Perception and Reality

A total of 40% of Americans rate the national economy as excellent, very good, or good and 59% rate it as bad, very bad, or terrible.


National
economy Excellent Very good Good Bad Very bad Terrible Undecided


Mar 2006 9% 13% 18% 28% 12% 19% 1%
Feb 2006 7% 13% 25% 30% 10% 14% 1%
Jan 2006 5% 9% 29% 29% 9% 17% 2%
Dec 2005 6% 19% 22% 26% 11% 14% 2%
Nov 2005 6% 11% 18% 31% 13% 19% 2%
Oct 2005 5% 12% 21% 28% 11% 19% 4%
Sep 2005 4% 10% 29% 20% 20% 13% 4%
Aug 2005 2% 7% 33% 29% 17% 9% 3%
July 2005 1% 4% 43% 37% 9% 5% 1%
Jun 2005 1% 5% 29% 44% 6% 13% 2%
May 2005 1% 2% 31% 45% 6% 13% 2%
Apr 2005 1% 1% 35% 46% 2% 14% 1%
Mar 2005 1% 1% 39% 42% 5% 11% 1%


Among those saying they approve of the way Bush is handling his job, 93% say excellent, very good, or good and 5% say bad, very bad, or terrible. Among those saying they disapprove of the way Bush is handling his job, 95% say bad, very bad, or terrible and 4% say excellent, very good, or good.



By any objective criteria the national economy is doing well and has been for several years now. During the year surveyed, unemployment dropped from a low 5.1% to a lower 4.8%. The Dow rose from 10,400 to 11,200. GDP grew at a respectable 3.5%.

And as a result, the percentage of Americans viewing the national economy is "Good" or "Very Good" rose from 2% to 22%. But at the same time, those seeing the economy as "Very Bad" or "Terrible" rose from 16% to 31%. The latter statistic is startling, and appears to be divorced from any objective reality

What is unknown and unknowable here is whether peoples perceptions of the economy are driving their preceptions of Bush, or whether their preceptions of Bush are driving their preceptions of the economy.

test2

It seems Google is drawing a line in the sand with respect to the US Government wanting to see anonymous searches that might lead to progress in attacking child pornography on the basis of some presumed right of privacy. OK--well if thats a matter of principle, then could some square the circle for me? why ever would they self-censor certain terms, at the request of the PRC government? Did I miss something here?

The Levee's gonna break

The extent to which Governor Kathleen Blanco played politics with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is slowly coming out into the open. Her administration in Louisiana recently, and finally, released documentation covering the communication the Governor had with her own staff, with the White House, and with Democratic spinmeisters in the week following the storm.

Robert Travis Scott, writing for The Times-Picayune, has the most informative account I have yet seen on what these documents revealed. It's a story which, predictably, is being ignored by the press on the whole.

The extent to which the press was complicit in covering for Blanco, and the extraordinary effort it made to smear the Bush administration, becomes clear in these passages;

.. an ABC News reporter wrote Blanco's press secretary, "2 senior GOP aides have called me to suggest we should be focusing more blame on Governor Blanco." A New York Times reporter wrote an e-mail message saying, "Several officials in Washington are asserting that the Federal Government should have assumed control of the overall operation . . . As it would have meant, they suggested, better coordination of the response."

In other words, when it was suggested to members of the press that perhaps they should do their jobs and expose Blanco's incompetence, they did not do so. Instead they contacted Blanco’s staff to feed them (dis)information about the White House. You have to wonder; how often do the members of the press, when contacted by Democrat officials, call or email Republicans to notify them of the Democrat position? All right, you don't really need to wonder; it never happens.

This is odd.

On the morning of Aug. 31, Blanco was awaiting a television interview when she whispered a comment to Bottcher, saying she should have requested troops earlier. The comment was picked up off-air and cited as an admission by Blanco that she was tardy in her request for ground troops.

It was cited as an admission? It appears to any reasonable observer as an explicit admission. Further documents hint at the insanity that gripped Blanco and her staff.

"What have we done to counter Bush claim that gov delayed relief because she needed 24 hrs to make some decision?" reads an internal e-mail message by a Blanco administration official.

Documents and interviews show that Blanco wanted to avoid conceding her authority, and during the week she argued that a federalization of all military units would compromise her ability to keep law and order.

The impression given by these documents is certainly that Blanco and her people were far more concerned with conducting a PR war against the White House than they were in the safety and wellbeing of the people of New Orleans. And "compromise her ability to keep law and order"? The entire reason she was asking for federal troops was that she was quite unable to maintain law and order.

"By the weekend, the Bush administration will have a full-blown PR disaster/scandal on their hands because of the late response to needs in New Orleans," according to a Sept. 1 e-mail message sent by Blanco communications director Bob Mann. He attributed the observation to former President Clinton's press secretary Mike McCurry.
Kopplin advised the Blanco staff by e-mail that "we need to keep working to get our national surrogates to explain the facts."

Their "national surrogates", of course, were the journalists and reporters of the MSM. As the Democrats expected, they proved quite willing to overlook murderous incompetence on the part of Louisiana officials in pursuit of their petty vendetta against the Bush administration. Among their number must be counted Mr. Robert Travis Scott, who, in presenting this evidence of political gamesmanship on the part of Democratic politicians, still manages to conclude that Bush (surprise!!) was at fault. For example, although the Guard units from other states could only enter Louisiana under DoD orders, Scott gives the clear impression that this activity was something the States coordinated among themselves, with no Federal involvement.

Other facts which their surrogates did a poor job of explaining to the world were that the city of New Orleans was lawless for several days, and that the only way Federal troops could have restored order was for the President to invoke the Insurrection Act and essentially oust Blanco from her post. If this report is any indication, the dam which the Democratic parties "surrogates" have built to protect Governor Blanco is finally showing a few small cracks.

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In West Side Story, one of the two rival gangs, the Jets, sings a hilarious parody of social-work-think, as it applies to their possible motivations for having — in their own self-characterization — turned into "punks." (Oddly, I can't remember anyone having been offended, at the time the musical was a hit, by the use this insensitive term.) At one point in the number a gang member, Diesel, impersonating a judge in juvenile court, sings:

Officer Krupke, you're really a square;
This boy don't need a judge, he needs an analyst's care!

Further on in the number another gang member, Riff, addressing the "psychiatrist," has a few thoughts as to why these "youths" have become gang members:

My father beats my mommy,
My mommy clobbers me.
My grandpa's always plastered,
My grandma pushes tea,
My sister wears a mustache,
My brother wears a dress,
Goodness gracious, that's why I'm a mess!

(In the paleolithic era, "tea" was slang for marijuana.)

But then the gang adopts the position that juvenile delinquency is "a social disease." The cure in that case? Take the patient to a social worker!

Dear kindly social worker.
They say go earn a buck,
Like be a soda jerker,
Which means like be a schmuck.
It's not I'm anti-social,
I'm only anti-work,
Glory Osky, that's why I'm a jerk!

This last "root cause" may be the one that is closest to the mark in trying to understand what happened, and continues to happen, in France, at least if the analysis of Anthony Daniels in NRO (November 22, 2005, subscription required), The Suburbs Are Burning, is correct. Mr. Daniels begins with a brilliant, funny paragraph about a very serious situation:

For the last two weeks, the French have been watching the numbers of cars burnt the night before in the suburbs the way New Yorkers watch the Dow Jones index. Does 463 mean that the riots are now in recession, or is the reduction compared with the previous night merely what stockbrokers call a technical correction? Could the senior policeman be right who said that the downward trend was "the beginning of a classic mobilization at the weekend"? In other words, could les jeunes be conserving their energy for a further assault on French complacency?

The writer quickly proceeds to get to the heart of the issue:

The French banlieues are in effect prisons, but prisons that are ruled by the prisoners who live in them — generally the worst and most brutalizing kind of prisons there are. These prisons have metaphysical walls rather than real ones, though they are geographically isolated from the towns and cities to which they are attached. The metaphysical walls are patrolled by a combination of rigid French labor laws, which make it so difficult for the young to find employment in France, and the subculture of les jeunes themselves, which is conducive to nothing except idleness punctuated by insensate rage.

Daniels does not believe that Islam or Islamism had a great deal to do with the rioting:

The part played by Islam in the riots is bound in an age of Islamist terrorism to preoccupy us, but in my opinion it played at most a peripheral or enabling role. Young men of Islamic background are perhaps more sensitive to humiliation, and more likely to react violently, than others, since they are habituated to thinking of themselves as superior beings to women, the elect of creation. They are also determined to preserve their domination of women. This is the principal interest that Islam has for the young Muslim men of both Britain and France, and probably Holland as well, who are in all other respects almost as highly secularized as their non-Muslim counterparts. Islam also helps to keep their resentment warm, to give it shape; and resentment is, of all human emotions, by far the most dependable — but also the most counterproductive. But les jeunes are not religious fanatics: They are not religious at all. When French Islamic clerics issued a fatwa condemning the riots, it had absolutely no effect. Only a fatwa calling for riots might have had some effect, but only because there existed an inclination to riot in the first place.

But he recognizes that Islamists are, in all likelihood, waiting in the wings:

It would be surprising indeed if fundamentalists did not try to take advantage of the discontents to further their designs — if an impossible and primitive utopian daydream can be called a design.

So perhaps we should conclude that the behavior we saw (and will see again) in Paris was, to use the Jets' terminology, "a social disease." Having made the diagnosis, we are still far from having any clue about a possible cure. Daniels is pessimistic, and sees the French people, and the French state, as unlikely to change the social structure and laws that shore up the walls of the "metaphysical prison:"

..it is] the state that ... enclose[s] les jeunes in an existential prison. Unfortunately, most of the French population benefits — or believes that it benefits — from the regulations that maintain that prison. Riots in les banlieues or marches down the Boulevard Saint-Germain: That is the choice facing the French government, and my guess is that they will prefer the former to the latter, even if in the end it means sending in the CRS [the feared Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité], no holds barred.

Escaping the blogosphere

There is an excellent discussion by Clay Shirky
on the dynamics driving the “inequality” of blogs. Although it was written almost two years ago the principles mentioned would seem to have been validated by time.

The question posed is “Why do a handful of blogs account for a disproportionate amount of blog traffic?” In other words, why are site visits not more equally distributed across all blogs?

The answer, according to Shirky, is that “In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.”

There are accompanying graphs of what Shirky refers to as “power law distribution”, and a prediction of how the world of blogs will evolve over time.

At the head will be webloggers who join the mainstream media (a phrase which seems to mean "media we've gotten used to.") The transformation here is simple - as a blogger's audience grows large, more people read her work than she can possibly read, she can't link to everyone who wants her attention, and she can't answer all her incoming mail or follow up to the comments on her site. The result of these pressures is that she becomes a broadcast outlet, distributing material without participating in conversations about it.

Many of the “A list” bloggers have reached this point and no longer have comment sections, which is the “conversational” aspect of blogging. They might be said to have reached the blogospheres escape velocity.

Meanwhile, the long tail of weblogs with few readers will become conversational. In a world where most bloggers get below average traffic, audience size can't be the only metric for success. LiveJournal had this figured out years ago, by assuming that people would be writing for their friends, rather than some impersonal audience.

In between blogs-as-mainstream-media and blogs-as-dinner-conversation will be Blogging Classic, blogs published by one or a few people, for a moderately-sized audience, with whom the authors have a relatively engaged relationship. Because of the continuing growth of the weblog world, more blogs in the future will follow this pattern than today. However, these blogs will be in the minority for both traffic (dwarfed by the mainstream media blogs) and overall number of blogs (outnumbered by the conversational blogs.)

There are some implications here for Open Source Media and similar efforts. One is that the blogging model does not scale up very well. Once a blog passes a certain traffic threshold it becomes impractical for the blogger to spend time reading and responding to comments. Instead the “mega-bloggers” read and respond to other bloggers, as well as regular news reports.

The other is that the large blogs will become over time something closer to the “MSM” than to the blogs from which they sprung. Their large volume of traffic gives them influence. This attracts the attention of influential people looking for outlets for ideas, who give “access” in the journalistic sense to anyone with an audience. The circle will be complete when the former bloggers begin to be seduced by the notion of themselves as insiders; in other words, they will become increasingly like the Old Media which they initially and rightly excoriated.

Hans Blix; Lying Neocon Warmonger?

On January 27 2003, Hans Blix delivered a report to the UN detailing the results of UNMOVIC's inspections into Iraqi disamament.

The following is a synopsis of his findings. My comments are in bold, followed by Hans Blix in his own words in italics.

As of January 2003, Iraq had still not accepted the need for disarmament.


Unlike South Africa, which decided on its own to eliminate its nuclear weapons and welcomed the inspection as a means of creating confidence in its disarmament, Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace.

As we know, the twin operation declare and verify, which was prescribed in Resolution 687, too often turned into a game of hide and seek. Rather than just verify in declarations and supporting evidence, the two inspecting organizations found themselves engaged in efforts to map the weapons programs and to search for evidence through inspections, interviews, seminars, inquiries with suppliers and intelligence organizations.


Iraq had a history of lying about its WMD programs to the UN.


While Iraq claims, with little evidence, that it destroyed all biological weapons unilaterally in 1991, it is certain that UNSCOM destroyed large biological weapons production facilities in 1996. The large nuclear infrastructure was destroyed and the fissionable material was removed from Iraq by the IAEA.


For years Iraq refused to participate in the disarmament process, and it required the presence of an army on its borders to compell Iraq to once again appear to cooperate.


For nearly three years, Iraq refused to accept any inspections by UNMOVIC. It was only after appeals by the secretary-general and Arab states and pressure by the United States and other member states that Iraq declared on 16 September last year that it would again accept inspections without conditions.


It was not the role of the inspections teams to prove or disprove the presence of WMD in Iraq.


The substantive cooperation required relates above all to the obligation of Iraq to declare all programs of weapons of mass destruction and either to present items and activities for elimination or else to provide evidence supporting the conclusions that nothing proscribed remains.

Paragraph 9 of Resolution 1441 states that this cooperation shall be "active." It is not enough to open doors. Inspection is not a game of catch as catch can. Rather, as I noted, it is a process of verification for the purpose of creating confidence. It is not built upon the premise of trust. Rather, it is designed to lead to trust, if there is both openness to the inspectors and action to present them with items to destroy or credible evidence about the absence of any such items.


Iraq appeared to be covering up its anthrax program.


I turn to biological weapons. I mention the issue of anthrax to the council on previous occasions, and I come back to it as it is an important one. Iraq has declared that it produced about 8,500 liters of this biological warfare agent, which it states it unilaterally destroyed in the summer of 1991.

Iraq has provided little evidence for this production and no convincing evidence for its destruction.

There are strong indications that Iraq produced more anthrax than it declared and that at least some of this was retained over the declared destruction date. It might still exist.

Either it should be found and be destroyed under UNMOVIC supervision or else convincing evidence should be produced to show that it was indeed destroyed in 1991.

As I reported to the council on the 19th of December last year, Iraq did not declare a significant quantity, some 650 kilos, of bacterial growth media, which was acknowledged as reported in Iraq's submission to the Amorim panel in February 1999. As a part of its 7 December 2002 declaration Iraq resubmitted the Amorim panel document but the table showing this particular import of media was not included. The absence of this table would appear to be deliberate, as the pages of the resubmitted document were renumbered.


Iraq was developing prohibited missiles.

Two projects in particular stand out. They are the development of a liquid-fueled missile named Al-Samud II and a solid propellant missile called Al-Fatah. Both missiles have been tested to arrange in excess of the permitted range of 150 kilometers, with the Al-Samud II being tested to a maximum of 183 kilometers and the Al-Fatah to 161 kilometers. Some of both types of missiles have already been provided to the Iraqi armed forces, even though it is stated that they're still undergoing development.

The Al-Samud's diameter was increased from an earlier version to the president 760 mm. This modification was made despite a 1994 letter from the executive chairman of UNSCOM directing Iraq to limit its missile diameters to less than 600 mm. Furthermore, a November 1997 letter from the executive chairman of UNSCOM to Iraq prohibited the use of engines from certain surface-to-air missiles for the use in ballistic missiles.

During my recent meeting in Baghdad, we were briefed on these two programs. We were told that the final range for both systems would be less than the permitted maximum of 150 kilometers.

These missiles might well represent prima facie cases of proscribed systems. The test ranges in excess of 150 kilometers are significant, but some further technical considerations need to be made before we reach a conclusion on this issue. In the meantime, we have asked Iraq to cease flight tests of both missiles.


Iraq was rebuilding banned weapons infrastructure previously destroyed under UNSCOM inspection.


In addition, Iraq has refurbished its missile production infrastructure. In particular, Iraq reconstituted a number of casting chambers which had previously been destroyed under UNSCOM's supervision. They had been used in the production of solid fuel missiles.

Whatever missile system these chambers are intended for, they could produce motors for missiles capable of ranges significantly greater than 150 kilometers.


Iraq was importing prohibited weapons parts, in violation of the sanctions.


Also associated with these missiles and related developments is the import which has been taking place during the last two years of a number of items despite the sanctions, including as late as December 2002. Foremost among these is import of 300 rockets engines which may be used for the Al-Samud II.

Iraq has also declared the recent import of chemicals used in propellants, test instrumentation and guidance and control system. These items may well be for proscribed purposes; that is yet to be determined.

What is clear is that they were illegally brought into Iraq; that is, Iraq or some company in Iraq circumvented the restrictions imposed by various resolutions.


Iraq was concealing important documentation relating to WMD programs.


The recent inspection find in the private home of a scientist of a box of some 3,000 pages of documents, much of it relating to the lacing enrichment of uranium, support a concern that has long existed that documents might be distributed to the homes of private individuals. This interpretation is refuted by the Iraqi side which claims that research staff sometimes may bring papers from their work places.

On our side, we cannot help but think that the case might not be isolated and that such placements of documents is deliberate to make discovery difficult and to seek to shield documents by placing them in private homes.


Iraq was in violation of Resolution 1441 which called for UN inspectors to be allowed to conduct private interviews with Iraqis.


In the past, much valuable information came from interviews. There are also cases in which the interviewee was clearly intimidated by the presence of an interruption by Iraq officials.

This was the background to Resolution 1441's provision for a right for UNMOVIC and the IAEA to hold private interviews "in the mode or the location" of our choice in Baghdad or even abroad.

Today, 11 individuals were asked for interviews in Baghdad by us. The replies have been that the individual would only speak at Iraq's Monitoring Directorate or at any rate in the presence of an Iraq official.


========================================================


Those who claim that the Bush administration "manipulated intelligence" in order to make the case for an invasion of Iraq need to come to terms with the fact the the head of the UN inspections himself acknowledged that Iraq "appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace."

A little over a month later, the Coalition forces moved into Iraq. The Blix report was undoubtedly one of the key events leading up to the invasion, so it is odd thats its findings have received so little attention. If the White House is attempting to finally set the record straight regarding what occurred in the run up to the invasion, then they would be well served to remind the world that what the UN inspections actually found was that Iraq was violating the sanctions and cease fire agreements, and that it showed no interest in complying with the disarmament process. They might start by distributing the Blix report to the white House press pool.

Congress Must Investigate the CIA

Victoria Toensing, writing in the Wall Street Journal, calls for an invesigation of the CIA to determine what really happened in the case of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame.

Among the many questions she raises is why the CIA did not warn Bob Novak off the story when he called to verify the information he had been given regarding Joseph Wilson's wife. As Novak himself noted, he would have edited out any mention of Plame if the CIA had indicated that there was anything "covert" about her.

The entire Plame affair appears increasingly likely to have been an attempt by a faction within the CIA to "sting" the Bush administration. Since Patrick Fitzgerald has displayed zero interest in getting to the bottom of what Wilson and his wife were up to, a Congressional investigation is both appropriate and long overdue.

This Republican Congress has displayed a near total aversion to investigating crimes on the part of the political opposition. Perhaps the lesson they took from the Clinton impeachment trial is that such investigations will always be spun to their disadvantage. Whatever the explanation, the list of matters crying out for Congresional hearings is extensive and grows longer all the time. The forged memos pertaining to Bush's TANG service are an example, and the widespread vote fraud in the 2004 elections are another.

John Hinderaker and Bill Kristol wonder why the Bush administration does not fight back against the lies. It's an appropriate question, but one which might be asked with equal force of the Republican majorites in the House and Senate, which appear to be more concerned with trying to appease the Democrats in Congress and the media than in defending themselves and advancing their own agenda.

A single blog has little influence. But if all the blogs on the right extert presure, and sustain it, they can sometimes get results. It is time for us to start putting pressure on the Republican party, both in Congress and in the White House, to throughly investigate what has happened and is happening within the CIA. This intelligence agency continues to leak classified information to the detriment of the war effort, even several months after Porter Goss took over the reins. If the executive branch is unable to control the departments under its juristiction then Congress has both the right and the obligation to provide oversight.