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Monthly Archives: May 2010

The Gulf of Mexico Does Not Have a Football Team

“It couldn’t possibly be bottomless.” – Lisa Simpson
“Well, for all intents and purposes.” – Bart Simpson

Way back in 2000, before the fall of American civilization, there was a feeling of resignation among environmentalist types.  The evidence for global warming was already overwhelming and sitting Vice President/environmental champion Al Gore was running for President, yet it was still impossible to have a sane policy conversation about changing the way we use energy.  More than a few people thought that it would take a true disaster to force the reality of the situation into the mainstream discourse.

That disaster basically happened in 2005 when New Orleans was all but destroyed.  But that catastrophe was quickly subsumed into the larger Red vs. Blue clan feud.  After a few documentaries and some good seasons from the Saints, the media-political conventional wisdom was that New Orleans had been fixed.  The Super Bowl win just clinched it.

But BP’s destruction of the Gulf of Mexico is a far grander and more durable disaster.  This time, there are no olde tyme racial undertones about poor black people getting screwed over (once again).  This time, the story won’t fade from the front page after only a few weeks.  This time, very wealthy people are going to be directly affected as all those fancy houses and resorts along the coast see their beaches trashed.  This time, blame can be laid at the feet of both political parties.  The Gulf cannot win the Super Bowl.

The powers that be are now talking openly about the well belching oil until August (and the start of hurricane season).  Even that may be optimistic.  Pictures and video of devastated shoreline, the development that finally put BP on the front page and kept it there, is going to increase in the coming weeks and months.  A complete recovery is already impossible, and the timeframe for getting things as back to normal as possible is going to be denominated in decades.

The corporate press, which made ignoring and distorting world changing events an art form in the Naughts, won’t be able to put this story to bed.  Afghanistan and Iraq are far away, and it was easy enough to settle them into the background noise of American life.  Record high unemployment doesn’t have much pull with the kind of people who work in newsrooms.  This past winter the global warming debate was – and it’s going to be hard to convince people of this thirty years from now – substantially affected by snow in Washington D.C.  This is different.  This is the disaster the environmentalists have been waiting for.

Whether or not it will actually change anything is still an open question.  And leveraging this into enough public concern about the unsustainable systems that provide our cushy 21st century lifestyles won’t be easy.  But the moment has arrived, and since it’s going to stay awhile, we might as well make use of it.

Obama Orders Team America Into Action

“And once a man is in your home, anything you do to him is nice and legal.” – Chief Wiggum
“Is that so? . . . Oh Flanders, won’t you join me in my kitchen? – Homer Simpson

The disclosure that President Obama has authorized the military to perform what amount to small scale invasions in the name of what used to be the War on Terror will be quickly lost in the news shuffle.  BP is busy not stopping the worst environmental disaster in American history, relations between the Koreas are extremely tense, and ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is winding its way through Congress.  But blurring the lines between spies and the military is an extraordinarily dangerous and foolhardy step.

There are only two types of countries where this kind of thing could be used.  The first would be places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan, countries with which we are nominally friends.  Sending armed troops into a nation undercover is not the act of a friend.  And, should something go wrong (as things involving guns so often do), the least bad outcome would be a serious, behind-the-scenes chill in relations.  The worst would be a public affair that, in the case of someplace like Egypt that isn’t exactly stable politically, could conceivably lead to enormous unintended consequences.  And those are in the countries we’re friends with.

The second type of countries are the places like Iran or Syria, regimes that don’t like us and have very effective internal security forces.  What would happen if we had troops captured?  Would they become hostages?  Would yellow ribbons sprout from every American town, even though they were there illegally?  Under well established international law and principle, they’d be subject to anything from life in prison to execution.  Imagine, say, a group of American special forces caught in Tehran, wouldn’t that destroy any international leverage the Administration has over the Islamic Republic?  Wouldn’t that set America back far more than ten successful missions that killed or captured some random guy who doesn’t like us?

With the possible exception of capturing or killing Osama bin Laden himself, the risk of a serious international incident far outweighs any potential gain.  If our troops are there with the tacit acknowledgment of the local government, it gives them a huge black eye in front of their people.  If our troops are there without the knowledge of the local government, it sets up the kind of massive international humiliation the United States hasn’t seen since Desert One in 1980.

This monotone militaristic thinking, that American guns can solve any problem, was supposed to go out with the Bush Administration.  And the idea that Team America can show up and right the wrongs should’ve been permanently discredited after all those CIA officers were caught living it up in Italy.  Performing law enforcement duties outside of the law just isn’t a good idea.  (Indeed, the Times article includes mention of a similar fiasco in Paraguay in 2004.)  Only the Administration knows how much of this is a result from pressure coming up the chain of command from the warped remains of the War on Terror national security infrastructure.  But how anyone who claims to see the big picture can think this is a good idea is a true mystery.

Republicans Who Like Weed

“Listen, Flanders, do you still have that store?” – Homer Simpson
“For two more days, then it becomes Libertarian Party headquarters.  I hope they have better luck than I did.” – Ned Flanders

Rand Paul’s bursting onto the national stage this week has generated a lot of discussion about all the things that get lumped under the rubric of “libertarianism”.  So I suppose this is as good a time as any to waste a few pixels complaining about what, to my thinking, is the biggest problem with most self-identified libertarians.  Whenever I get asked what I am in a political sense, I always reply “libertarian”.  It’s a way to retire to a neutral corner and avoid getting into a pointless political discussion with a stranger (though it doesn’t always work).  But it’s also what I genuinely believe, and so I do have some (very) small stake in this discussion.

I got sucked into libertarianism because once you get past the meaninglessly vague idea of being “pro-freedom” or “pro-liberty”, there’s the durable and immensely attractive concept of “pro-autonomy”.  The fundamental attraction of libertarianism is that it means that you, and you alone, get to choose how to live your life.  Obviously, there are limits to that: you can’t murder someone, you can’t shout fire in the proverbially crowded theater, you can’t teach math with assassination.  But on the whole, it means that you get to do whatever you want so long as it doesn’t screw up somebody else’s (all together now) life, liberty or property.

Which is why it’s always disappointing to me when I see “libertarianism” deployed as a political short hand for guys like Ron and Rand Paul.*  I’m not saying it’s an inaccurate characterization.  Most of the people who fall under, for lack of a better term, “mainstream libertarianism”, are a lot like him.  But they have very narrow – and blatantly self-serving – conceptions of what libertarianism is.

Much of the hypocrisy revolves around the fig leaf of “property rights”.  First, let’s set aside Rand Paul’s light speed retreat from his belief that the government shouldn’t have the power to force private businesses not to discriminate.  That’s obviously what he actually believes, and though it apparently comes as a surprise to even someone as politically well versed as Josh Marshall, it is a fairly accepted libertarian argument.

The reason such stark lunacy prevails down at LP HQ is that, in most libertarian circles, the question of what happens when “property rights” conflict with individual freedom is never hashed out.  (This is all the more striking because libertarians love to argue theoreticals.)  It’s not an idle question, it goes to the heart of what it means to believe that individual freedom is the first thing that ought to be considered in any policy question.  The elephant in the room is that plenty of privately owned businesses infringe on people’s freedom – all the time.

Anyone who has ever dealt with a cable company, or an insurance provider, or any other really large corporation knows that the phrase “evil bureaucracy” is not always preceded by the word “government”.  An individual has no practical recourse against such entities restricting their actions and reducing their freedom; after all, regular Joes don’t have legions of lawyers and lobbyists.  And while it’s true that, in theory, problems with a big company would get smoothed over by market forces, the reality around us is quite different.  Claiming that competition will solve all such problems is okay for a freshman dorm bullshit session, but by the time you get to the sophomore dorm you really ought to know that the world is awfully resistant to those kind of utopian, single-cause theories.

The monomaniacal focus on government as the restrictor of personal freedom is mainstream libertarianism’s biggest blind spot.  It’s an understandable one, especially given the relative affluence of most libertarians, but it’s still a gaping logical hole.  The government absolutely has the right to tell privately owned public businesses that they cannot discriminate on the basis of gender, race, religion, disability, age, etcetera.  Our currency says “legal tender for all debts, public and private”, not “legal tender for all debts, public and private, provided the other party approves of your skin tone”.  There are lots of thorny specifics, but enforcing economic nondiscrimination is the very essence of maximizing personal freedom and autonomy.

(And that ignores the historical and practical reasons smartly summarized by Ta-Nehisi Coates here.)

Hypocrisies like that are why “libertarianism” gets such a bum rap.  It’s also why “Republicans who like weed” is a sadly accurate description.  Mainstream libertarianism is mostly right wing people who are just independent minded enough to not want to be part of the Red Borg, but not so independent minded that they’re willing to take a hard look at the more self serving of their own beliefs.

*This is especially true since they are rabidly anti-choice.  The only reasons to consider abortion murder are religious, there is no basis for such claims in biology.  Sticking your religion into someone else’s life that blatantly ought to be – but sadly isn’t – an immediate libertarian disqualification.

End note on Atlas Shrugged:  Yeah, I read Atlas Shrugged as a teenager; and yeah, I liked it.  But what struck me, even while I was reading it, is that while all the talk of reason and personal responsibility is nice, in order to make her world work, Ayn Rand had to basically give her heroes superpowers.  You can see this especially in the characters of Hank Reardon and the all powerful John Galt.  These men invent things that even the relatively science-poor brain of my fourteen year old self knew to be impossible.  Their marvelous inventions would have the effect of creating a post-scarcity economy, which would fundamentally reorder politics and might even obliterate the profit motive with which the book is so taken.  I’ve seen a lot of attacks and defenses of that book over the years (and I make no claims as to its literary value), but I’ve never seen anyone point out that the superiority displayed by all the good, libertarian characters required a healthy dose of magic.  Of course, there’s nothing wrong with magic in fiction.  But magic isn’t real, and it makes an extremely poor framework for governing.  Eh, Alan?

End End Note:  After I wrote this, but before I posted it, Amanda Marcotte took many of the self serving ideas I loathe and hung them up for all to see.  She’s the best.

It’s Gonna Be Really Funny When the Blues Hold Congress

“Yes, I’m back.  Kent Brockman is not the kind of man who would leave a five-hundred-thousand dollar a year job just because he won a lottery.  Hey, I’m a journalist.” – Kent Brockman

With the midterm election still almost six months away, it’s still much too early to say that any of last night’s results are strongly indicative of anything.  The political climate can change enormously in that time, and who knows what the fever memes of the fall will be?

But if the Blues are going to assemble a real governing majority that can last several cycles, and possibly all of a two-term Obama Administration, then last night was a step in the right direction.  Not only did they convincingly win a House seat in a perfectly Purple district (went for Kerry in ’04 and McCain in ’08), but they got the best possible Senate candidates in Pennsylvania, Arkansas and Kentucky.  And while a sweep of those three races in November isn’t the most likely outcome, its chances improved last night.

Moreover, the successful rejection of establishment candidates will only add fuel to what Howard Dean famously called the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party”.  All of a sudden, great things like ditching closet-Red Jane Harman from her true Blue district seem very possible.  And that would be good for everyone except Jane Harman (and she’s fantastically wealthy so I’m sure she’ll get over it).  Meanwhile, conservative Democrats like Mark Critz can represent places like Pennsylvania-12.  This is what “big tent” politics is supposed to look like, running candidates who match their constituencies while at the same time making room for a lot of different opinions.  The opposite of “big tent” is making Arizona’s Brown People Intimidation Act a nationwide litmus test.

All of the above points to the Reds weakening themselves by embracing dead-end ideologically purity while the Blues strengthen their base and glom onto anything that can be called “moderate”.  It’s the final stages of the hard right retrenchment of the Republican Party.  That process has been going on for decades, but it accelerated rapidly under Bush the Younger, and now in 2010 Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment has been all but completely destroyed.

But the national media hasn’t caught on just yet, which is why it’s going to be so damned funny in the (increasingly likely) event that the Blues hold both houses of Congress by decent margins.  What I keep coming back to is Josh Marshall’s prescient idea of the “para-government”, that system of news organizations, lobbyists and the rest of the greater D.C. area who can’t quite comprehend the idea of a Blue government.  Remember that the modern national political media is a very new thing; it created itself during a time when the federal government was overwhelmingly Republican.  The last time the Blues controlled Congress and the White House, FOX News and MSNBC didn’t exist, “on-line” meant dial-up AOL, and CNN was still a news channel.

The speed and enormity of those changes is hard to overstate.  If you took a political operative from 1980 and dropped him in 1995, he’d have his bearings in minutes.  If you took someone from 1995 and dropped him in 2010, he’d need weeks just to understand the technology, much less the culture.

That internalization of Red rule as “normal” can be seen all around us.  Matt Drudge hasn’t broken a real story in years, yet is still treated as an important source of breaking news.  How else to explain the reality defying Washington Post op-ed page?  Or the New York Times op-ed page reacting to the biggest left of center political victory in more than four decades by hiring Ross Douthat, (even though David Brooks hasn’t retired yet)?

But nowhere is this mindless adherence to a right-center-left formula that skews right clearer than in the political entertainment networks.  The unspoken holy writ is that it goes FOX-CNN-MSNBC, but that formulation gets 2/3 of it wrong.  FOX is now agreed to be the conservative channel (although even that seemingly obvious concession required years of advocacy to take root).  But MSNBC, the supposed “left” network, has ex-Red Congressman Joe Scarborough on for an hour a day longer than Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann combined.  (And Olbermann’s “left” credentials are a relatively new development.)  Thinking of MSNBC as a “liberal” network is like calling KFC healthy because the only other thing you eat is McDonald’s.  Any weighing of MSNBC’s programming without the prior context of FOX and CNN would mark it as a very centrist network.

(There’s no point discussing which side CNN is on, their stupidity and incoherence defy polite classification.  Neither right, center, or left, it’s the Special Ed Network, where the likes of Wolf Blitzer and Rick Sanchez can go at their own pace, without the other pundits teasing them for coming to the studio on the short bus.)

Should the Democrats hold Congress, even with diminished majorities (and they could lose quite a few seats and still have bigger margins than the Reds ever enjoyed), how will this Republican nurtured beast react?  I’m really not sure; after Obama won their watchword was “center-right country”, and I wouldn’t have predicted that in a million years.  I am sure that it will be amusing, and after last night I’m increasingly confident that I’m going to get to enjoy it.

Lucrative Minorities

“I know this is different than that time I washed your pants with the twenty in the pocket.” – Marge Simpson

The always thoughtful James Fallows wrote the cover article for this month’s Atlantic Monthly.  It’s about Google and the search behemoth’s efforts to keep journalism alive.  Fallows’ trademark calm, his complete immunity to fashionable hysteria, infuses the entire article.  He agrees that journalism as we know it is dying but, without any of the pearl clutching despair that usually accompanies such topics, he concludes that something with an equivalent value to society is almost fated to rise in its place.

The entire article is worth reading, but the core point is that advertising of some kind ought to be able to continue funding journalism.  And it’s true.  But Fallows neglects something, perhaps as a result of hanging out with Google people who think advertising is the only way to make money.  The article all but ignores subscribers.

Subscribers, to magazines and newspapers (and I include myself) pay for a ton of words they don’t read.  They always have, and yet, in the conventional “digital future” discussion, they are assumed not to exist.  There are some logical reasons for that, certainly when a site begins charging for content its total number of visitors plummets.  But there are an enormous number of people out there who are accustomed to paying for content, most of which they will never even see.  Their on-line behavior won’t completely track their off-line behavior, but it seems more than a little foolish to assume that those habits will not translate on-line at all.

What if there is a hard core of subscribers?  Off the top of my head I can’t remember what I paid for my most recent renewal of Fallows’ Atlantic, but I’d be shocked if it was much over $20.  When the target demographic is almost exclusively employed and relatively prosperous people, $20 per annum is peanuts.  $20 barely buys two movie tickets, it’s a month of Netflix, and not even close to a tank of gas.  Even if the number of people willing to pay is a tiny fraction of the whole audience, $20 from them can go a long way towards funding a publication.

Could a magazine like the Atlantic survive online in something resembling its current form if just a fraction of its well-to-do readership was willing to pony up $20 a year?  I’d guess the answer is “yes”.  You’d obviously have to offer some kind of a sweetener, and those are usually thought of in terms of viewing the website without ads or getting articles as a single page.  The relative chintzyness of those advantages is usually cause for shutting down the discussion.  After all, it hardly seems like the customer is getting value for his dollar.

But those small advantages can be leveraged with something that subscription industries know well: the customer’s sense of self satisfaction.  Practical advantages are nice, but exploiting the smug feeling of superiority that comes with being above the hoi polloi has always been a cash cow.  Magazines, newspapers, even organizations like the NRA and the ACLU, all of them know the lucrative power of selling a sense of belonging.  Little tokens of membership, even something as simple as a “thank you” card at the end of the year, can give someone that warm and fuzzy feeling of “doing something”.  People who wouldn’t notice $20 a year can’t buy that any other way.

Yes, there’s a certain PBS/Save the Children begging quality to that.  But if it’s paired with something tangible, it’s exactly the kind of appeal to which middle, upper middle, and upper class people are proven to be susceptible.  Everyone wants to think of themselves as more than just their job and their family.  Paying for something with the socially acknowledged importance of “journalism” appeals to that notion, and it’s worth a hell of a lot more than $20.

Selling advertising is still a part of the game, and maybe Google is correct that on-line advertising is going to become more and more lucrative than it is now.  But “subscriptions” of some kind are far too reliable to discard, especially when the people to whom you are appealing can so easily afford them.

Darth Vader Had It Easy

“But Marge, I swear to you, I never thought you’d find out.” – Homer Simpson

Back at the beginning of the Bush the Younger’s reign of destruction, Dick Cheney famously invoked the Star Wars concept of the “dark side”.  This was Cheney in his element, doing his best Colonel Jessup imitation of a tough man telling unpleasant truths to a namby-pamby populace.  (Of course, in actuality Cheney is a coward who covers up for his lack of real bravery with a well honed tough guy facade.)  He was your grizzled uncle, and even though you might not like all the things he does, “deep down, in places you don’t talk about at parties” you knew he was right.

Except that he wasn’t.  The overwhelming majority of the men who’ve been captured by the US Government in the last decade never did anything wrong.  Even most of those who were sent to Guantanamo, a place that’s still linked in the public mind with the phrase “worst of the worst”, were later found to be completely innocent and released free and clear.  And Cuba is only the tip of the iceberg; in the last nine years we’ve exported our domestic philosophy of mass incarceration to Iraq and Afghanistan with no second thoughts.

The latest part of that iceberg to surface came this week when it was confirmed, by just about everyone (via) except the reality-denying Pentagon, that there is still a secret US prison in Afghanistan.  Are men still being tortured there despite last year’s regime change at home?  As an American, it’d be nice to be able to say “no”, but the more realistic answer is “probably”.  After all, despite Newsweek’s declaration of victory, our preferred government in Iraq seems to still be employing Saddam Hussein like tactics.

Some of the malingering influence of the lawless Bush Administration was doubtlessly inevitable.  You can’t sanction inhumane behavior for years and then expect it to stop as soon as you say so.  But down at Guantanamo, the Obama Administration has been giving a master course in the abuse of power.  Embarrassed by the spectacle of debating whether or not Omar Khadr was tortured too hard, they expelled the most dogged reporters on a technicality straight out of Brazil.  Their offense?  Reporting a public fact that, contrary to all logic, is officially a secret.

(As an aside, if the Teabaggers want to be called Tea Partiers, this is the kind of issue they need to be vocal about.  This is an abuse of government power at its absolute clearest: silencing reporters in an attempt to cover up embarrassing facts.  And yet, it’s only the sound of crickets coming from people who claim to think government is too powerful and authoritarian already.)

The Obama Administration has reasons for continuing with these grotesque and self-defeating policies.  No doubt the national security infrastructure, from the CIA to the NSA to the War Department, began whispering horrible things in their ears before they even took office.  There are political risks as well, the hysterical farce over trying Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York is evidence enough of that.  But the continuation of even some of Dick Cheney’s “dark side” policies is going to make them that much harder to root out eventually.  All the real Vader had to do was toss that mean old Emperor over the ledge and he got to come back from the Dark Side.  We’re having a harder time of it.

How Did We Ever Defeat These People?

“Remember, an elevator is called a lift, a mile is called a kilometer, and botulism is called steak and kidney pie.” – Marge Simpson

At around nine o’clock on Thursday evening, I flipped on the BBC website’s live stream of their televised election coverage.  I was instantly hooked.  This is what election television is supposed to be like.

I listen to BBC radio all the time, and the difference in quality between it and any American news radio is stunning.  But that’s nothing compared to the gap between the BBC’s election night coverage and that of, oh, CNN.  Even after its people had been on the air all night and into the following afternoon, the BBC’s coverage was everything that CNN’s isn’t: informative, intelligent and, near as I can tell, reality based.  It also helps that they’re intentionally funny from time to time, as opposed to CNN which is unintentionally funny pretty much all the time.

Whereas CNN is under the impression that election coverage means assembling the biggest brothel of desperate media whores (TM Samantha Bee), BBC had a couple of regular anchors, a couple of feature people, and then a rotating stable of people from every side.  Moreover, the people from each party actually worked for that party.  It was all party officials or elder statesmen.  There weren’t any hired guns, people who hadn’t worked for a campaign in ten years, or any of the other malingering peacocks that make up most of CNN’s regular rotation.  I don’t think I heard the word “strategist” used to describe a single person.  Since none of the commenters were hell bent on raising their profile in hopes of getting work, there was less empty preening in an hour of BBC’s coverage than there is in the average 30 seconds of CNN’s.

I’m sure I’m gushing a little too much here, and if I watched BBC’s blab shows all the time I’d probably hate them too.  But the simple fact that the debates were about real things, not the latest hysterical talking points, is undeniable.  Maybe the biggest problem of politics in today’s America is the fact that so much of the conversation has little to no connection to the reality-based community.  It’s just one set of overpaid, in-the-bubble media personalities arguing with another.  BBC’s election coverage was a welcome relief from that.  It was good to see a political discussion, every bit as heated and intense as our own, that didn’t resort to fantasy to make its points.

End Note: I’m embarrassed I didn’t know this, but I’ve also got to applaud Britain for the way they announce their results.  In each Parliamentary district, every person standing for office, from the biggest party to the fringiest fringe, stood on stage in front of a crowd while the results were read aloud.  There were no speeches full of false modesty and good sportsmanship from the losers, just a quixotic, “who farted?” look their faces as the often embarrassing results were announced.  And the minor candidates!  Conservative Party leader David Cameron had to share the stage in his very safe district with a guy dressed like Jesus and another who bore more than a passing resemblance to Colonel Sanders.  Truly wonderful.

False Dichotomy

“You can either be a fairy or a queen, it’s wide open.” – Springfield Ballet Teacher

There’s a neat article in last week’s New Yorker about the changes Apple and the iPad have made in the world of digital book publishing.  Long story short, Apple and the iPad have broken Amazon’s monopoly on serious e-book retailing.  Obviously there’s much more in the article itself, but that’s the gist of it.  At the end of the article, a much more interesting topic is broached, one that seems far more pertinent to the publishing world going forward:

Google will open an online e-books store, called Google Editions, by the middle of the year, Dan Clancy, the engineer who directs Google Books, and who will also be in charge of Google Editions, said.

Clancy said that the store’s e-books, unlike those from Amazon or Apple, will be accessible to users on any device. Google Editions will let publishers set the price of their books, he said, and will accept the agency model. Having already digitized twelve million books, including out-of-print titles, Google will have a far greater selection than Amazon or Apple. It will also make e-books available for bookstores to sell, giving “the vast majority” of revenues to the store, Clancy said. He suggested that in trying to dominate the market Amazon and Apple were taking the wrong approach to business online. “It’s much more of an open ecosystem, where you find a way for bricks-and-mortar stores to participate in the future digital world of books,” he said. “We’re quite comfortable having a diverse range of physical retailers, whereas most of the other players would like to have a less competitive space, because they’d like to dominate.”

As a concept, e-books have waxed and waned several times over the last fifteen years or so.  They took their first tentative toddles towards reality with the Kindle a couple of years ago and now, because Apple barfed up a new device with rounded corners, they’re all the rage again.  But Google and, as the New Yorker article makes clear, publishers don’t give a damn about hardware.  And why should they?

Publishers care about distribution, they care about someone plunking down money for content.  How a person chooses to read an electronic book is irrelevant to them.  People have been reading large amounts of text on screens for years and years.  The only thing that’s changing is that now there are options for them to pay for books they can read on those screens.  Whether it’s a Kindle (which is designed to be book-like) or an iPad (which isn’t, but is kind of the same size) or a laptop or a desktop or a netbook or anything else doesn’t matter to publishers in the least.

Moreover, it would be counterproductive to care.  Here in the infant stages of e-books there are only a couple of systems set up to sell the damn things, and those things are often related to a specific piece of hardware (think iTunes circa 2003).  But that situation is clearly temporary; in two years there will likely be numerous iPad clones out there just as there now are numerous iPhone clones.  Publishers want to be around for much longer than that, and committing themselves to a distribution system because of a piece of equipment that will be a museum piece in ten years is nuts.

No publisher is going to make any kind of an exclusive deal, and so all the glitz and glamour that accompanies events like the launch of the Kindle or iPad is periphery to the real matter.  E-books won’t have even begun to mature significantly until there’s an easy way to pay for them, and a base price that allows publishers, authors and everyone else to make enough to get by.  Those are the developments to watch for, and Google Editions, far more than Amazon or Apple, addresses them directly.

Flag Desecration

“Zoidberg, how could you?  I used to think you were cool.” – Fry

Shortly after he took office last year, Barack Obama made the fateful decision to continue his predecessor’s system of military tribunals.  Amidst the flowery civil rights rhetoric the accompanied the announcement, the real message came through loud and clear: we cannot allow these men to go free.  Thanks to torture, indefinite detention, and god knows what else, the new Administration did not think it could secure convictions for many of the prisoners in proper courts.  The alternative, letting them go, was considered politically toxic.

Obama and company may have avoided a political controversy by allowing the military tribunals to continue, but they also signed up for the embarrassing drip of legal, moral, and political embarrassments that comes with them.  Ever since the first military tribunals were proposed during the early, panic stricken phases of Bush the Younger’s response to the terrorist attacks of 2001, their frontier justice mentality has steadily been eaten away and eroded by the federal court system.  The original rules set up were little more than drumhead trials and were quickly attacked for being blatantly unconstitutional.  Gradually, over nearly a decade now, the rules governing everything from burdens of proof and admissibility of evidence to press access and legal counsel have shifted in favor of the accused.

After criticizing the tribunals during the campaign, Obama had no choice but to continue that shift once he decided not to scrap the system.  Politically, he could not go forward with the Bush era rules in place, so new rules and regulations were set up.  The practical absurdities of this latest revision were on full display this week as the trial of Omar Khadr, the first of the Obama era military tribunals, began.

For starters, the manual with all the procedures in it wasn’t even finalized until the night before the trial was to begin.  The rules would be inches thick if printed out and, even by the speed reading standards of well trained lawyers, there’s no way they could be adhered to in a closely argued legal contest if no one’s had more than a few hours to read them.

And all of that was just a preliminary to the main event: deciding how much, if any, of Khadr’s statements to interrogators will be admissible.  That was supposed to take place on Wednesday but, like everything else at Guantanamo Bay, it’s massively behind.  Not having an agreed upon set of rules until the day before the trial is embarrassing, but this conversation is downright shameful.

In a courtroom where the Stars & Stripes is doubtlessly hanging somewhere (though no one can say because of the paranoid levels of official secrecy involved), the locus of debate will be whether or not this man (who was only 15 when he was captured) was tortured too hard.  Boil everything else away, and that’s what this is about: whether or not he was tortured too hard.  If he was, then he might go free.  If he wasn’t, then he’ll be in prison for many, many years more.

That is the kind of odious legal question that should never be aired before the red, white and blue.  That’s the kind of thing that should happen under the ugly, militaristic flag of some dictatorship or corrupt military junta.  But thanks to the short sighted stupidity of Bush the Younger, and the political cravenness of Barack Obama, degrees of torture are now American legal questions.

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