fraxinus

The Trinity toll road vote

2007-10-25T21:24:00.001-05:00

Attention, you Fraxinus-reading hordes who are (a) still checking in on this thing after more than a year of silence; and (b) Dallas voters: this Trinity toll road vote coming up is important. Fraxinus heartily recommends you vote yes on November 6 or during early voting, which runs through November 2.

(Early voting locations; polling places for the main election on Nov. 6)

In case you haven't been following the debate, a "yes" vote means that you support holding any road built in the Trinity floodway to four lanes and a 35 mph speed limit. A no vote, on the other hand, means you're okay with a six-lane high-speed tollway in between our flood protection levees, cutting through the park that is supposed to become a great civic asset and bring north and south Dallas together.

My view, to summarize what could be a very long conversation if I cornered you at a cocktail party, is that Dallas is not so rich in parkland nor so poor in highways that we should sacrifice a big chunk of green space to build a stupid road we don't need. Plus, building a highway in the floodway is insane.

I could spend hours debunking the claims made by the vote no/pave the Trinity groups, but you can get it all, and read much more detailed and cogent discussions at Trinityvote.com and in the Dallas Observer (particularly the writing of Jim Schutze, who deserves a Pulitzer). There's also some good stuff at the Lakewood/East Dallas Advocate's Backtalk blog.

(On the other side, there's a lot of slanted reporting and propagandistic editorials at the Dallas Morning News. Plus the occasional piece of solid journalism. And, to its credit, the News has run some good op-eds by toll road opponents, though not enough to balance out the mountain of pro-paving verbiage in the paper.)

Fraxinus now returns to its previous quiescence.

one small step

2006-06-07T23:13:00.000-05:00

With a bizarre lack of publicity or media coverage, Dallas has apparently signed the U.S. Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement. Almost certainly not due to my tireless advocacy, but still: huzzah!

Oh, and go see An Inconvenient Truth.

Shelter Island Bridge and Tunnel Authority

2006-06-02T19:51:00.000-05:00

Pretty good prank.

Reichenbach Falls

2006-01-08T20:35:00.000-06:00

This is the time in the course of this exercise in micropunditry when I decide I've been spending too many hours on it. I'm going to take a vacation from Fraxinus for a while. My apologies to a couple of commenters for bailing out in the midst of our lively discussions. To show you what a magnanimous guy I am, you get to have the last word. (For a while, anyway.)

Thanks for reading.

an opportunity for Texas parks

2006-01-08T17:51:00.000-06:00

International Paper Co. is putting 6.8 million acres of its vast timber holdings up for sale, and apparently more than 400,000 acres of them are in Texas. This is a tremendous opportunity for a public-land-poor state like ours. (About 94% of Texas lands are privately held; only 0.3% of Texas is state park land.) "Wide open spaces" is a phrase Texans like to use, but if you live in Dallas and actually want to get to one you have to drive four hours or more. What parks there are tend to be small, overdeveloped areas clinging to reservoirs, which are fine for certain types of recreation and wildlife but useless for others. When large undeveloped tracts (such as, presumably, most of IP's forest lands) become available, we should do everything possible to acquire them and make them part of the state park system.

The lack of public natural spaces is not the fault of Texas Parks and Wildlife -- we simply don't give them enough money. To deal with the problem in the long run, our legislators need to overcome their anti-tax dogma and impose a new tax, perhaps one on property transactions, the revenues of which would go to open space and parks acquisition and to parks and wildlife management.

Opposition to Alito

2006-01-08T16:47:00.000-06:00

The Alliance for Justice has released a letter from over 500 law professors opposing the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. The Alliance opposed the Roberts nomination as well, so it's not that great a surprise that they oppose Alito, but the academic community did not show this level of opposition the last time around. The letter makes a couple of points related to environmental issues -- first, on Alito's record on interpreting the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which is the authority relied on by Congress in enacting most of the nation's federal environmental laws:

Machine Gun Ban. In United States v. Rybar, Judge Alito argued in dissent that the federal ban on machine gun possession – which had been on the books in some form since 1934 – is unconstitutional Commerce Clause legislation. His colleagues accused him of disrespectfully requiring the “coordinate branches of government” to “play ‘Show and Tell’ with the federal courts at the peril of invalidation of a Congressional statute.” All of the other appeals courts that had considered the law in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1995 ruling in United States v. Lopez agreed with Judge Alito’s colleagues. Every court to have looked at the law since then has done the same, except one, and the Supreme Court summarily vacated that decision this year after issuing its decision in Gonzales v. Raich, which rejected Judge Alito’s cramped view of Congress’ law-making authority.

Also, the letter discusses Alito's position concerning citizens' standing to sue to enforce environmental laws:

Clean Water Act. In Public Interest Research Group, Inc. v. Magnesium Elektron, Inc., Judge Alito voted to make it harder than Congress intended for citizens to establish standing to sue for toxic emissions that violate the Clean Water Act; in fact, he agreed that Congress lacked the authority to authorize certain citizen suits. Several years later, by a 7-2 vote in Friends of the Earth v. Laidlaw, with only Justices Scalia and Thomas dissenting, the Supreme Court effectively rejected Judge Alito’s position.

(Footnotes omitted from both excerpts. You can read the original here.)

monkey redux

2006-01-07T00:15:00.000-06:00

Speaking of monkeys, everyone should take a minute to read the classic Monkeytown, by Scott McCloud.

(And then speak the sacred monkey chant.)

war talk

2006-01-06T23:42:00.000-06:00

Yowza! We’re having some verbal fisticuffs lately at Fraxinus. What I thought was an innocuous post about peace among monkeys led to a rhetorical maelstrom, as loyal reader ABC took issue with, well, a lot. The story so far: my monkey post, ABC comment 1, my response, ABC comment 2, my response 2, ABC comment 3. For the rest, I’m taking the liberty of departing the comment section to respond, because I think forty-page comment sections are ungainly.

(The italicized stuff below is ABC’s.)

We begin with some bickering over name-calling.

Ah, the old reliable ad hominem argument. Any right wing-nut who dares impune the wholesome libertarian motives of the Left is nothing more than a bigoted, jack-booted thug. . . . [T]he people who the Left has allowed to become their de facto . . . spokesmen have rather cornered the market on ad hominemism. Nancy Pelosi, anybody? No? Then how about Howard Dean, Michael Moore, Paul Krugman, Ted Kennedy, Al Gore?

Exactly what ad hominem argument did I make? I know I’ve slung plenty of insults around (though I don’t think I did in the stuff you responded to), but my point was not that no one should use insults. My point was that you merely attacked the speakers (craven, treasonous, etc.) and ignored their arguments.

“Jackbooted thugs,” by the way, is what the noted-non-liberal Tom DeLay called the EPA. (Also, “the Gestapo of government.”)

As for Pelosi, Dean, et al., doubtless they have each said dumb things from time to time, but are you seriously suggesting that none of them makes substantive arguments, or that no one on the Right ever makes a personal attack?

Instead, they do seem craven, power hungry, unable to win at the ballot box, and frankly ashamed of Western civilization or at least too paralyzed by cultural relativism to stand up and fight a menace that has given ample evidence of its contempt for everything we should all hold very dear.

If you think any disagreement with you on national security issues constitutes cowardice, then it will be hard to have a rational discussion.

helping oppressed peoples realize freedom on their own shores was one of the reasons the president has consistently stated for launching this multi-pronged war

Okay, now we’re into some substance. Let’s look a little closer:

An examination of more than 150 of Bush's speeches, radio addresses and responses to reporters' questions reveal a steady progression of language, mostly to reflect changing circumstances such as the failure to discover weapons of mass destruction, the lack of ties between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network and the growing violence of Iraqi insurgents.

A war that was waged principally to overthrow a dictator who possessed "some of the most lethal weapons ever devised'' has evolved into a mission to rid Iraq of its "weapons-making capabilities'' and to offer democracy and freedom to its 25 million residents.

. . . Most of the rationales were on the table from the beginning. What changed was the emphasis.

Are you any more impressed with the naysayers who repeatedly, even still, claim that the "brutal Afghan winter" will do in the US military just as surely as it has done in all of history's other fools dumb enough to invade Afghanistan?

Haven’t really noticed that naysaying. (I must have forgotten to renew my subscription to Nattering Nabobs of Negativism Monthly.) I did find a 2001 CSM article, but it didn’t predict that the winter would defeat the U.S. (headline: “Afghan winter: US foe or ally?”).

Really, what concerns me about Afghanistan is that we may have failed to follow up the laudable, rapid military victory with a strong enough nation-building effort. Does Karzai’s authority extend beyond Kabul, or is the rest of the country given over to warlords, poppies, Taliban holdouts, and possibly a lurking Bin Laden?

How impressed are you with some of our supposed allies--I have a fine Bourdeaux to go with your spetzle and borscht--and their recent, oily history in Iraq?

First: why is this relevant? Did I say that Putin would be a better president than W.? (Not that I’ve looked deeply into Putin’s eyes or called him Pootie-Poot or anything, but I don’t trust the fellow. He, I suspect, is someone who seriously lusts for power. And who seems to be happy to let Iran get all nuked up.) Or are you saying that if you can identify another Western country that acts from impure motives, anything the U.S. government does is immune from criticism?

But to answer your question: not particularly impressed. And they should be helping out more in Afghanistan. Hmm, maybe if we had actually tried diplomacy instead of gratuitously pissing Europe off in dozens of ways (rejecting treaties, rejecting the idea of treaties, “old Europe,” etc.), we’d have had better luck.

"...but I think it's way too early to claim it as an ultimate victory for freedom." Well, who in the administration has claimed exactly that?

Not exactly those words, but Bush said:

In the coming weeks, the ballots will be counted, a new government formed, and a people who suffered in tyranny for so long will become full members of the free world. This election will not mean the end of violence. But it is the beginning of something new: constitutional democracy at the heart of the Middle East.

I’d say “full members of the free world” is mighty close to “ultimate victory for freedom,” but my point was really that the administration has always disregarded and continues to disregard the likelihood that a democracy in Iraq will put a government in power that will not be friendly to U.S. interests.

The opponents of this effort have from the onset seemed to demand that Iraq be a perfectly functioning society and democracy inside of six weeks from Saddam Hussein's fall.

Actually, what the opponents of the Iraq war really wanted was either that we not go to war, or that we not go to war so precipitately. The unrealistic expectations were more on the part of the neocons and other Administration hawks (e.g., Cheney: “greeted as liberators”).

The self-proclaimed paper of record "breaks" the story that the president has directed the NSA to use all its high-tech means to keep nutheads from blowing us up. Of course, the story is timed curiously to coincide with both the Iraqi election and the release of some hack's book.

I agree, the Times’ timing is odd. Why did they wait a year? We should have known sooner. It seems likely that the Times was forced to release the story because they were about to be scooped by the publication of the book. And speaking of elections, did the Times step on the story until after the U.S. vote in 2004?

Quick quiz: How many presidents over the last century have availed themselves of the secret wiretapping process to thwart our enemies, some of whom haven't been as obvious about their ill-will toward us as al Qaeda?

Because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was enacted in 1978, a maximum of five presidents could have used its secret process for wiretapping. The current Bush is the only one I know of who disregarded the requirements of the Act altogether.

How many presidents have taken other, arguably more invasive, steps to secure our safety, like suspending habeas corpus perhaps? Or throwing an entire segment of the citizenry into camps?

I’ve always been willing to cut Lincoln some slack on the habeas suspension, but most other wartime abuses of civil liberties in America – particularly the World War II internments – were tragic, unnecessary, and wrong.

Do you really think that intercepting nefarious attempts by a proven enemy to communicate plans for further destruction is going to lead to the People's Democratic Republic of America?

So as long as it doesn't lead to the PDRA, it's copacetic with you? For the record, the answer to your question is "no." But I think that the president is not above the law, that it is dangerous for the president alone to decide which laws apply to him, and whether we can even have a public debate about it, and that it's not too much to ask that the president follow a legally required secret judicial process to allow him to order a secret spy agency to secretly monitor communications of American citizens. I also – pardon my suspicious nature – doubt that the Administration is limiting its domestic spying to the circumstances you describe.

In having doubts about the FISA-free wiretap program, I stand with noted leftists like Senators Hagel, Snowe, Collins, Spector, Sununu, Lugar, Craig, Graham, and McCain; AEI scholar Norman Ornstein; Reagan admin. deputy AG Bruce Fein; columnists William Safire and George Will.

Glenn Greenwald has eloquently argued that the Administration is abandoning the conservative legal principles it claims to support in making its arguments for why the secret wiretaps are legal:

Listening to the Bush Administration and its defenders try to justify George Bush’s deliberate and ongoing violations of the law, one can’t help but notice that the Constitution and Congressional statutes sure do seem quite "flexible" in the hands of those seeking to defend him -- a particular irony given how stridently Bush followers rail against such legal theories in other contexts.

I suppose strict construction and relativism are in the eye of the beholder.

In fact, the Left seems to consistently ask the wrong questions. Instead of "how come we didn't find any WMD in Iraq?," how about "where are they now?" Because he had them, never accounted for their destruction, and the vaunted weapons inspectors never found them or any evidence of their demise. We all know the answer to the question, but we don't want to admit it because then we'll have to act on it.

Actually, I don't know this one. What weapons are you saying he had at the start of the war, and where did he send them?

Given the UN's impeccable record of getting tyrannical thugs to act nice and play by the rules (12 years and 16 resolutions against Hussein and bupkis), why is the president letting the usual UN-Oil-for-Food Capone-istas broker a deal with that obviously sensible Iranian fellow, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

Again, I don't know. It could be that (a) repeatedly telling the U.N. to piss off, and (b) putting all our eggs in the Iraq basket have weakened our leverage with the U.N. and reduced our ability to intimidate Iran.

If the Left isn't all-consumed in its loathing of GWB, why then are they so seemingly suicidal when confronted with real and obvious threats to our civilization? I mean, on the whole, Western civilization allows us to live more to our liking then say the visions of the current Islamist threat to the world, right?

It’s not that we’re suicidal; it’s that we disagree with you on the way to avoid disaster.

Here is the very funny and very smart Adam Felber, writing on February 20, 2003, in response to someone who responded to an argument about the wisdom of the Administration’s rush to war by talking about how bad Saddam was:

Let’s put it this way: If Bush’s plan was to launch 25 nuclear missiles at Iraq tomorrow morning, you’d probably oppose it, I’m guessing. That would put you in the position where you found yourself both in favor of stopping Saddam and convinced that the President’s strategy was completely wrongheaded.

That’s where I am. That’s where the majority of rational “anti-war” Americans are. That’s what the debate should be about.

But it isn’t. Just like in the McCarthy era, the debate has been manipulated into a cartoonish either/or context.

("Cartoonish either/or context" = “why is the Left suicidal” and “do they really prefer Islamofascism to Western civilization.”) So. I think that a forceful response to terrorism is appropriate, but that Iraq was not an appropriately-directed blow to deal with the terrorism threat. Which is not to say that Saddam was innocuous. Using force against him (beyond the no-fly-zone force, I mean) could conceivably have been appropriate, but not the way we went about it.

Saddam’s Iraq was not a significant sponsor of international terrorism, and contrary to the Bush Administration’s repeated suggestions was not behind the 9/11 attacks. I can’t say for sure why the Administration was so hell-bent on invading Iraq, but I suspect that the main driver was the neocon/PNAC goal of reshaping the entire Middle East.

Which, I think, was a disastrous fantasy. The war in Iraq has been a catastrophic strategic blunder that has reduced our ability to deal with graver threats (Iran, North Korea), to work for a peaceful Middle East (Israel/Palestine), and to respond to humanitarian catastrophes (Darfur). It’s removed a tyrant, which is great, but the world is full of tyrants, and we cannot invade all of their countries. In dealing with tyrants, we have to consider both the costs and how likely we are to make things better than they are at present. The Iraq war has cost tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. Likely outcomes include: national breakup and civil war, an authoritarian secular regime (meet the new boss . . .), or a fundamentalist Islamic regime allied with Iran. The war has strengthened Iran and has strengthened the hand of lunatic fundamentalists within Iran. To reach this point the U.S. government has countenanced the abuse of civil liberties and has played apologist for torture. We have lost the moral high ground we held after 9/11. In Iraq, the war may have created more terrorists than it destroyed. I don’t think it’s made us more secure. It may not even have been a just war.

But most of that is in the past now. I come back to one of my earlier points: what do we do now to get to peace in Iraq? I know you disagree with everything I said above, but what do you think we need to do next?

trashing the state

2005-12-31T10:51:00.000-06:00

It's good that litter on Texas roadsides has dropped by a third since 2001 -- from 1.25 billion pieces in 2001 to 827 million pieces in 2005. Which, alas, still works out to 2757 pieces of trash per mile of road. Ugh. We've got a ways to go yet, especially since 55 percent of Texans admit to littering.

North Texas nature

2005-12-28T22:26:00.000-06:00

Good site I've been meaning to mention for a while: A Natural History of North Central Texas. Links to maps and park/wildlife information.

(I think I learned about this from a post by Sarah Hannan on the DMN blog, which finally has permalinks and an RSS feed. Can't find the link to the post I'm looking for, though.)

lessons from our relations

2005-12-20T22:12:00.000-06:00

Robert Sapolsky has a fascinating article in Foreign Affairs on violence, and the lack of it, in primate communities. Chimps, bonobos, gibbons, baboons, and more. Reference to The Warriors. Nature, nurture, evolution, and the possibility of progress. Think people are biologically incapable of peace? Sapolsky: "Anyone who says, 'No, it is beyond our nature,' knows too little about primates, including ourselves."

no help for the Refuge

2005-12-19T22:00:00.000-06:00

Things are getting ugly in the Senate, with Alaskan oil lackey Ted Stevens inserting a provision allowing drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge into the defense spending bill. Dave Roberts has put together a choice collection of remarks regarding this rather craven maneuver. My favorite:

These people would snake a pipeline across one of the great landscapes of the world, the Arctic National Wildlife Range. Some have appropriately compared splitting the Arctic National Wildlife Range by a 48-inch pipeline and haul road with slicing a razor blade across the face of the Mona Lisa.

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), 1977.

(I guess Stevens was for saving the Refuge before he was against it.)

Should his current tactic fail, he may want to look into these other honest and democratic ways to get those rigs into the Refuge:

(Via Sierra Club.)

TLCV

2005-12-15T22:14:00.000-06:00

It's weird that I learned this from FrontBurner, but there is a Texas League of Conservation Voters. Excellent! And about time -- any measure at all to hold Texas legislators accountable for their actions is praiseworthy, and it's especially good to see an environmental analysis. Not that the results are always pretty. For instance, my own state rep., Bill Keffer, scored a whopping 15% of a possible 100, which I suppose at least makes him better than the dozen or so zero-percenters. Yippee. And the state Senate held too few recorded votes to support a ranking. Gutless bastards.

Still -- welcome, TLCV.

Not me.

2005-12-15T21:17:00.000-06:00

And not even related, so far as I know. Nonetheless: well done, young doppelganger.

(In my lone season of organized football -- Maroon Wolverines, 4th grade -- I think I earned exactly one star for my helmet. And I distinctly remember that I had no idea what I had done to earn it.)

parking: the Dallas Morning News gets it

2005-12-12T22:27:00.000-06:00

With a fine editorial today on the need -- and opportunity -- to make our city more about people and less about cars:

. . . why is the dominant form for commercial establishments a low-slung box surrounded by an ocean of asphalt? So the cars will have a place to hang out. Any developer will tell you that the first, last and only question that determines whether a given project is feasible is: "Can I park it?" (That's developer-speak for: "Can I meet the city's extremely high requirement for parking spaces?")

Previous Fraxinus criticism of excessive parking-space requirements here and here.

The News editorial goes beyond kvetching to point out that a master plan, one that could actually change things here, is in the works:

. . . [T]he nearly completed comprehensive plan that will go to the City Council next month is very, very important.

The planners start out with a strong case, because the vision at the heart of the plan – of a denser, greener, more architecturally varied, more walkable Dallas – came from the people who live here. The plan reflects what the planners heard in dozens of workshops and meetings with residents all over the city.

Right on.

Plan info here.

things to worry about

2005-12-08T21:34:00.000-06:00

When I was in college, for a couple of weeks I amused myself by making a list of worries: "things that are contributing to the decay of civilization, etc." I say to amuse myself, but really I'm not sure why. I did note "Inspired by Newsweek," which shows that if I was an easily-influenced consumer of mass media, I was at least a self-aware one.

Further caveats:
The list is in no particular order. It's as I wrote it then, except that I've fixed a couple of misspellings and removed a couple of duplicates. Occasional eccentric capitalization may reflect borrowed headlines. In places I was probably reaching a bit just to keep the list going, and obviously in some cases I was just being goofy. (That's my story, anyway.)

So -- from January 1988, the list:

1. Drug-related crime
2. Failure of U.S. electoral system
3. Computer "virus" programs
4. Budget deficits
5. The INF treaty
6. Freeway shootings
7. militant Mormons (renegades)
8. AIDS
9. Failure of U.S. educational system
10. killer bees
11. fire ants
12. Multimillion-dollar Van Gogh paintings
13. holes in the ozone layer
14. economic protectionism
15. dioxins
16. oil slicks
17. functional illiteracy
18. homelessness
19. the unending Palestinian/Israeli issue
20. New Age thinking
21. racism
22. decline of the Great Powers: America's Imperial Overstretch
23. greenhouse effect
24. nuclear war
25. nuclear power (failure)
26. radon in houses
27. crack gangs in L.A.
28. population explosion
29. famine
30. genetic engineering disasters
31. declining originality in pop music
32. lead poisoning
33. Amazon deforestation/resulting climatic change
34. third-world debts
35. Soviet space-based weapons systems
36. Failure of American space programs
37. George Bush
38. Pat Robertson
39. Richard Gephardt
40. cosmic radiation (see ozone layer)
41. exhaustion of Earth's fuel resources
42. drought/dust storms
43. creeping totalitarianism
44. the possibility that the USSR will become, as a result of perestroika, as healthy as Japan economically, but retain evil intention while lulling the West into fatal complacency
45. runaway military technology
46. incurable corruption in the Pentagon's procurement system
47. Nutrasweet
48. The gradual (certainly not in my lifetime, or era) evolution of humanity into something no longer recognizable as human (to us)
49. the possibility that the U.S. space program will never get out of low earth orbit
50. the growing popularity of blood sports
51. America's shift to a financial-services economy
52. the white globs, etc. in beef sticks, sausage, bacon, etc.
53. the national debt
54. Our Polluted Oceans
55. the widespread use of phrases like "the final farewell concert"
56. running out of landfills
57. worldwide deforestation
58. liability insurance and the litigious society
59. Television's destruction of people's minds
60. malnutrition in the inner city

Thoughts:
- I'm still worried about most of this stuff. Thanks a lot for reminding me, younger self.
- Plus ça change department: 2, 37, 38
- What was I thinking department: 7
- There aren't a lot of these where I can confidently say "whew! We conquered that one, didn't we?" I suppose 10 and 26 turned out to be manageable risks, and we've made progress on a few of the others.
- 5: I can only guess that I was afraid the INF treaty would fall apart in the final stages.
- 50: was I thinking of American Gladiators, or what?
- 55: I think I see what I was driving at, but that particular phrase, at least, doesn't seem to have become ubiquitous.
- The quotes I put around "virus" seem quaintly amusing now. (I should've put them around "thinking" in 20 as well.)
- 44: obviously deeply wrong on the economic front (although Japan hit a rough patch after that, I don't think I was suggesting that kind of parallel), but I think Putin's got a bad case of 43.
- 16: might seem prescient, coming a bit more than a year before the Valdez disaster, but (alas) you can hardly go wrong betting that there will be a major oil spill somewhere in the near future.
- 39: ? I'm sure this one was about the eyebrows.
- 22: pretty obviously Paul Kennedy-influenced. I think he was wrong on some major particulars, but maybe right in the big picture: we can't sustain a global reach forever.
- 52: And it only took me 11 years after writing that to go vegetarian.
- My list is not nearly as creative, interesting, or poignant as Michael Bernard Loggins's Fears of Your Life lists, which you can hear on This American Life.
- Really conspicuous (in hindsight, at least) omissions: Islamic fundamentalist extremism/terrorism, right-wing American nut terrorism, global loss of biodiversity.

I'll make another list, soon, of things to add. The potential, in a few decades, for a Terminator-like takeover by AIs will be one -- been mulling that one over lately. Further suggestions welcome.

lobbying and corruption

2005-12-04T20:59:00.000-06:00

Michael Kinsley, commenting on the political culture underlying the current DeLay/Abramoff/Cunningham series of ethical debacles:

Perhaps conceding more than he intended, former Democratic senator John Breaux, now on K Street, told the New York Times that a member of Congress will be swayed more by 2,000 letters from constituents on some issue than by anything a lobbyist can offer. I guess if it's a lobbyist vs. 1,900 constituents, it's too bad for the constituents.

Well observed.

how not to teach Iraqis about a free press and good government

2005-11-30T21:27:00.000-06:00

The story so far:

The Bush administration paid columnist Armstrong Williams to say nice things about it. And columnist Michael McManus. And columnist Maggie Gallagher. EPA paid for a propagandistic advertising campaign for the White House's "Clear Skies" legislation. The Office of National Drug Control Policy produced "Video news releases", which the Government Accountability Office deemed an illegal covert propaganda campaign. And the Department of Health and Human Services did the same thing.

Now this:

As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq.

The articles, written by U.S. military "information operations" troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor, according to U.S. military officials and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

At least some members of our military see the problem with this approach:

The military's information operations campaign has sparked a backlash among some senior military officers in Iraq and at the Pentagon who argue that attempts to subvert the news media could destroy the U.S. military's credibility in other nations and with the American public.

"Here we are trying to create the principles of democracy in Iraq. Every speech we give in that country is about democracy. And we're breaking all the first principles of democracy when we're doing it," said a senior Pentagon official who opposes the practice of planting stories in the Iraqi media.

Unfortunately, in this administration the propagandists hold the upper hand.

what Dallas should be doing

2005-11-28T22:40:00.000-06:00

Good story on Morning Edition today about Seattle's efforts to reduce its contribution to global warming. That city's mayor has taken the lead in convincing 188 American cities to take steps to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Smart, progressive, responsible.

Dallas Mayor Laura Miller? Not so much.

In other news, studies of Antarctic ice cores show that greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere "are 27 percent higher than the highest levels found in the last 650,000 years." And, of course, they're still rising. Methinks we're entering science fiction territory here, and not the fun kind, either. Something more like this, probably:

In memoriam

2005-11-20T20:30:00.000-06:00

Just heard an announcement on KERA that Glenn Mitchell died this morning. A damn shame. He ran a first-rate talk show here for years, classing up the joint by putting authors, thinkers, politicos, and other interesting people in front of a local mic. Seemed like a decent guy to boot. The Star-Telegram has an obit.

Constitution Avenue Freeze-Out

2005-11-19T22:44:00.000-06:00

Now this is just petty.

the matrix

2005-11-14T22:27:00.000-06:00

The Dallas Morning News had a short Q&A with James Howard Kunstler yesterday. Best was his response when they asked him what he thinks of recent developments in Dallas:

[Y]ou've got some decent little streets going. Uptown is pretty impressive. By national standards, there aren't too many in-town places that are that good. The scale of what you guys are doing here is impressive. Even so, it only goes on for two blocks. You've got little pockets of cool embedded in a matrix of crap.

Great line. In fact, I think "Pockets of Cool Embedded in a Matrix of Crap" should be the city's new slogan. (It's way better than "Live Large, Think Big,"which seems to have faded into the obscurity it so richly deserved.)

Either that, or the new name for this blog. www.matrixofcrap.blogspot.com, anyone?

good news on the equine front

2005-11-13T22:03:00.000-06:00

Looks like Congress is going to close down the small-but-unpleasant American horsemeat business. Given the timing, I'm afraid we can't credit this one to the Fraxinian diatribe of a year and a half ago. Nor, probably, was it Frank Deford's recent commentary on NPR. More likely this had something to do with the long effort by horse lovers to bring the slaughter to public attention. It seems that even most members of Congress think that killing horses for food is, well, icky.

One additional argument they may not have considered, which applies to wild horses in particular: we need them running free, not on a plate. Wild horses are part of the first wave in the Pleistocene rewilding of North America, a fearsomely cool idea that will probably never happen but is nonetheless fun to think about.

11-11-05

2005-11-11T15:34:00.000-06:00

A good day to follow Snoopy's example and visit Bill Mauldin. (Root beer optional.)

Dover, mining, Alaska

2005-11-10T22:13:00.000-06:00

High-quality day at Gristmill. Especially:

- The good citizens of Dover PA tossed out the creationists on their school board, so Pat Robertson warns them "don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin." Oh well. At least he didn't explicitly call for their assassination.

- Congress is thinking of ending a moratorium on new patents under the give-the-commonwealth-away General Mining Law of 1872. The basic idea is to sell public lands to fund the government's operations. I know; they can call it the Eating Our Seed Corn Act of 2005.

- Really, really cool use of Google Earth: the Sierra Club's put together a collection of maps of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Here's a screen grab, showing part of the Refuge along with the wells that are already drilled on the rest of the North Slope.

(Yes, the icons exaggerate the relative size of what they represent, as is always true of maps, but the easy scalability of Google Earth helps with that.) Go; check it out.