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

 It's a bizarre fact of San Francisco poverty do-gooding that almost every time someone passes out or gets stabbed or has a miscarriage and you call the paramedics, you get at least one full-sized fire engine and, in addition to yer basic EMTs, a bunch of firemen in yellow-and-black raingear who mill around looking for a crisis while the paramedics get to work on the patient. It has to do with the paramedics being merged into the firefighters several years ago -- an arrangement that turns out to have had other distorted results as well. Lately there are reports out of firefighters harassing paramedics in the stations, and overemphasis in the combined department on fighting fires instead of rescuing people with heart attacks, drug overdoses, and so on. This week's SF Bay Guardian summarizes it all in an article with links to the relevant local govt. and grand jury reports...

...which leads to wondering if the 911 dispatchers could just, you know, check if anything is on fire before they decide to send out a fire engine. Should be simple enough:

"San Francisco Emergency."
"I can't breathe... chest hurts...Can you send..."
"Sir, I understand you're feeling short of breath, but are you on fire?"
"Well, actually... I am on fire... but that's not why I called... "

(Since you asked, yes, Strange de Joel bears major responsibility for this item.)

6/30/04 11:23 a.m. (Link here.)

 On the "enemy combatant" cases, SF Chron cartoonist Tom Meyer gets it right again.

6/29/04 10:44 p.m. (Link here.)

 The narrowing of blogspace continues: Billmon (Whiskey Bar) is giving up comments. Really, I think the big blogs are going to consolidate into magazines and comments are going to become basically letters to the editor. Not sure I like that but that's where it's heading.

6/29/04 10:29 p.m. (Link here.)

 An interesting perspective from the Pacific News Service: two scholars say the Abu Ghraib revelations raise an issue that also affects immigrants in more ordinary detention within the U.S.: the accountability (or not) of private contractors guarding and caring for prisoners on behalf of the U.S. public.

6/29/04 6:36 p.m. (Link here.)

 If I have this right what the Supremes did today, at the end of their term, was bad for censorship (ACLU v. Ashcroft) but good for sketchy arrests in foreign countries that bring people to trial in the U.S. (U.S. v. Alvarez-Machain).

 Actually I never wanted to hear again about that Alvarez-Machain case with its ghastly fact pattern. It was in the news a lot in 1989-90 when I used to edit rip-and-read radio scripts in UPI's San Francisco bureau, and if there's a less attractive civil rights claim than Dr. Alvarez-Machain's, I don't want to hear about it. Unfortunately, of course, unsympathetic plaintiffs make bad law. That's not a legal maxim but it probably should be.

[UPDATE 6/30: The Chron's Bob Egelko, as usual, looks a little deeper into the case. A secondary effect of the decision, he says, is to protect the ability of people who have suffered serious abuses abroad to bring suit in U.S. courts.]

6/29/04 6:29 p.m. (Link here.)

 This isn't very original, but I'm afraid the Who have the only adult response to the Iraqi "handover":

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again

 If you wanted to throw in the Beatles and Phil Ochs you could add that "Allawi saying is give Diem-ocracy a chance," but maybe better not.

6/29/04 12:14 p.m. (Link here.)

 MoveOn is distributing this call for action on Sudan today. Don't tell me the left doesn't care.

6/29/04 11:12 a.m. (Link here.)

 Deep oddness: the Center for Public Integrity has been told that the federal database containing all the public information on registrations of lobbyists for foreign entities is too fragile to be copied.

[UPDATE 6/30: Further amazement and bemusement in today's Chron at this novel excuse for failure to comply with a records request.]

6/28/04 5:50 p.m. (Link here.)

 I'm adding Echidne of the Snakes to my blogroll today. She's funny and feminist, and her anthropomorphisms remind me of my cousin's relationships with her car and her cats.

6/28/04 1:50 p.m. (Link here.)

 About the Supremes: go read ScotusBlog like everyone else is, and knock on wood for the two more end-of-term decisions to come tomorrow.

6/27/04 11:51 p.m. (Link here.)

 So this bunch of Ohio State researchers with, apparently, nothing better to do are saying towns should regulate yard signs more strictly. It seems they're disturbed because one of those dastardly and presumptively degenerate artists has been shaking up the good folk of Amarillo, Texas by placing signs in people's yards, with their consent, that may disrupt or even offend the sensibilities of their fine god-fearing neighbors. The researchers warn: 

Cities should examine their regulations that apply to residential areas to ensure any signs are limited to an appropriate size, style and placement ... It's a topic that needs to be considered by cities around the nation.

Good question. It's past my bedtime. 'Night, all.

6/27/04 11:24 p.m. (Link here.)

 Further on San Francisco Gay Freedom (the old name) versus Gay, etc. Pride (the new name): This is the Chron on today's main-event parade. This is the Chron on yesterday's semi-unofficial Dyke March. It sounds like a little more freedom was expressed at the Dyke March. I'm only sorry about the separatism in last night's event, which banned all men except for those questioning their maleness. That didn't seem fair. Or nice. Oh, and I wish the whole weekend would improve its taste in music. J. thinks I'm judging unfairly because where we live we can only hear the bass chords and occasional loud vocals from amplified concerts held in front of City Hall -- but, hey, when there was a free Green Day concert over there several years ago, their chords sounded compelling even from here. And this afternoon when a band finally dug into the bass of "I Can't Get No Satisfaction," it cheered us both up. So, anyway, judging from, I admit, half a mile's distance, the last two days' live public concerts have been replete with Pride And Uplift to the exclusion of liveliness. Today apart from that one "Satisfaction" thing, it sounded like a lot of floppy meringue. (No, not merengue as in dance. Meringue as in pie topping.) Even the old "Y.M.C.A." anthem would've been nice for a change, and, yes, I think we would've recognized the bass to that one from here. Dammit, why is it that the world is full of great musicians who happen to be gay, but the music of official queeritude is such pap?

[UPDATE, 6-28-04: J., on "Y.M.C.A.": "But that's stereotypical."
Me: "Yes, but I like it. It adds a certain je ne sais quoi."
J. "Je sais perfectly well quoi."
On reflection he's probably right.]

6/27/04 11:03 p.m. (Link here.)

 John McKay (the "archy" guy), writing at From the Trenches, cites an argument that downsizing not only hurts people, it doesn't even help corporations. 

6/27/04 1:25 p.m. (Link here.)

 We've just been to the Pride parade here, watched the Dykes on Bikes, watched a jolly pink-shirted security volunteer doing handstands for the crowd between contingents, seen the bike messengers' union go by in tattooed glory (best sign: "Let Us Handle Your Package"), and had lots of laughs -- but there was mourning too, even in this year of semi-legalized marriages. A group was calling for justice in the murder of 17-year-old transgender Gwen Araujo, whose murderers just managed to divide a jury with a "gay panic" defense that treated murder as an understandable response to their discovering she was biologically male. Then the "Immigration Justice" contingent with a "Stop Deporting Our Partners" sign: members of couples carrying halves of broken hearts, each bearing their respective (different) national flags, and figures costumed as INS agents "arresting" marchers at random.

The Chronicle's float in the parade -- slogan, "We Come Out Every Day" -- featured the roundheaded "Little Man" spectator whose attitude in a cartoon at the top of each Chronicle review serves as a capsule rating system. (Why, of course he's gay -- he's been appearing in the entertainment "Pink Section" for years, hasn't he?...)

Of course all of what I've just written is conventional piety here, and rank blasphemous insanity in other parts of this same country.

We came home talking about polarization in America, and found this was the Chron's editorial cartoon: Ashcroft menacing the Little Man for giving a good review to Fahrenheit 9/11.

Went to the computer and clicked on a link sent by "Buck" to find something pretty damn unbelievable -- a right-wing group calling itself "Christian Exodus" that's trying to move like-minded people to South Carolina and secede from the Union all over again. They're not getting a link from me but you can look them up on Google.

It all reminds me of something a liberal social service worker in her forties told me up in Redding, California, which is a very Southern, fundie-dominated California town that was briefly famous in the '90s for physical violence against an abortion clinic. A very lovely quiet dusty town, but one with a nasty political fringe to it. This woman I talked with said she had grown up in Dunsmuir, an even smaller town up the highway, and had watched through her life as her rather ordinary area filled up with right-wing whites moving *out* of the urban areas to get away from liberal ideas and racial integration. She was really saying Redding and Dunsmuir had become radicalized by these newcomers in a way they once hadn't been. Ironic: emigrants looking for "small-town values" brought their own small-minded values to a small town that had in fact been more open-minded than the arriving hardliners wanted it to be. She and I had that conversation eleven years ago. It must be worse by now.

Here, we worry. We cheer at the parade and we worry.

6/26/04 11:57 p.m. (Link here.)

 The San Francisco Women's Motorcycle Contingent (AKA Dykes On Bikes), who will put a little remaining Gay Freedom into tomorrow's "San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Celebration" parade, have their own website now. They are a Good Thing.

6/26/04 11:34 p.m. (Link here.)

 Orwell said it years ago about London: this is a city where it costs money to sit down.

 Latest restrictions on San Francisco public space: "No Parking" signs all down the east side of Illinois Street, which is a normally quiet road among waterfront warehouses. The parking ban is probably being excused by the street's use for traffic detours during rail construction on parallel Third Street, but it seems pointless really except to put more pressure on local campers. The whole west side of the same street is now parked bumper to bumper with the RVs and vans of campers who have few other places left to go. The borders of the zone of semi-tolerance for campers are being narrowed, and the semi-tolerance itself was never especially tolerant -- people still get towed on the slightest pretext. It's inhuman what allegedly humane San Francisco does to campers.

 More of the same in the Tenderloin district, per friends at the Coalition on Homelessness: the latest anti-homeless tactic is orange-and-white public works sawhorses linked by caution tape in front of buildings. It looks like they're for construction projects. But the COH guys say the sawhorses just sit there without any discernible purpose -- no construction projects, no special truck-loading circumstances, no film shoots, no nothing. They figure the only point is to keep poor people from sleeping on the pavement in front of the buildings. I wonder, of course, whether the sawhorses themselves aren't illegally obstructing the sidewalk. Someone oughta ask a code enforcement officer.

And Gavin Newsom keeps picking up civil rights awards. So, OK, he's done a great thing on marriage, but how about civil rights for poor people?

6/26/04 11:03 p.m. (Link here.)

 The Greens have rejected Nader and endorsed a nobody for President. Thank heavens. I voted for Nader in 2000 but this year's different.

6/26/04 11:01 p.m. (Link here.)

 Once again the SF Chron is taking credit for the professional resurrection of comedian Doug "Dougzilla" Ferrari. I wish Mr. Ferrari the very best, but from what I've heard, credit for his rediscovery should really go to his onetime cheap-hotel neighbor Trent Hayward, who didn't make it out. The obit I've just linked to says Trent was found dead "on the sidewalk," but in the version I heard he was found under the large willow tree in the fenced-off vacant lot by the steam plant at the corner of Larkin and McAllister. At the time Trent died, the picturesque spot under the tree was accessible to campers because the fence around it was climbable chainlink. The steam plant folks gave him a memorial of a kind: they tore down the chainlink and put in a really solid iron fence. With spikes.

6/26/04 10:41 p.m. (Link here.)

 J. spotted this one:

 We got a promo catalog for the California State Bar annual meeting and continuing-education fest. It's to be held this coming October in Monterey, home of the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Featured in the catalog is the Aquarium's current exhibit: "Sharks: Myth and Mystery."

 Must be professional courtesy.

6/26/04 10:29 p.m. (Link here.)

 More Soviet treatment of scientists from the White House:

The Bush administration has ordered that government scientists must be approved by a senior political appointee before they can participate in meetings convened by the World Health Organization, the leading international health and science agency....

..."I do not feel this is an appropriate or constructive thing to do," said Dr. D.A. Henderson, a well-known epidemiologist who ran the Bush administration's Office of Public Health Preparedness and now acts as an official adviser to HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson. "In the scientific world, we have a generally open process. We deal with science as science. I am unaware of such clearance ever having been required before."

Henderson worked for the WHO for 11 years directing its smallpox eradication program. He said he could not recall having to go through government bureaucrats to invite scientists to participate in expert panels, except in the case of small eastern European countries...

...and why is it anyway that more members of the loyal opposition in Congress don't turn their public websites into useful news sources like Waxman's instead of cheesy self-promotion showcases like most of them? A free tip, folks: the news source approach is a lot more effective even for self-promotion purposes than the boneheaded direct "gee, look at my National Burgoo Week press release" approach. If the honorable members don't have time to get to know the Internet themselves, that's what they have twentysomething staffers for, isn't it?

6/26/04 6:39 p.m. (Link here.)

 I hadn't been paying attention to that name Blankley. It turns out the man Reagan once hired to misrepresent Orwell's legacy has lately been busy trying to destroy another reputation -- that of George Soros -- in an especially disgusting manner.

6/25/04 1:23 p.m. (Link here.)

 MBC has been sampling the American zeitgeist in a Wal-Mart break room. What he hears isn't pretty: "And now they're beheading our guys. We should start beheading theirs."

6/24/04 11:24 p.m. (Link here.)

 In time for George Orwell's 101st birthday (June 25), here's an odd and interesting confession from one Tony Blankley, who holds the unholy job of editorial page editor for the Washington Times. It's buried in a column Blankley wrote about the Reagan legacy:

...As a young White House staffer in 1983, I had a similar mission over another great dead man. I was assigned the job of working the media to stake our claim on George Orwell for the right. We expected that the arrival of the date 1984 -- the title of his most famous book -- would unleash a battle between the left and the right for possession of the iconic political writer's fundamental commitment. Both left and right found evidence in his public writings and private letters and commitments to support each claim. But George Orwell turned out to be too big to fit into one category...

So the notion that the Pinochet-loving Reagan Administration actually paid a man to claim Orwell for the right is disgusting. But it's certainly interesting to know the White House cultural framers cared that much about the Orwell legacy. Makes one realize what a prize Reagan's successors would still consider Orwell to be, if only they could airbrush his awkward habit if siding with the poor against the rich, and with democracy against any flavor of arrogance.

Here's a comment from Orwell's last literary notebook -- something not explicitly political, and really not even very sensible, but a clear reflection of his empathy for anyone at the short end of any stick:

No guilty person is ever punished. So far as subjective feelings go, a person who is in a position to be punished has become the victim, & has therefore become innocent. This is perfectly well understood, internally, by everyone concerned. When a murderer is hanged, there is only one person present at the ceremony who is not guilty of murder. The hangman, the warders, the governor, the doctor, the chaplain -- they are all guilty: but the man standing on the drop is innocent. Everyone who has ever seen an execution knows this, & indeed even the public which gloats over the reports in the News of the World knows it after a fashion; the vast bulk of what is said & written in favour of capital punishment is simply a hypercritical (sic) cover for continuing to enjoy the pleasures of being guilty & indulging in murder, while remaining respectable.

6/24/04 12:54 p.m. (Link here.)

Disclosure, first of all: I'm associated with a nonprofit that was helped out of a bad financial crunch by a timely donation through Michael Moore's local benefit showing of "Bowling for Columbine". So stop reading here if you think my opinion can be bought.

I don't agree with Moore on everything. Sometimes he gets stuff wrong. Sometimes he goes too far to make a point. But he's good at what he does, he's made a lot of people think, and I don't like the politically driven slanging he's getting this week.

About Christopher Hitchens: it is, in his phrase, "highly unwise" for him to quote Orwell while refusing to distinguish between the quality of Michael Moore's filmmaking and his personal distaste for Moore's opinions -- a kind of distinction Orwell always did make when talking about the nasty personal characters of, for example, Salvador Dali and Ezra Pound.

I also don't advise yanking an anti-pacifist quote out of Orwell's 1945 essay, "Notes on Nationalism," while forgetting or pretending to forget that the essay is a general rant against power-hungry political evangelisms, of both nation-based and doctrine-based varieties. An earlier Hitchens might have found a lesson in sentiments like these:

"By 'nationalism' I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled 'good' or 'bad'. But secondly -- and this is much more important -- I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction btween them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By 'patriotism.' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality...

INDIFFERENCE TO REALITY: All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage -- torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians -- which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side...

I'm afraid this Moore pan is it for the Hitch. He's given up his rebellious-sounding talk to the service of the Bush Republicans. He's been domesticated. I had hoped otherwise, but it's true.

6/23/04 2:48 p.m. (Link here.)

 There's something familiar in this sketch of Senator Joseph McCarthy, as in McCarthyism, from the Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. biography of RFK (Robert Kennedy and his Times, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1978, p. 106):

...Most of all, he retained a fondness for McCarthy. McCarthy was an affable fellow who put on a tremendous show of beastliness and somehow did not expect his victims to take it personally. "He was no kind of fanatic," wrote Richard Rovere in the most perceptive book about him; he was "as incapable of true rancor, spite, and animosity as a eunuch is of marriage. He just did not have the equipment for it. He faked it all and could not understand anyone who didn't." The record is filled with anecdotes of McCarthy's astonishment when people he vilified in the hearings cut him in the corridors. "He was a very complicated character," Robert Kennedy said a few years later. "His whole method of operation was complicated because he would get a guilty feeling and get hurt after he had blasted somebody. He wanted so desperately to be liked.... He was sensitive and yet insensitive. He didn't anticipate the results of what he was doing. He was very thoughtful of his friends, and yet he could be so cruel to others."

6/23/04 11:10 a.m. (Link here.)

 Whew. Harry's Place and Horizon seem to be back up. If anyone still can't get into the Horizon page please let us know.

6/22/04 10:55 p.m. (Link here.)

 The Kerry people emailed out their latest ad this morning. It's about the whopping cost of health care paperwork and Kerry's plan to fix it. All very well, but Democrats always campaign on health care, and this is just a gut feeling but I don't know that people necessarily base their votes on health care, even if they're personally scared silly how to pay for medicines. The health care structure (or lack thereof) is such a mess, and anyway we all watched Clinton try and fail to change it over eight years. Why don't they give us an ad on something a president can promise to do in a hurry on taking office?

In our household, for example, four words just cheered up dinnertime, and those four simple words are...

"Attorney General Eliot Spitzer."

 Some Atrios commenters are liking that idea too. 

6/22/04 8:10 p.m. (Link here.)

 Did you ever notice that when you go to the www.usdoj.gov website, it offers you a cookie containing the text, "ForeseeLoyalty"? I'd forgotten it until this morning, when a DOJ press relase about the comeuppance of a crooked Missouri tax preparer came in by way of the IRS media announcements and tried to feed me a ForeseeLoyalty cookie through my own email box. That was a little startling although it was nothing personal. I'm not necessarily saying the G-men are up to anything un-American here but their taste in phraseology bugs me.

6/22/04 1:20 p.m. (Link here.)

 Don't send anyone you love to Macedonia. This is cold, as in cold-blooded. Don't even read this article unless you're feeling strong.

6/22/04 11:42 a.m. (Link here.)

 Blog situation returning to normal: Horizon -- and hence, I presume, Harry's too -- should be up again in a day or two.

6/21/04 3:09 p.m. (Link here.)
 
 

I pulled out for San Anton',
I never felt so good.
My woman said she'd meet me there
And of course, I knew she would.
The coachman, he hit me for my hook
And he asked me my name.
I give it to him right away,
Then I hung my head in shame.
Lo and behold! Lo and behold!
Lookin' for my lo and behold,
Get me outa here, my dear man!

...This is an encounter in which the presumption of moral equality between one party and another guarantees that they can exchange moral goods -- a ticket fairly purchased, fair value in return -- without truly meeting: without asking who the other really is. It's a form of citizens' respect, a democratic deference, an American invention: that is why, in 1831, with Andrew Jackson in the White House trailing his campaign banner 'LET THE PEOPLE RULE,' Tocqueville responded to it. But the coachman has broken the rules. He has violated the presumption of equality and assumed a posture of authority; for no reason the man who felt so good can tell, the coachman has asked for too much. Who are you? Whatever the singer brought onto the train turns up worthless. His name? "I give it to him right away," Dylan sings, hurry and bafflement in his voice, then the hurry bleeding out, the bafflement joined with regret: "And I hung my head in shame."

From a country of thousand-mile vistas in the first line of the first verse, the man who as we met him there was filled with anticipation has by the end of the verse arrived in a country of hideouts and himself become a creature of guilt...

..."And he asked me my name," the singer remembers; as he spins the incident back, he can feel how he'd pulled away, and underneath the worry that's how he sings it, a cold half smile on his face, his fish-eye all over the coachman's mug. "And he--" "--asked me my name." For as long as that little pause holds, with the pause weighting the last word, the singer is still telling this story, writing its script, acting it out; with an edge of amusement he retains his mask, holding the name like a poker player holding his cards to his vest. My name? Perhaps you're lacking one yourself? Yes, that's what he should have said! Too bad it's too late. "And he--"...

...By the time the singer gets to 'my name' his knees are water. The coachman looks down at him, waiting. The singer says his name: Nobody....

[UPDATE: "Buck" notes that this decision came down on the fifteenth anniversary of the case protecting flag burning as a form of political protest -- and the Supremes apparently chose to mark the date by singeing the Constitution.]

6/21/04 10:30 a.m. (Link here.)

 Anyone know what's happened to the Bloghouse weblog hosting service? Last night I couldn't get into Horizon or Harry's Place. S'morning none of the links I can find ending in "...bloghouse.net" are up. The address that I think should bring up the main Bloghouse company site shows only a "Coming Soon" page covered with cheesy ads. What gives? Especially what gives re: taking Harry's Place off the air? Harry's is a respected bicoastal crew of careful thinkers on the pro-war democratic left -- obviously one that matters or it wouldn't get such unbelievable flak from wingers left and right. When the site comes back up I'll argue with the Harry's guys about the war again, but I want them back.

[UPDATE: With the help of a kind Wired reporter, a little light on the subject: it seems the www.bloghouse.net domain registration expired June 10. So it may be some kind of unpaid-fee problem. BTW I'm embarrassed to say Bloghouse turns out to be not as big a service provider as I'd thought. Not that this makes me less concerned about even temporarily losing Horizon or Harry's.]

6/20/04 10:26 a.m. (Link here.)

 The Chron has a tidy "The Story So Far" summary of public reports on our recent torture of foreign prisoners. Includes relevant websites. Also brief profiles of accused soldiers and administratively complicit figures. It's no secret that Harvard produces people who do -- or, rather, authorize -- things like this but I didn't expect it would be John Yoo. (Yes, I know, I know, "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!") Joel & I rented Casablanca several days ago. "It Had To Be Yoo" has been stuck in my head ever since.

Sorry to laugh. It beats retching.

6/20/04 1:18 a.m. (Link here.)

 For a quick campaign finance learning experience, go to this FEC link, type in the word "bank," and click on "Get Listing." Warning: this query yields a large data file containing many links. Don't bother if you have a slow connection.

6/19/04 2:32 p.m. (Link here.)

From the 9/11 Commission disclosures:

One Boston air traffic controller was left to juggle responsibility for both the doomed American Airlines 11 and United Airlines 175 flights that crashed into the twin towers. While focused on Flight 11, he lost track of the other plane as it began to deviate from its flight path. At 9:03 a.m., just as New York air traffic controllers were warning the military about a second hijacking, the plane flew into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

But...

 ...to the extent our failure to stop the attacks gets blamed on air controllers, I hope due consideration is given to the changes in the controllers' staffing levels and other working conditions since Ronald Reagan broke their union.

6/18/04 10:02 p.m. (Link here.)

Kudzu Files is wondering if he's alone in thinking bloggers are getting tired. (On the same site: a funny set of tips on growing kudzu.) No, he's not alone in thinking that, as readers of this space know. I think weblogs are beginning to consolidate and are becoming -- or becoming more like -- ordinary magazines. People want a reliable editorial style in a reliably updated publication, and yet good writing takes time. In other words, people like a publication that's a group effort. That's called a magazine.

There's also what William Gibson said about the effect on other work when he stopped blogging last September:

I’ve always known, somehow, that it would get in the way of writing fiction, and that I wouldn’t want to be trying to do both at once. The image that comes most readily to mind is that of a kettle failing to boil because the lid’s been left off.

6/18/04 6:14 p.m. (Link here.)

 Patrick Simms' ICAN Gallery has a new website. I'm not sure how many folks who read this page live around San Francisco, but if you're in the area, Patrick is a good guy with good taste and you should go to his events.

6/18/04 10:35 a.m. (Link here.)

 About those San Francisco protests, last Saturday through last Tuesday (June 5-8): I didn't go. It sounds like there would have been arguing to do.

Gene found reports of antisemitism in the weekend crowd. He has a moving further reaction to that from an Israeli writer here. There was sigificant Chron coverage of the weekend nastiness in which, oddly, the headline described a group of pro-Israel counterdemonstrators as the main group's "confreres." A letter-writer objected to the headline here.

The separate protests outside the biotech conference Monday and Tuesday drew what an Indybay writer neatly called "a massive display of multi-agency overtime." On Monday, just driving to and from work and taking a run in the afternoon, J. saw hundreds of waiting police, a street partly closed, and no protesters at all. Reportedly protest events did take place Monday with a handful of arrests and not much incident. On Tuesday the Chron and Indybay activist reports described the police as appearing in saturation-type numbers -- far more officers than needed for plain crowd control. Saturation tactics are unusual in San Francisco. So was the use of pepper spray to dislodge demonstrators who had locked themselves to the axle of a bus carrying conventioneers. What's less unusual is the way a demonstration ended late Tuesday with an encirclement and mass arrest of 151. There were claims that the legally required dispersal orders were not audible. Here's an account from within the arrested group.

A pity about that roundup, even if reports are true that some of the demonstrators were throwing things. The police should have arrested the throwers, not the whole group. Mass arrests are unavoidably arbitrary. They erode the idea that you can only be arrested if you yourself commit a crime. For a while in the late '90s it was possible to think the SFPD had eased up on the tactic. At least they issued clear dispersal orders and gave people a chance to obey them. Now encirclements and mass arrests seem to be back.

Maybe a sign of the times. A Salon writer seems to think so anyway.

I don't know if it's just as good to speak up online as to physically take part in an assembly to petition for redress. But in a physical crowd it's hard to be counted as opposing the war for one's own reasons and not somebody else's. So it's hard to go to the big protests just now.

6/17/04 10:46 p.m.(Link here.)

 Teleportation as Douglas Adams fans know it:

"It's unpleasantly like being drunk."

"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"

"You ask a glass of water."

 (Sorry, no politics today. I'm full up with the stuff.)

 6/16/04 11:32 a.m.(Link here.)

 Typical San Francisco: first the Chron's M&R column gloats over the misfortunes of poor people. Then it tells a cheerful story about a tolerant and unfazed county supervisor disappointing a naked woman's attempt to get arrested in a public hearing. In this town nudity is a foible but poverty is a crime. 

What's upsetting about the M&R column and the city official quoted therein is, they presume everyone who left the county welfare program at the start of "Care Not Cash" had been living out of town and committing fraud, just because that's what the program was designed to prevent. My own guess is that, yes, probably some out-of-towners were in the mix, but I bet some people who left the program were truly homeless in San Francisco, and simply not willing to deal with the demeaning institutional treatment and no-pets policies of the housing the city chose to provide in lieu of cash aid. The city should try opening just one "pets welcome" welfare hotel. They'd be overwhelmed by applicants for rooms. Same if they let people come indoors to ordinary apartments without visiting hours, guest fees, or felonious neighbors. (The Chron's Kevin Fagan -- for once writing about poor people without disapproval -- featured one such scattered-site "housing first" program in New York a few days ago. A pity the program in his story serves only the most troubled types. It sounds like it could help everyone.)

 As for continuing fraud in the San Francisco system, I would bet some of the cleverer out-of-towners are continuing to collect benefits illegally by simply paying corrupt landlords to maintain paper addresses for them. Every new law passed to prevent fraud only hurts honest patsies and dumb criminals, while the smart criminals just move on to another dodge.

6/16/04 11:16 a.m.(Link here.)

 Well, happy Bloomsday, all.

6/15/04 12:35 p.m.(Link here.)

 A case study in blog-to-print lag:

This morning when J. came up the steps with the San Francisco Chronicle he was talking outrage at Enron. The Chron had a front-page splash of the traders' gleeful quotes about stealing electricity money from "Grandma Millie...the one who couldn't figure out how to (expletive) vote on the butterfly ballot." And mixed with the happy talk about willful fraud, lots of happy talk about Enron as the biggest Bush contributor, and the traders' assumption that a Bush presidency would knock out the "cap" rule that kept them from stealing even more.

J's reaction: same as Mark Slackmeyer's to the Nixon gang: "Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!"

Interesting how the "Grandma Millie" story has propagated. I read some of the worst quotes more than a week ago on weblogs; J's parents, who read the Seattle papers, had seen them as of last weekend; and from the Snohomish Public Utility District material on the subject, it looks like the records entered the public domain way back on May 17, thanks to a court filing by lawyers representing the utility in its litigation with Enron. (After months of whoppingly high charges, Enron had the gall to sue the district for breach of contract.)

So we sat at our breakfast table wondering how many other breakfast tables haven't seen the "Grandma Millie" quotes yet. I guess in politics it pays to keep repeating things. Kerry should put the "Grandma Millie" material in an ad. It's a neat quick lesson on the kleptocrats he's up against.

6/15/04 1:05 a.m.(Link here.)

 Interesting, given the current talk of Republican campaigning among religious groups, that last week the IRS issued a press release reminding "tax-exempt organizations, including churches" of their obligations to avoid political campaign activity during the presidential election.

6/14/04 4:47 p.m.(Link here.)

 Our Kerry bumperstickers arrived today & we'll be putting one on the car shortly. J. remarked that the star on the flag logo between the words "John" and "Kerry" could be taken for an asterisk denoting restrictions. As better seen on the "Kerry Gear" site, the format on the sticker & many other campaign materials is a little like this:

John^* /// Kerry

 J. suggested "*Void where prohibited by law," to which we both answered, "Florida!" Some other thoughts:

* F.

* Void where prohibited by Jeb Bush.

* Action figure sold separately.

Yes, we hesitated to unleash this thought on the blogosphere, but, um, we thought it was funny, and anyway nobody reads this space.

6/13/04 9:14 p.m.(Link here.)

 No real surprise that Mississippi has made a disgusting cut in its Medicaid eligibility rules. I've lived in Kentucky, and the way Kentucky welfare bureaucrats preserve their self-esteem is by reference to the great state of Mississippi. But archy's take on the problem is possibly worth reading because it notes the contempt for disability in these kinds of cuts. California is starting to function that way too.

6/12/0410:02 p.m.(Link here.)

 J. asks, "Can you imagine Ronald Reagan in your beloved Casablanca?" Actually, we never had to. Snopes says the story that Reagan was considered for the role is pure fiction. Nice to know.

Incidentally, Archibald Cox, the Watergate prosecutor who was fired by Richard Nixon for being too honorable, and Sam Dash, who was chief counsel of the Senate Select Committee on Watergate, died on the same day: this past May 29. Now, those two deserve a national day of respect.

6/12/04 2:49 p.m.(Link here.)

 A bright spot amid the gloomy news: cheers and congratulations to a college instructor who is trying to actually carry out a law that should have dispatched voter registration materials to every high school and college graduate in California.

6/11/04 12:02 p.m.(Link here.)

 I'm glad we won't attend our Harvard fifteenth reunion this month. For one thing, the organizers sent 573 words of advice on what to wear.

Besides that, John Yoo is a member of our class. I worked with John, and with a classmate who is now his wife, at the Crimson student paper. I haven't seen either of them since graduation but wish them well personally. No, I don't like the calls for him to lose his job at Berkeley. Decent universities don't fire people for their opinions. But it is hard to know what to say to a professor of constitutional law who advised his government to disregard the Geneva Conventions on prisoners' rights.

It's also hard to know if we should have seen this coming.

Ironically, John wrote an undergraduate editorial in 1987 leading up with interesting proto-Scalia backhandedness to an argument that "Our interests in the Gulf best would be served by forestalling an Iraqi defeat. This would prevent the spread of Iran's Islamic fundamentalistism to the moderate Arab countries who supply much of the West's oil." Advocating the violent defense of Saddam Hussein's Iraq was, of course, a conventional conservative position at that time.

But if you click on John's byline for the archive of his student articles, you'll find that most of the time he was only conservative by comparison with the rest of the '80s campus mood. The Iran-Contra scandal and many other aspects of the Reagan Administration disgusted him as they did the rest of us.

Fifteen years ago, John was a smart, serious guy, a good student, and a pleasant coworker. But he had an odd quality I had forgotten until recently: in talking politics, he would say absurdly hard-edged things with a smile that made you think he was joking, and then he would turn out to mean what he said.

6/11/04 11:49 a.m.(Link here.)

 A good angry sentence snuck onto the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle this morning:

There's something about being tear-gassed that some Berkeley graduates will never quite forget, or forgive, and it remains a turning point in the relationship between Reagan and the Bay Area....

 My personal award for Least Poetic Memento Mori Of The Decade goes to Julian Guthrie for his article on Ronald Reagan's undertaker, in which we learn this:

In the most general sense, taking care of a president in death is not unlike caring for an average deceased person.

6/10/04 11:31 a.m.(Link here.)

 From Frederika Randall's review in The Nation of Silvio Berlusconi: Television Power and Patrimony, by Paul Ginsborg:

...Last year Berlusconi, who had up until then refused to appear in the courtroom, agreed to make a carefully prepared "spontaneous declaration" before the court in Milan that is trying him for corrupting several Roman judges. "All citizens are equal before the law," said Berlusconi in his declaration, but he argued that the court should not be allowed to deliberate his case because "some citizens are more equal than others." The nod to Animal Farm seems to have been entirely unintentional.

 Not in the least an original item, but very, very important: why to contribute to Kerry before he accepts the Democratic presidential nomination:

As of the moment Kerry accepts the nomination, presumably at the convention, he will no longer be allowed to accept private contributions as he's chosen to accept public money for the general election.
So, yes, if you want to contribute the earlier the better.

6/9/04 2:47 p.m.(Link here.)

 There's this problem with "anti-" campaigns: so long as they're against something bad, people hesitate to ask what it is they're for. Latest example: "anti-drug education".

6/8/04 8:52 p.m.(Link here.)

 It's hard to say anything that can cut the current bombast quotient. I recommend this painting.

 And just go read this Brokaw-Bush D-Day interview if you haven't already. Fill FDR's shoes? President Roosevelt had serious faults but this fellow would get lost in his right bunny slipper.

6/5/04 8:52 p.m.(Link here.)

 D-Day doesn't need my help to get commemorated but I'll join in the pride and nostalgia. The right thing done on a grand scale, in the right way, for several of the right reasons, is a rare event in this world.

6/5/04 6:42 p.m.(Link here.)

 The Peking Duck has a sustained run of Tiananmen Square coverage going this week. Go read it.

6/5/04 11:44 a.m.(Link here.)

 The SF Chron account of Tiananmen Square commemorations shows House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi hitting a point not sufficiently made elsewhere:

Pelosi criticized the policy of "trickle down liberty -- the notion of economic freedom bringing about political freedom. The 15 years since Tiananmen have exposed this policy as the illusion that it is."

6/5/04 12:18 a.m.(Link here.)

 Under a law "dormant since 1952" (like some other ugly things lately wakened), British journalists must have special journalists' visas to represent "the foreign media" in the United States -- and some have been very uncomfortably deported for not having them. What is it our protectors fear the oh-so-foreign British "foreign media" will print?

6/4/04 9:12 p.m.(Link here.)

 More: the Bush campaign website search function brings up nothing on "Tiananmen". Nothing on the Bush official campaign blog either. And, no, no "Tienanmen" on the Kerry campaign site. I guess the universal right to democracy is more in fashion for the Middle East this year.

6/4/04 8:44 p.m.(Link here.)

 Been grepping the word "Tiananmen" this evening with indifferent results. My highly unscientific conclusion is that the chattering end of the English-language Internet, regardless of political persuasion, mainly treated the Tiananmen Square massacre anniversary as a parochial concern of Chinese communities, which is kind of disgraceful given the amount of tendentious trumpeting done this past year in the U.S. and U.K. about universal democratic rights in other parts of the other side of the world.

A search of the White House website shows the word "Tiananmen" mentioned most recently last summer, and then only in a transcript of an unanswered question at a press conference

To its credit, Instapundit has an item. Drudge apparently had something. This morning the generally odious Little Green Footballs had headlines about this week's preemptive arrests in China in its right-margin news crawl. They were gone from the LGF front page by evening but these and other "Tiananmen" items were still available via search there.

Atrios and Commondreams had no "Tiananmen" items I could find. BlogsForBush appears to have no search function. A text search for "Tiananmen" on the front page came up empty

Alternet, FrontPageMag and the Lucienne Goldberg site all had Tiananmen search results from other days but nothing on their front pages as of this evening.

Technorati shows 217 "Tiananmen" blog posts in last 7 days, including Drudge, Instapundit, and a mid-level liberal, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. I don't recognize most of the blogs quoted & at least some look like specifically China-focused sites. But then maybe the Technorati crawler hasn't yet picked up everything posted today. It doesn't, for example, have Gene's item on Harry's Place yet.

I dunno what I expected but the Net seems surprisingly quiet on the subject.

6/4/04 5:29 p.m.(Link here.)

Gene remembers about Tiananmen Square, and commemorations and non-commemorations thereof.

6/4/04 5:10 p.m.(Link here.)

 Spent half the day in the Social Security office on behalf of a client, seeing one incident of bland unreasonableness after another, with three to four guards in the lobby at all times, and unbelievably frequent loudspeaker calls for "Security! Window 5!" People who hadn't gotten their first-of-the-month checks kept becoming understandably if not always coherently distraught & each time were immediately perceived as disorderly. I don't spend as much time as I used to in center-city public benefits offices but the unreasonableness level seems even worse than I remember. There seems to be less of an effort than before to offer explanations for denying people things. The worker I eventually got to sit down with at a desk made quite good sense & was very gracious but the scene in the lobby was depressing.

6/3/04 11:39 p.m.(Link here.)

 I've never been to China so a quotation from fiction will have to do. In Ursula LeGuin's story, a major protest is interrupted by the kind of attack that is called a "crackdown" as though its victims had committed crimes. Helicopter fire drives part of the crowd into the Directorate building, and then the soldiers come.

When they came, marching in their neat black coats up the steps among dead and dying men and women, they found on the high, grey, polished wall of the great foyer a word written at the height of a man's eyes, in broad smears of blood: DOWN.

They shot the dead man who lay nearest the word, and later on when the Directorate was restored to order the word was washed off the wall with water, soap, and rags, but it remained; it had been spoken; it had meaning.

6/3/04 12:44 p.m.(Link here.)

 We've had a good discussion going on at Horizon for a couple days about marketing companies' demographic analyses and how their pictures of America leave out people who don't buy stuff. From the SF Chronicle now, here's a profile of hunger in San Francisco that tells another story.

6/2/04 5:36 p.m.(Link here.)

 Spring in the Mountains

 Two weekends ago we bought an ice cream and a large ice tea in the heat on Highway 395, drove half an hour into the high desert, and reached the ghost town of Bodie under a storm of weird puffy "corn snow". This is how it looked when we got there. This is how it looked just under an hour later. At first there was an odd layer of snow pellets with a consistency like popcorn or Styrofoam that you could push into very lightweight snowballs just by scuffing a toe one a sidewalk. Then the sun came out and all the roofs were dripping furiously. Then it was damn near summer again. Photos courtesy of J., who also took this.

6/2/04 11:12 a.m.(Link here.)

 This is crappy: threatened protests have made Congressman Lantos cancel plans to appear at the City College graduation. I'm sorry, if folks don't agree with him they can say so but he doesn't deserve protests.

Meanwhile in the same Matier & Ross column, Schwarzenegger and Bush have fallen out. In part over Schwarzenegger being more popular than Bush.

6/2/04 11:02 a.m.(Link here.)

 Asmussen strikes again with "No Child Left Behind", in which The Rapture confronts public education and G.W. declares war on metaphor, beginning with Animal Farm.

6/2/04 12:05 a.m.(Link here.)

 The release date has been set for Michael Moore's new movie. It's June 25, 2004. Wonder if he remembers that's Orwell's 101st birthday.

6/1/04 5:03 p.m.(Link here.)

 MBC has spotted a nice Boston Globe feature on Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who finds the current administration worse even than Nixon's. Sad how views on whether Trudeau is still funny tend to follow party lines.

One media analyst comments, "As times get worse, satire gets better..." Wonder if that's true. The current hyper-Nixonian shitfest has certainly lit a fire under Trudeau, but what about Tom Lehrer, who claimed he gave up satire because Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize? In truly evil times, do people who can see what's wrong get bitterly funny or just plain bitter?

6/1/04 2:14 p.m.(Link here.)

 Military intelligence sergeant accused of making up allegations of inmate abuse in Samarra; sent to Germany for psych evaluation. OK, so for all I know he did make the stuff up. But someone ought to look into this pretty carefully. If Sgt. Ford wasn't lying or delusional, then what he suffered was a Soviet-style "political insanity" detention. But that wouldn't have happened among Americans, would it?
 

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