The View From the Sinister Side of Life
January 25th, 2006
Maud Newton reminded me of this list of recommended spec-fic stories from Matthew Cheney which included a link to Light of Other Days. Lovely is perhaps the most accurate way to describe the piece, and I really recommend reading it.
Categories: Culture, Writing | No Comments
January 25th, 2006
Some good discussion is still going on here. Check it out.
Categories: Legal Issues | No Comments
January 25th, 2006
The Onion’s AV Club has an interview with Stephen Colbert. Go check it out.
Categories: Humor, Media | No Comments
January 25th, 2006
In addition to benefiting from the Iraq situation, Al Qaeda is also apprently benefiting from the US’s failures in Afghanistan and Pakistan border region:
Al Qaeda and its former protectors — the Taliban — are in the midst of a powerful resurgence, according to accounts by local officials and information contained in new al Qaeda videotapes obtained by ABC News.
U.S. troops are not permitted inside Pakistan, and the Pakistani army is barely seen in this part of Waziristan Province.
… “The Taliban resurgence this year has been enormous and quite extraordinary,” said Ahmed Rashid, author of the book “Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and the Fundamentalism in Central Asia.”
The tape claims Taliban officials have taken over government functions. There is no date on the tape, but in the last month ABC News reporters have confirmed that Western aid organizations have been forced out, their headquarters burned, schools shut down, teachers and journalists killed, and music banned.
We had these people on the run and broken after the Afghanistan invasion. The Rumsfeld let his notions of what should happen get in the way of reality at Tora Bora and Bush turned his attention and our armed forces from Al Qaeda to Iraq. Now we have created a wonderful recruiting and training ground for Al Qaeda while giving them the space and breathing room they needed to recover. Bush has managed to snatch defeat form the jaws of victory. Rove should think twice before running on that record.
January 25th, 2006
The New Jersey freeholders that denied the partner of a dying gay cop the right to inherit pension benefits has reversed themselves:
Ocean County freeholders will grant Laurel Hester her dying wish, to have her death benefit given to her same-sex partner.
Despite state law allowing local governments to grant health and other benefits to the same-sex partners of their employees Ocean County has steadfastly refused to do so.
For months Sgt. Hester, who has inoperable brain cancer, has pleaded with freeholders to pass an ordinance recognizing same-sex partners for the purpose of benefits.
Earlier this week, with only a few months to live, she made a final plea from her hospital room. (story)
Appearing weak, and breathing with the help of a machine, she said on a video tape that she feared partner Stacie Andree would lose the home they shared after Hester dies.
With little doctors can do for, except make her as comfortable as possible, Hester has been a released from hospital and is now at home.
Until she became too ill to work Hester was a lieutenant with the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office. She had worked there for 23 years - more than half her life - and is a member of the New Jersey Police and Firemen’s Retirement System.
Although the state’s five other pension systems allow its members to pass pension benefits to domestic partners the NJPFRS does not. Under the state’s domestic partner law local governments can transfer pension benefits.
The death benefit amounts to about $13,000.
Following Hester’s emotional appeal freeholders refused to reopen the issue. But following news coverage including television reports which showed Hester’s deteriorating condition, freeholders were besieged with critical phone calls and emails.
This is wonderful news and a credit to ll the people who wrote, protested, called and otherwise pressured the freeholders into doing the right thing.
Categories: Culture | No Comments
January 25th, 2006
My post on DC statehood brought out a lot of interesting comments and emails, but more than a few people missed the point of pushing for DC statehood. While it is true that statehood could never pass today, that doesn’t make such a campaign useless. Pushing for DC statehood is valuable because it attacks one of the pillars of the Republican narrative.
Politics today is not really about policy. Policy does matter, but policy can only be discussed through the frames which our increasingly stupid media provide. When I say that the media is becoming increasingly stupid, I do not mean to say that the members of the media as a class are dumber than they were in the past (though, honestly, it certainly feels that way in many respects) but that the structure of the media has resulted in a dumber product. The corporations that run the news rooms no longer consider the news department a public good. It is seen as exactly every other aspect of the media business: a potential profit maker or a potential loss maker. As a result, there is much more pressure to appease advertisers and attract the most consumers through any means necessary. Television anchors are chosen more for their looks than their news abality. Newsrooms are cutting staff. Television news shows are more shout-fest than discussion, stories are told in a minute or less, and if a thought cannot fit onto a graphic on the bottom of a screen, it almost never gets aired. Image is king. Policy has a hard time surviving in an environment like that.
But policy does survive, to a certain extent, as long as that policy can be discussed in the accepted shorthand of the news media. If it fits into an existing frame — GOP tough on national security, Dems supportive of abortion rights, etc — then policy discussion can be built on the backs of an accepted narrative. You can see this with the Iraq debate in 2002. The discussion settled around the idea of the GOP being hawkish, even though Iraq was a retreat form the fight against al Qaeda. In large part this was because the GOP had built a narrative of being tough on national security and defenders of freedom around the world. The policy discussion was constrained by the narratives that the media had accepted.
And the GOP is very good at narratives. They have invested billions of dollars in building alternative media. They find young talent and give it opportunity to grow and develop under the protection of financial security. They have built a network of think tanks that can provide narrative friendly talking points and papers ot help build the new narrative. And it has worked very well, as the state of politics can attest to today.
The democrats are beginning to learn these lessons. The concentrated effort to highlight the rather large number of veterans running for office as Dems this cycle - -the Fighting Dems — is an effort to build a narrative. While it is true that having a bunch of veterans on your ticket does not mean you have a valid foreign policy, it does establish a narrative that can be used to make the media more receptive to your actual policy. The Fighting Dems are an easy o understand and effective shorthand that the media can use to say that veterans support Democrats. It has the added advantage of calling into question the GOP narrative on national security. if the GOP is the superior party on national security, then why are veterans, the people who have lived GOP policies, lining up so strongly against the GOP? The media can convey those message much easier than the can convey the policy reasons for the failure of the GOP on national security. By building that narrative and weakening the corresponding GOP narrative, the Democrats make it easier for their policies to be taken up in a meaningful way in our media.
And that is why DC statehood is so important. A push for DC statehood would reinforce a bad GOP narrative and cut away at a good GOP narrative. Part of the GOP national security narrative is that they support democracy around the world. How, then, can they oppose giving residents of the District the vote? Do they not care about democracy? An unfortunate part of the GOP narrative is their poor record on race relations. See, the GOP hasn’t abandoned the Southern Strategy — they don’t want the overwhelmingly African American District to have representation. These are simple, easy to understand and easy to convey narratives that help the Democrats and hurt the Republicans. And that has enormous value in the media environment we find ourselves trapped in.
Categories: Legal Issues, Media | 36 Comments
