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. "#364," to the end of the URL above.

3/31/04 9:50 p.m.(Link here.)

 Now, this guy is a conservative. Ex-Congressman Bob Barr is against gay marriage in Georgia and says he'll do his best to stop it in Georgia -- and there, of course, we disagree -- but at least he has some sense of the sheer contempt for the Constitution involved in trying to pass the only amendment since the Eighteenth actually intended to deprive people of rights. Or maybe, to be fair, all Mr. Barr has is a sense of moderation. But even that's something to appreciate in these times of radical right-wing ambition.

3/30/04 10:01 p.m.(Link here.)

 Good grief, I was joking about that "future White House staffers" business a couple days ago, but it turns out Mr. Bush's crew really were going the Nixonian full Cleveland in a manner frighteningly close to Doonesbury's 30-year-old parody.

 It never fails: every time I go on vacation, someone sticks one more nail in the coffin of satire.

3/30/04 9:50 a.m.(Link here.)

 An entertaining theory: I think the personal histories of intellectual Baby Boomers who underwent conversions during or after the 1970s may inhibit them from defending either the Vietnam War or the Nixon Administration even at the moments when the current administration most seems to be reliving 1972. Can't prove it, just a hunch. But how many favorable references to Haldeman, Colson, or Agnew have you seen in the op-eds or the weblogs lately??

 [UPDATE: I'm told the above is incomprehensible. What I mean is, people who were liberals in the 1970s and later became Reagan or Bush conservatives are possibly still reluctant to speak favorably of the actual Republican president who they learned so thoroughly to dislike in the aforementioned 1970s.]

3/29/04 10:39 a.m.(Link here.)

 Our local Fox TV affiliate doesn't share the outrageousness of national Fox News but it panders in the more ordinary bleeds-it-leads way. The news teasers during the early-evening comedies always create some dopey geographical mystery to draw people in, e.g. "...we'll tell you which Bay Area fire department staged a dramatic rescue today..."

 So this one last week was only mildly out of the ordinary. Near as I can remember, it went, "...we'll tell you what a Bay Area city wants to ban because of terrorism worries." 

We could not remotely guess what the item might be. It could have been anything at all. Seersucker. Milk. Anything.

 Later Joel read in the paper that they were talking in Contra Costa County about outlawing a kind of large firearm, which is a reasonable idea after all.

 But our sad discovery from the episode was this: if the thing to be forbidden had been ice cream or banana peels we would have felt indignant but not surprised. We had stopped expecting logic.

3/28/04 10:22 p.m.(Link here.)

 National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice "says she won't talk under oath because precedent prevents White House staffers from testifying about their advice to a president."

Let me guess: she's not thinking of herself, she's thinking of future White House staffers.

3/25/04 9:06 p.m.(Link here.)

 Tonight the moon and five planets not only lined up in a rare formation, they all appeared in the patch of night sky that we see best from the yard of our building.

Our neighbor came out on her porch, so I called up, "Hey, we can see five planets from here!.

 But she was on her cell phone, so all she said was "Mayonnaise."

3/24/04 9:37 p.m.(Link here.)

 A query for a current writing project: does anyone have a source for the comment often attributed to Robert Kennedy that he would prosecute a mobster even for "spitting on the sidewalk"? I know Mr. Ashcroft attributed this statement to Kennedy in October 2001, but is there a source indicating where and when RFK might have said this? If anyone knows, pls write to me here, OK?

3/24/04 9:33 p.m.(Link here.)

 Consider the implications of Clarke's statement today that the Bush Admin didn't want to retaliate against Al-Q for the U.S.S. Cole attack because "it happened on the Clinton administration's watch."

That should not have made a difference to public servants whose loyalty was to the United States as a whole and not to a particular administration.

AP is leading with it now. Good.

3/24/04 2:16 p.m.(Link here.)

 'Smorning's SF Chron details San Francisco authorities' expensive and to date unsuccessful pursuit of "the Bushman," a street performer whose gimmick is jumping from behind greenery to scare tourists on Fisherman's Wharf. The story says more than it admits about San Francisco, and I don't just mean the obsessive goofiness of our "quality of life" policing. This guy is a performance artist, and part of his performance is to shame members of the self-sequestered American majority into asking themselves just why they were so easily scared. In other words, he's unpopular with the authorities for the same reasons visibly homeless campers are hounded out of tourist areas: the folks who want to turn this town into a theme park don't want to make free-spending visitors stop and ask themselves any hard questions.

 3/23/04 6:44 p.m.(Link here.)

 A Cup of Coffee in Huesca:

I found this charming story today because a fellow Orwell fan is planning a trip to Spain.

3/23/04 11:23 a.m.(Link here.)

 Another tale of honesty unwelcome in the California prison system.

3/22/04 7:47 p.m.(Link here.)

 So much for the Brothers Grimm.

3/22/04 9:28 a.m.(Link here.)

 "My spirit just told me something wasn't going to be right down there," says Kenny Castille, one of many ex-tenants of public housing interviewed in a Denver Post feature on local HOPE VI public housing reconstruction. HOPE VI spiffs up urban neighborhoods, all right, but it does so in the service of the great eviction of the poor going on in major American cities as middle-class homebuyers return to urban centers. I think the massive displacement now going on will be remembered as an enclosure process comparable to -- if less complete than -- the Enclosures of British history, and maybe the Dust Bowl evictions of the 1930s. The common thread being systematic evictions of poor people driven not by individual tenancy disputes but by landlords' decisions to use their property otherwise. Perhaps it's especially severe in San Francisco given our legendary housing shortage, but this Denver story sounds depressingly familiar.

Where then, ah! where, shall poverty reside,
To 'scape the pressure of contiguous pride?
If to some common's fenceless limits stray'd
He drives his flock to pick the scanty blade,
And ev'n the bare-worn common is denied.

3/21/04 2:55 p.m.(Link here.)

 Read Joe Garofoli's article in the SF Chron on the decentralization of protest. This is an important and helpful phenomenon. Centralized big-event protests are outdated: what works is do-it-yourself media opinionmaking and small-scale hometown organizing.

3/20/04 10:16 a.m.(Link here.)

 I had thought of going to place flowers in U.N. Plaza today but instead I'll link to this photo from last March (courtesy of Stephan, who posted the link to Usenet at the time). The roses and carnations are honoring one in a series of plaques at the San Francisco site of the UN's founding. The text is a quotation from the Charter. It says, "...to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest..."

Nuff said.

3/19/04 4:48 p.m.(Link here.)

 About borrow-and-spend Republicans: they're worse than "tax-and-spend Democrats." Democrats ask working people to tax themselves to fund services for themselves, pensions for their parents, and education for their children. Republicans ask the people to borrow from their unborn grandchildren in the form of public debt to pay for wars and prisons. (I do admit California's Gray Davis believed in bond issues to build prisons and overpay prison guards. But then I never did count him as a Democrat.)

Funny, Republicans make such a big deal about the rights of the unborn. As Barney Frank used to say, they think society's responsibility to the individual begins at conception and ends at birth.

3/19/04 11:37 a.m.(Link here.)

 In Buncombe County, North Carolina, it is not easy to defend 54-year-old Linda Evans, a victim of long-term severe domestic violence who killed her rapist and domestic abuser -- she insists, in self-defense. At this point she is charged with first-degree murder, with a possible sentence of life without parole. I'm told by someone following the case locally, "Linda's first trial ended in a 11-1 deadlock; her second plea deadline is this coming Monday."

Local anti-rape activists have taken up her case, while at least one friend of the deceased has made a not-especially-veiled threat against the defendant with apparent impunity.

If only because of the severity of the charge, this looks like a case that needs attention from the outside world.  I don't know who to write to, but the editors of the Asheville Citizen-Times might be a start. Nother thought would be to advise any women's-rights organizations where anyone reading this happens to have contacts.

Update: here's contact and donation information for Our Voice, a rape crisis service working on this issue in Asheville, together with the group's recommendations on officials to contact about North Carolina domestic violence issues.

3/18/04 1:08 p.m.(Link here.)

 From Atrios and his commenters today: Freedom Sausage, Shoe Freedom, and more.

3/17/04 12:14 p.m. (Link here.)
 
 

Gotta love that right-wing spin. For a year or two the pseudopatriots were yelling that France had always been our near-enemy. But as my fellow Orwell fan Paul Sebastianelli says, there's been a Soviet-style overnight shift in their position: now France has always been our close ally and friend, and our former close ally Spain has always been a country of dastardly "appeasers". (The sheer tin-eared nerve, using the word "appeasement" to describe the present-day defeat of a Franco Lite party by Spanish Socialists...)

So I guess that means Franco-Americans are all right again, but not Zapatero-Americans. No more of this Freedom Fries business. We're free to eat omelets except for Spanish ones, and we don't have to send back the Statue of Liberty, though what with Ashcroft and Guantanamo and all, I still expect Lafayette's ghost to come repo the thing. 

Now we get to come down with the Freedom Flu and dance the Freedom Flamenco. We'll probably get smutty Internet spam advertising Freedom Fly. We can eat Freedom Rice, wear boots of Freedom Leather, sing about "a rose in Freedom Harlem." Down in those Louisiana bayous we'll find Freedom Moss hanging from the trees. 

Of course sooner or later we'll get sick of insulting the Spanish and find someone else to insult. Stay tuned for Freedom Bacon, Freedom Waffles, the Freedom Hat Dance and, who knows, maybe we'll top hot dogs with Liberty Cabbage like our great-grandparents did.

(So with all this freedom and liberty coming out of our ears, could we please have habeas corpus back?)

3/15/04 11:41 p.m. (Link here.)

 Is it too much to hope that this public letter posted on the Dean weblog means the doctor will put his online structures and contact lists to work for the Kerry campaign as of Thursday?

 Seems possible, but good grief, some of the responses from Dean loyalists sound terribly bitter.

3/15/04 10:54 a.m. (Link here.)

 Today's news from the world of California incarceration:

In the Corcoran prison, an old man died of starvation because he was afraid that if he left his cell a guard would beat him again. Nobody did anything about it except for a few fellow prisoners who brought the man a little food and tried belatedly to get help.

The guard who supervised the cellblock -- the same one suspected of having assaulted Singh -- is alleged to have told another inmate not to bother speaking out on behalf of the starving inmate. "Forget it; he's going to die"...

3/14/04 6:21 p.m. (Link here.)

 Speaking of stealth campaigning, the SF Examiner's Adriel Hampton spotted that local San Francisco campaign mailer from a previously unknown group called "San Franciscans for a New Direction." She rightly calls it "noxious," and adds this:

"For clarity's sake, it's a blessing that Wade Randlett, director of SF SOS, the downtown civic group backed by The City's wealthiest Democrats and Republicans, recently sent out a signed e-mail with a message nearly identical to the mailer."

3/14/04 6:09 p.m. (Link here.)

 Unhappy reading: a Center For Public Integrity report on more stealth campaigning through political front organizations: this time a Section 527 group with the innocuous name of "Americans for Jobs & Healthcare." The CFPI people report this group had a lot to do with sinking Howard Dean. And that a major contributor was Robert Torricelli, a Kerry supporter.

I'm not taking back the "give to Kerry" appeal. It's simply necessary to get mainstream politics back into the White House. But Kerry's supporters shouldn't campaign for him through obscure shell groups. He's got to be utterly transparent to show up the deep sneakiness of the Rove approach.

...and looking at this item brings to light a lovely new resource -- new to me, anyway -- for digging up the sources of campaign organizations' funding. It turns out the IRS does have a search page for Sec. 527 political organizations' disclosure statements. And did you know nonprofits themselves are required to provide copies of their 990 forms to anyone who asks?

3/14/04 12:33 p.m. (Link here.)

 If you have not yet sent any money to John Kerry, you can find inspiration in this list of Bush check-gatherers (from Rolling Stone via Cursor.org).

3/14/04 12:35 a.m. (Link here.)

 This may sound strange, but I think the Republicans are acting like Communists.

Reading yet another tale of scummy parliamentary legerdemain by a Republican committee chairman, I was just reminded of a section in a 1948 California legislative report that's otherwise, thank heavens, of mere historical or entertainment interest. It's the "Fourth Report of the Senate Fact-Finding Committee On Un-American Activities: Communist Front Organizations."

Oddly enough, there's support in this text for my more-than-half-serious theory that the Karl Rove branch of the Republican Party is using parts of the old Bolshevik playbook. Or perhaps I should say, the Bolshevik playbook as characterized, caricatured, and perhaps internalized by these fellows' spiritual fathers and grandfathers -- Bolshevism in a radical "anti-Communist" mirror image form.

The flavor of present-day Republican politics would be familiar to the old God That Failed boys: the enforced repetition of an opportunistically shifting party political "line"; the benign-sounding front groups (e.g. the "Independent Women's Forum"); the fake-grassroots efforts now known as "astroturf"; the efforts to take over or replace ideologically diverse organizations with squads of obedient party members (think about the K Street Project); the Potemkin cheering squads; the Lysenko science; the sacrifice of empirical analysis and competent civil service to political demands; the quick nasty clampdown on dissenters; the pretense of democratic values overlying a basically totalitarian mentality -- all these things were only sometimes true about actual American Communists, but were certainly believed about them by professional anti-Communists. Now these are standard tactics of the Republican Party.

Here, look at this chunk from the 1948 report, pages 26 to 27:

"...The most pronounced difference between ordinary American members of an organization and the Communist Trojan Horse clique within an organization, is in their attitude toward parliamentary procedure and tactics.

Parliamentary procedure, based on Robert's Rules of Order and other authorities, and on constitutional provisions and rules, is the method through which group actions are accomplished in an orderly way. Without some system such as the formal process of parliamentary procedure, an assemblage of any group quickly degenerates into an unruly mob.

Since the control and manipulation of organized groups is vitally necessary to Red Fascist strategy and tactics, every Communist must study and master parliamentary procedure to the limit of his individual ability and natural talent.

In contrast, the average non-Communist member of an organization is familiar with only the most rudimentary phases of parliamentary procedure. They are not obligated by any secret, conspiratorial authority outside the organization to which they belong, to study parliamentary procedure and strategy. Further, the subject, while vitally important to the conduct of organized group activities, is too infrequently taught for information and guidance to be easily available to leaders of organizations who want to learn more about the conduct and control of meetings...."

[UPDATE: Alan Hogue, (of alt.books.george-orwell, Vox Clamantis, and Galactic Dust Cloud), has some good points that I think I'll throw in here, just where your boredom, dear readers, will be setting in. After some kind opening words he opines thusly:

...Although perhaps not so much in this particular case, the left is clearly being caught off guard by this seemingly new tactic of appropriating traditionally leftist vocabulary and tactics by the more extreme end of the right. Just look at academia's response to Horowitz over the "academic diversity" debate if you want an example.

What makes your topic more complicated, and this article more dodgy, is that these are tactics once used by a nebulous, thoroughly discredited minority of the left. More complicating, you are presenting it filtered through the feverish paranoia (and concomitant rhetoric) of early cold war witch hunters.

This can rub off on you if you aren't careful. Your long excerpt invites another kind of double vision (actually triple, I suppose). Literally, it describes some members of the CP, more abstractly, it epitomizes the attitudes of the Senate Fact-Finding committee, and finally, you offer it as a mirror for the "Karl Rove Republicans". So the whole thing is simultaneously pointing in three directions.

And because you are turning this bit of rhetoric back upon the Karl Roves of today, you are in an ambiguous position in the sense that you must simultaneously claim that this passage is "sententious, paranoid stuff", but also, in a roundabout way, you stand behind it as in some way accurate when aimed at Karl Rove. So this incendiary tone will bleed into yours unless you can make this balance unmistakably clear.

Well, um, yes, he's right. I don't know if it's getting through what I'm trying to say: that the folks on the American right who come out of the old McCarthyist politics seem to have first selected the very worst thinking and tactics of the American old hard left as grist for caricature and collective blame -- and now they almost seem to have adopted the caricatured tactics as their own.

Or maybe there's no projection, caricature, or hall-of-mirrors flip-flopping going on here at all, and I've just found an overcomplicated way to say the Rovians are frequently unfair and undemocratic?

I dunno, maybe mind-cluttering stuff like this '48 legislative report doesn't even deserve to be dragged back into the light. But to get back to it now...]

"...Because of this disparity between the Communist professional parliamentarians and the anti-Communist amateurs, time after time the Communists put over their programs within organized groups against the openly expressed desire of the majority. Failing this, they usually are able to block and defeat the desires of the majority group.

Second to the Communist study and mastery of parliamentary tricks, is the Red Fascist science of confusion and misrepresentation in debate. Communists are not committed to any moral or ethical code and they have no respect for the basic principles, purposes and goals of any organization they seek to infiltrate and control.

Consequently, while a non-Communist member or group in an organization is thinking and talking in terms of the ethical, political and aspirational ideals of the organization, the Communists are free to engage in any misrepresentation, confusion, personal abuse or emotional appeal that will advance their purpose of the moment.

The most familiar and monotonously repeated device of Communists in debate is the use of the "unity" theme as a basis for twisting and manipulating organized groups to serve the purposes of the "party line." The device is used by Communists with consistent success to protect Communist leaders and key policies from attack and repudiation. Uninformed members of groups, who abhor controversy and internal dissension, have voted against their own best interests repeatedly under the lure of the Communist siren-song of "unity."

Unity is necessary within any organization, but no group or groups can have unity with Communism or Communist factions except at the price of unvarying subservience or agreement with the Communist "party line" of the moment..."

3/13/04 10:47 p.m. (Link here.)

 Interesting Guardian profile of Garrison Keillor, a character formed by the fundamentalist Plymouth Brethren who grew up to find Democratic politics consistent with the old-fashioned Christianity of his childhood. Something especially familiar and honorable in this:

"...Influence and hobnobbing where friendship and business intersect really went against my parents' theology. They looked with great suspicion upon wealthy people. They found it hard to imagine any good way they could have got rich. For my parents, wealth implied corruption and while my politics might not have fitted with that exactly, it also wasn't at odds with it."

 The article is over here, via Arts & Letters Daily.

3/13/04 4:03 p.m. (Link here.)

 You may not have heard how the chief actuary analyzing Medicare, described in the Washington Post as "a competent and neutral civil servant," has disclosed that Bush administration officials threatened to fire him if he told Congress his true predictions about the cost of the Medicare bill. Knight-Ridder also reports the actuary, Richard Foster, sent an email last June explaining he might need to resign in protest.

But apparently this is not front-page news. The SF Chron put the syndicated Washington Post report on Page A4. I don't know where the print edition of the Post put it but it's not on the front page of the website now

 Let this sink in: it is not front-page news that Bush officials pressured a civil servant to withhold information from Congress so our elected representatives would base their decisions about a major bill on a false understanding of the bill's effects. Even in an administration riddled with reports of unethical bullying, isn't this an important instance of high-stakes deception?

Why the hell is this story not front-page news?

 UPDATE: I hadn't noticed Talking Points Memo and Calpundit were already all over the Richard Foster story. But evidently it does still need more attention as it's not yet on Page One where it belongs.

 MORE: Further details here, and Daschle is calling for a revote.

 3/12/04 5:25 p.m. (Link here.)

 Tom DeLay's political party turns the Clinton surplus into the Bush defecit -- estimated likely to hit half a trillion dollars this year -- and what does Tom DeLay do? He dusts off a phrase used heavily during the years of the Reagan deficit: "...the old-time Democrat of tax and spend."

That would be, I guess, as opposed to the newfangled Republican of borrow and spend.

--

I've been wrapped up in an argument over on alt.books.george-orwell that feels as wrongfooted as its subject matter: the murder in Iraq of women's rights attorney Fern Holland, who the newsgroup's Iraq correspondent says he knew. I seem to have offended some people by saying it's especially tragic when a good person dies for a wholly good cause amid a dangerous hash of a situation made by others with more ambiguous motives. Someone thought (or pretended to think) I meant soldiers by that. No, I meant high-level hawks, armchair interventionists, Halliburton execs, and other folks who supported an invasion but didn't themselves take any risks. Well, anyway, R.I.P. Fern Holland. And in her honor, don't let the Bush Admin back down on women's rights there. Or elsewhere.

--

There's a suggestion shared by the very different weblogs TalkLeft and Instapundit that it would be a nice gesture to send flowers to Spanish consulates this week.

--

Damn, what a nasty week this has been.

3/12/04 (about 2 p.m. I think this was)(Link here.)

 Life in California:

Ahhh, I love the smell of ammonium perchlorate in my morning coffee...

3/11/04 9:27 p.m. (Link here.)

 OK, right-wing jerks are always yelling about "political correctness" when you say basic stuff like racism is bad, immigration is normal, affirmative action has done some good, etc.

But here's a case of PC I can help deplore: this AP story and Chron headline leave a howling void in place of the words: "It Ain't Over 'Til The Fat Lady Sings."

3/10/04 4:12 p.m. (Link here.)

 This afternoon I dropped by the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness office. Partly to send a fax, partly to deliver a six-pack of Sam Adams to occasional volunteer receptionist Mario McCarthy, who has declared Mar. 10 of every year to be "MAR10 Day" and on said date requires tribute in suds from friend, acquaintance and perfect stranger alike. I blush to admit I've forgotten Mario Day every single year since the late 'nineties. Hence the six-pack: a bottle for every year missed.

A cheerful errand, but one visitor in the office was not cheerful.

A heavy, noisy lady with a cane. It seemed another office had sent her on a wild goose chase to search for housing at several different unhelpful addresses -- a task especially unfair, she said, because she had a disability. She was demanding satisfaction from Planet Earth in general and also specifically from the volunteer on the reception desk, who did not happen to be Mario. Mario would have jollied her. This volunteer just listened. "It's genocide," the lady was saying, and while I fiddled with the Coalition's elderly fax machine I couldn't help listening too. "It'd be more humane to line people up and shoot them than to kill them slowly through economics..." Or words similar to that. I didn't take notes at the time. Receptionists in social service offices get that kind of drama a lot and can't afford to take it seriously.

But then I got to poking through a file of academic press releases and found something shocking from UMichigan:

In a vivid illustration of the tradeoffs that society increasingly faces in this age of costly new medical technology, new research examines the potential impact of Medicare's decision to cover lifesaving implanted devices only for certain heart patients, and not for others.

The analysis shows that more than half of the patients who would be good candidates to receive implanted cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) according to criteria from the MADIT II clinical trial would not qualify to be reimbursed for them under Medicare's current guidelines.

And some of them will die from sudden cardiac death that could probably have been prevented by an ICD, a pacemaker-like implanted device that monitors heart rhythm and shocks the heart back into a normal pace when an arrhythmia develops....

3/9/04 8:50 p.m. (Link here.)
 
 

...Needless to say, the cosmology of the Bible says nothing about membranes, quarks, gravitons or invisible dimensions. All we need is for the wingnuts in Congress to get a whiff of this heresy, and it'll be Galileo time on "American Grandstand." 

Here, read the rest of the column.

 Oh, and Ronnie Gilbert got married yesterday.

And I can no longer resist mentioning that the current U.S. President, the one hollering his head off against gay marriage, is himself a former male cheerleader.

 Further proof that, as J.B.S. Haldane allegedly once said, ""The world is not only queerer than we imagine, it's queerer than we can imagine."

3/8/04 11:20 a.m. (Link here.)

 Just an effort to be Improving this morning and recommend a way of performing Your Civic Duty but without being, I hope, completely dull.

 There's this website, Regulations.Gov. For every federal agency it posts the major proposed regulations currently open for public comment. All in one place you get summaries of the proposals, links to the full texts, and explanations of how to send in comments. This is an important way for voters to make their opinions known to their public servants and yet the political weblogs never seem to mention this site and I don't know why not.

 It would be nice to be wrong, but I at least get the impression that even with the huge expansion of electronic access, public comment on regulations is still pretty much something it only occurs to lobbyists to do -- just like it was ten years ago when our administrative law professor gave us all the homework assignment of finding a proposed rule in the Federal Register and commenting on it. Back then we had to go to the law library to do this. Now anybody with a computer can get at the Federal Register with one click but ordinary concerned citizens still don't ordinarily take a look at these precious public disclosures -- disclosures that offer a much better look at the machinery of government than most things emerging from the said machinery's press offices.

 So this is your homework assignment from me: go to Regulations.Gov, choose your favorite topic or federal agency, pick a rule and comment on it. If you don't have your own pet issue to search under, try just for example looking up "faith-based." You won't get academic credit for doing this but that shouldn't matter. It's your job, just like voting is.

3/7/04 4:04 p.m. (Link here.)

 Talking Points Memo has an item quoting a UK Daily Telegraph "expose" on an old Harvard Crimson profile of John Kerry as a young congressional candidate. As does sometimes happen with major-market journalists who derive stories from Harvard's student paper, the Telegraph doesn't give the present-day Crimson credit for digging up the story from its own archive. The part The Telegraph grabs is that Kerry once asked his draft board to let him postpone military service for a year. The actual description in the original Crimson profile is:

When he approached his draft board for permission to study for a year in Paris, the draft board refused and Kerry decided to enlist in the Navy.

After which, the profile says he began serving in 1966 and, as of February 18, 1970, "was honorably discharged from the Navy last month" though it says he's been preparing to run for Congress since the previous November.

Among other quotes:

One time Kerry was ordered to destroy a Viet Cong village but disobeyed orders and suggested that the Navy Command simply send in a Psychological Warfare team to be friend the villagers with food, hospital supplies, and better educational facilities.

It also says he's a pilot. Wonder how his flight skills compare with GW's.

And his political opinions as of 1970 make sense, even if they're not quite what the man says or thinks 34 years later: the UN should control international interventions; the CIA should get out of Laos; "most welfare recipients did deserve to be on the lists," and Spiro Agnew was "not one of our great statesmen."

Not bad. Not bad at all.

3/7/04 2:14 p.m. (Link here.)

 A billboard at Third and Cesar Chavez in San Francisco has been interestingly defaced for several weeks now. 

3/7/04 1:56 p.m. (Link here.)

 An annoying meme we've been getting from the right especially often lately: "You liberals believe in tolerance. If you disagree with our intolerant positions, you are yourselves being intolerant. Be open-minded: accept our closed-mindedness."

It's here again in an opinion piece by a Hoover Institution man who in my book commits an added sin by exploiting the honorable character and personal history of the new homelessness czar, Phil Mangano, as though Bush should get some kind of personal credit for letting his agencies hire a good man.

I do like Mangano, or did fifteen years ago anyway. As a student journalist covering city politics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I interviewed him several times about homelessness issues and he always seemed genuinely interested in providing useful services to people in trouble. This is a rare quality in a profession that frequently takes the perspective of the disgusted passer-by and considers not the housing crisis but the best way to remove the embarrassing human evidence of the crisis from the nicer parts of town.

3/7/04 1:32 p.m. (Link here.)

 I hope I'm not the first to nominate Eliot Spitzer for vice president.

He's a Democrat from New York. Reputedly good on his feet but not too flashy to play second fiddle.

He's opposing gay marriage in court right now, but because he sees it as his legal duty, not as some kind of holy mission. Not with the angry energy he has put into stopping fraud on Wall Street.

While the U.S. Attorney General has been bedeviling librarians and almanac readers and sending G-men to peer under decent people's beds, Mr. Spitzer has been actually prosecuting crime. The kind of crime that's hard to prosecute: fraud and corruption crimes commited by people with money and education who know their rights and can afford their own lawyers. This in a country where it's too obvious to even mention that most people in criminal courtrooms are poor.

When the SEC guys were trying to loosen the regulations they were supposed to enforce, Spitzer did their job for them.

And it's not just sterile righteousness. The man has a social conscience. Look at this from his Time Magazine profile:

...While still an undergraduate at Princeton, he took off for the South one summer to work at menial jobs. He hit the day-labor agencies at dawn and took whatever was available—stacking fiber-glass insulation at a warehouse, operating a jackhammer, cleaning up a sewage overflow at a hotel. He also worked that summer as a migrant laborer in upstate New York, side by side with Mexicans picking tomatoes. "I'd had a comfortable upbringing," says Spitzer, "so I wanted to experience harder work, to see the world from a different perspective."

Yes, I know, I know, he has also opposed the gun lobby. The NRA won't like him. But so what? The NRA leaders are extremists in a way many of their members probably aren't, and it's time the Democrats called their bluff.

A more serious obstacle is the one skeleton-in-closet I can find online: a report that Spitzer has taken
campaign contributions from law firms representing his prosecution targets. So, OK, I don't know if
that's as bad as it looks. If' it's directly taking money from opposing counsel, I suppose it's dirty enough to make me withdraw this suggestion.

But even that beats the weaknesses of two other possible veeps recently mentioned: Hillary Clinton, who has political liabilities out the wazoo, or Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, who should be distinguished as sharply as possible from John Kerry of Massachusetts, because the Nebraska man has a similar name and similar political history but, unlike Massachusetts Kerry, Nebraska Kerrey has acknowledged participation in what was arguably a war crime.

What may matter most about Spitzer is, he's the rare and precious kind of prosecutor who prefers to
pick on someone his own size. In lots of ways we could use a dose of that ethic at the national level.

3/7/04 12:11 p.m. (Link here.)

 "Ballyvara," an anonymous contributor to the Usenet group alt.books.george-orwell, told us many months ago that his son was in Iraq. Now he reports he's there as well. This is his comment about the report on the South African security men that I quoted earlier:

About the foreign security guys.  I wanted to add that I think the
story about the South Africans contractors was a cheap shot.  I know a
few of them, they have protected me in the red zone in the past.  Not
all of them are white, by the way.  They are decent guys.

3/6/04 10:44 p.m. (Link here.)

 The San Francisco Board of Supervisors can get exercised about the darnedest things -- for example, renaming pet "owners" as "guardians." And then not a peep about this new special tax district legislation that just went to Gavin Newsom for signature. I'm mystified.

The new ordinance is to help either business or residential property owners set up special districts in which a majority vote of property owners would require all property owners to pay extra taxes to buy extra local services.

Sounds nice, but it can have unpleasant consequences.

For one thing, it allows big businesses to put pressure on small neighbors who can less afford the extra taxes. And I guess there's some question whether all the usual protections of representative democracy apply.

Also, a business district can choose to hire private security guards for the public spaces in its area, and when undertrained security guards start imitating the roles of police officers, problems can result. There are stories from New York City about security guards of "business improvement districts" interfering forcibly with the rights of non-rich citizens to sit or stand still in public without spending money.

Besides which, if the more prosperous residents of a city are buying extra private services such as, for example, really good daily streetcleaning, why should they care about the quality of the plain-vanilla public services everyone else gets? And if it's only the less prosperous, less powerful citizens who care about the quality of the mere public services, what chance do those services have of getting better?

On the whole, it sounds like two kinds of privatization: public spaces treated as though they were private, and public city services part-replaced by private services with a consequently degraded "quality of life" for those who can't afford the extras.

These are not original arguments. They come from conversations at the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness back in the '90s when "business improvement districts" were first proposed in San Francisco and we were nervously learning about the New York experience. This 1995 report was one of the worrying items. I don't actually get why nobody -- not the Coalition nor anyone else -- is kicking up any fuss about this subject any more.

 3/5/04 7:03 p.m. (Link here.)

 Republicans aren't environmentalists but they are recyclers. It's not just Bush recapping the Nixon Administration; we're getting regular blasts from the past in California.

Arnold Schwarzenegger enters politics with the help of California's previous Republican governor. Then he appoints the memorably prosecutorial Republican governor from before that to chair a commission on state prison reform.

Joel says, "Pete Wilson! George Deukmejian! What's next, Ronald Reagan?"

The Deukmejian news is courtesy of Rough & Tumble, which meanwhile quotes an LA Times report saying that "40 or so" guards at the notorious Corcoran prison are refusing to cooperate with the local district attorney's investigation of how a prisoner bled to death in his cell last month. Not only are these guards still at large, they are still, apparently, employed by our tax dollars to enforce the laws against the disadvantaged people who end up in prisons while they themselves refuse to cooperate with a law enforcement investigation.

And George Deukmejian is the best we get to protect us from these fellows?

3/5/04 6:32 p.m. (Link here.)

GW's latest: "My opponent hasn't offered much in the way of strategies to win the war..."

That raises a question: do GW and his speechwriters remember Nixon claiming he had "a secret plan to win the war," or was the echo unintentional?

Y'know, it's an advantage for John Kerry that he remembers the 1970s. I bet GW doesn't remember whole chunks of that decade.

3/5/04 2:21 p.m. (Link here.)

 I've written a small item for publication elsewhere on this topic, hence probably shouldn't say much here, but there's some interesting material today on the Federal Election Commission site under "Political Committee Status."

3/4/04 8:15 p.m. (Link here.)

 Last month the "Whiskey Bar" site repoted the Bush Admin had hired a private company that in turn employed former South African secret police to provide "security" in Iraq. (Link via Atrios.) Now the Guardian reports another private security company, also providing "security" in Iraq, is recruiting mercenaries in Chile, including men who were trained under Pinochet.

One does wonder what specialized techniques for restoring the rule of law and establishing democracy are available from currently underemployed veterans of the former regimes of South Africa and Chile.

3/4/04 1:15 p.m. (Link here.)

 More ayatollah talk from the U.S. Baptist-in-chief. Today, a proposal to segregate the sexes in separate-but-equal schools. Probably just another attempt to distract voters from the problems that a free society ordinarily finds important, such as foreign policy, unemployment, and housing shortages. But there's something worse at work: you can just smell the fundamentalist patriarchal dread of equality and of unsanctioned human contact. Ever contemplate the faces of these "save marriage" activists and their helpmeets? You wonder what's so great about the institution of matrimony when its traditionalist defenders look so miserably imprisoned in it.

Meanwhile, Wal-Mart has sent out a warning after beating an anti-big-box ordinance through a forced referendum in Contra Costa County, California:

Wal-Mart collected enough signatures to force a vote on the ordinance, Measure L, and spent more than a million dollars to defeat it 54 percent to 46 percent. Company spokeswoman Amy Hill said Wednesday that consumers showed they want to be able to shop wherever they want, and that government should not try to limit their choices.

"I hope this vote makes communities think twice about passing these ordinances quickly,'' Hill said. "I think you will see Wal-Mart continue to defend the right of free enterprise and the right to choose where you want to shop.''

There's an old Soviet joke about this: a visiting American boasts. "I come from a free country. That means I can go out in public and call Ronald Reagan an idiot any time I want!" The Russian shrugs. "So what? I can go out in public and say the same thing."

Welcome to Wal-Mart World.

[UPDATE: Joel's spotted a fresh hypocrisy: "About Wal-Mart and consumer choice--a letter in today's chron claims that Wal-Mart doesn't let you "choose" certain kinds of birth control." Good point. In today's letters section, it's #7.]

3/3/04 9:53 a.m. (Link here.)

 OK, this morning I'm still talking San Francisco local initiatives but I'm not being so parochial.

The rest of the country should note yesterday's victory of San Francisco Proposition E. This is a citizen privacy measure that routes all federal requests for personal information to the Board of Supervisors. In setting up a protocol that makes the Supes the proper authorities to ask in the first place, it stops Mr. Ashcroft's people from intimidating low-level clerks or exploiting the Patriot Act provision that makes it a crime for the custodian of a demanded record to even tell anyone else it was asked for. If the Board of Supervisors are the parties responding to all records requests, there's no question of whether it's OK to tell them about the request.

 This is a victory, if you like, for local control over Big Government -- and that's something Republicans like, right?

SF Chron coverage in the third paragraph from the end here; PDF ballot pamphlet (big document) with summary, arguments and text at page 64 here; voting results here (scroll to the end).

 3/2/04 11:10 p.m. (Link here.)

 Go Vermont. Political memories are short but at least someone remembers what Howard Dean and his Internet team did for this election.

Now, I suppose, Internet people need to work for John Kerry and the traditional Democratic Party, whether the traditional precinct-walking Democrats understand what the Net can do for them or not.

Predictably, today we got a persuasive, inspiring invitation email from MoveOn asking for pledges of time to defeat George Bush in the coming election. Equally predictably, no phone calls or emails from the local or national Democratic Party. Why are little auxiliary electronic groups like MoveOn and People for the American Way so much sharper at organizing than the mighty institutional Democratic Party? Would the said institutional Democratic Party kindly please get off its duff and fight a little harder?

Now I'm going to be utterly parochial.(Feel free to stop reading here.)

Am pleased to report that the stealth "San Franciscans for a New Direction" mailing did not in fact redesign the District 13 Democratic County Central Committee in San Francisco. The top 12 vote-getters who (I think) have won committee seats include just two candidates the mailing supported: Leslie Katz and Catherine Dodd. Of those two, Katz probably got in on name recognition as a former county supervisor. Meanwhile we've elected all four of the candidates who the mailing tried to smear: Bill Barnes, Tracy Baxter, Joe Julian and Robert Haaland. Tinting people's photos bilious sepia over the blaring red headline, "Don't Support Democrats" is a dirty trick -- but, it turns out, not an effective one. Election results are here. Democratic County Central Committee is about two-fifths of the way down.

Also: goodbye to Prop J, which was Gavin Newsom's phony "workforce housing" proposal -- condos for his idea of a struggling middle class that would in fact have served people way richer than normal. Nearly 70-30 against. It's the last item on the results list.

Hm. "President Kerry." Got a ring to it, that does.

 3/2/04 9:59 a.m. (Link here.)

 It's election day and you wouldn't know it. The campaigning here in San Francisco has been exceptionally quiet.

--

George Soros in the SF Chron talks about creating a "presidential media fund" and says the Bush media blitz probably starts tomorrow.

--

Proof that Schwarzenegger does not think about consequences: first he says gay marriage is a threat to public order, then he says it's fine with him if the voters approve it. In persons with flatter chests this is called a flip-flop.

3/1/04 1:49 p.m. (Link here.)

 One of these "am I the only one with a memory?" moments:

S'morning's San Francisco Chronicle Oscar story quotes from Sean Penn's acceptance speech for Best Actor thusly:

...Visibly moved, Penn quickly downplayed his honor. "If there's one thing that actors know, it's that there's no such thing as best in acting," Penn said...

The only overtly political comments came from veteran documentarian Errol Morris, 56, who like last year's documentary winner, Michael Moore, used his acceptance speech to challenge U.S. military policy.

Morris' winning film, "The Fog of War,'' explores the tactics and regrets of Robert S. McNamara, secretary of defense during the Vietnam war. "Forty years ago, we went down a rabbit hole in Vietnam,'' Morris said. "I fear we're going down a rabbit hole once again.''...

"If there's one thing that actors know, other than that there weren't any WMDs, it's that there is no such thing as best in acting,"

 3/1/04 12:03 p.m. (Link here.)

 And, yes, it's more about San Francisco politics:

 S'morning's SF Chron has evidence of a small but interesting graveyard vote. The Chronicle found five names of people who had cast ballots who were listed on death records. One reaction:
 
 

Pavel Iskoz confirmed that his wife, Zinaida Iskoz, died in 1998, and he was upset to learn that a vote had been cast in her name.

 He said he has told election workers repeatedly that his wife had died and to take her name off the rolls. But he was not surprised that such a thing could happen.

 "If it happens in Russia, it must happen here,'' he said through a translator. 

 This morning I phoned the San Francisco Ethics Commission, the California Secretary of State's Office, and the San Francisco Elections Department. At all three offices I spoke with clerks who after diligent electronic searching could not find any filings by an organization of that name. It sounded as though the Ethics Commission and Secretary of State's offices might possibly have backlogged paper filings not yet entered into the computers they were searching, but they did seem mystified by the absence of a committee ID number on the campaign flyer I had received. The Secretary of State's guy told me to ask for a "410" filing, which is a "Statement of Organization" to form a campaign committee, at the local county elections office. When I followed his advice, the person answeriing my call at the San Francisco Elections Department said that any such filing goes straight into the computer system before it is even physically filed, so if they had received a "410" from this organization, she would have seen it on the computer.

 Hmmm.

 There's this frog-position photo of Gavin Newsom on the front of the "San Franciscans for a New Direction" flyer that makes him look like Superman. I wonder why someone who wanted to glorify our new mayor would choose such a sleazy way to do it.
 

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