My fiancee and I went to see the Asylum Street Spankers last night with charming fellow blogger Charles Kuffner. He notes: "Turns out they live fairly close to me. Since Ginger is also my neighbor, I guess that means there's an Axis of Left-Leaning Bloggers here in the greater Heights area."

We had a great time, and afterwards I went back and his personal assistant showed us his Bentleys, his collection of Faberge eggs, and his ermine-lined sinks. Watch for it on the upcoming "MTV Cribs: Bloggers" episode.

Asylum Street Spankers' frontman Wammo has a personal blog that can be very interesting.

I haven't seen the show I’m discussing here, so feel free to disregard the following commentary as uninformed. You get what you pay for.

PBS has produced the first televised dramatic series about a Hispanic family, and predictably, somebody's pissed off about it. Ruben Navarrette Jr. has written a Washington Post editorial criticizing the series "American Family" for “too much salsa on the taco.”

“The plot laid it on thick: the shouting patriarch, the Mexican kids painting murals, the overuse of "Spanglish" (a blend of Spanish and English), etc. But it was a later episode that contained something really tough to stomach -- the obligatory raid by the INS.”

Whatever. If minority activists want to see themselves portrayed in the media, I think they ought to give the producers and programmers the friggin’ benefit of the doubt when they actually pony up the cash to portray them. I really doubt that the reactionary anti-Hispanic bigots at PBS were trying to humiliate Hispanics by showing a nightmare fantasy world in which some Hispanics speak Spanglish and ever have to deal with the INS. It sounds, instead, like they were trying to create something different than an ordinary drama which happened to have a Hispanic cast (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Instead, they tried to convey the fact that Hispanic culture isn’t exactly like white culture. I can’t tell you if they dropped into stereotypes, although I’ve never heard a bigot refer to Hispanics as a bunch of “no-good mural-painters”. And I don’t see why right-thinking people should be upset when television portrays an INS raid. I mean, they’re kinda sorta based on something that happens in real life, and I can only imagine that “American Family” showed the impact that they have on the Hispanics in question.

Navarette argues that, “Generations of hard work, sacrifice and perseverance by a people who put their trust in a remarkable country that can change a family's destiny have produced untold numbers of Mexican American surgeons and judges and Rhodes scholars who, strangely enough, might go their whole lives without being involved in an INS raid.”

Imagine if the first television series about Hispanics was a “Cosby Show” type of program about a family of wealthy Hispanic surgeons and judges. Someone would complain that this is a bizarre perspective to show of a community in which so many people are under the poverty line. They would probably call it a whitewash which ignores the socioeconomic reality of American Hispanics. The producers can’t win.

In my opinion, minority activists are generally on the side of the angels when they agitate for more visibility in the media. But when they get it, there will always be someone there to smack the media for their portrayal. For the most part, these don't matter. Nobody cares when some dumbass with a fax machine is offended that two of the villains on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are named Bebop and Rocksteady (true).

But they’re still out there, like a million mosquitoes, and they function as a powerful disincentive to producers who want to portray minority issues in TV or movies. (This is not the same as just casting minorities in roles where race is irrelevant; no one really complains about that.) If I were a producer, I'd have to wonder if it was worth the grief to deal with minority issues. I would have to go in knowing that I’d be rewarded with carping from the people I want to portray. Walking the tightrope between “they’re all acting white/ straight” and “they’re such a bunch of stereotypes” is just about impossible. Maybe I’d decide to just do another Friends knock-off.

A while ago, I got mad at Matt Drudge for his inane front page story, which tried to link the bankrupt Global Crossing to Terry McAuliffe, and therefore the Democratic party, without actually showing that he did anything wrong.

I'm glad to know that it's not just me:

"CHARLIE BLACK, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: I got to say, again at the risk of agreeing with you and Bob, that I see no evidence Terry McAuliffe did anything wrong. Maybe some evidence will come out. Terry's wrong on every public policy issue and he leads the wrong party, but I see nothing he did wrong.

BILL PRESS: Well, on public policy, you can disagree. Whether or not he did anything wrong is an interesting question, which I also posed to a gentleman who was sitting right where you're sitting less than two weeks ago, the new chairman of the Republican National Committee, Marc Racicot. Terry McAuliffe was sitting right here. And I asked Chairman Racicot if Terry McAuliffe had done anything wrong. I'd like you to listen to his response. Here he is, Mr. Chairman.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARC RACICOT, RNC CHAIRMAN: I know of absolutely nothing that he did wrong. You know, that's one of the things that causes me pause about our political affairs these days is that by insinuation or some kind of innuendo, just because you want to win on a given day, you suggest things that are not supported by the evidence or that you don't believe to be true."

I'm feeling singularly uninspired today, but I just came across an excellent blog to restore my faith. Welcome, Thomas Nephew's Newsrack, to the links list.

Whenever I watch the Olympics, it always occurs to me that the people I’m watching are among the top dozen people in the whole world at a certain task. I’ve lived a blessed life, but I’ll never, ever be able to say that. It turns out that anyone can buy one of those “World’s Greatest Grandson” t-shirts; there’s no application or anything.

I started to write a long post about the tragic beauty of teenage athletes, but I realized that every point I was making had been cribbed from David Foster Wallace’s wonderful essay on amateur tennis. Buy that and read it instead.

I recieved several thoughtful emails last night about Christianity and homosexuality, which I didn't have time to reply to. Thanks to those that wrote.

The Washington Times has printed a retraction, saying that Ken Lay did not stay at the Clinton White House.

"A story in yesterday's editions incorrectly reported that Enron Chairman Kenneth L. Lay as a campaign contributor stayed in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House during the Clinton years. The information was first reported by the Chicago Tribune, which acknowledged yesterday through a spokesman that it was incorrect, although the newspaper has not printed a retraction."

(Thanks to SpinSanity's Brendan Nyhan for letting me know about this.)

What is the Chicago Tribune waiting for, I wonder? How did Stephen Hedges, Jeff Zeleny or Frank James get the idea in the first place? And will this be the end of the story?

UPDATE: Sam Coppersmith writes:

"You should note one additional reason why the "Ken Lay spent the night in the Clinton White House" story was suspect. If it had been true, there would be some White House record of it, and if there were any White House records that could embarrass the Clinton Administration, the Bushies would have released them immediately. The lack of public documentation from the Bush White House supporting the claim was "the dog that didn't bark" in this whole story."

I hadn't thought of that, but he's right.

The last post on bias for at least a day...

Shamed pointed out that the media gave more favorable coverage to Bradley over Gore, and McCain over Bush. I would agree with this, but I would not agree that it's evidence of liberal bias. Where did all the liberal bias go after the primaries? The same biased reporters and editors were on the case, but Both Shamed and Eve admit that the press was very hard on Al Gore. Al Gore was a centrist Democrat, while Bush was a conservative Republican, but Bush consistently got the benefit of the doubt, while Gore consistently got clobbered. You can call it personality bias or record bias or whatever, but you sure can’t call it liberal bias.

So what’s to complain about? If the press swung to the right during presidential primaries, then swung to the left during the actual election, I’d have a big smile on my face. But that’s logically incoherent and extremely unlikely.

To the best of my memory, (I'm not going to get cites, either), critical articles on Gore in the mainstream press rarely, if ever, were leftist critiques that argued that he was a sell-out. Left-wing magazines would pick on him for supporting free trade or whatever, and right wing magazines and papers would pick on him for being a radical environmentalist who wanted to abolish the internal combustion engine. But mainstream coverage said that he was a big fat liar, and they stuck with that story.

*****************
Bias Bonus: the Daily Howler has a good time dissecting Rick Berke’s piece which began with the sentence, “The Enron Corporation quietly drew up a plan to cultivate close political ties to Vice President Al Gore during the 2000 presidential race and tried to build relationships with his inner circle even though the company was one of the biggest campaign contributors to George W. Bush and the Republicans.”

Says Sommersby:

“What does Berke have as his actual story? Enron gave more than $600,000 to Bush—and $14,000 to Gore. And along the way, it held one event in which it met with two Gore aides. Anyone with an ounce of sense would know what this meant—Enron massively favored Bush, as was, of course, their perfect right (and in no way implies misconduct by Bush). No sensible person would want to call this a "double-sided" approach to the hopefuls.”

****************
No word back from Stephen Hedges, Jeff Zeleny or Frank James.

Whoa, whoa, WHOA! Michael Kinsley doesn't know what he's talking about when he's talking about mammograms. He says, "The only reason for any individual woman not to have a mammogram is the actual financial cost, plus the cost in inconvenience and discomfort." That's absolutely wrong. The biggest reason not to have a mammogram is that it bathes breast tissue in radiation, which increases the risk of breast cancer. Radiation risk is cumulative over a lifetime, so yearly mammograms delivered to younger low-risk women cause more deaths than they prevent.

This web page has some statistics on the cumulative risk involved in yearly mammograms. I don't know if this is the most up-to-date data, but it should impress upon you that there is a clinical downside to mammograms.

- Getting a mammogram every year between the ages of 30-34 creates a 1 in 220 risk of a mammogram-induced breast cancer.

- Getting a mammogram every year between the ages of 35-49 creates a 1 in 190 risk of a mammogram-induced breast cancer.

- Getting a mammogram every year between the ages of 50-64 creates a 1 in 133 risk of a mammogram-induced breast cancer.

Does Kinsley think everyone is dumb and callous but him? The controversy is far from absurd. During most of their forties, for women in an average risk category, the risk of missing a fatal tumor that a mammogram would have detected is approximately equivalent to the additional cancer risk that the yearly mammogram procedure would create. After fifty or so, the statistics change, and yearly mammograms have a net benefit.

This is a genuinely dangerous article if it convinces women under forty to start getting yearly mammograms. I hope that the new editor doesn't put out garbage like this.

U.S. may pay ransom for hostages under new policy:

I’ve heard some bad ideas recently, but this is possibly the worst. If this had happened under President Gore, I can’t imagine the outrage for this appeasement policy. We must be insane to consider negotiating with terrorists in the middle of a war against terrorism. I want potential kidnappers to believe that if they kidnap an American citizen, they will receive:

(a) nothing,
(b) life imprisonment, or
(c) swift death.

We’ve just officially added a new potential outcome:

(d) fabulous cash and prizes.

To be fair, if I personally had a loved one who was kidnapped, I would do anything on earth to get them back, including paying the ransom. But the ultimate goal of a kidnapping policy is to have the fewest number of citizens killed by kidnappers, which means preventing them in the first place. They’ve just jacked up the upside of kidnapping, while keeping the downside about the same. Can we pay enough ransoms to safely recover all of the additional kidnapping victims this policy shift will encourage? It seems like a sucker bet to me.

(Thanks to Kyle Still for the link.)

Peter Beinart of the New Republic has a good piece on campaign finance reform. Here are my favorite parts:

"The first reason to doubt that congressional opponents of campaign finance reform are motivated by devotion to free speech is that they haven't shown themselves particularly devoted to it on other issues. McConnell has called campaign finance reform "the most aggressive attack on free speech since the Alien and Sedition acts" (there's that hyperbole again), but he backed the 1995 Communications Decency Act, which banned obscenity on the Internet (until the Supreme Court struck it down for violating the First Amendment). McConnell himself introduced the Pornography Victim's Compensation Act, a Catharine MacKinnon-esque bill that would have allowed the victims of sex crimes to sue the pornographers who had inspired their attackers. And he was the prime mover behind a 1999 amendment to prevent movies and TV shows that display "wanton and gratuitous violence" from using federal land or equipment.

When confronted with this contradiction, McConnell usually replies that porn and violent movies don't constitute political speech and, therefore, don't deserve as much First Amendment protection as do campaign donations. But McConnell also backed a 1995 effort to restrict the political activities of groups that receive federal grants. And while McConnell, to his credit, opposed a constitutional amendment to outlaw burning the flag, virtually every other prominent campaign finance reform opponent in Congress--Trent Lott, Don Nickles, Dick Armey, Tom DeLay--voted to throw free speech out the window....

The opponents of Shays-Meehan are even more certain that it violates free speech in another way: by barring independent groups like the National Rifle Association and the Sierra Club from running ads mentioning specific candidates in the months prior to an election. And perhaps if it really did, they'd have a point. But despite their endless assertions to the contrary, it doesn't. All the legislation requires is that organizations pay for such ads with hard money--that is, through a political action committee (PAC). There are no limits to how much a PAC can spend. It can buy all the ads it wants; it just can't raise more than $5,000 per person per year--which means that if an independent group wants major sway over an election, it needs a wide base of support. Wealthy individuals can still buy ads mentioning specific candidates as well. But whereas in the past they could keep their identities secret--so, for instance, no one knew if they had ties to that candidate's opponent--under Shays-Meehan they must disclose who they are within 24 hours. More disclosure is what reform opponents usually say they want. So why do they think a requirement that individuals buying campaign ads do so openly--and that organizations buying campaign ads raise their money in smaller increments--violates the First Amendment?"

Ethel the Blog has an aggressive take on Bush's budget priorities.

I can't resist this:

"Take the 80,000-ton Crusader howitzer cannon designed to defeat the tanks of the Soviet army in a conventional war in Central Europe. As a candidate, even George W. Bush made fun of the antiquated weapon as he campaigned on the principle of a leaner, more efficient military built for modern wars.

But perhaps nobody had told him that the Crusader is being built by a defense contractor called United Defense, owned by the Carlyle Group. Clinton, on the advice of the Pentagon, was set to bury the weapon as a Cold War artifact. Now Bush the younger has embraced it--and Carlyle suddenly found the confidence to take United Defense public after holding off for a decade.

No biggie. What's $11 billion for the Crusader in a defense budget designed to grow to $451 billion by 2007? Only a bleeding heart pinko pacifist would point out that $11 billion is what this "education" president is planning to spend on educating the nation's poor children under next year's Title I appropriation. But hey, child poverty is not the Carlyle Group's business."

Again, no one is complaining that military spending is going up. But the devil is in the details, and it's pretty hard to justify an 80,000 ton cannon as an anti-terrorism weapon. It will be a great day when conservatives give military spending the scrutiny they give the education department.

UPDATE: Jay Cornell points me to this link, showing that the Crusader is 38-41 tons. An aircraft carrier is about 97,000 tons, and the heaviest land vehicle, the crawler-transporter at Cape Kennedy, weighs a mere 2,721 metric tons. My ass has been fact-checked. I should note that this isn't the first time that I've seen the 80,000 ton figure in the press. It's not only the right that passes on memes without fact checking.

Blogs to the left and the right are picking on Michael Moore. I'm still mad at him for his blockheaded support of Ralph Nader, even in swing states. I wrote to him about it after the election, and he wrote back to say that he votes his hopes, not his fears. I heard that line from Nader supporters all the time in 1999, and I wonder if they realized how vacuous it was. Do they make other decisions by looking only at the potential upside, and ignoring the downside?

I've written a short two-man teleplay about it, which I present for your enjoyment.

ON THE WINGS OF HOPE, by Ted Barlow

(Camera pans onto the top of a tall building, where NADER VOTER is perched on the edge)

GORE VOTER: What the hell are you doing? Get back from there, you'll be killed!
NADER VOTER: No way, dude! It'll be a blast! Besides, I jump my hopes, not my fears!
(NADER VOTER jumps and falls to his death.)

THE END

Kevin's Ideas has taken me to task for something I wrote about Andrew Sullivan's irreconcilable struggle between Catholicism and homosexuality. I argued that Sullivan's struggle ought to be no more and no more less onerous than that of most modern Christians.

"He's talking about homosexuality, but in fact, almost every Christian lives in contradiction of their faith. The Bible clearly and unambiguously condemns homosexuality. Of course, it also condemns working on the Sabbath, leaving home during menses, adultery, borrowing or lending money, masturbation, etc., etc., etc. It has a fairly elaborate code for the treatment of slaves. Five minutes on Betty Bowers should convince you that the the Bible, literally applied, is not a terribly useful guide to life. It seems to me that homosexuality is no more of a contradiction with Christianity than using a credit card. Less, really; Jesus ignored homosexuality but really went after the money-lenders."

Kevin took exception to the sentence, "the the Bible, literally applied, is not a terribly useful guide to life."

"The vast majority of Christians do not read the bible as literal in the way Mr. Barlow implies. Is Mr. Barlow unaware of something called hermeneutics? This is the process whereby one can learn to read the bible intelligently and with some confidence of getting the meaning; most Christians practice it with out knowing it. What Mr. Barlow is seems to imply is that the Old Testament has all kinds of weird rules and requirements and since Christians don't obey those commands they are living in contradiction with their faith. This is silly. The fact of the matter is that most of the Old Testament describes a covenant between God and the Children of Israel. The dietary laws and legal codes were not meant for modern day believers but for the nation of Israel, who at the time was a theocracy... I will admit that Christians fail to live up to the ideals of their faith and it is likely that plenty of Christians struggle with the tension between their faith and their desires. But this has little to do with Old Testament rules and a great deal to do with the challenge of the Sermon on the Mount."

I'm clearly outgunned in a Biblical debate. So I'm entering into this in a spirit of inquiry, not argument, and I hope it's recieved in the same spirit.

I don't understand the logic by which certain Old Testament laws are judged to be applicable or inapplicable in modern life. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus clearly states that he is not there to overrule the Law, even in the smallest particular.

Matthew 5:17-19: 17"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19 Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven."

On the other hand, in Matthew 15:11, Jesus says, "What goes into a man's mouth does not make him 'unclean,' but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him 'unclean'". So there's some justification for not obeying the kosher food laws.

My real interest in this subject is not to assert that Christians should obey Old Testament laws, which would indeed be silly. I'm interested in defending homosexuality from religious condemnation. I don't understand the logic by which some Old Testament laws are judged to be relevant today, and some are judged to be relics of the old covenant with the people of Israel. Homosexuality is never mentioned by Jesus. It's not in the Ten Commandments. As far as I can tell, the Biblical justification for condemning homosexuality comes from an ambiguous story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and from the same set of rules that are commonly judged to be part of the old covenant. It seems to me that homosexuality is singled out by much of Christian theology, and I don't understand it.

I mentioned a Suck cartoon about Elizabeth Wurtzel yesterday. I found it!

There's a good one about Robert Bly in the same series. Man, I miss Suck.

John Cole over at Balloon Juice has a long post about the modern left. As you might imagine, I disagree with huge portions of it. But he finishes with this:

"Think about it... Who do you believe? Christopher Hitchens, Matt Welch, Ken Layne, Ted Barlow, and Matt Yglesias, or Tom Daschle, Hillary Clinton, Maureen Dowd, Jacob Weisberg, Ted Rall, Robert Fisk and the folks at Common Dreams?... We need a new face for the left. Period."

In all seriousness, I couldn't be more flattered by the company he put me in. Aww, John, how can I stay mad at you?

Eve Tushnet has chimed in on the media bias debate, so check it out. I'll try to reply tonight; I've been blogging too much at work.

No word yet from the Stephen Hedges, Jeff Zeleny, or Frank James at the Chicago Tribune.

Andrew Sullivan is firing on all cylinders today. He's got a great post about Scalia's "cafeteria catholicism", criticizing Scalia's statement that the Church is wrong on the death penalty and that Catholic anti-death penalty judges should resign.

"There's also something more than a little disturbing about Scalia's resuscitation of the view that Catholics somehow have dual loyalty in the conduct of public office - and it's no less disturbing because a Catholic is making the argument. The silence of the right on this is particularly stunning. Imagine if a pro-choice liberal had made such a statement about, say, abortion - that all Catholic pro-life judges should resign. National Review would be producing a special issue on the scandal. So where's the outrage about Scalia?"

I couldn't have said it better myself, unsurprisingly.

He's got a clear-headed post on Rosie O'Donnell coming out, a hilarious link to my book ("Ted Barlow" is just a pen name), and a reasonable counter-argument to critics of the Pentagon's plan to spread disinformation. (Incidentally, I agree with the critics, and think that Sullivan is playing dumb. No one in the world thinks that it's a sin to deceive the enemy about tactics. That isn't what critics are talking about, and he knows it. It's not enough to use the excuse of war to justify any lie the government wants to tell. If we learned anything in Vietnam, we should have learned that.)

Maybe he ought to go to the UK more often.

Shamed (we're starting to sound like dueling banjos, aren't we?) found that the original source for the allegation that Ken Lay stayed in the Clinton White House was a Chicago Tribune story on January 13 by Stephen Hedges, Jeff Zeleny and Frank James. I can't search the Tribune corrections, but Shamed can, so I assume that there is no correction to the January 13th article. Fair enough. I've written to these three journalists to ask where they got their information from. I'll let you know what, if anything, they say.

I should point out that Spinsanity's source was not Media Whores Online, which I would cheerfully admit is strongly slanted. They looked at publically available records, which don't show Lay, and called Clinton's office, who denied that he stayed there. By the normal standards of journalism, this would be enough to kill a story.

Ken Layne has a vicious take-down of the glib, dumb, vapid, embarassing Elizabeth Wurtzel.

There was a great cartoon in Suck a few years ago which had Wurtzel begging her mom to sleep with her so that she'd have something to write about. I wish I could find it.

Matthew Yglesias has an insightful post about what a waste of energy it is to bicker about whether the word "terrorism" is an appropriate term for a particular group that we don't like.

"Waging war for Islamic fundamentalism wouldn't be any more right if it was done by uniformed bomber pilots dropping explosives on our heads, and combating Osama bin Laden wouldn't be any less right if it were done by irregular partisan (or, say, the Northern Alliance).

Sometimes, of course, moral distinctions are hard to draw. The point, however, is that we can debate and decide on the morality or immorality of an action independently of whether or not we think it's terrorism, so why bother with the latter which is, after all, only a linguistic question."

Washington D.C. is getting the Tyson fight. How perfect. I'm semi-seriously thinking that it may be time to move the national capital back to Philadelphia so that the clowns who run D.C. don't embarass this country further.

I really wish that the boxing federation had seen fit to take away Tyson's boxing licence. Mike Tyson is the Ann Coulter of athletes, and the world doesn't owe him a platform. If you've got a high speed connection, you can watch the press conference where Tyson publically lost his mind here.

I think that Tyson was probably the first public figure to yell "I'll f**k you till you love me" at a member of the press; however, I would want to Google "Warren Beatty" before I stated that unequivically.

The Ironic Times is pretty funny. Here's a couple of good headlines:

Bush offers murderers tax incentives to voluntarily reduce killing

French-Canadians furious with themselves

Building evacuated again at Suspicious Package Expo

54% of Americans Now on Internet
.01% using mature content filters.

This just in:

KEN LAY DID NOT STAY IN THE CLINTON WHITE HOUSE
KEN LAY DID NOT STAY IN THE CLINTON WHITE HOUSE
KEN LAY DID NOT STAY IN THE CLINTON WHITE HOUSE

Anyone who says differently isn't spinning, they're lying. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard and Republican political strategist Alex Castellanos both made this entirely false claim on FOX News and CNN. They either don't know what they're talking about, or they're deliberately lying. In either case, they deserve a lengthy "time out" from the national discourse. Man, this pisses me off.

Shamed, are you listening? This is the kind of disgusting crap that conservatives get away with all the time. When it comes to high-ranking Democrats, no small number of them shoot first and ask questions later.

UPDATE: You can find Fred Barnes's apology here.

Oh, wait, my mistake. There is no apology anywhere. In fact, this sentence can still be read on the Weekly Standard's web page: "And Clinton, it turns out, not only played golf with Ken Lay, the Enron chief, and hosted him overnight in the Lincoln Bedroom but also helped Enron win foreign contracts."

Liar, liar, liar.

It’s probably worth mentioning that during the work day, I don’t check personal emails. So if you’ve sent me something, I’m not necessarily ignoring it, I’m just not going to see it until tonight. Now you know.

I've just gone through Mickey Kaus's most recent posts. I've heard him described as a leftie or a neoliberal, but I just don't see it. Here are the subjects he's taken on in his most recent posts, in reverse chronological order:

-Attacks campaign finance reform
-Attacks the Washington Post, with a cheap shot at Gore and Dukakis
-Attacks campaign finance reform
-Attacks critics of Pickering's nomination
-Defends Giuliani's workfare policies
-Praises columnist Jill Stewart
-Defends anti-bilingual education Prop 227
-Attacks Robert Reich
-Jokes about Bush's good bad taste
-Attacks campaign finance reform
-Jokes about former Clinton aide Gene Sperling
-Praises Brian Linse's post about left-wing bloggers
-Praises Jill Stewart
-Links to story about plight of beltway Republicans in Bush administration
-Defends suburbs
-Skips Woodward's series about Bush
-Defends Robert Rubin
-Attacks Robert Reich
-Attacks Citigroup and the dumbasses who would buy Enron bonds from them
-Mentions new blogs
-Links to, and praises, John Ellis's blog (Bush's cousin, who called the election for him on Fox)
-Attacks Edward Kennedy
-Attacks David Brock for attacking Barbara Olsen
-Says Mitch Daniels accidentally told the truth when he criticized NY for its "little money-grubbing game"
-Links to story about Dick Armey's problem with AmeriCorps
-"Is Michael Cimino a woman?"
-Says "Axis of Evil" is a great band name
-Links to conservative American Prowler
-Links criticizing the NYT "Enron tainted the Republicans" poll
-Says Bush was right to suppress the Osama Bin Ladin videotape

and so on.

Kaus clearly isn't getting himself onto any White House enemies list anytime soon. Except where he defends Robert Rubin, he's consistently taken the conservative side of every fight he's picked lately. Why don't we call a spade a spade and admit that the guy's a neo-conservative? [Not that there's anything wrong with that--ed. Well, it's not my... wait, I don't have an editor. How did you get in here? Get back!]

A while ago, Glenn Reynolds set up a store to sell mugs and stuff that say, "It will be a great day when our public schools educate our children as well as the Pentagon trains our soldiers." True enough; we have fantastically trained soldiers, capable of extraordinary feats. Even if public schools had a self-selecting adult student body, 24-hour control of their students, and a strictly limited curriculum (let alone parity in funding), there's no telling if they could do nearly as well.

But let's not let the military off too easily. How about this for a counter-slogan: "It will be a great day when the Pentagon tests its weapons as well as the worst schools test their students." This Washington Monthly article details the way that the Navy changed the way they test weapons to make sure that they would work in combat. In contrast, the Air Force and the Army continue to blow untold billions, and cost some soldiers their lives, by failing to expose their weapons to realistic testing during the development process.

Here are some exerpts from the article:

"Unfortunately, one of these (Predator unmanned planes) crashed. Then another. The Pentagon blamed bad weather---even though bad weather is precisely what the craft was designed to fly through. In October, the Pentagon's central testing office reported that "the Predator cannot be operated in less than ideal weather, including rain. Furthermore, the system is unable to provide reliable, effective communications through the aircraft, as required." The classified report, obtained by the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, concluded that "the cumulative effect of the system's limitations render the Predator operationally ineffective... In early November, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged that they couldn't withstand an Afghan winter, although designed to do so. So Rumsfeld ordered the deployment of the Global Hawk, an even newer unmanned craft still under development, to do the job the Predator cannot..."

"The problem is endemic. According to the Pentagon's testing office, "in recent years, 66 percent of Air Force programs had to stop operational testing due to some major system or safety shortcoming." The Army fared even worse, as approximately 80 percent of its systems tested "failed to achieve half their operational reliability requirements." By comparison, in the past few years, 90 percent of the Navy's weapons passed operational testing, according to Philip E. Coyle, former chief of the Pentagon's central testing office..."

"(The B-2 stealth bombers) weren't designed to fly for two days straight, and the main reason that they had to was because of poor testing. The Air Force did extensive tests on the B-2, showing that it met all its specifications; it flew at the right speed, evaded radar, etc. But once in production, B-2s began returning from training missions with pockmarked "skin" (the stuff that makes them stealthy). Engineers discovered that rain damaged the B-2s. Testers had never thought to fly the plane through bad weather. The Air Force tried to fix the problem. But the planes were already built, and replacing the skin wasn't feasible. So instead, the Air Force repairs the fragile skin each time the B-2 is exposed to moisture, and houses the planes in special dehumidified hangers, which only exist at the base in Missouri. "We can't have ripples or bumps or anything like that," says an Air Force spokesperson. "We need to make sure the skin is flawless." That requires an enormous amount of maintenance. For each hour the plane spends aloft, the Air Force says the B-2 undergoes 45 man-hours of servicing on the ground. As a result, according to the Pentagon's testing office, only 33 percent of B-2s are capable of flying missions at any one time, a fact that led the office to conclude that the B-2 "did not meet user requirements for sustained operations." Indeed, in the first month of the bombing campaign in Afghanistan, B-2s flew just six missions. Navy planes, meanwhile, have flown more than 1,500..."

"Even the Navy's failures suggest the importance of its new testing regime. One of the most infamous weapons snafus in recent memory is the Osprey, a plane-cum-helicopter contraption built for ferrying Marines and other special forces into and out of the kind of rough terrain which we're now encountering in Afghanistan. (See sidebar below). The Navy helped develop the Osprey, but the craft was tested by a Marine unit (the same unit, incidentally, that maintains Marine One, the Presidential helicopter). The Osprey has crashed four times during test-flights, killing 30 Marines. It's now grounded. Had it gone through the Navy's testing system, the Osprey might be available to commanders in the field right now. Instead, every one of those built sits in hangars stateside."

I wish that the Navy was in charge of missile defense. That program has been the beneficiary of more social promotion than a Duke varsity basketball player.

Remember this as Bush backs the money truck up to the Pentagon. The military performs an utterly essential service to the nation, but they can be absurdly, comically wasteful with both money and lives. Unlike civilian bureaucracies, they can conceal their wastefulness under the aegis of national security.

Andrew Sullivan has a great, appropriately outraged post about Ralph Reed's shameless political prostitution for Enron. "For a $380,000 fee, the conservative political strategist proposed a broad lobbying strategy that included using major campaign contributors, conservative talk shows and nonprofits to press Congress for favorable legislation. Reed said he could place letters from community leaders in the opinion pages of major newspapers, producing clips that Reed would "blast fax" to Capitol Hill." Ralph, what would Jesus do?

Sullivan even goes so far as to acknowledge that this was an ethical problem that the Bush campaign should be held responsible for. He writes, "Almost as worrying is that Karl Rove clearly helped Reed get this lucrative position. He must surely have known that Reed would be paid substantially; and that, unlike others, he'd be expected to deliver. So indirectly, the Bush campaign was oiling the wheels for a massively corrupt corporation for strategic political reasons." I'd say that they were directly doing it, but I'm quibbling.

Sullivan is an interesting guy- he's clearly capable of telling right from wrong. While I disagree with him on many issues, a good deal of his commentary is valuable, insightful, and very well written. When he can manage to keep the word "Clinton" or "Gore" out of his posts, they're well worth reading.

(By the way, doesn't Reed seem like he's selling access to some kind of largish right-wing conspiracy here?)

Reader Ronaldo Carpio writes:

"I think you are right that the media does not generally show a liberal bias when you look at Gore-coverage vs. Bush-coverage, or Democrats vs. Republicans. But I also think it is undeniable that when it comes to coverage of specific issues, such as affirmative action, immigration, diversity, etc. there is a definite slant in which types of opinions are presented as "mainstream". A recent book that came out that explores this in depth is Coloring the News by William McGowan (he has a site at www.coloringthenews.com); it is far superior to the shallow Bias."

I'd have a hard time arguing with some version of that. I'll have to check out "Coloring the News."

I noticed Paul Orwin's site for the first time today, and I'm delighted to see a smart leftie spending too much time on his blog. He's in my links now.

He's in the middle of an argument with Ben Kepple about Horowitz's poll about the liberalism of college professors. Kepple is willing to concede that he don't know nuttin 'bout no sample sizes; he knows that professors are liberal based on his own experience and the "mountain of anecdotal evidence."

Orwin says this: "This sentence encapsulates everything that is wrong with this debate. There is no such thing as a mountain of anecdotal evidence! It is a meaningless statement. How many stories make up a "mountain"? Are all of these professors more liberal than Mr. Kepple (not too tough), or more liberal than the average joe? Do they fit in when the overall population is adjusted for education? Income? Any other of a hundred factors?"

This is exactly what I was trying to say in my long-winded media bias post. Measuring bias in a big, floppy institution like the media is extremely hard, probably impossible. I can spend all day flogging right-wing quotes and personalities, and others can point to a ton of left-wing quotes and personalities. All we end up with are battling "mountains of anecdotal evidence." There ain't no good guys, there ain't no bad guys, there's just you and me, and we just disagree.

--------------

On the other hand, I completely agree with Ben Kepple that it's nuts to expect credit for telling Glenn Reynolds (or whoever) about a story that you didn't write.

"Now this is the way I see it. If I come up with some sort of swell insight into Enron or something, and someone likes it, they should link to it. If I post the latest revelation from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, I want people to read it, and linking is definitely optional. If I tell people about it via e-mail, it's my way of doing them a favor: that's it. Maybe it will get that person to read The Rant, maybe not. But I would like to think my commentary can stand on its own two feet without groveling for links."

Sounds good to me.

Mac Thomason has a great little riff on the Alabama legislature's attempt to display the Ten Commandments in public schools.

"They say it's because the Commandments are a source of our laws. Well, let's see...

I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other Gods before Me.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Yep, you can sure see the parallels."

"I admit it -- the liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures."
William Kristol, as reported by the New Yorker, 5/22/95

Shamed believes in the liberal media, and he can’t believe that I don’t see it. He admits that the press was biased against Gore, but does not concede that this was a de facto bias in favor of Bush. I find that a little puzzling. I doubt that he would extend the same benefit of the doubt to the press if it was his candidate getting unfairly trashed. I can’t see him saying that the press was biased against Dole, while in no way being pro-Clinton. But no matter.

Here’s my take on “liberal” media bias, unoriginal as it may be: The media is a huge, amorphous beast, pumping out far more content than any human being can take in. It’s full of bias, to the left and the right, and there’s so much of it that cherry-picking is easy and fun. We all do it, but I wouldn’t try to point to (say) Howard Fineman’s tongue-baths of Bush, declare “conservative media”, and expect to be taken seriously. He’s got on red-colored glasses, and I’ve got on blue-colored glasses, and a fair judge shouldn’t really trust either one of us as an impartial judge of bias.

However, conservatives have made the “liberal media” part of the party line, and they are deliberate and aggressive at picking out left-wing bias. There is no proportional pressure from the left to avoid right-wing bias. It seems to me that when editors constantly have to watch their left, they inexorably move to the right. I’m reminded of an (unlinkable, sorry) editorial in the Houston Chronicle. The editor wrote a column addressing allegations of bias in the editorial page, which he vehemently denied. He said that they often got charges of liberal bias, but it wasn’t true. As evidence, he asserted that the Chronicle hadn’t endorsed a Democratic presidential candidate since Johnson. Case closed. The obvious counter-argument, that this implies a conservative bias, seemed to never occur to him.

Looking at the press in the aggregate, bias is a little easier to see. And it sure ain’t left-wing.

According to this page, 138 papers endorsed Bush, while 52 endorsed Gore. What kind of liberal media endorses the conservative candidate 70% of the time?

Did you see the study that FAIR did about the choice of guests on Fox News and the bad ol’ Clinton News Network last summer? It turns out that “left-wing” CNN talked to 57% Republicans on Wolf Blitzer Reports, while Fox talked to 89% Republicans on Special Report with Brit Hume. What would be the appropriate, non-slanted proportional representation of elected officials? 75% Republican?

I’m not the first to shake my head at charges of “liberal bias” after the press spent years tearing down Clinton. Al Franken once said something like, “I guess CNN is liberally biased because it only spends 23 ½ hours a day covering Monica Lewinsky.” I have to wonder about a liberal media that would breathlessly cover the Bush White House story about the Clinton team’s trashing of the White House, without a single photo or on-the-record quote. When they had to admit that the vandalism story was a fabrication, that story got printed deep inside. When it came to Clinton and especially Gore scandals, this happened over and over and over again. The right just threw pile after pile of crap at them, without worrying about whether it was true or not, and right wing pundits kept citing “scandals” that had long since been discredited. How many times did you see some dumbass pundit use non-stories like “Love Canal” or “Love Story” to prove that Gore was a Big Fat Liar? (In the case of the "Love Canal" story, the liberal media went so far as to change Gore's quote, from "That was the one that started it all," to "I was the one who started it all.") How many times did you hear Clinton called a "draft-dodger"? How many times did you hear it reported that Bush actually went AWOL in 1972-1973, skipping 18 months of his National Service duty? If you're being fair, I think you'll admit the answers are "a lot" and "not very often". Does anyone remember when the New York Times printed the "Clinton's black baby" story, based on an entirely false story in the Drudge Report? Are we reading the same media?

"Based on its recent direct-mail campaign, one of the [Leadership Institute's] primary fund- raising strategies is to convince conservative donors that its graduates can neutralize what it regards as left-leaning news media.

"Liberal media bias is out of control," said the letter, which was mailed over [Rep. J.C.] Watts's signature, but which [the institute's founder and president] Mr. Blackwell said was written at the institute. "It's indecent. It's time you and I did something about it."

When asked for examples of how bias by news organizations was undermining the presidency of George W. Bush, Mr. Blackwell complained about what he described as excessive press attention paid to Mr. Bush's critics, like Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona.

An alumna of the institute, who was recommended by Mr. Blackwell, found it difficult to cite cases of "out of control" liberal bias in recent news coverage.
"I have been in local TV newsrooms in Phoenix, Seattle and Pittsburgh, and I don't think there is bias, either liberal or conservative," said the alumna, Tallee Whitehorn, 27, an assistant news director at WTAE- TV, an ABC affiliate in Pittsburgh. "This is not really a place for it, unless I wanted to get a lot of hate mail, which I don't."

The young people in Mr. Montini's class were also hard-pressed to come up with examples of the news- media bias mentioned in Mr. Watts's fund-raising letter.
Mr. Tietz said he had been sensitized to such matters in recent months by reading conservative books, including Whitaker Chambers's "Witness." That book, Mr. Tietz said, "explains the deep-down meanness of the left."

But as for seeing that meanness in coverage of President Bush, Mr. Tietz said, "Honestly, I haven't noticed it one way or another."
from a June 11, 2001 New York Times article on the Leadership Institute (a training camp for conservative journalists) titled "In Virginia, Young Conservatives Learn How to Develop and Use Their Political Voices"

Shamed also asks if I can find an example of disgusting rhetoric from conservatives, like the shameful quote he cites where somebody wishes for the death of Clarence Thomas. Shamed, I’ve got a day job, but I could pull quotes all day.

I immediately thought of Jesse Helms declaration that his Commander-in-Chief needed a bodyguard to visit his state. I also thought of John Derbyshire, when he all but called for the death of Chelsea Clinton, who isn't even a politician.

“Chelsea is a Clinton. She bears the taint; and though not prosecutable in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot be ignored. All the great despotisms of the past — I'm not arguing for despotism as a principle, but they sure knew how to deal with potential trouble — recognized that the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin's penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an "enemy of the people". The Nazis used the same principle, which they called Sippenhaft, "clan liability". In Imperial China, enemies of the state were punished "to the ninth degree": that is, everyone in the offender's own generation would be killed, and everyone related via four generations up, to the great-great-grandparents, and four generations down, to the great-great-grandchildren, would also be killed.”

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that Derbyshire was disciplined in any way for this. He continues to write for the premiere journal of conservative opinion.

Can I use Ann Coulter as an example? She want to kill me, just as a precaution:

"They should take a few liberals out and shoot them in order to intimidate all the other liberals, because if you don’t intimidate them, they’ll turn traitor."

Here’s the incomparable bipartisan BS detector SpinSanity on Ann Coulter:

“At the basic level, her columns often open with inflammatory attacks like calling Ted Kennedy an "adulterous drunk" (1/18) and joking that President Clinton had "crack pipes on the White House Christmas tree" …

Most name-calling, however, is directed at Clinton, who is mentioned in 17 of her 28 columns (that's 61% - I'll omit a links list). Coulter calls him, among other things, a "celebrated felon" (3/29), a "known" felon (5/24), a "pervert, liar and a felon" (6/21), a "criminal" (1/11), "a flim-flam artist" (1/11) and a "prominent" criminal (3/29). More extended cheap shots include a "Thai sex tour" joke (4/12), a reference to a Thai "sex emporium" named after him (2/19)…

Here's one example from a column on the controversy over Ted Olson's nomination to be Solicitor General: "Liberals are always wrapping their comically irrelevant charges in a haze of lies..." (5/24) Or consider this dark statement in the context of a discussion about Jesse Jackson's affair: "Liberals always get a lot of credit for suffering, while never actually being made to suffer." (1/25)

Coulter's world is cartoonish. Liberals are "terrorists" (1/11) and a "cult" (2/22) who "can never just make a principled argument" (3/22). Their arguments are portrayed as hysterical (2/9, 4/5, 6/15), screaming (1/18, 6/21) or starting political World War III (2/9, 3/8). Meanwhile, as Coulter depicts it, conservatives are being persecuted ceaselessly. For example, when The New York Times urged Bush to "crack down" on anti-abortion activists who threaten doctors, she wrote this: "[i]n their darkest fantasies, this is what liberals claim McCarthyism was." (4/19)”

"Throughout 2000, with less pretense of objectivity than ever, [Tim] Russert dutifully echoed the Republican theme that the Democratic nominee was “dishonest”. Week after week, the topic on Meet The Press was the “repeated lying” of Al Gore. One lowlight of Russert’s descent into shameless propagandist occurred when it was revealed that George W. Bush had been convicted of drunk driving in Maine, thereby proving that the Republican candidate had been deceitful when he was questioned about whether he had ever been arrested.

Russert’s immediate response on national television was, “The question on everybody’s mind is, ‘Did the Gore campaign have something to do with the release of this information?’” That was not the question on everybody’s mind; a poll taken immediately after the revelation showed that most Americans did not believe that Gore was involved.

It was, however, the question being faxed nationally by the Republicans in a memo circulated to their operatives who were responsible for diverting attention from the fact that their candidate was guilty of, for want of a better term, “repeated lying”.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Russert established a link between Meet The Press and the G.O.P. opposition research team that was responsible for digging up dirt/manufacturing dirt on Al Gore. On election night, after conferring with Welch, Russert demanded that Gore quit the race before the legally mandated recount took place in Florida. The next morning, on the Today Show, he repeated the demand."

David Podvin article on Tim Russert

Am I cherry-picking? Sure I am. But I want to make the point that just because you didn't like something you saw in the New York Times, that doesn't prove a "liberal media."

UPDATE: I should have cited this page, from which I got the long italicized quotes. I also just re-read it and noticed this little fair-and-balanced fact:"FAIR has documented that conservative or right-leaning "think" tanks (like Heritage, Cato, RAND or our favourite, the "Family Research" council) received more than 50% of media citations in 1998 and 1999, while left-wing and progressive think tanks overally received less than 13%." They also had a link to this study, an examination of coverage of Election 2000. In their coverage, the most common theme in Gore's coverage was "scandal-tainted", and the most common theme in Bush's coverage ws "a different kind fo Republican."

If anyone decides to take this argument further, they're probably going to cite the study that showed that 89% of reporters voted for Clinton in 1992. Check out this link, which contains a serious critique of the methodology of that study. They only got back 139 surveys out of 323 sent out, skipped conservative journals, and skewed heavily toward tiny regional newspapers.