Thursday, July 22, 2004Apologies for my recent unexplained absence, and thanks to everyone who's asked after me. I was sick longer than I expected to be—nothing serious, just unpleasant—and since I came back to work we've been in a crunch and I've been playing catchup. That, plus post-being-sick fatigue, equals no real opportunity (or even especial willingness) to post. Plus, you know, my dog's been eating my homework ...
But not posting, in its way, has been instructive (how's that for a Zennish observation?). So I'm probably going to take a little more time out to think about what exactly I'm up to with this blog thing, and where I want it to go. (Since convention blogging is going to be all the thing in the next week, anyway, I don't imagine that my more extended absence is likely to cause all that much pain.) Meanwhile, eRobin at Fact-esque is doing a swell job of Times watching, so make sure to check her out.
Update (8/9/04): Oy. Oy oy oy. Looks like the Salon server ate this post, and people are worried at my disappearance. I'm really, really sorry for that. I've just now become aware of it: for emotional reasons, that I won't go into here, I literally haven't been able to look at my own blog these past couple of weeks, and had no idea that my (apparently) last words made it seem as if I'd been taken off by illness. I haven't. I'm in good health, and though my psychic balance at the moment leaves something to be desired there's really nothing with me to be concerned about. Heartfelt apologies for my inattentiveness—there are times when it's too easy to forget that there are other people in the world.
posted by michael 9:29:39 AM
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Wednesday, July 14, 2004Sick as a dog the last several days, and I had absolutely no energy for posting. I'm starting to recover, and I should be back on a more regular schedule soon.
posted by michael 10:22:55 AM
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Saturday, July 10, 2004The values police. Having taken a brief break from dispensing GOP snark, the Saturday Times is back on form today, with Richard Stevenson and Jodi Wilgoren prattling about "values" below the fold on A1 ("Campaigns Doing Battle on Values and Celebrity Barbs"). [Dimmy Karras writes about a similar values piece from Jim VandeHei yesterday in the WaPo.] There's a tone of almost unseemly excitement in the article: Stevenson and Wilgoren are getting to do what they're best at, and have had so little recent occasion for, namely taking the Republican cue to "report" a virtually contentless controversy. It's a "full-throated battle," a "fierce war of words" with "harsh criticisms" traded through an "array of battleground states." (Beware whenever writers like these strike up the martial music.) The battle is hardly joined on equal terms, of course; the "news" occasion in the article's lead will tell you where the heat's really coming from:
The two presidential campaigns engaged in a full-throated battle on Friday over a broad range of issues, trading harsh criticism on topics including personal character, Hollywood's politics, abortion and the indictment of Enron's former chairman.
A day after a $7.5 million Democratic fund-raiser in New York at which an array of stars harshly ridiculed President Bush, the Bush campaign criticized Senator John Kerry for what it called a "star-studded hate fest." Mr. Bush's campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, demanded that the Kerry campaign release a videotape of the event at Radio City Music Hall, which featured performers including Chevy Chase, Whoopi Goldberg and Jessica Lange.
Although Mr. Kerry had told the crowd at the New York fund-raiser that "every single performer" on the bill had "conveyed to you the heart and soul of our country," his campaign on Friday sought to distance Mr. Kerry and his running mate, Senator John Edwards, from the anti-Bush jokes, lyrics and statements of some of the entertainers.
But it declined to release a videotape of the performance at which Ms. Goldberg, a bottle of wine in hand, made an extended sexual pun out of the president's surname.
In a piece that goes on to discuss the rhetoric of "values" emerging in the Kerry/Edwards campaign—and to repeat the Republican critique of that rhetoric—you can see how this kind of setup rather tilts the playing field: just whose values does Kerry really exemplify? Obviously those of the snotty New York/Hollywood elites, not the heartland. (And if you didn't catch it the first time, Wilgorenson make sure you get it on the rebound, when late in the piece they quote every Republican's favorite Democrat, Zell Miller, calling the fund-raiser "the latest example of the sickness afflicting my party.")
Stevengoren are having absolutely none of the Dem values talk, not this time around: they seem to have deliberately selected quotes from Kerry and Edwards for their rhetorical weakness. The writers go so far as to chide Kerry/Edwards editorially (and, as it seems, per Times policy) for dragging poor Ken Lay into things:
"Values are putting the full force of the Justice Department on Day 1 in an effort not to take three years and a few months before an election before you bring Ken Lay to justice," Mr. Kerry told a crowd of more than 3,200 at Pier 94 in Manhattan on Friday morning, making a judgment about Mr. Lay before he has gone to trial.
Mr. Edwards spun a story about a young single mother struggling to make ends meet, and said she "represents middle-class and working-family values in America — not Ken Lay, not Enron, who this administration took three years to bring to justice."
["Spun a story," by the way, is a nice touch of underhanded skepticism.] The Republican message, on the other hand, comes through loud and clear, complete with a portentously-phrased resurgence of the "flip-flopper Kerry" meme. This is the article's centerpiece:
The Bush campaign, in a newspaper advertisement in swing states the Democrats were visiting mocked Mr. Kerry's statement last week that he represented "conservative values,"saying he supported abortion rights, favored gun control and voted against tax cuts for married couples and parents.
Speaking to a rally here at the end of a day-long bus tour through Pennsylvania, one of the most tightly contested big states, Mr. Bush described Mr. Kerry's assertion of "conservative values" as the mark of someone who says one thing and does another — or has no convictions at all.
[Bush quote snip]
At an afternoon airport rally in Beaver, W.Va., a town of 1,378 people, Mr. Kerry attached the word "value" to virtually every line of his standard stump speech — the one about never sending soldiers into war because of dependence on Middle East oil, the one about making sure every citizen has the same health coverage as representatives in Congress.
Catch the trademark Wilgoren sneer in that last graf? [And the trademark impatience with the stump speech: Wilgoren seems to take it as a personal indignity that Kerry forces her to listen to such stuff, over and over again.] Notice that she's not sneering at Kerry for embracing the "values" rhetoric: like the rest of her tribe, to whom (more even than to the voters, I suspect) that rhetoric is tailored, Wilgoren is much happier when the discussion favors values over issues. (It requires so much less work to write about values controversies, which you can do endlessly without having to think much or bother with research; if you write about policy questions you're responsible for things that could actually be right or wrong.) No, the sneer is in the word "attached": Wilgoren wants to reinforce the impression that Kerry doesn't really mean it about the values thing, that the values stuff is extraneous to his real agenda—so unlike our brave Values Warrior-in-Chief.
Last week I suggested that selling the values message had bought the Kerry campaign some slack from Wilgoren; looks like the slack is all taken up already. Today's article is a useful reminder that the GOP owns the values terrain—particularly in terms of the all-but immutable iconography that substitutes for thought among the Wilgoren types—and that amping up this sort of rhetoric on the Dem side just plays to BushCo's strengths.
posted by michael 3:14:58 PM
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Friday, July 09, 2004Firmly in Ken's corner. I can't fathom the reason—maybe he owes them money or something—but the Times seems to have adopted a party line on the subject of Ken Lay. Continuing from his efforts yesterday, Kurt Eichenwald writes the staight-news Business section lead on Lay's court appearance yesterday, and Floyd Norris adds a news analysis. The two are in such lock-step that it's hard to see why they're both necessary. Accentuating the Ken Lay positive, Eichenwald is more interested in what's not in the indictment than what is:
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the sweeping 65-page indictment is what the government does not charge.
There are no allegations that he knew of the fraudulent partnership dealings that hid the extent of the company's debt and contributed to its downfall. And while Mr. Lay's sales of stock in the months leading up to Enron's bankruptcy filing in December 2001 have been a primary focus of the investigation, no criminal charges contend that the sales themselves were improper.
And here's Norris, spinning the absence of large-scale charges into virtual confirmation of Lay's at least relative innocence:
The man who founded the Enron Corporation, even choosing its name, pleaded not guilty to fraud charges yesterday and insisted that he had not known of the fraud that brought the company down.
The Justice Department, which sought his indictment, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which filed a related civil suit, appear to accept a large part of Mr. Lay's defense. He is not charged with organizing the fraud, or even with knowing about it while it was flourishing in 1999 and 2000.
Is Norris being deliberately obtuse? Well, if he were honest he'd have had to at least consider this quote (unreported in the Times) from Linda Thomsen, deputy director of enforcement of the SEC, which speaks fairly strongly against Norris's speculation: "Mr. Lay is today a defendant not because he was a disengaged figurehead, but rather because he was an all-too-engaged participant in the fraud that was Enron," says Thomsen. He might also have noted, as Carrie Johnson does in today's Washington Post, the likelihood of strategic considerations coming into play in the narrowness of the indictment:
The criminal case against Lay is narrower in scope than the indictment of Skilling, who is accused of running the alleged conspiracy from 1998 until his sudden departure in mid-August 2001, when Lay resumed day-to-day control of the company.
Skilling and Causey, for instance, were charged with criminal insider trading and knowing about several deals that helped Enron hide debt and manufacture earnings. Lay, on the other hand, is facing only civil insider-trading charges, filed separately yesterday by the SEC. Those charges relate to his unloading of company stock in the months before Enron fell apart. That is perhaps a reflection of the rigorous standards of proof needed to bring a criminal insider-trading case, according to criminal law experts.
Former prosecutor David B. Irwin said a bank fraud charge against Lay may be a useful "catch-all" for prosecutors, who can direct jurors to a relatively simple, signed loan application rather than try to lead them through evidence about sophisticated accounting maneuvers that outside lawyers and auditors may have approved.
Norris would much rather spend some grafs insinuating that the Lay prosecution is in the nature of a witch hunt:
For the Justice Department, getting any indictment of Mr. Lay may have been the goal. From the beginning, he was the symbol of Enron. ... At the peak of his fame, he wowed fellow chief executives at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. To many, it seemed outrageous that the man at the helm would walk away while underlings went to prison.
"We can go to the top," said Linda Chatman Thomsen, deputy director of the S.E.C.'s enforcement division, "and the fact that we do, I hope, deters others from engaging in illegal behavior."
Yeah, for that insinuation he's glad to quote Ms. Thomsen.
Throughout their articles, Eichenwald and Norris are consistently biased toward exculpating Lay, from a settled prejudice that sees Lay's sins as, at worst, merely venal, and Lay himself as a sympathetic victim. (Norris's heart is tugged, just as Eichenwald's has been, by Lay's sad plight in having declined from multi-millionaire to having less than a million in cash on hand, a plaint which Lay repeated at his news conference yesterday.) It's one thing to offer an accused man the benefit of the doubt: it's another thing to suppress, or obscure, or otherwise try to spin away, the bad actions that led to his being accused. Take this howler from Norris's piece:
What may have gotten Mr. Lay to this point in the legal process was the disclosure that as he was trying to reassure Enron employees that the company would be saved, he was secretly selling his own shares. ... Mr. Lay's defense against that charge will be that he was not a willing seller. He had borrowed heavily against his stock, and needed the cash to meet margin calls as Enron's share price fell. ...
Mr. Lay could have disclosed what was going on and explained that his sales were forced, showing how he was putting in all his available cash to minimize the number of shares sold. But it may be understandable that he thought such disclosures would only make the situation worse.
In Norris's world, perhaps, tout comprendre est tout pardonner. But what "may be understandable" may still be criminal. Lay's disclosing his stock sales might have made Enron's situation worse? Well, yes: isn't that the point? If you lie to people because your company would be trashed if they knew the truth—hey, Floyd, in the securities world they call that fraud!
But in the Times, it's somehow just not the thing to question Ken Lay's motives. Or even to contextualize them. Back to Eichenwald, who with Norris is impressed that Lay is planning to insist on the speediest possible trial: obvious implication being, he must be that firm in his certainty of innocence.
After entering his plea before United States Magistrate Judge Mary Milloy in Federal District Court here, Mr. Lay was released on a $500,000 unsecured bond. Soon afterward, he appeared at a news conference - an exceedingly unusual move for a defendant in a criminal case - and he steadfastly denied committing any crimes during his years at Enron. Both he and his lawyers said they were pressing for the case to go to court as soon as possible, and planned to invoke the Speedy Trial Act, which would require that the trial start within 70 days.
Eichenwald should really get some kind of kickback from Lay's publicists for this. There's one small item of information that he's left out, whose presence might have colored the account somewhat. Lay has been added as a defendant to the fraud and conspiracy case against Jeffrey Skilling and Enron's former accounting head, Richard Causey. Eichenwald reports the fact, but in isolation—let's let the WaPo make the necessary link:
John M. Callagy, a New York defense lawyer, said it will be a "critical issue" for Lay to be tried separately from Skilling and Causey, lest Lay be affected by the more extensive evidence that prosecutors may present against his co-defendants.
Lay's chief defense lawyer, Michael Ramsey, yesterday said he would seek a judge's approval to have a separate and quick trial for Lay.
Does Eichenwald know that the speedy-trial thing is a defense strategy? Sure hope it doesn't disillusion him when he finds out—it'd be such a shame if his faith in rich corporate hooligans were to be damaged.
posted by michael 5:03:43 PM
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Thursday, July 08, 2004Who's the big winner here today? Kenny's the big winner, that's who! George W. Bush may want to turn away, but Kurt Eichenwald is standing by his man. Ken Lay finally had to do the perp walk today, but in Eichenwald's telling, the scene is all about giving Kenny Boy the chance to have his close-up. Here are the lead grafs of the Times' report (a later version of the story that appeared, pre-announcement, in the print edition. The Times's RSS feed, incidentally, reports six separate versions of this story at various points in the day, with two different co-authors credited beside Eichenwald at different points). Look at how dramatically the Lay figure is lit, and look how long it takes Eichenwald to come up with a (rather grudging) mention of the substance of the indictment that brought Lay onstage in the first place:
Just hours after he was led to a federal courthouse with his hands cuffed behind his back, Kenneth L. Lay, the former chairman and chief executive of Enron, said he was not guilty of any crimes.
Mr. Lay turned himself in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Houston this morning after being charged with 11 counts related to the fraud that led to the collapse in 2001 of the onetime energy giant. After his indictment was unsealed, Mr. Lay was released on a bond of $500,000 set by U.S. Magistrate Judge Mary Milloy.
This afternoon, Mr. Lay took to the lectern to talk publicly about the charges against him and acknowledged he played a role in Enron's downfall.
"I continue to grieve as does my family over the loss of the company, my failure to be able to save it,` Mr. Lay said. `But failure does not equate to a crime."
Mr. Lay stood before a phalanx of television cameras and reporters and said, "Although my lawyer and I do not believe that I should have been indicted, we want a speedy trial."
Looking and sounding confident but with his face glistening with perspiration, Mr. Lay made a statement, and then told the gathered reporters that he would answer any of their questions.
The indictment by a federal grand jury in Houston includes charges of wire fraud, securities fraud and making false statements to banks.Kurt Eichenwald and Maria Newman, "Ex-Chairman of Enron Pleads Not Guilty to 11-Charge Indictment"
Contrast this with the economy of statement in the first grafs of the Washington Post's article—not to mention the focus on what the charges actually are, and what Lay's supposed to have done to justify them:
Former Enron Corp. chief executive Kenneth L. Lay pleaded not guilty today after being charged with 11 counts of securities fraud, wire fraud, and false and misleading statements in a 65 page indictment unsealed this morning. ...
Prosecutors accused Lay of taking over the helm of a massive conspiracy to hide Enron's rapidly deteriorating finances after August 2001. He served as the "principal spokesman" to investors, employees, and credit rating agencies -- and lied to all of them about the health of Enron's balance sheet, the indictment said.
For instance, in September 2001, Lay told employees in an Internet forum that the stock was an "incredible bargain." But prosecutors say that in the months prior Lay had bought $4 million in Enron shares while selling $24 million.
Lay reaped profits of $217 million through sales of Enron stock between 1998 and 2001, the indictment said. Over that period, he also collected $19 million in salary and bonuses. The government is seeking to seize Lay's 33rd floor penthouse apartment in the Huntingdon, a luxury complex near downtown Houston.
Also today, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil charges against Lay and said it was hoping to recover more than $90 million in what it called illegal proceeds from stock sales.Carrie Johnson, "Former Enron CEO Lay Surrenders in Houston "
Those numbers Johnson offers, which seem crucial to establishing a sense of scale, are nowhere to be found in the Times story. Eichenwald is happy, though, to repeat the sad fact that Lay was "once worth some $400 million" and is now down "below $20 million, [with] available cash not earmarked for legal fees or repayment of debt" of not even a measly one million.
Eichenwald was similarly impressed by those figures in the "exclusive" blow-job interview he typed up on Lay's behalf for the front page of the Times the Sunday before last—an interview Eichenwald can't resist mentioning, apparently as a point of pride, in today's article. I suggested at the time that Eichenwald's treatment of Lay might have had something to do with his interest in setting up what he obviously regarded (and regards) as a plum interview—and with the inevitable media-management compromises necessary to bring it off. Kenny Boy may not have much money left, but lining up Eichenwald to be his NY Times quasi-publicist certainly seems to be paying dividends.
posted by michael 5:36:05 PM
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Wednesday, July 07, 2004Please, Hamilton, don't hurt us! About three weeks ago, I noticed Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, co-chairs of the 9/11 commission, issuing Dick Cheney a warning in the pages of the NY Times about the Veep's insane effort to spin back the commission's conclusions that Iraq could not be shown to have had a collaborative relationship with Al Qaeda prior to 9/11. Pretending to take Cheney at his word that he knew something they didn't, Kean and Hamilton essentially told him to put up or shut up:
"It sounds like the White House has evidence that we didn't have," Mr. Hamilton said in an phone interview. "I would like to see the evidence that Mr. Cheney is talking about."
Mr. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, said in a phone interview that he was surprised by Mr. Cheney's comments and would be "very disappointed" if the White House had not shared intelligence information about Al Qaeda with the commission.Philip Shenon and Richard W. Stevenson, "Leaders of 9/11 Panel Ask Cheney for Reports"
Just a week later, someone who seems to have had some link to the commission leaked the Times' Thom Shanker a document specifically referencing Cheney's claim that a (nearly ten year-old) Sudan contact between Iraq intelligence and bin Laden consituted an operational link of the sort the commission had denigrated. The clear implication of the article, which correctly noted how limited and inconsequential the contact was, being that the commission was in possession of exactly the same document Cheney was talking up as his own special intel.
Naturally, Cheney wouldn't take the hints. Today, Kean and Hamilton follow through with an explicit, public slap-down:
In a one-sentence statement, the panel's chairman and vice chairman said that "after examining available transcripts of the vice president's public remarks, the 9/11 commission believes it has access to the same information the vice president has seen regarding contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq prior to the 9/11 attacks."Philip Shenon, "9/11 Panelists Rebut Cheney on Information"
Of course, this is still a pretty subtle slap-down: the single-sentence length guarantees that it plays deep in the inner pages, as it does in the Times today. But that may be all that's necessary for this particular moment in the history of Vice-Presidential mendacity to have reached its endgame. Despite its rather weak bravado, the statement from Cheney's office in response today is essentially a capitulation, and a complete one. Give Kevin Kellems credit, he does all he can to pretend that the white flag he's waving is really Old Glory:
A spokesman for Mr. Cheney, Kevin Kellems, said on Tuesday that the White House welcomed the statement, calling it proof that the White House had fully cooperated in providing the panel all available intelligence relevant to its work.
"We are pleased with today's statement from the 9/11 commission, which puts to rest a nonstory," he said. "As we have said all along, the administration provided the commission with unprecedented access to sensitive information so they could perform their mission. The vice president criticized some press coverage of the draft staff report. He did not criticize the commission's work."
In other words, Cheney's people are admitting he lied when he claimed to have intel the 9/11 commission didn't.
Correction: While it's true (second graf above) that Thom Shanker's article appeared a week after Kean and Hamilton first reacted to Cheney's lie, the document he was reporting on had been provided him some weeks earlier. The Times spent the interim period attempting to verify the document's authenticity. Though the leak wasn't directly in reaction to the Cheney spin effort, as I noted in my original post, I think it's likely that it was made in anticipation of some such effort.
posted by michael 10:30:27 AM
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When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Adam "Some Democrats Worry" Nagourney demonstrates the truth of the saying on A1 today. Negative framing is either a reflex with Nagourney, or a program; you make the call. Here's the start of his "analysis" of the Edwards Veep pick:
In John Edwards, Senator John Kerry selected a running mate who embodies the very attributes that some Democrats worry that Mr. Kerry lacks: a vigorous campaign presence, an engaging personal manner and a crisp message that stirred Democrats from Iowa to New Hampshire.Remember, Nagourney's had a full day to "analyze" the Edwards pick, so this thin pap is the result, presumably, of his most considered efforts. Bonus RNC points for "embracing a trial lawyer": funny, I thought John Edwards was a U.S. Senator.
Mr. Kerry even took a risk or two in compensating for his own shortcomings, embracing a trial lawyer who has less governmental experience than any other major vice-presidential candidate in at least 20 years.
Is Kerry's choice meaningful in terms of electoral politics? You'll have a tough time finding out about it from Nagourney, for whom everything significant about the campaign has to do with style and symbolism: with the Kerry/Edwards brand, rather than the Kerry/Edwards ticket. You'll find better analysis on the comments boards of half a dozen blogs than you will on the front page of the NY Times.
posted by michael 8:55:56 AM
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Tuesday, July 06, 2004Brando and camp. There's a cultural-historical thesis to be written, if one hasn't been already, on popular misrememberings of iconic movie moments. I was reminded of one of the better misrememberings watching The Godfather last night, in my own little memorial for Marlon Brando. The Times' A. O. Scott repeated it in his essay on Brando's career, on his extraordinary association with great movie catchphrases: "Never go against the family."
Brando never said it. In fact, nobody in the movie ever said it. It's a canny misremembering, though, because it conflates a pair of statements, one by Vito Corleone, one by his son Michael, that the film (I think intentionally) places in apposition. The first comes near the beginning of the film's long second act (the war saga), right after the Corleones meet with Sollozzo, the Turk, whose request for drug financing the Don turns down. Sonny Corleone has spoken out of turn in the meeting, giving Sollozzo a crucial indication that Sonny'd be in the deal if Vito weren't against it, and once Sollozzo leaves the Don takes him to task:
Never tell anybody outside the family what you're thinking again.[From a movie transcript here.] The second comes in the last act, concerning Michael's ascension and the family's planned Nevada move. (The structural parallel: both moments come when a new phase in the history of the family business is being considered, or enacted.) Michael has offended Moe Green (the film's version of Bugsy Siegel) by insisting that the Corleones intend to buy him out of his casino. Fredo, to whom Moe Green has become a patron since the family shipped him to Vegas during the mob war, takes offense on Moe's behalf, and Michael chides him:
Fredo—you're my older brother, and I love you. But don't ever take sides with anyone against the family again, ever.Not just the repetition of the similar lines, but the structural weight of the repetition, I think, determines the misremembered quote. [By the way, I can never see The Godfather without admiring its structural rhythms, on small as well as large scales. It's an inexhaustibly rich movie.] The whole thematic and narrative arc of Michael's transformation into the Don is contained in it.
And yet the quote's also subject to misremembering because of its camp value: after all, we hear the false quote in Brando's voice, not Pacino's, even though the Pacino line is verbally nearer it. (Brando's voice, not just in the Godfather but throughout his career, is a kind of camp artifact in itself—think of how the Brando "mumble" was fetishized from his very first performances.) It's something that's missing from the various Brando eulogies, the degree to which Brando turned naturalistic technique—his playing as if unconsciously with Eva Marie Saint's glove, in On the Waterfront, gets mentioned a lot—to the service of creating such a mannered screen presence, as mannered maybe as any in film. As deep and as resonant as his characters seem, no one ever forgets, watching Brando, that they're watching Brando—you never lose the presence for the character. (A fact The Godfather plays with in the third-act reconciliation scene between Vito and Michael, when Vito expresses his regret that Michael couldn't have been "Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone, something ... There wasn't enough time," a deliberate, almost frame-breaking re-enactment of Waterfront's "I coulda been a contender" speech.) And in fact that's a large part of the pleasure of watching Brando, watching his specifically cinematic genius for iconifying his characters, and himself through them.
And a large part, too, of why I have no regrets that Brando never did more Shakespeare than he did. Not that his Marc Antony, in the Joseph Mankiewicz Julius Caesar, wasn't fine (the film itself is underrated, a fascinating exercise in using the language of film noir to approach Shakespeare)—but the great Shakespearean characters already have far too much iconicity of their own; how could Brando's camp have penetrated them? (That's probably the reason his Antony seems so subdued.) Genre types, like Terry Malloy and Vito Corleone, were the roles Brando was ideally suited to, and which his capture by the big-budget, "quality" side of the Hollywood industry in the late '50s and through the '60s kept us from getting more of.
posted by michael 1:17:25 PM
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Saturday, July 03, 2004Cool, comforting centrism. The story today is that the Kerry campaign is experiencing some press-relations success in this last week, having worked Times snarkmistress Jodi Wilgoren, and her GOP-friendly colleague Robin Toner, to garner some unusually uncritical A1 attention. Here's the lowdown ...
posted by michael 2:44:45 PM
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Friday, July 02, 2004No Florida news here. Yesterday the Florida courts ruled that the (Republican-originated) law limiting media access to the state's felon-purge review list is unconstitutional, making it possibly a bit more difficult for Jeb Bush to steal the state for his brother this November. Already the Florida papers are homing in on the manifold inaccuracies of the list:
A Florida Division of Elections database lists more than 47,000 people the department said may be ineligible to vote because of felony records. The state is directing local elections offices to check the list and scrub felons from voter rolls.As well as, shall we say, a certain tendentiousness in its construction:
But a Herald review shows that at least 2,119 of those names ... shouldn't be on the list because their rights to vote were formally restored through the state's clemency process.Miami Herald, "Thousands of eligible voters are on felon list"
Of the 2,119 people who obtained clemency, 62 percent are registered Democrats, and almost half are black. Less than 20 percent are Republican. Those ratios are very close to the same in the list of 47,000 voters who the local elections officers are supposed to review and possibly purge from the registration rolls.Miami Herald
Florida's error-prone list of 47,763 suspected felons who could be tossed from voter rolls before November's presidential election contains nearly three times as many registered Democrats as Republicans. Almost half are racial minorities. ...
Among racial groups, the largest reported group was non-Hispanic whites with 24,197, followed by 22,084 non-Hispanic blacks, 1,384 unknowns, 61 Hispanics, 14 Asian or Pacific-Islanders, 12 American Indians and 11 others. The list consisted of 37,777 men and 9,986 women.Tampa Tribune, "Voter-Purge List Of Felons Made Public"
[Blogwood, a Tampa-based blog, has a good roundup of today's voter-purge news as well as extensive background on the story.]
The Times, though certainly not a Florida paper, has a reporter based in the state who writes frequently about Florida issues. She's been working for some time now on a front-page series (three widely-spaced installments of which have appeared so far) on Florida's voting controversies. The first article in that series was an up-close (and nauseatingly pious) look at the clemency process that re-vested Florida felons with voting rights. So what does Abby Goodnough have for us in the wake of the release of the purge list, which would seem to be pretty much right up her alley?
You guessed it: not a goddamn thing. As we've noticed in the past, controversy, and breaking news, seem to make Ms. Goodnough's head hurt. (The Times does give us a whole graf on the court decision in today's National Briefing, which incidentally represents the sole notice taken by the Times, ever, of the CNN lawsuit, with the exception of a single sentence in passing from Goodnough's June article about the voter purge issue.) I don't want to suggest I'm looking forward to another Goodnough story—just making the point that it was, and remains, an egregious misjudgement to assign such a crucial and contentious topic to someone of Goodnough's "can't we all just get along" sensibilities. Either pay real attention to the story, NYT, or just let it drop.
Sensibilities aside, Abby may have to get past a certain embarrassment in order to be able to tackle the felon purge story again. She last popped up on the subject two weeks ago, credulously giving Times readers the Good News from Jeb that "Florida had nearly eliminated the backlog of felons seeking to have their voting rights restored and that only 8,000 applications remained under review" ("Florida Reports Progress in Reinfranchising Felons"). Which would seem to be somewhat beside the point now, wouldn't it?
posted by michael 1:23:27 PM
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Thursday, July 01, 2004David Sanger, who manned one of the floats in Tuesday's "let's everybody pretend that 'sovereignty transfer' means something" parade, seems to define "analysis" as "repetition and embellishment of Administration spin." His flattering take on the power-transfer charade was that it was a Decisive Moment in the career of our visionary Young Churchill:
Mr. Bush is gambling that the transition of formal sovereignty to the Iraqis will change the dynamic of the American intervention in Iraq, and with it the terms by which the Bush presidency is judged, not only on Election Day in November but also by history. His aim is to push doubts about the wisdom of the war and the bitter occupation into the past, and turn attention to the issue of where Iraq goes from here.
["Gambler Bush" is a durable trope, by the way: as far back as January Elisabeth Bumiller could barely contain herself as she imagined Bush "doubling his bets" by announcing—remember this one?—his visionary Mars challenge. Those were more innocent times, weren't they?]
Sanger's preferred mode of analysis does tend to lead to certain infelicities, though. It's never a good idea to go too far toward channeling Don Rumsfeld:
But for Mr. Bush, the bigger risk at home may be one that his own defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, has hinted at in recent days. Using an analogy that other members of the president's national security team have avoided, Mr. Rumsfeld compared the insurgency to the Tet offensive, a battle in which the North Vietnamese and Vietcong, he said, ended up "winning psychologically." He suggested that the insurgents in Iraq had studied history and were hoping to use the 24-hour news cycle, in which every rocket-propelled grenade that hits an American armored personnel carrier and every American death obliterates the news of an Iraq that is struggling to its feet.
"Will it work?" Mr. Rumsfeld said Sunday. "I think not."
Whether it works or not, it poses a huge risk for Mr. Bush.
[Stop saying "risk" every other graf, David!] Selfish, unpatriotic American soldiers: how can they keep dying like that and "obliterating" the important story, the brave story of Iraqi liberation? It's like they're deliberately putting their APCs in the way of those grenades, just to get themselves some cheap publicity! (Perhaps we should ask our troops to study history, too, so they'll understand what's at stake in this war. The 24-hour news cycle, boys, that's the enemy. By the way, when exactly did the news cycle get hijacked with stories detailing "every American death"? Have I missed something?) Of course, James Glanz has had a few things to say recently suggesting that the struggle to get Iraq back on its feet is taking a lot longer, and is a lot less advanced, than perhaps it ought to be: Sanger would have been aware of that if he was in the habit of reading his own damn newspaper once in a while.
It's not just Sanger at fault here: what editor with any sense of decency or decorum would allow this crap about American deaths "obliterating" the real news to see print?
posted by michael 7:12:25 PM
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Pesky reality! I've been meaning to note the good work that James Glanz has been doing lately: Glanz spent most of June reporting on the neglected nuts-and-bolts story of the Iraqi infrastructure, particularly the electrical infrastructure, and the floundering effort to rebuild it. (Glanz really seemed to take the bit after coordinated attacks in the first weekend of June shut down a major power plant south of Baghdad. Within the week he had written three more stories about sabotage and security nightmares threatening repair of the Iraqi electrical grid.) Writing with Erik Eckholm yesterday, Glanz offered a summary of what's gone wrong with the rebuilding effort to date, and though hardly a fire-breathing piece—in particular, the article avoids substantive discussion of the degree to which war profiteering and outright theft have compromised the reconstruction effort—it's still a worthy overview, with the added pleasure of seeing Jerry Bremer's mendacity on record, just a day after John Burns offered him a blow-job end-of-mission writeup:
From the start, refurbishing Iraq's dismal infrastructure and creating a thriving market economy were promoted by Bush administration officials as pillars of the American-led invasion — "the perfect complement to Iraq's political transformation," in the words of Mr. Bremer.
But more than a year later, supplies of electricity and water are no better for most Iraqis, and in some cases are worse, than they were before the invasion in the spring of 2003. ...
Three months ago, mindful of rising Iraqi frustration over the slow pace of change, Mr. Bremer made lavish promises that have only partly been met. "Now the contracts are signed, and in the coming weeks the dirt will begin to fly on construction jobs all over Iraq," he announced on March 29. By the end of June, he said, "50,000 Iraqis will be working on jobs funded by the partnership for prosperity. But this is just the beginning."
But by this week, only about half of the $18.4 billion had been allocated to contractors, and little of the work was visible.
"Reality Intrudes" has a certain nicely metatextual quality as a headline, given that this article follows the big, blowsy celebration of official fiction that was the Times' Tuesday A section.
posted by michael 6:12:01 PM
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A little strung out. It can't be a lot of fun these days being one of the Times' crew of political journos, what with the continuing, world-historic Iraq clusterfuck basically sucking all the oxygen out of the A section. (The chief reason, probably, why Jodi Wilgoren spent the weekend testing the waters in Arts & Ideas.) Nor has Kerry been quite as soft a target, perhaps, as the kids were expecting him to be. Which means that things are starting to get awfully dry, snark-wise.
Yesterday's deep inner-page article by Glen Justice seems like an authentic cry of distress. Continuing his colleagues' recent effort to surround any mention of Kerry in the Times with dollar signs, Justice writes that campaign finance rules will require John Kerry to decide, once he formally accepts the Democratic nomination, how he's going to repay the mortgage loan he took out last December at a time when his campaign needed an infusion of funds. There's no actual story here, so much as a stringing-together of hypotheticals: miserably, Justice is reduced to penning an 800-word expression of hope that maybe the Republicans can make a story happen, and give him a badly needed jolt:
A provision in the new campaign finance law requires Mr. Kerry to pay back the loan shortly after the Democratic convention next month if he plans to use campaign money. Although Mr. Kerry has raised millions of dollars in recent months, using those contributions could not only reduce the money he can spend on his campaign, but also perhaps draw Republican attacks. ...How desperate is that? Picture poor Glen Justice asking Professor Jarding if there's any way, any way at all, he can offer a little hope about "lasting effects" from those wished-for attacks ...
Some experts said using campaign money to repay the loan could leave Mr. Kerry vulnerable to attacks.
"I don't think there's any question that Republicans will try to make it an issue," said Steve Jarding, a Democratic strategist and a professor at Harvard.
Professor Jarding said he did not know whether such attacks would have lasting effects.
Time for a moment of clarity, Glen. Remember, the first step is admitting you've got a problem.
posted by michael 5:00:22 PM
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Playing catch-up. Feeling kind of run-down these last few days, so I've been posting less energetically than ideally I ought to. Today I'm going to round up a few shortish items I've been meaning to post.
Of interest to Wilgoren watchers were Jodi's two appearances over the weekend in the Arts pages: on Saturday, a ga-ga piece about John Kerry's Hollywood fundraiser ("It could have been Oscar night ..."), and on Sunday a longish, rather dull essay on the making of an independent documentary focused on Kerry's biography. (The filmmaker, George Butler of Pumping Iron fame, is a friend and supporter of Kerry.) Neither has much going for it, though for cringeworthiness it's harder to watch Wilgoren getting all palpitate-y over the presence of Hollywood celebs than it is hanging around while she strains (and signally fails) to produce a Thought about the "mixed-media art" of "political hagiography" (whatever that means).
In an event that was part Woodstock ("for really, really rich people," [Billy] Crystal said), part red carpet and part Gridiron dinner, an A-list of Hollywood celebrities shared the stage in the architectural splendor of Disney Hall to raise a show-stopping $5 million for Senator John Kerry and the Democratic National Committee.Demonstrating, if it needed demonstration, that gush is just the flip side of snark.
Having been slow to swirl around Mr. Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee-to-be, Hollywood is now giving him the full treatment, with the hottest of hot headliners offering heartfelt tributes and spurring a seemingly endless series of ovations.
Is it too much to hope that Wilgoren's finding her natural level in the placement of these pieces? Like her spiritual cousin Liz Bumiller, Jodi's basically just an entertainment gossip writer who's been handed a political beat; she has no more actual politics than a cat. Tuck her away in a back corner of the Arts section, please—she's much less likely to cause real damage from there.
posted by michael 3:21:21 PM
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Last update: 5/12/2005; 11:20:04 AM .
