Evidence of a Democracy Malfunction:
(compliments of Symi)
-----

Will We Need a New 'All the President's Men'?
by Frank Rich October 17, 2004
The New York Times

SUCH is the power of movies that the first image "Watergate" brings to mind three decades later is not Richard Nixon so much as the golden duo of Redford and Hoffman riding to the nation's rescue in "All the President's Men." But if our current presidency is now showing symptoms of a precancerous Watergate syndrome - as it is, daily - we have not yet reached that denouement immortalized by Hollywood, in which our scrappy heroes finally bring Nixon to heel in his second term. No, we're back instead in the earlier reels of his first term, before the criminality of the Watergate break-in, when no one had heard of Woodward and Bernstein. Back then an arrogant and secretive White House, furious at the bad press fueled by an unpopular and mismanaged war, was still flying high as it kneecapped with impunity any reporter or news organization that challenged its tightly enforced message of victory at hand.

It was then that the vice president, Spiro Agnew, scripted by the speechwriter Pat Buchanan, tried to discredit the press as an elite - or, as he spelled it out, "a tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men." It was then that the attorney general, John Mitchell, under the pretext of national security, countenanced wiretaps of Hedrick Smith of The Times and Marvin Kalb of CBS News, as well as a full F.B.I. investigation of CBS's Daniel Schorr. Today it's John Ashcroft's Justice Department, also invoking "national security," that hopes to seize the phone records of Judith Miller and Philip Shenon of The Times, claiming that what amounts to a virtual wiretap is warranted by articles about Islamic charities and terrorism published nearly three years ago.

"The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before," wrote William Safire last month. When an alumnus of the Nixon White House says our free press is being attacked as "never before," you listen. What alarms him now are the efforts of Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame-Robert Novak affair, to threaten reporters at The Times and Time magazine with jail if they don't reveal their sources. Given that the Times reporter in question (Judith Miller again) didn't even write an article on the subject under investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald overreaches so far that he's created a sci-fi plot twist out of Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report."

It's all the scarier for being only one piece in a pattern of media intimidation that's been building for months now. Once Woodward and Bernstein did start investigating Watergate, Nixon plotted to take economic revenge by siccing the Federal Communications Commission on TV stations owned by The Washington Post's parent company. The current White House has been practicing pre-emptive media intimidation to match its policy of pre-emptive war. Its F.C.C. chairman, using Janet Jackson's breast and Howard Stern's mouth as pretexts, has sufficiently rattled Viacom, which broadcast both of these entertainers' infractions against "decency," that its chairman, the self-described "liberal Democrat" Sumner Redstone, abruptly announced his support for the re-election of George W. Bush last month. "I vote for what's good for Viacom," he explained, and he meant it. He took this loyalty oath just days after the "60 Minutes" fiasco prompted a full-fledged political witch hunt on Viacom's CBS News, another Republican target since the Nixon years. Representative Joe Barton, Republican of Texas, has threatened to seek Congressional "safeguards" regulating TV news content and, depending what happens Nov. 2, he may well have the political means to do it.

Viacom is hardly the only media giant cowed by the prospect that this White House might threaten its corporate interests if it gets out of line. Disney's refusal to release Michael Moore's partisan "Fahrenheit 9/11" in an election year would smell less if the company applied the same principle to its ABC radio stations, where the equally partisan polemics of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are heard every day. Even a low-profile film project in conflict with Bush dogma has spooked the world's largest media company, Time Warner, proprietor of CNN. Its Warner Brothers, about to release a special DVD of "Three Kings," David O. Russell's 1999 movie criticizing the first gulf war, suddenly canceled a planned extra feature, a new Russell documentary criticizing the current war. Whether any of these increasingly craven media combines will stand up to the Bush administration in a constitutional pinch, as Katharine Graham and her Post Company bravely did to the Nixon administration during Watergate, is a proposition that hasn't been remotely tested yet.

To understand what kind of journalism the Bush administration expects from these companies, you need only look at those that are already its collaborators. Fox News speaks loudly for itself, to the point of posting on its Web site an article by its chief political correspondent containing fictional John Kerry quotes. (After an outcry, it was retracted as "written in jest.") But Fox is just the tip of the Rupert Murdoch empire. When The New York Post covered the release of the report by the C.I.A.'s chief weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, it played the story on page 8 and didn't get to the clause "while no stockpiles of W.M.D. were found in Iraq" until the 16th paragraph. This would be an Onion parody were it not deadly serious.

It's hard to imagine an operation more insidious than Mr. Murdoch's, but the Sinclair Broadcast Group may be it. The owner or operator of 62 TV stations nationwide, including affiliates of all four major broadcast networks, this company gets little press scrutiny because it is invisible in New York City, Washington and Los Angeles, where it has no stations. But Sinclair, whose top executives have maxed out as Bush contributors, was first smoked out of the shadows last spring when John McCain called it "unpatriotic" for ordering its eight ABC stations not to broadcast the "Nightline" in which Ted Koppel read the names of the then 721 American casualties in Iraq. This was the day after Paul Wolfowitz had also downsized American casualties by testifying before Congress that they numbered only about 500.

Thanks to Elizabeth Jensen of The Los Angeles Times, who first broke the story last weekend, we now know that Sinclair has grander ambitions for the election. It has ordered all its stations, whose most powerful reach is in swing states like Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, to broadcast a "news" special featuring a film, "Stolen Honor," that trashes Mr. Kerry along the lines of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads. The film's creator is a man who spent nearly eight years in the employ of Tom Ridge. Sinclair has ordered that it be run in prime time during a specific four nights in late October, when it is likely to be sandwiched in with network hits like "CSI," "The Apprentice" and "Desperate Housewives." Democrats are screaming, but don't expect the Bush apparatchiks at federal agencies to pursue their complaints as if they were as serious as a "wardrobe malfunction." A more likely outcome is that Sinclair, which already reaches 24 percent of American viewers, will reap the regulatory favors it is seeking to expand that audience in a second Bush term.

Like the Nixon administration before it, the Bush administration arrived at the White House already obsessed with news management and secrecy. Nixon gave fewer press conferences than any president since Hoover; Mr. Bush has given fewer than any in history. Early in the Nixon years, a special National Press Club study concluded that the president had instituted "an unprecedented, government-wide effort to control, restrict and conceal information." Sound familiar? The current president has seen to it that even future historians won't get access to papers he wants to hide; he quietly gutted the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the very reform enacted by Congress as a post-Watergate antidote to pathological Nixonian secrecy.

The path of the Bush White House as it has moved from Agnew-style press baiting to outright assault has also followed its antecedent. The Nixon administration's first legal attack on the press, a year before the Watergate break-in, was its attempt to stop The Times and The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers, the leaked internal Defense Department history of our failure in Vietnam. Though 9/11 prompted Ari Fleischer's first effort to warn the media to "watch what they say," it's failure in Iraq that has pushed the Bush administration over the edge. It was when Operation Iraqi Freedom was bogged down early on that it spun the fictional saga of Jessica Lynch. It's when the percentage of Americans who felt it was worth going to war in Iraq fell to 50 percent in the Sept. 2003 Gallup poll, down from 73 that April, that identically worded letters "signed" by different soldiers mysteriously materialized in 11 American newspapers, testifying that security for Iraq's citizens had been "largely restored." (As David Greenberg writes in his invaluable "Nixon's Shadow," phony letters to news outlets were also a favorite Nixon tactic.) The legal harassment of the press, like the Republican party's Web-driven efforts to discredit specific journalists even at non-CBS networks, has escalated in direct ratio to the war's decline in support.

"What you're seeing on your TV screens," the president said when minimizing the Iraq insurgency in May, are "the desperate tactics of a hateful few." Maybe that's the sunny news that can be found on a Sinclair station. Now, with our election less than three weeks away, the bad news coming out of Iraq everywhere else is a torrent. Reporters at virtually every news organization describe a downward spiral so dangerous that they can't venture anywhere in Iraq without risking their lives. Last weekend marines spoke openly and by name to Steve Fainaru of The Washington Post about the quagmire they're witnessing firsthand and its irrelevance to battling Al Qaeda, whose 9/11 attack motivated many of them to enlist in the first place. "Every day you read the articles in the States where it's like, 'Oh, it's getting better and better," said Lance Cpl. Jonathan Snyder of Gettysburg, Pa. "But when you're here, you know it's worse every day." Another marine, Lance Cpl. Alexander Jones of Ball Ground, Ga., told Mr. Fainaru: "We're basically proving out that the government is wrong. We're catching them in a lie." Asked if he was concerned that he and his buddies might be punished for speaking out, Cpl. Brandon Autin of New Iberia, La., responded: "What are they going to do - send us to Iraq?"

What "they" can do is try to intimidate, harass, discredit and prosecute news organizations that report stories like this. If history is any guide, and the hubris of re-election is tossed into the mix, that harrowing drama can go on for a long time before we get to the feel-good final act of "All the President's Men."

A while ago, I was working on a project that involved working with a guy who was located down in Metro Atlanta.

His name was Jim Crow.

Yes he is a real person. No, he wasn't pulling my leg.

I had to ask a few times to make sure I had it right but he wasn't fazed. Because he was having to go out of his way to something for the project, I didn't ask him specifically about his name but I'm still trying to figure out how something like that could have happened in earnest....

A very interesting article:

Deconstructing the War on Terror
by Pepe Escobar
October 13, 2004
The Asia Times

"Bush speaks of 'war', but he is in fact incapable of identifying the enemy against whom he declares that he has declared war." - Jacques Derrida, September 2001

Wales sinks into Irish Sea on EU map

Eh... Nobody could spell Welsh place names anyway--

It's amazing... the Bush administration can't find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but they're quite expert at leaving smoking guns around...

How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence

An Open Letter to the Heads of State and Government of the European Union and NATO
September 28, 2004

Very interesting. I wonder who specificially is their intended audience. More importantly, I wonder what all of these luminaries would recommend instead.

Finally, I find a real discussion about The Corporation, a documentary film and book that makes the case that the current status of the corporation within society is "psychopathic." It has, perhaps understandably, disappeared from theaters several months ago, after only about two weeks of very active promotion. I haven't seen or heard anything about it since. While I don't think I'd go as far as the movie seems to have done, the fact that it just disappeared really bothers me. I'm a firm believer in sunshine as being the most effective disinfectant.

But I just happened to stumble over this discussion on Radio Netherlands, an interview of law professor Joel Bakan, the book's author, and his responses to a few listener emails. The page opens onto a transcript of the discussion but you can find an audio link if you scroll down a little bit.

Does anyone out there know what happened to the film? I'd be interested to hear about it and what y'all think about the interview.

In case you missed it, here's the transcript of last night's "debate" between John F. Kerry and George W. Bush.

Ok, having grown up in a household that had a strong German hyper-diligent streak to it, I understand the phrase 'If you're going to do something, do it right' but this is just incredible.

Among the many foreign language versions of Deutsche Welle's homepage, somebody thought it would be funny to include something in the artificially developed Klingon language from Star Trek. But this goes waaaay further than just a few mentions....

A few happy birthdays to post--

First of all, many happy returns to DC Penguin on her birthday today--

What's this about my looking like I'm nine years old? That should make you, what? About four?? ;-)

Several other people have had birthdays in the recent past, who I don't think have blogs. (let me know if I'm mistaken)

Stuart Washington-- a truly remarkable guy who's pushing the bounds of science by, apparently, trying to read the minds of bats. I only found out about his birthday as it was hurtling by but warm wishes nonetheless....

Guy Jordan-- his birthday was last Thursday but I haven't had a chance to wish him well personally. If he stays at NTN tomorrow until I'm able to get there from my grad Russian class, I'll make sure that changes.

Congratulations all!

Happy Birthday to me... Happy Birthday to me...

Kind of torn about how to feel about today being my birthday. A lot of things have changed since I was born, though. 25 years is both too short and too long a time to be around...
(I was listening to this NPR story about the use of 'educational' filmstrips in the classroom. Damn, those recordings take me back. They were using those in my school district until the end of the 1980s!)

I'd like people to know about my birthday but don't want to toot my own horn about it. Doing that always seems to come across as expecting people to react in paroxysms of awkward congratulations. --Definitely not what I want.

In a perfect world, this kind of thing would somehow be more genuine, though I have no idea how it would work....

I guess I'm just being wistful... and rambling. Well, I'm a quarter of a century old and getting older, so tough! There's a lot more rambling to come.

Anger mixed with frustration mixed with sadness...

This is what you get when you blindly follow the 'free market.' Oro Grande is only about 50 miles from where I'm from.

The New York Times
September 17, 2004

Collapse of 60 Charter Schools Leaves Californians Scrambling
By SAM DILLON


Ken Larson was pacing the floor of his office in a tiny elementary school in Oro Grande, Calif., surrounded by the chaos of fax lines beeping, three beleaguered secretaries peppering him with questions and phone lines ringing for the umpteenth time.

It had been a month since one of the nation's largest charter school operators collapsed, leaving 6,000 students with no school to attend this fall. The businessman who used $100 million in state financing to build an empire of 60 mostly storefront schools had simply abandoned his headquarters as bankruptcy loomed, refusing to take phone calls. That left Mr. Larson, a school superintendent whose district licensed dozens of the schools, to clean up the mess.

"Hysterical parents are calling us, swearing and shouting," Mr. Larson said in an interview in Oro Grande last week. "People are walking off with assets all over the state. We're absolutely sinking."

The disintegration of the California Charter Academy, the largest chain of publicly financed but privately run charter schools to slide into insolvency, offers a sobering picture of what can follow. Thousands of parents were forced into a last-minute search for alternate schools, and some are still looking; many teachers remain jobless; and students' academic records are at risk in abandoned school sites across California.

Investigators are sifting through records seeking causes of the disaster, which has raised new questions about how charter schools are regulated.

"Until the Charter Academy went into its tailspin, few people predicted that these crashes could be so bloody, but this has been a catastrophe for many people," said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley. "The critics of market-oriented reforms warned of risks with the philosophy of let-the-buyer-beware, but in this case, buyers were just totally hung out to dry."

Jack O'Connell, the California superintendent of schools, said in an interview that a majority of the state's 537 charter schools were making a solid contribution to public education. But Mr. O'Connell has concluded from the disaster that the state must apply "tough love" in regulating them, "to keep this kind of near-bankruptcy and chaos from happening again," he said.

"If there's mismanagement and malfeasance, we'll come in and put you out of business," he said.

Back in 1999, the national movement to provide alternatives to parents through charter schools, which face less burdensome regulation than other public schools, was gaining steam. Many charter schools have since flourished, and experts say that some of them offer an excellent education. But in Southern California, there were signs of trouble soon after C. Steven Cox, a former insurance executive whose only educational credential was his brief service on a local school board, founded the Charter Academy.

State auditors are now scrutinizing Mr. Cox's financial records to determine whether he exaggerated enrollments and to sort out claims from a line of creditors, said Scott Hannan, director of school fiscal services at the California Department of Education.

"But our highest priority is securing the student records," Mr. Hannan said. That is a sore point with Mr. Larson, who said that thousands of students' immunization and academic records had been virtually abandoned all across California.

Mr. Larson, superintendent of a tiny school district in Oro Grande, a Mojave Desert village 88 miles northeast of Los Angeles that looks like a set for "Bad Day at Black Rock," has converted a storeroom at his school into a warehouse for the records. He has arranged for dozens of file cabinets holding student records to be trucked to Oro Grande from schools that have closed across the Mojave Desert, he said, but he has no way to collect records and equipment left behind elsewhere.

Mr. Larson said Mr. Cox approached him in 2001, preaching the charter school gospel that money spent on filing reports to government regulators would be better spent in classrooms, and asking the Oro Grande district to license him to found charter schools. The Oro Grande school board approved the idea, and two other California districts forged similar relationships with Mr. Cox between 1999 and 2001.

Mr. Cox eventually founded 60 satellite schools in low- and middle-income communities stretching from Chula Vista near the Mexican border to Gridley, 140 miles northeast of San Francisco, and under California's financing formulas the state paid him about $5,000 annually for each student he enrolled. As his business grew, he hired his wife, son, daughter-in-law and other relatives to work at his corporate headquarters in Victorville, near Oro Grande.

But by early 2003, Mr. Cox had become mired in several costly confrontations with the California Department of Education; one centered on whether 10 of his schools were in violation of a 2002 law barring charter operators from opening schools in counties they had not registered in. The state withheld more than $6 million that Mr. Cox had expected to receive.

Mr. Cox sued, seeking to force payment, but lost that battle after running up huge legal fees, and the state withheld money as a result of other disputes, too. By the summer, Mr. Cox's financial difficulties had grown severe, and on July 28, the trustees of one of the four charters responded to the mounting crisis by voting to close the schools they had licensed. Mr. Cox stalked out of that meeting and stopped responding to most phone calls.

Within a week and a half, trustees voted to close the rest of Mr. Cox's schools, and his second in command announced to scores of employees gathered at the Victorville headquarters that they were out of a job. Kim Ehrlich, a billing supervisor, said she spent the first half of August with workers dismantling the offices around her, phoning local utility companies across California to turn off the power at Charter Academy schools, then lost her job.

The sudden collapse blindsided even the charter school principals. Melody Parker, whose Village elementary school in Inglewood was one of the most popular schools in Mr. Cox's organization, said that although her budget had been slashed and Mr. Cox had grown aloof, she never imagined that his organization could fall apart.

"It hit us like a tornado," Ms. Parker said. On Aug. 12, she informed teachers that their jobs were gone, and the next day she told hundreds of parents gathered at the school that it would not open for the fall term. Many had still not found schools by the second week of September, she said.

"The collapse was so disheartening,' said Dwayne Muhammad, who works in a funeral home and whose daughter Aisha was to attend the Village's fourth grade this fall. "Everybody began rushing to find alternate schools."

Mr. Muhammad has visited eight schools in the weeks since, all of which have been full, he said Monday. "We've been left by the wayside."

The nonprofit California Charter School Association said in a report this week that 80 percent of the students displaced from Mr. Cox's schools had since enrolled in other charter schools. Some teachers, like Maria Boatwright, who taught first grade at the Village, have found new jobs at other charters.

But teachers all across the state have reported difficulties in finding new teaching positions because most schools had hired their staffs by the time the academy collapsed, Mr. Larson said.

At the interview in Oro Grande, he produced a stack of letters from distraught, jobless teachers. Travis D. Taylor, who taught art and science to students at a Charter Academy school in Gridley, wrote to say that he had not been repaid the hundreds of dollars he spent on books and science equipment for his students.

Mr. Taylor's mother, Shelly, said that since the collapse, Mr. Taylor had been unable to find another teaching job. With his debts mounting, he has been harvesting rice "to keep his head above water," she said.

Mr. Cox did not respond to requests for an interview left on his voicemail, sent by e-mail and relayed through former employees. Mr. Larson has not been able to reach him either, he said.

One of Mr. Larson's secretaries interrupted the interview to announce that the landlord of a school forced to close in Los Angeles was threatening to dump desks and student records in the street to make way for a new tenant. Mr. Larson wrestled with the notion of driving a truck to Los Angeles himself to fetch the assets.

"There's 100 desks down there," he muttered. "What would we do with 100 desks?"




http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/17/education/17charter.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=

For those of you confused by the cover of "The Economist" I posted a few days ago:

Look at this for background.

So... I was at work the other day and get a strange call on my cell phone... my brother!? I hadn't heard from him in at least 6 months. Apparently Los Angeles hasn't swallowed him up.

In fact, he's coming to DC tomorrow night! Still a bit stunned myself but I'll manage. Any recommendations as to what to do with him?

Now I've just got to get rid of this cold... Blech!

Quite possibly could be lost footage from Office Space... or maybe not...

The guys in this video probably worked about as hard as Peter did, at least.

Search for chair_test.wmv if it doesn't open automatically.

Absolutely perfect....

Bizarre--

Mood of Blagoveshchensk customs officers should improve

Aromatherapy lamps are to be installed at customs posts in Blagoveshchensk, Amur Oblast, Vostok-Media news agency reported in July. In an effort to improve the mood of customs officers, maintain their psychological well-being and reduce stress, their union has initiated the aromatherapy drive. Customs officers will also be able to take aromatherapy courses.

-- Russian Far Eastern News (September 2004)

(Keep in mind, Blagoveshchensk is on the border with China, north of Manchuria.)

People who own white Sport Utility Vehicles should be whacked upside the head. No... probably worse. Just like any parent who decides to name their child 'Chastity.'

Yaay! Redheads finally get a little more respect! And so cute!!

Red Letter Day for Red-Heads at London Zoo

LONDON (Reuters) - They say blondes have more fun, but redheads will have the edge on Sunday when they get into London Zoo for free to view a rare new-born ginger-coloured monkey.

The endangered south east Asian Francois Langur monkey, called Laa Laa, has typical baby orange fur which in six months will turn a glossy black.

London Zoo said 9,500 red-heads had already downloaded free vouchers from its Web Site.

"It has been very popular. We will accept all shades of red, auburn, titian, ginger, you name it," a Zoo spokesman said.

Ginger Sunday will also allow red-heads, often the butt of jokes in Britain, to win some friends since the vouchers allow them to bring a friend, be they brunette, blonde or even bald.

Britain has one of the highest concentrations of redheads in the world, but a recent survey showed that 9 out of ten were teased at school about their hair colour.

A national utility company even decided to poke fun at redheads when it ran an ad campaign during 2000 which showed a family of gingers above the caption - "There are some things in life you can't choose".

You've got to hand it to this guy---

Ghana: Opposition party wants US to pay for 1966 coup

GHANA BROADCASTING CORPORATION RADIO 1
Saturday, July 31, 2004

(FBIS Transcribed Excerpt)

The EGLE (Every Ghanaian Living Everywhere) Party has asked the US government to make amends for derailing Ghana's progress through the sponsorship of the 1966 coup d'etat that overthrew the government of Dr Kwame Nkrumah.

According to Mr Danny Ofori-Atta, chairman of the party, the Central Intelligence Agency's recent declassified files clearly admit the role of the United States played and it was only fair that it made up for causing Ghana's economy to stagnate ever since.

He has, therefore, called for a total cancellation of Ghana's 5bn-external debt and the setting up of "credit guarantee for a private company capitalized with 5bn which will be in the form of a 30-year US Treasury insurance guarantee to back the capital of the private company to be listed on the Ghana Stock Exchange". (Passage omitted)

(Description of Source: Accra Ghana Broadcasting Corporation Radio 1 in English -- state-owned, government-controlled radio)