Monthly Archives: June 2013

Ethics Schmethics II, or, ‘Let’s call the whole thing off’

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The story this morning about the SC Senate killing ethics legislation for the year was filled with the kind of nonsense that we’ve come to expect from this institution:

COLUMBIA — The state Senate polices its members just fine, senators said Wednesday, refusing to pass an ethics bill – Gov. Nikki Haley’s top priority for the year – that would end lawmakers’ practice of investigating ethics complaints against legislators.

But senators were pointed in their criticism of the GOP-controlled House’s ethics process, questioning its investigation last year of Republican Haley and its slowness to take up charges against Speaker Bobby Harrell, R-Charleston.

The Senate proved last week it should retain that responsibility when it investigated Sen. Robert Ford, D-Charleston, on charges that he broke the law by spending campaign money on himself, said Senate Ethics chairman Luke Rankin, R-Horry. Facing ouster from the Senate, Ford resigned and now faces a State Law Enforcement Division investigation.

“Is (the state’s current ethics law) broken in the Senate? I think last week was the perfect and the best evidence to show, flatly, no,” Rankin said late Wednesday as the Senate debated the bill…

Really? Because one senator decided to resign in the midst of an ethics proceeding, the system is working? How do you figure? What if he hadn’t resigned? Then we would have seen whether the system works. What Ford did in resigning was abort the process.

Or do you think this is the process? Is your plan that, the next time a senator is investigated, y’all will just say to him, a few weeks into the process, OK, this is the part where you resign and save us all a lot of trouble…?

And if you think it’s not working in the House, or with the governor, why on Earth wouldn’t you change the law in order to address that problem? Instead of just saying, We’re OK here in the Senate, so everything’s hunky-dory.

You know, you’re not elected to pass laws according to how they affect you; you’re supposed to pass them for the good of the state as a whole. Maybe that’s a radical concept for you, but that’s actually the way it’s supposed to be.

It’s not about how senators feel about themselves or about each other. It just isn’t.

But what am I saying? Who’s in the dreamworld here? Obviously, it is all about y’all…

Remind me to mention, over the phone, that I love Big Brother

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First, I saw this this morning:

Verizon providing all call records to U.S. under court order

The National Security Agency appears to be collecting the telephone records of tens of millions of American customers of Verizon, one of the nation’s largest phone companies, under a top-secret court order issued in April.

The order appears to require a Verizon subsidiary to provide the NSA with daily information on all telephone calls by its customers within the United States and from foreign locations into the United States.

The order, which was signed by a judge from the secret court that oversees domestic surveillance, was first reported on the Web site of the Guardian newspaper. The Web site reproduced a copy of the order, which two former U.S. officials told The Washington Post appears to be authentic…

Then, later, I see that much of official Washington was scrambling to defend the NSA program:

The Obama administration and key U.S. lawmakers on Thursday defended a secret National Security Agency telephone surveillance program that one congressman said had helped avert a terrorist attack in recent years.

The program apparently has collected the telephone records of tens of millions of American customers of Verizon, one of the nation’s largest phone companies, under a top-secret court order.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said the court order, issued in April, appears to be “the exact three-month renewal” of the program that has been underway for the past seven years. She said the program is “lawful.”…

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Thursday that the court order in question is a critical tool that allows the intelligence community to know when terrorists or suspected terrorists are engaging in dangerous activities. He says that’s particularly true for people located in the U.S.

He said the order doesn’t allow the government to listen in on calls, but only includes details like telephone numbers…

Which reminds me: Have I mentioned lately that I love Big Brother? I say it in front of the telescreen frequently. I guess I need to mention it over the phone…

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I had no idea Boehner was such a jerk

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There was an interesting piece yesterday in The Washington Post about how divided the House Republicans are these days, headlined, “House Republicans broken into fighting factions.”

It provided an in-the-room perspective of recent battles within the caucus, such as the meeting on New Year’s Day in which Speaker Boehner told the caucus he was going to vote for the tax deal with the Democrats, and his two top lieutenants said they would vote against it, and a representative from Tennessee shouted, “If you’re for this and they’re against, we’ve got problems.”

As I said, interesting piece. I’ve felt a good bit of sympathy for Mr. Boehner over the last couple of years as he has tried to lead the House despite the open opposition of the Tea Party faction. But I lost all sympathy when I got to this part of the story:

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, House Republicans filed into the same Capitol basement room, HC5, where they fought on New Year’s Day. They filtered past clearly marked NO SMOKING signs — which, as always, the Camel-smoking Boehner ignored — and settled into the same hard plastic chairs that have served as Washington’s toughest ideological fault line of the past 30 months.

OK, maybe I’m the last person in America to know this about Boehner, but I find that shocking.

I would think any member of the Congress who so blatantly ignored a rule in place for the health of other people to be beyond the pale. But for a leader to do it — for someone in chargeto demonstrate that he is entitled to indulge his own noxious habit to the detriment of the health of everyone around him, even though others have to follow the rules…

That’s just breathtaking. So to speak. I’m stunned.

No wonder nobody wants to follow that guy.

Why is Obama so high on Susan Rice?

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You know, I felt like the nation sort of dodged a bullet when Susan Rice fell out of contention for secretary of state.

Not because of the Benghazi thing, but because of all the other stuff we learned about her while she was in the news. Just one foreign policy mess in her background after another.

And now, this:

WASHINGTON — President Obama announced on Wednesday afternoon that Susan E. Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, would replace Tom Donilon, who is resigning, as national security adviser in a major shakeup of his foreign-policy inner circle.Susan_Rice,_official_State_Dept_photo_portrait,_2009

 The appointment, which Mr. Obama made in a Rose Garden ceremony, puts Ms. Rice, 48, an outspoken diplomat and a close political ally, at the heart of the administration’s foreign-policy apparatus.

It is also a defiant gesture to Republicans who harshly criticized Ms. Rice for presenting an erroneous account of the deadly attacks on the American mission in Benghazi, Libya. The post of national security adviser, while powerful, does not require Senate confirmation.

In his announcement, Mr. Obama referred to Ms. Rice’s role as an adviser during his 2008 presidential campaign and praised her work as a key diplomat during his first term…

So… she was advising him back when, for instance, he was against the Colombian Free Trade Agreement, before he was (happily) for it?

Why is the president so high on having this woman in the front ranks of his foreign policy team? The NYT excerpt above makes it sound almost like petulance on his part. I haven’t figured out what it is that recommends her, or at least, what there is that outweighs all the negative…

Open Thread for Wednesday, June 5, 2013

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At this hour on this day in 1944, paratroopers of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions were at their airfields in England, packing up (they carried gear that, for many of them, weighed more than they did) yet again and waiting for someone to help them climb into their C-47s.

They had done the same the night before, only to have the invasion delayed a day. I can’t imagine any of them slept during the intervening night. Then tonight, they were to jump into Normandy at midnight, spend the rest of the night trying to find their units after being misdropped, and then spend all of D-Day in hard fighting, wherever they happened to be. For starters.

Good thing they were all in shape.

This is just me free-associating because I don’t quite grasp the concept of an “open thread.” Kathryn said I should offer one. I said I didn’t know what that was, and that judging by the 155 comments on last Thursday’s Virtual Front Page, it seemed to me y’all talked about whatever you want anyway. She said, “You just say ‘Open thread’ and we talk about whatever we want. I can’t sort out the tangle that is Thursday’s VFP any more.”

So… “Open Thread.”

Glad to see the administration on board with Colombia trade

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Some of y’all — those who carry grudges — will recall that one of my reasons for endorsing John McCain in 2008 was that he supported the Colombian Free Trade Agreement. This caused some Obamaphiles to freak out, it just seemed so esoteric to them.

But to me, it was important to cite. First, the large portion of my childhood spent in South America causes me to care more about that part of the world than do most people in this country. I find Yankee indifference to the rest of the hemisphere pretty appalling, frankly. One reason I got into reading British publications years ago was that they actually covered news events in Latin America. Most media in this country do not, for the simple reason that their readers and viewers aren’t interested.

I also saw this as a little-discussed microcosm of a difference in judgment and decision-making with regard to foreign policy in general, one that for me made McCain look better.

I went into why I thought it was important in this post.

Anyway, spin forward more than four years, and I’m pleased to read this piece by Joe Biden in The Wall Street Journal, headlined “The Americas Ascendant.” It begins:

Last week, during a five-day trip through Latin America and the Caribbean, I visited a cut-flower farm outside Bogota, Colombia, an hour’s drive from downtown that would have been impossibly dangerous 10 years ago. Along the way I passed office parks, movie theaters and subdivisions, interspersed with small ranches and family businesses. At the flower farm, one-quarter of the workers are female heads of households. The carnations and roses they were clipping would arrive in U.S. stores within days, duty free.

What I saw on the flower farm was just one sign of the economic blossoming in the year since a U.S. free-trade agreement with Colombia went into force. Over that period, American exports to the country are up 20%…

Yeah, and we could have been enjoying that increase in trade years earlier, had not Sens. Obama and Clinton opposed it, to the gratification of Big Labor.

But hey, welcome aboard. I’m glad the administration gets it now.

I thought it particularly interesting that the vice president focused on the cut-flower trade. So did Nicholas Kristof in an April 24, 2008, piece that had helped focus my attention on the need for the agreement. It began:

BOGOTÁ, Colombia

For seven years, Democrats have rightfully complained that President Bush has gratuitously antagonized the world, exasperating our allies and eroding America’s standing and influence.

But now the Democrats are doing the same thing on trade. In Latin America, it is Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton who are seen as the go-it-alone cowboys, by opposing the United States’  free-trade agreement with Colombia….

That piece, too, focused on the cut-flower industry in Colombia. The headline was “Better Roses Than Cocaine.” Indeed.

The vice president today writes,

There is enormous potential—economically, politically and socially—for the U.S. in its relations with countries of the Western Hemisphere. And so the Obama administration has launched the most sustained period of U.S. engagement with the Americas in a long, long time—including the president’s travel to Mexico and Costa Rica last month; my own recent trip to Colombia, Trinidad, and Brazil; Secretary of State Kerry’s participation in the Organization of American States’ annual meeting in Guatemala; the president of Chile’s visit to Washington this week and a planned visit to Washington by the president of Peru. Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff arrives in Washington in October for the first state visit of the second term.

As leaders across the region work to lift their citizens out of poverty and to diversify their economies from commodity-led growth, the U.S. believes that the greatest promise—for Americans and for our neighbors—lies in deeper economic integration and openness.growth, the U.S. believes that the greatest promise—for Americans and for our neighbors—lies in deeper economic integration and openness.

I agree. And welcome aboard, Mr. Obama.

Cute to the nth degree: Lumosity’s ‘It girl,’ Emily Greco

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Silence complains that I had no new posts yesterday:

Brad, do you have plans to ever do a new post again, or should we just continue to battle amongst ourselves in last month’s comment threads?

He makes it sound like forever. It was just one day — and I was responding to comments. Gee, I figured that y’all were having enough fun with that rambling 153-comment thread on last Thursday’s Virtual Front Page.

I responded that “I get into these days sometimes when the only thing I can think of to post about is either a) Too trivial to post about without it being folded in among some more serious items, or b) Way too heavy and involved to embark upon on a busy day.

I had both kinds on my mind yesterday, and didn’t get to either. Here’s the one from category A…

I’m thinking about starting a new category of posts, called something like “What I Googled today,” or “Google of the day,” or just “Googling.”

Here’s the first entry.

Yesterday, after I found myself once again deliberately ALT-TABbing to and watching the Lumosity ad stuck between songs on Pandora (instead of hitting the “mute” button as I do on some of them, because they’re pretty jarring, especially when they occur on my Erik Satie station, as opposed to my Weezer station), I wondered who that unbelievably cute girl is — the one who makes me want to see the ad. I was pretty sure I was not the only one who had searched to find out, and I was right.

First, let’s pause to consider terminology. Some people misunderstand the word, “cute.” (Some also misunderstand the word “girl” when applied to someone of child-bearing age, but those people aren’t as old as I am, and/or don’t have children who are most likely older than this girl.) “Cute” does not mean pretty (although it often overlaps), much less beautiful, sexy or hot. It refers to a form of appeal, but it is not (necessarily) sexual, or related to pulchritude.

To explain: Zooey Deschanel is cute. She’s also pretty, but that’s a slightly separate thing. Ingrid Bergman was beautiful, which is not exactly the same thing as pretty. Carrie-Anne Moss is hot, especially in “The Matrix” — the first one, in which she wore the leather catsuit, which reminds us that Diana Rigg was hot in “The Avengers,” and this is not a leather thing. Speaking of cat suits, as in Catwoman, Sean Young was in her heyday sexy, hot and beautiful. Just kinda batty.

Anyway, the young woman in the Lumosity ad is unbelievably cute. This does not mean I want to have an illicit relationship with her. It just means that I look forward to seeing the ad. I am not alone, either in this, or in thinking the right word for her is “cute.” Here are some YouTube comments about her:

  • “For some reason,I think that this woman is really cute. And I’m a female.”
  • “Shes so f___ing cute”
  • “Emily Greco is so cute! She’s so cute I get happy just knowing the Luminosity commercial is starting. Whatever Luminosity paid her – it’s not enough now that hearing Luminosity puts me in a happy mood because I connect it with the cute woman in the commercial. I’m sure she has the same affect on most viewers.”

Those are sandwiched among some grossly negative comments, from the kinds of people who live to make negative comments. We all know the sort.

Anyway, as you see, her name is Emily Greco, and no, she’s not just some super-cute person who happened to be a Lumosity customer. She’s an actress. That naturalness is art. Here’s her agency’s page about “Our Rising Star — Emily Greco.”

What is it that defines her appeal? What is the “it” here? Well, it involves the fourth dimension, because it doesn’t come across in a still photo (although this isn’t bad). You need the video. You need to see the thing she does at the end (25 seconds) when she bats her eyes and smiles that crooked smile (proof that she’s not beautiful, since technically “beauty” is a function of symmetry, or so I’ve been told). All in one split second. And if you’ve seen the ad before, waiting to see her do that again is what keeps you watching the ad through the boring 10-second sales-pitch part, with the graphics.

Anyway, I haven’t seen an individual in an ad with that much appeal in years and years. So I take a professional interest in this. I also want to see the ad again…

No, Obama isn’t Nixon, much less worse. It’s not even close

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It’s getting to where I find Peggy Noonan more and more tiresome, but keep reading, hoping for flashes of the grace and thoughtfulness I used to admire.

Her column over the weekend was a typical sad example. An excerpt:

The Benghazi scandal was and is shocking, and the Justice Department assault on the free press, in which dogged reporters are tailed like enemy spies, is shocking. Benghazi is still under investigation and someday someone will write a great book about it. As for the press, Attorney General Eric Holder is on the run, and rightly so. They called it the First Amendment for a reason. But nothing can damage us more as a nation than what is happening at the Internal Revenue Service. Elite opinion in the press and in Washington doesn’t fully understand this. Part of the reason is that it’s not their ox being gored, it’s those messy people out in America with their little patriotic groups.

Those who aren’t deeply distressed about the IRS suffer from a reluctance or inability to make distinctions, and a lack of civic imagination.

An inability to make distinctions: “It’s always been like this.” “Presidents are always siccing the IRS on their enemies.” There’s truth in that. We’ve all heard the stories of the president who picked up the phone and said, “Look into this guy,” Richard Nixon most showily. He got clobbered for it. It was one of the articles of impeachment.

But this scandal is different and distinctive. The abuse was systemic—from the sheer number of targets and the extent of each targeting we know many workers had to be involved, many higher-ups, multiple offices. It was ideological and partisan—only those presumed to be of one political view were targeted. It has a single unifying pattern: The most vivid abuses took place in the years leading up to the president’s 2012 re-election effort. And in the end several were trying to cover it all up, including the head of the IRS, who lied to Congress about it, and the head of the tax-exempt unit, Lois Lerner, who managed to lie even in her public acknowledgment of impropriety.

It wasn’t a one-off. It wasn’t a president losing his temper with some steel executives. There was no enemies list, unless you consider half the country to be your enemies.

Let’s just list a few of the things wrong with those few paragraphs:

  • “The Benghazi scandal was and is shocking…” I’m not yet persuaded that “Benghazi” actually is a scandal, despite the efforts of people I respect, such as Lindsey Graham and John McCain, to portray it as such. Much less that it is widely accepted among others, outside of certain Republican circles. Much, much less that it is not only a scandal, but a shocking one. Yet she begins her column throwing it out there as something that doesn’t even need discussion, as an established fact on the way to what she really wants to talk about. It’s like she’s gotten into the habit of writing only for people on the right. She assumes all her readers think Benghazi is a shocking scandal, and she goes ahead and acknowledges that out of hand. It’s like there are no other kinds of readers out there looking at her column. And if she keeps writing like this, she’ll be right in that assumption.
  • “Part of the reason is that it’s not their ox being gored, it’s those messy people out in America with their little patriotic groups.” Really? Tell me again which ox was gored. “Gore” means to deliver a serious, perhaps fatal, wound. Did any of these “patriotic little groups,” a characterization we could debate all day, lose their ability to do what they do? Were they indeed “gored”?
  • Richard Nixon is mentioned, followed by “But this scandal is different and distinctive.” As in, she implies, worse.

What Richard Nixon did with regard to the IRS was indeed an article of impeachment. Because of the abuses of power that he, Richard Nixon, carried out.

Excuse me, but I have yet to see the evidence that indicates, even remotely, that Barack Obama was involved in this mess over at the IRS. (Please give me a link if I’ve missed it.)

And this particular scandal has been proceeding how long? A month or so? (Actually, the first press reports were in March 2012.) I seem to recall that the Watergate scandal connected directly to the White House on Day One. Reporter Bob Woodward, then a nobody, was assigned to go cover the arraignment of some guys caught breaking into Democratic headquarters, and that day found that one of them worked in the White House.

Yeah, pretty different, all right.

Oh, and by the way, I should probably say for the benefit of Steven Davis and others who labor under the delusion that I’m a Democrat or something: I don’t say “Barack Obama isn’t Nixon” because I think Obama is so awesome and Nixon was pure evil.

If I’d been old enough to vote in 1968, I’d have voted for Nixon, without hesitation. For that matter, I was solidly for him in 1960, although you may discount that because I was only 7 years old. I would have voted for him in 1972, the first time I ever voted, if not for Watergate. I pulled the lever for McGovern after standing and debating with myself in the booth for about 10 minutes. I firmly believed that Nixon was the better president — in fact, I was convinced that McGovern would be a disaster. But I was also convinced that the Democrat had zero chance, so this seemed like a safe way to register my concerns about Watergate.

(I did the same thing, only with the parties reversed, in 1996. I respected Bob Dole more as a man than I did Bill Clinton. But Dole had run such a horrendous campaign that I doubted his ability to be a good president. I actually thought Clinton better suited to the job. But I had a lot of problems with Clinton by this time and, knowing that Dole had no chance of winning, I pulled the lever for him as a protest.)

Nixon was in a number of important ways a pretty good president, on the big things. Probably better than Obama in a number of ways (although I haven’t thought deeply about that, and it’s difficult to compare, since the challenges facing them are so different). But his abuse of power on stupid, petty things did him in. And I’ve seen no evidence so far Barack Obama has done anything of that kind.

So no — Obama’s not as bad as Nixon in this regard, much less worse. It’s not even close.

Where have I seen that ‘postman’ before?

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This morning, I was walking from the kitchen toward the front entrance of ADCO, and passed a guy who had just walked in the front door and was heading confidently toward the back. I was trying to place him when I spotted his truck out front. Oh, yeah — he’s with a vendor we do business with, and knows his way around our building.

Normally, no one enters the building without being challenged — that is to say, without being asked how we might help him or her. This got me to thinking about the few exceptions, such as this one, or the postman, who walks straight in, picks things up from the front counter, drops stuff off, and goes.

Which in turn makes me think of a movie I saw on TV a few months ago…

Did you see “Safe House?” No, not the 2012 movie with Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds (which was pretty good, if you can handle the extreme level of violence in it), but the 1998 film starring Patrick Stewart.

I started watching that, a little it into it, on the tube several months back, and it took me awhile to figure out what was going on. As Wikipedia summarizes it, it went like this: Stewart was a retired agent for the DIA who “believes his life is in danger from his former boss who is now running for President of the United States.”

So he barricades himself in his suburban home, set up as a fortress, and posts damaging information about the candidate on the Internet in a way that it will automatically be distributed to multiple national media outlets unless he personally stops that distribution by entering a password only he knows every 24 hours. This is his ultimate defense.

Complicating things is the fact that he is suffering from the early onset of Alzheimer’s, and is being treated for it, and everyone in his life sees his security concerns as being in his imagination. You, the viewer, are left confused as to whether they are right, especially since he occasionally engages in extreme behavior in reaction to threats only he perceives.

Anyway, at some point in all of this, an assassin comes to his home disguised as a postman (or does he?), and gains access to the house by pretending a package has to be signed for, and that his pen is out of ink…

And right away, I recognize him as the assassin/postman with the submachine gun in his mailbag in “Three Days of the Condor”! (Remember, the guy who helps wipe out the office where Robert Redford works, and then later tracks him down to Faye Dunaway’s apartment, to which he gains access by having a parcel that needs to be signed for, and his pen doesn’t work, so he has to come inside…) The same actor (Hank Garrett), playing the same part in the same way!

Remember this guy?

Remember this guy?

On one level, that was one of the neatest esoteric movie references I’ve ever seen. On another, it adds to the sense of unreality in Stewart’s character’s perception of danger. You realize that he is imagining that the guy from “Three Days of the Condor” is trying to kill him…

Very cool, all around.

Anyway, I was just wondering whether anyone but me noticed it…

The desperate fight in Faye Dunaway's apartment.

The desperate fight in Faye Dunaway’s apartment.