SmartRemarks

Just a quickie here. I had to share DougJ’s wonderfully pithy comparison/contrast at Balloon Juice between last week’s news (the Henry Louis Gates incident) and this week’s news (the angry teabaggers):

When someone talks back to a cop in his own house, that’s disorderly conduct.

When people make death threats and start fights in public, that’s exercising their First Amendment rights.

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Tags: conservatism, fascism

As a prominent public figure, Robert McNamara was before my time. He had stepped down as Secretary of Defense well before I was even born. But the man who died Monday had a more profound influence on our country’s politics and policy than any number of more recent, more familiar, and more famous names.

McNamara was 93 years and one month old. He was born in 1916, before the U.S. was involved in World War I, and the strongest influence on his worldview was almost certainly World War II, in which he served under Gen. Curtis LeMay helping plan bombing strategy before the age of 30. But his rise to fame (and infamy) was certainly his management of the Vietnam War from 1961-’67.

And the results of that war had a negative impact on the politics and culture of this country that was both immediate (undermining the effectiveness of Johnson’s Great Society programs and polarizing the American electorate) and lasting (paving the way for Reagan-era feel-good revisionism, and teaching all the wrong lessons to the phalanx of neoconservatives who took us into Iraq).

McNamara certainly had second thoughts about his role in history, and in later years he expressed them, most notably in his 1995 memoir. But for all the media scrutiny to which he was subjected, in the ’60s and the ’90s, I still don’t find it (quite) possible to get inside his head.

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Tags: Dick Cheney, history, international, Iran, Iraq, neoconservatives, Robert McNamara, Vietnam war

And the mantra became, “June 12 is the new February 17.” After all the preliminary publicity, it was somewhat annoying to have the conversion from analog to digital TV broadcasting delayed four extra months. But I can see the logic of doing it after the main television viewing season was over… and as it happens, complications along the way have shown that not just viewers but quite a few broadcasters needed the extra time to get their technological ducks in a row.

Offhand, you wouldn’t think I’d be terribly concerned about the switch. I have an HDTV and a DVR with an ATSC (i.e., digital) tuner, so what’s the difference, right?

But as I’ve written before, there are complicating factors… for me and lots of other people. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: digital transition, DVRs, television, TVGOS

My 20th college reunion was last weekend. I was a bit taken aback by this because, first of all, it’s simply impossible:  I certainly haven’t been out of college for two decades. My infallibly accurate internal calendar tells me it’s more like six years, seven max. But twenty? That’s absolutely ridiculous.

Nonetheless, they insisted on holding the event, and I attended. I’ve always had a soft spot for reunions, not least because I’ve never really been the best at keeping in touch with people as time goes by (although Facebook does make that a lot easier these days), and organized reunions provide a great opportunity to “catch up.” 

I hung out with a lot of old friends, new acquaintances, and a few professors, and generally had a terrific time. (The Saturday afternoon wine tasting, ironically one of the least expensive events, was particularly enjoyable.) Still, there was something of a wistful feeling to the whole endeavor that it wasn’t quite possible to shake.

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Tags: Chicago, college, Shoreland, unemployment, University of Chicago

Where did we leave off? 

I was writing about the difficulty of finding something meaningful to say in the wake of all the full-time, professional political bloggers out there. Too often I feel like I’m just offering a synthesis of what others have said, rather than any new insight.

Perhaps I’m holding myself to an arbitrarily high standard. Posting seems easier on political discussion forums, where I can just spout off some quick impressions of the issue of the day without necessarily worrying about providing proper background and context for everything, and where the ebb and flow of responses from other posters guides the structure and flow of the discussion, rather than having to organize it entirely on my own. Nonetheless, I ramble on… 

Thus:  I was also writing about the political environment in which the Obama administration operates, and the political pressures that have led the president to make some decisions that are very disappointing in the eyes of civil libertarians, and indeed of concerned citizens in general. Which, in the wake of events this past week relating to the disposition of prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere, leads us to the perplexing questions:

Why has Barack Obama backtracked so quickly from so many of the progressive policy expectations of his supporters?

and, moreover,

WHY does the mass media keep treating Dick Cheney as a credible public figure?

One of these questions may seem deeply relevant, the other facile… but the answers are connected at a deep level.

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Tags: blogging, climate, Congress, conservatism, Constitution, Dick Cheney, energy, Guantanamo, health care, international, journalism, libertarianism, media, Obama, Reid, Republicans, torture

My recent posts on Star Trek brought me more readers than anything else I’ve written in months, but unfortunately I don’t have anything new to say about that right now.

My posts about politics, by contrast, usually draw markedly less traffic than the ones about pop culture. Nevertheless, I enjoy the topic, and certainly don’t intend to stop writing about it.

The problem with writing about politics, however, is perhaps the same one that leaves my readership diminished:  there’s already so much other good political analysis out there in the blogosphere. The conventional wisdom found in the corporate media punditocracy, especially on television, is seldom worth the attention of thinking people, of course… but while it’s easy enough to ignore David Broder or Chris Matthews, David Brooks or Joe Klein, there’s a lot of genuinely sharp, insightful political commentary being done online these days. It often seems that by the time I’ve informed myself sufficiently about some new development to form an opinion, Glenn Greenwald or Jane Hamsher or Digby or any of a dozen others has already said everything I could, in pithier style and with better documentation.

(And then there are the folks spouting off from the other side, whose arguments are seldom as thorough but frequently much more infuriating. They too make demands on one’s time. Or, as one of my favorite cartoons puts it…) ->>

So it’s hard to keep on top of breaking news… but looking back later to consolidate information and analysis isn’t necessarily easier (think “drinking from a fire hose”), and still leaves me wondering whether such reflections really offer any fresh insight.

—

Here’s a For Instance. For several weeks now, I’ve been meaning to write about the subject of the OLC torture memos, and the furor both before and after their release, in light of how it reflects on the Obama administration’s lamentable hesitancy to repudiate some of the worst excesses of the previous administration. Let’s review.

Way back on March 3, things were looking good. On the very same day it was revealed that the CIA, back in 2005, had deliberately destroyed 92 interrogation videotapes in violation of a court order… we also learned that Attorney General Eric Holder had not only formally denounced waterboarding but also released nine previously secret Bush-era memos, in which John Yoo and other OLC apparatchiks asserted remarkable expansions of executive power, such as (e.g.) that the president’s “power to suspend treaties is wholly discretionary,” and that the Fourth Amendment (prohibiting search and seizure without probable cause) does not apply to domestic military operations. 

The ACLU (which had filed FOIA requests on both the videotapes and the memos) hailed the release, but insisted that for a full accounting of the previous administration’s excesses, “dozens” of other even more incendiary memos still needed to be released. And less than three weeks later, it appeared that at least some of them would be forthcoming, as on March 21 Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball reported that

Over objections from the U.S. intelligence community, the White House is moving to declassify—and publicly release—three internal memos [from 2005] that will lay out, for the first time, details of the “enhanced” interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration…

And that’s when the shit really hit the fan.

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Tags: Dick Cheney, Eric Holder, international, media, morality, Obama, OLC memos, Republicans, torture

Just a quickie here. I’ve discovered today that in some browsers, this blog’s main page isn’t displaying the sidebar correctly. The search box, categories, tags, blogrool, etc. should be immediately to the right of the main content area… but in Safari and Opera, they’re instead rolling down to the very bottom of the page, underneath the content.

I haven’t been able to check it in Internet Explorer (I use a Mac). And it only seems to be happening on the home page, not when specific individual posts are loaded. Moreover, everything remains just fine in Firefox. I’ve tried to do some troubleshooting, but so far I haven’t been able to narrow it down.

So if you’re a reader and you don’t see the sidebar, please add a comment to this post and let me know what browser and system you’re using. If you’re a techie, feel free to pass along any suggestions that may be helpful. I put effort into getting this site to look the way I want it, and this kind of thing (while not disabling) is frustrating.

That’s all. On with your business!…

Edit:  FIXED.  See comment below.

Tags: blogging

Personal anecdote time here. Unemployment is much in the news these days. And as I’ve mentioned once or twice, I’ve been on the job market for a while now, looking for full-time work in the nonprofit sector. I try not to dwell on it. I did a little tallying-up today, though, and determined that since last Labor Day—not quite eight months, just before I started this blog and (coincidentally) the economic meltdown began in earnest—I have applied for 78 different jobs. Out of that, I’ve had a grand total of seven interviews. And no offers.

Anyone who’s lucky enough not to have been on the market recently simply has no idea how competitive it is out there. Not long ago I interviewed for a management position at a prison reform organization. The Board members I spoke with were effusive about what a great candidate I was—both before and after they rejected me. I lost out on that one to a Pulitzer-winning former editor from a major Chicago newspaper, someone who had led investigative series covering the prison system… but who had recently been laid off, and was accepting a substantial salary decrease to work at this nonprofit organization.

That’s what it’s like these days.

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Tags: Depression, economy, Republicans, unemployment

…just in case any regular visitors are curious enough to care, should not be taken to signify abandonment of this blog, deliberate or otherwise.

In fact, at the moment I have the beginnings of nine different posts in my Drafts folder, on various topics ranging from politics to comics to books to TV shows. I just haven’t managed to finish any of them to a degree that would justify posting for public consumption.

I’ve had my head in in a bit of a cloud lately. Sorry about that. I hope to shake it off soon.

‘Nuff said for now…

Tags: blogging

I just learned via Facebook that Len Wein and his family suffered a major fire yesterday morning at their home in Los Angeles.

Len, as everyone should know, is a terrific writer who has scribed almost every significant comics character out there over the last forty years. He’s the person who created Wolverine and Swamp Thing, among many other classic characters, and he was Alan Moore’s original editor on Watchmen. He wrote some of the earliest (and most memorable) comics stories I ever read, during his ’70s run on Spider-Man. His wife Christine was a friend and colleague of mine in law school in the dim, dusty days of yore (or a couple of years back, depending on how old I’m feeling any given day), and they’re both Good People in every sense.

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Tags: Len Wein