cognitive dissident

Marsalis, Wynton. Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life (New York: Random House, 2008)

I've read each of Wynton Marsalis' previous books, and have been looking forward to Moving to Higher Ground since it was announced several years ago; it was not a disappointment. Marsalis begins with this declaration of purpose, as bold a statement as any:

In this book I hope to deliver the positive message of America's greatest music: how great musicians demonstrate a mutual respect and trust on the bandstand that can alter your outlook on the world and enrich every aspect of your life--from individual creativity and personal relationships to the way you conduct business and understand what it means to be a global citizen in the most modern sense. [...] I'd like to demystify listening to jazz and show you how the underlying ideas of this music can change your life. (p. xv, Introduction)

Chapter six, Lessons from the Masters, was the highlight of the book for me. Marsalis discusses thirteen of jazz's most accomplished musicians, and relates some tales of their attitudes and artistry that are liberally leavened with humor and humility. This one, about Marsalis' first encounter with fellow trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, is revealing:

I first met Dizzy when I was about fifteen years old at a club called Rosie's on Tchoupitoulas Street in New Orleans. My dad said, "This is my son. He plays trumpet." Dizzy was standing near the dressing room doorway. He handed me his horn and said, "Play me something, man." He had a real small mouthpiece. I wasn't used to playing that--poooot. He didn't know what to say with my daddy standing there, so he said, "Yeaaah"--really drawn out, as I the length of it could help ease the awkwardness of the moment. And then he leaned down close to me and said, "Practice, motherfucker." (p. 136)

Far from being discouraged by such admonishment, Marsalis emphasizes the deep compassion in jazz musicians' interactions with each other:

For all of that hard, profane talk, there was an unusual type of gentleness in the way they treated one another. Always a hug upon greeting and--from even the most venerated musicians--sometimes a kiss on the cheek. A natural ease with those teetering on the edge of sanity. A way of admonishing but not alienating those who might have drug problems. Always the feeling that things in our country, in our culture, in our souls, in the world, would get better. And beyond that, the feeling that this mysterious music would someday help people see how things fit together: segregation and integration, men and women, the political process, even the stock market. (p. 5)

Whatever one's opinion of Marsalis' neoclassicism or his seemingly reactionary tendencies--he loathes much modern urban music--his vantage point gives him much to say about jazz. In Moving to Higher Ground he says it powerfully, and well. If I had but a single passage to summarize this book, I would choose this one:

It [jazz] is an endless road of discovery leading to more maturity and acceptance of personal responsibility, a greater respect for cultures around the world, an invigorating playfulness, an excitement about change, and an appetite for the unpredictable. It gives you a historical perspective, a spiritual acceptance of necessary opposites, an undying optimism born of the blues--and a pile of good listening. (pp. 10-11)

links:
Amazon's interview with Marsalis is here

Chapter one is online here

[typo fixed]

Posted by cognitivedissident at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ross, Alex. The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007)

Alex Ross' The Rest Is Noise seemed to be a good choice to fill in the gaps from the Aaron Copland and Julius Jacobson books I've read recently; Ross delivered a stellar book that exceeds the praise it has received so far. Geoff Dyer's NYT review called The Rest Is Noise "a work of immense scope and ambition" and "a great achievement." David Schiff's Nation review called the book "engaging" and asked "Who would have thought that a 600-page history of music that few people love could be such a page turner?" Joseph Kerman's TNR review praises Ross' New Yorker pieces, says that he "writes very well about classical music," and notes:

That he never shies away from technical language gives him cred (as he might say) with his musician readers and bothers not at all the non-musicians, who seem happy to skim over the C-sharps and the minor triads rooted a tritone apart, knowing these will always lead to something interesting and even breathtaking.

For Ross is one of very few music critics who somehow create the illusion that you grasp the music they write about even if you have not heard it. This a rare gift.

Ross' narrative effortlessly places composers, works, and performances placed into their historical and cultural settings to aid the reader's understanding, and never fails to maintain interest. He explains the tonality-to-atonality transition, twelve-tone serialism, the avant-garde movement, experiments with chance and collage, minimalism, and then sketches the way forward:

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the impulse to put classical music against pop culture no longer makes intellectual or emotional sense. Young composers have grown up with pop music ringing in their ears, and they make use of it or ignore it as the occasion demands. They are seeking the middle ground between the life of the mind and the noise of the street. (p. 541)

Part I kicks off with the 1906 premiere of Richard Strauss' Salome; and Part II with Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth in 1936, which leads into the well-known story of his immortal Fifth Symphony; Part III continues the tale from the end of World War II to the present. The middle section is the book's highlight, and Ross does a spectacular job of explaining and dramatizing Shostakovich's relationship with Stalin's totalitarian terror. I was unaware of the harrowing story of his Seventh Symphony, titled "Leningrad," which Ross brings to life here:

Against his own wishes, he [Shostakovich] was evacuated from the city on October 1 [1941], and spent the winter in Kuybyshev, formerly Samara, in the Volga region. [...] Besieged Leningrad heard the [Seventh] symphony on August 9, 1942, under the most dramatic circumstances imaginable. The score was flown in by military aircraft in June, and a severely depleted Leningrad Radio Orchestra began learning it. After a mere fifteen musicians showed up for the initial rehearsal, the commanding general ordered all competent musicians to report from the front lines. The players would break from the rehearsals to return to their duties, which sometimes included the digging of mass graves for victims of the siege. Three members of the orchestra died of starvation before the premiere took place. [...] An array of loudspeakers then broadcast the Leningrad into the silence of no-man's-land. Never in history had a musical composition entered the thick of battle in quite this way: the symphony become a tactical strike against German morale. (p. 246)

That is the sort of dramatic story that would be nearly unbelievable if it came from the pen of a Hollywood scriptwriter; the fact that it actually happened gives me shivers, and showcases Ross' ability to tell his story exceedingly well.

When Ross notes that Lenin "regarded [music] as a bourgeois placebo that covered up the sufferings of mankind" (p. 218), this struck me as a deliberate echo of Marx's "opiate of the masses" remark regarding religion; it is to Ross' credit that he assumes such historical familiarity on the part of his audience. His assumptions about musical knowledge may be less warranted, however. Readers who have never studied music theory may want to do some reading on intervals and modes to help understand Ross' detailed musical descriptions.

Don't be put off by the musical minutiae, because Ross has penned the best book I've yet read on music. His enticing explanations of the music have inspired me to take note of pieces I've not yet heard, in order to broaden my listening habits. (As encyclopedic as Ross was in The Rest Is Noise, his mentions of microtonality didn't include jazz trumpeter Don Ellis, who performed on a quarter-tone trumpet. A reference to the Modern Jazz Quartet in Ross' discussion of Gunther Schuller and Third Stream music wouldn't have been out of place, either.) Those minor details aren't much of a fault, as including every minor tidbit of information would surely have ballooned the book to over a thousand pages.

Ross constructs his narrative wisely, and has written the sort of book that I can't recommend highly enough. Avid music listeners should put The Rest Is Noise at the top of their reading lists.

links:
Alex Ross' New Yorker columns
his book's website and bibliography
Wikipedia's article on "20th-Century Classical Music"

[typo fixed]

Posted by cognitivedissident at 1:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Moore, Alan & Brian Bolland. Batman: The Killing Joke (The Deluxe Edition) (New York: DC Comics, 2008)

In honor of the new Dark Knight film--featuring Heath Ledger's final (complete) film role--I revisited a classic from the Batman comics canon: the Alan Moore/Brian Bolland tale The Killing Joke. The newly recolored hardcover "Deluxe Edition" may seem unnecessarily extravagant at $18 for a 46-page story, but its brilliance outweighs its brevity. Van Jensen's ComixMix review says:

The Killing Joke is without question one of the greatest encounters between Batman and his nemesis, and the real reason is that the story serves both as a zenith for the Joker's depravity and for his pathos. [..] It makes a Joker that's more real, and more terrifying.

The Killing Joke isn't nearly substantial enough to be classified as a graphic novel, but it's a very successful short story and a great example of what talented creators can produce within the comics medium. (This edition also includes an 8-page Batman tale, "An Innocent Guy," from Batman: Black & White. Bolland wrote, drew, and colored this story; it fits well with The Killing Joke, and helps add a little more bang for the buck in this slim volume.)

I read the new Killing Joke side-by-side with the original version, and noted a few minor artistic revisions: the yellow oval around the symbol on Batman's chest is gone, and Bolland admits that "every page has something slightly different on it from The Killing Joke of 20 years ago" (such as the inclusion of a new background figure in one of the panels--can you find it?). Heidi MacDonald discusses the coloring at Publishers Weekly, and Jon Haehnle has several well-chosen recoloring comparisons here. My favorite compare-and-contrast example is this one from the Joker's origin sequence:

While John Higgins did a dramatic job with the original colors, Bolland goes for more contrast (and for bleeding eyes, as many observers have noted):

I'm largely a fan of the newer, more subdued color scheme, although Higgins' more expressive work on the original wasn't bothersome either then or now. Bolland's scene-to-scene transitions remain some of the best I've ever seen, being almost uniformly excellent. Here are the two transitions (pp. 6-8) which bookend the Joker's flashback from his purchase of a dilapidated circus to an incident with his wife about a failed nightclub gig:

After she consoles him, the Joker snaps back to the present:

The first and last panels of the story are identical, which ties the story together nicely. (I wish the Deluxe Edition had preserved the original use of the rain-puddle image on the endpapers, rather than using sickly green.)

Is The Killing Joke the perfect Batman/Joker story? No, although it's one of the best I've ever read. Batman's reaction on the last page nearly ruined the ending of the story for me, seeming quite out of character. <SPOILER> A silently dismissive response from Batman would have been more appropriate and would have echoed the tale's opening in a very intriguing manner. However, doing so may have required changing the story's title.</END SPOILER> The overall excellence of the rest of the book is still thrilling and explains why I--and, apparently, many others--still hold The Killing Joke in high esteem since its initial release two decades ago.

I would have more trouble believing that it's really been twenty years since The Killing Joke came out, but that same time period also saw the Grant Morrison/Dave McKean Arkham Asylum, and the Frank Miller/David Mazzuccelli Batman: Year One story. (Miller's seminal The Dark Knight Returns is slightly older at 22 years; without the reinvigoration of the Batman franchise provided by it--and, of course, by The Killing Joke--we may not have seen the 1989 Tim Burton film or any of its successors.)

The legacy of Bob Kane lives on!

[chronology errors fixed]

Posted by cognitivedissident at 11:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Wheaton, Wil. The Happiest Days of Our Lives (Arcadia, CA: Monolith, 2007)

After enjoying the hell out of Wil Wheaton's first two books (Dancing Barefoot and Just a Geek, reviewed together here) I was itching to get my hands on a copy of his third book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives. That itch has now been scratched, and it feels GOOD!

The book's highlights are "Exactly What I Wanted" (about a Sunday ice-cream trip with his kids) and "Let Go: A Requiem for Felix the Bear" (about saying goodbye to a beloved family pet). They are perfect little episodes that evoke just the right emotional notes; I laughed out loud at the first and teared up at the second. You can read them online (here for the first story, here and here for the second) or in print (pp. 33-35 and pp. 107-118) while you sit in the bookstore's coffeeshop waiting for the checkout line to shrink down to a tolerable length. If you like those stories, then buy the book already; if you don't, then...you suck. Give up and go home.

Seriously, though: Wheaton is a great writer, and I'm now eagerly waiting the announcement of a publication date for his next book (or at least a convention appearance near me, so I can tell him in person how much I enjoy his work). When Wheaton writes that "I have been able to touch people's lives as a writer in ways that I never could have when I wore a spacesuit, just reading the words that other people thought I should say" (p. 104, "The Big Goodbye"), he's not exaggerating. It's great to have a Niven-reading, taiko-loving unrepentant geek writing such great slice-of-life stuff. Even when Wheaton writes about gaming and poker (two habits I never acquired) he does it so well that even a newbie can grok what he's saying.

Do yourself a favor and check out Wheaton's blog; then go read his books. For some levity, here are two Quotes of the Day that made my inner geek laugh:

My core cast [of Star Wars figures] was Han Solo (in Hoth and regular outfits), Luke Skywalker (X-wing fighter or Bespin version), Greedo (shoots second, goddammit, version), Obi-Wan Kenobi (I lost the plastic robe and broke the tip off the light saber version), Princess Leia (pre-slave girl "man I wish I could hit that" version), C-3PO (tarnished version), and R2-D2 (head stopped clicking a long time ago version). (pp. 43-5, "The Light Special")

...we had D&D fever, and the only prescription was more polyhedral dice. (p. 81, "A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Geek")

[typo fixed]

Posted by cognitivedissident at 6:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I received an email castigating me for being liberal:

"Regarding your liberal viewpoint - I consider it to be like braking with your left foot. It's novel and different, but sooner or later you outgrow it."

My initial reaction was to pen a dismissive response to this conservative condescension, perhaps quoting Christopher Hitchens: "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." ("Mommie Dearest," Slate, 20 October 2003) Upon further reflection, I decided to write a more considered response. Bear with me as I address the three problems in the criticism above: the automobile analogy, the novelty accusation, and the maturity argument.

"like braking with your left foot"

This analogy is so inapplicable to political ideology that I hardly know where to begin. Its main flaw is the presupposition that there is exactly one right way (the Right's way, of course) to do something, and that any attempt otherwise is definitionally incorrect, improper, or (perhaps) sinful. "That's the way we always did it" is hardly an empirical position; if it were, we would still be--to stick with automobiles--hand-cranking the starter motor and manually adjusting the choke as we drove (slowly) on dirt roads.

It would also take us much longer to get anywhere, if we could get there without road signs, AAA maps, and GPS; if we could tolerate driving long distances without climate control, power brakes, and power steering; and if we survived the trip without ABS, seat belts, and airbags. This brings me to my next point:

"novel and different"

It behooves us to remember that every advance in human knowledge, every miniscule bit of progress from the status quo, every invention that improved our quality of life, was--in the beginning--novel, different, and untried. Only the liberal dissatisfaction with life as it is, our idealism that it can be better, and our willingness to ask questions and strive for improvement has made our (liberal) American experiment in freedom possible. Accordingly, here are some liberal Quotes of the Day:

"Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?" (James Madson, Federalist 14) "I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." (Thomas Jefferson, letter to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816)

"Nothing is wiser than that all our institutions should keep pace with the advance of time and be improved with the improvement of the human mind."
(Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac Harby, 6 January 1826)

"you outgrow it"

Since liberalism is as much a methodology as an ideology, I'm unconvinced that one could "outgrow" it without foregoing necessities like skepticism and critical thinking (although perhaps not everyone considers those things necessary). Because liberalism relies on analyzing arguments rather than simply accepting or rejecting them based on preconceptions, it can lead to conservative conclusions--if warranted by the facts. The liberal-heart/conservative-brain trope to which many I'm-more-mature-than-you conservatives refer (often misattributed to Winston Churchill, with many variants) is unsupported, as it relies on two errors.

The first error is the association of conservatism with intelligence, or sometimes with education. Liberalism is actually somewhat correlated with higher education, as one would expect when previously sheltered students are exposed to thoughts and arguments that differ from those of their family and neighbors. From the 2005 Pew study:

Liberals have the highest education level of any typology group: 49% are college graduates and 26% have some postgraduate education. But the Enterprisers also include a relatively high percentage of college graduates (46%), although fewer Enterprisers [Pew's name for the far-right typology] than Liberals have attended graduate school (14%).

The second error, the conflation of conservatism and maturity, is factually questionable at best. One recent study (mentioned here at LiveScience) observed exactly the opposite, that liberalism is something that one grows into rather than grows out of. "[N]ew research has debunked the myth that people become more conservative as they age:"

By comparing surveys of various age groups taken over a span of more than 30 years, sociologists found that in general, Americans' opinions veer toward the liberal as they grow older.

"All the evidence we have found refutes the idea that as people age their attitudes become more conservative or more rigid," said Nicholas Danigelis, a sociologist at the University of Vermont. "It's just not true. More people are changing in a liberal direction than in a conservative direction."

[Caveat: I've only read the LiveScience article and the abstract, so I'm off to the library to find the whole paper!]

If calling my general outlook "liberal" is supposed to frighten me into silence or equivocation in the face of conservatism's (claimed, but unproven) superiority, it has not worked. In a very real sense--despite my lack of wealth, notoriety, and power--I am one of conservatives' worst nightmares: I am a liberal who is not afraid to be called by that name because I know what it means--and the meaning of liberalism has nothing to do with the caricature that conservatives use for their villainous vilification. Even a casual reader of this blog will note that when I attack conservative positions, I do so by confronting errors with facts. (In fairness, let it be remembered that I also criticize Democrats and other putative liberals for their failures; for example, I did so yesterday in reference to the FISA scandal.)

[typos fixed]

Posted by cognitivedissident at 10:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is a classic example of the Right's historical revisionism: Bush quoted Jefferson last week, but left out Jefferson's rather poignant criticism. Ed Brayton quotes from Bush's speech and offers an analysis:

On the 50th anniversary of America's independence, Thomas Jefferson passed away. But before leaving this world, he explained that the principles of the Declaration of Independence were universal. In one of the final letters of his life, he wrote, "May it be to the world, what I believe it will be -- to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all -- the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government."

Now let's look at the full quote, including the part that was cut out. This is from a letter he wrote to Roger Weightman reflecting on the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (which, it turns out, was the day both he and John Adams died):

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.

Jefferson made many such statements, of course. Clearly they are best edited out by those who advocate nothing if not monkish ignorance and superstition.

[typo fixed]

Posted by cognitivedissident at 2:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In response to a recent comment on my review of William Martin's What Liberals Believe, I was asked to share a few of my favorite quotes from the book. I was going to share a "top ten" list, but decided to go for a baker's dozen instead:

Here's a wonderful retort to small-government conservatives:

"Other than telling us how to live, think, marry, pray, vote, invest, educate our children, and, now, die, I think the Republicans have done a fine job of getting government out of our personal lives." (p. 36, editorial page, Portland Oregonian, 19 June 2005)

I used this quote when criticizing George Will's ANWR errors:

"That's what happened to Jimmy Carter--he asked Americans to take responsibility for their profligate ways, and promptly lost to Ronald Reagan, who told them once again that they could do anything they wanted." (p. 125, Jane Smiley, "The Unteachable Ignorance of the Red States," Slate, 4 November 2004)

Although I'm an atheist, these two pro-Christian quotes well worth pondering (the second one I had read a long time ago, but hadn't added to my commonplace book):

"Liberalism is secular Christianity." (p. 115, anonymous)

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth can save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." (p. 128, Jesus, The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas)

I laughed out loud over this one:

"Jesse Helms and Newt Gingrich were shaking hands congratulating themselves on the introduction of an anti-gay bill in Congress. If it passes, they won't be able to shake hands, because it will then be illegal for a prick to touch an asshole." (p. 248, Judy Carter, "Editor's Bit," BC Magazine, 16 June 2005)

TR would be appalled at the depths to which his (former) party has sunk over the past century:

"There once was a time in history when the limitation of governmental power meant increasing liberty for the people. In the present day the limitation of governmental power, of governmental actions, means the enslavement of the people by the great corporations." (p. 279, Theodore Roosevelt, Progressive Principles: Selections from Addresses Made During the Presidential Campaign of 1912)

Mencken was a hell-raiser of historic proportions, and funny to boot:

"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry." (p. 340, H.L. Mencken, Minority Report, 1956)

So was the great anarchist Emma Goldman:

"The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought." (p. 380, Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, 1910)

Krugman does a great job here:

"If Bush said the earth was flat, the mainstream media would have stories with the headline: 'Shape of the Earth--Views Differ.' Then they'd quote some Democrat saying that it was round." (p. 364, Paul Krugman, interviewed by Terence McNally, "The Professor Takes the Gloves Off," AlterNet, 12 November 2003)

This was depressingly prescient concerning Jonah Goldberg's screed Liberal Fascism:

"Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal." (p. 636, Ronald Reagan, Time, 17 May 1976)

We could really use a Schlesinger today:

"Human rights is not a religious idea. It is a secular idea, the product of the last four centuries of Western history. ... The basic human rights documents--the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man--were written by political, not religious, leaders." (p. 33, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., 1989 speech at Brown University, quoted in 2000 Years of Disbelief)

"The great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights in the contemporary sense--not only for their acquiescence in poverty, inequality and oppression, but for their enthusiastic justification of slavery, persecution, torture and genocide." (p. 506, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Cycles of American History, 1999)

These words are especially apropos for this coming weekend:

"It occurs to me that my patriotic duty is to recapture my flag from the men now waving it in the name of jingoism and censorship." (p. 395, Barbara Kingsolver, "And Our Flag Was Still There," San Francisco Chronicle, 25 September 2001)

Posted by cognitivedissident at 9:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today's NYT op-ed "Looking at America" opens with the plain truth that "There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country." After discussing a few of the "shocking abuses of President Bush's two terms in office," the piece concludes that "the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them:

We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.

Not only can we do better than Dubya, we must do better. As we look to the upcoming primary season, we must ask ourselves: which of the candidates is most capable of restoring the visage of America so defaced by the outgoing administration?

[typo fixed]

Posted by cognitivedissident at 4:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Glenn Greenwald discusses “The Completely Unreliable Washington Post” and how it impacted his article last Friday about Senator Arlen Specter, about which I commented here. Greenwald notes that

Before I wrote the post, I searched for the actual text of Specter's bill in order to read it myself, but could not find it (Specter's website is one of the worst sites for any Senator, as it is usually a month or more behind). As a result, my post -- as I noted in a Comment -- was based upon the Post's reporting about Specter's bill, rather than my own reading of it.

As it now appears, the Post article was simply wrong in what it reported.

[…]

As soon as I realized this morning that my post on Friday was based upon the apparently false premise that Specter's bill contained an amnesty provision, I was mortified and furious that I posted something so inaccurate based upon the Post article. My immediate priority became looking into that error, figuring out what happened, and then posting about it in order to correct the inaccuracy. I would never leave a post uncorrected that I knew was likely inaccurate.

Crooks and Liars has the transcript of Specter and Wolf Blitzer, and a link to the video. In it, Specter states that the WaPo article

was an erroneous report. If anybody has violated the law, they'll be held accountable, both as to criminal conduct and as to civil conduct. And in no way did I promise amnesty or immunity or letting anybody off the hook.

Since my post on Specter was based on Greenwald’s post, and thus on the Washington Post article, I offer the same correction.

Posted by cognitivedissident at 10:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

USA Today has a sizeable article on the NSA's domestic spying, with a Q&A here.

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY. [...] With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. [emphasis added]

Qwest is the only telecom firm to deny NSA access to its records; bully for them!

According to multiple sources, Qwest declined to participate because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants.

[...]

Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest's lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA's explanation did little to satisfy Qwest's lawyers. "They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them," one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events.

This entire program may be running afoul of the law:

Under Section 222 of the Communications Act, first passed in 1934, telephone companies are prohibited from giving out information regarding their customers' calling habits: whom a person calls, how often and what routes those calls take to reach their final destination. Inbound calls, as well as wireless calls, also are covered.

The financial penalties for violating Section 222, one of many privacy reinforcements that have been added to the law over the years, can be stiff. The Federal Communications Commission, the nation's top telecommunications regulatory agency, can levy fines of up to $130,000 per day per violation, with a cap of $1.325 million per violation.

There is much about this surveillance program that we may never learn, given the NSA's penchant for secrecy. Just this morning, the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility had to terminate an investigation into another NSA domestic spying program because the NSA refused to grant investigators the necessary security clearance. As the head of the OPR wrote,

"we have been unable to make meaningful progress in our investigation because O.P.R. has been denied security clearances for access to information about the N.S.A. program."

Who watches the watchmen, indeed.

update (12:47pm):

Bush issued a defense of the NSA's telephone spying. The White House website has his full remarks, and USA Today has a summation.

After his usual "war on terror" boilerplate, Bush claimed that "We're not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans," which--at least according to the USA Today article--is blatantly untrue.

Bush then remarked that the program only targets "Al Qaeda and their known affiliates," but this doesn't square with the collection of data on tens of millions of Americans. If we have that many al Qaeda operatives, we're really in trouble. Bush also stated that:

Our most important job is to protect the American people from another attack, and we will do so within the laws of our country.

Dubya, you dipshit, you really need to re-read the Constitution. You were apparently so consumed with your Commander-in-Chief duties in Article II Section 2 that you forgot to read section 3, which states that you "shall take care that the Laws be faithfully executed," and the oath of office, which requires every president to:

faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Bush's disdain for the Constitutional separation of powers and his inability--amply demonstrated by now--to stay within legal limits should give us all pause. I fully expect his poll numbers to be in the twenties before the end of the week.

update 2 (3:02pm):

Seventy-two members of Congress have files amicus briefs in two federal courts--ACLU v. NSA (1520KB PDF) and CCR v. Bush (49KB PDF)--seeking to stop Bush's illegal NSA wiretapping. It is to be expected that not a single member of the GOP has signed either brief.

[fixed transcription error]

Posted by cognitivedissident at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

George Clooney apparently did not intend this as his first post; the words are his, but were compiled from interviews and ghostwritten by someone at HuffPo into a blog entry. As Clooney remarked to the LA Times “The Envelope:”

I stand by my statements but I did not write this blog. With my permission Miss Huffington compiled it from interviews with Larry King and The Guardian. What she most certainly did not get my permission to do is to combine only my answers in a blog that misleads the reader into thinking that I wrote this piece. These are not my writings - they are answers to questions and there is a huge difference."

Arianna’s take on the situation is here.

[editor's note: fixed a typo.]

Posted by cognitivedissident at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This letter appeared yesterday in my local newspaper:

Democrats remain fixated on perceived mistakes

A recent letter attacked the electoral college for putting President Bush in office in 2000, his tax breaks, high deficits, going into Iraq, staying in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina relief, torturing prisoners, violating the Geneva Conventions and our rights under the USA Patriot Act.

That the electoral college is as old as the Constitution, that Bush's tax breaks have grown the economy, that the unemployment rate is the lowest in decades, that every intelligence service in the world agreed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that we have not been attacked since 9/11, that Democrats mismanaged New Orleans for decades prior to Katrina, that U.S. policy is not to torture, that al-Qaida regularly violates the Geneva Conventions by killing women and children and refusing to wear uniforms, and that no one's rights are being abused under the Patriot Act that both Republicans and Democrats passed in 2001, is irrelevant to a liberal mind-set fixated on perceived wrongs.

What Democratic congressional leaders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi haven't yet learned is that people vote for leaders who will protect them, rather than clueless whiners who tell them the sky is falling.

[name redacted]

Here is my response:

Republicans ignore Bush’s failures

A recent letter writer described Democrats as “clueless whiners,” but he needs to get a clue for himself. He was correct about the age of the Electoral College, and wrong about everything else.

• Bush’s repeated tax breaks for the wealthy have siphoned amounts of money upward into the pockets of those who need it the least. This caused the recovery from the 2001 recession to be far weaker than it could have been if the tax cuts had gone to the poor and the middle class. In addition, Bush’s massive deficit spending spree is doing long-term structural damage to our economy.

• The current unemployment rate is not “the lowest in decades.” December’s seasonally-adjusted rate of 4.9% was equaled by 1997’s rate. 1998 through 2000, each less than a single decade ago, had lower unemployment rates of 4.4%, 4.1%, and 3.9% respectively.

• The world’s intelligence services agreed that Iraq did have WMDs, but that was in the 1980s when Reagan and Bush’s father were Saddam’s suppliers. The inspection program was successful in neutering Saddam, and the administration's repeated assertions that WMD were found in Iraq are as false as their attempts to link Iraq to 9/11.

• The Army Corps of Engineers’ assessment of the New Orleans levees and FEMA’s bungled response to Hurricane Katrina were both failures at the federal level, and the latter was mismanaged by Bush’s buddy, Mike “heck of a job” Brown.

• Bush talks out of both sides of his mouth on torture. After being publicly shamed by former tortured POW John McCain into signing a ban on torture, Bush then declared that he would violate the ban whenever he wishes.

• Al Qaeda’s violations of the Geneva Conventions do not excuse Bush’s violations of them, such as “enemy combatants,” secret prisons, and the “extraordinary rendition” program. As with torture, Bush wants to claim the moral high ground while not actually living up to his lofty rhetoric.

• The so-called USA-PATRIOT Act does indeed sanction civil rights violations. Section 215 conflicts with the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments to our Constitution, as the ACLU has noted.

These issues are not “perceived wrongs,” they are actual wrongs. It appears that the soothing inaccuracies of talk radio and other right-wing media can lull some people into complacency about our nation’s future, and blind them to every miserable failure of the Bush administration.

[editor's note: fixed a typo]

Posted by cognitivedissident at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) released a report entitled "Misperceptions, The Media and The Iraq War." They examined consumption of various news media and correlated the results with the following three misperceptions about Iraq War II:

· that Iraq was directly involved in the September 11 attacks and that evidence of links between Iraq and al-Qaeda have been found

· that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq after the war and that Iraq actually used weapons of mass destruction during the war

· that world public opinion has approved of the US going to war with Iraq

I have excerpted some highlights below:

"The extent of Americans' misperceptions vary significantly depending on their source of news. Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions. Those who receive most of their news from NPR or PBS are less likely to have misperceptions." (p. 12)

(p. 13)

"While it would seem that misperceptions are derived from a failure to pay attention to the news, overall, those who pay greater attention to the news are no less likely to have misperceptions. Among those who primarily watch Fox, those who pay more attention are more likely to have misperceptions. Only those who mostly get their news from print media, and to some extent those who primarily watch CNN, have fewer misperceptions as they pay more attention." (p. 16)

"Among those who say they will vote for the President, those with higher exposure to news are more likely to misperceive and to support the war. The opposite is true for those who say they will vote for a Democratic nominee: those with higher exposure to news are less likely to misperceive and to support the war." (p. 19)

(p. 20)

I've discussed the issue of media bias with some of you - especially that of the "Faux News Network" - and this study illustrates one of the myriad reasons I'm so skeptical about their "Fair and Balanced" [sic] coverage. Rupert Murdoch has claimed that Fox is "challenging the established and often stagnant media," but Fox's popularity - outside of some excellent programming like The Simpsons - frequently relies on marketing salaciousness as entertainment and blatant bias as evenhanded news. Their ratings may be good, but popularity does not equal truthfulness. I don't fault Fox for disseminating the administration's lies about Iraq - all media outlets did, to some degree - but rather for their exacerbation of people's misconceptions in support of war and in opposition to the facts.

Not to make too much of one study, but I don't find it surprising that the media outlets most often derided as "liberal" (CNN, PBS, and NPR) had the most well-informed audiences outside of print. (As an aside, I heard about a study several years ago that compared people's estimation of their own informedness with their actual knowledge. It found that talk radio listeners - who rated themselves as the best informed - actually knew the least of any group surveyed.) If anyone has information about any study on media bias, regardless of results, please let me know; I'm always looking for more data.

Thanks for reading.

Quote of the Day:

"There has never been a just [war], never an honorable one - on the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful - as usual - will shout for the war. The pulpit will - warily and cautiously - object - at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, 'It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.' Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers - as earlier - but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation - pulpit and all - will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."

Mark Twain, "The Mysterious Stranger"

update: David Barker's Rushed to Judgment: Talk Radio, Persuasion, and American Political Behavior was the study to which I had referred, although it took quite some time to locate. Here is his summarization:

It is interesting to note that frequency of exposure to conservative talk radio displays a significant negative correlation with political information, indicating that although conservative talk radio listeners are more interested in politics, read the newspaper more often, and are more likely to vote, they are less likely to hold accurate beliefs even regarding nonideological facts (such as which branch of government determines the constitutionality of a law) when other factors are controlled, such as political talk activity. (p. 115)

Thus it appears that not only are conservative talk radio listeners in the sample less informed about general information than nonlisteners, the conservative talk devotees tend to be more misinformed as well, likely drawing false inferences from show content about political facts... (p. 117)

[the emphases are mine]

Barker later states, "We posit that listening to liberal talk shows would likely result in the spread of misinformation as well, only in the opposite ideological direction." (p. 140) If Air America and Michael Moore ever dominate our national political discourse, we may indeed be subject to systemic liberal misinformation. Since we do not live in that world, however, it is primarily conservative bias with which we must contend.

Posted by cognitivedissident at 9:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)