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Friday, July 26 As promised, and with an assist from reader S.K. and from Thomas, we present to you selections from the remarks of the Honorable James Traficant, made in his own defense, on the floor of the House a few nights ago:
Now, I am going to get right to the point. I want you to imagine there is a small army of patriots, and they are facing a gigantic army armed to the teeth. And the captain, trying to show strength, calls his assistant and says, "Go to the tent and get my bright red vest."He goes and gets the red vest. He puts the red vest on, and he says, "To show the power and courage of our people, without a sidearm I am going to carry this sword and I am going to attack the enemy, and, as they slay me, the blood will not be seen because of my bright red vest and you will be encouraged to fight for our homeland." He gave a banshee cry. He ran out into battle and was destroyed.
His assistant come up and he called his attendant. He said, "Go to the tent and get me those dark brown pants."
Think about it.
Tonight I have dark pants on. Am I scared to death? No. I will go to jail before I will resign and admit to something I didn't do.
Then there's this:
Richard Detore is a patriot. I didn't subpoena Detore because his attorney said, "Don't subpoena Richard, subpoena me." To tell you the truth, I was a gentleman, and I did it. I felt sorry for him.Before I was indicted, before Detore was indicted, I have a tape where he says everything on that tape that he told the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct. He said, "Jim, I think I am living in Red China. If I didn't have two kids, I would blow my brains out."
And this:
Now, let's talk about Tony Bucci. His fourth plea agreement, his brother in Cuba, fled the country on a fugitive warrant, they sentenced him to 6 weeks arrest, and here is what he said. He did $12,000 worth of work at the Traficant farm, and he owned me. Now, not all of you know me personally, but if you think someone owned me, you would throw me the hell out of here.Witnesses testified that I asked him for jackhammers because we had an old bank barn. I never owned the farm. But this old bank barn didn't have enough height for horses, Ralph. I asked him to let me use their jackhammers. He said, "It is an insurance problem. I will send some people out." I said, "I don't want you to do that. You will get too close to that old bank barn and you will drop it in."
And that is what happened, folks. And the whole corner of that barn, Cynthia, fell down. Harry Manganaro came out and helped me prop it up. It cost my dad $15,000.
Now, guess what? Harry Manganaro came to my office yesterday and said his building happened to be firebombed last weekend and all his records are missing, including the bill, $15,000, not counting materials, to my dad who owned it.
Sinclair. Now, look. You are prosecutors. Mr. Callahan made a hell of a point. Mr. LaTourette, thank you. But now I want a prosecutor to think, you really want Jim Traficant? They didn't allow a witness to testify, they wouldn't allow a vendetta defense. She voir dired nine of my witnesses outside the presence of the jury, didn't allow them to testify. Allowed none of my tapes. All of my tapes are exculpatory. Even on those who took the 5th Amendment, she didn't allow them.
Bucci lied through his teeth. His sister-in-law told me that there were three brothers and a brother that lived across the street from the farm and he was my friend. And she said he was sick, they took him to Florida, where he had his leg amputated; brought him back, stole the money from the family, and her children did not even attend the funeral. She submitted an affidavit and testified.
And, finally, this:
I had an FBI agent that compromised one of my constituents under mental instability, desperately trying to save custody of her child, compromised her into sex. She said, "Jim, he didn't throw me to the ground. I don't want my 87-year-old mother to know about it."FBI agent Anthony Speranza. I will be damned if someone is going to rape one of my constituents.
Enjoy the weekend. [posted 5:50 pm]
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ARI FLEISCHER, LYING MACHINE. Spinsanity has the latest, but we'll just give you this hint: it has to do with Social Security. [posted 5:25 pm]
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YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK. We thought Ryan Lizza's important cover story in The New Republic last week would have gotten more pickup, but no dice. So here goes: The
story concerns all the federal largesse -- your money -- that Bush is diverting to Florida in order to help his brother, Jeb, win re-election. (He's also funnelling GOP money down to Florida, the state that is by far the number one recipient of Republican National Committee transfers this year.) Lizza's story is detailed and interesting -- did you know a Florida sex shop recently received a targeted small-business loan from the Small Business Administration? -- and, more importantly, devastating. It's not just that the Bushies are diverting money to Florida. It's that the Bush adminstration is squandering our money on Florida. Remember how the administration bought back those oil-drilling leases to give Jeb some enviro cred? They cost $235 million. But the oil companies only paid $13 million for them back in the 1980s. "Under the current deal," writes Lizza, "Jeb and W. get to pose as conservationists, the oil companies make a massive profit -- and taxpayers get stuck with the tab." Sweet. [posted 5:15 pm]
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THE VERB "TO DINOSAUR." Brendan Koerner makes flawless use of this novel construction in this Slate explainer piece:
For the moment, however, 2002 NT7 sits atop JPL's "Current Impact Risks" chart, which lists the 37 Near-Earth Asteroids most likely to dinosaur the human race.Tapped is all for turning nouns into verbs when they work as well as this example does. Indeed, we think we may be trying one in our own prose in the future....Hey, does this new verb finally make it official that a meteor impact from outer space, and not volcanic eruptions, killed the dinosaurs? We sure hope so. [posted 5:00 pm]
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JUST HILARIOUS. This interview with the current chairman of the Federal Election Commission -- David Mason -- reveals that he doesn't believe that money in politics should be regulated, even thought that's the job of his agency. If this is supposed to be a joke, we're not amused. [posted 3:20 pm]
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TNR, HEDGING ITS BETS? Last April, The New Republic published a cover story by Charles Krauthammer advancing an allegedly "secular" case against research cloning (sometimes called therapeutic cloning). Now, the magazine has published a mid-length argument piece by Harvard Medical School professor Jerome Groopman that either repudiates or debunks most of Krauthammer's premises. Scathingly critiquing the President's Council on Bioethics's majority position -- which Krauthammer, himself a council member, supported -- Groopman writes:
An early-stage zygote is crucially different from the disabled, the deformed, the fragile young, or the fragile old. Before 14 days -- the legal cutoff Britain has established for scientific research -- the zygote has developed no organs, no nervous system, nor even the precursor to a nervous system. This absence of the most primitive neural anatomy means that biologically the zygote cannot receive any form of stimulation related to the senses, cannot perceive or cogitate, and thus cannot be hurt or suffer.But, for the council's majority, this biological fact is irrelevant "[b]ecause the embryo's human and individual genetic identity is present from the start." But if potentiality alone conferred sanctity, then the single adult nucleus, which holds the genetic program of the later zygote, would also be worthy of protection. No human cell could be discarded -- ever. No biopsy. No tube of blood. No vial of frozen sperm or egg. Absurd? Of course. But this is where the majority's logic leads.
So who's right? Tapped thinks it's obvious that Groopman is and that Krauthammer et al are trying to defend a position riddled with contradictions. But for TNR -- which has served in the past as a podium for the anti-research (and sometimes just plain anti-technology) hand-wringing of Leon Kass and Krauthammer -- this seems a remarkable, and noteworthy, departure. [posted 3:15 pm]
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VETO THE HOMELAND SECURITY BILL? Let's get this straight. The Bush administration spends months opposing the creation of a homeland security agency, while Senate Democrats continually press for one on the merits. Finally, the White House flips -- in part to change the subject from the FBI scandals (remember those?) -- and demands a homeland security agency, as though all along the Senate Dems have been the problem. But instead of moving forward on the essential plan, Karl Rove et al can't resist cynically larding up the bill with completely unnecessary provisions to strip government employees being moved into the new agency of civil service protections. And then they have the cojones to blame the Democrats for holding things up.
We say again: Who can argue with a straight face that civil service protections have been the problem all along? Well, besides actor/senator Fred Thompson and Susan Collins of Maine, who voted for the Democratic bill last week but, after presumably being called to the woodshed for doing so, now says she couldn't possibly support it without the civil service provisions Bush wants. Writeth the Times:
Mr. Fleischer said that if a drunken Border Patrol agent were found to have allowed a terrorist into the country, the agent could not be fired without a 30-day notice. Managers could not deny scheduled pay raises to poorly performing workers, he said, and could not easily be given merit pay increases.
If Mr. Fleischer can produce a single example of a terrorist entering the country thanks to a drunken Border Patrol agent, Tapped would love to hear about it. [posted 1:25 pm]
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MAYBE NEIL LEWIS ISN'T SO CRAZY. Yesterday, Jonathan Last spanked the New York Times for Lewis's story on how conservatives are worried about John Ashcroft's terror tactics. And more generally, folks at NRO's "The Corner" have been raising Cain about Lewis's report. Now, we don't necessarily want to claim to know more about the right than the right itself does. But Tapped doesn't find the notion that libertarian-leaning conservatives would be annoyed with Ashcroft very surprising at all, much less obviously wrong. Indeed, we've written about this sort of schism on the right ourselves.
And we see evidence of it everywhere. The latest is that USA Today says Republicans were among Ashcroft's toughest questioners on the Hill yesterday. [posted 1:00 pm]
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JEFF FOXWORTHY FILLS IN FOR CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER. Well, that's what it seems like, anyway. The theme: Why liberals are stupid. What's the matter, Chuck, couldn't think of anything else to write? On vacation somewhere, phoning it in? Too busy figuring out how you can extricate your reputation from the doddering mess that is the Kass Commission?
P.S. Krauthammer describes where liberals go wrong thusly: "Liberals tend to be nice, and they believe -- here is where they go stupid -- that most everybody else is nice too." For the record, Tapped does not think "everybody else is nice too." To rephrase: We don't believe human nature is "good," whatever that means. In fact, we believe 9/11 says quite a lot about human nature. And we're still liberals. Time to reshuffle the deck, Chuck. [posted 12:45 pm]
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SQUIRM INDUCING. The latest from Noy Thrupkaew is up -- it's her review of the film Tadpole, starring Sigourney Weaver. Click here to read it. [posted 11:45 am]
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AND IF BANKRUPTCY REFORM TURNS YOU ON... Wait til you hear what we've got to say about pensions! USA Today has a nice little round-up piece on other ways Congress can us show if they're really serious about corporate accountability -- some of which, like pension reform and expensing stock options, got dropped from the corporate accountability measure so it could be rushed through. Frankly, we think the outcome of the pension debate in the Senate will tell the American people whose side Congress is really on. And just in time for the elections, too, since Tom Daschle has promised to consider a bill in September.
The House passed a pension bill that will actually make things worse for workers and middle management. Workers should be able to recover from executives who mislead them about company stocks. They should be able to get independent investment advice. They should have representation on the company pension plan board to protect their savings. But the House passed a "reform" bill that excluded these things.
The "top floor" shouldn't have rights any different than the "shop floor." If the CEO gets a guaranteed pension, so should the workers; if the CEO can sells his stock options on short notice, workers should have that same right; and if the CEO has representation on pension fund boards, so should workers.
And....we're spent. [posted 11:40 am]
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HARKEN WATCH. Another document dump from the Center for Public Integrity fueled this Reuters story, which tell us that "President Bush played an active role in Harken Energy Corp.'s business decisions and consulted with the head of the company shortly before a controversial 1989 transaction that drew scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission." The White House can stonewall all they want, but we get the sense that this story is not going away. [posted 11:30 am]
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WHATEVER YOU SAY. We came across this delightful Christian Science Monitor story on conservate journalists via MediaNews. In it, Ann Coulter states that when she took a class at the National Journalism Center, "Ideology was not taught. Reporting was taught; do research and get your facts right."
Guess it didn't stick. Let us recap. Chapter 1: In
which we announce the plan to fact check Coulter, and catch her on Jim Jeffords' voting record; Chapter 2: In which we discover that she needs to get a calendar; Chapter 3: In which she spouts off (embarrassingly) on Hardball; Chapter 4: In which she viciously abuses LexisNexis (not for the last time!); Chapter 5: In which she repeats the Gore Love Story howler; Chapter 6: In which she abuses LexisNexis once again; Chapter 7: In which we show that Coulter's wrong about whether liberal women get called "ugly"; Chapter 8: In which Coulter misrepresents the end of the Cold War; Chapter 9: In which she lies about how "nobody" covered an Al Gore gaffe during a campaign stop in Monticello. [posted 11:05 am]
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GREAT. JUST GREAT. Get ready for an upswing in alleged UFO sightings. [posted 11:00 am]
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WE DON'T USUALLY DO THIS, BUT.... It's damn hard to make the issue of bankruptcy reform make sense, much less to make it sexy. And that's why Tapped is departing from our standard penny-pinching procedures and recommending to all of our readers that, if you haven't yet, you might want to think about paying for and reading this amazing investigative article on the consequences of bankruptcy reform in Time magazine by the ace duo Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele. Believe us, it's worth $ 2.50. [posted 10:10 am]
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MORE BACKROOM DEALS? Late last night when we were all in bed, the Democrats caved on giving the president fast track -- or, as Bush would have it, "trade promotion authority" -- another major victory for corporate America. [posted 10:00 am]
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SPECIAL TAPPED PORN EDITION!!! Just kidding. We really want to talk to you about the bankruptcy bill, but didn't know how else to get your attention. Just in case you thought corporate America had skulked off and was licking its wounds, here comes word that this long-stalled legislation -- which strongly favors Wall Street over Main Street -- has cleared the conference committee and is on its way to becoming law. The power of political contributions and lobbying behind the bankruptcy reform bill has been extraordinary, even by Capitol Hill standards. As The New York Times notes, some of those with the most to gain are some of the biggest contributors to President's Bush campaign. The timing of this "breakthrough" makes us wonder whether this might have been part of a backroom deal to get the Sarbanes' corporate accountability bill through. Now that we think about it, Tapped is worried about what other deals might have been struck.
Now, wasn't that sexy -- at least in the Austin Powers sense of the word? [posted 9:45 am]
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THIS IS PRICELESS. This. Right here. Princeton admissions folks hacked into Yale's computers to check up on students they were courting who had also applied to Yale. A bit of advice, folks. It's really not worth it. Consider: Of Tapped's two main contributors of late, one went to Yale and one went to Princeton. And look how we turned out. Are twirps like us really worth breaking the law for? [posted 9:05 am]
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Thursday, July 25 Here's how it works. Some new book/movie/TV show, usually pretty good compared to most of the pap that passes for quality mass entertainment, emerges -- David Eggers, West Wing, what have you. The newspapers, newsmagazines, and other arbiters of middlebrow culture rave about it. And then, a few months or TV seasons later, some smart, sharp, lacerating young critic -- usually at Slate, in the New Republic's back of the book, or in some other venue prizing critics who hate what everbody else likes -- goes to town and explains why the book is awful, the movie is trite, or the TV show sucks. All the cool kids are doing it! Including some of Tapped's favorite writers. We're thinking of Chris Lehmann on why he hates West Wing, Franklin Foer explaining why Steven Soderbergh should win an Oscar for the feel-good Erin Brockovich instead of the critically-acclaimed Traffic, and Dale Peck on why Rick Moody is "the worst writer of his generation." And now Slate's Emily Nussbaum says Six Feet Under -- an acclaimed t.v. show that by any reasonable measure is far better than your average sitcom -- is not so good after all.
It had to happen.
P.S. Extra credit if you can figure out where the title to this item comes from. [posted 6:45 pm]
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ORWELL, ABUSED. Remember when Michael Kelly made such a big deal out of George Orwell's World War II column attacking British pacifists as "objectively...pro-Nazi"? In his usual manner, Kelly excoriated opponents of the war on terrorism as traitors, scum, etc. (Kelly may be a pretty good editor, but as a columnist he was really born in the wrong century. How much happier would he have been writing for William Randolph Hearst in 1898?) Pacifists, he quoted Orwell, are:
[o]bjectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, "he that is not with me is against me."
"England's pacifists howled," continued Kelly, "but Orwell's logic was implacable."
Well, not so implacable. Looking through Tom Tomorrow's site yesterday, we discovered an excellent Gene Lyons article on the whole affair. Apparently, Orwell took back his commments. Tapped feels this is worth quoting at length, both to correct the historical record and to illustrate how much better Orwell is than those who abuse his words and memory to score cheap points. Lyons writes:
To readers familiar with his classic satires of political dogmatism later works, such as "1984" and "Politics and the English Language," it comes as a bit of a shock to learn that Orwell ever used the "objectively" formulation in the first place. The phrase originated in the poisonous political climate of the 1930s as pure Marxist jargon, meant to lend an air of authority to the "scientific" pronouncements of orthodox Stalinists. In a world of only two possibilities, see, anybody not 100% on Stalin's side with regard to every conceivable issue was "objectively" on Hitler's, hence a traitor. It was by such logic that the 1938 Moscow "show trials" so unforgettably satirized in Orwell's "Animal Farm" proceeded.Having written that book, which ironically nobody would publish until the war had ended, Orwell set about making amends. In December 1944, he used his regular "As I Please" column in the Tribune to specifically repudiate the term "objectively," and apologized by name to individuals whose views he'd caricatured and whose loyalty to England he'd unfairly questioned. Blaming "the lunatic atmosphere of war," he explained that the habit of accusing political dissenters of "conscious treachery....is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes harder to forsee their actions." The example Orwell gave was a pacifist asked to be an enemy spy. An honorable pacifist, he argued, would never betray his country. "The important thing is to discover WHICH individuals are honest and which are not," he wrote "and the usual blanket accusation merely makes this more difficult. The atmosphere of hatred in which [political] controversy is conducted blinds people to considerations of this kind. To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable. It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is a fool or a scoundrel."
Yep. Read the whole Lyons column here. It's brilliant. [posted 2:30 pm]
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MUST READ. Do not miss Ruy Teixeira's and John Judis' cover story in next week's New Republic. It's an excerpt of their forthcoming book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, which they've been building up in a series of articles for the past year or so in TAP, TNR, and elsewhere. (See here and here). The piece (and the book) convincingly predicts the rise of a new Democratic majority in American
politics, just as Nixon adviser Kevin Phillips did in his seminal 1968 book The Emerging Republican Majority. The high points: One, Karl Rove's Big Theory (that Bush will follow in McKinley's shoes to and exploit America's "transformational" shift from an industrial to a postindustrial economy to
build a GOP majority) is baloney. Two, Michael Barone's dumb introduction to the Almanac of American Politics 2002 (America is "two nations of different faiths. One is observant, tradition-minded, moralistic. The other is unobservant, liberation-minded, relativist") is also baloney. Oh, also: The Democrats are going to win. Well, probably. [posted 2:15 pm]
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DO YOU MINE? Periodically, Bush gets a chance to really help Afghanistan, Pakistan, or other countries involved in the war on terrorism. Sadly, he often passes -- like when he refused to give Pakistan the one thing it had asked for in exchange for help in the war on al-Qaeda, which was for the U.S. to lift tariffs against Pakistani textiles. Here's another one: Bush could sign the international treaty banning landmines, which, as Robert Schlesinger reports in The Boston Globe, remain a major menace to ordinary Afghans. Yes, it might be somewhat symbolic; signing it won't remove the mines already in the ground. But read Schlesinger's article and ask yourself whether it's not worth saving future kids from having their legs blown off. [posted 12:50 pm]
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CHANGING THE SUBJECT. A pitiful attempt is on its way: Dubya will give a speech on how the real reason health care costs have gone up is because of frivolous malpractice suits. This is really
dumb. It's not just wrong. It's demonstrably wrong. Every single halfway honest health care analyst in Washington will tell you that the two main
drivers in the rising price of health care are a) prescription drugs, and b) the rising cost of health care technology. More on this later. [posted 11:40 am]
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NUTS TO HIM. Did anyone watch Jim Traficant's bizzare, humiliating defense of himself last night? When we can get ahold of a transcript, we'll post the funnier stuff. [posted 11:35 am]
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HASTERT LOSES. A bit more on the accounting bill. It's worth noting that in this case the GOP rank-and-file won a rare victory against the dictarorial Denny Hastert and Tom DeLay, forcing them to pass the Senate accounting reform bill more or less as is. This is a big loss for the accounting industry too. Tapped's only worry is that Bush will sign this bill, take credit, and defuse a lot of the rising voter anger over this issue. [posted 11:30 am]
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JAZZ AND JUSTICE. We've just posted Sasha Polakow-Suranksy's look at the Louisiana juvenile justice system, and it isn't pretty. Children on trial are deprived of adequate counsel. Click here for the full story. [posted 11:00 am]
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IT AIN'T OVER YET. So the so-called corporate accountability bill has passed, altering how accountants do their business and threatening tough sanctions if CEO's do bad things. While some of have called these sweeping changes, Tapped thinks that's only true relatively speaking -- i.e., when you consider the last few decades' total laissez-faire attitude. Still, we're glad to see this progress, because it's an indication that lawmakers get the political message about corporations run amok.
But it ain't over yet. Washington Post reporters Jonathan Weisman and Albert B.Crenshaw have a very smart piece explaining how the implementation of the new law is key. They point out that the new, supposedly "independent" accounting board's members will be largely appointed by the SEC and will largely be supervised by it. The article goes on to say:
Accounting firms may have less reason to turn a blind eye to phony numbers, but one of the biggest incentives to inflate those numbers is still there. Because Congress refused to force businesses to count stock options as expenses, options will continue to be a mainstay in executive compensation packages. As long as corporate chieftains are holding so much stock, they will be tempted to boost stock prices through short-term gimmickry, then sell before their companies crash.As for the personal liability of executives, congressional negotiators did hand big business one break. The final bill holds executives criminally liable for cooked books if they knowingly and willfully certify them. The original Senate language had set a lower standard that would also hold executives liable for recklessness.
It's not that Tapped is cynical about these changes. But we need to be thinking beyond baby steps. Look for the next issue of the Prospect to take up the question of what real corporate reform would mean. [posted 10:55 am]
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THE LATEST FROM BEN SHAPIRO. The conservative columnist has taken it to a new low today:
I am getting really sick of people who whine about "civilian casualties." Maybe I'm a hard-hearted guy, but when I see in the newspapers that civilians in Afghanistan or the West Bank were killed by American or Israeli troops, I don't really care. In fact, I would rather that the good guys use the Air Force to kill the bad guys, even if that means some civilians get killed along the way. One American soldier is worth far more than an Afghan civilian.
Funny, Tapped didn't know it was so easy to put comparative values on human lives. But never mind; Shapiro continues:
The Afghans tolerated and supported the Taliban for years, no matter what President Bush says. A group doesn't conquer 95 percent of a country unless it has some support among the populace. The Afghans are fundamentalist Muslims. They didn't seem to mind too much that their women were treated like dogs or that the Taliban enforced Shariah (Muslim law). So frankly, it doesn't matter to me if some of their "civilians" get killed for involvement with the enemy.
To this, we can only quote Gandalf: "Do not be so eager to deal out death and judgment." Hopefully somebody will take Shapiro aside and edit him before he writes too many more columns that he'll later regret. [posted 9:25 am]
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STARK RAVING SANE. Glenn Reynolds is teeing off on the DEA's attempt to crack down on raves because some ravers seem to use ecstasy -- as well he should. We liked this part:
Unable to endure the continuing evidence of drug-war failure, the drug warriors are lashing out, hoping that the ignorant will be convinced that they're earning their pay. Congress is playing along because, basically, Congress isn't up to the job of riding herd on the massive drug-war bureaucracy.
Lay off our glowsticks! [posted 9:10 am]
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Wednesday, July 24 Apparently the philosopher's reputation is doing very well lately, as Tapped believes is richly deserved. And for once, we've actually read a good bit of the philosophy of the guy we're talking about. This Chronicle of Higher Education article on Popper (via Arts and Letters Daily) does also show some more distasteful aspects of the philosopher's character:
At the London school, recalls Mr. Munz, "people used to joke about the open society and its one enemy: Karl Popper. When people contradicted him in class, he would tell them that they had obviously not listened to what he'd said, because if they'd listened, they would know that he was right." Each dissenter would be asked to apologize, "and if no apology was forthcoming, he would then ask the student to leave the room."
But dammit, when it came to the philosophy of science and the problems with Marxism and Platonism, Popper was right. (And don't you dare contradict us.) [posted 9:00 pm]
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WE ARE HUMBLED. To learn that long before either we or Eric Alterman made fun of Dow 36,000, Tom Tomorrow was on the case. [posted 3:35 pm]
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HARKEN, IS THAT AN INVESTIGATION WE HEAR? The Hill's Alexander Bolton has another nice scoop, which is that the Democrats are are thinking about opening investigations into Harken Energy and Halliburton, Co. The two lead Democrats here are Joe Lieberman and Carl Levin, each a committee chair and thus capable of launching inquiries and issuing subpoeanas with a simple majority vote from their committees. Longtime (or even short time) readers know that Tapped has been especially critical of Lieberman's refusal to do so in the past, so we're glad to see him getting more restless. The truth will out. But better hurry up -- now that The New York Times' Jeff Gerth is on the trail, who knows how long it will be until this story breaks. [posted 3:25 pm]
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ACLU REPUBLICANS. That's what Chris Caldwell called those conservatives who, in the wake of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, fought against legislation to introduce "taggants" into commercial explosives -- chemicals that would allow investigators to track where the explosives had come from -- on libertarian grounds. (I.e., so they would be free to wage guerilla war when the black helicopters come down from the sky.) And now, it seems they're at it again.
While Democrats faithfully work with the president to create a Homeland Security Department, the GOP lards up the bill with all kinds of special amendments. One of them, according to The New York Times, is a provision to "delay by a year the start of screening airport baggage for explosives." But that's not the worst thing. They also want to strip civil service protections from the "new" employees of the Homeland Security Department (i.e., old employees of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Border Patrol, Customs, etc). The president claims he needs "management flexibility" to meet the terrorist threat.
This came as something of a revelation to Tapped. You see, up until now, it was our impression that the failure to stop 9/11 was a combination of bureaucratic failure at the FBI, poor information-sharing among federal law enforcement agencies, and the Bush administration's arrogant refusal to take seriously the counter-terrorism agenda handed over by the Clinton administration in 2000. But apparently, the real reason the terrorists actually got into the country was because Tom Ridge doesn't have the power to fire federal workers quickly enough. [posted 1:10 pm]
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TOO LATE. Al Sharpton, worried about damage to his sparkling reputation, is suing HBO for airing a police sting video from 1983 in which Sharpton appears to be discussing a drug deal. [posted 12:15 pm]
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NEWSFLASH! Michael Kelly writes a "nice" column. Well, sort of. [posted 12:10 pm]
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BETTER LATE THAN NEVER, GUYS. And welcome to the club:
Many religious conservatives who were most instrumental in pressing President Bush to appoint John Ashcroft as attorney general now say they have become deeply troubled by his actions as the leading public figure in the law enforcement drive against terrorism.Their dismay comes as several Bush advisers have begun complaining that Mr. Ashcroft, with his lifelong politician's fondness for attention, has projected himself too often and too forcefully. More significantly, they say privately that he seems to be overstating the evidence of terrorist threats.
Thanks to reader A.A. for pointing this story out. [posted 12:00 pm]
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STALEMATE! The Senate voted down the Democratic prescription drug plan, then the Republican prescription drug plan. Why? Election-year politics, of course. It's not in either party's interest to compromise in the months before an election (provided the GOP believes they can defuse the natural Democratic advantage on the issue with their own bill). Tapped would prefer a good bill, but we also think the GOP bill isn't just bad -- it sets the program down on the wrong path from day one, divvying it up among private insurers with no guarantee that they will actually cover those most in need of help. That's why it makes more sense to cover everybody while enacting cost-control measures, like forcing the timely introduction of generics and allowing Medicare to buy drugs on the federal supply schedule level -- that is, the discount price that the Veterans Benefits Administration and the military already get as bulk purchasers. But that's also what the GOP doesn't want. And it's not just because they listen to the drug industry, which is averse to anything that will diminish their profits or constrict their ability to game the patent system. It's also because a program that covers everybody is politically invulnerable, while a program that covers only poor people can later be demagogued to death and eventually overturned.
The suffering caused by the stalemate is no small matter. But the silver lining is that it forces the Democrats to overcome resistance in their own caucus, particularly among New Democrats and Blue Dogs, towards a generous program -- essentially, bidding up the benefits to a point where the GOP
can't match it and the issue achieves some electoral salience. That may be where we're headed now. [posted 11:55 am]
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NATURAL CAUSES. We've just posted an in-depth reporting piece on how the tide may be turning on the death penalty by Richard Just. A brief excerpt:
Ironically, the seeds of this reversal may have been sown in the setbacks of the 1980s and early 1990s. As courts lowered barriers to executions, the machinery of death accelerated -- especially in places like Texas -- and the number of opportunities for mistakes or close calls or sleeping defense lawyers grew exponentially. As errors piled up, dramatic eleventh hour reversals began to occur, and they struck a stronger emotional chord with the American public than the broad statistical claims that had been at the heart of [previous attempts to overturn the death penalty].
Read on. [posted 10:45 am]
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THE DREAD HACK ROBERTS. We're generally trying to restrain ourselves when it comes to lashing out at particularly ridiculous commentary on Townhall.com. To that end, we will simply quote from this Paul Craig Roberts column and let our readers do the rest in their own heads. Here goes:
First, understand that the bankruptcies of Enron and WorldCom were not caused by how they kept their books. The real scandal is that SEC rules permit the creative accounting which enabled the companies to delay public recognition of their failures for several quarters. Perhaps executives had hopes of turning things around, but the scene stinks because executives used the borrowed time to sell stock and award themselves bonuses.[posted 9:40 am]Second, understand that adding another layer of rules will not prevent future scandals. Indeed, new rules will contribute to future scandals, just as the existing rules caused this one.
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REMEMBER THE STARLING! When it comes to the snakehead, Tapped says hunt them down and exterminate every last one of them. Our perspective on these matters of introduced species is pretty much inevitably dominated by our daily experience of Washington, D.C. wildlife. Unless we wake up early and venture into a wooded area, it's a rare day when we see pretty much any bird besides pigeons (sometimes euphemistically called rock doves), starlings, and house sparrows. Every one is an introduced species -- and we're sick of all of them. [posted 8:00 am]
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Tuesday, July 23
CAN LIBERALS SAVE CAPITALISM (AGAIN)? We're pleased to announce that TAP co-editor Robert Kuttner's recent cover story has been adapted into an op-ad by TomPaine.com, and will appear on the editorial page of The New York Times. You can see the op-ad here, where it's displayed with a number of accompanying articles. [posted 5:20 pm]
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Stocks are now, we believe, in the midst of a one-time-only rise to much higher ground -- to the neighborhood of 36,000 for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. After they complete this historic ascent, owning them will still be profitable but the returns will decline. You won't be able to make as much money from them each year. We believe that in the meantime, however, astounding profits will be made.
The market in stocks, as is well know, has since corrected itelf. The market in policy entrepeneurs peddling crackpot theories that turn out to be stupifyingly wrong, however, has not. [posted 4:50 pm]
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PROSE CONS. When it comes to 9/11 intelligence failures, the least you could ask of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is for it to have filed a readable and professional report, for the sake of scholars and posterity if nothing else. But apparently the committee couldn't even manage that. According to Steven Aftergood's Secrecy News (scroll down), the latest subcommittee report on 9/11 intelligence failures "provides no new information of significance and its recommendations are banal and poorly written." A typical example of bad prose? "The summary finding regarding CIA is that CIA needs to institutionalize its sharp reorientation toward going on the offensive against terrorism." Ouch. And according to Aftergood, that line was italicized in the report. [posted 3:35 pm]
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IF TAPPED CONVERTS TO LIBERTARIANISM, PART III. Eugene Volokh has come to our aid and explained that the D.C. government can probably get away with licensing journalists as long as it doesn't single them out exclusively. He nevertheless invites us to convert to libertarianism not "on parochial First Amendment-liberal grounds that apply just to The Sacred Profession Of Journalism, but rather on the broader libertarian grounds that the government should stop trying to tax everything in sight, whether it's journalism or babysitting." Hang on a second: Is Volokh seriously asking us journalists to stop being obsessed with ourselves? Nah, couldn't be.... [posted 3:05 pm]
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BUSH, CLINTONIZED? That's Daily Pundit's opinion. The gist is that nobody really trusts Bush's motives anymore, much like nodody (in his opinion) trusted Clinton's. We had a similar observation in this article published right after the 2000 election in TAP. [posted 2:55 pm]
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DENNY HASTERT, TYRANT. Check out this AP report. Rank-and-filed Republicans are getting so nervous about voters' attitudes towards corporate corruption that they're urging Hastert to bring the Senate reform bill directly to a House vote as is. Hastert is delaying, largely because he and Tom DeLay are still looking for ways to water the proposals down. [posted 1:40 pm]
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SHADES OF POPPY, AGAIN. Ignore all the other things Bush said yesterday in his speech about the accounting bill. Focus on the things he's saying that people will remember, to his detriment.
Bush has been quick to express sympathy for people who are suffering financially in what his aides say is an effort to avoid one of the mistakes of his father, President George H.W. Bush. For instance, President Bush said his biggest concern about Sunday's record bankruptcy filing by WorldCom Inc. is the effect on the employees. "I worry that people will lose work," he said.
That's the best he can do? "I worry that people will lose work"? Way to go, buddy. [posted 12:55 pm]
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9/11 CONSPIRACY THEORIES. Don't ever say the left isn't self-critical! Just as David Corn debunked Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié in The
Nation, Ken Silverstein has debunked the "we-ignored-warning-signs-of-9/11-because-of-oil-politics" canard in TAP. Check out this follow-up in The Nation, wherein Brisard and Dasquié respond and Corn rips them a new one. (Via Instapundit.) [posted 12:40 pm]
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PAUL KRUGMAN, SPOT ON. How good is this guy? Seriously good. Most of our readers are probably already fans, but we want to carry this bit nonetheless:
Look at it this way: The Bush administration's economic plans have not changed significantly since the fall of 1999, when they were introduced as a way to ward off a challenge from Steve Forbes. Back when the tax cut that eventually became law was announced, "Dow 36,000" was climbing the best-seller lists. The economic environment has changed completely; the administration's plans haven't changed a bit.Our economic problems are real, but by no means catastrophic. What scares me is the utter inflexibility of the people who should be solving those problems.
That tells the story about as well as it can be told. No matter what the problem is, the solution is always the same. [posted 12:35 pm]
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BERNIE GOLDBERG WAS ROBBED! But seriously folks: Black and Hispanic members
of the National Press Club are up in arms over the NPC's decision to give William McGowan, author of Coloring the News -- a tome that argues that affirmative action and other attempts to accomodate minorities have corrupted journalism -- an award for press criticism.
Here's the thing: They're totally right. Coloring the News is an atrociously bad book, the kind where the author (in this case, a Manhattan Institute fellow) starts out with an ax to grind that distorts his reporting and analysis. See this excellent review by Seth Mnookin in the Washington Monthly. (That
McGowan was so negatively reviewed in a magazine where he once worked is telling.) [posted 12:30 pm]
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IF TAPPED CONVERTS TO LIBERTARIANISM, PART II. Today the Post editorializes vehemently against one of Tapped's bugaboos from yesterday: The stealth move by the D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs to (apparently) require licensing of independent journalists. The Post blows so many holes in the initiative that we won't bother, but trust us to keep our eyes on this one.... [posted 10:50 am]
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