July 2005 Archives

Ezra riffs on an article from Rick Perlstein:

The government should provide health insurance. The government should guarantee health insurance. It should do it because that's the right thing to do, because it'll give workers more freedom to move around, because it'll control costs, because it'll cover everybody, and because, for this job, government-involvement is the best way to handle it.

I wrote a few weeks ago that this isn't about covering the uninsured. If we want to do that, increase the size of Medicaid and slap down an insurance mandate -- it's easily doable. This is about validating our vision of government. On health care, we're right and they're wrong. The public sector is right and the private sector is wrong. We can't be afraid to say that. We can't be afraid to fight for that. And we can't settle for a plan that validates our ends but rejects our means. Validating government is the end because it's the best way to accomplish this. It's also, incidentally, the only way to redeem the Democratic party.

More on this as time allows.

CAFTA proponents said that reduced tariffs on American exports will help our economy. CAFTA opponents said that imports of cheap foreign goods will hurt middle-class workers.

POTUS and VPOTUS, mindful that public opinion of this administration is tanking, were on the Hill twisting arms like mad.

In the end, the bill narrowly passed the House 217-215 and is headed to conference before going for the President's signature.

So...here we are.

Knowing what we know about the trade deficit with China ($103 billion in 2002, to $124 billion in 2003, to $162 billion last year), knowing that our exports to China are primarily raw materials and the imports from China are cheap finished products (hint: we're India, they're England, circa 1900) knowing all that, how do you feel about this legislation?

If you are a pro-union Democrat who lives in the South, what do you do now?

More specifically, how do you convince a middle-class worker that there is a connection between lower prices at Walmart and that worker's lack of decent health insurance?

And, for God's sake, am I the only one that finds it richly ironic that this bill passes the same week that the AFL-CIO melts down?

My son is a film-maker, although he doesn't use film, per se. What he makes are digital movies. We talked about how this is a great time to be a film-maker because digital content can be produced and distributed is so many different ways now, most of which do not involve the nut-cases at the Hollywood studios. Why is this? Edward Jay Epstein has some very interesting answers:

What has inexorably changed is the location of the studios' crucial audience.

In 1948, with studios earning all their revenues from the box office, [100% of] that audience was moviegoers.

Even as late as 1980, when the audience had television sets and video players, studios still earned 55% of their money from people who actually went to movie theaters.

In 2005, however, those moviegoers provided the studios with less than 15% of their worldwide revenues, while couch potatoes provided it with 85.8 percent...

Through this reversal of fortunes, the stage has been set for what a top studio executive warned could be "Hollywood's death spiral..."

The spiral begins with a shortening of the delay, or "window," that separates a movie's theatrical release from its video release...

Essentially, we're headed for "one-off" movie theater events that tout the DVD, video game, pay-per-view, to the stay-at-home audience. Lots of press coverage, horse-race figures on opening weekend box-office gross and a quick closing at the theater.

The shorter the run, the less money the title takes in at the box office. As this spiral accelerates and studios earn a larger and larger share of their money from home entertainment, it adds to the pressure on studios to further reduce the video window.

How far can this cycle go? After Hong Kong collapsed its video window in 2002, there was a 70% reduction in theater attendance.

And, as a top studio executive pointed out after studying the problem, "A 6% reduction in attendance in 2000-2001 led to half the movie theaters in the world going bankrupt."

What's interesting is that once you go digital, the Internet (over broadband lines) becomes a gigantic distribution channel. And it isn't just an opportunity for distributing the digital content -- savvy marketers also have the opportunity to promote their films online as well.

The Hollywood studios will always have the ability to produce content. What's going by the boards is the distribution infrastructure that puts films into movie theaters. Some films will always be more enjoyable in the theaters, but most will eventually bypass that venue altogether.

If I were just beginning my career as a filmmaker today, I'd be licking my chops.

A couple of thoughts after watching Matt Cooper on Meet the Press, reading his cover story in Time Magazine, watching Ken Mehlman defend Karl Rove, etc etc today.

Whether or not Karl Rove committed a crime, well, I still don't know, and neither do you.

And/But until we do find out, we need to step back in order to try to see the big, historical lesson here.

I think Frank Rich has the best take on it:

This case is about Iraq, not Niger.

The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons.

The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11.

That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.

Yes, the mention of Nixon is apt: this gang is Nixon-creepy. Whereas Clinton lied about getting blowjobs in the Oval, we know now that this gang lied about an entire war and (if that wasn't bad enough) used the levers of power to destroy anyone who spoke out against them.

We've reached a tipping point in the Karl Rove scandal. Although it's important to determine his criminal culpability (if any), it has become just one of many issues that are on the table.

In other words, I don't know if Rove has committed a crime (and neither do you). But perhaps the conventional wisdom is now this: that we live in a different America because of him and it's one where we're all worse off.

Krugman nails it:

Mr. Rove should receive a medal from the American Political Science Association for his pioneering discoveries about modern American politics. The medal can, if necessary, be delivered to his prison cell.

What exactly are his pioneering discoveries?

[W]e're living in a country in which there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth. In particular, there are now few, if any, limits to what conservative politicians can get away with: the faithful will follow the twists and turns of the party line with a loyalty that would have pleased the Comintern.

For Rove (more than Bush), 9/11 was his defining moment:

Mr. Rove understood that the facts were irrelevant. For one thing, he knew he could count on the administration's supporters to obediently accept a changing story line. Read the before-and-after columns by pro-administration pundits about Iraq: before the war they castigated the C.I.A. for understating the threat posed by Saddam's W.M.D.; after the war they castigated the C.I.A. for exaggerating the very same threat.

Sidebar: those of you who wonder what stake the CIA has in Fitzgerald's grand jury investigation, there it is.

For example, many Bush apologists suggest that Plame really wasn't a covert operative; others respond that Fitzgerald wouldn't have stayed with the case for two years if she wasn't. Surprise! It's the CIA that gets to say who is and who isn't.

Let Krugman continue:

Mr. Rove also understands, better than anyone else in American politics, the power of smear tactics. Attacks on someone who contradicts the official line don't have to be true, or even plausible, to undermine that person's effectiveness. All they have to do is get a lot of media play, and they'll create the sense that there must be something wrong with the guy.

Rove says Earth is flat; Democrats disagree.

Ultimately, this isn't just about Mr. Rove. It's also about Mr. Bush, who has always known that his trusted political adviser - a disciple of the late Lee Atwater, whose smear tactics helped President Bush's father win the 1988 election - is a thug, and obviously made no attempt to find out if he was the leaker.

Most of all, it's about what has happened to America. How did our political system get to this point?

Good question. And don't bother answering that "they did it first," regardless of your party affiliation.

The only relevant question is, "Who did it last?"

From Joel Stein:

Holds Up:

1. Airplane!
2. Pee-Wee's Big Adventure
3. Caddyshack
4. This is Spinal Tap
5. Better Off Dead

Honorable Mention:

• Planes, Trains & Automobiles
• Beverly Hills Cop
• National Lampoon's Vacation
• Stripes
• Trading Places

Doesn't Hold Up:

1. The Cannonball Run
2. The Blues Brothers
3. The Toy
4. History of the World -- Part I
5. Fletch

Dishonorable Mention:

• Back to School
• Coming To America
• Bachelor Party
• Top Secret
• Strange Brew

Police Academy was left off the "Doesn't" list because it sucked since the day it was released.

Discuss.

Those who argue that the Supreme Court should be populated by "strict constructionists" or "originalists" should recognize that the Constitution was written by men who tried to embody "the Spirit of 1776" but who acknowledged in their deeds that the Republic was a work in progress.

On one hand you had men like Jefferson who went to his grave thinking that the Federal Judiciary was a betrayal of that "Spirit of 1776." Furthermore, he detested John Marshall and thought the entire idea of the Supreme Court was anathema to everything Jefferson stood for.

Of course, his views represented just one strain of thought. John Adams, et. al., had a different view, believing that the power of the majority must be balanced by mechnaisms that protected the rights of the minority.

A contemporary observer called Jefferson and Adams "the North and South poles of the American Revolution," meaning not just the geographical aspect (New England versus Virginia) but also the wide range of beliefs that joined together to make the Revolution manifest.

Today, we revere Jefferson and forget Adams. Frankly I think Adams should have a memorial in DC. That said, we should at least acknowledge that Jefferson's view is but one point on the American political spectrum.

Would it surprise you to know that another one of Jefferson's arch-nemises was Alexander Hamilton? And here's another surprise -- Adams was actually in the middle between THOSE two extremes.

The world has seldom seen an era as glorious as that represented by the the American Revolutionary era. Men like Jefferson and Adams (and their contemporaries) are giants. It's the least we can do to recognize what they stood for. I know it isn't easy -- they often disagreed and we are still trying to resolve their differences.

So to say that "originalism" is the right attitude to have when making judgements based on the Constitution, well, that's pretty shortsighted and narrow. There's a lot of distance between what Jefferson and Adams believed.

You should read the letters that these two patriarchs wrote to each other in the closing years of their lives. [Start with Joseph Ellis' marvelous book about Jefferson -- American Sphinx.] It will give you a much more complete picture of what the Founders thought the Revolution really meant. Surprise -- they didn't always agree! Which brings me back to the whole idea that "strict constructionism" and "originalism" is shortsighted.

From MSNBC:

[A]t least six explosions rocked [London] on Thursday, killing several people and wounding scores, in what police fear were attacks to coincide with leaders of the Group of Eight nations meeting in Scotland.

There are two things that terrorists want to accomplish when they perpetrate these acts:

1. Make life hell for the people, and
2. Split the allies apart from each other.

These two goals are closely linked, especially when the target is a democracy. In fact, this is what 4th generation warfare is all about: attacking the political will of the opponent.

What's the solution?

Some would say that you have to take the fight to the terrorists, i.e., the best defense is a good offense, you have to smoke them out of their holes, you have to get 'em dead or alive, etc. But the fact is, the enemy will almost always be weaker than you. They won't even try to fight you one-on-one, nor will they try to destroy your command, control and logistics capabilities.

They will fight to destroy your political will.

So in order to win that fight, we must strengthen not only our military capabilities, but also our political alliances. The art of statecraft, diplomacy and flexibility are more important today than ever before. The US-UK alliance must be strong; as must be our alliances with Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Far East. This means the exercising of strong leadership skills as well as the building of consensus.

John Rogers:

In his book The Sling and the Stone, Col. Thomas Hammes USMC expands on the idea of the evolution of warfare...

I'm paraphrasing like a bastard, but 4th Generation Warfare moves past direct destruction of your opponent's forces (1&2 Gen) and even past 3rd Gen, where one attacks the opponent's command, control and logistics, and instead takes the fight directly to the political will of the opponent. Most importantly, the 4th Gen army is not bound to the traditional battlespace. 4GW is trans-national, highly networked, and is not bound by the army of maneuver limits on a battlefield.

This is actually part of a much longer post that goes into some detail about how you can view the current struggle between Big Media and the pesky forces of file sharing in the same way.

If MGM v. Grokster is important to you (like it is to me), you should read his post.

Early on in our relationship, even before we'd met, we talked a lot about how we thought, imagined, hoped our lives would be together. I told Miss Julie this:

I am building a story in my mind that has you and me in it as the major characters...Will the story be about a clash of cultures? Or a clash of wills? A sweet romance? Or a cooking lesson where the souffle flops when you take it out of the oven? Will it be the closing of Casablanca? Or You've Got Mail? Sleepless in Seattle or Annie Hall?

Or the stateroom scene from Night at the Opera?

As it turns out, it's been a little bit of all of that. And it has been the most exhilerating, wonderful, and heartfelt time of our lives.

Happy Birthday, darlin. I love you.

Sometimes we forget that by the time the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia, the War of Indedepence had been underway for nearly a year. And, by the way, it had not been going well. Washington struggled to assemble something more than than a rag-tag collection of state militias; his goal of a Continental Army was still a ways off. On top of that, public opinion was split: one-third wanted independence, one-third wanted peace with the Empire, and one-third was ambivalent.

So when the Founding Fathers put their signatures to that document, they knew that they were putting not just their reputations on the line -- they knew their lives hung in the balance. As fractious as the debate was (and the whole issue of slavery was, in the end, deferred for another generation to resolve), as disappointing as it was for Jefferson to endure his document being edited by a committee, as badly as it might all have turned out, it was Franklin (as usual) who focused the attention of his colleagues, distilled the importance of the moment and blended it with his characteristic wit and his unique perspective of hope and irony:

John Hancock, President of the Second Continental Congress: "There must be no pulling different ways: we must all hang together."

Benjamin Franklin: "We must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately."

E Pluribus Unum.

God Bless America.

July 3, 2005