Michael Hiltzik who for some reason has become the new voice of opinion in the business section of “my” L.A. Times launched on The Governator last week (sorry for the delay in blogging, I’ve been busy):

Gov. Shuns Most Obvious Fiscal Remedy

…

For someone who accumulates praise for his do-it-now demeanor the way a scow collects barnacles, the governor certainly does a lot of whining. In truth, his budget can have anything in it he wants. If any California governor in the last 20 years has had the chops to prevail over this “broken system,” it’s him.

Yet he insists, “This is all the money we have…. We must live within our means.”

The only thing limiting the amount of money the governor can spend is his doctrinaire refusal to acquire it from the most efficient and least costly source: the tax rolls. It’s obvious from his budget that he endorses in principle most of the spending programs the state undertakes — on schooling, road building, environmental protection anod so on — or he would have taken a sharper ax to them.

But he keeps running from his responsibility to inform the voters that the right way to pay for them is cash on the barrelhead. Instead, he argues that putting the bill on the charge card — more than $2 billion in new debt this year alone — is the more responsible path.

Nor is it accurate to say that a tax increase is a “liberal” solution. Govs. Pete Wilson and Ronald Reagan, facing deficits like today’s, temporarily raised the top tax rates on the state’s richest residents to 11%.

Perhaps Wilson, who advises the governor, wants to spare him the pain of being pilloried by the right wing, but that’s a meager rationale for fetishizing the current top tax rate of 9.3%. (My rough math says that raising the top rate to 10% on all incomes higher than $500,000 and 11% on those beyond $1 million would yield as much as $2.5 billion a year.)

…

You can reach Michael Hiltzik at golden.state@latimes.com and read his previous columns at latimes.com/hiltzik.

Why can’t Jill Stewart be writing this column? Oh – sorry, the Times would never hire her back. That’s their loss (and ours). Here’s Jill, on the very topic of Mr. Hiltzik’s ‘obvious’ solution:

Elizabeth Hill, the state legislative analyst, who strives not to side with Democrats or Republicans, pointedly explained that corporations comprise only a small part of the roughly $70 billion tax revenue–roughly $6 billion.

That was a shock to some Assembly members. Hill noted, again rather pointedly, that “the top 5 percent of Californians pay 42 percent of the income taxes” and that just 10 percent pay 80 percent of income taxes. Furthermore, large numbers of millionaires and those making $100,000 or more have vanished. Some went broke, but others left for states that don’t make them carry as big of a load, like tax-free (and booming) Nevada.

The packed audience at the special hearing appeared stunned. The message was clear: There aren’t enough corporations and rich around to pour huge new tax dollars into state coffers and save us.

Here’s Dan Weintraub (who also would be a damn site better as a columnist):

Nobody knows how those wealthy taxpayers would react to such an increase. If they stayed in California, and didn’t change their behavior, the state treasury and those who rely on it for services would be better off. And certainly a tax increase of a few thousand dollars on someone making a half-million a year would seem unlikely to drive them from the state.

But if the increase prompted just a few thousand of the wealthiest taxpayers to flee California, then the revenue decline it would cause could make the past year’s drop seem mild. The truth is you could put thousands of laborers to work at good wages and probably not compensate for the lost income tax from one departed millionaire.

Even if it worked as intended, raising taxes on the wealthy would push California out on a fiscal limb that everyone already knows is weak. Had the higher rates been law during the late 1990s, the revenue growth the state experienced would have been even greater. And the decline, when it came, would have been even steeper.

Going further in that direction would make the state’s masses even more reliant on the good fortune of a few than they are today. And as the last few years have shown, in the long term that can be a very risky proposition.

One major reason, many analysts agree, for the fiscal collapse of california is that tax collections collapsed faster than the economy did becase they were so dependent on high-wage earners – whose wages either collapsed in the dot-bomb era, or who took their liquidity and managed their ‘taxable’ exposure through deferred compensation or other strategems, or who simply moved to a lower-tax state.

I believe strongly in progressive taxation.

But I believe more in a tax policy that works, provides stable revenues to state and local governments, and is accompanied by some measure of fiscal prudence on the part of that goernment.

I outlined some notions of such a policy quite a while ago.

My party handed out millions of dollars as party favors in the 90’s, and the credit card bills are now coming due. My party ought to take the lead in finding a solution – one other than asking Dad for his Mastercard, so it can be charged up too.

A passing note in the L.A. Times Magazine today suggests that Google is about to build an architecturally significant headquarters complex.

Time to sell the stock…

(As an explanation, I’ve had a theory for a long time that the longevity of a business’ success maps pretty well to the inverse cube of the overstandard tenant improvements of the space it occupies.)

Over at Crooked Timber, Daniel Davies writes (somewhat incoherently) about ‘The Iraqi Resistance and the Noble Cause.’ I think he means to suggest, on one hand that

bq. “Whatever Christopher Hitchens thinks, they are the direct moral equivalent of the Viet Cong; they represent much of what is worst about the human condition, and any future in which they gained power would most likely be outright disastrous, but for all that, to take up arms against an occupying foreign army is not an ignoble thing to do, and I can quite understand why lots of people on the left have been sympathetic to them.”

…and on the other that:

bq. “Iraq is not Vietnam (or more specifically, Iran is not China) and they have no hope of victory. All they can really do is prolong the occupation and therefore the misery.”

But then he moves directly to this:bq. “The time has well past by which anyone with brains in their head could reasonably hope for anything other than swift and reasonably democratic elections, a declaration of victory and for the coalition troops to jump in the tanks, start the engines and stop driving when they see the first McDonalds.”

So what the heck?

I don’t for a moment doubt that on February 1, there will be a long queue of Democrats queued up in front of the television cameras explaining that “we can bring the troops home now,” and that they will even be joined by some Republicans.

In January 2003, I said that I would support the Iraq war if several conditions were met – one of which was:

We’re in this for the long haul. We don’t get to ‘declare victory and go home’ when the going gets tough, elections are near, or TV shows pictures of the inevitable suffering that war causes. The Marshall Plan is a bad example, because the Europe that had been devastated by war had the commercial and entrepreneurial culture that simply needed stuff and money to get restarted. And we’re good with stuff and money. This is going to take more, and we’re going to have to be willing to figure it out as we go.

There are no good examples of this that I can think of in history. The postwar reconstruction of Japan comes the closest, and it’s not necessarily a good example, because the Japanese by WWII were a coherent, unified, hierarchical society that could be changed by fiat from the top. The Robert Kaplan-esque world we’re moving toward isn’t.

I supported Bush because I believed that he wouldn’t be inclined to ‘declare victory and go home,’ and so far haven’t seen anything to suggest that he’s changing his mind. The appointment of Rice as SoS, and her effort to bring like-minded staff into the core of the foreign policy apparatus is a key piece of evidence in this regard.

But I’m still watching, and to David and the others who think the troops should head for a Mickey D’s as soon as the Iraqi votes are counted, my response is simple … hell no.

Not only would such an act be deeply immoral in any world in which one doesn’t see murderous thugs as a ‘legitimate voice of national resistance,’ it would abandon the Arab world to more decades of brutal, kleptocratic dictatorship – wrapped in either the nationalist or pan-Islamist flag – and would expose Europe and the United States to a rising wave of violent, militant Islamist action.

We’ll be done when we’re finished, and we’ll be finished when we’ve won. It’s that simple.

I’ve been noodling with the issues around the ‘cocooning’ effect of mainstream media and the impact of blogs – and conversely, the ease with which blogs could become a new layer in that cocoon.

My thinking hasn’t gelled yet, but I’ll toss out three blog posts for your consideration.

Over at MyDD, Jerome Armstrong starts listing the ‘perks’ mainstream commentators are getting – speaking fees, sinecures, etc.

Over at Zonkette, Zephyr Teachout comments on the notion of buying blog mindshare by hiring bloggers, and notes that the Dean campaign did just that.

On my own post on ‘astroturf’ blogging, I’m still trying to gather cases where bloggers have become financially or professionally tied to partisan organizations. Clearly blogging is a recruiting tool – smart bloggers have the opportunity to move into advocacy or policy roles, and the visibility their blogs gives them may help that happen. But it also opens the door to a (relatively inexpensive) way to buy buzz and mindshare.

I’m not pointing this out to target Kos or Jerome (both of whom were on the Dean payroll, according to Teachout, in some part because of their blogfluence). I do want to kick open a discussion of the impact of the web of influence on each of us, and the ways that web extends itself to pull in voices that otherwise might challenge it.

I’m interested in all your comments and thinking as I try and work my way toward a conclusion on this.

And here’s a – literally – dissertation on Islamist terrorists in Europe [pdf], courtesy of ‘Secular Blasphemy‘ – it’s work sponsored by Petter Nesser at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment.

The dissertation, however, lays out the sociology and ideology of the part-Westernized Islamists in frightening detail. While this is much more Dan’s territory, I’m going to be reading and digesting this for a while.

The four conspiracies analyzed below involve transnational contacts and cooperation between Islamist radicals in several European countries and also between Europe-based Islamists and local Islamist insurgents in the Middle East, North Africa and Chechnya. The militants have traveled extensively both inside and outside Europe. Some of the conspiracies seem to have been initiated outside Europe, but planned, financed and prepared in several European countries. The first case, the “Strasbourg plot” was, for example, planned and financed from the U.K., prepared in Germany, and the attack was going to be launched in France.

The cases show the relevance of combining “levels of analysis” when studying Islamist terrorism in Europe. The militants originated from the Middle East and North Africa, they were situated in the European diaspora prior to their arrests, and the vast majority of them had been influenced by “global mujahidin” when training in Afghanistan. The militants’ actions and statements strongly suggest that they have been influenced by the Salafi-Jihadi doctrine. There is available information on the backgrounds and organizational affiliations of the militants, the nationality and type of target they selected for terrorist attacks, and their justifications and excuses for taking part in terrorism inside Europe.

The sources gathered for this report suggest the extremist milieu in Europe is relatively small and the most fanatic and violent Islamists probably can be counted as hundreds, rather than thousands.The case-studies show that there have been multiple links and contacts between militants involved in the different conspiracies. Although the Europe-based Islamist radicals surveyed here belong to movements that in theory emphasize the “local jihad” more than the “global jihad” or the vice-versa, it is important to note that despite differences in their emphasis, the movements’ ideologies are largely compatible. In training camps run by al-Qaida and like-minded groups in Afghanistan, personal relationships were established between members of different movements. These personal contacts seem to have lived on in Europe, in the sense that Islamists belonging to different movements supported each other on an operational level. For example, Islamists perceived as mainly committed to the “local jihad” have supported operations against targets typically associated with the “global mujahidin”.

From a ‘Adventures of Chester’ a conservative ex-Marine, who doesn’t appear to have a larger axe to grind.

This still leaves the question unanswered as to who is right bout Iraq, Rummy or the generals? We believe both. In fact, the most cogent part of Friedman’s analysis above is that Rumsfeld has misjudged the pace of “transformation.”

What do we think of transformation? Well . . . that is a big question. Assuming that you mean Rummy’s version of it (there are several versions, many contradictory), we agree with him that information technology can make the armed forces dramatically better at killing people and destroying things on the battlefield, and that this will mean a smaller, lighter, faster force can do much the same as the larger forces of yesterday.

But at the same time, we can’t help but think that we mustn’t think that war will become a standoff, sterile activity, conducted by computers, robots, and UAVs. Man makes war and man will always have an integral role to play not only in its conception, but in its execution as well.

He doesn’t serve us a conclusion yet, but he sets an interesting table.

I’ll be watching to see what he says next, and you should, too.

OK, here’s another fun blog game from Mixolydian Mode via normblog; take the list of books, and look in your shelf for the authors.

If you’ve got them on the shelf, leave them. If you don’t, insert an author you do have and bold it.Sadly, I seem to have very little overlap with Norm; he’s a professor and British, while I’m a random guy and a Californian…sigh.

For the new books, I decided to pick from the lefthand stack of shelves in the dining room, just to limit the amount of walking around and looking I’d have to do.

1. Evelyn Waugh
2. Vladimir Nabokov
3. Robert Stone
4. Joyce Carol Oates
5. Richard Yates
6. Tim Powers
7. Flannery O’Connor
8. Larry Brown
9. Fyodor Dostoevsky
10. William Shakespeare

> Same game, new list. This one’s non-fiction:

1. Atul Gawande
2. Max Horkheimer
3. I.F. Stone
4. Kevin Phillips
5. Primo Levi
6. Lewis Minkin
7. Julian Jaynes
8. Ferdinand Hayek
9. Thomas Merton
10. H.L.A. Hart

For much of my life as a teen and an adult, I’ve been involved in risky things.

I walked steel while my father built highrises; I’ve sailed offshore, climbed rock and mountains, raced cars and bicycles (the most dangerous!) and motorcycles. I like doing those things and the people who do those things, in no small part because they have very little bullshit in them.

If you lie to yourself about where you are and what you’re doing while sailing a small boat from San Francisco to Los Angeles, you are in a world of trouble. If you lie to yourself while setting protection on a rock face a thousand feet above the ground, you’re going to die.

I don’t like a lot of what the Republican party has to offer; that’s OK, I think we need a national dialog to make good policies. It takes two.

But given that, it may be puzzling to some (hey, JC, how’ re you?) why it is that I bash the media for their blind partisanship toward establishment liberalism, instead of cheering them as an ally.It’s because I find myself in a risky place surrounded by people who have lost the ability to tell bullshit from reality. Our party is wounded, leaking ideologically and demographically, and we sit here drinking quack nostrums made from apricot pits and listening to fake spirit mediums tell us everything will be OK because our dead ancestors FDR, JFK, and LBJ are looking over us.

They’re not.

Instead we get incredible nonsense like this defiant screed from Mary Mapes, victim:

Much has been made about the fact that these documents are photocopies and therefore cannot be trusted, but decades of investigative reporting have relied on just such copies of memos, documents and notes. In vetting these documents, we did not have ink to analyze, original signatures to compare, or paper to date. We did have context and corroboration and believed, as many journalists have before and after our story, that authenticity is not limited to original documents. Photocopies are often a basis for verified stories.

Read the whole unbelievable thing. The go read Appendix 4 of the CBS report itself, which concludes:

Tytell concluded, for the reasons described below, that (i) the relevant portion of the Superscript Exemplar was produced on an Olympia manual typewriter, (ii) the Killian documents were not produced on an Olympia manual typewriter, and (iii) the Killian documents were produced on a computer in Times New Roman typestyle . Tytell acknowledged that deterioration in the Killian documents from the copying and downloading process made the comparison of typestyles “to some extent a subjective call.” However, he believed the differences were sufficiently significant to conclude that the Killian documents were not produced on a typewriter in the early 1970s and therefore were not authentic.

Now I will leave to others the question of why this conclusion which seems both pretty obvious and well-proven were glossed over in the report itself; there is no other typographic analysis of the documents, as far as I can tell.

Both mainstream Democratic liberalism and free American journalism have been incredibly valuable to our country and to the world.

But when their leadership gets cocooned in – bullshit, there’s no other word for it – what they do is disastrous on two fronts.

First, we can’t decide on good actions because we have no idea what reality looks like.

Second, we won’t get elected because the voters don’t believe we’re connected to any reality that they recognize or that we can prove.

Both are bad for the Democratic Party, bad for journalism, and bad for the country. Are only the Democrats like this? Of course not. But right now, we’re the party stuck in the mud and sinking.

So I’m happy to stand here and swing away at what I see at the absolutely catastrophic detachment from reality. I wouldn’t risk my life by climbing with people who were like that, and neither would you.

The L.A. Times today has a recounting of the death of Lana Clarkson, who was shot in Phil Spector’s home here in L.A., quite possibly by Spector in a drunken fit of sexual frustration. It’s quite a read; the product of multiple reporters, it reads in part like a detective novel:

An hour before sunrise at the end of a very long night, Officer Michael Page was struggling to pin Phil Spector as the famed music producer wrestled with Alhambra police in the foyer of his hilltop mansion.

Page pressed his knee into Spector’s back and held down his arms. The officer had discarded his Taser after two shots from the stun gun failed to drop Spector, and now Page’s submachine gun was slipping off his back. Another officer grabbed the weapon before it fell within Spector’s reach.

Page turned to make sure his Taser wasn’t lying close by, and that’s when he saw the woman in the chair.

She was blond, tall, freckled. She slumped, half in, half out of the seat, her long legs extended in front of her. Her head lolled to the left, and a great deal of blood had flowed from her face down to her chest.

In the struggle, she had escaped Page’s notice. But on first sight the officer knew she was dead.

It was a depressing read for me; a recounting of two sad people, one blessed with success in the world and one not.

Biggest Guy is in town for a week, and I’m home, and so we’ve been sitting and talking a fair amount. I realized this morning that my whole objective as a parent is to keep my children from becoming either Phil Spector or Lana Clarkson, each victims in a way of their belief that a hit movie or record, a Mercedes, and a big house will make you whole or happy.

Reading about Spector, I was reminded so much of Harlan Ellison’s great book ‘Spider Kiss‘; I know it’s about Elvis, but in truth it’s about our worship of the “bitch goddess success,” and the lives we throw away at her feet.

From the CBS report:

The Panel does not find a basis to accuse those who investigated, produced, vetted or aired the Segment of having a political bias. The Panel does note, however, that on such a politically charged story, coming in the midst of a presidential campaign in which military service records had become an issue, there was a need for meticulous care to avoid any suggestion of an agenda at work. The Panel does not believe that the appropriate level of care to avoid the appearance of political motivation was used in connection with this story.

and this, an August 31 email from to Ms. Mapes from Michael Smith, a producer working with her:

Today I am going to send the following hypothetical scenario to a reliable, trustable editor friend of mine…

What if there was a person who might have some information that could possibly change the momentum of an election but we needed to get an ASAP book deal to help get us the information? What kinds of turnaround payment schedules are possible, keeping in mind that the book probably could not make it out until after the election.

(emphasis added)

Now just who the hell do they think they are kidding?

[Update:Note the correction – the email was to Mapes from her assistant, not from her.]