Month: February 2003

Some are. These guys do have a good slogan, though: “War Is Silly. Whack your willy.” Like I needed a reason?

Maybe he wasn’t such an obvious insider-trader, after all. The evidence suggests he did all he could to keep his Enron stock, even while the company was clearly tanking. In other words, he didn’t say one thing and do another. The New York Times engages in a pretty clear case of back-tracking:

That differs sharply from the story put forward early last year, after many news organizations, including The New York Times, reported that Mr. Lay had sold large numbers of shares as he urged others to buy. Many people seized on those facts as evidence of duplicity, not accounting for other possible explanations.

Good for the Times for correcting the record. I wonder if Krugman will.

Yep, it’s on the web.

MAIL JAM: I’m sorry some of you, many of you, have been unable to email me lately. Apparently, the mail server has gotten overwhelmed. I have calls and emails in to fix it.

I guess we wll know the answer to that, but this year’s nominees are almost a hetero-shut-out. An unusually well-informed movie buff friend sent me the following email:

Today’s Oscar nominations must set a record of sorts for gays in Hollywood. Best Picture nominee “Chicago” was produced by Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, both openly gay, while another Best Picture nominee, “The Hours,” had openly-gay Scott Rudin as producer. (The Pulitzer Prize winning book on which it is based was, of course, written by openly gay Michael Cunningham.) Two of the nominees for Best Director, Rob Marshall of “Chicago” and Pedro Almodovar of “Talk To Me”, are openly gay. Nicole Kidman is nominated as Best Actress for her portrayal of bisexual Virginia Woolf in “The Hours,” Ed Harris is nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of a gay man with AIDS in the same film, while Meryl Streep is nominated for Best Supporting Actress as his lesbian best friend. Selma Hayek is up for Best Actress for her portrayal of bisexual painter Frida Kahlo in “Frida”. Pedro Almodovar is also nominated for Best Original Screenplay, where he is joined by openly gay Todd Haynes, who wrote and directed “Far From Heaven.” Juliette Moore is nominated as Best Actress for that film, in which she plays the wife of a closeted gay man (played by Dennis Quaid, whose omission from the list of nominees will be noted as one of this year’s Oscar gaffes). Another original screenplay nomination went to “Y Tu Mam Tambien,” in which two young straight men end up having sex with each other. “Lilo & Stitch,” whose co-director Dean DeBlois is openly gay, is up for Best Animated Feature. Kander and Ebb are up for Best Song (as is Eminem). And the Dutch film nominated for Best Foreign Film, “Zus & Zo,” is a comedy about how a family deals with the news that the brother they all thought was gay decides to marry a woman. Stephen Daldry did not direct it.

Note that this is all related to people who are openly gay. The closet is crumbling – even in that most privately homophobic enclave, Hollywood.
UPDATE: My friend got one detail wrong: Meryl Streep was nominated for her performance in “Adaptation,” not “The Hours.” But one more addition: openly gay writer, Bill Condon, for his screenplay adaptation of “Chicago.”

In a sign of how extremist some of the elements behind the upcoming “anti-war” demonstrations in New York and San Francisco are, Rabbi Michael Lerner has been banned from speaking. Now Lerner is a really, really liberal Jew. He group-hugged with Hillary Clinton on the “politics of meaning.” On the Arab-Israeli dispute, Lerner is a peacenik’s peacenik. He’s been vociferously in favor of leaving Saddam in power rather than using military force for months now. But because he publicly complained about some of the extremist elements behind the “anti-war” movement, he’s been blackballed. David Corn has all the details. But one deeper reason for Lerner’s banishment from “progressive” company may be that the liberal rabbi, although a hyper-dove, actually favors the existence of the state of Israel. Imagine! ANSWER, one of three groups organizing the demos, does not. As David Corn notes, the media director for ANSWER said on a January 28 radio show in New York that “I know that the ANSWER coalition would not have a pro-Israel speaker on its platform.” As Corn also shows, ANSWER has given speaking slots in the past to some of the most militant anti-Semites around, including some who believe that Israel was behind 9/11. There’s now a petition to support Lerner’s ability to speak, signed by some of the saner lefties in then “anti-war” brigade. Worth signing. But not if it means papering over the intolerant, extremist and reactionary forces behind an unhealthy amount of the anti-war movement. Corn and other principled leftists are right to worry about this taint – on moral as well as simply tactical grounds. Here’s my medium-term prediction: the Afghanistan campaign dealt a terrible blow to the American far-left and far-right. A successful Iraq war could marginalize them for decades. Here’s hoping.

“If Saddam bows to the UN’s demands and co-operates promptly, what is the need for greater numbers of inspectors? If he maintains his refusal to cooperate, how will higher numbers help? Lethal viruses can be produced within an area the size of the average living room. In the absence of Iraqi cooperation, even a thousandfold increase in the UN monitoring, verification and inspection commission’s capabilities will not allow us to establish with any degree of confidence that Iraq has disarmed.” – Jack Straw, UK foreign secretary, yesterday. Exactly, which is why the Franco-German-Russian gambit is based on nothing but a desire to oppose the United States.

It’s obviously a multi-faceted phenomenon, but at some level I think its roots are pretty clear. The basis of it is resentment. The U.S. is what other nations wish they could be. It has a vibrant economy, a dynamic society and irrepressible popular culture; it absorbs more immigrants than any other society; and dominates global ideas and cultural images in ways that have simply never been experienced before. When you add to this overwhelming military superiority, you can see why many people around the world chafe in envy and resentment – especially when there’s no rival superpower to frighten the allies back into American arms. It’s human nature. Human interaction won’t prevent that. Here’s an extract from the Washington Post yesterday:

The irony, says Alain Frachon, a senior editorial writer for Le Monde newspaper, is that in many ways the French and Americans have never been closer. Trade and travel between the two countries are at an all-time peak. “More Frenchmen speak English, travel to the U.S. for vacation or to do business,” he says. “The practical understanding of what the United States is has never been greater.”

But that is surely the point. Europeans know how American society is equalling or besting theirs’ in almost every field, from technology to medicine through literature and the arts. They know that demographically, America is still booming, while they are in decline. Yes, they can reassure themselves that economic inequality is lesser in Europe, but only because the market has been restrained from rewarding talent, the same restraints that guarantee lower levels of economic growth for the Europeans. Moreover, the days when Germany or France actually mattered as great powers are long over, and the United States’ intention to engage more aggressively in the world since 9/11 merely rubs this in.

AGAINST THEIR OWN INTERESTS: Perhaps we’re reaching a point where, whatever the actual interests of Europeans are, they cannot psychologically acquiesce to them. From any rational point of view, the end of the Saddam regime in Baghdad cannot be a huge blow to European interests. In fact, it’s pretty much a no-brainer, a necessary international police action to remove an obvious potential threat from terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. Saddam is the easy case, not the hard one. So why the intensity of the opposition – even to the point of wrecking NATO and splitting Europe in two? Resentment, I posit. Resentment. And that resentment – which is not manufactured by European leaders, merely tolerated by them – is bound to have a deep effect on the future of international relations. This current crisis is just the beginning of a realignment that could be profound. The first casualty? My candidate is the European Union. Old Europe cannot live with its growing impotence. They will not rearm out of Euro-pacifism, which would be one way to express their desire to restrain the U.S. So they wil stew and stew, engaging in the kind of pure obstructionism we’re seeing today. But Britain, Italy, Spain and Eastern Europe may not be so resentful. American foreign policy in the next few years should be concentrating on this split, and doing what it can to deepen it.

More evidence of what Vladimir Putin said was more cooperation from Saddam in the matter of disarmament:

One scientist who met with the inspectors this week was so frightened, it took an hour for him to stop shaking, according to U.N. sources. “Iraqi scientists and researchers are under a lot of pressure and influence by the Iraqi authorities,” the Iraqi defector told ABCNEWS. “They were scared and threatened in different ways, including threatening to go after their families if they leave Iraq to meet with inspectors and going after their relatives if their families go with them and going after them even if they were in exile. “For these reasons, the scientist or researcher becomes scared to tell the secrets, even though he knows it’s a way to lift the difficult, miserable conditions the Iraqi people are living under.”

There will be no disarmament so long as the thug from Tikrit is in power in Baghdad. After twelve years, there can be zero doubt about that.

“We really haven’t made up our minds,” confesses Arthur Sulzberger Jr, about the New York Times’ editorial position on a war against Iraq. Then he goes out on a limb: “What we have made up our minds about is unilateralism vs. multilateralism. We are fully for multilateralism.” I assume by this, he means the implementation of U.N. resolutions. So he is for war, no? The coalition is multilateral – the U.S. and two dozen other nations, backed by an unequivocal U.N. resolution. Or does he mean universalism – the notion that military action cannot happen without unanimous world support? Who knows? My bet is that the Times will only take a position when events have made such a position unavoidable. Profiles in courage, and all that. If the president were a Democrat, however, I have few doubts they would have come to some kind of decision by now.

MORE LATER: Maybe it was the Norwalk virus. I’ll spare you the details, but I should be more functional by tomorrow morning.

“We really haven’t made up our minds,” confesses Arthur Sulzberger Jr, about the New York Times’ editorial position on a war against Iraq. Then he goes out on a limb: “What we have made up our minds about is unilateralism vs. multilateralism. We are fully for multilateralism.” I assume by this, he means the implementation of U.N. resolutions. So he is for war, no? The coalition is multilateral – the U.S. and two dozen other nations, backed by an unequivocal U.N. resolution. Or does he mean universalism – the notion that military action cannot happen without unanimous world support? Who knows? My bet is that the Times will only take a position when events have made such a position unavoidable. Profiles in courage, and all that. If the president were a Democrat, however, I have few doubts they would have come to some kind of decision by now.

MORE LATER: Maybe it was the Norwalk virus. I’ll spare you the details, but I should be more functional by tomorrow morning.