Real world life is kind of making me feel like Laocoon – I’m commuting to NYC, working on a major project, dealing with some fairly intense (but positive) family stuff, and trying to get caught up so I can formally launch Victory PAC. I feel kind of like King Humperdink…

So posting will be scarce until July and even though there is a lot for me to defend in comments, my ability to weigh in is going to be pretty constrained. So don’t get cocky, chris!!

I’ll leave you by inviting you to a thread on this one question. By any right, the upcoming Presidential election ought to be a Democratic blowout. The polls today aren’t leaning in that direction.

Will it be a blowout? If so why don’t the polls show it now? If not, why not?

If I get some breathing space, I’ll call a drinks event in NYC. There are a lot of bloggers and folks I’d love to meet here.

I’ll have to confess that I’m gobsmacked by the reaction to my piece below on the LA Times story on North Korea. People seem to think that it’s just no big deal.

I commented:

Why? Because to have walked through Belsen in 1944 and noted the concerts, the “children happily singing” or the “carefully tended gardens” with giving a side note to the unmitigated evil of the place may in fact be technically accurate reporting – possibly the weren’t burning people that day – but is, as I put it, vile.

And the willingness to cover one’s nose to hide the stench of the dead while commenting on the charm of a Starbucks-free existence seems, sadly all to common in the world of the modern tourist.

I find my sense of smell a little to sensitive to make that work for me.

And before you suggest that Guantanamo or Abu Ghreib are as bad as North Korea – no they’re not. We put people in jail when they are caught doing things like that. In North Korea, they get extra rations.

A.L.

Look, let me put it another way that might make things clearer.

This is a music program for September 1943 at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

It’s an impressive collection of music.

Can you, for a moment, imagine the LA Times music critic attending a concert there, coming back,and talking about the music as though he was watching a concert at Lincoln Center?

Sadly, I can imagine it, because I see people doing it.

Yes, it’s all karaoke and an amazingly commerce-free tourist experience in North Korea.

The LA Times – which was last caught fellating the brutal fascist dictatorship of North Korea in March of 2005 – hits its knees again today.

Pyongyang, North Korea — THERE’S not a lot to do when you’re a closely watched visitor in North Korea except hit the karaoke at day’s end, so we’re at it again.

From the sound of it, most North Korean karaoke falls into two categories. Soupy ballads about national glory, superior leadership, glorious workers. And hard-driving martial tunes urging citizens to think as one and pick up a bayonet. Rounding out the experience are video clips of goose-stepping soldiers and ozone-piercing missiles.

…

“It’s amazing to see streets without any commerce in Asia,” says Peter Tasker, a Tokyo-based private investor on the magical mystery tour. “It’s not always what you see that’s striking, but what you don’t see.”

The throwback nature of the entire experience is part of the attraction for many visitors. In a world of look-alike malls and identical Starbucks from Rome to Redondo Beach, there’s a refreshing lack of sameness about it, if you don’t stop to think about the suffering, hunger and deprivation underpinning the system.

One noticeable change from a visit in 2005 is the government’s apparent effort to skim more hard currency from foreign tourists. Most museums and monuments now offer souvenir shops, and a foreigners-only department store in Pyongyang has been expanded.

The problem is, there’s still hardly anything worth buying. A typical stand might feature books on the teachings of Kim Il Sung, some green and pink embroidery of dancing children, bottles of the local firewater known as soju, cans of peas and boxes of hemorrhage restorative herbal medicine. At one point while buying some apples, I try bargaining – de rigueur in most of Asia – to gauge the reaction, an affront that draws looks of shock and embarrassment.

[emphasis added]

Look that side reference to suffering, etc. – that’s called ‘throat-clearing’.

What’s amazing about North Korea is that you can get a vacation from the ‘world of look-alike malls and identical Starbucks from Rome to Redondo Beach‘ and enjoy the ‘refreshing lack of sameness about it‘

And the good news is that if you share the local’s diet, you’ll lose that unsightly tummy as well…

I’m dying to know what the editorial thought process behind these two articles really was. Maybe I’ll ping Kevin Roderick and ask.

Over the next few days, I’m going to point out some quotes from Nick Cohen’s book subtitled ‘How Liberals Lost Their Way‘, and then add some comments of my own. It’s a book that truly infuriated me as no book has in the last year. Why?

Because it’s one of the few books I’ve ever read that I genuinely wished I’d written. Edward Tufte’s books are there as well, but that may have to do with the fact that he can come to Los Angeles, give three canned five hour lectures, and walk away with a million dollars…

Seriously…it’s an excellent book about a subject that’s near and dear to me. Where the hell has my Left gone?? If you read this site, you ought to get the book. If you read this site and are nodding in agreement, get it and give it away as a gift. If you read this site and are pissed off at me all the time for not toeing the progressive line, buy the book, or send me your name and address and maybe I’ll even buy it for you.

Here’s a long quote that sums up the crux of the problem as he sees it…and so do I (from p 203).

..The previous thirty years had seen an estrangement between the classes. If the murderous fantasies of Shaw had vanished, the snobbery of Virginia Woolf was flourishing albeit in a more politically acceptable manner.

With the old factories gone, it became fashionable to talk as if the working class didn’t exist, even though millions lived in humble circumstances with nothing to sell but their labor. A priceless leader in the left-wing New Statesman, which had once seen the working class as history’s vanguard, announced in 2004:

Socially and culturally, most Britons feel more European than ever, being more likely to spend a weekend in Perpignon than in Harrowgate. Many could name the best restaurants in Barcelona and the best clubs in Rome [and] recommend truffle suppliers in rural France.

My colleagues on the New Statesman could indeed advise you on where to stay in rural France, and I may be able to answer your questions about the truffle market if you let me make a few calls, but I’m not sure those who continued to work in menial jobs after the collapse of heavy industry would be as helpful.

Other commentators accepted that the working class lived on, but were obsessed by identity politics and patronized the living daylights out of those who didn’t fit in. They failed to see that while it was commendable and essential to fight racism, sexism, and homophobia, taking account of diverse identities could strengthen the pecking order if they forgot about class.

…

Spotting trends and selling them was turning into a big business in post-industrial societies. But each new wave carried high culture further away from the working class. Rose quoted the opinions of young working-class men of theaters and art house cinemas. ‘Theater goers? Someone well off,’ said one. ‘It’s a class thing.’ Then he searched the Modern language Association of America’s international database of academic books published between 1991 and 2000. He got 13,820 hits for ‘women’, 4,539 for ‘gender’, 1,826 for ‘race’, 710 for ‘post-colonial’, and a piddling 136 for ‘working class.’ He tried the list of periodicals and couldn’t find one academic journal anywhere in the world devoted to proletarian literature, and concluded:

In Tony Blair’s Britain as in many other Western nations, professionals in the creative industries have successfully reconciled bourgeois and Bohemian values. Affluent and ambitious, profit-motivated and style-conscious, they are sincerely committed to women’s equality and genuinely interested in the literature, music, art and cuisines of non-Western peoples. But the boutique economy they have constructed involves a process of class formation where the accoutrements of the avant-garde are used to distance and distinguish cultural workers from more traditional manual workers.

From the theorists in the universities to the pundits in Canary Wharf, the intellectuals weren’t interested in the working class and the working class wasn’t interested in the intellectuals.

You could not have found a more lethal way to kill left-wing politics if you had tried.

Amen.

I have talked about ‘Skybox Liberalism‘ and pointed to articles about Bourgeoisophobia. It’s all the same process in which the intellectual workers manage to convince themselves that they are somehow above and apart from their grimy-fingered parents.

In so doing they sell themselves and their parents down the river.

I’ve asked in the past – in the last decade, what, exactly, has the Democratic Party done for a single mother in Los Angeles making $35,000/year or a working couple with kids making $50,000??

In either case they can barely afford housing, send their kids to mediocre schools, and are two or three lost paychecks or a serious illness from homelessness.

The Democratic Party neither appeals to their interests nor in many cases to their values – since the values that matter to the modern Democrats are all too often those of the folks snacking on exotic appetizers in the skyboxes.

Next, I’ll discuss his dissection of the antiwar Left – anti-World War II that is.

For more information, go to the Dwight D. Eisenhower site.

It is immensely frustrating to me to read about serious, controversial policy issues (like, say Iraq) that take one policy, dissect the problems with it and the sometimes stupid, incompetent, and venal behind it – and neglect to look at the problems with the alternatives and the sometimes stupid, incompetent and venal people who support them.

In the LA Weekly last week, reporter David Zanheiser has three well-researched, intelligent, and deeply incomplete articles about growth in Los Angeles – “What’s Smart About Smart Growth“, “Peddling Smart Growth“, and “Do As We Say, Not As We Do“.

Go over and read them to get a sense of the murky world of land-use politics in Los Angeles. Which are actually far worse than he sets out…the ‘iron ricebowl’ that local land-use provides in many cities where developers, homeowner groups, lobbyists and politicians all rely on a system that does very little real planning.Then stop and think for a moment. I don’t have the time to do a post that really does justice to the gaping holes in Zanheiser’s article, but let me do a quick introduction.

We live in a city and region that is growing in population (as most coastal cities really are). Growth in cities is usually a good thing, because the option tends to be collapse a la Detroit rather than the kind of benign stability I think everyone hoped for. If the population grows, you’ve got four axes on which you can grow – you can increase the density within the housing you have (doubling up, multigenerational families), you can increase the density of housing (building up), you can increase the size of the community field (building out), or you can try and throttle back on growth by allowing none of the above.

Each of those alternatives has costs and problems.

Most of these policies have been tried in different places, so we have experience we can look to.

Santa Barbara and Santa Barbara County have done a lot to throttle growth, using water connections as a limiting factor. They’ve done this for close to 30 years, and as a result housing prices in Santa Barbara are among the highest in the nation – and they also have terrible traffic problems, as the people who work in Santa Barbara and increasingly can’t afford to live there commute further and further to get there.

I’m not suggesting that more density is in fact the best policy in Los Angeles (although I do think that it’s inevitable and that if managed well need not destroy the city). I am stating that Zanheiser did half a job by failing to put the policy into a framework of policy alternatives, their histories, and their impacts, and that it’s frustrating to see him fall into the easy narative of developers, greed, and craven politicians.

Cities face hard decisions; Los Angeles more than most, I believe. We’d be really well served with a local press that could understand, explain, and follow planning issues better than the one we have…I’m hoping this article is a step on that path. Let’s see what the next few look like. C’mon Jill…

The News Blog is very much a kind of Bizzaro Winds of Change; it’s a progressive, antiwar site with an eye toward serious military knowledge. While we disagreed deeply on many many issues, it was a place where I went to see what smart antiwar people who weren’t clueless about war had to say.

This weekend, Steve Gilliard, the founder of The News Blog died. He’d been profoundly ill for some time, and it was sad to go over and see what his co-bloggers were saying as his condition deteriorated.

We seldom agreed, never spoke or even emailed, but my world is smaller because he’s gone.

South High is about a mile from my house.

My sons graduated from there, and Middle Guy graduated in 2005.

He wasn’t friends with Joseph Anzak, Jr. who was captured two weeks ago and was then killed in Iraq. He played football at South while Middle Guy debated. But Anzak’s parents were at PTA meetings with us, went to the same Starbucks, shopped at Ralphs with us.

Please never doubt for a second that I see the the real costs of our policies; I can only ask that people who disagree with our policies be as aware of the costs of the alternatives.

So in case anyone wondered how I spent my weekend…

And on Highway 33 at sunset:

I had no laptop, so no Memorial Day post on the day itself. Tonight…

Sorry for the lull – work is crazy busy and I went on our annual Memorial Day motorcycle trip on the new bike.

I’m almost done with Nick Cohen’s ‘What’s Left’ and loving it – he’s talking about Bad Philosophy and Dirty Hands like he’s been reading me. I wish it was a little less polemical, but will have a lot to say about the book if I can get a few hours to put something together.

But what prompted me to write and use the Stealers Wheel lyric as a title were two newsblips – Newsweek’s trumpeting that Valerie Plame was, in fact ‘covert’, and the Washington Times stirring the pot on Annie Jacobsen’s instabook charges that Northwest Flight 327 was a terrorist dry run.

Boy, I’m just shaking my head over both of these.First, let’s go to the left side of the board.

Glenn Greenwald (writing as himself) trumpets this on Salon: Right-wing noise machine: Plame not covert. Well, great – except that it’s prosecutor Fitzgerald’s filing that makes the claim. Now there’s an obvious joke about leftists, Stalin, and show trials, but personally, I’m unhappy with the thought that Greenwald might grant someone – say, Patterico – the right to make claims like these and suddenly enshrine them as fact. When the legal process concludes that she was covert, I’ll happily accept that determination – and even apologize to whichever of Greenwald’s personae he deems appropriate.

Now, the right.

In the Washington Times, Audrey Hudson comments on the release of a federal report on how the Flight 327 incident was handled and leaps directly to the Isle of Conclusion:

The inspector general for Homeland Security late Friday released new details of what federal air marshals say was a terrorist dry run aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles on June 29, 2004.

Several portions of the report remain redacted. The release stems from a Freedom of Information request by The Washington Times in April 2006. The Times first reported on July 22 that this and other probes and dry runs were occurring on commercial flights since the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Let’s be clear. Nothing in the report (pdf available here) makes that conclusion. I’ll repeat. Nowhere that I could find it in the real report was it so concluded.

Hudson cites current and former air marshals:

“This report is evidence of Homeland Security executives attempting to downplay and cover up an unmistakable dry run that forced flight attendants to reveal the air marshals and compel the pilots to open the flight deck door,” said Robert MacLean, a former air marshal who was fired last year for revealing that the service planned to cut back on protection for long-distance flights to save money.

Look, I think our air marshall program is inadequate. I know that the agencies running them are bureaucracies full of careerist trolls.

But none of this is remotely dispositive. Patterico thinks that the marshalls onsite – the ones who said “We Don’t Freak Out In Situations Like This.” – are in CYA mode. C’mon Patrick – that’s silly. They made contemporaneous comments to that effect. They controlled the situation. And to bring up what they said at the time:

LOS ANGELES | July 22, 2004 – Undercover federal air marshals on board a June 29 Northwest airlines flight from Detroit to LAX identified themselves after a passenger, “overreacted,” to a group of middle-eastern men on board, federal officials and sources have told KFI NEWS.

The passenger, later identified as Annie Jacobsen, was in danger of panicking other passengers and creating a larger problem on the plane, according to a source close to the secretive federal protective service. (hat tip Patterico)

I’ve written a bunch about this, and nothing here (in the current blog posts, news articles, or in the report itself) changes my view of what probably happened or of the relatively useless morass airport security has become.

XLRQ cites the report:

Other Comments
TSA noted in comments that it disagreed with our report language that there was a lack of coordinated action between the FAMS and FBI. Our audit identified examples where the Department’s investigators were interviewing individuals and taking other investigative actions without the direction or knowledge of the FBI. Because we also found activities where the FBI and the Department were clearly coordinated, we revised the report language to say the investigations were “sometimes” uncoordinated.

TSA also commented that it believed a referral of the suspicious activity that occurred on Flight 327 did not merit referral to the HSOC. TSA’s comments note, “The decision not to contact the HSOC was decided only after the FAMS and FBI leadership jointly determined that the subjects could be cleared. The reported suspicious activity was determined to be unfounded, and not a terrorist threat and therefore did not merit an HSOC referral.” We believe the HSOC clearly signaled a referral was merited by logging the Flight 327 matter into its database on July 26, 2004, following a July 22, 2005 Washington Times article, and an inquiry from the White House Homeland Security Council.

So the air marshals onsite are in CYA mode – but the bureaucrats in Washington aren’t?