Ann Salisbury sends me a link to a list of questions by Dennis Prager designed to help you decide if you’re a liberal or not. The questions are definitely of the “Have you stopped beating your wife?” class; a few examples:

1. Standards for admissions to universities, fire departments, etc. should be lowered for people of color.

8. It is good that trial lawyers and teachers unions are the two biggest contributors to the Democratic Party.

9. Marriage should be redefined from male-female to any two people.

…you get the flavor.

My first response on reading it was to suggest a mirror-image ‘conservative’ test, equally BS-laden, that involved ‘maintaining Jim Crow, supporting corporate looting, pollution‘, etc. but that seemed cheap even for me.

And it occurred to me at Brian Linse’s party – when Howard Owens busted me yet again for agreeing with him on so damn many issues – that I ought to set out some foundational issues that I believe define me as a liberal.It’s actually pretty easy.

If you like the clean(er) air and water in our urban areas, thank a liberal.

If you worked an industrial job for thirty years without being disabled, thank a liberal.

I certainly don’t believe that all regulation is good, that forms of regulation that were designed fifty years ago are the best we can do today, or necessarily that being pro-relgulation is necessarily what defines a liberal (conservatives seem to have no quams trying to regulate what we do in our bedrooms and what we can watch, read, and listen to). But there are some clear benefits to the ‘liberal regime’ and while we do need to change the bathwater, I’d like to keep the baby, if that’s OK with you.

There are probably some more…I’d love to get some suggestions. Maybe I can try and come up with something useful on this…

(Oct. 14th Update: MT-Blacklist has arrived!)

…our comments are being porn-spammed (at Armed Liberal as well, and I’ll be emailing some other blogs to see if they’ve been hit as well). We’re cleaning it up as fast as we can, but we’ve been hit by a series of spams from a Russian porn site. The last one appears to have left several hundred comments, and additional mutations are possible. So far we’ve seen “Lolita,” Preteen,” and “Underage”. Teresa Nielsen Hayden has more info. on the spammers, Scriptygoddess has a slew of admin. options for you, and Burningbird has a fairly simple way to make it harder for spammers next time (Hat Tip: David Janes).

JK: It’s an organized effort… was highly ranked at Blogdex.net a couple days ago, but I think they’ve put in filters. We may do the same soon, and meanwhile I’ve disabled all comments. We’ve also got a Swedish neo-nazi group that hangs out here and occasionally posts long rants. If you want to see an example, do a search for “Conspiracy and Truth Week” because I delete it everywhere else.

Re: the comment spams… why does this matter? And what can be done?This matters because if pornospams et. al. are left unchecked, they will significantly impair the entire weblogging community – not just by killing comments as a normal blog feature, but by triggering automated filtering software at some workplaces once they notice all the porno links. What do we need to prevent that? Software, and support.

Software: Yoz Grahame’s Cheerleader has a very intelligent set of suggestions, in “7 Tips for a spam-free blog“. The article addresses tools vendors as well, which I especially appreciate. It also references Mark Pilgrim’s outstanding overview of Club vs. LoJack solutions, which is finally available again after going down yesterday. If you’re looking for serious long-term thinking about how our tools need to evolve and what we need to do, Mark’s piece can’t be beat. Though Shelley has a good one, with some worthy cautions about trust networks and smart feature requests.

Roald and Macdonald have an Open Letter to Google which is very much on point. We all have a mutual interest in stopping this, and working together from both ends just makes sense.

I’ll add another thought. Not only do we need MT-Blacklist, we also need a clean-up utility. One that looks in the comments for the “URL” field, and when it finds a match with our ban list (or even a specific entered value for v1.0), it collects that comment and presents us with a “Power Edit” list that allows us to delete comments in batches of 25-100 at a time. When we’re done, one site rebuild would allow us to have a completely clean blog.

Support: In addition, hosting providers have to get smarter. Tens or hundreds of weblogs rebuilding hundreds of entries will have the same effect on their servers as a denial-of-service attack. Comment spam should therefore be treated like one. For starters, hundreds of incoming data posts from the same IP ought to raise a red flag and cause diversion or access denial.

Mwanwhile, our provider at Bloghosts.com has already moved to firewall out the following netblocks from their servers: 209.120.176.0/24 and 62.42.228.0/24. This will help for now, but over the long term they may want to consider an add-on service. It would include installation of MT-Blacklist, configured to draw from a central blacklist hosted and updated by bloghosts.com themselves, plus renamed CGI submission scripts in their MT(Movable Type) installations to make blogs they host a lower-profile target. The Cadillac option could even include an upgraded Host-specific MT package with a full-fledged spamtrap configuration.

That would be a substantial draw for many bloggers, I think, who would gladly pay additional fees for services that take this problem off their hands.

This much I do know – we’ll need these measures sooner rather than later. Preteen, Lolita and the spawn were just the beginning. There’s no reason these attacks couldn’t be scaled to add hundreds of comments to each weblog, and no reason why they wouldn’t be. Brace yourselves, because you ain’t seen nothing yet.

I haven’t been a fan of the DLC in a long time, but their response to the recall was something I’d have been proud to write.

The money graf, in my view:

Democrats also need to tend to their own garden and take very seriously the decision of California voters — who still decisively tilt Democratic in party identification and overall policy views — to support what began as a nutty right-wing crusade and ended as a popular movement. They need to regain their centrist, problem-solving reputation, and must absolutely reverse the recent perception that they don’t give a damn about anybody who doesn’t belong to a reliable Democratic constituency group.

Good for them.

I talked about the astounding, blind, arrogance of the California nomenklatura below.

Then last night, over at Dan Weintraub’s ‘California Insider’ I read an interview with Sheila Kuehl (State Senator from Beverly Hills and Santa Monica) that sets a new high-water mark for it. You’ve got to read this one… and my bear story too:

DW: How are you feeling?

KUEHL: I am really sad. I’m more angry than anything. And I haven’t even started thinking about what the Senate will need to do in order to save the state.

DW: Save the state from what?

KUEHL: From ignorance. This guy has no idea how to run a state. One of two things will happen. He’ll have his own ideas and no way to carry them out. I mean he has already proposed three things that the governor cannot do. He wants to roll back the car tax on his own by fiat, which he can’t do. He wants to tax the Indians, which he can’t do. He doesn’t know anything about running the state. So either he will propose a lot of stuff he can’t do and we’ll have to govern, or he’ll be pretty well manipulated by people who have an agenda, very much the way I think the president of the United States has been handled by people who are really telling him how to do these things. In which case we may have to counteract things that are worse than things he proposed on his own. His handlers will probably be more conservative than he is, or in the Republican Party line. Convince him he’ll bring businesses back to the state by cutting more benefits to workers, by unraveling anti-discrimination statutes which they call job killers.

DW: Will he be received civilly by the Democrats in the Legislature?

KUEHL: He will be received civilly. We have received everyone civilly. I don’t know if everybody is going to go to the State of the State (speech). Because frankly I don’t think there is going to be a lot of content that anyone’s interested in. What’s this guy got to say to us about the state of the state? Nothing.

I’ve had a few other interactions with the more-liberal part of my team, and one characteristic I’ve noted is a certain…arrogance.

The conservatives are arrogant too, but they simply think that we liberals ‘re delusional or traitorous. They give liberals the respect of being people responsible for their own actions The Democrats have this kind of sad, kindly, ‘we know better than you and we’re gonna make you do the right thing’ attitude. I’ve been burned by it twice in my old blog: First, in a post commenting on an email by Avedon Carol I said:

I’ve talked in the past about the ‘liberalista’ (I’m looking for a word for the high-profile liberals who I believe have hijacked the leadership of the liberal movement and the Democratic Party – that will do until I come up with something better) attitudes, and the underlying position of obnoxious superiority.

Avedon Carol posted a couple of times a response to my MESS OF CRACKPOTTAGE post below; I noticed that there were multiples, and that she had clarified her point and wasn’t trying to link me to Ann Coulter (ick), and thanked her.

I was too quick on the ‘send’, because this is the email that crossed mine:

(here’s the money graf:)

BTW, if the kind of support I was getting for my writing was of the caliber of the comments you got to this post, I’d definitely ask myself what I was doing wrong.

Avedon

(emphasis added)

Gosh, there are so many things to talk about here…

…the first is that my team, the Democrats does in fact elect fools as well.

Cynthia McKinney, anyone?

…the second is that marvelously perfect tone of self-righteousness in the last paragraph.

Then there was this, in response to a post by Dave Yaseen:

Dave Yaseen, of the usually smart blog A Level Gaze, posts what I pray to Woodie Guthrie is a slip of the liberal tongue. His post concludes:

Yes, this debacle of an election is the media’s fault. But it’s our fault as well, and we need to drastically change the way we do things in the Democratic party, not diddle around with how to phrase things to make them palatable to the electorate. If we have to drag American voters, kicking and screaming to chose their own interests, so be it.

(emphasis mine)

Well, damn. That’s the way to reach the poor uneducated voter and get them onto your side…

I’ve seen the problem elsewhere. I’m back helping out a prominent charity here in L.A. (one of the two that I actively – too actively, sometimes, given the state of my calendar and checkbook support), and met with the board president and executive director the day after the election. Their attitude was sadly an exact mirror of Sen. Kuehl’s; the lumpenproles had been suckered. I gently suggested that until the Democratic leadership could learn to respect that lumpenproletariat – even when disagreeing with on matters of policy – we had a lot of time outside on the porch to look forward to.

Here’s the deal; I think that facing reality is the way to go. You can ignore it for a long time, but eventually it catches up with you.

Up in Alaska, we’ve all read about how it just happened:

A California author and filmmaker who became famous for trekking to Alaska’s remote Katmai coast to commune with brown bears has fallen victim to the teeth and claws of the wild animals he loved.

Alaska State Troopers and National Park Service officials said Timothy Treadwell, 46, and girlfriend Amie Huguenard, 37, were killed and partially eaten by a bear or bears near Kaflia Bay, about 300 miles southwest of Anchorage, earlier this week.

…

U.S. Geological Survey bear researcher Tom Smith; Sterling Miller, formerly the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s top bear authority; and others said they tried to warn the amateur naturalist that he was being far too cavalier around North America’s largest and most powerful predator.

“He’s the only one I’ve consistently had concern for,” Smith said. “He had kind of a childlike attitude about him.”

“I told him to be much more cautious … because every time a bear kills somebody, there is a big increase in bearanoia and bears get killed,” Miller said. “I thought that would be a way of getting to him, and his response was ‘I would be honored to end up in bear scat.’ ”

In politics as well, when you ignore the bears, you are likely to wind up as bear scat.

A big part of my hammering away at the Democratic Party is because I perceive a sense of disconnection from reality as strong as Treadwell’s, who “routinely eased up close to bears to chant ‘I love you’ in a high-pitched, sing-song voice.”

I think that there is an equally strong disconnect from reality within the core circles of the Democratic Party – and that the results will be equally ugly until that changes.

— UPDATE —

I can’t believe I forgot to connect this dot as well. Arrogance in place of thoughtfulness figures in another recent post of mine, about Columbia. The key event? the response of the intellectually arrogant managers to the suggestion by some low-level engineers that the Air Force use it’s ultra-high-resolution reconnaissance satellites to take a picture of the damage on Columbia’s wing – pictures that almost surely would have shown the damage and allowed for the possibility some outcome other than the one spread across the Texas sky. The official position?

bq. “A NASA liaison then emailed an apology to Air Force personnel, assuring them that the shuttle was in “excellent shape” and explaining that a foam strike was “something that has happened before and is not considered to be a major problem.” The officer continued, “The one problem that has been identified is the need for some additional coordination within NASA to assure that when a request is made it is done through the official channels.”

Listening to Mickey Kaus and Marty Kaplan (USC Annenberg associate dean and Norman Lear Center director) on Warren Olney’s “Which Way LA”; Kaplan is a man without a clue – he explains that Arnold won because the people were voting for a movie version of reality, in which they could have “candy and ice cream and not gain any weight,” instead of (implicitly) supporting someone who had the experience and knowledge to “deserve” the win.

What an arrogant ass, to mince my words.

A while ago, I challenged a co-blogger who suggested that I wasn’t qualified to opine on an issue of diplomacy. I replied:

They’re missing a few things when they suggest that.

The most important thing is actually the simplest, which is that the genius of the American system is that there certainly are experts on game theory, diplomatic history, and policy who have substantive and valuable expertise in these areas.

And they all work for guys like me. Our Congress and our President are typically business men and women, lawyers, rank amateurs when it comes to the hard games that they study so diligently at ENA (Ecole Nationale d’Administration). And that’s a good thing, in fact, it’s a damn good thing.

It is a good thing because the unique power of the United States comes from our willingness to diffuse power down into the ranks – to act in ways outside what a small cadre of mandarins sitting at a capital can envision.

Wow. The numbers are solid enough that all the wires are predicting the race – fifteen minutes after the polls closed.

Given Roger Simon’s and my support how could he lose??

Congratulations to Gov. Arnold and his team, and condolences to those who ran serious races and lost.

Now, we need to watch what Gray is doing with the shredders he ordered…

Seriously, it will be interesting to see if the core Jackie Goldberg wing of the Democratic party can rev itself up for the threatened Repeat Recall; I’d bet a lot that it will fail miserably (the numbers look like 59%+ “YES” and Arnold brushing 50%) and that just might be the event that marches the lemmings off the cliff and lets the rest of us work to build an effective Democratic party that actually delivers to the working people of the state.

Roger nails it:

What we are witnessing is the beginning—the early movement–in the death of the two-party system as we know it. This is a revolt of the pragmatic center. And that is a good thing for the American people because those parties and the media that feed on them have indeed become a form of nomenklatura. They depend on each other. They are the mutual gate keepers of an old and sclerotic bureaucracy from which their jobs flow in a system of patronage as elaborate as the Czar’s. No wonder watching CNN tonight I felt as if I were watching a wake. They are threatened by what is going on—as they should be.

Went and voted in the California recall election at 7:15am in the Littlest Guy’s elementary school cafeteria.

Not to crowd on Lileks turf, but there is just something so cool about standing in line with your neighbors waiting to vote. We chatted with the people next to us in line; everyone was upbeat but serious at the same time, and somehow it was kind of perspective-shaping to be walking into an elementary school cafeteria, complete with kindergarten collages of jack-o-lanterns, and deciding on the fate of one of the most powerful people in the country. I think that’s how it ought to be done; neighbors waking up, walking along with their coffee cups and chatting about inconsequential things, deciding important matters while standing under a crude cutout of a pumpkin.

The line was way out the door; we left our coffee and tea on the table, figuring we’d be back in ten minutes, and it took over thirty. Our local polling places had been combined; where there were three, now there’s one.

But in ten years of living here, I’ve never been more than two or three people away from the signin table; I think that in our (relatively conservative) district, we’re going to see exceptional turnout today – which is obviously good for Arnold and the recall.

We’ll see. One of the interesting problems with not having TV is that we need to find someplace to go tonight to watch the results…or else we can just stay home and listen to them on the radio and make believe it’s the 1930’s…

I was home today when the mail came, went out to chat with the carrier, and got a handful of election materials, a couple of bills, and this month’s copy of The Atlantic. The lead article, by Langewiesche is about the STS-107 Columbia disaster, and what caused it. He’s doubtless working on a new book, and I’ll get my order into Amazon now; he’s becoming the John McPhee of this era.

The story is sad, since we know how it ends, and depressing, and enraging.

Because Langewiesche personalizes all his stories, we get a hero, and a villain – or a villainess, in this case:

Her style got the best of her on day six of the mission, January 21, when at a recorded MMT meeting, she spoke just a few words too many, much to her later regret.

It was at the end of a report given by a mid-ranking engineer named Don McCormack, who summarized the progress of an ad hoc engineering group, called the Debris Assessment Team, that had been formed at a still lower level to analyze the foam strike. The analysis was being done primarily by Boeing engineers, who had dusted off the soon to be notorious Crater model, primarily to predict damage to the underwing tile. McCormack reported that little was yet resolved, that the quality of the Crater as a predictor was being judged against the known damage on earlier flights, and that some work was being done to explore the options should the analysis conclude that the Columbia had been badly wounded. After a brief exchange, [Linda] Ham cut him short, saying, “And I’m really … I don’t think there is much we can do, so it’s really not a factor during the flight, since there is not much we can do about it.” She was making assumptions, of course, and they were later proved to be completely wrong, but primarily she was just being efficient and moving the meeting along. After the accident, when the transcript and audiotapes emerged, those words were taken out of context to portray Ham as a villainous and almost inhumanly callous person, which she certainly was not. In fact, she was married to an astronaut, and was as concerned as anyone about the safety of the crews.

Or maybe not…

The story was a sad and unnecessary one, involving arrogance, insularity, and bad luck allowed to run unchecked. On the seventh day of the flight, January 22, just as the Air Force began to move on the Kennedy engineers’ back-channel request for photographs [], Linda Ham heard to her surprise that this approach had been made. She immediately telephoned other high-level managers in Houston to see if any of them wanted to issue a formal “requirement” for imagery, and when they informed her that they did not, rather than exploring the question with the Kennedy engineers she simply terminated their request with the Department of Defense. This appears to have been a purely bureaucratic reaction. A NASA liaison then emailed an apology to Air Force personnel, assuring them that the shuttle was in “excellent shape” and explaining that a foam strike was “something that has happened before and is not considered to be a major problem.” The officer continued, “The one problem that has been identified is the need for some additional coordination within NASA to assure that when a request is made it is done through the official channels.”

There appear to have been other problems. Go great the magazine and read the story for yourself – you’ll understand how it is that large, stultifying bureaucracies, whether in Houston or Sacramento, just seem to be incapable of actually delivering adequate responses to the complex world in which we live.

I feel bad for Linda Ham, who with this book will doubtless be publicly hung with the tragedy.

But if we are going to hang her, let’s at least try and learn something from it.

I’ve been perplexed about what to do in the recall tomorrow.

For those of you who don’t live in California, stick around and I’ll explain why this matters to you.

Originally, I was hopeful that Arnold would run a real populist campaign, as opposed to an Astroturf one. But he did the – conservative – and probably smart thing, and surrounded himself with seasoned pros. Sadly, he didn’t pick an All-Star Team, but he picked one that had played well together, and his key operatives come from the mainstream – not the looney right – of the California GOP.

A week ago, I was drifting toward “No” on the recall. Davis is mortally wounded politically, and the next three years would be a kind of ‘caretaker’ administration with the second-tier Democratic figures – Angelides and Lockyer, maybe Shelley – would really run the state.

I wasn’t happy with that decision, but Arnie hadn’t measured up, and there was just no way I could support the idea of the pander-bear Cruz in office.

Then came Friday.The journalistic arm of the political establishment reached out and backhanded Arnold.

I’m sorry, but none of editor Jon Carroll’s excuses wash. He said:

“We ran it when we felt it was publishable, I would have loved to have published it earlier.”

He should have said:

“I know the timing looks bad for us. In retrospect, it was probably a bad call. But we published it when we felt it was publishable. Believe me, I would have loved to have published it earlier.”

But he’s far too arrogant to believe that. There’s no way not to acknowledge the timing of this. Kaus even predicted it (hey does anyone know how to figure out the ID’s for his individual posts so you can create direct links?); he explained:

“Wednesday, October 1, 2003

Shoe day? Tomorrow would be about the logical last day for the Los Angeles Times to drop its bomb on Arnold Schwarzenegger. If editor John Carroll waits any longer it will look like a late hit designed to stampede the electorate.”

Actually, it was a perfectly-timed late hit, guaranteed to dominate the weekend news, as it has.

And, as I noted, it was deliciously one-sided. I said:

“A good paper of record – one that took it’s responsibilities seriously – would have laid out both issues, talked about what each means in the context of governance, and trusted us – the public – to use that information to make up our minds.

But we’re talking about the L.A. Times. And in taking this kind of blatantly partisan stance, it continues to weaken it’s role as a reliable source for information.”

And as I thought about it over the weekend, I realized that to me, the greatest danger is the ossification of the political process; it’s the way groups like moveon.org – which started as a ‘non-partisan’ effort to damp the stupidly partisan impeachment effort, has become another string in the Democratic violin.

Somehow the gravitational field is such that as you become closer and closer to the center of power, you get pulled into a one of two rigid orbits; that’s an international issue (yes I know about multiparty coalitions and parliaments), not just a California or US of A one, and it’s incredibly destructive.

It’s destructive because it is flexibility, and the willingness to adapt to facts that make our Western liberalism powerful. And that becomes almost impossible to do in this kind of environment. Facts and language themselves seem to become plastic and run like Dali watches.

We’ve got to do something about it.

Electing Arnold won’t be the powerful statement that I hoped it might be, and I doubt that he’ll be the governor that I hoped he might become.

But…

Electing him will be a slap to the face of the political class, which it badly needs.

So at the end of all this, and for what little it’s worth, I’m endorsing him. My fingers are crossed, but I’m secretly pleased to imagine the fury of the editorial board of the LAT.

I think Arnold will win big (in part because I think his support tends to underpoll as people are abashed to admit they’re voting for him), and if so, I think the Times will have played a significant if inadvertent part in his victory.

It’s a brick pulled out of the wall.