lloydtown 

Mark Felt?

OK, so former FBI honcho Mark Felt was Deep Throat, unless, er, Woodward and Berstein are both pathological liars. (Via Kaus).

But I haven't given up on Rehnquist playing some role.

Bob Crosby, etc.

I was right: Bob Crosby was an extremely competent musician. He was about exactly the age of my late father, and he died in 1993. I just got a CD of his orchestra and smaller group, "The Bob Cats," from their very early years, roughly 1937 to 1942.

The funny thing is: Crosby was apparently a bandleader, period. He had earlier been a singer, but he was basically hired by the band, who knew that they could play, for his personality and youthful good looks. They included four (later five?) players trained in New Orleans, and they were always itching to play authentic Dixieland jazz, even though they were more or less booked for the same gigs that a straight "swing" orchestra like Tommy Dorsey would play. The players had been in drummer Ben Pollack's group; in the early years they acquired at least one player from Artie Shaw's band, and when they lost two players to Tommy Dorsey (with whom Bob Crosby had sung), it "created a sensation in the American music profession."

Wonderful stuff.

While I'm at it: I've been giving more of a listen to Harry Connick, Jr.,

30. Again, not much to say except it is very good, interesting stuff. Just him singing and playing piano, and he gives unusual, often beautiful arrangements to a surprising variety of tunes.

Kind of Like Starting Again

Do I still exist? Of, if I don't, does the blog?

Yes and yes. I had a whirlwhind trip to Edmonton to visit family. My mother is making the momentous decision to move from her house to an apartment. My brother and his wife, her only close relatives of our generation who live there, are going to Australia for 8 months. And my niece had her graduation. I had a great visit. I can't really help much with all that's going on there, but I hope they know I care.

Blogging seems to have become unbelievably lame. The Newsweek story may have been a bit careless, but it turns out to be more or less vindicated. (Shakespeare's Sister via Kevin Drum). Likewise Amnesty International's use of the word "gulag." (Reynolds shows at great length that there were far more Soviet gulags, and they were secret. He probably adds that people were far more likely to die in horrible ways there. But that seems to mostly concede some important similarities: indefinite detention with no semblance of a hearing; a certain degree of indifference as to guilt or innocence; hope that by interrogating/abusing/torturing, some information can be generated.)

Kaus is a lonely voice asking intelligent questions: isn't it possible the Bushies are trying to get of Bolton, packing him off to a job they consider strictly for losers, simply because Condi wants to get rid of him? Why does that possibility get no real coverage from left or right? (Skip to "Noumenal News," or word search "Bolton").

Why should Democrats oppose any change to Social Security when big problems are coming with Medicare as it is now, and Democrats presumably want to work for national health insurance when they get a chance. Aren't these things much more important? Wouldn't some means testing help Social Security?

Why not keep the filibuster only for judicial appointments, not for legislation? This is the opposite of what the Republicans say they want, and Democrats seem to feel they have to defend all filibusters. Judicial appointments are more or less forever, virtually impossible to change.

Kaus also had a nice link to a study of voting patterns in the US in 2004. The strongest demographic link to the outcome is not religion, guns, hanging or whatever but: white women marrying, buying homes, and having children. (See above here, here, and here). Areas where it is affordable to do these things, and it is at least somewhat plausible that you can look after yourself/your family, your family can look after you, vote Republican; areas where it is not affordable, and you can reasonably expect to be dependent on the government, vote Democrat.

Leaving the U.S. Constitution (for now)

I have taught American Constitutional Law at the University of Toronto two years in a row. It is no hyperbole, or conventional good manners, for me to say this was a rare privilege. I will not be teaching the same course next year; I may still have a chance to teach a different course.

I just want to set down some last thoughts (for now).

I came to have great sympathy for the "original intent" approach to reading the Constitution in grad school days. I was influenced by Walter Berns (I still own several of his books), and I sympathized with Rehnquist and Bork as well. Berns was deeper than Bork in that he tried to show how the Constitution was based on an understanding of the need for a strong government, balanced against "natural right," and the "natural rights" of individuals. Not every imaginable individual right is natural, or compatible with effective government, or a decent society.

Part of the argument about the Warren and Burger courts hinged on whether it made sense to incorporate the Bill of Rights, which limits what Congress can do, into the 14th Amendment, which restricts states. Was it part of the "original intent" of the drafters of the 14th to incorporate in this way? Almost certainly not--the intent was almost certainly to ensure that blacks had most (not necessarily all) of the rights that whites pretty much had without question. Was there some underlying "intent" from the beginning that some of the individual rights in the 1st 10 or so amendments would apply against the states? This gets a bit hazier. In the Slaughterhouse case, there was at least a lively debate about the "privileges and immunities" clause.

Jack Balkin takes up the question whether it is possible to argue both that Brown v. Board was correctly decided, and that it was consistent with the "original intent" of the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868. Some original intent conservatives, naturally, try to say both. They would never want to say in public that Brown was wrongly decided. Balkin shows, however, convincingly in my view, that virtually no white person in the U.S., at the time the 14th was drafted and ratified, wanted de-segregated schools. They didn't even necessarily want blacks to have the right to vote--that was covered in the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870. The 14th was intended to achieve "civil equality" for blacks.

Civil equality was distinguished from political equality-- the equal right of blacks to vote, serve on juries or hold political office, and it did not mean social equality, including the rights of blacks to intermarry with whites or the right to associate in civil society with whites on an equal footing. A strict colorblindness rule was rejected because it would give blacks the vote and lead to racial mixing. That is why the language of the Fourteenth Amendment is carefully chosen to guarantee only civil equality-- this is what the words "privileges and immunities" and "equal protection of the laws" meant in 1868-- and that is why a Fifteenth Amendment specifically guaranteeing blacks the right to vote (a feature of political equality) was required in 1870.

Gaddis on WMDs

Gaddis, from the piece in previous post:

[blockquote][Critics of Bush emphasize that] no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. But every intelligence agency in the world also believed that they were there, and it may be that Saddam Hussein believed that also. That they weren’t, was universally unexpected.[/blockquote]

The recently released report of the Weapons of Mass Destruction – while it does not attempt to evaluate the Bush administration’s use of the intelligence it received – provides plenty of evidence that internal flaws within the American intelligence establishment were enough in and of themselves to produce a flawed product.

The Bush administration was no doubt unwise to emphasize WMD as much as it did as a justification for the war in Iraq – it had lots of other good reasons for going in. But deliberate deception has yet to be proven.

The question of prewar intelligence has been thrust back into the public eye with the disclosure of a secret British memo showing that, eight months before the March 2003 start of the war, a senior British intelligence official reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair that U.S. intelligence was being shaped to support a policy of invading Iraq.

...a close reading of the recent 600-page report by the president's commission on intelligence, and the previous report by the Senate panel, shows that as war approached, many U.S. intelligence analysts were internally questioning almost every major piece of prewar intelligence about Hussein's alleged weapons programs.

These included claims that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium in Africa for its nuclear program, had mobile labs for producing biological weapons, ran an active chemical weapons program and possessed unmanned aircraft that could deliver weapons of mass destruction. All these claims were made by Bush or then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in public addresses even though, the reports made clear, they had yet to be verified by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Gaddis on Bush

Here's a very intelligent defence of Bush on the war (Professor John Gaddis, historian at Yale, via Ten O'Clock Scholar and Avedon at the Eschaton site).

Gaddis is surely right that academics have great difficulty in appreciating Bush--in not underestimating him. Academic work is more and more specialized--what you say supposedly has no credibility unless you are extremely well read in a narrow field. Bush, like all great leaders, reminds us that the only way to maintain broad interests is to "retain a certain shallowness." I would just repeat that Bush, when he is not speaking from a prepared text, still seems to me almost unbelievably inarticulate. It's one thing to want to be honest, not pretending to be an intellectual, or to know things one doesn't, etc. I think that describes Bush Senior very well. Bush Junior goes beyond that, making it difficult to believe he's ever read anything. Gaddis says he knows Bush reads--and urges his staff to read entire books he has read. If so, Bush may actually be unusually well-read among politicians, and he is certainly an enigma to me.

Gaddis is also right that Bush reminds us of the value of having something like a grand strategic vision, rather than responding to crises one at a time. Clinton may always represent the latter approach. It was always unclear what exactly constituted a crisis for Clinton (largely because the world seemed so unthreatening to the U.S.). He seemed to be looking for cases where compassion required action, so that became the main reason for intervening in ex-Yugoslavia. (It could be argued that strengthening NATO was an important strategic goal). Yet he deliberately did nothing in Rwanda.

Once again Gaddis is right that "grand strategy requires great language," and the art of rhetoric has largely been lost--perhaps especially at the university. I still have my doubts about Bush's major speeches, but they are obviously an attempt to get up to the level of Reagan, Kennedy, FDR, Churchill, Wilson, and so on.

Gaddis is also right that any U.S. President will be prepared to act unilaterally, and it is foolish for Democrats or Bush critics to pretend otherwise. Kerry was reluctantly forced to concede as much, and he looked very foolish as he did so in this grudging way. The Bushies themselves would have preferred some more multilateralism in Iraq; they made at least some efforts in this direction; perhaps their failure resulted partly from their own mistakes; but still, they are not somehow unilateralists in contrast to any other administration.

Gaddis is also right that international law cannot be used to provide absolute protection for the sovereignty of nations. Some of the most up-to-date or "modern" initiatives, including the Helsinki Accords, have moved away from that principle.

Gaddis is in agreement with the main points of Bush's strategy. He especially praises the Second Inaugural.

9/11, he argued, meant the end of isolationism once and for all. That event happened because of “ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder.”

Such ideologies, of course, have always existed. During the Cold War, though, they either lacked the ability to transform themselves into actions that could hurt us, or, where they were capable of such actions the countries espousing such ideologies could be identified and deterred, as in the case of the Soviet Union and China.

That was not true on 9/11. Decisions made by largely invisible individuals in a primitive country halfway around the world produced an attack that killed more Americans than the one the Japanese fleet carried out at Pearl Harbor sixty years earlier.

The only solution, the President has insisted, is to neutralize where possible, but to remove where necessary, regimes that embrace such ideologies. The objective, as the inaugural put it, should be to “expose the pretensions of tyrants and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant.” That means that “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.”

What is new is this: previous presidents tended to distinguish between ideals and interests. The expansion of freedom was an aspiration – but the interests of the United States lay elsewhere: in securing independence, suppressing secession, winning world wars, containment, deterrence, the maintenance of a balance of power, the promotion of capitalism, the encouragement of predictably pro-American regimes elsewhere, even if they didn’t meet our own standards for representative government and the defense of human rights.

Bush has now conflated ideals and interests. As he put it in the inaugural: “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.” Freedom itself is to be the strategy, not just the aspiration. It may, in this sense, be radical. It is hardly un-American.

Because the danger now is that the monsters from abroad, if nothing is done to counter them, will seek to destroy us here at home.

The trend in global politics is indeed toward democracy, but the trend could be reversed by just a few more well-placed attacks on the scale of 9/11 or greater, whether in this country or elsewhere. In this sense, the world itself is now like Iraq, in which the depredations of a few place all at risk.

I also detect in this some humbling effects of the Iraqi experience: that we didn’t know what we were doing when we first occupied the country; that we’ve had to adapt, based on what we’ve learned; that there’s been an increasing willingness to shift from the imposition of an ideology from the top down to the application of lessons learned from the bottom up.

Can Words Hurt?

I've almost completely missed the Newsweek story: it's most unlikely one Newsweek story caused anything at all; the same senior U.S. military person who said Isikoff ("that s.o.b.") caused deaths, a week earlier said the Newsweek article didn't cause any deaths; at worst the Newsweek article was confirming a story that had circulated for years. Maybe in the case of total war, such as World War II, it's necessary to censor the media. Today? I don't think so. Lefties are correct that when Glenn Reynolds threatens that "someone" might want to take away freedom of the press, he's resorting to an old trick of demagoguery, and trying to have it both ways. He's not opposed to freedom of the press, but he has deep sympathy for some of those who are, and if a newspaper office is attacked, he will sadly say "I told you so."

(Arthur Silber via Avedon at Eschaton).

And then there's this from the Corner. AOL runs a piece on a widowed judge whose family members had been murdered. "Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow said one way lawmakers could protect judges would be to condemn judge-bashing remarks by commentators and colleagues.

'''Fostering disrespect for judges can only encourage those that are on the edge, or on the fringe, to exact revenge,' Lefkow told the Senate Judiciary Committee."

Three examples are given of Republicans criticizing the courts over the Schiavo case and other cases. One example is from Sen. Rick Santorum, Katherine Lopez's hero. Lopez says:

Please explain to me how this comment is responsible for murder: ''The actions on the part of the Florida court and the U.S. Supreme Court are unconscionable.'' That's Rick Santorum speaking about Terri Schiavo. And, well, that's a legitimate, civil point of view.

You can argue about some other ill-advised comments from others, as we have corporately here, giving a little grief to guys we generally like a lot like John Cornyn. But, for instance, I think that Roe v. Wade is an abomination (luckily I'm not up for a judgeship). Does that make me responsible for what some crazy person does claiming to carry some kind of "pro-life" torch (a despicable contention to those who truly work to defend life)? (Argh--I probably just gave the Democrats a new talking point on Pryor now. Not that they need the prodding, they are that unfair on their own.)

Belinda Stronach

I've been trying to get a post together saying there's really no news for bloggers to feast on. It's ironic, in a sense that goes a bit beyond Alanis Morissette (very good but, alas, over-rated), that there are probably more bloggers than ever now, especially with Huffington in the picture.

And then, in poor old Canada, Belinda Stronach, our local Conservative MP, crosses the floor and becomes a Liberal minister just in time for the big confidence vote on the Budget on Thursday.

She says she didn't want the Budget to be defeated--it includes spending which is good for her riding, especially on infrastructure. The subtext here is that the Tory party has tended to be anti-tax and anti-spending, so it's doubtful that they would match the spending on any item if they were in office. She also says she didn't want to be in League with the separatist Bloc Quebecois--she didn't want to give them more cards to play. That I can certainly agree with. The spending I'm not so sure about. In one interview this evening she mentioned daycare spending as a good thing. Was she ever a Tory?

The way she crossed may be about the lowest possible. She could have become an Independent. She could have simply voted for the Budget on Thursday, and waited to see if leader Stephen Harper and the rest of the caucus kicked her out, or what. Arguably she wanted to strengthen the Liberal/Budget cause, and hurt the Tory/Bloc cause, as much as possible, or make a confidence vote as much as possible a sure thing, as she says, "for the good of the country." But she also got the maximum price for herself--a Minister's job, and a corner office. (No one is even mentioning which Minister lost the responsibility she just picked up--Human Resources and Skills Development).

(From Paul Martin's statement:

I would like to take a moment to thank the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, the Honourable Lucienne Robillard, who has so capably directed the ministry of Human Resources and Skills Development during this time in addition to her existing cabinet responsibilities and her role as National Campaign Co-Chair.

Finally, I want to thank Martha Hall-Findlay, who has agreed to stand down as the Liberal candidate in Newmarket-Aurora.

Canadians are Overrated

I used to say I would not join in with the National Post in saying "Canada sucks." But I'm coming pretty close here: are there any more or less famous Canadians, other than Wayne Gretzky, who aren't over-rated?

Conrad Black is way overrated by those who admire the tycoon-British Tory type.
The late Bob Hunter is overrated--his eulogies go on and on here in Toronto.
The late Pierre Berton is over-rated. We were always told he could have made so much more money if he had gone to the U.S. Really? He can be admired as an entrepreneur, in that no one else had the idea of getting rich by writing popular histories of Canada. But the books themselves? Robert Fulford pretty much wrote that as a historian, Berton made a pretty good columnist for the Toronto Star.
Wayne and Shuster are over-rated. So Ed Sullivan booked them many times--they were a relief from the Catskills comics talking about their mothers in law. And today: the greatest Catskills comics are still with us (Jackie Mason) or their material is (Rodney Dangerfield). Is there any Wayne and Shuster material that's actually funny?
Mike Myers is over-rated. I like Austin Powers; I liked the beginning of Wayne's World on SNL, and even the very beginning which I saw at Second City in Toronto years ago. I liked "Middle-Aged Guy" on SNL. But come on. Funniest SNL ever was Eddie Murphy guest hosting. I grant you, Eddie hasn't been funny for many years, but he killed that night--and Myers has never been in that league.
Jim Carrey is over-rated. Probably a richer, albeit crazier brew than Myers--there's flat out more material there. But still. It's not so much the material, it's his gross over-reaction to the material. He's the extreme case of the little guy who isn't sure he can handle much of anything, but comes through in the end. Period.
Sarah McLaughlin is way, way, way God help me over-rated, and Celine (whom David Foster was babbling about on TV tonight), and Shania. Yes, they've all succeeded in a very technical, competent kind of way, and I can't necessarily think of a better American in every case, but still.
Dalton Camp was over-rated. Trudeau emerged from somewhere behind Camp, at least in political circles, and ended up far ahead. But still, I think, over-rated.

Part of what started this was seeing Tom Hayden on TV tonight. This must be tape from his visit a few weeks ago. There's a global movement against the war in Iraq, environment, right-thinking people, blah blah blah, INCLUDING SOME RIGHT HERE IN CANADA. That's great Tom. We'll be your little friend. (I know, there are right-wing versions of a little friend to the Americans: David Frum, over-rated). We get the second-stringers and losers from the States praising us for being different than home. Robert Kennedy. Noam Chomsky.

School Year Wrap-Up

I graded 50 exams, and calculated final grades for 55 students. One I'm sure has given up on the course, but there may be four who want to write a make-up exam during the summer. That will mean I'll have to make up the exam myself, and grade it.

Of course I still do those calculations by hand, but the word is spreading at the university that it is quite easy to do with a spreadsheet. Take an hour or so to set it up at the beginning of the year, with all students who have signed up, add grades for specific assigments as they come in, and have the software keep track of percentages and the final grade. I know from my day job that this is quite doable, but I didn't get that far in computers when I was teaching full time.