archy

politics, fringe watching, and other stuff

John J. McKay is a grumpy, aging liberal who lives in a small house with his wife, two cats, and a couple thousand books. To comment on anything in archy, send an e-mail.

Blogs I'm reading this week
The American Street
Angry Bear
Balkinization
Body and Soul
Corrente
Counterspin Central
Crooked Timber
Daily Kos
Demagogue
Dispatches From the Culture Wars
The Early Days of a Better Nation
Eschaton
Hulabaloo
The Intersection
Is That Legal?
Kevin Drum
Mark A.R. Kleiman
Matthew Yglesias
Media Whores Online
Off the Kuff
Omnium
Orcinus
Pacific Views
Pandagon
Pharyngula
Philosoraptor
Preposterous Universe
Progressive Gold
The Right Christians
The Rittenhouse Review
Roger Ailes
Ruminate This
Shadow of the Hegemon
Skeptical Notion
Slacktivist
Steve Gilliard's News Blog
Talking Points Memo
TalkLeft
Tapped
Tristero
Very Very Happy
Waldchen vom Philosophenweg
Whiskey Bar
World O' Crap

Other good stuff
Americans United for Seperation of Church and State
Common Dreams
The Daily Howler
People for the American Way
Political Research Associates
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Spinsanity

? # Pacific Northwest Blogs ? ?

ATOM Feed

RSS Feed

This site is certified 69% GOOD by the Gematriculator

Archives
<< current

archy

Saturday, March 27, 2004

I am a good citizen
Today I wrote the check to pay off two of my student loans. That’s seven down and two to go. Only two more years till I completely own my education. This doesn’t free up any money; our little car was on its last legs, so we bought a new used car a few weeks ago. The first payment is next week. Essentially, I’m flush for one week. I feel very virtuous to have finally closed out this set of loans. I’ll be smug for the week that I have.
posted by John at 5:46 PM

Thursday, March 25, 2004

The end of civilization
Isn’t this one of the signs that the apocalypse is upon us (in this case I suppose it’s the apo-calypso)?
posted by John at 2:44 PM

Tuesday, March 23, 2004

Movie trivia question
I spotted this on the BBC:

A Brazilian pastor has died during a screening of Mel Gibson's controversial film The Passion of the Christ.

Jose Geraldo Soares, a 43-year-old Presbyterian, had booked a whole cinema to view the film with his congregation.

Halfway through, his wife noticed that he was no longer awake, and a doctor in the audience confirmed that he had suffered a heart attack.

Friends denied that violence scenes of Christ's beating and crucifixion had caused Pastor Soares to expire.

[...]

Pastor Soares is the second person to die at a screening of the film.

Peggy Law Scott, an American woman in her 50s, passed out last month during the crucifixion scene, when watching the film in Wichita, Kansas.

She later died in hospital, after suffering a heart attack.

So here's my question, baring disasters like earthquakes, fires, and such, what is the record for people dieing while watching a film. I suppose stampedes count if they can be blamed on the movie and not on something external. Is Mel in contention for some kind of record here?

posted by John at 12:25 PM

Monday, March 22, 2004

Imagine that
It appears I’ve been blogging for a year. In that time I've written about 220 pages on the state of the world. That's not a huge amount, but it's about twice as long as my Master's thesis. My wife says if could stay on subject, I'd have a book by this time next year. But if I actually wrote the book, what could I whine about?
posted by John at 9:25 PM

Remember Samuel Byck?
Most people don't. Condoleezza Rice certainly doesn't. In an op-ed piece in today's Washington Post she's still pushing the official party line that they had no reason to suspect that someone would try to hijack an airliner and use it as a weapon. She originally made this claim in May 2002: "I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people - would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." Today she qualifies it a little, but only a little: "...we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles...." It's minor difference, from one of no one could to no one would.

Atrios takes exception to this nonsense, pointing out that the CIA had produced a report on just that danger--specifically naming bin Laden--as early as 1999. "Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida’s Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House," according to the September 1999 report entitled "Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?." Atrios lets her off too easily. Since Condi follows her boss in not actually reading reports, she might have an excuse for not knowing about the CIA warning.

But that wasn't the only warning that such a danger existed. At the Genoa summit of the leaders of the G-8 industrial leaders, the Italians went to great lengths to protect the leaders from arial attack and specifically named bin Laden as the source of the threat.

Professional and amateur reporters have brought to light a whole series of explicit warnings about the possibility of terrorist attacks throughout the decade of the nineties, including some actual kamikaze attempts. In 1994, French authorities frustrated a plot to fly an airliner into the Eiffel Tower after the plane had already been hijacked and three passengers killed. In 1995 Philippine authorities uncovered plot by Ramzi Yousef's group named Project Bojinka. According to this ambitious plot they would fly hijacked airliners into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the Pentagon, the White House, the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Transamerica Tower in San Francisco, and the World Trade Center while blowing up another eleven planes in the air and assassinating the Pope in Manila.

Oddly missing from most of these accounts is the story Samuel Byck, the only homegrown, American, wannabe kamikaze.

On the morning of February 22, 1974, Byck tried to hijack a Delta Airlines DC-9 in Baltimore with the intention of killing Nixon by crashing the plane into the White House. Byck was an unemployed salesman from Philadelphia who was already known to the Secret Service. For two years he had been mailing threats to the president and bizarre taped messages to public figures like Jonas Salk, Senator Abe Ribicoff, and Leonard Bernstein. The previous Christmas he had picketed the White House in a Santa suit and a sign that read "All I want for Christmas is my constitutional right to publicly petition my government for a redress of grievances."

Byck's plan was a disaster from the moment he entered the airport. As soon as he was delayed by the screening line he went berserk. Drawing a gun he shot and killed a security guard and rushed aboard the plane. When the pilot tried to say the plane wasn't ready to take off he killed the pilot and wounded the co-pilot. Byck didn't know how to fly a plane so he grabbed a passenger and ordered her to fly him to Washington. Before he could take his frustration out on the terrified passenger, airport police fired through the window of the cockpit wounding him. Byck killed himself rather than be captured.

A tape sent to columnist Jack Anderson explained his motives. Byck had been turned down for a Small Business loan.

Byck may finally be getting his moment of creepy infamy. Twenty years later, Stephen Sondheim made Byck a character in one of his least successful (but still great) musicals "Assassins." Sean Penn will be playing him in the forthcoming movie "The Assassination of Richard Nixon." Penn takes his role philosophically, "Yes, once again, I'm in the feel-good picture of the year."

Why has Byck been so absent from discussions of terror? Is it because it was thirty years ago? Byck's incompetent plot took place during the golden age of hijacking. Had he succeeded, he would have killed about four hundred people (and rather abruptly ended the Watergate crisis). Certainly, any discussion of hijacking, airport security, and the danger of airplanes as missiles should include our closest previous near miss. Is this just another one of those things that we can blame on the lack of historical sense among Americans? Or is it because Byck was a white American citizen. Just as Oklahoma City and other right-wing domestic terror rarely makes it into our public discussions of the current threat, do we exclude Byck from our historical memory simply because he wasn't Cuban or Palestinian?

I believe my friend David Neiwert has the straight dope on this one. The War on Terror is more of a marketing effort than an actual war or even law enforcement campaign. The official narrative is that America is standing tall against cowardly (brown, non-Christian) foreigners. Straight talking Republicans are our only hope. The rhetoric rallies the faithful to the GOP banner and even peels some Democratically inclined voters over to Bush's side. There is no advantage in suggesting that some Republican friendly groups might be terrorists. The only domestic them allowable in this us-or-them scenario are people who would never vote for Bush, liberals, pacifists, and overly loud critics. The press, more lazy than evil, take the official talking points of the War on Terror and run with them. They still sometimes come up with conclusions that make the administration uncomfortable. But having been told we are in a war of civilizations with an unspeakable foreign them, how many are likely to look at the possible relevance of a middle-aged, unhappy, Jewish guy from Philadelphia?
posted by John at 3:16 PM

Sunday, March 21, 2004

Compassionate conservatism and demographic doom
Matt Yglesias says the following in a discussion of the demise of Compassionate Conservatism that started in David Brooks’ Saturday New York Times column and continued in Jack Balkin’s blog:

Before 9/11, Karl Rove and Matthew Dowd were concerned about the GOP's looming demographic doom -- with every passing day the electorate grows less white. Thus, Nixon's southern strategy, which paid off with decades of solid electoral wins, looks set to backfire in the early 21st century. The day of reckoning, moreover, is not far off. If Bush wins the same proportion of the white vote, the black vote, and the Latino vote that he won in 2000, he will lose the 2004 election by a non-trivial margin due to the changing racial demographics.

Matt goes on to suggest that Compassionate Conservatism was an effort to postpone that reckoning by calving off the socially conservative fractions of the Black and Latino vote with some relatively inexpensive safety net programs. Yglesias feels that the Republicans discarded Compassionate Conservatism when they found the better issue of “only we can make you safe” after 9/11. Brooks feels that Compassionate Conservatism required bipartisan compromise, a thing that required time to develop after the Florida recount and 9/11 robbed us of time because Bush was too busy making us safe. Balkin suspects Compassionate Conservatism was never more than a slogan and that slogan was not necessary when the Republicans found themselves controlling all branches of the government.

I agree with Balkin that Compassionate Conservatism was never more than a slogan and, though the Republicans may have had an eye on some minorities, the main intended audience was soccer moms. But I’m interested in the demographic problem Yglesias brings up.

Republicans have been courting the Hispanic vote since at least the first Reagan administration with the goal of making them “their Blacks” – a rather repulsive formulation that means they hope to make the Hispanic vote as perennially dependable for Republicans as Blacks are for Democrats and by the same margins. After twenty years, this effort has yet to show success.

The failure lies in two areas. First, is the simple fact that the Hispanic vote is not a monolithic block. Despite what TV sitcoms tell us, there is a large degree of diversity in that simple census category. Both parties have trouble with this concept and will find themselves regularly surprised and frustrated until they do get it. Second, the Republican effort to win Hispanic votes has always taken backseat to their Southern strategy and its race-bating successors. Their “big tent” concept always falls to their need to need to secure their position among their current core of white, Anglo, Protestants. During that same twenty-year effort to gain the Hispanic vote, the Republicans were tolerating and even celebrating people like Pat Buchanan, Pete Wilson, and the xenophobic, anti immigrant wing of the party. If the Democrats do continue to edge out the Republicans in the quest for (non-Cuban) Hispanic votes, we will have Pat and Pete to thank as much as any positive effort of our own.
posted by John at 9:15 PM