brainrow

The Washington Post:

A Texas grand jury on Wednesday charged Rep. Tom DeLay and two political associates with conspiracy in a campaign finance scheme, an indictment that could force him to step down as House majority leader.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

The New York Times reviews George Clooney’s new film, Good Night, and Good Luck:

Burnishing the legend of Edward R. Murrow, the CBS newsman who in the 1940’s and 50’s established a standard of journalistic integrity his profession has scrambled to live up to ever since, “Good Night, and Good Luck” is a passionate, thoughtful essay on power, truth-telling and responsibility. It opens the New York Film Festival tonight and will be released nationally on Oct. 7. The title evokes Murrow’s trademark sign-off, and I can best sum up my own response by recalling the name of his flagship program: See it now.

And be prepared to pay attention. “Good Night, and Good Luck” is not the kind of historical picture that dumbs down its material, or walks you carefully through events that may be unfamiliar. Instead, it unfolds, cinema-verite style, in the fast, sometimes frantic present tense, following Murrow and his colleagues as they deal with the petty annoyances and larger anxieties of news gathering at a moment of political turmoil. The story flashes back from a famous, cautionary speech that Murrow gave at an industry convention in 1958 to one of the most notable episodes in his career — his war of words and images with Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.

You can’t say the Bush Administration isn’t providing bold leadership. When a federal prosecutor started poking around in Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s business, The Bush Justice Department sprung into action and demoted him:

The Justice Department’s inspector general and the F.B.I. are looking into the demotion of a veteran federal prosecutor whose reassignment nearly three years ago shut down a criminal investigation of the Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff, current and former department officials report.

They said investigators had questioned whether the demotion of the prosecutor, Frederick A. Black, in November 2002 was related to his alert to Justice Department officials days earlier that he was investigating Mr. Abramoff. The lobbyist is a major Republican Party fund-raiser and a close friend of several Congressional leaders.

Colleagues said the demotion of Mr. Black, the acting United States attorney in Guam, and a subsequent order barring him from pursuing public corruption cases brought an end to his inquiry into Mr. Abramoff’s lobbying work for some Guam judges.

Public corruption is business as usual in the Bush Administration.

From this evening’s CBS News:

CBS News correspondent Gloria Borger reports that Michael Brown, who recently resigned as the head of the FEMA, has been rehired by the agency as a consultant to evaluate its response following Hurricane Katrina.

I think Bush misses his lightning rod. Those lightning bolts have been landing a little close, lately.

I’m sure Brownie will do a heckuva job.

Don Adams, who played Maxwell Smart on the sixties spy comedy Get Smart, has died. He was 82 years old.

Get Smart has never been released on DVD, but Amazon.com is collecting email addresses of customers interested in the series.

If you’re a huge fan of the Beach Boys, and you’d like to get a phone call from Brian Wilson, here’s your chance:

Beach Boys singer Brian Wilson has been personally telephoning fans who pledge more than $100 … to the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.

…

[Wilson] will also match donations of more than $100 until 1 October, with money going to the American Red Cross.

You can find details at Wilson’s website, www.brianwilson.com.

When a disaster stirs a wave of charitable giving, I worry about scams disguised as legitimate charities. This offer seems difficult to validate through traditional methods. The news story is from the BBC, and Brian Wilson’s own considerable reputation is on the line. I believe the offer is genuine.

You didn’t believe me, did you? Back in June, when I said Kate Bush was releasing a new album, you didn’t believe me. After all, it’s been twelve years since her last album, The Red Shoes.

Well, here is katebush.com, with a tiny Flash animation, and a short audio snippet of a new song called “King of the Mountain.” The new album, called Aerial, is coming out in the U.S. on November 8.

Rosabel, believe.

Small-town hick, while W.C. Fields shuffles the cards: Is this a game of chance?

W.C. Fields: Not the way I play it, no.

— from My Little Chickadee

After Hurricane Katrina, after he saw the DVD with the images of suffering in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast, after he saw his sagging poll numbers, George W. Bush made a televised speech in New Orleans. For what may have been the first time, he acknowledged the presence of “deep, persistent poverty” in America. He acknowledged the history of racism that has done so much to shape the face of American poverty. He promised “to confront this poverty with bold action.” He pledged to “do what it takes” to rebuild the region, better than ever. Some have called Bush’s reconstruction plan a “conservative New Deal,” after President Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-era New Deal.

Roosevelt’s New Deal was not a carefully-calibrated set of federal programs; it was a desperate set of experiments, trying anything that might get the economy moving and people working once again. The guiding principle was, try lots of stuff. If something works, do more of it. If it doesn’t work, stop doing it.

Bush’s New Deal doesn’t start with the same blank slate. Bush’s political guru, Karl Rove, has been put in charge:

Rove’s leadership role suggests quite strikingly that any and all White House decisions and pronouncements regarding the recovery from the storm are being made with their political consequences as the primary consideration. More specifically: With an eye toward increasing the likelihood of Republican political victories in the future, pursuing long-cherished conservative goals, and bolstering Bush’s image.

That is Rove’s hallmark.

Another Rove hallmark is the Blame Game — he’s always setting someone up to take the blame for every Bush administration screw-up. The Justice Department is on a fishing expedition, trying to blame the failure of the New Orleans levees on environmentalists:

Federal officials appear to be seeking proof to blame the flood of New Orleans on environmental groups, documents show.

The Clarion-Ledger has obtained a copy of an internal e-mail the U.S. Department of Justice sent out this week to various U.S. attorneys’ offices: “Has your district defended any cases on behalf of the (U.S.) Army Corps of Engineers against claims brought by environmental groups seeking to block or otherwise impede the Corps work on the levees protecting New Orleans? If so, please describe the case and the outcome of the litigation.”

What does a conservative New Deal look like? Well, it has no-bid contracts for Halliburton. It eliminates prevailing-wage protection for workers in the afflicted area. It has “enterprise zones,” areas with special tax breaks for business development, “temporary exemptions” from environmental laws and estate taxes, and more. From the Wall Street Journal:

Now, Republicans are working on legislation that would limit victims’ right to sue, offer vouchers for displaced school children, lift some environment restrictions on new refineries and create tax-advantaged enterprise zones to maximize private-sector participation in recovery and reconstruction.

Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson:

Problem is, New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta have been designated enterprise zones for a decade now, and they’re still just about the poorest places in the United States. Right-wingers have railed for 40 years now at the failures, real and imagined, of Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, but Johnson’s policies, and those of Franklin Roosevelt before him, have been far more successful at reducing poverty than those that presidents Reagan, Bush and Bush promoted during their terms in office. Indeed, poverty has risen steadily during the current Bush’s presidency, and median household income has declined for each of the past five years, though for the past three years the economy has been in recovery.

If it doesn’t work, do more of it?

The conservative New Deal helps the rich first. It has big tax cuts for casino operators, with the costs offset by more IRS audits of poor taxpayers and cuts to lots of social safety-net programs.

So we listen to George W. Bush’s promises and wonder: in the conservative New Deal, do poor people have a chance?

Not the way Bush plays it, no.

The New York Times belittles the concerns of TiVo users:

FALSE ALARM There was a short panic in blogland this week after someone wrote to the keeper of the PVRBlog to warn that his TiVo box had informed him that an episode of “The Simpsons” that he wanted to save was “flagged” by copy protection software — the episode would self-destruct at a certain date.

Reporters from CNET and elsewhere quickly determined that the flag was just a software bug, but some TiVo devotees remain convinced that they may soon be unable to save their favorite shows. Sure, it was just a bug, writes Matt Haughey of the PVRBlog, but it “demonstrates what could very well happen in the near future with TiVos and other sorts of P.V.R. devices.” Once the ire is worked up, it’s hard to just let it go.

The Times writer totally misses the point. The “bug” revealed a secret: that the TiVo box includes code designed to take control of recorded programs away from the user.

The “bug” was a programming accident. The anti-user capability it revealed is no accident, but a deliberate feature of the TiVo software, programmed at some considerable expense and effort. It was put in there to be used. You may rest assured, it will be used. Personally, I think that’s worth getting “worked up” over.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich:

Once Toto parts the curtain, the Wizard of Oz can never be the wizard again. He is forever Professor Marvel, blowhard and snake-oil salesman. Hurricane Katrina, which is likely to endure in the American psyche as long as L. Frank Baum’s mythic tornado, has similarly unmasked George W. Bush.

The worst storm in our history proved perfect for exposing this president because in one big blast it illuminated all his failings: the rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of “compassionate conservatism,” the lack of concern for the “underprivileged” his mother condescended to at the Astrodome, the reckless lack of planning for all government operations except tax cuts, the use of spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to substitute for action.

From Monday, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert:

The president is Lucy, and he’s holding a football. We’re Charlie Brown.

…

The country has put its faith in Mr. Bush many times before, and come up empty. It may be cynical, but my guess is that if we believe him again this time, we’re going to end up on our collective keisters, just like Charlie Brown, who could never stop himself from kicking mightily at empty space, which was all that was left each time Lucy snatched the ball away.

…

Not only was he proposing a Gulf Coast Marshall Plan, but he was declaring, in words that made his conservative followers gasp, that poverty in the U.S. “has roots in a history of racial discrimination which cut off generations from the opportunity of America.”

If you were listening to the radio, you might have thought you were hearing the ghost of Lyndon Johnson. “We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action,” said Mr. Bush.

He was being Lucy again, enticing us with the football. But before we commence kicking the air, consider the facts.

This president has had zero interest in attacking poverty, and the result has been an increase in poverty in the U.S., the richest country in the world, in each of the last four years. Instead of attacking poverty, the Bush administration has attacked the safety net and has stubbornly refused to stop the decline in the value of the minimum wage on his watch.

You can believe that he’s suddenly worried about poor people if you want to. What is more likely is that his reference to racism and poverty was just another opportunistic Karl Rove moment, never to be acted upon.

Charlie Brown’s sister, Sally, once asked how often someone could be fooled with the same trick. She answered her own question: “Pretty often, huh?”

Pretty often, yeah. But not this time.

Once upon a time, I wanted to become a journalist. One of my role models was Edward R. Murrow, a CBS reporter whose live radio reports from wartime London brought the early days of World War II home to Americans. His television shows in the 1950s helped shape the nature of broadcast journalism. He set the bar high.

Murrow made a career of confronting liars and exposing lies. His career is the stuff of legend. One of the most legendary — and most inspiring — episodes was his 1953 confrontation with Senator Joe McCarthy, the man for whom McCarthyism was named.

So, I’m looking forward to seeing George Clooney’s new movie, Good Night and Good Luck. It won’t be in theaters until October 7, and I’m champing at the bit.

David Carr of the New York Times has a preview:

“Good Night” is about journalism, not as a subject of parody, but of inquiry. With various reporters and news anchors splashing into fetid waters to save victims of Hurricane Katrina, “Good Night” serves as a reminder that it may take a different kind of journalistic courage, a willingness to risk career and more, to bring government to account. At a time when the news media are being denied access to everything from pictures of imprisoned foreign nationals to critical government security documents, Mr. Clooney, without pressing the analogy, has made a movie that reminds that government needs a vigorous, even oppositional press to find its best nature.

Like Murrow’s reports, the $8 million film, distributed by Warner Independent Pictures, uses McCarthy’s own words to demonstrate that his stated effort to save the United States from Communist infiltration was itself a far more insidious threat….

In “Good Night,” David Strathairn renders Murrow as a reluctant hero, and a twitchy, dark one at that. His Murrow, with the fatalism of Eeyore, is a journalist who reflexively expects the worst, but responds by doing his best, steeling those around him even as McCarthy’s gun sights are trained on his forehead.

In the movie, McCarthy is shown only in archival footage. Director Clooney thought no actor could do him justice. Modern audiences who have never seen this man, once one of the most powerful men in the U.S. government, are in for a shock.

Mr. Clooney has an odd relationship with the press — he reveres its role, but has been a victim of some of its less noble reflexes….

“In this and all the rest of journalism, I think the issues are complicated,” he said. “I don’t think that there are truly bad guys or truly good guys…. There is always a split in these things, but hopefully the need for entertainment does not push news off the screen.”

Murrow said as much in a famous speech he gave at the Radio-Television News Directors Association annual meeting in 1958. Part of the speech, a reminder that television should and could produce important journalism, closes the film:

“To those who say people wouldn’t look; they wouldn’t be interested; they’re too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: there is, in one reporter’s opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose?

“Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.

“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it is merely wires and lights in a box.”

The movie’s trailer is available, in several formats, here.

They turned on the power last week in parts of New Orleans. They used it to light Jackson Square with a garish light, as a backdrop for a televised speech by George W. Bush. Many observers thought it looked like something from Disneyland.

Bush promised to “do what it takes” to rebuild the areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina:

Throughout the area hit by the hurricane, we will do what it takes. We will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives. And all who question the future of the Crescent City need to know: There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans, and this great city will rise again.

The next day, he ruled out taxes to pay for the reconstruction.

The New Orleans of the future, he promised, would be better than the city that was destroyed:

When communities are rebuilt, they must be even better and stronger than before the storm.

Better how? Well, one vision of Neo Orleans calls for “fewer poor people.” And maybe we could replace all those jazz musicians with animatronic musical bears from Disneyland.

A couple hours after Bush finished his speech, electrical power to the city was shut off again. That’s show biz.

Some stuff is so complicated that only comedians truly understand it. On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart discussed the financing of the Bush recovery plan for Hurricane Katrina with “Daily Show Chief Fiscal Policy Analyst” Rob Corddry:

Corddry: Everything the president is doing is perfectly in keeping with the conservative ideal of limited government.

Stewart: How is what the president is doing limited government?

Corddry: This president believes government should be limited not in size, Jon, but in effectiveness. Now in terms of effectiveness, this is the most limited administration we’ve ever had.

Stewart: Rob, let’s stay with the financial part of this. How is his record spending conservative?

Corddry: Because it’s paid for through supply-side economics. It’s a faith-based accounting approach.

Stewart: Supply-side economics? How does that even apply to this?

Corddry: Wow — sounds like someone’s unfamiliar with the work of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School.

Simply put, Jon, supply-side economics is when a president cuts taxes. This makes people happy, and him popular. The tax cuts deprive the government of money, and after eight years the deficit balloons to astronomical size.

Then, with the economy in tatters, a Democrat is elected. He has to cut the deficit by raising taxes, making people unhappy, and him unpopular, perfectly setting up the next election, where a Republican uses the Democrats’ tax hike against them to win back the White House and start the cycle all over again.

Four men won Nobel Prizes for that, Jon.

Bill Maher on evil:

Exorcism … is a popular theme nowadays because it reinforces the comforting notion that evil resides outside of us. Well, I’m sorry, but it doesn’t.

…

Is George Bush purely evil? Of course not. And that’s what’s so evil about him. He doesn’t twirl a mustache and smirk and cackle — well, he doesn’t twirl a mustache. He’s like the Peanuts character Pigpen. Wherever he goes, he stirs up such a humongous mess it can only be cleaned up by Halliburton.

But he’s not pure evil, because evil is a chain.

Did any one person doom New Orleans? No. It’s a chain. People vote for a corrupt leader. A corrupt leader puts unqualified cronies in high places, and when those cronies f*** up, evil gets done. The devil didn’t fly up from Hell and knock a hole in that levee. The levee just didn’t get built, because the money for it went to rich people’s tax cuts, and pork projects, and corporate welfare.

…

This week an ailing American bald eagle was found to be dying from mercury poisoning. (Republicans immediately tried to blame it on the eagle’s lifestyle choices.) But it’s worth noting that, also this week, the White House threatened to veto limits on mercury pollution.

Now, pure evil would be if George Bush sat around the White House saying, “Let’s poison eagles,” and even I don’t believe George Bush would do that. Cheney would do that. And even he is not pure evil. Dick Cheney doesn’t hate poor children and caribou. They’re just in the way.

I just watched a remarkable movie called Downfall. It’s about the final days of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime.

One thing that makes it remarkable is that it was made by German filmmakers. While Alec Guinness and Anthony Hopkins portrayed Hitler in his bunker decades ago, many Germans preferred to treat the whole Nazi era as nothing more than a bad dream. Even now, Downfall is controversial in Germany. Critics complain that the film shows Hitler and his close companions as human beings.

The filmmakers say that’s just the point: the Nazis did not have horns or tails or cloven hooves. They were human beings just like us, and that’s the scary thing.

Downfall shows that Hitler thought himself infallible. He ignored advice from his generals. He ignored facts that didn’t fit his fanciful view of the situation. When his ill-considered orders didn’t work, he accused his officers of disloyalty rather than endure criticism of his plans. He fired, and sometimes executed, those who dared to stand their ground when he was wrong. As the Russians closed in on Berlin, he declared that they were falling into his trap, and would be destroyed by a massive pincer movement — by two German army groups that had already been wiped out.

A handful of those around him shared his delusions. More understood the true situation, but did nothing and said nothing. They were Hitler’s men, and they would drag the whole country down with them before they would contradict their leader.

Human nature doesn’t change. We must struggle today against the same dark tendencies within us that the Nazis allowed to govern their lives. We must not place our trust in deluded leaders, nor in those who turn their backs on truth and sign on to their leader’s happy delusions.