I'm so happy about Aaron McGruder's success. He's writing funny strips criticizing Bush, when almost no one else would do it. He's got a circulation of 20 million a day. He had a few newspapers cancel the strip (including my local paper, the Houston Chronicle), but in general, he says that the attention he's gotten has been good for him.

Most importantly, he's never played victim or cried censorship. I remember an interview in which he said that newspapers who pulled his strip were making a business decision, which they had the right to do. That's exactly right. Reflexive cries of victimization are too common in liberal activists, and in my experience, the average Joe finds them very unattractive.

Whoops! Cheney was collecting debts for Enron! Great scoop, Daily News; no wonder Ashcroft wants to choke the Freedom of Information Act!

Media Whores Online makes a legitimate point about Enron, as far as I can see.

"On October 29, Evans received a phone call from Enron CEO Ken Lay, informing him that Enron was on the ropes. Earlier, Lay had imparted the same information to O'Neill.

Yet two days after the call to O'Neill, the White House sent Ari Fleischer out to tell the press that the President and Vice President supported legislation that would hand the troubled Enron $254 million in taxpayers' money...

The economic stimulus bill passed the House in a sharply partisan vote. Had it passed the Senate, Enron would now be picking up its $254 million check of taxpayers' money. Imagine how embarrassing and hurtful that would have been!"

If we know that the White House had inside information about Enron's deep troubles by late October and November, what was it doing pushing the House stimulus bill which was going to write a check for $254 million to Enron? How is this not a bailout? And how is it in the taxpayers interest to knowingly funnel $254 million tax dollars into a money hole?

Old Modern Humorist piece in which literary celebrities write fan letters to Britney Spears. The Camile Paglia one is priceless- it begins "Ride young Valkyrie! Ride!" and ends with "P.S. My partner Alison agrees with everything I say about you." This kind of thing is one of the many reasons why I love the internet.

This is a little dated, but I just started the log yesterday...

Andrew Sullivan wrote a few weeks ago about George Bush's environmentally friendly ranch, and asked why he wasn't getting credit for it. He asked if Al Gore was president and had a similar ranch, wouldn't it be seen as an exemplar of his environmentally friendly ways? Therefore, why wasn't Bush getting credit for being green because of his ranch? He concluded that it must be because Bush doesn't use his personal life for political gain.

By a freak chance, I've recently been able to log onto Bizarro Andrew Sullivan's web page, where Gore is president and has an environmentally friendly ranch. Like Bush, he bought the ranch during the campaign and finished it in the spring of 2001. Enjoy!

PHONY, PART XXIV: Nothing exemplifies the sheer phoniness of Al Gore better than his “ranch” in Tennessee. You may have seen the New York Times fawning over it and its environmentally friendly features- “The house is environmentally correct, with a passive solar design, geothermal cooling and heating, a cistern to catch rainwater and purification tanks and filters so that water from the house can be recycled for use in irrigation”. What it doesn’t mention, as the Wall Street Journal revealed in February, June, and August, is that this ranch that he ostentatiously calls “home” was purchased in 1999, during the middle of the campaign. It wasn’t completed until this spring, and he’s never lived there in his life. A child could see that his futuristic ranch is pure political theater, complete with a laughable hound dog used as a prop during his recent press conference. (Who cares where the electricity comes from, when he only spends a week there a year? Did he invent the solar panel, too?) But then, we shouldn’t be surprised when Gore grossly exploits his private life for political gain. He learned at the feet of the master.

Slate casually dismisses the movie "Magnolia" here. I think that "Magnolia" got a lot less credit than it deserved; I'm with my friend Colonel T on this one. It was a little baggy as a whole, but the scenes worked so well, and the characters were vivid and touching, and the acting, and... I usually cite "Boogie Nights" as my favorite movie, so I've got a lot of love for P.T. Anderson. I can't wait to see what he does next.

If you've never been to see the Daily Howler, do yourself a favor and check it out. The top story right now is a dissection of Bernie Goldberg's "Bias". Bob Somersby actually takes the time to look up the stories that Goldberg cites and finds how slippery they are. My favorite: when he looks up a story that Goldberg cites as feminist and male-bashing, it turns out to be about insects.

To paraphrase Beavis, "This guy isn't, like, trying hard enough."

I suspect that honest people (e.g., Andrew Sullivan, not Paul Gigot) know that a left-leaning writer could use the same anecdotal approach, cherry-pick 10 years worth of right-leaning stories, and write a similar crappy book about how the media is biased to the right. (For example, they could look at this list of major newspaper endorsements and find that Bush was endorsed 69% of the time. Or they could watch campaign coverage of Gore, the big liar, and compare it to Bush, a different kind of Republican.) In the end, all they would find is that bias is very, very hard to define, and these arguments never win anyone over. Like most arguments, unfortunately.

Did you know that John Ashcroft has issued a memo urging federal agencies not to comply with citizen requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act? It happened on October 12, and it certainly slipped under my radar at the time. I haven’t seen any other major media pick this story up, and I’ve been looking.

Here's a quote from the article:
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So, rather than asking federal officials to pay special attention when the public's right to know might collide with the government's need to safeguard our security, Ashcroft instead asked them to consider whether "institutional, commercial and personal privacy interests could be implicated by disclosure of the information." Even more disturbing, he wrote:
"When you carefully consider FOIA requests and decide to withhold records, in whole or in part, you can be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions unless they lack a sound legal basis or present an unwarranted risk of adverse impact on the ability of other agencies to protect other important records."
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Excuse me? They can reject FOIA requests if "commercial" interests could be implicated? If "institutional" or "personal privacy" interests are involved? What does that leave, lunch menus?

This has nothing to do with fighting terrorists. This is a completely inappropriate blow against open, accountable government, and I don't think it's gotten the attention it deserves. When I lived in the UK, I would always bring up the Freedom of Information Act as an example of the strengths of the American government. And now it's being gutted, for no adequate reason at all. The FOIA is a right that we're giving up much, much too easily. I think that this is a subject that left and right can agree on.

According to the USA Today, one of the Al-Qaeda prisoners in Guantanamo Bay was crying last night. Now that's something I'd like to see broadcast.

For a fun bit of Tomorrowland-style science fiction, check out last year's government webpage for Bush's 2002 budget before they change it.

Hmm, it says here that Bush's budget is "balanced for 10 consecutive years". It also says that it "allocates (the) projected $5.6 trillion surplus over 10 years" and "achieves historic levels of debt reduction." Oh, and look- it "saves all of Social Security surplus ($2.6 trillion) for Social Security."

History has not been kind to his promises, has it?

Glenn Reynolds put up this piece from the Progressive a few days ago. Most of it, I'll agree, is marked by a palpable wish to be victimized. I can't pretend that I would like to be visited by the Secret Service, but it's not exactly New McCarthyism if all they do is ask some questions.

However, in the middle of the piece is something genuinely disturbing:

"You are no longer free to patronize a bookstore without fear of government scrutiny. On November 1, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) sent a disturbing letter to its members.

"Dear Bookseller," it begins. "Last week, President Bush signed into law an antiterrorism bill that gives the federal government expanded authority to search your business records, including the titles of the books purchased by your customers. . . . There is no opportunity for you or your lawyer to object in court. You cannot object publicly, either. The new law includes a gag order that prevents you from disclosing 'to any person' the fact that you have received an order to produce documents."

The letter recommends that booksellers who get hit with such an order should call their attorney or the foundation, but "because of the gag order . . . you should not tell ABFFE that you have received a court order. . . . You can simply tell us that you need to contact ABFFE's legal counsel.""

Okay, so the government can check what books you're buying. (This is now the government's business; not like, say, gun purchases or something) And they've gagged booksellers and prevented them from even mentioning this law, even to obtain counsel. You probably haven't seen any letters to the editor about this, because, after all, they would be illegal.

This is genuinely offensive. I can't believe that the libertarians out there are taking this lying down.

I'll start with Enron: I think that this week's New Republic hit the most important issue about this story right on the head, and I hope that people read it. The real scandal here is not what was illegal, but what was legal. Enron didn't pay any taxes for four out of the last five years- legally. Enron operated in a regulatory black hole which it bought and paid for, legally. It was "audited" by the same company that it paid millions in consultancy fees- legal. (Did you see that Enron actually fired Arthur Anderson today? Satire has become impossible.) It kept billions in debts off the books, legally. It prevented its employees from selling their stock legally. Enron bought extensive access to the Bush administration and wrote huge portions of the energy bill, all legally.

The point of this scandal should not be to bust some Cabinet member for taking a call in October. The point should be to change to laws so this can't happen again; despite what Paul O'Neil says, massive fraud, legally executed, is not an exemplar of the genius of capitalism. It's been said of Standard Oil that it didn't break any laws, but a lot of laws were written because of it. Maybe that will be the tombstone of Enron as well. It should inspire more transparency, fewer off-shore tax loopholes, less room for creative off-balance-sheet accounting, etc.

Corporations are not evil. However, they are only as honest as we let them be, and we're naive to expect anything different. The Deregulation Express let Enron and Anderson be pretty damn dishonest, and they destroyed $90 billion in shareholder value. It would be a shame if nothing changed as a result.

(conflict of interest note: I lost my job with Enron when it collapsed. I worked in London for Enron for six months, and was coming back the Houston to take a new job when Enron went to company heaven. I'm doing fine.)