Week of: |
4:35 PM
Court in the act
The need to balance patron privacy against the demands of law enforcement has made librarians a key bulwark against the more invasive provisions of the Patriot Act. In keeping with their newfound status as guardians of Americans' privacy, librarians in a Chicago suburb have gone up against local police in defense of a patron's personal information.
As the Chicago Tribune reports , librarians in suburban Naperville refused to let police learn the identity of a patron seen fondling himself at a computer terminal until police obtained a court order as required by state law. Library employees called the officers May 18 when three teenagers reported the patron's act, but he left before police arrived.
When police asked to check the man's identity via a computer log-on, the library refused, citing a 1983 state law that requires a court order before librarians can release the information. Now the city of Naperville is asking the state's attorney to look into the law, which has never been challenged in court.
Nearly every state has a similar law on the books, many of them responses to Cold War-era FBI surveillance of reading habits. With the Patriot Act making it easier for federal law enforcement to obtain court orders, state and local law enforcement must still abide by these laws. As Mark West, the deputy director of the Naperville Public Library, told the Tribune:
"What passes between a librarian and a reader, we're taught from the first day of library school that it is a confidential issue. If you have freedom of speech and freedom of assembly without government approval, then you should have freedom to read."
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1:45 PM
Rewriting Reagan
In the press coverage leading up to Friday's memorial service, Ronald Reagan has generally been portrayed as a popular and legendary figure, even among those who disagreed with his politics. But as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting explains, Reagan's popularity in office was just that - legend.
FAIR has highlighted a 1989 piece by Michael Benhoff, in which the author broke down Gallup poll numbers from Reagan's presidency, compared the data to other post-WWII presidents, and found the "Great Communicator" not so great at drawing popular support while in office :
"Reagan left office bolstered by the oft-repeated media myth that he had been far and away the most popular of any president since World War II. But bearing in mind Mark Twain's observation that a lie gets half-way around the world before truth puts its boots on, the US public deserves to know what the polling data actually says."
What it says is that Reagan averaged a 52-percent approval rating during his presidency, which means he was less popular on average than John Kennedy (70-percent), Dwight Eisenhower (66-percent), Franklin Roosevelt (68-percent) and even Lyndon Johnson (54-percent), who - as Benhoff pointed out - chose not to seek re-election because of his unpopularity.
The Gallup data further explains that Reagan's lack of popular support began early, with only Gerald Ford drawing lower first-year ratings. His first term drew 50-percent approval overall, and his ratings fell below that mediocre level in the aftermath of the Iran/Contra scandal. He did have a current 63-percent rating at the time he left office. That puts him below FDR and in the same league as Eisenhower and Kennedy at the time they left office - but their overall approval ratings were all higher.
While the past week's eulogies try to paint Reagan as universally beloved, his 52-percent approval rating seems more reflective of what Slate's David Greenberg describes as the 40th president's legacy:
"Apart from Richard Nixon, it's hard to think of a more divisive president of the 20th century. … Indeed, by stoking feelings of resentment on both left and right, Reagan did probably more than anyone to sow the social discord that so deeply divides our 50-50 nation."
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12:00 PM
No (Moore) mercy
That conservative critics are taking issue with his work is nothing unusual for Michael Moore, but the Oscar-winning documentarian has a new strategy for fighting back. As Michael Finnegan reports in Friday's Los Angeles Times, Moore has hired former Clinton/Gore advisors Chris Lehane (who for a while was also on John Kerry's campaign) and Mark Fabiani to counterattack criticisms of his new film "Farenheit 9/11":
"Employing the Clinton strategy of '92, we will allow no attack on this film to go without a response immediately," Moore said. "And we will go after anyone who slanders me or my work, and we will do it without mercy. And when you think 'without mercy,' you think Chris Lehane."
Former FEC chief counsel Larry Noble said Moore can expect another kind of attack - complaints that ads promoting the film violate campaign-spending laws (an argument previously noted in the New York Daily News). But, as Noble told the Times, that argument only works if the ads run within the 60 days before the election, and then must explicitly promote Kerry or call for Bush's defeat.
While Moore stresses that his film is "not a campaign for Kerry," he does (surprise!) hope it can get anti-Bush voters to the polls:
"If it can encourage the people who belong to the largest political party in America, the non-voter party, to leave that party behind and do the very minimum of what every citizen should do on Nov. 2, then I hope that will be seen as a significant contribution to this country."
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11:45 AM
Undecided, unimpressed
"But I'm not sure about Kerry," Ms. Plotkin said. "Based on all the things I've heard about him, he seems wishy-washy."
Thus a woman-on-the-street as quoted in a New York Times piece today about undecided voters -- the 5 percent of the electorate, clustered in swing states, who will likely turn the election but persist in playing coy. The Times sizes up recent polling data on holdout voters and finds little to cheer the White House: most think the country is on the wrong track; only 44 percent think Bush is doing a good job; they're less religious (therefore less instinctively Republican) than the average voter; they're less likely than most Americans to have an arsenal of weaponry in the broom closet; they're concerned about the environment; they're broadly supportive of abortion rights; and they're more likely to want to bring the troops home from Iraq, pronto. It all adds up to what a Democratic pollster calls "a tremendous impetus for change." Good news for Kerry, right? Not necessarily. Here's the rub:
[U]ndecided voters are not convinced that Mr. Kerry would be any better than Mr. Bush at ending the conflict [in Iraq]. Mr. Bush has a decided advantage over Mr. Kerry on the issues of security and foreign policy that the White House sees as pivotal in this election, according to the polls.
It's hard to avoid the conclusion that, with Bush on the ropes, this election is Kerry's to lose -- and that by dint of a mixture of woodenness, poor communication skills, anti-charisma and a (partly merited) reputation for wobbliness, he might just lose it. As Josh Shenk recently wrote here, Kerry has to get out there and tell his story in a way that captures the imagination of these middle-of-the-road voters (who are, by most accounts, his for the taking). All indications are that he hasn't started doing that.
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11:00 AM
All about Iraq?
British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour Government has been handed an embarrassing election drubbing, losing seats on local councils across England and Wales. But was the vote really just a referendum on Iraq, as Blair deputy John Prescott contends? Speaking to BBC Radio, Prescott insisted that Britons like the government's domestic policies, but "didn't judge this election on that. Iraq was a cloud, or indeed a shadow, over these elections."
Prescott might be right. Democrats in this country, eager to see American voters punish the Bush Administration for its own war record, undoubtedly hope he is. But scores of Britons posting to a BBC bulletin board are sending a different message: This vote was absolutely about domestic concerns. As one, Dan A., from Manchester, wrote: "If Labour think that they've lost over Iraq, then they really are showing how far from the voter they are. I didn't vote for them because I'm sick of paying spiralling costs and getting nothing in return."
So, maybe we shouldn't try too hard to see hints of November in the British vote. Then again, fewer than 50 British soldiers have died in Iraq since, while 825 American service people have been killed. Clearly, the political math on this side the Atlantic is going to be different.
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10:35 AM
Asinine ads
The Atlantic's Joshua Green wants to know: why are campaign ads so asinine? Or rather, in his memorable phrasing, why do election commercials "so consistently lag in quality and imagination behind those intended to influence our choice of light beer"? (After all, three bullfrogs booming "John." "Ker." "Ry." might be kind of amusing.) Green thinks we need punchier ads--more WWF, less CSPAN--but he also notes that part of the problem is over-saturation:
The effective frequency for consumer ads is now around five or six viewings. But political ads are even harder to remember—presumably because of their poor quality. Their effective frequency can run as high as twenty viewings. "That's forcing us to run a thousand, fifteen hundred, even as high as two thousand gross ratings points behind a single spot," Brabender says. Rather than come up with ads that are more memorable—more like consumer ads—campaigns have decided to pound viewers into distracted submission with the same mediocre product.
In that case, yes, showing Rick Santorum with a chainsaw could work. But another obvious solution screams out: shorten the election cycle. This year, beleaguered viewers in New Hampshire will have to zone out through 11 months of dribbling ad spots. No one needs that. No one wants that. And, as Mickey Kaus is fond of pointing out, news cycles have speed up dramatically, and people process information much more quickly--voters can make up their minds just as easily in a few short months. We might not get better commercials, but we would get fewer commercials.
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10:10 AM
North's no-show
A Who's Who of cold warriors has descended on Washington D.C. for Ronald Reagan's final send-off. One notable no-show, though, is Ollie North, he of Iran-Contra infamy. His reasoning: "Every doggone camera in the place would be shooting pictures of me instead of paying attention to what was going on," he told the LA Times. As poorly as it reflects on the national media, this is probably true. North expects to have his reunion with the Gipper down the line, though.
"I revere Ronald Reagan ... I certainly spent plenty of time with him in the past and I know I'll be with him in the future. ... Those of us who know where we are going, and know why we are going there, have no doubt that he is now in that shining city on a hill."
North, who served as a national security aide in the Reagan White House, still thinks he's on the side of the angels. He was found guilty of his role in the arms-for-hostages scandal, of course, but was then pardoned through the good offices of the first President Bush. He seems to be counting on working a similar deal with God Almighty. He'd better hope the Creator is a fan of Fox News.
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3:35 PM
Learning curve
While it's nice to see the military opening dialogue with a country that's not among the "coalition of the willing," there's something a little disturbing about a plan to learn tactics from the army of Sri Lanka, as suggested to AFP by the U.S. Army's Pacific commander, Lt. General James Campbell:
"Sri Lankan security forces have experience in facing the kind of situation that our men and women are facing today in Iraq and Afghanistan. ... We can learn from them how best to deal with such things."
While the first part might be true, Campbell also might want to look a little harder at how that experience turned out.
Sri Lanka's ethnic war against the rebel Tamil Tiger separatists wasn't exactly a success. The fighting stopped in 2002 when Norway helped the two sides negotiate an armistice that still stands, but the Sri Lankan military lost more than 18,000 troops in a three-decade conflict. The war took an even higher toll on the civilian population, with more than 20,000 killed and both sides of the conflict accused of human-rights abuses. In fact, on the same day Campbell discussed learning Sri Lankan tactics, the government of Australia announced $10 million to help resettle the more than one million Sri Lankans turned into refugees by the conflict.
The result, 60,000 casualties later, was a cease-fire (essentially a "tie.") So the U.S. might be able to learn something valuable from Sri Lanka's military, but only if the island's forces have learned from their mistakes.
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2:35 PM
Pay to play
It's not exactly paying off the national debt, but the government has agreed to pay its annual dues of $1.45 million to the World Anti-Doping Agency, which works to ensure fair play at the Olympics.
That's an improvement from 2003, when the International Olympic Committee needed to strongarm the U.S. to pay its bill. Only after the IOC threatened to remove nations from contention for the 2012 Games unless their debts were paid up - and with New York City actively vying for host privileges - did the government eventually pay.
One would expect drug-free sports to rank higher as a priority for President Bush, considering that he spent a (comically substantial) chunk of his 2004 State of the Union address discussing the dangers of performance-enhancing drugs:
"To help children make right choices, they need good examples. Athletics play such an important role in our society, but, unfortunately, some in professional sports are not setting much of an example. The use of performance-enhancing drugs like steroids in baseball, football, and other sports is dangerous, and it sends the wrong message that there are shortcuts to accomplishment, and that performance is more important than character. So tonight I call on team owners, union representatives, coaches, and players to take the lead, to send the right signal, to get tough, and to get rid of steroids now."
Apparently, getting tough with the U.S. worked for the IOC. Maybe the government should try something similar with sports teams.
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1:20 PM
Putting money where your mourning is
Friday's day of mourning for former President Ronald Reagan will cost California taxpayers $60 million -- to close state offices and pay 220,000 state employees. By a tidy coincidence, this sum happens to be equal to the amount of federal funding granted to human embryonic stem-cell research since President Bush imposed restrictions on the work in August 2001 -- despite its promise, in the words of stem-cell booster Nancy Reagan, to "provide our scientists with many answers that for so long have been beyond our grasp" (like, say, finding a cure for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases).
Sixty million bucks sounds like a lot for a day of mourning, but it's chump change when it comes to this kind of research. Consider this: California taxpayers will vote this November on a ballot initiative to grant $3 billion for embryonic stem-cell research that could help find cures from all kinds of debilitating diseases that afflict more than 128 million Americans. If passed, the measure would make California the nation's premier public funder of stem-cell research - doing much more to honor Ronald Reagan's memory than tomorrow's one-day state government shutdown.
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12:20 PM
A Bum-Rush to Rushmore
Ronald Reagan passed away on Saturday, and for the better part of five days, the limitless Internet has been paradoxically overstuffed with glowing eulogies and rosy remembrances. Which is right and expected. To many in America, Reagan remains an epic hero -- the man who scrapped government paternalism and cracked the Soviet Union. Progressives and liberals may profoundly disagree with that view, but we must respect it.
Not that the conservatives are making it very easy to do so.
It isn't just the rampant rewriting of history or the hysterical hero-worshiping -- both are understandable, and we on the left too happily do the same when it comes to remembering our own. What's really galling is the mad, hyperactive, and bitter lengths to which conservatives are taking it all. Reagan already has a mountain in New Hampshire named after him. And an airport in the nation's capital. And an aircraft carrier. But to the nation's conservatives, that is not enough. They want the former president on our currency, even on Mount Rushmore. And they want it now.
And these conservatives don't just want to celebrate Reagan. They want -- desperately -- to denegrate liberals and progressives and anybody else left of their far-right center. Take online pundit Bruce Walker's argument for kicking FDR off the dime in favor of Reagan:
Inevitably, Leftists consider FDR a "great president." Reagan was much greater in every way. As we remember Reagan, let us now begin to put his genuine greatness - second only, perhaps, to George Washington, in American history - into perspective. The pigmy Left will nip at his toenails until he his mortal body is dust. Conservatives and other normal people should simply thank God for Reagan....
Ronald Reagan was not just a great president, but a great moral force in our times. Franklin Roosevelt was a nebish, a frat brat, a Clinton. Why not now recognize these two paramount facts? Why not a Reagan dime?
Or consider Peter Kirsanow's case for Reagan on Mount Rushmore:
Not all great men merit great memorials. Those with spectacular achievements should surely be honored in ways more distinctive than mere recitations in history books. Statues, parks, and libraries usually suffice, for while many great leaders have momentous achievements, those of only a few are transcendent.Ronald Reagan's achievements were incontrovertibly the latter (those who would argue their significance, or Reagan's responsibility therefore, need only spend a little time with the victims of what Solzhenitsyn calls the Big Solitaire — the millions subjugated by Communist tyranny). That's why a memorial in his honor must adequately capture the scale of his accomplishments, not only as recognition of their importance, but as a visible standard to which future generations may aspire.
...
The reason for Reagan's inclusion on Rushmore has been set forth over the last few days in exhaustive detail on this page as well as in editorials in almost every newspaper across the country. Few presidents remained as true to the nation's founding principles as Reagan. He also expanded America's influence — effectively rendering it the sole super power in the world.
Kirsanow even considers another option -- in case Rushmore is too fragile or unstable to accept a fifth figure. Carve up Yosemite's Half Dome, he suggests. Half Dome, one of the nation's natural treasures, a perfect and awe-inspiring masterpiece of geology, the wonderous focal piece of what John Muir once called "by far the grandest of all the special temples of Nature I was ever permitted to enter." Carve it up.
A few conservatives at least recognize the unseemly nature of this rush to celebrate and denegrate. John Derbyshire of National Review, as a counterpoint to Kirsanow, actually takes the time to note that such behavior is not at all conservative.
Let's mourn this great man, who broke the confidence of the Soviet tyranny by wielding his own confidence, and who energized and emboldened an entire generation of conservative Americans. Let's remember his geniality and humor, the impression he always gave — how depressingly many presidents fail this test! — of being perfectly happy with who he was, just the way he was. Let's hope that the United States can still produce Ronald Reagans to remind us of what's important, confound our enemies, and cheer us up. But let's not get carried away to the degree that we make dramatic, hasty changes to a treasured national monument that it is our duty to conserve. We are, after all, conservatives.
In the end, I suppose that's what really galls about this right-wing bum-rush. There is an overwhelming sense that, for Walker and Kirsanow and scores of other conservatives, the nation and its treasures are just political spoils to be claimed by the majority -- even when there is no clear majority. Maybe Reagan deserves a place on our currency. Maybe he even deserves a place on Mount Rushmore. But only when the nation decides so. And, despite what the conservatives seem to feel today, they are not the nation.
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4:55 PM
Capitol sins
A few rogue bishops in the Catholic Church are really (ahem) hell-bent on excoriating John Kerry for his pro-life positions, but why stop at the senator from Massachussets? Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) has just released a scorecard on the best and worst Catholics in the Senate, according to U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' own criteria. Turns out we've got some naughty Catholics on both sides of the aisle.
Tallying up a whole slew of domestic, international, and pro-life votes, the report slots Kerry in at the top of the class, with a 60.9 percent overall purity rating (95 percent on domestic issues, 50 on international issues, 11 on pro-life issues).
At the bottom of the list, sporting some awfully dirty tunics, are Republican Senators Jim Bunning (42.9 percent), Rick Santorum (40.8), Lisa Murkowski (38), Susan Collins (36.8), Pete Domenici (34.4) and John Sununu (33.2). We can expect Vatican officials to express their "uneasiness" over these folks any day now…
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4:35 PM
Remembering Reagan -- or not
Congressional Democrats face a tough choice Thursday morning - to stay in their home districts or return to Washington to vote on a tribute for Ronald Reagan, of whose presidency many have less than fond memories. As Roll Call (subscription) reports, although there's no coordinated effort to snub the late president, a number of Democrats haven't yet decided what to do. The paper says that Democratic Party leaders "did not twist members' arms to ensure their participation in this week's events, but privately they were encouraging lawmakers' attendance." We'll know how successful those efforts were Thursday morning. The Senate convenes at 9:30 EST, the House 30 minutes later.
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2:50 PM
Tough at the top
The super-wealthy have made out better than anyone else under the Bush administration, but they have their worries, too. As the Wall Street Journal (subscription) reports today, a new survey of the richest 1 percent of Americans finds them increasingly concerned about the economic impact of terrorism. Specifically, the 2004 U.S. Trust Survey of Affluent Americans finds that 89 percent of those who luxuriate either in an annual household income of at least $325,000 or a net worth of $5.9 million or more are seriously worried, up from 86 percent in 2003 and 76 in 2002. (A much smaller number -- 57 percent -- consider themselves at personal risk from terrorism.) Perhaps anticipating limited sympathy for the plight of the loaded, the Journal quotes a U.S. Trust money manager as saying, irrelevantly and at the top of the story, "These people have worked hard for their money."
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11:55 AM
Fraudulent-flier miles
According to a couple of reports out today from the GAO, the Defense Department might have spent as much as $100 million over six years for airline tickets it didn't use. The fault, apparently, lies with flaws in the Pentagon's travel card program, which failed to ensure unused tickets were refunded, and in outright fraud by DoD employees, who often got reimbursed for tickets the Pentagon bought.
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3:10 PM
Idealism is not a plan
Time was, Republicans were the hardboiled foreign policy realists, Democrats the Wilsonian idealists. No longer. The rise of Bush and the neoconservatives has upended the natural order of things, says Ron Brownstein in the Los Angeles Times.
Inverting the usual debate between the parties, Kerry is increasingly arguing that Bush has committed America to unrealistic goals and unsustainable costs through his crusade to democratize the Middle East.Kerry is presenting himself as the flinty realist who will be less ideological and more practical than Bush, more skeptical of what he calls "foreign adventures" and more disciplined in establishing achievable goals for America in an imperfect world. Unstated but implied is that he would be more cautious than Bush about entangling the U.S. in another grand but grueling cause like the invasion of Iraq. ...
Kerry still says that the president has isolated America from traditional allies, complicating the war against terrorism and compelling the U.S. to bear too much of the burden in Iraq. Kerry insists as well that Bush has over-emphasized military power, while downplaying America's economic and diplomatic tools.
No argument there. Whether Kerry, by taking a hard-headed line, is doing himself favors politically remains to be seen; it depends -- as does so much -- on what happens in Iraq in the next few months.
With these emerging arguments, Kerry is appealing to a country that may be worn out with great causes after Iraq has turned out so much more costly and complex than it initially appeared. Yet he is walking a thin line. American foreign policy has always attracted the most popular support when it reflects American values. And most experts agree that without fundamental reform the Middle East will continue to incubate radicalism.
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