Blogging is light for a few days, as TG and I are in the mountains above Santa Cruz, attending Dave Trowbridge and Deborah Ross’ wedding today.
It’s shaping up to be a fun event and couldn’t be happening to nicer people. To Dave and Deborah, a public lifting of the glass.
Updates:
Jill Stewart’s original ‘New Times’ column is here.
My analysis of the Times’ coverage is here.
Until we get comments back up here, feel free to comment at Armed Liberal.
Original Post:
Jill Stewart has a column up responding to John Carroll’s slam of her recent criticism of the L.A. Times (around the issues blogged in the SkyBox Davis expose, and The Art of the Knife). She’s also got an (anonymous) interview with a Times staffer which, if true, just blows the hell out of any pretense of impartiality or fairness on Carroll’s part during the recent California recall.
In case you need to be titillated…
“Toward the end, a kind of hysteria gripped the newsroom. I witnessed a deep-seated, irrational need to get something on this guy [Schwarzenegger]. By Wednesday before it was published, I counted not fewer than 24 reporters dispatched on Arnold, and this entire enterprise was directed by John Carroll himself.”
“Carroll launched the project with the words: ‘I want a full scrub of Arnold.’ This was fully and completely and daily driven by Carroll. He’s as good as his word on being balanced and trying to make this paper more balanced, he really is. But not when it came to Schwarzenegger. Carroll changed completely. It was visceral, and he made it clear he wanted something bad on Schwarzenegger and he didn’t care what it was.”
…
“It all happened amidst a poisonous atmosphere here against Schwarzenegger—a blatant political undertone that was everywhere in the newsroom. These are people who have been in the building a long time and have formed a culture together. It’s easy for all of us to start thinking very much alike.”
“The reporters probed everything they could think of about Schwarzenegger: his health, his businesses, his charities. They couldn’t find out anything horrible about his charities, but they tried very, very hard. His business empire made him look good—so the business empire story was buried in the paper. It ended up on something like, I don’t know, Page A36. And as these issues got abandoned because they produced no dirt on Arnold, as desired by Carroll, the team going after him got more and more focused on sex and steroids.”
“It was awful to watch Carroll. It became a Capt. Ahab and Moby Dick thing where they felt an increasing need to nail those points that could most hurt Schwarzenegger. At times, it made me physically uncomfortable to be in the newsroom.”
As they say, read the whole thing. Here’s my take: I’m met Jill once or twice (we’re certainly not friends), and she doesn’t seem suicidal. For her to lay this directly on the Times, and to do so publicly, means she believes in what she’s saying, and believes that when push comes to shove, she’ll get backed up. Because if she’s not…
I’m making popcorn.
Oct. 20 Update: If you scroll to the bottom of Jill’s column, there’s a correction; it appears that her source got the betting pool wrong.
“Note: In a previous version of this interview, the source stated that betting pool of 113 journalists conducted at the Times showed about 25 percent thought Schwarzenegger would win and recall would win. However, reporter Ken Reich, who conducted the pool, says this information is wrong and offers the following correction:
‘Of the 113 participants, 74 picked both the recall to pass and Schwarzenegger to win the replacement race…. Of the 113, by the way, 101 picked Schwarzenegger to win the replacement race, 11 Bustamante and one McClintock.’ ”
Kind of a significant fact to get wrong; but as noted, I’m buttering the popcorn waiting to see how this develops.
I’d started a post criticizing the Israelis for building 600 new homes in the West Bank (Can someone give me some rational justification for the civilian – as opposed to the entirely justified military – occupation? Some basis on which the fiscal, human, and moral cost can be justified?). Instead, I tripped over this.
Go click over to the official U.S. State Department map of Saudi Arabia. Go ahead, I’ll wait, it’ll open in a new window.
Look at all the countries around Saudi Arabia. Look at their names. See anything missing?
Folks, this isn’t fricking Mercedes Benz or BMW, as Charles says over at LGF (his tip on this, by the way… and see how easy it is to fix). This is the United-Goddamn-States State Department, and I think we all ought to click over to this page and ask them exactly who they think they work for. Be polite.
JK: Instapundit has the classic quip in response to this.
Updates:
Jill Stewart’s original ‘New Times’ column is here.
Her response to John Carroll’s L.A. Times column is here.
Original Post:
Thanks to Calpundit, I read John Carroll’s column justifying the LA Times’ Thursday hit on Arnold on Saturday night. I’ve seen Kevin Roderick’s piece on it, and been waiting to hear from the principal actor in the drama, Jill Stewart, who can talk about it from an more-informed position than mine.
A lot of this is about the mechanics and minutiae of journalism, I thought.
Then I went to Brian’s party, and met a journalist (sadly didn’t get his name or affiliation).I’ll skip over his arrogance and rudeness; he was in a hostile environment, and maybe he was nervous. But watching the discussion, I realized something that brought the Times issue into clearer perspective for me.
In the discussion, I had substantive issues with his points, which were essentially that journalism is superior to blogging because it has an editorial process which drives it toward ‘fairness’ (he felt that objectivity was impossible and not necessarily even desirable), but a fairness informed by the moral sensibilities of the institution (I’m pulling a short argument out of a long and somewhat rambling discussion). Bloggers obviously don’t.
I tried to make the suggestion to him that individual blogs weren’t necessarily good at driving toward fairness, but that the complex of blogs – the dialog and interaction between blogs – was, and might in fact be better than mainstream media, isolated as they are from feedback. (Note that Perry from Samizdata got this point before I finished the sentence).
And what was interesting to me was this – that while I have (violently at times) disagreed with other bloggers in face to face discussions, I always had the feeling that there was a discussion going on, a dialog in which two people were engaged and trying to understand each other’s points, if for no other reason than to better argue against them. But in dealing with The Journalist In The Hat, no such dialog took place. He had his point to make, and very little that I said (or, to be honest, that others who participated, including Howard Owens, who pointed out that he had worked as a journalist) was heard or responded to. He had his points, and he was going to make them over, and over, until we listened.
Or until we said ‘bullshit’ too many times and he walked away in a snit.
And similarly, what I think torqued me off as a consumer of mass media – and I think others as well – was the LA Times blindness to the fact that it is a part of a larger ongoing dialog, and that the stories on Arnold’s sexual – I’m not sure how to characterize this – behavior clearly would have an impact, and were in fact reported to have an impact, by Carroll’s own admission.
I’ve said all along that what matters is that the paper act with at least the appearance of impartiality, or as my pet journalist said, ‘fairness’. Had the Times wrapped its Thursday piece in an explanation that made three simple points:
1) We’ve been working on this full-bore since August 6, we wish we’d run it sooner, but we didn’t believe it was right not to run it before you voted;
2) We understand the problems this presents for Arnold and his campaign, as well as the appearance it gives that we’re ‘hitting’ him, and we’ve given him and his campaign space to respond;
3) We devoted equal resources trying to dig into rumors about Davis’ behavior and been unable to come up with enough solid, sourced information to make a story out of it.
I’d have been mildly unhappy, but certainly not angry, and would have had no cause to be angry.
But the Times didn’t so any such thing.
And here’s my point. As someone who reads the Times every day, along with a lot of other media, the clear tilt of the paper couldn’t be more transparent to me.
I’m not going to go too deeply into the news portion, although I’ve started saving clips. But it took me about 30 minutes last night to go through all the columns available on the Web. I’ve got links and clips below, but let me give you a summary count (methodology was simple: I went to the Times web site, clicked on ‘columns’ in the left bar, and went through each of the listed columnists and pulled anything that had to do with Davis, Arnold, or the recall. Note that ‘balanced’ doesn’t mean pro-Arnold or pro-recall; it means looks at both sides and tries to present analysis):
Al Martinez: 1 column, violently anti-Arnold and recall.
Ronald Brownstein: 1 column, balanced.
Patt Morrison: 10 columns, 8 violently anti-recall and anti-Arnold, 2 moderately anti-recall and anti-Arnold.
Dana Parsons: 1 column, mildly anti-Arnold
Tim Rutten: 7 columns, 6 mildly anti-Arnold, 1 anti-Bustamente
David Shaw: 4 columns, 2 mildly anti-recall and 2 mildly anti-Arnold
George Skelton: 10 columns, all balanced
Steve Lopez: 9 columns, 4 violently anti-Arnold, 1 moderately anti-Arnold, 3 anti-recall.
Obviously, my characterization is subjective. Go down and browse the links below and make your own call. But I’m willing to bet that the overall characterization won’t be that the columnists were, overall, balanced between positions.
And that matters a lot, because the columnists are the human face the newspaper presents to us, it’s readers. And in this case, that face was largely speaking with one voice.
Update:
Porphy comments intelligently on this (as usual), but mistakes my meaning in one place – to his credit, I think I was unclear, so I’ll use this to do better.
First, when I talk about the ‘appearance’ of impartiality, I’m talking about what to me would be courtesy. It’s a recognition that while I’m taking one position and believe in it, there are other positions, and that I’m acknowledging that while I support this and think you should too, that it is one position in the marketplace of ideas and that you as a reader might want to consider the others, foolish as they may be, before making a decision.
Think of it as consultative selling.
He then assumes that when the reporter (I hope he doesn’t mean me) was talking about ‘fairness’ as opposed to ‘objectivity’ that he meant:
His concept seems to approximate that of “Progressives” – being “fair” means taking sides and treating others differently based on whose side they are on. Those on the Progressive side can and should be cut some slack, because they mean well, while those opposing Progressivism must be held to more exacting standards as a matter of course because they are not advancing the cause of justice, equality, and social change anyhow.
I took it slightly differently.
I think of what he meant as being a good Little League coach, called on to umpire the game. You clearly want one side to win, but you follow certain norms – in order to see that you, as well as both sides are playing by the rules (it’s not too different than what I talk about above).
Sadly, as I note, I think they’re making all the calls one way. That may well mean that Porphy’s definition is better (more accurate) than mine.
End Update…
All links as of Sunday night/Monday morning
Al Martinez:
Once upon a time in the land of Col-lee-forna, a village elected an idiot named Serios Gropper to run things.
The villagers all knew he was an idiot, but he was strong and had the widest grin anyone had ever seen and was always on stage lifting things and grinning whenever there was an opportunity, so everyone knew who he was. Familiarity counts.
The leader ousted in favor of Gropper was a 90-pound weakling named Maxim Dul who was always getting sand kicked in his face at the beach and who hardly had any grin at all. Gropper, everyone said, had substance and a bold face, and that’s what Col-lee-forna needed. Nice hair too, perfectly colored and sprayed.
Ronald Brownstein
If Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante becomes governor or if Gov. Gray Davis retains his seat amid the charges against Schwarzenegger, Republicans are sure to consider their candidate the victim of dirty tricks from Democrats and the media. Imagine the howls of outrage from talk radio – or the resistance from Republicans in the Legislature – that Davis would face if he survives under these circumstances. Every day after a date with the hangman is a good day – but Davis would be at war every moment for the rest of his term.
If Schwarzenegger holds on to win, the hostilities might be even more intense. Even before the allegations of sexual misconduct surfaced, Schwarzenegger was unlikely to win support from a majority of voters; it’s always been possible that fewer Californians will vote to make him governor than to keep Davis in office. Under the best of circumstances, that meant Schwarzenegger was likely to start with a precarious base if he won.
Patt Morrison:
Like your average Californian, I’m interested in just one thing in this election – me. Where does all this leave me?
If Arnold wins, it leaves me in deep, that’s where. So let me say right now: All that stuff I wrote about Arnold before? About him not being able to remember meeting with energy villain Ken Lay? About him being able to balance the budget but maybe costing the state big in sexual harassment suits? About his going AWOL from the Austrian army for a bodybuilding contest? About his not voting in six of the last eight state elections?
I was just making statements that were ludicrous and crazy and outrageous because that’s the way I always was. I knew they would get headlines. We were promoting bodybuilding – I mean newspapers. I was always outrageous. Otherwise I wouldn’t have done the things I’ve done in my career.
Hey, if the voters can believe it from him, they can believe it from me too.
The California Governor’s Conference for Women, the 17th annual, is still scheduled for Oct. 22 – but with which governor? Both First Lady Sharon Davis and her husband are scheduled to speak at the event – as is actor and children’s book author Jamie Lee Curtis, a Schwarzenegger co-star who in 2001 joined three of his other co-starring women to protest a Premiere magazine article alleging Schwarzenegger’s boorish conduct on movie sets. Since a Times story last week on the same subject, Schwarzenegger has acknowledged that he acted inappropriately toward some women and apologized.
Why did I have this dream, now? Ask me a hard one. It was about the recall.
If Arnold Schwarzenegger is a week away from being elected governor of the fifth-largest economy in the world, if comedian Dennis Miller’s name can be seriously bruited about as our next U.S. senator, then I can become a Supreme.
“I’m not quite sure if he’s a Republican, conservative. I’m not sure what he is. As you know, he’s pro-gay rights, pro-gun control, pro-choice, pro-orgy, pro-hashish Let me tell you if Arnold Schwarzenegger ever would win, I would love to go to a Republican Governors Assn. What a party this could be – he could light up that group.”
Terry McAuliffe, head of the Democratic National Committee.
McClintock, the man who’s been on the radar screen for 20 years, suggested acidly, on a different cable news show, that Robertson and his flock “take a closer look at the positions that Arnold Schwarzenegger has taken on a wide ranger of social issues. I think they’ll be appalled.”
The social issues – abortion, gun control, gay rights – the dirt swept under the carpet, the unmentionable topics of the campaign, which is saying a lot in an election that’s had to discuss group sex. The social issues the national GOP used to divide and conquer are the same ones that have derailed them in California, which is why everyone’s keeping his mouth shut about them this time, lest it run the GOP off the rails again.
The Schwarzenegger faction desperately wants McClintock to bail out before he becomes a Naderesque spoiler. But none of them wants his fingerprints to be found on McClintock’s back. So all they can do is hope that someone, in political-Becket fashion, will rid them of this turbulent candidate – because McClintock is not the type to oblige them and step aside.
“He is a great film star. But I find his idea to run for governor absolutely insane America should be governed by people who have a clue. I hope he doesn’t win.”
? Dixie Chicks banjoist Emily Robinson, quoted in the German newspaper Abendzeitung about Arnold Schwarzenegger. After Dixie Chicks lead vocalist Natalie Maines announced in March that they were all ashamed that George Bush hails from Texas, their CDs were slammed and stomped on in a vivid demonstration of free speech vs. free markets.
Arnold Schwarzenegger enlisted in Austria’s army, not its air force, but he’s an ace at flying the missing-man formation.
Schwarzenegger went AWOL from the army to compete in a bodybuilding contest, winning a title that got him his start – at the price of a few days in the stockade. Maybe going AWOL in the debates will work to his advantage, too.
This morning’s gubernatorial debate will go on without him, just like all the others, save for the one invitation he has accepted, for Sept. 24. This RSVP record may be bad democracy but it’s brilliant politics: Put your guy in one debate and one debate only – the one where the candidates get the questions in advance – so there’s only one set of video clips, one set of sound bites of your guy at the top of his game, for the press to use over and over again.
“For $1 million in California, I could get enough signatures to put a proposition on the ballot to outlaw ice cream.”
? Walnut Creek electrician Donnie Snyder, demonstrating against the recall outside the first gubernatorial debate.
The state budget, the state government, aren’t a film script, with a straw-man villain who is easy to set up and, ultimately, a cinch for the hero to knock down. Nobody is pro-taxes; anyone thinking of running on a pro-tax platform would be better off starting up a theme park called “Root Canal Land.” But please, Mr. S., in spite of the temptations to cinematic chest-beating, don’t tease us by invoking some no-tax paradise, unless you also plan on having each of us go out and boil our own drinking water, pave our own roads, pour our own sidewalks, and dig our own sewers.
In that case, I’ll be over to borrow a shovel.
” ‘Dianne, what’s happening out in California? It’s like you turned the United States on its side and all of the nuts fell to California.’ ”
? California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, telling a group of West Los Angeles business leaders about being teased about the recall by a fellow member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The quote is a variant of one often attributed to architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
Dana Parsons
I could have asked at that moment about Arnold’s original denials of boorish behavior around some women – before he ‘fessed up last week – but that would have killed the festive mood.
This is a weekend to celebrate what recall supporters say is democracy at its finest. Let’s all join the parade and anoint Arnold Schwarzenegger – this man we trust and know so well – to turn our fortunes around.
Tim Rutten
According to Carrick, “the way the entertainment press clustered around this campaign actually subverted the efforts of the serious press to be substantive. It allowed Schwarzenegger to pursue a strategy of inaccessibility and to get away with it.”
So was the recall itself so novel and Schwarzenegger’s presence so unexpectedly overwhelming that there are no lessons to be drawn about future campaigns and their news coverage?
Not in Carrick’s view: “At the end of the day, I think we can conclude that, when it comes to covering politics, more is not better – if it’s not of higher quality.”
Martin Kaplan, of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, agrees. “In some sense, we were auditioning all five of the candidates Wednesday night. After what we saw, it would be difficult to imagine wanting to spend the next three years with any of them.
“To many viewers, this debate may have confirmed a suspicion that the recall itself has become a great waste of time and money. Rather than the great experiment in public engagement that it once seemed to be, it’s become about as edifying as mud wrestling. People are saying it isn’t even entertaining anymore, which – as we all know – is the greatest sin of all.”
Steinberg faults the conventional political press for not finding more aggressive ways to pose tough questions. He pointed out that while most of the candidates were debating in Hollywood this week, Schwarzenegger was virtually across the street taping Larry King’s show at CNN’s Sunset Boulevard studios.
“None of the reporters and camera crews there for the debate even bothered to go across the street and hassle him with shouted questions,” Steinberg said.
“Schwarzenegger’s strategy requires a docile news media, and he’s getting one.”
Johnson argued that “under an elective system the recall should be applied to all officers. It will make no judge weaker, nor a strong judge less strong. It will be a warning and a menace to the corrupt only.” But state Sen. Charles Wheller, also a progressive Republican, denounced the concept as a threat to “judges with courage to decide against the majority” and as a “strike at the very foundation of the government in which I live.”
Judicial recall’s enactment, he warned, would overturn “the last of the republic of our fathers…. We will pass from a constitutional democracy built by them to a pure democracy and all its dangers.”
Sound familiar?
In an interview, Kaus said, “It fits in with Arnold’s line that the Oui interview also was a lie to promote a film. In both cases, Schwarzenegger is treating his audience as a bunch of marks who he can con. One senses that maybe he approaches politics this way, as well…. The other, more revealing, thing is that he thought this sort of story about conning people was appealing.”
It’s a distinctly Hollywood contribution to contemporary politics. No more bothersome second thoughts or tiresome contrition. Confronted with the failings or indiscretions of the past, simply deny it ever happened; just say you lied and then get on with it.
That’s publishing and politics, Hollywood style. All that’s required is that you lose the capacity to blush.
Field’s findings regarding Schwarzenegger are interesting on two counts:
One is that the action film star and former bodybuilder is struggling to increase his base of support among those Californians pollsters deem likely to cast a ballot. (Campaigns that somehow energize people who have not previously voted regularly are the sort that give pollsters nasty shocks; Schwarzenegger partisans are hoping this, like the first gubernatorial contest between the late Tom Bradley and former Gov. George Deukmejian, is one of them.)
Second, this latest survey confirms the findings of the most recent Times Poll in reporting that Schwarzenegger has a significant problem with women voters, who make up 50% of California’s total electorate and 52% of its likely voters. The Times Poll found that fully 50% of the women inclined to vote hold an unfavorable impression of Schwarzenegger, while 41% see him in a positive light. Field reports that Bustamante now leads his chief Republican opponent by 13 points among likely women voters.
There are few rules in life that admit no exceptions. Here is one: The pursuit of identity politics ends in an intellectual swamp that inevitably drains into a moral sewer.
That’s why Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante is wrong not to speak more clearly to the issues raised by his one-time membership in a Chicano student organization whose founding credo is a mind-numbing amalgam of quaint revolutionary rhetoric and pseudo-mystical racialism. It’s also why the mainstream media’s off-handed treatment of this issue is one of the avoidable shortcomings in their coverage of the recall campaign.
David Shaw:
Nothing seemed to stain his image or stem his advance. Instead of being hurt because his experience was in movies, not politics, he was helped by it. His on-screen persona made him so familiar that some newscasters even called him “Arnold” in their on-air stories, thus playing directly into his campaign effort to depict himself as a regular guy, the nonpolitician, the overgrown boy next door.
By its very existence, early media coverage legitimized Schwarzenegger’s candidacy and, over time, made him seem a likely winner. People like to side with a winner – especially against a loser like Davis. It makes them feel smart. So voter sentiment began to show a shift in his favor. That turned the polls around, and ultimately, it all became self-perpetuating – and self-fulfilling.
To be fair, the recall is something of a farce, and many of the candidates are worth a guffaw or two. I mean, when was the last time a candidate for the governorship of anything used the slogan “Finally, a governor you can get drunk with”?
Even California news organizations – The Times among them – have been unable to resist pointing out, in various ways, that this campaign more closely resembles the theater of the absurd than an election for the leader of the world’s sixth-largest economy.
Fortunately, even in a time of growing media consolidation, there is still enough variety in our news sources that a diligent citizen can get different images from different venues and, with some effort, gather enough information to triangulate and approximate what a public figure might really be like.
It’s difficult work, especially in politics, entertainment and professional sports, where the images of public figures are so tightly controlled by highly skilled, highly paid spinmeisters. But it’s both possible and necessary.
If you do seek information from several sources – and ignore rumor and gossip – you should be able to decide what you think Schwarzenegger is really like, how much his sexist behavior reflects his true character, and whether you want him for your governor.
At a time when the national news media are enjoying an enormous collective laugh at California’s expense, both suggestions are likely to be difficult to follow. With a Terminator, a HuffenPuffington, a pornographer and a self-described “ageless” billboard model among the 85,000 candidates for governor, the opportunities for online digression and vilification may be irresistible.
George Skelton:
Arnold Schwarzenegger won a historic election with ease. Now he has a historic opportunity – because of a rebellious public and a charismatic personality – to bring landmark change to California.
That will be much tougher than getting elected to replace a despised governor, especially when his principal rival was a weak-running lieutenant governor falsely linked, in voters’ minds, to the guy being bounced. (Gov. Gray Davis and Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante probably didn’t have five minutes’ total conversation in five years.)
But making big change won’t be as tough as pundits are predicting, if Schwarzenegger takes the right steps.
Sacramento–The campaign trail isn’t what it used to be. Especially a trail trod by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
It used to be – a few governors ago – that political reporters and campaign advisors would spar over issues. Like taxes, spending, education, the environment.
Just what does candidate Schwarzenegger mean by his promise to freeze spending? To restructure debt?
There’s no such sparring these days, not in a recall revolt that’s not only historic but often histrionic and hysteric.
Especially not with this substance-light front-runner.
Davis’ strategists are seasoned pros and they’re realists. Privately, they acknowledge the governor is on political life support. His chances of surviving the recall are very slim.
All these major polls continue to deliver bad news for Davis. Each brand is different, with its own polling method. Yet, all have one thing in common. For months, none has shown support for the recall dipping below 50% of likely voters. In fact, considering the margins of error, nothing much has changed since early summer. The polls, on average, have been showing recall support in the mid-50s and opposition in the low 40s.
If nothing has changed in months, why would it in the next week?
Huffington, 53, may be annoying, but she’s articulate.
Most important, she’s articulating and accentuating an issue most candidates don’t dare touch: the corrupting influence of California’s political contribution system and the need for public financing of campaigns.
Viewers and party partisans may wince when she accuses another candidate – Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, for example – of “legalized bribery” for accepting barrels of money from special interests, like Indian casinos. But that’s the most honest, cut-the-baloney description of it.
You’ve got to be very naive not to recognize the relationship between special interest donations and a governor’s bill signings and political appointments, or a legislator’s votes.
Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, the leading contenders, walking right into some nasty exchanges with independent Arianna Huffington that they had no hope of winning.
Sure, Huffington goaded them, but so what? We teach our kids to avoid such fights.
Schwarzenegger acted like a blunderbuss and looked like a bully, interrupting Huffington in a collision of booming and shrill European accents that was hard on the ears.
Sacramento is a fiscal basket case and there are plenty of people at fault. Gov. Gray Davis and the Legislature certainly share the blame – and so do California voters.
Yes, we should all take a long look in the mirror.
We’ve stripped the governor and – especially – the Legislature of the power they need to govern, tying their hands.
Sacramento–Look, I’m no lawyer, let alone a constitutional scholar. But you don’t need a JD degree to recognize simple errors of fact in that court opinion ordering a delay in the recall election.
Little errors, to be sure. But it’s annoying when a three-judge panel of a U.S. court of appeals produces a piece of work that, in some places, is just plain sloppy.
Granted, the mistakes undoubtedly are irrelevant to the court’s conclusion: that the recall election scheduled for Oct. 7 should be delayed – most likely until the March 2 primary – because some people using faulty old punch-card voting machines could be denied their equal protection rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
The California Republican Party is missing something. At least, I couldn’t find it at the GOP’s state convention last weekend in L.A. Neither could others I talked to.
Missing was the roar of social conservatives, the right-wing zealots who fight abortion, gay rights and gun control – and get their heads handed to them by Democrats in general elections.
I listened to Saturday’s speeches and didn’t hear the words “abortion” and “pro-life” once. Nor “guns” and “2nd Amendment.” Nor “homosexuals” and “traditional marriage.”
There is a familiarity to this movie. I keep thinking I’ve seen it before.
Actor runs for governor. Star-struck crowds get excited.
Rivals claim the actor’s a political amateur, totally devoid of government experience. Moreover, he speaks – or script-reads – in generalities; he doesn’t offer specifics.
Toward the end, opponents think – wishfully – that voters will come to their senses, be leery of the unknown and retain the status quo. Choose the devil they know. Back then it was Gov. Pat Brown. Today it’s Gov. Gray Davis.
Naw.
Proposition 54 is seen differently by different folks. Backers behold it as another death blow to racial preferences.
Democratic pros, although opposing the measure, welcome it as a tool to prod the party faithful into voting in the recall and saving Gov. Gray Davis.
Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante is treating it like a casino jackpot. He’s using it to launder Indian gambling donations – too large to legally handle in his gubernatorial campaign – into anti-54 TV ads intended to energize Latino voters and elect him.
Steve Lopez:
What in the world are we up to now? the rest of the country always wants to know. We sneeze, and they wonder if it’s contagious.
Now we’ve really done it.
We fired Gov. Gray Davis and replaced him with an action hero who doesn’t know a parcel tax from a pig in a poke, and we’re already being treated to jokes like this one: Arnold’s first health care proposal? Free breast exams.
“You tell the locals to pass parcel taxes in order to keep the library open,” Cain says. “The problem is we’re talking about police and fire services too, so this is going to be a dangerous game.”
I’m not buying any such rabble. I refuse to believe the new guv would have led us down this path if he didn’t have answers.
C’mon, Arnold. The cigars are trimmed, the beer is cold and the car is running.
Don’t let me down.
I thought there was supposed to be a stampede from Chico to Chula Vista – crazy populists running through the streets in a rage over an increase in car license fees.
After enduring Darrell Issa and Mary Carey, a Taco Bell poll, a seven-page ballot of candidates, several debates starring Arianna Huffington, 5,500 “I’ll Be Backs,” 7,000 “Hasta la Vistas,” and cameos by Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Rob Lowe, Dennis Miller, Oprah, Larry King and Jay Leno, was 60% too much to ask?
Actually, maybe it was all those things that made people sit this one out.
Perfect. A campaign that began with the late-night comedian may be notarized by him. And so we’ve had our little revolution and the new emperor is Der Gropenfuhrer, which, in Austrian, means:
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I’ve now found three actresses who say they were not molested by gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Yes, I’m telling you this for a self-serving reason – I’m hoping to save my job by preventing more people from canceling their subscriptions because of all our stories about Arnold groping women.
But there’s more to it than that. On this election day, I’m doing it out of a sense of fairness.
On Tuesday it probably won’t matter that the economic bust, term limits that stack the Legislature with amateurs, and state initiatives that devour the budget have done as much as Davis to create California’s problems.
What will matter is that Schwarzenegger has promised 30 pieces of silver and a clear conscience, regardless of who gets hurt.
I’ve been harder on Schwarzenegger than Davis lately because the challenger hasn’t made the case for why he deserves the job, and I offer no apologies.
I offer no apologies for this newspaper, either, for publishing stories in which a growing parade of women claim to have been bullied, pawed and humiliated by him.
The purpose wasn’t to derail his campaign. The purpose was to tell readers what was learned in a two-month investigation about the character of a man who wants to serve as both governor and role model.
You don’t have to believe that, and you don’t have to buy the newspaper.
But read something, will you? The quality of this country’s conversation is sinking faster than Davis’s numbers, and I don’t think the problem is too much reading.
Arnold’s Army came to Arcadia Friday morning, and the scene was like nothing I can remember in recent political history.
As I tried to park, and realized that one lot after another was jammed, the teeming masses streamed by me on foot, marching, marching, marching, trance-like, as if to a revival.
Old folks, young folks, moms and dads pushing strollers. Arnold Schwarzenegger, great terminator of evildoers, was coming to the Los Angeles Arboretum to vanquish sorrow, discomfort and the car tax.
Reports of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sexual mistreatment and humiliation of women drew outrage here Thursday on the campaign trail.
Outrage at the Los Angeles Times, not at Arnold.
I would have thought that at a gathering of conservatives, who rightly vilified President Bill Clinton for his raunchy scandal and nationally televised lies, there’d at least be some finger-wagging at Arnold.
Not a chance with the Teflon Terminator.
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 like the idea that Condi Rice is the NSC advisor rather than an instructor at a segregated secretarial school, thank a liberal.
If you like the Internet, thank a liberal (DARPANet was created in no small part thanks to a government research grant).
If someone you know or love survived an auto accident recently, thank a liberal. (Seat belts, safety glass, crush zones, air bags – yes, I know that air bags and seat belts have killed some people, but all the stats I’ve seen are pretty suggestive that they have saved far more than they have killed – etc. etc.)
If you were able to own your own house without paying down 30% to get a 5-year mortgage, thank a liberal (30-year mortgages were a FDR innovation).
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.