Thursday, October 13, 2005

Video iPod

Brew, you were so right on:

Steve Jobs introduced a new iPod capable of playing video Wednesday, and took the wraps off Apple Computer’s expanded online music store, which now includes downloadable TV shows and music videos.

Jobs also introduced a new version of the flat-screen iMac G5 with a diminutive remote control and new media software, called Front Row, to watch music, videos and movies from the couch.

The video iPod, available in classic white or shiny black, will ship next week in 30-GB and 60-GB capacities for $300 and $400 respectively.

The iPod has a 2.5-inch, 320-by-240 screen, and a video-out jack that can connect it to a TV using an optional cable, sold separately. Read on.

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Rice & Rosen via Fox

More from John:

And then there’s Rice. Rumors about her sexuality have long since become late-night TV monologue fodder. The 50-year-old bachelorette’s greatest ambition, after all, is to become commissioner of the National Football League. And while nobody has found a smoking gay gun for her, don’t tell that to Fox News. Recently, the network’s James Rosen seemingly tried to match-make Rice with one of Fox’s female anchors.

ROSEN: I close with a gift for you. You met this person once, I believe, but you really, I think, ought to know each other because this woman is… I think you’ll have an interest in knowing her. She is one of our Fox News anchors in New York. Her name is Lauren Green. She is brilliant, she’s beautiful, she’s African-American, she’s single, and she’s a concert pianist in her spare time.

RICE: My goodness.

ROSEN: And she asked me to give you her CD, and I promised her that I would.

RICE: That’s perfect.

ROSEN: And here’s her doing a number of different classical pieces.

RICE: Well, that’s special.

ROSEN: So there you have it.

RICE: Thank her very much and I look forward to seeing her sometime.

ROSEN: All right. She’s going to want to hear from you.

RICE: And maybe even playing dual piano sometime.

My guess is she’s asexual. But in a different time and place who can know what might have been…

Closets

Mehlman’s on The Daily Show. A repeat.

But it reminds me. John’s Radar piece (”I’m particularly happy with this one”) is on closet heterosexuals:

This week President Bush’s second Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers, joined the swelling ranks of high-powered Republicans with, um-how to put it?-ambiguous sexual orientations. The club of what we’ll call “closet heterosexuals” also includes such luminaries as the very single Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman, California congressman David Dreier, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Miers, 61, has never been married, has no kids, doesn’t appear to have any serious love interests, and has a special place in her heart for softball. Does that make her a lesbian? Of course not. But is it kosher to pose the question or just to report on the fact that others are asking it? According the mainstream media, no.

With Mehlman, Dreier, and Rice the mainstream press has simply refused to report on long-standing rumors about each of them. A reporter for a major newspaper told me that his paper had asked Mehlman about the rumors last year, but when Mehlman refused to affirm on the record that he was straight, the editors killed the article. Why? The fact that the incoming head of the Republican Party-which, after all, put the subject of sexual orientation front and center in the cultural wars-won’t publicly commit to liking women is about as legitimate a story as I can think of.

I don’t get it; the slightest excuse and nothing, nothing at all, is private. But up to that moment there’s some rule of etiquette that says don’t ask, don’t tell?

Health care hopes

Major article in the Times today about the labyrinth of paperwork our health care system inundates us with:

Medical paperwork is a world of co-payments and co-insurers, deductibles, exclusions and contracted fees. Nothing is as it seems: patients receive statements that often do not reflect what is actually owed; telephone calls to customer service agents are at best time-consuming and at worst fruitless. The explanations of benefits that insurers send out - known as E.O.B.’s - are filled with unintelligible codes.

The system is so impenetrable that it mystifies even the most knowledgeable.

“I’m the president’s senior adviser on health information technology, and when I get an E.O.B. for my 4-year-old’s care, I can’t figure out what happened, or what I’m supposed to do,” said Dr. David Brailer, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, whose office is in the Department of Health and Human Services. “I can’t figure out what care it was related to or who did what.”

Nathan Newman had a post this week suggesting there’s hope for national health care. Employer provided health care coverage is down and dropping further:

[I]n addition, copays and other costs mean that even employees with health care coverage are paying more out of pocket.

Which means that fewer and fewer people have a stake in the present system of health care coverage. And unions increasingly see negotiations for health care sucking up all their time and efforts during negotiations, so they are redoubling their efforts to pass serious health care reform. And as large employers providing health care see their profits eroding due to having to compete with countries with national health care systems—and without the costs they face—even some employers can be cajoled around to support.

He points to Ruy Teixeira on what we know and what we don’t know about public opinion on universal health care.

Dobson & me (reprise)

I’m (half) watching Diane Sawyer interview Charlize Theron and they’re chortling over the second “kiss-my-ass” video clip. Charlize kissed one and now hers is being kissed.

Ha ha ha.

At 8:15? They’re appealing to an audience I guess. Do they suppose the kids have gone off to school? Or it just doesn’t matter any more? More likely morning television is just that desperate.

On this one I bet my views are closer to James Dobson (though I’m not sure I’d make it illegal).

I’m reminded that Phyllis Schlafly and the Eagle Forum were early ardent opponents of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and filed a brief in support of our side in Eldrid v Ashcroft.

Many social conservatives believe, as I do, in local control of media and support mandates for diverse radio and TV ownership. We’re not always oppositional. If we worked together more on issues like these maybe we could find even more common ground.

Yes and no

Steve Miller on suing a doctor:

A Lambda Legal attorney is suing two fundamentalist doctors in California who refused to artificially inseminate lesbian Guadalupe Benitez. The doctors said to have done so would have violated their religious beliefs, and that they also would have refused to inseminate an unmarried heterosexual women.

So, Ms. Benitez couldn’t go to another doctor? The idea, it seems, is now prevalent in the gay legal world that no matter of personal conscience or religious conviction should permit a private business or practitioner to discriminate against a gay client.

I believe discriminating against gays is morally wrong. I also believe that there are limits in the ability of the state to force people to go against their personal convictions, especially in matters of abortion or procreation. There are other doctors in Southern California.

Ok, I agree. But then there’s this:

The matter has parallels with attempts to force all pharmacists to dispense birth control.

The difference that pops to mind is that doctors are the decision makers; the health practitioners. Pharmacists are dispensers.

Now I know that pharmacists once were health practitioners, and I’ll grant that those in hospitals may still be. But those at my local CVS have been reduced by insurance companies and their corporate chiefs to little more than computer jockeys who look up the med, phone in for approval, then pull it from the shelf, stick it in a bag and send me off to the register.

No, I’m not willing to give them an ethical veto over my meds.

UPDATE: A web-enabled mail order option both moots my concern and proves my point. Pharmacists aren’t what they used to be.

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

More Miers

Let’s just say I’m not as optimistic as the liberals who say that she’s the best we can get.

Nathan Newman points out that big business loves Miers:

That some Democrats—including some in the blogosphere—have gone soft on Miers reflects a fundamental betrayal of the working class base of the party. It pisses me off no end that because Miers MIGHT be soft on a few social issues, folks are willing to overlook the fact that she, like Roberts, worked for rightwing corporate law firms, both of which had tough union-busting divisions. In fact, Roberts brought one of the nastiest anti-union cases of the 1990s to the Supreme Court, thankfully a case he lost.

[...]

People wonder why Democrats are losing working class voters. It’s not because they care about abortion and gay rights; it’s because when it comes to the courts, they don’t seem to care about anything else, including the economic issues that many pro-life voters would turn against the GOP over if they were highlighted in the debates.

Dobson, marriage & me

A friend sent an email alerting me to Terrance’s post on Dobson’s recent pro-Miers statement that includes this on gay rights:

The noted Christian broadcaster answered several of the charges that have been raised against Miers, including one involving her position on gay rights.

In 1989, she answered “Yes” to a poll question by a gay rights organization that asked, “Do you believe that gay men and lesbians should have the same civil rights as non-gay men and women?”

“You know what? I do,” Dobson said, affirming her response. “I don’t believe that homosexuals should be denied a job. I don’t believe that they should not be able to buy a house. I don’t believe that they should not have the same rights everybody else does. I just don’t believe that there should be special rights given to homosexuals that are not given to everybody else.”

Terrance says, “Heh. Interesting.” Then goes on to quote this mournful lament from the conservative Washington Times Culture Briefs last month:

“We are losing the gay marriage fight, and, in fact, have lost it already, though not all of us know it yet. When the acceptance of civil-unions protections for gay couples is the conservative position, then we have been defeated.”
—Rod Dreher, writing on “Pink Campaign,” in the September issue of Touchstone

Terrance, a Georgia expatriot (and briefly a churchmate of my sometimes haughty partner Doug. Of Doug he quipped then, “what, does this church have a one-queen-quota?"), pays attention to the Religious Right and frequently flirts with optimism on the topic. But he can’t quite bring himself to hope against hope, ending this one on a characteristically down note:

I have feeling that once the Miers nomination is resolved one way or the other, Dobson and the rest of his cronies on the religious right will backslide in to gay-bashing again, quicker than you can say “amen.”

I’m more optimistic.

Consistently.

I agree with Rod. We’ve won. A personal story informs that opinion…

Doug’s family has a good sized evangelical fundamentalist contingent. One, an uncle who may be the most conservative among them, was giving away his last daughter recently.

I went to the wedding.

Now the thing is, it’s not just that I went. It’s that I HAD TO GO.

Don’t get me wrong, normally I’d be happy to. But it was a very busy time and a very long way away and I could have used the time at home.

Except I couldn’t.

It would have insulted him. He wanted me to be there. I might even say we’re close. And believe me, we have absolutely nothing in common politically.

It wasn’t just him; the whole family wanted me to be there. And we all had a very good time (save for one awkward conversation in which it was revealed that I really don’t care one whit about the Dawgs, even as I tried to fake it).

I know he and his family will, like Dobson and his followers, vote in favor of the marriage amendment again next time, even as they’d be upset if my life partner and I don’t come to thier wedding. And yes, they’d buy right in to his notion of special rights.

Years ago I’d try to make them ACCEPT ME AS I AM; now I know I’ve fought those battles. And I believe I’ve won.

If you read me regularly you know I oppose the closet and applaud the continued fighting and striving; my plea here is not for an end to that. But I don’t want ours to be a bitter victory. I want them to feel they have to come and dance eat cake at my wedding. And I want them to have a good time too.

A fundamentalist & me

Today I advised a student on buying a laptop. As we were talking I asked what year he was. A Senior.

“Oh, graduating.” I asked, “What do you plan to do?”

He answered that he was already an ordained minister and that since they don’t make much money, much as he loves his job, he’d probably have to earn a second income. So graduate school could be in his future.

Interesting, I thought, in light of the Slate photo-essay on God’s McMansions. While we do have one that aspires to be here, the “Real Life” church, most are quite small. They don’t make much money.

I was aware that I was having this conversation today, on National Coming Out Day. And that this particular student, the ordained minister, is one I happened to overhear last election season telling a friend that the two most important political issues for him were gay marriage and abortion.

Now I’m about as out as you can be—and yesterday a young woman, after attending a “coming out workshop,” decided to try it out on me as I was talking with my evangelical student staff, but that’s another story. Everyone knows Doug and me as a couple on campus.

When I neglected to fill out my form for the campus directory, the woman in charge secretary, whom I have never met, called to wonder if I wanted my partrner listed with me. I did. And I was moved by the kindness and consideration of the gesture.

So what did I tell the student minister?

I told him to shop around and find a few he liked, then look them up on the Internet and buy the one he determined to be the best. That his budget could be his guide and name brands (even the one the school endorses) are not necessary.

He knows I’m gay. I’m guessing it took a while before he could be comfortable enough even to ask about the computer. He will vote in favor of the marriage amendment again the next time. But I think he’s more reachable today than he was yesterday. And if we keep it up, he may well vote differently one day.

UPDATE: Edited to give credit where credit is due.

Monday, October 10, 2005

Yeah, where’s the talking robot?

Everyone at school says it’ll be a video iPod. Contrarian that I am, and going for the long shot, I’ll say OSX for the PC. Video is too obvious. Even if in time for Christmas.

Hell, just last year it might have leaked. Those were the days…

Bodog has odds on what will be unveiled at Apple’s press conference on October 12th, which has tech geeks all frothy with anticipation. So far, the heavy favorites are a video iPod at 3/2, iPod upgrades at 2/1, and updated versions of Mac and Powerbook at 2/1. Longshot odds go to an OSX for the PC at 9/1, which sadly, we have no idea what that means. Aren’t we at the stage where Apple can make a talking robot that does houshold chores? Weren’t those things supposed to be in every home by like 1994?

How about a web-enabled iPod?

UPDATE: Here’s a waffle making-robot… But can it play 99¢ songs?

We all have cameras now

In a room of 4 students here in rural Georgia I asked how many had video cameras in their phones. One did.

Police departments everywhere had better wake up. This was AP but it could have been your phone or mine:

Two New Orleans police officers repeatedly punched a 64-year-old man accused of public intoxication, and another city officer assaulted an Associated Press Television News producer as a cameraman taped the confrontations.

How about a law that makes it illegal to interfere with a citizen photographing a newsworthy event?

The APTN tape shows an officer hitting the man at least four times in the head Saturday night as he stood outside a bar near Bourbon Street. The suspect, Robert Davis, appeared to resist, twisting and flailing as he was dragged to the ground by four officers. Another of the four officers then kneed Davis and punched him twice. Davis was face-down on the sidewalk with blood streaming down his arm and into the gutter.

Meanwhile, a fifth officer ordered APTN producer Rich Matthews and the cameraman to stop recording. When Matthews held up his credentials and explained he was working, the officer grabbed the producer, leaned him backward over a car, jabbed him in the stomach and unleashed a profanity-laced tirade.

Katrina aside, the department is “long plagued by allegations of brutality and corruption.” The video (via CNN) is profoundly disturbing.

Terrance asks: “Maybe it’s me, but is being publicly intoxicated on Bourbon Street really that much of a big deal?”

Federal antispam laws

CNet’s Declan McCullagh argues the feds should do nothing about spam; leave it to the states. His argument is persuasive:

Five spyware-related bills exist in Congress, namely S.1004, H.R.744, H.R.29, S.687, and S.1608.

Three of those--including Rep. Mary Bono’s H.R.29, already approved by the House of Representatives--would explicitly override state laws, even if the state laws are more consumer-friendly than the federal law.

Many are. Last year, Utah enacted an anti-spyware law that was so strict that WhenU sued to block it even before the measure took effect. WhenU is one of those ethically challenged companies that tread the line between adware and spyware--its software is surreptitiously installed when unsuspecting Windows users download file-sharing programs like BearShare. Some 87 percent of WhenU “customers” are unaware where that constant stream of pop-up ads comes from from.

No wonder WhenU CEO Avi Naider says that his company “supports anti-spyware legislation at the federal level.” It would eliminate the possibility of state legislators taking a harder line.

Sunday, October 09, 2005

Judge Judy’s crowd-pleasing bullying injustice

Last week I endorsed Malcolm Gladwell’s suggestion that hiding the race of a defendant in a legal proceeding would alter its outcome. Adam Cohen in the Times today says Judge Judy brings up another, equally important point:

Since the French Revolution, Western society has been committed to the ideal that social status should not matter in court. The American legal system, perhaps more than any other, insists that all men and women are equal before the law, but legal sociologists can show that the reality is far different. In “Sociological Justice,” a book he wrote for a popular audience, [University of Virginia social sciences professor Donald] Black argues that the legal system would be fairer if efforts were made to hide information about the parties’ social status from judges and juries. Judge Judy, of course, is an extreme example of the reverse; she is constantly asking about people’s idleness and bad debts, and generally digging for what Professor Black calls the “social geometry of the case.”

It is hardly surprising that “Judge Judy” is so popular. People like to see social hierarchies reinforced, and people who violate social norms “taught responsibility” or otherwise punished. Humiliation is also a traditional crowd pleaser, and an important part of virtually every reality show on television. The real problem with “Judge Judy” is not that it is worse than most reality TV, which it is not. It is that for an audience that runs well into the millions every week, it is blurring the line between justice and social bullying.

Barry Diller doesn’t get it

Barry Diller has a much different take than the one I espoused just the other day:

Diller is still wearing his skeptic’s hat; at Web 2.0 he turned it on those among the new wave of Web visionaries who have dared to dream that our new publishing and searching technologies might help bring a wider conversation into being beyond control of the broadcast world’s gatekeepers. “There’s just not that much talent in the world,” Diller says, “and talent almost always outs.”

On the one hand, Diller likes the Web, because it makes it easier for people to strut their stuff, if they have any: “If you have an idea, you can get it up and out, and good ideas resonate.” On the other hand, don’t expect some sort of renaissance of creativity to happen when the Web allows us to tap the talents of a wider swath of humanity: “I think that entertainment—TV, movies, games—I think it’s going to be a relatively few people who do that, simply because there is not enough talent, and it is not hiding out somewhere...”

Scott Rosenberg could teach him a thing or two. He has me:

I’m sorry, I worked for 15 years as a theater and movie critic, and I know that Diller is wrong. Sure, I did my time working at a theater reading the slush pile of unproduced play submissions; I spent too many hours watching the awful 95 percent of movies that do manage to get produced and released. I don’t have any illusions about repealing Sturgeon’s Law.

But the promise of the Net, still not fulfilled but hanging there hopefully before us, is that a free, open, teeming network can actually provide more opportunity for “talent” to “out” than a handful of overworked script readers, slush-pile combers and A&R men. To think otherwise—to think that the existing corporate cultural system is the most efficient mechanism imaginable for the identification of artistic talent—is pure arrogance.

Based on what he said here, I think Barry Diller believes he is someone who understands the Internet because he knows so well how to make money through it. But I don’t believe he understands the first thing about what makes it anything more than just a money machine.

Lego’s Long Tail

Chris Anderson:

It all starts with Lego’s mail-order business, which began as a traditional shop-at-home catalog and is now increasing organized around its website. In a typical toy store, Lego may have a few dozen products. On its online store, it has nearly 1,000, ranging from bags of roof tiles to a $300 Deathstar (shown). If you want to see how different the online market is from the traditional retail market for Lego, check out their topsellers list. Only a few of those products are even available in stores, and most of those are inexpensive items added to other purchases to bring them over $50 and thus qualify for free shipping.

It’s worth pausing here and considering the Long Tail implications of this. At least 90% of Lego’s products are not available in traditional retail. They’re only available in the catalogs and online, where the economics of inventory and distribution are far friendlier to niche products. Overall, those non-retail parts of the business represent 10-15% of Lego’s annual $1.1 billion in sales. But the margins on these products are higher than the kits sold through Toys R Us, thanks to not having to share the revenues with the retailer. And because the virtual store can carry products for all Lego fans, from kids to adult enthusiasts, and not just the sweet spot of nine-year-old boys, the range of prices can be a lot greater online, from $1 bricks to the aforementioned $300 Star Wars kit.

I said bravo Lego last month, over their reaction to a customer hack. Chris has more…

Read the rest of "Lego’s Long Tail" in the extended entry.

Susan Ralston

Could she be the Rose Mary Woods of our time?

The photo comes via a commenter on TPM’s Susan Ralston thread. I missed it when she testified before the grand jury in August.

She’ll be back.

Howard Fineman on Chris Matthews this morning:

This is a woman who is Karl Rove’s secretary. But before that she worked for Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist who’s under investigation by another grand jury. Susan Ralston is arguably legally the most important person in Washington right now because she central to a lot of different investigations and you’re going to be hearing more about her in the days and weeks ahead.

Saturday, October 08, 2005

Slang rules!

P.J. O’Rourke doesn’t much like leslie Savan’s Slam Dunks and No-Brainers. I won’t be reading it. But I sure did enjoy the review:

A little information makes any book about language a pleasure. Very little information is found in “Slam Dunks.” Much effort is expended citing the use of catchphrases. Not much effort is expended discovering their sources or tracing their disseminations. Savan quotes from Charles Mackay’s brief chapter on slang in “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” but she doesn’t seem to have read it. Certainly she didn’t absorb Mackay’s sense of how “the favorite slang phrase . . . throws a dash of fun and frolicsomeness over the existence of squalid poverty and ill-requited labour.” Savan is apparently ignorant of Eric Partridge’s “Dictionary of Catch Phrases.” Here she would have found that a Macaulay Culkin “Home Alone” squelch she particularly deplores has a 100-year-old fun and frolicsomeness antecedent. And Savan writes that “exactly when cool jelled into the word we know today is difficult to say.” It is not difficult to say upon looking into The Oxford English Dictionary. “Assured and unabashed in demeanor . . . calmly and deliberately audacious or impudent” dates to the 1820’s. But the O.E.D. is not in Savan’s bibliography, which contains “Jones, Gerard. ‘Honey, I’m Home!: Sitcoms: Selling the American Dream’ “ and “Moore, Michael. ‘Dude, Where’s My Country?’ “

Rush’s Georgia “mistress”

She’s apparenlty CNN’s Daryn Kagan:

LIMBAUGH: In fact, I got a note from my mistress in Georgia this morning, who was watching the speech. She said, “This is great. This sounds like you wrote this speech. This sounds like you giving this speech.

[Also] Via Amanda: “Nothing says ‘down home man of the people’ like having a ‘mistress’. That’s pretty much how we common folk in the red states do it.”

Amanda’s right. He’s part of the conservative elite no matter where he stands on Miers.

Abby makes sense

Yesterday:

DEAR ABBY: From time to time, you tell young women who think they might be pregnant and are afraid to tell their parents, to do so. I usually do not write letters like this, but I need to express my personal experience. I am a minister. Several years ago, I worked for Planned Parenthood and we had a young girl—around 13 years of age—test positive for pregnancy. We urged her to tell her parents, but she kept refusing, insisting, “Dad will kill me!”
Of course, we knew better, and finally convinced her that the best thing was to tell her parents, have the baby, and get on with her life.

Her father beat her so badly that she was in the hospital for more than a month. She lost the baby because of the beating and ended up in foster care.

I will never again tell a young person that her parents will not go crazy, and I don’t think you should do that either. Thanks, Abby. I enjoy your column.—REGRETFUL IN FLORIDA

DEAR REGRETFUL: Thank you for the warning. Even though we wish all teenagers could disclose to their parents, as your letter illustrates, it is a sad reality that some of them cannot. And we, who care about young people, have to first be concerned with their safety. Although most young girls do involve their families, there will always be some who are unable to do so.

For that reason, I do not believe that parental notification should be mandated by law. And because sex education is no longer taught in as many states as it had been before, I strongly urge parents to begin talking to their children early about the facts of life and their personal value systems, in order to create a safe and comfortable environment should a crisis occur.

Via Amanda at Pandagon:

The paradox of parental notification laws is that the argument is that girls should tell their parents because their parents are their protecters, but girls who actually believe this don’t need to be forced by law to tell their parents.

Friday, October 07, 2005

Pyramids & pancakes

I was thinking of William Gibson‘s oft quoted “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.”

And I thought that it applies to talent, only in reverse: Genius is evenly distributed. We just don’t know it yet.

Now the genius I mean includes a whole bunch of things, talent of all kinds: artistic ability, musical ability, craftsmanship, business acumen, you name it. Not so long ago, in order to shine in any of those areas—or, rather, in order to be more widely recognized—you had to leave your hometown and go to the city.

That was a function of our primitive ability to find and produce you; we didn’t have a more efficient structure. And for all it cost to produce you once found, you’d better be a star. Not a whole lot of room there for particular tastes.

The internet has made it possible for us to stay in our own towns and shine.

Lately I’ve been quoting Michael Lewis’s metaphor of “pyramids and pancakes.” It’s a chapter title from his 2002 book, Next: The Future Just Happened, that describes how the successful organization of the future (and the future is now) will not have a top down, pyramidal structure. Rather, the organization will be flat, like a pancake, and draw intelligence from those of us on the edges.

All this comes to mind thanks to a significantly successful week of student media production here in rural Georgia. I am wonderfully and genuinely and joyfully impressed by the quality of their student work. And this is just the beginning; their homemade micro-content is tomorrow’s Media Giant killer.

I’ve been down this road before; cable was once my technology of choice. This is better. I know they’re going to do great things.

Lying pols

Lying is such a complex issue. Would that it could be so simple as to say that lying is always bad. The South is well known for the gentle lie that covers up a hard truth. And much as it is sometimes difficult for this direct, cut to the chase New Yorker to get used to, I kind of like that.

The lying we ask of our politicians might even be related. We blame them and berate them for it, but we’re unwilling to vote for the truth. So they lie and they lie and they become quite good at it. But once inured to lying, the difficult question becomes where to draw the line:

Former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) met for at least 30 minutes with the top fundraiser of his Texas political action committee on Oct. 2, 2002, the same day that the Republican National Committee in Washington set in motion a series of financial transactions at the heart of the money-laundering and conspiracy case against DeLay.

During the meeting at his Capitol office, DeLay conferred with James W. Ellis, the head of his principal fundraising committee in Washington and his chief fundraiser in Texas. Ellis had earlier given the Republican National Committee a check for $190,000 drawn mostly from corporate contributions. The same day as the meeting, the RNC ordered $190,000 worth of checks sent to seven Republican legislative candidates in Texas.

In the past two weeks, two separate Texas grand juries have returned indictments against DeLay, Ellis and a political associate alleging that these transactions amounted to money laundering intended to circumvent a Texas campaign law barring the use of corporate funds for state election purposes. The aim of the alleged scheme was to ensure that Republicans gain control of the Texas House, and thus reorder the state’s congressional districts in a manner favoring the election of more Republicans to Congress.

Via Kos.

The liberal conervative elite

Noam Scheiber says the Miers nomination reveals a conservative schism:

In many ways, the biggest fault line emerging among conservatives is between East Coast elites, on the one hand, and rank-and-file conservatives elsewhere in the country. As soon as the nomination was announced, Beltway conservatives began griping that Miers, a former Dallas lawyer and a graduate of Southern Methodist University Law School, lacked the credentials to serve on the Supreme Court. “An inspiring testament to the diversity of the president’s cronies,” quipped National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum argued that the conservative movement had spent decades grooming legal talent for the next Republican Supreme Court nomination. Promising young conservatives had attended top law schools, written weighty academic papers, embarked on distinguished careers as professors and judges--all to hone their legal philosophy for the day when they would be able to impose it on U.S. jurisprudence. For Bush “to take a hazard on anything other than a known quantity of the highest intellectual and personal excellence” was “simply reckless,” Frum concluded.

Away from the Eastern seaboard, however, conservatives were warming to Miers. Irate National Review readers wrote to accuse the magazine of elitism. A conservative Texas lawyer complained that calling Miers’s old firm “undistinguished” was “the kind of thing that only an absolute snob--someone who takes the position that no Texas firm could ever be anything but undistinguished--would say.”

What’s important here, says Scheiber, isn’t ideology; it’s sociology:

[C]onservative elites are frequently as credentialist, even snobbish, as the liberal elites they scorn. Many conservative pundits and wonks attended top schools, read highbrow publications, and belong to exclusive professional societies. They firmly believe that elite credentials signify merit. This has important implications. For example, one of the reasons conservative elites are offended by affirmative action is that they equate it (wrongly, it turns out, but not preposterously) with a relaxation of standards. In their minds, in fact, cronyism and affirmative action are equivalent, since both undercut meritocracy for political reasons. “It’s not just that Miers has zero judicial experience,” wrote commentator Michelle Malkin. “It’s that she’s so transparently a crony/’diversity’ pick.”

To be fair, the conservatives who populate National Review’s blog retreated from the credentialist critique of Miers once the angry e-mails began pouring in. They emphasized instead that Miers lacked a coherent conservative legal philosophy--that she’d “never written seriously on constitutional issues,” as National Review’s Jonah Goldberg wrote. But this is really just a politically correct form of the same argument.

Maps, McDonalds & the future of the Net

Wired on how digital maps are changing how we navigate our lives:

This technology used to be top-secret government stuff. Then, in the 1980s, McDonald’s dumped thousands into buying satellite images and developing software called Quintillion, which predicted the growth of cities and school districts. Ever notice there’s always a McDonald’s where you’d expect one? The company looked down from the heavens and dropped new franchises wherever it saw the right combination of kids, interstates, and suburbs, using one of the first geographic information systems for business analysis.

Look what we’re doing with maps now:

At their best, they’re user interfaces to the world, connecting places and people. Google has figured this out - the company knows its maps are only as good as the refinements made by users. In June, it gave away the code to its maps, as did Yahoo! Now an army of amateurs is flooding the Web with map-based analyses. ChicagoCrime.org lets users evaluate Windy City neighborhoods based on police data. Gmaps Pedometer lays out distances between any two points. And Squid Labs is working on augmented-reality screens that embed tags into 3-D space so you can tour a museum or battlefield and readily footnote what you see. And what’s more brilliant than those open source subway maps optimized for an iPod screen?

Imagine how vibrant the entertainment world would be if the big media companies acted as Google did.

Thursday, October 06, 2005

Polls

Last week James Joyner had the president’s job approval rating up noting, “what goes down must come up.”

It’s gone back down:

President George W. Bush’s overall job approval rating has reached the lowest ever measured in this poll, and evaluations of his handling of Iraq, the economy and even his signature issue, terrorism, are also at all-time lows. More Americans than at any time since he took office think he does not share their priorities.

Last week it was CNN, at 45%. This week CBS has it at 37% (Republicans still give him 79%).

It seems flat out obvious that he will sink like a stone. An unpopular war was hurting in August, before high gas prices. On the 4th of July gas cost $2.04 here and that I recall thinking was high. A delivery we were quoted at $10 a month or so ago has gone up to $50. Winter home heating has yet to hit.

That’s just got to ripple through the economy.

Last week Joyner said, “Bush has very little control over gasoline prices, of course, but we have been conditioned to associate all events in our lives with presidential authority.”

I don’t assume Bush could have stopped this, but he could have prepared us (be preparing us now), mitigated some, done anything more than continue in denial.

Then again, he’s likely been busy with other things.

Rove’s troubles

Yes, I’m intrigued and reading lots of speculation on Rove’s return to the grand jury. Since there’s absolutely nothing I can add, I’ll point instead to today’s other Rove news:

Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) announced that Frances Lovett, a registered voter in Kerr County, Texas, sent a complaint this week to Kerr County District Attorney, E. Bruce Curry, urging an investigation into whether Karl Rove, Deputy Chief of Staff to President Bush, violated Texas state law by illegally registering as a voter in Kerr County, despite never residing there.

[...]

Mr. Rove and his wife, Darby, registered to vote in Kerr County in 2003 after they sold their Austin, Texas home. County property records show that Mr. Rove and his wife have owned two tiny rental cottages in Kerr County since 1997, the largest of which is only 814 feet and is valued by the county at $25,000. In contrast, the Roves’ Washington, D.C. home is valued at over $1.1 million. Other local Kerr County residents have stated that they have never seen Mr. Rove in the area.