Blogonaut

2004-01-03T23:21:00.000-08:00

we've moved

2004-01-03T23:20:00.000-08:00

Blogonaut is being put into retirement.

My current project is The Joe Hill Dispatch where I hope you'll join us. These are the current projects of The Joe Hill Dispatch:

Laborwire: a daily journal of labor and union news and activism.
Nationwire: a daily journal of national news and domestic issues.
Industry: a daily journal of economic, financial and business news.
The World Beat: a daily journal of globalization and trade news and activism.
Greenwire: a daily journal of environmental news and activism.
Junkiewire: a daily journal of news for political junkies.
Activate: a running log of activist projects. It's where to go when you want to get your E-Activist on.

The Joe Hill Dispatch won't be as eclectic as Blogonaut was, but I promise to make it worth your while.

See you over there.

epa scuttled mercury warnings

2003-12-30T11:03:00.000-08:00

From the Washington Post:

For nearly 21 months, a government task force steadily moved toward recommending rules that within three years would force every coal-fired power plant in the country to reduce emissions of mercury, which can cause neurological and developmental damage to humans.

The Environmental Protection Agency-sponsored working group had a well-regarded mix of utility industry representatives, state air quality officials and environmentalists. Without settling on specific emission reductions, the panel agreed that all 1,100 of the nation's coal- and oil-fired power plants must use the "maximum achievable control technology" (MACT) to reduce mercury and other hazardous pollutants.

But in April, the EPA abruptly dismantled the panel.

SEND A MESSAGE TO EPA ADMINISTRATOR MICHAEL LEAVITT TELLING HIM TO CLEAN UP THE EPA'S ACT

Dean, Gepster and the Unions in Iowa

2003-12-30T07:26:00.000-08:00

The Chicago Tribune has an excellent article on the role of the unions in the upcoming Iowa caucus.

must read on the structural nature of our trade deficit

2003-12-30T06:30:00.000-08:00

Robert Kuttner writes in Business Week:

The U.S. trade deficit will exceed 5% of gross domestic product this year. A big trade deficit, combined with a low domestic savings rate, requires the U.S. to borrow heavily from abroad. We currently owe the world about 40% of one year's GDP -- $4 trillion, something totally unprecedented. That figure will keep rising, with more of our own income going to service external debt. At some point, our creditors will have second thoughts. For two decades, economists have warned about the unsustainable trade deficit. To paraphrase the late economist Herb Stein, anything unsustainable won't be sustained. But will the rebalancing be a soft landing or a painful crash?

I fear the landing could be nasty, but I disagree with most economists who blame the problem on our budget deficit, savings rate, and overvalued dollar. Look more carefully and you'll see three deeper structural causes, all related to hegemony and ideology.

safeway fight

2003-12-30T06:10:00.000-08:00

From Business Week:

The AFL-CIO and big pension funds want to boot William Tauscher, claiming conflicts of interest. The supermarket chain isn't budging

In this age of corporate-governance reform, few things rankle institutional investors like a presumably independent director whom they perceive to be anything but. William Tauscher, an independent director at supermarket giant Safeway, is learning that the hard way.

'good news' on healthcare costs

2003-12-30T06:07:00.000-08:00

Business Week:

While industry experts predict smaller cost increases for 2004, they'll still be rising at double-digit rates

The health-care industry has been down so long it must look like up. How else to explain the "good news" that virtually every industry expert is touting for 2004: a slowing rate of increase in health-care costs compared to the previous five years.

a union in china

2003-12-30T06:01:00.000-08:00

The New York Times has an extraordinary article on the struggle by one man, Liu Youlin to bring a legitimate union to a factory in China. Although foreign employers are legally required to have a local a branch of the national union, his employer has none. He overcomes a number of hurdles and eventually forces recognition. When the local office of the union required him to collect 20 signatures to petition for recognition, Liu Youlin came back with 182.

However at the election of officers, the union and the company collude to nominate only supervisers and a few handpicked workers. To attend the election, workers must take time off without pay to vote for the sham slate. Still, 109 out of 900 workers show up and hand in blank ballots or vote only for the workers. The slate cannot muster the necessary votes and the union is 'stillborn'.

"We defeated their idea of a union," Mr. Liu said. "But now we have to begin again."

it's the economy stupid redux

2003-12-27T00:10:00.000-08:00

From Zogby International:

The Top Issues For 2004 What issues matter most going into the new year? Polls suggest that even though the economy is bouncing back, it's still the issue voters cite most often as the most important issue facing the nation.

CBS News pollsters asked Americans in August whether domestic issues or foreign policy would matter more in deciding their presidential vote. Domestic issues won out by a 69 percent to 15 percent margin. When CNN/Time asked that question in November, domestic issues continued to dominate by a 61 percent to 32 percent margin.

The economy and domestic issues also were the top issues among two important demographic groups as well -- Democrats and Hispanics. In an October Marist Institute poll of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 74 percent said those issues were the ones they were most interested in hearing about during the campaign.

happy holidays

2003-12-23T21:41:00.000-08:00

St. Nick as rendered by Thomas Nast

Here's wishing you and yours the best at Christmas and through the New Year.

But first, this word about last minute Christmas shopping.

when workers die

2003-12-23T09:19:00.000-08:00

The New York Times ran a series on deaths on the job in the US.

Start with this interactive feature.

From the New York Times:

CINCINNATI - As the autopsy confirmed, death did not come right away for Patrick M. Walters. On June 14, 2002, while working on a sewer pipe in a trench 10 feet deep, he was buried alive under a rush of collapsing muck and mud. A husky plumber's apprentice, barely 22 years old, Mr. Walters clawed for the surface. Sludge filled his throat. Thousands of pounds of dirt pressed on his chest, squeezing and squeezing until he could not draw another breath.

His mother, Michelle Marts, was the first in his family to hear.

"You just stand there like you're suspended in blank space," she said of that moment. She remembers being enveloped by a paralyzing numbness. He was her only child. She could not hear or breathe or move. Was this, she found herself wondering, what Patrick felt?

She called Patrick's father, her ex-husband, Jeff. "It literally knocked me off my feet," he said. "I lay there, right there on the floor, screaming and crying."

Part Two:

Every one of their deaths was a potential crime. Workers decapitated on assembly lines, shredded in machinery, burned beyond recognition, electrocuted, buried alive - all of them killed, investigators concluded, because their employers willfully violated workplace safety laws.

These deaths represent the very worst in the American workplace, acts of intentional wrongdoing or plain indifference that kill about 100 workers each year. They were not accidents. They happened because a boss removed a safety device to speed up production, or because a company ignored explicit safety warnings, or because a worker was denied proper protective gear.

And for years, in news releases and Congressional testimony, senior officials at the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration have described these cases as intolerable outrages, "horror stories" that demanded the agency's strongest response. They have repeatedly pledged to press wherever possible for criminal charges against those responsible.

These promises have not been kept.

Part Three:

GUSTINE, Calif. - For decades, Portuguese dairy farmers have dominated this wisp of a town on the windswept edge of the San Joaquin Valley. Tough, stubborn and hard-working, their families have prospered in a dusty land where death and injury are as close as a falling hay bale or a thrashing bull.

It is accepted fact here that life is hard and cruel, that risk is everywhere, that death is as random as the summer lightning. When your time comes, words will be spoken over your coffin at Our Lady of Miracles, and then life will push on, as it always has. "We're a `forgive and forget' community," is the way one town elder put it some years back.

This is the place that Roy J. Hubert Jr. has made his battleground.

A tall, bearded man with a taste for bow ties and pink dress shirts, Mr. Hubert is a prosecutor with a mission. He is part of a small team of circuit-riding prosecutors who are crusading to transform the Wild West mores of rural California, a culture they regard as far too tolerant of death on the job.

Their methods are simple, and controversial. With permission from local district attorneys, they bring high-profile criminal cases against employers who kill workers by violating workplace safety laws.

"We're trying to drive a behavioral change within business," Mr. Hubert said. "We're a negative reinforcer."

modern day slavery

2003-12-23T07:53:00.000-08:00

The Palm Beach Post has an extraordinary series on abuses in the immigrant labor market in Florida.

"For nine months, The Palm Beach Post explored the roots of modern-day slavery. Reporters and photographers traveled to destitute Mexican villages, crossed the desert with a smuggler, rode across the U.S. with illegal immigrants, found new claims of slavery, uncovered rampant Social Security fraud, and found that Florida's famous orange juice comes with hidden costs."

Start with this audio slide show. Links for the entire series are below.

modern day slavery

2003-12-23T07:45:00.000-08:00

From the Palm Beach Post:

Part 1
Used and Abused
How migrants live in Florida: With fake names, fake Social Security cards and few rights,
migrant farm workers stay invisible in plain sight.
• Five recent slavery cases
• Women: Farm imprisoned us
• Labor under lock and fist
• If it's Tuesday, he's Jose
• Labor contractors control lives
• U.S. obligingly provides fake IDs
• What typical migrant makes
• Harvesting with visions of home
• Housing dodges health codes
• Fellsmere migrants in squalor
• Following the crops
• Pickers wade in pesticide
• A family album
• Slavery, rape await defenseless
• Load of 'Shame' has shifted
• Opinion: Still harvesting shame

modern day slavery

2003-12-23T06:24:00.000-08:00

From the Palm Beach Post:

Part 2
How They Come
Desperate journey: Driven by poverty, a crossing that can kill, a broken dream.
• Four nights in the unforgiving desert
• Where so many die
• Vigilantes sweep desert
• Bishop: Law is breaking migrants
• Dispersing the human cargo
• Van flip upends hope of paydays

Lives Affected By Slavery

modern day slavery

2003-12-23T06:10:00.000-08:00

From the Palm Beach Post:

Part 3:
The Real Cost
Fresh from Florida: A favored industry, a society burdened, a deadly cycle.
• That glass of OJ is squeezing back
• Some hidden costs of migrant labor
• Machine harvests steadily growing
• In Capitol, reform hits stony ground
• Farmers make up powerful committee
• U.S. 'guest worker' visa a pitted road not taken
• Growers step up to weed their image
• In their own words
• Sealed trailer in Texas pays in widows' tears

lax florida rules imperil workers

2003-12-22T14:35:00.000-08:00

From the Palm Beach Post:

It takes only $75, a fairly clean criminal record and 45 correct answers on a true/false exam to get a license to hire, house, feed, transport and pay farmworkers in Florida.

If you can't read or write, you can take an oral exam. If you don't speak English, you can take the test in Spanish or Haitian-Creole. And if you still can't earn a 75 percent passing grade, you can take the test over and over until you do. That's how easy it is to become a farm labor contractor in Florida, where most of the nation's slavery cases have been prosecuted during the past six years and most of those sent to prison were farm labor contractors.

It is a license that allows the holder to control almost every aspect of a worker's life.

jury award called win for worker's rights

2003-12-22T13:29:00.000-08:00

From Yahoo News:

SAN FRANCISCO - Macan Singh left a village in India and came to the United States to work for an employer he says promised him an education and his own business one day. Instead, Singh says he ended up working 12-hour shifts, seven days a week for three years — for no pay. After Singh, an undocumented immigrant, filed a claim for unpaid wages, his employer allegedly reported him to federal immigration officials. He was detained for almost 15 months. It was a nightmare made even worse by the fact that Singh's employer was his own uncle, his attorneys say.

A federal court jury Thursday ordered Singh's uncle and aunt, Charanjit and Davinder Jutla, to pay $200,000 in compensatory and punitive damages for reporting him to the government.

"I've waited a long time for this day," Singh, 33, said in Punjabi through a translator. "I thought that I would have a good life here."

The uncle and aunt were "shocked and disappointed" by the verdict, said Sandra McNabb, their attorney.

sex workers agitate for reform

2003-12-22T13:26:00.000-08:00

From Yahoo News:

SAN FRANCISCO, (AFP) - San Francisco's prostitutes and strippers are calling on the city's newly elected young mayor to help decriminalize the world's oldest profession and crack down on abuses of exotic dancers.

Dancers charge that the city's outgoing mayor, Willie Brown, the former lawyer of a prominent strip club owner, ignored years of labor law and safety violations in San Francisco's strip clubs. The California Labor Commissioner has held hearings for a decade in which dancers aired grievances and recovered back pay. But dancers say the abuses continued.

Fed up with non-enforcement of labor laws, dancers have filed two class action lawsuits against the city's strip clubs charging that managers seized their tips, failed to pay them wages, and charged them hundreds of dollars per shift for the privilege of working.

collecting steelworkers stories

2003-12-22T13:22:00.000-08:00

From the Jeffersonian:

Ed Bartee Sr., an African-American retiree from Bethlehem Steel, recounts his efforts to integrate the bathrooms at the Sparrows Point plant after World War II.

Edie Papadakis talks about her first day as the only woman in the all-male maintenance department at the mill.

Their memories, both good and bad, form part of a collection of videotaped interviews now preserved on the Internet, thanks to the efforts of a Dundalk college instructor. "I've always been fascinated by oral histories and the stories people tell about their experiences," said Bill Barry, director of the labor studies program at the Community College of Baltimore County-Dundalk. Earlier this month Barry posted audio clips from his collection of interviews on the Web at www.sparrowspointsteelworkers.com. The site was created by former CCBC-Essex student Ryan Pasterfield.

ergonomics boycott

2003-12-22T08:31:00.000-08:00

From Confined Spaces:

The nation's leading ergonomics experts have announced that they will boycott an upcoming ergonomics research symposium called by OSHA as part of its COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH TO ERGONOMICS.

Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA, John Henshaw, is not amused. "The good scientists will engage in the process and participate like responsible people." The bad, irresponsible scientists objected to the fact that "the focus of the symposium appears to be on research topics already exhaustively reviewed."

One of the leading lies that the anti-ergonomics industry, Congressional Republicans and the Bush Administration used in their campaign to repeal the ergonomics standard was that there was no science behind ergonomics. Despite the fact that there were more good studies done on ergonomics than any other health or safety standard ever issued by OSHA, and despite a comprehensive review of the literature by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in 1997, Republicans in Congress called for another review by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

us attacks iraqi unions

2003-12-22T07:54:00.000-08:00

From The Washington Times:

LONDON, Dec. 12 (UPI) -- Trade unionists around the world are protesting a U.S. raid on the head offices of the post-Saddam trade union movement in Iraq.

On Saturday, Dec. 6 American armored cars and soldiers raided the offices of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions in Baghdad, according to union sources. They reportedly trashed the offices, threw black paint over the windows and arrested eight officials.

Ironically, the soldiers tore up posters opposing terrorism in Iraq by remnants of Saddam Hussein regime and foreign fighters.

There is some confusion over what happened. The Iraqi trade unions say that the officials were released unharmed and are demanding an explanation and compensation.

walmart janitors

2003-12-22T07:50:00.000-08:00

From SEIU:

Last month federal immigration agents raided 60 Wal-Mart stores across the country as part of “Operation Rollback”. Reports estimate that over 250 immigrant janitors were arrested in the raids, many after working on night shift cleaning crews. Many of these workers are now in “removal proceedings,” meaning that the government is seeking to deport them from the U.S., an act that will separate family members and generate greater fear in immigrant communities.

Send a message to Michael Garcia of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement telling him not to deport these workers.

tariffs slapped on chinese tv's

2003-12-22T07:37:00.000-08:00

From the Labor Research Association:

US Commerce Dept. Slaps Anti-Dumping Duties on Chinese Color TVs (Dec. 18, 2003)

Trying to stem the flood of unfairly priced Chinese-made color television sets into American markets, U.S. authorities have imposed whopping duties on incoming imports from the world’s fifth largest trading nation, sparking cheers from labor and manufacturing sectors and jeers from across the Pacific.

In a preliminary ruling, the Commerce Department in late November slapped China with tariffs of 28% to 46%, in an effort to offset the effects of “dumping” products in U.S. markets by selling them below cost or market value.

. . . In their petition, Five Rivers and the two unions pointed to an astonishing 1,166% jump in color TV imports from China and Malaysia between 2000 and 2002, from 209,887 units to 2,656,456 units. Import penetration rose ten-fold during the same period, according to the IUE-CWA. Meanwhile, significant overcapacity exists among China’s leading color television producers, the petition said.

grocery strike

2003-12-22T07:31:00.000-08:00

From Newsday:

LOS ANGELES -- Ten weeks into a labor strike that has hit more than 800 Southern California grocery stores, talks between the supermarkets' operators and workers' union came to an abrupt end after resuming for just one day.

Negotiators for the supermarkets rejected the union's latest offer late Friday. No new talks were scheduled, but there was some movement in the dispute.

The United Food and Commercial Workers union, whose members struck Safeway's Vons and Pavilions stores on Oct. 11 and were immediately locked out of Ralphs and Albertsons stores, said Friday it would pull its pickets from the stores' distribution centers. And the Teamsters union, which struck in solidarity with the UFCW, said its members would return to work at those warehouses Monday.

Donate to the Strike Support Fund

labor is a forgotten part of this economy

2003-12-22T07:26:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times:

THIS economic recovery is distinctly unkind to workers.

Output is clearly rising, and, normally, that would feed into both corporate profits and labor income. But while profits have shot up as a percentage of national income, reaching their highest level since the mid-1960's, labor's share is shrinking. Not since World War II has the distribution been so lopsided in the aftermath of a recession.

Profits, it turns out, never stopped rising as a share of national income all through the 2001 recession and the months afterward of weak economic growth. That did not change even as the recovery kicked in strongly last summer and hiring resumed. New data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis erases all doubt on this point.

bush in 30 seconds

2003-12-19T19:35:00.000-08:00

Vote in MoveOn's 'Bush in 30 Seconds' ad contest.

send nader packing

2003-12-19T18:24:00.000-08:00

Ralph Nader wants to know if you want him to help George W. Bush dismantle this country for another years. You can tell him "HELL NO!!!!!"

there's something going on and you don't know what it is. do you mister jones?

2003-12-19T09:47:00.000-08:00

Q. WHAT WILL HAPPEN WHEN A NATIONAL POLITICAL MACHINE CAN FIT ON A LAPTOP?

A. SEE BELOW

Everett Ehrlich writes in the Washington Post:

Back in 1937, an economist named Ronald Coase realized something that helped explain the rise of modern corporations -- and which just might explain the coming decline of the American two-party political system.

Coase's insight was this: The cost of gathering information determines the size of organizations.

It sounds abstract, but in the past it meant that complex tasks undertaken on vast scales required organizational behemoths. This was as true for the Democratic and Republican parties as it was for General Motors. Choosing and marketing candidates isn't so different from designing, manufacturing and selling automobiles.

But the Internet has changed all that in one crucial respect that wouldn't surprise Coase one bit. To an economist, the "trick" of the Internet is that it drives the cost of information down to virtually zero. So according to Coase's theory, smaller information-gathering costs mean smaller organizations. And that's why the Internet has made it easier for small folks, whether small firms or dark-horse candidates such as Howard Dean, to take on the big ones.

For all Dean's talk about wanting to represent the truly "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," the paradox is that he is essentially a third-party candidate using modern technology to achieve a takeover of the Democratic Party. Other candidates -- John Kerry, John Edwards, Wesley Clark -- are competing to take control of the party's fundraising, organizational and media operations. But Dean is not interested in taking control of those depreciating assets. He is creating his own party, his own lists, his own money, his own organization. What he wants are the Democratic brand name and legacy, the party's last remaining assets of value, as part of his marketing strategy. Perhaps that's why former vice president Al Gore's endorsement of Dean last week felt so strange -- less like the traditional benediction of a fellow member of the party "club" than a senior executive welcoming the successful leveraged buyout specialist. And if Dean can do it this time around, so can others in future campaigns.

. . . Consider, for example, the first "modern" political campaign -- the Whig campaign for William Henry Harrison in 1840. Apart from some success as an Indian killer, Harrison had minimal credentials, but the Whigs figured out how to use the tremendous organizational apparatus of their party to promote him. They fabricated the image of Harrison as the "log cabin and hard cider" candidate, despite his more patrician roots, and used the party organization to enforce discipline around the fabrication -- to get everyone to say the same thing at the same time. In America's first political mass media stunt, they constructed a 10-foot-high ball of twine, wood and tin, covered it with Whig political slogans, and rolled it first from Cleveland to Columbus and then from town to town across the country (hence the expression "Keep the ball rolling").

It seems quaint now, but then it was an act of genius, because it capitalized on the Whigs' brilliant use of their party's primary asset -- the ability to coordinate information on a national scale. They got the entire party on message and then managed the activities of community supporters around the country to pull off the ball stunt. It was, a kind of primitive, analog blog. But in 1840, only a well-organized political organization could have done it.

No longer. Now anyone with a Web site and a server, a satellite transponder and about $100 million can have -- in a matter of months -- much of what the political parties have taken generations to build. Technology, of course, has changed politics before. Television changed the two parties, for example, but it didn't make the parties obsolete. In fact, in the day of Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy, television strengthened the two-party duopoly (the economist's term for a shared monopoly), as only those two parties had the resources to use it competitively.

But the Internet doesn't reinforce the parties -- instead, it questions their very rationale. You don't need a political party to keep the ball rolling -- you can have a virtual party do it just as easily.

And that's what Howard Dean has done. Nor is Dean alone. The same forces make the evangelical right a powerful force in the Republican Party. With its TV stations, membership lists and money, it is a party waiting to happen. When Republicans of more moderate stripes express concerns about the evangelicals "taking a walk" on the party, they are recognizing that underlying reality.

The ability to have "virtual political parties" is the greatest challenge the two parties have ever faced. There are strategies available to them, of course -- deft positioning allows them to preempt competitors, as it does in every industry, and they can use the same technology, although Internet culture doesn't seem readily amenable to either Democrat.com or Republican.com. Being a Democrat or a Republican isn't enough of an advantage anymore -- there are simply too many other places where people can get political information and find political bedfellows in an age of low information costs.

The real question is whether -- really, how -- the two parties, like any other waning duopoly, will use non-market means to preserve their fading power -- by, for example, keeping third-party candidates out of televised debates, making it harder for other parties to get public funding or closing off "open" primaries that invite marauding forms of political organization.

there's something going on and you don't know what it is. do you mister jones?

2003-12-19T09:43:00.000-08:00

Michael Tomasky writes in The American Prospect:

Clinton rebuilt the party ideologically. He shed it of some of its more hidebound ways. Whether one agrees with, say, his support for welfare reform or NAFTA, it must be said that those moves took some political courage insofar as there wasn't much of a natural constituency within the Democratic Party for his positions. Moving something as large as a political party off a marker on which it has stood for a generation or two is no easy thing.

He also rebuilt the party as a fund-raising machine. This, as we know, has had both its good and its ill effects. But whatever the downsides, this rebuilding, too, was necessary. From the stock-market boom to the exorbitant price of gourmet mustards, the 1990s culture was about money. Politics was not immune. The Democrats, always cash-poor compared with the Republicans—and especially so after losing three presidential elections in a row—needed to join the financial big leagues to be able to compete.

But there is one way in which Clinton did not rebuild the Democratic Party: from the ground up. Beyond rhetoric, and the occasional action, he didn't really make it a party of the people. He and Al Gore did energize a youth vote in 1992, and he made millions of voters who'd been disaffected feel comfortable voting Democratic again, bringing important states like New Jersey back into the Democratic camp.

. . . If Deanism was, and is, a natural and entirely logical part of a larger historical process—there's still a question: It's the right movement, sure, but is he the right candidate?

The voters, the process and the man himself will tell us that in time. Dick Gephardt, John Kerry and John Edwards would all be perfectly good candidates. Each has an argument. With regard to Wesley Clark, we can't quite say yet whether he'd be a good candidate, though he brings a few qualities to the table whose potential appeal in November is obvious. And goodness knows, if any of the above manages to overcome Dean and become the nominee, he sure will have earned the title.

Unless, that is, he benefited from an insider-driven process designed to block Dean at all costs. At this point, after he has amassed the armies of small donors and bloggers and volunteers, blocking Dean is not blocking one man. It's blocking the hopes of millions of Democrats who—understand the importance of this—would walk through fire for a candidate for the first time in their lives. That isn't something that should be done cavalierly; in the long term, blocking the active participation of these millions may do more damage to the Democratic Party than four more years of George W. Bush.

there's something going on and you don't know what it is. do you mister jones?

2003-12-19T09:40:00.000-08:00

Harold Meyerson reports in the Washington Post:

There are two kinds of Democrats in George W. Bush's America: those who are on the outside and know it, and those who are on the outside and don't. And the peculiar fascination of the Democratic presidential campaign is to watch the interplay between these two groups.

. . . Disastrously, it's been the Democrats in Congress who've been the slowest to pick up on their new marginality. Some of the Democrats who voted to authorize the Iraq war in October 2002 did so -- or say they did so -- in hopes of prodding Bush to embrace a more multilateral approach toward Iraq.

Call this the Tony Blair Fallacy -- both the prime minister and our own legislators failed to realize that Bush wanted only their permission, not their advice. And this year it was Ted Kennedy -- long the wisest liberal head on the Hill -- who calculated that the Medicare bill would grow more palatable the longer it was deliberated. In any previous Congress, that could well have been the case. In this Congress, however, no Democrats are allowed into the deliberations that matter.

Today the Democrats finally have a legislative leader -- San Francisco's Nancy Pelosi, who heads the party in the House -- who understands that dealmaking with the likes of Tom DeLay is a chimera, and that the business of the Democrats is to oppose. The overwhelming vote of House Democrats against the Medicare bill is testimony to her success. Her tenure casts a cold light on that of her predecessor, Dick Gephardt, who, in his eight years as minority leader, never assembled a united opposition to the malignant follies of Gingrich and DeLay.

While the nation's Democratic leaders were unable to understand just how marginal they'd become, however, millions of rank-and-file Democrats and just plain disgruntled Bush-haters intuitively grasped what was going on. Bush was bent on repealing the New Deal and replacing the internationalist order that the United States had erected after World War II with a more nationalist vision of his own. If you weren't with him, you were against him. And he was against you.

Howard Dean's initial appeal has been to those Americans who always knew they were on the margins of George Bush's America. Not the socioeconomic margins, not the African American and Latino communities, but the political, cultural and existential margins -- the young, urban, white middle class in particular. Dean's are the people who were bowling alone -- not churchgoers, not union members. They shared a set of beliefs on which they'd never before had an opportunity to act collectively.

The secret of Dean's success has been twofold. Alone among the serious Democratic candidates he understood that the party was shirking its obligation to oppose -- indeed, that the grass roots was furious at the failure of its leaders to realize this. Second, his campaign became the real Meetup for millions of Americans who'd had no place to go to affect politics in the age of Bush. Dean's edge is that his campaign has provided thousands of young Deaniacs with a dimension of meaning that their hitherto disaggregated lives may have lacked. No other candidate is within light-years of offering that.

there's something going on and you don't know what it is. do you mister jones?

2003-12-19T09:37:00.000-08:00

Adam Nagourney reports in the NY Times:
HANCOCK, N.H., Nov. 30 -- The sun was setting over the wooded hills of western New Hampshire as David Steinberg, 22, a Columbia University student from Baltimore, asked 12 local Democrats to gather their chairs in a circle. Mr. Steinberg proceeded to tell his story -- of how he deferred law school to come here to work for Howard Dean -- and asked the others to ''share a little bit.''

For 90 minutes the rural New Hampshire residents talked about their political passions, their views of the presidential race, and, most of all, their thoughts and concerns about Dr. Dean.

With little notice, the Dean campaign will, sometime this week, log its 1,000th neighborhood meeting like the one that took place here Sunday at the home of Jim and Polly Curran, two of Dr. Dean's earliest supporters. These sessions are led not by the candidate, but by paid out-of-state coordinators trained by experts in community organizing.

The meetings are designed to create a foundation of supporters with an intense personal commitment to a candidate that political consultants say cannot be created with a television commercial and that will be resistant to attacks on Dr. Dean by his opponents.

This show of organizing prowess is a tribute to the past and a nod to the future. These are the same methods that were used to organize farm workers in California 25 years ago. Mr. Steinberg is one of 45 Dean coordinators trained by, among others, Marshall Ganz, a Harvard University sociologist who helped pioneer these methods in 16 years with the United Farm Workers.

''The very first get-out-the-vote I learned to do from Cesar Chavez,'' he said. ''House meetings were the No. 1 organizing approach that we learned to use in the farm workers.''

. . . Rebecca Hutchinson, a former state representative, said that at the first house meeting she held last summer in Deerfield, she drew 150 people. Since then, she said, there had been six house meetings in the town, which has a population of 3,600

''There is so much activity happening without the candidate -- that's what is different,'' she said. ''It works. It's phenomenal.''

Mr. Ganz said the Dean campaign was particularly suited to this organizing model -- not only because of the unusual intensity of its supporters, but because of a campaign organization that, so far at least, seems eager to take chances. He said he had been startled when Dr. Dean's campaign aides turned to him for help.

''It blew me away,'' he said. ''They are open to learning. At least they seem to be. They don't seem to be -- 'Oh yeah, we've got it all figured out,' like the insider pros.''

there's something going on and you don't know what it is. do you mister jones?

2003-12-19T09:31:00.000-08:00

Lawrence Lessig interviews Joe Trippi:

T:. . . The response we are getting and the ideas that come off of it are just amazing. The comments section is just such an amazing thing. Little things you never would have thought of: Zephyr [Teachout] came up with the idea of having a poster that was downloadable and printable for each state, with a goal of getting a million of these posters put up — for example, "New Hampshire for Dean" — as a way to get visibility going. We put that up with the links of all fifty states and immediately afterwards, one of the first comments was, "I'm registered to vote, I'm working overseas in London, there's a lot of American expats here, and you know, you really, I'd love to have an Americans Abroad for Dean poster that I can put up and that my friends overseas can put." Two minutes later another post comment was, "I'm in Spain, and you guys shouldn't forget about us, you should do Americans abroad."

This is my 7th presidential campaign, but in every other campaign, the campaign never would have known that it had screwed up by not just creating the fifty-first sign. It's a small thing, but within ten minutes we had an "Americans Abroad" poster up with the rest, blogged about it, said, "hey, you're right, you caught that." And then right after that, someone posted, "Hey, you know, Puerto Rico's not a state, but it votes for President of the United States — votes for the nominee — and there's a lot of us down here, could you make a Puerto Rico for Dean sign?" All this is happening in the space of an hour.

There's this interaction going on between the campaign and every hole that we haven't plugged, or thought about. They're plugging it for us and saying, "Hey, you forgot this, you need one of those," and we're building them on the spot and putting them up for everybody to download.

I used to work for a little while for Progeny Linux Systems. I always wondered how could you take that same collaboration that occurs in Linux and open source and apply it here. What would happen if there were a way to do that and engage everybody in a in a presidential campaign?

L: So is this an open-source presidential campaign?

T: Yes. That moment when that was all going on made me think, "That's sort of what we're building here." I guess it's about as open as you can do it in modern-day politics.

. . . L: So let's say I'm a campaign manager of a different presidential campaign, and I say to you, look, I've got an email list that is ten times the size of your blog list, and I accept feedback, people can send me email back telling me where I screwed up. Why is what you're doing better than what I'm doing, if my list is ten times bigger than yours?

T: One, it's faster — sometimes almost in real-time, if you sit there and read the comments while you're doing it. You can really talk-out the ideas.

But I think more importantly, there's a sense of community that forms around the blog. That's really what the Net is about. It's about building a community. There may be zillions of communities within the Net, but you know, your own community builds around that blog.

L: So it's a community because people are both reading and writing at the same time about these ideas?

T: I think they're both reading and writing the ideas, but the other thing is that there is a sense of community. There's a sense of, "We're part of each other, and we're trying to find our way." No matter whether it's an issue of importance to the campaign or the nation, we're all exchanging these ideas in common cause — except for the trolls, of course.

L: Let's talk a bit about the trolls. If I'm a traditional campaign manager, the first thing I'd say is, "My God, you're giving up control here, and look what you're going to face: you're going to face a world of trolls and how are you ever going to get over that?" How do you answer the trolls?

T: Well, actually, they came up with that ingenious thing over at the blog. They actually created a Dean Team. We have a team-raiser thing where you can contribute money, and they created a "troll team-raiser," Dean-raiser, so that any time a troll comes on, everybody automatically goes and contributes to the troll Dean-raiser account. It's actually been pretty effective. Thousands of dollars have been raised because of the trolls. And this is no joke. It's not one of those things where they go, "Oh, a troll, everybody go pay the troll Dean-raiser." They actually go do it. So if you come on our blog and trash Dean, what you've done is help him raise $500 that half hour. So that's done some job in discouraging them

But in terms of the control thing: that's one of the reasons I don't think the other campaigns are having any success on the Internet. This is my 7th presidential campaign. In all of them, everything I ever learned was that you're supposed to have strong community control — military command over everything in the organization. You give commands to your state directors who give it to the county directors who order the precinct captains around.

I've worked with enough tech involving the Net to know that you will absolutely suffocate anything that you're trying to do on the Internet by trying to command and control it. It's hard to let go, but you know, we've decided that's what we were going to do. I don't think the other campaigns can do that.

There are a number of reasons this thing's working for Howard Dean. First, Howard Dean is who he is. He's different than these other guys. He's open, makes decisions based on facts, and really does believe that this is about engaging people in their democracy again.

Second, the campaign says, "Okay, we're willing to put the bat in people's hands, or put the blog in people's hands, and let them help us get there."

And third, regardless of where you are in healthcare, regardless of where you are on copyright or any of the issues that we've got out there, unless people stop complaining about them and actually get engaged in the democracy — unless this campaign can get them to participate in it — almost regardless of what our position is, there's no way those issues are ever really going to get addressed and solved. Because right now, in the end, it's all about the money.

This campaign is trying to say, "Look, you can do this differently. It doesn't have to be about the 33 lobbyists for every member of Congress in Washington. People actually have the power to engage and make a difference."

I think our blog helps do that. People get involved. They're actually participating in the campaign. And to the extent we keep building this community, then even people with positions different from the Governor understand that we're building this together. So that when we get into the White House, you know you're going have a fair hearing, and that we're actually going to have a discussion about some of these issues.

. . . That's one of the things this campaign really is about: the Governor believes strongly, and we believe strongly, that there's a responsibility for citizens to be involved in their democracy. You can't have self-government without it. That what's been missing for a good 2-3 decades now. It isn't something George Bush made happen. He's just put a magnifying glass on what we've lost.

What we need to do is to get people to participate in their democracy again. If people did that, and if thousands of them take small actions — a few hours of their time, a few dollars out of their wallet — there's a real chance that when a candidacy like ours wins the White House, the people will actually own their government again. And we'll actually have an honest discussion about all the issues that always get ground-down by the powers that don't want them to be raised.

We're trying to do a campaign that's on a different level than your standard presidential campaign — that's more than two people screaming at each other about who has employer mandates in their healthcare plan or not.

L: So when the Democratic Leadership Council attacks your campaign, are they attacking your campaign because they're not comfortable with this form of democracy?

T: Yes. I really think that's a good part of it. I think the one reason we have so much opposition — even within our own party — is because they like being in charge. They like it the way it is, or at least, too many of them do. And they're actually afraid of what would happen if people actually gave a damn again and started becoming involved and actually demanded that issues like healthcare got addressed without special interests whacking it down.

So yes, I have come to believe that a large part of why the DLC attacks Howard Dean so vehemently has a lot more to do with the power of what they're saying this campaign is about. They're not real thrilled with it.

. . . There is some natural cynicism about whether he really does mean it. Is he really for real? Or is he just one of those other guys?

Our campaign strives every day to make clear that that's not the case. But that's the other thing the blog does. Every day, day-in and day-out, you go over there, you can check what's going on, and you get that human feeling for the people who make up this campaign. For who and what they are. And somewhere along the line you hope that when you have that kind of connection, the people will begin to realize, "You know what? Maybe they really are different. Maybe this campaign really is different."

How you would get that over on a sort of flat, wallpapered website, I don't know. But on a blog, there can actually be that depth of a connection with people, as they communicate and exchange ideas together over months and months.

At least, I hope so, anyway.

L: So you believe the actual architecture of the blog is something that is enabling a deeper engagement with these issues than the television or the standard way?

T: Yes, absolutely. I really believe that there's a deeper connection on the blog for the exchange of ideas than I think you get over television or just a flat website.

L: One more question. Let's talk about the money issue. Just what are the numbers now? What are the averages that you are seeing? Has the success been a surprise, or did you expect it? And talk about the Cheney lunch.

T: On the numbers: We're up to 224,000 signing up to support Howard Dean.

On the Cheney lunch: the Vice President had something like 125 people who gave him $2000 each, for a total of $250,000. We had 9700 people, giving roughly $53 on average, totaling $508,000.

But there were a couple things that surprised us. We really didn't have much doubt that our supporters would respond to that and meet the 250,000. But we never thought it would happen as fast as it did. We weren't even sure that half the people would open their email, and even know that we were doing it. We thought a lot of people would go away for the weekend, get back, and not even know the thing happened, because of how late we sent the email out on Friday. So we were surprised by that.

On the other hand, yes, I think we knew the whole time that we'd been building this not for the money. That was the interesting thing. We've really been building this from Day One because we believed it wasn't enough to organize something on the Net. We wanted people to organize, to use the online community, to organize in their offline community. And we've seen amazing, absolutely amazing, things there.

We had, for example, an email list of 481 people in Austin and we emailed them and said "We're coming." We get to the event, and there are 3200 people there. The reason there are 3200 people there is that those 481 people went out, downloaded flyers, leafleted the Latino community, leafleted polling places for a city election that was occurring, made phone calls, and did all those kind of things on their own.

This happens all the time. In Seattle, we showed-up and there were 1200 people, half of whom have never been involved in politics before, all organized by small groups of people who had come to the blog, or somehow used our organizing tools, but are all part of this Dean community that we're building.

. . . Who can argue with $508,000 coming in over a $3 turkey sandwich?

there's something going on and you don't know what it is. do you mister jones?

2003-12-19T09:23:00.000-08:00

Andrew Boyd reported this summer in The Nation:

. . . if Seattle was the birth of this new kind of organizing, last February 15's global peace demonstration marked its coming of age. That day, some 400,000 people turned out onto the streets of New York to protest Bush's impending war on Iraq, and close to 10 million more turned out in cities across the globe. It was arguably the single largest day of protest in world history; the New York Times dubbed its participants "the other superpower."

The day sent a clear message about the grassroots organizing power of the net: It enabled the antiwar movement to turn out its base quickly and cheaply, do an end run around corporate-controlled media and reach into the politically disaffected American mainstream. The coming months and years will test how deeply the new movement can tap this potential, and to what extent "nets roots" organizing will be adopted by more established political players, liberal and conservative alike.

Given this deepening embrace of the net by movement culture, it is fitting that the website of United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), the national coalition at the heart of the February 15 protest, not only anchored the massive mobilization but preceded the existence of the organization and helped it to coalesce. In December, UFPJ did not have an office or a paid staff. The website, however, was already a one-stop shop for the many disparate strands of the peace movement. Launched the previous October, it was getting hundreds of thousands of hits a day.

"At the beginning, we had almost no money, not even enough to do a major mailing," says L.A. Kauffman, a staff organizer for UFPJ. The Internet allowed UFPJ to start serious organizing with only $5,000 to $10,000. "We pulled off a demo in five weeks that would normally take five or six months," she says.

Providing one place for UFPJ's hundreds of member organizations to list their actions and report their activities, the website quickly became an antiwar hub. Organizers put campaign materials and action kits online, and 15,000 copies of the February 15 flier were downloaded. People could easily find and plug into local peace activities in their towns or states, and time local events to coordinate with broader efforts. In the end, 793 protests happened around the world on that day, including more than 200 across the United States and Canada, with paid organizers put to work only on the biggest, in New York. All the others were self-organized by UFPJ affiliates--local church, labor and peace groups who used the website to facilitate their own coordination.

When I asked Leda Dederich, UFPJ's web director, where her organization would be without the Internet, she said, "Mostly, we wouldn't be."

A follow-up demonstration, on March 16, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, was even more a creature of the web. A wave of candlelight vigils, following the dusk west across the Earth, involved an estimated 1 million people in more than 6,000 gatherings in 130 countries and every state in the nation. This global action was put together in even less time--six days--by an organization with only five staff people, MoveOn. What MoveOn did have was a nearly 1.5-million-person e-mail list and a piece of web software known as "the meeting tool."

The meeting tool allows anyone anywhere to propose a meeting time and place in his or her own neighborhood--and makes it easy for others to sign up. The day before that Sunday in March, I went to the MoveOn website, entered my ZIP code and learned that three vigils had been scheduled in my neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn, including one outside the apartment of prowar Senator Chuck Schumer. The website told me how many of my neighbors had signed up for each. It was already well into the hundreds, and I made it one more.

That Sunday evening, I joined 1,500 of my neighbors. Someone handed me a candle and lit it for me; at some point a rabbi and a pastor spoke to the crowd. But otherwise, there was no obvious leadership, and it didn't seem to matter. There had been no meetings, no leaflets, no clipboards, no phone calls--we were all there, essentially, because of an e-mail we trusted.

. . .By now, many well-funded advocacy groups (Common Cause, Environmental Defense) have developed e-mail lists topping 100,000, which they typically use to run traditional, tightly controlled campaigns, using e-mail as they would direct mail or a phone bank to mobilize their base to lobby legislators. Within the more radical global justice movement, on the other hand, there are a multitude of resource-poor grassroots groups whose e-mail lists are relatively small (5,000 to 50,000), but who use their websites to foster self-organizing--putting their organizing kit online and trusting their activist base to run with it. "What MoveOn has done," says Tom Matzzie, 28, the AFL-CIO's online mobilization manager, "is to bring the core elements of these two models together for the first time." MoveOn has a huge list that it carefully manages, and it also provides web tools that enable members to organize themselves. In the past eight months, as antiwar organizing exploded, their membership more than doubled, to a global total of more than 2.1 million.

A good e-mail list is not something you can buy or borrow. "Every MoveOn member comes to us with the personal endorsement of someone they trust," Pariser says. It is word-of-mouth organizing--in electronic form. E-mail is cheap, fast and easy to use, and it has made mixing the personal and the political more socially acceptable. Casually passing on a high-content message to a social acquaintance feels completely natural in a way handing someone a leaflet at a cocktail party never could.

This "tell a friend" phenomenon is key to how organizing happens on the net. It gives people who feel alienated from politics something valuable to contribute: their unique credibility within their particular circle of acquaintances. A small gesture to these friends can contribute to a massive multiplier effect. It is a grassroots answer to the corporate consolidation of media, which has enabled an overwhelmingly conservative punditry to give White House spin real political momentum, and the semblance of truth, simply through intensity of repetition.

MoveOn is often criticized from the left for not attempting to build permanent local structures or on-the-ground leadership. "They're great at getting new people involved, but it's not true self-organizing," says UFPJ's Dederich. The criticism is fair, but MoveOn's strength lies elsewhere, in providing a home for busy people who may not want to be part of a chapter-based organization with regular meetings. And given what MoveOn is doing--activating people on two or three different issues at a time, often for short durations as legislative targets change--it's hard to imagine a more appropriate model. By combining a nimble entrepreneurial style with a strong ethic of listening to its members--via online postings and straw polls--MoveOn has built a responsive, populist and relatively democratic virtual community.

. . . According to Pariser, most MoveOn members do not define themselves as activists. Rather, MoveOn is often their first step into political action--and what brings them to take that step is usually an e-mail message. "A lot of 'Take action now' e-mails feel like they were written by a focus-group e-newsletter robot," says Madeline Stanionis, who as a senior consultant for San Francisco-based Donordigital has developed scores of online advocacy campaigns. "MoveOn e-mails feel personal and fresh. They write from their hearts." The e-mails about the global vigil came directly from Pariser. His voice was strong yet level-headed. There were no ideological digressions. He got to the point early and kept it action-oriented. It was easy to trust.

Pariser says he crafts his messages with an eye toward taking MoveOn members on a journey, by providing a narrative that connects them to an ongoing social movement. As each campaign proceeds, short e-mail updates ("50,000 of you have already signed up...here's a typical response from a schoolteacher in New Mexico...") build excitement and a sense of community. This feedback loop is an example of how the Internet, when well used, can extend the shoulder-to-shoulder solidarity one feels on the street to fellow participants across the nation and around the globe.

. . . Dean enthusiasts have made great use of a free web service, meetup.com (a commercial cousin of MoveOn's meeting tool). It allows users to identify and then meet face to face with like-minded locals who might share an interest in knitting, motorcycles or, say, Howard Dean for President. Anyone who joins a meet-up can volunteer as a "host," someone who shows up a half-hour early to meet and greet. Members vote on a public venue for the get-togethers from a preapproved list in their area.

Tim Cairl, 28, a financial consultant whose only previous political involvement had been to call his Congressperson a few times when prompted by MoveOn, put himself forward as host of the Atlanta Dean meet-up when it was first coming together. In March, forty-two Dean fans crowded together in the back room of a downtown restaurant. The group was mostly white but ranged widely in age and occupation; the majority were new to political involvement of any kind. The typical attendee--upset about the war, and curious about Dean after seeing him on TV--had browsed his campaign website, and then found her way to meetup.com. "Meetup.com gets us in the same room," Cairl says. "We have to take it from there."

The feeling was social, almost fraternal. The agenda was simple: introductions, then, What do we like about Dean? What should we do? What the group did, given that no campaign organization yet existed in their late-primary state, was create one, appointing county leaders, scheduling tabling and showing up to local Democratic Party meetings. Subsequent meet-ups became a way to funnel new volunteers into this work; attendance grew to sixty-five in April, 150 by May, and soon meetings sprang up in cities across Georgia. Nationally, the 500 people who had signed up for Dean meet-ups in January grew to 60,000 by mid-July.

Trippi says traditional campaign structures run on a military model--from the national campaign director down to local precinct captains--are deadly for an Internet strategy. Indeed, the more typical Kerry and Edwards campaigns have only 5,600 and 1,000 members, respectively, on meetup.com. "The other campaigns see this Internet activity as chaos. They can't control it, so they don't want to waste time on it. We trust our members to be good representatives of their own views. Instead of trying to control the chaos, we feed it and give it a little direction."

Matzzie says all this activity is impressive, but could prove irrelevant in the general election if it doesn't take place in the right precincts. He notes that in 2002 only 94,000 well-placed votes would have given the Democrats control of Congress. He quotes recent studies from Yale's Institution for Social and Policy Studies showing that e-mail on its own--just like direct mail and commercial phone banking--does not increase voter turnout. "Anyone who gives you his e-mail is already with you," says Matzzie. "The trick is to get those people to talk to their neighbors, friends and colleagues offline. Those are the people we need to mobilize." He's been growing the AFL-CIO e-mail list by hundreds of thousands in the past few months with this goal in mind. But he'll combine online work with shoe leather and door-knocking. Stanionis says the discussion among online advocacy experts is similar--how to get beyond the just-send-an-e-mail consumer model to "escalate the ask" and achieve more real-world involvement.

. . . Although it replaces some organizing structures (e-mail makes for a far better phone tree than phones ever did) and invents whole new ones, like the campaign web hub or the meeting tool, the Internet is no silver bullet. But what organizing tool ever is? Rather, contemporary social movements will, more and more, straddle both worlds, in a synthetic feedback loop, at once real and virtual, online and off.

Last December in South Korea--the most densely wired country on the planet--a grassroots revolt streaming rich media across high-bandwidth connections helped elect an outsider human rights activist as president. Where will our own Internet-fueled movements take us?

In the first month after MoveOn installed its meeting tool on the Dean campaign website, supporters self-organized more than a thousand local events--testament, perhaps, to the stirrings of a democratic revival, in which large swaths of disaffected Americans are finding forms of political participation that feel fulfilling, effective and connected. MoveOn's Zack Exley asks us to imagine a political landscape, five years from now, with fifty MoveOns, each tapping different political currents, with a whole new ability to mobilize grassroots power. In June, United for Peace and Justice announced plans for a protest during the Republican National Convention in August 2004. But unlike the Philadelphia demonstrations in 2000, this protest will go global. Such plans are a sign of activists' growing confidence, post-February 15, in the potentially explosive convergence of common global concerns and the wide reach of the Net.

there's something going on and you don't know what it is. do you mister jones?

2003-12-19T09:16:00.000-08:00

Michelle Goldberg reports in Salon on MoveOn's success:

On Nov. 21, the Republican National Committee unveiled the first ad of the Bush reelection campaign, rebuking Democrats for criticizing the president's handling of Iraq. It begins with a clip from Bush's last State of the Union address, in which Bush warns of the catastrophes that terrorists may sometime unleash. Then words flash across the screen: "Some are now attacking the president for attacking the terrorists." Conflating the war in Iraq with the war against al-Qaida, its message is clear: Bush's opponents are soft on terror.

Within hours, MoveOn e-mailed its members, seeking $500,000 to counter the Republican spin. "When Republicans equate the war on Iraq with the war on terrorism, we'll remind the public of the truth," said MoveOn's message. "When Republicans raise money from wealthy donors and corporate CEOs to attack the Democrats, we'll raise it with hundreds of thousands of small contributions from people across America ... Today, we can show the GOP what they're up against. They're paying $100,000 to run their ad. Together, we can raise $500,000 today to run ads that get out the truth in key battleground states."

In five hours, they raised half a million dollars for the MoveOn voter fund.

"They get things done," says Todd Gitlin, the veteran activist and Columbia University professor. "They raise money, they hold straw votes, they're constantly dreaming up practical activities that have a constituency."

Though Gitlin says MoveOn has taught progressives about the Internet's potential, it's gained respect and influence in the Democratic Party the old-fashioned way: by raising cash. "The big watershed for them was the proof that they could raise piles of money before the midterm elections," says Gitlin. "They raised millions within a few days in various selective Senate races. After Paul Wellstone [the U.S. Senator from Minnesota] died, they were raising piles of money for [former Vice President Walter] Mondale. They demonstrated they could raise six-figure sums in a day or two. A few months later, they demonstrated they can be instrumental in organizing demonstrations. They were the force that organized the candlelight vigils [against the Iraq war]. That was international. They've straddled the discourse of mainstream politics and the discourse of outsiders. They seem to be both insiders and outsiders. That appeals to those who are both moralists and hardheaded."

. . . MoveOn's genius for drawing strength from right-wing attacks mirrors that of the Howard Dean campaign, with which the organization is often associated. Earlier this year Zack Exley, MoveOn's organizing director (and the creator of the infamous anti-Bush site "GWBush.com") took a two-and-a-half-week leave of absence to work on Dean's Internet campaign. MoveOn says the group volunteered to help other Democrats as well, but only Dean's people accepted the offer. Now the Dean campaign has grown to echo MoveOn in style and strategy. When MoveOn jumped on the Republicans' attack ad to raise money, Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi had the same idea. He sent out an e-mail to the 503,000 people on Dean's mailing list, lambasting the "fear-mongering that George Bush and Karl Rove are going to use" and appealing for funds to counter the Republicans. "Our goal," he wrote, "is to raise $360,000 by Tuesday at midnight -- $5,000 for every hour they are going to lie to the American people with their ad."

They didn't have to wait until Tuesday -- by noon on Monday, they'd reaped $395,640. And while MoveOn will use its $500,000 as part of a general campaign to expose what it sees as Bush's deceptions, Dean's ad takes on the Republican commercial directly. It mimics the Bush spot, showing the president giving the State of the Union address. This time, though, a narrator says, "He misled the nation about weapons of mass destruction." Then the scene changes to Dean on the campaign trail, and the ad says, "Howard Dean is committed to fighting terrorism and protecting our national security. But Howard Dean opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning. He believes it's time we had a foreign policy consistent with American values. And it's time to restore the dignity and respect our country deserves around the world."

John Kerry ran a similar response, with a commercial that makes use of footage of Bush in a flight suit. "George Bush's ad says he's being attacked for attacking the terrorists," says the spot's narrator. "No, Mr. President, America's united against terror. The problem is, you declared, 'Mission accomplished,' but had no plan to win the peace and handed out billions of contracts to contributors like Halliburton."

Both messages were similar, but the dynamic behind them was different: By mobilizing its supporters to fund such ads, Dean's campaign makes them feel like they're talking back to Bush. "This is a new kind of democracy happening right now," says Tiffany Shlain, the founder and director of the Webby Awards, the Internet version of the Oscars. Last year, MoveOn won the Webby in the politics category. Both MoveOn and the Dean campaign, says Shlain, "are tapping into a whole new group of people who weren't involved with politics because they didn't feel like they had a voice. They're making people feel like they can make a difference, and that's real and that's big."

"The hardest thing to get across to the political establishment is that this is not just another set of tools you use to manipulate constituencies and tap them for money," says Boyd. "This has to be seen as a way to engage constituencies and engage in a two-way conversation."

. . . Their sense that American politics had run off the rails began during the impeachment, but was driven home after the 2000 election. During the recount, the right mustered mobs, but Democrats were oddly quiescent. Gitlin, the Columbia professor, held a count-the-vote rally the Monday after the election at Manhattan's Federal Building. At its peak, there were 300 people.

MoveOn was among those that failed to act. "We totally blew it," Boyd says now. The reason wasn't a lack of passion -- it was a kind of disbelief that American democracy could go so awry.

"There was tremendous energy within our base, but we didn't engage because I thought for sure that the system would work, that the wheels would turn and a fair result would be found, and I was wrong," he says. "And we now know that the system, to be fair, has to be people screaming on both sides."

. . . Of course, MoveOn runs plenty of campaigns that don't ask anything more of users than sending e-mail or making donations, but the group also engages people in deeper ways. One obvious example is the "Bush in 30 Seconds" campaign, which allows MoveOn to freely draw on the creative energy of thousands while giving average Americans a chance to enter a process previously open only to campaign professionals.

"We're NOT looking for the same old slick political ads from Washington media consultants," says the contest Web site. "Instead, we're looking for really creative ads that will engage and enlighten viewers and help them understand the truth about George Bush."

Contestants e-mail their spots as digital files. They'll be posted on MoveOn's site, where users will vote on them. Judges will make their final decision from among the top-rated entries.

MoveOn is also moving into the kind of face-to-face community building pioneered by MeetUp.com and the Dean campaign. It's encouraging its members to hold thousands of house parties across the country on Dec. 7 to screen Robert Greenwald's documentary, "Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War." The film, becoming a key liberal account of the administration's duplicity, is sold or given away with membership dues on progressive Web sites, including John Podesta's Center for American Progress and AlterNet. Guests at these parties will be able to join a conference call with the director and submit questions for him online. "This'll be fun, but it's also strategic," says an e-mail from MoveOn to its members. "Coming together, we'll strengthen the MoveOn community. This is also a great way to get the word out -- you can invite friends and co-workers who aren't yet part of MoveOn."

. . . Given its scope and the nearly infinite number of projects it could undertake, there's very little division inside MoveOn or sniping outside it. Partly, this is because its membership has such a large role in setting the group's agenda. In June, MoveOn asked its members to interview each other about what values and issues were important to them. About 20,000 participated, interviewing each other by phone, producing 10,000 pages of feedback. MoveOn then hired a linguist to parse the data and figure out which concerns were most widely shared by the membership. The top three were security and Iraq, energy and the environment, and freedom and civil liberties. Boyd says they didn't put them in any order: Iraq was most cited as a top issue, but freedom was most often cited period, and that's where MoveOn has focused its resources. Even the slogan on MoveOn's new T-shirts, "Democracy is not a spectator sport," was chosen democratically: Members submitted more than 700 suggestions, with a vote determining the winner.

It's also no accident that all seven paid MoveOn employees work from home. Boyd and Blades deliberately chose not to have an office, to avoid the cliques that come with any real-world work environment. "You can't have two cultures, an in-person culture and a distributed one," Boyd says, because power will automatically cluster among those working together in the real world. MoveOn thrives in part because it keeps power dispersed.

there's something going on and you don't know what it is. do you mister jones?

2003-12-19T08:58:00.000-08:00

Christopher Hayes reports on the new Progressive 527's for In These Times:

Election Day is a year away and the Democrats don’t yet have a presidential nominee, but for labor activists, environmentalists, pro-choice advocates and other progressives, the battle for the White House is well under way.

About a dozen groups—backed by the likes of Emily’s List, the AFL-CIO, the Sierra Club and MoveOn.org—are quietly building an infrastructure to undertake the most extensive door-to-door grassroots voter contact operation in U.S. history. Its potential to turn the election already is well understood on both sides: Longtime activists say they haven’t felt this energized in decades—and Republicans are using congressional hearings to shut down the operation or steal directly from its playbook.

“It’s never been done before on this level,” says Steve Rosenthal, the former political director of the AFL-CIO and current president of America Coming Together, a voter outreach group funded by Emily’s List, organized labor and private donors such as George Soros. “It’s something that the parties should have been doing but were neglecting.”

Cecile Richards, former chief of staff to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, is director of America Votes, a coalition of 24 progressive organizations that will be coordinating field efforts. She echoes Rosenthal and adds, “For me, personally, that’s the best kind of politics, direct retail, engaging voters about issues. I think it’s a really welcome change and emphasis.”

. . . Each 527 has a specific geographic or demographic niche. America Coming Together, which with a projected budget of $98 million is the largest, is looking to register and educate Democratic-leaning voters in 17 battleground states. Partnership for America’s Families is focusing on registering minority voters in swing state urban centers like Cleveland and St. Louis. And Voices for Working Families is working on registering and contacting black, Latino and women voters in other hotly contested areas such as Dade and Broward counties in Florida.

Alongside groups that will manage and execute the field operations are a few 527s, like America Votes, dedicated solely to coordinating these efforts.

“We want to make sure everyone isn’t knocking over each other in the same neighborhoods,” Richards says. “It’s a big country and there are a lot of voters.”

Nearly all 20 organizations within the America Votes coalition routinely meet to share ideas and strategies. Richards says that groups with more experience, such as organized labor, have been mentoring units newer to the field: “It’s an opportunity for those who are established to work with groups that are newer, that have more flexibility.”

. . . TV ads no longer provide the value they once did.

“Really it’s been the orthodoxy of campaigns for the last 20 years that money for TV is the whole ball game,” says Dan Berwick, an associate at the grassroots consulting firm FieldWorks. “But you can’t cut through all the schlock that’s on TV, so you have to go for quality over quantity and that’s why people are ending up on people’s doors.”

If door-to-door canvassing seems a throwback to the oldest and most basic kind of politicking, the technique has been radically updated. “We’re doing a precinct-level analysis to figure out who the voters are we need to reach and then where they are and how we can talk to them,” Rosenthal says. “We’re using a pretty sophisticated Web-based voter data base and we’re using Palm Pilots so we can load all of the questions to voters into the Palms and then take their responses and hot sync back onto the system at the end of the day.”

By developing a detailed profile of each voter or potential voter’s concerns, organizers can target messages with an unprecedented degree of specificity. “What I think you’ll see is a significant amount of localization of message,” says Laurie Moskowitz, former director of the National Coordinated Campaign and co-founder of FieldWorks. “We’re not just talking about Superfund sites, but Superfund sites in your neighborhood.”

The local message also will be combined with a local face, as groups look toward hiring canvassers from within the communities. Arlene Holt-Baker, who heads up Voices for Working Families, says she’s hoping to channel the energy of local community activists angered by the war and the radical Bush agenda in their canvassing and registration efforts. “We are not sending people in,” she says. “We really believe that the people who are on the ground, the ones who are interested in what’s happening in their communities, are the best people to be going door to door.”

. . . Aside from updating their techniques, the field-oriented 527s are starting their operations earlier than ever before. “In 2002 you saw people paying attention to field, but they didn’t start early,” Moskowitz says. “That’s the biggest difference. The whole realm of activity and planning is going to be so different because people are backing up their timeline.”

Service Employees International Union Local 1199 in New York announced that it would pay the salaries of 1,000 union workers to take a full year’s leave from their jobs and spend the time canvassing in battleground states; America Coming Together began setting up field offices a year ahead of election day; and Voices for Working Families started knocking on their first doors in Florida in mid-November.

“We’re going to have a year’s worth of contact that is layered and meaningful,” Rosenthal says, “as opposed to bombarding people with a lot of mail and prerecorded phone calls that they just turn off to.”

. . . This year’s massive field effort is the culmination of years of efforts by Rosenthal and others to make grassroots politics the center of the left’s political agenda. In the ’90s, Rosenthal, then political director of the AFL-CIO, undertook a concerted effort to reassert labor’s political influence by turning out more union voters. He began a program of sustained voter registration and outreach among union members, and the results were impressive. Between the 1992 presidential election and the election in 2000, the percentage of the electorate who were union household members increased to 26 percent from 19 percent. Over the course of the last eight years, 15.5 million non-union household voters dropped out of the electorate, but 4.8 million more union household voters were added.

“The lessons were pretty basic,” says Rosenthal. “One, we found that when we talked to people about issues they cared about, they responded. Two, when you talked to people face-to-face, as close to where they live as you can get, they responded. Three, when you talked to them a lot over the course of several months, they responded.”

Rosenthal applied what he learned to the 2000 presidential election, where labor’s canvassing and voter contact operations helped Al Gore receive more votes than any other Democratic presidential candidate in history, and is credited with providing the margin of victory in a number of states that he won by less than 10,000 votes.

there's something going on and you don't know what it is. do you mister jones?

2003-12-19T08:51:00.000-08:00

Harold Meyerson reports in the American Prospect on Terry McAuliffe's reorganization of the DNC's machinery:

Working largely under the radar, McAuliffe has actually made the DNC better prepared for a presidential election than it may ever have been. While the innovations in fund raising and communications of Howard Dean's presidential campaign and MoveOn.org have been widely noted, the analogous changes at the DNC have largely escaped attention. So, too, has the ramping up of its 2004 field campaign, which, under the direction of general election strategist Teresa Vilmain, is taking place earlier than ever before.

. . . Indeed, much of the good news for Democrats these days is coming from a variety of organizations (dubbed "527s" in the argot of election law) that have been set up to do the kind of campaign work that, in theory, the DNC used to perform but which the funding restrictions of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law now make impossible. One such piece of good news came in the form of the re-election of Democratic Philadelphia Mayor John Street -- in a state that McAuliffe argues is more important than Kentucky or Mississippi. "We had a very good night in Pennsylvania," he effuses. "We need those 21 electoral votes."

Street's victory was, in fact, a big deal. Two months before election day, polls showed Street to be extremely vulnerable. Then came revelations that the FBI was bugging his office, which unleashed a wave of indignation at John Ashcroft and the FBI within the city's huge black community. But more important in terms of the implications for 2004 was the massive voter-registration drive in black and Hispanic Philadelphia. The first project funded by Partnerships for Working Families, a nationwide voter-mobilization program set up in the wake of McCain-Feingold, registered a stunning 86,000 new voters. In a city of 1.5 million residents, that's mind-boggling. Should it portend equivalent successes for the 527s just now gearing up, the turnout of Democratic base voters in battleground states next year could soar.

. . . "When I came here in 2001, I was horrified," McAuliffe says. "We were $18 million in debt. We were leasing space. We had 400,000 donors; their average age was 76! [At this, DNC Press Secretary Tony Welch interjects that he thinks the age was 67, but McAuliffe is on a roll.] Fifty million people had voted for Al Gore, and I could not go to my desk and pull up one voter from the Gore campaign. Not a single voter file was left in the building. Then, in 2002, I lost 80 percent of our disposable income with McCain-Feingold. So we changed all that."

And, to a large extent, he has. For reasons not just of legal but also of strategic necessity, the big-money guy is cultivating the grass roots. McAuliffe made two critical decisions shortly after he became chairman. The first was to devote major resources to building a small-donor list. The second was to assemble a master voter file, with the names, addresses, voting history and demographic particulars of every one of the nation's registered voters. The Republicans had long since had both.

In his first two, pre-McCain-Feingold years as chairman, McAuliffe retired the $18 million debt and raised an additional $25 million with which he bought and rehabbed a Capitol Hill building that will serve as the party's new headquarters when completed this December, and acquired the technology and the lists to reach donors and voters. The committee's techies dubbed the donor and activist list -- which has grown from 400,000 names to well over a million -- "Demzilla." Already the donations coming in from Demzilla, though they average just $38, bring in enough revenue to cover the DNC's operating expenses. McAuliffe is unsurprisingly bullish on its potential, announcing, "I will raise $100 million on Demzilla!" -- the amount of soft money the party raised in the 2000 election cycle.

Also notable is the DNC's creation of DataMart, its file on the nation's 158 million registered voters. Historically, lists of voters have been kept by state parties, individual campaigns and commercial list vendors. At the end of many campaigns, the results of the phone polling and precinct canvassing that the campaigns have done on voters -- often a pretty fair profile of those voters' politics -- are carted away by consultants or simply trashed. As for the state parties, most have lacked the technical capacity to maintain these lists. DataMart, ideally, will fix all that. "We had 27 million incorrect addresses and phone numbers," McAuliffe marvels. "In Florida alone, 1.6 million were wrong."

As election day loomed in 2002, the DNC was racing to get DataMart in working order, and attempted to use it in two last-minute experiments. In New Hampshire, working with the senatorial campaign of outgoing Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, the DNC developed a profile of a likely Shaheen voter and identified 60,000 of them for outreach. But time ran out before the Shaheen campaign could contact them. In Arizona, the DNC was able to identify areas of Tucson where voters were likely to support the gubernatorial campaign of Democratic nominee Janet Napolitano but where turnout had been historically light. The campaign put late money into Tucson voter mobilization, a move that's credited for Napolitano's victory.

The party has now cleaned up the lists and is making them available -- along with new technology and newly trained technicians -- to the various state parties. Predictably, Democratic state party chairs are among McAuliffe's biggest backers. "Only half our county chairs even had computers," says Denny White, the chairman of the Ohio party. "Now they all have computers with good voter files on them." The battleground states are also on a McAuliffe-accelerated calendar to get their coordinated campaigns -- the field campaigns for the presidential and other party nominees -- up and running. The DNC has directed the parties to do their hiring this winter (historically, hiring takes place in the summer of an election year) so that the coordinated campaigns will already be in place when the party's nominee emerges from the primary process in March.

McAuliffe plans to deliver another gift to the Democratic nominee this spring. The eventual winner, McAuliffe fears, is likely to emerge from the primary season battered and broke. At that point, Bush will have at least $200 million on hand for media buys. "In 2000, Al Gore was dark," McAuliffe thunders, meaning that the vice president ran no television ads because he didn't have the money, "for 92 days!" Such darkness, McAuliffe vows, will not descend on 2004's nominee. "We will have tens of millions in the bank the day we get a nominee. On March 10, or whenever it is, we'll give the nominee $25 million." In the next breath, McAuliffe whittles the figure down to the $18.6 million the law permits the party to transfer. But his point is that such funding has never gone to the nominee "before September or October of election year."

McAuliffe's fund-raising success may have to do less with anything Democrats support than with something -- or someone -- they oppose. George W. Bush has provided more incentive for Democrats to give money to their party than Bill Clinton did. "I'm sitting here with $10 million in the bank," McAuliffe notes. "In the first nine months of 2003, we've outraised our totals for '96 and 2000"(the last two presidential election years). "And that's with a garbled message! When I have a nominee and we got a message, it's gonna be great!"

. . . McAuliffe's critics question more than just his accelerated calendar -- doubting, for instance, whether the DNC's online presence resonates as deeply as it could. "Terry looks at Demzilla as a profit center," says one techie who's worked with the DNC. "Howard Dean's Web site gives his supporters something to do. Somebody in Peoria said, 'I want to build a Peoria for Dean Web site.' The campaign manager said, 'Great.'" At the DNC, there's no such two-way street when it comes to the flow of information. "They mainly want to clean up the state voter files and own the e-mail addresses of registered Democrats," the techie continues. "These are great ideas -- but then what?" The DNC is plainly reaching more Democrats than ever before, but when it comes to creatively engaging its rank and file, it is not in the Dean campaign's league.

there's something going on and you don't know what it is. do you mister jones?

2003-12-19T08:42:00.000-08:00

Gail Beckerman writes on IndyMedia in the Columbia Journalism Review:

New York City's Independent Media Center is just one piece of the rapidly expanding Indymedia movement, a four-year-old phenomenon that grew out of the trade protests of the late 1990s, and now encompasses a constellation of about 120 local collectives from Boston to Bombay. Each collective has a diverse palette of mediums it uses, including radio, video, print, and the Internet. Each is driven by political passions its volunteers don't find in the mainstream press, and each struggles to make the process of covering news as inclusive and empowering as possible for the community in which it exists.

Although the individual collectives have their political and cultural idiosyncrasies, they are united through their Web sites. To join the worldwide collective, a new Independent Media Center must have an online presence. This is the kernel of the experiment, the clearest expression of the movement's vision. The concerns and interests of these activist-journalists are immediately apparent on any of the local Indymedia sites. Go to the Melbourne, Australia, site, for example, for an article about aboriginal elders protesting the dumping of nuclear waste on their land; or to the Washington, D.C., site to read about the USA Patriot Act's many alleged violations of the Bill of Rights; or to the United Kingdom site for a piece titled new eu constitution threatens free education.

The sites all have a similar format and feature a newswire that employs a technology called open publishing. This allows a writer to post a story directly to the newswire from his or her own computer, without going through an editor. Using a simple form on the site, you merely paste in your file, click "Publish," and immediately see a link to your article appear at the top of the Web site's wire.

The open wire usually appears on the right side of the homepage of the local sites, while the center column is reserved for particularly relevant stories off the wire that a committee of volunteers has decided to highlight. The network of collectives also maintains a global site (www.indymedia.org) that pulls content from all the local sites. More than any other element of Indymedia, the accessibility of open publishing has allowed activists from Brazil to Italy to Israel to Los Angeles to answer the revolutionary demand that inspired this grass-roots movement: Don't hate the media. Be the media.

But Indymedia volunteers are also learning that being the media is not so simple. An open, representative form of media may be a worthy ideal, but in reality is often a messy thing. As the collective evolves, the volunteers are faced with difficult decisions many members never contemplated: about their Web site's usefulness, about editorial policy, about money. Whether they thrive or fade into irrelevance will ultimately depend on how well they keep their most extreme tendencies at bay. It won't be easy. Pure democracy can be chaotic, spontaneity can tip into incoherence, absolute independence might just mean poverty.

At their best, Indymedia Web sites serve as a sort of activist bulletin board and a space to report on and support a wide range of left-leaning causes — from environmental extremism and anarchism to fair-trade advocacy and universal health care. One IMC in Urbana, Illinois, for example, relentlessly reported about the detention of a local pro-Palestinian activist, Ahmed Bensouda, who was being held by the Immigration and Naturalization Service after 9/11 for a minor violation. After a few weeks of constant attention, he was released. Because each posting can be followed by potentially endless comments, Indymedia sites have also facilitated difficult debates within the activist community. A graphic photograph posted on the Prague IMC site of riot police being hit with a Molotov cocktail during that city's September 2000 International Monetary Fund/World Bank meeting inspired a contentious online discussion about whether violence was an acceptable form of resistance.

. . . As the WTO meeting neared, a group of Seattle activists began building this "different way" in a 2,500-square-foot space that was donated to the group by a local nonprofit housing advocacy group. It became the first Independent Media Center, a place where reporters could bring their articles, as well as video and radio reports, to be uploaded to a central Web site.

The activist community in Seattle coalesced around this center. Unlike previous efforts to coordinate the often fractious groups, the IMC became an energetic hub of collaboration. "It was like we were high," says Sheri Herndon, forty-three, one of the founding members of Indymedia. "The right people came and we plugged them in. And one of the things that was pretty powerful is that we weren't really fazed about working together. We had a short-term common goal. The smaller differences, you just let them go."

The use of open publishing made the Seattle Indymedia experiment revolutionary, even though the original motivation for the technology was practical. It would take too long to upload all the reporters' accounts manually in one location. The solution came from an Australian computer programmer involved with Indymedia who, three weeks before the protests, adapted an open-source code that enabled the activists to use any computer to simply post accounts or photographs of what was happening on the streets. "With open publishing, your experience of the news is different," says Jay Sand, thirty-one, another of Indymedia's early volunteers. "You really feel like you were there, even more so than TV. On TV, you are seeing one image at a time. Real life is more confusing and this comes through on the IMC site."

The result was a street-level collage of text and image: a photograph of a legion of police in riot gear. An account of a protester whose nose had just been broken. A video of the anarchist group Black Bloc smashing the windows of a Nike store. An analysis of the trade talks over fishing rights happening that day inside the convention hall. An explanation of the cause that drove activists to dress up like sea turtles.

Unwittingly, the Indymedia organizers had found a technology that fit philosophically with their ideas about how to transform the media. Everyone was now empowered to contribute to the creation of the news.

In the four years since the Seattle protests, it wouldn't be farfetched to say that Indymedia has become a brand — although that might not be the word activists would choose. From the time the first Web site was set up, Independent Media Centers have proliferated at a rapid pace, about one new one every eleven days. It soon became clear that the Indymedia format was attractive to activists around the world, not just as a way to cover protests but as a day-to-day accounting of the local and global concerns of social-justice and antiglobalization advocates.

. . . For the newswire, new technology is being developed by the tech geeks to make it easier to sift through the information and find the news a reader is looking for. Instead of deciding which posts are acceptable and which are not, Indymedia volunteers can be librarians, categorizing posts so that at a click one can find everything having to do with bioengineering, for example. The idea is to make the sites easier to use. The next step is to create themed Indymedia sites (about the economy, Israel-Palestine conflict, environment, etc.) that would include all related stories funneled from local sites.

. . . There is a surprising amount of talk about the need to expand the rules and processes and guidelines that govern Indymedia. "The ideal has not been abandoned," Chris Anderson insists. "But the great thing about Indymedia people is that they are not ideologues, they are pragmatists, not hung up on things. They have ideals but are also very practical."

This flexibility will be necessary to confront the challenges that lie ahead. IMCs continue to multiply. A group of young Iraqis are trying to set up one in Baghdad. They have begun work on publishing a newspaper, and British activists are helping the Iraqis with their Web site. A radio station in Amman, Jordan, has sent people to get them started in that medium. All this would have been impossible a few years ago

there's something going on and you don't know what it is. do you mister jones?

2003-12-19T08:35:00.000-08:00

Matt Welch writing on the Blog Movement in the Columbia Journalism Review:

Besides introducing valuable new sources of information to readers, these sites are also forcing their proprietors to act like journalists: choosing stories, judging the credibility of sources, writing headlines, taking pictures, developing prose styles, dealing with readers, building audience, weighing libel considerations, and occasionally conducting informed investigations on their own. Thousands of amateurs are learning how we do our work, becoming in the process more sophisticated readers and sharper critics. For lazy columnists and defensive gatekeepers, it can seem as if the hounds from a mediocre hell have been unleashed. But for curious professionals, it is a marvelous opportunity and entertaining spectacle; they discover what the audience finds important and encounter specialists who can rip apart the work of many a generalist. More than just A.J. Liebling-style press criticism, journalists finally have something approaching real peer review, in all its brutality. If they truly value the scientific method, they should rejoice. Blogs can bring a collective intelligence to bear on a question.

And when the decentralized fact-checking army kicks into gear, it can be an impressive thing to behold. On March 30, veteran British war correspondent Robert Fisk, who has been accused so often of anti-American bias and sloppiness by bloggers that his last name has become a verb (meaning, roughly, "to disprove loudly, point by point"), reported that a bomb hitting a crowded Baghdad market and killing dozens must have been fired by U.S. troops because of some Western numerals he found on a piece of twisted metal lying nearby. Australian blogger Tim Blair, a free-lance journalist, reprinted the partial numbers and asked his military-knowledgeable readers for insight. Within twenty-four hours, more than a dozen readers with specialized knowledge (retired Air Force, former Naval Air Systems Command employees, others) had written in describing the weapon (U.S. high-speed antiradiation missile), manufacturer (Raytheon), launch point (F-16), and dozens of other minute details not seen in press accounts days and weeks later. Their conclusion, much as it pained them to say so: Fisk was probably right.

In December 2001 a University of New Hampshire Economics and Women's Studies professor named Marc Herold published a study, based mostly on press clippings, that estimated 3,767 civilians had died as a result of American military action in Afghanistan. Within a day, blogger Bruce Rolston, a Canadian military reservist, had already shot holes through Herold's methodology, noting that he conflated "casualties" with "fatalities," double-counted single events, and depended heavily on dubious news sources. Over the next two days, several other bloggers cut Herold's work to ribbons. Yet for the next month, Herold's study was presented not just as fact, but as an understatement, by the Guardian, as well as the New Jersey Star-Ledger, The Hartford Courant, and several other newspapers. When news organizations on the ground later conducted their surveys of Afghan civilian deaths, most set the number at closer to 1,000.

But the typical group fact-check is not necessarily a matter of war. Bloggers were out in the lead in exposing the questionable research and behavior of gun-studying academics Michael Bellesiles and John Lott Jr. (the former resigned last year from Emory University after a blogger-propelled investigation found that he falsified data in his antigun book, Arming America; the latter, author of the pro-gun book, More Guns, Less Crime, was forced by bloggers to admit that he had no copies of his own controversial self-defense study he had repeatedly cited as proving his case, and that he had masqueraded in online gun-rights discussions as a vociferous John Lott supporter named "Mary Rosh." The fact-checking bloggers have uncovered misleading use of quotations by opinion columnists, such as Maureen Dowd, and jumped all over the inaccurate or irresponsible comments of various 2004 presidential candidates. They have become part of the journalism conversation.

shazam

2003-12-18T08:39:00.000-08:00

From the Telegraph via the Memory Hole:

John Ashcroft, the US attorney general, has been fined £21,000 for breaking election laws during his defeat by a dead rival for a seat in the Senate. During his unsuccessful campaign in 2000, America's top lawman illegally accepted £62,700 from a body set up to support a run for the presidency, the Federal Election Commission found.

A controversial, deeply religious figure, Mr Ashcroft was standing for re-election as a senator from Missouri. Humiliatingly, he was beaten by an opponent who died in a plane crash before polling day.

His rival's widow, Jean Carnahan, was later awarded the seat. One dissenting Democrat member of the FEC protested against the size of the fine, calling it "so low that I do not believe it adequately reflects the severity of the conduct at issue".

strike support

2003-12-18T08:35:00.000-08:00

From the AFL-CIO Working Families NetworK:

Dear Working Families e-Activist:

More than 75,000 grocery workers will spend this holiday season on the picket line. These brave workers are holding the line for health care and good jobs in the face of stubborn employer greed. They're on strike or have been locked out by their employers, including Safeway-owned Vons, Kroger-owned Ralphs and Albertsons for more than nine weeks now.

That is a long time for these workers and their families to go wthout their regular paychecks or health care coverage and
strike fund savings are running low. But these workers feel their struggle is essential to the well-being and future of
their families.

Maria Lopez, a five-year Vons employee, had this to say about the strike: "I've been out there [on the picket line] for 40
hours a week because I'm fighting for my health benefits. There are a lot of moms on the line. We are afraid to lose our jobs with this strike but more afraid to lose our health benefits if the company gets its way. If one of my kids gets really sick and I couldn't afford the insurance, I wouldn't know what to do."

You can donate to a special strike fund right now by clicking here

cutting the deficit through cutting revenue

2003-12-18T08:27:00.000-08:00

From the San Francisco Chronicle via Delong:

Bush goal of halving federal deficits draws skepticism, derision

President Bush's goal of cutting in half a projected $500 billion federal deficit within five years is being dismissed as too timid by conservatives, unachievable by analysts and laughable by Democrats.

Bush will include the objective in the $2.3 trillion budget for 2005 he sends Congress in February, nine months away from the presidential and congressional elections.... The deficit for the budget year that ended Sept. 30 was $374 billion, the highest ever in dollar terms.... White House officials say to achieve their goal, Bush will rely chiefly on two strategies. He will propose extending tax cuts that would otherwise expire, which they say will spur the economy, and limiting the growth of spending that Congress must approve each year, probably to 4 percent or less.

the potempkin economy

2003-12-18T08:22:00.000-08:00

From Brad Delong:

The Wall Street Journal's David Wessel appears unhappy at the Bush administration's decision that it is time to assume a simulacrum of fiscal rectitude. His main point: Potemkin villages are fine until it becomes time for somebody to try to live in them:

WSJ.com - Capital: ...Is it enough for Mr. Bush -- who stuck with his tax-cutting agenda despite the unanticipated costs of homeland security and Iraq -- to walk out of the White House with a deficit of bigger than 2% [of GDP]? Only if he has taken steps [which he does not plan to do] toward preparing the federal budget to absorb the retirement of the baby-boom generation and the rising cost of government health-care programs for the poor, elderly and disabled. Budget deficits don't kill economies. They disable them over time. The big economic threat isn't this year's deficit. It is the cost of keeping the pension and health-care promises the government has made. Adding prescription drugs to Medicare made the long-run cost bigger, and Mr. Bush has yet to show a strategy for forging a bipartisan consensus on fixing Social Security.

This President specializes in pain-free budgeting. Watch him resuscitate last year's discarded proposal to expand tax breaks for Americans who save. It actually will make money for the government during the first five years by encouraging people to take money from existing retirement accounts and pay taxes on that to move to the new accounts. It will widen the deficit only later -- beyond Mr. Bush's term. Watch him put down a budget in February that avoids estimating the cost of occupying Iraq, deferring that for later "supplemental spending bills." Watch him boast that if you set aside defense and homeland security (56% of annually appropriated spending this year), spending isn't going up much.

This may be smart politics. The chances are small that Americans will take to the streets to protest budget deficits. The chances are great Mr. Bush will bequeath his successor a deficit to fill. But one force could ruin the president's plan: The bond market. For now it's calm. Long-term interest rates haven't risen much despite a rebounding U.S. economy. But what if the Federal Reserve begins to raise short-term rates and the bond market follows...

George W. Bush's people do seem to be betting that the economy will be strong enough to push unemployment down and yet weak enough that rising investment demand won't send interest rates spiking. It is an uncomfortably small needle to be trying to thread--but the alternative would require constructing an economic policy.

loya jirga

2003-12-18T08:15:00.000-08:00

From the World:

Afghan report (4:00)
A bit of chaos erupted in Afghanistan's fourth day of its "Loya Jirga," or "Grand Assembly" which has been called to form a constitution for the country. The hubbub broke out after a female delegate took to the floor, protesting the presence of Afghan faction leaders she blamed for much of the suffering of the country. The World's Lauri Neff reports.

what's wrong with the airline industry

2003-12-18T08:12:00.000-08:00

Q+A - A look at airline troubles
Many airlines are still struggling to climb out of the doldrums brought on by the recent economic downturn and the 2001 terrorist attacks. Host Cheryl Glaser talks with aviation finance expert Richard Gritta about what is ailing the airline industry 100 years after the Wright brothers made their historic flight. Gritta says, over the years, bankruptcy has been an all-too-common destination for many airlines.
Q+A: Host Cheryl Glaser talks with Richard Gritta

daimler chrysler sketchiness

2003-12-18T08:10:00.000-08:00

From All Things Considered:

Kerkorian, Daimler-Benz Battle Over Chrysler
NPR's Robert Siegel talks to James Politi of The Financial Times about an ongoing legal battle between financier Kirk Kerkorian and top financial officers at Daimler-Benz. Kerkorian alleges the German auto giant sought to "take over" Chrysler when the two companies merged in 1998, and that it was not a merger of equals.

There seems to be a pattern here. Daimler Chrysler foxed the UAW with some fine print in the contract negotiated this summer.

glasnost?

2003-12-18T08:03:00.000-08:00

From All Things Considered:

Pentagon Touts TV Feed as 'Unfiltered Resource' on Iraq
The Pentagon is making a television feed of briefings from the Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority directly available to media and government agencies -- programming it calls "an unfiltered resource" for providing "the full news story" to news outlets. So far, however, only C-Span has agreed to pay for the coverage. NPR's Lynn Neary reports.

trade unions in iraq

2003-12-18T07:58:00.000-08:00

From the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions:

Brussels, 16 December (ICFTU Online): An international trade union delegation will hold talks with representatives of Iraqi trade union groupings in Amman, Jordan on 17 and 18 December. 23 representatives of national and international trade union organisations will discuss reconstruction efforts, the rights of Iraqi workers, and the effects of the ongoing violence in the country.

ICFTU General Secretary Guy Ryder, who will lead the international delegation, said “This meeting is an opportunity for us to become better acquainted with the different groups seeking to build a genuine and democratic trade union movement in Iraq, to provide a basis for future international support to the emerging trade unions and to analyse together the problems facing Iraqi workers and the Iraqi people in general. The capture of Saddam Hussein is a welcome development, and a major blow to those who are trying to stop Iraq becoming a democracy. But very serious problems remain. Helping to build a free and democratic trade union movement in Iraq is a key priority for the ICFTU.”

machinist union considers demanding its money back for anti-dean ad

2003-12-17T18:30:00.000-08:00

Howard Kurtz reports in the Washington Post:

Howard Dean's campaign demanded yesterday that his Democratic presidential rivals repudiate an independently financed commercial that uses a picture of Osama bin Laden in attacking the former Vermont governor.

The 30-second ad, being aired by Americans for Jobs, Health Care & Progressive Values, also was denounced by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which has given the organization $50,000. A spokesman called the commercial "despicable" and said the union may ask for its money back.

I reported on this on Monday and called for Terry McAuliffe to step in. Click here to do the same.

2003-12-17T13:48:00.000-08:00

i'm starting to really dislike this guy

2003-12-17T13:42:00.000-08:00

From the Boston Globe:

CAMBRIDGE -- Presidential candidate Joseph I. Lieberman said yesterday that the capture of Saddam Hussein will potentially save hundreds of thousands of American lives.

"The truth is, with Saddam Hussein gone, I believe we have saved the lives of thousands, maybe tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of Americans, who eventually he would have brought to death," he said.

Saddam would have brought to death hundreds of thousands of American lives? What Ian Fleming planet are you living on man?

William Saletan writing in Slate in a piece criticizing Dean's Monday foreign policy speach:

the crux of Dean's case: The real threats to the United States are global terrorism and WMD, and the Iraq war addressed neither. Saddam's terror connections and weapons programs were more than zero but less than what other regimes had. To that extent, the war was a net loss, since it consumed resources that could have been used more efficiently to fight terrorism or WMD elsewhere, and it antagonized countries whose help we needed in those pursuits. Ousting Saddam was good for the Kurds, the Shiites, and probably for the nations bordering Iraq. But it wasn't essential to the security of the United States.

The line that in the speech that draws the most flak afterward is, "The capture of Saddam has not made America safer." But analytically, Dean is right. The people who are safer with Saddam in prison are in Iraq, Iran, and Kuwait. We weren't on the list. I supported the war to punish a scofflaw and put teeth in U.N. resolutions. Bush now defends the war as a rescue mission for oppressed Iraqis. Neither reason has to do with U.S. security.

And Lieberman is wrong again when he calls for a trial for Saddam in the US:

Senator Lieberman said Saddam should only stand trial in a tribunal with the power to impose the death penalty. "This evil man has to face the death penalty. The international tribunal in the Hague cannot order the death penalty," he said on NBC television. "If it can be done by the Iraqi military tribunal, fine. But if it cannot, he should be brought before an American military tribunal and face the death that he has brought to hundreds of thousands of his own people and 460-plus Americans."

It is more important that he is tried in Iraq by Iraqi's than whether or not he is executed.

who are these people

2003-12-17T13:29:00.000-08:00

It seems like some of the haze of spin and stereotype is starting to burn off the Dean campaign:

David Tell writes in the Weekly Standard:

How come it's Howard Dean, of all people, and not someone like . . . well, Gephardt, who appears, weeks and weeks before the first official ballot has been cast, to be running away with the race?

A new polling analysis by the Pew Research Center confirms the anomaly. And rather deepens the mystery, in fact. The ordinary rule of thumb is that people are disposed to "vote their hearts" in early-state presidential primaries. Which is thought to mean that hard-boiled general-election imperatives remain a relatively distant concern in these contests: Iowa and New Hampshire Democrats will be less likely preoccupied with identifying the candidate best equipped to unseat President Bush in November, and more likely, instead, simply to choose the guy whose views most closely match their own. Or so it's expected.

But over the past three weeks, no fewer than seven different reputable and well-known polling outfits have released data indicating that Howard Dean is thoroughly dominating the once-heavily-favored John Kerry in New Hampshire--by a 24-percentage-point average margin. And Pew's research suggests that neither man's views have much to do with it: "Supporters of Dean and Kerry exhibit few issue differences." If anything, on the domestic policy front, which both candidates ritually contend ought to be paramount, a significant number of New Hampshire Democrats, whether they realize it or not, are making up their minds despite the issues; a plurality of Dean supporters, for example, actually disagree with Dean--and agree with Kerry--about the need to preserve some portion of the Bush tax cuts. New Hampshire, then, is not tilting hard toward Howard Dean because people are "voting their hearts," as that phrase is traditionally understood.

Instead, according to Pew, Dean is far ahead of Kerry in New Hampshire, and threatening to snuff out Dick Gephardt here in Iowa, because he enjoys a sizable lead in both states among Democrats "who place a greater priority on defeating Bush." In other words: Dean voters become Dean voters--defying all the standard predictive formulas; on paper, either Kerry or Gephardt would be their party's stronger general-election standard-bearer--because they've convinced themselves that Dean's the winner's bet. Who on earth are these people?

Clay Risen writes in the New Republic:

perhaps the important thing about the speech wasn't what it says about Dean vis-à-vis President Bush, but what it says about Dean's relationship with his own supporters, many of whom embraced Dean as the only antiwar candidate in the early days of the campaign. True, Dean vociferously opposed the war, but the details of his foreign policy views--his support for previous military action, his support for increased military spending--were lost in the roar of antiwar, progressive groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER. All of which raises the question: If Dean is now trying to shed his dovish image, will he end up shedding those supporters as well?

The short answer, if immediate post-speech message-board posts are any indication, is no. "YES! He's outflanking Bush to the right on Saudi Arabia!" wrote one pro-Dean poster on Blog for America, the Dean campaign's official weblog. "Each of the policies outlined by the Governor can put to rest the meme that Gov. Dean is a blanket anti-war 70s liberal. The speech reflected a nuanced and proactive approach to the current situation in the world," wrote another. Indeed, what comes out most in the posts, and more generally in comments by Dean's core supporters on all manner of topics as of late, is that they're even more ideologically flexible than he is. Having judged the former governor and found him pure, they're willing to accept things like a more hawkish foreign policy. "Sorry for those that didn't know but Dean is a centrist," wrote one poster. "I'm not crazy about people that believe that war is an option, but our doctor here will not and would not send troops to awar without looking at all the FACTS and EVIDENCE and deliberately taking TIME to decide."

Also interesting, but only tangentially related -
From the New Republic:
DOES DEAN HAVE A BETTER CHANCE AS AN INDEPENDENT?: Mickey Kaus raises the interesting possibility that Howard Dean could take his impressive political organization and go home (er, run as an independent) should he lose the fight for the Democratic nomination. This leads Kaus to ask, "In a Dean vs. Gephardt vs. Bush race, is it clear Dean would finish third? Not to me."

But why couldn't Dean aspire to more than just not finishing third? We're even tempted to argue that Dean has a better shot of winning the presidency in a Dean vs. Gephardt vs. Bush race than in a Dean vs. Bush race. For one thing, he'd be the only guy in the race who opposed the Iraq war. And, if all the polls taken over the last year are any indication, that opposition puts him on the same wavelength as at least 35-40 percent of the country. That issue alone could win him the presidency.

first we kill the soviets, then we kill each other - afghan warlord

2003-12-17T11:41:00.000-08:00

In the aftermath of Saddam Hussein's capture, the non-Dean Democratic candidates have set up a circular firing squad around Howard Dean. They've gotten the impulse of the aforementioned Afghan warlord backwards and have set about campaigning in a way that will make it nearly impossible for any of them to beat George W. Bush in November.

Which is not surprising, giving that Gephardt, Kerry and Lieberman represent the Democratic leadership that has brought us a Republican House of Representatives, a Republican Senate and a Republican White House. Looking for strategic smarts from any of these guys is like... ah but I rant. Let me explain.

From the New York Times:

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, who supported the war, spent a second day in row hammering Dr. Dean on the Iraq issue, and scheduled a speech for Tuesday in New Hampshire to highlight their differences on national security.

"If he truly believes the capture of this evil man has not made America safer, then Howard Dean has put himself in his own spider hole of denial," Mr. Lieberman said. "I fear that the American people will wonder if they will be safer with him as president."

. . . Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, whom Dr. Dean has criticized during the presidential campaign for voting for the resolution on using force against Iraq, on Monday accused his opponent of shuffling to the center to bolster credibility for a general election.

"We can't beat George Bush by playing politics with foreign policy," Mr. Gephardt told reporters in a campaign swing in Ecorse, Mich. "We've got to stand up for what we think is right. That's what I've always done and that's what I'll always do."

Mr. Kerry, who has been among the fiercest critics of Dr. Dean's statements on the Iraq war, renewed his argument that his military credentials and foreign-policy portfolio make him a better candidate to face President Bush, saying Democrats "deserve more than" a "foreign policy speech written by someone else."

From the New York Times:

DES MOINES, Dec. 16 - Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts attacked Howard Dean on Tuesday as inexperienced, inconsistent and weak on foreign policy, and maintained that Dr. Dean lacked both "the judgment to be president" and "the credibility to be elected president" for asserting that America was no safer because of Saddam Hussein's capture.

QUESTION: If the capture of Saddam Hussein really makes the US significantly safer, who wins the election? A) John Kerry B) Dick Gephardt C) Joe Lieberman or D) George W. Bush ?

ANSWER: You're so smart, you got it on the first try. Of course. The answer is D) George W. Bush.

The only way to compete with George W. Bush on foreign policy is to distinguish yourself from him. Dean has showed the Democrats a way to do this. It consists of two parts.

The first is to continue to hammer away at the fact that for US interests and security, Iraq was unnecessary. It was an invasion based on deception, that has isolated the US abroad at a time when we need all the friends we can get and has energized the militant Islam. It was carried out without the broad international support that it could have had and without the planning that the State Department had spent months developing. The important thing to hammer on here the lack of WMD's or links to Al Queda.

The second way to distinguish yourself from George W. Bush on foreign policy is to outflank him from the right on everything else: staying the course in Iraq and Afghanistan, engaging and disarming North Korea, bringing pressure to bear on Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to join the fight against terrorism domestically. Outflank him on homeland security and the intelligence battle against Al Queda. All of these are crucial issues that have been sidelined by Iraq, which turns out to have had nothing to do with making the US safer.

As usual Joe Lieberman leads the charge in trying to further his career by sinking the Democratic ship. Every time Saddam Hussein's name is said in public, it helps George Bush's chances for reelection.

Look at these numbers from the New York Times/CBS News poll:

SPLIT HALF - ASK EITHER 53 OR 54

53. Do you think removing Saddam Hussein from power is worth the potential loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq, or not?

9/28-10/01 '03 | Worth It 51% | Not Worth It 41% | DK/NA 8%
12/10 - 13 '03 | Worth It 47% | Not Worth It 43% | DK/NA 10%
12/14 - 15 '03 | Worth It 54% | Not Worth It 37% | DK/NA 9%

54. Do you think result of the war with Iraq was worth the loss of American life and other costs of attacking Iraq or not?

9/28-10/01 '03 | Worth It 41% | Not Worth It 53% | DK/NA 6%
12/10 - 13 '03 | Worth It 39% | Not Worth It 54% | DK/NA 6%
12/14 - 15 '03 | Worth It 44% | Not Worth It 49% | DK/NA 7%

Support drops by ten percent just by taking Saddam out of the equation and more people said that the war was not worth it than said it was worth it.

Lieberman at least has been consistent in his support for the war, he really thinks he's right. Kerry is certainly the most pretzelfied of the field. But the problem for all the Democrats who voted for the war is that the capture of Saddam Hussein makes their differences with Bush trivial. Multilateralism, planning, blah, blah, blah BUSH CAPTURED SADDAM FRICKIN HUSSEIN and you didn't. The only response that starts to close the gap with Bush on Iraq is Dean's response: Big deal. Saddam hasn't posed a threat since his statue was toppled and it turns out that he didn't really pose any threat before that. What about the Soviet nuclear arsenal? What about Al Queda in Afghanistan? Saudi Arabia? Homeland Security?

George Bush's approval ratings only jumped 6 points with this news from 52% to 58%. That's still way down from the high 60's, low 70's that he was hitting during the invasion. They are subject to fade awfully fast. The non-Dean Dems keep trying to make this election about foreign policy, when it is going to be won or lost on the economy and jobs. The more they make it about foreign policy in general and Saddam Hussein in particular the greater their chances of ultimate failure.

One more poll result:

3. Which one issue would you most like to hear the candidates for president discuss during the 2004 presidential campaign?

------------------------------------12/10-13 '03 | 12/14-15 '03

Economy -------------------------------- 14 ----------------- 14
War -------------------------------------- 11 ----------------- 3
Jobs and Unemployment ------------- 9 ----------------- 11
Medicare/Medicaid --------------------- 5 ------------------- 5

more lies

2003-12-17T02:00:00.000-08:00

From Florida Today:

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson said Monday the Bush administration last year told him and other senators that Iraq not only had weapons of mass destruction, but they had the means to deliver them to East Coast cities. Nelson, D-Tallahassee, said about 75 senators got that news during a classified briefing before last October's congressional vote authorizing the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Nelson voted in favor of using military force.

Nelson said he couldn't reveal who in the administration gave the briefing. The White House directed questions about the matter to the Department of Defense. Defense officials had no comment on Nelson's claim.

Via Daily Kos

halliburton

2003-12-17T01:58:00.000-08:00

From Salon:

Dec. 12, 2003 | On April 30, 2003, shortly after U.S. forces toppled Saddam Hussein's government, U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld inquiring about evidence that American oil services giant Halliburton Corp. had profited from doing business with countries that sponsor terrorism. He got no response. On Sept. 30, Waxman wrote to Joshua Bolten, the Bush administration's director of the Office of Management and Budget, with concerns about overspending and a lack of oversight in the reconstruction operations in Iraq. He got no response. For almost six months now the California Democrat has been asking the Bush administration to explain why Halliburton, formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney, has been charging what appears to be five times the necessary cost of importing millions of gallons of gasoline from Kuwait into Iraq. To date, the White House hasn't responded.

. . . It's the cost of Halliburton's exorbitant gas contracts that appears to jump completely off the scale. Without more details from the White House, Waxman is at a loss to justify Halliburton's extraordinarily high prices -- as much as $3.06 per gallon, according to his most recent letter of Dec. 10 to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. "At best, I would think it's mismanagement," he told Salon. "But at worst it's government-sanctioned profiteering."

Waxman, the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Government Reform, has coauthored the series of letters to the Bush administration with Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., which cite mounting evidence that Halliburton's 26-cent-per-gallon "markup" on gas trucked in from Kuwait -- on top of an already astronomical transportation cost of $1.21 per gallon -- makes no sense. In a Nov. 5 letter to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Waxman cites energy expert Jeffrey Jones, the director of the Pentagon's own Defense Energy Support Center, who says Halliburton's prices are "extraordinarily high" and "way out of range." Officials at the support center have told Waxman that it is able to import gasoline from Kuwait into Iraq for $1.08 to $1.19 per gallon -- less than half Halliburton's alleged cost.

miami

2003-12-17T01:55:00.000-08:00

From Salon:

"THIS IS NOT AMERICA"

In Miami, police unleashed unprecedented fury on demonstrators -- most of them seniors and union members. Is this how Bush's war on terror will be fought at home?

Editor's Note: This is the first installment of "Lost Liberties," a series of stories that will be published in the months ahead exploring the erosion of civil rights and personal freedom in the United States since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Dec. 16, 2003 | On Saturday, Nov. 22, a few dozen policemen on bicycles rode by the warehouse that activists protesting Miami's Free Trade of the Americas summit were using as a welcome center. The big protest had taken place on Thursday, Nov. 20, and most demonstrators had already dispersed. Some were in jail, others were nursing their injuries. But the cops wanted to deliver a final message to those still around. "Bye! Don't come back here!" shouted one. A pudgy officer gave the finger to an activist with a video camera. "Put that on your Web site," he said. "Fuck you."

the electorate is ours if we play our cards right part three

2003-12-16T22:49:00.000-08:00

I'm finally ready to get this analysis of the New York Times/CBS News Poll done and over with. It's getting really stale and it's not very fun, but I'm stubborn and I want it as resource on the web, even if it's just for me to refer back to.

The analysis of the polling numbers relating to Security were done last Monday and those dealing with domestic issues were done last Tuesday.

RECAP INTRODUCTION

Priorities

3. What do you think is the single most important problem for the government, that is the President and Congress, to address this year?

7/13-16 '02
| Terrorism 17% | Other 17% | DK/NA 14% | Economy 13% | Business Corruption 6% | Education 5% | Jobs 4% | Defense 3% | Healthcare 3% | Poverty 2% | War 2% | Budget Deficit 2% | Medicare/Medicaid 2% | Big Government 2% | Social Security 1%

9/28-10/01 '03
| Other 25% | Economy 16% | Jobs 16% | Terrorism 8% | War 6% | Education 4% | Foreign Policy 3% | Healthcare 3% | Poverty 2% | Budget Deficit 2% | Defense 2% | Medicare/Medicaid 1% | Social Security 0% | Big Government 0% | Business Corruption 0%

If we cluster issues thusly:
National Security (Terrorism, Defense, Foreign Policy) Economics (Economy, Jobs) and Domestics ( Healthcare, Social Security, Budget Deficit, Education, Medicare/Medicaid, Poverty) and filter out categories that are not indicative (Big Government, Business Corruption, War) then the numbers look like this:

7/13-16 '02
National Security 21% | Economics 17% | Domestics 15 %

9/28-10/01 '03
National Security 13% | Economics 32% | Domestics 12%

And today we look at the Economic polling numbers:

6. How about the economy? Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling the economy?

10/25 - 28 '01 | Approve 64% | Disapprove 25% | DK/NA 11%
2/10 - 12 '02 | Approve 38% | Disapprove 53% | DK/NA 10%
03 / 23 '03 | Approve 53% | Disapprove 38% | DK/NA 9%
8/11 - 12 '03 | Approve 36% | Disapprove 52% | DK/NA 12%
9/28-10/01 '03 | Approve 37% | Disapprove 56% | DK/NA 7%

Bush's approval ratings on the economy peaked after 9/11 and then again as we launched the Iraqi invasion. We've gotten mixed signals this month on consumer confidence and the perception of the economy that matters most is in the steel producing and manufacturing swing states where it isn't likely to improve any time soon.

9. How would you rate the condition of the national economy these days? Is it very good, fairly good, fairly bad or very bad?

9/20-23 '01 | Very Good 3% | Fairly Good 50% | Fairly Bad 33% | Very Bad 11% | DK/NA 2%
5/13-14 '02 | Very Good 4% | Fairly Good 62% | Fairly Bad 27% | Very Bad 7% | DK/NA
9/28-01 '03 | Very Good 4% | Fairyl Good 39% | Fairly Bad 37% | Very Bad 19% | DK/NA 1%

The National Economy routinely got 'Good' ratings in the high 80's from February '98 until December '00 ending abruptly with Bush's inauguration in January '01. That included double digit 'Very Good' ratings peaking with a stunning 29% 'Very Good' in May of 2000. It seems unlikely that perceptions will diminish much over the next year but aren't likely to improve. What may happen is that some state governments face extreme budget crises and that is blamed on poor growth and cuts from the Bush tax cuts. It may also be the case that the minimal forward steps that the economy is making will no longer be seen as a good sign and instead will signal disappointment that the economy isn't achieving more.

10. Do you think that the economy is getting better, getting worse, or staying about the same?

9/28-01 '03 | Better 24% | Worse 29% | Same 46% | DK/NA 1%

44. Compared to when George W. Bush took office, do you think the nation's economy is better today, worse today, or about the same as it was when George W. Bush took office?

9/28-01 '03 | Better 12% | Worse 59% | About the Same 26% | DK/NA 3%

That's a pretty big deal.

45. Is your family financially better off today than it was before George W. Bush became president, is it worse off financially or is it about the same as it was before George W. Bush became president?

9/28-01 '03 | Better 18% | Worse 29% | About the Same 53% | DK/NA 1%

46. How serious do you think the current budget deficit is for the country -- very serious, somewhat serious, not too serious or not at all serious?

9/28-01 '03 | Very 50% | Somewhat 36% | Not Too 9% | Not At All 3% | DK/NA 3%

59. Which do you think is a better way to improve the national economy: cutting taxes or reducing the federal budget deficit?

1/19-22 '03 | Cut Taxes 36% | Lower Deficit 56% | Neither 2% | DK/NA 6%
9/28-01 '03 | Cut Taxes 28% | Lower Deficit 59% | Neither 2% | DK/NA 11%

These two questions, 46 and 59 play to Dean's big strength. He needs to link the growing Bush deficits to a slow moving economy and insecurity about the future.

56. Do you have confidence in George W. Bush's ability to make the right decisions about the nation's economy, or are you uneasy about his approach?

4/11-13 '03 | Confidence 54% | Uneasy 42% | DK/NA 4%
5/9 -12 '03 | Confidence 47% | Uneasy 49% | DK/NA 4%
9/28-01 '03 | Confidence 40% | Uneasy 56% | DK/NA 4%

58. Do you think that the reductions in federal taxes enacted since 2001 have been good for the economy, bad for the economy or haven't made much difference?

5/9 -1 2 '03 | Good 19% | Bad 12% | NMD 63% | DK/NA 6%
9/28-01 '03 | Good 24% | Bad 20% | NMD 50% | DK/NA 6%

66. Do you think the Bush Administration has made your taxes go up, go down, or have the policies of the Bush Administration not affected your taxes?

9/28-01 '03 | Go up 29% | Go Down 19% | No Effect 47% | DK/NA 4%

If we look at questions 58 and 66 in tandem, we some some confusing things that suggest most likely a range of nuance understanding and ignorance of the impact of the Bush tax cuts.

Despite the conventional wisdom, deeply ingrained in the American psyche that tax cuts are good for the economy, 70% of the electorate believes that Bush's massive deficit creating tax cuts have been 'Bad' for the economy or 'Not Made a Difference'. How is it that American's are interpreting the tax cuts this way? Are they so dispassionate that they can look at the simple fact that the economy had not been moving and drawn the obivious conclusion?

76% believes that the Bush Administration's policies have either made their taxes go up or had no effect on their taxes. Is this based on a recognition that Federal cuts have pushed up state and local taxes and fees? Or is it simple cynicism, just expecting taxes to always go up / "nothing changes" attitude? I would venture a good bit of both. Whatever the source of these perceptions, they mean that Bush is running a perception deficit on his tax cuts.

62. Do you think the policies of the Bush Administration have increased the number of jobs in the United States, decreased the number of jobs, or have the policies of the Bush Administration not affected the number of jobs in the US?

9/28-01 '03 | Increased 12% | Decreased 51% | No Effect 29% | DK/NA 9%

87. How concerned are you that you or someone else in your household will lose their job in the next year? Are you very concerned, somewhat concerned, not very concerned, or not concerned at all?

9/28-01 '03 | Very 26% | Somewhat 18% | Not Very 22% | Not at All 33% | DK/NA 1%

These numbers have held fairly steady back to May. That's how far back they go.

2003-12-16T10:21:00.000-08:00

i know i can beat george bush in missouri

2003-12-16T09:56:00.000-08:00

David Tell writing in the Weekly Standard has consistently written the best campaign trail coverage this year. This week he covers the Gephardt campaign:

He has remained characteristically optimistic in public, however. And having now seen the post-AFL-CIO-"setback" version of his Iowa campaign firsthand, I'm not sure he isn't right to be. AFSCME and the Service Employees are unions representing public-sector employees, who have relatively secure public-sector jobs, and whose principal worry is consequently that their relatively generous public-sector job benefits might one day be reduced. The 21 trade-union internationals that have lined up behind Dick Gephardt, on the other hand, are filled with people who make things in American factories--which not infrequently close down or get moved overseas--and whose principal worry is consequently a rather more immediate and urgently political one: that they might be left unemployed and destitute by some macroeconomic exigency or twist of federal trade law. Maybe he has been forced by circumstance to focus and intensify his appeal to such voters, I don't know. But whatever the reason, over the past couple months Gephardt has become a considerably more effective--even commanding--stump speaker.

No, the import-export stuff hasn't got quite the distinguishing bite it might have. By now, each of the other first-tier Democrats in the race, none more crudely and completely than Dean, has long since effected a tactical policy shift in Gephardt's direction, walking away from the free-trade past and loudly promising a fair-trade future in its stead. But Gephardt's remains the most transparently sincere and compelling fair-trade pitch; even if you reject the argument intellectually, it takes a heart of stone not to be moved by his description and denunciation of the "human exploitation" produced in NAFTA's near-term wake. The same goes for Gephardt's insistence that he'd be the president most loyally committed to traditional Democratic party principles as a whole. It's true, after all: He would. And it seems to be true as well, at least according to Pew's latest data, that party dogma still matters to Democrats. Howard Dean may have hurtled into the front-runner position by monopolizing the affections of those for whom it doesn't much matter, people who just wanna beat Bush, dammit. But most Democrats throughout the country--and in Iowa and New Hampshire, too--continue to tell pollsters that they'd prefer to nominate a man who's right on the issues, even if he might not be the very fastest horse in the stable.

In any case, Gephardt is nowadays making an ever more voluble and explicit and plausibly persuasive case that he, not Dean, is in fact that fastest horse. Gephardt wants to beat Bush as much as anybody, he tells an attentive group of Iowa Democrats in an Oskaloosa junior high school conference room this morning. But "if you're gonna beat him, you've got to beat him in the Midwest." Democrats will win California and New York, that much is assured. But they've also got to win "states like Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia," he explains. Then comes Gephardt's kicker: "If Al Gore had beaten George Bush in Missouri alone, which he almost did, even without Florida, he would be president today." And "I know I can beat George Bush in Missouri."

Howard Dean can't make that claim.

Why wasn't he able to carry Missouri for Gore? He was the Democratic House leader at the time.

It's been surprising to see Gephardt hanging in there. However, it's unlikely that he can win Iowa and even if he does, Dean is still in the hunt and he is running third in South Carolina, polling at 7% behind Clark 9% and Dean 11% and he's not even on the radar in New Hampshire where he is in 6th place polling at 3%. He also has some heavy negatives that make for easy late date bombs. He resigned the House Minority Leader spot after failing to regain control of the House in four consecutive elections. That's a tough ad. He was absent from 91% of the votes in Congress this year. That's a devastating ad.

it's all over now, baby blue

2003-12-15T22:02:00.000-08:00

Last week I tried to offer some help to John Kerry, my second choice for Democratic presidential nominee and first choice for anyone but Dean nominee, but he's kaputski. Stick a fork in him. Not cuz he's done. Just for fun.

From the New Republic:

The final category for the Democrats yesterday was the fair-weather hawk--with John Kerry as the first and only member. It's an understatement to say that Kerry's campaign has been hobbled by the difficulty he's had in balancing his vote for the war with his fiery criticism of how the war has been executed. On the campaign trail over the last week or so, Kerry has been saying two new things about the war. First, he has insisted that we would not be at war with Iraq if he were president (and presumably Saddam would still be in power). Secondly, he has accused Howard Dean of supporting a war resolution last year little different than the one Kerry has been pilloried for supporting. Kerry has been telling anyone who will listen--correctly--that the resolution that Dean supported, known as Biden-Lugar, would have led to the same unilateral war that Bush eventually waged. As Kerry put it the other day, "Howard Dean exercised the exact same judgment that the rest of us exercised." Kerry argued that Dean's pro-war stance was one of the great underreported stories of the campaign.

But not long after Saddam's furry face first appeared on TV, Kerry switched from attacking Dean as a war-monger who "exercised the exact same judgment" as John Kerry, to attacking Dean as a hopelessly soft-on-Saddam peacenik and recasting himself as a maximalist hawk. Here's how the Associated Press reported Kerry's initial reaction to the news of Saddam's capture:

Kerry and Lieberman sought to remind voters of their support for Bush's war resolution, even as they criticized the president anew for not reaching out to allies....He and Lieberman also suggested Dean had been soft on Saddam, noting Dean's statement that Iraq would "probably" be better off without Saddam....

Added Kerry: "I guess he supposes it's a good thing to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Well, I knew it was a good thing on that day, day one."

How in the world did anyone ever get the idea that John Kerry has been ambivalent about the war?

From the Unofficial John Kerry for President Blog:

It's official: I'm withdrawing my support from John Kerry. No, I'm not running to Dean. If I support anyone at this point, it will be Clark or Gephardt. I still have a tremendous amount of respect for John Kerry and believe him to be the best qualified to be president. If he is the nominee, I will be very happy and will offer my wholeheardest support. But his campaign is just God-Awful. The clincher today was an e-mail I got accusing Howard Dean of this and that. Sure, there may be truth to it, but it's fodder for the Republicans. No candidate is perfect. No one has been consistent on every issue their whole lives. These are human beings. Dean is far from perfect, and Kerry can even point out legitimate policy differences with him. But to start digging up dirt and sending it out under the official auspices of the campaign is too much for me to stomach. It's Republican. And once Dean is the nominee, it'll be in the RNC ads.

I started looking for one other article that I wanted to link to that illustrated the pretzel Kerry has twisted himself into two weeks after putting the F in John F. Kerry in the pages of Rolling Stone and now becoming downright hawkish with the capture of Saddam Hussein, but it doesn't matter. If you want to be President, go back to Congresss and show some leadership. But, you can't be President, so go back to Congress and show some leadership.

Unofficial Kerry Blog link via Daily Kos.

markets react?

2003-12-15T20:00:00.000-08:00

From KAUZ in Witchita Falls:

The stock market did not do as well as expected after Saddam's arrest. It started off with a rally, but ended in negative territory. The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended the day down 19 points to finish the day at 10,022. The NASDAQ Composite dipped 30 to 1918 and change.

From Reuters:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The capture of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein gave an initial boost to stock markets worldwide on Monday, leading some analysts to believe that a bigger rally would occur if the United States reels in Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Market players said capturing the elusive al Qaeda leader would give stock markets a significant boost, at least in the short term, since bin Laden is seen as having a more direct link to global terrorism than Saddam Hussein.

"Osama bin Laden has a more direct impact on the global war on terror, so the impact (from his capture) would be larger than what we're seeing after Saddam's capture," said Peter Gottlieb, president of Gottlieb Investment Management Corp. in Chicago.

News that U.S. troops had captured the former Iraqi dictator over the weekend sparked early rallies in stock markets from Tokyo to London and New York on Monday, only to peter out by the close of trade in some locales.

"I'm somewhat surprised the gains aren't bigger, but the feeling is that major military operations were already completed and Saddam's capture was inevitable," Gottlieb said. "It also won't affect the outcome of the U.S. presence in Iraq."

On Wall Street, the three major U.S. stock indexes finished lower, erasing earlier gains, as investors

More interesting than polls. Which weren't that impressive either.

From the Washington Post:

Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president? Do you approve/disapprove strongly or somewhat?

12/14/03 | NET Approve 57 | Strongly Aprv 37 | Somewhat Aprv 20 | NET Disapprove 39 | Strongly Disap 29 | Somewhat Disap 10 | No Opin. 5

12/7/03 | NET Approve 53 | Strongly Aprv 32 | Somewhat Aprv 21 | NET Disapprove 40 | Strongly Disap 27 | Somewhat Disap 13 | No Opin. 7

Bush only picked up 4 approval points the afternoon when the news was most pristine? 95% of those polled already knew. He does better when the question is specific to Iraq.

12/14/03 | Approve 58 | Disapprove 38 | No opinion 4
11/16/03 | Approve 48 | Disapprove 48 | No opinion 4

wto talks breakdown

2003-12-15T19:38:00.000-08:00

From the Guardian:

A formal relaunch of the stalled global trade talks was deferred for at least two months yesterday after the World Trade Organisation admitted that deep differences between rich and poor countries among its 146 members had yet to be settled. Hopes were fading last night that the WTO would be able to complete the round of liberalisation talks on schedule on January 1 2005 as the stalemate continued, even though officials in Geneva remained optimistic that rapid progress in the first six months of next year could allow the deadline to be met.

. . . Among the issues causing most controversy are the subsidies paid to farmers in rich developed countries, the lack of access to western markets for poor cotton producers in West Africa, and demands from the European Union that the WTO talks should include four new issues - investment, competition, government procurement and rules governing trade.

With Washington preoccupied by the presidential elections next year and the European Union convulsed by a row between free traders and protectionists, WTO officials had privately ruled out several weeks ago any possibility of an immediate full scale resumption of the negotiations launched in Doha, Qatar, in November 2001.

Don't expect any progress until after the 2004 election.

scumbags with possible ties to dick gephardt

2003-12-15T12:39:00.000-08:00

The scumbags at Americans for Jobs, Health Care and Progressive Values are at it again with a truly despicable attack ad aimed at Howard Dean. The ad says that Howard Dean has no military or foreign policy experience. True enough, but it is a voiceover as the camera zooms in on the Time magazine cover photo of Osama Bin Laden.

As I reported last week:

The "group" Americans for Jobs, Healthcare and Progressive Values seems to consist solely of Timothy L. Raftis former Iowa Senator Tom Harkin's former campaign manager.

. . . The Americans for Jobs, Healthcare and Progressive Values website is hilarious. The homepage is a very personal letter from Raftis. The "About" page which you think is going to be "About" the organization is "About" Raftis. And the "Issues" page that you think is going to be about jobs, healthcare and progressive values is about Howard Dean and guns.

Now the "group" seems to consist solely of Former Congressman Edward Feighan.

In an editorial on Saturday the Washington Post condemned this sleazy outfit:

. . . Values that don't include letting voters know who's footing the bill. The group has spent $230,000 for the first week of ads, but it won't say where the money is coming from. Under the out-of-sync reporting schedule that governs such groups, donors' names don't have to be revealed until early February, after the caucuses are safely over. Meanwhile, its identity is getting more and more mysterious: Early last week, its president was Timothy L. Raftis, a former aide to Sen. Tom Harkin; now, a new president has suddenly appeared on the group's Web site: former representative Edward Feighan (D-Ohio). The group's treasurer is fundraiser David Jones, who has worked for one of Mr. Dean's chief rivals, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri -- but suddenly, it has a new spokesman, John Kerry's former press secretary, Robert Gibbs, which might suggest, to the conspiracy-minded, an effort to deflect attention from a possible Gephardt connection.

["Progressive values" apparently] don't include letting voters know who's footing the bill. Under the out-of-sync reporting schedule that governs such groups, donors' names don't have to be revealed until early February. So is the money from unions that back Mr. Gephardt but don't want to be publicly connected to this anti-Dean campaign? Or is it from a few wealthy donors who don't like Mr. Dean -- and perhaps are backing another one of the trailing Democratic candidates? From Republicans who want to take Mr. Dean down a few notches? There's no way for a voter to know, not in time for that information to make a difference.

This outside-group dodge, from those who pose as champions of "progressive values," [is] despicable. "I believe strongly in the view of Thomas Jefferson that an informed electorate helps insure the strength of democracy," [the group's president] said on the group's Web site. Informed, that is, of what he chooses to tell them. What hypocrisy.

Click here to contribute to the Dean campaign so that we can respond to these ads in Iowa, where Gephardt still poses a threat. Even if this garbage succeeds in derailing the Dean campaign it only strengthens George Bush's hand against any Democratic challenger.

Terry McAuliffe needs to get off the dime and put the kibosh on this crap. He needs to lean on Gephardt and Harkin. Hard and fast.

Send a message to Terry McAuliffe:

Copy and Paste or write your own

Subject: Americans for Jobs Healthcare and Progressive Values

Message:

Dear Terry McAuliffe:

You must act now to stop the irresponsible ad campaign underway in Iowa. You must put pressure on Dick Gephardt and Tom Harkin to get a muzzle on the group Americans for Jobs Healthcare and Progressive Values right now. The Osama Bin Laden ad they are running doesn't just hurt Howard Dean, it hurts any Democrat's chances of beating George Bush in November.

saddam's capture

2003-12-15T07:12:00.000-08:00

Sorting through my thoughts on Saddam Hussein's capture:

Number one

I think that it's great that he was captured alive. I don't think that he should be executed. Not just because I oppose the death penalty. The magnitude of his crimes puts him even beyond my absolutist arguments on that issue. I think that execution would be to generous, too humane. If the images from his capture suggest anything, it's that shame and humiliation are going to be brutal punishment for Saddam. And it would be unhealthy for the Iraqi people. Founding a revolution on blood revenge isn't a particularly good way to go. As an object lesson in the rule of law, due process and all the attendent frustrations and messiness that go along with it.

I think that he should be carted around the country and being forced to listen as people heap upon him their stories and grievances. People should then be allowed to spit in his face. That would be cathartic in the extreme for the country and that's what is called for in this situation. Catharsis.

Number three

Things in Iraq will get better and worse at the same time. For Iraqi's that have been reluctant to roll up their sleeves and pitch in to help rebuild their country this is a green light to start. It's not clear to me that Saddam was casting such a lingering shadow. For a country completely cowed by Saddam's regime, Iraqis new penchent for hitting the streets to protest the efforts of the world's greatest military power would make A.N.S.W.E.R. blush. Likewise, the insurgency will most likely grow stronger. For Iraqi's that want the US out, but didn't want to play a role in returning Saddam to power, this is a green light. Shiites will most likely redouble their efforts to frustrate the our efforts there.

Number four

The timing of the capture was good and bad for the President. With the Halliburton scandal last week threatening to reinforce every negative stereotype about Bush LLC., the desertion of half the Iraqi army that we just trained and outfittedand his poll numbers sagging to their lowest levels, this is a much needed shot in the arm. As far as the November election goes, he probally peaked too early on this one, but hey what can you do?

Number five

This doesn't change the fact that Joe Lieberman is a lousy candidate with a dour and sanctimonious demeanor, bad frown lines, bad hair, no organization and not enough money.

Number six

It doesn't change the fact that we were mislead into this war. It doesn't change the fact that Saddam posed no threat to the United States. It doesn't change the fact that this war has made the world a more dangerous place.

Number seven

Howard Dean handled the news with a great deal of grace and class. - "President Bush deserves a day of celebration,'' said Dean, campaigning in Florida. "We have our policy differences, but we won't be discussing those today. I think he deserves a day to celebrate. This is a great day of pride in the American military.'' Dean will survive this bump in his candidacy. People still see the campaigns as a game of checkers being played out in the newspapers and opinion polls. The organization of the Dean campaign will get him through this. As a campaign issue, this will be pretting faded in three months. As things continue to go poorly, and Iraqi's continue to seem ungrateful, voters are going to be watching thinking, we got rid of Saddam, what do you want? What's wrong with you people?"

Note: In an effort to make this blog more myopic, let me point out that - Juan Cole had this foolish statement on Dean and Clark's reaction - "Howard Dean and Wesley Clark were far more gentlemanly about the news than one might have expected. I suppose their handlers told them that capturing Saddam is very popular with the US public, and they had to find a way to applaud it and to avoid seeming petty toward Bush on his day of victory." What makes you think that they needed their handlers to tell them to say what was the only real response anybody could have had to this great news? (unless you are one of the other Democratic candidates, in which case you use the historic occasion to attack Howard Dean.)

Number eight

Andrew Sullivan is a jackass.

He hands us this a bit of treacle:

It is not for us to understand fully what these people were put through. At a moment like this, when we can see fully and clearly the evil that existed for so long - evil that we in the past did our part to maintain - it is important simply to recall the dead and their loved ones. Think of every moment when some poor soul believed he was about to die, every moment spent in hellish prisons, every person tortured beyond imagining, every child dumped in a mass grave, every person of faith treated as an enemy of the state. To watch the perpetrator of this extraordinary evil brought low - into a rat-hole in the ground - is a privilege. It happens rarely. It is a moment when some kind of cosmic justice breaks through the clouds, and all the petty wrangling and mistakes and political jockeying fall away in the face of liberation from inescapable fear and terror and brutality. It was a day of joy. Nothing remains to be said right now. Joy.

And then proceeds to spend untold hours trawling the web for comments by political enemies who didn't hit the right notes of jubilation. Round up of Iraqi reactions? Photo gallery of street celebrations? No, just ten nominations for the "Galloway award".

And then this - he experpts an Iraqi blogger's reaction:

"I don't know what to say.. I am confused.. no . . . I am very happy.. I am very happy.. .. I am very happy.. .. I am very happy.. .. I am very happy.. .. I am very happy.. .. I am very happy..
This is the end of tyranny.. congratulations .. a great day.. for Iraqi and all the good people.. share us our great day.. I can't express my feelings.. thanks to the coalition forces and all the honest people who helped in that great operation. . .thank you thank you thousand times."

And Sullivan replies: "You're welcome."

Yes, let's all thank Andrew Sullivan for liberating Iraq from his Centcom command center on Cape Cod. What an asshole.

grocery strike goes to the senneradabooseye

2003-12-13T08:49:00.000-08:00

From the Christian Science Monitor:

LOS ANGELES – Placard-toting demonstrators remain a common sight at supermarkets here as a strike and lockout of 70,000 southern California grocery workers begins its ninth week with no end in sight.
Management and unions are still hunkered down; negotiations could trickle into next year. And the fight has become emblematic of a larger national anxiety over tradeoffs between consumer prices and decent-paying jobs. On one level, it's a tussle between management - which says it must cut costs to compete with bulk discount houses - and workers who want to preserve health benefits. But there's also a more universal question, analysts say: As manufacturing jobs disappear here - and across the Midwest and South - what alternatives remain for the working middle class?

Read the rest. It's one of the best pieces on the strike that I've seen thus far.

the blog ate my homework

2003-12-13T08:46:00.000-08:00

I was working on finishing up my analysis of the New York Times/CBS News poll and Blogger lost my work. Damn. I'm moving to new digs the first of the year and I look forward to it more everyday. Blogspot was down for two hours last night.

My apologies for a lack of content today, but the blog ate my homework

halliburton

2003-12-12T19:28:00.000-08:00

From the FT:

President George W. Bush warned Halliburton on Friday that it would have to repay the US government for any overcharging on $5bn of contracts to rebuild Iraq and support US troops there.

His remarks appeared to be an attempt to distance the administration from a growing scandal involving the oil field services company formerly run by his vice-president, Dick Cheney.

The warning came a day after Pentagon auditors reported they had found evidence that Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary might have passed on $61m in excess costs to the government for hauling fuel from Kuwait to Iraq. That work was done under a contract the company was awarded in March to restore Iraq's oil sector.

. . . The Pentagon also said that KBR appeared to have over-estimated by $67m the potential cost of providing dining facilities under a separate contractwhich covers a wide range of Army logistics.

What the print stories don't get at is how unenthusiastic Bush sounds when he commends the Pentagon accountants for finding the discrepancy.

This is the point when John Kerry should go on the war path pushing for wholesale investigations of the no bid contracts the two overcharging scandals and how it all ties up with Cheney and the administration. It's at least as juicy as Whitewater and he has nothing to lose and everything to gain in jumpstarting his campaign.

This is the kind of thing that the Democrats are just hapless about capitalizing on. When you are in the minority you have to create a relentless drumbeat until the issue becomes a crisis.

And I say, bang, bang, bang!!!!!

2003-12-12T19:11:00.000-08:00

Continuing from yesterday. . .

From Marketplace:

After NAFTA? CAFTA.
The debates over NAFTA are much more than academic for the workers of Central and South America. The successes and failures of NAFTA are weighing heavily on Latin American countries that are negotiating their own trade pacts with the United States. Sam Eaton meets farmers in Guatemala who are growing new products through new methods, in an effort to succeed under the trade agreements in ways that Mexican farmers could not under NAFTA.

UPS vs Canada
NAFTA contains a small provision that did not get much public attention: It's called Chapter 11. The provision lets companies sue foreign governments for damages -- if their laws impede free trade. In the first seven years of NAFTA, foreign corporations collected $1.8 billion from U.S. taxpayers, alone; Canadian taxpayers coughed up $11 billion. From Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Stephen Henn reports that Canadians are now furious that United Parcel Service is suing Canada to get a piece of one its fundamental social services: the mail.
Reporter: Stephen Henn

Q&A with "The Economist's" Clive Crook
The Chapter 11 provision has been a major point of contention for countries cutting trade deals with the U.S. The world has been watching as the benefits and pitfalls of NAFTA have been played out on the global stage. Should these problems serve as warning flags for the growing pain-free trade evolution? Host David Brown talks with Clive Crook, deputy managing editor at "The Economist" magazine in London.
Q+A: Host David Brown talks with Clive Crook

Q+A with Carlos Salinas de Gortari
Host David Brown talks with former Mexican president and NAFTA architect Carlos Salinas de Gortari about first turning down, and then accepting, the free trade agreement. With a new world unfolding, President Salinas changed his mind and set out to convince skeptics at home that NAFTA was worth the risk.
Q+A: Host David Brown talks with Carlos Salinas de Gortari

consumer confidence

2003-12-12T19:05:00.000-08:00

From CBS News via Delong:

(CBS MarketWatch) Consumers have turned more cautious after deciding that all the talk of an improving U.S. economy may still be just so much hot air, according to researchers at the University of Michigan.

The consumer sentiment index fell Friday to a reading of 89.6 in early December from 93.7 in November. The decline was unexpected. The consensus forecast of Wall Street economists was for sentiment to improve to 95.6.

offshoring

2003-12-12T19:03:00.000-08:00

From Brad Delong:

The Economist writes about service-sector offshoring:

Economist.com | Offshoring: ...Although there have been no federal legislative proposals in America against offshoring per se, there has been a tightening up on the granting of visas that allow foreign workers to enter America for training and temporary employment. The annual quota for so-called H-1B visas used by itinerant Indian software programmers fell in October to 65,000 from 195,000 a year ago. The idea is to prevent foreigners from taking Americans' jobs. In fact, the effect may be the reverse. Craig Barrett, the chief executive of Intel, a chipmaker and a big employer of Indian engineers, says that America's main problem is a lack of suitably educated engineering graduates. The impact of fewer visas may thus be to encourage American firms to shift more work to India, where well-qualified computer engineers are plentiful.

But the vast majority of the service jobs that are now going offshore do not require highly qualified engineers. Multinationals may in future do original R&D in low-cost places, but for the moment most of the jobs on the move are the paper-based back-office ones that can be digitalised and telecommunicated anywhere around the world, plus more routine telephone inquiries that are increasingly being bundled together into call centres.

Several American states have moved faster than the federal authorities in trying to halt this "labour arbitrage". Lawmakers in New Jersey have proposed a bill to stop firms using foreign workers to fulfil state contracts. Public pressure forced the state to bring back a helpline for welfare recipients that had been outsourced to India. For similar reasons, in late November Indiana withdrew from a $15m contract with the American subsidiary of a leading Indian IT outsourcing firm. Governor Joe Kernan said that the contract did not fit with Indiana's "vision" of providing better opportunities to local companies and workers.

On one estimate, America accounts for over 70% of all offshoring business. The second biggest market is in Britain. Big companies there regularly announce that they are moving service jobs abroad, many of them involving the wholesale transfer of call centres. In late October, the HSBC banking group announced that it is taking 4,000 jobs from Britain to India, and earlier this month Aviva (the Norwich Union insurance group) said it is transferring 2,350 jobs, also to India.

As yet, such moves have been less politically contentious than in America. Patricia Hewitt, Britain's minister of trade and industry, responded to those concerned about the job losses by saying it was a"myth" that offshoring would create widespread unemployment. Nevertheless, her department has commissioned an independent study into the competitiveness of Britain's call centres. Representatives of Amicus, a big British finance-sector union, were this week seeking to persuade the European Parliament to set up a more general inquiry into the likely impact of offshoring on Europe's economy.

The offshoring business remains predominantly English-speaking. It is dominated by American and British companies outsourcing their internal operations to third parties in places such as Ireland, Canada and South Africa, but most of all in India. The fact that America and Britain have relatively liberal employment laws has also been influential in the shift of business overseas...

The fact that trade balances--that dollars paid to Indian call-center workers show up as demand for American exports or as funding for investments in America*--means that the Economist is doing a bad thing when it talks about "job loss" rather than "job shift." Bad Economist! Go lie down now!! No biscuit for you!!!

The question these state governors should be asking themselves is, "Are these call-center jobs really the ones we want to keep?"

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*As long, that is, as the Federal Reserve does a reasonably good job of turning Say's Law from an ideology-soaked theory into a practical rule of thumb.

2003-12-12T09:41:00.000-08:00

From the Daily Show

Don't Be A Debata Hata
The Democrats pout and glare at Dean one last time in 2003

Bad Senator
In a recent interview John Kerry uses a very naughty word. Someone's getting coal in their stocking.

Stephen Colbert: Interviews I Could Get
Stephen Colbert chats with former presidential candidate and general do-nothing, Bob Graham

From the Portland Mercury:

The Bush administration thinks John Kerry should have his mouth washed out with soap, and then say he's sorry. In question? The F-word. Kerry, in an interview with Rolling Stone, opined about Bush and the situation in Iraq thusly, "Did I expect George Bush to fuck it up as badly as he did? I don't think anybody did." The use of the F-word sent the Bush people over the fucking edge. Chief of Staff Andrew Card went so fucking ape shit that he threatened to fuck up the Democratic motherfucker once and for all. During a CNN appearance on "Late Edition," Card said that the word was "so fucking beneath Kerry it wasn't even fucking funny." And that "a fucking apology might be in order." Kerry's people said that he has no regrets. And to fuck off.

From the Onion:

NEW YORK - Citing curiosity as his primary motive, Bill Clinton typed his own name into the popular search engine Google.com during a lull in his daily activities, the former president reported Monday. "I had no idea I would get 2,790,000 results!" Clinton said while seated before the Apple PowerBook in his Harlem office.

WASHINGTON - According to the results of an intensive two-year study, Americans living below the poverty line are "pretty much fucked," Center for Social and Economic Research executive director Jameson Park announced Monday.

GROSSE POINTE, MI-As part of the ongoing trend toward replacing U.S. workers with foreign labor, the marital duties of United Carborundum CEO Howard Reinhardt have been outsourced to his Mexican groundskeeper, industry sources revealed Monday.

"It was time for a change," said Reinhardt's wife Melanie, who has been married to the CEO for 17 years and has conducted her sexual business almost exclusively with him since 1984. "While I was generally satisfied with the level of servicing that I received under Howard, it was my feeling that a younger, more aggressive hand on the tiller might bring some new ideas into play. No matter how mutually satisfying the old deal was, its time had passed."

they shoot donkeys, don't they

2003-12-12T03:07:00.000-08:00

Bob Herbert takes the Democrats to task for acting like Democrats.

Who was it that said, "The Democrats want to fall in love with their candidate. The Republicans just wan't to fall in line."

The only thing more myopic than the blogosphere is the Democratic Party. It's driving me crazy.

honey or vinegar? vinegar, definately vinegar.

2003-12-12T02:58:00.000-08:00

Bill Kristol writes in the Weekly Standard:

A deviously smart American administration would have quietly distributed contracts for rebuilding Iraq as it saw fit, without any announced policy of discrimination. At the end of the day, it would be clear that opponents of American policy didn't fare too well in the bidding process. Message delivered, but with a certain subtlety.

A more clever American administration would have thrown a contract or two to a couple of those opponents, to a German firm, for instance, as a way of wooing at least the business sectors in
a country where many businessmen do want to strengthen ties with the United States.

A truly wise American administration would have opened the bidding to all comers, regardless of their opposition to the war -- as a way of buying those countries into the Iraq effort, building a little goodwill for the future, and demonstrating to the world a little magnanimity.

But instead of being smart, clever, or magnanimous, the Bush Administration has done a dumb thing. The announcement of a policy of discriminating against French, German, and Russian firms has made credible European charges of vindictive pettiness and general disregard for the opinion of even fellow liberal democracies. More important, it has made former Secretary of State James Baker's very important effort to get these countries, among others, to offer debt relief for the new government of Iraq almost impossible. This is to say nothing of other areas where we need to work with these governments.

This decision is a blunder. We trust it will be reversed

Don't count on it. The admin spent the day digging in their heels.

iran and the left

2003-12-12T02:48:00.000-08:00

Danny Postel argues in In These Times that the American Left has been irresponsible in it's lack of interest in the Iranian Student Democracy Movement.

In Tehran since 1999, government vigilantes have stormed a student dormitory brandishing clubs and thrashing students with chains. They have tossed one student out of a window to his death. During such raids, helicopters hover overhead, elite units of anti-riot police gather and plainclothes Intelligence Ministry agents buzz around on motorbikes. Plainclothes security officers routinely detainstudent radicals at gunpoint.

Why are American progressives by and large silent about the situation in Iran today?

How many American progressives knew who Shirin Ebadi was before she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last month? Almost no one. By the same token, how many of us knew who Rigoberta Menchu was before she won the prize in 1992? Many, if not most of us: We'd seen her speak, read her autobiography, or simply had come to know her story by osmosis in activist circles.

. . . But what happens when people are struggling against tyranny and repression that is not being perpetrated by the United States or its proxies and when - to take the case of Iran today - the regime in question is a sworn enemy of the United States.

Let's face it: It's just plain uncomfortable for progressives to say anything that sounds like it could also come out of the mouth of George Bush or Paul Wolfowitz.

Jeremy Brecher argues in Foreign Policy in Focus, however, that "failure to defend human rights in such circumstances only plays into the hands of the Bush juggernaut." Progressives must, he contends, be known as "people whose fundamental solidarity is not with one or another government but with all people who are struggling for liberation from oppression."

I've been making the same case for the last six months. Here and here and here and here.

How bad is it? In September I reported:

From the Opinion Journal:

Blogress Karol Sheinin reports that an Iranian democracy activist named Banafsheh contacted the most prominent "antiwar" group asking them to take a stand against Tehran's thuggish theocracy. In an e-mail (quoted verbatim), Banafsheh describes the answer she got:

Recently I contacted a group called A.N.S.W.E.R. COALITION which organizes marches. After having introduced myself and explained to them the situation in Iran (after 4 phone calls and messages) I was told that they won't help the Iranian activists and their friends in organizing marches against the Islamic Republic as they're afraid the Iranian student movement might be run by IMPERIALIST!!!!!

Student Movement Coordinating Committee for Democracy in Iran

after nafta

2003-12-11T16:15:00.000-08:00

Marketplace is running a series called After NAFTA:

Jobless in Milwaukee
Factory workers in the Midwest were some of the first to feel effects from NAFTA. One by one, companies looked to Mexico for cheaper labor and moved, taking thousands of jobs with them. As a safeguard for workers who lost jobs, NAFTA promised to retrain them for the better, higher-paying jobs of the future. But what happened to those workers? Sarah Gardner went to Milwaukee, where blue-collar workers once enjoyed a middle-class lifestyle, to see how the changes played out. Apparently, workers are still waiting for those new, better jobs to appear.
Reporter: Sarah Gardner

NAFTA and You, the Consumer
Robert Reich, the Secretary of Labor 10 years ago when Clinton signed the agreement into law, shows us, in a concrete way, how we have benefited from the trade agreement. He says the consumer is the big winner from NAFTA because reducing tariffs and sourcing parts abroad has lowered prices and created more consumer choice.
Commentary: Robert Reich

Post-NAFTA Shopping
The opening of new markets under NAFTA has made for dramatic changes on supermarket shelves. Jeff Tyler went shopping on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border and explored the sometimes-strange world of post-NAFTA shopping.
Reporter: Jeff Tyler

Missing Maquiladoras
During the 1990s, resentment built up in Americans as the pendulum swung well in the direction of Mexico. The number of jobs in Mexico during the first seven years of NAFTA doubled. Most were in the factories, known as maquiladoras, clustered along the U.S.-Mexican border. But as Marianne McCune reports from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, many of those once-well-off workers are now trying to cope after the pendulum of global trade swung back -- to Asia.
Reporter: Marianne McCune

All the Tees in China
In 1992, Ross Perot predicted that America would soon hear "a giant sucking sound" as American manufacturing was drawn down to Mexico. But 10 years later, the sound is that of American and Mexican jobs being sucked away by China and Southeast Asia. Jocelyn Ford explains how NAFTA caused an American golf equipment manufacturer to take his business to Mexico, but how the trade pacts that came in NAFTA's wake have meant the company is on the move again.
Reporter: Jocelyn Ford

Dueling Numbers In a twist on Marketplace’s signature "Numbers" segment, we "do the numbers" on the results of 10 years of NAFTA. So, was NAFTA a good or bad deal? Well, with pro- and anti-NAFTA camps offering different accounting of net job losses and gains, the experts say it’s not that simple. That’s why we challenged Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, and Robert Lawrence, of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, to an on-air numbers duel.

White-Collar Mexico
It's no longer just factory work that's moving down to Mexico: Some big U.S. firms like Boeing, GE and Principal Financial Group are outsourcing white-collar computer programming and service jobs to companies south of the border. These jobs are helping create a new middle class in Mexican cities like Monterrey. Sam Eaton explores the new well-heeled middle-class lifestyle of Mexican I.T. workers.

Mad in America
This flight of white-collar jobs has begun to alarm some American workers. There's a new group of them who feel threatened by this overseas competition. Amy Scott introduces us to a group of tech workers in Connecticut raising their voices in an effort to prevent more high-skill jobs from moving to places like India, China, and Mexico.
Reporter: Reporter: Amy Scott

To Be Continued:

so that's where it went

2003-12-11T16:04:00.000-08:00

Kuttner in the American Prospect:

As a new report by the Economic Policy Institute points out, this recovery is like no other recent economic turnaround in the low proportion of income gains that have gone to wages. The EPI, citing Commerce Department data, calculates that in the last seven major recoveries, dating back to 1949, labor compensation at this point in the cycle typically commanded around 61 percent of the new growth in output and in no case less than 55 percent.

But in the current recovery, labor compensation is just 29 percent of total income growth. What gets the lion's share? Corporate profits.

In the typical postwar recovery, corporate profits got about 26 percent of the pie. This time they are getting 46 percent. That helps explain the stock boomlet, but it won't feel very comforting to the typical worker (who is also the typical voter). The other big job-killer is trade. The trade deficit is now running at an annual rate of more than $500 billion -- about 5 percent of GDP. If America's trade accounts with the rest of the world were balanced, foreigners would be buying more products from the United States, and Americans would have millions more jobs.

pelosi? really? alright, if you say so.

2003-12-11T15:58:00.000-08:00

Mary Lynn F. Jones tries to make the case in the American Prospect that Nancy Pelosi has been a strong leader and exceeded expectations in the House this year. It sure doesn't feel that way. The few times that I've seen her on TV she was awful. Wishy washy and all over the place. I'll give her the benefit of the doubt. But I'm going to be watching a lot closer this year coming up.

kuttner on miller

2003-12-11T15:51:00.000-08:00

Robert Kuttner reviews Matthew Miller's book the 2% Solution in the American Prospect.

Miller's assessment of what ails our society is flawed by a bizarre conception of politics and wishful programmatic fixes. While preparing his book, he went around the country interviewing leaders of both parties and proffering his plans. He managed to convince himself that Democrats and Republicans alike would accept his grand compromise of "using conservative means to achieve liberal ends," if only old shibboleths and interest groups didn't stand in the way.

To read Miller, you'd think that American politics was deadlocked and that the blockage was roughly symmetrical. But that's hardly the real story of the era since Ronald Reagan. As we all know, the far right has won one victory after another, and even after the Clinton interlude, the center is much farther to the right than it was in 1980. The fact that 42 million people have no health insurance, that too many jobs pay poverty wages and that schools are failing is not the result of partisan deadlock but of conservative hegemony.

Liberals have solutions. What they don't have is political power. Even under Clinton, as Miller notes in passing, federal outlays were cut from 22 percent of the gross domestic product to 20 percent. Federal revenue is now at its lowest share of national income since Dwight Eisenhower.

Scour the conservative think tanks and you will find no Matt Millers commending a grand bargain with liberals. You will find right-wing ideologues who are serious about winning. Bill Kristol, Karl Rove, and Grover Norquist did not prevail by disdaining a new right and commending a new center. Rather, the conservative strategy is simply to destroy liberalism and take no prisoners.

to the victor go the spoils

2003-12-11T10:05:00.000-08:00

My big insight yesterday:

The decision to limit bidding on the reconstruction of Iraq really defines the contracts as the spoils of war.

the other amazon

2003-12-10T13:28:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times:

UMPUENTSA, Ecuador — As international energy companies move into the Amazon basin to tap some of the last untouched oil and natural gas reserves, more and more natives are fighting to keep them out.

Oil workers and contractors have been kidnapped, company officials say. Equipment has been vandalized. Protests, injunctions and lawsuits are piling up as Indian groups grow increasingly savvy in their cooperation with environmentalists.

The governments may increasingly regard the Amazon as an engine for economic growth, but native groups are struggling to balance development with the desire to preserve a nearly primordial way of life. . .

Natives also are reportedly tired of being badgered to ship books in three to four business days.

View Slideshow

from the how to win friend and influence people dept.

2003-12-10T13:22:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times:

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- The European Union said Wednesday it would examine whether the United States violates world trade rules with its decision to bar countries that opposed its war in Iraq from bidding for $18.6 billion worth reconstruction contracts. France, Germany and other U.S. allies were angered and surprised by the Pentagon decision -- which forbids bids by countries with no troops in Iraq -- seen as a slap after efforts to patch up the trans-Atlantic divisions over the Iraq war.

Canada suggested it might halt further aid to Iraq, and Russia issued an implicit threat that it would take a harder line on the restructuring of Iraqi debt that Washington seeks.

"I find it really very difficult to fathom,'' Canada's incoming prime minister, Paul Martin, said of the Pentagon order. Martin, who takes office Friday, said he was ``disappointed'' -- particularly since Canada has pledged about $225 million for Iraq and has troops in Afghanistan.

. . . In Moscow, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, when asked about the Pentagon decision, responded by ruling out any debt write-off for Iraq. "Iraq's debt to the Russia Federation comes to $8 billion and as far as the Russian government's position on this, it is not planning any kind of a write-off of that debt,'' he said. ``Iraq is not a poor country.''

That's not making James Baker's job any easier.

Elsewhere in the Times:

The United States government is paying the Halliburton Company an average of $2.64 a gallon to import gasoline and other fuel to Iraq from Kuwait, more than twice what others are paying to truck in Kuwaiti fuel, government documents show.

Halliburton, which has the exclusive United States contract to import fuel into Iraq, subcontracts the work to a Kuwaiti firm, government officials said. But Halliburton gets 26 cents a gallon for its overhead and fee, according to documents from the Army Corps of Engineers.

court to rule on gerrymandering

2003-12-10T13:05:00.000-08:00

The Supreme Court will hear arguments on gerrymandering in Pennsylvania today. The outcome will determine the degree to which partisan concerns can play in redistricting. Hopefully, the Court will decide that the drawing of districts can be so politically motivated as to be unconstitutional.

Republicans have handed Democrats several defeats through redistricting. What concerns me more is the corrosive effect gerrymandering has on our democracy.

Gerrymandering isn't just bad for either party, depending on who's running a given statehouse, it's bad for democracy because it creates districts that are so geographically tortured they have no civic identity. That alienates citizens from the political process. It also has created constituencies that do not require politicians to build majorities by appealling to moderate voters. The result is an increasingly polarized Congress. Recent moves by the Republicans have been so baldly political that they have severely undermined the civility between the two parties necessary for the two party system to work.

Democrats gave the GOP their first taste of the joys of gerrymandering when they created majority black Congressional districts. The result of this was that it isolated blacks in majority Democrat districts surrounded by brand spankin' new majority Republican districts. Now the GOP uses redistricting to pit Democratic incumbents against each other.

In Texas, they redistricted even though there was no new census data to trigger the redistricting. The Republicans' map disregarded a standard known as "community of interest," which means keeping cities, counties, and regions with shared interests intact if possible.

The Supreme Court should reaffirm the standard of community of interest and rule that redistricting can only be done at certain intervals based on new census data. Citizens should be represented in districts that they have some identification with and the parties need the political football of redistricting taken out of play.

the case against UN peacekeeping

2003-12-10T11:21:00.000-08:00

From the Canadian National Post via the Agonist:

Four years after it was "liberated" by a NATO bombing campaign, Kosovo has deteriorated into a hotbed of organized crime, anti-Serb violence and al-Qaeda sympathizers, say security officials and Balkan experts.

Though nominally still under UN control, the southern province of Serbia is today dominated by a triumvirate of Albanian paramilitaries, mafiosi and terrorists. They control a host of smuggling operations and are implementing what many observers call their own brutal ethnic cleansing of minority groups, such as Serbs, Roma and Jews.

In recent weeks, UN officials ordered the construction of a fortified concrete barrier around the UN compound on the outskirts of the provincial capital Pristina. This is to protect against terrorist strikes by Muslim extremists who have set up bases of operation in what has become a largely outlaw province.

Minority Serbs, who were supposed to have been guaranteed protection by the international community after the 78-day NATO bombing campaign ended in the spring of 1999, have abandoned the province en masse. The last straw for many was the recent round of attacks by ethnic Albanian paramilitaries bent on gaining independence through violence.

I don't think that this means that we should be abandoning the concept of UN or NATO peacekeeping. Instead I would argue that we need to be more involved. More involved in peacekeeping missions and more involved in restructuring to make those missions more effective. Admittedly, I'm not aware of the details, but I would venture that not enough has been done to develop civil society and the UN has primarily worked as cop. These are the results you would expect after four years of simple containment . . . decay and entropy.

let's look at the numbers

2003-12-10T10:55:00.000-08:00

John Cassidy writes in the New Yorker:

Things are looking up - according to George W. Bush and the Times, anyway. Last Tuesday, the paper led its front page with this sunny triple-decker:"MANUFACTURING AT HIGHEST LEVEL IN TWO DECADES;HIRING OUTLOOK IS UPBEAT; STOCKS AT 18-MONTH PEAK ON RUN OF POSITIVE DATA - BUSH OPTIMISTIC." The headline's main claim, however, was inaccurate. It misinterpreted an economic indicator that is designed to gauge whether factories are churning out more or less stuff than they did last month, not absolute levels of production. The most reliable measure of how manufacturing is doing is the Federal Reserve's index of industrial production, which in October was 112.7, compared with a high of 118.4 in June of 2000. The November figure comes out next week. A six-point jump isn't impossible, but it would be virtually unprecedented.

In October, 73.5 per cent of plants and equipment were in active use. Three years ago, more than eighty per cent were. When President Bush took office, about 17.1 million Americans worked in factories; today, 14.5 million do. Last month, another seventeen thousand manufacturing jobs disappeared. Manufacturing employment has now fallen for forty straight months.

Mickey Kaus writes in Slate:

Is Productivity Overstated? In Tuesday's WSJ, columnist George Melloan raises a disturbing possibility: If the discouraging, widely-publicized official employment numbers--only 57,000 jobs gained last month!--understate employment because they don't count self-employed workers (whose ranks have been growing), then maybe the encouraging productivity numbers--9.4 percent rate last quarter!--are overstated because the government divides output by a smaller number of workers than are actually working. The two do not seem to be exactly opposite sides of the same coin--the productivity figures, according the Slate's Brendan Koerner, do incorporate at least some data from a "household" survey that catches the self-employed. But they seem to be on some kind of statistical seesaw--if one is wrong in the down direction then the other's probably wrong in the up direction. How much of a seesaw? I can't answer that. Maybe some economist who knows more about the data can.

In the New York Times Floyd Norris also points out:

The self-employed are a group that statisticians have a hard time dealing with, and the apparent growth in that group may or may not be a good sign for the economy. Some people who say they are self-employed may really be out of work and trying to bring in money as consultants or freelance workers. Others may be doing very well, living a dream of boss-free success.

In any case, the government reported that the number of self-employed workers rose by 156,000 last month, to 9.2 million. That gain was a primary reason that the unemployment rate dropped to 5.9 percent. The number of people on nonfarm payrolls - a number that excludes the self-employed - rose just 57,000, far less than expected, and that led most analysts to call the report a disappointment.

. . . The survey to which Wall Street pays the most attention is the establishment survey, which questions employers about how many people are on payrolls. It is that survey that provided disappointments this month, as it has done for most of the last few years. But the report of strong growth a month ago set off hopes that the employment picture was finally brightening.

That number shows 328,000 more jobs last month than in July, when employment hit its recent low. Even with those increases, there are now 2.26 million fewer jobs, on a seasonally adjusted basis, then there were in January 2001 when President Bush took office.

So, the numbers aren't as rosy as originally reported and gains in self-employment may cancel out the highly touted gains in productivity. That's especially if you count the number of self-employed people who are blogging when they should be trying to drum up some work.

Overall though most opinion seems to hold that the economy will still edge forward through the November election. So then the Democrats case will have to be: "2 million fewer jobs than when George Bush took office, staggering deficits, environmental roll backs - the price we've paid for this meager economic growth is too high. A Democrat could put people back to work and cut the deficit." That's a little subtle, except in Midwestern swing states that have gotten creamed by the loss of manufacturing jobs. The rest of the country has a sentimental/practical attachment to the idea of the United States as a country that makes things.

Anyone care to suss these numbers out a little more?

court to dems: you've made your bed, now sleep in it. fools

2003-12-10T08:33:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A sharply divided Supreme Court upheld key features of the nation's new law intended to lessen the influence of money in politics, ruling Wednesday that the government may ban unlimited donations to political parties.

. . . Congress may regulate campaign money to prevent the real or perceived corruption of political candidates, a 5-4 majority of the court ruled. That goal and most of the rules Congress drafted to meet it outweigh limitations on the free speech of candidates and others in politics, the majority said.

the ability to cloud men's minds

2003-12-10T08:17:00.000-08:00

One thing the Gore endorsement might do is level out people's emotions surrounding Howard Dean. The candidate clearly has the ability to cloud men's minds (and women too).

Take Bob Dole on Howard Dean:

"I thank God F.D.R. was my commander in chief in WWII. Had it been Howard Dean we would have not participated. This would have saved lives and none of us would have been wounded. Just one little problem: we would have lost our liberty and freedom."

Except that:
Axis powers had already invaded Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Romania, British Somiland, North Africa and Greece and had been mercilessly bombing Great Britain when the United States finally froze German and Italian assets in America. Then the Nazi's invaded the Soviet Union. On July 26, 1941 Roosevelt froze Japanese assets in United States and suspends relations. On Aug 1, 1941 United States announced an oil embargo against aggressor states. On Dec 7, 1941 the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. On Dec 8, 1941 United States and Britain declared war on Japan. On Dec 11, 1941 Germany declared war on the United States.

So how one would draw the conclusion that Dean's stance against preemptive war, his criticism of Bush's failure to organize a legitimate international coalition or exhaust inspections before launching a war against a country which hadn't threatened the U.S. or anyone else in twelve years would somehow indicate that he would not have taken us into war against Japan after they attacked us or Germany after they declared war on us is bizarre to say the least.

Speaking of bizarre William Saletan's rant in Slate got top billing and picture in their table of contents:
Stop This Train
Who decides this election - you or Al Gore?

Now the presidential candidate Gore prefers is ahead. Not in the vote count - the first votes haven't been cast yet - but in Democratic polls and money. In Iowa, Howard Dean leads his nearest competitor by eight points. In New Hampshire, he leads by 14 points to 25 points. Financially, he's blowing the field away. He has already renounced matching funds, allowing him to ignore the customary spending caps and outspend his opponents with impunity in the early primaries.

Should Democrats fight it out and see who wins? Not if Gore has his way. "Democracy is a team sport," he declared as he endorsed Dean in Harlem this morning. "All of us need to get behind the strongest candidate."

Who decided Dean was the strongest candidate? Not the voters: They haven't voted. Not the polls, either: They've shown Dick Gephardt, John Kerry, and Wesley Clark scoring better than Dean in hypothetical match-ups with President Bush. The person who anointed Dean the strongest candidate is the same intervening politician who complained three years ago about intervening politicians.

William dear, it's an endorsement and an admonishment. Not an edict. Sheesh.

A couple of weeks ago at Tech Central Station, Megan McArdle started doing a libertarian take on Dean's call for re-regulation.

Mr. Dean indicated that one of his major priorities is going to be "re-regulation." He didn't exactly suggest nationalizing the coal industry, mind you, but he did indicate that he wanted the iron fist of government to close a lot more tightly around utilities, large media companies and any business that offers stock options. Oh, and while he's at it, maybe telecoms too.

. . . To be fair to Mr. Dean, in the last few years it has become apparent that deregulators haven't always paid proper attention to aligning the incentives of the corporate managers with those of their shareholders, or the markets they are supposed to serve. Our first taste of the new millennium has been a veritable festival of opportunities to observe that economic stalwart, the Principal-Agent Problem, in action.

. . . the Principal-Agent Problem describes the inherent difficulties of hiring an agent to manage some piece of your affairs, whether that agent be the CEO of WorldCom or the night manager of your 7-11: the interests of the agent are not the same as your own, and he will be tempted to pursue his interests at your expense.

Some variation on the Principal Agent Problem has been at the heart of nearly every one of the corporate scandals that has shaken investor confidence and defrauded innocent stockholders over the last few years. Libertarians were as appalled as anyone at those abuses -- perhaps more so, because libertarians really care, deep down, about markets. If Howard Dean is ready to try and fix it, why not give him a shot?

Unfortunately, the interview reveals that Mr. Dean is far less interested in trying to fix an important market issue that has been worrying economists for years, than he is in good old fashioned leftist corporation bashing. For among the central goals of his "re-regulation" campaign is increasing unionization. And unions, like corporations, are prime candidates for agent abuse.

Corruption is of course legendary (though thankfully on the wane due to RICO), and generally comes at the expense of union workers whose leadership cut sweetheart deals in exchange for kickbacks. And fraud is so common at unions that the National Center for Policy Analysis reports that between 1998 and 2002, labor union officials were indicted at a rate of 12 per month -- and convicted at a rate of 11 per month. But those aren't the only ways in which union leaders can betray their workers' trust. Possibly even worse are the legal ways that union leaders seek their own interests at the expense of their workers.

And then she spends the next 9 paragraphs detailing examples of union malfeasance. What that has to do with Howard Dean isn't clear. What Howard Dean is calling for is card check recognition which would allow workers to join a union without going through a long expensive government supervised election.

Libertarians should be in favor of card check for two reasons. Number one, it represents less government regulation than the current system. Number two, it restores the fundamental right of freedom of association to citizens to whom that right is almost always denied through the legal wrangling by their employers. Number three (I know, it's a bonus reason) collective bargaining achieves the goals of a just and equitable society without government interference or wealth redistribution. It allows employees and employers to freely bargain over wages hours and working conditions.

As for union corruption, it may be legendary but it isn't widespread. 132 convictions a year? Heavens. Pedatory lending, insider trading, price fixing, illegal dumping of toxic substances, etc. it's not like unions have a monopoly on corruption. The impact of the Enron debacle alone is more than likely greater than the impact of all union corruption for the same year. Most unions simply aren't powerful enough any more to be corrupt.

It's very strange that McArdle eschews looking at the ways re-regulating our utilities markets to avoid another Enron, California, Blackout of 2003 and chooses instead to focus on union corruption, which is currently well-regulated, having been reprioritized by the Bush administration even as they are dropping suits against corporate crimes. It just strikes me that she has a conservative (not a libertarian) axe to grind and the Howard Dean interview was an excuse to use a bunch of anecdotes that she'd saved up. The examples that she gives are maddening, especially to a staunch union supporter. And they are examples of the Principal Agent Problem. But they aren't examples of an industry that has been deregulated and now it's markets are functioning properly. Union's problems mostly stem from being over regulated. And to allow those markets to function properly Howard Dean and every other Democratic candidate is proposing deregulating them.

Then there was the New York Times Magazine piece this weekend about Dean's campaign workers:

Alex Perkins, a 32-year-old policy coordinator for the campaign, quit his job, sold his house in Seattle and showed up at the campaign office offering to work free. Austin Burke, 22, who researches the other candidates, drove from Phoenix -- it took him six days -- and then just wandered around Burlington asking where the Dean office was. Matthew Bethell, 20, a British university student, left London and took the year off to volunteer full time in New Hampshire, even though he can't vote in American elections.

. . . Others take steps of their own invention: they cover their pajamas with stickers that say ''Howard Dean Has a Posse'' and wear them to an art opening, or they organize a squadron to do ''Yoga for Dean.'' They compose original songs in honor of Dean. (About two dozen people have done that; another man wrote a set of 23 limericks.) They marry each other wearing Dean paraphernalia. Overweight supporters create Web pages documenting, in daily dispatches, their efforts to lose 100 pounds in time for Dean's election. One woman, Kelly Jacobs of Hernando, Miss., took it upon herself to travel around the Memphis area for 15 weeks, standing on a single street corner for a week at a time, to promote Dean. I saw a middle-aged man at a garden party in New Hampshire preface a question to Dean by saying he was associated with Howards for Howard. Dean nodded, as if the man had said he was with the AARP.

2003-12-09T23:38:00.000-08:00

china

2003-12-09T23:04:00.000-08:00

Nicholas Kristoff writes in the New York Times:

SHUN SHUI VILLAGE, China - The most important thing happening in the world today is the rise of China, and that's the reality hovering in the background of the delicate U.S.-China talks under way in Washington this week.

. . . (In 1987) Shun Shui Village had no paved roads, no motor vehicles, no telephones and three black-and-white televisions. Now, along the paved road through the village, every house has a color television, and most have phones and motorcycles. Among Sheryl's distant kin, the youngest son of parents with only a second-grade education has just graduated from the university and bought a cellphone.

Multiply Shun Shui's transformation by the 700,000 villages of China, and you begin to appreciate the implications of China's industrial revolution. One study has found that China accounted for 25 percent of the world's economic growth from 1995 to 2002 (measured by purchasing power parity), more than the U.S.

. . . Soaring Chinese demand has become the major force propping up world energy prices, and the International Energy Agency predicts that China will have net oil imports of four million barrels a day by 2010 - twice Iraq's current oil exports.

Where will that oil come from? What will China's carbon emissions mean for global warming and the New Jersey coastline? Will the U.S. and China go to war over Taiwan, or over the Diaoyu Islands now controlled by Japan? Will China sustain its boom or collapse into chaos?

Instead of engaging on these issues, the White House and both parties in Congress seem intent on launching a new trade war with China. Washington appears unable to focus on anything more weighty than the supposed Chinese dumping of bras and nightgowns in our markets (even though U.S. companies don't make bras).

. . . President Bush has generally handled China quite sensibly, and it was also smart to warn Taiwan against steps toward independence. China's leaders have reciprocated, and have been especially helpful this year in restraining North Korea.

But with next year's elections approaching, the White House has turned demagogic and begun clubbing China over trade so as to win votes in manufacturing states, while endangering cooperation on a broader agenda. There are plenty of reasons to prod China to behave better - I know people who are in prison here, including a South Korean photographer (who often shoots pictures for The Times), whose only sin was documenting the plight of North Korean refugees in China. But our trade denunciations are petty and intellectually dishonest.

. . . One can quibble about China's keeping its currency cheap to promote exports. But China is stabilizing its currency by buying U.S. debt, financing Mr. Bush's budget deficit and keeping U.S. mortgage rates low.

Managing the rise of China will be one of the world's toughest challenges in coming years. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao is offering Mr. Bush both cooperation and patience, and it ill behooves us to slap him around for selling us cheap bras.

gore, dean, the debate and medicare

2003-12-09T22:32:00.000-08:00

Liberal Oasis has some good commentary on the Gore endorsement, the debate and Dean in general.

Highlights:

Check out this exchange yesterday with CNN’s Judy Woodruff, as she pressed about how he switched Christian denominations after a dispute over a proposed bike path:

WOODRUFF: You don't believe, Governor, the Republicans are going to have a field day with comments like these?

DEAN: The Republicans always have a field day with things like this.

That's the reason Democrats lose…because they're so afraid of the Republicans having a field day with comments like this or like that, that they never make any comments.

and

A side benefit of the Gore-Dean news is that it bumped Dubya’s signing the Medicare bill, in an elaborate hyped ceremony, as the top news story on many shows.

(NBC Nightly News, ABC World News Tonight, CNN’s Paula Zahn Now, Fox News’ Special Report, to name a few).

And Bush needs all the free PR he can get, because more polls came out today showing the Medicare bill is a political loser.

From the ABC/W. Post poll:

Do you approve or disapprove of the Medicare changes voted on by Congress last month?

All Adults
Approve – 32%
Disapprove – 38%

At first blush, the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll showed more support for the drug benefit:

Do you favor or oppose…the new prescription drug benefit for Medicare recipients?

65 and Over
Favor – 46%
Oppose – 39%

But other questions showed how soft the support is for the overall bill:

Do you favor or oppose…the changes made in Medicare coverage?

65 and Over
Favor – 38%
Oppose – 44%

How concerned are you that the new changes to Medicare will…not go far enough to help seniors pay for prescriptions?

65 and Over
Very concerned – 56%
Somewhat concerned – 29%
Not too concerned – 7%
Not concerned at all – 3%

How concerned are you that the new changes to Medicare will…benefit prescription drug companies too much?

65 and Over
Very concerned – 58%
Somewhat concerned – 20%
Not too concerned – 11%
Not concerned at all – 4%

It’s tough to step on a presidential news story. But Gore did, making Bush’s sell job, already uphill, just a little bit harder.

goddamnit

2003-12-09T22:18:00.000-08:00

Gavin Newsom has defeated Matt Gonzalez in the San Francisco mayor's race.

From KPIX:

With 100% of precincts reporting, Democrat Newsom got 53% of the vote compared to Green Gonzalez's 47%.

That makes me sad. It's bad for the Democratic party. Newsom is the kind of candidate that has led to the atrophy of grassroots Democratic support.

the electorate is ours if we play our cards right - part two - domestic issues

2003-12-09T20:56:00.000-08:00

Picking up from yesterday. Let's continue looking at the New York Times/CBS News poll, shall we. Yeah, I know it's boring. But it's important. At least pretend that your listening.

Todays cluster of issues: Domestics!!! Tomorrow: Economics - and then we're done.

And yeah, I know that I said that we would do Economics today but I changed my mind.

RECAP INTRODUCTION

Priorities

3. What do you think is the single most important problem for the government, that is the President and Congress, to address this year?

7/13-16 '02
| Terrorism 17% | Other 17% | DK/NA 14% | Economy 13% | Business Corruption 6% | Education 5% | Jobs 4% | Defense 3% | Healthcare 3% | Poverty 2% | War 2% | Budget Deficit 2% | Medicare/Medicaid 2% | Big Government 2% | Social Security 1%

9/28-10/01 '03
| Other 25% | Economy 16% | Jobs 16% | Terrorism 8% | War 6% | Education 4% | Foreign Policy 3% | Healthcare 3% | Poverty 2% | Budget Deficit 2% | Defense 2% | Medicare/Medicaid 1% | Social Security 0% | Big Government 0% | Business Corruption 0%

If we cluster issues thusly:
National Security (Terrorism, Defense, Foreign Policy) Economics (Economy, Jobs) and Domestics ( Healthcare, Social Security, Budget Deficit, Education, Medicare/Medicaid, Poverty) and filter out categories that are not indicative (Big Government, Business Corruption, War) then the numbers look like this:

7/13-16 '02
National Security 21% | Economics 17% | Domestics 15 %

9/28-10/01 '03
National Security 13% | Economics 32% | Domestics 12%

Domestic Issues:

50. How much do you think that George W. Bush cares about the needs and problems of blacks -- a lot, some, not much or none at all?

3/08 - 12 '01 | A Lot 30% | Some 31% | Not Much 22% | None At All 11% | DK/NA 5%
9/28 - 10/1 '03| A Lot 23% | Some 36% | Not Much 20% | None At All 14% | DK/NA 7%

Bush doesn't do badly here 61% for 'A Lot' or 'Some' and 34% for 'Not Much' or 'None at All'. The only significant shift is 30% to 23% in 'A Lot'.

51. How much do you think that George W. Bush cares about the needs and problems of Hispanics -- a lot, some, not much or none at all?

9/28 - 10/1 '03 | A Lot 25% | Some 36% | Not Much 22% | None At All 10% | DK/NA 6%

Again, Bush does well. 61% for 'A Lot' or 'Some'.

61. In general, do you think the policies of the Bush administration favor the rich, favor the middle class, favor the poor, or do they treat all groups the same?

1/21 - 24 '02 | Rich 50% | Middle Class 14% | Poor 2% | All Same 28% | DK/NA 7%
9/28-10/1 '03 | Rich 60% | Middle Class 10% | Poor 1% | All Same 26% | DK/NA 3%

This is obviously bad news for Bush and the trend is worse.

65. Do you think the policies of the Bush Administration have made the nation's schools better, worse, or have the policies of the Bush Administration not affected the nation's schools?

9/28-10/1 '03 | Better 23% | Worse 26% | No Effect 47% | DK/NA 11%

What happens when the teacher's union's start running ads attacking Bush's 'No Child Left Behind' law?

This is definitely the weakest part of the poll. It does very little to look at the domestic issues (Healthcare, Social Security, Budget Deficit, Education, Medicare/Medicaid, Poverty) that they asked people to prioritize.

I think the two points that stand out in crafting a strategy to defeat Bush is the widespread(ing) perception that he favors the rich above everyone else and the fact that only 23% think that the 'Education President' has improved education.

ad wars

2003-12-09T19:18:00.000-08:00

The television ad war going on in Iowa and elsewhere is providing more than a modicum of drama and intrigue.

The Reaganite Club For Growth is running this ad attacking Dean for calling for huge tax increases in New Hampshire and Iowa.

It's a pretty tough ad. I'm not sure how much resonance it will have with Democratic Iowa voter's. What Dean is calling for is a return to the tax levels of the Clinton era. I have to say that while I admire Dean's principled and responsible position here, I don't think it's smart politics and I think the tiny part of the cuts that went to the working poor and people making under say . . . $60,000 a year a worth keeping on principle.

Joe Lieberman is running this ad attacking Dean for sealing his gubernatorial papers. Joe sits in a diner and looks straight at the camera and castigates the Bush administration for secrecy and then questions Dean's decision to seal his papers. Joe's big mistake is not going the visuals/ominous narrator route because the more voters see Joe, the less they like him.

The "group" Americans for Jobs, Healthcare and Progressive Values seems to consist solely of Timothy L. Raftis former Iowa Senator Tom Harkin's former campaign manager. They're running a purportedly negative ad against Howard Dean in Iowa criticizing him for getting an 'A' rating from the NRA. This is wrong-headed on so many levels it's hard to know where to start.

Number one: Are Iowa Democrats going to be horrified by an 'A' rating from the NRA? I doubt it.

Number two: For a progressive group to interject the kind of wedge issue that keeps Republicans in power back into the political debate undermines the progressive project.

Number three: The ad lumps Dean with Bush on the issue of gun control. If Dean is the Democrat running against Bush his ability to possibly preclude the NRA (4.3 million members) from endorsing in this election is a pretty big advantage that his rivals don't bring to the table. Even if the NRA endorses Bush, NRA members will be able to vote this election based on other issues because of that 'A' rating.

Number four: On behalf hundred of thousands of Dean supporters who are getting sick of hearing a hawkish, centrist, fiscal conservative, NRA 'A' rating candidate continue to be described as too liberal to elect - THANK YOU - from the bottom of my heart.

The Americans for Jobs, Healthcare and Progressive Values website is hilarious. The homepage is a very personal letter from Raftis. The "About" page which you think is going to be "About" the organization is "About" Raftis. And the "Issues" page that you think is going to be about jobs, healthcare and progressive values is about Howard Dean and guns.

And I think this is the ad that Gephardt erroneously called the first negative ad ever in the Iowa caucus. It's not the first and if Gephardt thinks that the line about Washington Democrats not standing up to George Bush is about him then that's his problem. Gephardt will know that he's getting hit with a negative ad when someone does: "This Congressman Dick Gephardt he's asking for your vote for the Democratic nominee for President. Unfortunately, he hasn't bothered to vote 563 times in Congress this year. That's 91% of the votes that the people of Missouri elected him to represent them in. Is that the kind of leadership you want in a President?"

card check

2003-12-09T15:01:00.000-08:00

H.R. 3619 and S. 1925 are bipartisan bills to secure card check recognition for workers trying to form a union.

The current system is that when a majority of the workers at a worksite sign cards joining the union those cards are presented to the National Labor Relations Board to show support for an election supervised by the NLRB. That sets up a long campaign by the company to scare the workers and block the election through legal wrangling. Those campaigns are very expensive and difficult for unions to win. This legislation would allow the union to be certified as soon as a majority had signed membership cards. It would go a long way towards making it easier for the millions of workers who would like to join a union but are thwarted by the cumbersome process in place today.

Go here to send your Congressmen a message in support of this bi-partisan legislation.

This article does an excellent job at framing the issue in terms of human rights and the freedom of association and looking at the economic price we pay for low union membership in this country.

here comes santa claus

2003-12-09T14:45:00.000-08:00

Check out the new Move On ad. Just in time for Christmas. Contribute here to the campaign to run anti Bush ads in swing states.

It's pretty corny. Effective? I'm not sure. I think this ad was better.

adios amigo

2003-12-09T14:11:00.000-08:00

It really is a shame about Kerry's campaign. After Dean, he was my second choice for nominee. Then Edwards. Then I start to cringe. And then I start to wretch.

From the Boston Globe:

. . . There is a mixture of fight and bemusement in his eyes as he stands outside a Market Basket in Portsmouth early Friday evening. "I need your help," he tells shoppers who are corralled by aides and encouraged to "meet the senator,"

. . . "What is your biggest issue?" he asks those who step up to him. "Bush," answers one woman. "I'm the guy who can beat Bush," Kerry answers. "Probably," she counters. "Probably? What do you mean, probably?" he responds. "How do I persuade you?"

The war in Iraq in this woman's real issue. She is against it, and supports Dean, the candidate now leading New Hampshire polls. "We've got a plan for how we're going to deal with it," Kerry tells her. As she walks off, he continues talking: "I'm going to get your support. You're going to listen to me."

. . . The night before this New Hampshire stop, at a holiday party in Boston, Kerry supporters like Tom O'Neill insisted it is not over for the Bay State's junior senator. Kerry can still turn it around in New Hampshire, said O'Neill, son of the late, legendary Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill. All he must do is " give people a reason to vote for him," Tom O'Neill says.

It sounds so simple. But Kerry has yet to do it, and time is growing short.

Talk about desperate.

The press has been trying to help him breathe some life into his campaign. This month's Atlantic did a cover story on his Vietnam experience. Rolling Stone did an interview with him.

The Rolling Stone interview was interesting for Kerry's combativeness on Bush's foreign policy and of course the money shot was . . .

Did you feel you were blindsided by Dean's success?

Well, not blindsided. I mean, when I voted for the war, I voted for what I thought was best for the country. Did I expect Howard Dean to go off to the left and say, "I'm against everything"? Sure. Did I expect George Bush to fuck it up as badly as he did? I don't think anybody did.

. . . was a breath of fresh air / a stupid mistake / a desperate ploy to grab a news cycle.

It was clear that things had totally fallen apart when he canned his campaign manager and staff quit. Eric Alterman's account of an evening at Al Franken's apartment talking strategy with a bunch of writer types shows just how desperate he is.

Kerry and I had what candidates call a "spirited exchange" in which he defended his vote. He said he felt betrayed by George Bush, whom he had believed, had not yet made up his mind to go to war when the vote was taken. He never expected a unilateral war given the way Powell, Scowcroft, Eagleberger and others were speaking at the time. He defends his willingness to trust the president of the United States, but now realizes that this was a big mistake

You got big troubles if you publicly admit that you thought that Bush would only go to war as a last resort. Their was never any doubt that we were going to war not matter what Saddam did or the UN.

The choice of Franken to organize the event is interesting, since I think Franken's political instincts stink and he hasn't been doing Kerry any favors describing him dressed as a pirate with parrot on his shoulder over and over.

I think Kerry's big mistake, and it's too late to correct was in not running for President from the floor of the Senate. The Senate has been badly in need of leadership. If he had been there, fillibustering, pulling DINO votes, pulling moderate Republicans, doing the interviews on the issues, just really rallying the troops then he would have been one to watch. It would have been good for his campaign and it would have been good for the country.

Instead, Kerry missed 35 votes on the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill alone and 287 total votes or 63%

UPDATE: David Corn takes a good look at how Kerry ended up poorly positioned on just about every issue in this race.

gore to endorse howard dean

2003-12-08T18:18:00.000-08:00

From the Los Angeles Times:

WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Al Gore will endorse Howard Dean on Tuesday, culminating the former Vermont governor's transformation from little-known insurgent to the commanding front-runner in the 2004 Democratic presidential field.

Sources close to the campaign say Gore will appear with Dean at a campaign event Tuesday morning in Harlem before campaigning with him in Iowa later in the day.

This will do a number of things.

Most importantly, it further elevates Dean's national stature, giving him momentum in states where he is not campaigning intensely. He is the clear front runner in states where the campaign is in full swing, but lags in the nation as a whole. This will start to put his name recognition on par with Lieberman and Clark's.

It will help him with establishment fundraising. It should shut up some of the party establishment that have been mumbling about Dean whenever they get near a microphone. It should help him in the South and with black voters.

Not a bad day for Dean.

the electorate is ours if we play our cards right - part one - national security

2003-12-08T15:20:00.000-08:00

This has been sitting in my to do list for a while.

In an attempt to put the 37 pages of raw data into some sort of semi-manageable form, here is my analysis of the New York Times / CBS News poll conducted from September 28 - October 1, 2003. I look at what it may tell us about the direction, with particular focus on independent voters, public opinion is headed in this country. My primary interest is in getting the lay of the land for the 2004 General Election. I'm going to do this in three parts over the next three days.

Priorities

3. What do you think is the single most important problem for the government, that is the President and Congress, to address this year?

7/13-16 '02
| Terrorism 17% | Other 17% | DK/NA 14% | Economy 13% | Business Corruption 6% | Education 5% | Jobs 4% | Defense 3% | Healthcare 3% | Poverty 2% | War 2% | Budget Deficit 2% | Medicare/Medicaid 2% | Big Government 2% | Social Security 1%

9/28-10/01 '03
| Other 25% | Economy 16% | Jobs 16% | Terrorism 8% | War 6% | Education 4% | Foreign Policy 3% | Healthcare 3% | Poverty 2% | Budget Deficit 2% | Defense 2% | Medicare/Medicaid 1% | Social Security 0% | Big Government 0% | Business Corruption 0%

If we cluster issues thusly:
National Security (Terrorism, Defense, Foreign Policy) Economics (Economy, Jobs) and Domestics ( Healthcare, Social Security, Budget Deficit, Education, Medicare/Medicaid, Poverty) and filter out categories that are not indicative (Big Government, Business Corruption, War) then the numbers look like this:

7/13-16 '02
National Security 21% | Economics 17% | Domestics 15 %

9/28-10/01 '03
National Security 13% | Economics 32% | Domestics 12%

Iraq, Foreign Policy, Defense, the War on Terror

4. Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling foreign policy?

6/14- 18 '01 | Approve 47% | Disapprove 31% | DK/NA 22%
10/25-28 '01 | Approve 74% | Disapprove 16% | DK/NA 10%
12/07-10 '01 | Approve 75% | Disapprove 13% | DK/NA 12%
3/07- 09 '03 | Approve 51% | Disapprove 42% | DK/NA 7%
9/28-10/1'03 | Approve 44% | Disapprove 45% | DK/NA 11%

5. Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling the situation in Iraq?

4/11 - 13 '03 | Approve 79% | Disapprove 17% | DK/NA 4%
5/27 -28 '03 | Approve 72% | Disapprove 20% | DK/NA 8%
7/08 - 09 '03 | Approve 58% | Disapprove 32% | DK/NA 10%
9/28-10/1 '03 | Approve 47% | Disapprove 48% | DK/NA 6%

My guess is that even if the Administration begins to make baby steps forward, the broad public will be filtering out most detailed news about Iraq and will continue to view it as a messy situation that is costing us lives and treasure. I think it's going to be awfully hard for the admin to puncture the perception that Iraq is getting worse.

43. Would you prefer the Democratic nominee for President to be someone who supported the war in Iraq, someone who opposed the war in Iraq, or would this not matter to you?

8/26-28 '03 CBS | Supported 28% | Opposed 40% | Doesn't Matter 28% | DK/NA 4%
9/28-10/1 '03
REG DEM PRIM VTS Supported 25% | Opposed 29% | Doesn't Matter 41% | DK/NA 5%

Now that 'Opposed 40%' is both striking and puzzling. It would indicate that either: Independent voters are more inclined towards a Democratic nominee that opposed the war than committed Democrats - or - the Republican voters polled are thinking very strategically and are convinced that a Democratic nominee who opposed the war would mean certain victory for their candidate. Only more data will indicate which is more likely.

I think that it goes a long way towards dispelling the myth that Dean's opposition to the war will be a liability in a general election race with Bush. In fact, I think a year from now it will seem prescient.

The other question is which party do those 'Doesn't Matter 28%" favor. If Bush runs on the war and the Democrat on the economy, it most likely will favor the Democrat, notwithstanding a sharp turn in the economy. It doesn't help Bush, that's for sure.

SPLIT HALF - ASK EITHER QUESTION 72 OR 73

72. Do you think that removing Saddam Hussein from power is worth the potential loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq, or not?

4/02 -03 '03 | Worth It 68% | Not Worth It 22% | DK/NA 10%
9/28-10/1 '03| Worth It 51% | Not Worth It 41% | DK/NA 8%

73. Do you think that the result of the war with Iraq was worth the loss of American life and other costs of attacking Iraq or not?

9/28-10/1 '03 | Worth It 41% | Not Worth It 53% | DK/NA 6%

Clearly the Admin needs to keep the war about Saddam Hussein. The more time that passes, the more it is about liberating the Iraqi people, who are quickly loosing the sympathy of the American public.

74. Has the Iraqi war been longer than you expected, shorter than you expected, or has it been about what you expected?

9/28-10/1 '03 | Longer 45% | Shorter 13% | About expected 40% | DK/NA 2%

Only 2% DK/NA? Odd.

75. Has the war in Iraq cost the United States more money than you expected, less money than you expected, or has it been about what you expected?

9/28-10/1 '03 | More 66% | Less 2% | About Expected 26% | DK/NA 6%

76. So far, do you think the Bush Administration has developed a plan for rebuiling Iraq after the war, or hasn't it developed one yet?

4/11- 13 '03 | Has A Clear Plan 42% | Not Done That Yet 45% | DK/NA 13%
9/15 -16 '03 | Has A Clear Plan 22% | Not Done That Yet 64% | DK/NA 14%
9/28-10/1 '03 | Has A Clear Plan 29% | Not Done That Yet 59% | DK/NA 12%

80. George W. Bush has asked Congress for an additional $87 billion for the next year for military and reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do you think the United States should or should not spend this amount of money?

9/28-10/1 '03 | Should 34% | Should not 61% | DK/NA 5%

81. Who should have the lead responsibility for setting up a new government in Iraq after the war is over - the United Nations or the United States?

5/9 - 12 '03 | United Nations 45% | United States 13% | Neither 2% | DK/NA 1%
9/28-10/1 '03 | United Nations 68% | United States 26% | Neither 2% | DK/NA 4%

There seems to be a typo for the May numbers, because they don't add up.

84. Do you think of the war with Iraq as part of the war on terrorism, or do you think of it as separate from the war on terrorism? IF ANSWERED "PART OF WAR ON TERRORISM", ASK: Is it a major part of the war on terrorism, or a minor part of the war on terrorism?

9/28-10/1 '03 | Major Part 47% | Minor Part 10% | Not Part 37% | DK/NA 5%

The question is, do the "Minor Part" voters swing with the "Not Part"s or the "Major"s?

64. Do you think the policies of the Bush administration have made the United States safer from terrorism, less safe from terrorism, or have the policies of the Bush administration not affected the U.S.' safety from terrorism?

9/28 - 10/1 '03 | Safer 60% | Less Safe 18% | No Effect 18% | DK/NA 4%

Advantage: Bush

8. Which comes closer to your opinion about what the United States policy should be after the war with Iraq? The United States should not attack another country unless the U.S. is attacked first, OR the U.S. should be able to attack any country it thinks might attack the United States?

4/26-27 '03 | Should Not Attack 50% | Should Attack 42% | DK/NA 8%
7/08 - 9 '03 | Should Not Attack 58% | Should Attack 33% | DK/NA 9%
9/28-10/1'03 | Should Not Attack 55% | Should Attack 35% | DK/NA 11%

11. Should the United States try to change a dictatorship to a democracy where it can, OR should the United States stay out of other countries' affairs?

4/11 - 13 '03 | Change 29% | Stay Out 48% | Depends 16% | DK/NA 7%
9/28-10/01 '03 | Change 21% | Stay Out 61% | Depends 10% | DK/NA 7%

The swing to a strong preference for staying out of other countries affairs is striking. What interesting is that the loss of almost 38% support for the 'Depends' option, given the shift from WMD's to the barbarity of Saddam's regime as a rationale for the invasion.

47. Do you have confidence in George W. Bush's ability to deal wisely with an international crisis, or are you uneasy about his approach?

4/11-13 '03 | Confidence 66% | Uneasy 31% | DK/NA 3%
9/28-10/1 '03 Confidence 45% | Uneasy 50% | DK/NA 5%

48. Compared to when George W. Bush took office, are relations today between the United States and its European allies, better today, worse today or about the same as they were when George W. Bush took office?

9/28-10/01 '03 | Better 9% | Worse 55% | About the Same 31% | DK/NA 5%

Overwhelmingly, these numbers argue that the Bush administration is not positioned on Terrorism/National Security/Defense/Foreign Policy as well as they think they are.

When the Republicans aired this ad in Iowa (ignore the email request and simply hit play on the viewer), Move On aired this ad in swing states. Bush lost four points in West Virginia.

The numbers show that the National Security cluster of issues has slipped in people's priorities. It will likely continue to slip. As the war in Iraq continues to slog on, approval of Bush's handling of it will continue to slide, wether he gains ground or not, unless their is dramatic improvement or a withdrawal that does clearly put the region in danger of sliding off into immediate chaos.

It also argues that Dean is well positioned going into the general. A majority is in favor of multilateralism and UN involvement, they are opposed to preemption, were against spending $87 million on Iraq and don't think that liberating the Iraqi people was worth the cost in lives and treasure.

Tune in tomorrow when we look at the numbers in the Economics cluster.

get out to vote for matt gonzalez in san francisco

2003-12-08T11:29:00.000-08:00

If you live in San Francisco and somehow haven't made up your mind, check out my piece on the mayor's race, I think it remains the most thorough look at the race available on the web.

Common Dreams has a piece arguing that the national Dems who are piling on the Newsom campaign have their party's interests backwards. Peter Gabel argues - and I agree - that Gonzalez will energize the progressive base in San Francisco and beyond. He makes the case, but does have numbers to back it up, that Nader's run in 2000 turned out more Democratic voters for Gore than the Green voters that cost him. I don't know if I buy that, but the point is moot since Gonzalez is running against an establishment Dem, the kind that have hollowed out the party, but he's not running against a conservative Republican.

What Gabel fails to notice is that, as I pointed out last Wednesday, is that a Gonzalez win sets up the Greens to take a shot at Tom Lantos' District 12 congressional seat in 2006. And that is scary to them. But it's not scary. A Green in that seat would be voting with the Dems in Congress most of the time. At least as much as Zell Miller or John Breaux.

A more interesting piece is San Francisco political analyst Richard DeLeon's analysis of this chart that he has constructed:

Here's his breakdown:

This kind of graph is called a scatter plot. This scatter plot measures San Francisco precincts on two scales. The bottom scale shows the percentage “yes” vote to recall Governor Gray Davis (Democrat) in the October recall election.

The left scale shows the percentage vote for Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante (Democrat) of the total votes cast in that same election.

The yellow, red, and green numbers displayed in the graph mark where each precinct is located on those two scales. (I used Board of Supervisors district numbers as the plotting symbols to add valuable information.)

The top 25% of precinct electorates voting for Matt Gonzalez on November 4 are coded yellow. The top 25% voting for Gavin Newsom in that election are coded red.

All the rest are coded green.

To illustrate interpretation, look at that yellow “8” at the very top upper left. Reading off its location from the two scales, we can see that this District 8 precinct electorate was in the top 25% for Gonzalez (code yellow), voted only about 7% in favor the of the recall (bottom scale), and voted about 76% for the Democrat Bustamante (left scale). Now look at that red “2” near the bottom farthest right. This District 2 precinct electorate was in the top 25% for Newsom (code red), voted about 46% in favor of the recall, and voted about 32% for Bustamante.

Okay. Now, two more interpretive steps and we're done with this walk-through.

First, sit back and look at the overall pattern of the precinct voting data displayed in this graph. That pattern is quite tight and clear and may be described as a negative (or inverse) correlation: i.e., the higher a precinct electorate's “yes” vote to recall Davis, the lower its support for Bustamante -- and vice versa. We are not surprised by this, to say the least.

Second, let's zoom in and pay close attention to color. As you can see, most of the top Gonzalez precincts (yellow) are tightly clustered in the upper-left portion of the plot.

Generalization: Voters in the top Gonzalez precincts voted overwhelmingly against the Davis recall and also voted overwhelmingly to elect Bustamante.
And as you can see, most of the top Newsom precincts (red) are located in the bottom right quadrant of the plot.

Generalization: Voters in the top Newsom precincts were the most supportive of the Davis recall (although not even one precinct electorate, it should be said, mustered a majority), and they were clearly the least supportive of Bustamante

From the San Francisco Sentinel. The site is so poorly organized that it is impossible to link to the article.

This makes a something of a case for the arguement that the Dem establishment is on the wrong side of this race when it comes to the party's true interests. It's not exactly correlative. And you could argue ( and I have ) that getting rid of Davis and Bustamante were in the Dems long term interest. That's not how the party elites see it. But then the party elites have been presiding over fifteen years of Democratic decline.

Vote Matt!!! Three cheers for Matt!!!

And while you are at it, buy Richard DeLeon's book Left Coast City, the definitive exploration of the political fault lines in San Francisco from 1975 to 1991. Highly recommended. Even if you don't live in San Francisco.

afghanistan

2003-12-08T03:46:00.000-08:00

From the Salt Lake Tribune:

KABUL, Afghanistan -- A flurry of terrorist attacks over the past several days, as well as the deaths of nine children Saturday in a U.S. air assault on a village where a lone Taliban fighter was said to be hiding, have cast a jittery pall over preparations for a historic constitutional assembly scheduled to begin Wednesday.

The U.N. envoy to Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, reacted with unusual sharpness to the Saturday air raid, saying it "follows similar incidents" and "adds to a sense of insecurity and fear in the country." Afghan officials were more restrained in their response. Security is already tight for the constitutional assembly, with soldiers stationed at many city intersections. Officials have vowed not to let the U.N.-mandated meeting be sabotaged by violence, but they said Sunday that it may now be delayed by several days.

The recent attacks also threatened to overshadow two milestones in the country's reconstruction and pacification: the imminent completion of the 310-mile highway from Kabul to the southern city of Kandahar, a U.S.-funded project, and the launching Sunday of a program to disarm and demobilize thousands of militia fighters in Kabul province.

From MSNBC:

MIRAN SHAH, Pakistan, Dec. 7 — Four rockets exploded near a school housing U.S. security personnel in the remote western region of Pakistan but there was no damage or reports of casualties, officials said on Sunday. . . Three rockets exploded a few hundred metres (yards) away from the school building where a few U.S. security personnel are temporarily stationed to check the movement of Taliban and al Qaeda members in Pakistan's tribal rim.

From Newsweek:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 — Al Qaeda told the Taliban last month it planned to divert a large number of anti-American fighters from Afghanistan to Iraq and cut by half funding to Afghan fighter groups, Newsweek reported on Sunday.

. . . Al Qaeda representatives at the meeting said bin Laden had decided to reduce the network's monthly payment to the Afghan resistance to $1.5 million from $3 million, and that raising and distributing funds was complicated by the U.S. crackdown on finances of suspected terror groups, Newsweek said, citing a Taliban meeting participant who goes by the name Sharafullah.

From the Asian Times:

BANGALORE - The spurt in violence in Afghanistan in recent months has generally been attributed to the resurgence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. However, aid workers in Afghanistan are saying that it is warlords with connections to the production and trade of narcotics who are behind many of the attacks.

The sharp rise in killings, say aid workers, coincides with the autumn harvest of the poppy crop. Diane Johnston, country director for Mercy Corps, told Associated Press "security is worse in places where people are growing poppies". Late last month, the European Union's envoy in Afghanistan, Francesc Vendrell, warned that laboratories for producing heroin that had been closed down by the Taliban were being set up again.

From Hi Pakistan:

LAHORE: Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan have agreed to initiate collaborative efforts in the special education sector for bringing a much-needed improvement in the condition of handicapped and disadvantaged children over the next few years. The education ministers of the three countries signed and adopted a declaration to emphasise upon inclusive education at the conclusion of a two-day meeting in Islamabad here Sunday.

From the IRNA:

Kabul, Dec 8, IRNA -- Visiting Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Asia-Pacific Affairs Mohsen Aminzadeh met here on Monday with UN Special Envoy to Afghanistan Lakhdar Brahimi. Appreciating Iran`s constructive role in restoring peace and security in Afghanistan, Brahimi called for Iran`s more assistance in a bid to hold a Constitutional Loya Jirga (grand assembly) more effectively aimed at finalizing a draft constitution.

From Turk.US::

Two Turkish workers kidnapped on Friday in southern districts of Kabul were freed, ambassador Mufit Ozdes said.

From the Hindustan Times:

Authorities were on Monday searching for two Indian road workers kidnapped by heavily armed men in southern Afghanistan, even as two Turkish engineers and an Afghan kidnapped three days ago near Kabul were freed.

no sunday magazine today

2003-12-07T14:59:00.000-08:00

Sorry, Blogger has been down all day. Now I'm heading out to do some x-country skiing.

2003-12-06T07:45:00.000-08:00