brainrow

On Election Day, the polling places here open at 6:30 in the morning. Last year, aware that everyone was predicting a record turnout, I went early, arriving at 6:45. There were long lines. The conventional wisdom was that a large turnout would benefit John Kerry. I was happy to see long lines. I was happy to see the lines were even longer when I was done voting.

I waited patiently for about fifty minutes. I overheard a couple of the poll workers talking. One of them wondered why there were fewer voting machines for this record-turnout election than there had been for the previous off-year election. The other said it was probably because the turnout had been so low at the previous election.

At that point, listening in on their conversation, I probably nodded my head. That explanation seemed to make sense. I wasn’t capable of believing what was really happening all across Ohio.

As Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell was responsible for running the election in Ohio. He was also the Ohio chairman of George W. Bush’s election campaign, a job that trumped his obligation to honest democracy for Ohio voters. He presided over a massive voter-suppression effort for the Bush campaign. Long lines at my precinct, which leans toward Democratic candidates, were only a tiny part of his efforts to undermine democracy.

Lines grew longer all day long at Democratic-leaning polling places. Long lines of voters stood in the cold rain outside some polling places until midnight and beyond. When someone suggested using paper ballots for some voters to speed up the lines, Blackwell said voters who didn’t want to wait should just go home.

Well, tomorrow is Election Day again. There are four voter initiatives on the ballot to try to seize power back from the anti-democracy schemers. Of particular interest to me is Issue 5, which “places a bi-partisan Board of Supervisors in charge of Ohio’s elections, instead of a partisan official who backs candidates and takes sides in elections.” Other issues restrict campaign financing, allow Ohioans to vote by mail, and take control of legislative redistricting out of the hands of gerrymandering politicians.

I’m sure Ken Blackwell will be working hard again tomorrow to defeat the will of the voters, if they disagree with him. If I get my way, it will be the last time he’ll have a chance to do that.

I’ve just finished reading Al Franken’s new book, The Truth (with Jokes).

It’s better, I think, than his previous book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and that book was pretty good.

Franken is not a reporter. He’s not uncovering new Republican scandals. Rather, he takes stories that have already been reported and puts them together very effectively to show the depth of hypocrisy, incompetence, and malice of the Bush administration and its apologists in Congress. Despite the jokes mentioned in the title, it’s a serious book. The jokes aren’t laugh-out-loud funny (although I did laugh out loud a couple times). Mostly they serve as a sort of safety valve. Without them, many readers might collapse sobbing after learning just how bad Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, DeLay, Frist and their ilk really are.

From a chapter about the Iraq war, Franken summarizes:

Let’s face it. You can’t count on them to give you straight information. You can’t count on them to tell us straight why we’re going to war. You can’t count on them to tell us what’s happening over there.

You can’t count on them to do their homework. To keep track of our money. You can’t count on them to punish war profiteers. You can’t count on them to protect our troops.

You can’t rely on them for much of anything. Armor. Veterans’ benefits. You can’t count on them for the true story of how Jessica Lynch was captured, or how Pat Tillman died. Even for how the “Mission Accomplished” sign went up on the USS Abraham Lincoln. They actually lied about that.

You can’t count on them to count terrorist attacks. You can’t count on them to count civilian victims. You can’t count on them to listen to military commanders and send in enough troops, or not to lie about the commanders asking them to send more troops, or to listen to Colin Powell and not torture people, or to not lie about whether the torture policies started at the top.

You can’t trust them to care. About Iraqis. About Americans.

You can’t trust them to do the work of actually signing killed-in-action letters. You can’t trust them not to lie about not signing killed-in-action letters.

You can’t count on them to acknowledge any mistakes whatsoever. You can’t trust them not to lie when confronted with those mistakes.

You can’t trust them not to believe their own propaganda.

You can’t trust them. Period.

…

If you want to know what I think we should do in Iraq, it’s that we should think about what we have to do in America. We have to throw these guys out.

The NewsHour on PBS reported on a memorial service for Rosa Parks:

Julian Bond: Ms. Parks was much, much more than the bus woman. She was much, much more than that. Eldridge Cleaver famously remarked that when she sat down that December day in Montgomery fifty years ago, somewhere in the universe a gear in the machinery had shifted. Rosa Parks shifted the gears of the universe all her life. Now she belongs to the universe.

Oprah Winfrey: That day that you refused to give up your seat on the bus, you, Sister Rosa, changed the trajectory of my life, and the lives of so many other people in the world.

Ted Kennedy: She, too, was our shepherd. She restored our soul. She led us in the paths of righteousness. She walked through the valley of the shadow of death, but she feared no evil, because she knew the Lord was with her. Goodness and mercy followed her all the days of her life, and now — and now — she dwells in the house of the Lord forever.

Since June, I’ve been watching The Al Franken Show on cable TV, on Sundance Channel. The show has provided me with a lot of ideas for blog posts. From Thursday’s show, here’s Canadian journalist Patrick Graham:

Everything in Iraq, for the first year and a half, was run for how it appeared in the States. People talk about Iraqi democracy. Iraqis are voting in large numbers. The problem is American democracy and this debate at home. And everything in Iraq was run, basically, for Bush’s re-election campaign. And you can’t run a war in a complex country — you can’t run a complex country — and an insurgency, when your only real interest is your poll numbers at home. That’s a big problem.

Graham spent a lot of time talking to insurgents in Iraq. He wrote about it in Harper’s magazine, in an article called “Beyond Fallujah.”

Friday night’s Franken Show was the last one that will be carried on Sundance Channel. If this blog is to survive, I may have to start making stuff up.

Rosa Parks has died. From CNN:

Rosa Parks, who helped trigger the civil rights movement in the 1950s, died Monday, her longtime friends told CNN. She was 92.

Parks inspired the civil rights movement when she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama in December 1955.

Update: BBC News has photos from the civil rights movement.

Today is the national opening of George Clooney’s new movie, Good Night, and Good Luck. I’ve been looking forward to it for weeks.

But it’s not playing at any theater here in Columbus, Ohio.

Rats.

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.

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.

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.