Am I the only one to notice what was missing in the invocation when Gerald Ford’s body was returned to the U.S. Capitol? The chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Rev. Daniel Coughlin, said: “Lord, wehumbly ask you to grant peace and reconciliation, healing and gentle civility to this nation, as this man so nobly tried to do in life's singular moments, by his effort to close chapter upon chapter on America's sadness.”
Eloquent indeed, but note that Coughlin said “Lord” (and, at another point, “Lord God”), not “Lord Jesus.” The Senate chaplain, Dr. Barry Black, a former Navy chaplain, also eschewed the J word, but Black did pray “in the name of him who is the resurrection and the life,” an allusion to John 11:25, in which Jesus says: “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, yet shall he live.”
Coughlin’s delicacy in particular was an interesting footnote to one of the oddest controversies to consume Congress in 2006: whether a defense authorization bill should include language sought by evangelical Christians that would allow military chaplains to pray in Jesus’ name, even at events attended by non-Christians.
The so-called Jesus amendment, which was shelved in an end-of-session compromise, said: “Each chaplain shall have the prerogative to pray according to the dictates of the chaplain’s own conscience, except as must be limited by military necessity, with any such limitation being imposed in the least restrictive manner feasible."
What’s really interesting is that Coughlin is a Roman Catholic priest, the first to serve as House chaplain. He was appointed by outgoing Speaker Dennis Hastert in 2000 after an unedifying campaign against another Catholic who had been expected to get the post. (You can read about that controversy here.)
Coughlin’s prayer for encapsulates several developments in American church-state relations, from the mainstreaming of Catholicism to greater solicitude for Jews and Muslims.Yet Coughlin’s choice not to pray explicitly in Jesus name would sit poorly not only with evangelical Protestants but also with some Catholics, who might ask: “What price assimilation”?
The prayers for Ford offer a twist on the debate over whether religion has been banished from the public square (or the Capitol Rotunda). Obviously, it hasn’t been, but in both Congress and the military the price for government-endorsed “civic religion” is a certain fudging of doctrine. Maybe advocates of a more porous wall between church and state should be careful what they pray for.
Want to see your tax dollars at work, in a demonstration more incandescantly revealing than the light of a thousand suns? Get out there and find an uncut video of Saddam Hussein's execution, which looks like nothing so much as a gang killing befitting the legendary Godfather fanatic. (On the off-chance killing of Saddam finally eliminates the Godfather pictures as a cultural touchstone, it will all have been worth it.) After all the blood and treasure we've spent in Iraq, this is the most professional job we can get? The ski-masked hangmen, according to one eyewitness, danced around the corpse. Remember: These are the good guys doing the killing here.
No Rocky Sullivan waterworks for the bully of Baghdad, by the way. Saddam takes it like a man for the duration of the ordeal available here. I just wish we could see the whole thing. At times like these I wish for Arab TV news, which knows no coyness when it comes to delivering grisly death. I also wish our own state-sponsored killing were done with this kind of brio. The more we dress up execution with humane cocktails of poison and gas, the more horrific it is revealed to be. Our own executions could stand a little more honesty about the sacrament of human sacrifice and everything that it entails.
Praise Allah for the pre-Copernican Islamic holiday calendar, which by divine accident means we may get a Saddam-free 2007. The imperative to get the ugly business of killing a man over with before the haj really heats up has spared all of us a Mumia-style limbo of pleas and appeals that might have dragged on well into President McCain's first term. Specifically, Eid-al-Adha (which ironically celebrates Abraham's narrowly averted sacrifice) is dawning over Iraq right now, and Saddam Hussein's execution is scheduled to come off in the early morning hours—bad news for Saddam, for those of us who believe the state should use a minimum of force to protect its citizens, and for Jerry Haleva (pictured at right), Hollywood's Saddam of record. (He's played the doomed dictator in six films.)
It's a customary copout at times like these to note that, well, we're opposed to the death penalty, but in this case we'll make an exception. Another factor in favor of the copout is that an execution backed by the full faith and fanfare of the state may contribute in some small way to stability in Iraq (or do just the opposite, or most likely have no effect at all). But let's dispense with the copout: State-sponsored execution is a loathsome, outdated practice that tarnishes everybody connected with it—including the citizens who approve it through their participation in the workings of the state. It would have set a greater example for Iraq and for the world to let him rot in prison, his signal (already grown so faint after just three years) fading into oblivion.
Is the great za'im of Tikrit even now conferring with some Father Jerry counterpart, an old friend and cleric trying to persuade him to go to the gallows bawling like a yellow coward, so that kids may learn from his example and stick to the straight and narrow path? Unlikely, but tales of Saddam's behavior in his final moments will almost certainly be with us for many years—even if the Iraqi government makes public its promised snuff videotape. Maybe the most regrettable thing about the execution is that it re-dignifies Saddam Hussein as somebody important enough to kill. For the millions of survivors of Saddam's victims in the three gulf wars and the bloody maintenance of his 24-year reign, that importance was never in doubt, and I hope they get some comfort from his end. But Iraq has had few enough examples of living former leaders that it's too bad the courts have ignored the wisdom of James T. Kirk: "The problem with the Nazis...wasn't simply that their leaders were evil, psychotic men—they were!—but the main problem, I think, was the Leader Principle."
Will the Leader Principle (which for my money is too strong everywhere at all times, but is particularly pronounced in Saddam's little corner of the world) lose some strength from the spectacle of a bloodthirsty tinpot swinging from a rope? I'd doubt it. People love their strong men—including, as it turns out, many fair-weather supporters of the Iraq war, who now welcome the prospect of building up some new sub-Hussein tyrant to enforce a cold peace in Baghdad. This is the kind of mad logic that results when we measure out our progress in the termination of human lives.
A little more than a year ago, Ed Whitacre, CEO of SBC (since renamed AT&T), famously told Business Week, "For a Google or Yahoo or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!" The response from Google, Amazon and other Web-based companies was, in essence, "It's ON." And now it looks like Whitacre was nuts to think he could say something like that and not be the one to pay. Today, the FCC approved the latest in a string of Whitacre acquisitions, AT&T's $84.5 billion acquisition of BellSouth. But it did so only after AT&T agreed not to charge Google, Yahoo, Vonage or anybody else for priority delivery of its data. The restriction, which lasts for two years, specifically bars AT&T from offering "any service that privileges, degrades or prioritizes" any data transmitted to its broadband customers. In other words, the FCC told AT&T that it was stuck offering a "dumb pipe" to DSL users for at least two years. The two exceptions to the Net neutrality requirement were for managed corporate networks and for the TV service AT&T is starting to introduce. Those carve-outs make sense because they draw a bright line between what happens to data transmitted by an Internet access service and how traffic can be managed in other services running over the same network. And a temporary restriction is appropriate, given the promise of more competitors emerging (particularly in wireless broadband) as well as the new Democratic majority in Congress' interest in Net neutrality. Other interesting new concessions by AT&T include agreements to bring 3,000 jobs back to the U.S. that BellSouth had sent offshore; to offer relatively low-speed broadband (768 kbps) for less than $20 a month with no obligation to buy AT&T's phone service, too; and to offer wireless broadband to at least one fourth of its service area by 2010 (if it doesn't, it will lose those wireless licenses).
Addendum: FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and fellow Republican Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate issued a remarkable joint statement that declares the Net neutrality condition unnecessary and pledges not to extend it to other carriers. Read it here. AT&T agreed to the condition (and several others aimed at preserving competition for business phone lines) at the insistence of the FCC's two Democratic commissioners. Given their stance, look for Democrats on Capitol Hill to legislate on this issue, using the AT&T rules as the starting point.
Jack Weathorford channels Genghis Khan, taking the countryside, letting the cities rot, and bringing law and order throughout the land, by killing people.
Now it's your turn. Whom would you pick as your Iraq war avatar? Alexander, Hannibal, Crazy Horse, Napoleon, Rayovac of Ceti Alpha 7? Or would you dispense with models entirely, and find some totally new tactic? Tell the world, in the comments.
Breathe easy, California: Even from his sickbed in Saint John's Health Center, Gov. Schwarzenegger is making sure Cruz Bustamante's hands don't get anywhere near the ship of state's rudder, ever again! His doctor cleared him for duty Tuesday, and now the governor is up-and-at-them, writing with the gubernatorial pen, holding a video conference, oozing enthusiasm for the minutiae of state leadership. You can help out by coming up with captions for these official governor's office photos:
"Honey, I forgot to duck."
There's been a lot of speculation and japery about the supposed fishiness of a healthy 59-year-old breaking a bone from a standing fall. I wouldn't wish a broken femur on Thulsa Doom himself, let alone on Conan, so I'll note that always, there remains the discipline of steel: Arnold's biceps are still bigger than my thighs (and possibly bigger than his own, if this accident is any indication).
Caption suggestions are welcome in the comments.
Update: Ken Schultz comes through with a caption for the IV-in-the hand shot. The other two pics remain uncaptioned.
What happens when a Jewish atheist in Venice writes Jack Abramaoff in prison, telling him that "You're why people hate Jews"? He writes back about the "King of the universe," that's what!
I have long believed that there is no better recipe for outrageously stupid public policy than mixing politicians with sports. A fine example comes this week from the Wall Street Journal, which reports that the current building boom for college football stadiums is being financed partly by leasing expensive luxury suites to fans, who can then deduct 80% of the price from their taxes, on the comical grounds that the expenditure amounts to "charity." How could such a loophole get created, especially when game tickets themselves are not eligible? A quick look inside the sausage factory:
In 1986, the Internal Revenue Service ruled that [charitable] gifts [to universities] required to obtain a "substantial benefit," such as season tickets, are not deductible. Nevertheless, a tax-reform act passed that same year allowed full deductions for contributions for the right to buy seating at the University of Texas and Louisiana State University. The provision was pushed by the late Texas representative J.J. Pickle, a University of Texas alumnus and influential member of the House Ways and Means Committee, and the late Louisiana Sen. Russell Long, an LSU graduate and longtime member of the Senate Finance Committee.
In 1988, Congress extended the deduction to all universities but reduced it to 80%.
Additionally, the Journal reports, the stadiums are often built with tax-exempt bonds; tickets and concessions can be written off as buxiness expenses, colleges can deduct the millions they pocket by selling naming rights, and so on. Best quote:
"I don't see a thing in the world wrong with" the 80% deduction, says oil executive W.A. "Tex" Moncrief Jr., who leases a luxury suite at the University of Texas stadium. "That money is used to further many educational activities."
"Always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty; always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself."
-- Richard M. Nixon, farewell address to his staff in 1974
“I call on you not to hate because hate does not leave a space for a person to be fair and it makes you blind and closes all doors of thinking and keeps away one from balanced thinking and making the right choice."
-- Saddam Hussein, farewell letter to his supporters, 2006
Gerald Ford had almost 40 years on me.Even so, the former president’s death provided me with an intimation of morbidity, if not mortality. Death has taken another figure (sometimes a figure of fun) from my formative years as a journalist.
As a young editorial writer at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1973, I landed the coveted Watergate franchise when the editor, who had written our 1972 editorial endorsing Nixon’s re-election, withdrew in pain from the whole subject. (He returned, after the release of the “smoking gun” audiotape, to write an editorial urging Nixon to resign. I was hoping Tricky Dick would stay on, be impeached, tried and convicted, if not hanged.)
Watergate made Ford president, but it made me a legal journalist. As the legal cover-up unraveled, I found myself delightedly writing about subpoenas, indictments and grand juries. The interest stoked by Watergate moved me to attend law school (where I learned to my horror that serious constitutional lawyers supported Nixon’s argument that he could defy the courts and hold on to his Watergate tapes).
Any man's death diminishes me,according to John Donne, but Ford’s passing inters another part of my newspaper career. I winced when I saw the sub-headline on The Times’ Ford story today -- “Sworn in After Nixon Resigned, New President Helped Nation Recover” -- not because it was predictable but because the information it contained was probably news to some readers. To today’s 25-year-old, the Ford administration is as distant as FDR’s presidency was to me when I was writing about the 18 ½-minute gap in a vital Watergate tape.
For some time I have noticed that reporters, and not just obituary-writers, are painstakingly filling in historical background that strikes me (at first anyway) as redundant. Some of the back story really is unnecessary, like a young reporter's overly conscientious description of a long-dead European leader as “German dictator Adolf Hitler.”
But other history is necessary if younger readers are to navigate through stories that link the present and the past.To someone my age, the name “Gerald Ford” instantly conjures up WIN buttons, Ron Nessen on "Saturday Night Live" and waiting lines for the swine flu vaccine. But why should even a well educated 25 year old be aware of those iconic images from the real “That 70s Show”?
The flip side of the helpful addition to news stories of historical factoids is that, when inserted by younger reporters or copy editors, they’re sometimes wrong. A story that requires a reporter to include background from before he or she was born can be a ticket to the Corrections column.
That scenario occurs to me when I see corrections like this one from the New York Times:“An introductory note last Sunday in a transcript of President Lyndon B. Johnson's telephone calls misstated the title held by Robert F. Kennedy when he participated in a 1965 conversation. He was a United States senator, no longer the attorney general.”
It’s highly unlikely that someone my age wouldn’t have known that Kennedy quit the Johnson Cabinet in 1964 to run for the Senate. His resignation was widely regarded at the time as the last nail in the coffin of Camelot. But you had to be there -- as Gerald Ford was and as I was, albeit as a teen-age political junkie. Now one of us is gone.
Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) recently rejected C-SPAN's request to use its own cameras to televise proceedings in the House chamber, saying the "dignity and decorum of the House of Representatives are best preserved" by the current system. Under that system, which is controlled by the Speaker's office, the cameras have been limited to two types of shots, both stationary: tight views of whoever happens to be speaking, or somewhat wider views of the middle of the chamber as votes are cast. What Lamb wanted to show was what anyone in the visitor's gallery might see: how members reacted and interacted during debates and votes. It was a perfectly reasonable request, and the Times' editorial board endorsed it earlier this month. But Pelosi clung to the illusion that unrestricted cameras would somehow encourage less decorous behavior -- as if the House microphone didn't already invite demagoguery? Has she already forgotten Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio) calling Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) a coward? Or how about the debate over whether to give federal courts jurisdiction over the fate of Terri Schiavo? The list goes on and on and on.... To her credit, Pelosi threw C-SPAN a bone. Brian Lamb, C-SPAN's chairman and CEO, had also asked for the ability to show individual members' yeas and nays immediately after a vote ends. Pelosi said she had asked the Clerk of the House to determine if Lamb's request could be granted without affecting the accuracy of the count. If the Clerk's answer is "No" -- and it's hard to imagine how it could be -- the House needs to find a better system for recording votes. Beyond that, C-SPAN should be able to show what visitors in the gallery can see: an instantaneous display of how individual members vote and, in some cases, change their votes before the gavel comes down. Maybe that's what Lamb plans to ask for next year. As members are overly fond of saying, this is the people's House. And in the Information Age, the people shouldn't have to travel all the way to Washington to see what their elected representatives are doing in the House chamber.
Robert L. Jackson gives a masterful rundown of President Gerald Ford's life and career on page 1 of today's Los Angeles Times. It's worth picking up a hard copy just for a lovely jump-page portrait of Ford signing legislation—lefthandedness being of the few reasons to remember the accidental president with any affection. The Times editorial reminds us of a few more reasons, including his honest and merciful nature. I'll give one more: He was a skier.
Though easily dismissed and lazily forgotten, Ford was a central figure in the creation of modern neoconservatism. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney both served as chief of staff in the Ford Administration, while Paul Wolfowitz headed up nonproliferation issues at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Ford's peak came in service to the founding father of post-ideological Republicanism, President Richard M. Nixon. Significantly, his political career began with the sacrifice of a paleocon: Rep. Bartel J. Jonkman, a geezer isolationist in Michigan's fifth district whom Ford beat in a party primary in 1948.
From there, Ford's dedication to demonstrating that government is good never waivered, no matter how much evidence piled up against him. His service on the Warren Commission produced a book called Portrait of the Assassin, co-written with John R. Stiles and available starting at $4.55. (Dedicated collectors of Fordiana can get an inscribed copy for $1,250.) As leader of a tiny House minority, Ford was on the front lines of the GOP's surrender to the Great Society and reeducation as a party of big government.
Ford's most controversial act, the pardon of Nixon, has had an ironic history. Public opinion polls at the time indicated outrage over the pardon, but history has since decided it doesn't really care about the pardon. It should be the other way around. Pardoning Nixon was the right thing to do for the American people circa 1974; but the longterm health of the nation suffered from passing up this opportunity to break the taboo against sending presidents to prison. What a laugh that Ford at the time justified his decision by saying: "I do believe the buck stops here and I cannot rely on public opinion polls to tell me what is right."
Maybe too much has been made of the pardon issue. Too much has certainly been made of Ford's odd position as the only president not elected to either the presidency or the vice presidency. Our exaggerated notions about the meaning and importance of voting have created a myth that Ford was uniquely hamstrung by his lack of a "mandate." This weakness has been blamed for both his failure to come to the rescue of South Vietnam in 1975—an inaction from which newly elected Sen. Jim Webb (D-Virginia) is still smarting—and for his inability to get anything done with the strongly Democratic Congress. In fact, no president could have gotten the appropriations to dive back into the Vietnamese civil war, and Ford maneuvered quite well against the Congress, delivering a heroic 66 vetoes during his brief time in office.
Caretaker presidents are my favorite presidents, and those veto numbers may be enough to outweigh the fact that Ford's place was always at the get-along-go-along end of the Goldwater-Rockefeller continuum of Republicanism. In my opinion, they're not enough; your mileage may vary.
So rest in peace, and let the Squeaky Fromme death watch begin.
More to the moment, let the watch for phoned-in tributes by editorial cartoonists commence: Will we see Jerry Ford tripping at the pearly gates? Mt. Rushmore briefly moved? Maybe St. Peter telling the former prez, "You've been given a pardon...into Heaven!" No reasonable guess will be refused.
[With Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger undergoing surgery today to repair his broken femur, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante became acting governor for the few hours that Schwarzenegger was under general anesthesia. Here is the legacy of that historic time, the first Latino governorship in modern California.]
SACRAMENTO -- As the year draws to a close, it is time to reflect on the successes of the Gov. Cruz Bustamante Administration.
Under the leadership of Gov. Cruz Bustamante, California enjoyed peace and extraordinary prosperity. State coffers swelled with sales tax revenue, thanks in large part to the huge post-holiday sales surge. The state’s violent crime rate actually declined slightly.
California’s prisons reported minimal incidents of violence. And fortunately, no natural disasters struck the state on Gov. Bustamante’s watch.
Asked what he was proudest of as he looked back on his Administration’s record, outgoing Gov. Bustamante said it was his leadership role in keeping the state of California on a steady course during troubled times in the rest of the world.
Asked whether he had any regrets, he said it was that his Administration could not bring peace to Iraq.
Then, asked about any regrets in his personal life during his Administration, he smiled and said, "Eating those leftover cookies the morning after Christmas.''
He also said he is looking forward to private life after the hectic but rewarding hours of his governorship.
Tick, tick, tick: Somalia is a bomb threatening to explode. Washington knows that, but it has no good policy options.
Bakersfield gets religion: School officials decide to call winter and spring breaks Christmas and Easter recesses.
Dropping charges at Duke: After trial by media, three Duke students are off the hook for rape. Maybe sexual offense and kidnapping charges should be out too.
Best wishes to Gov. Schwarzenegger for a speedy recovery from the broken leg he suffered yesterday while taking on the grey and overcast slopes of Baldy Mountain in Sun Valley...
At first glance, the “war over Christmas” (my preferred term for what right-wingers call the “war on Christmas”) might seem a separate issue from the controversy over Rep. Virgil Goode’s Koran-bashing. Goode is the Virginia congressman who is irked because an incoming Muslim member of Congress wants to use the Koran at his unofficial swearing-in.
Don't be so sure.
Goode is fair game for the abuse he is receiving, not just because of his obtuseness about the need for religious freedom but also because he seems to be in urgent need of a fact-checker. Goode linked his criticism of the Koran oath-taking with his opposition to immigration by Muslims.
"If American citizens don't take up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration,” the congressman said, “there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran." Problem is: The incoming Muslim congressman, Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), is not an immigrant but a native-born African-American who converted to Islam in college.
Goode’s criticism is so cartoonish that it’s tempting to dismiss him as an eccentric outlier. I’m not so sure. I speak as a veteran of the Christmas wars – I used to be a newspaper editor in Pittsburgh, Pa., ground zero for one of the great Christmas display controversies to reach the U.S. Supreme Court (read the opinion here). My abiding impression of the seasonal skirmishes over religious displays is that they aren’t about religion so much as they are about bragging rights.
Let’s face it: It feels good to be in the majority, and it feels even better when your majority status is institutionalized (consecrated?) by government. The Pittsburghers who clamored for a Nativity scene at the county courthouse could have gotten their manger fix at lots of locations in the city, including churches. But that wasn’t the point. The agitation for returning religion (our religion, that is) to the so-called public square is rooted, I’m afraid, in a desire to flaunt one’s majority status. (Anyone interested in a longer version of this argument can find it here.)
I suspect the people cheering on Goode are motivated by the same anxiety about “us” losing ground to “them,” and I’m not sure it matters that the Koran is (mis)used by Muslim terrorists.
About 11 days ago, I picked up a very strong signal of the Howard Stern satellite show at 88.1 FM while driving east on Washington Blvd. The signal, a rebroadcast of the no-cusses-barred Stern Sirius show by an unlicensed station, broke decisively into the jazz station KKJZ at the Culver Blvd./Wash. Blvd. intersection, dropped out until the other side of the Selznick International plantation house (now known as The Culver Studios), then grew in strength and clarity, particularly once I got east of the 10. From about LaBrea to Vermont, Stern guest Evil David Letterman vied with Ella Fitzgerald singing "Sleigh Ride" on KKJZ for control of the 88.1 band. What initially seemed to be a dinky signal pointed out a window in Culver City turned out to be a fairly strong broadcast. When I reached the dowtown cluster, KKJZ regained control of the band. I was unable to raise the Stern signal again by scanning up or down on the dial. This was about 8:00am on a Tuesday: Checking my hearing against MarksFriggin.com, I see that I was listening to that day's show.
Daniel at LosAnjealous.com relates a similar experience this past February, at 6:15pm, traveling south on Coldwater Canyon Blvd., and picking up the signal at 88.3 FM. NBC11 news in the Bay Area reports that this is Pirate Cat Radio, which is run by Monkey Man from a Mission district theater in San Francisco and broadcasts at 87.9 in both S.F. and L.A. An email from Pirate Cat Radio tells me only "Yes we are!" (In reply to my question: "Can we say that you're still broadcasting, and still available at 87.9 FM, and can we give our readers any advice on where to pick you up?")
I haven't picked up PCR again since last Tuesday, though I've tried with various car radios on 88.1 (nothing but jazz), 88.3 (nothing at all), 87.9 (strong but fuzzy Spanish language) and 107.9 (pretty good Christian programming from KWVE, the station that is not ashamed of the gospel). Nor have I picked up Monkey Man's signal while traveling along Beverly Blvd., Santa Monica Blvd., the 10, various downtown routes, or for that matter Coldwater Canyon. KKJZ did not return phone calls—not that I would really want the jazz station to take any action; better to leave some mystery around Monkey Man's unreliable piratecast.
If you were interested in Tony Badran's recent piss take on Michel Aoun, the Maronite former general who is now Hezbollah's biggest pal in Lebanon, Megan K. Stack has a new profile of the general that's worth reading. Aoun wins on points by painting his opponents as collaborators, an argument that seems to make sense until you examine what it actually means. An example:
"Hariri and his group were pro-Syrian. And they took advantage of that and made fortunes from the resources of the country," Aoun said. "So what's going on now is that these people collaborated so much with Syria that they have to show some hate, some extremism, in speaking of Syria."
Saad Hariri didn't make fortunes in Lebanon. His late father, Rafiq al-Hariri, did that. In the process he rebuilt downtown Beirut and the Beirut airport, brought billions in investment into the country, and vastly increased the wealth of a nation that was a ruin when Aoun left it in 1990. For his troubles he was murdered on Valentine's Day last year.
During the period of Lebanon's reconstruction, Aoun was living behind a gate on an estate in France, apparently cursing the non-exiles who stayed and had to work within the empire of his enemies. That could be painted as a form of collaboration, if only Aoun had actually been fighting to get the Syrians out all those years. Instead he returned to Lebanon only when the rebellion against Hariri's probable assassins made it possible to do so. For Aoun to portray the opposition as the "remainders of political feudalism" while the bodies of opposition journalists and polititcians are piling up is grotesque. Unfortunately, beating up on the corpses of Hariri and the other victims plays well with underachieving sad sacks who look to a great Leader to fix up their lives; and Lebanon's got plenty of those.
The audience measurement firm Nielsen recently released year-end top 10 lists
in about 20 categories, including movies, albums and products placed on
broadcast television shows. One of the more unusual rankings: primetime
TV shows that were most likely to be time-shifted. Nine
of the 10 were dramas or comedies, led by NBC's "Studio 60 on the
Sunset Strip," a dramedy that has proven less attractive to viewers than to critics. Read more about the stats and the implications at the Bit Player blog.
Turkmenistan may be overshadowed by its northern neighbor Kazakhstan in the popular mind thanks to "Borat", but the country's recently deceased leader Saparamurat Niyazov gave North Korea's Kim Jong Il a run for his money when it came to creating a personality cult. In case it's too soon to speak ill of the dead (he died today of heart failure), I'll just follow the Associated Press's lead and call him "colorful."
In 2002, Niyazov decided to rename the months of the year after prominent Turkmen, starting off by giving himself January.
After condemning ballet, gold teeth, long hair, and recorded music, Niyazov spoke out against lip synching, likely to save his country from the scourge of mediocre pop stars on tour.
Niyazov required drivers in Turkmenistan to pass a rigorous test that includes not only, say, how to change lanes, but also his philosophical writings (which children read daily and which sit next to the Koran at mosques).
In one of his poems, Niyazov passed himself off as a combination of Big Brother and Santa Clause: "If you are honest in your deeds, I see this; if you commit wrongdoing, I see that too."
About eight years ago, when two meteorites fell to Turkmenistan in the space of a month, Niyazov named one after himself. It now sits in a museum.
More coverage on Niyazov's passing--and the succession dilemma it poses for his energy-rich country--here.
Uncle Sam needs more: Bush's call for a larger military is the right thing to do, even if the president's reasons miss the mark.
Unveiling China's past: "The Painted Veil" is unflattering to China, and still government censors approved it. But that doesn't mean Hollywood has free rein in the country.
"[T]he point of dystopian fiction isn't that it paints a likely future," says the Instapundit. "And implausibilities abound in the field, with varying degrees of criticism -- Margaret Atwood's misogynistic American theocracy certainly isn't any more plausible than Card or Ferrigno's scenarios (and in our podcast interview, Card admits that his story is implausible), but I remember plenty of people at my university (where I did a panel on it some years ago) seeing Atwood's book as a realistic depiction of a possible future."
"The problem is that liberalism's alleged weakness is crucial to the conservative critique of liberalism, which makes it hard to outline a coherent liberal totalitarianism," says Matthew Yglesias. "I think the best job is probably done in Demolition Man in which we see a kind of public health totalitarianism but it's important here that the state actually has almost no repressive apparatus and proves incapable of coping with Edgar Friendly's small, unarmed band of graffiti artists without resorting to illiberal methods that promptly lead the regime to collapse."
In 2006, the protectionist Congress' casualties were Dubai Ports World and Open Skies; could it be Airbus in 2007? It has all the makings of a classic protectionist rumble: An overseas corporation (in this case, European planemaker Airbus) wants to sell the U.S. Air Force possibly 100 tanker jets that refuel other planes in flight. Airbus faces a competing bid from Chicago-based Boeing for a contract that could be worth about $20 billion. This was the subject of a major controversy a few years ago, in which the Air Force employee negotiating the contract was also cozying up to Boeing for a $250,000-a-year job.
Airbus is offering the Air Force a military tanker version of its A330-200 passenger jet (pictured above), a larger and more fuel-efficient competitor than Boeing's offering, the 767. To sweeten the deal for the Air Force, Airbus would build the A330 tanker in Alabama, and consequently employ many Americans. No matter which planemaker the Air Force chooses, the deal will be a boon to American workers.
This is an opinion page, and we feel honor-bound to render an opinion on today's finest news story: Grandmother X-Rays baby at LAX.
Some possibilities:
Stop the epidemic of stupid grandmothers! It's time for Gov. Schwarzenegger to get serious about grannies so out to lunch you can't even trust them not to put a baby through a radiation machine. Or maybe the real message here is that abuela was smarter than the panicky government authorities. See next opinion:
You hear the most outrageous lies about radiation. Take a bow, J. Frank Parnell. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the baby received only 20 percent of the radiation dose you received last time you flew New York to L.A. For that we may say:
Excellent work, TSA! An alert screenwatcher "immediately noticed the outline of a baby and pulled the bin backward on the conveyor belt," so ignore the talking head later in the story who rhetorically asks "if a baby can get through..." The baby didn't get through. Nice try, though, in spinning this story as one of the horrors understaffing produced, Transportation Security Administration flack Nico Melendez. And while you're at it get some Spanish speakers at these gates. In fact:
This should be standard procedure at our airports! With such low radiation doses, why not give a break to a tired old woman who'd rather just walk through the gate and let her baggage take a ride? Shame on the "security officals and paramedics" who forced her to send the baby to a hospital.
OK, these are all pretty weak opinions. I'll try one more and then call it quits:
America's callin' Pat Paulsen: Every weird news item has its perigee of weirdness, and this one's comes here:
In the several seconds the baby spent in the machine, the doctor added, he was exposed to as much radiation as he would naturally get from cosmic rays — or high energy from outer space — in a day.
Solar flares, delta radiation, cosmic rays: Isn't it bad enough that stuff exists out in the vacuum? Do we have to deal with it on earth too? As presidential candidate Pat Paulsen said during his campaign: It's time to stop sticking our bayonets into each other and start sticking them into space.
OK, there's no opinion to be rendered on this matter.
Pacifism's last stand in Japan: A constitution that bars Japan from military action seems quaint in the face of North Korea's nuclear threat. But right-wingers should tone down the rhetoric.
Dead wrong: It's killing that's cruel and unusual.
Trump, not Tara, triumphs: 'The Donald' swoops in to rescue his embattled Miss USA, proving his genius for self-promotion.
The French-administered princedoms of Morocco and Tunisia gave mercy to Jews during the Shoah, so why, Max Boot demands, does today's Muslim world silence or deny discussion of the Holocaust?
Here's another reason why NASA should dump its shuttle program now: Real space news gets obscured whenever one of them is running circles around the Earth for a few days.
Example: NASA announced Monday that its Spitzer Space Telescope captured images of the first stars in the universe. The numbers by themselves are staggering: The light captured by Spitzer comes from objects about 13 billion light years away, or about 74,204,208,000,000,000,000,000 miles away from the Earth. Some more:
A little math therefore shows that these newfound objects are indeed the infants of the universe. But what are they? If they are stars, they are about 10 times more massive than theories suggest the first stars would have been.
The mysterious objects are in clusters. If they are each stars, then the clusters might be the first mini-galaxies. And if so, each apparently has a mass that's less than a million suns. Our Milky Way, by contrast, holds the mass of about 100 billion suns and is thought to have been built up by mergers of smaller galaxies -- perhaps like those the astronomers now think they might be seeing.
Meanwhile, 200 miles above earth, the crew of Space Shuttle Discovery made news today by managing to fold a space station solar panel on its fourth attempt.
Four tries?
*Photo credits Top: NASA/JPL - Cal Tech/GSFC Bottom: AFP/Getty Images
So there I was, standing in line for nearly an hour with about 100 people outside a busy train station in Paris, waiting for a taxi -- I'll let that sink in -- when two or three youngish men, minds clearly altered by some substance, began shouting and gesturing menacingly at various people in line, including a professional-looking single woman who appeared to be in her 30s. The proximate cause was, uh, people not standing in the right place or something, but there was no real reason; they were just crazy and trying to get a rise out of people. I thought there was going to be violence, and mentally rehearsed some kung fu moves, but luckily they grew distracted and walked away.
Having long been a purveyor of the unoriginal theory that France's public order today bears a striking resemblance to the bummed-out pessimism and occasional wildings of 1980s New York City (down to the shrugging cops, paralyzed onlookers, and easy accusations of racism against people who refer to the problem as ... a problem), what came next was no surprise -- the woman decided to be brave enough to ask every uniform-wearing human she could see if they could please help guard the line and maybe hunt down the menacers, because people felt destabilized about standing with their bulky possessions in the cold for nearly an hour while young men seemingly without restraint decided whether or not they were going to commit a little ultra-violence ... and, as expected, the responses ranged from irritated shrug (with matching facial expression) to snappy assertion that it's not our responsibility, madame, and don't you know how overworked we are?
In the end, no one stood guard, but a taxi finally came for us (after a first passed us over because he didn't want to deal with two suitcases). In a friendly sort of way, my wife asked the driver what the deal was with the no-taxis-at-Gare-du-Nord situation, and whether it was normal to wait for an hour. "And what about us!" he shot back (translation approximate). "What happens when we have to stand for an hour waiting for passengers!"
A few nights later, on one of those many French TV shows where a bunch of philosophers sit around a table sipping from goblets and talking loftily about politics, someone made the observation that the difference between cabbies in New York and Paris is that the former always tell you about their dreams and plans, and the latter just complain. I can neither confirm nor deny this theorem, though I always appreciate spinning the thinnest of French anecdotes into sweepinggeneralizations that probably don't hold up.
Get a whiff of what Bob Schieffer calls the "refreshing honesty" of Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Indiana), who this weekend abandoned his presidential candidacy. CBS veteran Schieffer, a gentleman of the old school, applauds Bayh for his candor in admitting that he just didn't have the power to win. But sometimes you can be charitable to a fault. Here's what Bayh said:
"The odds were always going to be very long for a relatively unknown candidate like myself, a little bit like David and Goliath. And whether there were too many Goliaths or whether I'm just not the right David, the fact remains that at the end of the day, I concluded that due to circumstances beyond our control the odds were longer than I felt I could responsibly pursue."
Rappers make less cliché-ridden speeches than this at awards shows. If this is what Bayh could do in 50 words, imagine the State of the Union addresses we've been spared.
Before The Times or any other local newspaper runs another story comparing public services in L.A. to those in New York, let's just stipulate something: New York always spends more. When LAPD Chief William Bratton complains that he doesn't have enough officers, he likes to point out how far the department lags behind New York (it has one officer per 207 residents, compared with one for every 411 residents in Los Angeles). New York also spends roughly twice as much on services for the homeless. And in media reports on L.A. County's troubled jail system, it has become standard practice to mention that New York has dramatically more jail guards overseeing a smaller inmate population than L.A.'s.
An otherwise excellent report on jail killings in Sunday's Times by Stuart Pfeifer and Robin Fields repeated that familiar theme, pointing out that 3,300 uniformed deputies in L.A. County must watch over about 18,000 inmates, while in New York there are three times as many guards overseeing 5,000 fewer prisoners. This is frequently offered by the Sheriff's Department as an excuse for the oversight problems that may have contributed to the 14 jail homicides in L.A. County since 2000. Certainly, the comparison makes L.A. jails look shockingly underfunded -- unless you look at any other big city besides New York.
L.A. County spends roughly $27,800 annually per inmate, compared to $61,000 in New York. Yet L.A. still spends more than the next three biggest cities in the United States. Philadelphia spends $23,700 per inmate, Chicago's Cook County spends $20,000 and Houston's Harris County spends only $15,800. Harris County happens to be the nation's death-penalty capital, and killing the inmates off does save on room and board. Still, it's clear that L.A. is only a laggard on jail spending when compared to New York.
Why does that city spend so much? Probably because it has more to spend, given sky-high property and sales taxes. But while Sheriff Lee Baca would like people to believe that an ongoing crisis in the local jails is the result of underspending on his department, that isn't necessarily the case. A bigger problem is the shortage of people who want to be sheriff's deputies, creating a recruiting shortfall that makes it hard to fill open slots. It's also more than possible that training and oversight of the deputies who serve as jail guards leave a lot to be desired, while computer systems and jail facilities are badly outdated.
What's certain is that L.A. is never going to match New York when it comes to spending on law enforcement and other services, and unless Angelenos want to pay much higher taxes, that isn't going to change. So comparisons on such things aren't really very valuable.
This morning the editorial board gave one-and-a-half cheers to the durability of Fouad Siniora's government in Lebanan, which has so far weathered a full-court press from Hezbollah and its fellow travelers. For an added perspective on the Party of God and its ambitions in Lebanon and beyond, here's an interview I did with Mohammed Fneish, Hezbollah's member of parliament from Bint Jbeil. Fneish has since moved up in the world and is now Lebanon's minister of energy. He seemed likable enough, made some effort to answer my actual questions rather than giving pure boilerplate, and was soft-spoken to a dictaphone-baffling fault, but my confidence that Hezbollah can ever be integrated peacefully into the Lebanese political scene has diminished sharply in the years since that interview.
"In the real world, you can't strip at a job interview, nor can you rap to convince your co-workers that you have the best idea at a meeting."
"Community policing works and would work a lot better if drugs were distributed like alcohol and cops didn't have to patrol South-Central as if they were combat troops in a war zone."
"Women are being beaten, raped and tortured in front of their own children."
"Those of us in the baby boom generation remember the prophetic words of Pete Seeger:"
"Privacy is something given to us by the 4th Amendment."
"How the 9th Circuit determined that wearing buttons with pictures of a murdered love one violates a criminal's rights is beyond comprehension."
"It is scary to think that if some kind of disaster were to happen in California, we would not be well prepared with vaccines and enough hospital beds."
What does it all mean? What else are people saying? Find out in Letters.
In 2006, the protectionist Congress' casualties were Dubai Ports World and 
Here's another reason why NASA should dump its shuttle program now: Real space news gets obscured whenever one of them is running circles around the Earth for a few days. 
Meanwhile, 200 miles above earth, the crew of 
