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Friday, July 12, 2002
Site maintenance Finally updated the American Prospect archive (click on the cartoon archive button to your left, then click on, you guessed it, American Prospect). I'm taking over more of the site maintenance duties myself, so I'm also hoping to bring you more frequent updates and more Grab Bag oddities as a result. Not to mention more pictures of my dog. Because it's my website, and I can. Have a good weekend. No--have a great weekend. Update: a lot of new stuff in the Grab Bag section: some new photos in the Photo Gallery, of an extraordinarily surreal place in New Orleans called Mardi Gras World, and a big steaming pile of pop cultural detritus in the new Cabinet of Wonders. Enjoy. -------------------- Thursday, July 11, 2002
Items of note from our friends at The American Prospect Several items worth noting on the Prospect's blog, Tapped: --This piece, published by Mother Jones in 1994, detailing some of the financial malfeasance of the Bush family. (Remember Neil? You don't hear much about him these days.) --This column by Matt Miller, summarizing a Harper's article by Joe Conason from February 2000: The "investigation" of Bush's fortuitous dumping of Harken Energy stock in 1990 was conducted by an SEC headed by a pal of Bush's father that dad appointed to his job. The SEC's general counsel then was the Texas attorney who had handled the sale of the Texas Rangers for George W. Bush and his partners in 1989. In the third world, given such circumstances, we'd say the fix was in. Anyone for an independent look this time? When the Texas Rangers were sold in 1998, while Bush was governor, his partners, Conason reports, "fattened his payout six times over by awarding him additional shares in the team at the time of the sale that brought his 1.8 percent share up to 12 percent." This boosted Bush's return on a borrowed $600,000 investment from about $2.5 million to $15 million. Anyone think it's time to better understand what that was all about? If Democrats who'd made fortunes from Bush-like patterns of crony capitalism were in the White House during a crisis of corporate integrity, does anyone doubt that Richard Scaife would have scrambled the jets months ago and bankrolled mountains of American Spectator exposes? --And this paragraph, which I'm lifting from Tapped verbatim: As long as we're making fun of Bush's speech on "corporate responsibility" -- and the Republican assertion that corporate corruption is individual and personal, rather than systemic -- let's not forget that just a few months ago this was the very same tack chosen by Joe Lieberman. Like Bush, Lieberman wanted to make this debate about personal ethics, not the influence of big business on politics. (He also wanted Bush to appoint a commission of "respected former CEOs and investor advocates" to think up new accounting and oversight regulations" -- the same Bush who appointed accounting industry lobbyist Harvey Pitt to head the Securities and Exchange Commission and Ken Lay pal Pat Wood to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Oops!) Check out Lieberman's NYU speech here. Check out Nick Confessore's article on Lieberman here.
That Orwell quote You know the one: "Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist." Coulter used it in that column of hers I mentioned a few days ago, Michael Kelly made a big deal of it awhile back, and sex columnist Dan Savage brings it up again in a Fourth of July call to arms in The Stranger (which seems to be point-counterpointed in the same issue by this writer). (Savage echoes the usual argument for war with Iraq, essentially: September 11 was a terrible day, and Saddam Hussein is a terrible man, therefore we must go to war with Saddam. It reminds me of the old joke about the drunk who lost his wallet in the dark alley but chooses to look for it under the streetlamp because there's more light there. Before we commit a quarter million American troops and a substantial portion of our national resources, I just think maybe we need to think about this one--well, a lot more than we're probably going to. But I digress.) It's true that Orwell wrote the line above, in 1942. What writers who flourish it so triumphantly fail to mention is that he specifically disowned the same quote in 1944, as Gene Lyons notes in this column (for which I am indebted to reader Chris Borthwick). In December 1944, (Orwell) used his regular "As I Please" column in the Tribune to specifically repudiate the term "objectively," and apologized by name to individuals whose views he'd caricatured and whose loyalty to England he'd unfairly questioned. Blaming "the lunatic atmosphere of war," he explained that the habit of accusing political dissenters of "conscious treachery....is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes harder to forsee their actions." The example Orwell gave was a pacifist asked to be an enemy spy. An honorable pacifist, he argued, would never betray his country. "The important thing is to discover WHICH individuals are honest and which are not," he wrote "and the usual blanket accusation merely makes this more difficult. The atmosphere of hatred in which [political] controversy is conducted blinds people to considerations of this kind. To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable. It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is a fool or a scoundrel." ...The real message of Orwell's work, as well as of his heroic personal example, is that intellectual integrity is more far crucial to an embattled democracy than orthodoxy. Without vigorous dissent, there's no creative thinking. Honest people can change their minds; demagogic bullies, alas, almost never do.
In your backyard Got this one from August. You plug in your address and it tells you how much nuclear waste will be passing through your neighborhood on the way to Yucca Mountain. I live 10.6 miles from the nearest nuclear waste route, and 41.3 miles from the nearest nuclear waste source (Indian Point). And there are additional fun facts: o Number of people in New York that live within 1 mile of a nuclear transportation route - 995,305
-------------------- Tuesday, July 09, 2002
Okay... ...new cartoon is up at Salon. I'm predictably behind in everything after taking a few days off. It's the freelancer's curse--nobody covers the work for you while you're away, so you never really get time off, you just shift the workload around to carve out some free time occasionally. So the blog forecast calls for light-to-medium posting for the next day or two; plan your social activities accordingly. -------------------- Monday, July 08, 2002
I have no idea... ...why there's no cartoon up on Salon this morning. I sent it to them before I left for vacation, but maybe they didn't receive it, or maybe they lost it, I don't know. At any rate, please direct your questions toward them, not me. In the meantime, here's a defense of all that is decent and good that you might enjoy. Usual conservative blogosphere "but our enemies are evil!" sort of thing, but least this guy shows some creativity... -------------------- Sunday, July 07, 2002
Back to work, reluctantly So I get back from a wonderful, relaxing fourth of July road trip to visit friends in Charlottesville, with a stopover at Gettysburg to watch the Civil War re-enactors do their thing, and find that I've been labeled unAmerican by conservative inside-the-Beltway elitist Ann Coulter. Mostly I'm just noting this so you'll know I've seen it--no need to send the link. The cartoon Ms. Coulter references was meant to mock the idea that "some Americans are more American than others"; I assume that the irony of her use of it to support her contention that some Americans are more American than others is not lost on readers of this space. But--I can't resist pointing out that Ann Coulter grew up in the wealthy, elite community of New Canaan, Connecticut (average household income: $243,000). By contrast, I grew up in Iowa, Georgia, and Arkansas, in financial conditions which ranged over the years from lower middle class to outright poverty. This is where I'm from, this is where my family still lives. (Hey Ann--any of your siblings ever live in a double wide? ) As an adult, I've taken more meandering road trips up and down and across this country and back again than I can even remember. (Hey Ann--you ever travel cross-country on a Greyhound bus?) In short: gosh, I get tired of these conservative elitists lecturing me about "real" Americans. Hence the cartoon. Ms. Coulter argues that the point of my cartoon "was simply to convey all the proper prejudices of elitist liberals against ordinary Americans." Actually it was exactly the opposite. The vast majority of people who read my cartoon live in places like Dayton and Austin and Athens and Des Moines and Missoula and Milwaukee and Buffalo and Savannah and Springfield, and while they may not believe that twenty-first century Americans are God's chosen people, and while they may find cause to disagree with Republican policies and priorities, I think they'd be very surprised to learn that they are anything but ordinary Americans. The point is, Americans are a hugely diverse people, with a far greater range of opinions and beliefs and ideas than conservative elitists like Ann Coulter give us credit for--which she might find out, if she ever got out of the self-contained wingnut lecture-and-conference bubble and actually talked to some of the rest of us. --------------------
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