Category: News-esque

News that doesn’t fit anywhere else

Newspapers in Decline

Seth Anderson2 Comments

I don’t want newspapers as an institution to fade away like the 78 Victrola, I depend upon the news-gathering services of several national papers, including the Chicago Tribune. I have print subscriptions to three papers, but even more so, I rely upon their online presence. I may disagree frequently with the slant of newspaper coverage, and lament the obvious pro-corporate sympathies, but if suddenly the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal started cutting their reporting staff to ridiculous levels, I’m not sure what would happen.

News You Can't Use

This is why Dr. Alterman’s article troubles me:

Spend some time on the “future of news” conference circuit, as I have recently, and believe me, you’ll need a drink and perhaps a Prozac. The flight of readers and advertisers to the web has led to an unprecedented assault on stockholder value, making newspapers the investment equivalent of slow-motion seppuku. For instance, on July 11 Alan Mutter’s invaluable Reflections of a Newsosaur blog reported that in “perhaps the worst single trading day ever” for the newspaper business, “the shares of seven publicly held newspaper companies today plunged to the[ir] lowest point in modern history.” When these losses continued to accelerate, Mutter calculated that newspaper stocks had shed an amazing $3.9 billion in value in just the first ten trading days of July, leading to the disappearance of more than 35 percent of these companies’ combined stock price in 2008 alone

It’s been nearly two and a half years since the much-missed Molly Ivins observed of media moguls that, “for some reason, they assume people will want to buy more newspapers if they have less news in them and are less useful.” And yet the strategy continues unabated. The Los Angeles Times just announced that it will cut loose another 250 people, including 150 in the newsroom–this on top of a series of job cuts by the previous owners, which led to a revolving door of resigning editors and publishers who could not in good conscience carry out the cuts demanded of them.

As a result of this avalanche of industrywide layoffs, buy-outs and firings, Mutter notes, the industry’s age-old ratio of one journalist per thousand papers in circulation is about to disappear. But as a contributor to Romenesko pointed out, this is “a self-correcting mechanism. As subscribers find less and less to read because newspaper staffs are thinned too much to produce quality copy, subscriptions will lapse and the ratio will be restored–until, of course, additional layoffs refresh the cycle.”

[From I Read the News Today… Oh Boy]

Very troubling indeed. Television news is a joke, the news-weeklies (The Nation, et al) don’t have the depth, or space, to cover each days events. The blogosphere, while valuable, would be hard-pressed to step into the breach. Blogs function more as a correcting mechanism, teasing nuance out of already published material. Hardly any blog actually does any hard reporting (Josh Marshall‘s empire, of course, and a few others, a very small percentage).

Answers? I have none, or I’d become fabulously wealthy selling advice to publishers. I do wish more corporate media moguls would take Ms. Ivins advice and find other ways to cut costs other than firing staff.

Of course, executives don’t have to worry about their salary: they’ll continue draining the blood from the goose1

Virtually the only expense still intact is executive pay. On the Recovering Journalist blog, Mark Potts notes that the average compensation among the thirteen public-company newspaper CEOs was just under $6 million a year in 2007, according to corporate proxy filings with the SEC. These figures, one can only conclude, are entirely unrelated to performance.

Footnotes:
  1. or however that cliche goes [↩]

Austin Anyone?

Seth Anderson0 comment

Everyone loves Austin, sometimes. For your fluff news of the day…

Senator Barack Obama marveled at the view here in Big Sky Country. He discovered that the gumbo in New Orleans was far tastier than in Chicago. And he was pleasantly surprised that he loved Austin, Tex., and its music — but who doesn’t?

…

“A place that I’ve come to love, which I did not expect until this campaign, is Texas,” he said in an interview the other day aboard his campaign plane, a patchwork of the countryside passing below him. “I ended up loving Texas! I’ve been struck by how many beautiful places there are in the country that you don’t necessarily think of as beautiful. Pittsburgh, for example, is a really handsome town with the rivers and the hills.”

[From Obama Is Going Places He Has Never Seen Before – NYTimes.com]

Flavin Disciple
[neon sign at Curra’s, Austin]


“U.F. Orb (Deluxe Remastered Reissue w/Previously Unreleased Tracks) – 2 discs” (Orb)

“U.F. Orb (Deluxe Remastered Reissue w/Previously Unreleased Tracks) – 2 discs” (Orb)

Russia and the US

Seth Anderson1 Comment

David Remnick writes a brief essay re: the history of the collapse of Soviet Union, and makes this point:

Taken individually, the West’s actions since the collapse of the Soviet Union—from the inclusion of the Baltic and the Central European states in NATO to the recognition of Kosovo as an independent state—can be rationalized on strategic and moral grounds. But taken together these actions were bound to engender deep-seated feelings of national resentment among Russians, especially as, through the nineteen-nineties, they suffered an unprecedentedly rapid downward spiral. Even ordinary Russians find it mightily trying to be lectured on questions of sovereignty and moral diplomacy by the West, particularly the United States, which, even before Iraq, had a long history of foreign intervention, overt and covert—politics by other means. After the exposure of the Bush Administration’s behavior prior to the invasion of Iraq and its unapologetic use of torture, why would any leader, much less Putin, respond to moral suasion from Washington? That is America’s tragedy, and the world’s.

There is little doubt that the Georgian President, Mikheil Saakashvili, provided Putin with his long-awaited casus belli when he ordered the shelling of South Ossetia, on August 7th. But Putin’s war, of course, is not about the splendors of South Ossetia, a duchy run by the Russian secret service and criminal gangs. It is a war of demonstration. Putin is demonstrating that he is willing to use force; that he is unwilling to let Georgia and Ukraine enter NATO without exacting a severe price; and that he views the United States as hypocritical, overextended, distracted, and reluctant to make good on its protective assurances to the likes of Georgia.

[From David Remnick – Boundary Issues: Comment: The New Yorker]

Thanks, George Bush and the Republican Party, for squandering any possibilities of moral suasion. Not that the United States has ever had much moral suasion to spare, but even less so since the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan on minor pretext.

Soviets Lithuania

And I like this Bishop Joseph Butler quote, I’m adding it to my pantheon of pithy epigrams:

Inevitably, a number of neoconservative commentators, along with John McCain, have rushed in to analyze this conflict using familiar analogies: the Nazi threat in the late nineteen-thirties; the Soviet invasions of Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968. But while Putin’s actions this past week have inspired genuine alarm in Kiev and beyond, such analogies can lead to heedless policy. As the English theologian Bishop Joseph Butler wrote, “Every thing is what it is, and not another thing.” Cartoonish rhetoric only contributes to the dangerous return of what some conservatives seem to crave—the other, the enemy, the us versus them of the Cold War.

Only one with a heart of stone could fail to be moved by the spectacle of the leaders of Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic states standing by Saakashvili last week at a rally in Tbilisi. But Putin is not Hitler or Stalin; he is not even Leonid Brezhnev. He is what he is, and that is bad enough. In the 2008 election, he made a joke of democratic procedure and, in effect, engineered for himself an anti-constitutional third term. The press, the parliament, the judiciary, the business élite are all in his pocket—and there is no opposition. But Putin also knows that Russia cannot bear the cost of reconstituting empire or the gulag. It depends on the West as a market. One lesson of the Soviet experience is that isolation ends in poverty. Putin’s is a new and subtler game: he is the autocrat who calls on the widow of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. To deal with him will require statecraft of a kind that has proved well beyond the capacities of our current practitioners.

Why Georgia and Georgia are both named Georgia

Seth Anderson1 Comment

I’ve often wondered about this myself.

Why does a country that was formerly part of the USSR have the same name as a state in the American Deep South?

Both got their present-day monikers from the British. The name of the country comes from the Russian word Gruzia, which was in turn derived from the Persian and Turkish versions of the name George, Gorj and Gurju. It’s not clear when the Brits started using the word Georgia in place of Gruzia, but scholars believe the switch happened sometime in the late Middle Ages.

In their native tongue, Georgians refer to themselves as the Kartveli and to their country as Sakartvelo. But the Kartveli have for many centuries been associated with George, the Roman soldier and Christian martyr. (They adopted Christianity under Roman rule in the 330s.) The Arabs, Ottomans, and Persians—who ruled over the country at various times until the Russians took control in 1801—chose to name Sakartvelo after its beloved patron saint, whose image dotted the art and architecture of the region.

The American Georgia, on the other hand, was named after King George II of England, who granted the state its charter in 1732. The –ia suffix, meaning “state of,” comes from the Greek and was tacked onto the end of many place names via the vast imperial and lingual legacy of the Romans. The name George became popular in Western Europe only after the Crusades, when knights traveling to the Holy Land came in contact with the widespread veneration of the saint among the Eastern Christians—in places like Georgia. (George became the patron saint of England in the 1340s.) Meanwhile, the saint’s name derives from Greek and refers to a tiller of land. In that respect, both Georgia and Georgia live up to their names.

[From Why are Georgia and Georgia both named Georgia? – By Noreen Malone – Slate Magazine]

So now we know…

Guam 1974 redux

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Our far-flung correspondent1, Shannon Murphy, adds some corrections to the record re: Roger Gale’s article excerpted in Guam in 1974.

Spain first occupied the Marianas (named after Queen Mariana), to include Guam, in 1668. Legaspi claimed the island in 1565. So that means the Marianas have been colonized for 443 years if you go by Legaspi or 340 years if you go by when the Spanish first settled there – not 250. The US took Guam from Spain during the Spanish American War in 1898, so its been under American rule for only 110 years, minus the 2 and a half years of Japanese occupation during World War II.

Guam changed the most just after World War II then any time during Guam’s history as the island was badly bombed and then 150,000 American military occupied the island for three years or so making it a staging base for the planned attack on Japan and Asia. The villages were destroyed and then relocated, much of the land was seized (by writ of eminent domain to non- U.S. citizens) and the bases were built. The 22,000 Chamorros on the island were marginalized to the military mission. They had no rights and no voice and those who survived a brutal Japanese occupation (the Japanese punished them for being loyal to the Americans) were sickly and starved.

[The United States military] built something like 6 runways, 6 field hospitals, filled in land to make a better harbor and port, built hundreds of quonset huts all over the island. Then they dropped the bombs on Japan (taking off from next door Tinian) and the war was over.


“We Fought the Navy and Won: Guam’s Quest for Democracy (Latitude 20 Books)” (Doloris Coulter Cogan)

Doloris Coulter Cogan’s book has been highly recommended if you are interested in this history. From the blurb:

We Fought the Navy and Won is a carefully documented yet impassioned recollection of Guam’s struggle to liberate itself from the absolutist rule of the U.S. Navy. Doloris Cogan concentrates on five crucial years, 1945-1950, when, fresh out of journalism school, she had the good fortune to join the distinguished team of idealists at the newly formed Institute of Ethnic Affairs in Washington, D.C. Working as a writer/editor on the monthly Guam Echo under the leadership of the Institute’s director, John Collier, Cogan witnessed and recorded the battle fought at the very top between Collier (assisted by former Secretary of the Interior Harry L. Ickes) and Navy Secretary James V. Forrestal as the people of Guam petitioned the U.S. Congress for civilian government under a constitution. Taken up by newspapers throughout the country, this war of words illustrated how much freedom of the press plays in achieving and sustaining true democracy.

Part of the story centers around a young Chamorro named Carlos Taitano, who returned home to Guam in 1948 after serving in the U.S. Army in the Pacific. Taitano joined his colleagues in the lower house and walked out of the Guam Congress in 1949 to protest the naval governor, who had refused their right to subpoena an American businessman suspected of illegal activity. The walkout was the catalyst that introduced the Organic Act of Guam, which was signed into law by President Truman in 1950. Many other Guamanians, including the men and women who testified before the U.S. Congress, were involved in this historic struggle. We Fought the Navy and Won is the first book to tell their story and the first detailed look at the events surrounding Guam’s elevation from possession to territory.

Our far-flung correspondent continues:

It took another several years before Chamorros were made US citizens and then many more before they could elect their own governor. We still can’t vote for President or by a meaningful part of Congress.

All the rest of the corrections are just because this is a 30 year old article:

Our population by the last census update was 162,000.

The military gave some “excess” land back in the 90s so now they only have about 1/4 of the island, rather than 1/3. They might take some more again though.

We have our new airport and lots of airlines now.

The Political Status Commission isn’t doing anything anymore. Sen. Frank Lujan died already as have others who spoke up so well. Most people now have accepted the status quo and are just trying to figure out how to make this all work out. We don’t believe there is anything we can do about the military build up here. Many people welcome it, seeing it as an opportunity to make some money.

Your last paragraph was right on – Guam is an occupied territory. Chamorros (they don’t call themselves Guamanians anymore as that was an American idea to give them a new name to differentiate themselves from Chamorros who were considered a thing of the past!) are a minority in their own home due to US immigration policies which they have no control over. We are nowhere near getting a new political status.

There is a cool group of Chamorro graduate students who are trying to raise awareness and wake people up at http://famoksaiyan.blogspot.com/

Also the PDN is not owned by foreigners but by Gannett Corp. But if the point is that it is not locally owned you got it! There is another paper and two TV news stations that are locally owned though. But the PDN is the big news organization.

Thanks, Shannon, for the informative, brief history. Care to fact-check this anecdote too?

Footnotes:
  1. borrowed title from the New Yorker I think, always wanted to use it [↩]

Guam in 1974

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Today’s tiptoe through history1 comes from an article published in The Nation, October 26, 1974 by Roger Gale.2 I wonder if America’s newest colonial acquisition, Iraq, will have a similar trajectory as Guam did?

I realize most of you are not very interested in Guam, but I am. Avert thy gaze if you are feeling hurried and pressed for time. I won’t reproduce the entire article this time, but I have the PDF if you want a copy.

Guam 1971

First a little background:

Although a speck on the world map, Guam may soon become the hub of America’s presence in Asia. Most distant of all American colonies, the island’s economic potential is now being recognized for the first time. It is within 1,500 miles of both Tokyo and Manila, and is fast becoming part of the Asian economic orbit after long years of isolation and secrecy imposed by the American military. Guam has probably changed more in the past five years than in the 250 years since the Spanish seized the island. A sleepy port of call since it became an American colony during the Spanish-American War, it is experiencing an astounding annual growth rate of more than 25 percent. More than a dozen hotels have transformed – once tranquil Tumon Bay into a junior Waikiki; the newest of them is the tallest building between Honolulu and Manila. More than 6,000 new homes have been completed in the past Jour years alone.

Tourism, almost all of it from Japan, has become Guam’s most visible industry. Last year, 240,000 tourists visited what is now Japan’s most popular “Caribbean” island; it was the destination of almost a third of Japan’s world travelers. Five years earlier, only 3,500 tourists had stopped at Guam.

and the problem:

But despite the sudden tourist boom, the U.S. military, hidden behind its fences, is still the mainstay of the economy. It employ more people and buys more services than does any other activity on the island. According to Navy figures, the $171 million it spent last year constituted a full, one-quarter of the island’s’ economy. It was only a few years ago that the Navy relinquished control of the island’s power, phone and water systems. Until 1963, in fact, permission from the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington was needed to visit the security-conscious island. In the past decade, especially during the war in Indochina when B-52s flew bombing missions from Guam, the military presence has grown immensely, but security has become less of a preoccupation.

Although Guam is the Navy’s largest home port and will grow even larger next year when six new destroyers are transferred to the island, the military now has a rival for economic predominance on the island. Like the military it does not wish to advertise its presence, but in the past few years investment and land speculation have become a major industry on tropical Guam. A free port, with casual accounting practices, Guam has become a haven for excess Japanese yen and since Nixon’s visit to China, for insecure New Taiwan dollars. Because large contracts are becoming scarce in Vietnam, South Korea’s largest construction firms have moved their major foreign operations to Guam. As a result of all this new money, between 1972 and 1973 bank deposits rose a phenomenal 300 per cent and recorded loans increased almost 700 per cent.

With a population of 105,000 and a density per square mile of 500, Guam’s potential for capital-intensive growth is incalculable. Something more than one-third of the 206 square- mile island is in U.S. military hands so land prices in prime areas have shot up to as high as $1 million an acre. Speculation in tract homes still to be built by Kaiser Industries or by one of the Korean construction firms, has raised the cost of the average two-bedroom house to about $50,000.

…

The military has returned a few small parcels of land in the last year but, as one Guamanian pointed out when the Navy announced its latest offer, “What a joke! The Navy is leasing our own land back to us so we can construct a school for military dependents.” At the same time that it is returning small parcels of land, the Navy is moving to buy Guam’s last undeveloped shoreland for a $250 million ammunition wharf.

and no wonder why Jack Abramoff wanted to do business on Guam with his buddies in the Bush Adminstration, creating clothing sweatshops.

Guam is also a free port and therefore attractive to producers, and retailers of high-cost, low-weight goods like watches and cameras. Watches, which are partially assembled in a number of small factories on the island, can be imported into the United States at reduced tariff rates. In the future, it’s location at the “mouth'” of Asia will be a more important factor in Guam’s growing role as a transshipment point to and from the U.S. mainland. Because Guam’s economy is almost all “store-bought,” with agriculture nearly nonexistent, ships now return to the West Coast almost empty.

As an air hub, Guam has’ grown in five years from a one airline island to being served by six regularly scheduled airlines and a number of charter and transient aircraft. A new $25 million air terminal is in the works. Guam is already the world’s biggest cable crossing, and a new trans-Pacific cable now being laid will make it still more important in this respect. The island is also the “Communications Area Master Station” for the Pentagon, coordinating all military communications in Southeast Asia, Japan and the South Pacific.

Although the local labor supply is small and fully employed by the military and the government of Guam, cheap nonunionized labor from the Philippines and Korea3 is easily imported. Receiving the minimum wage (a good part of which has to be sent home to their families) and living in military-style barracks, workers are hardly in a good bargaining position.

In addition to all these attractions, Guam is virgin territory in an area that is being picked over and ripped off by multinational corporations based in Japan and America.

King and Queen of Guam walk on thin ice of modern life
and of particular interest to me:

This year Guamania’ns became a numerical minority on their own island. If you count “stateside” Americans as foreigners, as the natives do, there are almost as many aliens on Guam as in Hawaii, where the population is eight times larger. The scheduled 20 per cent increase in military personnel and the continued influx of Asians means that in the next three or four years, more than two-thirds of the island will be populated by foreigners.

Even when Guamanians were in the majority, control of the island had long since passed from their hands. Joe Murphy, editor of Guam’s Pacific Daily News, estimates that 70 to 80 per cent of the island’s businesses (including the newspaper) are foreign-owned and that considerably more than half the island’s land is either leased or owned outright by non-Guamanians. But the sudden realization that they no longer even form the majority of the population has provoked the most vociferous reaction’ on the part of Guamanians since the bloody Spanish conquest of the island.

…

The legislature-has also created a Political Status Commission which inspired a series of hard-hitting newspaper columns on Guam’s colonial status. Sen. Frank Lujan, chairman of the commission, says the people of Guam have been kept dependent by a series of “colonial myths” which have led Guamanians to believe that they have no choice but to remain in the American political orbit. The Pacific Daily News refused to run any more columns on the subject after the publisher reportedly deemed them “anti-American.”

I haven’t been to Guam since 1997, so perhaps my information is out of date, but seemed like these same issues exist. Tourism, especially Japanese tourism, is still huge, the military is slightly antagonistic towards the rest of the island, and Guam is an occupied territory without representation in Congress.
—Update – Our far-flung correspondent adds some much-needed corrections to the story. Check it out.

Footnotes:
  1. I had fun with yesterday’s blog from history [↩]
  2. never heard of him, actually, but he was the director of Friends of Micronesia in Berkley, California, and a former chairman of the Department of Political Science at the University of Guam. [↩]
  3. and Saipan [↩]

Bridge to Somewhere, Sometime

Seth Anderson0 comment

Bridges are falling down, or nearly, and nothing is being done about it.

Division Street Bridge
[Division Street Bridge]

A troubling report indicates the state has found little progress on “urgent” repairs for some of the most heavily-traveled bridges in the Chicago area.

As CBS 2’s Joanie Lum reports, Illinois is in better shape than most states. But the Associated Press found that of the 20 busiest bridges in the state, only six have undergone necessary repairs, and funds are short.

The findings come as the one-year anniversary of the tragic Interstate 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis approaches. Thirteen people died when the bridge caved in and sent cars plunging into the Mississippi River.

In Illinois, Gov. Rod Blagojevich and state engineers have said the Minneapolis bridge collapse should have been a wakeup call, but few bridges have actually been repaired.

Overall, the vast majority of Illinois’ 26,000 bridges have been deemed safe. But a review of records last year by The Associated Press found more than 1,500 Illinois bridges had worse structural ratings than the Minnesota bridge collapse.

[From cbs2chicago.com – Report: Little Progress On ‘Urgent’ Bridge Repairs ]

Federal dollars are being wasted in the sands of Iraq, state dollars being wasted on trifles, city dollars being squandered on baubles: meanwhile the nation’s infrastructure continues to decay. How much longer can it be ignored before a tragedy occurs?

One structural engineer argued Wednesday that while insufficient funds is part of the problem, it also provides an “easy excuse” for inaction.



“The Minnesota collapse doesn’t appear to have been the wake-up call it should have been,” said John Frauenhoffer, head of a Champaign engineering firm and past president of the Illinois Society of Professional Engineers. “If anything ever happened at one of those bridges, it’d be impossible to explain to the public why those repairs hadn’t been made.”

Enchanted Sky Machine
[Enchanted Sky Machine, Evanston]

Of course, if all the bridges suddenly got repaired, I’d lose a favorite photo subject, but I’d rather deal with finding some other metaphor of decay than have another bridge collapse.

Lost Causeways
[Lost Causeways, Ogden Avenue]

Ted Stevens Is Indicted for Corruption

Seth Anderson0 comment

I’m sure the internet tubes will be buzzing tonight

Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, the longest-serving Republican senator in United States history and a figure of great influence in Washington as well as in his home state, has been indicted on federal charges of failing to report gifts and income.

Mr. Stevens, 84, was indicted on seven felony counts related to renovations on his home in Alaska. The charges arise from an investigation that has been under way for more than a year, in connection with the senator’s relationship with a businessman who oversaw the home-remodeling project

[From Alaska Senator Is Charged With Failing to Disclose Gifts – NYTimes.com]

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f99PcP0aFNE

and httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cZC67wXUTs

and probably dozens of other YouTube compilations

Blind and Evil

Seth Anderson0 comment

The Dark Lord, Robert Novak, apparently didn’t notice he had run over a pedestrian, and kept going, even though the victim was on Novak’s car. Sounds like a hit and run to me.

Robert Novak says he has been issued a $50 citation after hitting a pedestrian while driving in downtown Washington.

Witnesses say the collision occurred about 10 a.m. Wednesday as the 77-year-old Novak was traveling near K Street in his black Chevrolet Corvette.

Novak tells WJLA-TV he was cited for failing to yield the right of way. He says he didn’t realize what happened and continued driving until a bicyclist stopped him.

David Bono, the bicyclist who witnessed the incident, told The Associated Press that the pedestrian was hit in a crosswalk and was splayed across Novak’s windshield.

[From The Raw Story | Video: Columnist Robert Novak issued citation after hitting pedestrian]

Novakula in a black Corvette sounds appropriate somehow. Novak shouldn’t be allowed to mingle with humans.

TalkLeft adds:

The bicyclist was David Bono, a partner at Harkins Cunningham, who was on his usual bike commute to work at 1700 K St. N.W.when he witnessed the accident.

As he traveled east on K Street, crossing 18th, Bono said a “black Corvette convertible with top closed plowed into the guy. The guy is sort of splayed onto the windshield.”

Bono said that the pedestrian, who was crossing the street on a “Walk” signal and was in the crosswalk, rolled off the windshield and that Novak then made a right into the service lane of K Street. “The car is speeding away. What’s going through my mind is, you just can’t hit a pedestrian and drive away,” Bono said.

Flesh and Blood in B-More

Seth Anderson0 comment

For some reason, David Simon didn’t manage to work this scenario into the plot of The Wire. A pity there won’t be another season, say, set in Chicago…

Willie “Bo” Mitchell and three co-defendants—Shelton “Little Rock” Harris, Shelly “Wayne” Martin, and Shawn Earl Gardner— appeared for a hearing in the modern federal courthouse in downtown Baltimore, Maryland. The four African American men were facing federal charges of racketeering, weapons possession, drug dealing, and five counts of first-degree murder. For nearly two years the prosecutors had been methodically building their case, with the aim of putting the defendants to death. In Baltimore, which has a murder rate eight times higher than that of New York City, such cases are depressingly commonplace.

A few minutes after 10 a.m., United States District Court Judge Andre M. Davis took his seat and began his introductory remarks. Suddenly, the leader of the defendants, Willie Mitchell, a short, unremarkable looking twenty-eight-yearold with close-cropped hair, leapt from his chair, grabbed a microphone, and launched into a bizarre soliloquy.

“I am not a defendant,” Mitchell declared. “I do not have attorneys.” The court “lacks territorial jurisdiction over me,” he argued, to the amazement of his lawyers. To support these contentions, he cited decades-old acts of Congress involving the abandonment of the gold standard and the creation of the Federal Reserve. Judge Davis, a Baltimore-born African American in his late fifties, tried to interrupt. “I object,” Mitchell repeated robotically. Shelly Martin and Shelton Harris followed Mitchell to the microphone, giving the same speech verbatim. Their attorneys tried to intervene, but when Harris’s lawyer leaned over to speak to him, Harris shoved him away.

Judge Davis ordered the three defendants to be removed from the court, and turned to Gardner, who had, until then, remained quiet. But Gardner, too, intoned the same strange speech. “I am Shawn Earl Gardner, live man, flesh and blood,” he proclaimed. Every time the judge referred to him as “the defendant” or “Mr. Gardner,” Gardner automatically interrupted: “My name is Shawn Earl Gardner, sir.” Davis tried to explain to Gardner that his behavior was putting his chances of acquittal or leniency at risk. “Don’t throw your life away,” Davis pleaded. But Gardner wouldn’t stop. Judge Davis concluded the hearing, determined to find out what was going on.

[Click to read more about what Judge Davis found out Too Weird for The Wire – Kevin Carey]

Via Kottke, of course.

In case your constitutional memory is weak, here’s the text of the 14 Amendment which the Flesh-and-Blooders think is illegitimate:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

Section 3. No one shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

and the controversy:

Bruce Ackerman claims that the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment violated Article V of the Constitution, because:

  • The Fourteenth Amendment was proposed by a rump Congress that did not include representatives and senators from most of the former Confederate states, and, had those congressmen been present, the Amendment would never have passed.
  • Former Confederate states were counted for Article V purposes of ratification, but were not counted for Article I purposes of representation in the Congress.
  • The ratifications of the former Confederate states were not truly free, but were coerced. For instance, many former Confederate states had their readmittance to the Union conditioned on ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment.[26]

In 1968, the Utah Supreme Court diverged from the habeas corpus issue in a case to express its resentment against recent decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court under the Fourteenth Amendment, and to attack the Amendment itself:

In order to have 27 states ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, it was necessary to count those states which had first rejected and then under the duress of military occupation had ratified, and then also to count those states which initially ratified but subsequently rejected the proposal. To leave such dishonest counting to a fractional part of Congress is dangerous in the extreme. What is to prevent any political party having control of both houses of the Congress from refusing to seat the opposition and then without more passing a joint resolution to the effect that the Constitution is amended and that it is the duty of the Administrator of the General Services Administration to proclaim the adoption? Would the Supreme Court of the United States still say the problem was political and refuse to determine whether constitutional standards had been met? How can it be conceived in the minds of anyone that a combination of powerful states can by force of arms deny another state a right to have representation in the Congress until it has ratified an amendment which its people oppose? The Fourteenth Amendment was adopted by means almost as bad as that suggested above

Cellphone Nation Ruining Polling Data

swanksalot0 comment

Polling data is goofy anyway, there is only so much one can really learn from them. Still, this undercount seems to me worthy of note.

Cell phone-iphile

Say you want to reach a representative sample of the U.S. electorate for a presidential poll. The Obama-McCain race is relatively close these days, with the Democrat’s lead hovering around 5 to 6 points in most surveys. Someone tells you that he’s selected a sample that’s predominantly under 40 years of age (oops, that one favors Obama); disproportionately renters rather than homeowners (Obama-leaning again); full of college students (sounds like a Starbucks Obama thing to me) — and, for good measure, includes a higher proportion of blacks and Hispanics than the national population does.

At this point you throw up your hands and exclaim: “Why are we concentrating on such a pro-Obama universe? He could be leading by 20 points or more among those people!”

He could. He probably is. But in actuality, the sample I’ve described is either not being included at all in many national polls or is being undercounted. Why? Because I’m talking about the growing number of American cellphone users who have no other type of phone or who choose to go wireless for the vast majority of their interactive needs. And this election cycle — for the first, and perhaps only, time — this group has the chance to render presidential polls “wrong from the start”: potentially disguising at least 2 to 3 percentage points of Obama support and maybe more.

Heretofore my industry has dismissed the cellphone-only population with a troika of “yes, buts.” Yes, they’re undercounted, but 1) they don’t vote anyway; 2) their numbers are still small; and 3) we can find acceptable substitutes in the land-line population.

And to be honest, there is a fourth, still more powerful rationale that remains unstated: “Yes, they’re undercounted, but it’s too damn difficult and expensive to reach them.”

[Click to read the rest of Cellphone users missing from election surveys | Salon ]

Hanging Out

Squeamish Quotations of Those Potty Mouths

Seth Anderson0 comment

The New York Times cannot decide if it is a contemporary publication, or a throwback to the Puritan/Victorian heritage that considered exposure of an ankle to be shocking. Naval-gazing is not solely the province of the blogosphere.1

The Times does not always seem consistent in its decisions. It would not print “nuts” last week but put “cojones” in a headline 10 years ago. The newspaper reviewed a rock band last fall without printing its name because it contained what is probably the most objectionable of Carlin’s seven words. When Vice President Cheney used a variant of the same word on the floor of the Senate in 2004 to tell Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont what to do to himself, The Times again passed. But two years later, it did print another of Carlin’s words when President Bush told Tony Blair, then the British prime minister, what Syria needed to tell Hezbollah to knock off. The same word appeared last year in an article about a telephoned threat to Bernard Spitzer, whose son Eliot was then governor of New York. The Times was back on the conservative side this year, ignoring a vulgarism by former President Bill Clinton in the middle of a rant about Todd Purdum, a writer for Vanity Fair.

Keller told me before the Jackson issue arose: “I think the trend here — and it’s something I share — is we don’t want to be leading the charge to a coarser public discourse. We want to err on the side of civility. If occasionally that makes us seem squeamish or square, I can live with that.”

Caine, the law professor, argued that The Times needs to loosen up and cited as one model The New Yorker, where the barriers to Carlin’s forbidden words began falling in 1985.

David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, said, “People use these words in everyday speech. Why should we editors become so decorous and want to protect our readers from them? If a vice president uses a profanity to describe a senator, why should we sanitize his expression?”

Allan Siegal, Whitney’s predecessor as standards editor, said that Remnick was invited to speak at a retreat of Times editors some years ago and criticized “the prudery and hypocrisy of not using dirty words in the paper.” But while Remnick sees his audience and The Times’s as the same, The New Yorker is not delivered to middle- and high-school classrooms as 40,000 daily copies of The Times are.

The Times has built one of the most powerful brands in the world on the strength of writing “in a civil, measured way for people who want to read in a civil, measured way,” as Siegal put it. Although I would have quoted Jackson — and Cheney and Clinton, for that matter — I think the newspaper is wise to preserve its character and adapt slowly and carefully to the language around it. I use some of Carlin’s dirty words, but I do not want to read them in The Times unless it is essential, and I do not think I am alone.

[From The Public Editor – When to Quote Those Potty Mouths – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com]

How about my compromise: use language that is appropriate to the topic. My grandfather, Joe Murphy, has a quote about writers and salty language, which goes something like, “only a poor writer requires curse words to communicate clearly.” The culture has changed a bit since Joe Murphy was a newspaper editor though, and the self-proclaimed paper of record should accurately quote Vice Presidents,2 musicians,3 and other public figures, but reporters need not work the word “fuck” into their supporting sentences, unless absolutely necessary – like discussing George Fucking Bush and his love for torture and other war crimes.

Footnotes:
  1. yes, skippy coined the phrase [↩]
  2. Cheney told Senator Leahy to “Go Fuck Yourself” [↩]
  3. Bono proclaimed winning some award was “fucking great” [↩]

Hitchens on Display

swanksalot0 comment

George Packer weighs in on Hitchens and his waterboarding moment.

The uncharitable view is that Hitchens will do anything to be noticed, that celebrity elicits a kind of masochism in him, and that being unpublished or unheard or unseen for even a day must be more agonizing for him than having his pubic hair removed by strips of hot wax or trying to breathe while water is poured over a towel spread across his face. And this view might well be true, but there’s more to it—there always is with Hitchens.

His greatest weakness as a writer is his need to put himself at the center of attention, to win every argument, to walk away from every encounter in prose, as in life, having gotten the better of someone else.

[From Interesting Times: George Packer: Online Only: The New Yorker]

I can’t fault Hitchens for his solipsism1 but since Hitchens has so vehemently supported the Bush version of the war on terror, one does wish Hitchens would have managed to work in more discussion of that topic, perhaps wrapped around his proclamation that torture is waterboarding and waterboarding is torture.

See also tristero for a longer look at George Packer’s little throw-away post.

Footnotes:
  1. not a precise use of the word, by the way [↩]

Waterboarding is Torture

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Everyone who actually undergoes a waterboarding treatment comes away shaken, even those who have the ability to say a code word, and have the torture stop. The America of my dreams would never strip away the dignity and humanity of a person via torture. Christopher Hitchens undergoes a little torture in the name of journalism.

Hitchens gets waterboarded

Here is the most chilling way I can find of stating the matter. Until recently, “waterboarding” was something that Americans did to other Americans. It was inflicted, and endured, by those members of the Special Forces who underwent the advanced form of training known as sere (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape). In these harsh exercises, brave men and women were introduced to the sorts of barbarism that they might expect to meet at the hands of a lawless foe who disregarded the Geneva Conventions. But it was something that Americans were being trained to resist, not to inflict.

Exploring this narrow but deep distinction, on a gorgeous day last May I found myself deep in the hill country of western North Carolina, preparing to be surprised by a team of extremely hardened veterans who had confronted their country’s enemies in highly arduous terrain all over the world. They knew about everything from unarmed combat to enhanced interrogation and, in exchange for anonymity, were going to show me as nearly as possible what real waterboarding might be like.

[snip]

And so then I said, with slightly more bravado than was justified, that I’d like to try it one more time. There was a paramedic present who checked my racing pulse and warned me about adrenaline rush. An interval was ordered, and then I felt the mask come down again. Steeling myself to remember what it had been like last time, and to learn from the previous panic attack, I fought down the first, and some of the second, wave of nausea and terror but soon found that I was an abject prisoner of my gag reflex. The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. I still feel ashamed when I think about it. Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass. As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured. I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

[From Believe Me, It’s Torture: Politics & Power: by CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS vanityfair.com]

Read the entire tale here

Michelangelo wears Kabbalah bracelet

Seth Anderson0 comment


“The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo’s Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican” (Benjamin Blech, Roy Doliner)

Could be another case of Dan Brownism (conspiracy theories created without much basis in fact, but fun), I don’t know enough about Michelangelo or Kabbalah to proclaim with any authority.

The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which the renaissance artist worked on for four years in the early 16th century, is actually a “bridge” between the Roman Catholic Church and the Jewish faith, according to The Sistine Secrets: Unlocking the Codes in Michelangelo’s Defiant Masterpiece.

The book, which is already on the New York Times bestseller list, is the work of Rabbi Benjamin Blech, an associate professor of Talmud at Yeshiva University in New York, and Roy Doliner, a tour guide at the Vatican.

Scanning through the arrangement of figures on the vast 14,000 square foot ceiling, the authors have found shapes that correspond to Hebrew letters.

For example, the book states, the figures of David and Goliath form the shape of the letter gimel, which symbolises g’vurah, or strength, in the mystical Kabbalah tradition.

[From Michelangelo ‘hid secret code in Sistine Chapel’ – Telegraph]

Making obscene gestures toward the Pope? Do tell…

The authors believe Michelangelo picked up his knowledge of Judaism while at the court of Lorenzo de Medici in Florence.

In addition, they say there are several attacks on Pope Julius II, who commissioned the work, embedded in the painting.

Disgusted with papal corruption, they think Michelangelo painted the prophet Zechariah in the pope’s likeness.

Behind him, one angel is “making an extremely obscene hand gesture at the back of his head.”