The Green[e]house Effect: a Weblog

The First Viral Candidate

I shared this idea with Jessica and Tim Jarrett by way of mentioning that I was about to whip up a freelance article on the subject, but Britt Blaser beat me to the punch with this post pointing out what’s so revolutionary about the Dean campaign: it tapped into the community-building potential of the Internet to build a campaign that effectively markets itself. Here’s how he explains it:

Let’s reset our perceptions about the American political process:

The Howard Dean phenomenon isn’t a campaign, it’s a web app.

The Dean For America web app (blog, contribution link, funding report, blogroll) is the primary entry point for knowledge about the candidate. Through links to its related Dean Meetup web app, the campaign web app has attracted some 45,000 citizens to ubiquitous political meetings that are unprecedented at this point in a pre-primary roll out. Those people, the most Internet-connected progressives, were then moved to participate in a related web app called the MoveOn Primary. By attracting so many of the most-connected progressives to its candidate, the Dean web app was able to win the MoveOn primary in a landslide.

The campaign appears to be on a ride even it can’t comprehend. As of a week ago, Sunday morning, 6/22, the campaign had raised $3.2 million in the previous 84 days. By tonight–8 days–it will have doubled that amount. At 2:47 am this morning, $2 million of the $2.8 raised had came through the Internet. Let’s be clear: the campaign is now past the fund raising stage, it’s in the fund receiving business. In a week, we’ll see that this is a phenomenon feeding on itself like any other viral phenomenon.

And it’s still going strong.

Mean Green Dean Machine

The Howard Dean presidential campaign — seemingly unaffected by the candidate’s stammering performance on Meet the Press last week — went supernova over the weekend after a spectacular surge in fundraising. Just read this, and wait for your jaw to drop:

As of 4:30 PM ET, Howard Dean has raised $406,457 online today, bringing our total for the quarter to $6,713,685.

That might sound like small potatoes — but consider: just a week ago, the Dean camp had only collected $3.2 million.

A surge like that, ladies and gentlemen, merits just one word: wow.

Mobilizing the Second Superpower

People on the left have started worrying that Republicans could bury Democrats under an avalanche of money in 2004. It’s a matter worth concern. With the GOP having increasing success in locking in the backing of K Street lobbyists, and with Democrats having dug a hole for themselves with the enactment of the new campaign finance law, Bush could spend the eventual Democratic nominee into oblivion before the general election campaign even begins.

Bush plans to build his war chest with unorthodox tactics; people at his campaign say he intends to reject federal matching funds so he can get out from under spending caps during the primaries. Progressives — if they want to counter that advantage — might need to consider an unconventional response.

Much of the GOP war chest comes by way of corporate largesse, in the form of contributions made in return for favorable treatment — for an example, look at Halliburton — or to buy a seat at the table. In many instances — think of the oil industry, or the lenient treatment financial institutions have received from federal regulators in comparison with the efforts of New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer — that power derives from multinational corporations that earn healthy portions of their revenues from overseas.

That power needs a counterweight. Progressives can look overseas to find it.

A February article in the New York Times described world opinion as “the second superpower.” Through the winter, world opinion proved itself to be among the greatest impediments to the Bush administration’s march to war, and played a significant role in preventing more foreign governments from supporting American efforts. Fareed Zakaria summed up the attitude behind the widespread protests:

[The Bush] administration is wrong if it believes that a successful war will make the world snap out of a deep and widening mistrust and resentment of American foreign policy. . . . What worries people around the world above all else is living in a world shaped and dominated by one country—the United States. And they have come to be deeply suspicious and fearful of us.

That suspicion and fear proved to be enough to drive millions of people into the streets. Those people wanted a chance to have their say on American policy.

What if someone gave that chance to them?

The MoveOn Primary, and that group’s surprise success in raising a quick $700,000 for Sen. Paul Wellstone last fall, demonstrate how to use the Internet for ‘smart mob’ politics — for drawing people of disparate backgrounds and from far-flung places together in a common cause. The size of this year’s antiwar protests, in the meantime, illustrates the worth of the internet as a tool for channeling global opinion. By combining aspects of both models — MoveOn’s fundraising prowess, and the war protestors’ global reach — the left could create a bulwark against the Republican financial onslaught.

Call it the ‘Beat Bush’ bucket brigade. With American progressives looking for a financial assist while they take on the Bush campaign machine, and people overseas who disapprove of Bush looking for a way to register their opposition, it doesn’t take a stroke of genius to see the sense in harnessing overseas energy to the effort to elect a new president. Enterprenurial political operatives here could put two and two together by setting up an internet-based organization — chartered under section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code — designed to give people abroad a means of funding an independent expenditure campaign against Bush-Cheney 2004.

Relying on overseas dollars, to be sure, opens Democrats to charges of hocking our interests to foreigners. To deflect that allegation, organizers — aside from maintaining strict operational independence from the party —could promise to accept contributions only from individuals and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), not from corporations or foreign governments, and to limit contributions to no more than $2,000. Having thousands of individual donors and nonprofits would make it tough for any one of them to exert undue influence. As for NGOs, they have special reason to get active; conservatives have trained their sights on such groups in the wake of the war in Iraq. (One Bush administration official says that NGOs that want to aid Iraqis should act “an arm of the U.S. government.”)

For the sake of appearances, control of the campaign would need to rest firmly in the hands of Americans, and as a practical matter the campaign would need to tune its message to the best issues to use against Bush, rather than playing up sentiments that resonate better overseas than with American voters. Still, given the breadth of worldwide opposition to the administration and the ease with which people have already used the Internet to tap into it, it’s hard not to envision more than a few people overseas jumping at the chance to put their money where their mouth is. Someone ought to give them a way.

Grits & Gomorrah

If you’d walked around midtown Atlanta today, you would have gotten a glimpse at everything about modern life that Strom Thurmond would have hated.

On the southern end, Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson, some former Carter aides, ex-Governor Barnes and others gathered onstage to do last rites for local icon Maynard Jackson. To the north, drag queens and leather men clotted the streets as the annual Pride Parade and festival wended its way up Peachtree toward Piedmont Park. If Strom weren’t dead, today’s spectacle would probably have killed him.

With the close timing of the passing of Strom Thurmond, Maynard Jackson, and Lester Maddox this week, you almost get the sense that the trap door of Southern history has swung on its hinges, dumping the old offstage and leaving us to get to work on building the new. We’ll see whether that bears itself over the long run, but it’s worth a thought.

On my way to meet friends for brunch today, I drove past a sign outside a Baptist church that said the Sunday morning message would be about “taking America back.” I feel like that’s in order as much as anyone else on some days — I wouldn’t mind taking America back from George Bush — but when you hear someone say “take America back,” you have to wonder where they plan to take America back to, and who they want to bring with them.

My occasional pangs of nostalgia aside, I subscribe more to what Hugh McColl — the ex-Marine who built North Carolina National Bank into the modern day Bank of America — used to say: “when you stop growing, you start dying.” Learn from the past, but take life — and the country — forward. I wouldn’t mind an America where the Baptists and the leather boys could coexist — where George Bush wouldn’t send my cousin to Iraq, where the police wouldn’t send consenting adults to jail to spite their sexual orientation, and where, yes, we respected the views of those who would rather “take America back.” I hope that somehow, that doesn’t turn out to be asking too much.

Strom Says Good Night

Wow, they’re dropping like flies this week — now it’s the radio stations of South Carolina queuing up the funeral music. Here’s the headline from the [Columbia, S.C.] State:

Great South Carolina politician, Strom Thurmond, 100, dies

Well, now. If you mean “great” as in notable, I can’t quarrel with that. If you mean “great” as a synonym for “succesful” — well, his record speaks for itself. But if “great” means a man to be held in high esteem … well, sorry. No sale. His record speaks loudly — too loudly — on that score as well, and no amount of naming lakes and courthouses after him can drown it out.

Speaking of the Supreme Court …

Hasta la vista, Bowers v. Hardwick. You won’t be missed.

State Politics: Attorney General Wins Senate Redistricting Appeal

[Also posted at the Political State Report.]

In a 5-4 decision handed down on the last day of its term, the Supreme Court of the United States reversed a lower court ruling that discarded state Senate districts drawn by legislative Democrats and then-Governor Roy Barnes in 2001. The 2001 plan, if restored, could improve Democrats’ chances of retaking the Senate in 2004.

The ruling represents a defeat for Governor Sonny Perdue (R) [see right], who tried to force Attorney General Thurbert Baker (D) [below, left] to drop his appeal of the case. A state court ruled in April that Perdue, as governor, had no authority to interfere with the separately elected attorney general in his determination of how to defend the state’s interests in court.

The redistricting case, known as Georgia v. Ashcroft, originated with a suit filed by the state in 2001 to have the original redistricting plan “precleared” — or approved — under the Voting Rights Act. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which has jurisdiction over preclearance cases, rejected the state’s proposed Senate plan, saying that it would have reduced opportunities for African American voters in three districts to elect candidates of their choice.

Justice O’Connor, writing for the majority, vacated the lower court’s holding, saying that the “increase in black voting age population in the other districts likely offsets any marginal decrease in the black voting age population in the three districts that the District Court found retrogressive.” Unpacking African American majorities of as much as 60 percent from a few districts, said O’Connor, ehanced overall African-American political influence, “increas[ing] from 10 to 13 the number of districts with a majority-black voting age population and increas[ing] from 8 to 13 the number of districts with a black voting age population of between 30% and 50%.”

Joining O’Connor in today’s holding [PDF] were Justice Scalia and Chief Justice Rehnquist. Justices Kennedy [PDF] and Thomas [PDF] wrote separate concurring opinions, while Justice Souter wrote a dissent [PDF] joined by Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, and Stevens.

Again

Another day in Iraq brings another fatality — no, it brings two:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — Assailants launched a wave of ambushes against U.S. forces in Iraq, dropping grenades from an overpass, blowing up a vehicle with a roadside bomb and destroying a civilian SUV traveling with U.S. troops, soldiers and Iraqi police said Thursday. Two U.S. soldiers and two Iraqi civilians were killed.

That’s some mission, Mr. President. That’s some accomplishment.

… and in Other News, Americans for Deficit Spending Gave Him an A+

My former colleagues at the League of Conservation Voters gave President Bush an F today on the group’s annual Presidential Report Card. Don’t act surprised.

Reefer Madness in National Parks

Who would have thought that the drug war would make a casualty of our national parks?

---

Outside Online // Kate Siber :: “Covert Marijuana Farming Threatens National Parks” :

For countless years national park rangers have been finding the occasional marijuana specimen tucked away in the underbrush, but recent discoveries of large plots of the illegal plant on federal land point to an increasingly pernicious problem.

These illicit growing projects—in many cases believed to be organized by Latin American drug cartels—wreak havoc on natural resources, and the armed men who protect them threaten the safety of law enforcement officers and park visitors.

California’s Sequoia National Park in particular has seen a steady increase in the number and size of marijuana farming projects discovered in the last ten years, with a dramatic jump in 2002 findings. Last year alone, rangers removed 34,000 plants from the park and found evidence of 20,000 others that had been successfully harvested. In previous years, rangers have generally found no more than 1,000 plants.

Park caretakers are tormented by the damage covert marijuana growing does to resources, especially in designated wilderness areas, which are meant to remain unmarred by human activity.

“The lands involved [in this issue] have been set aside for the highest level of protection,” said Bill Tweed, chief naturalist for Sequoia National Park, “and we’re having a major assault on our natural resources. We’re having vegetation chopped out, pesticides, poaching, severe disturbance of the soil, which leads to erosion, and depletion of riparian resources because water is being diverted. All of this adds up to a whole sweep of resource damage issues.”

Marijuana growers in national parks have built complex irrigation systems to divert water from streams for up to half a mile, and have cleared and terraced tracts of land to the detriment of local ecosystems. Insecticides and fertilizers used by the growers have also tainted groundwater supplies and killed fish in nearby streams.

In addition to the harm done to land and water, park officials say that these illicit farming projects threaten the security of visitors. Law enforcement officers have had shoot-outs with marijuana workers, and hunters and hikers have been shot at after stepping into the wrong territory. The growers—who are frequently illegal immigrants from Latin America—have been known to wield automatic assault weapons like AK-47s to protect their cash crops.

The problem has grown to nationwide proportions but is most troublesome in California, Utah, Arkansas, and in parks with international borders like Texas’ Big Bend National Park and Montana’s Glacier National Park. Sequoia National Park’s foothills are prime territory because of their remote location and ideal growing conditions.

It’s possible that national parks have recently become popular targets for this illegal activity because of the increased vigilance of border patrols since 9/11. Marijuana sellers are increasingly opting to grow the weed domestically and face less severe punishments than they would receive for international drug trafficking.

“Why take the risk of risk of smuggling marijuana over the border when you can come here to grow it?” asked Sgt. Marsh Carter, who has led drug enforcement efforts in Sequoia National Forest.

What the author doesn’t say is that the problem also has a great deal to do with the president’s neglect of the park service’s public safety personnel — a neglect that has had fatal consequences.

In January 2002, Interior Inspector General Earl Devaney released a report describing Interior’s 4,400-person police force as operating in “a disquieting state of disorder.” He singled out the Park Service as an agency that “suffers from extreme organizational dysfunction.”

A few months later, a federal workers’ advocacy group called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) found that attacks against National Park Service rangers had risen from ten incidents in 2000 to 104 in 2001. (Kris Eggle’s was the only death.) It’s hard to tell if there really is more crime or if the big jump comes from improved record keeping—and that’s the point. “The Park Service keeps better track of popcorn sales from its concessionaires than it does of hazards to its own workforce,” says Eric Wingerter, 29, PEER’s national field director.

In July, a law-enforcement-reform task force assembled by Interior Secretary Gale Norton submitted its findings, confirming Devaney’s conclusion that the agency is a mess. Norton appointed Larry Parkinson, a former senior FBI official, to the new post of deputy assistant secretary for law enforcement and security. So far, though, Norton and Parkinson’s big idea has been to turn the jack-of-all-trades park ranger into more of a specialist. Under their blueprint, law-enforcement rangers would concentrate solely on crime, while resource-protection rangers would perform more traditional duties.

Critics argue that role shuffling is not the answer and say that increasing staff is the only solution. Just ask Organ Pipe superintendent William Wellman, 56. “Right now we’re down to almost nothing in terms of manpower,” he says. “Normally we’d have eight rangers in winter, but because of job transfers we’re down to four, and two others that rotate in on temporary duty.”

Of course, the larger question hovering over this issue is why the federal government has ignored the policing shortfall for so long, especially given the current climate of fear about domestic terrorism. In Organ Pipe, the tide of illegal immigration involves more than just Mexican nationals slipping across the border—rangers have also arrested Chinese, Russian, and Middle Eastern aliens attempting to cross. Meanwhile, President Bush’s $4.9 billion National Parks Legacy Project, which debuted in 2001, focuses on maintenance and keeps funding for law enforcement at the 2001 level of $94 million.

According to that story, the Park Service gives Organ Pipe just six agents a day to police 331,000 acres of land. That’s an agent for every 55,000 acres — meaning that each man has to try to cover an area almost four times the size of Manhattan.

With law enforcement stretched so thinly, it’s no wonder that drug cartels have decided to treat our national parks like personal gardens. If we don’t care enough to protect parks, why should they?

Maureen Dowd, Arbiter of Black Authenticity

More pernicious thinking on how black people should properly think, courtesy of a Maureen Dowd column on the Michigan affirmative action cases:

[W]hy, despite his racial blessings, does [Justice Claernce Thomas] come across as an angry, bitter, self-pitying victim?

It’s impossible not to be disgusted at someone who could benefit so much from affirmative action and then pull up the ladder after himself. So maybe he is disgusted with his own great historic ingratitude.

When he switched from a Democrat to a conservative as a young man, he knew that he would be a hotter commodity in politics. But he also knew that it would bring him the scorn of blacks who deemed him a pawn of the white establishment — people like Justice Thurgood Marshall, who ridiculed Clarence Thomas and others as “goddamn black sellouts” for benefiting from affirmative action and then denigrating it.

Do you notice how she sticks in the shiv by borrowing that “sellouts” line from Thurgood Marshall? That takes real class, MoDo — if you’re going to chuck insults, at least you could make them yourself, instead of hiding behind someone else.

Look, I hold no brief whatsoever for Justice Thomas. I disagree with his jurisprudence, and I don’t admire much about him personally. But the civil rights movement, if it was about anything, was about giving him and every other African American the freedom to be whatever they want to be. It would be a ridiculous fate if those who marched and died freed us of the tyranny of others’ bigotry just so we could act like bigots towards ourselves. Or — when it comes to Ms. Dowd and others like her — so we could replace a discredited bigotry with a more socially acceptable kind that’s just as condescending, just as intellectually bankrupt, and just as wrong.

Correct me if I’m wrong here, but last time I checked, blackness was a skin tone, and maybe even a state of mind — but not an ideology. Black people disagree with each other. We always have, and always will. What’s great about this country — especially now that we have a full stake in it — is that we have the freedom to disagree as much as we like.

I might deride Justice Thomas’s ideas for a fair approximation of eternity, but I don’t presume to tell him that his beliefs make him any less black than I am. Dowd has no standing to appoint herself to make that judgment, either — and in the America I live in, none of us does.

The Kids Are Alright

Pour yourself a glass of iced tea. Time for some nostalgia.

I hadn’t remembered it until a day or two ago, but 10 years ago this summer, I spent a few weeks at the White House. I worked there as an intern through June and July, from an office in the Old Executive Office Building.

[Before you ask: no, I never met Monica Lewinsky. She worked there two years later.]

For most of the time I read scheduling requests for the turn-down pile, but I also got to buy lunch in the White House Mess, take in the view from the Indian Treaty Room, and bring my friends to the South Lawn for the Fourth of July fireworks. I can’t say that I totally enjoyed the experience — I came out of it disillusioned, probably because I had such lofty expectations — but I wouldn’t trade the experience for the world.

That summer I got to hang out with some of my best friends in the world — one was working at the fundraising arm of the University of Virginia, which put him within roadtrip distance, while the other two lived just a few miles on either side of me in northern Virginia. We spent more than a Friday or two goofing around Old Town Alexandria, making our way through the menu at the Capital City Brewing Company, or hanging out at State of the Union. The more I think about it, the harder it gets for me to believe I could forget it all for so long.

Sitting back and looking at the experience with a decade behind me, I’m amazed with how far we’ve come. Two guys still live up there — one had a hard couple of years, but got a law degree and landed a great job with a D.C. firm, where he still works today. The other gets a new job next week, when he gets sworn into the Alexandria city council.

The third has spent the last few months in Sweden, on a consulting assignment — just the latest chapter in his globetrotting saga, since he spent over a year in the late 1990s in Beijing. And I’m still working in politics — lobbying for trade associations and environmental groups, and having a couple of people asking about running for the legislature myself.

If it sounds like I’m proud of these guys, I am. We may be scattered to the four winds, but I have to say the kids are alright.

The Cost of War

Over the weekend, I got word that the has given my cousin Chris mail delivery duty with a convoy traveling in Iraq. Keep your fingers crossed.

For part of Saturday, as luck would have it, I had his kids at the house. I teased them, but took a second to ask his two-year-old daughter whether she missed her dad. She didn’t answer directly — I don’t think she understood me — but she did say that “he’s defending the country.”

I really don’t anything to happen — with the probabilities being what they are, I don’t see a point in getting nervous. But if by chance something does go wrong, who wants to explain to his daughter that the mission she lost her father to was a lie — that it had nothing to do with “defending the country” whatsoever? How does the president plan to explain that?

Take that question and apply it to all of the families who have lost people, and you’ll see the true cost of the war in Iraq.

Midnight in the Forbidden Forest of Good and Evil

I talked a good game last week about hitting the crowds at Athfest and taking in Hedwig over the weekend, but come Friday night, I lined up with every other good American lumpenprole and nervously bit my fingers waiting for the new Harry Potter. Well, let me be more accurate; I waited in three lines. The first two stores I visited [both outposts of Borders] had booked their entire inventories for sale, so I had to drive up Peachtree into the heart of Buckhead to find a spare copy at the Barnes & Noble.

How crazy was it? From what I could tell [I couldn’t see much, thanks to my putting on those darling fake glasses], the store had divided customers up according to at least nine color codes. I got through the line at about 12:30, but the crowd behind me snaked all the way through the main aisle of the store and down to the children’s section, near the restrooms.

I spent yesterday on the road in south Georgia for a funeral, but managed to get about 200 pages into the book by last night. Given that J. K. Rowling wrote the story out to a length that rivals War and Peace, I have plenty of reading ahead of me. But who needs a social life?

Notes on the State of Alabama

The newsletter from my high school came in the mail today, and for a change it was chock full of great stories about the latest doings of some of my fellow graduates.

¶ The cover feature touted a Birmingham-based startup magazine called Mental Floss, which the Washington Post helpfully described as a guide to “being smart for dummies.” Sounds like a snarky-but-smart concept — and one that’s getting plenty of play, if this still shot from Friends (see left) is any indication.

¶ Farther north, Laura Thomas — a fellow traveler from my days in the Chamber Choir — has set up house in Brooklyn and staked her name on rock and roll. A writer with the Post took a liking to her debut disc (available here). If tracks like this give any indication, she deserves the buzz.

Movement of Jah People

Greg of The Talent Show became the latest member of the Former Blogger Users Society this morning, when he opened the doors at his swank new Movable Type-powered site. Go over and give him a warm welcome.

Big News Tomorrow

After last week, which felt like the news junkie’s equivalent of spending a week stuck on the Sargasso Sea, tomorrow’s live broadcasts [more on those in a sec] should come as a welcome gust of fresh air.

First and foremost — at least on my block — comes the Steve Jobs keynote at the Apple World Wide Developers’ Conference, where we get to see whether the product unveilings can live up to the advance hype. Political junkies should get a taste of Christmas in June thanks to Howard Dean, who cranks up his campaign in earnest with a straight-outta Smart Mobs nationwide kickoff rally via satellite.

I’m getting all tingly just thinking about it. This is gonna be fun.

A Fish, a Barrel …

… and a smoking gun.* Happy huntin’, boys.

How ’Bout Them Apples?

What with the leak that set the Mac world to buzzing this morning, I can’t resist the temptation to rub a certain doomsayer’s nose in it a little [emphasis added]:

Now it’s more or less confirmed that [a faster chip from IBM] is coming, sampling next summer, with volume production in the second half of 2003. It should probably be noted that this kind of thing is notorious for missing schedules, not to mention the fact that there will be a lag time from when IBM has parts available in quantity until when they’re actually available in consumer products. Quantity shipment in Macs almost certainly won’t begin until early in 2004.
– Steven Den Beste, “We’re Gonna Be Faster!” Oct. 19, 2002

[W]e’re unlikely to see more than a token increase in speed from Apple until units based on the IBM Power 970 come out in 2004.
– Steven Den Beste, “Time Is Money,” January 13, 2003

• 1.6Ghz, 1.8Ghz, or dual 2Ghz PowerPC G5 Processors
• Up to 1 Ghz processor bus (!!)
• Up to 8 GB of DDR SDRAM
• Fast Serial ATA hard drives
• AGP 8X Pro graphics options from NVIDIA or ATI
• Three PCI or PCI-X expansion slots
• Three USB 2.0 ports
• One FireWire 800, two FireWire 400 ports
• Bluetooth & Airport Extreme ready
• Optical and analog audio in and out

– stats leaked from the Apple Store, June 19, 2003

Apple has reportedly been supplying its Apple retail stores with boxes scheduled to be opened Monday afternoon, and not before then, first noted by MacRumors earlier in the week. According to Think Secret sources, some Apple stores have already received the boxes, while others expect to receive them later this week (but still in advance of the Monday keynote). As can be expected, security around these boxes — which reportedly come in multiple sizes — has been tight.
– Nick DePlume, “Channel News,” ThinkSecret, June 19, 2003.

Funny — it seems like that was an awfully short year …

Doings About Town

Hot town, summer in the city — the streets are drenched, but the weekend’s lookin’ pretty …

¶ People who consider theater a drag should stay far, far away, but Actors’ Express continues draw crowds for the roadshow of Hedwig & the Angry Inch in west Midtown. Tickets have sold out for Saturday, but performances continue through July 26.

¶ Gemütlichkeit! Suds lovers and Germanophiles, rejoice: Bierfest 2003 cranks up at Piedmont Park this Friday at 6 p.m. Twenty dollars covers all the beer you can drink — so head on over to hoist a brew and savor den frauen. [Or to savor the brew and hoist den frauen.]

¶ The Pushkin Museum exhibition at the High is drawing to a close, with two weekends left before curators pack three centuries of French masterworks off to the next town. If you have a sweet tooth for Monet’s White Water Lilies but think the idea of flying to Moscow sounds less than fun, hurry up — time’s a-wastin’.

¶ Just up Ga. 316, Athens turns on the stage lights this Friday for its cut-rate answer to Music Midtown. Expect a who’s-who of local artists and favorites to plug in for Athfest, including the Cindy Wilson Band, Cracker, Five-Eight, I Am the World Trade Center, and former Drivin’ ’n Cryin’ lead singer Kevn Kinney. A three-day pass costs $12 online, or $15 if purchased at the show.

What Honor? What Dignity?

“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.”
– Vladimir Ilych Lenin

“The administration may have deliberately lied. If Bush didn’t know the purported uranium deal between Iraq and Niger was a hoax, plenty of people in his administration did — including, possibly, Vice President Cheney, who would have seen the president’s State of the Union address before it was delivered. Rice and Rumsfeld also must have known that the aluminum tubes that they presented as proof of Iraq’s nuclear ambitions were discounted by prominent intelligence experts. And, while a few administration officials may have genuinely believed that there was a strong connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, most probably knew they were constructing castles out of sand.”
– John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman, “The First Casualty,” The New Republic, June 30, 2003.

Read the article. Right now.

SOP at the GOP

Yesterday brought a cornucopia of developments at the party that continues to change the tone of American public life:

• The Best Party Money Can Buy: In a reshuffle at the top of the party, President Bush brought in new talent to chair the Republican National Committee, appointing Ed Gillespie, a longtime political functionary … who also happens to be one of Washington’s top lobbyists.

  Gillespie promises to take a leave of absence from the private sector, but will retain his stake in his governmental affairs firm (presumably entitling him to his end-of-the-year draw of the profits). No word on whether Gillespie plans to bid out ownership stakes in the GOP — but if you take The Onion at its word, the party’s doing massively well on its balance sheet.

• Chief Justice Starr … I Like the Sound of That: Well-placed sources floated a trial balloon about an upcoming judicial nomination past the Washington Post yesterday, giving notice that Brett Kavanaugh — who co-authored that famed erotic masterpiece, the Starr Report — has his name down for a seat on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. No word yet on whether his former boss plans to provide a character reference.
  
  
• Wow, My Feet Taste Good! Georgia insurance commissioner John Oxendine was struck with an acute case of candor at a conference recently, apparently forcing him to advise an audience of auto insurers that “you have to find a way to always make me look good in front of the voters.” He apparently passed on the opportunity to pass the hat around before leaving the podium, but not out of a lack of concern about fundraising: “[y]ou all are going to give me money,” he said, “because you’re afraid not to.”
  
  
• “But How Can You Make a Phone Call When You … Are Unable to Speak?” Upon taking office, the president commissioned the EPA to prepare a report on the environment. One might think that a comprehensive study would include remarks on climate change — but somehow, somewhere between Christie Whitman’s desk and the trip to the printing office, the section on global warming melted away like so much flotsam from the Ross Ice Shelf. The culprits behind the deletion were apparently the crack scientists at the White House, and “[t]he editing,” according to the New York Times, “eliminated references to many studies concluding that warming is at least partly caused by rising concentrations of smokestack and tail-pipe emissions and could threaten health and ecosystems.”

  It gets better from there [emphasis added]:

  Among the deletions were conclusions about the likely human contribution to warming from a 2001 report on climate by the National Research Council that the White House had commissioned and that President Bush had endorsed in speeches that year. White House officials also deleted a reference to a 1999 study showing that global temperatures had risen sharply in the previous decade compared with the last 1,000 years. In its place, administration officials added a reference to a new study, partly financed by the American Petroleum Institute, questioning that conclusion.”

  I’ll let Joe Rospars take it away on this one:

  Conservatives are allowed to believe in anything they want — creationism, cleaner water through pollution, whatever. But when you begin to subvert science in order to propagate your beliefs or political agenda, we have reached a level of dishonesty at which reasonable debate cannot take place.

So how do I feel about the Republican Party, you ask? Let me put it this way: check with Charlie Murtaugh.

George W.’s Days Off

Matthew Yglesias writes:

[N]o matter how many times Karl Rove says it, it’s simply not the case that “just folks” non-elites spend the entire summer vacationing at their ranches in Texas. Given Bush’s well-known love of vacationing, though, I wonder if he couldn’t score a lot of populist points by introducing legislation mandating France-style six week paid vacations for all workers.

As Tom DeLay would say: “ain’t gonna happen.” Just the same, Democrats in Washington have a golden opportunity to nail Republicans on this. The president takes weeks of vacation for himself — at one point, he had spent nearly half of his term on break — but says nary a word to protect us when his party tries to abolish the 40-hour work week.

If those facts aren’t a campaign commercial waiting to happen, I don’t know what is.

Health Care and Your Paycheck

Okay, everyone — it’s time to eat your spinach. I’m posting in policy wonk mode.

Let me be frank: most of the time, I would sooner eat rocks than talk about health care policy. The subject bores me, and I hardly think about it — except to the extent that I sing the occasional hosanna about having insurance. [For a short while, I couldn’t afford it.]

Earlier this week, though, I read an article with a passing reference to people who hold tight to jobs they would otherwise quit, just to keep coverage of a pre-existing condition. That prompts a question: do people choose that option with enough frequency to have a measurable impact on the economy?

Having to worry about confronting massive health care costs after switching a job would — if enough people face that problem — lead to friction in the job market, as people turn down better, or higher-paying, job opportunities that, all things being equal, they would take. To the extent that employers no longer need to worry about workers leaving for better-paying posts as a result, that allows them to pay lower wages, thus dampening growth in personal income.

Of course, what with my usually not paying a whit’s attention to health care, I could be totally wrong here. But I’d like to know.

On a Personal Note …

The complaints of Craig Pfeifer aside, I feel good about the state of D.C. government right now. A few of its higher-ups just sent me a note certifying me to practice law there as of July.

The process took — what, all of six months? They move as fast as lightning up there, I tell you.

Mad Max

Former Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.), the triple-amputee Vietnam War vet who quit the public scene after losing last fall to a Republican congressman who challenged his patriotism, is back in the public eye — and he’s sounding angry.

On Saturday, Cleland gave the keynote address at the Young Democrats of America convention, where he delivered an excoriation of Bush administration policies the likes of which totally eluded him during the campaign. If he had spoken this bluntly last fall, he might have kept his seat in the Senate.

Here’s the text of the speech. Enjoy.

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When I volunteered for Vietnam as a young Lieutenant in the United States Army in the spring of 1967, my country was at war. It was at war with an enemy which used guerrilla warfare, attacks on civilians and suicide bombers. In Vietnam, we called the suicide bombers “sappers.” They would strap a satchel charge with explosives on their back and attack a U.S. command post, barracks, or restaurant in Saigon where U.S. soldiers hung out and blow everyone, including themselves, to bits. It was a war of terror against a U.S. ally. The terrorists were determined, willing to wait a long time for the success of their strategy and seemed undeterred by American will, technical know-how and military strength. Does all this have a familiar ring to it? It does to me.

Before I went to Vietnam, I had the privilege of a personal meeting with Sen. Dick Russell from Georgia. He was then the chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee. It was the summer of 1965. I was an intern on the House side of the Congress and had a rare opportunity to sit at the feet of one of Georgia’s political giants. Among Russell’s personal doubts about the American military engagement on the ground in an open-ended guerrilla war with no exit strategy was his fear of our lack of intelligence. I remember he said, “The French had 10 times better intelligence than we have.” He was of course referring to the French battle against the Viet Minh, which the French lost. The Viet Minh were the precursors to the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong that we fought in our war.

In 1968, on 1 February, the American military was surprised by an all-out attack by the enemy known at the Tet Offensive. I was caught up in that attack. Several hundred thousand North Vietnamese and VC were sacrificed to make a political point. But that point stuck. President Lyndon Johnson dropped out of the presidential race 60 days later and sued for peace. The war, for all practical purposes, was lost. Later, on April 8, 1968, in relieving the siege of Khe Sanh, I was wounded. For the rest of my life I will remember the sense of surprise and shock by the enemy offensive based on our lack of intelligence up against a determined foe.

I would like to fast-forward to September 11, 2001. I was in my office in the Senate discussing the future of American defenses, particularly against worldwide terrorism, with the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Meyers. The first plane had already hit the World Trade Center and Gen. Meyers bolted from his seat. We rushed into an adjoining office as we saw on TV the second plane slam into the second tower. Gen. Meyers rushed out of my office, headed for the Pentagon. At that moment, the Pentagon was hit. I stared out my window and looked at the Capitol. I had a strange feeling that I was back in Vietnam. I knew the Capitol was next. Thank God it still stands, primarily because of the courage of some wonderful American citizens who sacrificed their lives on a Pennsylvania field.

Since 9/11, as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and now as a member of the Independent Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States responsible for finding out what happened on 9/11, and why, I have formed some definite opinions about how we should defend our country both at home and abroad.

First of all, let’s not make the same mistakes we made in Vietnam. We got sucked into an open-ended ground war with guerrillas and terrorists, and we had no ultimate plan for our exit strategy or what victory looked like. The enemy we faced then had better intelligence then we did. They knew the terrain and the countryside better than we did, and they were fighting for their concept of their own homeland. We underestimated the determination and will of our enemy, and overestimated our willingness at home to pay a political price in blood and treasure over a long period of time. We also over-stayed our military effectiveness.

We cannot afford to make those same mistakes again. However, I am afraid we are getting sucked into a major ground involvement in Iraq and in Afghanistan with no exit strategy. To say that a three-week war in Iraq against an adversary not linked to 9/11 was a victory against terrorism, and, then, proclaim victory on an aircraft carrier by the President of the United States, is misleading at best. Within days of the so-called victory in Iraq, Al Qaeda was alive and well and killing Europeans, Americans and upper-class Saudis in Riyadh, the very capital of Saudi Arabia. Additionally, LTG. David McKiernan in Iraq says the war is not over. He is right. Since the President declared a so-called “victory,” we have buried 34 young Americans killed in Iraq. We are losing young men and women every day. We are trapped in a quagmire. We have 240,000 American troops tied down in Iraq and Kuwait. We have no clear exit strategy. So far we have found no WMD. We have taken our eye off the ball. In so many ways, we have substituted a rogue regime for the true target. The real target is Osama bin Laden and his terrorist cadre around the world.

This administration has not found Osama bin Laden. It has not found Saddam Hussein. And it has not yet found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Supposedly all of that was the rationale for losing over 200 American lives and wounding over 500 American troops so far. We do have to go on the strategic offensive against the terrorists, but we have to chase them down in their own holes, in their own caves, in their own lairs and in their own sanctuaries, wherever they may be. We let Osama bin Laden escape into Western Pakistan in the Tora Bora Mountains of Afghanistan because as we closed the loop on him we violated one of the basic lessons of counter insurgency I learned in ROTC in 1962. You cordon off the enemy and close the loop with your own troops. We relied on Afghan rebels and warlords in the operation and Osama bin Laden skipped country. He slipped through the net. Just like in Vietnam, reliance on South Vietnamese intelligence and South Vietnamese troops always proved costly.

This issue of fresh battlefield intelligence is critical because the way we fight and win the war against terrorism is primarily through intelligence and the network that we create with our allies. We need allies all over the world. We need as many friends as we can get. We must not ignore the warning signals our allies provide, as was the case in the months leading up to 9/11. We can’t use our technology and our force if we don’t know where the terrorist are and can’t target them.

For all the hoopla of the president declaring victory, we have to understand Iraq and Afghanistan are still boiling sores. As long as chaos continues to reign in Baghdad, Basra, and other parts of Iraq, resentment will continue to fester and resistance by native Iraqis will foment. We are increasingly looked upon as outsiders and as an occupying force. If only those in the administration had heeded the warnings of the challenge of post-war stability given by Republican Sen. Lugar, and my fellow Vietnam veteran Chuck Hagel, perhaps our troops would not be under constant threat of attack. We have taken on an almost impossible mission. We are trying to police an area as big as California. We can’t even keep the peace in California much less in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We are trying to re-build hospitals and schools and trying to provide health care and food in Iraq. We need to rebuild crumbling schools in America. We need to extend health care insurance to the 41 million Americans not currently covered by health care insurance. We need to improve police and first responder capabilities in America. We need to rebuild the infrastructure of America, provide jobs to Americans. But we are trying to make Iraq the 51st state. This administration is doing all of this in a time of record deficits while at the same time slashing taxes for the wealthy. And let’s be clear about this “economic stimulus.” In the long run, this tax cut will redistribute the tax burden onto the middle class. In the tax bill the president signed, those families with children making less than $26,000 a year were denied a child tax credit while those families making more than that amount were given a $1,000 deduction per child. I ask you this. Does this seem fair? As I travel around this state, I see increasing unemployment, increasing financial hardship and increasing economic devastation due to Republican policies which have become themselves weapons of mass destruction particularly falling hardest on those families making $26,000 year or less.

What then is the Bush record in fighting the so-called war on terrorism? They have not found bin Laden. They have not found Saddam Hussein and as of yet there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. However, we have found two trailers. Is that why we fought the war? For two trailers? Did we send our sons and daughters to spill their blood in the desert over two trailers? We are spending over $100 billion bombing and then rebuilding Iraq while giving a tax cut to America’s wealthiest citizens and denying hard-working Americans making $26,000 a year or less a child tax credit in order to pay for it.

That’s the Bush record. It is not compassionate, and with this year’s budget deficit running over $400 billion — a record set by no other President, Republican or Democrat, it is certainly not conservative.

We do have to go after terrorists abroad, but they are not dumb enough to hang out in capitals highlighted by this administration as part of the Axis of Evil. We have to track them down, destroy their cells, cut their supply lines and communication channels and destroy their financial network. We must thin their ranks, not cause them to swell. We have to kill and capture every one of them or they will continue to come after us and our military forces around the world. Which brings us to the issue of really protecting America here in this country. What this administration fails to understand is that we really are in a war. Like Colin Powell, I have served in a real war, and I know what it is like. The same cannot be said for other top administration officials, including the president, vice president, secretary of defense, deputy secretary of defense, and other top national security advisers who hatched this scheme to go to war with Iraq. We must be on the strategic offensive abroad, but we really do need to be on the strategic defensive at home. And let me assure you, “strategic defense” involves more than duct tape and a color-coded warning system.

We are being drawn into the kind of battle the enemy wants — a clash of civilizations where East meets West. Where Islamic fanatics meet Christians and Jews on the battlefield of terrorism in the cities and on the seas where civilians are killed and military units are attacked. The enemy does not care whether this takes 10 years or 50 years or 100 years to triumph.

Therefore, I propose the following as part of “Real Homeland Defense” given the nature of the war we are up against.

Put the Coast Guard under the Navy and its direct control. That’s what’s done in wartime. It is time to do that now. Let the Coast Guard guard the coast. This is a war and we need to treat it as such. We need to allow the Coast Guard the budget and support to provide essentially a quarantine around American ports. They should be allowed to search, seize and inspect any ship, passenger or freighter, suspected of containing contraband to aid terrorists. Additionally, we need to do what I suggested when I was in the Senate. Namely, inspect ships in foreign ports before they get to American ports. A majority of the cargo containers entering American ports come from basically two foreign ports. This job is not only doable but it must be done because at present only 2% of the cargo containers entering American ports are inspected. This administration must not continue to underfund port and harbor security.

Let the National Guard guard the nation. That is what it was designed for. Let the National Guard guard our borders. They are in dozens of places all over the world in so-called “peace keeper” roles filling in for regular U.S. Army units that are needed elsewhere. These regular Army units are stretched so thin that they continue to go to war in some place in the world all the time. If we continue to try and police the world, we will soon run out of people. The National Guard was designed to protect and defend Albany, Ga., not Albania.

Let’s give the active duty military the force it needs to fulfill the expanded missions it is increasingly asked to perform. The U.S. Army takes on a new mission somewhere in the world every 16 weeks. If we can’t find enough people to volunteer to fill the all-volunteer force, let’s supplement our forces with the draft. If the sons and daughters of farmers, carpenters, bricklayers, mechanics and hairdressers can serve in Afghanistan and Iraq, so can the sons and daughters of the wealthiest Americans who just benefited most from the recent Bush tax cut.

In terms of the tax cut — more than $300 billion of tax cuts I might add — these monies should go to improve the health care in the military for the over 500 servicemen and women and POW’s who were wounded in Iraq alone. Additionally, we need to improve dramatically VA healthcare for all of our veterans instead of cutting the requested VA budget by $6.5 billion as President Bush has done.

Stimulate the economy not by tax cuts for the rich but by a payroll tax holiday so that working-class Americans upon whom the burden of taxes and war always falls will see their sons and daughters return from overseas to an economy that has jobs for them.

Create a National Service Corps for young Americans to spend two years of voluntary service and enable them to serve in government and non-governmental positions that have to deal with homeland defense as well as serving in organizations designed to help the poor, underprivileged and elderly. Additionally, public service in the National Service Corps would make an individual exempt from any draft that might be in effect.

For all involved in defending this country at home and abroad in uniform or in the National Service Corps, we need a greatly expanded GI bill funded by a national lottery. We need this to improve enlistments in the all-volunteer force, to make military service and service in the National Service Corps more attractive and provide real educational opportunities to go to college for those who serve and defend our country.

Eliminate the silly and stupid color-coding in the country. Its real effect is to frighten everybody in the nation without telling them why they should be scared and putting an extra burden on already strained local law enforcement. This is exactly the kind of fear terrorists want to spread. We are doing their job for them! Does a sheepherder in Montana really care about whether the color-code threat level in this country is either orange or yellow? Additionally, get rid of the crazy emphasis on duct tape and plastic. That is about as effective in case of a terrorist attack as the “duck and cover” drills we used to perform in grammar school when I was a young boy. We were supposed to hide under our desk to protect ourselves from a thermonuclear war.

Let’s get serious about airport screening. Let’s focus on people, not shoes and belt buckles. Terrorists are people. Passenger screening systems should be able to effectively identify potential terrorists. Focus on them.

Like the British, create a domestic intelligence unit separate from the FBI which coordinates its efforts with a new National Intelligence Director. This National Director of Intelligence should be the one person accountable for pulling together all the aspects of American Intelligence, foreign and domestic, into a mosaic that can be clearly understood in terms of threats to our country. There are currently more than a dozen different intelligence agencies in six cabinet level departments. The so called “Intelligence Community” is a horse built by a committee that winds up looking like a camel. We know that we did not have enough adequate intelligence or coordination among our intelligence agencies to stop the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001. Now we are learning that we did not have enough adequate intelligence in terms of knowing why we were going to war in Iraq. We went to war in Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction, but we have not found any yet. Is that a fault of our intelligence community? Or was it just plain deception on the part of the administration? Who knows? The Congress needs to fully investigate the rationale and outcome of the war and explain to the American people who knew what and when did they know it. If the Congress does not do its duty, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States on which I sit should take the mission on itself. The American people need to know who was accountable for the war in Iraq and why the cream of American youth was sacrificed. To try to look for justification for the war after our young men and women are buried is immoral, unjust, and unacceptable Before we go to war the next time, the president must be fully truthful to the American people and the Congress, and we should know what we are doing and why. That includes straightening out the intelligence community.

These are just some suggestions that I feel should be taken seriously because we are in a serious war with serious consequences, and the young people of America have the most to gain and the most to lose by the successful defense of the greatest country in the world. To try to look for a justification for the war after our young men and women have been buried, is immoral, unjust and unacceptable.

All Hat and No Cattle

Post media critic Howard Kurtz comes oh-so-close to making a great point about the Bush administration, yet still manages to give the president too much credit:

Is George Bush becoming a lip-service president?

Not on Iraq or Afghanistan, of course; he threw his weight behind those wars and they were fought, brilliantly and successfully. Not on tax cuts; he just slammed another $350 billion measure (although the hidden costs are far, far higher) through Congress, and the deficit be damned.

But beyond the small set of issues about which he cares passionately, Bush sometimes mouths the words and stands by as nothing happens.

Right on one — Bush gives more lip service than a cosmetician.

Which is why the “of course” on Iraq and Afghanistan leaves me baffled. Bush carried us to war in the desert to topple a dictator brandishing weapons of mass destruction … but proclaimed our mission accomplished before we turned up either the dictator or the weapons. As for Afghanistan, outside Kabul we hardly have any semblance of control, which — given the steady drip of stories about military personnel killed in ambushes — should raise questions about how much our situation in the country differs from that faced in the 1980s by the Soviets.*

But Bush sure is hardcore about tax cuts. You can’t argue about that.

The Donation Booth Revisited

Joe Rospars wants a better approach to campaign finance reform — but he has his doubts about the workability of the ‘donation booth’ proposal that I outlined in an old post. I understand the skepticism, but the idea has more hardiness than he gives it credit for.

He quibbles about the notion of keeping donations secret, both in theory and in practice. I’ll tackle the theoretical issue first. Joe writes:

[V]otes are democratic — donations are not. Voting booths make private the sacred act of the citizen. The vote is the great equalizer in a society. One of the important things to remember when discussing campaign finance is that votes and donations are not equally protected either by democratic theory or by law.

Without commenting on his appeal to democratic theory — on matters of political theory, I defer to my learned friend Micah Schwartzman — the sole question of note here is the amount of constitutional protection that the courts give to political contributions. Until the challenge to the McCain-Feingold Act makes its way to the Supreme Court, the most relevant pronouncement comes from Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976), a decision handed down in the wake of the reforms of the Watergate era. There, the court holds:

The expenditure limitations contained in the Act represent substantial rather than merely theoretical restraints on the quantity and diversity of political speech. The $1,000 ceiling on spending “relative to a clearly identified candidate,” 18 U.S.C. § 608 (e) (1) (1970 ed., Supp. IV), would appear to exclude all citizens and groups except candidates, political parties, and the institutional press from any significant use of the most  effective modes of communication.

Buckley, 424 U.S. at 16-17. That sounds like a rock-solid statement of the value the court places on the role that donations play in the political system. Given that current justices focus even more intently on economic considerations in law than the justices of the 1970s, it’s a safe bet that the concept that political contributions deserve First Amendment protection as speech will remain good law.

Joe has his doubts that drawing a curtain around the act of giving money to a campaign would affect the flow of information between contributors and politicians. “Barring some draconian laws on speech,” he says, “there would be nothing to prevent people from saying, ‘I gave $50,000 to George Bush today,’ and from his campaign trust-watcher to note that the fund went up $50,000.”

Fair enough. The people who developed the donation booth approach, however, have a ready solution for that issue: a grace period. Yale law professor Ian Ayers, in a 2001 article, described how placing a hold on checks for campaigns would affect the relationship between contributor and beneficiary:

We could defeat that practice by adopting a 10-day cooling-off period in which contributors could cancel their contribution. A cooling-off period would give non-donors as well as donors the ability to cancel checks that were sent to the trust.

By making candidates less sure about trusting their ostensible benefactors — if a contributor can cancel a check in mid-stream, no one can know whether she really gave — a cooling-off period leaves officeholders at a loss about which of their friends need to have favors returned. Clever people could claim credit for writing checks that they later tore up, in hopes that a candidate would offer a quid pro quo for a favor never performed. Clever candidates, meanwhile, would catch on to the difficulty of telling separating true friends apart from free riders — and feel less obliged to do favors for anyone.

That captures in a nutshell what makes the donation booth constitutionally defensible. It depends less on “draconian laws on speech” — in the case of McCain-Feingold, draconian restrictions on money as speech — than on introducing enough uncertainty to make the speech less valuable. Joe worries about “a black-tie gala with 100 contributors at which everyone together, at their tables, writes their six-figure checks” — but if a contributor can phone the blind trust that accepted the check the next morning, and say she’d like to have her six figures back, how would a campaign identify which of the hundred contributors to write off? How could it tell which contributor went back on their word?

It couldn’t. Claims about writing a check — however false — would, in the absence of other information, be impossible to debunk.

That uncertainty would immediately make the act of writing a six-figure check less valuable, because the difficulty of identifying contributors would leave officeholders less confident that putting policies on the auction block would earn them any financial favor in return. Another species of influence seeker that Joe points to — “the donor [who sends] the Bush staff his canceled check in the mail” — would run into the same problem; a canceled check, without proof that the check doesn’t represent a canceled contribution, is hardly worth more than the paper it’s printed on.

The inventors of the donation booth proposal anticipated those problems as long ago as 1997. Ayers, in a paper written that year with Stanford economist Stephen Bulow, wrote:

Our meta-principle of implementation is to allow non-donors easily to ape any signal that true donors might try to send. If non-donors can mimic the signals of donors, then the donors will have difficulty credibly communicating their contribution … To undermine the credibility of a donor’s canceled check, we have tried to give non-donors the option of acquiring an identical canceled check by merely cashing a check with the blind trust. And to undermine the credibility of mailing a check in the presence of a campaign worker, we have suggested giving a cooling-off period — so that non-donors can publicly donate and privately cancel.

Joe mentions another worry: that contributors will defeat the donation booth system because they want their generosity to be known. He writes:

The secrecy plan only works if the people you’re seeking to protect actually want to be protected. In the same sense that the secret ballot doesn’t prevent a voter from walking out of their elementary school gymnasium and telling an exit pollster who they voter for, secret donations would only be truly secret insofar as donors saw it as being in their interest that they remain so. Most probably won’t.

He underestimates a factor here: the pressure that lawmakers often put on corporations and other sources of wealth to ante up just for the sake of getting equitable treatment from the party in power. It may sound like a mob-style protection racket, but it’s a real problem — just consider the ledger that House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) (affectionately known as “the Hammer”) used last fall for keeping track of “which corporations and trade associations [were] giving to whom.”

Given that unwelcome attention, corporations might see the donation booth as a way to thwart DeLay’s efforts to fund campaigns through extortion. With blind trusts cutting lawmakers off from reliable information about who gives them money, keeping a ledger that sorts out naughty from nice becomes impossible, and companies that prefer stay out of politics can go about their business.

In my mind, the donation booth still does the best job of attacking corruption in politics — it recognizes, as I wrote last year, that “it’s tough to be corrupt when you don’t know who to be corrupt for.” We can tinker with current law, and take disclosure requirements and spending limits to Rube Goldberg levels of complication — but what with skeptical courts and creative candidates somehow defeating that approach, over the long run, every time, I’m ready to tear up the current model and start fresh. Given the abysmal rate of voter turnout here compared with other Western democracies, I suspect more than a few of my fellow Americans agree.

Ford: Selling Any Car You Want, As Long as It Guzzles Gas

The Sierra Club raps America’s No. 2 automaker on the knuckles with a surprising statistic: the company’s current fleet of vehicles gets worse mileage, on average, then a vintage Model T. The company deserves kudos for dumping the Excursion last year — although that had more to do with lousy sales than any ecological kindheartedness — and gets credit in my book for turning the River Rouge plant into a test case for sustainable architecture. Still, a ten percent decline in fuel efficiency over the last hundred years — well, that’s ludicrous. If computer innovation operated on the same curve, I’d have to blog on an abacus.

Why, Just Yesterday, Two Fedayeen Shot an RPG at My Car Before Burning Down the Library

Courtesy of Billmon, this paean to my fair city:

After six weeks of patrols in his area, Colonel Grimsley said the level of violent crime was lower than in Atlanta, the nearest big city to the brigade’s base in Georgia. Shops and cafes have reopened. Vendors have appeared again on sidewalks, selling cigarettes and sodas. Traffic, even traffic jams, have returned.

“When this bicycle shop opened about a week after we got here, I knew we were going to be O.K.,” Colonel Grimsley said as he rode in an armored Humvee through Adhamiya, the neighborhood where Mr. Hussein is reported to have made his last known public appearance . . .

Time to get back out and deal with the ribs, I guess — that is, as soon as I remember where I put my flak jacket …

Oh, My Papa …

… is set for a treat today. I have a couple of slabs of ribs curing in the refrigerator right now, soaking up a fresh-mixed dry rub of brown sugar, kosher salt, black and cayenne pepper, garlic and onion powder, curry and rubbed thyme. It smells so great that I expect Emeril Lagasse to knock at the door any minute now to ask about the recipe.

My brother has orders to bring some