Good for a grin
(Bob) Harris poll: "How would Scottie McClellan spin things if Karl Rove had gotten caught holding up a liquor store?" I voted for "This is nothing more than the Democrats' partisan attempt to criminalize armed robbery."

"Carpetbagger Report" guest blogger Morbo, reflecting on the apparent failures of the Free State Project and Christian Exodus movements (nutshell summaries: Norquistas take over New Hampshire, radical clerics take over South Carolina):

I wanted to see them succeed for two reasons:

1. Getting as many nuts as possible in one state is a good thing. Sticking the religious fanatics in South Carolina, for example, should make it easier for normal people to once again run states like Ohio, Missouri, Iowa and so on.

2. Letting these crackpots set up their scheme and fail miserably, as of course they will, would serve as a lesson to the rest of the nation. Anytime Grover Norquist opened his mouth, all we would have to do is say, 'Good Lord, what do you want to do — turn the entire country into New Hampshire!?' [...]

Once we get the sensible people out of both states, the kooks can pursue what I believe is their long-term goal: secession. Here's the beauty: We let them. We say, 'So long, it's been great. Don't let the door hit your butts on the way out.' It's the perfect plan. We cram as many Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell devotees as possible in South Carolina, while New Hampshire gets the Norquist-Ayn Rand followers. Then we cut them loose. Within three years they'll have made such a mess of things they'll be begging for re-admission to the union. We let them back in — but on our terms.

Morbo's terms: a combined electoral vote of 1. Commenters were, if anything, even more draconian.

"Howdy doody lookin' nimrod" -- What Arkansas' Marion Berry called David Dreier during a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives. Via Justin Logan and Michael Crowley, who writes, "click if you've got 60 seconds." I'm not proud of it, but there's something about insults delivered in a really slow drawl that cracks me up every time.

"Only in Cheney's Anbar province--his home state of Wyoming and the neighboring Utah--does his approval rating break 50 percent, and in almost three dozen states, it's in the twenties and thirties. And not just in the liberal blue coasts." -- Laura Rozen, Village Voice

On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study by Ali Rahimi, Ben Recht, Jason Taylor, Noah Vawter --

It has long been suspected that the government has been using satellites to read and control the minds of certain citizens. The use of aluminum helmets has been a common guerrilla tactic against the government's invasive tactics [1]. Surprisingly, these helmets can in fact help the government spy on citizens by amplifying certain key frequency ranges reserved for government use. In addition, none of the three helmets we analyzed provided significant attenuation to most frequency bands.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:42:00 PM -- |  

 
Happy Thanksgiving
Have a nice Thanksgiving, everyone! Blogging will probably be light over the holidays. Meanwhile, here are a few Internet toys to play with:

Frappr -- You know where I'm coming from, so it's only fair that you leave a pushpin and comment in a world map so I can see where you're coming from. If you have a picture of yourself you don't mind sharing, that would be nice too.

Wherever you are, your hole ends here -- if you dig straight down through the center of the earth and out the other side. I would surface under the Indian Ocean west-southwest of Australia, so I'd better not do that. You can find more cool Google map applications at the Google Maps Mania blog.

StumbleUpon -- records your favorite web-surfing finds and uses a kind of "directed luckiness" to steer you to similar things you might like. Kind of like the Amazon "other books you might like" thing.

LeftyBlogs, LeftyBlogs Maryland -- LeftyBlogs.com seeks out local and state interest bloggers by registration, and creates feeds of local issue-related posts from those bloggers by RSS/computer wizardry. They want you to run a fair amount of local content in your posts, so I'm not sure I'll qualify. I do mention Governor Ehrlich and the Fair Share Health Care bill fairly often, so I'll give it a shot. Left-leaning Tennessee RockyToppers may want to cross-register at LeftyBlogs Tennessee; it looks like several have already done so. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:00:00 AM -- |  

 
Stryker is shrill
"Stryker," in the armed services, once of "Sergeant Stryker's Blog," and now writing at digitalwarfighter, has authored a memorable rant titled "Off the Fence and Off the Cuff":

All the talk about Republicans being big supporters of the military is bullshit. If there’s someone insulting a vet and calling him a coward, chances are it’s a Republican who’s never served. [...]

I have never seen a Party so full of shit when it comes to supporting the military. They fight wars on the cheap and get people killed unnecessarily, instead of fighting with everything we’ve got under a coherant and cohesive strategy that ensures military victory. [...] They play us for suckers and weep crocodile tears at our deaths as their stock values rise. They are strangers to integrity and completely bereft of the basic values that we hold dear. They are without honor. They can go to hell.

If this is what Republicans mean by 'supporting the troops,' then they can by all means support the insurgents. We'd have a free and democratic Iraq by the end of the year.

Hear, hear. Go read it all, I had to cut something.

Stryker got a well-deserved "Quote of the Day" link and probably about 5,000 hits from Andrew Sullivan, who also outlined the Murtha-like path Stryker has taken in his online writing career.

As is often the case, the things that get you noticed aren't necessarily the ones you planned on. Stryker himself calls the piece a "boilerplate rant" in an update, but I think that (a) a really good rant is a pleasure to read, and (b) Congresswoman Jeanne Schmidt's smug, dishonest ("...did not intend to suggest [my remarks] applied to any member..."), outrageous "coward" tirade against Murtha last week is the necessary context. I'll take his "boilerplate rants" over her and her fellow zombie talking points in a heartbeat. Full disclosure: Stryker is a fairly frequent and always welcome commenter at this blog. posted by Thomas Nephew at 9:45:00 PM -- |  

 
Department of followups: vanishing civil liberties edition
Freedom of speech in ole Virginny, October 4, 2005 -- We can all breathe easy: George Mason University student (and Air Force veteran) Tariq Khan will not face charges for being roughed up by university police after he peacefully protested against military recruiting on campus. The Washington Post's Tom Jackman reported (November 15, 2005):

Fairfax County prosecutors yesterday dropped charges against a George Mason University student who was arrested by campus police in September while protesting military recruiting at the school.

After investigating the case, George Mason officials asked last month that the charges against Tariq Khan, 27, be dismissed. Fairfax prosecutors complied in a brief hearing in Fairfax General District Court. Neither school officials nor prosecutors would explain why yesterday.

Here's my theory why: from accounts I've read, I think Khan has a better case against the university than they do against him. At any rate, Khan had a lot of support on campus; the article says that about a hundred students and faculty held a teach-in on his behalf last month.


Senatorial malpractice: habeas corpus attacked, November 14, 2005: As is well known, the Senate first rejected Senator Bingaman's detainee bill by 45-54, and then passed a Graham/Levin/Kyl compromise amendment apparently undoing the worst of the Graham court-stripping bill, but still leaving habeas corpus rights for detainees in shambles -- if only because the net legal effect is apparently unclear even to legal scholars like Marty Lederman. As Hilzoy ("Obsidian Wings") wrote that day of the fourteen "nay" votes, "If you look at the list--Baucus, Biden, Bingaman, Byrd, Dayton, Durbin, Feingold, Harkin, Kennedy, Lautenberg, Leahy, Rockefeller, Sarbanes, Specter--it's clearly a protest vote by senators who simply would not put their names on any bill to strip habeas."

Hilzoy concluded her and Katherine's series on the issue with "Requiem", which takes up the details of the Adel case mentioned in the update to my post, based on the transcript of his hearing before Judge James Robertson of the U.S District Court for the District of Columbia. Mr. Adel was a Uighur (Western China) Muslim turned in to American forces by a bounty hunter. It turned out that the government kept its finding that Adel was a noncombatant a secret from defense lawyers and the court, while keeping said defendant incommunicado and often chained to a floor in Guantanamo. Apparently their difficulties in finding a country to take in Mr. Adel outweighs his human right to be free -- sometime, manana, whenever:

"THE COURT: Counsel, you said that -- you used the word 'soon' to describe when you thought that this might be resolved. Define 'soon'.

MR. HENRY: I don't know when that is. I apologize if I misspoke. I mean, I think I said 'soon' in kind of the hopeful sense of the word."

Why Mr. Adel isn't entitled to an apology, a permanent visa to the U.S. or U.S. citizenship (if he'll have it), reparations, and freedom yesterday is not clear to me.


Fidelio, May 24, 2003 -- When I wrote about Beethoven's opera celebrating the liberation of prisoners from a repressive political system, I concluded:

Beethoven's story of political oppression and liberation couldn't help but remind me and, I'm guessing, most of the audience of the events of the past months in Iraq: oppressors toppled, political prisoners freed, torments, disappearances, and "prison cleansings" ended. Self-congratulation on the order of the final scene in Fidelio isn't warranted for Americans about Iraq, at least not yet. But Beethoven's opera was a stirring reminder for one audience, for one night, that ending repression and liberating its victims is a fundamental triumph for all mankind.

So much for Americans congratulating themselves about that. Mark Kleiman's co-blogger Michael O'Hare saw "Fidelio" last weekend, and remarked:

...the last time I saw it, perhaps a decade ago, it was about the kind of thing bad people in foreign, benighted, and afflicted lands did to their freedom fighters and those who spoke truth to power. Tonight, when the prisoners staggered out of their cells into the sun in Act I, ragged, haggard, and beat-up, all I could think of was how many of the wretched oubliettes around the world, with ragged, haggard, and beat-up people in them, have an American Flag or a CIA compass over the door, and God knows what horrors being practiced inside.

I'd hesitate to call many of our enemies in Iraq "freedom fighters" (and you'll note that's not really what O'Hare does either) but I'd certainly also hesitate to call Abu Ghraib etcetera "freedom." Like O'Hare, I miss being proud of my country.


=====
EDIT, 12/6: Replaced "Judge X" with "Judge James Robertson of the U.S District Court for the District of Columbia" (blush), and added a link to the transcript. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:06:00 AM -- |  

 
A BBC journalist in King George's Court
BBC journalist (and neighbor) Adam Brookes is along for the ride with the "uber-pack" -- his term for the press corps accompanying President Bush on his Asia trip. He's been keeping an entertaining diary of the experience:

November 18: ... And in an odd episode, the South Korean Defence Ministry has chosen this moment to announce that it intends to reduce its troop presence in Iraq by a third. This, a day after Presidents Bush and Roh stood side by side proclaiming solidarity over Iraq.

The White House didn't seem to know it was coming.

"There has been no official communication to the United States of a change of position by the South Korean government," was the line.

November 19: ...John Murtha, a Democratic Congressman from Pennsylvania, is the critic of the moment. He has described the Iraq effort as "a flawed policy wrapped in illusion", and has called for withdrawal.

Why should Mr Bush care about a lone Democrat? Because Murtha is a decorated veteran, a hawk, and he previously supported the war. Most importantly, he's seen as close to the military. Is Murtha speaking for the army? Some in Washington think so.

As the president's speech wears on, I can't be sure, but I think the bursts of applause are becoming less frequent. On the Iraq passages, the clapping seems more restrained - polite rather than tumultuous.

One final observation: in the advance version of the speech was this line: "We will fight the terrorists in Iraq, we stay in the fight until we have achieved the victory our troops have fought and bled for."

When the President delivered the speech, "and bled" had been taken out.

November 20: ...Later, Mr Bush meets the 'travel pool' - a group that splinters from the uber-pack to dog his every move.

He is much more animated. America's relationship with China is 'big and complex'. China has 'undergone an amazing transformation'. But a 'freer economy will yield a freer political system'.

This is one of the president's core beliefs, in plain view on this trip: when a state liberalises its economy, political liberalisation will inevitably follow.

This belief obviates the need to confront the Chinese leadership. Economic liberalisation is underway in China. Ergo, political liberalisation is only a matter of time. The die is cast.

A reporter asks why he seemed so subdued earlier at his appearance with Mr Hu. The reporter suggests he was 'off his game'.

'Have you ever heard of jet lag?' Mr Bush fires back. He then ends the meeting by striding purposefully away towards a door - which turns out to be locked. An aide shepherds him out.

Also, unless you're Korean (or maybe Klingon) you'll want to avoid octopus sushi in Busan, South Korea.


=====
UPDATE, 11/21: The Poor Man answers the president's question with one of his own: "Ever heard of free drinks on Air Force One?" posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:20:00 PM -- |  

 
Starbucks challenge
Coffee house behemoth Starbucks (SBUX) is touting its corporate social responsibility efforts, including 'fair trade coffee' -- coffee bought at a price that gives growers a decent profit after labor and materials. In a memorandum titled "Starbucks, Fair Trade, and Coffee Social Responsibility," Starbucks pledged:

...Fair Trade Certified coffee has been promoted by Starbucks as a brewed “Coffee of the Week” and can be brewed by coffee press during store hours upon customer request.

Accordingly, the "green LA girl" blog has issued the Starbucks Challenge:

1) Simply visit your local Starbucks and ask: "Could I get a cup of fair trade coffee?"
2) Tell us what happens next. Was it hard or easy to get a cup?

I learned about it earlier this weekend in a comment to the "Union Jeans" post below. So later on I went to a Starbucks on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, DC, and asked for a 'fair trade' brewed cup of coffee (I didn't want to stretch into latte territory).

The lady at the cash register didn't know anything about it, but the shift manager (I assume) offered to make a french press brew... but it turned out they didn't have the fair trade beans on hand to grind. She said they'd get a shipment later in the afternoon. She seemed very honest and a touch apologetic about it, but the upshot was that there was no fair trade coffee to drink at that store. I go there every Saturday (my little girl's ballet class is nearby). So I'll keep checking.

Starbucks stores have passed only 18 of the most recent 31 challenges, which seems a bit low for a company that usually succeeds in making its stores meet its quality standards. Whether the whole initiative amounts to so-called "greenwashing" -- when a company carries out a few environmentally or socially praiseworthy actions to deflect attention from its overall record on those scores -- is another question. While my experience at the Starbucks outlet was somewhat troubling, on the whole they seem to be trying, judging from the additional research I've done since then this weekend.

Not many people ask for a particular bean or roast for a brewed cup of coffee, let alone a 'fair trade' product; more people will buy a half pound or pound of a particular roast, and I have in fact bought Starbucks fair trade coffee beans myself before. In its 2004 corporate social responsibility annual report Starbucks claimed it bought 2.1 million pounds of fair trade coffee in 2003, 4.8 million pounds in 2004, and hoped to buy 10 million pounds in 2005.

The offer to brew fair trade coffee on request isn't the only or even the most significant aspect of the "coffee social responsibility" plan Starbucks says it is following. On the face of it, that would seem to be Starbucks' professed "C.A.F.E" (Coffee and Farmer Equity) purchasing guidelines which "give preference to farmers who score high in measurements of economic fairness, socially responsible working conditions, and progressive environmental practices."* In the same 2004 annual report, Starbucks claimed it bought 43.5 million pounds of coffee in 2004 made under these guidelines, which it summarizes as follows:

The guidelines contain 28 specific indicators that fall under five focus areas: product quality, economic accountability (transparency), social responsibility, environmental leadership in coffee growing and environmental leadership in coffee processing.

Each indicator is assigned a maximum number of points that can be earned, except for our prerequisites of product quality and economic accountability. A total score is tabulated to determine preferred supplier status.

For their part, "green LA girl" and commenters point out that SBUX' own claims of paying $1.20 a pound worldwide for coffee (a) fall below the $1.26 mark mandated for fair trade coffee and (b) don't yet fully specify to whom such prices were paid -- farmers or "coyote" middlemen who underpay farmers and pocket the difference for themselves. How you view Starbucks' claim that they have detailed data about this for 59% of their purchases (or, for that matter, the 18 out of 31 fair trade brewing success rate) depends, I guess, on whether you're a 'glass over half full' or 'glass nearly half empty' sort of person.

I admit I'm kind of fond of Starbucks: they make consistently good coffee, they provide a nice, familiar place to relax whether you're in your home town or on the road, and they appear to be a decent employer: health benefits for part-time employees, profit sharing, tuition deals. For whatever it's worth, Fortune has the company among the 100 best employers in the United States in 2005, and Business Ethics had the company on its top 100 list 5 years running through 2004. The right to organize appears to be recognized, although the level of unionization is "one eighth of one percent" of "partners," Starbucks' term for employees.

But "green LA girl" has a point: if you can't keep one promise, you may not be keeping others, and if you say you're going to do something, you should just do it. This time I went ahead and got the lattes for my wife and me that I had planned to get anyway. Next time, I'll pass if Starbucks is still not living up to their own simple pledge.


=====
* A company called Scientific Certification Systems runs the certification process for Starbucks, and provides additional descriptions of the process at its web site.
UPDATE, 12/4: No fair trade coffee on Friday at an Arlington, VA Starbucks either. The store manager fellow didn't know that "fair trade" was a term, not a brand: "All we've got is Estima." "Fine" (whatever). 5 minutes later, the person put to French-pressing the brew comes back and tells me they're out of Estima. "Fine, I want my money back." She gives me a coupon instead; I didn't want to make more trouble, and left with that. Meanwhile, greenLAgirl is writing an open letter to Starbucks inquiring what's up with no Estima anywhere: high demand? manager screwups?
UPDATE, 1/26/05: Still no fair trade coffee at the Wisconsin Ave. store, each of the last two times I've tried. I did succeed at a Starbucks in downtown Silver Spring around Christmas time. I was so startled I didn't object to buying a whole French press' worth of coffee, and didn't have the presence of mind to check what I was paying for it compared to a regular cup of brewed coffee. I asked for and got two paper cups, filled them both and left.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 9:30:00 PM -- |