Eric Mink: Late to the Rove Scandal

Hard-hitting, easy- (if at all) thinking Eric Mink weighs in on Karl Rove:

t’s ironic that political genius Karl Rove – and perhaps others – could end up in prison for exposing the identity of an undercover CIA agent. Ironic, because their essential mistake in doing so was one of identity: their own.

Excellent work, Mink! Now, tell the rest of us what you think about the electoral mess in Ohio!

New motto suggestion for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Commentary on the news for the people who don’t care or pay attention by people who don’t care or pay attention!

UPDATE: McGehee illustrates that Mink might be just in time.

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Book Report: Desperately Seeking Susan by Susan Dworkin (1985)

I bought this book at a garage sale in my old eBay days. When cleaning out the backstock of those old books, I decided to add it to my personal library since I’ve never seen the movie, but I was kind of familiar with the plot. So I read it.

What do you want? It’s the novelization of a romantic comedy about Baby Boomers being New Wave in the middle 1980s. Man, they actually used to novelize those things. Now, that tradition is only upheld for books that geeks and fanboys will buy.

Roberta, an aging (26!) and disenchanted suburban housewife, lives vicariously through the personal ads, particularly a series of ads wherein a man desperately seeks Susan. When she follows the directions to one of Susan’s rendezvous, Roberta becomes more immersed in Susan’s life than in her own.

I took two things away from this book:

  • If Madonna had been born 20 years later, she would have been one of the first stars with a sex tape accidentally leaked to the Internet.
  • I find it unintentionally amusing when I read books where characters in their mid twenties think they’re old. You don’t really get old until your middle thirties, anyone in his or her middle thirties will tell you.

Now I’ll have to get the commemorative twentieth anniversary two-DVD retrospective that’s due any day now.

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eBay Changes Rules to Benefit Community; By Coincidence, Also Results in Additional Revenue for eBay

eBay tightens rules for sellers:

    eBay said Monday that sellers could no longer accept PayPal payments from buyers without accepting credit card transactions, thereby avoiding PayPal fees. eBay acquired PayPal in 2002.

    Sellers’ practice of restricting PayPal payment methods “was creating a bad buyer experience,” said PayPal spokeswoman Amanda Pires. “It would be like walking into the grocery store and filling up your cart, getting to the check stand with your credit card and being told sorry, even after you saw the credit card logo outside the store.”

    Under PayPal rules, sellers can accept payment through bank transfers or PayPal balances for free. But sellers in the United States who accept credit card payments are charged between 1.9 percent and 2.9 percent of the value of the transaction, based on volume.

    Pires sought to quell concerns that eBay was tightening the restrictions merely to boost PayPal’s fee collections.

    “We got a lot of community feedback, which is why we’re changing this,” Pires said. “And it was a very small percentage of sellers who were doing this.”

Sure. Like they’re responding to community feedback to lower seller’s fees. I used to spend a lot of time selling inexpensive books on eBay, mostly books I picked up for a buck or so at garage sales and sold for five to ten dollars. Eventually, I calculated that eBay was making more money from my effort than I was.

Community that, eBay.

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New York Times Condemns Activist Judiciary

In perhaps a great case of Laphamization, the New York Times is lamenting judicial activism before the judge is even confirmed:

    One of the most important areas for the Senate to explore is Judge Roberts’s views on federalism – the issue of how much power the federal government should have. The far right is on a drive to resurrect ancient, and discredited, states’ rights theories. If extremists take control of the Supreme Court, we will end up with an America in which the federal government is powerless to protect against air pollution, unsafe working conditions and child labor. There are reasons to be concerned about Judge Roberts on this score. He dissented in an Endangered Species Act case in a way that suggested he might hold an array of environmental laws, and other important federal protections, to be unconstitutional.

Isn’t it a shame how much power the judiciary has?

Only when it’s wielded by judges of whom the New York Tomes disapproves, apparently.

(Link seen on Michelle Malkin.)

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Presented as Straight News

Survey: 25,000 civilians killed in Iraq war:

    Nearly 25,000 civilians have been killed since the start of the Iraq war, according to a group that tracks the civilian death toll from the conflict.

    The Iraq Body Count — a London-based group comprising academics and human rights and anti-war activists — said on Tuesday that 24,865 civilians had died between March 20, 2003 and March 19, 2005. [Emphasis mine]

Swell. How did this survey come about? Did the anti-war activists ask people if they had been killed in the Iraq war? Close.

    “Our data has been extracted from a comprehensive analysis of over 10,000 press and media reports published since March 2003. Our accounting is not complete: only an in-depth, on-the-ground census could come close to achieving that,” the group said.

    “But if journalism is the first draft of history, then this dossier may claim to be an early historical analysis of the military intervention’s known human costs.”

At least CNN did add a bit of a rejoinder, some paragraphs down, from people closer to the conflict than press and media reports:

    The Iraqi government disputed some of the finding of the report.

    “We welcome the attention given by this report to Iraqi victims of violence but we consider that it is mistaken in claiming that the plague of terrorism has killed fewer Iraqis than the multinational forces,” said the prime minister’s office, citing recent terror strikes, including the Musayyib bombing that killed nearly 100 people on Saturday.

    “The international forces try to avoid civilian casualties, whereas the terrorists target civilians and try to kill as many of them as they can.”

So it’s really unclear to me why this piece puts the claims of academics activists above Iraqi government officials and U.S. government officials. No, wait, come to think of it, it’s clear.

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A Real Estate Challenge The Noggles Share

Where to put the books:


    WHERE do you house 10,000 books? In an apartment with plenty of shelf space, of course.

    So that’s what Thomas and Katherine Cole needed when they moved to New York.

    Mr. Cole, 71, who retired five years ago as a classics professor at Yale University, likes working from home, which means having on hand the thousands of reference works he might need. (He is writing a literary study of Ovid.)

We can aspire to 10,000 volumes. We’ve got to be at several thousand now. Our next house will need a room dedicated to being the library. Probably not a finished room in the basement which might flood. You see, we’ve thought it over.

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When Scienceocrats Attack!

A new study questions whether conversion of corn into ethanol actually expends more energy than it stores. When confronted with contrary data, modern scienceocrats do the obvious: they attack the study on merits other than scientific:

    Researchers at the National Corn-To-Ethanol Research Center at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville said there are several federal studies that cite the opposite and said the recent study is harming their ability to reduce the United States’ dependence on foreign oil.

    “It discourages me,” said Martha Schlicher, director of the research center. “People tend to remember negative news instead of becoming educated in what may not be as interesting. I worry that in a time so critical for energy security and the environment that this detracts from getting accurate information to consumers.”

Forget about the data. How do you feel? The director of the research center nust feel discouraged, because if scientists cannot disprove this data, then something more important than truth lies at stake:

    At a time when businesses, state officials and farmers are investing millions of dollars in ethanol research, researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., and the University of California at Berkeley found it takes 29 percent more energy to turn corn into ethanol than the amount stored in the resulting fuel. [Emphasis mine]

If ethanol proves to as effective as mixing snake oil with banana oil, who’s going to want to pay to maintain research facilities to studying the proper ratios, and more importantly, to keep directors salaried?

Allow me to quickly consolidate the new, revised, and more better

Twenty-First Century Scientific Method

  1. Observe some aspect of the universe.
  2. Determine that the aspect of the universe impacts some large corporation, public policy initiative, or both.
  3. Write grant proposals and get funding for research into the aspect of the universe.
  4. Organize and attend conferences to confabulate with others who are thinking about the aspect of the universe, or perhaps just related fields, or perhaps unrelated fields–after all, the universe is holistically interrelated.
  5. When funding is about to run out, invent a tentative description, called a hypothesis. You can make it all up if you want; it only needs to be believeable enough to warrant more funding.
  6. Use the hypothesis to make predictions and as progress report or new grant proposal fodder.
  7. Receive more funding.
  8. Test those predictions by experiments or further observations and conclude you need more funding to conduct further research.
  9. Repeat steps 6 through 8 until retirement age.

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Book Report: Ring of Truth by Nancy Pickard (2001)

I inherited this book from my aunt, which explains why I’ve read a chickthrilla. That in itself lends itself to some interesting contrasts with the crime fiction I tend to read, where every protagonist has a shot in an equal fight with amateur bad guys. Here, the protagonist is a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter than commone adversaries. Weird.

This book revolves around a true crime writer who has put to bed a book on a south Florida crime of passion. A minister who has argued against the death penalty has been convicted of killing his wife to cover up an affair or to be with his lover. Coincidentally, he’s now on death row in the next cell from the inmate whose cause the minister championed. But as she sends the book off, the narrator has some niggling doubts about the crimes, and she investigates a little more.

The book intersperses chapters of the fictional true crime book with current thoughts of the true crime author/sleuth, Marie Lightfoot. It struck me as odd that the chapters of the book are all in third person past tense, but the current investigations are in the first person present. I mean, that’s just weird. I’m sure the author (Pickard, the real author) used the conceit to differentiate the fictional book from the real fictional book, er, story. It’s more jarring than it needs to be, though, and I could have done without it.

Overall, it’s a serviceable book with an interesting plot but with an ending and whodunit resolution that seems sudden, but part of that’s the function of the first part of the book including a higher portion of fictional chapters from the true crime book, which presents the story as it’s thought to be, and the last part of the book includes a higher portion of contemporary investigation of the fictional author. I don’t regret reading it, unlike some books with which I have burdened myself of late, but I won’t actively seek out other works in Pickard’s Marie Lightfoot or Jenny McCain series on the basis of this exposure.

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Libertarians Tear Hair Out In Missouri

Nudity or lap dances in strip clubs? Now illegal!

Adult entertainment businesses plan to ask a judge to block a new law that would prohibit lap dances and full nudity in Missouri strip clubs.

The Missouri chapter of Adult Club Executives plans to seek an injunction next week against the law, scheduled to take effect Aug. 28, said Kansas City attorney Richard Bryant, who represents the group.

The legislation, signed Wednesday by Gov. Matt Blunt, would prohibit customers and employees younger than 21 at strip clubs. It also would ban nudity and require seminude employees to remain at least 10 feet away from customers and behind a 2-foot-high railing. The bill would prohibit employees from touching customers.

Drinking in public? Now legal!

For revelers in Kansas City’s downtown entertainment district, the party won’t have to end at the door.

A law signed by Gov. Matt Blunt will allow patrons to stroll in and out of restaurants and bars without dumping their alcoholic beverages. Kansas City officials are reworking the city’s alcohol ordinance to make it conform with the state’s law.

We Libertarians would rather not trade one vice for another because we just cannot choose which one we like best.

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Brian J. Does Potter


Welcome Back, Potter
Click for full size
Warning: Contains Spoilers!

Like everyone else this weekend, Friday night at midnight found me with inked sigils upon my body, attire of coarse robes, and silly-looking glasses. In other words, it was a normal Friday evening. But on Saturday, I too joined America in picking up the latest Potter book, and I read it in one sitting. After which point, I could hardly walk after not having eaten nor napped in the afternoon as is my wont.

This one departs from earlier novels and takes the series in a new direction. Harry Potter, having graduated and decided against wizard graduate school or a career in wizard fast food, returns home to Brooklyn to open a new storefront affiliate of Hogwarts. Thus, at Hogwarts High School, he becomes a teacher and mentor to a group of loveable losers called the Sweathogwarts. Although losers in the muggle world, the Sweathogwarts have power in the ways of disco magic and Potter begins to teach them to use their powers for good and not merely peeking into the girls’ locker room.

But evil follows Harry across the ocean, and the Sweatwarthogs must confront an evil called the Woodman who’s working for He Must Not Be Named As The Confidential Source. I don’t want to give too much away of the plot, but needless to say the Sweathogwarts work together, with Harry offering guidance, and use the power of their authenticity, ethnicity, magic, and ‘fros to dispatch the Woodman.

Rumor had it that someone would die in this book, and the rumor has become fact: Near the end, Malfoy comes into the apartment he has leased in Brooklyn to be evil’s base of operations. He finds a wand on the counter and as he’s looking at it, a nervous Barbarino comes out of the bathroom. Malfoy turns Barbarino into Swiss cheese.

To lessen the impact, the book ends with Potter telling his wife Hermy a humorous anecdote about his great uncle’s cousin who owned a fish shop. Perhaps this foreshadowing indicates that the next book deals with evil under the sea? Let the speculation commence!

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Casting Call for the Plame Scandal

Getting a jump on the movie version of the Plame scandal, which will be as ageless and relevant as All The President’s Men for future generations, we at MfBJN proffer the following suggestion for cast:

The Operative Word (2006)

No poster submitted

Directed by
Oliver Stone

Writing credits

Stephen Glass (written by) &
Jayson Blair (written by)

Genre:
Comedy / Drama
(more)

Tagline: Love. Politics. Bush=Hitler.
(more)

Plot Outline: As retaliation for telling the truth about the Bush regime’s illegal war in Iraq, an evil mastermind outs an undercover CIA agent, putting her life in danger as she travels the world’s hotspots and New York’s photo ops to minimize the danger done by the real terrorists, the Republican administration.

Cast overview, first billed only:
Helen Hunt …. Valerie Plame
Jeff Bridges …. Joseph Wilson
Bjork …. Judith Miller
Camryn Manheim …. Maddy Cooper
Ed Asner …. Robert Novak
Paul Giamatti …. Karl Rove
Will Ferrell …. The "President"
  (more)

Production Notes/Status:

Status: Announced
Comments:
Status Updated: 15 July 2005
Note:

Since this project is categorized as being in production, the data is subject to change; some data could be removed completely.

Scheduled for release in October 2006. Just in time for elections Oscar nominations!

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Poor Form, Peter

A radio station here in St. Louis suspends two morning personalities who had an on-air discussion of how to fight cops effectively. Yes, that’s crass and abominable, but free speech and all that. The radio station has taken steps and public outcry should lead to outright firings and “you’ll never work in this town again!”-esque corporate blacklisting. None of which is censorship because the government isn’t involved.

This, on the other hand, is very, very bad:

But O’Fallon sergeant Tom Otten is far from satisfied by the punishment. “What does a suspension do? It does nothing. That shows a horrible lack of character and moral judgment”[sic]

If the deejays aren’t fired, Otten vows to write and call his fellow officers to have them contact the KATZ advertisers, and urge them to remove their ads.

Law enforcement officials, even if acting unofficially, should not urge businesses to do anything other than obey the law. Because this police-urged boycott does lend itself to censorship.

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Book Report: The Last Jihad by Joel C. Rosenberg (2002)

The Publishers Weekly blurb that appears on the Amazon page for this book begins, “Timeliness adds considerable juice to Rosenberg’s frenzied political thriller, set a couple of years in the future.” Riiiiiight. The book is set in 2010. Saddam Hussein is behind a plot to assasinate the president who wants to bring peace the Israel, finally, by talking to Chairman Arafat and with the deus ex discovery of oil off the shore of Israel and the Gaza Strip. Or something.

I bought this book for $5.98 off of the discount rack at Barnes and Noble, using gift cards, natch. I picked it because I thought Joel C. Rosenberg was Joel Rosenberg. I started reading it last week because I heard Rush Limbaugh talking about Joel C. Rosenberg. Friends, don’t be fooled. Although Joel C. Rosenberg gleefully blurs the distinction to draw suckers like me in (why else is is Web site JoelRosenberg.com when he’s diligent about putting his middle initial on his book covers, hmmm?), he’s not Joel Rosenberg. He’s not even a decent fiction writer.

All right, so I’ve already mentioned the gripping premise of the book, whose shelf life expired by the end of 2002. Now, I will break down the book’s composition for you:

  • 60% meetings
    of the cabinet and president or the president and someone or someone and staff. Includes 4 pages spent on a “tension-breaking” anecdote about flatulence and its counter tension-breaking 3-page story of misunderstaken lesbianism. The characters loved these particular stories, breaking up in laughter I, the reader, didn’t share. Most of the rest of these meetings involve various cabinet members debating the stakes of the plot.

  • 12% character sketches
    thrown in simply because the author went through the trouble of creating them. The life story of the minor character of the Chief of Staff? Hey, we’ve got the material, throw it in!

  • 4% action,
    presented in riveting cut scenes of short length and of pointless peril. Whoa, the helicopter of SEALs almost got shot down by an Iraqi MiG! That was close. Considering that they don’t do a fallujin thing in the book, it’s wasted space.
  • 8% miscellaneous exposition.

Hey! That doesn’t add up to 100%!

Neither does this ordeal of a book. Lord amighty, although I took some snickering amusement from the book (what was it with using rimming BlackBerries all the time, including the middle of a firefight between the Wall Street protagonists and the dreaded uberterrorists in the red shirts? Why do the bad guys send clandestine e-mails to each others’ AOL accounts?), I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone at any price.

It’s Clancy without the technology. Or suspense. Or any redeeming feature one finds in Clancy.

How many rules of fiction does it break? I just wrote an essay about things fiction writers should avoid, partially inspired by this book. I mean, when he wrote the book in 2001 or early 2002 (that long weekend this book took, three whole days, no doubt), its premise was believeable and compelling, but Rosenberg mistakes the personalities of the enemy (Hussein and Arafat) for systems (the Cold War Soviet Union of countless fiction writers or the WWII Nazis of Alistair MacLean and others). And then he projects their existence almost a decade into the future–probably because they existed for most of his adulthood. Three years later, both Hussein and Arafat are gone, and five years before this book’s setting, the world is a different place. Rosenberg also dips technologically into waters that will change by 2010. BlackBerries? Who’s going to have a BlackBerry in 2010? We could have chip implants by then. Telling us how careful the bad guys are to empty their deleted items folder in Microsoft Outlook? In 2010? Eight years before this book was published, Outlook was a twinkle in Bill Gates’ eye.

This book is the equivalent of a contemporary conservative book attacking Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. They’re designed for quick bucks and quick obscurity. This one, on the discount racks as late as 2005, won’t be on a publisher’s backlist because it’s irrelevant and dated before its action takes place.

(Note: Hi, MLI! You’re the only one who reads these things in their entireties, and I laud you for making it this far even though I told you in person how bad this book sucked even before Joel C. Rosenberg reached his word limit and destroyed Baghdad with a last minute Deus Ex Nuclea. I hope I’ve adequately ruined the ending so you never, ever, bother with this book.)

Maybe this C. Rosenberg guy got better after this, his first fiction book, but I’ll never know because from now on I shall be vigilant in avoiding the C. and in not taking Rush Limbaugh’s advice on fiction. I weep for the portion of my life I sacrificed for this book. I got nothing from it.

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Family Planning

Surprised by a multiple birth? MfBJN offers handy motifs for naming multiple simultaneous children:

Presidential Theme

Twins:

  • Zachary, Taylor
  • John, Adam
  • Rutherford, Hayes
  • Chester, Arthur
  • James, Monroe
  • James, Garfield
  • John, Tyler
  • James, Madison
  • Jimmy, Carter
  • Franklin, Pierce

Triplets:

  • William, Henry, Harrison

Musical Theme

Twins:

  • Paula, Abdul
  • Bryan, Adam
  • Rick, Astley
  • Lindsey, Buckingham
  • Garth, Brooke
  • Mariah, Carey
  • Alice, Cooper
  • Bob, Dylan
  • Celine, Dion
  • Missy, Elliot
  • Aretha, Franklin
  • Radney, Foster
  • Peter, Gabriel
  • Lou, Graham
  • Billy, Joel

Triplets:

  • Billy, Ray, Cyrus
  • Terence, Trent, Darby

Okay, so it ran out of funny before I ran out of names.

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