Sorry for the low-tech rerouting, but: 

If you reached this page because of a link to a numbered item that is no longer on my main page, you can get to it by adding "#" and the number -- e.g. "#822" -- to the end of the URL above.

Last night among the mid-evening broadcast comedies, our Fox broadcast station in San Francisco aired three different military recruitment ads.

1/30/05 6:15 a.m. (Link here)

Grrr. Been sitting and typing all afternoon. And thinking dim thoughts of a sprightly ditty in three-four time beginning, "Why can't all interrogatories be form interrogatories now that spring is heeeere?..." Haven't got time to finish the song. Goddammit.

1/30/05 11:16 a.m. (Link here)

Your Tax Dollars At Work, Cont'd:

In this episode, GAO points out to the genius authors of the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002 that "...a self-reporting system would be of limited use in locating aliens who are avoiding contact with the government. Nonimmigrant aliens who do not wish to be located are not likely to comply with an annual requirement to self-report address information."

1/28/05 10:42 a.m. (Link here)

Jon Carroll, quoting Hannah Arendt, saying this thing that has to keep being said: the problem we have now is that the public has stopped requiring leaders to tell the truth.

1/27/05 3:22 p.m. (Link here)

The Midnight Of The Century --

I can't really add to today's anniversary coverage but I can link to some of it. Weirdly, it's no longer possible to assume that people learned about the death camps in school. I think, or hope, that much of my generation does know it happened. My generation is no longer the youngest. This is a strange and very sad world.

1/26/05 1:39 p.m. (Link here)

Good grief, now our meatpacking industry is a job for Human Rights Watch?

(I'm running today. Go read what the nice persons at Crooked Timber have to say about not only Upton Sinclair meatpacking atrocities but also the shortage of labor news on weblogs.)

1/25/05 7:13 p.m. (Link here)

I've gotten mixed up in some interesting paradox talk at Echidne's site: Which is the party of facts and logic? Which is the party of the emotional appeal?

1/25/05 3:34 p.m. (Link here)

So an activist group has filed a bar ethics complaint against Al Gonzales. No, it's not over his famous anti-clemency "clemency memos" or his more recent apologetics for torture. No, it's for allegedly helping Governor Bush to duck jury duty. Which is sort of like the way Kerik's complicity in the manufacture and promotion of the Taser was fine with official Washington but his nanny problem was something else again.

Oh well, whatever works. They got Al Capone for tax evasion, didn't they.

1/24/05 9:33 a.m. (Link here)

"Beware of the blog" reprise: now that blogs are past their first vogue and in fact suffering kind of a post-election slump, s'morning's SF Chron business page finally notices the phenomenon. It warns, "Be careful what you blog."

So now that cussed theme song is stuck in my head again. "It creeps, it leaps..." Urrrrgggh...

1/23/05 6:23 p.m. (Link here)

R.I.P. Luma Hadi, sort-of-accidentally killed by two soldiers horsing around with a gun in a real-life "Pulp Fiction" moment.

The soldiers got sentences of three years in one case, eighteen months in the other, plus demotion to private and dishonorable discharge.

...

Oh, I'll let Bob Dylan say it. Be sure and read the last stanza.

1/22/05 10:52 p.m. (Link here)

From yesterday's SF Chron:

Bush used the word "freedom" Thursday six more times than Martin Luther King did in his seminal "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963.

1/21/05 10:52 p.m. (Link here)

I hadn't realized the advocates for Social Security privatization were holding up a Chilean system created by Pinochet as a model. David Lazarus takes a mordant look at it here.

1/21/05 Friday Evening (Link here)

It's Friday catblogging time. As you can see, all members of our household follow the news closely.

1/20/05 9:33 a.m. (Link here)

There's a lesson in this news story about a planned San Francisco anti-abortion demonstration: organizers on the Right don't really believe that red-blue stuff. They'd be foolish to. They play good chess. They refuse to declare any part of the board off-limits to themselves. They advance one piece, then another, and eventually their opponents' "home territory" has changed.

This is one reason I really don't think it's a good idea for progressives to treat political demonstrations as having to be big, raucous events in major cities. Dedicated small-town people travel to these things at great personal cost, and all their effort to get to the center of things only leads the dimly aware heartland public to see the exercise of the right to assemble and petition for redress as something only alien urban people actually do.

The Right has an edge on the low-key neighbor-to-neighbor approach. Time we did a little more of that.

Also time we paid more attention to what the Right is up to in "our" part of the country. There's a poster on Eddy Street in the Tenderloin, for example, from a Christian school, apparently for very young children, across from the TL's newish police station. The poster says they're offering low tuition, scholarships, the safety of the location, even free groceries for parents. It doesn't say what they get in return. Souls, presumably. So it's basically saying to poor parents "let us indoctrinate your children and in return we will keep them safe and give your family food." It's a completely illegitimate appeal, but one that I'm sure becomes more appealing to parents the worse the public schools and other public services get.

1/19/05 8:50 a.m. (Link here)

Now that Lawrence Summers has unmasked his true opinion of women, it may be time to think about bringing back Radcliffe as a college separate from Harvard. I never thought I'd say that, but I never thought any president of Harvard in my lifetime would claim women were innately less able to do science. I fear we are skidding backwards.

1/14/05 1:04 p.m. (Link here)

I spent the morning waiting for a charge to be thrown out (it was) in a San Francisco criminal courtroom. I don't sit through these plea-and-arraignment sessions so often any more and in a perverse way I miss the experience. This morning a judge threw out a battery charge against a man (not my client) who was additionally accused on vandalism and graffiti charges. The public defender started by asking to have the matter discharged and then, when the judge very reasonably asked why, she stood and dithered several minutes. Well, asked the judge, what was the basis for the battery charge? Well, said the public defender, the security guard had hit the defendant. After further dithering it emerged from the DA that the defendant had "swung his backpack" at the guard. Well, asked the judge, had the backpack made contact with the guard? No clear answer. In the bench at the back of the room, the guy next to me muttered, "And we're wasting taxpayers' money on this stupid stuff?" The judge threw out the battery charge. But then she otherwise threw the book at the alleged vandal because she saw he was already facing other criminal charges. Presumably on the theory that the best thing to do with a man in trouble is to give him more trouble of the same kind.

When the guy next to me had his turn before the court, he seemed to be charged with "trespassing" on account of homelessness. The judge, and even more intensely the DA, put big emphasis on his getting housing and benefits as a condition for dropping the charge. There seemed to be in general more emphasis than in past years on requiring people to be housed as a condition for gentler treatment. Which sounds backhandedly like the old blaming-the-victim practice of jailing people for "being without visible means of support."

Lots of Victorian stuff going on in our courts and elsewhere. So where's Charles Dickens when we need him to write about it?

1/12/05 5:57 p.m. (Link here)

Had been wondering if there was something more, well, optimistic to do than joining a protest march on Inauguration Day. Katha Pollitt, via Echidne, suggests a specifically labeled abortion rights donation. Not a bad idea. You don't like abortion rights? Substitute something you do care about that's in trouble.

1/12/05 12:19 p.m. (Link here)

Parental (and otherwise out-of-towner) advisory: the following item contains San Francisco local politics. Should you be susceptible to feelings of boredom or confusion when viewing San Francisco local politics, we offer you as an alternative viewing option this previously released photo of an adorable kittycat.

...cue elevator music...

Anyway, San Francisco is having a wave of political divorces. First the Gavinator split with Kimberley. Now Mabel Teng and Fiona Ma are dumping their respective spouses. (Or vice versa, how do I know?)

So I'm reading this nugget out of the paper s'morning and Strange de Joel says, "Next thing we'll hear Willie Brown is getting married."

What's that you say? You wanted a better punchline after all the buildup? Sorry, pal, that's the risk of reading these SF items. Ya can't say I didn't warn you this time.

1/11/05 2:55 p.m. (Link here)

"That word -- 'values' -- has lately become a codeword for appeasement of the right-wing fringe...." Ah, nice to hear again from Howard Dean, a man who does understand this framing stuff. I could live with him as head of the Democratic National Committee. It's a nice idea, in fact.

[Weird supplemental thought: why isn't it obvious that the party of moral values is the one that's against torture?]

1/10/05 6:53 p.m. (Link here)

Charles of Charles' Orwell Links has kindly helped us to prepare a photo essay on Orwell's Spain for his site, which is also otherwise nicely redone. Go check it out.

1/10/05 3:06 p.m. (Link here)

There's a GAO study out today on the part of the "No Child Left Behind Act" where schools labeled as substandard -- that's a tenth of all American schools -- have to give their students a chance to transfer elsewhere. It seems that in practice there are some bugs in the transfer option. In the program's second year, only about 1% of students eligible to transfer really did change schools, and in some cases "better" schools didn't have room to accept all the applicants for transfers.

1/10/05 12:20 p.m. (Link here)

Worse and worse. It isn't enough we should reenact Vietnam, we've also got to revive the crimes we learned to commit in El Salvador?

Time to get out the B side of Dire Straits' "Brothers in Arms." It's still the best distillation of how it felt, even as a faraway bystander, to have some part of every day's news devoted to Central American cruelties committed in the name of defending one's own undemanding self.

1/9/05 7:44 p.m. (Link here)

I always think I'm overstating the decline of the republic and then something I thought was completely beyond contemporary possibility -- at least in my own country -- turns out to have been going on for years. Tonight on the news there was a report of a proposal someplace in the East Bay to create an adult curfew. So I went and looked up Adult Curfew on Google and found some towns already do have such things. Adult curfews? Now, of course, there'll be some people who work night shift and have to be traveling to work at night. Aha! Let's give them passes from their employers. And, um, let's send around some patrols to stop people walking around after midnight and ask if they have those passes. And then we'll have -- what -- 1985 South Africa? 1850 North Carolina? Doesn't anybody read the Constitution any more?

1/9/05 6:40 p.m. (Link here)

Explain this again, Mr. Schwarzenegger. Why is the California Nurses' Association a "special interest" but not the donors to your own re-election campaign? Those would be, e.g., Blue Cross of California; the Chase Manhattan Bank; Milton Friedman of the Hoover Institution; Charles Crocker of BEI Technologies, Inc.; Home Depot; the BAMC Mortgage Company; Apple Computer; Sierra Pacific Industries; Sunset Growers, Inc.; Qualcomm Incorporated; the Hertz Corporation; Microsoft; WalMart Stores, Inc..... aw, go read the rest of it yourself. (You have, haven't you?)

And that's just one of your many campaign committees. Donors to which are -- what? General interests? Usual suspects?

Are nurses "special" because it's just so specially unusual for people who work hard all day at miserable jobs to take a part in politics at all?

1/8/05 12:30 p.m. (Link here)

So anyway, I'm betting Mayor Gavin is out of the closet by spring.

Strange De Joel sez: "His marriage of inconvenience is over."

1/8/05 11:45 a.m. (Link here)

An American I know woke up with a howling toothache yesterday morning, scheduled emergency dental surgery, drove to work in a rainstorm -- part of it through deep water on the road -- worked until time for the surgery, had the surgery, then went back to work, worked hard despite the pain, and didn't head home until after six. Being personally self-employed I find it hard to believe but this kind of heroism appears to be normal in my country.

1/7/05 2:25 p.m. (Link here)

...and I forgot to mention that Barbara Boxer has forty times more guts than John Kerry.

1/7/05 1:53 p.m. (Link here)

If any previous administration had literally bribed journalists to support its policies with ostensibly independent commentary, how long would it have taken to get articles of impeachment to the floor? Just asking.

1/6/05 3:06 p.m. (Link here)

Was just listening to a fine rant from an ex-admiral explaining to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Mr. Gonzales and his cronies started putting American troops in danger as soon as they "got cute with the Geneva Convention."

I phoned Senator Feinstein's office s'morning for the first time in quite a while. Had forgotten how good it does feel to exercise a democratic right. Told them torture is not just wrong, it's also unseemly, it's embarrassing, and while it would be nice if they'd consider the morality of the matter they should at least think of the international embarrassment.

Other than which things are looking bleak enough that I'm agreeing with the Fafblog's rant: "What has 2004 done for anyone?" (Warning: contains language. And rudeness.)

[Later: Oops, I forgot about the Red Sox. And MoveOn. MoveOn is a good thing.]

1/5/05 7:25 p.m. (Link here)

This just in: the (Gavin) Newsoms have filed for divorce. Strange de Joel sez, "Bloggers, start your engines."

1/5/05 1:07 p.m. (Link here)

People Unclear on the Concept Dept. --

Here we have a press release from a mortgage company claiming that an increase in foreclosures "may be the beginning of another real estate investor boom."

Does nobody remember the savings and loan crisis? I feel old.

1/4/05 7:06 p.m. (Link here)

Still catching up on my reading. Here's David Sirota, also in The Nation, making a persuasive case that the Democratic Leadership Council, fount of business-Democratic "centrism," is really to the right of most Americans.

1/3/05 3:56 p.m. (Link here)

More on Wal-Mart: A&L Daily reminds of the good NYRB article on same, and the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce have made available online their report showing that Wal-Mart actually receives extra public subsidies by forcing its employees to draw public benefits for lack of adequate private-sector wages or benefits.

BTW the majority website of this House committee has found the most insulting method yet for linking to the minority party website. The Democratic Party site, home to 22 of the 49 representatives of the people on this committee, is linked from the dismissive words, "Democrat Views." Whaddayamean "views"? How about legislation, votes, reports, investigations... the rest of the business of governing? What has happened to the majority party's Congressional not to say common courtesy? And in a country that roots for underdogs, how long can the Republicans get away with swaggering around like B-movie villains?

[UPDATE: And speaking of villainous arrogance...]

[FURTHER UPDATE: Hey, lookit, public incredulous disgust actually works. Maybe it'd be worth applying more often.]

1/3/05 1:06 p.m. (Link here)

One of several new ways to think about Wal-Mart from Liza Featherstone in The Nation:

Al Zack, who until his retirement in 2004 was the United Food and Commercial Workers' vice president for strategic programs, observes that appealing to the poor was "Sam Walton's real genius. He figured out how to make money off of poverty. He located his first stores in poor rural areas and discovered a real market. The only problem with the business model is that it really needs to create more poverty to grow." That problem is cleverly solved by creating more bad jobs worldwide. In a chilling reversal of Henry Ford's strategy, which was to pay his workers amply so they could buy Ford cars, Wal-Mart's stingy compensation policies--workers make, on average, just over $8 an hour, and if they want health insurance, they must pay more than a third of the premium--contribute to an economy in which, increasingly, workers can only afford to shop at Wal-Mart.

1/3/05 11:09 a.m. (Link here)

BadAttitudes has the straight dope on why not to buy those Chilean strawberries. Hint: the U.S. trade deficit is about to include food as well as lawn furniture and Beanie Babies.

1/2/05 9:45 p.m. (Link here)

Too many dead. The tsunami, and three American heroes: Sontag last week, and now both Rep. Robert Matsui and former Rep. Shirley Chisholm. Damn, damn, damn. We needed them all.

1/2/05 1:17 p.m. (Link here)

Happy New Year, and now our own government is overtly making plans for life imprisonment without trial of people who they find dangerous in ways too amorphous to survive a courtroom test.

Habeas corpus, anyone?

Now that the Soviets are defeated, does our executive branch no longer feel a need to justify that hoary label, "the free world"?

[Later] And there's this report from the London Observer about sickening torture at Guantanamo. These stories are getting to be normal. Supporters of this administration who claim to believe in freedom or in the rights of the individual should examine their stomachs. If they don't find at least some queasiness they need an empathy transplant not to mention a refresher in elementary-school civics.

And I still can't believe that educated American lawyers -- people who cannot claim the excuse of ignorance -- actually bring themselves to torture the words of our Constitution into an endorsement of this filth.

Yes, we have to defend the country. But we also have to keep it worth defending.

1/1/05 12:48 p.m. (Link here)

Otherwise decent WFCR, the NPR station for western Massachusetts, marked the New Year with a countdown followed by a bunch of jazzy modulations that failed to resolve into anything like "Auld Lang Syne." The tune turned out to be "America the Beautiful" -- strangely, unpleasantly out of place. I'm happy to find my country beautiful, but it does not, excuse me, have a unique claim on the arrival of 2005. "Auld Lang Syne" is perfectly nice, is deeply traditional, offers a nice, rare breath of pleasant hope, and is sung in quite a few of the countries in which the New Year does annually arrive without reference to national distinctions. So it's precisely the wrong time to be singing the patriotic songs of one's own country.

Has our auld acquaintance with the rest of this planet been in fact forgot? Are we now addicted to marking every public occasion with inward-looking ceremonies of nationalism? What's next -- the national anthem at weddings? Maybe, if the hard-line nationalist mentality doesn't soften, we'll develop some equivalent of the old Soviet wedding practice where the happy couple went straight from the ceremony to lay the bride's bouquet at some high grim war memorial.

Sorry -- call me a conservative if you want, but I think societies should respect tradition and the individual enough to let the old plain celebrations take place without looking-over-the-shoulder, more-patriotic-than-thou genuflections to the national glory. For that matter, the actual national glory doesn't exactly gain dignity through all this smotheration in whipped cream and tinsel.

OK, grump over. Here's to auld acquaintance being remembered in 2005.

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