The test-ban treaty. Last night's agreement averting the nuclear option is, if you consider it carefully, nothing less than an announcment of an alliance of convenience between the Democratic minority and the Republican swing bloc that signed the agreement. It confirms, in no uncertain terms, that Bill Frist has lost control of the Senate for the remainder of the 109th Congress. The more I reflect about this, the more extraordinary a circumstance it seems to me: and since it's going to take me a few paragraphs to develop the thought, I want to highlight it here (I have a way of burying my leads when I'm writing in essay form). Read on, please.

MoveOn's message to the troops this morning, in re the nuclear test-ban treaty is that we've won:

With 7 Republicans pledging to oppose Frist's scheme as long as the Democrats stick to the standard for filibusters they've used all along — only using them in extraordinary circumstances — the "nuclear option" is dead unless Republicans break their word. And if that happens we will be in a much stronger position to stop them. ...

Had Senator Frist succeeded in executing the "nuclear option" we wouldn't just be facing three terrible judges on the US Courts of Appeals — we'd be watching one party take absolute control of all branches of government for the first time ever. And radical Republicans would have had complete power to stack the Supreme Court with unchecked extremists and to roll back decades of progress on all our most cherished rights.

Of course, the Republicans could still decide to go back on their word and break the agreement at some point in the future. But even if that happens they have already failed in their primary goal: to eliminate the filibuster now, before there's a vacancy on the Supreme Court — before Americans are watching and it's clear how much is at stake.

Averse as I am to taking anybody's marching orders, and lacking in nuance as this is, I have to say that it's a decently persuasive analysis of the larger state of play, particularly that last point, about the timing of the filibuster fight wrt a Supreme Court vacancy. I've found myself getting less inclined to eat fire about this as time goes on—much less than I was at first blush last night. In particular, I recommend Chris Andersen's post analyzing the text of the Gang of 14 agreement on dKos, which gets it mostly right, I think, in its analysis of winners and losers.

Yet in Chris's post, as in most other commentary, I think the "winners and losers" balance gets somewhat skewed, by its being calculated entirely, or almost entirely, with respect to the outcomes for the Senate leadership and for the national parties. In my reading, the crux of the agreement comes in its last few paragraphs, particularly considered in light of the commitment made by the memorandum's signatories not to support the "nuclear option" for the duration of the 109th Congress:

We believe that, under Article II, Section 2, of the United States Constitution, the word "Advice" speaks to consultation between the Senate and the President with regard to the use of the President's power to make nominations. We encourage the Executive branch of government to consult with members of the Senate, both Democratic and Republican, prior to submitting a judicial nomination to the Senate for consideration.

Such a return to the early practices of our government may well serve to reduce the rancor that unfortunately accompanies the advice and consent process in the Senate.

Chris Anderson suggests that, as this language explicitly rejects the winger contention (orchestrated, of course, by the Bush White House) that the Executive owes no deference to Senate sentiment in the nomination process, it represents an endorsement of "the Democratic position that the Senate holds a co-equal responsibility with the Executive branch" in the judicial nomination process. (Corrente's Lambert sees it, a bit more succinctly, as "a slap at Bush for acting unilaterally" in making his nominations.) "They have sided with the balance-of-powers argument," Chris optimistically continues, "and, in the process, re-established the power of both the judicial and legislative branches."

And while I sympathize with the desire to draw broad conclusions here, there's no way that this language does the job of "re-establishing" anything to do with the balance of power between the constitutional branches. In hard political terms, a commenter on Andersen's post comes nearer to the truth with the suggestion that the memo gives notice "that the President, in consultation with a bipartisan commission from the Senate, ought to be presenting nominees where the question of a filibuster is moot"—that he "ought to be consistently presenting judicial nominees that are amenable to—at a minimum—60 Senators." Actually, the number of Senators who Bush is now forced to consider in the matter of judicial nominations is considerably smaller—seven, to be exact—and not at all a "bipartisan" group. (The Joementum Democrats who signed the memo, whatever delusions they may harbor about their position, are nothing but a group of rather wilted-looking fig leaves: they've been played by both sides here.)

In hard political terms, the big winners in the Gang of 14 agreement are the Republican signatories—the anti-theocrat mavericks, who have now established that they hold the balance of power in the Senate, at least on this matter and probably, potentially, on others. (Can we please agree not to call them "moderates"? Lindsay Graham is a centrist by no possible reasonable definition of the term: he's a hard-right conservative, the only difference between him and his ideological brothers being that he seems to have retained some measure of civic conscience. Which is a large enough difference, I guess, in these degraded times.) Karl Rove's going to have to suck it up and deal with them now, much (I expect) to his chagrin. (Unca Karl's not exactly known for his patience with legislators who won't toe the line.) It's strange to see the memorandum spun as a "compromise"—what kind of compromise is it where one of the two warring parties is unrepresented in the negotiations, or in the end product? Frist's enlistment with the theocratic extremists has, in effect, created a power vacuum in the Senate—a small enough vacuum, but one that the Republican mavericks have deftly stepped into, with the Cheshire-cat assistance of Harry Reid. John McCain may have no remote chance at the 2003 presidential nomination, but he's neatly slipped a shiv in Bill Frist's back; and Lindsay Graham his positioned himself as perhaps the crucial Senate power broker through 2006.

And, most important by far: the GOP mavericks have served notice that the road to the next Supreme Court appointment, assuming a vacancy occurs as it almost certainly will in the 109th Congress, runs directly through them. They have essentially announced that if the Democratic side feels a filibuster is required then, there will be no room for anyone on the Republican side to invoke the nuclear option—they've committed to its failure, and they have the votes to see to it. Don't trust that commitment? Well, follow the logic: the mavericks need the threat of a Democratic filibuster to be alive and well, or there will be no incentive whatever for Bush/Rove to deal with them. These guys are determined to get what they regard as an acceptable (i.e., non-theocratic) Supreme Court nominee, and this temporary league with the Democratic opposition is their ace in the hole. I'm a bit surprised nobody has so far teased out this obvious corollary, so I'll say it again: the threat of Democratic filibuster is the power of the Republican mavericks, and the Gang of 14 agreement has formalized that fact. (There won't actually have to be a Supreme Court filibuster now, of course; last night's demarche means that everybody knows the score and knows that the mavericks hold the whip hand here.) McCain and Graham et al. need Harry Reid every bit as much as he needs them.

It's clear that Reid decided a month or more ago that what emerged as last night's agreement would be his preferred outcome: one that would fatally weaken the majority leader while giving him a degree of leverage over a key Republican swing group, and at the same time avert a really disastrous Supreme Court pick. Of course, the price we pay for Harry gaining this room to maneuver is steep: three (even only two will be bad enough) of the most retrograde and corrupt judges ever nominated to the Federal bench will now receive their lifetime appointments—which they will regard as a free pass to smash anything they feel like smashing.

On balance, I was looking forward to Frist having to fully explore the space between that rock and the hard place that he'd wedged himself into. (If Billy F. had a brain, he'd be singing hosannas at the cup having passed, at least for now.) I had come to regard the filibuster fight as a teaching opportunity: following hard on the heels of the Schiavo debacle, an occasion for the left to further instruct the buyer's-remorse segment of the public about the full ugliness of what they'd bought when they voted Republican last year. But the floor of the U.S. Senate, especially with a Supreme Court vacancy looming, is probably no place for guerilla warfare and the sharpening of contradictions. There'll be (dismayingly) plenty of opportunities for such stuff in the months and years to come. Under the circumstances, I'm coming round to feeling that Harry's given us the best we could reasonably hope to have gotten out of this one.

posted by michael  1:40:18 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

People who undergo major surgery look like death afterwards. It's one of the many things the medical dramas don't really prepare you for—nor anybody in the actually existing health-care system, for instance the surgeon (affectless by some inscrutable combination of temperament and policy) who has primary charge of your Mom's case and who will disappear behind the wall of his answering service once (actually, well before) the last suture has closed.

I'm back home in Chicago, having spent pretty much every waking hour the last three days in the fluorescent maze of Missouri Baptist, the hospital in suburban St. Louis where my Mom was given a kind of bypass surgery, to correct a condition known as portal hypertension. (It's a form of high blood pressure specific to the liver—I hadn't even been aware there was such a thing as an organ system-specific hypertension.) One waiting room after another, each with its useless ritual cackle of television (which one doesn't dare turn off), a pre-op room, a post-op recovery room, an ICU room, two more dingy semi-private rooms (two, because nobody checked the first for necessary equipment till after they'd moved my Mom into it). Mom's well on her way to mending now, as it seems (though she hasn't started eating yet, which will be a test, since she runs the risk of encephalopathy if her liver is more compromised than it's thought to be), but it's been a tough few days. Saturday afternoon and evening were especially rocky, after she was transferred (with none-too-careful bed technique) from ICU: she had a spike of fever, and though she seemed lucid when she was awake she couldn't remain awake (more than 36 hours after surgery) for even a couple of minutes at a time—her speech would slur, and she'd drop off in mid-sentence, mid-word. Her breath when she slept came rough, each intake preceded by a motionless few seconds, then a shudder of effort or pain, or both. We (my younger sisters and I, prompted by the nurses) were worried about pneumonia, since she wasn't moving about or doing the breathing exercises that would keep fluid from building in the lungs (post-op pneumonia is a significant risk); I worried to myself about stroke. Nor was there any realistic hope of seeing or even speaking to a doctor until next morning's rounds.

But the fever broke overnight, and by morning the nurses had already helped Mom get into a bedside chair, and she was making jokes (though she hadn't stopped, really, even at the worst the day before) about her lack of makeup and the pre-op hairdo that was going to waste, and she had the strength to stay awake and interact. (A strength that at that point I could barely summon myself.) She ate a cherry popsicle that was the best thing she'd ever tasted. I'm going to spend the day—the best spring day Chicago is capable of, from the looks of it—enjoying my (provisional) relief. For some unknown (but blessed) time longer, there are dreadful things I don't yet have to face. The dreadful things of politics and the affairs of the world can wait a bit.

posted by michael  9:51:02 AM  
tell me about it []  

 

Historical ecomagination. I'll reserve judgement, for the time being, on whether the green-technology initiatives recently announced by GE under the (moronically Disneyfied) slogan of "ecomagination" represents an encouraging corporate commitment to environmental progressivism, or is just an unrepetant old (and continuing) polluter's attempt to buy itself a little greenwashing. But I don't need to reserve judgement about the ad campaign that accompanies it, specifically the TV ad that promotes GE's coal-gasification project.

Here's Lew Lazare in the Sun-Times with a glowing account of the spot:

"Model Miners" is an even more dramatic effort. Set in the bowels of a coal mine, the spot piques the imagination when it becomes apparent that the miners are a mix of men and buxom women who, except for their coal miner togs, look as if they could have stepped directly from the pages of Vogue or GQ.

As the models strike various fashion model poses and go through the motions of "mining," the soundtrack regales us with a forceful rendition of that classic tune "Sixteen Tons." This jaw-dropping montage of brilliantly lit and photographed images is there -- the voiceover finally announces -- to impress upon us that GE is working on new emission-reducing technology that makes harnessing the power of coal look more "beautiful" every day.

Well, my jaw certainly dropped, to hear a song that protests the serfdom into which miners were forced in the last century ("I owe my soul to the company store") being used to sell the idea that I ought to trust a corporate environmental criminal to make coal green, but I guess that's just me. Lazare, who apparently has a higher tolerance for corrosive irony than I do, thinks the work is "genuinely intelligent."

Perhaps Lew, or the anonymous Adrants poster who calls the ad "the really fun element" of the GE campaign, would like to enjoy some hot, sweaty, sexy fun doing endless backbreaking labor in the dangerous bottom of a coal shaft? Do the ad guys think this sounds like a pitch for a beauty regimen?

At work you are covered with dust. It's in your hair, your clothes, and your skin. The rims of your eyes are coated with it. It gets between your teeth and you swallow it. You suck so much of it into your lungs that until you die you spit up coal dust. Sometimes you cough so hard that you wonder if you have a lung left. Slowly you are getting short of breath when you walk up a hill. Finally, just walking across the room at home is an effort.

The history of coal mining in American has seen thousands and thousands of men—and boys—dying horrifically in those shafts. Hundreds of thousands more have had their lives shortened, and ended in misery, from black-lung disease—the direct product of the mine operators' greed for faster and greater exploitation. And hundreds of men, women, and children, for the unforgiveable sin of trying to organize to improve their conditions, have suffered violence and death at the hands of company thugs. I wonder what any of those people might have had to say about GE's beautiful dummies striking poses on the stage of their oppression. I wonder, for that matter, what any of their still impoverished, still disenfranchised descendants might have to say on the subject, if anyone were to ask them.

I've worked in an ad agency, and I should know better than to be outraged by the depth of privileged ignorance any of them harbors. But I can't help myself: this is disgusting. Smug impertinence doesn't even begin to cover it. Dave Lubars, creative director at BBDO/New York, and his team of yuppie shits who produced this ad—not to mention the GE suits who approved it along the way—ought to be ashamed of themselves. But I doubt they'd have even a clue what I was on about.

posted by michael  11:29:51 AM  
tell me about it []  

 

There really is an Iron Law of Bloviation, isn't there, whenever journos look over their shoulders at the online community? Let there be the merest touch of Blog in a story, and the print opiners will fall all over themselves displaying their bad faith.

The latest example, for which thanks to Tex, comes from Peter S. Canellos in the Boston Globe, where he's (God help us) the Washington bureau chief. Canellos, either too lazy or too stupid to understand what the Jeff Gannon story is about, dials himself up an order of the hack's favorite, the Plague on Both Their Houses, with a side of Irresponsible Bloggers for good measure. (He also comes up with a turn of phrase I've never seen before, when he contends that "the story's endurance [by which he means, the fact that the story has persisted, unless he's attributing aerobic qualities to it] reveals how influential the Washington blogosphere has become": somebody might want to inform Mr. Canellos, assuming he's teachable, about the difference between cyberspace and real, geographical space.) Let's go straight to the peroration, and see what paltry stuff passes for thought in the Globe's Washington offices:

Few would argue that the Internet is responsible for all, or even many, of the weaknesses of the Washington journalism culture. But online journalism's ability to transmit loaded anecdotes, images, and symbols to specialty audiences with an ideological hunger for them has helped create a culture in which all news comes with quotation marks around it.

In response, many mainstream news outlets have vowed to police their standards of fairness and accuracy more aggressively, to establish a clearer contrast with some of their online brethren. But these efforts, such as the recent resignation of a USA Today reporter for borrowing two quotes from a sister paper without attribution, may have backfired: The public remembers only the suggestion of wrongdoing, not the rigorous efforts to explain and atone for any lapses.

This furthers the Internet-fueled perception that all media are untrustworthy, unless they conform to one's exact expectations. The lowered trust and expectations are small but significant legacies of both the pseudojournalism of Jeff Gannon and some of his most intense critics.

On the evidence of this passage, I'd have to say that Canellos is the spiritual cousin of John "We're Not Losing in Iraq So Long As We Don't Report It" Tierney: apparently, the only thing corporate journalism needs to have its public credibility restored is for those mean old Internets to stop talking trash about it. Jayson Blair who? Jeff Gerth who? Judith Miller who? (Boy, the Times could have saved a lot of money and effort on their Credibility Group report if they'd just talked to Canellos, huh?) If we just didn't have to keep shooing away all those pesky online pseudojournalists, people'd stop putting quotation marks around our rigorously produced, utterly trustworthy news ...

This is as naked as old-media anxiety gets. It's tough finding yourself accountable to the unwashed masses, isn't it, Peter? No doubt you wish you could just dial back the clock and find yourself safe in the cozy in-culture of the journalistic age of yore. The plagiarism reference above (excuse me, the reference to "borrowing without attribution," a much more circumspect phrasing) comes as practically a Freudian slip, given the Globe's own rather compromised history: shall I mention the name Mike Barnicle? Or perhaps I can reprint this richly ironic item of two months back, from Public Apology:

Boston Globe reporter Rebecca Price was suspended today by newspaper management pending an investigation into allegations that she had used without attribution several passages from a Boston Phoenix article in which a local academic was himself accused of lifting three paragraphs from an out-of-print biography of the Irish patriot Charles Parnell published in Australia in 1928. The Boston Globe had recently established a plagiarism desk to deal with the large volume of complaints pouring into the paper and hired Price, a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, as its sole correspondent. Tim O'Neill, the author of the Boston Phoenix article, characterized the controversy as "ironic," a description that Price did not dispute. "That's gold," she told a reporter. "Can I use it?"

Of course, everything looks bad if you remember it.

Maybe I'd have more sympathy for Canellos if his own work in this piece weren't so ridiculously shoddy, and didn't reflect so depressingly the Beltway go-along-get-along ethos. In what way, exactly, are Jeff Gannon's critics responsible for a "legacy" of "lowered trust and expectations"—equally responsible, with Gannon himself? Apparently because, unlike Canellos, they don't take an official "no" for an answer:

Despite the sex pictures, the linchpin of the scandal was always the allegation that Bush and/or his press secretary, Scott McClellan, catered to Gannon so that his softball questions would make the president look good. Having Gannon in the press room allowed McClellan to change the subject whenever a mainstream reporter began to bore in with a tough line of questioning, according to the bloggers who promoted the story.

But the allegation was never proven. McClellan argued that he called on questioners in a routine manner, getting to Gannon only after fielding inquiries from larger news outlets in a fairly predictable order. Veteran White House correspondents backed him up. Meanwhile, McClellan maintained that his office did not give Gannon favorable treatment in getting a press pass. Former White House press secretaries from the Clinton administration generally sided with McClellan.

At that point, despite the lurid aspects of Gannon's past, most newspapers gave up on the matter as a news story. But many bloggers glided over McClellan's denials, simply asserting that Gannon was a plant intended to help the White House avoid thorny questions.

Now, if it's me, and I'm going to write an opinion piece about a news story, I try to inform myself about the state of play: Canellos, though, seems to have stopped paying attention sometime in, say, late February. This is what the Globe's Washington bureau chief thinks is the "linchpin" of the affair, that Gannon was planted to help Scotty when the gaggle got feisty? No, Peter, Gannon was observed to have consistently offered up softball, biased questions: but the linchpin, as you put it, is the set of discoveries those questions led to, namely Gannon's bizarrely fraught pseudonymity (did you forget about that?), his as yet unexplained access to the White House with absolutely no journalistic background or credentials. What drives the story is one's desire to account for the yet unaccounted-for (not to mention deliberately obscured) web of connections that put an ex auto-body office manager and gay webmaster, under an assumed name, into the White House press room. How hard is it to get that?

[Out of pity, by the way, both for my readers and for Canellos, I'm going to spare you the part that comes next, where we learn that Gannongate is just like the "similarly unproven charges" made against John Kerry by the Swift Boat Veterans, an instance of symbolic politics managing to trump substance and fact. No kidding—I couldn't make that up. Such is the power of the know-nothing hack in full Plague on Both Their Houses mode.]

Have we "glided over" official denials (of dubious relevance anyway), or simply refused to let the matter drop despite them? Which is, as I in my naivete understand it, a typical practice of investigative journalism. Canellos doesn't seem to understand it, though, or much of anything else. Authority has declared the story Over. That's good enough to squelch Peter Canellos's curiosity. (Though one suspects it might not have been, in the days when Authority worked for Bill Clinton.) But those Internet pseudojournalists—they just won't learn manners.

posted by michael  12:12:54 AM  
tell me about it []  

 

It's our party, and we'll cry if we want to. Via Paperwight, I see that Ed Kilgore plans to write a review:

As it happens, I recently read [Craig] Shirley's January 2005 book, Reagan's Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All. In fact, the next issue of Blueprint magazine will include a review I wrote of that book and the much-better-known Before the Storm, Rick Perlstein's study of the Goldwater campaign.

Which is of some interest to me, since I'm in the middle of reading (haphazardly, while I try to drum up paying work) Perlstein's book myself. Paperwight notices what he calls a "humdinger" in Kilgore's teaser for the forthcoming review, and what I think of more as the usual story of old dogs and new tricks:

My Perlstein-Shirley review will focus on the dangerous belief of some Democrats that we should emulate the 1964 and 1976 conservative "noble defeats," and one of my arguments is that Reagan's survival in 1976 and his apotheosis in 1980 were far more fortuitous than anyone, including Shirley, seems to be willing to admit.

This isn't a surprise, is it? The Kilgores of the Democratic world get paid to bash, after all, and they don't get paid to bash toward their right. Besides, the sermon on the evils of ideological enthusiasm must be so well honed by now that Ed can recite it in his sleep.

Still, you have to give the man some credit for stones, since he's going to be arguing in the teeth of an account (Perlstein's, I mean) which on any honest, untendentious reading makes an all but unanswerable case against the DLC tendency: namely, that the Goldwater Takeover—coming after years in which the Republican party had been hollowed out, structurally and ideologically, by "me-too" efforts to calibrate its appeal within the (apparently invincible) ascendancy of liberalism—was the necessary precondition for the eventual electoral success of the modern conservative movement. The parallels to our current moment are so apt as to be eerie. Not two years after the retirement of a centrist, two-term Republican president, and the impossibly narrow defeat of his vice-presidential successor, the party according to Perlstein was practically an empty shell, out of money and out of ideas:

The Republican Party was going broke. The debt from the Nixon campaign approached a million dollars, which in itself was no great problem; the parties always borrowed in presidential election season and paid off the deficit in between. This time, though, money wasn't coming in. Every Friday night the Republicans' creaky old Senate and House leaders Everett Dirksen and Charlie Halleck went on TV to retail the tired argument that too much spending promised recession just around the corner; ... with economists predicting 10 percent economic growth in 1962 against 3.2 percent yearly during Eisenhower's terms, the counsel of doom just wouldn't take. The "Ev and Charlie Show" played so poorly against John F. Kennedy's sparkling weekly press conferences that in a poll of thirty GOP congressmen, only two admitted liking it: Ev and Charlie. A prgram to sell "sustaining memberships" in the Republican Party for $10 showed promise. If only the leadership could agree on what they were selling.

I'm sure Ed will be happy to tell us why all the obvious parallels in fact mean the opposite of what they seem, but for the life of me I can't tell you how he's going to do it: it's not a task I'd want to take on.

'Cause the thing is, Ed, it seems to me that we've already tried it your way: we've given in to the reflex that prefers the ignoble pursuit of victory to "noble defeat," and what do we have to show for it? Or were those last two Democratic presidential campaigns not the cautious, calibrated, "me-too"-ist failures of imagination and confidence we (along with a considerable majority of our fellow citizens) all thought they were? Perhaps you can enlighten us misguided leftists about that, too.

Past which, I seem to have missed the memo in which Comrade Dean instructed all of us about the nobility of losing, and commanded his minions to fan out across the country in '06 and '08 and send Democrats down in beautiful, defeatist flames. Naive, non-Beltway sort that I am, it's my impression that people generally involve themselves in politics—major-party politics, certainly—in order to win. I've noticed plenty of disagreement about ways to win, but if there's a debate currently raging in Democratic circles between proponents of winning on one side, and losing on the other, I confess it's passed me right by. Nor were the conservatives of '64 or '76 trying to bring their parties down around them. On the contrary, they held a reasonable belief—which at this point appears to have the vindication of history on its side—that a party without ideological direction, without passion or vision, had no hope of success unless its could harness the energy of its most committed cadres.

And the vacuum of ideology and passion in the Republican establishment, post-Eisenhower, made it ripe for those cadres to move in and take over. (Win the party apparatus first; electoral success will follow.) No doubt an intensely uncomfortable historical parallel for Ed Kilgore to contemplate, who seems to believe in his core that "ideology" and "passion" are political dirty words. And I sympathize with your discomfort, Ed, and that of your DLC bretheren, I really do. As I know from too recent experience myself, unemployment's a bitch.

posted by michael  5:39:49 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Immiseration*. From the Business section of yesterday's Times:

Wal-Mart Stores, with its less affluent, more rural customer base, came up short yesterday when it and Target both released results for the first quarter. Target - with customers a little richer and more chic - posted a better-than-expected profit, while Wal-Mart reported its lowest sales growth in more than two years. ...

High gas prices reduced the number of trips consumers made to the Wal-Mart Supercenter, analysts agreed, and other rising household costs cut into the money the average shopper had to spend on nonessentials once there. Target's more upscale customers continued to spend. ...

Wal-Mart spokesman Marty Heires ... blamed economics for the results. "As we've commented in the past, our customers live paycheck to paycheck and they are pretty sensitive to costs," he said. "They've told us gas is a burden, and cuts into their discretionary spending."

But more than gas prices hurt Wal-Mart, analysts said. After a fine February, the company hired extra employees. "Their labor costs were too high," [an analyst for Smith-Barney] said. "That's what singed them in April."

Tracie Rozhon, "Wal-Mart Lags but Target Hits Its Sales Goal"

Meanwhile, from the wilds of the op-ed page, Paul Krugman offers a bit of missing perspective:

Today, Wal-Mart is America's largest corporation. Like G.M. in its prime, it has become a widely emulated business icon. But there the resemblance ends.

The average full-time Wal-Mart employee is paid only about $17,000 a year. The company's health care plan covers fewer than half of its workers.

True, not everyone is badly paid. In 1968, the head of General Motors received about $4 million in today's dollars - and that was considered extravagant. But last year Scott Lee Jr., Wal-Mart's chief executive, was paid $17.5 million. That is, every two weeks Mr. Lee was paid about as much as his average employee will earn in a lifetime.

Not the sort of information, of course, relevant to a business discussion.

More irrelevant perspective available from eRobin at Fact-esque, who along with Mick Arran at Dispatch from the Trenches has been doing a consistently bang-up job looking at the Wal-Mart economy. Bookmark them both.

*Follow-on: eRobin, commenting on this, mentions the irony that "as soon as the going gets tough for WalMart, they play the class war card." Which is actually in the vein of what I wanted to point out yesterday, without quite having the time/attention span to do it. The thing that's so wrong and obtuse and confused about the kind of "business" reporting the Times is doing here is its easy—not to mention bizarre—reliance on a class narrative, in which these massive corporate retailers don't simply target themselves to particular market-demographic segments, they actually come to represent the class condition of the people they sell to. (A narrative, as eRobin notes, that Wal-Mart works hard and successfully to sell. And a testament to how utterly impoverished the American discourse of class is.) As if the fact that Wal-Mart forces whole communities into a kind of vicious-circle, race-to-the-bottom form of wage peonage were irrelevant to the discussion: Wal-Mart makes customers of the little guys (that it immiserates), and that means that it's somehow of their party.

Literally the case here, where it's a Wal-Mart spokesman who's given the opportunity to speak to the concerns of "our customers" and their "[Wal-Mart-limited] paycheck to [Wal-Mart-limited] paycheck" state of existence. (Like the plantation owner who knows just what "his Negroes" really need, and no outsiders wanted, thank you very much.) It's such an ordinary feature of business reporting that you hardly notice it, but in this case, and thanks to the juxtaposition with Krugman's column, it strikes me with especially ugly force.

posted by michael  11:41:15 AM  
tell me about it []  

 

The ghosts of the Carboniferous. Again via EnergyBulletin.net, I find that Bill Totten is blogging excerpts from Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, a book by human ecologist William R. Catton, an emeritus professor of sociology at Washington State. The chapter on offer at EnergyBulletin is an extraordinary discussion of resource limits, based on the notion of human carrying capacity (roughly, the population capable of being sustained by exploiting the resources immediately available in a given social/ecological system) and phantom carrying capacity, what Catton explains in terms of "ghost acreage":

Georg Borgstrom, a food scientist at Michigan State University, devoted a whole chapter of his 1965 book, The Hungry Planet, to [the subject of ghost acreage]. A number of nations have seemed to get away with exceeding the human carrying capacity of their own land, but Borgstrom pointed out that they had only been able to do so by drawing upon carrying capacity that was "invisible" - that is, located elsewhere on the planet. The food required by such a nation's population comes only partly from the harvest of "visible acreage" - farm and pasture land within the nation's borders. A very substantial fraction comes from net imports of food. Not all the imports come from other countries; some are obtained from the sea. Borgstrom therefore subdivided "ghost acreage" into two components, "trade acreage" and "fish acreage". By each phrase he simply expressed, in terms of land area, the additional farming that would have been needed to provide from internal sources the net portion of a nation's sustenance actually derived from sources outside its boundaries and in excess of its own carrying capacity.

Tellingly, Catton extends the concept to the question of fossil fuels: he calls the world supply of these fuels, rather elegantly, "a global energy bank," an accumulation "in the transformed remains of organisms that lived millions of years ago" of the "energy captured in prehistoric photosynthesis." We can thus think of our use of oil and natural gas as a another phantom carrying capacity, an importation not from outside some political or land-mass boundary, but from the past:

The energy we obtain from coal, petroleum, and natural gas can be expressed as "fossil acreage" - the number of additional acres of farmland that would have been needed to grow organic fuels with equivalent energy content. Mankind originally did rely on organic fuels, chiefly wood. Wood was a renewable resource, though even in the world's once vast forests it grew in limited quantity. Access to vast but non-renewable deposits of coal and petroleum came to be mistaken by peoples and nations as an opportunity for permanently transcending limits set by the finite supplies of organic fuel. ...

Ghost acreage of the Carboniferous period was the resource base for "modern" living. In Asia, Japan was the nation most dependent upon such prehistoric photosynthesis. In Europe, Britain has been dependent on it longer than other nations. Americans were heavily dependent upon it, in spite of their huge expanse of visible acreage and their conspicuous agricultural surpluses. The more "modern" a nation had become, the more its way of life was based on importing energy from hundreds of millions of years ago.

There's far more to the chapter than this (including a brief discussion of the role of mechnical energy in destroying the economic logic of human slavery), and I highly recommend reading it. I'm going to have to seek the book out.

And the kicker? The humbling (and, given Catton's "historian from the future tone," spooky) thing about the book is that it looks far-sighted even in today's context—and yet it was published fully twenty-five years ago. Think of it, and realize the enormous lost opportunity that quarter-century represents in the history of our civilization.

posted by michael  1:35:27 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

The end of empire. Worth reading: this from Michael Ventura, published a couple of weeks ago in the Austin Chronicle, today via EnergyBulletin.net, on the question of just how American empire ends in the face of the oil decline:

America is like Wile E. Coyote after he's run out a few paces past the edge of the cliff – he'll take a few more steps in midair before he looks down. Then, when he sees that there's nothing under him, he'll fall. Many Americans suspect that they're running on thin air, but they haven't looked down yet. ...

One key to America's future will be: How quickly can we build or rebuild heavy and light rail? And where will we get the money to do it? Railroads are the cheapest transport, the easiest to sustain, and the only solution to a post-automobile America. ... There's only one section of our economy that has that kind of money: the military budget. The U.S. now spends more on its military than all other nations combined. A sane transit to a post-automobile America will require a massive shift from military to infrastructure spending. That shift would be supported by our bankers in China and Europe (that is, they would continue to finance our debt) because it's in their interests that we regain economic viability. What's not in their interests is that we remain a military superpower.

And that's where things get really interesting. The question becomes:

Can America face reality? If the government responds to the coming changes by attempting to remain a superpower no matter what, there is no way to underestimate the harm. The numbers speak for themselves. Soon we'll no longer have the resources to remain a military superpower and sustain a livable society that is anything like what we know today. It happened to England; it happened to Russia; it's about to happen to us. England sustained the transformation more or less gracefully; it lost its dominance while retaining its essential character. Russia is still in a period of transformation, but has remained a player thanks to its oil reserves. Europe in general – France, Germany, Italy, and Spain (all world powers in the fairly recent past) – is creating a post-national society, the most experimental form of governance since America's revolution. We have no appreciable oil, and we no longer have a manufacturing base. So what will the United States do? Sanely recognize its declining status and act accordingly, or make one last ignoble stab to retain its position by force?

Half a century ago James Baldwin wrote: "Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses." Americans believe they're "No. 1," destined to lead the world. That is the America that's over. If we insist on that illusion, then this world is in for tough times.

The fact that the country is in the grip of its worst elements, a clique of utter political fantasists (and totalitarians of the spirit if not in fact) who believe will is the only necessary precondition for world-historical success, who have been working for the last fifty years to lever themselves into the kind of power they now enjoy, and who act, at least, as if they're convinced they'll never lose another election—that fact bodes very ill for any sanity in the process of our extricating ourselves from the imperial mire.

posted by michael  10:45:42 AM  
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Waving the (white) flag of credibility. I'd say the Times knew what it was doing, assigning political apparatchik Kit Seelye to write the summary of the Bill Keller-mandated "Credibility Group" report that appeared in yesterday's edition. Knew what it was doing, because Seelye's article, with its obscurantist focus on PR strategy ("the Times must respond to its critics") and error-checking, has so far succeeded in dissuading anybody in Blogovia (left or right) from reading too deeply into the Credibility Group report itself. Which is a shame, because you're missing a signal moment in the paper's contemporary history: its official, essentially unconditional surrender to the demands of right-wing political correctness.

Nothing the Times understands better than burying the lead. You have to persist to the report's final set of recommendations (blandly labeled "The News/Opinion Divide"), beginning on page 12 (of 16)—and in fact to the discussion of those recommendations, beginning a page later—to reach its statement of capitulation. I'll excerpt the two key sections.

2. Monitoring Cumulative Coverage

Though we have our lapses, individual news stories on emotional topics like abortion, gun control, the death penalty and gay marriage are reported and edited with great care, to avoid any impression of bias. Nonetheless, when numerous articles use the same assumption as a point of departure, that monotone can leave the false impression that the paper has chosen sides. This is especially so when we add in our feature sections, whose mission it is to write about novelty in life. As a result, despite the strict divide between editorial pages and news pages, The Times can come across as an advocate.

The public editor found that the overall tone of our coverage of gay marriage, as one example, “approaches cheerleading.” By consistently framing the issue as a civil rights matter -- gays fighting for the right to be treated like everyone else -- we failed to convey how disturbing the issue is in many corners of American social, cultural and religious life.

3. Diversifying Our Vantage Point

Too often we label whole groups from a perspective that uncritically accepts a stereotype or unfairly marginalizes them. As one reporter put it, words like moderate or centrist “inevitably incorporate a judgment about which views are sensible and which are extreme.” We often apply “religious fundamentalists,” another loaded term, to political activists who would describe themselves as Christian conservatives. ...

Many staff members say that the paper covers breaking news well, but that it needs to take additional steps to cover the country in a fuller way. The national desk is already moving in this direction, but we encourage more reporting from the middle of the country, from exurbs and hinterland, and more coverage of social, demographic, cultural and lifestyle issues. We would also welcome even more enterprise reporting beyond New York, Washington and a handful of other major cities.

Nothing we recommend should be seen as endorsing a retreat from tough-minded reporting of abuses of power by public or private institutions. In part because the Times’s editorial page is clearly liberal, the news pages do need to make more effort not to seem monolithic. Both inside and outside the paper, some people feel that we are missing stories because our staff lacks diversity in viewpoints, intellectual grounding and individual backgrounds. We should look for all manner of diversity. We should seek talented journalists who happen to have military experience, who know rural America first hand, who are at home in different faiths.

Or, we can just cut to the shorter version: The Times has separated from the wisdom of the Volk, and must return to it.

Didja catch how those confessions of lapse all seem to go in a single direction? Apparently nobody is more convinced of the Times' liberal bias than the Times itself. This barely even requires comment: the Credibility Group has fully adopted a critique of "labelling," and a rhetoric of "diversity," that only L. Brent Bozell and David Horowitz, respectively, could love—could hardly fail to love, seeing how tirelessly they've been propagandizing these very terms, the state-of the art language of right-wing victimization. Well, it's nice to see that hard work pays off. About the only thing missing here is the Times admitting that its Science section has persecuted Christians by being insufficiently skeptical about evolution.

This, then, would be the shape of things to come at the Times, under what's emerged as Bill Keller's grand vision: a kind of grotesque inversion of the Wall Street Journal, a (very modestly) liberal and reality-based editorial page (Brierny excepted) marooned within a sea of news columns given over to right-wing time-serving. If you've still got a subscription, now might be an opportune time to cancel it.

As for the notion of the Times turning to go on the offensive against its critics: given the paper's new commitment to "diversity" and fairness in "labeling," is there any doubt where the boom's going to be lowered, first and foremost? Any doubt that Danny Okrent and Ad Nags haven't already established the template for the campaign?

posted by michael  10:00:29 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Chilling effects. Via EnergyBulletin.net (an important resource on, er, resources, and thanks to James Wolcott for pointing me to it), an extremely disturbing article from the UK Sunday Times:

Climate change researchers have detected the first signs of a slowdown in the Gulf Stream — the mighty ocean current that keeps Britain and Europe from freezing.

They have found that one of the “engines” driving the Gulf Stream — the sinking of supercooled water in the Greenland Sea — has weakened to less than a quarter of its former strength. ...

Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, hitched rides under the Arctic ice cap in Royal Navy submarines and used ships to take measurements across the Greenland Sea.

“Until recently we would find giant ‘chimneys’ in the sea where columns of cold, dense water were sinking from the surface to the seabed 3,000 metres below, but now they have almost disappeared,” he said.

“As the water sank it was replaced by warm water flowing in from the south, which kept the circulation going. If that mechanism is slowing, it will mean less heat reaching Europe.”

Such a change could have a severe impact on Britain, which lies on the same latitude as Siberia and ought to be much colder. The Gulf Stream transports 27,000 times more heat to British shores than all the nation’s power supplies could provide, warming Britain by 5-8C. ...

Wadhams’s submarine journeys took him under the North Polar ice cap, using sonar to survey the ice from underneath. He has measured how the ice has become 46% thinner over the past 20 years. The results from these surveys prompted him to focus on a feature called the Odden ice shelf, which should grow out into the Greenland Sea every winter and recede in summer.

The growth of this shelf should trigger the annual formation of the sinking water columns. As sea water freezes to form the shelf, the ice crystals expel their salt into the surrounding water, making it heavier than the water below.

However, the Odden ice shelf has stopped forming. It last appeared in full in 1997. “In the past we could see nine to 12 giant columns forming under the shelf each year. In our latest cruise, we found only two and they were so weak that the sinking water could not reach the seabed,” said Wadhams, who disclosed the findings at a meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna.

As the article goes on to note, the effects of a weakening or even shutdown of thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic are extremely difficult to predict: it could mark the beginning of another Little Ice Age in Northern Europe (and possibly the Atlantic United States), it could merely mean that Europe cools, relatively, within a more general warming.

The point here is that the climate-change schedule seems to be accelerating. From the Peak Oil perspective, that's very bad news: significant, abrupt shifts in local temperatures and rainfall are a major additional stressor (on the energy economy, on food production, on population) that we really can't afford to face while we're trying to manage the end of the fossil-fuel era. (Climate shifts all on their own have historically been major social challenges.) If the disruptive effects of global warming are going to start manifesting within the next two decades, I have to think that significantly reduces our odds (low enough as it is) of finding a sane, more-or-less peaceful transition out of the oil regime.

posted by michael  9:37:49 AM  
tell me about it []  

 

Take care. Call me a sentimentalist—go ahead, because you won't get many chances—but Doghouse Riley made me cry this morning, eulogizing his cat Hoover:

We're granted an illusion of time and we get to share it with others. Then it's gone. And we cry because we can't hold it back.

She never told me her favorite song, so I played Tom Wait's "Time". If she could have, I know she'd have appreciated the growling. Managed to give her a nice spot next to the Boy (with all the big tree roots you never know til you start digging), with her favorite toy (plastic bottle cap) and a coin for the ferryman. If there's a Heaven I trust the bathroom faucet trickles endlessly and the mice are slow.

Didn't make for any less emtionalism that I was listening at that moment to Alex Chilton's beautiful and elegiac "Take Care," from Big Star 3:

This sounds a bit like goodbye;
In a way it is, I guess:
As I leave your sky
And take in the air
Take care, please, take care.

Living with animals is instructive: I sometimes think that there's only one consequential thing I know that they don't, but it's the one thing that makes all the difference. My oldest cat, Samson (one-eyed Sam, lapper at running faucets and eater of cream cheese), is 12 now, and the others not far behind. The fact that I'll have to take care of their passage out of life is inextricably—and growingly—a part of my relationship with them.

In the last few years, there've been a couple of bad stretches were the cat comity of my household has broken: the youngest cat, Ant'ny, is dominant and a bit heedless (a bit of a meathead, if you want the truth), and once in his usually benign wrestling with Sam managed to poke him in his bad eye and cause pain. Samson's been wary of Ant'ny, at times not just wary but hysterically avoidant, ever since. Mostly, we've all learned to keep the peace, and the usual state of things now is comfortable. (However things turn, Nadine, the middle cat, places herself above the fray.) But twice, and for months at a go, the level of tension got to be such that I thought there could be no resolution but to give Ant'ny up for adoption. (It could never be Sam, who's my first cat and who I raised from an unweaned kitten.) What tore me up about that wasn't even so much the prospect of losing Ant'ny's companionship (and he's as comfortably people-centric a cat as I've known): it was the thought that I wouldn't be there, when his time came, to say goodbye, and being unable to believe that that wouldn't somehow make a difference.

When you take responsibility for pets, you make a contract with the universe: you're with them for the whole ride. It's practice, to think of it in Zen terms: the pain of letting them go is part of it. But I hope not to have to learn whatever that's going to teach me for a while yet. Best wishes, Doghouse.

posted by michael  10:45:25 AM  
tell me about it []  

 

I avoided uploading (and linking to) the PDF advance copy of the Vanity Fair article on Jeff Gannon, since I wasn't sure it was intended to be public, but I now see that it's available on the VF website itself, so go ahead and have a look.


posted by michael  2:18:32 PM  
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Shortchanging Gannon, III. Last installment, I promise, and thanks for your patience. But this is where it gets a little freaky ...

Here's a longish excerpt from the Vanity Fair article, the passage in which Margolick/Gooding deal with the Guckert-to-Gannon transition:

Gannon was also becoming increasingly political, and vocal, writing op-eds for various conservative Web sites. It was around this time that “Jeff Gannon” first appeared. ...

Sometime near the beginning of 2001, Gannon gave notice at the auto-body shop. He told McFarland, among others, that he was taking a job with a subcontractor for the Department of Defense, something for which he would need security clearance. For someone of conspicuous patriotism, with a fascination for things military, it seemed a good fit. “He said that whenever the Pentagon came out with a new missile or bomb or tank this subcontractor would do research to decide whether to go ahead with it,” McFarland recalls. “He made it sound like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” McFarland, for one, believed him; after one of the hijacked jetliners crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, he even called Gannon to make sure he was all right.

In fact, Gannon was still in Delaware, though he drove to the Capitol on September 12 just to express his solidarity with his embattled country. The attacks, he said, only heightened his resolve to straighten out his life and contribute to the commonwealth. “I said, ‘Let’s see: your career sucks, your personal life sucks, your financial life sucks.’ . . . It’s like ‘What do you believe in?’” He had already been reading the Bible. Now he intensified his writing, and, to clean his slate completely, moved to Washington, D.C., becoming perhaps the first person ever to go there actually to expiate his sins.

He attended the Leadership Institute’s Broadcast Journalism School, a two-day boot camp for aspiring right-wing journalists, and tried landing a job with Human Events magazine, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and Accuracy in Media, among other conservative outposts. He also began posting pieces at a Web site he called “The Conservative Guy”—“I enlisted in the military more as a challenge to myself than anything, but got so much more than I ever expected,” he declared on it—and at JeffGannon.com, while submitting and writing articles for other sites, such as ff.org (Frontiers of Freedom), IntellectualConservative.com, and MichNews.com. Though his escort business seemed to be tapering off and some of those Web sites went off-line, the two livelihoods apparently overlapped on occasion: on November 12, 2002, the same day Gannon wrote for the Conservative Monitor that George W. Bush had just won a clear electoral mandate, a satisfied customer wrote on an escort-review Web site that Gannon was “easily in the top 5% of any escort I’ve found.”

"It was around this time that 'Jeff Gannon' first appeared"—around what time, exactly? Compare this account, largely scrubbed of identifying dates, with the one I offered in my Alternet article: and notice how thoroughly—I'm tempted to say, with what deliberate care—the timeline is muddled. Margolick's intent here, consistent with the overall bias of the article, is to un-problematize the Guckert/Gannon transition, to make it appear a series of evolutionary steps, a natural progress from opinion to commitment, rather than the dramatic break with a former life which it clearly represented.

Gannon was not "becoming increasingly political" across some ill-defined period in the late '90s and into the early 2000s, not by any practical meaning of the term "political." There was no "Gannon" before the latter half of 2002—as there was no Conservative Guy until a few months before that—as there was no political activity or even public political expression on JD Guckert's part that anyone can point to before that move to D.C. at the start of the year. Those Internet publications don't begin to happen until late in 2002, when they happen all at once and in a spate, and hardly constitute the gradual emergence of a career. Margolick seems to be consciously arranging his account to obscure those facts.

[Incidentally: Guckert's "two livelihoods"? None of the writing that Guckert published was paid, nor were his own conservative websites money-making propositions: they were calling cards, ways of establishing his bona fides to the bigger fish he hoped to swim with. What's more, there is simply no evidence for the assumption Margolick makes, that Guckert was earning a living from escort work: he really should have paid attention to what blogslut and Tex both tried to make him understand, that JG's porn sites weren't primarily escort solicitations, but intended to generate traffic to member sites that JG was affiliating with. It remains a mystery how Guckert was supporting himself after he left Karmak—a mystery that Margolick seems perfectly content to slide right on past, in this case by means of actual misstatement.]

But here's the freaky bit. Look again at Randy McFarland's account above, which places Guckert's resignation from Karmak in early 2001, and testifies both to knowledge of JG's DoD subcontractor cover story (independently reported earlier by another informant) and to an erroneous belief that JG was living in D.C. as of 9/11. Well, here are two separate statements—written statements, worded carefully, according to McFarland, so that he'd be sure of not being misquoted—that McFarland supplied to Tex MacRae during the course of her Propagannon investigative work:

James Guckert (JD) worked for Karmak From April, 1999 to January, 2002. Karmak sub-contracted JD to manage the office, including accounting, scheduling, etc. When JD gave his notice to Karmak in December 2001, we knew his intention was to work in Washington, DC, however, we did not have any knowledge as to his future employment. JD was a good employee and pleasant to work with. His personal and political life was not discussed at work.

I worked with James Guckert (JD) in the mid to late 80's landscaping in the Deleware area. My wife, Amy, and I remained friends with JD through-out the years and when we were planning the start-up of our new business, Karmak, Inc., in 1999 we were fortunate to hire JD for the position of Office Manager. JD proved to be an excellent employee and worked for our company until January 2002. His personal and political interests were never discussed within the work environment. We have not spoken to JD since he went to Washington, DC in 2002.

Now these statements are quite clear that

• Guckert worked and lived in Delaware until the end of 2001,
• McFarland knew where he was during this period (since Guckert was still employed in McFarland's shop), and
• McFarland didn't know what JD was planning to do when he made the move to D.C.

So who is Randy McFarland lying to, Tex MacRae or David Margolick? He can't be telling the truth to both parties. (I don't think it can be a case of Vanity Fair having gotten something wrong, given how thorough their fact-checking is.) And why would he be lying? Is he doing his old friend JD some kind of favor—helping him spin the move to D.C. as the effloresence of an already well-known patriotic commitment? (Certainly the spin seems to have pretty easily turned Margolick's head, anyway.)

Hard as it can be to sort out the odds, I'm pretty sure that McFarland lied to Margolick/Gooding, not to Tex. Not just because of the care McFarland took to compose his earlier statments, but because of the photo evidence: the Karmak group photo in which Guckert appears, which Tex posted about below (and which is still found, oddly, on Karmak's About page), would look to be a feature of the original upload of the Karmak website—the containing page bears a modified date of April 14, 2002, likely the date of first upload and thus very near the date of creation. It's one thing for the photo to have remained there, on a back page of a very lightly updated site: but would it have been created initially on that page (as in McFarland's second story it would have to have been) well over a year after Guckert had last been a Karmak employee, and thus well over a year after the photo would have been taken?

I confess I'm at a loss, for the moment, to understand how or why McFarland would have changed stories like this (and with embellishments, to boot)—and it doesn't seem like Guckert gets much out of the change, if it's done on his behalf. Or is this just another instance of con-man JG arranging as best he can to throw sand in people's eyes once more? Why so much continuing effort to obscure the facts of his move to D.C.?

posted by michael  1:59:06 PM  
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Not even the Brits (their journalists, anyway) are necessarily competent stewards of the English language. Consider this, from the Guardian's article today on Blair's shaky position following the just-finished elections:

[Former Foreign Secretary Robin] Cook's call for a more collegiate style of government was echoed by Peter Hain, leader of the Commons, and by the Blairite moderniser Stephen Byers. Writing in the Guardian, Mr Byers warned it would be a mistake simply to put up the "business as usual" sign outside No 10. ...

In his only speech yesterday - outside No 10 - Mr Blair appeared to concede the point, even correcting references to "I" to "we".

In the first test of collegiate behaviour the premier consulted Gordon Brown twice yesterday as he reconstructed his cabinet. It took longer than expected, delaying expected announcements last night.

Unless the announcements were delayed because Tony B. and Gordon Brown were hanging out till all hours in the dorm hallway, drinking beer and bullshitting about life and the cosmos, I believe the word our authors are looking for is collegial.

posted by michael  11:42:17 AM  
tell me about it []  

 

Shortchanging Gannon, II. How shoddy is the political judgement that produces this assessment of the significance of the Jeff Gannon story?

The deeper the bloggers dug, though, the shallower Gannon seemed to become; the more they tried to build him up, the more he seemed to shrink. ... True, by publishing a series of scorching articles with a scoop or two, he played a perplexing and arguably important role in the defeat last year of Senate minority leader Tom Daschle, of South Dakota. But, from the standpoint of Washington, D.C., power politics—as opposed to pure human interest and intrigue—his irrelevance is one of those rare things on which left and right agree. “I can’t emphasize enough what a marginal figure he is,” says David Corn of the liberal weekly The Nation. “The fact that the guy is, well, ‘lilliputian’ makes him sound bigger than he was,” adds the rightwing National Review’s Jonah Goldberg. Right-wing bloggers, Goldberg wrote, had bagged Dan Rather and Eason Jordan; leftwingers had bagged “a chipmunk.”

Bad enough you should be retailing insights on a right-wing media scandal from Jonah freakin' Goldberg, who would of course never speak about such a thing in less than good faith—but by what standard is David Corn a representative voice of the Left in this context? Nation writer David Corn, yes: but the David Corn whose utterly uncomprehending dismissal of the Gannon story, which he's maintained from the start, has been roundly criticized by that by no means minor segment of the Left that has actually engaged with it.

By what standard? Well, by the standard of the sort of bullshit Beltway centrism that would cherry-pick this aggressively (as, indeed it has to) to get the desired Left-Right convergence: and in the process dismiss the Gannon story as a comic affaire de fringe. Margolick's appeal to the Corn-Goldberg axis might seem merely crass: but consider the other point in the article where the question of significance is allowed to emerge. Here, Margolick and Gooding allow an actually engaged lefty blogger to speak, but the result is if anything even less enlightening:

Others see something darker and more sinister in Gannon’s maneuvers, especially as he gained access to so rarefied a Washington, D.C., venue as the Wednesday meeting, a weekly conclave of conservative politicians and policymakers, led by one of the panjandrums of the Washington conservative establishment, Grover Norquist, of Americans for Tax Reform. “It’s hard to believe that someone with no background in journalism or politics could simply waltz into town, get access to the White House on a regular basis, be invited to Grover’s meetings, and then uncover scoops that take down the minority leader of the Senate,” says John Aravosis, of Americablog.com, who revealed Gannon’s gay-escort Web sites. “Folks work decades for that kind of access and success. The question is whether someone big was helping this guy, and who.” Gannon says that up to a third of the e-mail he gets accuses him of blackmailing someone for access, a charge he called “absolutely, completely, totally false.”

Other people say something so diabolical just isn’t Gannon. “He was almost cherubic when we first met him,” said Bob Johnson, of Rightalk.com, the conservative Web site that gave Gannon an online radio program. “People in Washington get crusty, jaded. Jeff wasn’t like that. He was like a newborn baby, full of glee and giddiness, always with a smile on his face and always laughing.”

Good questions, all, from John Aravosis—and the answer, God help us, is that Gannon's too much an innocent to have bad motives imputed to him! Just too darn cute! (Remember that when we get to the end of the article, and its touching vignette of Gannon at church, where all "is about sin and redemption.") But this time around, it's not just any media right-winger who's allowed to wish the story away: no, it's Bob Johnson, the very Bob Johnson who financed the Web-radio platform on which Jeff Gannon appeared as a personality back in the day, the Bob Johnson whose own player's ambition, and the embarrassment of his entanglement with Jeff Gannon, means that he's about the last person you can trust for unbiased testimony.

Special pleading, anybody? Believe it or not, this passage is the only one in the article that even gestures toward the question—the key point of interest of the whole affair—of how and why someone as improbable as James Guckert managed to acquire the sort of connections he did. And this is as much effort as Margolick and Gooding are willing to put into answering the question—no effort at all, in other words. Not that I see them pursuing a right-wing agenda, as such. What I see, instead, is another instance of the big media Fear of a Blog Planet. Far from promoting the Gannon story to a wide audience, the intent of the VF piece is to drive a stake of (mild, sympathetic) ridicule through it: to make a false equation between Jeff Gannon's negligible personal importance and the significance (nugatory, we're to understand) of the citizen journalism phenomenon, which Margolick and Gooding seem unable or unwilling to address forthrightly. And to reassure themselves and all the rest of us that the pros are still where they belong, at the top of the media ecosystem.

Is Gannon small potatoes? In himself, sure. Maybe he's even the giddy rube Bob Johnson portrays him as. But as both Tex and I have argued, it's Gannon's very littleness that's important—that gives us a window, if we choose to look through it, into the nature of the right-wing communications machine. The anomalies in Gannon's ascent are real: and it doesn't require some deep conspiracy to explicate them, or to document the way they reach into the upper layers of the machine. It requires persistence, and a willingness to see what you're actually looking at: qualities in which, so far, the citizen journalism around the Gannon story has managed to far outshine the dismissive brand practiced by the traditional press. Unfortunately, the Vanity Fair publication hasn't changed that balance any.

posted by michael  8:05:49 PM  
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Shortchanging Gannon. In late March, while I was in the middle of writing the "Becoming Gannon" article that was eventually published on Alternet, I learned from Tex MacRae that David Margolick was working on a Guckert/Gannon profile of some kind for Vanity Fair. (To be precise, the Propagannon principals had asked Tex to cooperate freely with Margolick about any ongoing research. Considering that my piece was on the way to being buried by those same Propagannonites, who would react with high dudgeon to its publication on Alternet, I found the corporate attitude toward who could and couldn't make use of Propagannon research a bit, shall we say, inconsistent. I got the impression that Margolick was OK because SusanG thought his work would be flatteringly ePluribusMedia-centric. In which case, the more fool her.) And I've been waiting since with some trepidation to find out whether the big-league magazine piece was going to eat my little article's lunch.

I needn't have worried, it seems. In spite of superior resources, and their access to Guckert, who they interviewed at some length, there's little in the VF piece that's new—and, sadly, less that's salient. Much less. (Journalists always pay for access one way or another. And though only someone of Jeff Gannon's addled self-infatuation could possibly think the article a net plus, still he's been compensated: Margolick and Gooding do a great deal to smooth over the rough edges in the story, to as it were un-problematize Guckert's progress. I'll have more to say about that in a later post.)

I'm struck, overall, with how politically obtuse Margolick and Gooding are. The question is how much of that obtuseness is evidence of a lack of understanding, how much of it has to do with contamination from the form of celebrity-profile journalism they're practicing here, and how much of it is simply willful. Take, for the space of this post, their thesis about the pursuit of the Gannon story in the left blogosphere. After a somewhat lengthy narrative of the question—the "divorced from reality" Bush press conference question that started the Gannon snowball rolling downhill—Margolick suggests that the whole fuss, as far as the left goes, was basically adventitious:

For a couple of hours [after asking the question], Gannon was thrilled ... But the tide soon turned. Indeed, with that single question, something on the American left seemed to snap. Its accumulated frustration—over losing the presidential election, over its growing political impotence, over the administration’s attempts to manipulate what it already considered a passive, supine media, over seeing right-wing bloggers help take down Dan Rather and CNN boss Eason Jordan—boiled over. And the vitriol soon engulfed Jeff Gannon.

[Eason Jordan, by the way, wasn't "taken down" until well after Gannon was outed as James Guckert, and for that matter as a gay porn webmaster, a point you can recover reading my earlier compare-and-contrast posts on Eason- and Gannon-gate. But why let the facts stand in the way of a good myth?] This is every bit as Gannon-friendly, if not Gannon-approved, a narrative as Margolick and Gooding could have cooked up: testimony to the sort of silent compromises inherent in a journalism of access. Indeed, it's put from Gannon's own perspective: we're left holding our breath anticipating the tide of "vitriol" that's about to "engulf" the man. And that vitriol itself? Nothing to do, nothing essential, with the case in question: it's just the opportunistic lashing-out of a bunch of (however understandably) frustrated losers eager for an emotional release.

To be fair, though, they've been given some help from our own side reaching that view of the matter. That's where Propagannon comes in: Margolick and Gooding turn to the ePM effort at the end of the article, and boy howdy, do they leave an ugly impression. I argued, at the time SusanG was preparing the Guckert bio research dump that was diarized on dKos, that it was a significant public-relations error to take the sort of snarky, personal tone that she was taking: that a qualified kind of sympathy had to be offered Guckert so that the shape and significance of the story could emerge, so that Guckert could be seen not to be just a kind of hapless victim of a blogmob mentality. (A stance I worked to adopt in my own piece.) Based on how Margolick writes it, my points would seem to be vindicated:

As time passed, Gannon came to seem, to at least some of the bloggers, as more like a freelance zealot than the linchpin of some much larger conspiracy. Interest in him waned and some of them even came to feel sorry for him, at least until he uttered his latest outrage. They now admit that for them Gannon emerged as less a target in and of himself and more of an instrument for venting rage and for building what Gardner and Keeler have incorporated as “ePluribus Media,” an Internet-based, freelance investigative unit. “At this point, it could have been a dead dog in the road,” says Gardner. “He ought to be sending us flowers. He was not much of anybody and now he’s swaggering around with a persecution complex talking about book deals.”

The personal animus (not to mention the book-deal envy) in this isn't just unseemly: it's horribly off-message, and makes me wonder whether Susan Gardner even understands what the Propagannon effort is actually about. Want to give aid and comfort to the right-wing propaganda machine of which Jeff Gannon is a small (but emblematic) part? Say shit like this—make it easy for a guy like Margolick to ignore the genuine political import of the story. I'm amazed that Susan can have had so little sense of the PR requirements—or so much unwarranted trust in a journalist who, for Chrissakes, has to be understood to have his own agenda—as to have offered up that "dead dog" line. For any future ePM has as an enterprise, somebody had better figure out how to hustle her out of range when the press come sniffing around.

posted by michael  2:03:54 PM  
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Speaking of citizen journalism, please take note that Tex MacRae, who focuses on Iraq war blogging at UnFair Witness, has created a new site, Becoming Gannon, as a repository for research on the the Guckert/Gannon story—and on the little rogue's gallery of right-wing operatives that surrounds it. I'll be contributing there from time to time, assuming I get my currently distracted act together: but Tex is where the research mojo resides, and you should definitely check back to Becoming Gannon periodically to see what's been dredged up.


posted by michael  10:38:01 AM  
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Nice to see that MSNBC, the network that practically invented jarvising, really gets the whole citizen journalism thing—and is putting its money, in Web terms, where its mouth is. Funny I've seen so little discussion about it; you'd think Buzzmachine'd be all over something like this, wouldn't you? I mean, what with it being the wave of the future and all?

Herewith, the current MSNBC assignments for all you citizen scrapbookers reporters out there:

Assignment 1: A mother's best advice
In celebrating mother's day, MSNBC is asking its readers to submit the best advice given by their mothers.

Assignment 2: Spring has sprung
With the change of season, MSNBC is asking readers to send in their thoughts on what signifies to them that spring has arrived.

Assignment 3: Baseball beginnings
With a new baseball season upon us, MSNBC is asking readers to send in their memories from their first big league baseball games. Click above to submit your memory.

Assignment 4: Frontline families
Are you or a loved one serving in the Military? Was the training appropriate for the tour of duty - too little, too harsh, just right? How is your local community responding to the war effort? How does this military service affect your family? Send us your report!

Around Chicago, anyway, Spring hasn't yet Sprung (hell, we've got a freeze warning for tonight): a scandal that only engaged citizen reporting is likely to get to the bottom of. (Why does the liberal media hate Spring? They probably hate mothers, too.) Here's hoping this post helps end the lefty blogosphere's puzzling inaction on this, and all MSNBC's other hot journalisming topics.

posted by michael  10:30:33 AM  
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The soft landing. Kunstler has a telling brief passage about technological optimism that ought to give pause to anyone who thinks we can innovate our way out of the Long Emergency:

No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough will come true. These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing ardently for a seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements.

But for the sake of argument, let's assume contra Kunstler that there are technical solutions near to hand that would allow us—not to fully balance the energy deficit that declining oil production will create in our economy, much less to extend the regime of unlimited growth in consumption—but that would allow us with minimal disruption to bridge the gap that separates our current economy from the low-growth, sustainable economy that pretty much has to succeed the fossil fuel age, now certainly drawing to a close. A soft landing, to coin a phrase, though hardly onto a feather bed. Let's say that the challenges facing us are challenges of scale more than challenges of technical innovation, challenges of organization and investment and of social will. Let's say that what faces us is something like the man-on-the-moon challenge, though one really dwarfing it in technical and social complexity, and likelier to require twenty years rather than ten to meet.

The question is, how lucky do we have to be to find our way to that soft landing?

Let's start with the fact that we can't have just any sort of trajectory of oil decline. Oil production will have to continue to increase—i.e., not reach peak—for a substantial part of the next quarter-century: the rate of increase will slow, of course, and will begin to fall well behind the rate of increase of demand, which comes now not just from the United States but from China and India. The energy supply gap will become more and more painful: but it will have to become not too painful at any given point, and not too suddenly. Global competition for oil must be conducted rationally, if not cooperatively, without any of the main players giving in to the temptation to undertake military adventures. Oil producers will have to be honest and transparent in their statements of reserves—rather against their own interests—and the production curve will have to be such that there is general consensus (general political consensus, not just, as in the case of global warming, scientific) on the fact and the timing of the coming oil peak, and the speed of the subsequent production falloff. There will have to be widespread public awareness of, and urgency about, the fossil-fuel transition, but that urgency must never be allowed to tip over into panic.

Telford's Jesse accuses Kunstler of a species of bad faith, for constructing a doomsday scenario by "assuming the worst [outcome] at each turn on the path to the depletion of oil." On the contrary: I think any soft-landing scenario requires that we be maximally lucky, maximally resilient, and maximally wise in negotiating that path. Look at it dispassionately: just how much give is there in the system? The American financial house rests, as Billmon frequently reminds us, on a narrow and shrinking base. (The fact that the chief prop of what Billmon calls "ODIC," the Organization of Dollar Importing Countries, is China, which just happens to be our chief emerging oil competitor, doesn't exactly make the setup any less shaky.) Our political, media, and corporate elites are in the aggregate more parochial, less rational, less capable of foresight and self-sacrifice than at any time since the end of World War II. Many of them regard environmentalism as a form of criminal conspiracy against their interests. Our populace as a whole is sunk, by the deliberate and long-term practice of those elites, in indolence and hopeless fantasies of wealth. A significant proportion of that populace is committed to a crypto-fascist ideology of religious and national particularism, and has had its civic instincts relentlessly (and again deliberately) brutalized by violent, eliminationist rhetoric for most of the last generation—believes, in fact, that any political repudiation it suffers can happen only through the agency of treason.

Is this the description of a polity that can meet the challenge of transitioning its entire economic base away from the energy equations that have grounded it for more than a century? Technical solutions to social problems are never merely technical solutions. The technological optimism that sees a soft landing ahead depends on unspoken assumptions about social and political normalcy—about our capacity as a society for large-scale undertakings and what might be called organized selflessness—that are no longer safe to make. No doubt that capacity still exists, even at our current low political ebb. But the capacity for social violence exists, too: and it's at a dangerously high level. And our heedless profligacy has strained us to the limits; we have little margin for error. All it's going to take is a couple of good, hard knocks—a quick drop in the dollar, a sudden, sharp (and lasting) upward correction in oil prices, an avian flu pandemic, a significant homeland terrorist strike—and we're likely to find that we've swung into a period of wild instability if not active each-against-all struggle.

I can't say it's going to happen. (And I sure as hell don't want it to.) I can say that if it happens, and to the extent it does, we're that much less likely to find the path to the soft landing. With the best will in the world, time isn't our friend: and the best will may be very hard to come by. This is the worst moment in our history to be faced with the success of a fascist tendency within one of the two major parties. Even defeating the Christian Right may not be enough, given their seemingly infinite capacity for resentment (and their probable willingness to translate resentment into violence): but if they continue much longer as a dominant political force, if their GOP minions steal another one in 2008, then God—their God—help us, because it's damn sure at that point we won't be getting help from any other quarter.

posted by michael  10:53:22 AM  
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