Resistance is futile
So far this week has had "give up and run away" written all over it. In the name of protecting us from brown foreigners who might want to commit some terroristic act like picking our fruit, Congress is well on the way toward creating a national ID system and exempting the Secretary of Homeland security from any laws or judicial oversight (I'm not exaggerating). With that lurking in the back of my mind, I looked over at Jeralyn Merritt's place this morning to find this:

The only grade school in this rural town is requiring students to wear radio frequency identification badges that can track their every move. Some parents are outraged, fearing it will take away their children's privacy.

The badges introduced at Brittan Elementary School on Jan. 18 rely on the same radio frequency and scanner technology that companies use to track livestock and product inventory.

Where to start? It's dehumanizing. It's an invasion of privacy. It destroys autonomy at the age when it is most important to encourage it. It panders to the most fearful cowardice on one hand and the most authoritarian impulses on the other. Depending on a device like this reduces the personal bund between teacher and student. How is this going to play with the endtime crowd?

Did I leave anything out? Slippery slope? There is no slope here, it's a vertical plunge. The program is being justified as a way to simplify taking attendance, but since it tracks movement it will also be used to prevent and investigate vandalism. Plans are already afoot to connect the system to the library database and the cafeteria payment system. How long before it occurs to someone to connect it to the municipal bus system? How long before it occurs to someone to sell the system to malls and other businesses that often feel themselves to be at war with young people? Surely they have a right to know who enters their premises. With Congress already introducing national IDs for grown-ups, is it out of line to suspect that 24 hour electronic tracking of minors is just around the corner? And when we have raised a generation used to that kind of surveilance and control from above, what kind of adults will they make? What freedoms will they surrender in the name of security?

Is it really that bad or am I just paranoid? Not that the two are mutually exclusive. Let's back away from the future for a moment and just look at the present. How bad is this program?

The system was imposed, without parental input, by the school as a way to simplify attendance-taking and potentially reduce vandalism and improve student safety. Principal Earnie Graham hopes to eventually add bar codes to the existing ID's so that students can use them to pay for cafeteria meals and check out library books.

[...]

Graham, who also serves as the superintendent of the single-school district, told the parents that their children could be disciplined for boycotting the badges - and that he doesn't understand what all their angst is about.

It was started without parental knowledge and is being continued over their protests. Participation is compulsory for all students. Okay, that's pretty bad. But certainly principal/superintendent Graham is addressing the parents' concerns.

"You know what it comes down to? I believe junior high students want to be stylish. This is not stylish," he said.

I suppose open contempt could count as addressing their concerns.

My advice to parents is to get a couple of powerful bar magnets, bolt them together into the shape of a cross, and have their kids wear them around their necks at about the same height the cards hang (purely as an act of religious freedom, mind you). I wonder if the cards are washer and dryer safe. And if the student accidentally left the card out with a slice of bacon wrapped around it, they couldn't be held responsible for anything the dog did, could they?

The Electronic Privacy Information Center has much more information on this issue. Meanwhile, if anyone needs me, I'll be curled up in a fetal position under the stairs.

Social Security speech for Mom
The elevator speech, if you are lucky enough to have never encountered it, is a marketing concept. The idea is to have a short speech that is able to define your product/service and the need it fills in the time space of an average elevator ride. That usually means a hundred words or less. Authors are often told that they need to be able to explain what their book is about in one sentence if they want to sell it.

During the tech boom, I worked for a software startup as their main writer. Though hired as a documentation writer, I ended up writing a lot of their marketing copy. We had a difficult service/product to describe. Before I learned the concept of the elevator speech, I thought of it as the Mom speech. How could I tell Mom what I did for a living in terms that she could explain to her friends?

We all need to be able to deliver the Democratic/anti-Bushevik position on Social Security as a Mom speech. It's not just how do we explain it to Mom; it's how do we implant memorable phrases that she can repeat, meme fashion, to her friends.

Bush is playing a sophisticated divide and conquer game with Social Security. He is telling people over 55 that they will get theirs, therefore they shouldn't care about anyone else, even though it's their children who will be screwed. He's promising young people that they will all be part of the minority that win in the stock market; everyone will collect winnings and no one will be the losers who pay. To the middle aged he says "look, homos are getting married!!"

Let's hear your elevator speeches. If we win my Mom's friends, the fight is over.

This is not a scientific poll
Rep. Chris Shays of Connecticut's fourth district gives us this little poll.

To address the long-term structural deficit in Social Security, do you support adding personal savings accounts to the program, which have the potential to significantly increase the benefits future retirees can expect to earn?

Let me rephrase that, "To address the long-term structural deficit in Social Security, do you support a program that might give you buckets of cash?* Or maybe big buckets?**" If you say "yes," we'll quote you in Congress.

* "Then again, it might leave you out on the street trying to sell apples to orchard owners."

** "Or we might sell your grandkids' kidneys to rich GOP donors."

PS - Thanks for voting for us
In a heartwarming act of conservative comapassion, the Bush administeration tells injured veterans "bite my shorts."

President Bush's budget would more than double the co-payment charged to many veterans for prescription drugs and would require some to pay a new fee of $250 a year for the privilege of using government health care, administration officials said Sunday.

I could comment, but it speaks for itself.

Have I mentioned lately that I really hate these guys (Condi, too)?

Bad History in the Social Security Debate
I think we can expect a lot more of this in the coming months.

In an attempt to promote President Bush's plan to partially privatize Social Security, nationally syndicated radio host and former Reagan administration official William J. Bennett and FOX News managing editor and anchor Brit Hume falsely claimed that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt advocated replacing Social Security with private accounts. In fact, while Roosevelt advocated "voluntary contributory annuities" to supplement guaranteed Social Security benefits, he never proposed replacing those benefits with private accounts.

[...]

Former Social Security associate commissioner James Roosevelt Jr., Roosevelt's grandson, noted in a January 31 Boston Globe op-ed piece: "The implication that FDR would support privatization of America's greatest national program is an attempt to deceive the American people and an outrage."

As a debate tactic, what Bennett and Hume are attempting is as old as written language and probably older. They are attempting to make their ideas unassailable by claiming that they spring from ancient revered authorities. This argument is especially effective with conservative audiences, so it's no wonder that conservative pundits would use it to push forward the agenda of an ultra-conservative president.

As history, Bennett and Hume are committing two sins. The first is misrepresentation or just plain lying. The second is trying to draw an ahistorical parallel. This is the act of pulling historical examples and saying they are relevant to present day issues because of some similarity. There is nothing wrong with using historical examples in debate, but the issues have to match.

In this case, the real problem is the misrepresentation. If the Roosevelt program had been what Bennett and Hume claimed it was, then they would have had a valid parallel. But it wasn't, so they don't. This then undermines the debate tactic. They appealed to a revered authority for support and the authority didn't support them. They lose this round.

Cross posted at The Carnival of Bad History.

Poison the women and children first
The party of family values at work.

The Environmental Protection Agency ignored scientific evidence and agency protocols in order to set limits on mercury pollution that would line up with the Bush administration's free-market approaches to power plant pollution, according to a report released yesterday by the agency's inspector general.

Staff at the EPA were instructed by administrators to set modest limits on mercury pollution, and then had to work backward from the predetermined goal to justify the proposal, according to a report by Inspector General Nikki Tinsley.

Mercury is a toxic metal released as a byproduct by coal-burning power plants and other industries, and it is known to have a range of harmful health effects, especially on young children and pregnant women.

Good thing those tree-hugging, family-hating, blue-state liberals aren't running things. Sigh.

The article goes on to say that the agency disputes Tinsley's claim and says she doesn't understand the science involved. I can't say that I have the credentials to sort the issue out on it's scientific merits, but based on the administration’s history of sacrificing good science to desired results and of bending over backward to give the energy industry what it wants, I'm inclined to take Ms. Tinsley at her word.

This is a prime example of something I've been meaning to post on, but usually give up on in despair before I can produce anything. While most of our attention is usually focused on high profile things like the war, torture, the administration's lawlessness and efforts to gut the bill of rights, and the grotesque behavior of the Republican majorities in congress, the Bush camarilla has been slowly dismembering a hundred years of regulatory machinery.

The role of the US government as a regulator of business and shield to the public against predatory and outright murderous business practices dates back to, ironically, a Republican, Teddy Roosevelt. Republicans eat their ancestors. It's disgusting but true.

We're not done with Gonzales
The confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General by the Senate yesterday was a national disgrace, but it was not a surprise. Voting to endorse torture and lawlessness confirms every negative image of America that the rest of the world has come to belive over the last three years.

The Republican Party used the brute force of their majority in the Senate to push his nomination through. The vote was 60 to 37. Every single Republican voted for the man who justified torture, breaking of treaties, and arbitrary executive rule while White House counsel.

To their credit, 36 Democrats and Independent Jim Jeffords voted against confirmation. To their shame, six Democrats voted to confirm. Those six are:

• Ken Salazar (CO)
  
• Ben Nelson (NE)
  
• Mary Landrieu (LA)
  
• Mark Pryor (AR)
  
• Bill Nelson (FL)
  
• Joseph Lieberman (CN)

The first five have a weak excuse for their behavior. As representatives from conservative red states that voted for Bush in the last election, they must perform a delicate balancing act in the course of their duties. Even though they were elected as Democrats, they have to recognize the conservative values of their constituents and periodically join the Republicans on issues that resonate with that base. This is where their excuse weakens until it has all of the strength of a wet tissue (single ply).

Red states fancy themselves to be "the heartland," a term that implies that they are the real America, the core that exemplifies traditional, authentic American values unlike the decadent coastal enclaves of the blue states. Torture and lawlessness are not traditional values, they are not conservative values, and they most certainly are not American values. Did these Senators believe that there was an irresistable groundswell of support for torture and lawlessness among their constituents? Did any of them even try to appeal to the American values of respect for law, fair play, and basic human decency among their constituents? By bringing this shame down on us all they have ill served their states and their country.

Joseph Lieberman is a different case. He doesn't even have the fig leaf of a weak excuse for his vote. He represents one of the bluest of the blue states. His vote can only have been one of conviction. Someone of those convictions has no place in the Democratic Party.

The vote is over and we lost. But that doesn't mean we should let the issue drop. Write to these Senators and (politely) let them know disappointed we are in their action. Let them know that they are on probation and that we will not forget how they embarassed their party and disgraced their country.

Vote NO on Gonzales
Since the vote will probably happen tomorow, today is your last chance to make your opinion heard on Gonzales. Call your Senator, especially if you live in a red state. Torture is not an American value. Ignoring international law does not make America more secure. The world will see a vote for Gonzales as a vote for lawlessness. And that's exactly what it is. Tell your Senators to support American values and reject Gonzales.

Euphemism watch
In the context of reporting on another Republican who refuses to go along with his president's scheme to privatize Social Security, Josh Marshall pulled this sentence out of the Cincinnati Enquirer: "Davis has said he will not support Bush's plan to allow workers to invest a percentage of their payroll taxes into self-directed personal investment accounts." (My empahsis.) From here it's only a short step to "self-directed personal investment account program related research activities."

Condi's greatest hits
In honor of Condoleezza Rice's new job, and in honor of the debut of The Carnival of Bad History, I'm rerunning an old archy post from August 31, 2003 in which Condi commits bad history.


History lesson
A while back, someone taught Bush a new phrase and something about the concept that goes with it: "historical revisionism." Like many people with a new cool concept he couldn’t wait to find opportunities to work it into conversations. The leader of the free world may or may not have been briefed that “historical revisionism” is a term embraced by Holocaust deniers and that in using it to describe his critics, he got to slip in an oblique accusation that they are in some way anti-Semitic. And although an accusation that critics of the war in Iraq must be anti-Semitic by itself makes no sense, he could rest snug in the knowledge that it nevertheless pissed off liberal intellectuals to hear it.

Now the administration, in the persons of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Rummy, has decided to practice historical revisionism.

On Monday, Dr. Rice told the San Antonio VFW that:

There is an understandable tendency to look back on America's experience in postwar Germany and see only the successes. But as some of you here today surely remember, the road we traveled was very difficult. 1945 through 1947 was an especially challenging period. Germany was not immediately stable or prosperous. SS officers—called "werewolves"—engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them—much like today's Baathist and Fedayeen remnants.

Before looking at the substance of her statement notice how she frames her parallel by anachronistically transferring modern terminology into the past. The Allies have become "coalition forces." By this rule I suppose we should start referring to John Wilkes Booth as a member of the Fedayeen Jefferson Davis.

On the same day before the same audience, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld referred to, "dead-enders ... known as ‘werewolves’ ...[who along with] other Nazi regime remnants targeted Allied soldiers, and they targeted Germans who cooperated with the Allied forces."

Meanwhile, Australian blogger John Quiggin, has tracked the source of this story to an article in National Review Online by Mackubin Owens. There can be no doubt that this is the source because Rumsfeld uses as examples in his version of the Werewolf story only those examples that appear in one block quote in the Mackubin article. The source of that quote, and indeed apparently the only source for Mackubin is a one-thousand-word book review in the British magazine History Today.

Daniel Benjamin in Slate demolishes their story. There was some resistance by German soldiers behind the lines while the fighting was still going on at the end of WWII. Among these were the famous efforts by Otto Skorzeny in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge, the assassination of the collaborationist mayor of Aachen after the Americans occupied that town, and the less known efforts by Volkdeutsch leader Andreas Schmidt in Rumania against the Red Army. However, none of these were Werewolf activities in the sense that Rice and Rumsfeld mean. These were commando activities directed by Reich authorities in Berlin.

The real Operation Werewolf had a little reality and a lot of myth. The reality was a plan to train troops in guerilla tactics and sabotage, to create hidden supply depots in the Bavarian and Austrian Alps, and to make Germany ungovernable for the Allied occupiers. The reality was more like an unfunded Bush social program; the supply depots never materialized and the troops were mostly Hitler Youth boys who, as soon as the command structure vanished, ditched their guns and cyanide capsules and went home. In an ugly sequel, the Soviets, who had some understanding of partisan warfare, used the Werewolf rumors as an excuse to execute German POWs while the restored national governments of continental Europe used those same rumors to justify their expulsion of 14 million ethnic Germans from Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Werewolf has lived on as a great plot device for a hundred Ludlum wannabes and not much more.

This is not a matter of interpretation where one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. There was no one there to call a terrorist, freedom fighter, or ice-cream vendor for that matter. No one.

Not long ago, on a drive down to Mom’s, my wife and I engaged in a variation of the perennial "stupid or evil" debate. You know the one, does the administration act the way they do because they are stupid or because they are evil? The usual answer is that it’s a trick question and the correct answer is "all of the above" (on our trip we were dividing the administration into plain old corrupt and ideological fanatics). This time the division appears easy. Dr. Rice is co-author of a book on recent German history and should know better. Her willingness to sacrifice truth for her career has been well established through revelations concerning the run up to the war. It’s clear, to me at least, that she’s a willing liar. Rumsfeld is only a little harder. He has already demonstrated by his version of the early epilogue to the American Revolution that History is not his best subject. On the other hand, he too has shown that he doesn’t really care about truth; he’ll say whatever is necessary to get his way.

I’m only going on like this because history is my field. After all, they are not abusing history any worse than they already have science, economics, or ethics.