The Dish

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?

I can’t be the only person mildly perturbed by the glee with which two Slate writers have lampooned Dick Cheney for having heart problems. Tim Noah yucked it up within hours of Cheney’s return to hospital, throwing in a few, tired, Bush-is-a-bonehead remarks that doubtless had some of his readers rolling in the aisles. “It goes without saying that George W. Bush isn’t up to the job,” Noah blithely remarked, pronouncing Cheney all but dead before he’d even had his operation. Then comes the usually impeccable David Plotz with a comic tale depending on the notion that a) Cheney is all but dead; and b) that Bush would happily milk this for personal gain. The humor-fantasy piece quotes from future press releases: “Time, July 23, 2001: It was an extraordinary scene: The vice president, just two days out of open-heart surgery, was wheeled on a gurney to the Senate floor to beg confirmation for the president’s controversial supreme court nominee, Judge Kenneth Starr. Cheney, who couldn’t speak, scrawled on a pad that “I will lose my will to live if you don’t vote for Starr.” Three Democrats, calling it their “patriotic duty,” immediately announced that they would cast votes for Starr, ensuring his confirmation … The New York Times, Dec. 16, 2001: President Bush today threatened “to unplug Dick from the respirator” if House Democrats don’t go along with his plan to privatize Social Security and Medicare …” I’m sorry but this isn’t funny. A perfectly decent man is having health problems. Leave him alone.

BEAT THIS SENTENCE: “Geminates never lenite, unless they concomitantly degeminate.” – Segmental
Phonology in Optimal Theory, edited by Linda Lombardi (forthcoming).

Two “beat this sentence” sentences, forwarded by some readers with too much time on their hands:

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.” – Judith Butler, “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” Diacritics (1997).

“Total presence breaks on the univocal predication of the exterior absolute the absolute existent (of that of which it is not possible to univocally predicate an outside, while the equivocal predication of the outside of the absolute exterior is possible of that of which the reality so predicated is not the reality, viz., of the dark/of the self, the identity of which is not outside the absolute identity of the outside, which is to say that the equivocal predication of identity is possible of the self-identity which is not identity, while identity is univocally predicated of the limit to the darkness, of the limit of the reality of the self).” – D.G. Leahy, “Foundation: Matter the Body Itself.”

It’s actually possible to come up with this stuff yourself. A couple of bright sparks have set up a random post-modern sentence generator on the web. If you’re dong “queer theory” in some goddawful graduate school and need to pull an all-nighter, this is the solution you’ve been waiting for. An instant, computer-generated meaningless, i.e. pomo, essay at your finger tips. <a HREF = "http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern” TARGET = NEW>Enjoy.

“As it happens, the level on which Bush is not intellectually impressive is the only one that most journalists respect: verbal intelligence, the ability to understand and manipulate logic and language. This is precisely the sort of intelligence Bush does not possess, and so, many journalists stupidly thought of Bush as, well, stupid. I include myself in this and hereby renounce and regret my repeated past use, in connection with Bush, of the word “pinhead.” … [His are] politics played on a high and nuanced plane of intelligence, the sort of level that signifies a natural ability — natural political smarts. George W. Bush: smart guy. Who knew?” – Mike Kelly, by no means a Bush-whacker, but coming to see W’s smarts, in today’s Washington Post.

NOW THEY TELL US II: “The question is not one of Bush’s legitimacy. The new President – so the highest authorities assure us – holds office by virtue of a process that was legal and constitutional.” – Rick Hertzberg, the current New Yorker. By “highest authorities,” I assume Rick is referring to the Palm Beach Post. Anyway, it’s good to see two former New Republic editors, of very different ilk, come round to W. A little, anyway. Now all we need is Kinsley. Oh well.

A chilling memo from the epicenter of the new economy. It was first posted on Jim Romenesko’s invaluable website. It’s a memo sent from San Jose Mercury News publisher, Jay Harris. Can we say NASDAQ 1000?

Sent: Monday, March 05, 2001 1:00 PM
To: ALL
Subject: Update on the Budget Situation
TO: All Mercury News Employees

“This is a letter I have worked very hard not to have
to write to you. It is a letter that brings news you
will not be pleased to receive. But the information
that follows reflects reality and, as always, I want
to make sure you know what’s ahead.
“As you all know from reading the paper and my
recent e-mails to employees, the national economy
generally – and local high tech companies in
particular – are in decline. This continuing decline
has had a significant impact on our business.
“Most problematic is the reduction we’ve seen in
recruitment advertising. With fewer and fewer Valley
companies hiring, and more and more announcing
hiring freezes or layoffs, we are experiencing a sharp
drop in recruitment advertising.
“To understand the speed and size of the decline,
consider this:

“In January, our recruitment revenue fell $103,000
short of the same month last year. In February,
recruitment revenue fell about $2.5 million below the
same month last year.”
Yikes.

“The last time Marc Rich called off a party was in Spain, about five or six years ago. His Mossad-trained bodyguards were tipped off that his private jet would be forced down the moment it left Swiss airspace by Yankee F-16s, so he stayed put. No reason was offered back then. Although the US government was out to grab him, Rich had the proverbial ace up his sleeve. By giving lotsa moolah to Israel, he was being fed information by Mossad that even the top brass of the Pentagon weren’t getting. Mossad knew that the snatch was on by listening in on the Americans. They tipped off the fugitive fraudster, a move that eventually made Bill Clinton rich, pun intended… Marc Rich, however, has done us a favour… By bribing everyone and sundry, … [he] proved what we, soi-disant anti-Semites for daring to protest about soldiers shooting at kids, always knew. The way to Uncle Sam’s heart runs through Tel Aviv and Israeli-occupied territory.” – Taki, The Spectator [of London].

You might also be interested in Conrad Black’s response to Taki in the following issue. <a HREF = "http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old&amp;section=current&amp;issue=2001-03-03&amp;id=488″ TARGET = NEW>Here it is.