Saturday, June 07, 2003

In 50 words or less...

Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of words have been committed to paper and pixel in attempts to capture the essence of the dangers and damages residing in the person of our current Attorney General.  After all that, it took Jeanne d’Arc of Body and Soul a mere 45 words to distill Ashcroft’s pathological influence, his anti-democratic monstrosity, his loutish disregard for American values and American freedoms, his utter unfitness to hold the reins of power as America’s lawyer, his absence of common sense and common intellect.  Here, in toto, is Jeanne’s explanation of the cluelessness of John Ashcroft:

Most Clueless: How out of it do you have to be to believe that when you’re dealing with suicidal terrorists, the best weapon you have is increasing the number of crimes subject to the death penalty? Yeah, the prospect of death—that will deter them.

That’s only a tiny piece of the eloquence of Jeanne d’Arc.  She comes very, very highly recommended.  I just wish she would set up her blog to ping weblogs.com so that I’d know about her new material as soon as she posts it.

Friday, June 06, 2003

Not a smoking gun, but perhaps just as damaging

When John Dean talks about the brewing of a potential Presidential scandal, he knows whereof he speaks.  It was Dean, after all, who on March 21, 1973 warned Richard Nixon about the cancer growing on his presidency, a warning that not only went unheeded but actually raised the intensity and extent of the Watergate coverup to their eventual epochal conclusion.

On Friday, Dean wrote one of his biweekly FindLaw’s Writ legal commentary columns.  The title of the piece is Missing Weapons Of Mass Destruction:  Is Lying About The Reason For War An Impeachable Offense?, and it’s a can’t-miss essay.  Take the time to read it carefully and completely…

General Ashcroft

More and more, C-SPAN is becoming my favorite television network to watch.  And it’s not only because the entertainment networks are in summer reruns.  Last night, I chanced upon a rebroadcast of a Justice Department Terrorism Prosecution Roundtable, described on C-SPAN’s website this way:

From the Department of Justice, Attorney General John Ashcroft and several State Attorney Generals deliberate the success of continued efforts to prosecute arrested terror suspects.

Well, not quite.  It was really a press conference.  Ashcroft spoke for about 10 minutes at the very beginning, ticking off his “accomplishments”, but got up and left before any of the reporters in the room could ask him any questions.

At that point, Alice Fisher, Deputy Assistant AG for the Criminal Division, took over.  She had to deal with the anger and tumult of a number of pissed-off reporters, who had expected to have an opportunity to address a few questions to Ashcroft before he hightailed it off the stage and into whatever nefarious (or prayer) meeting was next on his agenda for dismantling the rights of Americans.

But I digress.  What interested me, and prompted this blog entry, is that she started off her portion of the show by thanking Ashcroft, addressing him as “General”.  That got me to wondering about that honorific title.  My recollection is that the first time I ever heard a reference to an AG as “General” occurred during the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973.  It was G. Gordon Liddy who said it, in testimony about some meetings he’d had with John Mitchell, and he said something on the order of “I told General Mitchell about ...” I also recall some consternation from the Senators regarding the term, though perhaps I’m projecting my own consternation.

It seems to me that calling the Attorney General of the United States “General” is as valid and appropriate as using the term when referring to a corporation’s General Counsel, or when talking about a baseball team’s General Manager.  In other words, not at all.

Maybe there’s something more to the term than the implication that the AG is the nation’s general purpose lawyer.  If so, I’d be very interested in documentation of such a connotation. 

On the other hand, perhaps it’s time to start referring to General Billy Beane of the Oakland A’s, or General Pat Gillick of the Seattle Mariners, or General Theo Epstein of the Boston Red Sox.

UPDATE: Further evidence that the AG isn’t a general—according to the Wikipedia entry, when talking about more than one AG, the appropriate term is Attorneys General.  In its description of the “Roundtable”, then, C-SPAN formed the plural incorrectly ... maybe I should drop them a line about that. 

From the correct grammatical construction, it is clear that “general” is an adjective modifying the noun “attorney”.  More research is needed, however, to ascertain whether my memory that Liddy invented the improper honorific has any validity.

Monday, June 02, 2003

He's real!

Salam Pax lives!  That’s the word from Slate’s Peter Maass, who reports that not only did he speak with Salam while on assignment in Baghdad, but that the Iraqi worked briefly as Maass’s interpreter!

Maass didn’t realize this while he was in Iraq, because he maintained contact with his editors and western colleagues via a non-web-enabled satellite phone.  Only after reading some of Salam’s blog entries and recognizing events that he had participated in—Salam borrowed Maass’s New Yorker magazine, Salam and Maass delivered those famous 24 pizzas to the American soldiers—did Maass learn that he’d been hobnobbing with the most mysterious blogger in the world.

Note:  link to Maass obtained through Amygdala.

A sign of the future, as seen by Michael Powell?

Not that Michael Powell will ever see it, or that Mr. Powell will be troubled by it if he does see it, but a story in Monday’s New York Times exemplifies all that is wrong, all that is unnerving, all that is undemocratic, all that is corporate in the FCC regulations that will be ramrodded into place today.

Reported by Jim Rutenberg (with Micheline Maynard), “TV News That Looks Local, Even if It’s Not" discusses a television station in Flint, Michigan (apropos of nothing except linking to his site, that’s Michael Moore‘s hometown) where the firebrand political commentator, Mark Hyman, is actually based in Baltimore suburb Hunt Valley, Maryland, in a studio maintained by the Sinclair Broadcast Group.  The same Mark Hyman, with the same, umm, insights:

“Black, Asian and Hispanic seniors are graduating from colleges this spring in ethnically themed ceremonies that are out of bounds for whites,” Mr. Hyman, the station’s commentator, inveighed. Before passing the camera’s attention back to his colleagues on the Flint news team, he added, “Segregated ceremonies have no place in America’s college campuses."

also turns up as the firebrand political commentator in, among other places, Pittsburgh, Rochester, Oklahoma City, and Raleigh.  Need I mention that in four of the five cities specified in the NYTimes report the TV stations are on the FOX network (Raleigh is either UPN or WB)?

Within the next two months, Sinclair will extend its “Central Casting” (their own term for it, apparently) news operation to another seven markets, including Birmingham (UPN or WB) and Tampa (WB).  Eventually, Sinclair intends to deploy a fleet of such Central Casting reportage throughout their portfolio of television stations.  At present, Sinclair owns 62 stations (20 FOX, 19 WB, 6 UPN, 8 ABC, 3 CBS, 4 NBC, and 2 independents) in 24 states.  According to their corporate site, they currently reach 24% of TV households, so there’s a whole lot of room for growth of their Central Casting model even if Powell doesn’t raise the limit from 35% to 45%.

I’m sure that not all multi-market media corporations will follow the example of Sinclair.  But unless the companies make a concerted effort to resist such homogenization and widespread dissemination of corporate opinion rather than community opinion, the allure of such economies of scale is likely to result in more and more of the same.  This is precisely the sort of scenario that the overwhelming majority of public respondents to the FCC, numerous members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, and a few voices in the world of mass media (for some examples, see my May 14 blog entry) don’t want to see in our future.

Not that Michael Powell and his two fellow-travelers on the FCC care about public opinion or Congressional opinion, or anyone’s opinions except those of their political mentors in the White House and their benefactors with the wide-open checkbooks.  The naked and dismissive arrogance of the Bushies, as exemplified by Colin Powell’s son’s little FCC fiefdom, never ceases to amaze and horrify.