Sunday, January 04, 2009
Of Sputnik babies, paratroopers, and senators: Why Caroline Kennedy's "qualifications" are a bad joke
The first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched on October 4, 1957, and burned up upon re-entering Earth's atmosphere on January 4, 1958. About mid-way through its effective life, on November 26, 1957, my mom launched me in Lamesa, Texas. And on the very next day, in New York City, Jackie Kennedy launched her daughter, Caroline Bouvier Kennedy. Caroline Kennedy and I are thus "of an age" — meaning we're both now 51, and that we're both "of" the "Space Age." We're both tail-end Baby Boomers, but more specifically, we're "Sputnik babies" whose very pregnant mothers perhaps looked for that same unblinking point of light crossing the same night skies, albeit half a continent apart from one another.
I remember watching Caroline Kennedy and her brother John-John on television at their father's funeral in November 1963. I remember being told that she and I were almost exactly the same age. I felt very sad for her, and I've been aware ever since that while her life has been filled with certain kinds of privileges, growing up with a daddy has not been one of them. I, by contrast, was able to celebrate my dad's 86th birthday with him this Christmas Eve just past — and I would not trade that, nor the years in between, for all of Caroline Kennedy's fortune and privilege. She seems like a nice person, and although my politics differ from hers as dramatically as the circumstances of our respective upbringings, on a personal level I wish her nothing but good things and happiness.
But I've been baffled and dismayed that she, or anyone else, has tried to make a serious argument that Caroline Kennedy is well qualified to become the next junior United States Senator from New York.
I will concede that she's minimally qualified — which is to say, per section 3 of Article I of the Constitution, she has indeed "attained ... the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States." I would also agree that the current junior U.S. Senator from New York was not much, if any, better qualified before she was elected to that office. And I will stipulate that from time to time throughout our history there have been many other U.S. Senators, from not just New York but every state at some time or another, whose qualifications were also objectively poor. Some of them nevertheless turned into adequate or even better legislators once in office. These things are not in dispute.
Yet as I've watched and listened to Ms. Kennedy discuss her purported qualifications to become Hillary Clinton's successor during press interviews, I've felt a mix of astonishment, amusement, and pity.
Ms. Kennedy says, for example, "I am a lawyer." That is true in exactly the same sense that I could say "I am a paratrooper."
I haven't actually ever been in the Army, you see. But I own a pair of camouflage pants, and I did take a weekend skydiving course and made — and survived! — one static-line jump from 2000 feet while I was in college! Ms. Kennedy is, likewise, a law school graduate and a member of the bar in both New York State and the District of Columbia (I suspect at least one of those via reciprocity, rather than her having taken and passed both bar exams, but that's just a guess). But she's no more actually practiced law than I've secured the Arnhem bridge as part of Operation Market Garden. If both of us are being really honest in describing ourselves, I'd say I'm a lawyer, and she'd say she's an unemployed heiress.
In Sunday's New York Times Magazine, however, Lisa Belkin — described by the NYT as a "a contributing writer and author of the [NYT-hosted] Motherlode blog" — makes yet another serious effort to refute those who've questioned Ms. Kennedy's objective and non-dynastic qualifications. The only possible way to do that, however, is to either (a) change the definition of what it means to be "qualified," (b) expand the list of experience types which can lead to becoming "qualified," or (c) do both. Ms. Belkin ambitiously tries for option (c).
Ms. Belkin tries to persuade us that we ought to change our ideas about what it means to be "qualified" by trying to ridicule other purportedly unqualified people who've nevertheless gone to Congress: "Those who aspire to serve in Congress sometimes 'pay their dues' by playing for the N.B.A. or the N.F.L. or starring on 'The Love Boat,' which are all less relevant qualifications for the job than financing city schools."
But playing sports does involve teamwork and discipline, and acting involves communication skills — all qualities that Ms. Kennedy has yet to demonstrate that she possesses. Whether it was on the set of "The Love Boat" or the floor of the U.S. House, Fred Grandy certainly managed to speak without embarrassing tangles of "ya knows" and "umms." And does anyone who's heard them both speak doubt that former Congressman and Sooner QB J.C. Watts could eat Caroline Kennedy's lunch (and then drink her milkshake) in any kind of political debate?
I will grant that Caroline Kennedy is probably gangbusters at twisting arms or guilting vast numbers of rich friends, classmates, and wanna-be Kennedy groupies into donating lots and lots of money that they can well afford. But that's hardly the same thing as actually running even a single school, or a single classroom. Hell, nobody has ever doubted Rod Blagojevich's prowess as a fund-raiser. I'd be far more impressed with Caroline Kennedy if instead of an unpaid no-need-to-show-up fund-raising "job" for the New York schools, she'd actually spent even a few weeks substitute-teaching a seventh grade civics class.
To persuade us to ignore such traditional qualifications as prior public service in a lesser elected office, or military service, or executive service running a business, Ms. Belkin points out that Ms. Kennedy "has served on boards — those of the Commission on Presidential Debates, the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation — where those who worked with her agree that she was hands-on and not just window decoration." But did she have any qualification for any of those positions other than being a Kennedy? And even as a "hand-on" board member, did she ever do anything but attend meetings with other wealthy, famous board members, at which they all listened to reports and then cast mostly unanimous votes? If you told me she actually ran the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or that she had executive or operational experience of any sort in any of these organizations, then that might suggest that she had acquired some wisdom or skills which she could potentially use as a U.S. Senator. But with due respect to Ms. Belkin and to Ms. Kennedy, there ought to be something more required by way of qualifications for the U.S. Senate than a demonstrated ability to show up and vote "yay" or "nay" on other people's ideas and hard work.
So then Ms. Belkin approaches and perhaps crosses into a sexist argument. It's one that may be patronizing and offensive to women who've actually had both successful families and successful careers outside the home — a category of women which (were they still alive) would include both my own mother and Caroline Kennedy's:
[W]omen changed the culture of the workplace, not least when highly visible women began to leave it. The rhythm of office work — its hours, its demands, its life cycle — is designed for a man, ideally a man with a wife back home with the kids. Ever since the industrial age, career tracks have been built on the assumption that you can work around the clock in your 20s, shoulder increasing responsibility in your 30s and 40s and begin to ratchet down and move over for the next generation in your 50s and 60s.
That doesn’t work for many women, who are apt to want to pause, physically and emotionally, for children, maybe slow down in their 30s, when men are charging ahead, and come back with a new energy in their 50s, when men are slowing down. Someday, perhaps, work will become more a lattice than a ladder — a path that allows for moving up, stepping down a notch or two, taking a few large sideways strides, making your way upward but not necessarily at a sprint....
But this vision works only if experience — we’re back to that word again — is redefined. If what you do, and think, and produce, and change all count — even if none of your activities take place in an office, where you enjoy a title and a salary....
I agree with part of this. I'm one of those people, for example, who thinks that Barack Obama's experience as a father is at least a small plus in his thin list of credentials. And I'm certainly one of those people who's impressed that Sarah Palin could address a governor's conference in Texas, fly back to Alaska to give birth to her fifth child, and then resume her work as a public servant after a break measured in hours instead of weeks or months.
I don't think you need to diminish those of either sex who have climbed ladders, however, by pretending that lattices are exactly the same. And I don't think we should pretend that presiding over a family dinner table is comparable to presiding over a presidential cabinet meeting either. But provided that we're still talking about identifying genuine excellence and extraordinary achievement of some sort, then I'm open to considering non-traditional categories in which that excellence and achievement can be manifested, and I'm also open to further consideration of why those categories ought be counted as senatorial qualifications. So let's take Ms. Belkin's prescription on its own terms:
Q: Whether in an office with a title and a salary or not, what precisely has Caroline Kennedy ever "done, thought, produced, or changed" that we should count as a sound qualification for her to become the next junior U.S. Senator from New York?
A: [For sound effects comprising answer, click here.]
I'm emphatically not insisting upon conventional achievements. If Caroline Kennedy's particular genius was that she figured out how to make one 20-count package of Pampers meet all of an infant's diapering needs for six full weeks, I'd be very impressed by that, even though she didn't have an office and wasn't a vice president of product research for Procter and Gamble. Or if she'd done some substitute teaching, for instance, and had gotten every single student in a seventh grade civics class to understand that Article I of the Constitution is about Congress — a datum which Joe Biden, the very Vice President-elect whom she helped Barack Obama select, hasn't quite managed to figure out despite his own law degree and years on the Senate Judiciary Committee — then point that out to me. Just show me something, anything, that she's done, thought, produced, or changed that is genuinely impressive. And then we can talk about whether it's the sort of "impressive" that ought to count as a legitimate senatorial qualification.
But after working up all that righteous indignation (and going out of her way to insult poor Fred Grandy), Ms. Belkin utterly fails to make any persuasive showing that Caroline Kennedy is qualified even under her (Ms. Belkin's) expanded and re-defined terms. Indeed, with this sentence at the beginning of her concluding paragraph, Ms. Belkin practically flees the debate hall: "None of this is to say that Caroline Kennedy deserves to be senator, or that she wouldn’t be better off being elected to the post rather than appointed to it." Well, duh. If that's not a grand-scale cop-out, I guess it's just a wild coincidence that the first eight paragraphs of the op-ed were about Caroline Kennedy at all then, huh?
Let's grant Ms. Belkin's point, gentle readers, that some types of "untraditional [experience should] count" at least some times and in some ways. But let's grant, too, what's obvious even so to anyone with an ounce of intellectual honesty:
Whether appointed, elected, or otherwise anointed, and whether based on conventional or unconventional standards of achievement and experience, Caroline Kennedy does not deserve, and is not well qualified, to be a U.S. Senator — no more than either she or I deserve or are well qualified to be paratroopers. An accident of both our births made us Sputnik babies, and an accident of her birth, combined with her family's tragic fate, made her into a sadly beloved American princess. Grown-up princesses who actually govern, however, are only for fairy-tales, and the accident of Caroline Kennedy's birth ought not make her into a United States Senator.
Posted by Beldar at 03:42 AM in Congress, Current Affairs, Family | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)
Saturday, January 03, 2009
Review: Beldar & kids see Jim Carrey's "Yes Man"
My oldest daughter, Sarah, was working today, but I took my sons Kevin and Adam and my younger daughter Molly to a Saturday afternoon movie matinée. None of the choices were terribly appealing, but they opted to take a chance on Jim Carrey's latest comedy, "Yes Man." My kids liked it quite a bit better than I did — Molly and Kevin gave it four stars on a zero-to-five scale, and Adam gave it three, but I would only give it one.
I am certain that at some point during the earliest planning for this movie, someone made the inevitable observation that "Gee, this script reminds me a whole lot of Jim Carrey's hit from just over a decade ago, 'Liar Liar.'" And that observation ought to have triggered some serious second-thinking and re-writing. But it didn't. The result is a film that's completely predictable, from the first frames to the closing credits — a film that lacks even the dramatic arc of a sleazy lawyer's eventual redemption. Other one-word descriptions that I'd consider apt include stale, boring, tedious, and trite.
My kids and I did find leading lady Zoey Deschanel appealing and funny, and according to imdb.com, she and Carrey actually share the same birthday — January 17th. The problem is that hers was in 1980, making her a still very young-looking 28, whereas his was in 1962 (and he looks it). They are simply not a credible couple. Indeed, Carrey reminds me more and more of Jerry Lewis at the same stage of his career, struggling in an ever less successful, ever more painful effort to simulate youth through a goofy, zaney affect. (Maybe the reason my kids found this less sad than I did was that they haven't got a clue who Jerry Lewis is.)
Indeed, this movie even manages to make super-model Molly Sims, in a too-brief supporting role as Carrey's equally improbable ex-wife, look comparatively unglamorous. Her presence in the movie, however, gives me more than enough of a fair-use excuse to republish this fabulous photo of Ms. Sims, not from "Yes Man" but from the 2004 Sports Illustrated swimsuit model collection, just to illuminate — as a matter of public interest and, umm, intellectual artistic commentary — the potential squandered by Warner Bros.
And on that note, and with that visual, I'll wish you all a Happy New Year!
Posted by Beldar at 09:46 PM in Family, Film/TV/Stage | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Rather seeks trial to promote his revisionist history, but the world still can't look to CBS News for the actual truth
Charles Johnson and Glenn Reynolds are not the only ones who are dismayed by the "revisionist history" being pushed by Dan Rather and uncritically repeated by National Public Radio.
I played a small but enthusiastic part as one of bloggers who were scrutinizing Dan Rather, "60 Minutes," and CBS News during the 2004 Rathergate controversy. As I reminisced earlier this fall:
CBS executive vice president Jonathan Klein had derided the bloggers who were writing daily about the forgeries and CBS News' then-still-ongoing efforts to defend the indefensible — famously saying that "you couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances [at CBS News and "60 Minutes"], and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing what he thinks."
I was another one of those pajamas-wearing bloggers, and Hugh [Hewitt and others] appreciated the irony that CBS News had nevertheless thought enough of me some years earlier [when I was an associate at Houston-based Baker Botts] to employ me (without pajamas) as its own lead counsel before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, when I successfully defended a summary judgment in CBS News' favor in a defamation lawsuit based on another of its national broadcasts.
But there's still more in my "small world of Rathergate" department: CBS News is now being defended in Dan Rather's lawsuit against it by Jim Quinn of New York-based Weil, Gotshal & Manges. I also practiced in the Houston office of that firm, the last three of those (1988-1991) as Quinn's partner.
Although we were in the same practice area, represented some common clients, and consulted on a few matters, Quinn and I didn't ever work together closely or get to know one another well, and I left that firm in 1992 to return to a Texas-based firm with whose partners I had far more in common. So I have nothing even remotely resembling "inside information," nor continuing connections by which I might even accidentally blunder into any. And the coincidence that more than a decade later, one of Quinn's former partners in a national mega-firm later became a conservative blogger critical of both Rather and CBS News creates no conflict of interest for Quinn or WG&M.
Quinn's had some early success against Rather and his lawyers, and in a November 2008 NYT article, Quinn was quoted confidently talking a good game about his client's odds:
Jim Quinn, a lawyer at Weil, Gotshal & Manges who is representing CBS, said in an interview that whatever Mr. Rather had learned in the discovery process would not help his case. He said it was the network that had gained the most ground, especially in persuading the judge to dismiss five of the seven original claims by Mr. Rather, as well any claims against individual CBS executives. CBS is believed to be spending about as much on its defense as Mr. Rather is spending.
Mr. Quinn also said CBS would consider asking for a summary dismissal of the case, once the process of discovery had concluded. “Either on summary judgment or at trial, we feel very comfortable we’ll succeed,” he said. “We feel the case is meritless.”
And if I may lapse for a moment into the kind of crude language Texas courtroom veterans often use when referring to "New York litigators," Jim Quinn is no only-motion-practice silk-pants candy-ass. He's got his share of scars and the legal street-smarts that can only be acquired by actually trying a fair number of significant cases to a verdict.
The problem, though — as I noted at length when Rather first filed his case, here and here — is that Quinn's hands are effectively tied by the fact that his client was spectacularly gutless in its dealings with the psychotic prima donna who for so long occupied its anchor chair. Quinn's defense for CBS News won't be that Rather and Mapes and their entire team were incompetent, biased frauds who committed the worst kind of journalistic malpractice to change the outcome of a presidential election and then, when caught, tried to cover it up. CBS had ample, compelling, even glorious "good cause" to fire Rather no matter what time term remained on his contract or what other terms it contained to guarantee his preeminence at the network.
But CBS didn't do that. Instead, it convened the Thornburgh-Boccardi Panel, whose ultimate report was far from a bare-knuckled or clear-eyed assessment of the culpability of Rather and CBS News' top brass. CBS News eased Rather out, rather than immediately throwing his sorry butt on the street.
And now, instead of defending itself against Rather by using the awesome mechanisms of the law to prove, once and for all, the essential truths of Rathergate — including the indisputable fact that the Killian memos were pathetically obvious forgeries — CBS News' defense is not that Rather is a crazed scoundrel and a national disgrace, but that CBS fully performed its contractual obligations to Rather. Thus, Quinn was quoted saying in April 2008 that
the contract issue left [after the pretrial rulings dismissing most of Rather's claims] relates to "whether or not we 'benched' him and whether he had sufficient time on 60 Minutes and 60 Minutes II after he stepped down as the anchorperson."
"We obviously say we gave him all the time in the world," says Quinn.
So: No one can expect Quinn or his client to win this case via the righteous, straightforward path. CBS long since forfeited the absolute high ground, and it's left instead trying to stick to a comparative high ground, in which it must rely on establishing that Rather is merely being unreasonable and greedy (instead of crazed, corrupt, and paranoid).
This case may provide some fine moments of legal theater. But no one should labor under any misconceptions that it's even remotely about justice.
Posted by Beldar at 09:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (36) | TrackBack (1)
Renewing Texas drivers licenses online
In consulting the Texas Department of Public Safety's website to find out the location of the nearest drivers license renewal office, I learned today that I, and many other Texans, are able to renew our drivers licenses entirely over the internet, paying by credit card and promising (via an online click) that we haven't incurred some new visual or other disability.
Being spared the inconvenience and indignity of appearing in person to renew my slightly-expired drivers license before embarking upon my annual year-end driving trek to the Panhandle was thus, to me, an unexpected Christmas present.
Thank you, Texas!
(In due course, during the new year, I'll probably ponder, and then grumble over, the marginally increased likelihood of unfit drivers who'd have flunked the in-person eye-test and stopped driving as a result — in particular if one such collides with my car. But having been spared today something I'd been dreading, I'm willing to let the gift horse's teeth go unchecked for the rest of 2008.)
Posted by Beldar at 04:50 PM in Law (2008), Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Friday, December 19, 2008
Review: Blackberry Storm cellphone
I. Background: Curmudgeonly lawyer as early adapter
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was an early adapter for cell phone technology. That's when I was a big-firm lawyer who traveled a lot and who did not at all like being out of telephone contact or riding in ordinary taxis. I had the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x, a/k/a "The Brick." I progressed through a series of upgrades to, in due course, the Motorola StarTAC, a/k/a "the Star Trek communicator."
But at some point — coinciding roughly with my flight from "BigLaw" to a more independent law practice either solo or in very small firms — I decided that I didn't like traveling so much, I didn't actually mind taxis, I was sick and tired of being so "in touch" all of the time, and I didn't want to be accessible 24/7/365 to anyone but my family. So for several years in the early part of this decade, I resolutely refused to carry a cell phone — any kind of cell phone, ever.
Colleagues found that perplexing and frustrating, and eventually, so too did clients — whose views I could less afford (literally) to ignore. So I bought a pay-in-advance ultra-simple El Cheapo™ cellphone whose most advanced feature was voicemail, and I used it for two or three years only to the minimum extent necessary.
I replaced it a couple of years ago with a Motorola KRZR K1m, which also did good duty as a personal MP3 player while I was traveling or exercising; it allowed me to keep up, barely, with my four kids and their increasingly phone-and-text-message existence as they moved into their teen years. And now I'm somewhat chagrined to report that I've fallen completely off the lo-tech wagon: It appears that I'm in the process of becoming a Crackberry Addict. So with my purchase of a Blackberry Storm
II. Why not an IPhone?
The Blackberry Storm is a market reaction to Apple's IPhone, and the most obvious and significant feature of either is its touch-screen.
I'm content to be a somewhat distant fan of Apple. It's an innovative company that influences technology in indisputably important and mostly positive ways. But as a matter of principle, I utterly refuse to support it with my purchasing dollars because of its aggressive, toxicly-anticompetitive linking practices. I can't count the number of times I've rejected (and/or deleted) ITunes applications from various of my computers and other electronic devices because I refuse to subsidize a company who insists, for example, on maintaining a right to grant its permission before I can listen to a recorded song I've purchased. Thus, for philosophical reasons unrelated to Apple's comparative technological advantages, buying an IPhone was never something I considered.
Blackberry's manufacturer, however, "Research in Motion," has a fine reputation as an innovator and a nimble responder to its addicted customer base's wants and needs. I was willing to consider abandoning my stodgy old Motorola preference (rarely cutting-edge anymore, but rugged and adequately supported) in RIM's favor based on the dazzling features promised by the Storm.
I'd also had an extremely negative experience with the sole service provider for the IPhone, AT&T (as corporate successor to Cingular). Before the KRZR, I briefly used a Nokia product that proved in its first 30 days to have either a manufacturing or design defect — it was never entirely clear which — that Cingular refused to accept responsibility for. This led me to become, for the very first time in my life, a plaintiff in my own capacity in small claims court; I'm now prevented by contract from revealing the terms upon which that litigation was settled, but suffice it to say that I was once extremely unhappy with that company and I remain unlikely to deal with its cellular division by choice in the future.
It may only be the luck of the draw, but by contrast I've been comparatively pleased with Verizon Wireless' products and services, and Verizon is the exclusive U.S. service provider for the Storm. I ordered my Storm from a Verizon storefront operation on December 9, and despite their warning that it might not be delivered until after Christmas, it arrived at my house by FedEx on December 15.
III. The Storm's touch-screen and keyboard
The Storm is about the same length and thickness as my KRZR, and has the same glossy (but finger-print and smudge-prone) finish. The Storm is slightly wider. The workmanship seems to be very, very good.
I will not pretend that holding it to one's ear — like a classic old Ma Bell telephone handset, or even the more conventional clamshell cellphone handset — is natural and aesthetically satisfying. Instead it's like talking into a deck of playing cards. But that mostly misses the point. During my KRZR (or should I say KRZR-ier?) days, I became one of those people on the top of the Borg's lists of likely assimilation candidates — yes, one of those people often seen driving or sitting at a restaurant wearing a Bluetooth headset, with a flashing LED, in one ear. In particular, I love to type or pace back and forth while I talk on business calls. With my Storm, as with my KRZR, essentially all of my longer calls will be on a hands-free Bluetooth headset with the phone either on my desk or in a belt holster. So the Storm's shape — which, again, is all about the touch-screen — makes plenty of sense, and is no significant disadvantage.
Unlike the IPhone, the Storm's touch-screen is tactile, and you actually have to press on (not just touch) it to register your inputs. I have moderately large hands and fingers, and whether it's with a touch-screen or some sort of mechanical keyboard squeezed down into phone size, there's no chance that I'll ever match my computer keyboard typing speed and accuracy on any phone. (I'm an excellent touch-typist who can exceed 100wpm with superb accuracy on my desktop keyboard; indeed, my high school typing teacher once insisted that I had a promising career before me in law — as a court reporter.) That being acknowledged — and it's a nontrivial point, but an unavoidable one — I'm pretty happy with the Storm's touch-screen, and in particular with its keyboard, after a few days' use.
Look, I managed to burn neural pathways sufficient to let me poke the "7" chiclet-style button on my KRZR four times in quick succession for every occasion on which I wanted to include the letter "S" in a text message to my 17-year-old daughter. When it's oriented in landscape mode, the Storm's QWERTY touch-pad keyboard lights up before you actually press it; if you pay a reasonable amount of attention to that, and are willing to learn/burn your new neural pathways with both thumbs (which is vastly faster than using one index finger), you'll adapt to the Storm's keyboard pretty quickly. Blackberry's predictive typing software (suggesting what you really meant to say) is unobtrusive and useful, too.
Will I use my Storm to write 3000-word screeds — or, for that matter, to compose posts on BeldarBlog? Not likely. Will I write the Great American Novel on my Storm? Umm, no. But it's already clear that for text-messaging the kids (or letting a client know I'm running five minutes late to a meeting), using the Storm will be vastly better and faster than trying to text-message on a traditional cellphone.
And for uses other than typing, the Storm's screen is simply gorgeous. It's crisp and bright and clear in full daylight. Reading incoming emails is a pleasure. I have no expectation that my new cellphone will wholly replace either my laptop or my desktop computers. But in a pinch, it can do a lot of what they can do. And that's pretty cool.
IV. Other applications
I have a pretty beefy Contacts list that I normally maintain using Microsoft Outlook, and that represents a large time investment in data acquisition and capture. Motorola's proprietary "Phone Tools" software, while extremely frustrating in its Verizon-friendly versions (because of its ruthlessly planned inability to manage non-Verizon-purchased music files or other media files), did a decent job of synching that Contacts list to my KRZR. And I had grown utterly dependent upon — and extremely fond of — using my KRZR's voice activated dialing software with a Bluetooth headset. Being able to push a button on my Bluetooth headset and say, "Call Dyer, Sarah, mobile" to immediately reach my daughter's cellphone while I'm driving (without ever touching the phone itself) was a very important feature to me.
Fortunately, the Storm has the exact same voice activated dialing software. Its initial refusal to perform was remedied by nothing more complicated than turning the Storm off and removing, then reseating, the battery (causing the phone to do a hard re-boot). The voice activating dialing is now working flawlessly, and paired with a Bluetooth headset, it's worth more than the phone's weight in gold as far as I'm concerned.
Another outstanding app is the "Visual Voice Mail." With it, instead of simply getting an icon indicating that I had one or more missed calls and that I now have one or more voicemails waiting, I get a list of line items for each missed call with the number — and name, if it's someone from my Contacts list — along with a button on the touch-screen to push that permits me to immediately play (and replay and delete) just that particular voicemail message.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, that is a useful application. Being able to view and navigate this via the Storm's touch-screen — as opposed to through a voicemail menu — is a huge improvement in my ability to manage my missed phone calls. Being able to pick my clients' (and a few judges' chambers') voicemail messages to me out of a long list, and to listen to and respond to them immediately during a busy, busy day, is simply huge, and well worth the extra $3/month.
I did have one frustrating problem: Because I also use Microsoft's Office Live service to host my business website and business email, my Outlook 2003 Contacts are actually maintained remotely on one of Microsoft's servers, rather than as part of a local Outlook .pst file. Blackberry's included Desktop Manager CD has a straight-forward application to sync the phone's Contacts list to most personal information managers, including Outlook and Outlook Express, but it couldn't find the online version that I'm now using. I ended up doing a temporary work-around — exporting my Contacts data from Microsoft's server to a cvs file on my hard drive, then importing that into my (never-before-used) Microsoft Express, then syncing my Storm up to that instead of to Microsoft Outlook. That's the kind of kink that is to be expected, though, in a brand-new product. If you're not game for finding a work-around for that kind of problem, you probably ought to put off buying any touch-screen cellphone for a few more months.
Per Blackberry's reputation, I also had no trouble at all in configuring my Storm to download and display both my POP-account based personal email and my MS Office Live online-based business email accounts in separate (virtual) buttons on my Storm's touch-screen. The Storm always offers me the option to delete only the handset copy of the emails I read on it or both versions. And when I read through and winnow my personal and business emails on my laptop or desktop computers, the Storm syncs up to those changes in my email lists automatically too. So keeping my personal and business emails synced is going to be a snap.
(This, though, is where the "Crackberry" name comes from. You can of course configure the Storm to give you an audible tone whenever you receive a new email, and the temptation to review each one as it comes in is almost irresistible. I suspect I'll end up keeping the audible tone for my business email address, and suppressing it for emails that go to my personal and blog email addresses. It's either that, or ask one of Pavlov's dog's to make room for a new pallet in the cages.)
For my non-copy-protected music files, RIM's Blackberry Desktop Manager did a straightforward job of copying them into my Storm. I haven't messed much yet with the camera or video functions. And I haven't yet made any attempt to use the GPS/directions functions, and remain skeptical of those. As much a creature of habit (who rarely gets lost) as I am, and as reliant as I am on my regular video and still cameras, all those functions are frankly likely to remain in the "glad to know I have it if needed" capabilities. I also haven't yet worked on getting my Storm to act as a cellular phone modem for my laptop, but that's definitely on my "To-Do" list for those places where I can't get WiFi for the laptop.
V. Conclusion
I expect that Blackberry will be at least as successful as Apple has been with the IPhone in attracting people to write "third-party apps" for the Storm. And I don't want to rule out the possibility that some new, unforeseen use for the Storm will suddenly capture my affections.
And I'm also relying on Blackberry and RIM, frankly, to continuing investing in firmware upgrades. Some of the reviews of the Storm that I'd read reported that it was extremely sluggish and frequently buggy. Personally, I've only seen hints of that so far: Mostly my Storm has been responsive and quick, performing as it's intended to perform.
Nor would I want to oversell the Storm as being "simple" or "intuitive." The various menu trees are sound and well thought out, to the point where I've had many "Aha! That's how you do that!" moments already within my first week of ownership. But if you still have a VCR video recorder and its clock is flashing "0:00" right now, you probably ought not buy this cellphone.
Overall, however, I'm a happy camper. I'm convinced that my Storm is going to add to my personal productivity, and its frustrations so far have already been counterbalanced by its utility and coolness points.
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UPDATE (Tues Dec 23 @ 6:40pm): After a few more days, I'm yet more pleased with my Storm, and sufficiently inspired to add a few more remarks to an already over-long review. The whole design is simply far more elegant, flexible, and powerful than I had originally realized — to an incredible degree for a product that's new in so many fundamental respects.
The main point worth supplementing has to do with the touchscreen: I'm becoming a genuine fan of this device, to the point that I'm now skeptical of other brands' conventional ones (meaning, mostly, the IPhone's). Two things I understand now that I really didn't before, and that were obviously not understood either by many of the early reviewers whose opinions I'd read:
Once a particular area on the screen is highlighted — which the lightest touch will do — then the "strike zone" for the subsequent press-down (to achieve the tactile "click") is considerably larger than what's outlined. Trivial example: While touch-typing, my pinkie lights up the Q key but the actual press-down is about half on top of the Q, about half on top of the W. The Storm will reliably register that the Q "key" was pressed. Non-trivial example: I want to put a check-mark or dot into a tiny, tiny box or radio-button circle on a webpage I'm viewing in the browser, such as a "remember my data" box. The figure itself is too small by to press down upon by itself. But once I can see that it's been high-lighted by a touch, then my subsequent press-down in that general area — even if it looks like it would smush other "keys" or "figures" in the vicinity — will only actually activate that box or radio button. The overall point here is that being able to highlight without the equivalent of a mouse-click makes the touchscreen vastly more responsive to (and accurate for) relatively fat fingers in the real world than you'd think just from looking at the size of the keys or boxes or circles themselves.
Related point: Because you actually do have to press down and get the tactile click, you don't have to be careful about random and erroneous touch-highlighting. In particular, during touch-typing, you don't have to worry about keeping your fingertips lifted up completely off the screen. If you've dragged a fingertip across the keyboard — accidentally highlighting the F and V key en route to the B key — it just doesn't matter: So long as the B key is highlighted before you complete the stroke with the tactile click, there won't be any mistakes registered. I had frankly underestimated how much more like an actual keyboard this feature makes the Storm's virtual QWERTY keyboard. If I'd bought an IPhone instead, would I have learned eventually to be bouncy-and-tappy straight-up-and-downy instead of a bit more sloppy? Oh, yeah, probably so. But then again, the number one complaint of my long-suffering piano teacher was that I never learned to do that well for her notwithstanding years of lessons and much scolding.
It's also become clear to me how much general Blackberry lore and protocol is designed into the Storm. I've spent some time browsing around the various online forums where the "power users" (i.e., most desperately Crackberry addicted) trade tips and hints. Even as a new and revolutionary product, the Storm is packed with non-obvious shortcuts. A trivial fer-instance: When you're typing an email address, if you just use two space instead of switching to the "symbols" screen twice to enter an "at"-sign and a period as part of the address, the Storm will presume that you intended that first spacebar press to be the @ and the second to be the dot before the address' .com or .net or whatever. A non-trivial fer-instance: When you're in an app what's likely to include text entry, you can open the virtual keyboard with a non-clicked touch-swipe from the bottom of the screen to the top, or close it with a touch-swipe from the middle of the screen to the bottom. That avoids having to press the "Blackberry" key and select "open keyboard" or "close keyboard" from a scrolling menu in those apps. Or — as I've chosen to do — you can re-program one of the "convenience buttons" on either side of the phone to toggle the virtual keyboard open and closed. (The defaults for those buttons are starting the voice-activated dialing and camera apps.)
Posted by Beldar at 10:01 PM in Technology/products | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Beldar predicts that Blagojevich won't be impeached until convicted in court
This post may may make some people in Illinois mad at me. I'll have to risk it.
Prof. Ann Althouse is having fun ridiculing Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan's efforts both before the press and before the Illinois Supreme Court. Madigan is trying to persuade that court to effectively remove Gov. Rod Blagojevich from office based on an argument that he's "disabled" due to the allegations that have been made against him in the pending federal indictment being prosecuted by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. Earlier, Prof. Althouse wrote: "Given that ‘conviction on impeachment’ is one of the specified reasons for inability to serve, using this procedure as an alternative to the impeachment process looks like an abusive power grab." Prof. Glenn Reynolds adds: "I agree with Ann Althouse. The way you get rid of a crooked governor is via impeachment. Why play games here? If the case is so obvious, that shouldn’t take long."
I agree with both Prof. Althouse and Prof. Reynolds. Even though it would remove the reins of power from the hands of a crook, using the "disability" provision of the Illinois constitution in lieu of impeachment would be legally, politically, and intellectually illegitimate.
But picking up on Prof. Reynold's point about impeachment, the question about whether Blagojevich is "obviously crooked" becomes "obvious to whom?" and "under what standard of obviousness?"
That Blagojevich is a banal, petty crook has been "obvious" to anyone who cared to see such things long before he was indicted and arrested. Under a practical, common-sense standard, that should have been obvious to the voters of Illinois who nevertheless elected and then re-elected him.
But elections have consequences. Among them is the fact that once a crook is elected, constitutional niceties must be observed to remedy the situation.
With respect to Gov. Blagojevich's liberty, he's guaranteed all of the process due under federal law to anyone accused of such crimes, and Fitzgerald — who wants a conviction that will stand up against any appeals — will ensure that he gets it. But another consequence of Blogojevich's election is that the people of Illinois will have to be punished with him as their governor until political pressure can induce him to resign, or he's duly impeached and convicted by the Illinois legislature.
The people of New York elected as their governor a habitual liar and whore-monger, but he at least had the decency to resign when caught. The people of Illinois elected someone far worse, and one of the respects in which he is worse is that when confronted with his crime, he hasn't had the decency to resign.
To impeach and remove Blagojevich from office, the Illinois legislature would have to act without benefit of the actual proof of these allegations which Fitzgerald will use, in due course, in court. Legislators would have to display the political courage and common sense to say, in so many words: "Even though these are so far only alleged crimes rather than crimes proved in court to the satisfaction of a jury backstopped by trial and appellate courts, we are going to use the discretion granted us by the Illinois state constitution to accept a lower, lesser burden of persuasion and proof than do the federal courts in criminal matters, and we're going to hold Gov. Blagojevich responsible for these alleged crimes now." They will have to listen to Blagojevich's fervent, hypocritical pleas that he's presumed innocent until proven guilty, and then they will have to say boldly in response: "True, but that's in court, and this isn't a court. We're already sufficiently convinced that you're guilty."
The political legitimacy of such an impeachment would be, and should be, subject to close scrutiny — by the voters who will, in due course, consider whether they wish to re-elect legislators who voted for such an impeachment. For that is the procedural check on legislatures which abuse their impeachment powers — a theoretical check, but one sufficiently effective that their impeachment powers remain very rarely used, and almost never abused. (That's the realpolitik reason, and probably the only reason, why Nancy Pelosi hasn't tried to impeach Dubya, even with Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate.)
The ability to discern right and wrong is so uncertain among the voting public of Illinois, however, that incumbent legislators can safely figure that they won't be punished at the polls if they join Blagojevich's pious pleas of "innocent until proven guilty." Indeed, they may still more fear a backlash (either at the polls or, more likely, from other corrupt Illinois politicians, of which there will be no shortage even when Blagojevich is history) from doing the right thing by voting for legislative impeachment and conviction.
Indeed, the harshest criticism that can be leveled at the people of Illinois is the old truism that people generally get the government they deserve. To get a government sufficiently principled that its legislators will have the courage to impeach and remove an elected governor who's not yet been convicted in court, the public must first have voted for honest legislators who act according to principle. I frankly doubt that enough of those have been elected in Illinois.
Thus, my prediction is that an insufficient number of Illinois state legislators will have the courage necessary to impeach Blagojevich before he's convicted in federal court. That's likely to be many months from now. And that, too, is a consequence of awful electoral decisions made by the people of Illinois. It's a pathetic, tragicomic circus, worthy of the ridicule of decent people when viewed from almost any angle.
Yes, it's terribly unfair to the minority of Illinois citizens who've been outvoted by peers who preferred the likes of Blagojevich and the ethically challenged legislators who won't yet impeach him. Those good people — who number in the millions, but not sufficient millions — have my sympathy and respect.
But everyone who voted for these clowns is going to be stuck with them, and they richly deserve the government they've got. For them, I have no sympathy and no respect.
Posted by Beldar at 03:21 PM in Current Affairs, Law (2008), Politics (2008) | Permalink | Comments (34) | TrackBack (0)
Problems leaving comments here?
TypePad is making some improvements under the hood, and I think some of them may be causing conflicts with some of the customized templates I'm using for my comments. At least as I perceive the problem, it starts with the moment I click on the data entry field for the comment text — that's where I start getting odd behavior, anyway.
A few readers have emailed me to indicate that they've had similar problems; but a few readers are still managing to post comments.
For those who are still managing to see their comments posted, I wonder if you're seeing any of the weird behavior (as compared to how my comments were working, say, two weeks ago). If so, feel free to post a description of what you're seeing as a comment to this post.
Or feel free to use this post to test whether or not you can post a comment.
TypePad's customer service folks are very responsive, so I'm hoping the problem can be diagnosed and fixed in short order.
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UPDATE (Sun Dec 14 @ 10:55pm): TypePad's support folks say the bug (as illustrated by this screencap) "is a known issue which [TypePad is] working to resolve this coming week." In the meantime, it seems that the best way to work around the bug is this:
Click within the comment text entry field (which will start the bugged behavior, complete with whirling and never-stopping "progress" icons).
Click on the "View an alternate" hyperlink, which will cause an error box to appear saying that "You cannot leave an empty comment" error box to appear; click the "OK" button in that error box.
The randomized verification text will then appear. Re-type the characters you see into the small text entry field just below them, but don't click any buttons yet.
Click again inside the comment text entry field and type your actual comment text. If you click the "Preview" button, a preview of your comment will indeed appear, just below the bold-faced "Previewing Your Comment" headline.
When you're satisfied that your comment says what you want it to say, click the "Continue" button just below the verification text entry box — not either of the "Post" buttons.
That should post your comment within a few seconds. But the screen won't automatically refresh to show the new page with your comment as posted. (This is causing lots of duplicate comments at the moment, and understandably so.) Instead, you have to manually refresh your browser to display the new page.
I'm confident that the TypePad folks will have this sorted out in short order so that this work-around will no longer be needed. Thanks for your patience in the meantime.
Posted by Beldar at 01:55 PM in Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Unabashedly oldschool (tragically unhip) blogging
For the record, in response to Wired's claim (h/t Instapundit) that blogs are "so 2004":
My blog has always been for "long-form writing," as my masthead conspicuously warns. I'm generally satisfied with how my posts fare in search engine rankings. I don't think my commenters are 'tards. I don't have a Facebook entry, and neither do I Twitter, although when properly amused I may chortle.
I have no aspiration to put up 30 posts per day, nor to turn a profit through advertising. I am perfectly content for such readers who may find their way here from time to time to do so because they hope I might provide them with sufficiently "clever, insightful, witty prose to compete with [the] Huffington [Post] and The New York Times" — neither of whom I hold in high regard, and both of whom surely need all sorts of further alternatives on the internet. Ultimately, however, I write here for my own enjoyment.
Posted by Beldar at 01:41 PM in Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (21) | TrackBack (0)
Minnesota court of appeals affirms Craig conviction
I wrote quite a bit last year about Sen. Larry "Wide Stance" Craig (R-ID)'s pathetic attempts to withdraw his guilty plea for disorderly conduct in a Minneapolis-St. Paul airport restroom, and after reading the trial judge's opinion rejecting that attempt last October, I concluded that for purposes of any appeals, Sen. Craig was already toast. However, by continuing his appeals, Sen. Craig managed to stave off any Senate action to unseat him, and he's now served out all but the last few days of the balance of his term.
Thus, today's decision by the Minnesota Court of Appeals — which affirmed Sen. Craig's conviction and the trial court's refusal to reconsider it — is a belated epilogue to the melodrama of the Larry Craig story. Craig may, for appearances' sake, seek further review in the Minnesota Supreme Court or even the Supreme Court of the United States (since he insists that he, or the ACLU on his behalf, has raised federal constitutional issues). But today's decision — which the appellate court didn't even consider significant enough to warrant marking for publication in the bound volumes of appellate precedent — is plenty solid enough to survive further attacks, just as was the trial court's.
Were I to struggle to extend my metaphor from last October, then, I supposed I'd have to say that Sen. Craig is now merely stale crumbs of toast.
Click to read more of this post »»»
Posted by Beldar at 01:03 PM in Law (2008), Politics (2008) | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
There was nothing "culpable" about the 2003 Texas redistricting
I'm angered to read the following passage in a very silly and badly informed article called The End of Gerrymandering, and in particular, I'm dismayed to read it in the Weekly Standard:
But Republicans have not been without culpability, especially in recent years. The mainstream media has naturally sought to highlight this, especially the "DeLay Plan" to gerrymander Texas to the GOP's advantage mid-decade without even waiting for a new census. This occurred in 2003, when the Texas legislature, newly controlled in both houses by Republicans, redrew lines established by a court in 2001 after legislative deadlock. The gerrymander, which created several more GOP-leaning seats in the Texas delegation, ultimately was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Incoming Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, then chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, opined: "Every redistricting is a partisan political exercise, but this is going to put it at a level we have never seen. That's the gift that the Supreme Court and Tom DeLay have given us."
I have several questions for the authors, Christian Whiton and Larry Greenfield: Why do they think it was appropriate for the citizens of our nation's second most populous state — a state that has trended Republican since the early 1990s, and been solidly Republican for more than a decade — to continue to live with a pro-Democratic gerrymander from the 1990s that no longer remotely reflected Texas' majority-Republican status? Why should we have to continue to submit to a Congressional district map that was specifically designed to give, and in fact gave, Democrats a majority of Texas' seats in Congress when not a single Democrat could win election to a statewide post? Why should we pretend that a three-judge federal court — one whose judges candidly and expressly recognized their own lack of political legitimacy, since it was comprised of unelected judges holding life tenure from the single branch of the state or federal government least responsive to small-d democracy — was entitled to have its decision (which made the least possible changes necessary to the 1990s pro-Democratic map to accommodate Texas' new seats due to the 2000 Census) written into stone?
Why, in short, are Christian Whiton and Larry Greenfield swallowing hook, line, and sinker the most incredibly misleading anti-democratic clap-trap of the disingenuous Hard Left (viz: Rahm Emanuel!), describing as "culpable" a readjustment of Texas' districts to closely reflect modern-day Texans' own voting patterns?
What Rahm Emanuel meant was that Tom DeLay and the Supreme Court had given lying Democrats like him a fact-pattern that they could continue to twist, in order to mislead people into thinking that a legitimate democratic process reflecting the wishes of a majority of Texas voters, as expressed through their elected state legislators and governor, was instead a racist and improper one.
I expect better of the Weekly Standard's editors than to print this kind of drivel. The byline tells us that "Christian Whiton is a State Department political appointee. Larry Greenfield serves on the Resolutions Committee of the California Republican Party. The views expressed are their own." But that frankly doesn't excuse the fact that this piece goes out of its way to insult the citizens of Texas and their duly elected state leaders.
Far outside the Beltway, here in Texas, we don't see a problem with our own elected officials — rather than even very good federal judges — drawing our Congressional district map. Culpable? No, that's democracy. That's why America has a Census every ten years, and that's why redistricting is supposed to be done by the combined action of state legislatures and state governors thereafter. Indeed, the voters of Texas reacted to the Dems' 2001 stonewalling in the state legislature by electing more Republicans, who as a result were able to break the Dems' attempts to stonewall and boycott in 2003. There's nothing wicked about voters punishing a party which was badly abusing even its minority status; rather, it's a text-book example of the success of representative democracy.
(The rest of the Whiton and Greenfield piece expounds the great virtues of the new system just passed into law for California that is supposed to make redistricting "nonpartisan." That's about as clever, and is about as likely to be effective, as passing a constitutional amendment requiring state legislators or state governors to be "wise." Redistricting is inherently a political exercise. Moreover, Supreme Court precedent and civil rights legislation, most prominently the Voting Rights Act of 1965, make it impossible for states to redistrict in a random, apolitical fashion anyway: Even if they try to avoid partisan issues, the law's assumptions (among them the repugnant proposition that only Democrats can represent blacks and hispanics) and repercussions will require them to consider the political effects of their actions. I have no confidence that the new California plan will work; indeed, California seems to me and many of my fellow Texans to be most useful as the political laboratory for testing out the most conspicuous failures that the other 49 states can then observe and avoid. (See point #5 here.) But I wish them luck in what I nevertheless believe to be an impossible and unrealistic task, and I would thank those like Whiton and Greenfield who believe otherwise to withhold their insults to the State of Texas at least until the day — indeed the decade, or two — in which the new California plan has proven itself to be an even arguably viable alternative.)
Posted by Beldar at 12:44 AM in Politics (2008), SCOTUS & federal courts, Texas Redistricting | Permalink | Comments (27) | TrackBack (1)
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Beldar's reaction to rumors of Hillary for SecState
Per the AP:
Hillary Rodham Clinton, meanwhile, was expected to decide soon whether to take the job [of Secretary of State in the Obama Administration], which associates said she believes is hers if she wants it. Transition officials for President-elect Barack Obama said the former first lady had not formally been offered the job and other candidates have been vetted. But several Clinton associates said Obama has told her she is his top pick.
My first reaction was to immediately review the line of presidential succession, to count how many Secret Service teams will need to be beefed up once Hillary is formally in line for succession to the Oval Office. The answer is four: Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi (as Speaker of the House), and Robert Byrd (as President Pro Tempore of the Senate).
Biden and Byrd would have to get used to spending lots of time in lonely, undisclosed locations, I suspect — never in the same room with the other two.
On the merits: As always, I'm disappointed to see either Clinton taken seriously for any serious responsibility because they are completely amoral, and their effectiveness is overrated. But there are worse alternatives for this job, and worse alternatives who've already been proposed for other offices. And again, as always with the Clintons, there is the small, cold comfort that their overwhelming ambition to retain power will probably compel Hillary to triangulate to some extent, rather than being an utter captive to the MoveOn.com/dKos Hard Left Dems.
Obama, by contrast, is wimping out big-time if he's seriously considering this appointment. In his own mind, he excuses that, probably, by thinking he's Lincoln and Hillary will be one of his Team of Rivals. Rivals he can find, but he's no Lincoln, and the point of Doris Kearns Goodwin's excellent book about Lincoln's cabinet was in part that only a Lincoln can succeed in riding herd over a team whose members are pulling in different directions. Since my priority is the future of the Nation rather than the specific success of Obama's particular administration, I'm somewhat more reassured by the Clinton triangulation likelihood than I'm distressed by the Obama emasculation likelihood.
Posted by Beldar at 07:49 PM in Congress, Current Affairs, Obama, Politics (2008) | Permalink | Comments (35) | TrackBack (1)
Monday, November 17, 2008
Blog noir at Patterico's
Wikipedia tells us that "film noir," literally "black film," is
a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize moral ambiguity and sexual motivation. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as stretching from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. Film noir of this era is associated with a low-key black-and-white visual style that has roots in German Expressionist cinematography, while many of the prototypical stories and much of the attitude of classic noir derive from the hardboiled school of crime fiction that emerged in the United States during the Depression.
There are plenty of modern-day wanna-be-noir movies, among them Chinatown (1974), The Usual Suspects (1995), L.A. Confidential (1997), The Black Dahlia (2006), and Hollywoodland (2006).
But my friend and fellow lawyer-blogger Patrick Frey is exploring two frontiers simultaneously: One is the citizen-journalist-blogger paradigm, where a knowledgeable blogger (day job: California state-court prosecutor) digs through the debris that the mainstream media have discarded or, perhaps, buried, to bring you not just punditry but fresh and genuine reporting.
The second frontier is what we might call "blog noir" because it involves crime, moral ambiguity galore, and so many of the sorts of characters that give these fictional films their glamor — the prize-winning star reporter who may make, or cover up, as much news as he reports; the rich entertainer who's been brutally murdered; the snitch; the fall guy; and an assortment of other cops, lawyers, press types, and Hollywood stars and wannabe-stars. I'm still waiting for Patterico to find a cool blonde dame with legs down to there and an attitude up to here as part of the mix — but Patterico's writing about real life, and maybe there's not a Kim Bassinger role in this drama.
Or maybe she doesn't show up until Act II, which is promised for later.
Mickey Kaus' teaser post could be the blurb for the book jacket:
Poor "Pulitzer" Chuck Philips! Patterico is on Philips' case, he doesn't seem about to give up, and he has a hot doc. ... P.S.: This isn't the embarrassing Philips screw-up that led to a spectacular LAT retraction in April. This is another, potentially more-than-embarrassing, incident — but also related to the Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls murder stories.
Peel this one like an onion, folks, starting with Patterico's executive summary and then working down as deep as you care to drill.
Posted by Beldar at 12:54 PM in Current Affairs, Mainstream Media, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Twisted dollop of evil scum Bill Ayers claims his and Weather Underground's bombs were mere "protests" and never terrorism, but that U.S. gov't "murdered" thousands every month
I know that when John McCain called Bill Ayers just "some washed up old terrorist," he was trying to minimize Ayers' significance and deprive him of any current relevancy.
But that was just another of McCain's well-intentioned misjudgments.
Ladies and gentlemen, friends and neighbors, there is evil in the world, and Bill Ayers was, and remains to this very day, a twisted dollop of evil scum. Perhaps he hasn't set off a bomb in the previous few years — although I wouldn't bet the ranch on that, and he still refuses to rule out future violence — but he's as totally inappropriate a candidate for the phrase "washed up" as Adolf Eichmann was just because he hadn't gassed any Jews in the previous few years before his trial and execution in 1962.
Proof: In a post-election interview yesterday with ABC News, this piece of excrement had the nerve — one might say, "the audacity" — to simultaneously contend that the bombings he and his comrades in the Weather Underground did were "not terrorism because [they didn't] target people, to kill or injure," but that "thousands of people were being murdered every month" by the lawful, elected, democratic government of the United States of America. That's a despicable, intentional, unforgivable, scurrilous lie, immediately followed by another.
It is a terrible mistake to try to minimize great evil. Ayers already lacks legitimacy; he cannot be further delegitimized or marginalized by wishful, inaccurate thinking like that represented by McCain's dismissive language.
I can excuse, barely, Chris Cuomo of ABC's "Good Morning America" for speaking to this vile bastard without overtly judgmental statements: Sometimes journalists arguably have to sheer away their own humanity to expose evil to public view.
But anyone else who could sit in the same room with Bill Ayers without complaint, without speaking out about his continued depravity, has deliberately chosen to ignore evil — and by ignoring it, to perpetuate and implicitly defend it. That this worm has taken Barack Obama's election as his cue to crawl from his hole and spew his nasty lies is one of the sickest and saddest things I've ever seen happen in America.
And to the extent John McCain's characterization of Ayers was a suggestion that nobody ought to care anymore, then even McCain had lost his own moral compass.
Posted by Beldar at 01:32 PM in 2008 Election, Current Affairs, Mainstream Media, McCain, Obama, Politics (2008) | Permalink | Comments (14) | TrackBack (0)
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Regarding the Obama camp's leaks about confidential talks with the POTUS
On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama will become the 44th president of the United States. We call him the "president elect" in recognition of that fact, and it's an important fact. Indeed, since the passage of the Twentieth Amendment, being "president elect" has had constitutional significance.
But until he takes the oath administered by Chief Justice John Roberts on January 20, 2009, Barack Obama is also still the junior senator from Illinois — complete with a goofy pretend seal of office (you'd think he would have learned, but no; and he even chose his tie color to match it) for his temporary new job, and with the apparent political maturity of an eighth grader.
Permitting his staff to leak details of his private discussions with the current President of the United States — completely apart from the fact that those details were given a political spin which both the White House and the Obama transition team were then at pains to deny within hours — is like peeing in the pool, and then bragging about it.
Posted by Beldar at 12:10 AM in Obama, Politics (2008) | Permalink | Comments (34) | TrackBack (0)
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Beldar on Brooks on conservatism
My subject in today's post is David Brooks' column in yesterday's New York Times on the future of conservativism. And here on my blog, I am going to give that column every bit of the thoughtful discussion, and exactly as many hyperlinks, as it deserves, given the current credibility of its author on this subject and the source of its publication.
Thank you for your careful attention.
Posted by Beldar at 11:24 PM in Politics (2008) | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)
Monday, November 10, 2008
Meanwhile, in the Oval Office
Ann Althouse is right: This photograph of Dubya and Obama in the Oval Office is "[a]rtfully composed and deeply historic." It's flattering to both men, and although it cannot soothe all or even most of my worries about the impending Obama Administration, it's nevertheless reassuring in many important ways.
Professor Althouse's link to the photo, this one, contains a claim by the Associated Press that it owns the copyright to the photo, and a stern warning that it "may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed." Poppycock. Perhaps the Associated Press and the mainstream media consider the presidency a gift that they have bestowed upon Barack Obama, and they certainly did their best to determine the election's outcome. But their photographers didn't take this photo — it was made instead by White House Photo Director Eric Draper — and the Associated Press doesn't own or have any rights the image whatsoever. The AP's just flat-out lying again, in other words.
This photo belongs to America — and it, and all that it signifies, is a gift from us to the world.
Note that the leather chair between the flags is empty, as are the small guest chairs on either side of the desk. George W. Bush, a/k/a Chimpy McBusHitler and all sorts of other vile names, has no need or wish to play status games with the next occupant of this office.
More importantly: There will be no tanks on the Mall. There will be no manufactured crisis to justify the 101st Airborne seizing the Metro stations while Dick Cheney directs the suppression of the Obama Transition Team from a bunker in an unspecified location. There won't even be any "O" keys pried off computer keyboards. The barking moonbats who've been saying for years that we're already living under a Dubya-imposed military government would be ashamed if they had the decency necessary for that emotion.
Posted by Beldar at 06:09 PM in 2008 Election, Politics (2008) | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBack (0)
Sunday, November 09, 2008
No to Gorelick for AG
The Democratic Party's ethical standards have now plummeted significantly below those which prompted Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards to joke in 1983 that "The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy."
It appears that we have no example extreme enough to provide an answer yet to this critical question: How badly do you have to screw up to stop getting promoted, much less destroy your career, in the Democratic Party?
Oddly enough, one of the first series of posts I wrote when I began blogging in August 2003 was to defend Jamie Gorelick — a Clintonista liberal Democratic Washington lawyer — from charges that she was ethically disqualified to serve on the 9/11 Commission because the law firm she had just joined, then known as Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, also had prominent Saudi clients (whom she did not personally represent, but some tiny percentage of whose fees would flow to her through the law firm partnership). I continue to believe that her law firm's Saudi clients were not a legitimate source of serious objection to her service on the 9/11 Commission.
But I didn't know then — nobody much outside the Clinton Administration knew — that she had been the principal builder of the "wall" between domestic and foreign intelligence that, more than any other single factor, made possible the success of the 9/11 attacks. Now that was a huge, glaring, substantive, and disabling conflict of interest. And her decision on that matter while in office showed such incredibly bad judgment on a crucial matter of mixed legal and national security concerns that it ought to have disqualified her from ever serving in any future president's cabinet.
Then there's the little fact that from 1997 to 2003, she was the vice chairman of Fannie Mae.
And yet: The New York Times says Jamie Gorelick is under serious consideration to become Barack Obama's attorney general (h/t InstaPundit). The NYT allows how "Some conservative bloggers have already begun trying to derail Ms. Gorelick’s possible nomination as attorney general, pointing to her experiences at both Fannie Mae and the Sept. 11 commission." To that, my response is to jump up and down with both hands waving frantically as I shout, "Damned right we are! Damned right!"
Short of appointing an actual member of al Qaeda, I cannot imagine a more offensive symbolic repudiation of the Global War on Terror — nor a more enthusiastic embrace of the chronic mismanagement, cronyism, and graft which led to this fall's credit crisis — than the appointment of Jamie Gorelick as attorney general.
When Obama choose an amoral, souless Hard Left hitman like Rahm Emanuel to be his chief of staff, I was willing to grant that such is his right for such a position, and I didn't even grumble. Indeed, because Emanuel is likely to be effective in doing his principal's wishes, that simply means that Barack Obama himself can be held strictly accountable for his administration's successes and failures: Emanuel is a switchblade, and every political corpse he leaves behind him (some of whom will also be Democrats, although of which flavors we do not yet know) will be stacked in a large pile directly at Barack Obama's feet.
But the prospect of Jamie Gorelick heading up the Department of Justice is worth filibustering, if anything or anyone is. She's not "change you can believe in," she's "change guaranteed to cause even more cosmic calamities" because she's done that consistently in the past.
Posted by Beldar at 09:42 PM in Law (2008), Obama, Politics (2008) | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBack (1)
Visualizing Obama's victory
A new reader I've known for a long time emailed me with this link to a series of fascinating maps (with explanations for how they're prepared) created by Mark Newman, the Paul Dirac Collegiate Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan. I'll reproduce one of the most interesting (and, arguably, meaningful) here:
So what do you think Obama's victory looks like? A large bird, taking wing and headed for the left, as viewed from behind? If so, is it eagle, phoenix, or buzzard?
Here, by contrast, is the analogous map for Bush's 2004 victory:
It makes me think for some reason of a profile-shot, attacking from right to left, of the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Perhaps Obama found the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch to use against McCain.
Posted by Beldar at 06:24 PM in 2008 Election, Obama, Politics (2008) | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Saturday, November 08, 2008
A plea to John McCain: Find and expose the anonymous sources telling lies about Sarah Palin and use the McCain temper to "make them famous"
In the many hours I spent online doing background research on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin before I wrote my first post about her on June 8, 2008, I read many dozens of newspaper stories about her, dating back to her time as mayor of Wasilla in the late 1990s, in the state's largest newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News, as well as in some of the smaller Alaska newspapers. I was specifically looking for negatives: I knew that the Democrats would be too, in the (then unlikely) event that Gov. Palin became a serious possibility as the GOP Veep nominee.
The single most frequently recurring theme was that Sarah Palin's political opponents underestimated her. In every campaign, her opponent attacked her as inexperienced. None of them argued, however, that she was stupid. The closest any opponent ever came to that was one of her two opponents in the 2006 gubernatorial race, Andrew Halcro, who claimed that she didn't immerse herself in the minutia of policy detail in which he himself reveled. Halcro is a wonk, and an annoying, patronizing twerp, and a sore loser, and the people of Alaska recognized that by leaving him an embarrassing distant third in that race, with less than 10% of their votes. But even Halcro didn't claim that Sarah Palin was stupid.
Nor did anyone else of consequence make that claim during Gov. Palin's first year-and-a-half as governor. She was criticized for having "sharp elbows," for holding political grudges, and for disfavoring those who'd crossed her — complaints leveled by losers left behind in the wake of every successful politician, because that's the loser-side view of being held accountable for ones actions and positions. But dim? Provincial? Uneducated? Nobody in Alaska had ever seriously charged Sarah Palin with being an airhead — not even the political enemies she'd left bleeding in the dust.
Because she was relatively unknown outside Alaska, however — and, very frankly, because she is an attractive woman who could therefore be easily tagged with the most cruel and sexist of stereotypes, the airhead — from the day John McCain announced her as his vice presidential nominee, her political opponents simply began manufacturing lies about her, many of which were designed to reinforce that airhead stereotype.
It did not surprise me that partisans opposed to the GOP ticket would believe these lies. But it very much surprised me that some smart centrists and even nominal conservatives did too.
I'll give you an example — one that makes me sick at heart. I've read Dr. James Joyner's blog, Outside the Beltway, regularly since before I started blogging myself in 2003. I regarded him as one of the most articulate, knowledgeable, and reasonable right-of-center bloggers around. I was tickled to be invited to participate by telephone in his podcast immediately after the Palin announcement in late August, and I agreed with him and the other participants that Gov. Palin was an exciting choice. Some time shortly after that, however, something changed Dr. Joyner's mind about Gov. Palin. And he now seriously purports to believe, for example, that Gov. Palin "couldn't even name a newspaper she read." That's not an isolated or snarky comment; that's consistent with everything he's written about Gov. Palin for weeks in perfect seriousness. And it's no different than if he were to insist that really, seriously, Joe Biden can't count to four because he claims "J-O-B-S" is a three-letter word. People joked about "Bush Derangement Syndrome," and about "Palin Derangement Syndrome" as its successor. But at some point this kind of thing stops being a joke and becomes a genuine cognative disability — an inability to process and deal in a rational fashion with objective data because of a bias that is so intense that it blocks out reality.
I can't explain it. I just hope it's a temporary, acute problem rather than something long-term or possibly organic, like the sort of brain tumors or lesions of which Dr. Oliver Sachs writes in his book, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat." I'm not being at all snarky here. Rather, I'm entirely serious, because I have considered Dr. Joyner a friend, and I am genuinely concerned for his mental health. He, Andrew Sullivan, and others in their camp are completely persuaded that they can see a degree of ignorance in Gov. Palin which is utterly inconsistent with anyone's ability to function as the governor of any state, but to which hundreds of thousands of Alaskans were absolutely blind for many years despite a much better opportunity to assess Gov. Palin first-hand. That kind of thinking represents a break with reality, one that's not funny at all, but genuinely sad.
The latest of the deliberate liars — the people who are inventing stuff out of whole cloth, maliciously and without any pretense of a factual basis, without any regard for their utter implausibility — are the cowardly, sniveling pieces of garbage who've been masquerading as "campaign aides" for the McCain-Palin campaign. They are the worst kind of traitors in politics. Like the scumballs who invented the list of books that Sarah Palin had supposedly wanted burned when she was mayor of Wasilla — and who included in the list Harry Potter books that hadn't even been written when Gov. Palin was mayor — these anonymous assassins don't even bother to come up with plausible lies: Why bother, when mainstream publications like Newsweek will uncritically regurgitate them to millions without doing the most basic fact-checking?
It's time for this to end. It's time for the liars to be identified to the public and held accountable.
To Carl Cameron and others at Fox News: Shame on you for granting these people anonymity. There is no basis in journalistic ethics for you to do that. Shame on you for reporting this garbage at all.* With the exception of a few there like Greta Van Susterin who've refused to buy into this nonsense, you are rapidly eroding such credibility and respectability as your network had earned among Americans disgusted with the mainstream media in general. Stop what you're doing immediately.
To Sen. John McCain: Although you were far from my first choice as the GOP nominee, I've spent hundreds of hours working on your campaign's behalf, as have many others who were thrilled by your selection of Gov. Palin as your running mate.
I never thought I would have cause to label you, of all people, as a coward or dishonorable. You're acting in a cowardly and dishonorable fashion, however, by permitting people identified with your campaign to make these anonymous attacks on Gov. Palin. Identify them. Make them famous. If what they say is true, then make them back it up. If it is not — and I believe it is not — then expose them as liars so that no GOP politician will ever again dare hire these sniveling worms. They have no honor, but they are besmirching yours. And your silence is compounding this problem with every hour that passes. It's time, and past time, finally, for your long-suppressed temper to be unleashed, because you finally have targets who deserve the worst public tongue-lashing you can deliver.
To any and every potential GOP leader, including Mitt Romney: If I ever learn that you are knowingly employing any of these traitors, I will oppose your candidacy for any office, and do everything within my power to persuade others to oppose you too. Gov. Romney, you need to be heard on this matter too, immediately and forcefully, regardless of whether those responsible are in fact, as is being widely reported, former or prospective aides of yours.
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UPDATE (Sat Nov 8 @ 2:05pm CST): It's helpful for other campaign aides to go on record, by name, denying these things (see, e.g., here, here, and here). But that's not remotely adequate. McCain needs to be personally involved — on the record, on video that will be carried by the national media. The exposure and discrediting of these traitors needs to replicate as closely as possible the opening scenes with Chuck Conners in "Branded" — except these people are not innocent, and none of them is a real man:
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UPDATE (Sat Nov 12 @ 4:30pm CST): I embrace and adopt the sentiments of Allahpundit and Michelle Malkin: John McCain has failed this test of his own character.
The would-be commander-in-chief surely still had the clout to summon the top twenty-five or so campaign aides into a room for a "Come to Jesus" meeting, a "we aren't any of us leaving this room until I know who leaked those comments" meeting, a "you aren't any of you ever going to work in politics again until we find out who's to blame for this" meeting.
Instead, he goes on Lenno and shrugs his shoulders, minimizing the whole episode. That didn't make anyone famous. That affirmatively encouraged this crap to continue, not just in this campaign but in future ones.
I practice a profession in which secrets are important. I understand the concept of fiduciary duty. I've employed people, professionals and staff alike, who — simply by virtue of working for me — have been made subject to the same bright-line, absolute standards that I'm subject to. Very, very rarely, someone in my employment has breached that trust — and my reaction has been ruthless and thorough and instantaneous. Yes, there have been a few times when I've enjoyed firing someone, and have gone out of my way to make sure that anyone who cared to make future inquiries about hiring that person would find out exactly why they were fired.
McCain's background as a military officer ought to have acquainted him with high ethical standards and the need for their consistent and vigorous enforcement. He almost flunked out of the Naval Academy at the end of every year he spent there, based on conduct demerits, but he never once had an Honor Code violation.
Senator, this was an Honor Code violation by someone on your staff. And you just blew it off. There was no shame in losing the election. But there is definitely shame in this.
Posted by Beldar at 12:33 PM in 2008 Election, Mainstream Media, McCain, Palin, Politics (2008) | Permalink | Comments (38) | TrackBack (3)
BeldarBlog re-design done (for now)
Many thanks to those of you who've provided feedback on the changes in format I've been experimenting with here.
I've decided to stick with a fixed-width white container for post text, and to go with something wider than the 500 pixels I'd used since 2003. But I've dialed that back from 800 to 700 pixels to keep the line lengths from becoming too long.
The consecutive comment numbers seem to be working okay, and I've widened the text entry box.
I think the RSS syndication feed (now being redirected through Feedburner) is working okay now.
One reader asked that I incorporate buttons in the sidebar that would increase and decrease the text size. Unfortunately, TypePad advises that they have neither a widget or script to do that, although they've added that to their "new features to-do list" for future development. In the meantime, if you'd like a larger, or different, font, you'll need to use your browser settings for that.
Posted by Beldar at 10:37 AM in Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
Friday, November 07, 2008
Yard sign, remodeled
Dave from Sugarland sent (and gave me permission to republish here) a photo of his yard sign — which is not the product of vandalism, but rather, of his intentional remodeling:
Simple. Energy-conscious (re-cycling). Works for me.
Posted by Beldar at 12:18 AM in Palin, Politics (2008) | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)
Thursday, November 06, 2008
Changes in comments format
While I was tinkering with other things tonight, I think I've figured out how to make two changes to the format in which comments are displayed.
First, comments will no longer display email addresses (even with what's supposed to include no-spam harvesting code). So if for some reason you want to give out your email address, you'll now have to do that in the text of your comment. And those worried about spam and privacy in general need not, I hope, worry about accidental disclosure of their email addresses. As before, however, if you enter a URL in that blank, your name at the bottom of the comment will contain a hyperlink to the website you link.
Second, before the commenter's name at the bottom of each comment, there should now be a number listed that corresponds to the display sequence of that comment (in ascending order, chronologically from the earliest and top-most). This may help commenters be more specific in referencing each others' comments for discussion within a comment thread. As before, there will still be a permanent hyperlink at the bottom of each comment that permits direct links to individual comments.
Let me know if these changes seem not to be working properly, or if you have any other requests/suggestions.
Posted by Beldar at 11:39 PM in Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)