Month: April 2006

"He tends to come from behind," – RNC chair, Ed Gillespie, on Senator Rick Santorum. As Malcontent comments, doesn’t Santorum think that should be illegal?

It’s a quite wonderful experience. Like speaking in a very large and empty desert; or giving a book-reading to a couple of stray passers-by. Bruce Bartlett reminisces on his month of complete obscurity in an email:

"I just completed a month as a ‘guest columnist’ for the New York Times. In reality, this meant that I wrote a blog for a month. Someone new will take over for me next week. It was an interesting experience for several reasons: No one knows that the Times has a blog because it is only available for TimesSelect subscribers.  Moreover, very few people even at the Times know that this feature exists. Just today I spoke with a New York Times reporter who knew nothing about it.

The Times clearly has no feel for the nature of blogging. Everything I wrote was, in effect, an op-ed article that went through the same editorial process as something that would appear in the print edition. All comments are also edited.  Thus the immediacy and back-and-forth between bloggers and commentators is largely lost. And because of the subscription wall problem, it was impossible for outside bloggers to link to what I wrote. A couple simply reprinted almost all of a couple of my posts so that people could see what I was saying.

Not surprisingly, almost all the comments came from the left. The experience reinforced my observation that hardly any conservatives ever read the Times.  Why newspaper with national circulation would seemingly cut itself off from at least 40 percent of the population has long been a mystery to me as a simple business matter. It is also a mystery to me why the Times chose a business model that is the opposite of the Wall Street Journal‚Äôs, when the Journal is the only paper to make money from its Internet edition. The Journal charges for its news and gives away its opinion. The Times still gives away its news and charges only for its opinion."

Christine Gorman, fellow-vassal of my corporate overlords, investigates a flurry of new data. More analysis here.

My second Just-For-You-Mickey item of the day. It always seemed to me that Brokeback Mountain’s commercial success or failure should take into account DVD sales. There are a large number of people in this country who are what I’d call "closet-tolerants". They don’t want to make a big splash about being fine with gay people, they don’t want to upset socially conservative or Christianist friends, or they don’t want to appear gay by going to a gay movie in public. So they may not show up in a movie’s box office take until the DVD comes out. And sure enough:

"The film, which earned three Oscars, sold a hefty 1.4 million DVD copies its first day in all retail stores on Monday, according to Universal Studios Home Entertainment, part of the media division of General Electric Co."

It’s been Number One on Amazon for a while now, as well. "Narnia" is at Number 9. A reader comments:

"My local Wal-mart has had a large Brokeback Mountain ‘sandwich board’ sign right at the front door for a couple of weeks now advertising the DVD release. This is in a "conservative" central Pennsyvania suburban store."

Some Christianists tried to prevent Wal-Mart from promoting the DVD. But who’s going to argue with 1.4 million in one day?

Every now and again, a blogger outdoes himself. Go read Mickey Kaus’s multiple successive posts on the immigration Senate debate. There is not a debater’s nook that doesn’t also have a cranny that turns out to have a nook. I’m not saying the tangled knots of logic and free association, of questioning and double-questioning, are bad things. Au contraire. I think Mickey helped pioneer blogging as a genre precisely by showing readers how the pundit-sausage is made. Or, in more elevated terms, how a person thinks out loud. I just wish he wouldn’t give others such a hard time for following his example.

There’s a dog walking around on two legs.

Here’s a rough start.

Torture = "Coercive Interrogation Technique"
Insurgency = "Dead-enders"
Law = "Signing Statement"
$43 trillion in Unfunded Government Liabilities = "Fiscal Responsibility"
Leaking = "Declassifying Intelligence"
Christianity = "Republicanism"

Any other suggestions?

The reason Super Adventure Club members Scientologists believe that a woman in labor should "be silent and make all physical movements slow and understandable" has now been explained. According to Scientologist, Anne Archer, "shouting things like ‘push, push’; can sometimes have an adverse effect later in life." On the baby. Just passing along public information. Meanwhile, Viacom still hasn’t put South Park’s "Trapped in the Closet" Scientology episode back into rotation. And Comedy Central still won’t let Matt and Trey include an image of Muhammed on South Park, despite the fact that they have done it before. In the battle between religion and free speech, Viacom is against free speech.

Thanks for your emails. Here’s some more information relevant to the discussion. Here is the executive order in March 2003 specifying who gets to declassify classified information. Money quote:

"The authority to classify information originally may be exercised only by:
(1) the President and, in the performance of executive duties, the Vice President;
(2) agency heads and officials designated by the President in the Federal Register; and
(3) United States Government officials delegated this authority pursuant to paragraph (c) of this section [which, again, is a section of an order by the President]"

The president seems to have the power to do what he did. But I stand corrected on one point. The NIE was never fully declassified. Bits of it dribbled out over the last couple of years, including the information that questioned the aluminum tube issue. But Bush wasn’t the driving force behind that; and his gambit was to selectively declassify certain bits of intelligence and selectively keep other contrary evidence from the public. As Steve Clemons notes, we don’t have the full NIE formally declassified sitting over at the National Security Archives at GWU. In fact, GW’s own website tell us the contrary, claiming in July 2004 that

"The CIA has decided to keep almost entirely secret the controversial October 2002 CIA intelligence estimate about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction that is the subject of today’s Senate Intelligence Committee report, according to the CIA’s June 1, 2004 response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the National Security Archive."

The bottom line is that the president clearly used his prerogative to classify and declassify intelligence data to leak selectively to the press to give a misleading notion of what his own government believed about Saddam’s WMDs before the war. He was personally involved; and he tasked his veep to coordinate it. The most plausible explanation is that the president believes grave national security prerogatives can be used for political purposes and/or that he had something embarrassing to hide. Bottom bottom line: we can’t trust him to be fully honest with us on one of the bases on which he led us to war. That matters, doesn’t it?

"The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;"

– Philip Larkin, "The Trees."
The full poem can be read here.