Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Magazines Run Mushy Editorial Cartoons

Posted on September 21, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Romenesko points to an LA Times piece arguing that when it comes to editorial cartoons, editors prefer mush:

Week in, week out, editors at these publications, and at many others across the country, fill space with our lamest throwaway stuff. This has gone on so long that an entire generation of readers and, sadly, editors, seem to regard editorial cartoons as just another infotainment medium, something to break up the gray type and give a comforting chuckle. If the cartoon mentions sex, sports or celebrities, so much the better.

The article argues that editors are just scared of angering readers, so they pass on [update: 'pass on' in the sense of 'decline,' not in the sense of 'forward'] the hard-hitting stuff such as this.

Posted in Readings | 1 Comment

Don’t Forget

Posted on September 21, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

War crimes? Criminal activity? Criminal neglect? Major cover-up? Any of these is enough to demonstrate the moral unfitness to govern of the current lot.

TalkLeft—Female Abu Ghraib Prisoner Speaks Out: Huda Alazawi was one of the few females imprisoned at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. She was a wealthy businesswoman, blackmailed by a lowlife informant who falsely dropped a dime on her and her brothers, claiming they were supporters of the Iraqi resistance after she refused to meet his demand for money. Recently released after several months at Abu Ghraib, she recounted her ordeal to The Guardian.

Alazawi was imprisoned with two of her brothers and a sister. One brother was brutally sexually assaulted —hours later he was thrown at her and her sister's feet, bleeding from his head, knees and between his legs. He was dead.

The torture, abuse and degradation of Alazawi and other prisoners went on for months. She was able to document some of the abuse in a Koran. Other aspects of her report match those of other prisoners.

A few bad apples? No way.

Posted in Iraq Atrocities | 2 Comments

The Crapshoot

Posted on September 20, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Newsweek reports the soundbite du jour: Kerry's New Call to Arms. Seems Kerry will now roll the dice and make Iraq the main issue.

This is a sensible, but high-stakes strategy. On the merits it's Kerry's best issue: while people still don't agree on the merits of the attack, everyone honest agrees Bush's post-invasion plan was to collect garlands from the happy natives. It sure didn't work out that way.

While some will say Kerry has adopted this tactic now out of desperation, and who knows they might be right, the fact is that there was no sensible way Kerry could have done it any sooner. Facts on the ground were too fluid, and there was the danger that something might work out right. Now that danger seems attenuated.

A different danger for Kerry remains: that the Bush admin will lean on Pakistan to scoop up 'Osama bin forgotten' sometime during the next four weeks. That would — very unfairly but very effectively — take a good chunk of the wind out of Kerry's sails.

So it's a good strategy, a timely strategy, but still something of a risky strategy. That's in a way good too: any challenger who doesn't take risks usually loses, and there haven't been any risks taken since Kerry mortgaged his house to pay for Iowa.

Hmmm. That risk worked out OK, didn't it?

Posted in Politics: US: 2004 Election | 1 Comment

Bush Caught in Blatant Lie. No One Cares?

Posted on September 20, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Someone please explain this to me. Usually GW Bush speeches are artfully concocted creations that sound like they say one thing (e.g. Saddam was in bed with Al Qaeda), but in fact when you parse them carefully don't actually lie as such. (Disclaimer: does not apply to uses of economic statistics, where the M.O. is to accurately quote transparently concocted statistics.)

But yesterday GW Bush said something quite plainly false. Look at this article in the Manchester Union Leader, referenced in Dan's latest column:

The President said, as he has in the past, that after flying more than 570 hours in the Guard, he asked permission to work on a political campaign. “I was granted permission by my superiors,” he said. “I did everything they asked me to do and met my requirements and was honorably discharged. I’m proud of my service in the Guard.

We all know that the claim that “I did everything they asked me to do” is false. “They” asked Lt. Bush to take a physical. In fact, if the Guard followed its routine, they almost certainly ordered him to. And he didn't.

This incident demonstrates the major reason why the issue of 30-year-ago National Guard service is relevant today. Not because someone pulled strings in order to put some poor person's kid at risk in Vietnam instead of Jr. Not because Bush gamed the system to get out of flying just when his unit was going to a genuine mission to patrol US airspace. Not because the ill-minded of the world speculate that substance abuse lead to his being grounded, and meant he would have flunked the physical. Not because someone falsified the official records to record credits that were never actually earned. Nor even because the records were later sanitized to remove the critical separation codes that would tell us something about what really happened.

No. The reason this incident matters most is because GWB still can't come clean about it. And that sort of stubborn denial of facts is digging us deeper into holes in Iraq and at home.

But you know all this. Everyone knows all this. So the question I want explained to me is this: Why is it that when Dan Rather unwittingly albeit negligently tells a lie, everyone gets excited. But when the GOP candidate for President tells a lie knowingly and with malice aforethought…no one calls him on it?

Posted in Politics: US: GW Bush Scandals | 15 Comments

A Year Already?

Posted on September 19, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Depending how you count, I've been blogging for a year now. The first post, such as it was, is dated Sept. 15, but I started in earnest on the 20th. And I still think that one of the early posts was one of the best; it certainly hit the kind of issues I ended up blogging most about. (My eldest son, however, says that this one is the best of the early posts and maybe all time.)

I had thought when I began to take part in the life of the mind working out loud. There hasn’t been all that much of that here; my academic work tends to stay on academic pages where I can go on at sufficient length to be as precise as I feel a need to be. Instead, this blog ended up far more political than I originally imagined it would be. There's a reason for this.

I find it shocking and horrible that anyone running the government, anyone running the Justice Department, could argue for torturing prisoners of war, or any other class of person.

I find it frightening that anyone running the government, anyone running the Justice Department, could even entertain arguments that US Citizens should be held in solitary confinement, indefinitely, without charges or access to court and counsel. The assertion of this power strikes at the hear of our democracy. It is in my view many steps down the road to serious, genuine, good-old-fashioned tyranny, with or without raising the almost distracting issue of whether this is some nascent form of fascism.

(And the bankrupt-America policies of this administration, with many mainstream economists predicting a crash of the dollar or other economic disaster unless we change our policies doesn’t make me feel all that great either. Especially when I think about the political developments that often tend to follow an economic crisis.)

So, one reason I’ve kept on doing this is that I don’t want to look back in twenty years and discover that during the crunch time I was the modern equivalent of a ‘good German’—busy with the demands of family and career while ‘the great experiment,’ the USA, went down the tubes around me. Even bearing witness against these trends serves, I hope, in some small way to begin to roll them back.

As for the rest, it's part archive of interesting things, part sharing. The mix seems to work for some people. Your civil comments, public or private, are always welcome.

Continue reading →

Posted in Discourse.net | 10 Comments

Make Way for the Kamelopedia

Posted on September 19, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Oh how Borges would have loved the Kamelopedia. The English-language version of this online user-contributed dictionary defines German as follows:

A German is the counterpart of a Gerwoman. The Germans are a very clever people, having discovered the Kamel. They are very similar to the Americamelian people, which is to say very friendly and kind when they are not in a mood to take over the world. In Germany there are no palm trees.

What's going on? Joi Ito (who got it from Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales) explains:

Kamelopedia, originally a German parody of Wikipedia, has launched in English. Kamelopedia uses the same MediaWiki software that Wikipedia uses, but it is a joke encyclopedia based on puns and mistakes. Wikipedia has an english language description of Kamelopedia. I just signed up, but I'm not sure which is more fun… trying to be funny, or writing in the Wikipedia deadpan tone about something that is funny. (I'm working on this style on the Stealth Disco article.) There is also the Wikipedia Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense page.

Posted in Internet | Comments Off on Make Way for the Kamelopedia