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

9/30/03 5:59 p.m. (Link here.)

In the October 13 Nation, freelancer David Jones reports:

In December 2001 Acxiom hired Gen. Wesley Clark, now a Democratic presidential candidate, as a lobbyist and board member to help procure government contracts. 

Axciom's own site reports proudly Clark's arrival as a board member as of December '01. This past Saturday, the Washington Post reported Clark has lobbied for Axciom, 
 

"...earned $300,000 from Acxiom last year and was set to receive$150,000, plus potential commissions, this year, according to financial disclosure records. He owns several thousand shares of Acxiom stock worth more than $67,000."

9/29/03 11:38 p.m. (Linkhere.)

Arnett Watson, the longtime client advocate in the San Francisco city shelters, died unexpectedly this past weekend of an aneurysm. I think I last saw her at the Coalition on Homelessness benefit auction earlier this month. Staff at the Coalition say she left work on Friday seeming OK, and by Monday she was dead. In her mid-50s. [UPDATE 9/30: now I hear she was only 49 years old./M]

Arnett was city-employed but had her desk in the Coalition office, which put her in a delicate position. She handled it honorably. Her work dealt with bad moments in hard lives, and she did that work with rock-solid perseverance for more than a decade. Here's one testimonial to her good work and the faith people had in her. And here's a brief article she wrote about her own work in 1997.

In conversation I never saw her loudly indignant, as she often had every reason to be -- only ironic, laconic, steady. Humor always half-bitter, laughter only from the corner of the mouth, comments on office politics always judicious in the extreme. Now of course I wonder how much she held in. Hers was not an easy job for the blood pressure and she worked at it for a very long time.

To people who have only seen public protests by the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness, it may come as a surprise that the Coalition's internal office culture is one of understatement. People regularly walk into that office with stories of arrests, evictions, destroyed or confiscated property, relapses into addiction, physical assaults, officials ignorant of the law, missing disabled persons unable to fend for themselves, pet kittens lost in the tow yard, etc. The Coalition longtimers know there is no point getting as emotional about such events as they deserve. Their standard response to tragedy and injustice is a hard quiet pronouncement: "that sucks." Arnett was a prime practitioner of Coalition understatement. It's a style not meant to minimize the bad news but to save time and strength for the work it makes necessary.

Arnett Watson is dead. That sucks.

9/29/03 12:31 p.m. (Linkhere.)

We had dinner in North Beach last night & were puzzled to see a much-defaced billboard advertisement for the right-wing talk show host Michael Savage on a wall next to hallowed Caffe Trieste. Seemed odd of him to go looking for dittoheads right around the corner from City Lights, especially using a billboard just a few feet above the sidewalk that could be easily vandalized. 

Back at home, I looked up Savage on the Net and found he actually used to be part of the Ginsberg-Ferlinghetti circle before noisily breaking with them. Ex-friend Stephen Schwartz claimed to Salon, "He would come into Caf[f]e Trieste and start yelling at me that I was a nobody and he was a somebody." (The article is available with a Salon day pass from viewing an ad. See especially Section 2.) Not personally knowing any of the parties involved, I don't quite know what to believe, but anyway it seems clear enough that Savage had first a friendship and then a tempestuous falling-out with some of the Beat luminaries around Broadway and Columbus.

The billboard's location could be a coincidence of course, but I do wonder if Savage was making a "Look at me now, boys" gesture.

Among other damage to the billboard, there was a big poster of Alfred E. Newman pasted over the image of Savage's face. And there was writing below from someone who obviously didn't know  Savage was a local character. It said, "Fascist/Racist, go back to Texas."

9/28/03 11:12 p.m. (Link here.)

Another cause for Laura Bush: the Kuwaiti women's suffrage movement.

9/28/03 5:32 p.m. (Link here.)

And People Wonder Why We Have PC Dept.

Was looking for something else on the IRS site and learned that in our inclusive, civilized 21st century, when the right wing would have us believe that all the traditionally mistreated groups' battles for respect have been won and any campaigns for further reform are mere whining etc. etc., ... (...OK, deep breath...)... there are still some unbelievable technical terms on the books. To wit: "Competent Indian," and "Non-Competent Indian." Turns out these have to do with the extent of tribal landholding rights. Readers are advised: "NOTE: This term should never be confused with "incompetent", which refers to one's inadequacy for a particular purpose." Nevertheless, the implication of inadequacy is bleeding well unavoidable. Can't somebody get around to changing these labels?

9/27/03 9:58 p.m. (Link here.)

Speaking of which, here's a reprise of the only good thing that came out of the 2000 presidential election: Ross Altman's tragicomic "Punch It Twice, It's Alright." Courtesy of NPR, which has been kind enough to post this and other satirical election songs.

9/27/03 6:09 p.m. (Link here.)

Odd: the Wired headline here about the same report is "Maryland E-Voting Passes Muster," but there's further cause for concern in the article itself.

9/27/03 2:02 p.m. (Link here.)

Via the always useful Cornell Legal Information Institute, here's a report prepared for the State of Maryland saying the Diebold Accu-Vote-TS system for touch-screen voting does not meet state security standards. 

9/27/03 12:44 p.m. (Link here.)

Timely: Umberto Eco on "Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt." Atrios has a link to this essay today, & some of his readers' resulting comments that are worth reading, but the link itself finds the essay on some kind of Macedonian propaganda site. Here's a link to a less distracting version.

I'm finally getting around to The Name of the Rose.  So many sad thoughts from the debates about whether monks should be permitted to laugh. 

9/26/03 11:03 p.m. (Link here.)

More from Gene at HurryUp Harry about the problem Bustamante mentioned Wednesday night of WalMart irresponsibly sending its employees out to seek public benefits and publicly funded health care.

9/26/03 4:44 p.m. (Link here.)

Hand-printed in square capitals on a wall near the welfare office:

THE CITY CANNOT APOLOGIZE
BECAUSE IT IS AN ENTITY
WITHOUT FEELINGS OR COGNITION

9/26/03 1:14 p.m. (Link here.)

GAO says the Defense Department didn't do enough to monitor soldiers' health.

9/25/03 11:26 p.m. (Link here.)

HUD and DOL have announced a possibly nice little $13.5 million collaborative program to house and employ chronically homeless people, but there are things about it that bother me. 

Mistake #1 is defining "chronically homeless" to include having a "disabling condition," meaning:

"a diagnosable substance use disorder, serious mental illness, developmental disability, or chronic physical illness or disability including the co-occurrence of two or more of these conditions."

Mistake #2 is the awful name: WorkFORCE, which abbreviates "Working for Freedom, Opportunity and Real Choice through Community Employment." That "working for freedom" part especially has an unfortunate sound. This is pure conjecture now, but I'm guessing that some govt. PR folks have noticed same and are tactfully avoiding it: neither the HUD press release nor the Interagency Council on Homelessness announcement mentions the program's acronym nor what it abbreviates.

9/25/03 9:19 a.m. (Link here.)

Amina Lawal spared. 

Laura Bush should give a speech or something.

9/24/03 7:36 p.m. (Link here.)

Schwarzenegger got the first closing statement too: I think he said, "California has given me the opportunities to create the wonderful career, the money, the family and the businesses that I have." I'm not certain of his exact words, but am certain that his "family" was enumerated as one item in his list of possessions. 

McClintock says he "supports the entire Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment." OK, but are we sure he's heard of the Fourth?

From our moderator: "...They are fine human beings here. Will you please give them a great round of applause..." Feh.

Then he tells viewers to go to www.cabroadcasters.org (I can't get into this link myself yet) and "tell us what you think" about how the "new" debate format works. 

"New"? No, it's just typical TV talk-show instead of typical League of Women Voters civic discussion.

Closing line from Channel 7: "You may never see these five people on the same stage again." Well, why not? Just who is scared to debate again?

At the end of the anti-Prop. 54 ad featuring Bustamante, was that a scrap of "Imagine"?

9/24/03 7:12 p.m. (Link here.)

Debate impressions on the fly:

The moderator is playing for entertainment, not fairness. He's setting up Jerry Springer conflicts on purpose -- "I've thought of something to make this a whole lot more controversial..." -- while playing "referee" in a way that only creates further excitement, a la World Wide Wrestling. He's letting Schwarzenegger and Huffington take more time because they're willing to be more outrageous than the current office-holders. Camejo I think is getting the least time of all. Somehow Huffington is "Arianna" and McClintock is "Senator."

Moments of unintentional humor:

From Schwarzenegger:

"...1.6 million people have signed this recall petition. They have basically said they are mad as hell and not going to take it any more...."

Where's Howard Beale when you need him? Of course that quote is from the film "Network," a satire whose fury points straight at what's wrong with a candidacy like his.

Later on:

Moderator, complaining that a candidate has gone off-topic again: "...I don't know how Ms. Huffington got around to Republican sexuality on balancing the budget..."

Simple: it's OK so long as you don't fall off.

Biggest audience hoot: Schwarzenegger interrupts Huffington. She comes back with: "This is the way you treat women, we know that, but not now."

Oh, but of course, the moderator insists that that's "a direct and personal attack on " Schwarzenegger and allows him an extra response. Whereas when Schwarzenegger sneers at "you politicians," that's, what, a direct and generic attack?

Schwarzenegger says, "I am the only person here who has run a business." Someone off screen answers, "Not true, Arnold." Whoever said that isn't identified or allowed to elaborate, and at least on Channel 7 the camera stays on Schwarzenegger. 

Good audience support for Bustamante saying that when Wal-Mart etc. underpays people and then hands them papers to apply for publicly funded benefits and health care, that's a burden. 

Bustamante wearily explaining actual details of government, intended to make the entertainers' sweeping statements sound like goofy pot-shots, but maybe without enough flash for current tastes (?). Camejo talking a lot of sense about unfair taxation though occasionally acting out "earnestness" too rhapsodically. At the moment it's a tough call for me between Camejo and Bustamante.

9/24/03 6:47 p.m. (Link here.)

In the debate, Schwarzenegger and McClintock claimed that "people are leaving California." In fact the state Demographic Research Unit reports only a slight decline in the *rate of increase* in California's population: 
 

During the past year, California grew at a 1.7- percent rate, adding 591,000 people for the year, to total 35,591,000 on
 January 1, 2003. This is a slight reduction from the prior year, when the state added 633,000 people and grew 1.8 percent. For the third year, net migration accounts for over half (51 percent) of the state’s growth. However, this is a smaller share than in the prior year (53 percent). 

Fact-checking, anyone?

9/24/03 5:55 p.m. (Link here.)

I do not understand Toyota's pricing structure unless it is in fact a hidden stupidity tax. Why does anyone pay five times the price of the same company's cheapest model to have a Land Cruiser that gets half the gas mileage of said cheapest model, or one-third the mileage of the Prius? And don't give me that "mountain driving" nonsense. First of all, the Corolla does just fine on steep, rocky dirt roads, not to mention in five inches of flood water (Los Angeles, January, 1995). Second, anyone who's paying off $50,000 for a car doesn't have time to drive in the mountains anyway.

OK, nuff bellyaching here, the guv debate is on in five....

9/24/03 3:39 p.m. (Link here.)

Nobody's life, liberty or property is safe while the legislature's in session. That's especially true for immigrants, especially recently. Among the latest is something called the CLEAR Act that would require state and local police to act as local immigration law enforcers. The American Immigrantion Lawyers' Association issue paper on CLEAR says it's anything but: the proposed requirements may not be desirable or even legal. Sponsoring this beaut of a bill  is Charlie Norwood, R(what else?)-Ga., also the deliverer of this sententious speech about "criminal aliens" under every bed. As though the CLEAR Act wouldn't also fall on undocumented but law-abiding farm laborers. 

Some of the many other frightening legislative proposals on immigrants are described here. 

9/24/03 3:05 p.m. (Link here.)

Nice to see someone using Louie's "Shocked -- shocked!" line from Casablanca in an actual discussion of gambling.

Here, Laurel Wellman pays a visit to Andrew Bustamante's uninspiring Mono Wind Casino and notes, "Some commentators seem shocked -- shocked! -- that gambling money is making its way into the recall campaign." 

In the same issue of the SF Chron, we learn that Mr. Arnold Unbuyable Schwarzenegger "didn't mind taking $60,000 in tribal money to help win passage of his initiative for after-school programs last year."

9/23/03 4:15 p.m. (Link here.)

When one's local news comes from eight time zones away, things can get lost in translation. E.g. today's UK Guardian headline, "Arnie Plays the Green Card." Since a "green card" in the U.S. is a (confusingly pink-colored) proof of permanent resident status, I figured maybe he was citing his own immigrant origins as a counterweight to his apparent anti-immigrant positions -- for example, associations with U.S. English  and support for Proposition 187. 

But no, it was something about his sudden appeal -- via Humvee -- to environmentalism.

Sorry, I love the Grauniad, but if it's really going to publish a U.S. edition it'll need localization editors big-time.

9/23/03 9:15 a.m. (Link here.)

Just for slice o' life purposes, the following is a notice received earlier this year by homeless recipients of San Francisco county benefits for childless adults. Typography, including underlining, as in original:
 

Notice of Appointment to be Enrolled in New Finger-Imaging System for CAAP

Effective May 12, 2003, the County Adult Assistance Programs (CAAP) will be using a new finger-imaging system. Beginning at that time, CAAP clients will be required to be finger-imaged in this new system, even if you have been previously imaged in another system. Be assured that this information will not be shared with the INS or any other law enforcement agencies.

An appointment letter will be mailed to General Delivery (101 Hyde Street, San Francisco) or your Alternative Mailing Address, if you provided us with one, approximately two weeks before your appointment date. Please make sure to check your General Delivery mail at least weekly so you do not miss this mandatory appointment. If you do miss this appointment, your case will be discontinued.

Please contact your worker if you have questions or concerns.

Thank you.

9/22/03 10:57 p.m. (Link here.)

One more thing about the recall arguments -- I had vaguely thought there would be some kind of protest crowd around the courthouse this afternoon, but only the 12 Galaxies man was there. Amazingly, it turns out this guy has a major Internet following.

9/22/03 10:47 p.m. (Link here.)

SF Chron's Matier and Ross today on Ashcroft dispatching local U.S. Attorneys to shill for the Patriot Act. 

9/22/03 10:25 p.m. (Link here.)

What Would Eleanor Roosevelt Do?

One measure of official attention to the women of Afghanistan is the topic index of Laura Bush's speeches. The first category in the list is "Afghan Women/Children." Dates of speeches devoted primarily to same run November 17, 2001 through May 21, 2002.

In May 2002, Human Rights Watch wrote to Mrs. Bush with thanks for her attention to the problem but concern about the continuing atrocities. But when she gave a pair of speeches to Afghan and European audiences on May 21, she perhaps understandably looked on the bright side (see index).

There are a few further Afghanistan appearances on record: Mrs. Bush apparently attended a speech by her husband on Afghan aid in October 2002. She also discussed Afghanistan as part of a larger speech in January 2003, saying,
 

... Our involvement in the world brings freedom and greater dignity to all people. We see this in the faces of Afghanistan's women. Once prisoners in their homes, today they are learning the joy of freedom through work and education....

Almost every woman and girl interviewed by Human Rights Watch in southeast Afghanistan said that life now was better than it was under the Taliban. Many women told us there were no longer government regulations barring them from studying, working, and going outside without wearing a burqa or without a close male relative (a mahram). However, on many occasions when Human Rights Watch asked women and girls if they were, in fact, studying, working, and going out without burqas, many said that they were not. This was especially true in rural areas. Most said this was because armed men have been targeting women and girls.....

...“We couldn’t go out during the Taliban,” said a woman in rural Paghman. “Now we are free and we can go out, but we don’t.”

But surely Mrs. Bush must want more progress than that?

9/22/03 4:36 p.m. (Link here.)

Drat. 

If I'd known Cursor was going to link to the War On Hurricanes and give me an actual readership today, I'd've tried to do some reporting on the California recall oral arguments. We went over that way for lunch but decided we didn't have time to go in. Anyway if there was room at all it probably would've been in the overflow room watching the proceedings on TV.  That, and AP had it covered. And I'm sure ex-AP ace Bob Egelko will have a nice analysis out on the Chron site soon.

All your intrepid correspondent can report is that Seventh Street was full of network TV vans with big satellite dishes, and the 7-Mission Restaurant served a damn good five-spice chicken.

9/20/03 9:01 a.m. (Link here.)

Persons concerned about the dangers of the Atmosphere may also wish to learn how to protect their families from dihydrogen monoxide.

9/19/03 10:40 p.m. (Link here.)

With Facilitators Like These....

Report out this month from the San Francisco Legislative Analyst on "Police Facilitation of Mass Protests." The report does note some civil liberties concerns, but it also recommends, per the executive summary, "...with respect to crowd control, the SFPD may want to investigate New York's use of 'pens' to contain demonstrators and Seattle's use of 'force multipliers' (trained volunteers used to multiply the police force) to determine if they are appropriate for San Francisco..." Facilitation? Hm. Sounds more like "obstruction."

Also troubling: the casual use of "citizen unrest" as a synonym for political protest. Call this a quibble, but I think it implies that "rest" is the natural state of a citizenry, and hence that "unrest" needs to be tamped back down to normal. So much for "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" as an ordinary part of healthy public life.

I have a special interest in this report, having put in considerable time as a legal observer at protests. I'm proud to say I spent a few weeks summarizing evidence for Collins v. Jordan, which won the million-dollar settlement mentioned in the report. More recently I spent several hot, frightened days in protest crowds that were arbitrarily penned and threatened during the 2000 Los Angeles Democratic Convention. 

Based on these experiences, I think SFPD absolutely should not consider New York-style "penning." That would be more or less to revive our own department's early-'90s tactic of encircling demonstrators in closed squares of officers -- and possibly its accompanying bad habit of ordering people to disperse while physically blocking them from leaving.

The mass roundup, with or without arrests, is a terrible tactic that hurts law-abiding people and gets municipalities sued. It's frightening. Families and groups of friends get separated and sometimes pointlessly detained, as described very typically in this Village Voice account of the New York "penning" experience (scroll down). When mass arrests are made, as often as not they vacuum up blundering concerned citizens and bystanders, at a huge cost in officers' attention. Meanwhile genuinely mischievous looters and vandals, being craftier at evasion, run off to cause trouble around the corner.

Basically, crowds have to be managed intelligently. Arbitrary enclosure doesn't help anything.

9/19/03 6:13 p.m. (Link here.)
 

Our War On Hurricanes

We now have credible evidence that Al Qaeda is associated with the Atmosphere, a shadowy force known to perpetrate hurricanes, including this week's audacious assault on our nation's capital.

Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters are known to have taken advantage of bad weather caused by the Atmosphere during the Afghan war. Potentially dangerous elements -- oxygen, for example -- are in the Atmosphere all over the world. And, as we all know, whenever bad things happen, bad people are responsible. All bad people are on the same side -- the Bad Side -- against good people, who are on the Good Side.

Cowardly appeasers will say our first task is to get houses repaired and power restored along the Chesapeake coast. The treasonous Blame America First extremists will whine out apologetics for the Atmosphere, saying that our fossil fuel exhausts have provoked it, that we should coddle its ozone layer, that we should not blame the Atmosphere for a hurricane that has itself shown no mercy to the innocent.

But we must come to terms with something: the Atmosphere is not merely uncooperative. It is not just a jealous would-be competitor for global dominance. The Atmosphere is becoming our enemy.

When a hurricane directly attacks the capital of the Good Side, it is no random fluke of "nature." It is a weapon of mass destruction controlled by the forces of evil. Evil is headed by a few bad people who, with enough effort, can be hunted down and brought to justice, or at least caged on tropical islands. And make no mistake: we will find the conspirators who caused this hurricane.

Past administrations have been criticized for taking military action against "natural" entities. The emperor Caligula was mocked for waging war on the ocean. But he was not wrong: only misunderstood and ahead of his time.

As the Project for the New American Century explains, "At present the United States faces no global rival. America's grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible." We can and must stop the Atmosphere. 

Accordingly, I am asking Congress for emergency powers and an $870 billion appropriation to open a War On Hurricanes, to be formally known as the War On Hurricanes, Typhoons, Tornadoes, Dust Devils, Waterspouts, And Other Noncompliant Atmospheric Phenomena.

Our top priority will be to smoke out and stomp those responsible for the Al Qaeda-Atmosphere alliance.

Meanwhile, our troops and contractors will build a system of heavily guarded offshore oil platforms in the Atlantic Ocean, which has been known to harbor hurricanes and is suspected of alliance with the Atmosphere. The platforms will provide a first response capability against further Atmosphere attack. They will spread protective oil slicks and raise precision mile-high wind baffles to protect our Homeland from further harm. Any profits to Halliburton from the drilling will be purely incidental.

Details of the skyhooks for the wind baffles are still being worked out at DARPA, but we're told they'll be ready for deployment by New Hampshire, excuse me, that is to say, January.

Victory can be ours. Soon -- in fact, probably next October -- the day will come when I descend from the skies through a pacified and democratized Atmosphere to an oil platform on the very site of Hurricane Isabel's launching. You will hear me claim victory over the Atmosphere before thousands of cheering troops and Halliburton technicians.

Have faith: the War on Drugs will stop intoxication;  the War on Terrorism will stop violence; the War on Hurricanes will stop bad weather. We are gaining in the War on Taxes. Next come the Wars On Gravity and Death. Then we will be safe.
 

9/18/03 12:56 p.m. (Link here.)

Hey, waitaminnit --

AP, via the SF Chron, is reporting Ashcroft now claims the Justice Department hasn't used the notorious Sec. 215 of the Patriot Act to get information from libraries: "The number of times section 215 has been used to date is zero." All right, then, what about the University of Illinois survey showing 85 of 1020 public libraries "had been asked by federal or local law enforcement officers for information about patrons related to Sept. 11" -- ?  Those didn't count? They were under some other law? They didn't happen? Or what?
 

[Addendum 9/19/03: The USA Today article is from ALA's "FBI In Your Library" page.]

9/17/03 11:23 p.m. (Link here.)

From the promo for this year's Litquake:  "A recent Bureau of Labor Statistics poll placed San Francisco at the top of the nation’s list in both book purchases and alcohol consumption. We are officially the city that thinks and drinks." 

As might be expected, the drinking figures are higher: for spending on alcohol, "$744 compared to [the national average of] $360," and for spending on books, "$266 compared to $144." Actually the figures don't necessarily mean we're heavier boozers here: more likely we just buy pricier drinks. I mean, cripe, the Tonga Room charges nearly eight bucks for a margarita. 

The USA Today article cited above actually links to the wrong BLS press release. The (apparent) right one is here. See especially page 6, which clarifies that the figures cited for "books" spending are really for "reading" in general -- i.e. including newspapers etc. -- and the comparisons are really only among six major U.S. cities. For all we know the folks in St. Paul or someplace are putting us all to shame on drinking and reading both. Maybe there's a way to extract truly comprehensive U.S. MSA rankings from the BLS data menus, but I'm not up to finding it.

Fans of George Orwell's essay "Books vs. Cigarettes" may wish to know that Boston ranked tops on "tobacco products and smoking supplies" with expenditures of $369 compared to a national average of $313.

Elsewhere on the Bureau's site: Americans with bachelor's degrees spend more on alcohol than Americans with advanced degrees, but both spend far more than people who are not college graduates. Go figure. See page 16 here.

9/17/03 10:00 a.m. (Link here.)

Congressman named Bob Ney (R-Ohio) was part responsible for the name change to "Freedom Fries" on House menus and is still defending this insult to the United States' oldest ally. 

Call this corny, but I crack up over the phrase, "Lafayette, we are here." Something to do with old words like honor, fealty, oath-keeping. Two hundred years and more of alliance between the world's oldest republics, and suddenly hooligans-for-the-homeland are pouring good wine into gutters. I suppose they'll soon be sending back that outdated statue in New York Harbor. (Why is it that Americans who rant about "freedom" are nearly always against liberty?)

A few commentators have noted already that Mr. Ney shares a name with one of Napoleon's generals but none have determined if he's any relation.

I may just have found the missing link: says here that Napoleon's Marshal Ney was "insanely brave" but "not known for his coolness, or an excessive amount of intellectual capability." 

9/17/03 12:41 a.m. (Link here.)

Still looking for the Union Label

One of the nice things about growing up is knowing what clothes one can wear and buying them with a minimum of false steps. E.g. every other year I buy two pairs of Calvin Klein five-pocket tapered-leg jeans at Macy's. Calvin Kleins fit my tush: no need to waste time trying on things that don't. 

Except that I went over there this weekend and couldn't find a single pair with a UNITE label like the ones in my older pairs. Finally bought two pairs made in Mexico and worried about who made them under what circumstances and wished I'd had time to look harder for union-made jeans. 

Weird that there wasn't a single union label in the Calvins section, considering that Calvin Klein is one of several garment manufacturers cooperating with UNITE to promote products "Proudly Made In New York." 

It is aggravating to go shopping and spend half the afternoon wincing at maquiladora labels and not trying anything on. I can't stand giving The Speech to perfectly nice sales staff. Dammit, why doesn't the the AFL-CIO or somebody open a Union Label Store? That wouldn't be some kind of antitrust violation, would it? I mean, there's no Equal Shelf Space for Sweatshops law, is there?

9/16/03 11:48 p.m. (Link here.)

Oops, I spoke too soon: the court decision saying Prop. N needed the Supervisors' approval in addition to its election victory is still on appeal.

9/16/03 4:42 p.m. (Link here.)

The big SF news of the day is: NO more PROP N! 

I was just over at City Hall filing some papers and ran into everybody I know from the Coalition on Homelessness doing the post-game schmoozing and press thing on the lawn and steps in a very, very cheerful mood. Seems the Board of Supervisors had just defeated the last gasp of the anti-homeless "Care Not Cash" measure. 

Hooray. One less thing to worry about. Plenty of worries left.

9/16/03 4:28 p.m. (Link here.)

Want to be a night copy editor for ANG Newspapers? Well, drop your trousers here. "Pre-employment drug test and background check required." I.e. "civil libertarians need not apply." 

9/15/03 7:22 p.m. (Link here.)

There's a GAO report out today on the effects of the more close-mouthed Ashcroft policy on FOIA releases. In a survey of FOIA officers at 25 federal agencies, 31.1 percent said there was a decreased likelihood at their agencies of "discretionary disclosures" in response to requests. In other words, if you really want the info, better bring a lawyer.

9/15/03 10:31 a.m. (Link here.)

Political football

Kronstadt FC 4, Left Wing 2, in this weekend's game of the SF Bay Area's one and only anarchists-vs.-communists football tournament, to the strains of the Internationale as played by the Brass Liberation Orchestra.  Fittingly, the first game had been broken up by the police for lack of a permit. 

9/14/03 2:33 p.m. (Link here.)

In what sounds like a right-wing answer to "The West Wing," convicted perjurer and present-day lobbyist Michael Deaver is promoting and advising a TV drama show about lobbyists like himself, with the idea that it would "do for [political] consultants what "L.A. Law" had done for lawyers." The overtly stated intention is to blur the line between fact and fiction, each week basing an invented story on real events in that very week's news. I guess he's realized that acknowledged fictionalizing is legal, unlike the old-fashioned lying that got him in trouble a few years ago -- and yet in an image-driven society, an admittedly fictional "event" can affect national political attitudes quite effectively.

Reminds me of the "Calvin and Hobbes" episode where our hero discovers "Chewing" Magazine, the journal of the serious recreational gum-chewer: "I don't know whether I'm looking at a review of a product, an advertisement for a product, or the product itself."

About Deaver: whoever said there are "no second acts in American lives" overestimated our political attention span.

9/13/02 11:07 a.m. (Link here.)

A secret plan to win the election?

No surprise that Mr. Arnold is afraid to debate a real political pro -- in this case, McClintock -- but gotta love the reason: 

"I'm not going to go around and respond to individual
challenges," Schwarzenegger said at a news conference outside
a Los Angeles manufacturing plant. "I have a plan to become the
next governor of the state of California and the best way to do
that is to stay on course." 

What troubles me is, people don't necessarily *need* honesty or intelligence in a candidate. Both Bush's and Schwarzenegger's people have discovered they can get along without half the qualities people claim to want in a political figure. Honesty? who needs honesty? Just keep repeating stuff you want to think until people believe it. Mental agility? Who needs it? Even if sensible people can defeat every single point you raise with facts, figures and logic, just make sure you keep control of the subject matter, and keep changing the subject back to hot-button social issues like abortion that make everyone forget to follow the money. Doesn't matter what smarter people manage to say so long as you keep them talking about the subject you chose. Decent personal conduct? Just laugh and say you don't remember. Courage? Duck real conflicts and get yourself filmed looking tough in a costume. 

Reminds me of the essential fact of "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance": Jimmy Stewart was a real combat hero. John Wayne never enlisted.

9/12/03 10:50 p.m. (Link here.)

Leave No Voter Behind

This just in: study says the writing on government websites is too damn complicated for Americans, half of whom "read at the eighth-grade level or lower." Actually, what worries me even more is that hashes of business jargon like this may be our administration's idea of clear-as-a bell simplified English. Also that attempts to simplify -- as with Social Security regulations and income tax forms -- often just cause more confusion in the long run by leaving out details that matter. Shit, never mind the "reading level," what we need are clear, complete statements that don't talk down to the public.

BTW, can it possibly be true that information about U.S. public benefits "is spread across 31 million federal government Web pages"? If so, in what sense? I'm not saying I can prove it's false, but how on earth do they figure that? Google estimates that, of sites with the suffix ".gov," there are 2.44 million containing the word "benefit"; 2.28 million containing the abbrevation "VA" (for "Veterans' Administration"); 1.66 million containing the word "eligible"; 456,000 containing the word "Medicare"' 387,000 containing the word "pension"; 319,000 containing the word "Medicaid";  772,000 with the phrase "Social Security"; 42,300 with "TANF" (the acronym for "Temporary Aid to Needy Families," which replaced AFDC, a.k.a. "welfare"); and 34,100 with the phrase "food stamp". Most likely a lot of these words turn up on the same pages, and some of the sites containing these words may not have anything to do with benefits. But but even if you take the figures I've just listed and lay them end to end, you still won't have 31 million. Perhaps they're counting corporate welfare too?

9/12/03 9:27 p.m. (Link here.)

Tom Lehrer never goes out of date. I don't just mean obvious stuff like the George Murphy song. ("The movies that you've seen/on your television screen/show his legislative talents -- at a glance...") or "Send The Marines" ("They've got to be protected/ All their rights respected/ 'Til somebody we like can be elected....") Today there's an absurd tragedy -- it seems we've killed eight Iraqi policemen by mistake -- and once again lyrics come to mind: 
 

...People ask me how I do it,
And I say, "There's nothin' to it,
You just stand there lookin' cute,
And when something moves, you shoot!"
And there's ten stuffed heads in my trophy room right now,
Two game wardens, seven hunters, and a pure-bred Guernsey cow. 

9/11/03 10:49 p.m. (Link here.)

Yep, it's the online edition of the California Voter Information Guide for the October 7 recall election. Other details on the Cal. Secretary of State's recall page.

9/11/03 10:53 a.m. (Link here.)

A little over two weeks ago Atrios was kind enough to link to an item here about Arnold Schwarzenegger's political philosophy as reported by U.S. News in 1990. It produced my only serious burst of site visits to date: about 500. When I posted it, the quote about "My relationship to power and authority is that I'm all for it..." appeared on Google only in two versions of the same article by an odd Australian professor. As of this writing, Google produces a dozen independent mentions of the quote (not counting my own). Now, of course, I'm far from being the only person with an interest in Arnold Schwarzenegger and access to a public library, but maybe I can claim some credit for bringing attention to the U.S. News article -- which, btw, is worth reading in full. 

Now I see on Cursor that Arnie is claiming all publicized reports of his past bad behavior (or penchant for self-promoting confabulation, depending who you believe) somehow emanate from the Davis campaign. So, for the record, let me state that I don't like Gray Davis and I have nothing to do with his campaign and if I did I'd go straight home and take a bath in tomato juice. I don't like his creepy obedience to the prison guards' unions and I don't like his cynical management-by-occasional-sop of his own party's moderate and liberal members. So, yeah, this week he appointed Dolores Huerta to the UC Regents -- but it's for a term that expires in March. So typical.

My position: no on the recall because it's anti-small-d-democratic; yes on Bustamante because the Lieutenant Governor is the logical caretaker for the office if the elected Governor is deposed; no on Gray Davis in 2006 because he's anti-big-D-Democratic. Clear enough?

9/10/03 10:35 p.m. (Link here.)

Dunno who named the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval, but I bet (or maybe I hope) they hadn't seen "Brazil". Interesting stuff at this site, anyway.

9/10/03 10:24 p.m. (Link here.)

Got this art site from a college alumni mailing list. Can't say I knew the guy, but his site sure is cool. Sort of Borges stuff, as in "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."

9/9/03 10:50 p.m. (Link here.)

Sorry for the silence: been on Labor Day vake, and just getting back up to steam now or however that expression goes.

Here's an old but possibly overlooked item from the July 16 Federal Register: HUD's analysis of comments suggesting that the Tennessee Human Rights Commission quite possibly just plain isn't. For example, that as of July it was accused of having held exactly one administrative hearing in the past seven years. No, the Department says, this is incorrect: it held two hearings. Well, that's all right, then....

9/3/03 10:47 p.m. (Link here.)

Here's a bit of advice from the IRS for schoolteachers on the tax deduction for out-of-pocket educational expenses. Of course the IRS and the members of Congress who created the deduction are just making the best of a bad situation -- but it's godawful that we've institutionalized the practice of first underpaying teachers and then saddling them with what is pretty obviously a public duty to provide basic educational supplies for public school students. The school tax cutters should be ashamed of themselves.

9/1/03 10:52 a.m. (Link here.)

A while ago Joel and I came up with a proposed candidate for governor of California. We sent it to the Chron but heard nothing, so here it is:

The name is Big Red.

"Big Red" is a newly discovered giant deep-sea jellyfish, also called "Gumdrop" and, more formally, Tiburonia granrojo. The Chronicle reported in May that he, she or it (so far we don't know which) lives 2,000 to 4,800 feet below the ocean's surface near the Gumdrop seamount northwest of the Farallon Islands. Big Red has also been found in waters off Hawaii, Japan and Mexico. The creature's "striking red bell" can grow more than a yard across. In place of tentacles it has four to seven thick "oral arms." It also has "wartlike clusters of stinging cells." Scientists think it may eat smaller jellyfish, but as yet they don't really know.

And Big Red, dear friends, could be the Golden State's next governor.

Sending a deep-sea jelly to Sacramento may seem an unusual and even a desperate move, but then backing a shallow invertebrate like Gray Davis isn't much to write home about either. Of course, if a genuine Democrat were to run -- someone who could at least fake an interest in life on minimum wage -- the Republicans would have to put up a candidate who claimed to have a soul, or at least a backbone. But as it is, all they'll need is the standard formula of leniency toward big business, cranky "family values" rhetoric, a nod to organized religion, and ferocious punishment of crimes committed by poor people.

Yep, Big Red can handle that.

Consider the advantages:

- Perfectly suited for politics: mostly mouth, no backbone. Has no skeleton. Has no closet either.

- We already know what depths it will sink to.

- Able to withstand high pressure -- can function in environments above a thousand pounds per square inch.

- Can make stinging responses to challengers.

- May not exactly live in California, but neither does Jack Kemp.

- Is not homo sapiens but we're not sure about Schwarzenegger either.

- Attractively colored in traditional Republican red. Red is so much sexier than Gray.

- Would appeal to paleo-Republicans: hasn't evolved in 250 million years.

- Would appeal to creationists: gets along fine without evolution.

- Can function in total obscurity (if necessary, could serve as Lieutenant Governor).

- Never inhaled anything.

- Comes from a crime-free district: must be doing something right. (Well, have *you* heard of any crimes committed on the Gumdrop Seamount?)

- Has no criminal record.

- Has no tax returns to disclose.

- Has no ex-girlfriends. In fact, no girlfriends at all. Or boyfriends. We don't even know what gender it is.

- Has not taken money from prison guards. Or anyone else.

- Experienced with offshore hostile takeovers of smaller organisms.

- Can shake hands with four to seven donors at the same time.

- An avid hunter, and exercises the right to bear multiple arms.

- Can shape itself to fit any platform.

- On dry land, would probably look like Ronald Reagan.

On the other hand, would you want a jellyfish kissing your baby? No? Well, how about Darryl Issa?

Despite the minor flaws of clamminess and stinging warts, plus habitually putting its feet in its mouth, Big Red could generate a broad-based following, perhaps even attracting crossover Democrats. Consider these focus-groupable positives:

- Would promote transparency in government -- or at least translucence.

- Is cold-blooded like Gray Davis but, unlike Davis, can be warmed internally by its surroundings.

- Might be able to get Spongebob Squarepants as a running mate.

- As Gerard de Nerval said of his pet lobster, it does not bark and knows the secrets of the deep.

Given Big Red's many attractions, the leaders of both parties should be racing for the docks to rent submersibles and send down exploratory committees for high-powered low-level negotiations. We think Big Red would rise to the challenge. We know Californians could do a lot worse.
 
 

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