Through Declan McCuollogh’s Politech, I’ve been following the matter of the Indymedia posting of the GOP delegate’s personal information. Note that I downloaded and looked at the file – and it does contain home phone numbers, addresses, and names for a bunch of people I assume are Republican delegates.

The ACLU has stepped in on behalf of Indymedia.Am I the only one bothered by this? It’s not new – here in Los Angeles, the director of the Department of Animal Services recently retired after protesters circled his home; the same group has protested at the home of Los Angeles Mayor Hahn.

Now Scott McNealy may believe that “privacy is dead, get over it,” and he may be right.

But it seems that by blending the public (would anyone be as squeamish about demonstrations in front of Jerry Greenwalt’s office?) and the private, these demonstrators are changing the game somewhat, and in a way that I’m not sure I’m comfortable with.

And, what’s more, they are doing it in a way that doesn’t exactly level the playing field.

Demonstrations against Greenwalt were led by ‘Animal Defense -LA‘; a whois shows a maildrop address (amusingly, Amy Alkon gets her mail at the same place), and the name of ‘Marcus Wolf’ – those who know a bit about Stasi history might wonder whether that’s a pseudonym…

So when will the Protest Warriors start showing up at the homes of Indymedia contributors? Or groups of grad students in biology at the homes of animal defense organizations?

Do we need more James Kopps??

Or am I just being too concerned about this?

I noticed this last week, and meant to post it Friday.

Then the L.A. Times covered it in detail today.

Ted Hayes is a leading advocate for the homeless in Los Angeles. While I do a fair amount of volunteer work around homeless issues (mostly in working on mediating ongoing disputes between a homeless services agency and it’s neighbors), I’ve never met him.

But he came to prominence as an advocate for the homeless who lived among them himself; he runs a charity from which he takes a $30,000 salary (as compared, say to the $400K salary the head of the NRDC takes). His views are – to put it mildly – iconoclastic, but he’s done a lot in Los Angeles to both create political support for programs to serve homeless people and help raise some of them out of homelessness and back into society and find ways for those homeless people who won’t live in society to live in a manner that respects them and reduced their impact on the community.

But that’s not the good news.

The good news is that his daughter, Joanna Hayes, set an Olympic record in winning the women’s 100-meter hurdles in Athens.The Times story doesn’t spare the consequences on Ted’s family of his decision to “…give up his family to live on the streets.”

But there’s a summation.

As Joanna grew older and politically aware, she came to respect the choice her father had made.

“Obviously, with my dad, there have been times when I’ve been angry with him,” she said. “But there are so many more times when I’ve been proud of him.”

“I will,” she said proudly, “always be the Dome Village girl.”

Ted Hayes was cheering in the stands in Athens this week along with Joanna’s mother and other family members.

I was cheering when I read about her victory as well.

Here’s a fascinating, and non-vitriolic look at the ‘character’ issue for both candidates. Note that just because I’m unhappy with the polarization of politics right now that I’m not dismissing politics or the importance of the election. And note that I’ll publicly commit to aggressively attack anyone who – after the election – immediately launches into a partisan effort to hamstring whichever candidate is elected.

That’s my pledge, and I’d love to see other polibloggers take it as well.

The column is by Craig Crawford, of Congressional Quarterly (via Taegan Goddard), and I’ll be reading a lot more of his stuff.He says:

Someone like me, who never served in the military, has no business passing judgment on a combat veteran’s record – and I am not doing that here. Anyone such as Kerry, who carries shrapnel in his body as a result of service to his country, deserves to boast if he wants to. But politics is not always fair, and Kerry’s eagerness to harness his military background for political purposes is haunting him. It fits a lifelong pattern of grooming himself for high office. Voters like ambition, but they’d rather not see you sweat.

and

We learned that, unlike Kerry, he [Bush] was most willing to use his privileged status to avoid harm’s way in Southeast Asia.

But in light of Bush’s hawkish presidency, claims that he dodged a fight do not fit the pattern of how voters see his character.

Instead, Bush’s military record fits a character pattern that many voters like about him. His war years demonstrate that this is not a man who spent his entire adult life plotting to run for president.

For starters, how lame it was for Bush to lose his Texas Air National Guard flight status simply because he missed a physical examination. But it does fit his image as a regular guy who cannot stand paperwork.

Even if Democrats could prove their unsubstantiated claim that Bush was AWOL in the summer of 1972, it is not clear that enough voters are going to care to make a difference.

A great analysis, and one that points to where the Democrats must not go if they’re going to have a chance (certainly, a chance with me – and I assume that I’m pretty typical).

…can never be defeated.

I finally managed to join 2004 and start using a RSS-based blog reader (Bloglines, in my case), which has meant that instead of randomly popping out to read blogs when I’m on boring phone calls (or procrastinating to avoid making boring phone calls), I now tend to just, robot-like, click down an alphabetical list of 62 blogs and newsfeeds (I’ll append the list).

And it’s kind of depressing.

Most of the blogs I read are fully engaged in electoral politics, which is on one hand good because it’s an important election and it’s neat to see citizen’s media play an important role in it, and on the other hand bad because the level of partisan venom is just stupefying.

Here’s a quick shoutout to my fellow bloggers.
It’s going to be a damn important election, there’s no question. But guess what. As much as there are at least two dozen people I’d rather have as president than either George Bush or John Kerry, one of those two will be our president on January 20, 2005. He’ll have to lead the country through what will be one of the most challenging periods in our history as we try and fight a low-intensity war and keep it from becoming a high-intensity one.

The biggest threat they will face isn’t Islamist terrorism, European intransigence, Chinese economic power, or Iranian nukes. It will be a polity paralyzed by internal rage, distrust, and contempt. If we – as a nation and as citizens – can manage to engage each other in constructive ways, I am certain that we will beat whatever events throw at us.

Go read Josh Marshall or Wizbang. Or look at how Kevin Drum’s rhetoric has changed over the year. These aren’t semi-humorous blogs like Scrappleface or IMAO. They are serious commentators on the events of the day, people who I take seriously, and their rhetoric displays exactly what it is that I’m afraid of. I used to comment (as snark) that Matt Yglesias’ overheated partisan rhetoric meant he was trying out for the DNC. That’s less funny in light of Atrios’ and Oliver Willis’ employment, but I wonder why it is that the amateurs are working so hard to outdo the professionals at thuggery.

It would be nice if we could all – acknowledging that we have sides – work to make the professionals a little bit ashamed instead.

It’s interesting how Dean Esmay’s challenge has fallen off the radar.

For what it’s worth, here are the blogs in my reader:

American Digest
Andrew Sullivan – The Daily Dish
Asymmetrical Information
Belmont Club
BLACKFIVE
Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog
BuzzMachine
Calblog
California Insider
Crooked Timber
Daniel W. Drezner
Defamer
DRUDGE REPORT 2004
Dynamist Blog
EconoPundit
Eschaton
Guardian Unlimited
Hakmao
Harry’s Place
Healing Iraq
Hit & Run
Howard Lovy’s NanoBot
Instapundit.com
INTEL DUMP
IRAQ THE MODEL
L.A. Observed
LAist
Lessig Blog
Little Green Footballs
Los Angeles Times
Mark A. R. Kleiman
matthew
MY WAR
MyDD
One Hand Clapping
Outside The Beltway
OxBlog
Patterico’s Pontifications
Political Animal
Power Line
Priorities & Frivolities
Roger L. Simon
Slate Magazine
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall
TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime
TAPPED
The Idea Shop
The Indepundit
The New Republic Weblogs
The New York Times > Home Page
The New York Times > Opinion
The Southern California Law Blog
The Volokh Conspiracy
The Washington Monthly
Tim Blair
War and Piece
washingtonpost.com
Wired News
Wizbang
Wonkette

The Marijuana Policy Project is looking for technology staff:

Application deadline: September 20, 2004. The Information Technology Coordinator position is based in MPP’s main office in Washington, D.C. The position requires the ability to perform exceptionally in a fast-paced campaign environment. First and foremost, the Information Technology Coordinator must be meticulous and have an exacting attention to detail. Applicants for this position should not have even small degrees of sloppiness or forgetfulness.

(emphasis added)

Sorry, the jokes are just too damn obvious. I can’t bring myself to make them. But you should feel free…

Note that my man, Valentino Rossi, is currently leading the MotoGP world standings, after changing teams between last season and this one.

Now comes the word that MotoGP is coming back to the US, and that it will be at Laguna Seca Raceway on July 8 – 10 2005.

Get your tickets now – they won’t last long.

Go check out the ‘Pocket Guide to the Blogosphere‘ from Jeff at Beautiful Atrocities …

…and yes, Chico Marx.

Interesting take on Moore v. the Swift vets by Derek Cressman, in the Christian Science Monitor today.

The key graf:

People who go to see Moore’s movies know pretty much what they are getting. Other citizens prefer to get their news from Rush Limbaugh, or the networks. Whatever the source, when people seek information, especially when paying for a book, newspaper, or movie, the marketplace of free speech is at work. We all theoretically have a somewhat equal opportunity to say our piece in the town square through pitching a screenplay or a news release. If the producers and editors that citizens have trusted to seek out the news think that what we have to say is of interest, our voice will be heard.

But when donors pay big money to interrupt what we are otherwise viewing, that is paid speech – and that is where campaign-finance regulations should come into play. We live in an age where the federal candidate who spends the most money wins more than 9 out of 10 elections. Yet the funding for those campaigns comes from but a fraction of all Americans, who are not representative of the rest of us. Paid speech is available primarily to the wealthy few and it is overwhelming free speech and distorting the political marketplace.

I strongly disagree, but have to run and will toss the subject out for discussion until I get back.

Mark Kleiman has an interesting post suggesting that one of the key metrics we’re using in law enforcement – the number of people convicted – is the wrong one.

But what police and prosecutors do from day to day is make arrests and secure verdicts (or guilty pleas) and thus sentences. It seems natural to count those activities and use the counts as performance measures. That, however, turns out to be a mistake. Actual arrests and prosecutions are mostly costs rather than benefits.

It’s an interesting notion, but I think that he ignores one key point.

The audience for crime control isn’t just criminals, it is the citizens who use the state’s ability to protect them as a measure of the legitimacy they grant the state.
This is, for example, kind of crucial in solidifying (or, better, creating) the legitimacy we’re seeing in Iraq.

The consequence of losing that legitimacy looks like this:

Maria del Refugio Perez is a 60-year-old street vendor who says she abhors violence. But this month, she joined a raging mob that corralled, pummeled and hog-tied a suspected thief and almost burned her alive.

Drawn by a butcher’s shouts that she had caught the woman grabbing money from a cash drawer at her shop, Perez and other neighbors quickly seized her. Once the church bells in this Mexico City suburb started ringing, signaling a town emergency, the mob grew in size — and anger.

“These things happen because the authorities don’t do anything,” Perez said, recalling days later how the woman, Juana Moncayo, was tied to a flagpole in the town plaza for several hours as the crowd of 200 insulted and beat her.

An orderly society not only requires some control over who gets to use force and in what conditions; more important, it requires a public sphere of justice and respect for the law.

The risk of a formulation like Kleiman’s is that we may decide not to punish certain criminals, because for us as a society, it is as Kleiman suggests simply too expensive (we do that today – ever try and report an auto burglary in a major city?). Kleiman says:

[Putting someone away is a benefit when an especially active bad guy gets locked up, preferably for a long time, thus reducing criminal victimization through incapacitation, but the median person who goes to prison isn’t actually worth locking up, balancing the costs — financial and non-financial — of keeping him behind bars against the benefits of the crimes he doesn’t commit while incarcerated.]

In making that calculation, he needs to add to the costs the erosion of the legitimacy of the overall body of laws in the eyes of the victimized noncriminal class.

In light of the post below on Adeimantus’ excellent comments on the ‘Vietnam Truce,’ I thought I’d (belatedly) post my idea of a Kerry speech that would start to tie his career and divergent positions on Vietnam together. Personally, I’d have felt much better about his candidacy if he’d made a speech like this at the Convention or shortly thereafter.

It may not be too late.

Almost thirty years ago, I was a college student, and I spoke against the war in Vietnam. I wasn’t alone at that time; while standing against the war was not as common in 1966 as it was in 1972, it certainly wasn’t a position that was strange for someone to take.

I took that position after much thought – I do that, think about my decisions – some people seem to think that’s strange – and I took it for a few simple reasons. First, because like all sane people, I abhorred war. I grew up in the aftermath of World War II, and saw the destruction done to cities and people. I believed then, as I believe now, that we need to make war when we must, not when we can.

I thought we could have easily avoided the war in Vietnam by supporting the legitimate national aspirations of the Vietnamese people against the colonial power – the French – that ruled them.

I thought that we were sending the wrong message to the world by supporting dictators and by using our might to oppose a relatively weak and poor enemy. I believed then, as I believe now, that we have been given our power and wealth to help the weak and poor, not to kill them.

When I graduated college, like other young men of that era, I was feeling a draft. I wavered – I certainly wasn’t excited about fighting in a war that I did not believe in – but I also knew that I owed a duty to my country and to those who had fought for the freedom I enjoyed.

Duty won, as it often has in my life, and I enlisted.

Whatever I have done in my life, I’ve tried to do well. When I enlisted, I made a conscious decision that if I was to wear the uniform of the United States Navy, I would be the best sailor that I could possibly be.

And when I was given a command, I decided I was going to be the best leader I could be. I would execute my missions, protect and lead my men, and put my life on the line in service to the country that had given me so much.

I did my best to do so.

But it was difficult. Not only because the work was hard and dangerous, which it was and which I freely accepted when I put on the uniform for the first time.

It was difficult because what I had believed about the war as a college student was confirmed in front of my eyes every day by me and my men and the men who served with us. We used the machinery and power of a mighty state to kill people who – dangerous as they were to us as individuals – were no threat to us as a state, and whose desire was simply that we leave them alone and let them have their own country.

I talked to Vietnamese men, women, and children while I was there. Members of their armed services who rode on my boat, women and children in the cities where we were based. They hated the Communists, but knew that the Communists had only been able to take power when the French refused to leave. I began to regret every morning, every new mission, every bullet that we fired.

Today, looking at what tragedy followed out withdrawal, I am filled with a different regret. I wonder if I was right. I know that there must have been a better way.

The regret then became a moral struggle within me that I felt began to weaken my ability to perform as an officer, and would – I believed – either destroy me as a person or cause me to fail in my duties and endanger my men.

I took the option open to me because of my wounds, and asked – as many others did – to leave the theater of battle. I no longer had that moral certainty I had entered the Navy with, and as I struggled, the decision to simply leave certainly seemed like the right one to make.

When I came home, I began to talk to other veterans who felt as I did, and who questioned what we had done and what was being done by our fellows in our name. The more we talked, the more certain I became that the war was wrong, and that we needed to work hard to stop it.

I did so, in every way open to me.

In doing that, I said and did some things that were immature, exaggerated, and hurtful. I don’t know today if the moral value of any help I may have been in ending the war outweighs the personal hurt that I visited on my fellow veterans. I hope it does, and I offer my hand in apology to those whose wounds I deepened.

Today, I still believe that we have to balance duty and morality – a service to a higher honor, and that the hardest thing we can do looking forward is to strike that balance as best we can.

History and my Church both teach that we are imperfect. I know that in my own life, I have tried to balance the conflicts as best I can, and while I know that I could have done better then if I knew what I know now, that I did the best I could and I have never hung my head because I did not try.

The scar of Vietnam is deep within the memories of this country and the lives of the Vietnamese even today.

I cannot dissolve that scar and make it as though there was never a wound. But I can stand before you, imperfect and human, as we all are and offer my own life and service and my continued service to lessening the pain of the past and improving our vision of the future.

No one who stands behind the podium that I am behind today is free of ambition. But please know that the ambition I have is not for myself – I have already been far more successful than I ever dreamed as a child – but for the future we can make together, a future where wounds are healed by hope.