America’s dashboard GPS of war

Sad to say, this earlier post still applies. It’s all I have to say about l’affaire McChrystal et Petraeus.

I’ve read more than one news item describing how drivers sometimes place too much faith in their GPS navigation devices. Guided by the disembodied voice coming from the dashboard, some have doggedly followed dirt roads to nowhere, faced oncoming one-way traffic, or narrowly avoided driving over cliffs. The authority of the voice-in-a-box overrules … Read More

via à la Rob

A few dots on politics

• NASCAR and Congress: I’ve seen yet another approving mention of the idea of dressing politicians in NASCAR-style uniforms bearing the logos of their corporate sponsors. So when is someone going to Photoshop these outfits for us, using data from, say, opensecrets.org? I’d do it myself if I had the time and skills.
• Health care: Liberals want the government to take care of everyone, while conservatives want the government out and the free market in. Everyone hates what we have, and neither side can have everything they want. Can we reach a consensus that works? The ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee thinks maybe so. Rep. Paul Ryan talks with health reporter Ezra Klein, then rushes off to an unspecified appointment.
• Casino economy: And you thought that was just a metaphor. After the president called a Las Vegas vacation an example of unwise spending, the Senate majority leader and other Nevada pols lost no time grousing and whining about how cruelly Obama had harmed the tender sensibilities of the gambling and convention businesses. The Nevadans’ statements make it clear who calls the shots in their state.
• Remote-control havoc: While we’re in Nevada, leave it to BBC Radio to look into the way certain commuters in the Battle-Born State earn their paychecks by operating drone aircraft to spy on people in Afghanistan, or to kill them. It’s a living. Drone strikes are war crimes that enrage our allies and inspire our enemies, yet we can’t seem to wean ourselves off them. See the discussion at Crooked Timber.

Why We Fight

One of Birmingham’s best writers, Kyle Whitmire, is leaving the Birmingham Weekly where for several years he’s provided the most astute and most readable commentary on city and county affairs. (Hat tip to Wade Kwon.)

Rosalind Fournier’s profile of Whitmire at b-metro reveals how Kyle’s column got its name, which is “War on Dumb.” Seems that one day he spotted a bumper sticker:

“It said, ‘Let’s win the War on Hunger.’ I thought to myself, how exactly do you win a war on hunger? Do you bomb hunger’s cities? Do you burn its villages to the ground, and kill its women and children? Or, you could just feed people, because that’s what we’re really talking about.

“Not only that,” he continues, with what appears to be his natural state of contained agitation, “but don’t we lose every so-called ‘war’ we declare … on poverty, drugs, crime, terrorism?”

So he renamed the column [“War on Dumb”] with more than a trace of irony. “The name had two prongs,” he explains. “I got to make fun of the infusion of violence into our language, and I admitted to anyone paying attention … that if I declared a war on dumb, I was going to lose.”

Best of luck to Kyle in his next endeavor, and I’m glad that he’s planning to stay in Birmingham.

P.S. If I may be allowed to kvetch, the editorial folk at b-metro need to get their act together. The Whitmire profile was well put together, but the gremlins in the copy were distracting. For starters, take that bold subhed about Whitmire being “the only guy in town will to tell the truth about local politics.” Will to wha-?

Ask me about the Muslim Mafia

Well, there’s no hiding from the facts. According to several members of Congress, I am a terrorist sympathizer. As an American Muslim and a member of my local Islamic society, I am ipso facto an agent of the “secret underworld that’s conspiring to Islamize America.”

You know, I had no idea.

Why we call it waterboarding

I recently found some supporting evidence for my theory (in this post, one of my most read) that the term waterboarding is intended to make nonsense of a victim’s suffering by comparing his torture to an extreme sport. (Think of snowboarding, etc.)

Well, a while ago Isabel Macdonald searched newspaper archives to learn about the history of the word waterboarding in print. She found that “until May 2004, the term had actually meant an aquatic sport similar to surfing.” Since then it has rapidly come to signify water torture.

In a May 2004 article, a New York Times reporter quoted an anonymous “counterintelligence official” who said the CIA was using “a technique known as ‘water boarding,’ in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.” That seems to be the first time the word went public. Evidently it was already in use among U.S. interrogators. No explanation of the term is offered.

Alan Dershowitz, who notoriously argued in favor of legal torture in 2004, was probably the first to use the single word waterboarding, instead of water boarding, in the mass media.

You can read the whole story in Macdonald’s article for fair.com.

That press conference

Coverage of tonight’s Obama press conference, as with the health care reform issue in general, has been tediously focused on political tactics and horse trading. Media consumers are being schooled to feel that reform is a prospect to be feared, as it’s bound to be expensive and is likely to make things worse.

They allow that the U.S. health care system is flawed, but the scale and focus of that critique is almost solely on cost — especially costs to businesses — and the consequences for our “competitiveness.” Because this, you see, is how grown-ups talk about public affairs: in terms of profit, loss, growth prospects, and the global marketplace.

Mark Halperin’s post at the Time magazine blog The Page is a study in this kind of trivia and misdirection. It’s a list of “ways that Obama can make news at his Wednesday press conference” — because mature adults should know that the only thing that matters in politics is how an event feeds the news cycle and sets up the next event.

Uprising in Iran

Elections in Iran on Friday returned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to a second term as president. Supporters of challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a conservative reformer, have taken to the streets in protest. Violence has broken out, and people have been shot to death by police. Remarkably, the Islamic republic’s leading cleric, Ali Khamenei, has called for an investigation of the election results. So have other members of the Iranian ruling class.

Regardless of the outcome, the United States needs to stay out of this. Mousavi’s supporters and Iran experts are clear about this. Given the history of U.S. intervention in Iranian affairs since World War II, and the anti-Americanism that was a theme of the 1979 revolution, any effort by our government to promote the opposition is guaranteed to backfire and to help unify and expand Ahmadinejad’s support. This is why Mitt Romney’s remarks this weekend have been self-serving and irresponsible. Obama’s balancing act — expressing doubt about the election’s fairness without taking sides — is the right move for this moment in the chess game.

Yet another Siegelman update

The “Free Don Siegelman” lobby has been active, but Obama’s Justice Department seems unimpressed. In April the dismissal of the Ted Stevens case raised hopes that Siegelman’s prosecution might also be found improper. And in May, a federal judge in Alabama sent a strongly worded letter to Attorney General Eric Holder on behalf of Siegelman.

Siegelman fans are enthusiastic, but I remain unmoved. (In the past I disclosed my own bias here and criticized Siegelman’s case here.)

The future of journalism

Birmingham writer Wade Kwon just used Twitter to ask about the future of journalism. He’s getting ready for a panel discussion in front of J-school students at the University of Alabama.

For some reason I tweeted back (with exactly 140 characters): @WadeOnTweets Future of journalism is Waffle House: It’ll be Scattered, Smothered, Covered, Chunked, Topped & Diced. Figure out what I mean.

I wasn’t sure what I meant myself, when I wrote that, or why Waffle House hash browns should come to mind. For a brief, chilling moment I thought I might be channeling former governor Fob James, who famously proposed the Waffle House chain as a model for good gummint.

But no worries. All I was really doing was grabbing a random meme to use in thinking about a large, chaotic topic. So here we go.

Newsroom song

As a tribute to the fading newspaper industry, and the tiny part I played in it, here is a song about “trying to keep my editors satisfied.” It’s set to the tune of this Paul Simon song. I’m not that imaginative, so the numerous verses are all based on Simon’s second verse.

Managing editor says to me:
Yesterday’s piece was OK, boy,
We sent it out over AP.
And that was pretty good, but whatcha got for me today?

Chorus:
It’s the same old story (yeah)
Every time I write.
I get trimmed back,
I write lede hooks,
I use words I’ll never find in the Stylebook.
And I’m one step ahead of the deadline,
Constantly toeing the party line,
Just trying to keep my editors satisfied,
Satisfied.

City editor says to me:
Do you think you’re on stage, boy?
Your job is impartiality.
Just leave opinions to the guy who does the op-ed page.

[Chorus]

Photo editor says to me:
Whadya want me to say, boy?
We gotta compete with TV
And all you’re giving me is one more page of solid gray.

Copy editor says to me:
Well we ain’t got all day, boy,
I need you to anchor page three
And I can’t proof it ’less you hand it here right away.

Advertising says to me:
Ain’t no need to get mad, boy,
I’m just talking reality
’Cause all your copy’s just to fill the space around the ads.

It’s the same old story
Every time I write.
I get trimmed back,
I write lede hooks,
I use words I’ll never find in the Stylebook.
And I should be tired
But that newsroom coffee’s got me wired,
And I’m one step ahead of the deadline,
Constantly toeing the party line,
Just trying to keep my editors satisfied,
Satisfied.