brainrow

The New Yorker on the Bush Administration’s attempt to blame Newsweek for our deteriorating stature in the world:

Is it really necessary at this late date to point out that the problem is torture and abuse, not dubiously sourced reports of torture and abuse? If the allegations in the Newsweek story seemed credible on their face, not only to its editors but also to government officials (such as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who quickly assigned a general to look into them), perhaps that is because of the long, dismal history of horrors that have already been documented—in many cases, by investigations conducted within the Armed Forces themselves, which are full of men and women who recognize that the honor of their service is at stake.

In preparation to see Revenge of the Sith sometime soon, I’ve dug out the old DVDs and watched them.

Yikes, is The Phantom Menace ever a rotten movie!

If anyone ever tries to tell you that good special effects make a good movie, sit him down and show him — oh, Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights — back-to-back with The Phantom Menace. And the next time he dares to open his mouth to say something about movies, say two or three years from now, offer to show him those two movies again.

Attack of the Clones is much, much better, but it’s not very good, either.

Years ago, when Return of the Jedi came out, and I saw those adorable Ewoks, I knew that whatever George Lucas’ original vision might have been, the movie had been tailored to sell teddy bears. And when I first saw The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, I knew those movies were not so much written, as designed — built around ideas for video games.

There was one glimmer of a thought in Attack of the Clones: that it’s possible to feel completely justified in doing something terrible, but that sense of justification does not excuse the terrible deed. The new movie is getting a lot of attention for commenting on current events, but I think that started here.

Nevertheless, I was ready to skip Revenge of the Sith entirely, but I won’t. The reviewers have been mostly positive, and surprised.

Andy Ihnatko likes it:

Unbelievable. Unbelievable!

“Revenge Of The Sith” is clearly the best of all the Prequels, but that sounds like faint praise at best and sarcasm at worst. It’s better than “Return Of The Jedi” and I have to ask myself if it isn’t better than “A New Hope,” too. When I come down off the endorphin buzz, I’ll probably conclude that no, it isn’t, but the fact that I even have to consider such a question says a whole hell of a lot about this movie.

So I’m going to see it soon. I hope I’ll like it, too.

Doctor Faust — er, Frist — seemed disappointed that a last-minute compromise prevented him from blowing up two hundred years of Senate tradition with his innovative nuclear option. But he needn’t feel that he’s accomplished nothing. Even without pulling the nuclear trigger, Senator Frist has poisoned the atmosphere in the Senate in a way that can probably never be undone.

The Constitution of the United States says “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings,” and over the years, the Senate has accumulated a long list of rules, including rules defining how those rules may be changed. The current rules require a three-fifths majority to cut off debate on an issue. Even larger majorities are required to change the rules. The idea is to avoid precipitous and foolish changes to serve the passions of the moment.

Some of those rules were inconvenient to Doctor Frist, so he proposed his diabolical innovation: that the Vice-President can dictate what the rules of the Senate are, so long as he has fifty like-minded Senators to uphold his decrees.

It doesn’t matter that Bill Frist didn’t get to pull the nuclear trigger today. The idea, once thought, can’t be unthought. From now on, until the U.S. government itself has crumbled into dust, any time the Vice-President and half the Senate wish to dictate the outcome of any deliberation, that devilish Fristian bargain will be there, tempting them.

The nuclear genie isn’t going back in the bottle.

From the PBS program NOW, here’s Jan LaRue, Chief Counsel of the right-wing group Concerned Women for America, on the topic of an official government religion:

Well, you know the interesting thing is, at the founding of our country, there were state churches. That’s what it’s all about in a country where the people get to rule. And if you’re in a state you don’t like, you get to move to another state.

You may notice I called Concerned Women for America a right-wing group, not a conservative group. Their vision for America is a radical one. There’s nothing conservative about them.

Bob Harris at This Modern World:

When I was a kid, I remember reading about how democracies ended. What surprised me was how often it was a peaceful takeover. Fascists took power in many places not through force, but through rigged elections, broken rules, and consolidation of power, all hidden behind flags and God and promises of glory.

Today, the fanatics who have seized the GOP are beginning their attempt to flagrantly defy a half-dozen Senate rules which have existed for generations in order to install federal judges more interested in ideology than legal precedent.

If this “nuclear option” works, they will very likely soon also begin stacking the Supreme Court as they wish… The character of the very laws of our nation itself could soon be under the fundamentalists’ control.

It’s happening right now.

I guess I wasn’t the only person to note the 1,347 day milestone. I haven’t seen it mentioned in the mainstream media, except for this column by Randall J. Larsen in the Washington Post:

I find it difficult to understand why, 1,347 days after the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States remains inadequately prepared for the two most dangerous threats facing it: biological and nuclear terrorism.

Why 1,347 days? That was the number of days between Pearl Harbor and V-J Day — a reasonable measurement of progress. Starting from an abysmally unprepared posture, the United States required only 1,347 days to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. I do not expect a World War II-style victory in the war on terrorism, but after 1,347 days it is reasonable to ask: Who is in charge of defending this nation against what most experts agree are the only two existential threats we face — biological and nuclear terrorism? The disturbing answer: no one.

It seems most of the people who noticed the milestone were bloggers. Ed Fitzgerald:

I’m not claiming I’m the victim of any kind of post-traumatic stress disorder: I’ve been able to go about my life fairly normally in the past four years — but, on the other hand, I’m still not “over it” completely either. And nothing, not one single blessed thing, that the Bush administration and their neo-con and religious right allies have done since that day has made things any better, for me or for the rest of the world. Instead of using that awful event as a springboard to something good, a potential revolution in the way the world works, they seized on it as a convenient catch-all excuse to put across their warped agenda of rights rollbacks and tax giveaways to the rich and powerful, and leveraged it to reinvigorate the right-wing’s culture war against rationality and secularism.

Another blog, called Bush Lied Again, contrasts Bush’s Mission Accomplished declaration with the end of World War II:

US troops encircle Germans in the Ruhr, Allies liberate Buchenwald and Belsen concentration camps, Roosevelt dies, Truman becomes president, and on May 7, Germany unconditionally surrenders. In August, the US drops an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and another on Nagasaki 3 days later. Japan surrenders unconditionally.

Mission Accomplished. (Really!)

Another blogger, Angry Bear:

But this milestone does provide the opportunity to compare the effectiveness of America’s responses to both crises. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, America came together, and with determination, shared sacrifice, and the effective and focused leadership of FDR, George C. Marshall, and many others, America and her allies were victorious.

After the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, America once again came together. However, within months of 9/11, the Bush Administration lost focus and never clearly defined a winnable [Global War on Terror].

V-J Day, marking victory over Japan and the end of World War II, came on August 15, 1945 — 1,347 days after the United States was drawn into the war by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Today, it’s been 1,347 days since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The war that began that day has now lasted as long as U.S. involvement in World War II. How have we used that time?

When Pearl Harbor was attacked, we were ill-prepared for war. Americans across the country rushed to volunteer, and the military draft brought in more. There weren’t enough guns, so recruits drilled with broomsticks, or with dummy wooden rifles.

Taxes were levied to pay for the war, and money was borrowed through the sale of War Bonds. Old factories were converted to wartime production, and new factories were built. We built ships, planes, jeeps, trucks, tanks. New designs moved swiftly from the drawing board, to the factory floor, to the field of battle.

Soldiers, sailors and pilots were quickly trained to use the new weapons. Our British allies had invented radar, and we learned to use it. We sought and exploited countless advances in science and engineering.

The German army was the best in the world. U.S. soldiers were mauled in their first major encounter with crack German troops at the battle of the Kasserine Pass in north Africa. We understood we weren’t yet good enough. We learned from our failures.

We fought massive naval battles and fierce island battles across the Pacific, demolishing the Japanese navy and closing in on the Japanese islands.

With our allies, we captured Sicily and landed on the Italian mainland. We fought German and Italian fascist forces as we drove up that country. We landed at Normandy in northern France on D-Day, the largest amphibious assault in history. We liberated France, driving the once unbeatable German army of occupation back mile by brutal mile. We suffered Germany’s devastating counter-attack in the Battle of the Bulge, and we surmounted it.

At home, women worked factory jobs to replace men who had gone to war. Scarce resources were rationed. There were scrap metal drives. Nearly every American made sacrifices to help win the war. In secrecy, tapping the talents of European scientists who had fled Nazi oppression, we developed the atomic bomb.

Americans, British, Canadians, Russians all pushed into Germany. Hitler, trapped, killed himself and the German government capitulated. In the Pacific, Japan’s empire collapsed. American forces were poised for invasion. Russian forces were expected to join the assault, too. Atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Tokyo, a military coup was attempted to prevent Emperor Hirohito from surrendering. It failed. The war ended.

World War II was a hard struggle, and the path was not always as clear as it may seem now in hindsight. But we saw what needed to be done; we didn’t seek diversions. We did not seek dominion; we knew we couldn’t win without our allies. We shared sacrifices; the wealthy were not exempted. Congress investigated reports of war profiteering. The government made post-war plans to bring our defeated enemies back into the community of civilized nations.

All in 1,347 days.

Have we made good use of our 1,347 days?

Too good to ignore, from Newsweek’s Perspectives:

“That’s unconscionable … I believe in family values.” —Seminole County (Fla.) Republican Party chairman Jim Stellings, testifying in the defamation suit he filed against a political rival who he says falsely accused him of having been married six times. The correct number of marriages is five.

Buy five, get one free?

George Lucas knows how to get people talking about his movies. A right-wing website has added him to its long list of boycotted entertainers. (The website demands “Please name one liberty we’ve lost, Mr. Lucas,” right under their online petition asking the Attorney General to charge Michael Moore with treason.) Hey, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. From the New York Times:

For sheer lack of subtlety, the light-saber-wielding forces of good and evil in George Lucas’s “Star Wars” movies can’t hold a candle to the blogging, advertising and boycotting forces of the right and left. (Or left and right.)

More a measure of the nation’s apparently permanent political warfare than of a filmmaker’s intent, the heroes and antiheroes of Mr. Lucas’s final entry, “Episode III – Revenge of the Sith,” were on their way to becoming the stock characters of partisan debate by mid-Wednesday, hours before the film’s opening just after midnight:

¶The liberal advocacy group Moveon.org was preparing to spend $150,000 to run advertisements on CNN over the next few days … comparing Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, to the movie’s power-grabbing, evil Chancellor Palpatine, for Dr. Frist’s role in the Senate’s showdown over the confirmation of federal judges.

¶Conservative Web logs were lacerating Mr. Lucas over the film’s perceived jabs at President Bush – as when Anakin Skywalker, on his way to becoming the evil Darth Vader, warns, “If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy,” in an echo of Mr. Bush’s post-9/11 ultimatum, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

¶A little-trafficked conservative Web site about film, Pabaah.com – for “Patriotic Americans Boycotting Anti-American Hollywood” – added Mr. Lucas to its list of boycotted entertainers…

¶Even the Drudge Report Web site got into the act: beneath a picture of Darth Vader, it compared the White House press corps to the vengeful Sith, after reporters peppered a press secretary for pressing Newsweek magazine to “repair the damage” in the Muslim world caused by a retracted report about desecration of the Koran.

Think Progress reports that Bill “Nuclear Option” Frist sorta melted down on the Senate Floor this morning:

This morning on the floor of the Senate, Sen. Chuck Schumer asked Majority Leader Bill Frist a simple question:

SEN. SCHUMER: Isn’t it correct that on March 8, 2000, my colleague [Sen. Frist] voted to uphold the filibuster of Judge Richard Paez?

Here was Frist’s response:

The president, the um, in response, uh, the Paez nomination – we’ll come back and discuss this further. … Actually I’d like to, and it really brings to what I believe – a point – and it really brings to, oddly, a point, what is the issue. The issue is we have leadership-led partisan filibusters that have, um, obstructed, not one nominee, but two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, in a routine way.

Frist himself has supported a filibuster against a Clinton judicial nominee. Now he wants the practice declared unconstitutional. These guys always want to play by their own set of rules.

Cartoonist Ruben Bolling on The Nuclear Option.

As before, you’ll probably have to look at an ad to get access to the site. Click for a Site Pass. After you’ve endured the ad, you can browse the entire site all day without facing additional ads of that type. While you’re there, you might as well look around.

Bolling and Tom Tomorrow are shedding light on creationist revision of science.

Tom Tomorrow exposes a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. He says Republicans Believe the Darnedest Things. He’s got artistic range, too. He can do film noir.

Salon.com isn’t all funnies. Here’s their primer on the nuclear option:

Unless somebody blinks first, we’re in for a mind-warping set of unprecedented Senate maneuvers that could put Dick Cheney in charge of deeming the filibuster “unconstitutional” — without a word from those folks in black robes across the street — and grease the way for each and every right-wing extremist George W. Bush ever cares to put on a district court, an appellate court or the U.S. Supreme Court.

A little more than ten years ago, I was summoned to jury duty. It was an endlessly educational experience.

A jury throws together people who don’t often mix in modern America. My fellow jurors came from many walks of life. We each saw and understood things from our own perspective. When another juror’s perspective was very different from mine, I was tempted to see that perspective as a bias. I suppose my own perspective may have looked like a bias to other jurors. All the jurors took their duty seriously, and we all found ways to get along while we were stuck together.

I was there for three weeks, and sat on two juries, each trying a civil lawsuit. A lawsuit that reaches a jury is unlikely to be a simple open-and-shut case. Those cases are usually settled out of court.

These were not celebrated cases, so there was no thought of sequestering the juries. We wandered around downtown during the long lunch breaks, and went home every evening. But each day the judge gave us “the admonition,” reminding us not to discuss the case with anyone, including our fellow jurors. We talked about sports, music, movies — anything but the case.

There were ten of us in the jury box during the trials: eight regular jurors and two alternates. At the end of the trial, the alternates were sent away, and only the eight regular jurors participated in deliberations.

We were given a series of questions, called interrogatories. Had the defendent done this specific act? If not, we had to return a verdict for the defendent. Had the plaintiff suffered actual harm from the act? If not, we had to return a verdict for the defendent. Had the plaintiff taken reasonable care to avoid that harm? And so on. We discussed each question and voted on it. A jury in a criminal trial must reach unanimous agreement. In our civil cases, we needed 75% agreement to answer each question.

A friend asked whether I had more or less confidence in our system of justice after my three weeks of jury duty. It wasn’t an easy question to answer.

I worried about the biases I had noticed. In each jury I thought there were one or two jurors with a predetermined bias against the party with more money. In one case that was the plaintiff, in the other case it was the defendant. There was a different juror who didn’t seem to understand some particular rule of logic. There were disagreements about the meaning of terms like “reasonable care.”

But those disagreements and rough edges were good, too. Because we jurors saw things from different perspectives, we collectively saw and understood more than any one of us alone would see.

What smoothed out the rough edges was this: we couldn’t reach a verdict without a 75% majority. If half the jurors held a wrong-headed bias, they had to persuade not just one, but two other jurors to join them. If they could do that, maybe they weren’t wrong-headed after all. My confidence in the jury system is based very much on its requirement of supermajorities.

You know, there once was a time when the Senate commonly approved federal court nominees unanimously. That wasn’t because the Senate thought its constitutional duty to “advise and consent” was to rubber-stamp all the president’s nominees. No, it was because presidents understood that federal judges serve for life, and make life-and-death decisions from the bench. They nominated people with excellent credentials, with impressive records of achievement, and without extremist ideologies. It wasn’t too hard to get unanimous approval of nominees like that.

We have a different kind of president now, sending a different kind of nominee. We have a different kind of Senate, too, weighing a “nuclear option” to let them ram through judicial extremists on a straight party-line vote.

How do I know the nominees are extremists? The Republicans can’t find five Democrats to join them to vote for cloture to end a filibuster and bring the nomination to a vote.

How do I know it’s not just the Democrats being partisan? Because they’ve tried to block only ten of Bush’s 214 federal court nominees.

Judges with life-and-death power. Serving for life. Approved by strict party-line votes, over all objections. If you want to undermine confidence in the government of the United States, that’s the way to do it.

One of my brothers called me this morning and asked whether I’d seen Bill Moyers’ speech to the National Conference for Media Reform, broadcast on C-SPAN. I hadn’t, so he helped me find the prepared text and an MP3 audio file of the speech online.

The speech is one hour and four minutes long, and I really think you should take the time to listen to it. It’s one of the best things I’ve heard in a long time. (The prepared text differs in places from Moyers’ spoken words. The quotes below are mostly from the prepared text, with only one or two changes, by me, to reflect the version as delivered.)

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Moyers helped create NOW, a PBS news magazine program featuring voices not usually heard on traditional news programs — not just people from across the political spectrum, but poets, scientists, philosophers, and ordinary citizens who could not be characterized by something as narrow as a political spectrum. From the start, Moyers became a lightning rod for right-wing wrath.

Let me assure you that I take in stride attacks by the radical right-wingers who have not given up demonizing me although I retired over six months ago. They’ve been after me for years now, and I suspect they will be stomping on my grave to make sure I don’t come back from the dead.

…

Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control, using the government to threaten and intimidate. I mean the people who are hollowing out middle-class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class in a war to make sure Ahmed Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq’s oil. I mean the people who turn faith-based initiatives into a slush fund and who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets. I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy.

That’s who I mean. And if that’s editorializing, so be it. A free press is one where it’s OK to state the conclusion you’re led to by the evidence.

The Rules of the Game

One reason I’m in hot water is because my colleagues and I at NOW didn’t play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.

…

These “rules of the game” permit Washington officials to set the agenda for journalism, leaving the press all too often simply to recount what officials say instead of subjecting their words and deeds to critical scrutiny. Instead of acting as filters for readers and viewers, sifting the truth from the propaganda, reporters and anchors attentively transcribe both sides of the spin invariably failing to provide context, background or any sense of which claims hold up and which are misleading.

I decided long ago that this wasn’t healthy for democracy. I came to see that “news is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity.” … I realized that investigative journalism could not be a collaboration between the journalist and the subject. Objectivity is not satisfied by two opposing people offering competing opinions, leaving the viewer to split the difference.

I came to believe that objective journalism means describing the object being reported on, including the little fibs and fantasies as well as the Big Lie of the people in power. In no way does this permit journalists to make accusations and allegations. It means, instead, making sure that your reporting and your conclusions can be nailed to the post with confirming evidence.

Orthodoxy Can Kill a Democracy

In Orwell’s 1984, the character Syme, one of the writers of that totalitarian society’s dictionary, explains to the protagonist Winston, “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only on partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda, is less inclined to put up a fight, to ask questions and be skeptical. That kind of orthodoxy can kill a democracy — or worse.

Moyers talked about the original concept behind NOW:

I told our producers and correspondents that in our field reporting our job was to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth. This was all the more imperative in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. America could be entering a long war against an elusive and stateless enemy with no definable measure of victory and no limit to its duration, cost or foreboding fear. The rise of a homeland security state meant government could justify extraordinary measures in exchange for protecting citizens against unnamed, even unproven, threats.

…

I also reminded them of how the correspondent and historian Richard Reeves answered a student who asked him to define real news. “Real news,” Reeves responded, “is the news you and I need to keep our freedoms.”

NOW was praised by reviewers. Moyers cites the Baton Rouge Advocate, which said NOW draws on “a wide range of viewpoints which transcend the typical labels of the political left or right.”

The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican Party became. That’s because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth.

This is the point of my story: Ideologues don’t want you to go beyond the typical labels of left and right. They embrace a world view that can’t be proven wrong because they will admit no evidence to the contrary. They want your reporting to validate their belief system and when it doesn’t, God forbid.

Our reporting was giving the radical right fits because it wasn’t the party line. It wasn’t that we were getting it wrong… The problem was that we were telling stories that partisans in power didn’t want told … we were getting it right, not right-wing.

I’ve always thought the American eagle needed a left wing and a right wing. The right wing would see to it that economic interests had their legitimate concerns addressed. The left wing would see to it that ordinary people were included in the bargain. Both would keep the great bird on course. But with two right wings or two left wings, it’s no longer an eagle and it’s going to crash.

The Flag in the Lapel

One night Moyers put an American flag pin in his lapel and sent the right wing into a fury by talking about it:

I wore my flag tonight. First time. Until now I haven’t thought it necessary to display a little metallic icon of patriotism for everyone to see. It was enough to vote, pay my taxes, perform my civic duties, speak my mind, and do my best to raise our kids to be good Americans.

Sometimes I would offer a small prayer of gratitude that I had been born in a country whose institutions sustained me, whose armed forces protected me, and whose ideals inspired me; I offered my heart’s affections in return. It no more occurred to me to flaunt the flag on my chest than it did to pin my mother’s picture on my lapel to prove her son’s love. Mother knew where I stood; so does my country. I even tuck a valentine in my tax returns on April 15.

So what’s this doing here? Well, I put it on to take it back. The flag’s been hijacked and turned into a logo — the trademark of a monopoly on patriotism. On those Sunday morning talk shows, official chests appear adorned with the flag as if it is the good housekeeping seal of approval. During the State of the Union, did you notice Bush and Cheney wearing the flag? How come? No administration’s patriotism is ever in doubt, only its policies. And the flag bestows no immunity from error. When I see flags sprouting on official lapels, I think of the time in China when I saw Mao’s little red book of orthodoxy on every official’s desk, omnipresent and unread.

But more galling than anything are all those moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapels while writing books and running Web sites and publishing magazines attacking dissenters as un-American. They are people whose ardor for war grows disproportionately to their distance from the fighting. They’re in the same league as those swarms of corporate lobbyists wearing flags and prowling Capitol Hill for tax breaks even as they call for more spending on war.

So I put this on as a modest riposte to men with flags in their lapels who shoot missiles from the safety of Washington think tanks, or argue that sacrifice is good as long as they don’t have to make it, or approve of bribing governments to join the coalition of the willing (after they first stash the cash). I put it on to remind myself that not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what Bin Laden did to us. The flag belongs to the country, not to the government. And it reminds me that it’s not un-American to think that war — except in self-defense — is a failure of moral imagination, political nerve, and diplomacy. Come to think of it, standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country.

Powerful Republican politicians started to demand that Moyers be silenced.

As rumors circulated about all this, I asked to meet with the [Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)] board to hear for myself what was being said. I thought it would be helpful for someone like me, who had been present at the creation and part of the system for almost 40 years, to talk about how CPB had been intended to be a heat shield to protect public broadcasters from exactly this kind of intimidation.

…

I thought the current CPB board would like to hear and talk about the importance of standing up to political interference. I was wrong. They wouldn’t meet with me. I tried three times. And it was all downhill after that.

I was naïve, I guess. I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out for the White House. But that’s what Kenneth Tomlinson has done.

…

Only two weeks ago did we learn that Mr. Tomlinson had spent $10,000 last year to hire a contractor who would watch my show and report on political bias. That’s right. Kenneth Y. Tomlinson spent $10,000 of your money to hire a guy to watch NOW to find out who my guests were and what my stories were. Ten thousand dollars.

…

That would have bought five tables at Thursday night’s “Conservative Salute for Tom DeLay.” Better yet, that ten grand would pay for the books in an elementary school classroom or an upgrade of its computer lab.

But having sent that cash, what did he find? Only Mr. Tomlinson knows. He’s apparently decided not to share the results with his staff, or his board or leak it to Robert Novak. The public paid for it — but Ken Tomlinson acts as if he owns it.

In a May 10 op-ed piece, in Reverend Moon’s conservative Washington Times, Tomlinson maintained he had not released the findings because public broadcasting is such a delicate institution that he did not want to “damage public broadcasting’s image with controversy.” Where I come from in Texas, we shovel that kind of stuff every day.

The Big Donor and the Widow’s Mite

In his op-ed essay this week in Washington Times, Ken Tomlinson tells of a phone call from an old friend complaining about my bias. Wrote Mr. Tomlinson: “The friend explained that the foundation he heads made a six-figure contribution to his local television station for digital conversion. But he declared there would be no more contributions until something was done about the network’s bias.”

Apparently that’s Kenneth Tomlinson’s method of governance. Money talks and buys the influence it wants.

I would like to ask him to listen to a different voice.

This letter came to me last year from [the widow of a New York City fireman killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks], five pages of handwriting. She said, among other things, that “… since I lost my husband on 9/11, not only our family’s world, but the whole world seems to have gotten even worse than that tragic day.”

She wanted me to know that on 9/11 her husband was not on duty. “He was home with me having coffee… But my Charlie took off like a lightning bolt to be with his men from the Special Operations Command. ‘Bring my gear to the plaza,’ he told his aide immediately after the first plane struck the North Tower. … He took action based on the responsibility he felt for his job and his men and for those Towers that he loved.”

In the FDNY, she said, chain-of-command rules extend to every captain of every fire house in the city. If anything happens in the firehouse — at any time — even if the captain isn’t on duty or on vacation — that captain is responsible for everything that goes on there 24/7.”

So she asked: “Why is this administration responsible for nothing? All that they do is pass the blame. This is not leadership…”

And then she wrote: “We need more programs like yours to wake America up. … Such programs must continue amidst the sea of false images and name-calling that divide America now. … Such programs give us hope that search will continue to get this imperfect human condition on to a higher plane. So thank you and all of those who work with you. Without public broadcasting, all we would call news would be merely carefully controlled propaganda.”

Framed above my desk at my office is [a copy of] the check she made out to “Channel 13 — NOW” for $500. When I go discouraged or need to remind myself that public media truly matter, I look at that check, and think of the woman who wrote it, and the husband who did his duty, and their belief in us. And I will take — over the big check that Ken Tomlinson could have gotten from the demanding right winger — I would take the widow’s mite any day.

Go listen.

I’ve been watching HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher for about a month now. Even though it sometimes makes me cringe, it seems there’s something good on there every week. Now the show is going on summer vacation, so this blog may not have so many quotes from comedians and foreign dignitaries for the next few months.

Bill Maher on liberals:

We don’t hate America. We love America. We just want it back from the cretins who’ve taken it over.

Al Franken on the people who opposed having a paper trail on electronic voting machines:

If they wanted people not to have conspiracy theories, they would have a paper trail. So, if they wanted to actually play this clean, and not get people doubting — if you really believe you’re gonna win, you don’t want people doubting that you won. You want the certainty.

The Republicans don’t mind a little doubt, so long as they have the power. If they can make the doubters look paranoid, then heck — that’s just a bonus.

I guess I’m not the only person who’s noticed that the Dark Side of the Force looks a lot like the Bush Administration. Here’s Dan Froomkin in the Washington Post:

“Revenge of the Sith,” it turns out, can also be seen as a cautionary tale for our time — a blistering critique of the war in Iraq, a reminder of how democracies can give up their freedoms too easily, and an admonition about the seduction of good people by absolute power.

Some film critics suggest it could be the biggest anti-Bush blockbuster since “Fahrenheit 9/11.”