Category: Old Dish

Trust me. This is sticking. Now the Los Angeles Times has done a thorough story. My favorite quotes from it? Robert Woodsen, black activist: “[Jackson] uses the black community to threaten corporations, but then who benefits? It’s not the black community. It’s a handful of black businessmen around Jesse Jackson. And what it’s really doing is diluting the rich legacy of the civil rights movement. That legacy is now for sale.” T.J. Rodgers, president and CEO of Cypress Semiconductors: “It’s a shakedown. The basic shakedown mechanism is, he declares racism based on dubious statistics. Then he gives you a chance to repent – and the basic way is to give Jesse money. The threat is you’ll be labeled a racist if you don’t. That scares business leaders.” Maybe now it’s Jackson who’s a little scared.

DUDE, WHERE’S MY DRUG POLICY?: Fascinating story in today’s New York Times on new research into the possible medical uses of LSD, peyote, and even Ketamine, the party drug known as “Special K.” Some anecdotal evidence suggests that moderate use of these drugs might be helpful in curing addictions, personality disorders, depression, and schizophrenia. More evidence of the collapsing barrier we have put between so-called ‘recreational’ drugs and ‘medicinal’ pharmaceuticals – see my TRB posted in the Politics Section of the Greatest Hits. Too bad Joseph Califano hasn’t noticed.

No less an authority than E.J. Dionne has now conceded that George W. Bush is not a moron. No word yet on what George W. Bush thinks of E.J. Dionne.

JUST SAY NO: Just when you thought the drug war couldn’t get any worse, along comes Joseph Califano in today’s Washington Post homing in on “addiction” as the problem – including addiction to alcohol and nicotine. Our drug policy should not be scaled back, Califano urges, but expanded to hammer even further the alcohol and tobacco companies, force miscreants into government re-education camps to stop using drugs, make drunkenness punishable by law, and on and on. “Prevention, education and media campaigns should target alcohol and tobacco as aggressively as illegal drugs,” Califano avers. “Congressional restrictions that confine the White House drug policy director to illegal drugs should be lifted.” Next up will be class action lawsuits against liquor companies. Help! They’ve taken away our joints and our pills. Now they want our beer and our cigarettes. Califano won’t be happy till we’re all sitting upright in school like miniature Johnny Ashcrofts, indoctrinated against pleasure by our government – and all for our own good. The piece has the usual canards, including the typical hooey about this being “about our kids.” Remember: the drug warriors are just using kids for practice. What they really want is your Makers Mark. I guess we should be grateful to Califano for admitting it.

WAIT, THERE’S MORE: In the item below (“AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND, ER, SNEAKERS”), I wrote about the riot-looting-demo in favor of racial discrimination in college applications. The demo was full of high school kids, who were actually bussed there and organized by their San Francisco public high schools! Can you imagine public high school teachers bussing their kids to a rally against race preferences? Check this out in last Friday’s San Francisco Chronicle. Apparently some San Francisco teachers decided against the demo because it would be hard to keep tabs on the kids, and other procedural worries. No-one seems to have batted an eye-lid at the use of public high schools for left-wing propaganda – against a ballot inititiative that passed by a hefty margin. The kids who had to stay home were treated to “teach-ins” on the merits of racial preferences. Not as fun as looting sneaker stores, I bet. Maybe this will all backfire, and San Fran is quietly rearing a generation of future libertarians. We can only hope. Small thought: maybe as a compromise Janet Reno should have sent Elian Gonzalez to school in San Francisco rather than back to Cuba. He would hardly have noticed a difference.

Why the former could defuse the latter. For why, check out “Pied Beauty” opposite. Oh, and thanks for all your donations. Bit by bit, they’re adding up: $5,167 as of today. THANKS.

Priceless story I somehow missed last Thursday about a rally at Berkeley in defense of racial preferences in higher education. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “about 2,000 young people, many of them high school students, converged on Berkeley for a noontime rally in support of a return to affirmative action programs. After some of the speeches began at the gate to the UC Berkeley campus, a group of students ran into and started looting an Athlete’s Foot shoe store on Telegraph.” It seems the students want affirmative action, women’s rights, aid for East Timor, and a pair of those really cool new sneakers. Reminds me of the equally priceless Onion headline in their compilation of spoof newspaper covers, “Our Dumb Century.” For the L.A. riots in 1992, the Onion’s headline was: “L.A. RIOTERS DEMAND JUSTICE, TAPE DECKS.” The text, in part, read: “Calling for an end to racial prejudice and oppression, an estimated 15,000 people marched on Al’s Electronics Emporium on the corner of Slauson Avenue and Avalon Boulevard at noon Wednesday. The historic march climaxed in a stirring “I Have A TV” speech by Compton resident Melvin Haskins, who told the crowd that he envisions the day when “white men and black men, Jews and gentiles have 27 inch RCA ProScan televisions with Dolby sound.” Oh and a pair of Nikes to make a mother proud.

There are lots of ways to write about the high-school murderer, Charles “Andy” Williams, but did Time.com have to make him their “Person Of The Week?”

TAKING THE PITH: Laughed out loud over my pancakes this morning over the following new anecdote to be included in the updated Bartlett’s Book of Anecdotes. The New York Times got permission to reprint a few choice ones. Check them out if you’re dealing with Monday issues. Here’s my fave: “Andrew Lloyd Weber was searching for someone to write the lyrics for his latest production, and paid a visit to Alan Jay Lerner, who had written the lyrics for “My Fair Lady.” Lloyd Weber expressed disappointment that he had not been able to find a steady collaborator. “I don’t know why,” he said, “but some people dislike me as soon as they meet me.” Lerner replied, “Perhaps it saves time.”” Now I think I understand Michael Wolff.

JACKSON WATCH I: Fascinating piece in today’s Chicago Sun-Times by Mary Mitchell in response to her expose of Jackson’s shakedown operation, aka Operation-PUSH. Of 150 emails Mitchell received, only six backed Jackson. Many, many African-Americans seems to have had enough. “He has become the very thing he despises: taking and not giving. Operation PUSH should have been investigated a long time ago. I am an Afro-American, and I am ashamed at what I see,” wrote one emailer. “Yes, some of us (black folks) don’t like it when the cover is taken off,” wrote another. “Well, I say if you cannot run with the big dogs, stay on the porch. Rev. Jackson brought this on himself.” Or this one: “I have been called a house nigger and sellout because I am an achiever who cares less about my skin color and more about my ability to succeed. I have been aware of Jackson’s double dealing and race baiting for years, and I’m glad the Teflon is starting to wear off.” I’ve had a few emails accusing me of being a racist for going after Jackson, as if I haven’t criticized white pols as well. In fact, I think it’s a form of insidious racism not to criticize this kind of betrayal of the civil rights movement. Too many white liberals look the other way out of misplaced, if well-meaning, condescension. Good for the Chicago media for keeping the heat on. But don’t hold your breath for the New York Times.

JACKSON WATCH II: Weird moment, my sources tell me, on This Week with Cokie and Sam this morning. For some reason, Cokie Roberts asked attorney-general John Ashcroft if the Justice Department is mounting some kind of criminal investigation into Jesse Jackson’s race racket. Ashcroft didn’t confirm or deny. Hmmmm. I wish I could give you a link to the transcript, but none is posted yet on the next-to-useless “This Week” website. Watch this space.

POT, KETTLE DEPT: Interviewed on the religious webite, Beliefnet, Jerry Falwell opined that Muslim groups should be barred from President Bush’s faith-based charity initiative. Why? “I think the Moslem faith teaches hate,” Falwell said. “I think there’s clear evidence that the Islam religion, wherever it has majority control – and I can name a dozen countries – doesn’t even allow people of other faiths to express themselves or evangelize or to exist in their presence…. I think that when persons are clearly bigoted towards other persons in the human family, they should be disqualified from funds. For that reason, Islam should be out the door before they knock.” That’s quite a statement, but not nearly as fascinating as Falwell’s subsequent spin. “I am not anti-Moslem,” he sputtered. “I know and work with many American and foreign Moslems who love all peoples. In my interview with Beliefnet.org, I was simply saying that the Bush administration should bar all bigots and racists from participating in their faith-based program.” Put those two quotes together and Falwell is lying somewhere. He’s also completely incoherent on the general principle. In general, he’s in favor of the program, but he wants the government to pick and choose which religions are permitted on the question of whether they are “bigoted” or not. This is probably, ahem, not a path Falwell should go down. One man’s bigotry is another man’s Book of Revelation. Are homosexuals part of the “human family”? If so, why does Falwell support public funds for the Boy Scouts? The paradox of the faith-based programs is that, in today’s multicultural America, the Feds will have to be completely neutral about the actual religion they are funding. Sorry, Jerry, but that means your favorite president is actually set on accelerating government’s role in undermining any talk of a Christian nation. And all to appease the Christian right. Go figure.

Helpful piece in today’s Washington Post about the Clinton scandals. In the final, desperate spin effort, conducted by the likes of Robert Scheer, Clintonistas argued that in fact, the former president was merely in line with a long tradition of sleaze in Pardonscam. The Post, hardly a signed-up member of the VRWC, points out calmly that while there have been shady pardons in the past, Clinton’s yard sale of the criminal justice system was “unique in terms of scope, lobbying, lack of scrutiny.” If you have some poor, deluded friend who still has something defensive to say about Clinton’s pardons, direct him quietly to this URL. Meanwhile, the ever-amusing Jonah Goldberg digs up a Jacksonism I hadn’t heard before. When George Pataki proposed an increase in school spending of only $154 million in 1999, this is what Jackson said in front of the state senate: “Pataki is trying what Wallace tried, what Faubus tried, what Wilson tried? We see Pataki in that tradition. And, whether you’re blocking school doors in Alabama and Arkansas or simply locking kids out of closed school doors in New York is not the wave of the American future.” Classic. I don’t know whether to laugh or bang my head against a wall. Meanwhile growing pressure on Jackson – finally! – from the media. Check out yesterday’s Chicago Tribune. The man’s going down! Yeah, right.

Fascinating nugget in the latest docu-dump from the U.S. Census Bureau. Around 8 percent of blacks under the age of 18 cited themselves as multi-racial, compared to 2 percent of blacks over 50. Could be a function of the end of miscegenation laws in the 1960s; or more evidence that Robert Byrd was onto something; or, better still, a shift away from rigid racial identities in the younger generation. Here’s hoping it’s the latter.

WHY I’M NOT THE HARVARD CRIMSON: Digging out from under the blizzard of angry emails after my piece in defense of the estate tax, I can’t help but be amused by the Harvard Crimson’s defense of its decision not to run David Horowitz’s ad on slavery reparations. “The ad was written in a style that seemed as though it sought solely to aggravate our readers, and we didn’t feel comfortable running it unedited,” said Crimson President C. Matthew MacInnis ’02. Rest assured that every now and again, I will write something designed specifically to aggravate my readers. And everything you read here is always unedited. Unless you count my own, amateur page-proofing.

OUTSIDE.COM: Couldn’t help but notice that after zillions of dollars’ worth of hype, marketing, ad copy, editorial stars and on and on, Inside.com, according to today’s New York Times, only gets about five times as many readers as this site. Hmmm. I’m not criticizing Inside.com as journalism. It just strikes me that the lesson of the past few years on the web is that smaller, quirkier and freer is better.

FINALLY: My own magazine wakes up and smells the coffee on the current consequences of Clinton. Check out the splendid editorial calling for the Dems to dump McAuliffe. It finishes with these wise words: “If Democratic bigwigs force McAuliffe out, it will spawn a week of stories about the party’s disarray–and then give the Democrats a real shot at a post-Clinton identity. If they don’t, the whiff of scandal will follow the party for the next four years, handing the Bush administration a patina of moral superiority that it doesn’t deserve and a political advantage the country can ill afford.”

If you listen to some activists, the answer to the world’s AIDS crisis is simple. Just break international patent laws, rip off the drug companies, shower the Third World with protease inhibitors and all will be well. I wish it were that simple. The decision by major drug companies to sell their drugs to developing countries for no profit seems to me to be a sensible compromise between addressing a world health crisis and not killing off the financial incentives to find AIDS treatments in the first place. As long as the cheaper drugs cannot be reimported, Merck’s proposal sounds promising. If we want to make the drugs even cheaper, then there’s nothing stopping governments from subsidizing them. But then we have the real problem: how do you ensure effective administration of the meds? As anyone close to this epidemic knows, taking your HIV meds half-heartedly is arguably worse than taking nothing at all. HIV mutates swiftly around weak medicines and becomes resistant to them. Currently, the regimen is grueling. I take well over 30 pills a day, for example, and if I miss one dose by more than a couple of hours, I risk becoming immune. I’m not alone in feeling sick and tired after I take my pills – an inbuilt incentive to avoid taking them. My time spent volunteering in the local AIDS clinic here was enough for me to worry about how effective such treatments were for poor, underclass women, who had to juggle extraordinary pressures as well as a complex, nauseating drug routine. Now multiply that a dozen times for impoverished Botswanan farm-workers and you see the extent of the problem. That’s why today’s Washington Post op-ed by Barry Bloom is important. Better to save fewer people in monitored, TB-style enclosures and prevent resurgent, resistant HIV, than to try to help too many too indiscriminately and make the situation all the worse. There are some platitudes in the piece, but the analysis is sound.

PASTEL POLITICS: Check out this electoral map. It’s a variation on the famous red-and-blue map, but adjusted so that each state is colored a different blue-red purple hue depending on the actual share of the vote each candidate received. It makes the point in color that I tried to make a while back in the New York Times. We’re not quite as divided as we think. And we’re all a fabulous shade of lavender!

Jesse Jackson has finally admitted that, yes, his Operation-PUSH/Citizen Education Fund organization did pay his former mistress, Karin Stanford, $35,000 in “traveling expenses” last year as well as a hefty salary of $120,000. Previous IRS filings for 1999 had somehow omitted both facts. The tax form section which asked whether Jackson’s Citizen Education Fund employed anyone at over $50,000 in annual salary had “NONE” written on it. That will now be, ahem, amended. Stanford, by the way, wasn’t the only employee kept off the list. Doesn’t all this scream: audit? Surely the IRS needs to do a thorough investigation of Jackson’s chaotic organization, and see whether these lies are simply the tip of the iceberg. By the way, in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Jackson described his lifestyle as modest. He earns some $430,000 a year. Good news that selfless activism for the downtrodden has become so lucrative in recent years.

AMAZON UPDATE: In one week, you have donated $3866. I’m a little stunned. THANKS SO MUCH. It will go directly to paying back some of the expenses of setting up this site and the server costs involved in keeping it up. Depending on whether we keep this rate of donation up, which I doubt, we will at least have found a partial solution to how to make content pay in the web. To actually pay me something will probably require advertising of some discreet sort. But at the rate you’re logging on, that shouldn’t be too hard. We’re on course for well over 125,000 unique visitors this month – a quadrupling in five months. If you haven’t donated anything yet, and would like to chip in, click on the “Tipping Point” button on the right and all will be clear. But once again: THANKS. This adventure is something I would gladly do for free – but if we can make this model work on its own, we’ll have done something to advance e-journalism a little. And since I’m not a leftie, I wouldn’t mind an occasional pay check either.

BEING TAXED TWICE: I’m no fan of taxes, especially those that tax income, but I make an exception for the estate tax. I’ll spell out my reasons in a piece posted tomorrow morning, or you can take a look at it on The New Republic’s website here, but one thing I didn’t mention in the piece is this notion of being taxed twice. Opponents of the estate tax argue that it’s unfair because the money has already been taxed as income. But this is silly. Almost everything has been taxed at least twice. You go out for a meal and you pay sales tax. The money you use to pay it has already been taxed as income. You buy a packet of cigarettes with your pay check money, which has already had both income tax and FICA tax withheld. Then you pay a punitive sales tax as well. Ditto gas. Or you send a relative abroad a gift. The money you buy it with has been taxed at least twice as income, then there’s a sales tax, then there’s a customs duty: triple tax! To single out the estate tax as some sort of especially noxious form of double taxation is simply silly. In fact, it’s less plausible than these other examples because, unlike all these other double and triple taxes – you don’t actually pay it. Why? Because you’re dead! The only people really indirectly paying the tax are your living beneficiaries and they pay it once and once only. So support the aboltion of the estate tax if you want. But don’t use this phony argument while you do so.

SWEETIE DARLING, CAN DADDY HAVE A PARDON?: Hilarious piece in the New York Observer on the uncanny resemblances between Edina and Patsy of Absolutely Fabulous fame and Denise and Ilona Rich of Absolutely Scandalous fame. Ilona’s a fashion designer, darling, and mother is thrilled to itsy bits. The difference between Denise and Edina is that Edina’s daughter had the good sense to find her mother’s stuck-in-the-70s schtick just a mite embarrassing. Not Ilona. You want to know why I don’t live in New York City? Read this piece, sweetie, and you’ll see.

As a big fan of Dick Cheney, I have to say it’s worrying that he has put in a ten-hour day just two days after having a stent replaced in an artery. I know the complication from the angioplasty is not a function of stress; and I know Cheney feels the need to establish himself as an active player in a city where any physical weakness is regarded as some sort of failure. But giving absolutely no ground to a serious health condition seems to me to be a kind of Washington machismo that should be beneath Cheney. No-one would complain if he took a week off. Invasive surgeries are shocks to the system; stress, while not directly related to his current ailment, is nevertheless a factor in weakening one’s physical well-being. One of the things I have learned from living with a serious illness is that it isn’t always the smartest tactic to give it no ground. A tree that bends in the wind endures. A tree that will not budge will snap. Washington, like many other power-centers, is already a deeply unhealthy place. People work far too long hours; they are forbidden by the outdated rules of political propriety to seek psychological counseling; they are not supposed to be sick; they are barely allowed to sleep more than five hours a night. A pager or cell phone is attached to them at all hours, even on weekends, to keep their brain connected to their job. Rest, exercise, recuperation, sleep: all these are seen as failures of the will. This is hooey. (Yeah, I know I’m writing this at 1am, but I’ll sleep till 10 in the morning.) I admire Cheney’s calm acceptance of the largely genetic ticker problems he has to deal with. But someone needs to tell him to cool it, that less is more. W seems incapable of it. Isn’t this what a spouse is for?