eight years). The good news is that their posture, in it's current form, looks to be wholly self-destructive, and is being carried out by a cavalcade of clowns that make the hapless Washington Generals seem like the Harlem Globetrotters the Generals made a living by losing to in embarrassing fashion. These guys aren't just the gang that can't shoot straight, they are shooting themselves and each other at a furious pace.

Principle's cost is declining daily as the revelations get worse, and it looks like AG Holder may be ready to pull the trigger on doing his job. It can't happen soon enough, and if it's explained as a matter of letting the law take it's course, I don't think the cost will be as high as leaving the crimes uninvestigated. I hear that, like Obama, Holder likes a game of basketball. Time for a full court press, General.

Cheney gets extended Secret Service protection (Oy!)

US News and World Report posts a report that former VP Dick Cheney is getting his Secret Service protection extended past the usual six-month period after service (this just after former President Bush's detail was cut back to save money, an interesting piece of timing).

Cheney is getting extended Secret Service protection (unlike any other past VP) because his actions as VP have bred widespread anger at him, and some of that is apparently taking the form of threats.

There's an easy way to resolve this problem, though. It's becoming abundantly clear that he's guilty of having committed several crimes while in office. Try him for them. That will provide him with the opportunity to present the defense he keeps claiming he's entitled to, and after that fails we can provide him with protection somewhere very safe - Leavenworth.

Krugman does it again...

Here's a great op-ed by Paul Krugman about Obama's dilemma regarding the stimulus package and the political night of the long knives that the president's opponents are trying to get started as a result of the worse than expected economic news from this week. Read the whole thing, but the essence of it is in the last line:

"What he needs, in short, is to do for economic policy what he’s already done for race relations and foreign policy — talk to Americans like adults."

MoveOn's Clean Energy Campaign

Here's a great offer from MoveOn.org - get a great clean energy graphic designed by Shepard Fairey on a free sticker, and put it up wherever it can be seen the most (maybe you should leave it off your Hummer, but maybe not):

Happy Birthday Katie!

Yesterday was Katie Mooney's 13th birthday. A very enjoyable brunch for the family, followed by a day of relaxing and a great barbeque and fireworks display. Samples here, photo album added today.

Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons

This incredible article was published as a paper and delivered as a presentation to the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Pacific regional meeting in June of 1968. Since then, it has become the most widely quoted piece of peer-reviewed scholarship in history, and it deserves it. Read it if  you haven't. Reread it if you have.

...and now a musical interlude...

Thanks Steve!

It took me a week to get the photos out of the camera, and we see the perils of taking pictures with a new rig, but I'm left with a memory of a a tasty musical treat anyway (the playing was much better than the photography!), and a good time was had by all (or at least, by me!)

"Journalism isn't dead; it's online."

A week ago, the Webby awards were held, and unsurprisingly, the Huffington Post got one. One characteristic of the Webbys is that one's acceptance speech must be a maximum of five words long. HuffPo solicited readers' suggestions for acceptance speeches, and I'm proud to say that my suggestion, which appears above, was among the finalists (the speech Arianna actually gave said "I didn't kill newspapers, okay?").

Having looked at the speeches that were most seriously considered, I can see that my very earnest offering missed a critical component to any speech - it wasn't funny (see the other contenders here).

Epochal Change

It's been too long since I posted here - for the few of you who have actually been stopping by to read, thanks for your patience and please accept my apologies.

The reasons for my silence have been mostly personal - lots going on in meat life lately, including a good deal of work, the beginning of summer, preparations for a major trip next month, and a great house concert last weekend by my friend and onetime classmate Stevie Coyle (thanks Steve!). Time has been short.

The other reason has been a bewildering series of events over the last several weeks, which seem so significant that I'm not sure what to make of them yet. I feel a little like the proverbial blind man trying to describe the elephant by feel - it's a certainty that the description is flawed, but without a lot more groping around, it's not even possible to guess what the flaws are.

There have been several of these changes over the last few weeks, but two have been standing out for me over the last couple of days. They are completely unrelated to one another, except insofar as they seem to have the potential to portend really big changes in the sweep of history. Both are immediately dangerous, and both will cause a great deal of suffering (albeit of different kinds), but both contain the possibility of reversing developments that occurred decades ago that I believe were disastrous for our country, and indeed for human civilization as a whole.

That's big stuff, and may be overdrawn, but bear with me:

California is bankrupt. There is no money in the state treasury, and there is a $24 billion state budget deficit that nobody has any idea how to pay for. The citizens of the state have declined to vote for any tax increase to cover the costs of the services that they're using, and the federal government has (rightly, in my view) declined to step in to bail out those citizens in the absence of any real effort to preserve those services for themselves.

The governator has said that this means that numbers of critical government programs must be terminated, because there is no way to pay for them. The speaker of the state senate is working on a bill that attempts to preserve those programs' structures, but seems to effectively eviscerate their funding, such that they will be mere shadows of their former selves untril further funding can be secured. Neither seems likely to succeed entirely, but both will parbably get some of what they're after, and the state will see drastic reductions in fairly essential services until it begins to sink in with the voters that they need to find some way to pay for the programs they want.

There has been a great deal of chat about the whys and wherefores of this bankruptcy (national recession, California being the epicenter of the mortgage collapse, and various political posturings on the part of one side or the other), but the one thing I haven't heard mentioned yet in the national coverage I've seen of the problem is something that happened thirty years ago. That something was the passage of the ballot initiative known as Proposition 13, the "Jarvis-Gann" property tax initiative, which amended the state constitiution to limit the state property taxes to 1% of assessed value and prevented any increase in that assessment greater than 2%/year, unless the property changed hands.

The measure immediately cut property tax revenues in half for the state, leading to budget nightmares that have persisted ever since. It also was the first shot fired in a national tax revolt that ushered in thirty years of conservative dominance of national politics, along with the cavalcade of economic fantasies about the value of cutting taxes which that dominance has spawned.

Unlike the federal government, California can't print money, so it has long been a bellweather of the impact of making political hay by cutting taxes without reducing spending - school budgets and other state services have been pared to the bone for decades, which has turned the state's world-class public education system into an distant echo of what it once was (and an led to explosion of private schools in the state that exacerbates the difference in the quality of education recieved by rich and poor).

Since the lack of state tax revenue forced local communities to make up the shortfalls in sevices left by dwindling state budgets, it also contributed to a widening gap between rich and poor communities (indeed, it was the redistribution of revenues from richer to poorer communities that prompted the initiative in the first place).

California was an incredibly wealthy state at the beginning of the process, though, so it has taken a long time for the state's finances to arrive at the complete collapse that they find themselves in today. At this point, the state's ability to convince creditors that it can make good its debts is gone, so it seems likely that we may see the real consequences of Prop 13 played out over the next few weeks. Once the state's citizens see those consequences in real time, we may well see a movement grow to overturn Prop 13 or otherwise free the state from its inability tro fund itself. That could generate another political sea change in California and add to the similar change which we can only hope is underway in the country at large.

I'm watching a chorus of folks decrying the refusal of the federal government to save "the eighth largest economy in the world" from its troubles, but in none of those comments have I seen any mention of the fact that the eighth largest economy in the world has just finished declining to fund its own government. speaking as a resident of a state with a smaller economy, I can think of no good reason to fund the continuation of that sort of irresponsibility with money my state's having its own trouble raising.

At almost the same time that California was sabotaging its own finances and inspiring the nation at large to follow suit, there was a revolution in Iran that replaced the repressive, US-backed regime of Shah Reza Pahlavi with the theocratic and also repressive regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, and led to the taking of the US embassy staff hostage for over a year by "students" obviously acting at the behest of the regime.

That act brought to a critical head an antagonism between the US and Iran which has stayed impenetrably hostile for thirty years and has contributed to several of the spectacular missteps made by the US government in the middle east over that time (including the invasion of Iraq, which in turn did a great deal to empower the hard-line theocrats in Iran and undermine any movement toward reform within Iran).

Whether President Obama's inspiring and ingratiating speech to the Muslim world in Cairo last month was a factor or not, the internal troubles within Iran have opened fissures within that country's politics that have come to a head over the last couple of days. The putative reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was announced by the country's "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Khamenei, only to have the obvious fraud in that announcement overwhelmingly rejected by hundreds of thousands of Iranians, in protests that have continued (and even expanded) to this day.

Three things are impressive about this development. One is that it has been about the same thirty years since the revolution in Iran to the apparent beginnings of the disintegration of that theocracy that we're seeing in the current protests, and if it continues in this vein, it may well be that another sea change moment is upon us. The revolution in Iran and the attendant enmity for the US that attnded it had a great deal to do with the consequences of interventionist US foreign policy during the cold war (in the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Iran by the CIA in 1953), and that memory has remained strong for the intervening thirty years. This evening, I've watched Reza Aslan on CNN reporting that there has been a call for a meeting of the Assembly of Experts that empower the Supreme Leader (the only body in Iran that has the power to actually change the direction of the government by changing or giving direction to that officer), so it's possible that we're finally seeing the consequences of that intervention wane and leave us.

The second notable aspect of this unrest is that the administration has been admirably wise about staying the hell out of the business of avidly supporting the protestors in Iran, since the predictable effect of such support will be to empower the reactionaries to crush the uprising as the product of US meddling in internal Iranian politics. Unfortunately, much of what's left of the Republican party has been predictably stupid about the same decision, with Congressmen Mike Pence and Eric Cantor proposing a resolution voicing support for the protestors, John McCain demanding that the administration condemn the elections as a fraud and the repression that has followed as unacceptable, and of course, Joe Lieberman continuing to wax hysterical about what a threat Iran is and what we must do to protest against that threat, regardless of the consequences of such protests.

Finally, the restrictions placed by the government on foreign press coverage of the uprising have been very troubling, but they have also spurred an incredible blossoming of citizen journalism from within Iran, and there has been a steady stream of reports via Twitter and Facebook that have described the trouble in gripping detail. Nico Pitney's live blogging of the uprising on Huffington Post has been incredible, and the video footage has been dramatic and moving. There has been a demonstrative proof that journalism is not dead, and I defy anyone to find me a professionally produced news package more dramatic, moving, or informative than this:

Take Heart!

If, like me, you're saddened by the California Supreme Court decision not to overturn Prop 8 yesterday, here's a great article by Mark Morford in the SF Chronicle. The subtitle of the piece is "Sorry, enemies of gay marriage. Prop 8 or no, you've already lost", and here's the nut:

"Head on down to your local high school -- hell, make it a junior high or even an elementary -- and take yourself an informal survey. Ask the various wary, bepimpled youth of Generation Tweet what they think about those scary gay people getting married...

...Please note the response. Please observe how the kids merely look at you as though you're more than a little bit deranged and prehistoric, so out of touch you might as well be Dick Cheney talking up the diesel-powered rectal thermometers he so loved back in World War I.

Watch carefully as they sigh and roll their eyes, then whip out their Nokias to text their friends about how this creepy elder just tried to convince them that the harmless, yawningly commonplace homosexuality currently saturating the popular culture all around them, from fashion to Facebook, movies to "American Idol," is not only wrong, but so wrong that the law should ban it forever because... well, no one really seems to know exactly why.

Did you see it? That big, sighing shrug of what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you, combined with lots of who-the-hell-cares? Because that's the reaction to note most of all.

Here is what it tells you: Gay marriage is a foregone conclusion. It's a done deal. It's just a matter of time. For the next generation in particular, equal rights for gays is not even a question or a serious issue, much less a sinful hysterical conundrum that can only be answered by terrified Mormons and confused old people and inane referendums funded by same. It's just obvious, inevitable, a given"

(Don't miss the link in the middle of the quote - it's priceless!)

As sad as it is to see what should be a fundamental right fail to be upheld by a court, it may also lead to a more decisive resolution of the matter in the form of another ballot initiative  that decisively repudiates the bigotry enshrined in Prop. 8.

After all, we've had decades of culture wars fueled by the anger over the decision in Roe v. Wade, which solved a political problem by judicial means. Polling shows that most Americans favor women's right to choose what happens to their own bodies, and if Roe v. Wade is overturned, it seems likely that it should spur a whole series of political actions that would codify that preference in new law. The same thing seems likely to happen in this case, and if it galvanizes a progressive political community to action, that's a pretty happy side-benefit of such a change.

Update: Here's an article byt Aaron Zelinsky of the Yale Law Journal that makes the same point.

Update II: Here's a link to the Courage Campaign, which is beginning the activism that will be needed to overturn Prop 8 and return marriage to an equal footing in California. Go. Sign the petition (you don't have to be from CA to do it). Donate if you can.

Head Scratcher du Jour

Hmmmm...

I heard a Memorial Day episode of Tom Ashbrook's NPR "On Point" program on Monday that had Andrew Bacevich on, discussing our policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. For those who aren't familiar with Bacevich, let's just say that his scholarship and his experience demand our respect. He served in two wars, retired as a colonel, lost a son in Iraq, and has been a scholar of American military policy in several places, including West Point and now Boston University. His book, The Limits of Power, is an important piece of work that levels a withering criticism of US military policy over the last few years, the essence of which is contained in its subtitle (the End of American Exceptionalism).

Bacevich suggests that President Obama has made important changes to American policy, in reducing our commitment in Iraq, shutting down Guantanamo (assuming the chickenshits in the Senate will let him do that) and so forth, but he says that Obama's own policy suffers from a failure to conceive a strategy that is consistent with what we can achieve on the middle east and takes into account root causes of the enmity toward the US that we have seen explode in that region over the last decade or more.

He is careful to emphasize that he's not trying to suggest that we caused or should feel guilty for the attacks of September 11th, 2001, but that we should think carefully about where the anger that causes them comes from, and should take the sources of that anger into account as we form a strategic response that governs our middle east policy.

Bacevich rejects the strategic assumptions of the Bush administration as wildly unrealistic and anchored in flawed assessments of the real situation, but he does say that the anger we are seeing in the middle east is in significant measure a function of our intemperance in trying to make the rest of the world fit and acquiesce to our own thirst for oil and our insistence that the societies in the middle east function in ways that we approve of, regardless of whether those ways are satisfactory to those people in them who must live with the consequences of our choices for them (hint: they're not).

In that sense, depite his condemnation of Bush's policy, Bacevich's critique raises an interesting question. Bush was fond of saying (and every member of the right-wing Greek chorus that sang us into war was fond of echoing) that "they hate us for our freedom". It occurs to me that while taken as it was offered (i.e., that "those people" hate freedom per se), the assertion that they "hate us for our freedom" is nonsensical on its face, it may be closer to the truth than I have given it credit for in the past. If our "freedom" is freedom to consume absurd amounts of oil and monkey around with their societies with reckless abandon in order to continue that profligacy, then the people who have attacked us may indeed hate us for our freedom, because that freedom has direct and unhappy impacts on their lives. If that's true, then in an odd way, even though what he proposed to do about it was disastrous, Bush's base assertion was right.

Infrastructure....Yum!

CNN's decision to disband its science reporting unit and sack the reporters that worked there, including their head science reporter, Miles O'Brien, will go down in history as one of the stupidest decisions ever made by a TV network, and this evening, O'Brien narrated a PBS documentary that went a long way toward proving it.

The documentary is called "The Road to the Future" and it's about transportation infrastructure and land use planning issues, which are now the stealth issue and will increasingly be the central front in the struggle to build a sustainable society in the US.

The documentary is available on a web site, and unlike the Moyers piece referred to below, it's not worth looking to see if the program will run on TV - just go to the site and watch it. The reason it's not worth waiting to see on television is that it's just the tip of the iceberg of a fantastic muti-media presentation that is a treasure trove of reporting, of the sort that gives the lie to the lament that reporting is and has to be dying in this country.

Bravo to PBS for producing another brilliant program, and bravo to O'Brien for landing squarely on his feet.

Moyers on Health Care

We're about to begin the debate on health care reform in the US, and its well past time, but we've left the most promising reform of all off the table. The reform in question is a single-payer health care system, and the most recent Bill Moyers Journal program covers that omission in some detail.

The bugaboo that has kept us from real consideration of the overwhelming advantages of single-payer health care has been the phrase "socialized medicine", but that objection is an attempt to create fear of something there is no reason to be afraid of. As has been said before (and as a couple of Moyers' interview subjects allude to), when most of us (in suburban and urban areas, anyway) turn on the tap and fresh, potable water comes out, we are reaping the benefits of a "socialized" water system, and when that water goes down the drain and doesn't end up in the back yard, it's because of a "socialized" sewage system. When we put our trash on the curb in most parts of the country and someone takes it way for us, we are enjoying the services of a "socialized" trash removal system. When we are in trouble and need a policeman, we call for the help of a "socialized" police protection system, and when our houses catch fire and someone risks his life to put the fire out, that fireman is working for a "socialized" fire department.

All of those solutions are "socialized" because the most efficient and fair way to solve those problems is through community action. Everyone needs those goods, and the best way to provide them is through public investment and management. The same thing is true for medicine, and what we have now in the medicine world is analogous to a system in which numerous providers of water are competing to get us water for a fee. The problem is that the inefficiencies are killing us by the thousands, the "water" we're "drinking" isn't potable, and a small cadre of powerful insurance companies are getting absurdly rich by arbitraging the availability of health care.

It's a situation that has to change, and there's a very real possibility that the debate we're about to have won't change it, due to the self-interest of a few very powerful companies, who own enough lawmakers to prevent that debate from happening honestly. Moyers' attempt to uncover that situation is yet another demonstration of why the man is a national treasure. If this week's Journal will run again on your TV, watch it. If it won't run again on TV, watch it on the web - it's an eye-opener.

Ridiculous Sources and Global Public Sublime

Once again, CNN produced both alpha and omega of Sunday morning chat shows this morning.

They started with the omega. It's probably not surprising that a TV show that purports to critique TV shows has a significant structural problem when it comes to making that critique. Even giving Howard Kurtz's Reliable Sources the benefit of some understanding for having to overcome such a structural disadvantage, though, the show never fails to provide the sine qua non of fatuous "analysis". It has long been the place to go to watch the mainstream media rationalize and excuse away its own shortcomings.

These rationalizations tend to assume a similar arc, which goes as follows. First Kurtz makes note of general outrage over some glaring omission or active distortion in mainstream press coverage of some major issue. This is followed by discussion of the difficulties of covering the powerful and paeans to balance that usually conflate editorial impartiality with a lack of attention to factual reporting on the matter at hand, and the discussion is concluded with a consensus position that the Mainstream media is doing a great job and the outrage over its failures is misplaced. This is often seasoned with a hefty dose of disdain for those who are outraged by those failings, along the "they just don't understand the problems that the news business contends with" and the "the coverage refllects the desires of the public" varieties.

This morning's offering ran true to type. There was a general discussion of the differences between the ostensible biases of the coverage on Fox and MSNBC, with the former held to be the bastion of conservative opinion and the latter of similarly distorting liberal or progressive opinion. CNN was set up as the median between these two "extremes' of bias, cleaving to a commitment to "balance" between the two points of view, regardless of the failure of that balance to bring the facts of any given issue into sharper focus.

The structural problem is thrown into particularly sharp relief by the spectacle of having Kurtz hold CNN's coverage up as the model of "balance" on CNN's own airwaves (this analysis might be just a tad self-interested, no?) Apart from that, though, the show distinguished itself for the sort of breathless distortion that has characterized much of CNN's coverage of any issue on which people have differing political views. As usual, this sort of coverage sheds much more heat than light, and serves nobody, especially not the CNN viewer, who comes away with less information than he or she started with. This morning's specific example included Kurtz's regular guest, Baltimore Sun TV critic David Zurawik, who waxed anxious about the damage the partisanship ostensibly on display at those other networks does to the political discourse of the republic. He was particularly panicky about MSNBC's (and specifically Keith Olbermann's) bias, which in a spectacular display of misunderstanding history, he asserted was "fascism".

The other two forgettable commentators and Kurtz himself were somewhat less overwrought about both sides of "the bias problem" than Zurowick's barely contained apoplexy, but they all elided the presence of bias with the absence of reporting facts, and all drew the same line between "balance" (good) and "bias" (bad), without taking any effort to tease out what else might be missing in much mainstream TV coverage (and other media coverage as well) - i.e., independent factual reporting that allowed the viewer to make sense of the stories presented and the rhetoric that accompanied them.

It's a commonplace on this site that the mainstream news organizations that are lamenting the demise of their business models are missing the point, and that it's not the change in the business model that is primarily responsible for the decline in journalism in this country, it's the abdication of those media outlets from doing their job of helping the public understand when they are being told the truth by public officials and when they are being sold a bill of goods by those same officials.

Kurtz's show was almost enough to make me shut the TV off in disgust, but I didn't, and CNN went a long way toward redeeming itself with Fareed Zakaria's GPS program, which this morning devoted itself to questions of middle east peace. Starting with an illuminating panel discussion among several knlowedgeable contributors including Brett Stephens from the Wall Street Journal, Gideon Rose of Foreign Affairs magazine, Lebanese-born author Fawaz Gerges, and French international affairs scholar Dominique Moisi, and continuing with an interview with Israeli opposition leader Tzippi Livni, Zakaria orchestrated a full and interesting discussion of the situation between Israel and its neighbors that was unusual for its frank exploration of the issues at hand.

The web site for Zakaria's show carries it in segments. They're not up yet, but they should be within a day or two. Watch them, it's worth it. Kurtrz's show's site appears to limit itself to transcripts. Those aren't up yet either. I won't be waiting for them.

Kaleefonia

Blogging has been very light the last week or so, because I've been traveling. I went to the Golden State for a photography workshop/tutorial in Mammoth Lakes, with a great wildlife photographer called Moose Peterson. Moose is a nice guy, and the sessions were intensive, but very interesting and useful. I learned a lot, including how not to bury my subject in its background, how not to include distracting junk in the foreground of a landscape shot, how to hold and pan a camera smoothly and steadily. All of these things will take practice, but that's just fine. I also learned that if you go out and spend the day close to snowbanks at above 10,000 feet, you really ought to put on sun block <dope slap here>. I've learned that before, of course, but maybe this time it will sink in (yeah, right).

I also had a week of music and old friends around the workshop, which would have made the trip a great one even if the workshop itself hadn't been worth it. My old friend Mike Gibbons took me to see the (not yet) Dead in Mountainview on the 10th, and then I saw two house concerts later in the week, one by Corinne West, with whom I was unfamiliar (she was fantastic, as were the musicians who played with her, Doug Adamz and Josh Zucker), and one by her housemate and my old classmate Steve Coyle, who played a few tunes from his new CD and a couple of standards (including a hilarious version of the theme song from Gilligan's Island, played to the tune of Stairway to Heaven), and was also great. I missed seeing Martin Sexton in Golden Gate Park, but I did catch the Bay to Breakers race the following day, which provided its usual share of classic San Francisco looniness. All in all, a neat piece of travelling!

Calmer Heads

Yesterday afternoon, President Obama made a courageous speech at the commencement ceremonies at Notre Dame. Moreover, the administration of Notre Dame made a courageous decision not to fold under the pressure from a variety of conservative Catholic and other anti-abortion groups who wanted them to rescind their invitation to him to speak.

On CNN, just before the president of the university introduced President Obama, there was a discussion between one of those conservative Catholics and a Jesuit priest, Fr. John Martin, SJ, who took the position that Obama's speech was a good thing, despite his own opposition to abortion. Fr. Martin noted that a university was supposed to be a place where the expression of different views was encouraged, and lamented the decision of a number of Catholic bishops to object to Obama's reception at Notre Dame, saying that that decision effectively limited the view of such Catholics to a one-dimensional appreciation that isolated them from the world in which they are expected by their faith to live.

Fr. Martin's remarks were echoed immediately by those of Fr. Jenkins, Notre Dame's president, who also said that it was more important for a university to foster dialog than to make itself irrelevant by taking a stand sure to lead to a Phyrric victory by snubbing the president.

I'm not a Catholic (or a believer of any kind), so it's not my place to advocate for any position to be taken by the Catholic faithful to improve its tactical position in the public debate. I was educated by Jesuits, though, and it made me proud to see that the order that was responsible for much of my college education is still able to see the value of reason in public debate. Bravo to Fr. Martin for his rational take on this speech, and to Fr. Jenkins for having the fortitude to maintain the value of such reasoned discussion about this issue. As President Obama said in his speech, a search for common ground on this issue won't be easy, but without the willingness to respect one another and reason together, it is impossible.

"Criminalizing a Policy Difference"

Joe Scarborough is missing from Morning Joe this morning (he called in to make the questionable point that 50% of the American people agree with Dick Cheney about torturing people, but he was not sitting in the chair when he did it). If, however, he had any concerns that his absence would leave a lack of people parroting right wing talking points or cheering on right wing apologists without any semblance of journalistic efforts to correct the record, he can now sleep easy.

The right wing apologist du jour this morning was Liz Cheney, and her primary task, when she's not spouting the same sort of slanders in which her father specialized, was carrying her father's water on the subject of torture. 

Apparently, it's bad form to question an interviewee on the batshit insanity of what she's saying if what she is saying is a defense of her father. Using this bit of unwritten protocol to its best advantage, Cheney made a whole host of unsupported assertions, and those assertions went completely unchallenged by two journalists (Adam Ross Sorkin and Mike Barnicle) and whatever it is that Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist call themselves. Sorkin and Barnicle were apparently there to demonstrate why the New York Times company is going broke (the times owns the Boston Globe, Barnicle's employer and fellow newspaper basket case), which they did in spades.

I can understand why it's uncomfortable to say to someone who is sitting in front of you that they're spouting nonsense, and I can certainly understand that it's difficult to challenge someone defending a parent of other family member without coming off as overbearing or combative, but if you can't do that in search of the truth in a story, you need to turn in your journalist's union card. It's just not an excuse on a news program to neglect to question a guest on what he or she says, particularly if it flies in the face of a great deal of other people's comments.

The bullshit was thick and furious, but the leading offense was the assertion, which Cheney made repeatedly, that those who want to see this stuff investigated are trying to criminalize a policy difference, and that bodes ill for the future of democracy. That argument is complete bullshit - the policy in question was a crime before Liz Cheney's daddy decided to implement it, a crime that we have prosecuted people for ourselves and condemned in others. 

And yet, nobody saw fit to mention that small point at all for most of Cheney's conversation on the show. In fairness, at the end of her considerable segment, the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson came on and at least challenged some of what she said, but Cheney interrupted him so many times that that point was buried.

You can't have it both ways, boys and girls. If you want to do a puff piece on the ex-VP's daughter, that's fine (if uninteresting), but if you're going to have her on to defend her father's policies, it's professional misconduct to fail to challenge that defense. If you can't issue such a challenge, you have the wrong guest on. If you don't know that, you're blind to the requirements of tour own profession, and if you do know it and do it anyway, you're not a journalist, you're a PR flack.

Update: It gets better. According to this piece on TPM, Cheney asked to stay longer than her allotted time, in order to get into an argument with Robinson, who wrote an unflattering assessment of her father in this morning's Post. Her intention was clearly to make it impossible for robinson to make his case clearly, and it worked, in no small part because Morning Joe's producers allowed (in fact, encouraged) it to happen.

Cap & Trade Getting Mugged by the Media (AGAIN!!!)

This story on HuffPo by Joseph Romm (one of our national political treasures) is a good reason to shout at your tv (and your newspaper, while you're at it). It gives a summary of a study by former Fortune and Time editor Eric Pooley at Harvard's Shorenstein Center, which found that the media had totally miscast the consensus position on the costs of cap & trade and other legislation aimed at addressing climate change, painting all efforts at working on the problem as being much more expensive than sober analysts agreed was the case.

The study discusses how this happened in the defeat of the Lieberman-Warner bill, but Romm's article points out that the exact same thing is happening again. This is the next step in the climate change denial industry program - now that there is clear consensus about the existence of anthropomorphic climate destabilization, misstate the costs of working on the problem to make it appear insoluble.

The media can't be allowed to be complicit in this distortion. If you write only one letter to the editor of your newspaper/magazine/TV/radio news organization, make it about this failure. Better yet, devote an evening to writing all of them. Our children's lives depend on it.

That's it!

Have a look at the new ad for the repeal of California's Prop. 8. Short and sweet, and very effective.