By The River

Sometime after leaving the White House in 1929, but before Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, Calvin Coolidge burned most of his Presidential Papers. In so doing, he denied Americans an irreplaceable record of what the President of the United States did and didn't do during the Roaring 20s, that go-go economic era. Given the time period of the destruction, Coolidge may have been knowingly trying to cover up his own administration's culpability for the Great Depression--Herbert Hoover was President only six months before it began, although his dithering inaction made the economic pain far worse.

What Coolidge did was a crime against history, but it didn't violate any laws of the time. The same can't be said for George W. Bush, who knows that federal law now requires the President to save all White House documents, whether in traditional paper form or e-mails. As we now know from the oversight hearings being conducted by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., a large percentage of White House e-mails during the Bush Administration appear to have been permanently lost, including many of those in the period before the start of the Iraq War. The number may be in the millions.

Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin tells the story best. Perhaps only journalists and historians know what this really means--that much of the stupid and foolish and, yes, criminal decisions of Bush during the last eight years will escape meaningful historical scrutiny. I strongly suspect that the number of conventional letters and memos being written by government officials has been on a steep downward curve since the late 1990s, when e-mail became ubiquitous.

Eliminating the paper trail, including e-mails, is the most effective way for government wrongdoing to be permanently hidden. Devastating books like Tim Weiner's stunning, "Legacy of Ashes," about the CIA's monumental incompetence and criminal behavior over the decades, would simply not be possible without documents. Imagine if Nixon had burned the White House tapes?

The question is whether the Bush Administration's war on e-mail retention is simply another Katrina-like FUBAR situation, or a cleverly designed, and quite criminal, attempt to evade federal document retention law. Given the lack of cooperation from the White House and the Republican National Committee in finding the missing e-mails, I think we know the answer.

It is time for Congress to appoint a special prosecutor to look into these crimes, and perhaps as well some sort of overseer to protect the paper documents (there are still a lot of them). Only a complete fool would believe there isn't a risk of massive shredding of files--much like Enron did in its last days--before Bush rides off into historical ignominy in 2009.

Posted by David at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When the histories are written of the movement conservative era of 1980-2008, the key figures will be Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush, and a number of other extreme right wingers and fundamentalist clergy types who collectively sought to destroy liberal democracy in the United States.

But Evan Mecham--remember him?--will, I predict, be seen as a harbinger of the sort of destructive buffoon we came to know so well during the last eight years of this benighted era. Mecham, who died of Alzheimer's Disease last Thursday at the age of 83, was Republican governor of Arizona for 15 painful months in 1986, 1987, and 1988 before being impeached and removed from office by the legislature for financial misdeeds.

He got things off to a rip-roaring start by trying to cancel the Martin Luther King Day state holiday instituted by his Democratic predecessor, Gov. Bruce Babbitt. Then he defended referring to black children as "pickaninnies," saying that in his bizarro world, they liked being called that. Mecham told Jews they needed to "accept" that America is "a Christian nation"--sound familiar?--and as things were falling apart, accused the Arizona attorney general of beaming microwaves into his office. He predicted the impeachment drive would fail because it was led by a gay man.

People still had the capability to be shocked by this sort of behavior back then. Arizonans by and large were not amused, especially after a tourist boycott against their state was organized.

All this story needs is George W. Bush visiting from the future in a time machine to pronounce, "Evan, you're doing a heckuva job." In the 43rd President's version of reality, Mecham is the type of person he would appoint, for example, to head the U.S. Office of Civil Rights. Poor Evan. Ahead of his time. He could have had a spectacular career helping our worst President ruin America.

Posted by David at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It was great to see Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova win the Oscar for Best Song tonight. They were nominated for 'Falling Slowly,' the infectious main song from "Once," a low-budget Irish film written and directed by John Carney. I saw it at the Midtown in Harrisburg, Pa., last year and couldn't stop humming that song. You can listen to it here. "Once" is about a struggling street musician, Hansard, who insists on playing his own songs. He meets Irglova one day and it turns out she is an accomplished pianist. He bets everything he has on producing a great CD of songs, and she is with him all the way. The ending isn't quite what you expect, but it is real.

Hansard, front man for the band, The Frames, and Irglova, who is Czech (neither are trained actors), dedicated their award to struggling artists everywhere. You just know they haven't had an easy time of it. The music business these days is almost as troubled as journalism, and with no fewer trolls who don't care a whit about what is good and right, only what is perceived to sell. "Once" is the antithesis of that kind of thinking, and Hansard and Irglova couldn't have looked happier to be up on stage.

Posted by David at 12:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

At the end of December, I had an unfortunate accident. Really, it was. My Motorola Razr, a cellphone I liked a lot, stayed in the pocket of my jeans on a trip through the washer. It emerged very clean and very dead.

I needed to get a replacement quickly. AT&T informed me that I wasn't far enough into my current two-year indenture to qualify for a discount on a replacement phone. That meant I would have to pay full retail price--about $330, as I recall--for a new Razr. Fortunately, the old one was insured for that much against just this eventuality. So I figured if I had to pay that much for a new phone, I might as well get what I really wanted, which was an Apple iPhone. $399 plus tax, plus $20 a month on top of my regular AT&T calling plan for the unlimited data access and messaging.

It would be better for my work as a journalist. Honestly. And much more cool.

The differences start from the moment you make your decision to buy. There are no discounts on the iPhone. You pay your money and get your phone, and then you take it home to activate. No standing around for half an hour in the store. You complete the sign-up from your home computer, including porting over your old number. It was really quite simple. I didn't even have to redo the voicemail.

So after a month, do I still like it? Very much, although as with any love affair, eventually you find a few things you don't like. Unlike a regular Mac using Apple Mail, there is no junkmail filter on the iPhone. That meant all the spam that is launched at my blog showed up on the iPhone, often dozens of them a day. Don't get me started on Russian spamsters. We may have won the Cold War, but they're paying us back with spam bombs. While unwanted e-mails can be removed quickly from the iPhone with the tap of a finger--nearly everything is controlled by the touchscreen--it got to be really annoying. I eventually asked my blogmaster to forward the blog mail to my G-mail address, which didn't forward to the iPhone. That took care of that problem.

The iPhone is also more difficult to answer in a moving car than the Razr was. Of course, the Razr was a flip phone, and to answer it you needed merely to open it up. No buttons to push. With the iPhone, I have to draw my finger across the screen to unlock it and then punch the touchscreen answer button, which doesn't always work the first time. My suggestion to Apple would be to have the phone unlock automatically when a call comes in.

And finally, I don't like the Apple address book software as much as the address book in my Palm Tungsten T-3, which was far easier to customize. I haven't yet figured out how to categorize the names and addresses in my iPhone, and there isn't a search function that I've been able to find. But perhaps that will change in the future. I'm ever hopeful.

On the good side, I love the ability to send and receive e-mail from just about anywhere. And there's nothing like the reaction that comes when people see the e-mail tag, "Sent From My iPhone." Blackberries, I believe, were the first to have this ego feature. I find the iPhone great to have when I'm covering stories for the Patriot-News and need to alert the desk that a story is or isn't coming. Instead of getting up to leave the meeting, I can whip out the iPhone and dash off an e-mail, provided I'm not in someplace like the East Wing of the Pennsylvania State Capitol, where there is no AT&T service at all.

I haven't found many places like that. The iPhone accesses the Internet and sends messages through free Wi-Fi connections or the AT&T Edge Network. It shifts seemlessly from one to the other depending on where you are. At home, it's Wi-Fi. At the office, it's Edge. The Internet access is great during the mind-numbing third hour of a night municipal meeting. a lot of what I do these days.

I find myself fetishizing the iPhone, obsessively wiping fingermarks off its glass (not plastic--it won't scratch) face so it looks shiny and new. I keep finding new things to do with it, but one thing I never do is leave it in my pants pocket. Every night, it goes on the charger. I don't want another washing machine accident ever again.

Posted by David at 06:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Obama won big

Hillary's dream fades away

What more can I say?

Posted by David at 08:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"While it is necessary, it is no longer sufficient to protect ourselves against known or suspected terrorists; we must protect ourselves against people with no known affiliation to terrorism."
--Kip Hawley, administrator of U.S. Transportation Security Administration, in remarks to Congress about rail security, Oct. 20, 2005.

Amtrak announced today that it will conduct unannounced spot checks of boarding passengers and their carry-on luggage as part of the war against terrorism. While greater attention to rail security is long overdue--the rail unions have been vocal about this since 2001--the unique nature of rail travel is likely to make anyone chosen for a spot check feel like the unluckiest man or woman alive.

Here's how the AP described what will be done: "The [security] teams will show up unannounced at stations and set up baggage screening areas in front of boarding gates. Officers will randomly pull people out of line and wipe their bags with a special swab that is then put through a machine that detects explosives. If the machine detects anything, officers will open the bag for a visual inspection. Anybody who is selected for screening and refuses will not be allowed to board and their ticket will be refunded."

If you're not a regular Amtrak rider between Harrisburg and Philadelphia and New York, this might seem no more onerous than what airline passengers endure every day. But there's a big difference. Very few Amtrak passengers, and none on the trains between Harrisburg and Philadelphia and New York, have assigned seats. It's mostly open seating.

So while you wait for the explosives test to be conducted, the majority of passengers not chosen for spot checks will be boarding the train and grabbing most of the seats. On a busy travel day, you and your wife, or you and your wife and two children, may end up sitting far apart because only widely scattered single seats--possibly on different cars--are left. You may be dragging your luggage from car to car searching for those seats.

This won't be much of a problem for riders boarding in Harrisburg, where the trains originate and there is always plenty of seating. But it will be a problem when you get on the return train in New York's Penn Station, which on the best of days is a scene of barely organized chaos. Here's how it works in Penn Station: passengers for all the trains mill about in the waiting room, watching the train board intently for the gate to be announced for their train--it's always different. They then rush to that gate and crowd down a narrow escalator to the train platform.

It is hard to imagine where in the Penn Station waiting area these screenings could be done. My guess is they will do them on the platforms, where there is somewhat more ability to control the flow of people. Amtrak hasn't said whether trains will be delayed so screened passengers have time to board. The next train could be hours away. If you are forced to miss the last train of the night, who pays for your hotel and meals? Take a guess.

Anyone who thinks their status as a nice, white, middle class family on a weekend jaunt to New York will exempt them from these security screenings should re-read the quote that begins this post. But can you imagine how that family is going to feel if they are hauled out of line for screening, and then forced to sit in widely scattered seats, while someone who looks vaguely Middle Eastern goes on their merry way? Profiling, while unpleasant, is likely to catch more real terrorists than pretending an elderly white or African-American grandmother could be a human bomb.

The security problem is real. Imagine a suitcase bomb exploding in an Amtrak train as it passes under the Hudson River on the last leg of its journey to Penn Station. But this isn't the solution. Determined terrorists could arrange for their suicide bombers to get on the train at whistle-stop stations like Mt. Joy or Parkesburg that are unlikely to be visited by the screeners. Or have one bomber get on at one small station--there are nine of them between Harrisburg and Philadelphia--and one at another, knowing it was unlikely they would both be checked. Or for real, guaranteed impact, have the suicide bomber detonate in the crowded Penn Station waiting area. It is a nearly unsolvable problem.

One almost wonders if this is a back-handed attempt by the Bush Administration to destroy Amtrak by cutting not its appropriations--which it tries to do every year, while Congress puts the dollars back--but its supply of passengers willing to ride the trains. No business traveler or vacationing family who is seriously delayed or inconvenienced by a spot check is likely to ride Amtrak again, if there are alternatives. No one of questionable immigration status is going to risk being detected by the spot checkers, either.

A better solution, and one which Amtrak says it will employ in tandem with the spot checks, is to have more uniformed security in the stations--Penn Station has plenty of this already--and on the trains, accompanied by bomb-sniffing dogs.

Posted by David at 08:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's a hell of a thing to have your career destroyed by someone trying to make a point. You're going along great guns, doing all the right things, then blam!

Valerie Plame Wilson, who spoke at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., last night, knows that all too well. She was a CIA agent, working in the Counterproliferation Division and trying to determine whether Saddam Hussein was really trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction. By all fair-minded accounts, she was good at her job. Then in July 2003, her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times debunking Bush Administration claims, especially the now infamous "16 words" in Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address, that an African nation (Niger) had sold uranium to Saddam Hussein that could be used to make an atomic bomb. Wilson suggested that intelligence had been cooked to justify the Bush Administration's rush to war with Iraq.

We all know how that turned out. A week later, columnist Robert Novak betrayed her identity as a covert CIA agent in his column. Plame said last night that when her husband showed her Novak's column in the Washington Post, her head was spinning. "I'm thinking of my network of assets (foreigners who provided intelligence), the safety of my children, and how the career I love is over." The Bush Administration had retaliated against Wilson by ruining his wife's career. In one stroke, she could no longer be an undercover CIA agent, although she stayed on doing non-covert duties until January 2006. By her own account, she was "radioactive" at the office.

Plame said it wasn't illegal for Novak to disclose her identity, but it was illegal for Bush Administration officials with access to classified intelligence to disclose her identity to Novak. Only one of them was called to account. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted of obstruction of justice in the Plame incident last year and sentenced to 30 months in prison. President Bush--I had already forgotten this--immediately commuted Libby's sentence, calling it "excessive," and left open the possibility of a full pardon later.

Plame drew a full house at Dickinson College last night. The college required everyone attending the speech to go through a metal detector, but as college spokesman Bill Sulon pointed out, they did that for a Bob Dole speech, too. Plame is as attractive as she is often described, but shorter than I somehow expected. If you compare her to girls in your high school class, she's kind of cheerleader, D.A.R. Good Citizen, and valedictorian all rolled into one.

Plame is clearly constrained in what she can say in her speeches. The CIA has sought to legally bar her from talking or writing about her pre-2003 career with the agency, even though details of this are widely available on the Internet. Her book, "Fair Game," was published with sections deleted at the demand of the agency. Perhaps as a result, her talk last night was interesting, but didn't offer up any new information beyond what has been widely reported. For all her outward friendliness, she is clearly an angry woman who, with her husband, is pursuing legal action against Cheney and others. As Plame said more than once last night, she doesn't want this to happen to anyone else. Quite understandable.

This was a homecoming of sorts for Plame. She spent her high school years in the Philadelphia suburbs and graduated in 1981 from Lower Moreland High School (her high school English teacher, Frank McKee, was in the audience last night) in Huntingdon Valley. Then it was off to Penn State University, where she was a member of the Pi Beta Phi sorority, worked in the business section of the Daily Collegian, and got to know my Shipoke neighbor, Bill Cluck, who was also in the audience last night. Plame was a guest of Penn State president Graham Spanier this past weekend and was spotted with Spanier at the Phyrst Bar.

Posted by David at 07:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Every journalist deals with hundreds of public relations people throughout his or her career. Most of them are decent people, even while doing a tough job on behalf of an obnoxious client. Some are exceptional, going out of their way to help you get your story. But there are a few who make you cringe at their blatant stupidity or wonder whether they are telling outright lies.

Gawker.com, an irreverent Manhattan gossip site that is a guilty pleasure for many journalists, including this one, recently put out a call for "bad flack" stories, flacks being the slang term for p.r. people. Back comes a tale from an unnamed executive who took his senior management team to a seminar put on by Edelman, one of the nation's largest public relations firms, one which counts Wal-Mart among its clients. I'll let Gawker give you the rest of the details, but one message of the seminar was that sometimes you have to lie to the press.

Edelman, needless to say, isn't happy about this story being reported by Gawker, but, as noted above, it goes to the worst fears of many journalists. We all wish the corporations-in-crisis we report on behaved like Johnson & Johnson during the Tylenol poisoning of 25 years ago, but the reality is that far more behave like GPU during the Three Mile Island crisis, bumbling and dissembling, or Enron, aggressively trying to stifle reporting about what they are doing.

I suspect Edelman will get through this with some good p.r., perhaps buying full-page ads in various newspapers proclaiming its innocence and commitment to the Truth. I'm always suspicious about the real motivation behind full-page ads, but that's a subject for another day.

Posted by David at 07:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For any of you under the illusion that Sen. John McCain was not just another rightwing Republican politician, that he was "Senator Straight Talk," consider this: McCain voted against a bill that would ban torture of captives detained by the U.S. government or military. It would have simply required that any interrogations follow the limits prescribed in the U.S. Army Field Manual, which doesn't allow water-boarding and other forms of torture allowed by the Bush Administration at its prisons abroad.

McCain's vote was a sop to the red-meat right wingers in the Republican base who confuse the show "24" with reality. He was tortured himself while a prisoner-of-war in North Vietnam, and has spoken out against torture in the past. But now that he needs the votes of the bottom-dwellers, McCain has shown that he is quite willing to throw his principles out of the airplane into the ocean.

Bush has vowed to veto the anti-torture bill if it reaches him, as it probably will very soon.

Posted by David at 07:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Tribune Co. overlord Sam Zell is now blaming Orlando Sentinel photographer Sara Fajardo for the F-bomb he launched at her after she asked him some hard questions at a staff meeting. It seems that Zell--doesn't he look like Golum from Lord of the Rings?--thought that Fajardo had turned her back on him and walked huffily away in response to his declaration that she was guilty of "arrogance" for defending good journalism. According to a Tribune Co. spokesman, Fajardo was being "disrespectful" in both the tone of her voice and body language. The Los Angeles Times, which Zell also owns, then pointed out that Zell's now-famous employee handbook directly encourages employees to ask tough questions of their supervisors.

I'm sure this "explanation" for the F-bomb was concocted by Zell and his people after long meetings on how best to spin his damaging behavior. Zell has allegedly attempted to call Fajardo twice to apologize but just can't seem to reach her.

The Orlando Sentinel has recovered from its temporary urge to suck up to the new boss and is now defending Fajardo, who for her part says she simply thought her turn at the microphone was done and was returning to her seat. She has refused all request for comment, which might be an attempt by her to hide out until the storm blows over, or may have been ordered by Sentinel management.

And what's this stuff about Zell wanting to run strip club ("gentlemen's club") ads in the Los Angeles Times? I guess that's part of his vision to raise more money so his papers can run more photos from Iraq and fewer photos of puppydogs.

Posted by David at 07:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's okay to be angry. Heck, I remain angry over a number of things that have happened to me over the years. Anger can be a motivating force, or a destructive one. It all depends on what you do with it. And what you CAN do with it.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee for President, was a prisoner-of-war of the North Vietnamese for more than five years. He was a bomber pilot, and was shot down in 1967 on a mission to bomb Hanoi. One thing McCain must address in the coming campaign, either willingly or unwillingly, is how that awful experience--he was tortured--affects him today. Does he harbor grudges against Vietnam and--we learned yesterday--Cuba that could lead him into rash actions against either country? Is he driven to make up for the U.S. withdrawal from the Vietnam War by staying in the Iraq War for another five years? Or 10?

I had not heard about McCain's claim that Cuban agents helped torture him in North Vietnam until news stories yesterday about Fidel Castro's published denial of any involvement by Cuban agents. AP says he addressed the issue in his 1999 book, "Faith of Our Fathers," which I'm going to make a note to find and read. Although this does sound like urban legend, it may well have happened. Other former POWs and U.S. government investigations have backed up McCain's story. I take Castro's denial and that of the Vietnamese with a grain of salt. They're worried about dealing with an angry McCain as President of the United States.

But before anyone gets in a dither, we should remember that Cuba and the United States during the period of McCain's imprisonment were in a state of war and remain so today. Cuban participation in harsh interrogations of McCain and other prisoners in distant North Vietnam was reprehensible, but no worse than the torture being carried out by U.S. agents on terrorism suspects at the Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo prisons. Bush flushed away our moral high ground, but that's an issue for another day.

The issue now is McCain and what he will do with his anger if he becomes President. Will he be a statesman and rise above it, or, like Rambo, let it drive him--and us--back to the jungle of everlasting war?

Posted by David at 06:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

No matter how it's spun, it's never a positive development when a candidate dumps her campaign manager in the middle of a hard-fought fight.

Hillary Clinton did that over the weekend, replacing campaign manager Patti Solis Doye with her longtime aide and confidante Maggie Williams. That came on the heels of losses to Barack Obama in caucuses or primaries in Washington state, Nebraska, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Maine, and Louisiana. Because of the Democratic Party's proportional representation rules, Clinton will still pick up some delegates in each state. But the momentum is clearly with Obama.

Running for President is both the ultimate ego trip and the ultimate gamble. You do it because you believe you are better than anyone else to run the country, but you do it knowing that only one person can get your party's nomination, and only one person can become President. Somebody suffers a crushing personal defeat, the ultimate rejection, and it might be you. For the rest of your life and throughout history, you will carry the "loser" tag. Yet you push on because you've been preparing for this your entire life. How can they deny me?

Clinton has to be thinking those thoughts about now. Her best bets are in Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, where Gov. Ed Rendell has endorsed her. She still has a narrow lead in delegates if the so-called "super delegates"--party officials--are counted. But how would it look if the super delegates thwarted the will of the people?

Posted by David at 06:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Dark Lord was in Harrisburg yesterday, disrupting downtown traffic and arguing that waterboarding of captives isn't torture, but is necessary to the security of all Americans. He was among friends and could say things like that.

Cheney was the speaker at a Republican fundraiser at the Hilton in Pennsylvania's capital city, where the remaining faithful, like those in Hitler's bunker in Berlin in April 1945, pretended not to see the Soviet army a block away. They competed to show their loyalty and fidelity to the man who, as much as George W. Bush, was responsible for the Iraq War and every other evil thing to come out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the past seven years. That these bunker faithful would pay $2,500 to have their pictures taken with Cheney, and presumeably to then frame and hang these photos, beggars belief.

"We do not torture--it's against our laws and against our values," Cheney lied.

He will say things like this and in the next breath defend waterboarding and deny that it is torture. If he was pushed, and he won't be, the Dark Lord might point to the infamous August 2002 "torture memo" written by John Yoo, a high-ranking member of the Bush Justice Department, which gave the narrowest of definitions to torture and approved waterboarding. Yoo has since argued that the President as Commander in Chief has the authority even to torture an innocent child of a terrorism suspect to get the parent to talk.

In waterboarding, a prisoner is strapped to a slanting board, head down, feet up. A cloth is placed over his or her face and water poured on the cloth to simulate drowning. Here's one courtroom description of the practice. After World War II, we prosecuted Japanese army and secret police members as war criminals for doing the very same thing.

Cheney yesterday also called on Congress to approve explicit authority for the White House to listen in on your phone calls without a court order--also justified as an anti-terrorism measure--and to grant amnesty to telephone companies that went along with the administration's previous ventures into domestic eavesdropping.

It's not nearly as long a step as you might think from engaging in waterboarding of enemy prisoners and domestic wiretapping to arresting political critics on trumped-up charges and later throwing them, still alive, out of airplanes into the ocean like the Argentine military dictatorship did from 1976 to 1983. It all begins with a little torture, and soon nothing is too much to protect Argentina, or America, or whatever other nation comes to see their Bill of Rights as an impediment to power.

It is time for Americans to face up to what Cheney and Bush did in their names.

Posted by David at 06:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After the 24 Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses, I don't think either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama are inevitable winners for the Democratic nomination, but it is Clinton's to lose--provided she doesn't run out of money.

What is saving Clinton so far, I think, is her strong support from women and Hispanics, but also a general unease among some Democrats--shell-shocked after eight years of George W. Bush--about venturing beyond the known world. To them, Obama embodies more risk than they are willing to take in their desperate quest to restore the pre-Bush country they remember. If they sail off the edge of the world with Capt. Obama, will they land in heaven or hell? They don't want to find out. Clinton represents that pre-Bush America to them. She is a known quantity, good on most issues, and they don't much care what Bill did or didn't do.

That, I think, is why the rapturous crowds attending Obama's appearances in the days leading up to Super Tuesday didn't necessarily translate into votes. That and the fact that more of his support is among young people, who don't always make the effort to vote that their elders do. I had earlier posted a story from C/Net about how Clinton had surprisingly trounced Obama in Silicon Valley, but one of my readers provided me with actual voting results from the California Secretary of State to show that Obama did in fact carry the valley by a comfortable margin.

Obama mania could still carry the Illinois senator to the nomination--he isn't that far behind Clinton in the delegate count--but he has to do a better job of convincing the Democratic wounded that he has what it takes to succeed at governing, not just making inspiring speeches. I was a John Edwards supporter (Dennis Kucinich was my really secret love), but I'm almost to the point of making that leap of faith and going with Obama.

Posted by David at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I nearly wrote "Hickabee" in the headline, which is a Freudian slip almost as telling as Times Co. owner Sam Zell launching an f-bomb (see yesterday's post) at a young woman photographer at the Orlando Sentinel who challenged his concept of journalism as lowest-common-denominator hucksterism. But I digress.

John McCain and Mike Huckabee were the big winners on the Republican side in yesterday's 24-state "Super Tuesday" primaries. McCain because he actually won, and Huckabee because he won several southern states plus West Virginia and probably got himself onto the ticket in the fall as the vice presidential nominee. The two have been making nice of late, and I can really see this happening.

Democrats have reason to be both exhilarated and fearful over a McCain-Huckabee ticket. It will be eminently defeatable, but won't be the romp that facing a ticket headed by Rudolph Giuliani or Mitt Romney would have been. McCain and Huckabee have great surface appeal to certain voters who don't know their positions very well. It will be up to the eventual Democratic nominee, be it Clinton or Obama, to make sure voters know what the country faces if McCain and Huckabee take over the government.

For starters, McCain is the ultimate hawk. A prisoner-of-war in North Vietnam (he was a bomber pilot) for more than five years, he is still fighting the Vietnam War in his mind. McCain has promised again and again that he will stay in Iraq until "victory" is achieved, whatever that means. He has expressed willingness to keep U.S. forces in Iraq for even a hundred years if necessary. He seems the most likely among any of the candidates to go to war with Iran, and the most likely to ask Congress to reinstitute the military draft. There won't be any other way to fight a war like that.

Huckabee laid out his vision for America in comments to supporters in Arkansas last night. He promised to scrap the current federal income tax and replace it with the so-called "Fair" Tax, which isn't fair at all if you're in the lower or middle classes. This is essentially a 30 percent national sales tax on top of whatever sales tax your state already charges, and without the exemptions for food and clothing that some states, like Pennsylvania, provide. "Huck" also made clear that abortion will be ended--at least legal abortions--if he has anything to say about it.

If he is picked as McCain's vice presidential running mate, Huckabee will face more scrutiny than many vp nominees do. McCain would be the oldest man ever to hold the U.S. Presidency, older by two years than Ronald Reagan was when he took office. While healthy longevity seems to run in his family--his 95-year-old mother seems 30 years younger than her numerical age--people who have been subjected to torture and brutal imprisonment often suffer permanent health damage which may be invisible for a time but ultimately shortens their lives. There is a much higher risk than normal that Huckabee would ascend to the presidency to finish out a McCain term.

Neither McCain nor Huckabee have truly been subjected to the brutal vetting of their records that is only applied to candidates running for President, the picking over of their past by people who know how to find anything that isn't kosher, the relentless fall campaign ads that highlight whatever is found. By the time this all plays out they will seem like George W. Bush reincarnated. They won't win unless the Democrats really screw up.

McCain and to a lesser extent Huckabee are despised by movement conservatives like Rush Limbaugh. Much of this stems from McCain's votes against both Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and his general refusal to play nice with the really far right. This hatred of McCain is visceral and shows no signs of abating, which is another positive development for Democrats.

I haven't said anything about Mitt Romney in this post, and there really isn't much to say except he lost big-time yesterday. His victories were in insignificant states or in "home" states like Utah and Massachusetts, where he was once governor. The longer he stays in, the better for the Democrats, because it will force McCain to spend more money in the remaining primaries.

Posted by David at 07:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Real estate zillionaire Sam Zell, the self-described "vulture capitalist," decided that he wanted to get into the newspaper business, having figured out (like Warren Buffett before him) that despite the protestations of the industry, newspapers still made a lot of money. So he bought the Tribune Co. last year and gained ownership of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Allentown (Pa.) Morning Call, and, we shall see, the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel. The question was how soon Zell would succumb to the tug of the dark side and decide that 25-35 percent profit margins just weren't enough when more could be squeezed out of the business by eliminating things like reporters and more reporters. Answer: very soon.

Zell has had a bad year so far, what with another editor being fired at the Los Angeles Times for refusing to fire more reporters, and the continuing media attention to the story line of "The Wire" on HBO, which among other things portrays a dysfunctional newspaper called the Baltimore Sun, which he happens to own. So that may be why he got a bit testy the other day while addressing a staff meeting at the Orlando Sentinel. One thing Zell apparently hasn't figured out, or didn't until this video began circulating, is that newspapers, for all their external posturing, are rather genteel compared to the commercial real estate world.

He may have thought it quite normal to launch an F-bomb at someone who said something he didn't like, because that's how they talk across the negotiating table in his world. It's not like no one has ever accused him of being an uncouth, foul-mouthed jerk. Zell's having a tough time in general adapting to the idea of the help asking tough questions, and was apparently quite put out when L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez knocked on his door in Malibu to chat.

Photographer Sara Fajardo of the Sentinel challenged Zell's views on the overriding importance of raising revenues, noting that, "we're not the Pennysaver." Zell then went on a tirade about how it was her duty and that of the rest of the staff to "help me" by producing journalism "that readers want." That phrase, incidentally, is code for dumbed-down, tepid, chicken-dinner reporting that a segment of the newspaper industry has convinced itself readers want. Fajardo tells Zell that "readers want puppy dog pictures," but is that what we ought to be doing? Which launches him on another tirade about "journalistic arrogance" and how they can't have both puppy dog and Iraq pictures until revenues come up. And then, almost as an afterthought, or Freudian slip, came the F-bomb.

When a member of upper management--the uppermost of upper management in Zell's case--launches an F-bomb at a rank-and-file employee, a young woman to boot, it goes beyond uncouth to potentially actionable. Gawker.com says Zell has called Fajardo at least twice to apologize. Wonder how the Orlando Sentinel reported the same event? Just like you'd expect someone kowtowing to the new boss to report it. There's a passing mention of Fajardo's exchange with Zell, but it's shaded in such a way to make him look like the wise new daddy lecturing the silly children, not an overbearing thug. The exchange is edited completely out of the video on the Sentinel website, and there's no mention of the F-bomb, of course.

Just another great day in the newspaper business.

Posted by David at 04:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've always been of two minds about candidate endorsements.

On one hand, they seem a waste of time, because most voters today are quite able to make up their minds themselves, thank you. I always remember a local elected official in Shamokin, Pa., where I used to be a reporter, scoffing at claims by various party committee people that they "controlled" 15 votes or 20 votes and could deliver them at election time. I suspect that "control" in many cases lasted only until the curtain was pulled shut in the voting booth.

On the other hand, endorsements CAN help truly undecided voters come into one candidate's camp or another. The New York Times telling you that in it's considered opinion, Hillary Clinton is the best Democratic candidate, or Ted Kennedy giving an enthusiastic thumbs up for Barack Obama, can help make up your mind, provided you respect the institution or person making the endorsement.

Then there's the situation--where I find myself today--of liking the arguments of both the Clinton and Obama endorsers, and those of Obama critics like New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Hillary Clinton seems tougher and more able to take on the Republican right. But is she electable? Obama seems very electable, and an inspirational leader, but his national healthcare plan is inferior to Clinton's (see Krugman column linked above) and he's no Lyndon Johnson in the legislative arena. Is it better to bet on the 'horse' that will likely win, even if you don't think you'll like what he does afterward? Or should I bet it all on the 'horse' that is more likely to fight for the progressive agenda--provided she wins the race. What's a liberal democrat to do?

Pennsylvania doesn't hold its primary until April 22, which seems an eternity away. The race could well be settled by then, and I'll support whomever the Democrats nominate. But with how close the race for the nomination has become, we in the Keystone State may find outselves in the decidedly rare position of being kingmakers.

Posted by David at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The murderous rioting and ethnic violence in Kenya has reminded the world that tribalism--loyalty to one's own group above all else--remains the scourge of Africa in the 21st century, and just about everywhere else as well.

I had intended to write something here about American philosopher Francis Fukuyama's bold prediction in 1989 about "the end of history," by which he meant that liberal democracy had triumphed once and for all over communism, fascism and monarchy. I don't completely agree with him, but do believe that what we are seeing in the early 21st century regarding tribalism is a related phenomenon.

Tribalism, I believe, flourishes in the absence of an overriding ideology or belief system uniting people of diverse backgrounds and pointing them toward a common goal beyond the immediate needs of the tribe. That can be religion or communism. A third way of suppressing tribalism was through colonial rule.

Communism held Yugoslavia together for almost 70 years. Once the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the power of the Soviet Union to maintain its empire ended (along with the Soviet Union itself), Yugoslavia's member nations--Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia in particular--descended into murderous tribalism. Citizens of those nations didn't forget who they were during those 70 years, but tribalism was suppressed in the interests of building a worker state. I'm not saying Kenya needs communism, but it needs some overriding authority system that the people of that country can trust with their future.

One can only imagine what the turmoil in Kenya is doing to the tourism industry. No one is going to go there to see the wildlife parks if they fear ending up in the middle of another Rwanda.

Can tribalism ever afflict America? It already is in one respect--the whipped up fervor over illegal immigrants that began a couple of years ago.

Posted by David at 07:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)