...But what is with this allergy shit? I don't have allergies in the autumn. Certainly not in glorious October.
I just got home five hours ago. It's pleasant out and will likely remain so so I opened up the house. Now I'm all stuffed up and sneezy and my eyes are watering like it's high April.
Listen up, Tampa. You will NOT take my autumn away from me, do you hear me? I don't know what's in bloom out there, but it had best stop it right now!
Over the last few weeks I've had lots of time to do lots of thinking, and though I experienced no brilliant epiphany with the heavenly light shining down and the angelic strumming of harps (or harpsichords), I have come to a handful of what I'll call gradual recognitions of the obvious, which I'll be discussing a bit in the future. One of those gradual recognitions, and probably the most recent of them, is that it would really be best if I left Tampa entirely, one way or the other. I now realize that if I'm going to be forced to spend my autumns in shorts and sandals with a box of kleenex by my side, I'm going to have to leave Tampa immediately, as well as entirely. This is the one season of the year I really get to enjoy. I am not happy.
31 October 2005
Smitty Returns from Vacation
Sadly, my vacation has come to an end.
I had to drive back home today, from Atlanta. It's not a bad drive, although it was very, VERY hard to turn south onto 75 from 20 this morning. I had to think about it. I could have turned north. I really wanted to.
Oh well. I have tomorrow off from work, so I can do laundry and wash the car, get a haircut. I'm also going to write; just because I'm back from vacation doesn't mean I can stop.
I did not meet my goal of finishing half of Lauderdale, and now that I look at it that was an absurd goal. I would have had to write 13,500 words a day on the days I had set aside for writing. Fat chance. That said, I did finish chapters 27 through 44, which is good, and mapped out the remainder. Theoretically, I can finish by the end of this year if I write 1230 words a day. I say theoretically because I've made such pronouncements before. But that doesn't seem like such a tough number. We'll see how it goes.
Anyway. Wonderful vacation. I recommend everyone take one.
I had to drive back home today, from Atlanta. It's not a bad drive, although it was very, VERY hard to turn south onto 75 from 20 this morning. I had to think about it. I could have turned north. I really wanted to.
Oh well. I have tomorrow off from work, so I can do laundry and wash the car, get a haircut. I'm also going to write; just because I'm back from vacation doesn't mean I can stop.
I did not meet my goal of finishing half of Lauderdale, and now that I look at it that was an absurd goal. I would have had to write 13,500 words a day on the days I had set aside for writing. Fat chance. That said, I did finish chapters 27 through 44, which is good, and mapped out the remainder. Theoretically, I can finish by the end of this year if I write 1230 words a day. I say theoretically because I've made such pronouncements before. But that doesn't seem like such a tough number. We'll see how it goes.
Anyway. Wonderful vacation. I recommend everyone take one.
08 October 2005
Smitty's World is Going on Vacation
I am departing Tampa for a much-deserved and needed vacation. I’ll be staying someplace nice and spending, I hope, a lot of time working on Lauderdale, which is about ¼ finished now and of which I hope to write another half while on vacation.
Posting here will be intermittent at best between now and the first of November. But never fear, for I shall be back soon enough (too soon, for me). Enjoy your October as much as I’ll enjoy mine; it is the finest month of the year.
Posting here will be intermittent at best between now and the first of November. But never fear, for I shall be back soon enough (too soon, for me). Enjoy your October as much as I’ll enjoy mine; it is the finest month of the year.
Sudan, Somalia, and Territorial Integrity
I didn’t mean to think too hard today, really, what with the cleaning, packing, and preparing that was on my menu. But during lunch I sat down to finish last week’s Economist, and lucky me the “Africa and the Middle East” news section actually had multiple articles about Africa—albeit the part of Africa that’s nearest the Middle East. Still, this is better than usual.
The article included a handy little map. The map pretty well carved Sudan up into four smaller chunks; the article implies that Sudan is barely holding together, and may ultimately descend again into civil war or split up.
And I wondered, what's so wrong with splitting up?
There's more after the jump.
For the most part, the West tends to place a great deal of emphasis on territorial integrity in the Third and Failed worlds. As a general rule this is probably a good idea, and if nothing else serves to keep the nation-state as the dominant concept of governance. There is little doubt that Wilson's doctrine of self-determination is not in all cases appropriate, but Western diplomacy as a rule seems to have gone all the way in the other direction, supporting territorial integrity even in the face of the absurd boundaries of states in many parts of the world (boundaries drawn largely by the West).
Sudan seems to be a perfect example of this. Here is an enormous country with huge potential resource wealth that has nonetheless known few years since independence free from civil war. The civil war in the south of the country ran for two decades, but the ceasefire and peace agreement there didn't bring peace to Sudan, because as the southern rebels left northeastern Sudan they were replaced by, well, northeastern rebels. And Darfur has been seething for years now, though the West only took notice in the last year. The article mentions that the continuing strife in western and, now, eastern Sudan, combined with the death of the south's John Garang, may test the southern ceasefire or lead to renewed hostilities there.
There can be little question that civil war is in all cases bad for a country and bad for its people. This is not to say that countries ought never to split or that civil wars ought never to be fought to cause or prevent that; only that the damage ought to be minimized as best as possible. Uprisings should be crushed swiftly or, if they cannot be, ceasefires and peaceful separations ought to be attempted. Of course this is far easier said than done and I come from a country that had a civil war lasting for five years.
The question, however, is, at what point should the West, of which Sudan is no fan anyway (and vice versa), stop discussing territorial integrity and start thinking along the lines of whether it wouldn't be much better for Sudan and the Sudanese people to break apart. Ah, say the diplomats, this is a slippery slope. Encourage Sudan to break up, and soon you have Indonesia and Nigeria and Congo and dozens of other states aiming to follow suit.
Perhaps. This seems a bit simplistic and alarmist. The West did not encourage the breakup of Yugoslavia, but neither did we step in to force Slovenia and Croatia and Macedonia et all to rejoin the mother country. We did attempt to stop the Serbs from killing members of the other ethnic groups, though we did little enough to stop the other ethnic groups from killing the Serbs or each other. In the aftermath of the Yugoslav breakup, other countries around the world did not get ideas in their heads and suddenly erupt into civil war. Sudan was at war before 1991, and is still at war. And anyway, the West as much as created the country of Kosovo, which is an independent state except in name; despite this, few ethnic groups (even including Iraq's Kurds) suddenly rushed in to ask NATO for aid in achieving their own independence.
But with Africa, of course, the West much prefers to turn away and let things seethe. We messed the place up, and we just can't bear to look at our own rotten history there.
Still, I think the time has come to stop looking at Sudan as the next polyglot dynamo a la India, and start thinking of it as it is: an absurd, dysfunctional country that we can not reasonably expect to pull its citizens out of their wretched existence without being substantially reconfigured. Ultimately, the view of Yugoslavia in the West has become one of, it was a terrific idea, but doomed to fail in the end. Perhaps Sudan is the same thing: it seems like a good idea, a large country with many different resources and enough people to exploit them well, but ultimately it isn't going to work. Perhaps if it were a rich country the various cultural, religious, ethnic, and linguistic quarrels around which the British drew Sudan's borders would be unimportant; but poor people tend to cling to these things as they have so little else to cling to.
Ultimately, we must recognize that, petroleum contracts aside, a country as wrought by civil war as Sudan is never going to be a successful country. It will never get rich, and it will never meet the basic needs of its people. It has not done so at any point in its history and we are fooling ourselves if we think it can do so. No country in history has ever seen its economy grow or its quality of life improve in the midst of full-scale war. That Sudan has continued this trend should not surprise us.
The question then is not one of whether Sudan can get better despite civil strife. Of course it can't. The question is can any of the various pieces of Sudan achieve peace on their own more easily than the whole? Would South Sudan at least have internal peace? Would Darfur? If the northeastern tribes had their own country, would they stop fighting each other? We can't know for sure, but we know two things: a country won't get better in the midst of war, and Sudan is not apparently capable of putting an end to its wars. Doesn't it make sense to support notional independence, if not outright secession, of South Sudan? Couldn't that make both halves more viable?
Across the Ethiopean plateau from Sudan lies the remains of what used to be called Somalia. Most countries of the world and the UN still refer to the open quarrel on the Horn of Africa as "Somalia," and "Somalia" even has a government, though it does not function, most of its members in fact live in Kenya, and it is riven by clan identity much as the original country of Somalia was in the early 1990s.
In the northern part of the former country, a nominal state has arisen called Somaliland. Somaliland has a capital city, a functioning nominally democratic government comprising three branches, prints its own money, and even has diplomatic relations with its neighbors; it has recently struck a deal with Ethiopia to ship Ethiopian goods out from its main port. In contrast to its western neighbor Djibouti, an American client state, Somaliland is democratic and open (granted, Djibouti sets a low standard). The country recently held a reasonably fair election. Yet Somaliland is not recognized by any country on Earth.
Why not? Again, it comes back to the overemphasis on territorial integrity, by the West and many other actors. The UN and the AU (African Union) both support the concept of "Somalia" as it used to exist, despite over a decade of anarchy. Why are we so averse to the idea of Somalia splitting up? The country utterly failed to govern its people or provide for their basic needs, to the point that it descended into anarchy and has failed to recover for, so far, 13 years. You would think that if a group of Somalis succeeded in creating a functioning state in any part of the former country, the world community would raise a great Huzzah and welcome the new state with open arms.
The government of Somaliland recently raided an al-Qaeda cell operating in their territory, killing or apprehending seven terrorists (which is pretty much an entire cell). The much-vaunted government of "Somalia" can't keep peace in its own capital of Muqdisho, to the point that the few reasonable members of that government have removed themselves to another town to govern, but control little outside that town. Yet here Somaliland not only operates and keeps the peace, it is fighting the war on terror on its own. That the West, and indeed the entire world, should feel some need to deny Somaliland recognition is absurd.
The nation-state is on the wane. The insistence on territorial integrity is merely an attempt to keep the concept viable for as long as possible. Ultimately, technology will bring down the entire nation-state order, but for now and for at least a few generations yet, the present order is all we have. Given the results of our insistence on keeping old borders (civil strife, rampant poverty, and no improvements in either), it is time the West and the international community begin recognizing when a state's borders have become untenable, and work to create sound borders so that people can live in some amount of peace and have the opportunity to make something of their lives.
The article included a handy little map. The map pretty well carved Sudan up into four smaller chunks; the article implies that Sudan is barely holding together, and may ultimately descend again into civil war or split up.
And I wondered, what's so wrong with splitting up?
There's more after the jump.
For the most part, the West tends to place a great deal of emphasis on territorial integrity in the Third and Failed worlds. As a general rule this is probably a good idea, and if nothing else serves to keep the nation-state as the dominant concept of governance. There is little doubt that Wilson's doctrine of self-determination is not in all cases appropriate, but Western diplomacy as a rule seems to have gone all the way in the other direction, supporting territorial integrity even in the face of the absurd boundaries of states in many parts of the world (boundaries drawn largely by the West).
Sudan seems to be a perfect example of this. Here is an enormous country with huge potential resource wealth that has nonetheless known few years since independence free from civil war. The civil war in the south of the country ran for two decades, but the ceasefire and peace agreement there didn't bring peace to Sudan, because as the southern rebels left northeastern Sudan they were replaced by, well, northeastern rebels. And Darfur has been seething for years now, though the West only took notice in the last year. The article mentions that the continuing strife in western and, now, eastern Sudan, combined with the death of the south's John Garang, may test the southern ceasefire or lead to renewed hostilities there.
There can be little question that civil war is in all cases bad for a country and bad for its people. This is not to say that countries ought never to split or that civil wars ought never to be fought to cause or prevent that; only that the damage ought to be minimized as best as possible. Uprisings should be crushed swiftly or, if they cannot be, ceasefires and peaceful separations ought to be attempted. Of course this is far easier said than done and I come from a country that had a civil war lasting for five years.
The question, however, is, at what point should the West, of which Sudan is no fan anyway (and vice versa), stop discussing territorial integrity and start thinking along the lines of whether it wouldn't be much better for Sudan and the Sudanese people to break apart. Ah, say the diplomats, this is a slippery slope. Encourage Sudan to break up, and soon you have Indonesia and Nigeria and Congo and dozens of other states aiming to follow suit.
Perhaps. This seems a bit simplistic and alarmist. The West did not encourage the breakup of Yugoslavia, but neither did we step in to force Slovenia and Croatia and Macedonia et all to rejoin the mother country. We did attempt to stop the Serbs from killing members of the other ethnic groups, though we did little enough to stop the other ethnic groups from killing the Serbs or each other. In the aftermath of the Yugoslav breakup, other countries around the world did not get ideas in their heads and suddenly erupt into civil war. Sudan was at war before 1991, and is still at war. And anyway, the West as much as created the country of Kosovo, which is an independent state except in name; despite this, few ethnic groups (even including Iraq's Kurds) suddenly rushed in to ask NATO for aid in achieving their own independence.
But with Africa, of course, the West much prefers to turn away and let things seethe. We messed the place up, and we just can't bear to look at our own rotten history there.
Still, I think the time has come to stop looking at Sudan as the next polyglot dynamo a la India, and start thinking of it as it is: an absurd, dysfunctional country that we can not reasonably expect to pull its citizens out of their wretched existence without being substantially reconfigured. Ultimately, the view of Yugoslavia in the West has become one of, it was a terrific idea, but doomed to fail in the end. Perhaps Sudan is the same thing: it seems like a good idea, a large country with many different resources and enough people to exploit them well, but ultimately it isn't going to work. Perhaps if it were a rich country the various cultural, religious, ethnic, and linguistic quarrels around which the British drew Sudan's borders would be unimportant; but poor people tend to cling to these things as they have so little else to cling to.
Ultimately, we must recognize that, petroleum contracts aside, a country as wrought by civil war as Sudan is never going to be a successful country. It will never get rich, and it will never meet the basic needs of its people. It has not done so at any point in its history and we are fooling ourselves if we think it can do so. No country in history has ever seen its economy grow or its quality of life improve in the midst of full-scale war. That Sudan has continued this trend should not surprise us.
The question then is not one of whether Sudan can get better despite civil strife. Of course it can't. The question is can any of the various pieces of Sudan achieve peace on their own more easily than the whole? Would South Sudan at least have internal peace? Would Darfur? If the northeastern tribes had their own country, would they stop fighting each other? We can't know for sure, but we know two things: a country won't get better in the midst of war, and Sudan is not apparently capable of putting an end to its wars. Doesn't it make sense to support notional independence, if not outright secession, of South Sudan? Couldn't that make both halves more viable?
Across the Ethiopean plateau from Sudan lies the remains of what used to be called Somalia. Most countries of the world and the UN still refer to the open quarrel on the Horn of Africa as "Somalia," and "Somalia" even has a government, though it does not function, most of its members in fact live in Kenya, and it is riven by clan identity much as the original country of Somalia was in the early 1990s.
In the northern part of the former country, a nominal state has arisen called Somaliland. Somaliland has a capital city, a functioning nominally democratic government comprising three branches, prints its own money, and even has diplomatic relations with its neighbors; it has recently struck a deal with Ethiopia to ship Ethiopian goods out from its main port. In contrast to its western neighbor Djibouti, an American client state, Somaliland is democratic and open (granted, Djibouti sets a low standard). The country recently held a reasonably fair election. Yet Somaliland is not recognized by any country on Earth.
Why not? Again, it comes back to the overemphasis on territorial integrity, by the West and many other actors. The UN and the AU (African Union) both support the concept of "Somalia" as it used to exist, despite over a decade of anarchy. Why are we so averse to the idea of Somalia splitting up? The country utterly failed to govern its people or provide for their basic needs, to the point that it descended into anarchy and has failed to recover for, so far, 13 years. You would think that if a group of Somalis succeeded in creating a functioning state in any part of the former country, the world community would raise a great Huzzah and welcome the new state with open arms.
The government of Somaliland recently raided an al-Qaeda cell operating in their territory, killing or apprehending seven terrorists (which is pretty much an entire cell). The much-vaunted government of "Somalia" can't keep peace in its own capital of Muqdisho, to the point that the few reasonable members of that government have removed themselves to another town to govern, but control little outside that town. Yet here Somaliland not only operates and keeps the peace, it is fighting the war on terror on its own. That the West, and indeed the entire world, should feel some need to deny Somaliland recognition is absurd.
The nation-state is on the wane. The insistence on territorial integrity is merely an attempt to keep the concept viable for as long as possible. Ultimately, technology will bring down the entire nation-state order, but for now and for at least a few generations yet, the present order is all we have. Given the results of our insistence on keeping old borders (civil strife, rampant poverty, and no improvements in either), it is time the West and the international community begin recognizing when a state's borders have become untenable, and work to create sound borders so that people can live in some amount of peace and have the opportunity to make something of their lives.
07 October 2005
Blogroll III
I've made a few small changes to the Blogroll.
I removed The Gas Guy's blog, since A) I think he's stopped writing it, and B) the whole thing was a deception anyway, which I cannot respect.
I've added a great academic/law blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, one of the best general smart-people blogs anywhere.
I've also added Camp Katrina, a blog by a National Guard soldier working on Katrina Cleanup. Again, well worth the time.
I removed The Gas Guy's blog, since A) I think he's stopped writing it, and B) the whole thing was a deception anyway, which I cannot respect.
I've added a great academic/law blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, one of the best general smart-people blogs anywhere.
I've also added Camp Katrina, a blog by a National Guard soldier working on Katrina Cleanup. Again, well worth the time.
Harriet Miers: The Best Person Anywhere In America For The Supreme Court
For those who have difficulty with sarcasm, the title of this post is a good example.
The Harriet Miers nomination is looking more and more like a play by Bush to see how far he can take the idea of presidential privilege. Here’s a nominee with no record, scant qualifications, and oh by the way I’m not going to let you see anything she’s done in the last six years, since I have executive privilege. So there. He acts like a pre-schooler who finally gets to take home the class gerbil; now he thinks it’s his gerbil, so he thinks he can make up any rules he wants before you can see it.
I just posted that Congress has accepted its constitutional duty to set limits on detainment and interrogation of combatants. Now we get to see if they take the job of "advice and consent" seriously, or if they knuckle under to the White House yet again and let Bush's cronyism go unchallenged.
Here are three things worth reading. This blog post from ACS Blog notes that the White House has announced it will not give up any of Miers' papers from the last six years (executive privilege). And then there's this New York Times article that says about the same thing, but it's the Times, for those who prefer MSM to blogs. And finally here is Charles Krauthammer's column, which is pretty much the first statement by a prominent conservatie that blatantly and openly says "withdraw this nomination."
The Harriet Miers nomination is looking more and more like a play by Bush to see how far he can take the idea of presidential privilege. Here’s a nominee with no record, scant qualifications, and oh by the way I’m not going to let you see anything she’s done in the last six years, since I have executive privilege. So there. He acts like a pre-schooler who finally gets to take home the class gerbil; now he thinks it’s his gerbil, so he thinks he can make up any rules he wants before you can see it.
I just posted that Congress has accepted its constitutional duty to set limits on detainment and interrogation of combatants. Now we get to see if they take the job of "advice and consent" seriously, or if they knuckle under to the White House yet again and let Bush's cronyism go unchallenged.
Here are three things worth reading. This blog post from ACS Blog notes that the White House has announced it will not give up any of Miers' papers from the last six years (executive privilege). And then there's this New York Times article that says about the same thing, but it's the Times, for those who prefer MSM to blogs. And finally here is Charles Krauthammer's column, which is pretty much the first statement by a prominent conservatie that blatantly and openly says "withdraw this nomination."
Congress Decides to Stop Being So Damn Lazy
The Senate yesterday took a constitutionally required step and set limits on the manner in which “enemy combatants” et al can be detained and interrogated.
This is fairly significant. As this post on The Volokh Conspiracy notes, the Constitution gives Congress the power to make Rules concerning captures on Land and Water. The lawsuits and hand-wringing over the Bush Administration’s handling of detainees could have been avoided had Congress exercised its power to set rules for the treatment of “captures on Land,” rather than abdicating that authority to the President. The White House has argued it will veto the rules; I’ve read them, but haven’t really pondered them, and I don’t know why the rules are so onerous to the White House (they passed the GOP controlled Senate 90-9), except that they are rules and indicate a heretofore dormant sense of Congressional independence from the White House. This is scary to Bush, who would much rather be King than President anyway. Eight comments down is a comment by Robert Lyman, who includes the full text of the amendment, so you can read the rules yourself if you like to see how horrifyingly complex they are (they’re not).
This story will be underreported. I’d not have heard about it but for a late afternoon scan of Volokh before I left work. It could be something to watch, however.
This is fairly significant. As this post on The Volokh Conspiracy notes, the Constitution gives Congress the power to make Rules concerning captures on Land and Water. The lawsuits and hand-wringing over the Bush Administration’s handling of detainees could have been avoided had Congress exercised its power to set rules for the treatment of “captures on Land,” rather than abdicating that authority to the President. The White House has argued it will veto the rules; I’ve read them, but haven’t really pondered them, and I don’t know why the rules are so onerous to the White House (they passed the GOP controlled Senate 90-9), except that they are rules and indicate a heretofore dormant sense of Congressional independence from the White House. This is scary to Bush, who would much rather be King than President anyway. Eight comments down is a comment by Robert Lyman, who includes the full text of the amendment, so you can read the rules yourself if you like to see how horrifyingly complex they are (they’re not).
This story will be underreported. I’d not have heard about it but for a late afternoon scan of Volokh before I left work. It could be something to watch, however.
Maddox Takes Smitty's Advice
At long last, after an endless string of minor scandals that cast doubt upon his ethics and managerial skills, Scott Maddox has done what I long ago said he should do, and withdrawn from the governor's race.
Good for Scott. Of course, his career in elective politics is at this point pretty much over. Good for Florida.
Good for Scott. Of course, his career in elective politics is at this point pretty much over. Good for Florida.
Maria's End To End
If you need to get your car detailed and you live in South Tampa, you should go to Maria's End-to-End, at 1101 South Howard: 254.9699. She shampooed and dried the interior, cleaned the floor mats, vacuumed, and sprayed a citrus enzyme to combat the mildew smell from leaving my windows down last weekend, all for only $35. Plus, she washed the car, too, which she didn't charge me for because it was going to rain again that afternoon anyway.
04 October 2005
I'd say I'm lazy, but I don't want to offend lazy people
You'll note that on those days when I'm feeling particularly lazy, I mostly post links to other stuff instead of creating "content" of my own. This is one of those days. Shut up!
Here is a link to a brilliant blogpost by Eugene Volokh that everyone should read about the whole issue of offense and accomodation... that is to say, political correctness. Go read it. Leave me alone!
Here is a link to a brilliant blogpost by Eugene Volokh that everyone should read about the whole issue of offense and accomodation... that is to say, political correctness. Go read it. Leave me alone!
Down with the RIAA
Because it is not possible for news of the RIAA’s bullying tactics to be too widely disseminated, I hereby link to Ars Technica for the first time ever, to a story about a 42-year-old disabled single mother in Oregon who has allegedly been wrongly accused by the RIAA of music piracy (gangsta rap, no less) and then threatened by that shithole organization that if she refused to settle on the claim despite it’s probable falsehood, RIAA would proceed with the lawsuit to “discourage others from attempting to defend themselves against unwarranted litigation.”
And to think, there were CDs out there I wanted to buy. Not anymore, though. The money just goes to fund this racketeering campaign by the RIAA, so forget it.
And to think, there were CDs out there I wanted to buy. Not anymore, though. The money just goes to fund this racketeering campaign by the RIAA, so forget it.
03 October 2005
A Christmas Judge
Well. So, the president nominated his friend Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Rather than try to come up with something witty on my own, I’m going to link to a couple of worthwhile articles on the subject. The first is not a very good article. I wouldn’t even bother reading it if I were you. But it has a truly wonderful picture right there at the top. I’d post this picture directly on the blog but I don’t want to scare the children with this picture of Skeletor with a bouffant. More after the Jump.
Here is a much better in-depth article about Ms. Miers (technically, she could still be called Miss Miers) and the various hurdles she has to jump. Mr. Cohen here does a good job of painting a rather bleak picture of the road ahead for our darling Harriet. This reflects the notion I’ve seen repeated several times around the web today that Miers’ nomination is doomed, that she may even withdraw her name at some point (this last seems purely hopeful), and that the nomination is intended solely to pave the way for Bush to nominate Al Gonzales later this year. An interesting idea, but troubling; what is it about Ms. Miers that will cause her nomination to go south? Cronyism? Isn’t AGAG something of a crony of the president’s? Hmm.
Finally, here’s a column by Michelle Malkin about the reaction around the blogosphere today (you can rest assured this post will not make it onto Ms. Malkin’s radar). This is perhaps the most interesting of all, because it shows how early the negative coverage got started, and how much of said coverage is coming from the right. Of course those agencies devoted to pimping Bush nominees for any court are going to support Ms. Miers. But it seems like the rank and file are in a funk and riled (I’ve been waiting for months to use that).
One of the bloggers that Ms. Malkin links to talks about how people on both sides of the political spectrum "overwhelmingly seem to agree that Harriet Miers was an underwhelming selection." This seems unfair. Surely there is at least someone out there in the world who is merely whelmed (that may not be a real word, but it should be), and not actually underwhelmed. I wouldn’t say I’m overwhelmed by Ms. Miers, except in the sense that I am overwhelmingly opposed to her use of eye makeup (she’s been spending too much time with Krazy Kat Harris). I’m sure that she won’t make it through the Senate hearings without a competent makeup artist and hair stylist. Well, I would be sure of that, except that said competent stylist clearly was not roused out of bed for this morning’s announcement, and one would expect that with a person so obscure as Ms. Miers, a good first impression would have been warranted. But this White House apparently doesn’t swing that way.
My first impression, upon hearing of Ms. Miers' nomination this morning on NPR, was, what gall. Twice now Bush has set a friend to the weighty task of finding the best person in the country for a particular role, and the friend has looked no further than his or her own mirror. That Bush sees no problem with this is troubling. Troubling, too, is the fact that, all political considerations aside, there are dozens, probably hundreds, possible thousands, of people in this country better qualified by dint of experience and temperament to the job that Ms. Miers successfully found herself for. This is truly disappointing.
I've never been a defender of this president and there is no chance that I'll start now. But with his selection of Mr. Roberts (a selection Ms. Miers is said to have had a hand in), Bush showed that at times he can put politics and partisanship aside, damn the tides of diversity and tokenism, and simply find the best person for a position. Few people can call Roberts unqualified; none can do so seriously. Roberts was not a Bush friend, and though he is clearly ambitious that is no sin. Roberts' colleagues to a man agreed that he is a brilliant thinker and well-suited to his new position on the Court. Roberts may (or may not) prove more conservative than me, but that is of little consequence when one considers that Bush selected him purely on the basis of his great qualification for the job. I gave Bush much credit for this. What is most disappointing to me, then, is that the nomination of Ms. Miers clearly shows that Bush's striving to find a competent, rather than loyal, appointee was a one-shot deal. He clearly didn't try to find another Roberts. He didn't even try to find someone who could be passed off as another Roberts. And I have no choice but to conclude that we merely got lucky with Roberts, and that competence and qualification are of as little importance to Mr. Bush now as they were when he saddled the taxpayers with a glorified horse-trader as their FEMA director.
But this is merely another in a long string of disappointments from Mr. Bush. And when one looks past the rather disturbing message sent by Ms. Miers' nomination, there are some good things to be found. For example, there is almost no chance whatsoever that there will be cause for a great filibuster showdown in the Senate and a change of the Senate's rules. For that we can be deeply thankful.
The exciting thing about this nomination is that it could go in any of a dozen different directions. With Harry Reid tacitly offering her support immediately after the announcement (and he did so brilliantly, remarking when told of her previous donations to Al Gore that, though he hadn't known of them before, the fact made him feel that much better about Ms. Miers; you could hear the skin crawling on the right), anything could happen. Ms. Miers may not be a shoo-in for the job. She may get filibustered—maybe even by a combined group of both Demos and GOPers. Or, she could sail through the hearings and be confirmed 97-3 (the three being Schumer, Kennedy, and Byrd). None of these are outside the realm of possibility. Regardless of how this nomination turns out, the president has given journalists a big early Christmas present: excitement, slander, strange coalitions, vitriolic conservatives, confused liberals, and the possibility of complete implosion! Just in time for the holidays, and all wrapped up in a big box of too much Dallas hairspray and smeared eyeliner. Hooray for Christmas!
Here is a much better in-depth article about Ms. Miers (technically, she could still be called Miss Miers) and the various hurdles she has to jump. Mr. Cohen here does a good job of painting a rather bleak picture of the road ahead for our darling Harriet. This reflects the notion I’ve seen repeated several times around the web today that Miers’ nomination is doomed, that she may even withdraw her name at some point (this last seems purely hopeful), and that the nomination is intended solely to pave the way for Bush to nominate Al Gonzales later this year. An interesting idea, but troubling; what is it about Ms. Miers that will cause her nomination to go south? Cronyism? Isn’t AGAG something of a crony of the president’s? Hmm.
Finally, here’s a column by Michelle Malkin about the reaction around the blogosphere today (you can rest assured this post will not make it onto Ms. Malkin’s radar). This is perhaps the most interesting of all, because it shows how early the negative coverage got started, and how much of said coverage is coming from the right. Of course those agencies devoted to pimping Bush nominees for any court are going to support Ms. Miers. But it seems like the rank and file are in a funk and riled (I’ve been waiting for months to use that).
One of the bloggers that Ms. Malkin links to talks about how people on both sides of the political spectrum "overwhelmingly seem to agree that Harriet Miers was an underwhelming selection." This seems unfair. Surely there is at least someone out there in the world who is merely whelmed (that may not be a real word, but it should be), and not actually underwhelmed. I wouldn’t say I’m overwhelmed by Ms. Miers, except in the sense that I am overwhelmingly opposed to her use of eye makeup (she’s been spending too much time with Krazy Kat Harris). I’m sure that she won’t make it through the Senate hearings without a competent makeup artist and hair stylist. Well, I would be sure of that, except that said competent stylist clearly was not roused out of bed for this morning’s announcement, and one would expect that with a person so obscure as Ms. Miers, a good first impression would have been warranted. But this White House apparently doesn’t swing that way.
My first impression, upon hearing of Ms. Miers' nomination this morning on NPR, was, what gall. Twice now Bush has set a friend to the weighty task of finding the best person in the country for a particular role, and the friend has looked no further than his or her own mirror. That Bush sees no problem with this is troubling. Troubling, too, is the fact that, all political considerations aside, there are dozens, probably hundreds, possible thousands, of people in this country better qualified by dint of experience and temperament to the job that Ms. Miers successfully found herself for. This is truly disappointing.
I've never been a defender of this president and there is no chance that I'll start now. But with his selection of Mr. Roberts (a selection Ms. Miers is said to have had a hand in), Bush showed that at times he can put politics and partisanship aside, damn the tides of diversity and tokenism, and simply find the best person for a position. Few people can call Roberts unqualified; none can do so seriously. Roberts was not a Bush friend, and though he is clearly ambitious that is no sin. Roberts' colleagues to a man agreed that he is a brilliant thinker and well-suited to his new position on the Court. Roberts may (or may not) prove more conservative than me, but that is of little consequence when one considers that Bush selected him purely on the basis of his great qualification for the job. I gave Bush much credit for this. What is most disappointing to me, then, is that the nomination of Ms. Miers clearly shows that Bush's striving to find a competent, rather than loyal, appointee was a one-shot deal. He clearly didn't try to find another Roberts. He didn't even try to find someone who could be passed off as another Roberts. And I have no choice but to conclude that we merely got lucky with Roberts, and that competence and qualification are of as little importance to Mr. Bush now as they were when he saddled the taxpayers with a glorified horse-trader as their FEMA director.
But this is merely another in a long string of disappointments from Mr. Bush. And when one looks past the rather disturbing message sent by Ms. Miers' nomination, there are some good things to be found. For example, there is almost no chance whatsoever that there will be cause for a great filibuster showdown in the Senate and a change of the Senate's rules. For that we can be deeply thankful.
The exciting thing about this nomination is that it could go in any of a dozen different directions. With Harry Reid tacitly offering her support immediately after the announcement (and he did so brilliantly, remarking when told of her previous donations to Al Gore that, though he hadn't known of them before, the fact made him feel that much better about Ms. Miers; you could hear the skin crawling on the right), anything could happen. Ms. Miers may not be a shoo-in for the job. She may get filibustered—maybe even by a combined group of both Demos and GOPers. Or, she could sail through the hearings and be confirmed 97-3 (the three being Schumer, Kennedy, and Byrd). None of these are outside the realm of possibility. Regardless of how this nomination turns out, the president has given journalists a big early Christmas present: excitement, slander, strange coalitions, vitriolic conservatives, confused liberals, and the possibility of complete implosion! Just in time for the holidays, and all wrapped up in a big box of too much Dallas hairspray and smeared eyeliner. Hooray for Christmas!
02 October 2005
Mmm, Spidery
Am I the only person who thinks that Honda's decision to advertise the new Civic with an image of millions of baby spiders bursting out of their egg sacs was, um, ill-advised? (It's commercial number 6 at that link, "Keyhole". Creepy.)
I like the one with the little cartoon Civic bouncing off the rooftops (though it is exceedingly silly), but this one just sort of creeped me out.
I like the one with the little cartoon Civic bouncing off the rooftops (though it is exceedingly silly), but this one just sort of creeped me out.
Savannah
Lucky for me, the last few books I've received as gifts (of which Savannah is one) have all been very good. Savannah is not the sort of book I probably would have picked up on my own, so I'm doubly glad to have got it (was it for my birthday? Or Christmas?). Thanks, Mom and Dad!I've never read John Jakes, though I've thought about picking up Charleston once or twice. I probably will. This is a very simple little story, a fast read, but rather exciting nonetheless. The cast of characters is wide but ably drawn, and with a handful of exceptions are brought together well at the end. I read most of this book this afternoon; it's not a particularly weighty tome, but it isn't meant to be. It's the sort of thing you could read in a few days at Christmastime, and I think that's what was intended. (More after the Jump.)
The story centers around a young girl named Hattie Lester, and the family cobbled together around her. She and her mother share duties at a dried up old plantation on the outskirts of Savannah. They flee into the city to stay with a friend as Sherman's troops approach the city, and the story plays out around and through those desperate circumstances.
The book takes in over a dozen separate plot lines, which is a lot to manage. This can be a bit confusing in the early going, keeping everyone straight. Once the action moves into Savannah along with the Union army, the book picks up substantially. I'll wager you probably won't want to put it down once Gen. Sherman himself makes his appearance.
Of course, by the time you've got a third of the book left, you have a pretty good idea how it's all going to play out in the end. The question that keeps you reading is, how exactly is Jakes going to get us there? It's well worth the journey.
My main criticism would be that one of the plotlines is deemed so frightfully unimportant as to not warrant resolution at the end of the book. This little plotline seems to stem from a need to allow young Hattie to visibly irritate her relatives early on in the story; Jakes returns to it only two or three times, taking the time to flesh out a backstory on a sympathetic character, but come the end of the book the story is left open. Hopeful, but open. I question the need for it, but this is minor.
Gen. Sherman is almost sympathetic here, which is saying something because of all individuals I've studied from that era, Sherman comes the closest to having a heart of pure evil. I'm not saying I need to reevaluate my impression of him, only that Jakes has done a good job here.
This is a very charming little story, and as the Christmas season is approaching and it's coming out in paperback, it's probably worth picking up.
Savannah
Lucky for me, the last few books I've received as gifts (of which Savannah is one) have all been very good. Savannah is not the sort of book I probably would have picked up on my own, so I'm doubly glad to have got it (was it for my birthday? Or Christmas?). Thanks, Mom and Dad!I've never read John Jakes, though I've thought about picking up Charleston once or twice. I probably will. This is a very simple little story, a fast read, but rather exciting nonetheless. The cast of characters is wide but ably drawn, and with a handful of exceptions are brought together well at the end. I read most of this book this afternoon; it's not a particularly weighty tome, but it isn't meant to be. It's the sort of thing you could read in a few days at Christmastime, and I think that's what was intended. (More after the Jump.)
The story centers around a young girl named Hattie Lester, and the family cobbled together around her. She and her mother share duties at a dried up old plantation on the outskirts of Savannah. They flee into the city to stay with a friend as Sherman's troops approach the city, and the story plays out around and through those desperate circumstances.
The book takes in over a dozen separate plot lines, which is a lot to manage. This can be a bit confusing in the early going, keeping everyone straight. Once the action moves into Savannah along with the Union army, the book picks up substantially. I'll wager you probably won't want to put it down once Gen. Sherman himself makes his appearance.
Of course, by the time you've got a third of the book left, you have a pretty good idea how it's all going to play out in the end. The question that keeps you reading is, how exactly is Jakes going to get us there? It's well worth the journey.
My main criticism would be that one of the plotlines is deemed so frightfully unimportant as to not warrant resolution at the end of the book. This little plotline seems to stem from a need to allow young Hattie to visibly irritate her relatives early on in the story; Jakes returns to it only two or three times, taking the time to flesh out a backstory on a sympathetic character, but come the end of the book the story is left open. Hopeful, but open. I question the need for it, but this is minor.
Gen. Sherman is almost sympathetic here, which is saying something because of all individuals I've studied from that era, Sherman comes the closest to having a heart of pure evil. I'm not saying I need to reevaluate my impression of him, only that Jakes has done a good job here.
This is a very charming little story, and as the Christmas season is approaching and it's coming out in paperback, it's probably worth picking up.
01 October 2005
Stuff 'n Things (Contents)
I must post! I must provide content!
I don't understand that in the slightest, by the way. What, exactly, is content? I looked in the dictionary, and sure enough, it's a perfectly valid word. But it seems odd. When I see the word "content," I'm thinking of the word pronounced kən·tent, meaning "happy or satisfied". That seems most normal to me.
And when I think about the noun form of the word, meaning "stuff 'n things", I usually think of kon·tents, with an 's' on the end. Am I the only person who thinks of it this way?
Dictionary.com will tell you that in fact content is a perfectly normal word, and even provides a quote of some presumably long-deceased individual named Frederick Turner using the word in a sentence (although the sentence itself is nonsense; how can a generalization be either precise or explicit?) in just the way we use it to describe the contents of our blogs. The blog reader seeks content, not contents.
Why then do I still think of the word "content" in this context the way I think of the word "access" when used as a verb? I hate the idea of accessing things. I don't access information on the hard drive; I have access to the information, but I prefer not to access it. I would much rather collect, procure, requisition, or it some other way get my grubby little mitts on it. Access as a verb seems incestuous; we took the concept of "gain access to" and just dropped the words "gain" and "to." I guess that's efficiency for you; no wonder the usage didn't develop until productivity became the great societal mantra.
I'm doomed to lose this battle, but just as there are separate pronunciations of the word "content" for each part of speech, it seems we should do the same for "access." I think the verb form of that word should be pronounced ak·sess. But then I'd rather not use it at all.
Ah, well. So much for today's content(s).
I don't understand that in the slightest, by the way. What, exactly, is content? I looked in the dictionary, and sure enough, it's a perfectly valid word. But it seems odd. When I see the word "content," I'm thinking of the word pronounced kən·tent, meaning "happy or satisfied". That seems most normal to me.
And when I think about the noun form of the word, meaning "stuff 'n things", I usually think of kon·tents, with an 's' on the end. Am I the only person who thinks of it this way?
Dictionary.com will tell you that in fact content is a perfectly normal word, and even provides a quote of some presumably long-deceased individual named Frederick Turner using the word in a sentence (although the sentence itself is nonsense; how can a generalization be either precise or explicit?) in just the way we use it to describe the contents of our blogs. The blog reader seeks content, not contents.
Why then do I still think of the word "content" in this context the way I think of the word "access" when used as a verb? I hate the idea of accessing things. I don't access information on the hard drive; I have access to the information, but I prefer not to access it. I would much rather collect, procure, requisition, or it some other way get my grubby little mitts on it. Access as a verb seems incestuous; we took the concept of "gain access to" and just dropped the words "gain" and "to." I guess that's efficiency for you; no wonder the usage didn't develop until productivity became the great societal mantra.
I'm doomed to lose this battle, but just as there are separate pronunciations of the word "content" for each part of speech, it seems we should do the same for "access." I think the verb form of that word should be pronounced ak·sess. But then I'd rather not use it at all.
Ah, well. So much for today's content(s).
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