Via Byrd's Brain: A little flash game called Flyguy. Fly in any direction and explore the world. I love the internet.

Go read Nathan Newman.

On Christmas Eve (nicely dumping the story per Bush practice on a night to bury the story), the Bush administration announced that the Bureau of Labor Statistics no longer thought it worth the effort to keep track of mass layoffs across the country. Yes, the fact that 2150 employers in November laid off 240,000 employees is not considered relevant information for policymakers across the country... Take the focus off the mass layoffs by eliminating the monthly reports, so reporters don't get a story. The Bush administration doesn't have a plan to deal with mass layoffs, other than to now pretend they don't exist.

It actually gets worse. They've reduced funding for the displaced worker program by $177.5 million, and are now blaming their own defunding for the need to stop reporting on mass layoffs. You see, sometimes honest economics, displaced workers, and the promises inherent in welfare reform have to be sacrificed in the tight, tight budgets that naturally accompany a 22% increase in government spending between 1999 and 2003.

Incidentally, all these funds and more could be recovered if American companies were not able to nominally move to foreign tax havens to avoid paying taxes. So you'll be pleased to hear about the way that Republican legislators are cracking down on these unpatriotic companies. Here's a stern message to corporate freeloaders who enjoy the protection and freedoms of the United States without paying their share: This way to the government trough!

Before the election, both parties vowed to deny government contracts to companies that acquired an offshore address, a tactic that both Republicans and Democrats denounced as unpatriotic. But after the election, the Republicans reversed course. Republican legislation creating the Homeland Security Department allows such companies to win government contracts if the work is done by an American subsidiary.

The Bush Administration is studying ways to cut corporate taxes further. The Treasury is looking at big ideas, Kenneth Dam, deputy secretary of the Treasury, said at a dinner last week as reported in Tax Notes.

"Corporate tax rate reduction is a big idea," the publication quoted him saying.

Priorities, people. Priorities.

UPDATE: Sam Heldman has more:

There would, by the way, be an easy way that the DOL could continue to provide information that was not as good but still worth something, and to do so very cheaply. Employers who have mass layoffs or plant closings are required by federal statute to give notice to their State governments; and the feds could very inexpensively collect and publish the aggregate data from the notices given to the States by law-abiding employers. Again, this would not be perfect, but it would help. How far from perfect would this cheap alternative be? Hey, that's an interesting question in itself -- if we compared the DOL's independently-obtained data against the list of those employers who gave the statutorily-required notice, what would we find to be the rate of law-abidingness among employers who had the statutory duty to provide this notice? Fascinating question to which I have absolutely no answer, and don't expect to get one from the Administration. They just don't want to get into such things. The economy is fine -- now move along.

Flashback Friday (well, why not)

You may or may not remember the story from a few years ago; Greenbrier High School in Evans, Georgia had sponsored a "Coke in Education Day" in order to win $500 from the Coca-Cola company. One kid wore a Pepsi shirt to school to protest and was suspended.

The sadly-defunct web page Fade to Black saw this as a great opportunity. They wrote the following letter to the principal:

Greenbrier High School
5114 Riverwood Parkway
Evans, GA 30809
Attn: Gloria Hamilton

Dear: Gloria

My name is Michael Page and I am an editor of a magazine called "Fade to Black". It has come to my attention the great amount of publicity received after your suspension of Mr. Michael Cameron for wearing a Pepsi T-shirt during your school sponsored Coca-Cola schmooze day. Our magazine would be interested in donating money to your school in exchange for some public relations as well. We understand that Coca-Cola offered you a chance to win $500 for a picture of your students lined up to spell our the word "Coke", our magazine would like to offer your school the following options for a similar picture:

- We will pay you $250 (two hundred and fifty dollars) to spell out the words "www.fadetoblack.com" with at least 100 students.

- $73 (seventy three dollars) for you to spell out the words "F2B" with at least 50 students

- $40.25 (Forty dollars and twenty five cents) for students to lineup and paint the letters "www.fadetoblack.com" on their chests like you often see on football games, with each person representing each letter.

- $60.13 (sixty dollars and thirteen cents) for your faculty to paint www.fadetoblack.com on their chests.

Selecting one of the options above, automatically qualifies you for our "Corporate Sellout" contest, with a prize cash equaling $125 (one hundred and twenty five dollars.) The rules of the contest are as follows: we are looking for the most creative way a principal of a publicly run school can suck up to a corporate conglomerate. Although I am not allowed to go into detail, I will say that your suppressing students free speech in fear of offending a corporation definitely puts you on top of the list.

Please let us know which option will work best for you. And just to show you that we are serious we included a money order for $25.

Thanks you for your time, looking forward to your reply.

Sincerely,

Michael Page
Editor Fade to Black
F2b@fadetoblack.com

When they recieved no reply, they called Ms. Hamilton up. Hilarity ensued. Check it out.

Eve Tushnet has a long series of thoughtful posts about race. Highly recommended. Start here and read up.

I promised to post something from Ian Buruma's Wages of Guilt. I love this book. Buruma spent years studying how different factions in modern Germany and Japan have dealt with, or failed to deal with, the moral responsibility of World War II. By the end of the book, I had a better opinion of modern Germany and a considerably worse opinion of modern Japan. One of the Amazon reviews sums it up better than I would:

"The Wages of Guilt" finds that the German people, at least in the western part, have been more ready to come to terms with their war legacy than the Japanese. There are Nazi sympathizers and Holacaust deniers aplenty in Germany, but they seem to be confined to the fringes. In Japan, however, rightist elements remain powerful and the official line is to portray the war as an economically driven power struggle in which any excesses committed by the armed forces occurred in the heat of battle, thus denying any similarity to the behaviour of the Nazis. Moreover, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are viewed as atrocities on par with any act committed by the Axis powers; racism and a perverted scientific curiosity are among the motives attributed to America in its decisions to drop the bombs. Buruma explores the efforts to re-examine the war through the prism of German and Japanese reactions to Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Nanking, the war crimes trials, etc. and the result is a troubling and thought provoking meditation on the power of history and the psychology of escape. Check this one out, it's worth a look.

There's a passage in the book about a tour of Auschwitz that has stayed with me for years. It by no means encapsulates the complex subject, but I feel like it could be the seed for a great novel. Here it is.

As I walked from photograph to photograph in the Polish block, wondering what had happend in these rooms long before they were converted to the clean, white-walled museum rooms of today, I encountered a group of German tourists, mostly people in their fifties and sixties. They would have been teenagers during the war. A Polish woman in her thirties was guiding them. The photographs spoke for themselves. Yet the guide quietly explained in fluent German what people were seeing: giggling soldiers watching elderly rabbis crawling on their knees, Himmler peering through an eyehole to inspect the efficacy of the gas chambers, children driven through the ghetto with rifle butts, bony corpses piles high. The tourists looked stricken as they silently shuffled from one outrage to the next. Suddenly one of them became agitated. She was a woman of about sixty, in a green hat, a beige twin set, and thick brown shoes. She went up to the guiden and clutched her arm: "You must understand," she said, "we knew nothing of this, wir haben nichts gewusst..." The guide looked at the woman and said, quietly and contemptuously, "I'm sorry, but I cannot believe you. I honestly cannot believe you."

I'm sorry to hear that Rob Lyman doesn't get the traffic he deserves. Show some love, people.

For example, this line about the "West Wing" is great:

Funny thing: Forced to think of something "liberal," that is, something which would please Democrats and displease Republicans, one of the characters said, "Death is bad."

Oh yeah. Every Republican Party meeting I've ever been to has ended with the Official Conservative Battle Cry: Death! Death! Death!

Oliver Willis points out this charming post from National Review's favorite Brit:

RE: WELCOME TO 2003 [John Derbyshire]
K-Lo: So DC's first baby of the year was born to a lesbian couple. New York's seems to have been to a black single mother. Don't you sometimes feel like giving in to despair?

I'd post a pithy reply, but Derbyshire isn't worth pithing on.

Here's a question:

As I blog, I find myself seeing things through a politicized lens more and more of the time. For example, I'm reading Jose Saramago's Blindness right now. The story is fascinating and the writing is wonderful- it's about the breakdown of society as a highly contagious blindness epidemic sweeps over an unnamed city. As I read it, I keep seeing political metaphors for gun control, libertarianism, feminism, and so on. I don't think that I'm making these metaphors up, exactly, but I might not have noticed them if I had read it a year or two ago. I'm not sure if that's a feature or a bug.

So this is just for fun, in the holiday spirit of excessive politicization of non-political issues:

I got a terrific game for Christmas called Age of Mythology. It's a real-time strategy game in which you build up a village, create an army, and attack and destroy your hated enemy. In this game, you can create mythical units such as manticores, hydras and mummies to fight alongside your archers, infantry and cavalry. It's more hands-on than board games like Risk or Axis and Allies, as you can make your units follow specific paths, attack specific enemies and buildings, and so on. Although I'm not any good at it, it's a lot of fun.

I've never believed that violent video games do kids harm, and I still don't. But I wonder,

Will Americans think about war differently in twenty or thirty years, when we'll have a society full of adults who grew up playing these kinds of games?

It will be interesting to contemplate future wars in a society full of amateur generals who have had hands-on time playing with tactics. I think that I understand the value of "overwhelming force" in a much more visceral way now. I wonder if future niche reporting will concentrate on military tactics and strategy more than we see now.

On the other hand, the tactics that Age of Mythology encourages would be horrific in real life:

- Your assaults (well, my assaults) are suicide missions. My armies get hacked to pieces when they try to retreat, and they can't surrender. So I just send them out with the assumption that they're all going to die in battle.
- There's no need to worry about building supply lines for your soldiers. They don't need food, ammo, or support.
- If you restrict your attacks to military targets, you will lose. You get much better bang for your buck by attacking enemy civilians, homes, and domestic industry.

I doubt that this will have a lasting effect on how people think about war, and I hope I'm right.

(Side note: Dick Cheney had a plan during the Gulf War that would only make sense in a game:

What if we parachute the 82nd Airborne into the far western part of Iraq, hundreds of miles from Kuwait and totally cut off from any kind of support, and seize a couple of missile sites, then line up along the highway and drive for Baghdad? Schwarzkopf charitably describes the plan as being "as bad as it could possibly be... But despite our criticism, the western excursion wouldn't die: three times in that week alone Powell called with new variations from Cheney's staff. The most bizarre involved capturing a town in western Iraq and offering it to Saddam in exchange for Kuwait." (Throw in a Pete Rose rookie card?)

I've quoted this story before, but I'm glad it's still up. I hope that you understand why I lose my temper when I hear that politicians rather than generals are drawing up our war plans.)\

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds and Dave Koppel have a better-informed look at wargames. But you probably just came from Glenn's site, so you know that.

I've got enough going on today that I have no business blogging. I'd like to extend a warm welcome to Digby's Hullabaloo, and I'd also like to recommend Soundbitten's O'Reilly vs. Hip-Hop. We webloggers have a healthy amateur-boosting ethic, but I can't help but notice that the professional writers (like G. Beato) and lawyers tend to make us look like, well, amateurs. Soundbitten's comparison of Britney Spears' little black dress (which O'Reilly thinks is fine) and Serena Williams' little black dress (from which children need shield their eyes) is telling. Here's Beato:

Take, for example, Britney Spears. Because her music is exclusively marketed to middle-aged men who show mad crazee luv for aspirational teen-pop, O'Reilly has no beef with her. But then take someone like Serena Wiliams. Williams is a professional tennis player, and as several federal investigations (and Ralph Nader) have shown, professional tennis mostly appeals to (though some would say "preys on") little girls without any sportswear judgement. Thus, a different standard applies: "See, now, here's Britney Spears, who I don't have too much of it, she's dressed up like a dominatrix here, but that's just rock and roll nonsense. There she is, it doesn't bother me. But Serena Williams, I come back to that, in the sense that there are a lot of little girls watching here, and they got this outfit on, and, all right, you have a 10-year-old girl, she's watching Serena, what do you say to her?" (09/03/02)

One more post, then I'm off the blog and high on life for the day.

Rob Lyman has an interesting point about the way that Asian racism makes dealing with North Korea more difficult. Here's the essential point:

Koreans from the south seem to regard North Koreans as kin--which of course they are--and therefore not dangerous. This is a ludicrous attitude. Meanwhile, they strongly mistrust the Japanese, who of course were responsible for a brutal colonial occupation in the first half of the 20th century. Some of my wife's aunts speak Japanese because they grew up under occupation. The Chinese have a similar mistrust of the Japanese, and of course the South Koreans don't trust the Chinese at all. And nobody trusts the Americans, who are the only power in the region which can credibly enforce its will against Kim Jong Il...

In Asia, there's so much cultural and racial hatred and mistrust, lots of South Koreans will take their chances with a lunatic Stalinist rather than trust a white guy from Texas.

It's a difficult subject and I have no special expertise, but it's congruent with my experience, especially re: Koreans and Japanese. And he's right that it makes everything much, much harder. I don't envy the Administration this responsibility.

Incidentally, let me recommend a fantastic book- Wages of Guilt, by Ian Buruma. I was thinking about an excerpt from it over Christmas; I'll try to post it in the next few days.

From Democratic Veteran, a good story about a bureacracy that needs a good ass-punching:

LA Times

Over the radio, they were told that their request for the pump had been denied because the Humvee could be driven without it. The men were incredulous. Trying to drive icy mountain switchbacks at high altitudes without power steering or power brakes would be suicidal.

Again, they were running up against ground truth. "They have no idea what the conditions are really like," Dan said. He paused and added: "Hell, we didn't know how difficult the conditions were till we got out here."

Finally, Dave, the captain, decided to repair the Humvee himself. Using parachute cord, he managed to connect engine fans to cool the engine and pump power steering fluid.

From Roger Ailes:

To underscore that he’s not a captive of Washington, President Bush’s Christmas card this year is postmarked Crawford, Texas, although the return address reads, “The White House, Washington, D.C. 20500.” But the record 1.7 million cards the Bushes sent were too much to handle for the Crawford post office, which is a two-person operation. To accommodate Bush’s down-home image, the post office arranged for the cards to be stamped in Austin, where a special dye was ordered to authenticate the Crawford postmark. Bush, who spent Christmas at Camp David, is apparently the first president to insist on an out-of-town postmark.

Roger argues that this is mail fraud, while a commentator disagrees. I don't know. But logically, it makes about as much sense as postmarking your Christmas cards from your time-share condo:

By showcasing the Crawford ranch, the Bush spinmeisters hope to show voters that Bush had a life, an identity, and a home before he entered the White House. But the third point, at least, is certainly untrue. The Crawford ranch does not precede Bush's life on the national stage; it is a product of it. When Bush was just governor of Texas, he didn't have the ranch--it was bought two years ago, with his presidential campaign at full steam. Before then, he lived in the governor's mansion and spent vacations at a home he owned at a members-only lakeside retreat in East Texas called the Rainbo Club, which caters to the Dallas elite. His other holiday destinations were the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, which did so much to identify his father as an aloof preppy, and the Gasparilla Inn, a luxurious Florida hideaway owned by an heir to the DuPonts, where the Bush family went after the Florida recount. As one Texas newspaper noted back when Bush purchased his ranch, "Mr. Bush has no roots in the area." But after seven trips there as president, Bush has most of the national press convinced that he was practically born and bred in Crawford. It's a great political feat.

President's Compassionate Agenda Lags

Earlier this month, as Bush announced that the AmeriCorps volunteer program was "expanding mightily," the program disclosed that it had halted enrollment; his proposed expansion of national service has not cleared Congress. That same week, the White House acknowledged that it was unlikely to free from congressional gridlock Bush's "faith-based initiative" to help charities, instead enforcing a limited version of it through executive orders.

Meanwhile, action on major welfare, prescription drug and disabilities legislation was postponed. Proposals to liberalize immigration were dropped, a plan for health-care tax credits was not pursued, and efforts to expand low-income housing are yet to see the funding Bush sought...

"He has always been rhetorically on the right side of the issue," said Harvard University's Robert Putnam, who has been consulted often by Bush aides. "They have not yet done nearly enough in practical terms to match the rhetoric." Putnam said right-wing conservatives trumped compassion-minded aides. "The compassionates win a lot of rhetorical battles," he said, "but when you look where the budget is, it shows hardly a hint of the compassionate."

My favorite detail:

The one major success on the compassion list -- education legislation -- has become the subject of a budget fight, with Bush proposing only $22 billion of the $28 billion the new law authorized for the current year...
When GOP moderates complained last month about the lack of funds, Bush budget Director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. criticized the "explosively larger education bill."

The grownups are back in charge.

Via Oliver Willis

The Washington Post printed this over the weekend. Keep in mind, this is a straight news story, not an editorial:

Aides to Tom Daschle had favored a plan to freeze cuts in income tax rates scheduled to take effect in 2004. But Daschle's political advisers, concerned that Republicans will neglect the poor to promote an accelerated reduction in the top rate, have suggested dropping that plan, instead emphasizing a cut in lower tax brackets.

Isn't this just what Andrew Sullivan and Michael Kelly have been talking about? I mean, if dropping liberal talking points into the middle of straight news coverage isn't bias, what is? What do Republicans have to do to get a fair shake from the liberal Washington Post? Let me re-read that...

Oh, whoops! Actually, the story said:

Aides to President Bush had favored a plan to accelerate by a year cuts in income tax rates scheduled to take effect in 2004. But Bush's political advisers, concerned that Democrats will use a class-warfare argument to fight an accelerated reduction in the top rate, have suggested dropping that plan, instead emphasizing a cut in taxes on stock dividends.

Ohhh, a class-warfare argument. Well, that's a perfectly value-neutral term to use. Sorry to have kicked up a fuss.

Matthew Yglesias makes a good point here.

For what it's worth, I'd like to make the tangentially-relevant point that while liberals are correct to criticize Bush and conservatives more generally for taking an overly black-and-white view of the world, I feel like a lot of liberals have a tendency to do essentially the exact same thing with George Bush or John Ashcroft cast in the role of The Great Satan.

I don't think that this is an especially liberal thing to do; I read a lot of liberal sites, and I don't see a Bush Body Count being taken seriously. Prominent liberals haven't made a video accusing him of murder and drug smuggling, as Jerry Falwell did for Bill Clinton. But Matthew is right that Bush/ Ashcroft/ Rove are often caricatured as actively malicious, and it's not fair, accurate or useful. No one is the villain of their own story, and I'm quite sure that Bush believes he's doing good for either the country or his party with every move he makes. (The extent to which they're uninterested in distinguishing "good for Republicans" and "good for America" will be the subject of another post.)

Nonetheless, I have a hard time being reasonable about this story.

Just seven months ago (Rowley) was being heralded as a national hero for daring to testify that top-level FBI officials had stymied efforts by Minneapolis agents to search records of Zacarias Moussaoui before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. A go-ahead from Washington for a search in Minneapolis might have yielded information that might have prevented the horrid attacks. A search of Moussaoui's belongings after 9/11 found clues to the plot.

When Rowley appeared before congressional committees in Washington, there were concerns being expressed that she might pay a price for her courage.

"The real question is not what happens today or tomorrow," the late Sen. Paul Wellstone said at the time Rowley was testifying. "It's what happens in the next year or two, or after that. That's always the case with whistle-blowers. It's going to be important for us to remain vigilant in her case."

What's happened?

(snip)

The Star Tribune's Greg Gordon reported last week that at a quiet little ceremony earlier this month, Marion (Spike) Bowman was one of nine people in the bureau to receive an award for "exceptional performance." The award carries with it a cash bonus of 20 to 35 percent of the recipient's salary and a framed certificate signed by the president.

What does this have to do with Rowley?

Bowman heads the FBI's National Security Law Unit. That's the unit that blocked Minneapolis agents from pursuing their suspicions about Moussaoui.

Bowman received the big pats on the back (and cash) a few days before the House and Senate Intelligence committees turned in their reports of pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures. The committees said that Minneapolis agents deserved honors for their work and that those who performed poorly should be disciplined. The National Security Law Unit was singled out by Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., for inept performance.

There were no FBI honors for the Minneapolis office. There was a big honor for the lead antagonist of the Minneapolis office.