The Apollo Creed

Bye bye Ricky Poo

2006-12-28T08:26:00.000-08:00

The latest for the Citypaper: A farewell to Rick Santorum.

2006-12-25T18:43:00.000-08:00

Where Republican Governance Leads....

Well they can't run the state or the country, but those Republicans -- they sure know how to rename things after Ronald Reagan. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before the Internets themselves get named for the Gipper. Note to the Jersey GOP: this is probably not the way you want to position yourselves against the corrupt Democratic establishment.

Long live our alliance with Libya

2006-12-19T09:39:00.000-08:00

Your friend and mine in the Global War on Terror has just convicted a bunch of innocent foreigners on ridiculous charges of infecting children with HIV. They will be executed. But you see, Qaddafi is a good Arab and Saddam was a bad Arab. You understand the difference, right?

Right?

Michael Kinsley's ridiculous article on Jimmy Carter's new book

2006-12-14T08:26:00.001-08:00

As if anyone needed more evidence that the mainstream American left doesn't care at all about Palestinians or even understand the problem, along comes Michael Kinsley with a really idiotic review of Jimmy Carter's book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Kinsley argues that the Palestinians aren't as bad off as the South African blacks because, after all, they have citizenship in Israel. Of course, Carter wasn't talking about the Palestinians in Israel but rather the millions of citizenship-less, unemployed Palestinians trapped behind fences in Gaza and the West Bank. The fact that Kinsely avoids talking about those Palestinians -- whose situation does have certain parallels with South Africa -- indicates one of two things to me. Either Kinsley doesn't have the tiniest clue what he's talking about, or he's deliberately misrepresenting Carter's book. You have to think that a pundit who's been around as long as Kinsley would know the elementary facts of this conflict, so I'm going to go with deliberate misrepresentation.

Stop dogging on the fans

2006-12-06T06:30:00.000-08:00

So I see the intrepid Philly sports writers have climbed aboard the Bash the Fans bandwagon. I guess they're out of mean things to say about our wretched sports teams, so it's time to go after the paying customers. Before Monday night's Eagles game against Carolina, ESPN did an excruciatingly long feature story on the Snowballing of Santa -- a boilerplate story that apparently must be mentioned every time a major national sporting event takes place in this city. You had to know that Gov. Rendell - who was at the game in question -- would be hauled out to talk about it too. This 38-year-old event is trotted out by the media to demonstrate what callous boors the fans in this city are, even though we aren't the ones who started a riot on disco demolition night, destroyed the city after a championship, or started a globally-broadcast melee from the stands. And I sort of don't think the infamous 1995 forfeit - in which Dodgers fans tossed hundreds of souvenier baseballs at players and umpires - gets mentioned every single time they broadcast a game from L.A.

But it got worse during the game. At one point the Panthers absolutely laid Jeff Garcia out with a brutal hit, and backup A.J. Feeley put on a helmet and started onto the field. But Garcia pulled himself off the mat and waved Feeley away, and the Philadelphia fans committed the terrible crime of booing. From the announcers' reactions you would have thought the fans had caught a flight to Darfur and slaughtered some villagers. Hey Lords of Decency: Philly fans like A.J. Feeley and think he should be starting, with or without one lonely 3 touchdown performance from Garcia. That means we are going to boo Jeff Garcia. Deal with it. And maybe visit some other stadiums around this country, where they boo people all the damn time, even in Baseball Heaven out in St. Louis. Wankers.

Capturing the social libertarians

2006-12-05T12:44:00.000-08:00

God hath declared it illegal to gamble at this table

A friend of mine who basically makes his living playing online poker is despondent about the fate of pokerroom.com, which is in the process of booting all of its U.S.-based players because of yet another idiotic law passed by the 109th ~~debating society~~ Congress -- which made it much more difficult for online gaming organizations to deal with U.S. players. Some little countries to our South are so pissed off about this that they're taking it to the WTO, where they will probably beat us. There is no legitimate argument that the government can make on behalf of the new law, and they know it.

As others have eloquently pointed out, making poker and other forms of online gambling illegal is counterproductive and pointless. People will figure out how to get around the laws, and the only people who will profit are either criminals or businesses based in other countries. If there are legions of mediocre poker players out there who want to give their money to poker sharks like my friend, then who am I or the U.S. government to stop them from doing so? The new gambling law is yet another example of how the Southern evangelical mode of thinking and social regulation has captured the public debate and made meaningful reform impossible. While banning online gambling is not the same kind of problem as the useless and globally destructive Drug War, it is representative of a certain kind of lawmaking.

I think there is a silent majority in this country that wants to be left alone to play poker, bet on football, pick up hookers, smoke joints, and find a nice doctor to euthanize them when they're ready to die. In other words, there's a silent majority of fun people in this country who want glassy-eyed scolds like Rick Santorum talking to them about sex, dying, and gambling about as much as they want to see Bill Bennett naked. And there is a major political vacuum waiting to be filled -- which is currently populated only by the far left and the libertarian party, neither of which has a great deal of influence on discourse in this country. The Democrats should recognize their historic opportunity to seize the social libertarian agenda and run with it. If people had any idea of size of the government-funded Leviathan that's being used to fight the drug war -- a "war" that can never be won unless Americans can be convinced to stop putting things that make them feel good up their noses -- they might adjust their voting priorities.

Let Them Eat Cake

2006-10-18T09:38:00.001-07:00

Are you really free if you’re too fat to walk to the donut store?

Well, that’s the upshot of the debate currently raging through the legislative halls of New Jersey and New York City. Both the Garden State and the Big Apple are attempting to reinforce their healthy nicknames by eradicating trans fats from restaurant kitchens and grocery stores.

For those of us unaware of the horrors of the trans fat, it’s the unseen ingredient that puts the tasty in a Tastykake. But, according the NationalCancer Institute, trans fats “increase blood cholesterol levels and the risk or heart disease.” Basically, trans fats turn a liquid saturated oil into a solid fat. The synthetic creation allows ingredients to fry at a higher temperature, which apparently improves the frying outcome. Trans fats also give baked good a longer shelf life.

Concerned lawmakers have taken trans fat evils literally to heart, and
called for their total elimination. While butter-churning milkmaids everywhere eagerly await a windfall, restauranteurs are crying out for civil liberties. You can take away their trans fats, but you can’t take away their FREEEEDOM!!

The whole lard-laden melee reanimates one of the greatest political debates
of all time: is a person more free when they choose to be fat or when
they’re forced to be healthy?

Isiah Berlin most eloquently introduced this debate in his famous 1958 essay
“Two Concepts on Liberty.” Berlin’s claim asserts that the goals of men often conflict with one another. A momentary decision to eat a fatty donut, for example, is at loggerheads with my goal of shedding my
Halloween-candy-supplied love handles.

With the trans fat fiasco, Berlin's two liberties are challenged. Are you freer if you have the choice to cook with and eat your trans fats (this is Berlin’s concept of negative liberty)? Or does freedom arrive when you’re a healthy, self-actualized citizen -- (Berlin’s concept of positive liberty)? If you believe that freedom comes with the ability to make ones own individual choice -- say, you're right to commit suicide via baked goods, you're a fan of negative freedom. If you'd rather have government goad you into doing what's best for the whole of society -- say, require seat belts and airbags in cars while you're force fed baby carrots, then you're a positive liberty kinda citizen.

The essential question is whether government should force you into being free. Are we as Americans proud to be disgusting, gut-busted individuals, or would we rather become a squeaky-clean, health obsessed collective?

Americans often have trouble wrestling with these two concepts of freedom. As disciples of philosopher John Locke, we grab hold of our negative liberties like a security blanket and huddle in a fetal position. We relish in our freedoms to purchase a Glock with cop-killer bullets or ride around without a motorcycle helmet -- even if we understand that these options might not lead to the best possible future for ourselves or our community. We enjoy doing almost anything our selfish hearts desire – unless it inconveniences our equally selfish neighbor.

But there are those Americans in search of a more slender electorate – one without automatic weapons or brain-damaged quarterbacks. They see fellow citizens as often unable to control the destructive animals inside of them. And government serves as a check on their masochistic designs.

Both visions sveltely embody the nation’s historic ideals.

While some local eateries, including South Jersey staple Ponzio’s Diner, portend the end of their saccharine existence, other venues, including Monks and Standard Tap, have voluntarily opted for non-trans fat alternatives.

Though the ubiquity of trans fats is unknown to those without culinary acumen, it doesn’t take Craig LaBan to understand that Krispy Kreme isn’t the healthy option. Erasing trans fats entirely seems to toss the Baby Ruth bar out with the bathwater.

Confectionaries carry with them unfriendly consequences. Part of their delectability lies in their forbidden ingredients. Like sneaking your high school boyfriend into you bedroom, trans fats feel even more exciting because you know you’re breaking the
rules. In the morning, there’s lots of guilt – and your tummy might start to
grow. But you knew the possible consequences when you committed the crime.

Yes, the public needs more information on the dangers of trans fats, like teenagers need the fear of God and pregnancy. And restaurants, like Planned Parenthood, should happily offer nutritional information to their patrons.

But lawmakers must trust that we know donuts and French fries are the devil’s foods. Please, let us indulge without legal recompense.

Generation Flap

2006-09-18T19:00:00.000-07:00

Inquirer sportswriter Frank Fitzpatrick had a Ted Stevens (R, Alaska) moment recently, causing several people to call him old in various ways. Sure, the Inky article didn't even link to the blog it quoted, but that's no excuse for treating Fitzpatrick the way George Washington treated bears.

The Big Hurt is on a roll

2006-09-11T20:02:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to send some love to Frank Thomas, who is having a monstrous season with the A's in his first year away from the south side of Chicago. He homered Monday for the sixth consecutive game, giving him 36 HR, 98 RBI, and a line of .284/.396/.567 (AVG/OBP/SLG) for the year at age 38 after missing 128 games last year to injury. The record for consecutive games with a HR is eight, shared by Ken Griffey Jr, Dale Long, and Donnie Baseball. Even if the streak ends at six, it's been a nice reminder of how devastating a hitter The Big Hurt once was and apparently still can be. And special thanks to Hawk Harrelson for giving this future Hall of Fame slugger one of the best nicknames in baseball history.

Summer of violence

2006-08-24T06:45:00.000-07:00

I don't know what's in the water here, but there is a serious crime wave rocking the city of Philadelphia this summer. It's flown mostly under the national radar because national journalists have more important stories to tell, like the ten-year-old murder of a little white girl. The latest victim, like most in this city, was black, a mother of four. I haven't seen the statistics, but my guess is that other crimes are up as well. Just this year one of my friends has been assaulted, another has had her apartment totally cleaned out by burglers, and I've had 2.5 bikes stolen from my front porch. But you know, as John Street says, you have to expect "a certain level of violence" in the city.

Chalk this up as one more goddamned thing that has gotten worse under George W. Bush.

Peace requires balance

2006-08-24T06:06:00.000-07:00

Is anyone else starting to get the feeling that certain Arab states are starting to take steps to redress the strategic imbalance with Israel? It looks like the Lebanon war may finally have punctured the illusion of Arab helplessness. When certain senior Israeli leaders started making noises about peace with Syria after their humiliation at the hands of Hezbollah, the lesson is clear: Israel has made all the peace it is going to make unless the balance of power in the region changes.

The major Arab states have had a comprehensive and permanent peace with Israel formally on the table since 2002, but they have no partner for peace in Tel Aviv. There is no one on the other end of the line. Maybe these "Eurofighters" (frankly the name does not exactly inspire fear) are a gambit to restart regional talks.

It's Not Me, It's You

2006-03-16T08:06:00.000-08:00

I feel sorry for Barry Bonds. The baseball fan in me is repulsed by him, but the human side of me is sad for him. This is the beautiful, bright, extraordinarily gifted man who hit, scrapped, dove and ran through my childhood in a Pittsburgh uniform and is now transformed into a crippled, unrecognizable monster who will, at best, stumble through the final months of his magnificent career. Whatever drove him to do steroids -– jealousy or greed or some kind of incomprehensible inferiority complex – was a combination of weaknesses to which we are all prone, and while I cannot accept his giving into his weaknesses rather than trying to overcome them, I know that he will suffer punishment enough on his own.

Within a matter of years, chances are good that Barry Bonds will not be able to do any number of the things that many of us consider to be the most important in life. He very well may not be able to pick up his grandkids, walk, have sex, or hit a baseball. Perhaps he believes that a few years of glory and riches and a few words in a record book are a worthy price to pay for the way he will spend the rest of his life, shunned and in pain. If that’s the case, it’s just another reason for me to feel sorry for him.

I feel sorry for Major League Baseball. They have a mess on their hands, and they are almost as much to blame for it as all the steroid users themselves. This is an organization that began with as many stars in its eyes as Barry Bonds did. It’s run by a bunch of men in suits who either weren’t good enough to play the game they loved or couldn’t face a career in law or business dealing with things that didn’t interest them. They wanted to believe in the best aspects of their game. And they screwed themselves and the rest of us by turning a blind eye to the controversy for too long. Now they are stuck in a situation with hundreds of questions, thousands of pages of legal documents, millions of confused Americans and exactly zero answers. As a baseball fan, I demand that they find a way to straighten this out; as a human being, I don’t envy their task.

But I do not feel sorry for the rest of you.

My heart is covered in band-aids to stop the bleeding. Good God, how I have wanted this to somehow be okay. I’ve looked for the loopholes in the rulebooks, and I have found them. I have berated people for singling out Bonds as an egoist and an African-American, because these people exist. I’ve listened attentively, if skeptically, to arguments regarding the validity of the very records that Bonds is threatening to break, and they’re smart arguments. And I am now properly exhausted.

I’ve made more cases for defense than Sam Waterston has faced in a decade on NBC; I’ve discovered ways to slip through so many loopholes that I could probably partner with a sewing needle to affix a button. And I’ve had it. Because in the end, it doesn’t matter. Barry Bonds cheated. So did Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and Jason Giambi and a great number of other men whom many of us have loved. Whether they broke the records, whether they broke the law, and whether they belong in the Hall of Fame are not concerns of mine. I’m not a professional statistician or an attorney or a member of the Writers' Association. I am a baseball lover, and they did not play baseball by the rules. I am now officially, at long last, kicking them off my team, and I am angry at all of you on my team of baseball lovers who are still making excuses for them to stay.

There are those of you who believe that Barry Bonds has not taken steroids. There aren’t many of you left, but the fact that there are any of you at all baffles me speechless. The evidence that has been presented at this point is staggering. Piece by piece, perhaps, it could be attributed to bad luck or character slander. But altogether, the records, the testimony, and the documenation leave no doubt. Point 1: Barry Bonds took steroids. Point 2: Barry Bonds exploded from an excellent, complete baseball player into a power-hitting aberration at a time when his career should have, by most standards, been slowing down, and in this time he happened to break the single-season home run record. Point 2 is directly dependent on Point 1. He has had the smarts or the good fortune never to be caught with the drugs in his system at the moments when he’s been handed a paper cup. If that’s your beef, you’ve got a good one. Walk it over to the courthouse and throw it into that debate, though you probably won’t be needed, because his lawyers are going to do a bang-up job there if it comes to that anyway. I live out here in the real world, where I have the luxury of trying Barry Bonds based on unencumbered logic. I’ve looked at the pictures on the baseball cards and I’ve read the Sports Illustrated article. My job is done. He took steroids, and if you want to keep claiming he didn’t, then I’m through with you.

There are those of you who want talk about the greater issue of steroids’ hazy place in the game of baseball. I’ve had a lot of beers with you, and I’ve enjoyed it. You tend to put forth unique and well-researched arguments, and while we’ve come to fisticuffs at times, I appreciate the thought that you’ve put into them. We’ve talked about some of the legal things that athletes do to improve their performance and the advances that have been made in the game.

We’ve talked about the reality of a skinny 17-year-old prospect from Puerto Rico who’s willing to do anything, anything, to make the big leagues over his privileged, cut competitors. I am a supporter of athletes pushing to find ways to improve themselves and the game; I have tried to reconcile this with the issue of steroids in baseball, and at times I have briefly succeeded. But I can’t do it anymore. So much crap has gathered in front of me that I have been forced to step back and look at the situation with the most simplistic logic that I possess, and this logic tells me that steroids are bad for the game in every way. Sport exists as a way for human beings to take their bodies to the highest and healthiest limits possible and as a way to merge individual talents into a common goal of winning a fair and honest competition. Steroids work in direct opposition to both of these goals. I’m glad that you smart people are out there and I wish you luck in your work as scientists or historians. But I’m not watching baseball games with you anymore.

And then there are those of you who want to talk about memories. Until recently, you have been the toughest for me. You know how to hit me where it hurts, because you know that I am a sap and that my most treasured images of baseball are so drenched in sentimentality that I can’t even see them clearly through my tears.

You tell me about how you met your wife on Waveland Avenue on one of the late summer days of 1998, your eyes breaking contact only when the smiling Dominican’s 55th – or was it 56th? – sailed over your heads into a throng of screaming people with battered gloves over their hands. You tell me about how you kept a logbook of what happened to all the nondescript baseballs that took on new life as record-breaking home runs over the last eight years, and how that marbled notebook replants your faith in humanity at times when the world tries to shake it loose, because all of those baseballs are worth millions of dollars and nearly all of them were given back to the sport. You tell me about how you took your son out of school for two weeks to drive him from Indiana to San Francisco in the fall of 2001, because you thought that he would never be able to learn this much about history in a classroom. Maybe there’s no heart-wrenching story surrounding your memory: maybe you simply happened to be in the ballpark that day, having coughed up a couple hundred bucks just to sit there and watch it. Don’t take that away from me, you plead, with the anger and the hurt and the desperation breaking your voice apart.

I’m through with you.

You think that your memories are somehow devalued because the circumstances that brought them about are fraudulent. You are wrong. Your memories are priceless because of the meaning they have taken on in your life, because of the meaning you have given them. You in the ballpark that day, you may have seen a bogus hit, but the joy you took in seeing it was real. You still met your wife. You still know that those baseballs were returned. You still took an impetuous roadtrip with your son. He may have fallen in love with Barry Bonds at that game in San Francisco, the day the slugger hit two home runs out of the park. Your kid will never forget it.

But I’ve got some good news for you. Barry Bonds didn’t give that moment to your son. You did. And when you got home, bless you, the two of you headed out to the backyard to share one of the greatest experiences that an American dad can share with his son: a game of catch. You hope that your son will love baseball as much as you do, that the steroid mess hasn’t scared him away forever. You hope that he will perform the same ritual with his son 30 years from now. First day out, four years old, it’s the most basic throwing and swinging. A year or two later, maybe he’ll draw a diagram of the strike zone for your grandson, just the way you did for him. A couple of years past this and the kid’s ready to grasp the infield fly rule. He will probably love the game by this point, and he’s growing, with all the physical and mental tools he needs to be an athlete falling into place just fine. A few years after that, then, it’s time to bring him his tray of needles and pills and creams and give him the lessons about which ones will help him hit harder, which ones will help him run faster, which ones will make his face break out and turn the girls away, which ones may give him cancer in 40 years, but it won’t matter because they’ll probably have a cure by then, and in the meantime he’s going to be a great ballplayer.

Was this part of your dream? Was this what you had hoped your memories would become? If you tell me no, but still cling to the two home runs you saw with your son as the tie that binds two baseball fans together, then your logic is faulty. To accept Barry Bonds’s accomplishments as they stand is to accept the steroids that made them happen. To argue that he should stay in the game because of the things he gave you in the past is to permit them to continue happening in the future. If that’s what you want, I don’t feel sorry for you. And don’t you dare try to tell me that I’m one of you just because I’m still a baseball fan. People go to games to see the long ball, you tell me.

And you ask me why I keep going to the ballpark if I feel so strongly that steroids are wrong when it’s clear that they’re running rampant through the sport. My friend, all I can say is that you’re so turned around that you’re seeing the issue backwards. If there are people who are there only to see the homers, then they’re not there for the same reasons that I am. I’m there to watch the game of baseball. You can fuss over attendance records all you want. You don’t have to. Baseball is too great a sport, and its fans love it too deeply, for it not to survive if it’s given the chance to be played based on the original premises on which it was so perfectly designed.

So stop worrying about your memories and stop worrying about the fans. They are both hearty enough to survive. Don’t even worry about the record books or the Hall of Fame; they’re not as important as you think they are. Baseball as a game is bigger than a record and it’s bigger than even its most bulked-up superstar. Start worrying about the fact that the 2025 reunion of great baseball stars from the late 20th century is going to look like an aging freakshow. Start fretting over the fact that the words “fair competition” in your kids’ minds will encompass hard work, leadership, the clear and the cream. And most of all, start laying into all of your fellow morons who are taking the battle against steroids as a personal slight on their family scrapbooks. They’re my memories, they scream, and you’re not going to take them away from me. If that’s the way you want it, fine. Baseball is my game and I’m not going to let you take it away from me. I see the sport that matters to all of you, the one in which the players knock thousands of baseballs out of the park but can’t hit a wiffle ball off their six-year-old kids after they retire; the one in which time outs are used to comb through legal documents; the one in which prescriptions are filled at the concession stand during the seventh-inning stretch. Get off the field and go find your own pastime. We have a game to play over here.

The Arabs are coming!

2006-02-24T17:02:00.000-08:00

American anti-Arab hysteria reached a new peak this week with the revelation that the United Arab Emirates-based Dubai Ports World may soon be managing some U.S. ports. Americans, who typically have no problem selling anything to anyone, (particularly weapons) have suddenly gone all weak in the knees at the thought of foreigners running a U.S. port. As one of the always-literate commenters at the international capital of hating the Arabs, Little Green Footballs writes, "UAE is no friend of the USA and the Civilzed (sic) World."

I'll tell you, if the UAE made cars, I'm sure we'd be seeing people out smashing them up like they did in the good old days of hating the Japanese. Remember when they tried to buy the Seattle Mariners? You would have thought the Japanese were sending over another fleet to screw up another attack on Pearl Harbor.

The only thing that surprises me about this situation is that the preznit is actually on the side of making the deal. Then again, he never has been one to let anything get in the way of money exchanging hands between consenting adults -- just as long as one or both of them is a crook.

Everyone else seems to think that the UAE is dumb enough to send saboteurs over to incinerate Newark or something. People always say that the business of America is business, but I say that catch-phrase should belong to the Emirates, the global center of anything-goes capitalism. My friends, we're talking about people who are building a $500 million underwater hotel. This is clearly not a country that wants to jeopardize it's insane oil wealth for the sake of murdering Americans. It's a country that wants to keep the party going for every last minute until the oil runs out.

It is also a country that has been very cooperative in ~~the war that will never end until Republicans leave office~~ The War on Terruh. They have been Very Well-Behaved Arabs who eat their broccoli and lima beans and never speak to Uncle Sam unless spoken to. They have also been such good partners because, you know, they don't respect the Geneva Conventions either. You can see why George W. Bush -- who has never met an international treaty he wouldn't like to flush down the toilet after setting in on fire, would get along with these folks.

Dubai Ports World actually has a very good reputation. Now, I'm open to the argument that the U.S. government should be running U.S. ports, instead of for-profit corporations. That's the kind of reasoning that might appeal to me. But can you imagine that there would be an instinctive reaction if a Swiss company had done this? Even the French could probably get away with running our ports, despite the fact that a number of Republican public intellectuals seem to want to refight the battle of the Somme with American soldiers playing the part of the Germans.

The most pernicious manifestation of this syndrome is the tendency to define any Arab-majority country as "the enemy." New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez said "This sale is especially troubling because of the UAE's questionable track record. Two of the 9/11 hijackers were from the UAE." According to such third-grade logic, we shouldn't sell to an American firm either because Timothy McVeigh pulled off the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995.

If we truly want to help change attitudes about the United States in the Arab world, we can't do things like this. We can't say, "We'd really love for you to like us and to eat nachos with us while we watch Monday Night Football, but the truth is that we don't like you either and you definitely can't buy our stuff." This is a public relations strategy brought to you straight from the creators of Pajamas Media.

In other words, it sucks. And for once, I have to say that (gulp) I agree with George W. Bush about something. Kind of. With addenda. And my fingers crossed.

My Secret Garden -- State.

2006-02-19T13:29:00.000-08:00

New Jersey, you know how I know you’re gay?

There’s Jim McGreevey, James Dale and Walt Whitman. But more than that, there’s a legacy, actually. You have a papertrail of pro-homo support that makes you the perfect battleground for the current gay marriage civil rights case.

Against a Trenton backdrop, the left-leaning New Jersey Supreme Court is currently hearing testimony from advocates for gay marriage as well as the state of New Jersey that wants to send the matter to the legislature. Interestingly, the argument isn’t whether gay New Jersey will become the second state in the nation to legalize gay marriage. Instead, at least at this point, the question is whether an activist Supreme Court should be the mechanism legalizing the gay marriage. Advocates for the practice fear it could be rerouted through the cumbersome – and less likely to watch Will & Grace -- state legislature.

New Jersey is among the more progressive states when it comes to gay civil rights. State workers, for example, get same-sex partner benefits. And, unlike other states, New Jeresey has a civil union law that gives gay partners exactly the same legal rights as a married couple. These are but a few of the litany of reasons New Jersey serves as the perfect setting for the gayest storm in years.

New Jersey’s warm same-sex embrace has a time-tested and well-entrenched history. One good place to start is with Camden’s own Walt Whitman. The caber-rattling war monger also liked to frolic in the Garden State’s bucolic fields with the finest specimen of fieldhand. He was the star in his own Brokeback Pine Barrens. Check out my favorite Whitman poem, “O, Tan-Face Prarie Boy:”
Before you came to camp, came many a welcome gift;
Praises and presents came, and nourishing food—till at last, among the recruits,
You came, taciturn, with nothing to give—we but look’d on each other,
When lo! more than all the gifts of the world, you gave me.

Not enough yet? Move on to Newark-born Allen Ginsberg, the beat-generation guru whose homosexuality played a crucial role in shaping America’s fascination with and aversion to gays. Check out Howl if you don’t believe me:
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fuded in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailor, caresses of
Altantic and Caribbean love,of Atlantic

But poets aren’t your only gay export. New Jersey has a Supreme history of gayness. Recall, for example, James Dale, the Boy Scout who outted [SP?] himself in a Star-Ledger newspaper story about gay advocacy. When the Scouts caught wind of the Dale’s homo vibe, they tried to eliminate the Eagle Scout from their membership roster. Enter New Jersey’s Supreme Court, which slapped the Scoutmaster’s wrists and resumed Dale’s slot in the scouting ranks.

In politics, we have the iconic McGreevey – the first gay governor. Well, maybe he’s not the first, but he was definitely the first to out himself in a press conference to thrwart an effort at blackmail. Now that’s gay.

And in the arts: Drag’s best friend Flip Wilson was born in Jersey City, N.J. Queen Latifah hasn’t come out yet, but really Queeney … like we don’t know already. And how gay was Bon Jovi in the 80s? Even I didn’t wear that much spandex – and I was like eight.

So New Jersey, don’t hide your rainbow flag. March in the pride parade. Be who you truly are. And don’t be afraid to invite anger and controversy. Blaze your well-groomed, pedicured trail. Allow your cities, towns and schools to be the carnation pink battleground it was meant to be. Don’t deny your nature. It just wouldn’t be in proper character. It wouldn’t be the first time you took a step in the gay direction. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Shooting straight just isn't their thing

2006-02-19T04:23:00.000-08:00

People are warning of the coming Republican electoral strategy: declare "victory" in Iraq and run on it. With some soldiers trickling home and marching in victory parades, will the electorate still be in the mood to hold the Administration and its allies responsible for anything?

This is certainly a suitably diabolical plan, and I'm sure the GOP will try just about anything to keep its slimy grip on the levers of power. But will even state-sponsored propaganda parades be enough to turn the party's rapidly declining fortunes? Polls show a double-digit advantage for Democratic Congressional candidates. Bush is at 39% in some polls despite the State of the Union pushback and the rolling out of yet another terrorism story to make everyone clutch their carebears in horror.

Still, you have to hope that at some point people will realize what an astounding cock-up this administration has made of everything it's ever touched. On the domestic front, Bush managed to alienate all ends of the political spectrum with his idiotic prescription drug plan, which is both a huge economic commitment and a big bottle of champagne and assorted cheeses for the pharmaceutical industry.

Social Security ~~evisceration~~ reform died with the president's fleeting and paper-thin popularity. No Child Left Behind has turned into the cruel joke that its name always promised. The number of uninsured Americans has skyrocketed. Job growth has not kept up with population growth, environmental protections have been gutted, worker's rights have been trampled upon, and to top it off, these humorless clowns decided to make it harder for all these struggling people to declare bankruptcy -- even in the face of crippling medical debt.

All of this might be overshadowed if the Administration had any meaningful international accomplishments to brag about. It would be like the last-place team that still led the league in batting average or something. Unfortunately, the willfully ignorant and deranged people running this country have accomplished nothing in the international arena -- unless you consider destroying the country's good name something of which to be proud. In the Middle East, the Bushies have coolly and disinterestedly presided over the worst five years in the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1967-73. Negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians came to a crashing halt while Bush signed off on the Israeli annexation of vast swaths of the West Bank, undermining nearly 40 years of established diplomacy and making the two-state solution an increasingly dismal prospect.

The administration has also precipitated two entirely needless crises: one with North Korea, which appears to have passed, and one with Iran, which is simmering and may yet spill out into open conflict. Both were caused by Bush's swaggering and his idiot speechwriters, all of whom seem to take a fratboy's delight in pissing people off for no good reason. Bush has alienated a host of traditional allies. And by deliberately and fraudulently lying this country into war, turned the name of the United States into a pile of dirt.

And lest we forget, there is the minor problem of having turned Iraq from a police state that threatened no one except its own weary citizens into a spectacularly failed state and the biggest incubator and training ground for international terrorists since 1980s Afghanistan. All it cost was 2,273 American lives and counting, $2 trillion dollars, and perhaps a hundred thousand Iraqis. Meanwhile we threaten and harangue strategically insignificant puppet states like Syria and lecture them about democracy and occupations, whereas the world's largest outlaw occupier state, China, gets warm trade relations and happy tidings. Now, say what you will about Bill Clinton's foreign policy, but it always made more sense than this.

Aside from the quick and clean exit of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan from the world stage (and truth be told, the situation in that country is no longer anything to brag about) this administration can't boast a single meaningful accomplishment. But they know how to win elections, you can't take that away from them. They get their fundamentalist judges confirmed, their illegal wiretappings approved and forgotten, and they sure do know how to illegally redistrict their favorite states. They also do a bang-up job funneling money from lobbyists to officeholders. You might say that the business of the Republicans is taking care of their own dirty business.

But even that would be too charitable.

Beware the Veep

2006-02-14T08:18:00.001-08:00

Vice President Dick Cheney’s recent hunting trip is the first direct manifestation of his increasing wonton bloodlust. Sure, it starts with 78-year-old lawyers and farm-raised quail, but the thirst for more could quickly escalate.

On Saturday Feb. 11, the president went to a Texas hunting ranch on a trip that clearly served as a thinly veiled sojourn to unleash years of pent-up anger and a desire to expedite the thinning of the American population. On the trip, Cheney “mistook a hunting buddy for a cubby of quail” and riddled the man with buckshot from his shotgun. Sure, sending hundreds of thousands of young men to war is one effective method of reducing the burgeoning American population, but, apparently for Cheney, it wasn’t working quickly enough.

The bad news for the 64-year-old Cheney is that his shot isn’t what it used to be. His efforts to remove 78-year-old hunting companion and Arlington attorney Harry Wittington from the social security files was thwarted when the dogged septuagenarian fought the buckshot’s nasty effects and is now listed in stable condition at a Corpus Christi hospital.

According to various news sources, including the BBC.CO.UK, Whittington had more than ten pieces of buckshot throughout his face and body, but fewer than 100 scraps of the shrapnel. I, personally gonna bank on about 56 pieces that – at the right angle – look smackingly like a new multi-million dollar contract for Halliburton. Just for one last FU to Wittington, some of the buckshot will never be able to be removed from his body, according to the victim’s daughter, Sally.

Ignoring the real story of Cheney’s internal evil sublimating to actual bouts of attempted murder, the news media has tended to focus on the more inncuous question of whether the White House spindoctors dragged their feet notifying the press and public about the attempted murder/hunting mishap. "I think you can always look back at these issues and look at how to do a better job,” said White House spokesman Scott McClellan at a press conference on Monday morning. Was he talking about handling the press or the entire length of the Bush administration? Oh, those public information guys are wiley and cryptic. In fact, there is speculation in the media that Cheney and his staff attempted to keep the entire incident under wraps until ranch’s ower Katharine Armstrong leaked the story to the journalistic juggernaut the Corpus Christi Times.

To compound Cheney’s bad luck/taste for blood, it seems he might not have had the proper certification on his hunting license to attempt murder. This oversight could leave the failed would-be murderer a severe slap on the wrist not only from the environmental lobby (who don’t so much like the man anyway), but also the pivotal NRA contingent who actually do attempt to separate hunting from homicide. Most of the time, anyway.

Cheney, of course, is not the first VP to attempt murder. There was Alexander Hamilton and his famous and ill-fated duel against Aaron Burr. But Cheney is the first to grow pointy horns and sport glowing red eyes at the time of the incident. He also failed to give his victim a sporting chance at reciprocity. Okay, that horns part is a slight exaggeration – and I’ve heard nothing about the color of Cheney’s eyes at the time of the incident. But I’m warning anyone contemplating a sporting weekend with the VP to reconsider.

On the golf course, you could be mistaken for a pesky gopher. At the bowling alley, you might lose some digits in the ball return. Don’t get me started with the perils of archery or, God forbid, bocce. Keep Cheney far from Turino. His outdoorsey evils know no boundaries. Our second in charge has smelled fear in 78-year-old form. It can only have served to jump-start the eventual massacre. Beware the Veep.

Impeach the bastard

2006-02-06T21:03:00.000-08:00

It is time to impeach the President of the United States. I have resisted the impulse to say this for a very long time. And let’s face it, some folks of my political persuasion have been throwing around the I-bomb like lapdances at a Minnesota Vikings sex cruise since the day Bush took office.

But there is really no way around it – this president set aside very clear provisions of the Constitution – specifically the Fourth Amendment and a set of very lenient spying provisions in FISA. He did it for no good reason other than that he and his advisers knew perfectly well that it was illegal and that they would not otherwise have been able to get away with it. The legal doctrine being wielded to support this egregious and unapologetic violation of American law is the idea that if the President does it, it’s not illegal. Most legal scholars are chuckling at the idea that the Afghanistan war resolution in 2001 gave the President the authority to do whatever the hell he pleases.

They should also chuckle at the argument that Bush’s advisors told him it was okay. In fact, this should be the ultimate argument for not having a president so dumb that he can barely tie his own shoes. Listen, I could go out for beers tonight with a bunch of lawyers and have them tell me it’s okay to hold up the bar and beat the snot out of anyone who looks at me crooked. But that doesn’t make it legal, now does it?

I have heard the argument that it would not be good for American democracy for two consecutive presidents to be impeached. Well my friends, Clinton’s impeachment cannot be undone, but it was a farce perpetrated by a hostile Congress bent on his destruction from the day those maniacs swept to power in 1994. But even if you believe that Clinton’s impeachment was legit, that’s not an argument for letting the next president off the hook for what are indisputably graver crimes than lying about blow jobs.

If Americans don’t want to see their presidents impeached, they should try electing people that don’t brazenly and openly violate the law. You can’t blame them on that score for electing Bush in the first place, but when you re-elect a guy who thinks it’s okay to capture American citizens and then ship them off to Syria to be tortured by a government you are actively trying to overthrow, you kind of have it coming. When you send a man back to the White House who sold you a pack of lies to get you into a totally unnecessary war, you have this coming. Frankly, American democracy has this coming. An impeachment might be just what this country needs.

If spying on your own citizens without permission from any legal authority whatsoever is not a high crime and misdemeanor, than nothing is. Unfortunately, Congress is controlled by a group of lawmakers so corrupt that they belong in the Ethical Special Olympics. Impeaching the president requires you first to remove his hand out from underneath your balls. And these guys have never – not once – shown any inclination to do so. After launching an investigation every time Clinton took out his recycling, the GOP-controlled Congress has been so compliant with the Bush Administration that you’d think they were being paid by the hour.

This is one more reason why it’s so important to take back one or both branches of the legislature this fall. The ha-ha hearings being held this week aren’t going to lead to impeachment any more than the intelligence failure hearings resulted in anyone getting fired or taking responsibility for anything. At the most Arlen Specter will be trotted out to slap the President on the wrist. Lightly.

The galling thing is that Americans would get behind an impeachment of Bush in a way that they never did for Clinton. The violation of the law is much clearer here, and illegal spying and surveillance have much more relevance for the average American than Clinton screwing an intern. Bush is deeply unpopular and mistrusted. And he has this coming. He and his advisors have treated the law as something to be bent, twisted and molded to fit whatever authoritarian impulses John Yoo and Alberto Gonzalez were feeling on any given morning. Their behavior, and Congress's obeisant acquienscence to it, calls into question the very machinery of American democracy.

Wouldn't you like to see that smug, self-satisfied little frat boy frogmarched out of office with his sneering and corrupt advisors trailing behind, forever disgraced and discredited?

I can always dream.

Let Them Have Nukes

2006-01-31T21:45:00.000-08:00

U.S. hypocrisy about nuclear proliferation is truly boundless. For the past two years America and its allies have warned Iran that it must halt its nuclear activities or the country will be sent to bed without dinner and have its TV privileges revoked. Meanwhile the United States sits atop a stockpile of nuclear weapons large enough to erase every man, woman and Republican from the face of the Earth.

From the perspective of the Global South, this is like Bill Bennett telling you not to build casinos while he’s tossing dice at the craps table. In reality, its even worse, since Bennett is at least repentant about dropping millions of dollars into the bloated coffers of gambling houses, while the U.S., France and Britain are utterly unapologetic about possessing nuclear weapons. The nuclear weapons countries no longer even give lip service to the idea of disarmament.

The same thing happens every time a new country decides to build nuclear weapons. Climb into the way-back machine and recall the faux outrage that swept the globe like bird flu when the Indians and then the Pakistanis tested nuclear weapons in 1998. Short-lived sanctions were imposed on the South Asian rivals. So far the peace between those two countries has held despite a number of close calls.

Many people point toward the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s unhinged statements about Israel – it needs to be “wiped off the map” – as proof that the typical calculus of nuclear weapons does not apply to Iran. His religious millenarianism indicates that he may not be deterred by Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) – the idea that Iran would not launch a nuclear strike on Israel or any other nuclear-armed state because of the knowledge that Iran would in turn be destroyed in retaliation.

Of course the decision to launch nuclear weapons ultimately rests not with Ahmedinejad, but with the actual center of power in Iran – the profoundly conservative Council of Guardians, stocked with clerics who would not sign off on a suicidal decision to destroy the Israelis. MAD may be just a theory, but so far it has proven to be a pretty good one, since no two nuclear-armed states have ever gone to war with one another. It is certainly a more reputable theory than the disgraceful Intelligent Design.

But more importantly, this scare tactic is coming from the United States, a country that in 2002 released a Nuclear Posture Review, which indicated our willingness to launch first-strike nuclear attacks against countries that do not possess nuclear weapons. What’s crazier -- a virtually powerless Iranian president making empty threats against a sworn enemy, or the world’s most powerful country threatening to obliterate you any time it pleases? Keep in mind that this country is still, 60 years after the dawn of the nuclear age, the only country ever to use nuclear weapons in combat.

And who could blame the Iranians for wanting nuclear weapons? Every developing country must look at the divergent fates of non-nuclear Iraq, which was invaded and occupied by the U.S., and nuclear-armed North Korea, which was left alone, and draw the same conclusion. If you don’t want your country crawling with American GIs, build some nukes. Iran was also the recent victim of an invasion at the hands of Iraq, a war that cost as many as 1 million lives and almost certainly would never have happened had one or both states possessed nuclear weapons.
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which the Iranians are still a part of for the time being, makes it clear that the nuclear weapons states are eventually expected to disarm. The Cold War gave states an excuse to keep their nuclear weapons, but the disappearance of the Soviet threat left the nuclear weapons states with no clear rationale for their stockpiles. It’s the same thing that happens to every pothead that graduates from college – what exactly to do with that brick of weed now that there’s no dorm room to smoke it in. The U.S. has chosen to keep puffing away on its nuclear joint.

And like most potheads, the United States is not thinking very clearly. Neither the Americans nor the Europeans can really stop a country bent on acquiring nuclear weapons unless they are willing to unleash a bombing campaign. And with the U.S. military tied down in Iraq, even this administration is unlikely to start another war -- particularly against a country that is much more capable militarily than circa-2003 Iraq.

The Iranians know this. They also know that they could cripple the world economy just by taking their oil offline for a few weeks. So if you try to send them to bed without dinner, they may burn down the house. I say let them have their nukes.

Is this democracy?

2006-01-26T08:14:00.000-08:00

Only a month after Israeli PM Ariel Sharon’s sudden stroke shook Israeli politics, the Palestinians have experienced a shock of their own. Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement), the militant opposition to the ruling Fatah party, appears on the verge of scoring a huge victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections. While the party’s victory is almost certainly bad news for the peace process, it may be the best thing ever to happen to Palestinian politics. It may even transform the politics of the whole region.

If this were any other developing country we would be hailing the victory of an opposition party over a corrupt and ineffectual ruling party. It’s funny though, I don’t hear anyone waxing eloquent about the Green-and-White Revolution yet. That’s because this is Palestine, and a different set of rules apply to out-of-favor Arabs (i.e. not Saudi, Jordanian, or Lebanese) than to everyone else.

First the bad news. Hamas maintains what you might charitably call an untenable position in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The organization remains officially committed to Israel’s destruction, although in the past its leadership has indicated a willingness to accept a two-state solution to the conflict as a stepping-stone towards the reclamation of all of Israel by the Palestinians. The forthcoming Israeli leadership is unlikely to bargain with Hamas unless it renounces violence and accepts the so-called Road Map. This is a bit ironic, since Sharon did more than anyone else to destroy the Road Map, but that’s politics for you.

But let’s be honest here – there is not currently much of a peace process to speak of. The Blue Jays and the Brewers did much more talking and dealing this winter than the Israelis and the Palestinians. Israel carried out its evacuation of the Gaza Strip by fiat and refused to negotiate with the secular Palestinian leadership at all. Sharon’s obstinate neglect of Mahmoud Abbas and the Fatah ruling group sealed the demise of the old guard in Palestinian politics. A cynic might suggest that this was what Sharon wanted all along – the end of the moderates, the rise of the extremists, and a tailor-made excuse for Israel to keep the West Bank indefinitely.

Nevertheless, the ascension of Hamas could in theory trigger some positive events, in Palestine and in the region. First, the peaceful transfer of power from a ruling group to the opposition is one of the hallmarks of a democracy. And if Fatah actually releases its grip on power – unlike the Algerian junta, which canceled elections won by the Islamist opposition in 1992 and plunged the country into a ten-year civil war – then the Palestinian polity will qualify as at least somewhat democratic. If nothing else, this would mean that the Israelis and Americans could no longer use the lack of Palestinian democracy as an excuse for their refusal to negotiate.

More importantly, the behavior of Hamas in office could have important implications for the region. No one expects them to govern like the Canadian Liberals (another corrupt party that got thrown out of office this week). But if Hamas displays some pragmatism, bargains with the opposition, forms coalitions, and moderates its position on Israel, it would suggest that participation in parliamentary politics by Islamist groups is not the horrifying specter that some people suggest.

If Islamists can govern Palestine, they can govern elsewhere as well. And this means that the corrupt kleptocracies “governing” places like Tunisia, Algeria, and Jordan would no longer be able to use Islamic oppositions as a scare tactic. The U.S. could place more pressure on these governments to open up their systems and share power with the Islamist oppositions, since in all cases Islamists constitute the only viable alternative to the ruling groups.

Of course you can see this all going horribly wrong too. For instance, the official Hamas leadership might shift its position, creating splinter groups within the organization which carry out attacks in Israel. The Israelis then blame Hamas and either cut off all contact or actually assassinate the elected Palestinian leadership. It doesn’t take a particularly vivid imagination to come up with a whole host of such pessimistic scenarios. It doesn’t help that Hamas, assuming it is permitted to take power, will be governing a series of disjointed and disfigured territories, with all the same limitations imposed on Fatah and maybe even more.

But for now, everyone should keep their wits about them and give the political process within Palestine a chance to unfold.

Persecute, Kill the Democrats!

2006-01-23T06:06:00.000-08:00

Hide your exam sheets. Get your blue books notorized. Cover up your Kerry/Edwards bumper stickers. The “academic freedom” movement has descended on Pennsylvania. Spearheaded by the bitter and deranged ex-Marxist David Horowitz, Students For Academic Freedom seeks to strip professors of their right to do independent teaching and research, and instead to impose on them an arbitrary set of standards designed to ensure the absence of “bias” in the classroom.

The banner of this Orwellian crusade – which after all seeks to strip professors of their academic freedom – is “balance,” or as they call it, “teaching the controversy.” The focus of most of their ire is anyone who dares to teach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in front of anyone other than their close friends and family. I myself, a lowly teaching assistant at Penn, have been harassed for a full semester by a dim-witted, crackpot student-spy from the odious Campus Watch, and tailed at public lectures by senile watchdogs from the Zionist Organization of America. And I’m basically a nobody.

The natural endpoint of this crusade is the pitiful, 52-year-old snot-nose who recently sued his professor for giving him a B- at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Continuing-ed students aside, an entire generation of conservatives are being taught that they can write any idiotic thing they’ve cribbed from Bill Kristol or Jonah Goldberg, turn it in as a term paper, and expect to receive the A- they believe they so richly deserve. And if they don’t, they’ve been taught to bitch about it -- imitating the very worst tendencies of the political correctness movement that conservatives have so long abhorred.

In Pennsylvania, lawmakers have been holding hearings about alleged bias on state campuses. Republicans, not content with controlling basically every lever of power in this country, now want to get their gold-stained paws on the academy. These fascist crusaders cite surveys that indicate a massive Democratic majority in the humanities and social sciences. They want students who argue that evolution is just a theory to get the same grades as the kids who actually study and learn things.

Well of course there’s a Democratic majority in the academy. Who but a liberal is willing to withstand the years of grinding penury of graduate school, followed by a lifetime of mediocre wages and marginalization in the public sphere? It’s the same reason that corporate boardrooms are dominated by Bush-voting exurbanites who drive Hummers to work and contribute to Americans For Tax Freedom. Some professions are self-selecting. But not all professors are lefties – pay a visit to your local economics department or business school, and I guarantee you that you’ll find a much-reduced advantage for the donkey.

I think it’s ironic that a political party that has always advocated for freedom from government interference now wants government oversight of higher education. If Horowitz, Campus Watch, and SAF had their way, there would be a pinstriped bureaucrat in every college classroom in America, zapping professors with a dog collar every time they dared to utter treasonous words about terrorism or Israeli aggression. If you think GOP actions on this issue are inconsistent with official Republican dogma, you’re right, but you haven’t been paying much attention to the news. The crooks running this country don’t care about ideological consistency – they want your submission to their every whim.

And in Pennsylvania – including the countless universities of Philadelphia – they are coming for your academic freedom. It’s like someone seeking to strip you of your civil liberties under the name Americans For Civil Liberties, or trying to stop you from smoking in bars with the Committee For Smokers’ Freedom. The cognitive dissonance is overwhelming -- just not overwhelming enough to stop the PA House from establishing a Select Committee on Academic Freedom this past summer, which will hold more hearings later this year to determine whether an Academic Bill of Rights is necessary here.

I can tell you exactly what will happen if Pennsylvania continues these hearings and seeks to interfere with the academy: Professors will increasingly be intimidated by radical right-wing fundamentalists who want to censor, hector and obstruct professors. Anyone sympathetic to the Palestinians – like Joseph Massad of Columbia, who was viciously smeared and attacked by the SAF crowd – will come under attack. Every single conservative on campus will assume that he or she has a blank check to write whatever suits them on exams and papers, even if it wasn’t on the syllabus and has nothing to do with the content of the course. And tenure will be rolled back – long a cherished dream of the radical right.

Finally, the Right, having recently cowed the media into Swift-Boating John Kerry and covering up an illegal spying scandal until a year after the 2004 election, will have forced yet another institution to succumb to its browbeating and victim-mongering. Republicans, for all their pretensions about being the party of manly men and iron-chested warriors, sure seem to get their panties in a twist every time someone gives them a bad grade on a midterm, or God forbid, says something liberal in a classroom.

I mean, God, this professor totally just dissed George Bush and junk! Like, call the cops!

Thanks, Jack. Just Because.

2006-01-18T18:10:00.000-08:00

I’d like to second George Clooney’s Golden Globes thank you speech that tipped his hat to former Republican uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. While standing at the Tinsel Town pedastal earlier this week, Clooney gave the soon-to-be felon a shout out “just because.”

I have reasons for my praise of the man whose name will soon be synonymous with brazen disregard for fundraising ethics. For one, he’s already prompted the resignation of former House Majority Leader Tom Delay, R.–Sugar Land, Texas. Second, Pennsylvania’s favorite son – Rick Santorum, R-Penn. -- seems poised to be another political casualty caught in the Abramoff web of legal and moral impropriety. (And Santorum thought abortion was immoral!)

Though fundraising rules were never carefully heeded by either side of the partisan divide, Republicans took their schemes to a new and unstomachable level when they created the so-called K Street Project. Named in honor of the plethora of lobbists with offices located on Washington’s K Street, the project created a backscratching symbiosis that awarded job openings to Republican friends and large injections of lobby funds into GOP campaign coffers in exchange for policies that matched interest group desires. In short, high-ranking Republican loyalists would get well-paying lobby jobs at corporations who would concurrently get profit-friendly legislation. Morally righteous Santorum was a key player in the creation and maintenance of this K Street Project. This might be another pivotal tidbit to keep in mind this election year. It can be tucked into your collective memory along with his love of gays and women's rights. I can’t say that enough.

The K Street Project is just one manifestation of the problems that plague Washington’s existing interest-group bonanza. One person, one vote no longer means anything when millions of dollars are flippantly tossed among corporate kingpins and key politicos. But the Abramoff shock to the system offers Congress and the public the opportunity to redraw the existing structure of interest group politics and political candidacy.

Both Republicans and Democrats are currently burning the 5:15 p.m. oil, creating policy remedies to close up the cheesecloth of loopholes that comprise existing campaign fundraising law. But why not throw the lachrymose politician[S?] out with the tainted bathwater and start anew? With public awareness and outrage piqued, now is the time for elected officials too make real change. And this is where my big thank you goes to Abramoff. He's so villified [SP?] right now, he's opened a vent in a perpetually gridlocked political system. He's created a window in which real, structural change to a faulty system can be made. Now is the time to move from a system that rewards backroom deals that effectively remove the importance of voting from the political process and usher in the remedy of publicly financed elections.

I know, I know. It sounds crazy. It’s like I’m asking you to seriously consider socialized medicine (which, I actually do). But, stop. Take a look at how the existing rules make our elected officials behave. I’m not saying DeLay and Santorum are innocent victims of a pernicious set of campaign finance rules. No, they’re unethical, self-indulgent political slugs. But every congressperson has to spend the bulk of their time courting sources of funding – especially members of the House, who come up for election every two years. Publicly financing elections would not increase public spending -- taxpayers already give money to those who seek office. But adopting the new system would push political office away from something only guilty or greedy millionaires could secure. Instead, knowledgeable everymen and women might actually be able to win an election.

This is a historical moment that allows politicians to actually remove the evils of money from the political system. And I’m watching as our elected representatives bicker partisanly over who's more egregiously exploited the faulty existing structure. Instead, why can't they enact a solution that actually solves the ethical problem instead of shifting and tucking its weaknesses for later abuse? You know, why don’t they save democracy, “just because.” Thanks, Jack Abramoff.

Take out a contract on them

2006-01-17T19:01:00.000-08:00

Rumors have been floating around the internets that the Democrats may be ready to float their own contract with America, ala Gingrich and the mid-90s GOP. My fear is that this platform is going to contain more meaningless gibberish about “working families” (what, does everyone in the family work?), keeping you safe from Arabs, helping old ladies cross the street and that sort of thing. Now I like my party, but they’re about as exciting as a bag of chex mix, and they have the strategic wisdom of that second interception Tom Brady threw against the Broncos.

Say what you will about Newt and his fellowship of the right wing that took over Congress in 1994, but they had a vision. People are compelled by strong storylines and a coherent narrative. You tell them what’s wrong and how you’re going to fix it. While voters may not agree with every bullet point, if it’s all connected by a governing philosophy, they may just buy it.

This is something the Dems have been sorely missing for a generation, since the collapse of the New Deal consensus. What is the Democratic solution to health care; try to insure everyone, somehow, but if we leave a few people out, well, shucks, that’s just too bad? What is the Democratic position on the war? Give me the Democratic critique of GOP national security policy, other than the ridiculous claim Kerry kept making that we aren’t inspecting enough containers at our ports? How do the Democrats feel about privacy?

If you don’t know the answers to those questions, you’re not alone. My guess is that most people couldn’t locate Democratic positions on a political map even if they had a political GPS system. At the same time, they could probably sum up the GOP platform with a few quick phrases: more guns, more bombs, more Jesus, fewer taxes, fewer gays, more barefoot and pregnant women.

What the party really needs is a nationwide debate about what belongs in its platform. Being a man of many opinions, I have my own ideas about what belongs in our own ten-point contract. We need to take the most popular aspects of libertarianism and marry them to a progressive social policy grounded in ethics that are recognizable to religious Americans. Our slogan would be – Pay us more, fix the roads, and leave us alone. Here are my ten:

1. U.S. Out of My Pants
The government of the United States has no business telling consenting adults what they can and can’t do in the bedroom. The state also has no right to issue marriage benefits only to certain kinds of people. The second part of this platform can slip in under the radar if we emphasize the first.
2. Give Me More Money
I fail to see the appeal of capitalism if people who work their asses off cleaning our toilets and slopping up our fast food can’t make enough money to get by. Have you ever seen the movie The Best Years of Our Lives? It’s about a returning WWII vet who makes a living as an ice cream man. Today that guy would get laughed at and would have to work three jobs just to pay the rent on a flophouse on skid row. Every American deserves a living wage. Santa Fe, NM's living wage law may serve as a bellweather for these policies.
3. Mandatory Insurance Isn’t Just For Metal Driving Machines
Our health care practices are killing us. They kill uninsured Americans, and they kill businesses big and small. We need to get the private sector out of the insurance business. It’s good for corporate America and it’s good for the millions of uninsured people who have to go to the emergency room every time something goes wrong. The French spend less per capita on health care than we do, they insure everyone, they live longer, and their women are more promiscuous. There must be a connection.
4. People Need Drugs
The drug war is costing us $30 billion a year. It is destabilizing countries like Colombia and Bolivia, and it is pissing off everyone in Latin America. It is also not working. Some people seem to like and need drugs, and I don’t see why we should subject our cities to drug turf wars every day of the year just to keep the heroin out of their arms when it is clearly going to find its way in there anyway. Frame it as a freedom from government issue and run with it. With a competent politician making the connection between the illegality of drugs and crime, people might start to get it.
5. War and Peace Or: War, What Is It Good For?
War should be a last resort when we are truly threatened, not a tool used blindly to accomplish strategic aims that could be reached with other methods. When we go to war unnecessarily, we expose our own weakness and leave those who are actually imperiled (i.e. the Sudanese) to die.
6. Free Trade Is Not As Cool As Free Love
I’m as eager to buy $15 cars from China as the next guy. But if it results in the wholesale destruction of our most important industries, we might want to think twice about untrammeled free trade. If trade doesn’t include the appropriate protections for labor and the environment, then it’s just another form of destruction.
7. Size Doesn’t Matter For Business
The GOP keeps trying, preposterously, to portray itself as the party of small businesses. This is so ludicrous I almost dropped my triple mocha latte onto the floor of my Volvo station wagon. The Republicans are so closely tied to the Wal-Marts and Targets of the world that they eat out of the same mass-produced, polyurithane bowls. We should maybe start pointing this out and stake out a position as the defender of the beleaguered small entrepreneur. And yes, in places like Philadelphia, this means getting rid of some of the annoying legislation that gets in the way of people opening restaurants, bars and that sort of thing. Some laws suck even though they were designed for your protection.
8. People Need More Vacation
Americans work more than basically anyone else in the industrialized world. Some sick, depraved people don’t even take the vacations they have coming to them, feeling some weird obligation to show up at work even when they are not needed or wanted. The Democrats should campaign for a mandatory minimum of three weeks vacation for every full-time worker in the United States. Who will have a problem with that?
9. We Don’t Want To Take Your Guns.
No really, we don’t want them. There’s too many of them out there anyway, and it would take the cops 475,293 hours to collect every handgun in America. This has always been a losing issue for us. We live in a violent society, and that violence has other causes.
10. You Should Get Stuff For Being Born
Every baby born in America should get several thousand dollars from the government that they can claim to buy houses or start business when they turn 30. This would help rectify the resource gap that still separates black and white Americans, and it’s a surefire winner. We can pay for it by suing Halliburton for all the shit they’ve stolen.

Your thoughts?

Gloomier times?

2006-01-15T09:50:00.000-08:00

Normally I like ESPN's Jim Caple, a smart writer who rises above the usual tripe posted by the average sportswriter. But he has just written one of the most astoundingly silly things I've seen in a long time. Expounding on the impending pursuit of Hank Aaron by Barry Bonds and comparing it to the Summer of '98, Caple writes:

We'll see what the nation's reaction will be as Bonds approaches Aaron (assuming he's healthy enough to do so), but here's one guarantee. It will not be the national lovefest McGwire and Sosa received in 1998, when those two sluggers captivated us amid gloomier news of a White House scandal and a falling stock market.

On one hand, it obviously is not going to be a national lovefest. Very few people like Bonds, and the steroids scandals of the past few years have made most fans wary of getting too excited about home runs flying out of ballparks, even 756 of them. So on that score, Caple is right. But what the hell is he talking about when he says that 1998 brought us "gloomier news"? Yes, there was the Asian financial crisis that hit the stock market in the spring and summer, but the low point, which came on August 31st, was still 1,200 points higher on the Dow than the previous year's low.

Americans really had not begun to feel this economic bad news at the time. There had been no recession, the country was not bleeding jobs like it was from 2001-2004, and more importantly, there was no war. Furthermore, the economy quickly recovered from the "Asian Flu," and the stock market reassumed its rocket-like climb, recovering to over 9,000 by the time the World Series was over. Having lived through that summer, I can say without hesitation that while people were concerned about what was going on in Asia, and although the market took a dive, it wasn't exactly like people thought the sky was falling.

Even if you grant Caple his contention that the Summer of '98 was a gloomy one, economically speaking, how can you argue that it was a worse time than today? The Lewinsky scandal did not exactly blacken the national mood -- in fact the GOP's reaction to the President getting a blow job seemed to rally the public around Clinton. At the height of this supposed national depression, on August 19th and 20th, Bubba's approval rating spiked up to 65% in the CBS news poll. This is not exactly evidence that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa somehow pulled us all out of a country-wide skid. People like Mike Lupica have long traded on the notion that Sosa and McGwire saved civilization, something that makes much less sense when you wipe away the warm glow of nostalgia and recognize that 1998 was pretty much a year like any other.

Compare 1998 to today. Like 1998, the White House is plagued by scandal, although instead of rummaging through the president's sex life to expose his peccadilloes, the press is now exposing much graver misdeeds -- particularly the revelation that George Bush, on the advice of his power-mad legal advisors, set aside the Constitution in order to spy on people without so much as a warrant from the rubber stamp court set up for precisely that purpose. News is starting to trickle out that perhaps the reason the Bushies wanted to keep this all a secret was because they were spying on people they shouldn't have been -- perhaps even journalists.

Looming larger for my purposes here is the small matter of the endless guerrilla war in Iraq that keeps chewing up American soldiers and spitting them back home in wheelchairs and bodybags. I just don't remember 2,200 dead American GIs back in the Summer of '98, or the possibility that our children will be garrisoning the Green Zone until I start collecting Social Security. Sure, we had a few thousand troops in the Balkans, and there was the Kosovo storm cloud on the horizon, but 1998 was a much more peaceful year for the United States of America. Aside from the retaliatory strikes on Afghanistan and the Sudan, I don't even think we bombed anyone. Now that makes it an annum to remember.

Finally, you can perhaps judge the national mood by approval ratings. Although Bush has climbed out of the mid-30s in the polls, he is not a popular man. Pew still has Junior at 38 percent, while even Faux News has him at an abysmal 42 percent. These are not the marks of a man presiding over happier times than Bill Clinton.

What this all means for Barry Bonds is unclear. I think the sourness to come over his pursuit of Hank Aaron has less to do with some ethereal national moodiness than with the fact that steroids have tainted every home run hit over the past 12 years. What do Mark McGwire's 583 taters mean now that we know he was juicing the whole time? In retrospect, what was the Summer of '98 except the high point (or the nadir, depending on how you look at it?) of the Creatine and Andro Era?

Columnists are suggesting that McGwire should not get into the Hall next year. If people are turning on Mr. Sunshine and Charity, how are they going to react to the morbidly grumpy and churlish Bonds? My guess is not well. And I don't think it has anything to do with blow jobs or wars.

Brother, can you spare a turning point?

2006-01-09T12:28:00.000-08:00

The horrific carnage in Iraq this past week has shattered the emerging myth that the war is won and that the elections convinced hard-core insurgents to put down their weapons. A brief post-election lull has been followed by some of the worst violence of the war, including one of the single worst days for U.S. troops on Thursday. It only got worse over the weekend, as five more soldiers were killed, a Blackhawk crashed or was shot down near Tel Afar, and hundreds of Iraqis perished.

This war has featured more turning points than a Mapquest printout. From the flyboy proclaiming Mission Accomplished before adoring crowds of Republican military grunts to the capture of Saddam (after which Rumsfeld said, "Saddam's capture likely has cut off one source of funding for insurgent attacks against coalition forces.") the handover of power, the interim constitution, the November 2004 siege of Fallujah, the elections of January 2005, the constitutional referendum and now once again another round of elections, you surely can’t blame the Iraqis and Americans for having a bit of turning point fatigue.

Still, at each of these crossroads, the Armchair Division of the Navy Seals tell us that things really aren’t that bad – schools are opening, electricity is flowing and goodhearted American GIs are doing their darnedest to bring democracy to the benighted Iraqis. People like the bloviating Victor Davis Hanson tell us that the carnage is no worse than your average day in inner-city Los Angeles, [HA! DASH]as if this is supposed to be an argument for American tutelage rather than a terrific case against it. He writes:

Read the papers about an average day in Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Detroit, or even in smaller places like Fresno. The headlines are mostly the story of mayhem — murder, rape, arson, and theft. Yet, we think Afghanistan is failing or Iraq hopeless when we watch similar violence on television, as if they do such things and we surely do not.

You might wonder about the last time a car bomb went off in the United States, and you might also tell this blowhard that not even those unmentionable black people in our scary, scary cities have to go to work wondering whetheR they will be blown to pieces by a suicide bomber. It is typical of deranged, racist and utterly uninformed Republican paranoiacs to believe that U.S. cities are plagued by the kind of violence currently infesting Iraq. When was the last political assassination in the United States? How many highways in America are considered unsafe for travel because of the threat of IEDs and kidnappings? Do you remember the last time 130 people were killed and more than 200 wounded in massive bombings?

It is a shame that Harper’s is not available online because there is a very long and devastating dispatch from Iraq by Tom Bissell called “Improvised, Explosive & Divisive: Searching in vain for a strategy in Iraq.” At one point, Bissell writes, “The Marines are forced to travel four hours out of their way to avoid a particularly dangerous highway between TQ [Camp Taqaddum] and Fallujah. ‘The most powerful army in the history of the world,’ one soldier told me, ‘cannot keep a two-mile stretch of road open.” I’m sorry, but how can this be no worse than an average day in Philadelphia? Victor, as a denizen of one of those cities that you and your effete, elitist friends would never dare venture into except perhaps to visit the Ritz Carlton for a conference on Spartan military history, I can tell you that I drive through one of the most blighted stretches of city in this country -- Northwest Philadelphia -- every day, and I don’t need a military escort.

Victor Davis Hanson (or VDH as he is called by his fellow Laz-E-Boy infantrymen at the Corner) wants you to believe that things aren’t that bad in Iraq. He tries to convince you of that point by making these kinds of idiotic, unthinking comparisons in every single column. But more importantly, there is a reason that he and his fellow masters of war see turning points where there are only roundabouts and dead ends: they have to. If there are no real turning points -- if Iraq is going to scuffle along in violent turmoil for five, ten or fifteen years -- then the last justification for this terrible catastrophe of a war will evaporate like Ann Coulter’s cheap perfume.

The reality is that the insurgency, while ultimately doomed because of its narrow, sectarian character, can go on for years. The U.S. does not have enough troops on the ground to decisively defeat such a determined enemy. Our very presence in the country is a big part of the problem, leading to a vexing catch-22: leave and abandon the overmatched Iraqis to a grueling civil war, or stay and ensure that the violence continues indefinitely. All the while our forces are stretched like one of Laura Bush’s fake Stepford smiles. Everywhere our enemies are nodding their heads and saying, “Not only are they weak, they are weak and stupid.”

Not coincidentally, it looks like the bill for this little misadventure might be a touch bigger than we originally thought. Remember when we were going to zip in and out with a few thousand troops, get showered with candy and sweets and return triumphantly to ~~win the 2004 elections~~ to continue fighting tyranny everywhere we find it -- outside of our own executive? Well, we’re two months away from the three-year anniversary of the invasion, and according to people who can actually count things and compare them, we’re no better off than we were in the Summer of '03, since the death rates have stayed more or less the same for three years. The fact that we’ve saddled the Iraqis with a ruinously immobile constitution does not help matters, since only politics can truly defeat the insurgents.

So here’s where things stand: Iraq is a violent, chaotic mess, nearly 2,200 American soldiers are pushing up daisies, another 15,000-or so are crippled or wounded and anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 Iraqis are no longer with us to enjoy the benefits of the freedom that George Bush so selflessly and graciously granted them in between naps and pratfalls. The U.S. military can’t meet its recruitment goals. The other two members of the Axis of Evil have basically been thumbing their noses at us for two years because they know we can’t do anything about it. The Middle East is, if anything, more violent and chaotic than it was before, with Lebanon gripped by fears of assassinations, Israel and Palestine no closer to peace than the day Bush took office, Syria dangerously unstable, and Jordan threatened by radicals who were trained and armed in Iraq.

I guess $2 trillion just doesn’t go as far as it used to. Don’t worry though, I’m sure there’s another turning point coming up just around the corner.

My Resolution of Revenge

2006-01-09T10:37:00.001-08:00

I knew last year’s resolution was a bust (literally) as I sat at my home computer, caked in self-tanning lotion while watching my then-gooey skin turn orange. In a fit of rage, a handful of weeks earlier, I had vowed to try out for the Philadelphia Eagles Cheerleading Squad. But, at that moment, I more closely resembled a rejected Buccaneers jersey design than a buxom Eagles beauty.

My embarrassing and angry journey began months earlier when my boyfriend Dave and I attended the wedding of one of his friends. At the wedding was a member of the current Eagles Cheerleading Squad – Corinne. Now, I’ve known of Corrinne because Dave has made more than passing reference to “Hotty Corrinne” on several occasions. But this wedding was to be my first face-to-face with the woman of lore – or so I thought it was to be.

I’m not gonna lie: at the wedding I was looking pretty good. Green halter dress. Cute heels. Minimal, but accentuating makeup. But Corinne was definitely the one searching for male attention. After a very public argument with the man she brought to the wedding, Corinne was bouncing from man to man with a big smile and an eager attitude. At some point she bounced happily over to Dave and just grabbed and kissed him. I hasn’t seen him so happy since 2000, when the Yanks won the series.

I’m not the kinda girl who gets upset when an attractive girl smooches on her boyfriend. Not my style [IS THERE A PERIOD MISSING HERE?] I realize that no other woman in her right mind wants him [DAVE SPECIFICALLY HERE, OR JUST ANY BOYFRIEND? THIS IS CONFUSING] for much more than a sad ruse to anger a nearby, misbehaven boyfriend. But if you’re gonna use my boyfriend for such a ploy, however, I ask that you introduce yourself to me and at least acknowledge the gambit. But Corinne gave me nothing – not a “hello,” not an “I’m sorry for that, but …” Nothing. She just turned around with a contented grin and walked out onto the dance floor, where her anger continued its public display.

It was at that moment I began racking my brain for revenge techniques. It wasn’t until about a month later at a drunken New Year’s Eve bash that I concocted the scheme: take Corinne’s slot on the cheerleading squad. It was juvenile -- after all, I was heavily inebriated. Success was highly unlikely to nearly impossible. The scheme was brilliant.

The plan wasn’t entirely crazy. I have more than a decade of classical dance training under my tap shoes and tutu. The plan was to try out at the Linc with the other bosomy hopefuls and wow the judges with my wit and rhythm.

When I went to the Pre-audition Workshop, however, my hopes were substantially lowered. There were about 200 girls there learning how to gain an edge in securing the coveted squad openings. Current cheerleaders – who in a few weeks would be our competition – were offering advice on how to gain an edge on the other competitors. Wear lots of makeup. Straighted[N] your undesirable curly hair. Wear as little clothing as possible. Fake bake – that is, use sunless tanner.

It was this last option that proved to be the greatest misstep. Contrary to popular belief, redheads were never meant to tan. I spent a few days avoiding the public while the orange glow washed off a bit in the shower each day. When gameday came for real, I had returned to my translucent self. Maybe that was the problem. The day of the tryouts arrived, and I got all slutted up – as directed. I straightened by curls. I gobbed on the eyeliner and eyeshadow. I ripped and clawed to get on an undersized sportsbra and bike shorts combo. I knew I was on the right track when I walked downstairs and asked Dave how I looked. He grabbed my hand and dragged me back upstairs in true caveman fashion.

When I arrived at the link, more than 500 girls were crashing through the entry doors in the hopes of becoming the subject of Eagles fans’ wet dreams. I, on the other hand, was simply out for revenge.

The punchline is that I didn’t even make it past the first cut. I knew the routine and hit the steps, but it wasn’t enough to impress the judges. I was taller than all the other women by at least four inches. I was really, really white and I was wearing more clothing that[N] all the other would-be cheerleaders if you stitched their clothes together.

I knew I was in trouble when several of the girls started doing splits in their skimmies within clear eyeshot of the male judges. It got worse when I realized I was the only contestant without a hand-held mirror and a make-up bag the size of Andy Reid’s pre-diet gut.

Corinne remains a staple of the Eagles’ squad. I remain in grad school. I came home that day with a wounded ego and a bit of a pulled groin muscle. But my skin has returned to its happy, pale glow.

This year’s resolution: make out with other women’s boyfriends.

Dead miners would have loved their ownership society

2006-01-06T14:08:00.000-08:00

"We are the union, the mighty mighty union"

I don't generally like to simplify cause and effect, but there are 12 dead miners (well, quite possibly 13) in Tallmansville, West Virginia, who would still be alive today if they were in a union. Mines are difficult things to run under the best of circumstances, but they are much worse when the workers are disorganized and the government refuses its role as regulator. And with the most anti-labor administration in history ensconced in the White House for three more very long years, strong unions are the only thing that can prevent more of these disasters

This is not exactly theoretical physics here -- reasonable people can disagree about whether the universe is expanding or contracting. But no one can get around the fact that the mine was cited nine times in the last year for failing to implement a ventilation plan. Without proper ventilation, mines are more prone to fires and explosions -- and hence more prone to piling up the body bags for its workers. It's that simple.

It is definitely not a coincidence that this disaster happened under the Bush Administration, which has overseen the two worst mine catastrophes in the last 20 years. In 2001, two methane gas explosions killed 13 workers in Alabama. The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) has not upped its funding to keep pace witht he expanding activities of mines, and in fact the 2006 budget slashes its funding by $4.9 million, adjusted for inflation. You get the feeling that this little line item might be revisited by nervous GOPers in Congress. Right now they look like they've all handled this issue about as well as Putin handled the Kursk.

The mines have no incentive to look after the workers. There's always a fresh supply of unskilled workers who are willing to risk their lives and their health to keep America's supply of coal flowing. And as is often the case, fighting the lawsuits that are likely to be launched as a result of this tragedy will be cheaper than actually taking the measures needed to prevent them. You just don't have to look very hard to identify the business community's attitude toward employees, or the government's attitude toward workers. What we have here is an intersection of profit-seeking interests -- maximize profits at the expense of the vulnerable.

What better illustration of the so-called "ownership society" could we ask for? Bush wants you to own your health care costs, your retirement costs and your unemployment costs. Well guess what -- you own your risk of horrific death by suffocation in a mine shaft, too. Congratulations! You've hit Republican Bingo! Far be it from a regulatory agency to say, do something about such an atrociously run mine other than throw pennies-on-the-dollar fines at it. It's like when managers fine guys like Bobby Abreu $1,000 for not running out a groundball. Seriously, it's not worth it for him to even run towards $1,000 that's being pulled away from him on a string by Montgomery Burns.

I actually think old Burnsie is a pretty good model for this administration: ruthless, amoral and perfectly inept. Isn't it wonderful that the entire country is being run like the Springfield nuclear plant?

It would be funny if it wasn't so horrifying.

I'll say it again: those guys needed a union. Everyone who works in hazardous conditions for mediocre pay in the service of bottom-line-wielding corporate suits needs a union. You get paid better, you retire earlier and you chop your chances of dying in half. Do unions introduce inefficiencies? Sure they do. But that' s kind of the point. Those 12 dead miners and their needlessly suffering families would probably be happy to trade a little inefficiency for their lives.

Santorum's Unintelligent Designs

2005-12-27T18:26:00.000-08:00

Click here to help oust Rick Santorum

To the behest of our beloved Sen. Rick Santorum, R- Penn. intelligent design recently proved it wasn't a theory meant to weather Darwin's hypothesis. ID, like many other whackadoo theories before it, ironically went the way of the dodo as a federal court the hypothesis a religious contention that advanced Christian beliefs in secular public schools. Santorum, apparently, hadn't noticed the less than hidden link.

I’m all for methodological pluralism and the rigorous scientific testing of hypotheses, but I’m not willing to accept an idea on blind faith. Intelligent design is the belief that life on earth is so beautifully complex, it must have been the product of a supreme being and not the result of mitochondrial happenstance. In other words, God – or some all-powerful being – made fingers on purpose and they’re not modern-day flagella. Wow. Deep.

But if everything is a brilliant, complex plan, why do I always walk into walls? Shouldn’t I have better spacial ability? Was the duck-billed platypus some kind of superior being inside joke? Because that thing is just crazy looking. And are holiday sweaters a test of human will?

There are things about earthly existence that fascinate and confuse. Some can be empirically tested, while others remain mysteries. Faith has its place in life. But this place shouldn’t be in the science classrooms of elementary and high schools. Science – any quality science, that is – relies on the scientific method: observe, create a testable hypothesis, test it empirically, analyze the results, use result to predict future event. Any good hypothesis should have a viable counterargument that [COULD POSSIBLY BE] disproven. The outcome to any scientific experiment should be replicable and observable.

Intelligent design lacks replicability, which means that other scientists can recreate experiments that prove whether a hypothesis is true. ID lacks empirical evidence other than an attractive hunch that the world is so breathtaking it couldn’t have happened by accident. I'm not saying that I've wished for something implausible to come true. I'm just saying I've never taught my wishes as truth in a science class.

As a social scientist, I understand it is nearly impossible to explain all actions and attitudes. But difficulty doesn’t mean impossibility. Experimental designs and tools are constantly improving. Intelligent design is a theory that deserves scientific testing. If it stands up to the rigors of the scientific method, it should rightfully claim its place in the annals of life science textbooks. But intelligent design theory hasn’t been published in renowned scientific journals because it can’t live up to the scientific requirements. If it isn’t true science, it doesn’t belong in a science classroom anywhere.

My final rant goes out to my friend and yours: Sen. Rick Santorum, R- Penn. Upon hearing the federal court decision on the intelligent design case, the good senator pulled his name from the advisory board of the organization spearheading the charge for teaching ID in schools. Sen. Santorum apparently didn’t realize that religion was behind desires to teach ID in public schools, so he removed himself from the board of the Michigan-based Christian-rights Law Center.

It’s an election year in Philadelphia. And this is the first time I can remember Santorum shying away from attempting an establishment of religion in public policy. Santorum, who we all know loves gays and women’s rights, is often at the conservative forefront banging the drum of righteousness. But not during an election year.

In November, Sen. Santorum faces a viable challenger in current ,state Treasurer Robert P. Casey Jr. If Sen. Santorum’s primary goal is re-election (as research would say it is), his latest equivocal action was taken to garner much-needed votes. Not a bad move for a conservative senator located in a swing state. But Sen. Santorum’s move is pure posture. His actions betray his true beliefs. He fully endorses infusing policy with right-wing moral propriety. If re-elected, I don’t think he’ll push to have ID become a life science staple, but he won’t be opposed to those who improperly seek its implementation. I actually might be more willing to buy into ID if Santorum flunks his re-election bid.

The Millionaire's Club

2005-12-23T19:43:00.000-08:00

I'm not even a Red Sox fan, and I hate the Yankees for signing Johnny Damon.

You know, when the Yankees won their first World Series in their current run, in 1996, I cheered for them. In my baseball lifetime (starting in roughly 1984) the Yankees hadn't won squat, so at the time they were a novelty. I was going to school in North Jersey, and it was actually really exciting when they were making their run. They were also a gritty bunch of homegrown players and outcasts -- Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, and Ramiro Mendoza from the farm system, and unlikely heroes Jim Leyritz, Darryl Strawberry, Jeff Nelson and Mariano Duncan off the scrap heap.

Today, the Yankees' core of homegrown talent has dwindled down to just Jeter, second-baseman Robinson Cano, catcher Jorge Posada and closer Mariano Rivera. Instead of scrappy journeymen like Joe Girardi, their roster is stuffed full of millionaire 30-somethings at nearly every important position, -- and the payroll is up around $185 million. The gap between what the Yankees spend on their roster and what the second-biggest spenders -- the Red Sox -- lay out is larger than the entirety of many teams' payrolls.

This is why people hate the Yankees today. It isn't because they're good. The Braves have been good for 15 years, and no one really hates them. In truth, no one likes them either, because their Olympic stadium is usually emptier than a David Brooks column. It's even empty during the playoffs, when the Braves ritually lose in the first round like islanders being fed to King Kong. No, people hate the Yankees because of the organization's mania to turn itself into a high-priced all-star softball team. Consider the Yankees current roster going into '06 -- almost every position is filled by a millionaire 30-somethings brought into New York via trade or free agency:

1B: Giambi (30-something millionaire free agent)
2B: Cano (the exception to the rule)
SS: Jeter (30-something homegrown millionaire)
3B: A-wad (30-something millionaire trade)
RF: Sheffield (30-something millionaire free agent)
CF: Damon (30-something millionaire free agent)
LF: Matsui (30-something millionaire free agent)
C: Posada (30-something homegrown millionaire)
SP: Mussina (30-something millionaire free agent)
SP: Johnson (40-something millionaire trade)
SP: Pavano (30-something millionaire free agent)
SP: Chacon (ok, he's 27)
SP: Wright (30-something millionaire free agent)
SP: Wang (young and homegrown but hurt)
CL: Rivera (30-something homegrown millionaire)
RP: Villone (30-something millionaire trade)
RP: Farnsworth (As of April, he'll be a 30-something millionaire free agent)
RP: Myers (30-something millionaire free agent)

So out of 18 significant roster spots on this team, 15 are filled by millionaire 30-somethings, 9 of whom came through free agency. Another two who were acquired in trades that no other team could have made because of financial contraints. This is like the government going out and extending contracts to the highest bidder for every single budget item. ~~Or like giving out no-bid contracts to Halliburton and other cronies to rebuild Iraq~~. People hate the government. And now they hate the Yankees.

Look, I realize that the Yanks pour millions back into baseball's revenue stream in the form of luxury taxes, revenue sharing and increased gate money when they visit poor sodding franchises like the Devil Rays and Pirates. And most of those other franchises have pocketed that money like Rep. Duke Cunningham at a foreclosure auction. A Yankees visit to Colorado surely helps allay the unrelieved tedium of watching the Rockettes get pummeled every night. The Yanks drive up the TV ratings, and they're almost certainly a big part of the reason that baseball has reinvented and saved itself in the wake of the mutual kamikaze run between players and management in 1994. They also do other teams favors sometimes by signing away expensive free agents who would have become albatrosses for their former employers. I mean, how happy are the A's that Jason Giambi took his overpriced steroid show to New York instead of the Bay Area? Does anyone think the Orioles want Mike Mussina back?

But it's time for the Yankees to reinvent themselves too, the old-fashioned way. People like Peter Gammons keep yammering on about the Great Yankee Youth Movement, but all they have to show for it so far is a sore-armed Chinese pitcher named Wang and a slow second baseman named Cano. This has got to be the most disappointing youth movement since Bashar al-Asad took control of Syria after his father died. Surely they could have stuck Bubba Crosby in center, or traded for someone like Seattle's Jeremy Reed.

Instead, they opted for another millionaire free agent, Jesus Damon, ripping the soul out of Boston's championship team. Will it work out? Probably not. But it still sucks.

I Heart the War on Terror

2005-12-20T20:04:00.000-08:00

Tonight I was watching one of the shows on prime-crime TV – that solid block of television from Monday through Friday that concerns people killing other people and then the cops or CSI's creatively and stylishly catching the killers, preferably while clad in black leather boots and low-cut blouses. This one is called NCIS, and like the other CBS crime shows, it is a profoundly conservative affair. The plotlines are unctuously deferential to the military, and to American foreign policy in general. It made me wonder if the show has become part of the Administration's burgeoning propaganda war.

Tonight there was a two-part episode concerning a Mossad (Israeli CIA) agent in the United States who was sent to recover some plutonium stolen by a Hamas cell (yes, this is absurd, but bear with me). The deputy director of the unit, who likes to wear go-go boots and about eight layers of caked makeup, is chatting with Mark Harmon -- one of the agents -- about the stakes. She says that she wants to cooperate with the Israeli secret service Mossad to catch Hamas members so they aren’t “over in Iraq killing our boys.”

I threw up my hands in disgust as this line was uttered because it played into a whole series of Bush Administration fantasies about the War on Terror. First, it does not take a particularly knowledgeable Middle East expert to realize that Hamas is not carrying out attacks in Iraq or anywhere else outside of Israel and the Palestinian territories. It is an anti-Israeli terrorist organization and has absolutely nothing to do with Iraq or the global war on terror. It certainly has nothing to do with al-Qaeda.

More perniciously than a simple factual error, though, the plot conveniently blurs the lines between terrorist organizations, just as the Preznit has been doing for four years. Bush, Cheney, Rice and others have always conflated disparate terror organizations – from Hamas to al-Qaeda to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey – for their own political purposes. Because if all terrorist organizations were created equally, then the methods used to deal with them – for Bush, that would be blunt force – should also be exactly the same. So to enlist Russian aid in the war, for example, we have turned a blind eye as the rotting former Soviet military ruthlessly crushes Chechen rebels and turns Grozny into a festering ruin.

More importantly, it reinforces the long-running Bush storyline on Iraq, which is that Iraq was a “safe haven” for terrorists before the invasion -- which it quite demonstrably was not. If Hamas was and is operating in Iraq, or at least if TV viewers can be led to believe so, then people are more likely to believe Bush is on the right track. Hamas in Iraq killing our boys? Well then, it must be the central front in the War on Terror that it has been so preposterously made out to be. I can just see Americans nodding along to this plotline, and shrugging their shoulders at revelations of the Bush Administration’s illegal wiretapping.

There is a larger story here, though, and a larger worry for me. Network TV has long been used by the government to plant storylines that are approved by the state. E.R., 7th Heaven, and other popular shows have been getting paid for quite some time to push the failed and costly Drug War on reluctant, bong-toking Americans. If you spend five minutes watching network television (as opposed to cable TV), you are bombarded with anti-drug messages. Think back to Carter’s painkiller addiction on E.R. as just one instance of an anti-drug storyline worming its way to the forefront of network plots. It’s even worse on these crime shows, where typically one puff on a joint will land you on a concrete slab being examined by some hottie with plucked eyebrows and a ridiculously fashionable outfit. Can you think of a single character on network TV (outside of the gang on the wonderfully subversive That 70’s Show) who regularly smokes weed and doesn’t end up being interrogated by David Caruso or Gary Sinise?

So here’s my question: Is the government paying certain programs to push plots that are friendly to the War on Terror? Before you call me a conspiracy theorist, remember that this is the government that has notoriously been paying several journalists to produce White House-friendly op-eds, planting pro-American stories in the Iraqi media, burying unflattering EPA reports, and threatening to fire Medicare officials who improperly estimate the costs of new government entitlements. In other words, the Bush Administration has turned itself into the most notorious manipulator of information and propaganda in the modern age.

I can rattle off several shows just off the top of my head that seem to push these kinds of plots, including 24, E-Ring, NCIS, CSI Miami and who knows how many others. I can’t bring myself to watch most of these shows, so I can’t say for sure what’s going on in their plots. But this NCIS tonight was fishy enough to make such a scenario plausible to me.

So what, you might ask? The networks have been losing viewers to shows like Rescue Me and The Sopranos on cable for ages, and there hasn’t been a drama on network TV in donkey’s years that even remotely approaches the brilliance of Six Feet Under. Network television certainly does not have the same cultural currency that it once did. But ask yourself if you really want to live in a country where the government is manipulating its own artists to push the standard storyline of the day, whether it’s about drugs, abstinence or the War on Terror. Do you really want your art subject to the strictures of the DEA or the Department of Homeland Security?

George W. Bush Invades my Love Life

2005-12-20T15:08:00.000-08:00

I can only hope that President George W. Bush wasn’t listening to my transcontinental phone sex calls this summer. The recent New York Times article that unpacked the president’s wiretapping habits was terrifying on so many levels. And a girl has needs when she’s thousands of miles from her live-in boyfriend.

I rifle through every article, hoping that an excerpt from my long-distance summer of love doesn’t end up in the belly of a New York Times piece. Could my romantic relationship be the political football that effects the demise of Dubya? Will my parents get the dry heaves when they read it?

My personal quandary aside, my true fear stems from the clandestine nature of our allegedly transparent democracy. This week has been filled with an unapologetic president reasserting his patriotic decision to listen in on approximately 500 domestic phone lines per month – without so much as a warrant. In fact, he’s been lashing out at the traitors who leaked the story to the nefarious New York Times – the teammates of the treasonous. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, who has previously denied government’s constitutional right to spy on people inside the United States, claims the wiretapping actually provides for greater civil liberties. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never felt more liberated. For all I know, I’ve checked out the wrong library book, ended up on the Bush naughty list and am now a victim of pernicious and blind pursuit of domestic terrorists.

The patriotic eavesdropping surfaces after a reel of evidence accusing the administration of operating or condoning prisons in which torture was a mainstay. Yeah, it’s been a blissful week in the enlightened Oval Office. Can’t you just hear the echoes of “Joy to the World” blast through the corridors?

With wiretapping policy, Bush took advantage of a largely unknown loophole in the presidential instruction manual. Presidents are allowed to stealthily pass executive orders, which permits the executive to enact laws unilaterally. Giving the executive lawmaking powers is a touchy subject in America’s political design.

The Founding Fathers – nearly all wary of recreating monarchy on American soil – took great pains to create a checked and balanced government that shared powers. They carefully placed the ability to make laws in the hands of Congress – with 535 total members and multifarious interests and constituencies. The diffusion of power was intentional. Congress, like my long-distance relationship this summer, was designed to frustrate.

Bush’s executive order is hurtful on many fronts. First, and most importantly, it flies in the face of our government’s intended structure. Even a basic civics class teaches that the executive’s charge is to enforce the laws made by legislature. When the president engages in law creation, it tests the foundations of American institutional design. Clearly, executive orders have historically been useful tools: The Emacipation Proclamation, integration of public schools and itegration of the armed forces. But they must be used sparingly and carefully: think of the ramifications of Japanese internment camps. Spying on citizens without legal warrant or a really good reason should be condemned and abruptly ended.

Beyond the concerns of our founders, the policy is constitutionally questionable. And questionable is a euphemism. According to security experts, this order represents the first time national authorities tapped stateside without a warrant issued from the secret court designed specifically for this purpose. Not only were National Security Agency employees tapping people suspected of interaction with Al Queda, they tapped a panoply of citizens, tourists and legal residents who merely came into contact with anyone under suspicion. They targeted people without criminal pasts. They might have targeted me, since I sometimes attend parties thrown by Middle Eastern student groups. Or maybe they listened because I spent a suspicious summer in London amid a series of terrorist bombings.

Bush claims to have gained the approval of the wiretapping policy from top congressional leaders. Did he mumble the proposal into his hand when he explained it? Was a really loud background fireworks display muffing the most important nuggets of the conversation? Or did our elected leaders just fail to defend civil liberties?

Our leaders are charged with ensuring our security. Their methods to reach this end, however, have left me anxious and suspicious. I only hope Bush enjoyed my summer phone calls as much as I did. His heartwarming apology will surely restore the American public's trust.

Pay the man

2005-12-18T16:12:00.000-08:00

It never ceases to amaze me how otherwise normal, sensible people get their knickers in a twist when confronted with the salaries of professional sports players. Stupendous contracts now litter the baseball offseason, doled out to players who are not exactly on the fast-track to the Hall of Fame: $55 million to sub-.500 hurler AJ Burnett, $47 million to reliever BJ Ryan, a man with one year of closing experience, and $21 million to Estaban Loaiza, a guy who has averaged 10.5 wins over the past two seasons, just to name a few.

SI’s Richard Deitsch writes:

I know I shouldn't care. It's not my money. If Universal Studios thinks $160,000,000 is an appropriate budget for Van Helsing, well, bombs away, fellas. If Ben Affleck wants to blow $1.2 million on a shiny pink engagement ring for Jennifer Lopez, well, you can't put a price on love. But thanks to the Toronto Blue Jays, you can put a price on a pair of pitchers with a combined career record of 65-69. And that price is $102 million.

It’s called a market, mate, and it works like this: when there is competition for scarce resources (in this market it is quality pitching), the cost of the commodity skyrockets. But still the pundits have lined up to denounce the $55 million contract lavished on A.J. Burnett by the Toronto Blue Jays, which everyone complains has “skewed the market” or something. Dan Szymborski thinks “failure is more likely” than success. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune calls the contracts "madness" and players like Burnett "unproven." I could go on.

I don't know if these moves will work out, but in a larger sense all the hand-wringing is nonsense. The truth is that people are still fundamentally jealous of the big, dumb athletes they spend half their lives watching on TV and at the stadium. They look at their own lives and wonder why they aren’t worth $35 million over seven years with an $11 million signing bonus. We figure we’re worth at least a mil for every time we fix the copy machine. Most of all, many people are unconsciously skittish over the role that professional sports play in our lives.

How else to explain the drama over salaries? Here’s the reality: Americans have turned professional sports into the eighth largest industry in North America – a gross national sports product of at least $85 billion. CBS Sportsline, a fantasy sports entity, made $15 million all by itself last year. Of that $85 billion, how much do you suppose filters back to the men and women who leave their hearts and souls on the fields in the first place? How much would be too much? A quarter? Half?

It may be that the Blue Jays and Mets have overspent on key players this winter. Everyone seems to think they’ve indebted themselves into oblivion, and that the free agents they signed are inevitably going to end up soaking their feet in the trainer’s room while watching their minimum-wage replacements get slapped around by the Devil Rays or, God forbid, the Royals.

But championships have been bought with free agents before. Just ask the 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks. Or the 1997 Marlins. Randy Johnson’s 1998 contract with the D-Backs – 4 years, $53 million – turned out to 1be one of the greatest free agent signings in history. He went 81-27, and the D-Backs made the playoffs in 1999, 2001 and 2002, winning it all in ’01. Surely there were some writers who thought it was insane to give such a contract to a 30-something left-hander.

I actually don’t care how much money baseball players make. If the owners wanted to make the games cheaper to watch, they could do it in a flash by setting aside certain seats on certain days for low-income families and individuals. Art Moreno does it in ~~California~~ ~~Anaheim~~ Los Angeles. But the owners don’t have any more interest in such niceties than the players do. As long as someone is making coin off of me, it may as well be the players. Many of these guys are from hard-scrabble backgrounds and have busted their balls their entire lives to get where they are.

Years ago, I graduated from high school with a guy who got drafted in the early rounds out of college by the Seattle Mariners. He was a stand-up guy, a straight-A student, and just an all-around good person. He dropped out of the minors after two seasons even though he was doing pretty well. We went to see a Phillies game together, and he told me he just couldn’t take the baseball life. You’re always out on the road, always training, always working. You have no social life. Most of these guys have their normal social and intellectual development short-circuited by spending 24-hours a day with a bunch of other guys who play a child’s game for a living.

For most baseball players, the game is all there is. If it doesn’t work, it’s back to a life of menial drudgery in the hometown, or if they’re lucky, toiling in the low minors as a bench coach or manager in some backwoods hick town. So believe me, I feel no remorse that some of our money trickles down to these guys. If anything, I wish the players' union would look out for the grunts even more by funneling a portion of these huge contracts into pension funds for career minor leaguers and by lowering the number of major-league years it takes to qualify for a pension. The last thing I want anyone to do with that money is stick it back into the pockets of petty plutocratic tyrants like Jeffrey Loria and George Steinbrenner.

The attitude toward sports players making money is the mirror image of how Americans feel about most unions and most wage-earners. They look at striking teachers or auto workers and ask, “How dare these people stop working to make more money? Who do they think they are?” No one wants to take their place though, because they would quickly find out what grueling work teaching or manufacturing really is. They want their education, their cars, and their entertainment for exactly what they think it’s worth – which, strangely enough, is always significantly less than the market will bear.

So I say three cheers for A.J. Burnett, the son of a postal worker and a high school teacher. His family can retire and get a taste of the magnificent inherited wealth of people like billionaire Blue Jays owner Ted Rogers. And it brings a smile to my face to think of Rogers writing out $11 million checks to a nobody from nowhere like A.J. Burnett. It must really eat him alive.

What a pity.

An Open Letter to Andy Reid and Mike McMahon

2005-12-14T17:37:00.000-08:00

I was the fan sitting in the second tier during the Monday Night Football Cowboys debacle. I was yelling, cheering and defending myself from the drunken mooks across the aisle. The redhead, yeah, that was me. I believed. I could smell the win. I was going to join you, Donovan McNabb, when you explained the tenets of teamwork to media-hound Terrell Owens. Instead, I ache.

The trauma – and excessive amounts of alcohol -- have luckily erased many of the gutting details of the final three minutes of the game. I do, however, remember Dave turning to me shouting, “We’re gonna win. We’re gonna win.”
I’m not a gridiron whizkid, but I knew this outburst was bad karma.

“You idiot,” I slurred. “Two minutes is an entire football game. Three minutes is an eternity.” I know this through years of painstaking football indoctrination curtosey of my Giants-fan father.

Now I’m not a fan of Jennifer Love Hewitt nor her new television show Ghost Whisperer or whatever it is. I don’t know what it’s about – other than various perky elements of her, uhm, self. But if I were to guess the plot, it would be something like my experience at Monday Night Football.

I was a prophet. I saw – I did not will – the drastic and humiliating defeat. I wanted, terribly, to thwart the impending doom. But the Eagles lack free will. It is a team destined to collapse. Like a tortured pooch near a piercing dog whistle [I'M NOT SURE ABOUT THIS METAPHOR], I could hear the histrionic cackles of Terrell echo throughout the Link. I felt the pain of McNabb’s sports hernia pulsing through my innards.

Though I didn’t see McNabb go down, I knew Mike McMahon’s entrance wasn’t a pre-game plan. I knew this, Andy Reid, I knew. I watched in terror as you blew the 14-point cushion. Even I know you can't force a west-coast offense on a QB will an inaccurate rifle of an arm. A part of me died that day. I knew the people around me that Monday night felt the same because they stopped saying vulgar and suggestive things to me. Now I’m an empty, vacuous shell of a woman because of the Philadelphia Eagles. I can’t look at the color green without pain. I hate Don Henley. Please send help.

Mike McMahon:
You probably don’t remember me, but I was in your Sports Labor Relations Class at Rutgers. I sat in the middle of the room, while you collected with the other football players near the front. We never had any significant interaction beyond a passing introduction, but I think our parallel New Brunswick pasts cosmically unite us.

I’ve been in Philly just a few years more than you. This city will love you, if you treat her right. Expectations for you are not high, Mike. Maybe it’s because you’re a product of the Big East’s personal pigskin punching bag. Between your time at Rutgers and with the Detroit Tigers you did, after all, boast a 25-83 won-lost record. Our time on the banks of the Raritan was special – mainly for the sporadic beaching of dead bodies on the Piscataway breakers. I’ve watched you grow and I was stoked when I heard you were following me to Philly.

New Brunswick and Detroit are cool, but Philly is something spectacular. Love her, but be aware she bites back. Buy your cheesesteak “wit,” and never wince at the thought of Cheese Whiz. You’re the one who can make me believe again. You can be my A. J. Feeley with a twist of Jersey trash. Let’s get a Lager some time. And Mike, that’s Philly for Yuengling.

Andy Reid:
You suck.

Krauthammer does torture

2005-12-13T06:02:00.000-08:00

"Torture you? That's a good idea. I like that."

Charles Krauthammer thinks we should torture people, or -- more specifically -- he thinks that other people should torture people, since torture is "as degrading and morally corrupting to those who practice it as any conceivable human activity including its moral twin, capital punishment." So no one in the military is to practice torture. Also, and importantly, conservative opinion columnists named Charles Krauthammer are exempted from having to torture people.

Rear Admiral Krauthammer also has a pretty good idea of who we should torture, and why:

Outside the military, however, I would propose -- contra McCain -- a ban against all forms of torture, coercive interrogation and inhuman treatment, except in two contingencies: (1) the ticking time bomb and (2) the slower-fuse, high-level terrorist (such as KSM). Each contingency would have its own set of rules.
In the case of the ticking time bomb, the rules would be relatively simple: nothing rationally related to getting accurate information would be ruled out.

It should be immediately clear what's wrong with this formulation: who decides which suspects are "ticking time bombs"? What if the suspect was plotting an attack to take place a year hence? Is he or she still ticking? Or are they burning fuses? Could they be remote detonation devices? What if it's a quick-burning fuse? In addition to this terrible metaphorical dilemma, Krauthammer's "rules" for torture could easily be subverted by just about anyone with two electrodes and a brain.

"You there, what are you doing to that man's genitals?"

"Um, well, Sir, what I was actually doing was, um, torturing him. But he's...a...ticking time bomb! That's it! Man, he was about to go boom! And then I stuck these electrodes on his privates and he started talking. Oh, Sir, he told us everything. Names. Places. Apparently the mastermind is--"

"--Let me see that. Sayid Jarrah. Excellent work. That's the Indian guy from Lost."

There's a bigger problem, though. Krauthammer justifies the torture of terrorists by claiming that they operate outside the laws of war and thus are not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions. The terrorist "does not wear a uniform, he hides among civilians and he deliberately targets innocents."

As for the uniform problem, I've got a great solution for the terrorists: Cafe Press. Something like this. But there are several other problems with Krauthammer's logic: the laws of war were clearly designed to allow advanced, industrialized countries to fight each other. When the conventions were written, most existing countries had big, lumbering armies that dressed their soldiers in distinctive uniforms.

Today's reality is that there are few countries whose armies could last more than a few minutes against the U.S. military. Call it premature capitulation. Does that mean that, logically speaking, enemy armed forces should have no alternative to fighting pitched battles in their Jihad t-shirts and buttons, getting blown away by the next generation of Donald Rumsfeld's weapons? Of course not. The Geneva Conventions should be updated to recognize the necessity and legitimacy of armed guerrilla warfare against numerically and technologically superior occupying forces. (And no, this does not mean I approve of Iraqi insurgent activity. But someday a country that we like will be invaded and occupied by a country we don't like. And then what?)

But there is a bigger problem. Loads of the people hanging around in Guantanamo were picked up in Afghanistan while fighting for the Taliban. Were Taliban fighters terrorists? As far as they were concerned, they were fighting for the legitimate government of Afghanistan -- a government that was recognized by several of the country's neighbors. What if we picked up one of them and he knew of an impending attack? Torture or no torture? What if the torture contravenes the actually existing text of the Geneva Conventions? For instance, what if a former Baathist, wearing the old Iraqi Army uniform for old time's sake and walking brazenly among the non-innocent, were captured during an attack on American forces? What if he could be tortured to give up information on an upcoming bombing? Waterboard him?

As for Krauthammer's repetition of the line that "torture works," he is able to trot out only one example. Apparently, 11 years ago the Israelis tortured a Palestinian and he gave up the location of a 19-year-old soldier who had been kidnapped by militants. As an aside, Krauthammer notes that the soldier was killed during the rescue attempt, but asserts that this does not change his argument about torture's efficacy.

Excuse me? This is not a minor problem -- the act of torture appears to have gotten this young man killed. It is certainly plausible that he would have been killed anyway, but how are we to know? Was this one man worth the damage done to the Israeli torturers themselves? And is Krauthammer dim enough to believe that terrorists won't figure out a way around this problem? If I were them, here's what I would do: instruct all members of Team Kidnapping to give up false information if tortured (just like John McCain gave his North Vietnamese captors the names of the Green Bay Packers' offensive line) like a false location. Have someone watch that false location. If anyone shows up there, execute the captive, or send up a Bat-signal or something. And it only took me, like two minutes to come up with that.

I don't doubt that at several points in the space-time continuum, people have yielded accurate information when tortured. The question is not whether torture ever works -- it is whether or not, on balance, it works better than standard interrogation and pressure techniques. Who's better at getting a confession -- SVU's Mariska Hargitay, or Lyndie England? Frankly, with civilization really was on the line in Krauthammer's ridiculous nuclear scenario, I'd rather have Mariska in there with KSM instead of sending in some depraved reservist who likes to stack Iraqis on top of one another for fun. Plus she's cuter. And don't tell me that your ideal torture-practitioner wouldn't be crazy; like academics, torture is a self-selecting profession.

Krauthammer's "rules" are in fact nothing more serious than an attempt to excuse specific American behavior. They are designed for our use and our convenience and nothing more. Here's the bottom line: we should not torture people. We should not torture ordinary terrorists, and we should not torture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. We should not torture Palestinians, Iraqis nor members of the Taliban. We should not torture to save one life, and we should not torture to save a million. We should not cut off people's ears while dancing stylishly to "Stuck in the Middle With You" by Stealers Wheel. We should not strap suspects to boards and simulate drowning. We should not torture people to save Charles Krauthammer's life, nor mine. It is morally degrading, it violates the clear intent of the Geneva Conventions -- if not their actual text -- it clearly harms American interests, and there is no systematic evidence that it even works.

However, I'm sure that all pales in comparison to Krauthammer imagining how cool it would be to taunt Osama with "Are you gonna bark all day little doggie, or are you gonna bite?"

You want a War on Christmas?

2005-12-08T07:53:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry folks, but this column is being published, for real, actual greenbacks, by the Philadelphia Citypaper this week. You can read it here.

The Bush Leagues

2005-12-02T12:38:00.001-08:00

By Wendy Ginsberg

Splashed across the front pages of every major U.S. newspaper is the groundbreaking headline: “Bush has absolutely nothing new to say.” Okay, maybe the wording is nuanced, but the top news story across the nation is the president’s mini-whistlestop extravaganza during which he’ll unpack his nitty-gritty plan for successful Iraqi democratization. First stop: the midshipmen of Annapolis, Maryland.

Along with the song and dance, Bush is peddling his newest cure-all elixer: the “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq." While journalists spend the day tearing into the 35-page exit strategery manifesto, visions of Ikea assembly instructions were surely dancing in their heads. The plan: beat up the bad guys and let the unstructured, ineffective Iraqi security forces do the real dirty work of controlling remaining Saddam Hussein supporters and edgy Sunnis. Like Ikea furniture, this plan will collapse soon after widespread consumer purchase.

Like they’re rallying the team in a locker room before kickoff, Bush, Rove, Rice and Rumsfeld spent the last few weeks chastising the Iraq war nonbelievers and nay-sayers. Dissent was weakness. Questions were unpatriotic. We were to listen to Coach Bush and win the clash. But that’s where comparisons between the White House horsemen and a successful gridiron squad end.

A well-oiled squad gets the game plan well before the coin toss. It took the Bush Administration two and a half years to create its first publicly-available roadmap to success in Iraq. President Bush stressed that the document didn’t offer any new ideas, but it did put them all together in one, neatly typed compilation. One can only assume the classified war plan still exists, consisting entirely of doodles on alcohol-spotted cocktail napkins and any available rolling papers.

Who knew it would only take 35 pages to solve U.S. entanglement in Iraq? Oh, and the first three pages are a summary of the remaining 32. Surely Peyton Manning’s playbook for his weekly three-hour contests contain more substance. Additionally, the government document espouses the benefits of “Victory in Iraq” (because it makes us feel warm and fuzzy – I swear, that’s a reason), but doesn’t investigate the war’s costs ( more than 2,000 American deaths and more than $224 billion).

The Bush White House is right about one thing: there is nothing new or groundbreaking in the strategy document. But they’ve garnered a lion’s share of fanfare to tell the American public absolutely nothing. The plan sounds good in the abstract – create a solid institutional foundation, become regional role model, live long and prosper. The problem is that there is nothing more than the abstract. An evacuation timetable might not be the answer. But concrete, measurable and incremental goals are a must.

For Bush, Iraq is an experimental design. You know, like the old Statue of Liberty play -- use patriotic symbols to exact victory. But democratic institutions have no history in the Middle East. Iraq, according to the White House, will serve as a model for other neighboring states. It could convince despots to relinquish their control and create more stable and legitimate regimes. But the existing playbook comes up short. There aren’t shortcuts to democratization. The same way the Houston Texans won't find shortcuts to pigskin success. Playbooks -- military or otherwise -- can’t overlook the details. Bush can’t expect to hand American citizens a faulty and incomplete game plan two and half years after the clash commenced and expect a unified and organized front. Peyton Manning wouldn’t stand for it, and neither will I.

TagliaOops

2005-12-02T12:12:00.001-08:00

By Wendy Ginsberg
When Paul Tagliabue recently announced his desire for an NFL team to return to Southern California, it smacked of deja vous. Not simply because we’ve already seen the demise of not one, but two football teams in that exact location, but because powerful leaders across the board are constantly trying to reignite failed endeavors.

If a government official or CEO believes in a city, person or a cause, they often throw money toward it blindly – ignoring historical evidence that begs them to do otherwise. Though it’s Tagliabue is once again drinking the Los Angeles Kool-Aid, he is just one of many of powerful executives seduced by the sugary prospects of would-be success.

Take the saga of the Florida Marlins, for example. Here’s a team that clinched a World Series victory only to watch the general manager dismantle the winning rhythm in the off season and trade off the most successful players. MLB officials should have seen this firesale coming. Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria, was similarly flippant with team members when he was the holder of the Expos wallet. Since the Expos ceased to exist as Quebecois at the end of Loria’s tenure, one can only think that Major League Baseball’s decision to hand him a new franchise on a silver platter was not the best of decisions.

The Expos reappeared last season in Washington, D.C. as the Nationals. The head honchos at MLB – the very same men who let Loria purchase the Marlins after running the Expos into the ground – run the Nationals organization. It’s a hardball case of foxes guarding the lime-lined, diamond shaped henhouses. Loria ransacked one franchise and was handed a new one. The bequeathers of franchise happily picked up with tattered pieces Loria left behind. MLB officials continue to excuse and bail out Loria, a man who has single-handedly turned the entire city of Miami into basketball fans.

But members of the NFL and MLB aren’t the only multi-million dollar monstrosities who continue to make poor investment choices. Government technocrats make similar miscalculations. The federal government, for example, has a solid history of continuing to bail out failing carmakers, awarding contracts to corrupt construction giants and implementing tax breaks for human-rights violating textile companies. These struggling, corrupt and often-failing organizations consistently receive government’s red carpet treatment.

Sure there are situations in which government intervention – or the wisdom of Paul Tagliabue – is necessary. When Art Modell smacked heads with the city of Cleveland over the construction of a new stadium, Tagliabue could have intervened and prevented the team’s controversial move to Baltimore. Similarly, when gas prices skyrocketed after Hurricane Katrina, government could have fined those involved in price gouging.

In the long run, Tagliabue can appoint task force groups to examine the profit potential for new franchises in areas with burgeoning populations. This plan could avoid the inanity of taxpayer money being put toward construction of a goliath stadium in a small and short-term market (see Milwaulkee’s Miller Park). Government, on the other hand, could invest heavily in a public relations campaign to encourage the use of public transportation or it could subsidize hybrid car sales. On another front it could award government contracts only to companies that adhere to international human rights requirements.

None of the institutions – neither the panoply of major league sports organizations nor the houses of American government – needs to succumb to the whims of a fickle market. Both need leaders that understand harsh vicissitudes of the American consumer. But pouring money into faulty foundations is foolish.

For major-league sports, the options are clear: invest in new, emerging cities with ripe markets (see Las Vegas). Don’t plug franchises into cities where they’ve already failed or the market is weak (ahem, Los Angeles). That’s like continuously bailing out Chrysler, Ford or various airlines. Maybe the deal looks great on paper, but it hasn’t worked -- and it probably won’t work again. Instead, pro sports should look at burgeoning cities like Las Vegas or build up a sports-jonezing city like Portland. The Marlins, who struggle with an empty stadium even when they’re World-Series bound, are seeing the light and contemplating a move to Sin City.

Government has an obligation to look out for the welfare of all its citizens – even if they live in a struggling post-industrial town. But this charge doesn’t mean tax dollars should be spent bailing out companies with faulty organizational foundations. Instead, entrepreneurs with new technologies and bold business plans can be offered tax breaks and grants to move to economically struggling areas. Come on, Tagliabue, we’ve been here before. Don’t invest in the broken. Find the most promising seedbed and plant your new franchise there.

Put Fish on Ice and Ship Them To Vegas, Baby

2005-12-01T10:42:00.000-08:00

Baseball’s latest relocation fiasco has commenced following the Florida state senate’s rejection last spring of a proposed $420 million retractable-roof stadium for the two-time world champion Miami Aquatic Dwellers. Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria, who has been given permission by baseball to look elsewhere, is threatening to move the franchise to greener (as in dollars) pastures. If I were one of the five or six Marlins fans left in South Florida, I’d not only wish them good riddance, I’d buy the airfare for Loria and his depleted bunch of post-firesale ballplayers. And then I’d send them a fruit basket to thank them for getting the hell out of my life.

If Loria wants to reach deep into his millionaire pockets and buy a stadium for himself, that’s fine with me. And indeed the team is willing to pony up about half the cost. But the era of generously-funded stadiums seems to have come to a crashing halt with the advent of Bushonomics. Baseball parks are an inextricable part of the "Beast That Must Be Starved," known in more treasonous left-wing circles as government. And let’s be honest here -- even today, $420 million is a lot of greenbacks. It could pay for six hours of the war in Iraq, a day and night of Bill Bennett’s gambling or even part of Duke Cunningham’s house.

I’m not going to lie to you: I don’t know the first thing about Miami. I’ve never been there, I have no intention of visiting, and, frankly, I resent them for playing host to that awful version of CSI with a brooding David Caruso offering up his best "Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven" impression every Monday night. But my guess is that like every other major urban center in this country, there’s barely enough money for essentials like schoolbooks or the mayor’s prostitutes, let alone for a giant, manicured sandbox littered with luxury boxes for America’s burgeoning millionaire population. The wise legislators of Florida -- previously known for creatively stripping released felons of their voting rights -- have decided that with whole portions of their hurricane-stricken state to rebuild, it might look a bit gauche to give millions to a baseball team.

As everyone with access to Lexis-Nexis knows, baseball stadiums tend not to do very much in the long run for local economies. Camden Yards, for instance, may bring a net benefit of $3 million a year into Baltimore. But the $110 million price tag may take more than 35 years to recoup. And by that time the ghost of Peter Angelos will undoubtedly be clamoring for a multi-purpose underwater stadium for Baltimore Harbor -- just to keep up with the times.

And Camden Yards is a success story. Many cities build stadiums far from city centers, like Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park. These venues are designed with huge parking lots for suburbanites to zip in and out of Philly's boundaries without having to interact with the scary superpredators of the inner cities. Most of the jobs created by the new construction are part-time Burger-King-level concessions and gatekeeper positions that add very little to the local economy and offer less than a living wage. And sometimes no one even goes to the fancy new park because the team is still rotten, as the Detroit Tigers found out the hard way.

Voters seem to have seen through the myth that sports stadiums can act as catalysts for citywide revivals. This knowledge even appears to have performed the marvelous trick of penetrating the consciousness of Florida’s legislators. But Floridians are not only bitter about the economics – they are in the process of getting screwed by the Marlins for the second time in eight years.

Let me give you a short history of the Florida Marlins: Baseball decided to expand for the 1993 season. That expansion has been a disaster -- mainly because of where they chose to locate the teams. One of them went to Denver, where the thin air has turned the Rockies into a softball franchise that can’t attract decent pitching. The other went to Miami, where the clamor for major league baseball was so loud that you could almost hear it in the other room.

The Marlins and their thrifty owner, Blockbuster magnate Wayne Huizenga, endured three expansion-quality seasons before making a splash by signing Kevin Brown prior to the 1996 season. He was a bigger smash than the Marlins could have imagined, winning 17 games with a microscopic 1.89 ERA. He helped bring the Marlins respectability with an 80-82 win/loss record. Then Huizenga green-lit an even bigger spending frenzy and the Fish went out and signed Moises Alou and Alex Fernandez in the ’96 offseason. The team, which drew respectable crowds in 1996, suddenly became a big draw again -- like they were in their inaugural season.

And then the Marlins went all the way to the wretched 1997 World Series. There they faced off with the pitiful ’97 Indians and gave us the most error-filled, mistake-laden World Series in modern history. Still, it went seven games, and Miami had its champion. At which point Huizenga claimed he wasn’t making any money on his beloved champions because of their outdated stadium, and decided to perpetrate the greatest firesale since Charlie O torched the Oakland A’s in 1975. In the offseason and early in the 1998 season, the Marlins traded or shed the entire core of their world champions, including Moises Alou, Gary Sheffield, Kevin Brown, Devon White, Jim Eisenreich, Bobby Bonilla, Charles Johnson, Al Leiter, Robb Nen, Jay Powell, and Dennis Cook. They turned a championship-caliber team into 108-game losers. Miami fans had to watch in horror as guys like Leiter, Brown, Sheffield, and Nen took their teams to the World Series over the next eight years.

This was worse than anything the Expos ever did to Montreal. It was worse than Art Modell moving the Browns to Baltimore. In fact, it was probably the greatest and most lovingly-rendered kiss-off to the fans of any major city in all the years of American professional sports. Huizenga took the beating heart of the Marlins franchise out of Miami’s chest cavity like the deranged pagans in The Temple of Doom, and tossed it into the festering swamps of the Florida Everglades. He then lit a cigar and went back to ripping off Blockbuster’s customers. The only people who showed up to watch the feeble Triple-A team masquerading as the Marlins in 1998 were the people who didn’t realize that the team had been sold off for a bag of baseballs and some crap prospects like the immortal Oscar Henriquez. Attendance dwindled year-by-year until only a few more than 800,000 showed up to watch the 2002 Marlins go 80-82.

In 2003 the Marlins miraculously won the World Series. But they still finished 15th out of 16 National League teams in attendance, outdrawing only the Puerto Rico Expos. They barely drew half the fans they had in 1997. To any clear-eyed observer, the Marlins had permanently squandered their goodwill with the Miami community. This is why they were on the short list for the contraction that commissioner Bud tried to pull off by the 2002 season. Cooler heads prevailed, and the Marlins were sold to Jeffrey Loria, who had helped destroy the Montreal Expos and perhaps defrauded his partners to boot.

So this (cough, alleged) fraud Loria then had the temerity to demand from Florida’s taxpayers, who were still putting makeup over the bruises Huizenga gave them, a gigantic, completely unnecessary stadium with a retractable roof (so the Marlins wouldn’t lose revenue to all those April rainouts). There are several profoundly disturbing things about this demand, the first, however, is the $420 million price tag. Camden Yards, which opened in 1992, cost $110 million. Are you telling me that the price of baseball stadiums has increased 400 percent in 15 years? Even allowing for soaring real estate prices and general inflation, this is rather hard to believe. Even the Money Pit better known as Citizens Bank Park didn’t cost that much money, and I think the cost of living is just a touch higher in the Northeast than it is in Florida.

The more disturbing point is that Loria thinks anyone in Miami cares whether he takes his team to Las Vegas or Charlotte or Monterrey. And to highlight his own stupidity, he shows his ongoing goodwill by selling off the remnants of his 2003 World Champions, trading young, cheap Josh Beckett -- the undisputed hero of the ’03 postseason -- along with Mike Lowell and Guillermo Mota, to the bloody Red Sox for some double-A prospects and a basket of warm bread. Carlos Delgado, signed only the year before to a monster contract, is now a New York Met. Ace starter A.J. Burnett and closer Todd Jones will not be re-signed. Is this supposed to make the people of Miami regret the decision of their representatives not to authorize the stadium? It’s like dumping your boyfriend for cheating on you and then watching him go sleep with ten people in a week. There’s nothing more satisfying than realizing you’ve made the right call.

I have no idea where the Marlins will end up. Right now no one has a working stadium for them, so they’re stuck in Miami until at least 2008 with a dwindling base of bitter fans. And instead of groveling for Jeffrey Loria to keep his band of merry teal warriors in Miami, the good citizens of South Florida have sent the man a message that ends with “So long and thanks for all the fish.”