Okay. I Believe John Kerry Meant it as a Joke. So Why Didn’t He Apologize? *(updated)

I don’t get John Kerry — and even though I voted for the guy, I never really did get him. My theory on Kerry, which always riled my mother to no end, was that he was burdened by the appearance of being a highly intelligent man, when in fact he is just average. If he looked like, say, me, for example, he would have gone into a line of work more commensurate with his abilities. That world-bearing gravitas…isn’t that the kind of wise leader we need for our troubled times? So his face seems to say.

His face lies. With the best chance of beating an incumbent president since 1968 (I think Clinton bucked the odds in ’92 by beating Bush, aided heavily by the presence of Ross Perot on the ballot), Kerry managed to blow the 2004 presidential election. I don’t think it was a sudden outbreak of love for W. I think a lot of fence-sitters at the end were turned off by Kerry, and stuck with the devil they knew. He just didn’t seem very smart, after all.

So last night in Pasadena, Kerry made his famous comment to the students at the City College, saying, “We’re here to talk about education, but I want to say something before, you know education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

Unbelievable. Even if this was how he really felt — and the sentiment did seem to fit what we know about this pompous preppy — it seemed impossible that he would actually say it.

So — it was a gaffe, right? He meant to make a joke about the “dumb” Bush getting us stuck in Iraq, and it came out wrong. To stop the bleeding, here’s the PR 101: Apologize. Right away. Say he realizes what he said might have been taken as an insult by our servicemen and women in Iraq. He didn’t mean to suggest they all got there because they screwed up in school. Mea culpa.

But no. Here‘s what he actually said today about the mess he made:

Let me make it crystal clear, as crystal clear as I know how. I apologize to no one for my criticism of the president and of his broken policy. If anyone owes our troops in the fields an apology, it is the president and his failed team and a Republican majority in the Congress that has been willing to stamp — rubberstamp policies that have done injury to our troops and to their families.

My statement yesterday — and the White House knows this full well — was a botched joke about the president and the president’s people, not about the troops. The White House’s attempt to distort my true statement is a remarkable testament to their abject failure in making America safe. It’s a stunning statement about their willingness to reduce anything America, the raw politics. It’s their willingness to distort, their willingness to mislead Americans, their willingness to exploit the troops as they have so many times at backdrops, at so many speeches in which they have not told the American people the truth.

I’m not going to stand for it. What our troops deserve is a winning strategy, and what they deserve is leadership that is up to the sacrifice that they’re making. Sadly, this is the best that this administration can do in a month when we have lost 100 young men and women who have given their lives for a failed policy. Over half the names on the Vietnam wall were put there after our leaders knew that our policy was wrong, and it was wrong that leaders were quiet then, and I’m not going to be quiet now. This is a textbook Republican campaign strategy: try to change the topic, try to make someone else the issue, try to make something else said the issue, not the policy, not their responsibility.

Well, everybody knows it’s not working this time, and I’m not going to stand around and let it work.

If anyone thinks that a veteran, someone like me, who’s been fighting my entire career to provide for veterans, to fight for their benefits, to help honor what their service is — if anybody thinks that a veteran would somehow criticize more than 140,000 troops serving in Iraq, and not the president and his people who put them there, they’re crazy. It’s just wrong.

This is a classic GOP textbook Republican campaign tactic. I’m sick and tired of a bunch of despicable Republicans who will not debate real policy, who won’t take responsibility for their own mistakes, standing up and trying to make other people the butt of those mistakes.

I’m sick and tired of a whole bunch of Republican attacks, the most of which come from people who never wore the uniform and never had the courage to stand up and go to war themselves.

Enough is enough. We’re not going to stand for this.

This policy is broken, and this president and his administration didn’t do their homework. They didn’t study what would happen in Iraq. They didn’t study and listen to the people who were the experts and would have told them. And they know that’s what I was talking about yesterday. I’m not going to be lectured by a White House or by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, who’s taking a day off from mimicking and attacking Michael J. Fox, who’s now going to try to attack me and lie about me and distort me. No way. It disgusts me that a bunch of these Republican hacks, who have never worn the uniform of our country, are willing to lie about those who did. It’s over.

This administration has given us a Katrina foreign policy: mistake upon mistake upon mistake, unwilling to give our troops the armor that they need, unwilling to have enough troops in place, unwilling to give them the humvees that they deserve to protect them, unwilling to have a coalition that is adequate to be able to defend our interests.

Our own intelligence agency has told us they’re creating more terrorists, not less; they’re making us less safe, not more. I think Americans are sick and tired of this game.

These Republicans are afraid to stand up and debate a real veteran on this topic, and they’re afraid to debate — you know, they want to debate straw men because they’re afraid to debate real men.

Well, we’re going to have a real debate in this country about this policy. The bottom line is, these Republicans want to distort this policy. And this time it won’t work, because we are going to stay in their face with the truth. And no Democrat is going to be bullied by these people, by these kinds of attacks that have no place in American politics. It’s time to set our policy correct.

They have a stand still and lose policy in Iraq, and they have a cut and run policy in Afghanistan. And the fact is our troops, who have served heroically, who deserve better, deserve leadership that is up to their sacrifice, period.

Q Senator, John McCain said that you owe an apology to many thousands of Americans serving in Iraq who answered their country’s call because they are patriots. Should those people who didn’t get your joke, who may have misinterpreted you as saying the undereducated are cannon fodder — what do you say to them?

KERRY: Never said that. And John McCain knows I’ve never said that, and John McCain knows I wouldn’t say that. And John McCain ought to ask for an apology from Donald Rumsfeld for making the mistakes he’s made. John McCain ought to ask for an apology from this administration for not sending in enough troops. He ought to ask for an apology for putting our troops on the line with a policy that doesn’t have an adequate coalition, that doesn’t have adequate diplomacy, where we don’t have a strategy to win.

And what we need is to debate the real issues, not these phony, sideline issues that are part of the politics. Americans are tired — sick and tired of this kind of politics. They know my true feelings. They know I fought to provide additional money for veterans. They know I fought to provide money for combat — for veterans. They know I fought to put money for VA. They know I’ve honored those veterans. They know that this is the finest military — and I’ve said it a hundred thousand times — that we’ve ever had. They know precisely what I was saying, and they’re trying to turn this, because they have a bankrupt policy and they can’t defend it to the nation and they can’t defend it to the world, and I’m not going to stand for this anymore, period. That’s the apology that people ought to get.

Q Do you need to go to joke school?

KERRY: Sure. Q It sounds like you regret saying those remarks. And what were you trying to say?

KERRY: Very simple, that they — that those who didn’t study it properly, those who made the decisions, they got us into Iraq, very simple. And the fact is they know that. The administration knows that. And they’re simply trying to distort this. They’re trying to play a game, and again, I’m not going to stand for it. This is the kind of thing that makes Americans sick. People know.

And there ought to be some level of honor and trust in this process. You know, I have fought a lifetime on behalf of veterans, and we have the finest young men and women serving us in the United States military that we’ve ever had. And I’m proud of that. But this administration has let them down, and that was clearly in a remark directed at this administration. They understand it, they want to distort it. It’s a classic Republican playbook. They want to change the topic. We’re not going to let them change the topic. The topic is their failed policy in Iraq. The topic is that they don’t have a strategy; they don’t have a way to be able to win.

You got Dick Cheney saying everything’s just terrific in Iraq only a week ago. John McCain ought to ask for an apology from Dick Cheney for misleading America. He ought to ask for an apology from the president for lying about the nuclear program in Africa. He ought to ask for an apology for once again a week ago referring to al Qaeda as being the central problem in Iraq when al Qaeda is not the central problem.

Enough is enough! I’m not going to stand for these people trying to shift the topic and make it politics. America deserves a real discussion about real policy, and that’s what this election is going to be about next Tuesday.

Q Senator –

KERRY: One more question, and then, I got to run.

Q (Off mike) –

KERRY: Let me tell you something, I’m not going to give them one ounce of daylight to spread one of their lies and to play this game ever, ever again. That is a lesson I learned deep and hard, and I’ll tell you, I will stand up anywhere across this country and take these guys on. This is dishonoring not just the troops themselves by pointing the finger at the troops, it’s abusing the troops. They’re using the troops. They’re trying to make the troops into the target here. I didn’t do that, and they know that. And for them to suggest that somebody who served their country as I did and has a record like I have in the United States Congress of standing up and fighting for the troops would ever, every insult the troops is an insult in and of itself. And they owe us an apology for even daring to use the White House to stand up and make this an issue again. Shame on them. Shame on them. And may the American people take that shame to the polls with them next Tuesday.

Thank you, all.

Wow. Just terrible. He thinks it’s 2004, and the Swift Boat guys are after him again. Only this time, he’s going to man up, and confront those bastards. Isn’t that what he’s thinking? Sure seems like it. Except the hard-nose, not-backin’-down rhetoric is all wrong for the event that prompted it. Everyone knows he hates Bush, disagrees with the Republicans — nothing new there. But it’s the soldiers in Iraq who needed to hear from him, not political reporters! Bush wasn’t offended — the troops and their families were (presumably).

Now he’s guaranteed a fire-storm. Democratic candidates will get drawn into it, their GOP opponents “demanding” they renounce the party’s 2004 standard-bearer. Commercials are being cut now. The Democrats don’t get it, the Democrats disrespect the troops, the Vietnam syndrome lives. Blah blah blah. Count on it.

I was thinking this weekend that the Democrats had finally gotten it together, and were about to win this mid-term election with a margin to spare in the House, and perhaps squeak by in the Senate, developments I welcomed as exceedingly healthy for both the nation and the party. But now, this colossal narcissist John Kerry, who shouldn’t even be out in public… Well, we’ll see how it turns out.

My stomach’s in knots. We did not need this.

*Update, 11/1/06:  As expected, Kerry has retracted his pledge to “apologize to no one.”  He has apologized to anyone who “misinterpreted” his remarks:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Sen. John Kerry apologized Wednesday for a “poorly stated joke,” which the Massachusetts senator says was aimed at the president but was widely perceived as a slam on U.S. troops.

“I sincerely regret that my words were misinterpreted to wrongly imply anything negative about those in uniform, and I personally apologize to any service member, family member, or American who was offended,” he said in a written statement.

“As a combat veteran, I want to make it clear to anyone in uniform and to their loved ones: My poorly stated joke at a rally was not about, and [was] never intended to refer to any troop,” he said.

Not to be a grammar Bushitler, but:

Coming from such a highly educated man, I’m surprised this statement’s double-negative got through.  If Kerry’s words were “misinterpreted to wrongly imply” something, doesn’t that mean the opposite of “interpreted to wrongly imply,” and also the opposite of “misinterpreted to imply?”  If you misintepret something to wrongly imply something else, the two negatives cancel each other out, so you’re left with a statement correctly “interpreted to imply….” Which is what we were saying all along — he insulted the troops.

Maybe Kerry didn’t study hard enough.

Le Halloween, c’est mort.

In the past few years, some red-state communities have all but banned Halloween celebrations because of the pagan roots of the holiday. Now, the holiday is under attack — from the left! Or, I should say, a gauche.  It’s a victim of French anti-Americanism.

From Forbes.com:

The major dailies Le Monde and Le Parisien reported on Tuesday that following some short-lived popularity, the Halloween holiday has been “pretty much buried.” The reasons seem to be a mixture of falling sales and anti-Americanism. Perchance a smattering of protectionism too. “Our Halloween sales have been falling by half every year since 2002,” Le Monde quoted toy retailer La Grande Recre as saying.

The costume company Cesar, which should otherwise be having a blowout month, proffered the “buried” quote, adding that the death of the holiday was linked to a rise in anti-Americanism.

That likely follows the use of pumpkins, skulls and other typical Halloween imagery in the publicity campaigns of McDonald’s, Walt Disney Company, and Coca-Cola.

(snip)

The French didn’t hear much about Halloween till the latter part of the 20th century, thanks to the initiative of foreign residents, tourists, and torrential marketing from American companies.

French adults and children alike went on to celebrate Halloween with costume parties and trick-or-treating, while retail businesses cottoned on to the idea that utilizing holiday paraphernalia could get their ads or products noticed.

But the holiday has always been controversial in France. It’s not an archetypal French holiday, and these days it is not even clear what is being celebrated.”Non a Halloween,” a French group set up to stop to trend, has even disbanded, its mission deemed complete. It seems the boycott of this thoroughly commercialized, Americanized event, and entreaty for people to refuse to enjoy it, has worked.

I guess it’s true that Halloween as it is now celebrated is American as apple pie and movies about self-amputation. But of course, the roots of the holiday are a meshing of Anglo-Saxon and Christian traditions, and folklore about witches, ghosts and the idea that, at certain times of year, the spirit world intersects with the physical.

This poem, “Halloween” by Robert Burns can bring you back to a sense of what the celebration felt like in Scotland in 1785. Here’s how it ends:

Wi’ merry sangs , an’ friendly cracks ,
I wat they did na weary;
And unco tales, an’ funnie jokes –
Their sports were cheap an’ cheery:
Till butter’d sowens ,¹⁶wi’ fragrant lunt ,
Seta’ their gabs a-steerin;
Syne , wi’ a social glass o’strunt ,
They parted aff careerin
Fu’ blythe that night.

I swear, it all makes sense…after a few ales. The links are all to The Robert Burns Club of Milwaukee’s Glossary of the Scots Dialect.

(Photo, “Sea of Pumpkins” by innusa)

Don’t NOT Vote…

I’m back in Orange County today while my son attends another play at Cal State Fullerton, which, from hearing him talk, might be what you’d get if Stratford-on-Avon mated with Broadway. Uh, okay. Sitting and waiting in Starbucks, I pick up a discarded OC Register Sunday Commentary Section, and see a friendly face on the front page, Jill Stewart, who I just mentioned the other day. She has a great column today that begins this way:

Have you noticed how, the more money the union and corporate special interests spend to promote their particular candidate, bond measure, or tax, the less interested and less aware of these issues we voters seem to be?

Although record amounts are being spent in California to drag us out away from our plasma TVs and our favorite blogs, we, the electorate, are deeply uninvolved. We are stuck in our comfy chairs.

How true. I’m going to vote Tuesday, but I expect to have to spend a lot of time in the voting booth reading over some of the propositions, because with one or two exceptions (the oil tax and the cigarette tax), I don’t understand what most of them are. Which are the ones that were Gov. Schwarzenegger’s grand deal with the legislature, the infrastructure bonds that are supposed to prepare California for the wave of population that, er, actually started arriving 20 years ago? I have no idea.

The advertising has been more unhelpful than usual. There’s one proposition that has been called a “taxpayer trap.” That’s all they say: Vote no on the “taxpayer trap.” To make sure I get the point, there’s a huge graphic of an old-fashioned mousetrap with what looks like a house from Monopoly being used as bait. So, does that mean if I give into temptation and try to take that nice little house, I’ll be caught in the taxpayer trap? The ad gives no further information. Then there’s another one that, if I recall correctly, implores me not to be fooled: Such-and-such proposition is bad for the environment. Since I had not heard of this proposition, listed only by number, I figure it’s unlikely that I’ve been fooled — but maybe, subliminally, I have.

I vote in every election, so in fact I will do my homework. But, as Jill Stewart suggests, most voters see these ads and figure the safest place to weather the election is from that comfy chair. So many traps out there, so many people trying to fool you! And if you’re just going to vote no, why bother showing up at all?

And that’s the special-interest strategy, Stewart suggests: To keep turnout “horrifically low.”

Little wonder why voters will stay away Nov. 7, and why record monies spent will be inversely related to votes cast. I figure a cost of $52 per vote.

The sharp pollster Mark Baldassare, director of research at Public Policy Institute of California, tells me, “What is going on is that a lot of money is spent on directing relatively few people to vote, and telling the rest of them to stay home. Campaign consultants … buy a list telling them who the voters are, they winnow it down to the 50 percent they need, and they try to get as many of the other people not to vote. And it works. This is no accident, that we are spending more money and getting less voters.”

The special interests get a bonus from this system, too, Stewart says. For an initiative to qualify in the next election, it must collect signatures equaling 5 percent of the total votes cast for governor. With the 2006 gubernatorial race pretty much a wipeout, and an initiative ballot full of obscure traps and tricks, turnout will be low, and so the 5 percent threshold in 2007-10 will be easier to meet, leading to “an onslaught of ballot measures.”

Who benefits from these ballot measures? They aren’t serious attempts to change the law, for the most part, are they? Given the overwhelmingly persuasive influence of the “vote no, it’s a trap!” advertising, I figure that the odds are against almost any ballot measure now–the good, the bad or the ugly. So who benefits? The election industry, that’s who — TV and radio stations who get to sell lots of advertising, the media buyers and other consultants. A full slate of initiatives, no matter how doomed, means full employment in the campaign and elections industry.

Back in my Berkeley days, I used to stop many late nights at Top Dog, which was run by some hard-core libertarians. The inside of Top Dog was decorated with libertarian bumper stickers. One of them was, “Don’t Vote. It Only Encourages Them.” But after reading Jill’s column, I think that slogan is due for an update. Voting is the last thing “they” want you to do. Don’t NOT vote. It Only Empowers Them.

Big Weekend for Yosemite Search-and-Rescue*

Blogged in the desert deals in extremes — earthquakes, severe weather, remote landscapes prone to stark conditions. In this post, he transcribes what the Yosemite Search and Rescue team had to deal with last weekend, as reported by the National Park Service. I hope this weekend goes more smoothly for them!

Zodiac Route, El Capitan, Yosemite Valley – Park dispatch received a 911 transfer call from CHP on Saturday afternoon, reporting a request for the rescue of a climbing team on the Zodiac Route on El Capitan. The Korean climbers on the wall spoke no English, and a Korean climber/interpreter who was assisting SAR personnel spoke only limited English. Clarifying the situation was accordingly difficult, but it was eventually determined that the climbers wanted to be rescued simply because their haul bag rope was tangled and they couldn’t figure out a means to correct the problem. Following a careful evaluation of the situation, SAR staff declined to launch a rescue at that time. Cold, rainy weather engulfed El Capitan the next morning, though, raising the concerns of SAR personnel. Due to the team’s obvious inexperience and the ongoing poor weather, SAR staff continued to monitor the progress of this team until they completed the route three days later.

Cables Route, Half Dome, Yosemite Valley – On Sunday, the park received several 911 cell phone transfers regarding a person who’d slipped outside the cables on Half Dome and slid 100 to 150 feet down onto the blank face. He was lying precariously on the face, using only the friction of his body against the rock to stop him from falling more than 800 feet to the ground. A ranger and a SAR climbing team were immediately dispatched to the incident location. The Yosemite rescue/fire helicopter was unavailable, so a primary rescue team was put on standby to await the arrival of another helicopter to fly them to the shoulder of Half Dome. A helicopter from Sequoia/Kings Canyon responded to the request for mutual aid assistance and was the first available for the mission. Unfortunately, due to the time it took to free up a helicopter, more than two hours passed before technical rescuers were on scene. SAR technicians then repelled down to the man and rescued him. Although uninjured, he was treated for hypothermia at Yosemite Medical Center and later released.

There’s more, so if you’re looking for adventure, go visit both the post and his site.

*UPDATE — Somehow I overlooked this huge Yosemite story on “blogged in the desert,” about the accidental death near Bridalveil Falls of pioneering free climber Todd Skinner.  Here is the excellent New York Times obituary for him, and here’s an excerpt from it:

In 1988, using only their hands and feet to move upward, Mr. Skinner and his longtime climbing partner, Paul Piana, completed the first free ascent of the 3,600-foot Salathé Wall on El Capitan in Yosemite, a seminal achievement in American climbing.

“He proved that it was possible to free climb El Capitan,” Mr. Model said. “Now it’s common.”

Perhaps Mr. Skinner’s most renowned feat was his team’s free ascent, in 1995, of the East face of Trango Tower, also known as Nameless Tower, a 4,700-foot rock face in the Karakoram Range of the Himalayas in Pakistan. No one had tried to free climb it before.

Mr. Skinner and three climbing partners from Wyoming — Mr. Model, Jeff Bechtel and Mike Lilygren — spent 60 days at more than 18,000 feet and reached the peak of about 20,500 feet. Mr. Skinner described the expedition in a cover story for National Geographic in 1996.

“We faced serious objective dangers — avalanches, rock falls, we were trapped in hanging tents for days at a time,” Mr. Model said.

On the LA Weekly, David Zahniser and the Progressive Movement

Over on LA Observed, you have probably been following a dramatic series of developments involving the LA Weekly: Harold Myerson’s departure as political columnist and cheerleader for the local labor organizations, David Zahniser’s cover story this week about the circumstances surrounding the untimely 2005 death of LA labor chief Miguel Contreras, and the way in which LA’s progressive community, including Myerson himself, views both events through the lens of how the Weekly’s new ownership has betrayed the paper’s past role in progressive movements.

Well, in all your clicking, don’t miss the series of posts in the LA Observed “We Get Email” section concerning this matter. The last note, from Larry Kaplan, makes the most crucial point about Zahniser’s scoop that all the “whither the Weekly” eulogies ignore:

…I think the crux of the story is the way Contreras’ death was handled by the coroner, the cops and the bigwigs who showed up at the hospital that day.

The story should NOT be where Contreras was and what he was doing when he died, and perhaps the critique of the Weekly story is that it did not make that clear enough.

Exactly.

David Zahniser is what this city hasn’t had for a long time: A government watchdog. His City Hall coverage at the Daily Breeze always had two things most of his competitors’ coverage did not — depth and style. In the face of generations of local news editors who alternately viewed LA’s municipal government as a morality play or a boring backwater, Zahniser actually found things out, and could turn them into interesting stories.  He writes stories that serve nobody’s interests but the readers’.

Zahniser’s accomplishments merited attention because, unlike the Times and to a lesser extent the Daily News, nobody in their right mind would strategically leak a story to any reporter for the almost unread Breeze. When I read an exclusive story in the LA Times, I can almost always guess who served it up it to them. That’s the advantage of being a reporter for the biggest daily in town. You don’t have to dig for stories, the stories dig for you. A Times reporter can be very lazy, and still look good to their editors.

Zahniser’s brought his talent to the Weekly, and now has a bigger stage on which to perform. The stakes are higher. As Kaplan points out, he or his editors might have erred in emphasizing the first half of the story, the tawdry death scene, rather than the second half of the story, the fervent efforts by high officials allegedly to cover it up by blocking an autopsy.

Normally, if a 52-year-old man dies in a store like the botanica where Contreras died, that would be considered an unusual death. Leaving aside the fact that the locale was later determined by police to house prostitutes, even the ostensible product, herbal remedies, would raise red flags. Whatever you think of the benefits of herbal medicine, some of the remedies in that category are, in fact, powerful chemical agents that are not regulated as drugs. If for no other reason than to protect public health, an autopsy should have been done. Public officials allegedly put pressure on hospital officials to ensure an autopsy was not done, for the sake of Contreras’ reputation and legacy. Folks, that’s a story.  There is a long history in Los Angeles of political interference in the County Coroner’s performance of his duties; of autopsy findings being buried, changed, leaked or otherwise abused by people in power to guard the private interests of the living and the dead.

The progressive community sees Zahniser’s article as a watershed. The old, progressive LA Weekly would not have published Zahniser’s story, Myerson basically asserts. Occidental College professor Peter Drier articulates the left’s rage in an email sent around the progressive community and published by LA Observed:

The article is irresponsible, gutter, tabloid journalism, with no redeeming value. It is difficult to understand why the paper published this crude story — and put in on the cover, no less — except to sell newspapers and/or to lend support to those who wish to harm LA’s progressive labor movement. Miguel and his family, who are still mourning his death, deserve better than this cheap hit. They will survive this crude piece of gutter journalism. They, and his many friends and allies, know that Miguel’s life as a warrior for justice, was his real legacy and his gift to us.

(snip)

The loss of the LA Weekly as a progressive voice is a tragedy. When we organized the Progressive LA conference at Occidental College in October 1998, the Weekly was one of its cosponsors, featured it on its cover, and published several stories in the September 30, 1998 issue about the past, current, and future of progressive politics in LA: link and link. This reflected the Weekly’s view of itself at the time as a watchdog and as an instrument for change. On politics, culture, and other matters, the LA Weekly has helped give voice to those forces who might otherwise be shut out of the public debate. It has reported on the people and organizations — unions, community groups, environmentalists, women’s rights and gay rights groups, immigrant rights activists, school reformers, fair trade advocates, living wage crusaders, and ordinary folks trying to cope with life in this diverse and sprawling city — who’ve been on the front lines of the struggles for social and economic justice.

(snip)

But how do we hold the new LA Weekly accountable? Outraged by this week’s cover story, some folks floated the idea of organizing a boycott against the Weekly. But how can you organize a boycott against a newspaper that is distributed for free? And how can you put pressure on its advertisers when its ad pages are dominated by penis enlargement ads, breast augmentation ads, and dating services?

The fear, which Myerson articulates too, is that the Weekly will become a muckraking journal that splatters muck on progressives, not just their enemies. Myerson cites Jill Stewart, the iconoclastic writer for the defunct New Times LA (whose owners now control the Weekly) as the kind of journalistic example he fears will take over the Weekly. Stewart enraged many at City Hall because her investigations and commentary evinced deep disillusionment with the left’s hypocrisy. She was tough on leaders like Jackie Goldberg, to whom LA’s left is devoted. And her writing was juicy and irresistable, so her scoops got attention. Back then and today, I’ll admit it — I’m a fan of Jill Stewart. And I’m a fan of David Zahniser (which is not to say he’s similar to Stewart — it was Myerson who made that leap).

Far be it from me to challenge Myerson and Drier on what’s good for the progressive movement — they work in it every day, and I don’t. But my opinion is, they’re wrong about the kind of journalism that helps those “who’ve been on the front lines of social and economic justice.” The news should not be ideological. It should not be afraid to hit hard at hypocrisy and double-dealing on the part of progressive icons.

Going back to the 1920s, there is an unfortunate history of socialist journalism, or journalism by socialists, that turned out to be propaganda, concocted to mask failure, corruption, even atrocities. Today’s progressives should want to take pains to disassociate their movement from such unethical and ultimately self-defeating reportage; to demonstrate that unlike the left-wing of the past, they are not afraid of the truth because their ideas have value quite apart from the flawed mortals who advocate them.

And let’s face it: the good-ol’ LA Weekly that Myerson and Drier could depend on as an ally and publicist was also funded by ads for plastic surgery, tanning salons, massage parlors and escort services. What does that suggest? That most Weekly readers, then as now, skipped over the political content to read the movie and nightclub listings, and were more interested in dancing than demonstrations. The Weekly could be edited by William F. Buckley and probably make the same profit if Buckley were willing to accept such advertising.

The left is not entitled to the news columns of the LA Weekly by divine right. But if the left can help scrupulous reporters like Zahniser find powerful stories to illustrate the need for their brand of politics, their presentation in a more balanced setting will give them greater credibility. In this era of nakedly partisan journalism and blogs, it is too often forgotten that most of us read journalism for stories, not political instruction. We can come to political conclusions on our own.

Seasons in the Sun

In an altogether gimmicky and boring piece about director Tim Burton (a Halloween-themed piece on “frightening spots” in LA) in today’s Calendar, I came across the following passage that encapsulated for me so much of what is wrong with the LA Times:

So most of the stuff Burton loved in Los Angeles is gone, he says. (Not the first time we’ve heard that one.) Traffic has gotten a lot worse. (Check.) The lack of seasons seems kind of eerie. (Ditto.)

The “lack of seasons.” Oh, please. How long has the writer of this tripe lived in Southern California? Of course we have seasons. Southern California has more seasons than most places I’ve been. Each month has a particular quality to it. We don’t just have four seasons — there are at least eight. And that’s assuming you stay in one part of Southern California all the time. If you travel from the desert to the sea, going through the mountains and the valleys, you’ve got four distinct weather-regions, each one of them with huge seasonal variations.

The oceans bring fog to the coast in Spring and Summer, fog that sometimes rolls deep into the interior. The deserts bring Santa Ana winds that clear every particle of dust and moisture from the air. Rain and, at higher elevations, snow can be heavy at times, or just a light mist. Tropical storms bring warm breezes. Arctic storms bring fierce blasts of cold air. Some summer days are languid, humid, the sky painted with boiling clouds. Others are hot, dry, the sun penetrating and hazardous. I was sitting on the beach one evening last July. The wind was blowing onshore in a bizarre rhythm: Ten minutes of warm air, ten minutes of chilled air, like the thermostat was broken.

You live here long enough, you can tell what month it is just by looking at the sky. From where I’m writing right now, there is no doubt it’s October — even though October is probably the most unpredictable month of the year. Today is a hot, dry October day — as the horrific fires near Palm Springs attest. But some of the biggest storms I’ve ever seen came through in October. Yesterday, it looked like it was about to rain.

The LA Times apparently thinks we’re all from somewhere back east. Or that we take our weather cues from drugstore calendars or advertising that depicts the four dictionary-defined seasons: snowy winter, budding spring, hot summer, colorful autumn. These are not the seasons most people in the world experience. They are the seasons of Northern Europe and the Northern half of North America. The cradles of early civilization were all, like Southern California, closer to the equator, and that’s still where most of the world’s people live.

Look at this map:

Los Angeles’ position on the globe is roughly the same latitude as Beijing and Tokyo, just a little south of Teheran, a little north of Casablanca, a little north of Islamabad, the northernmost city in India. Sleigh-bells do not ring and the maple leaves don’t take on a golden glow, for most of the world’s population, Angelenos among them.

To be sure, humans have taken advantage of the receding glaciers to colonize regions closer to the poles, at least for now; but to assert that the weather patterns of, say, Denmark are the norm and what we experience here in LA is anomalous, even creepy, is a kind of bizarre Northeastern U.S.-centrism that the Southwest’s biggest newspaper should be able to avoid. We really aren’t all involuntary refugees from our old stomping grounds in New York or Boston; not anymore.

Political Football Fumbled

I love it. For more than a decade, the members of the LA Memorial Coliseum Commission have deployed their combined political muscle to kill off proposals to build a new stadium for a National Football League team to replace the Rams and Raiders. In the face of league resistance, the local leadership has insisted that when the NFL returns to Los Angeles, it will be at a refurbished Coliseum. Now that the NFL has finally given the signal that its final answer is “no,” the Coliseum’s leadership is acting like they’re the ones rejecting the league, not the other way around.

Coliseum Commissioner David Israel told Times’ columnist T.J. Simers:

“L.A. is surviving quite nicely without the NFL and the NFL is surviving quite nicely without L.A.,” Israel said. “I guess the divorce is final.”

Well, uh, yeah, except it’s the Coliseum’s dog-in-the-manger political strategy that has kept the league out since the league let two teams leave after the the ’94 season. The NFL would have been thrilled to occupy a football stadium in the Dodger Stadium parking lot, with the participation of then-Dodger owner Peter O’Malley. Mayor Riordan asked O’Malley to draw up a plan (which cost him a million dollars), then a year later, at the behest of the Coliseum Commission, instructed O’Malley to bury that plan.
To break the logjam, Anschutz Entertainment Group’s Tim Liewecke and LA Avengers’ owner Casey Wasserman developed a privately-financed downtown stadium proposal, introducing it complete with renderings, at a civic breakfast, introduced by Mayor Hahn — and within 48 hours (or was it 24?), they meekly dropped the idea, with Liewecke saying they “didn’t want to go through an ugly political process.” Translation: They didn’t want to take on the Coliseum’s die-hard backers.

For most of the past 12 years, NFL officials expressed a complete lack of interest in returning to the Coliseum in any form. “Trying to put a new dress on an old hooker is not the way I want to go dancing,” was how then-Baltimore Ravens owner described the city’s ideas for renovating the Coliseum. Less colorfully, NFL spokesman Joe Browne said, “We have yet to see a viable stadium plan for an NFL team at the Coliseum.” The local leadership’s insistence on the Coliseum or bust is generally cited as one major reason the last NFL expansion team went to Houston in 1999 instead of Los Angeles.

It looks like the dance is over; the Coliseum and the city are standing near the punchbowl, acting as if all along, it was the NFL wooing them, and now, the Belle of the Ball has decided to go home alone. From today’s LA Times story on the Coliseum’s talks with USC on a new lease:

Word of the (USC) negotiations came a day after the NFL said the cost of a new or renovated stadium in the Los Angeles area could top $1 billion, more than double the estimate of a few years ago. At their annual fall meeting Tuesday, several team owners said a return to the region was not a top priority.
That prompted frustration and exasperation from some influential members of the Coliseum Commission, who earlier this month said they might investigate non-NFL alternatives if no significant progress was made at the league meetings.

They “might investigate non-NFL alternatives?” I think the NFL has been telling them to investigate non-NFL alternatives for 12 years!

“I think they regressed,” said David Israel, a state appointee to the commission. “I basically think the deal is done. It isn’t going to be made.”

County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who also serves on the commission, said it became apparent over time that if the NFL really wanted to make a deal with the Coliseum, the league would have made one already. He, too, said it’s time for stadium officials to move on.”When you ask a girl out 25 times and she says no 25 times, maybe the 26th time you just don’t call,” he said.

As a football fan, I guess I really don’t mind. I look at it this way: Los Angeles has now become the biggest college football market in the country. Interest in USC has never been higher, and UCLA has a huge, loyal fan base. Neither of these teams are about to move to St. Louis because their owner can cash in. Both teams are part of the exciting Pac-10, which brings teams like Cal, Oregon, Stanford, Arizona State, etc. into the city each year — not to mention the frequent appearances of other top college teams. If you really want to see a Trojan or a Bruin game, it’s not outasite expensive like an NFL ticket would be. After 12 years without the NFL, some expansion franchise or a lame NFL team that really belongs to another city would have a hard time winning any fan’s hearts.

Sure, this city is full of NFL fans. They follow the Rams, the Raiders, the Chargers, or whatever team a former USC star is playing with now.  Lately, I’m seeing New Orleans Saints and Arizona Cardinal hats and jerseys popping up–in honor of Reggie Bush and Matt Leinart.

But the political side of this fiasco has been cost-free for too long. This region’s leadership failed to accomplish what should have been easy — to bring a team from the most TV-dependent sports league into the nation’s #2 TV market. They let politics gum it up. If this were any other kind of business but politics, heads would be rolling.

Dinosaurs: Hard to Kill

It took a lot more than just one meteor slamming into Mexico to wipe out the big lizards, it turns out:

There’s growing evidence that the dinosaurs and most their contemporaries were not wiped out by the famed Chicxulub meteor impact, according to a paleontologist who says multiple meteor impacts, massive volcanism in India, and climate changes culminated in the end of the Cretaceous Period.

The Chicxulub impact may, in fact, have been the lesser and earlier of a series of meteors and volcanic eruptions that pounded life on Earth for more than 500,000 years, say Princeton University paleontologist Gerta Keller and her collaborators Thierry Adatte from the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, and Zsolt Berner and Doris Stueben from Karlsruhe University in Germany. A final, much larger and still unidentified impact 65.5 million years ago appears to have been the last straw, exterminating two thirds of all species in one of the largest mass extinction events in the history of life. It’s that impact — not Chicxulub — which left the famous extraterrestrial iridium layer found in rocks worldwide that marks the impact that finally ended the Age of Reptiles.

“The Chicxulub impact could not have caused the mass extinction,” says Princeton University paleontologist Gerta Keller, “because this impact predates the mass extinction and apparently didn’t cause any extinctions.”

The climate changes, caused in part by greenhouse gases released from “prolonged and massive eruptions” of the Deccan Flood Basalts in India, were pretty extreme: Oceans 3 or 4 degrees warmer, and land temperatures 7 or 8 degrees warmer, 20,000 years before, and 100,000 years after, the Chicxulub meteor struck. Marine life was affected by growing smaller and reproducing more offspring — to increase the odds for survival. Tropical species were on the edge of extinction. Then there was another huge meteor impact, comparable to the first. Where did that meteor strike? Scientists don’t know, although some are suggesting a 500-kilometer-wide crater in India might be a remnant of it.

It Won’t Be Jane Harman? (Updated)*

Until the post-2000 redistricting, Jane Harman was my congresswoman, and I was always pleased to vote for her. My part of the South Bay used to be one of the few real, bona-fide “swing” districts for both congressional and state legislative races, thus the political debate was sharper and the candidates, on both sides, more solid. The ideal candidate for this district was a pro-environment, pro-strong defense, pro-choice, fiscally responsible Democrat and that’s what Jane Harman is.

However, she now serves a district where anybody with a -D. after their name would win — where she faced a primary challenge from the left — and I’m now in a “safe” Republican district, represented by my fellow former Palos Verdes High School graduate Dana Rohrabacher, who was once a self-described “anarcho-capitalist,” and still pretty much votes like one. When I was working with the Port of LA, I heard him propose that the answer to increased post-9/11 port security was for the ports to charge shippers more, with each port free to make its own decision on whether to do this and by how much. He seemed completely unaware that the west coast ports all compete for business; that there was already a long-standing “race to the bottom” on port enviromental mitigations, and the last thing we needed was a similar competition on security.

But I digress.

To reset, Jane Harman is a good congressional representative. She is smart, prepared, and has an independent mind. She has been the ranking Democratic member on the House Intelligence Committee, and in that role has gained national prominence. She has been a good face for the Democratic party when the war against the jihad is being discussed, and would be even better in the role of chair heading into the 2008 presidential campaign.

I didn’t know until today, however, that if the Democrats win a majority in the House of Representatives in next month’s election, Harman will not become the chair. From the NY Times:

Ms. Harman, a moderate from Southern California, has been one of the party’s most outspoken voices on national security matters since the Sept. 11 attacks. But she has also drawn sharp criticism from more liberal Democrats, including Ms. (Nancy) Pelosi, who have privately said that she has not sufficiently used her position to attack the Bush administration for its prewar intelligence failures on Iraq and for its use of secret programs like the domestic eavesdropping carried out without warrants by the National Security Agency.

Losing Harman’s leadership is unfortunate. But get this:

Two candidates whom Ms. Pelosi is said to be considering for Intelligence Committee chairman are Representatives Alcee L. Hastings of Florida and Silvestre Reyes of Texas, both of whom currently serve on the panel.

The selection of Mr. Hastings, who is black, would help Ms. Pelosi shore up support from the powerful Congressional Black Caucus. But he has a checkered past, having been impeached and removed from a federal judgeship in 1989 on a bribery charge. Some Democrats fear that installing him in so sensitive a position would only invite Republican charges of weak Democratic leadership on national security matters.

Umm…ya think? What kind of House Speaker would pull an experienced intelligence expert like Harman for a former judge found to have taken a $150,000 bribe in exchange for a lenient sentence? This is a position with access to highly classified information!  I’m not sure but I believe that among intelligence experts, the term for people who take bribes is “security risk.”

The Times story reports that Harman has been lobbying for the job, and the lobbying has gotten her into trouble — both alienating Pelosi and reportedly (in Time) prompting an investigation into whether Harman “had made improper promises” to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) in exchange for its support of her candidacy. According to Harman’s attorney, former Bush solicitor general Theodore Olsen, Harman is not under investigation, “and the idea that she should be investigated for being a supporter of Aipac is frightening.”

The idea that a Speaker Pelosi would toss Harman aside is frightening. The idea that the Democratic Party, with a real chance to win a majority in an election two weeks from now, would publicize Pelosi’s preference for someone so compromised as Hastings to head up the Intelligence Committee is ridiculous. Karl Rove does not deserve such a gift.

*Update:  Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball have a story up today that fails to resolve whether or not Harman is being investigated for her Aipac ties, but gives a lot more detail on the overlapping agendas of Harman, Pelosi, current Republican chair Peter Hoekstra and the issue of whether the committee was vigilant enough in watching the bribe-fueled lobbying activities of disgraced Rep. Duke Cunningham.

If Harman isn’t being investigated by the FBI, someone is sure making a big effort to make it appear like she is.

Is It Tet Yet? John Keegan Says No

John Keegan is the pre-eminent military historian of our times. He was prompted today to write an op-ed for the Daily Telegraph by President Bush’s statement in a recent interview agreeing with the notion that what is going on today in Iraq is comparable to the Tet Offensive. Tet was launched by the combined forces of the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong in early 1968. It ended a year and a half later as a ruinous military failure, but a massive propaganda success. The fact that the enemy in Vietnam could launch an assault in South Vietnamese territory on 40 towns and cities made American leadership’s promises of “a light at the end of the tunnel” appear to be foolish pipe dreams and/or base lies.

Bush’s fiercest foes like the Tet comparison because that offensive caused Lyndon Johnson to drop out of the race for re-election. Keegan is unhappy that Bush bought into the Tet analogy:

His admission can do nothing but harm, certainly to him and to his administration, but also to the US forces in general and to the servicemen in Iraq in particular.

A large part of the reason for that is the lack of comparability between Iraq and Vietnam. Anyone familiar with both situations will be struck by the dissimilarities, particularly of scale and in the nature of the enemy.

By January 1968, total American casualties in Vietnam — killed, wounded and missing — had reached 80,000 and climbing. Eventually deaths in combat and from other causes would exceed 50,000, of which 36,000 were killed in action. Casualties in Iraq are nowhere near those figures. In a bad week in Vietnam, the US could suffer 2,000 casualties. Since 2003, American forces in Iraq have never suffered as many as 500 casualties a month. The number of casualties inflicted in Iraq are not established, but are under 50,000. In any year of the Vietnam war, the communist party of North Vietnam sent 200,000 young men to the battlefields in the south, most of whom did not return. Vietnam was one of the largest and costliest wars in history. The insurgency in Iraq resembles one of the colonial disturbances of imperial history.

There is a good reason for the difference. The Vietnamese communists had organised and operated a countryside politico-military organisation with branches in almost every village. The North Vietnamese People’s Army resembled that of an organised Western state. It conscripted recruits throughout the country, trained, organised and equipped them.

The Iraqi insurgency, by contrast, is an informal undertaking by a coalition of religious and ex-Ba’athist groups. It has no high command or bureaucracy resembling the disciplined Marxist structures of North Vietnam. It has some support from like-minded groups in neighbouring countries, but nothing to compare with the North Vietnamese international network, which was supported by China and the Soviet Union and imported arms and munitions from both those countries on a large scale.

North Vietnam was, moreover, a sovereign state, supported explicitly by all other communist countries and by many sympathetic regimes in the Third World. The Iraqi insurgency has sympathisers, but they enjoy no organised system of support and are actively opposed by many of their neighbours and Muslim co-religionists.

The whole thing’s worth reading, as are the highly disputatious comments that follow. Some think Keegan missed the point of Bush’s comment — that in fact Bush was agreeing with Keegan that Tet was a failure of the battlefield, but a success in turning the American media against the war. (That is not how Bush’s “admission” was played on the news broadcasts I heard.) Others think the comparison with Vietnam is, in fact, quite apt:

Mr. Keegan has missed one very crucial similarity between Iraq & Vietnam: Mr. Bush avoided fighting personally in both wars. And yet he urges us to “stay the course”, “get the job done”, and accuses others of “cut-and-run.” What a fine example he sets.

Although Mr. Keegan may very well deserve his reputation as an astute military historian, he is just that – an historian, and not in the war. 50,000 dead and 2,000 dead may seem different to a historian, but it is no difference at all to the families of the dead. I daresay anyone who uses cold numbers to justify this war, has not lost a loved one in this war.

If America or Britain were occupied and thousands of our citizens killed due to “collateral damage”, it would be quite understandable if many of us were willing to fight to the death to expel the occupiers from our home – no matter how many years it took. Many people around the world would likely do the same – including people in Iraq and Vietnam, and even Mr. Bush or Mr. Keegan. Maybe.

But of course, that is not how we see Iraq. In this “War on Terror”, as we sit comfortably in our living rooms surfing the Internet half a world away, it is WE who feel terrorized.

For myself, I’m amazed that Keegan — whose books are great; vivid and thought-provoking — sees what’s going on in Iraq as comparable to a “colonial disturbance.” It is far more significant than that.

The Islamist war against the West and the West’s response is going to be essentially about perception and persuasion for the foreseeable future; but there’s no question Iraq is where that war is happening now — where our soldiers are dying, and where the enemy is going for broke. Keegan is right that the force we face there is not organized or equipped like a real army — but if anything, that’s why the situation is so dire for us. We can’t afford to lose to such a ragged force, but we don’t know how to overcome them and pacify the land we’ve conquered. This underequipped, disorganized and divided enemy is calling the tune. How did we ever let ourselves get into such a posture?

Responsibility for Child Abuse

I’m fascinated by the twist that the case of former Rep. Mark Foley has taken toward trying to locate the source of his predatory behavior at the precise moment in his childhood when a Catholic priest apparently fondled him. The Nancy Grace types scorn this as “the abuse excuse,” an attempt by wrongdoers like Foley to shift the blame and avoid responsibility. That’s how Foley’s statements initially hit my ears, too.

But then it turned out Foley wasn’t lying. The priest in question, Father Mercieca, publicly said, “Once maybe I touched him” during their naked times together in a jacuzzi.

Fr Mercieca said he had befriended the boy after he arrived in Florida from Brazil.

The priest said he didn’t understand why Mr Foley had decided to come forward after almost 40 years.

“`Why does he want to destroy me in my old age?” Fr Mercieca told the newspaper.

“I would say that if I offended him, I am sorry. But remember the good times we had together and how we enjoyed each other’s company, and let bygones be bygones,” he told WPTV.

Ugh.

And now, less than 24 hours later, the Catholic Archdiocese of Miami has issued a public apology to Foley.

THE Catholic Church today apologised for the “inexcusable” behaviour of a priest who allegedly fondled Mark Foley when the now disgraced ex-Republican politician was an altar boy.

“An apology is due to Mr. Foley for the hurt he has experienced,” the Archdiocese of Miami said after the State Attorney’s office in Palm Beach, Florida identified the priest who allegedly abused the former politician four decades ago.

“Such behaviour is morally reprehensible, canonically criminal and inexcusable,” the Church said.

Meanwhile, Foley is being encouraged by activists to file a police report, even though the statute of limitations has probably run out.

This story illustrates what we all know about child abuse — that it is passed on, that the abused frequently become the abusers. We might be able to learn from Fr. Mercieca about the episode in his childhood that led him to mistreat a child this way. Beyond that, the path will surely get murky, but going forward, there will be a record, if any of Foley’s victims become abusers.

Another angle to examine: Fr. Mercieca claimed his abuse occured because he was “down…taking tranquilizers.” And Foley has blamed alcohol for his actions. Again, the popular response is, “there they go again, shifting responsibility.” But maybe we need to think a little deeper about this. How many child molesters are sober when they commit their crimes? A primary role for alcohol in society is to lower inhibitions — that’s why it is served at parties, to help overcome social awkwardness. But in the hands of the abused/abuser, it is often the fuel that takes their awful fantasies into the realm of reality.

Truly, I am not suggesting that an abuser should be viewed sympathetically if they claim they were drunk or on drugs when they committed their heinous acts. If anything, I am suggesting the reverse. Perhaps there needs to be an affirmative responsibility on the part of those who are suppressing these evil impulses to stay away from alcohol and drugs, and to seek help in doing so. “Know thyself” needs to become more than just good advice, but a legal and moral responsibility.

There also needs to be an affirmative responsibility on the part of the alcohol industry to warn their customers that their product lowers inhibitions and might lead to extremely regrettable behavior. They already warn about drinking and driving and drinking while pregnant or nursing; but drinking and abuse are at least as big a threat. What would be so terrible if the alcohol industry were forced to post signs and create ads warning that, for certain individuals, drinking leads to abusive, criminal behavior? If it makes one potential abuser think twice, it might be worth it.

It is particularly reprehensible that a doctor prescribed tranquilizers, as Fr. Mercieca has said, and the result was his woozy indulgence in child sexual abuse. Who was the doctor? What were the pills? Do they bear any responsibility for these acts on the part of Fr. Mercieca, and thus for Foley? If doctors are aware that drugs they are prescribing have the effect of lowering inhibitions or overcoming good judgement, then they need to develop a risk profile of their patients before letting them have a prescription. Doesn’t that make sense? Shouldn’t the doctors at least be required to ask questions like, “Were you sexually abused as a child? Do you harbor fantasies of having sex with a child?”

Believe me, in some ways I recoil from the implications of my own thoughts here. I am talking about a massive increase in exposure to legal liability for doctors, pharmaceutical manufacturers and those who make and sell alcohol. I am also adding a layer of prosecutable offenses to what is already illegal — child abuse — by suggesting that individuals must be held accountable for knowing their own risk factors, and structuring their lives to minimize those risks. The trial lawyers hardly need more slop to feed on.

But if we have the power to break this chain of abuse by aggressive social intervention of this nature, shouldn’t we at least explore the potential to end this tragedy? Because it is a tragedy that ultimately victimizes the most innocent. If we can protect them, shouldn’t we?

You Are There…When Two Galaxies Collide and a Million Stars are Born

“This new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of the Antennae galaxies is the sharpest yet of this merging pair of galaxies,” according to Universetoday.com. “During the course of the collision, billions of stars will be formed. The brightest and most compact of these star birth regions are called super star clusters.”

The two spiral galaxies started to interact a few hundred million years ago, making the Antennae galaxies one of the nearest and youngest examples of a pair of colliding galaxies. Nearly half of the faint objects in the Antennae image are young clusters containing tens of thousands of stars. The orange blobs to the left and right of image center are the two cores of the original galaxies and consist mainly of old stars criss-crossed by filaments of dust, which appears brown in the image. The two galaxies are dotted with brilliant blue star-forming regions surrounded by glowing hydrogen gas, appearing in the image in pink.

Just…wow.

See You in 2089

A child is born today in Los Angeles.  Let’s say this is a very fortunate child in terms of health, although not very adventurous.  He or she resides in the same house their entire lifetime, which lasts 90+ years.  That house is also in Los Angeles.

As the child’s mother brings her baby home from the hospital, she trips on a little crack in the sidewalk, almost dropping the baby.

She places her child in the bassinette, and makes an angry call to the City of Los Angeles Bureau of Street Services to complain about the sidewalk.

According to this article, by the time the sidewalk is fixed, that child could be 83 years old.

When I worked in City Hall, I was told by one of the staff that the street-tree maintenance cycle was 17 years.  “Boy, that’s a long time,” I said.  I guess I was spoiled.

Some Watered-Down Santa Barbara News-Press News

I hadn’t heard any recent developments in connection with the blow-up at the Santa Barbara News-Press. It seems like the whole thing has evolved into a rather unsexy union vs. management dispute, and that Wendy McCaw’s rule over this particular roost has consolidated since the summer.

But I thought I’d check anyway and see if anyone had missed anything. I came across a story involving McCaw’s fiance, Arthur Von Weisenberger. (What a great name. If I was still a kid, and I was arguing with another kid who was acting like a know-it-all, I might say to him: “Who do you think you are, Arthur Von Weisenberger?”)

It turns out Von Weisenberger is in charge of Bottled Water Web, “The Definitive Bottled Water Site.” In addition to offering the latest in bottled water information, the site has 79 registered users who chat about bottled water. Just today, “anonymous” asked the following penetrating question:

Greetings! Does anyone know the size of a standard 5-gallon water bottle? (In inches, preferably.) Also, do you know the average weight for a plastic 5-gallon bottle? I believe the water itself should weigh about 40 pounds. Much thanks!

But perhaps that’s unfair. Perhaps I’m making this site sound trivial. In fact, Bottled Water Web is a newsmaker. Just last week, Jessica Mullen, staff writer for the UC Santa Barbara student newspaper, the Daily Nexus, filed this report:

Contrary to popular belief, a recent study proves that UCSB students are fueled by fluids other than Natty Ice.

Bottled water, but not tap water, is the preferred drink of a random sampling of over 100 UCSB students, according to a study conducted by Bottled Water Web President Arthur Von Wiesenberger. The next most popular drink choices on the survey were juice, flavored tea, diet soft drinks and milk respectively.

So Natty Ice doesn’t even show up. Boy, the “popular belief” sure was way off this time! By the way, the Urban Dictionary defines “Natty Ice” as “trailer trash beer.” If that’s true, then obviously the survey is questionable, because no UC Santa Barbara student would ever admit to any association with “trailer trash.”

Von Wiesenberger, the long-term fiance of Santa Barbara News-Press owner Wendy McCaw, said the trend reflects students’ increased exposure to bottled water from childhood onward.

“University students today are really the first generation to have grown up in America when bottled water became mainstream in the 1980s,” Von Wiesenberger said in a press release. “Their parents – the baby boomers – brought bottled water into the home as a primary beverage choice, so from an early age these 20-year-olds were accustomed to drinking bottled water as a part of the American lifestyle.”

Survey interviews began on campus this past May. Von Wiesenberger shared the findings at the International Bottled Water Associations 2006 Convention, held in Las Vegas two weeks ago.

Do you get the sense there might have been some built-in bias to this survey? It was taken by a bottled-water website operator for presentation at a bottled water trade meeting. We’ll have to get a look at the questions in this survey.

The data revealed that 42 percent of students drink water “all the time,” and 33 percent consume water more than half of the time. Of the students interviewed, the median age was 20, 68 percent were female, 26 percent were male and 6 percent did not specify a gender.

“All the time?” “More than half the time?” What was the universe of time being measured? Every waking minute? That’s a lot of water. It might have been more responsible for the reporter to point out at this juncture that you can get very sick from drinking too much water — a condition called hyponatremia. Ironically, hyponatremia symptoms “mirror those of dehydration.” You can die from too much water!

In addition to preferring bottled water, over 50 percent of the students surveyed claimed they rarely drink tap water and believe “bottled water is better than tap water,” citing the taste and convenience of bottled water.

First-year global studies major Bethany Abbott reaffirmed Von Wiesenberger’s belief that this generation’s drinking habits and consumer preferences seldom involve tap water.

Certainly, if you’re on the go, bottled water is a great convenience. But it is infinitely more expensive. Slurping at a water fountain on most college campuses is free of charge. A single-size bottle of water can set you back almost two bucks. These are kids who are going to graduate under a heavy load of student loan debt. It might have been responsible for the reporter to point out the serious fiscal consequences of bottled water. Plus, public water agencies frequently hold blind taste tests between bottled water and tap water, and tap water often wins.

“I only purchase bottled water,” Abbott said. “I do not spend money on anything else, be it soda or Jamba Juice. I only buy bottled water.”

According to Agnes Huff, president and CEO of Agnes Huff Communication Group, the study is important to companies that aim to sell students water.

A-ha! Agnes Huff. Where have we heard that name before? That’s right: She is the spokesperson for Wendy McCaw! Working for the McCaw family is turning out to be a lucrative little cottage industry for Ms. Huff’s PR business. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

“The results provide valuable marketing implications for a business attempting to target this important constituency,” Huff said.

How does a result “provide…implications?” You make implications. You imply. They are not provided, passively, like rain falling from the sky, from results. Oh, never mind.

Although the survey was conducted strictly at UCSB, Huff said she hopes to take the study to a variety of schools in order to widen Von Wiesenberger’s research.

“We want to compare results at different campuses to find out if results differ geographically,” Huff said.

Because different results geographically could provide additional valuable marketing implications, doncha know. Plus, what great PR. You go onto a college campus, you ask a bunch of kids if they like drinking water out of a bottle, you publish the results in a press release, and the college paper will run with it. If you somehow find a campus that prefers “Natty Ice,” then, no problem. Don’t write the press release, and no one will be the Weisenberger.

(P.S. If we really want to put the Bottled Water Web and Agnes Huff to the test, someone should ask them to respond to this.)

Punching Picasso

Robin Williams once said that cocaine was God’s way of saying you were making too much money. That was during the 80s. Now, 20 years later, God is finding more dramatic ways of making this point:

A US casino mogul has pulled out of a deal to sell his Picasso painting for a record $139m (£74m) after accidentally elbowing a hole in the middle.

Las Vegas magnate Steve Wynn was showing Le Reve (The Dream) to guests at his office in Las Vegas last month.

Mr Wynn, who has retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease affecting peripheral vision, tore a coin-sized hole.

He will now keep the painting, which he bought in 1997 for $48.4m, and repair it, his spokeswoman said.

Mr Wynn had finalised the sale of the 1932 painting to art collector Steven Cohen.

The $139m price tag would have been $4m higher than the previous private-sale record – for Gustav Klimt’s 1907 portrait, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, in July this year.

Picasso’s Boy With a Pipe, which fetched $104.1m in 2004, holds the record for art sold at auction.

Mr Wynn, known for gesturing with hands while speaking, was showing the painting at his office at Wynn Las Vegas when he struck it with his right elbow, spokeswoman Denise Randazzo said.

Director and screenwriter Nora Ephron was at the incident and wrote about it on a blog site.

She said Mr Wynn raised his hand then “at that moment, his elbow crashed backward right through the canvas. There was a terrible noise”.

“Smack in the middle… was a black hole the size of a silver dollar. ‘Look what I’ve done’ he said. ‘Thank goodness it was me.’”

Mr Wynn, a high-profile art collector, developed The Mirage and Bellagio resorts in Las Vegas in the 1990s.

Foreign Policy Mix-Up

I agree with some foreign-policy hawks that our country needs to get more real about the threat we face from radical Islamists. Though I am a Democrat, I have given the Bush Administration the benefit of the doubt, not because I “agree” with them, but because the Constitution gives them the burden of responsibilty to protect this country, and I believe that there can only be so much political interference with their carrying-out of this responsibility before it becomes damaging to the country. The childishness, cliquishness, hypocrisy and naked partisanship of the Administration’s critics has drained much of whatever ideological sympathy I might have started with. I mean, my God, even the most committed liberals must get bored with the constant “Bushitler asshole” rants — although the evidence is they can’t get enough of it.

All that being said: This is disgraceful, unacceptable and makes we want to impeach all of them:

FOR the past several months, I’ve been wrapping up lengthy interviews with Washington counterterrorism officials with a fundamental question: “Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?”

A “gotcha” question? Perhaps. But if knowing your enemy is the most basic rule of war, I don’t think it’s out of bounds. And as I quickly explain to my subjects, I’m not looking for theological explanations, just the basics: Who’s on what side today, and what does each want?

After all, wouldn’t British counterterrorism officials responsible for Northern Ireland know the difference between Catholics and Protestants? In a remotely similar but far more lethal vein, the 1,400-year Sunni-Shiite rivalry is playing out in the streets of Baghdad, raising the specter of a breakup of Iraq into antagonistic states, one backed by Shiite Iran and the other by Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states.

Just to cut to the chase for those who can’t keep it straight: Bin Laden is from Saudi Arabia, and his #2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is from Egypt. These are Sunni states. Al Queda is a Sunni organization.  The Taliban?  Sunni.  Hezbollah, on the other hand, is Shiite.  The Ayatollah Khomeini?  A Shiite.

And, it goes without saying, there are millions of Sunnis and Shiites who don’t belong to terrorist organizations.  Neither denomination is inherently “more radical.”  There are far more Sunnis than Shiites, by a factor greater than 5 to 1. The origin of the split was the Shiites belief that only the descendents of Ali, Muhammed’s son-in-law, can lead the Muslim people.  But the split occured at the dawn of Islam, and at this point the differences are more the result of how the two sects developed historically over the succeeding 1,400 years.

A complete collapse in Iraq could provide a haven for Al Qaeda operatives within striking distance of Israel, even Europe. And the nature of the threat from Iran, a potential nuclear power with protégés in the Gulf states, northern Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, is entirely different from that of Al Qaeda. It seems silly to have to argue that officials responsible for counterterrorism should be able to recognize opportunities for pitting these rivals against each other.

But so far, most American officials I’ve interviewed don’t have a clue. That includes not just intelligence and law enforcement officials, but also members of Congress who have important roles overseeing our spy agencies. How can they do their jobs without knowing the basics?

The author of this op-ed, Jeff Stein, who writes for Congressional Quarterly, makes a little game out of asking senior FBI officials and members of Congress if they know anything about the Shi’a and the Sunnis, and which forces are allied with which sects. Here’s an example:

At the end of a long interview, I asked Willie Hulon, chief of the (FBI’s) new national security branch, whether he thought that it was important for a man in his position to know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. “Yes, sure, it’s right to know the difference,” he said. “It’s important to know who your targets are.”

That was a big advance over 2005. So next I asked him if he could tell me the difference. He was flummoxed. “The basics goes back to their beliefs and who they were following,” he said. “And the conflicts between the Sunnis and the Shia and the difference between who they were following.”

O.K., I asked, trying to help, what about today? Which one is Iran — Sunni or Shiite? He thought for a second. “Iran and Hezbollah,” I prompted. “Which are they?”

He took a stab: “Sunni.”

Wrong.

Al Qaeda? “Sunni.”

Right.

I think I could make a lot of money in Washington if I just printed out a palm-sized card that briefly explained the difference between the two denominations, how they started, and which countries and organizations are associated with each one. I’m sure I could sell quite a few to the Democrats who are about to take over the key committees. They must be a little glad that it’s Republican officials whose stupidity is being exposed. This gives them a little time to bone up.

The ignorance — and arrogance defense of such ignorance — is particularly galling at a time when we are fighting a war in Iraq, a country whose primary characteristic is that it contains large populations of both Shiites and Sunnis. If you can’t keep straight which group is closer to Iran, vs. which group is supported by Al Queda…

(I’m sorry, I just fainted.)

Nothing Better than Griffith Observatory

Is there any public space in Los Angeles more wonderful than Griffith Observatory?

It is an architectural gem set against a cliff overlooking a vast expanse of Los Angeles. It is a celebration of a branch of science, astronomy, to which Southern California can stake a proud claim. In a few weeks, it will reopen after a five-year renovation project, but because our friends Todd & Robin Mason have gained the affection of both the scientific and science-history communities in this area, they were invited to a preview opening Sunday morning — and let my wife and me tag along.

The Masons are finalizing a documentary, “Journey to Palomar,” the story of George Ellery Hale’s creation of the Mt. Wilson and Palomar Telescopes that profoundly expanded humankind’s understanding of the universe, beginning with Edwin Hubble’s first observations of  the universe’s expansion, which led to the development of the Big Bang theory that is now almost universally accepted. The Mason’s documentary will be one of the films you can see at the Leonard Nimoy Event Horizon, a new theater that the “Star Trek” actor and his wife made possible.

As will the public after November 3, we met a shuttle bus on the Orange Street side of Hollywood and Highland and presented our tickets there. The Observatory will accept visitors via a registration system, but as before the renovation, admission will be free. Waiting for the bus gave us a minute to check out the old Grauman’s Chinese Theater:

We arrived to hear a talk from a volunteer who was clearly excited and proud of what had been done to bring the observatory back — and asked us not to take pictures of the few still-uncompleted details. Rather than going into the front door, which is what past visitors are familiar with, we were guided down a flight of stairs on the observatory’s west side, which leads to a new exhibit area — the Gunther Depths of Space, which covers a lot of information — our solar system and what we know about each of the planets; the stars, galaxies and nebulae; and “The Big Picture,” a 152 x 20 foot image of the “cosmic wilderness” — the Virgo cluster of stars and galaxies.

Here is what the Gunther room looks like:

And here is a detail from “The Big Picture,” which in its entirety shows you a million stars. Each lighted object on this image represents not a star, but an entire galaxy:

Upstairs, you’ll find some of the exhibits you recall, such as Foucault’s Pendulum, and the arresting murals in the rotunda, all nicely restored and probably augmented. But for me, when I got to this floor, I was less focused on the scientific information, and more on the sheer artistry of the building, indoors and out:

You probably remember this monument that depicts Gallileo and Copernicus and other early explorers of the heavens:

…and the walkways around the domes, up on the roof, opening up fantastic views of the city…

…as well as beautiful little architectural details like this:

I am really grateful we got to see this. It felt like a pilgrimage to the L.A. of old, the city and region with a spirit of adventure and discovery–a better place and a better time than L.A. now. But Griffith Observatory is here now, so the present-day is ennobled by it.

(Photo credits: From the top, #1 and #9 are by Todd Mason; #2-8 and #10 are by yours truly. And I hope the volunteers at Griffith Observatory will note that everything shown here is ready for public consumption!)

Liking Ann Powers So Far

When Robert Hilburn retired from the LA Times, it provided me with an opportunity to unload years of pent-up scorn at the venerable pop critic. I had just started this blog, here was something I knew about having read Hilburn since before I was a teenager, so I went at it, making fun of his clutzy and predictable writing style. And ever since, I’ve been feeling guilty and like maybe I made a mistake. After all — I read him. I was acquainted with his work because I had rarely skipped a piece of his. He was frustrating — but essential. I chalked it up to my only being a blogger for one month at the time I wrote it. I’ve sobered up a little. But the piece is still here, as are all the other ones I’m a little embarassed about.

So anyway. What brings me back here is Ann Powers, the critic who took Hilburn’s place. At first I hated her. She struck me as a serious over-writer, kind of like the critics I used to read in the LA Weekly (current team excepted but only because I hardly read the Weekly anymore). Reading her first Times pieces was like chewing frozen salt-water taffy.  She wrote long paragraphs of post-modern contextualizing, which gave off the distinct sense that, like many music critics, she was writing to impress other critics. The opposite of Hilburn, who clearly wrote for a big, mainstream audience. Careful what you wish for, and all that.

But I said nothing here. And I’m glad I didn’t. She’s gotten a lot better. She must have been nervous at first, and maybe she was trying to convince people in the alternative-weekly world that taking the Times job wouldn’t change her. But she’s starting to settle in; and now it’s obvious her talent is enormous. From her review of a concert by the Killers, a hot band of the moment with a charismatic lead singer:

What the Killers do best is stance. That doesn’t just mean posing, although (Brandon) Flowers looked sharp — much-debated mustache and all — in gray sharkskin. It means understanding one’s place in history, and thinking in mythic terms. Flowers is trying to grasp these complexities by moving through various rock archetypes: first the androgynous glitz of the British Bowie lineage, and now its American counterpart, super-heroic earnestness. He’s sometimes off the mark, but the attempt counts.

In performance, Flowers’ heroism was not earnest; it was fun, a serious game. His fans understood; instead of the heady passion of a U2 or Springsteen crowd, this one projected lighthearted cheer. After all, the Killers’ fan base is the “compilation generation,” whose scattered tastes and preoccupations make it unlikely that rock, or any one musical form, can serve as a mass unifier.

What’s left to ambitious young stars such as Brandon Flowers is the job of sifting through, of seeing what works for his small slice of the pie and what feels irrelevant. If he’s smart, Flowers will assume another posture with the next album. There are plenty to try.

And then, this, from her reminiscence today about Tower Records:

Tower’s demise may be inevitable given today’s schism between mainstream consolidation and the fragmenting of the underground. Stores aiming at both sides of this divide seem destined to fail. Deep catalog, though still available in rare spots like Amoeba Music, now feeds the “long tail” of the Web, where low overhead allows entrepreneurs to sell just one of many things and survive. The selection is better than ever on the Web’s myriad retail and subscription sites, not to mention MP3 blogs. And the virtual conversation among fans seems inexhaustible.

But I mourn the bodily encounters Tower offered — with those beautiful vinyl albums of my youth, but mostly with the people whose fingers tripped through them. Tower was where music nuts, not a socially adept breed, had to face each other in the flesh. It was good for us; it brought us into the light and gave us a place in the ordinary world.

Nice. Who knows how long she’ll stick around — her newspaper is apparently in some trouble, and she’s widely known among pop music fiends outside of LA, so she doesn’t have to suffer through the Times’ current throes if she doesn’t want to. But I hope she stays for awhile. She was a good choice of music geek to put in the “ordinary world” of Angelenos, and her influence on the LA based music industry can only be positive.

The heady days of rock-and-roll as mass movement that Hilburn chronicled are over, but there will always be something called pop. Nowadays, explaining pop music to a fragmented audience is far more difficult, but Powers seems to have a gift for conveying the experience of music in words. Hilburn didn’t, but he didn’t have to; he could assume that most of the music he wrote about was on the radio, so he could focus on other aspects of it. The beat is more challenging now, but in the right hands, much more interesting.

It would be smart for the Times to give Ann Powers a little promotional push. She might be good for circulation.

P.S. In preparing this post, I found out Powers has a blog. She only writes in it occasionally, but her last post was fairly recent, so it’s worth checking from time to time. Her tagline is funny and appropriately self-aware: “Rockcrit and a mama, Ann Powers thinks way too hard sometimes.”

Don’t Blow Off the Playoffs

I’m not sure if it’s your duty, Judy, but despite lingering disappointment over the Dodgers’ exit from the baseball playoffs (or the Yankees, Padres or Twins, the other teams that didn’t survive this round), there’s every reason to think the remaining four teams will give us an entertaining show on the way to the World Series.

The most ratings-challenged pairing, Detroit vs. Oakland, which starts tonight, has the makings of a classic, so hopefully someone will watch. Both teams feature the most basic elements in baseball: Great pitching and power. You will see Tiger hurlers like Justin Verlander trying to whip the ball past the reborn home-run hitting “Big Hurt,” Frank Thomas. You will see Athletics’ curveball artist Barry Zito trying to fool a young Tiger lineup, anchored by three underappreciated veteran stars, Carlos Guillen, Magglio Ordonez and Ivan Rodriguez.

The Tigers have the edge, I think. They’ve got one of the best managers of our era, Jim Leyland, they’ve got more speed than Oakland, and they’ve got a better bullpen. But the advantage is not overwhelming. This series will be a revelation — the making of at least a few new stars’ reputations.

The NL series, which starts Wednesday night, features two better-known teams, the New York Mets and the St. Louis Cardinals. The Cardinals, who feature the game’s best player nowadays, Albert Pujols, have been in the post-season frequently this decade, reaching the World Series in 2004, only to be swept by the walking-on-air Boston Red Sox. They were a tougher team back then than they are now, but they are still dangerous.

This year’s Mets were built somewhat like the Yankees — a few homegrown stars like David Wright and Jose Reyes, surrounded by expensive veterans like Carlos Delgado, Tom Glavine, Carlos Beltran and the injured Pedro Martinez. I have no idea how the Mets can survive a seven-game series with so many of their pitchers hurt. But St. Louis has pitching problems too. If you like a lot of home runs, I think the NL series will be where to find them.

My Last Yellow Bag

“We had better sales before we were going out of business,” says a soon-to-be-unemployed Tower Records clerk about the big Going Out of Business sale the terminally liquidated music and video chain launched on Saturday. (Link from the Velvet Rope via LA Observed.)

It’s no wonder. The chain is knocking a measly 10 percent off its overpriced stock. You can do better at Best Buy, and they aren’t going anywhere. I went inside the Torrance store anyway and picked up a few classical disks (Beethoven’s triple concerto featuring David Oistrakh, Debussy’s most famous orchestral works, a two-disk Leonard Bernstein survey) that looked like good deals, plus a live Irene Kral — that jazzy lady is almost forgotten and her recordings hard to find. I didn’t want to wait until all their best inventory was gone and the racks half-empty; that would be too depressing.

I asked the sweet Goth girl behind the counter how long this sale would go on. “About a week,” she said. I told her I thought at this rate it would be more like a month. But now, thinking about it, maybe not. These items were not priced to move. At best, they were trying to get rid of the most recent stuff that the store overstocked. Could be, in a week they will close the doors and ship the remaining inventory to an online reseller. Maybe it will all be sucked into the maw of Amazon, or Ebay.

This story, by longtime music industry journalist Chris Morris, suggests the liquidation will unsettle a number of businesses:

The sell-off of Tower’s inventory, valuations of which run as high as $200 million, could have a wide-ranging impact on the music business at large. The company’s West Sacramento, Calif., warehouse is filled with product from the vendors of its independent distribution company, Bayside Distribution, and its accessories suppliers. Companies with a high degree of exposure could be dealt a serious blow when their product is returned for full wholesale cost.

According to Morris, Tower’s demise leaves Virgin Megastores as the largest remaining terrestrial “deep catalogue” music seller. The firm’s founder took note of the occasion.

The family of Russ Solomon, who founded Tower in 1960 as a music department in his father’s Sacramento pharmacy, remained a 15% shareholder. Solomon did not enter a bid for the company.

In an e-mail circulated Friday to Tower’s staff, Solomon said, “The fat lady has sung … she was way off key. Thank You, Thank You, Thank You.”

Invested in Angelides

So, according to the LA Times and the San Jose Mercury News, the California Democratic Party has figured out recently that this gentleman Democrats nominated for governor, state Treasurer Phil Angelides, is encountering unexpected trouble and might lose the election.

It’s hard to figure out how a campaign that started with such seemingly unstoppable momentum could run into a rocky patch, but in politics, like in life, sometimes the unexpected happens. It’s starting to look like the Republican incumbent, Arnold Schwarzenegger, might just eke out a victory — a development few party activists could have foreseen back in March, when Angelides seized the nomination.

Moreover, if Angelides is somehow defeated, it might have an impact on the fortunes of other Democratic statewide candidates. Imagine!

Worried Democrats said Sunday that Phil Angelides failed to achieve the breakthrough he needed in the sole gubernatorial debate and expressed fear that his campaign’s trajectory threatened others on the statewide ticket.

Fellow Democrat John Garamendi, in a tight race for lieutenant governor against Republican state Sen. Tom McClintock, has started to distance himself from Angelides. He said in a television interview aired Sunday that he disagreed with an Angelides plan to raise taxes on corporations and the well-to-do.

“I don’t think it’s necessary,” Garamendi, now insurance commissioner, said on KNBC’s “News Conference.”

Though few thought Angelides did poorly in the debate, there was wide agreement that Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger benefited the most from Saturday night’s allotted 55-minute session, largely because nothing occurred to change the essential dynamic of the race.

Angelides, the state treasurer, entered the evening desperately needing to redefine a contest that by all measures — polling, fundraising, party morale — was going badly for him. And he needed the lift not just for himself, but for fellow Democratic candidates counting on him to spur a strong turnout Nov. 7.

Okay, with my tongue now excavated from my cheek, I just want to know one thing. Angelides won the nomination from a moderate, pro-business candidate, Steve Westly, because a group of labor leaders and other party regulars organized an independent campaign on Angelides’ behalf. They spent a lot on it, and made a heroic effort. Their hard work paid off.

Why did they do this?

Angelides is the same guy in October 2006 that he’s been his entire public life. The Dems always do opposition research on their own candidates, so they knew he was vulnerable on the issue of tax hikes. The positions the Schwarzenegger campaign is throwing in his face were promulgated over the course of his career.

In fact, that’s Angelides’ defense, essentially to say, “I didn’t support those tax increases all at the same time.” But he’s not making much of a case for what he’d spend that money on. He’s running basically for the status quo — for letting lots of busy government employees keep doing things Democrats have faith are worthwhile. He’s misread the public mood. The public doesn’t think all of what state employees are doing is worthwhile — and hasn’t felt that way since the Gray Davis years.

In this story, the Times says California has “a left-moderate tilt.” I agree. But the left side is mostly about social issues, specific policy issues like the environment, and national issues like the war in Iraq. The moderate side of California’s political persona still leans right on the issues of taxes and government expenditures: Lower taxes, no deficits, keep spending under control, don’t touch Proposition 13. The sky-high cost of living is a factor that dominates most Californians’ daily lives. Few believe they aren’t being taxed enough. Even relatively painless bond issues lately have failed, unless they are for schools.

It is on taxes and spending where Angelides is weakest — and yet, many in the party’s leadership decided he was the candidate they wanted to see at the top of the ticket.

Now, some Democrats talk about a “triage,” not throwing good money after bad, focusing resources on down-ticket Democrats who Angelides is hurting. But when was it good money? When did this candidate look like a worthy challenger to a superstar incumbent, and to whom? Would they care to explain now what they were thinking back then?

“The Yuppies and the Junkies Can Have It.”

While watching the Mets beat the Dodgers’ brains in, I checked out a few of the blogs on my blogroll that I hadn’t read in awhile. On the San Pedro-based group blog “Life on the Edge,” the most recent entry is a terribly sad tale that suggests the latest efforts to revive the beautiful but unsettled village overlooking LA Harbor are falling short.

The author is an artist named Marshall Astor, whose nom du blog is “Calamari.” Astor announces that he won’t be posting much on the site for awhile, in part because “I don’t really feel like writing about Pedro at the moment.” The post explains why. To sum it up, Astor ran the Walled City Gallery in downtown San Pedro until closing it in August. (He also has a position at Angels Gate Cultural Center.) Astor had a good rent on the space, so he decided to retool it as studio space for himself and two other artists.

At about the same time we began to transition the space from a gallery to a working studio, I got some new neighbors in my building. The illegal live work, sublet that was a bit of an irritation became at first a hassle and then later, a crisis. I had been speaking with my landlord for half a year about the issue with the sublet next door, and for half a year, he claimed that he was going to evict the tenants. No eviction took place, and in August, more people started living next door, most notably a couple that engaged in on and off, 24 hour a day domestic violence. It was soon obvious that everybody next door was using methamphetamine, and by the beginning of September it had become obvious from the amount of in and out traffic at both the front door and the alley entrance that the place had become a major drug den.

By the beginning of September, it had become impossible to use the backyard, as there was either constantly a semi/non-operational vehicle parked in my half of the yard, or just piles of new and mysterious junk had been dumped on my side. The lock on the back gate was changed. Lumber and paint started disappearing when I would leave it outside. So many people were now living/crashing/hanging out/getting loaded/buying drugs at the space that I didn’t even know who to blame or talk to. When I did manage to bring it up to anyone, it was a non-productive conversation with a doped up, out of it, loser.

The landlord promised to evict the tenants, but never started the process. In the meantime, the building was sold. The new landlord told Astor he would evict the tenants and wanted him to stay — at a significant rent increase. Astor stresses that the rent hike was fair and in keeping with the market, but he wasn’t interested in paying that much. He decided to stay until December 15, and began slowly to move his belongings out. However, he didn’t move quickly enough:

Edith (one of his studio-mates) had arrived at the studio, found the back door wide open. I immediately directed her to the dusty silhouette where my laptop had been before some tweaked out, low life had made off with it. Every box, container or package in the building had been opened and searched, for what, I do not know. My talles was strewn across my desk, defiled and manhandled, and during the high holy days, no less. The remanents of my father’s coin collection was gone, one of my backpacks was gone, presumably to carry off my belongings in. Edith’s stuff was searched, but nothing taken. Someone had spent a lot of time in my place, making a mess, rifling through my personal business, and otherwise subjecting me and my mates to a disturbing and frustrating violation.

They posted a guard until they could return to the studio to move everything out, and turned in their key.

So I’m out of downtown, and due to the level of gentrification, combined with the general decline in the quality of life downtown (I’ve spoken with a lot of police in the past week, they all have heard or experienced that San Pedro has become a mecca for drug activity and more of a “dumping ground” than usual), I’m not likely to have either a studio, or a gallery there in the future. The yuppies and the junkies can have it.

I’ve lived in LA, and mostly in the South Bay/Harbor area, since the late 60s. All that time, San Pedro has been a town on the verge. Not everyone agrees with me, but I think it’s one of the most beautiful spots in the Los Angeles. Some blame the Port of LA, but I should think having such a vital economic force as a neighbor could only help. Besides, container cranes are kind of interesting to look at. They don’t blight the landscape — they’re just more colors and shapes for the morning and evening sun to illuminate.

Why can’t all the powers-that-be line up to keep this gem safe from becoming a “mecca for drug activity?” What a waste if they let San Pedro’s downtown slide into the kind of chaos from which decent, community-spirited people like Astor have to flee.

(photo credits: “Warner Grand, San Pedro,” by My Life as a Haint, “Downtown San Pedro” by Lyan Zurke)

Half a Century of Credibility, Down the Drain

Well maybe it’s not that bad, but the way the Dodgers ran themselves into a double play yesterday brought back for Vin Scully “the old Brooklyn Dodgers” that he began announcing for in 1950. It reminded Thomas Boswell of the same thing, even though he’s closer to my age than Vin’s.

Throughout history, whenever too much is going right for the Dodgers, they are forced to run the bases.

In 1926, John Lardner wrote, “Babe Herman did not triple into a triple play, but he doubled into a double play, which is the next best thing.” For decades, that play inspired Brooklyn fans to respond to news that “the Dodgers have three men on base” by asking, “Which base?” To the Dodgers, a rally has always been a potential comedy skit in disguise.

Thus it was again Wednesday. In Game 1 of the NL Division Series, the Dodgers lost, 6-5, to the Mets because they turned a line drive off the right field wall into a double play with two runners tagged out at home on the same play. The first runner was out by six feet, the second by a fascinating 10 yards. Nobody could explain why, though many tried. But neither Jeff Kent nor J.D. Drew was carrying a pastrami sandwich, so they weren’t on orders to “stop at the deli on the way home.”

A year before I was born, the Dodgers won their first World Championship, ending a six-decade drought that bought the Brooklyn Dodgers a reputation as a team just as likely to make you laugh as cheer. Since that 1955 breakthrough, the Dodgers have won five more titles, all in Los Angeles.

Six titles in 51 years doesn’t sound like a lot, but in that span, think of the other good teams in baseball. The Oakland A’s have won four titles, the St. Louis Cardinals three, the Cincinnati Reds three, the Pittsburgh Pirates three, and no other team has won more than two…well, except for the New York Yankees, who have won 10 titles since 1955. So the Dodgers are the second-most successful baseball franchise of the past 51 years.

It’s been a while since the Dodgers’ last one: 1988, two years before my son was born. No wonder he’s not a baseball fan. In the past 18 years, the Dodgers have had some pretty good teams, some pretty lousy teams, and, mostly, boring teams. A few fine players have come through here, like Mike Piazza, Hideo Nomo, Ramon Martinez, Gary Sheffield and, my vote for the greatest Dodger of the past 18 years, Eric Gagne.

But to use my son’s favorite word lately, the Dodgers of the past 18 years have been mostly Dullsville. Admittedly, contenders more often than not. A playoff team three times. But not close to a championship caliber team. Dull, but respectable.

This year’s been different. The Dodgers are exciting. They were exciting yesterday, almost winning the game despite the goofy play that cost them at least two crucial runs. For the past three months, the excitement has mostly resulted in winning, not losing. But Boswell wonders if the team will recover from this classic bonehead play:

Fortune has been in their corner for weeks. In one victory over the Padres, they tied the game with four solo homers in the ninth inning, then after falling behind, won 11-10 on a two-run homer by Nomar Garciaparra in the 10th. Such extended streaks of hot play — the Dodgers are 41-19 since July 28th — can only be snapped by omens of equal weight.

This game had that eerie feeling — cubed. Immediately after the double-tag at the plate, the next Dodger doubled. So, with competent conservative base running, L.A. would’ve had a 3-0 lead with a man on second and no outs with Maine on the ropes. Instead, pitcher Derek Lowe struck out to end the inning with just a 1-0 lead. When Carlos Delgado hit a 470-foot home run off the top of the three-story TV camera tower in center field and Cliff Floyd homered one out later, the Mets led 2-1.

The Dodgers tied it at 4 on a two-run double by Garciaparra in the seventh, but Kent, trying to hit one so far that he would have infinite time to circle the bases, struck out to end the inning. Finally, in the ninth, with a runner on second, Garciaparra struck out to end the game, leaving Kent on deck and Drew in the hole.

Which, all sins considered, is exactly where they belonged.

The Mets are a tough team — probably the best National League team this season. But the Dodgers have been a much better team lately.  So I think they will overcome this jinx, and win this round in five games.

Tonight will tell the tale.  If left-handed rookie Hong-Chi Kuo can tame the Mets like he did last month, we’ve got Greg Maddux going in game 3, which would put LA up 2-1 with two to play.  In Game 4, Brad Penny will be fighting for his credibility as an ace starter.  That game’s not too promising.  But Derek Lowe comes back in Game 5, and I think he’ll have better luck if he’s given a second chance at this lineup.

Go Kuo!

Tea and Sympathy and Science

Maybe the British are tired of everyone making fun of them for their seemingly fussy obsession with tea. University College London has conducted a study of tea-drinkers and has determined, scientifically, that “daily cups of tea can help you recover more quickly from the stresses of everyday life,” according to this item in Science Blog.

Professor Andrew Steptoe, UCL Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, says: “Drinking tea has traditionally been associated with stress relief, and many people believe that drinking tea helps them relax after facing the stresses of everyday life. However, scientific evidence for the relaxing properties of tea is quite limited. This is one of the first studies to assess tea in a double-blind placebo controlled design – that is, neither we nor the participants knew whether they were drinking real or fake tea. This means that any differences were due to the biological ingredients of tea, and not to the relaxing situations in which people might drink tea, whether they were familiar with the taste and liked it, and so on.

“We do not know what ingredients of tea were responsible for these effects on stress recovery and relaxation. Tea is chemically very complex, with many different ingredients. Ingredients such as catechins, polyphenols, flavonoids and amino acids have been found to have effects on neurotransmitters in the brain, but we cannot tell from this research which ones produced the differences.

“Nevertheless, our study suggests that drinking black tea may speed up our recovery from the daily stresses in life. Although it does not appear to reduce the actual levels of stress we experience, tea does seem to have a greater effect in bringing stress hormone levels back to normal. This has important health implications, because slow recovery following acute stress has been associated with a greater risk of chronic illnesses such as coronary heart disease.”

The two groups — one that had been given caffeinated tea, but in a fruit-flavored drink that deprived the drinker of all the tea-drinking atmospherics like decorative teacups, tea cozies, finger sandwiches and framed pictures of the Queen; and one that was given a caffeinated placebo with a similar flavor — were subjected to stressful experiences.

The real tea-drinkers had the same level of stress response as the placebo group, but “50 minutes after the task, cortisol levels had dropped by an average of 47 per cent in the tea drinking group compared with 27 per cent in the fake tea group.”

Expect the folks at Lipton, Bigelow and Celestial Seasonings to start marketing their products around these findings– teaming up with stress-management experts and putting them on media tours, sponsoring tea-tastings outside locations associated with stress, such as office buildings, DMV offices and Bar-exam test sites. The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, struggling to stay relevant in a Starbucks world, might start pushing the tea side of their business more.

Adagio Teas already sponsors “Tea Chat.” On the Black Tea forum, the University College findings are already causing quite a stir. This site also links to a “Tea Map,” described as “the online destination for finding tea rooms in and around your area.” For example, residents of the High Desert community of Lancaster can visit the Belladona Gift Boutique and Tea Room,

located in a renovated ’1954 Storybook Home’ painted in true Victorian Flair with purple, yellow and teal. Your experience actually begins with the fragrance of roses along the walk-way while discovering the teapot shaped cut-outs in the concrete. Don’t miss the hardscape greeting around the bend – it is very colorful and full of sweet meaning.

First time visitors always catch their breath with surprise at the whimsical decor and enchanting aromas. The most delightful statement made was ‘Oh my Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore’.

Coffee-makers won’t take this lying down. I imagine they will soon commission a study showing the benefits of stress, and then dust off their old “Coffee Achievers” campaign.

Baseball Diaries

The major league baseball playoffs began yesterday, but here in Los Angeles, today is the big day, as the Dodgers bring their streaky, drama-queen team to New York for their first game this afternoon at 1 p.m. LA time.

Major League Baseball has invited several playoff participants to keep blogs. The Dodgers’ Game 1 pitcher Derek Lowe is one of them. Here he describes how he spent part of his day off yesterday in NY:

Today started about as far from baseball as possible. A few of us left the hotel and went to Ground Zero. I hadn’t been there in three years. We walked around and thought a lot about what it means. I went over to Station 10, the fire station that’s located right across the street from where the towers fell.

A couple of the firemen recognized me and yelled my name. They called us over, and we spent maybe an hour with them. They showed us around the station and we talked. I didn’t want to get into too much detail, but I was curious and they told us about what it was like on Sept. 11. They were the first responders, being right there across the street. It kind of puts our job in perspective. A bad day for us really isn’t like a bad day, compared to what those guys go through.

I put Lowe first, because he’s our guy, but the best playoff blog by far is the Oakland A’s Barry Zito, who beat the Twins in their game 1 yesterday. Zito is going to be a free agent after this postseason. Based on his talent alone, I hope the Dodgers sign him. But his writing ability is a plus for a city that likes a good story:

You know that Kevin Costner movie, “Love of the Game”? You know when he talked about, ‘Quieting the mechanism?’ I don’t know how I did it, but I quieted this crowd in my head today. Last time I pitched in the playoffs here, I’d look in for the signs, and Ramon Hernandez’s fingers looked like they were shaking from sound waves bouncing around. But today my focus was so sharp, and it was like I just turned the volume down in my head. It was just me and Jason, pitch and catch. That, more than anything, was the key for me today. It’s not easy to block out 55,000 people, but I — we — did it somehow. Just an awesome day.

I might not be blogging so much this month. I could tell you it’s because I’ve got some new work, and that would be true. I could tell you it’s because of developments in my legal case, and that would be true also. But the fact is, I’m always kind of distracted in October. I would give up all the holidays and my birthday if I had to, but I always want to be watching postseason baseball in October. It’s especially exciting if you’ve got your team in the mix, but even if you don’t — do-or-die baseball elevates this great game into truly compelling entertainment. Myths and legends are created during these weeks. It’s important to pay attention — it just is.

Reverse-Engineering 9/11

It amazes me that 9/11 conspiracy theorists can get an audience.

If you think the towers fell as a result of a planned demolition, think about the number of people who would have to be involved to carry out such a scheme. Demolition experts to set up the bombs. Security personnel at the WTC to give them access. Ditto at the Pentagon. Nineteen suicidal Muslims who could fly planes, and who could each be given fake backgrounds implicating Al-Queda. People to teach them to fly. A group of people to coordinate all this activity. This conspiracy would be immediately exposed if either of the WTC planes were delayed by bad weather or maintenance problems — like that never happens. So there had to be people inside the airlines and air traffic control.

To pull off a stunt like this would require the work of dozens, if not hundreds, of trained and educated people. All of them would have to agree to take the secret to their graves. Not one of them could experience a change of heart later, or be tempted by the chance to become a celebrity by blowing the whistle, writing a book, going on Oprah. They would also all have to keep the secret from their families and friends — including their cover stories to explain what they were doing during the years of preparation a plot like this would require. All of them would have to be well-compensated to ensure this silence; a lot of money to obtain and distribute without the notice of any banking regulators or the IRS. You’d have to vigilantly ensure their continued silence. That means you’re paying a crack team of spies and assassins to monitor and control everything these people say and do — forever.

Forever — because who are the suspects in this alleged conspiracy? President Bush? He has an ambitious family that could not survive exposure of this plot. This dynasty does not intend for W to be the last Bush who serves as president. The oil companies? I assume these publicly-traded companies think they’ll be around for a long time in some form, and thus would remain liable for damages into the trillions if they were conclusively fingered. Any powerful person in business or politics would be extremely paranoid about one person leaking the plot — so paranoid that even if they had some yearning for 9/11 to happen to facilitate war or a U.S. takeover of the Middle East’s oil supply, they would probably shy away from the risks.

Anyway…these thoughts came to mind when I came across this study on Science Blog — a Purdue University-sponsored mathematical simulation of what happened when the jet hit the north tower. This quote is from Mete Sozen, the Kettelhut Distinguished Professor of Structural Engineering in Purdue’s School of Civil Engineering:

“Current findings from the simulation have identified the destruction of 11 columns on the 94th floor, 10 columns on the 95th floor and nine columns on the 96th floor,” he said. “This is a major insight. When you lose close to 25 percent of your columns at a given level, the building is significantly weakened and vulnerable to collapse.”

To depict the first half-second after the plane hit the building required 80 hours of a high-performance computer’s time. Many of the same researchers in 2002 conducted a study of the 9/11 Pentagon crash. If I’m reading the following correctly, the presence of 10,000 gallons of jet fuel and other liquids were responsible for much of the damage — even before the fuel caught fire:

“As a result of the Pentagon research, we have a better understanding of what happens when a tremendous mass of fluid such as fuel hits a solid object at high velocity,” Sozen said. “We believe most of the structural damage from such aircraft collisions is caused by the mass of the fluid on the craft, which includes the fuel.

“Damage resulting solely from the metal fuselage, engines and other aircraft parts is not as great as that resulting from the mass of fluids on board. You could think of the aircraft as a sausage skin. Its mass is tiny compared to the plane’s fluid contents.”

The simulation represents the plane and its mass as a mesh of hundreds of thousands of “finite elements,” or small squares containing specific physical characteristics. Like the previous Pentagon simulation, the software tool uses principles of physics to simulate how a plane’s huge mass of fuel and cargo impacts a building.

Do you believe the conspirators had the knowledge or ability to stage explosions that would precisely mimic these effects? That means there’s some fluid-mechanics genius with a high-performance computer out there going, “Mwah-hah-hah, they’ll never be able to tell the difference!”

I think most of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are actually hucksters. Generally, you have to pay for something — a book, a lecture, a downloadable video — in order to get them to tell you the real story.

What’s the Point of Electing Republicans?

“What’s the point of electing Republicans?” the party’s base voters must be asking in the wake of the Foley scandal.   Family-values voters, who think gays are a bigger threat than Al Queda, now learn that the GOP leadership was, at minimum, aware that one of its caucus’ members was writing inappropriate notes with a romantic subtext to a youth of the same sex.

Whatever fog is coming from Hastert and Boehner to explain their actions, the signals should have been sufficient to prompt action to protect the other pages.  The fact that these leaders were so uncurious should outrage every American, but will have a particular effect on the homophobic “base” that Karl Rove has worked so hard to bring to the polls.

I would think the leadership’s lassitude would also upset the kind of GOP voters who see Republicans as more business-like managers.  It sounds like Hastert and Boehner were just hoping the problem would go away — the kind of magical thinking that CEOs and military commanders cannot afford to indulge in.

However, the Democrats are not in a strong position to exploit this mess. Sexually predatory behavior focused on the young on the part of Democratic leaders has not exactly caused party leadership to leap into action in the past.  The one Democrat who was willing to condemn President Clinton for having his way with a 21-year-old intern, Sen. Joe Lieberman, had his 1998 speech criticizing Clinton thrown back in his face as an act of party disloyalty during his recent primary campaign against Ned Lamont.  If the Democrats try to make this into an issue, there are undoubtedly lots of quotes about “private behavior” that the Republican opposition-researchers can inject into the debate via friendly bloggers and talk-radio hosts.

But it’s outrageous that Hastert and Boehner did so little to protect the other pages.  Is pederasty now tolerated in Washington?  Are congressmembers so impressed with themselves and the power they wield, they now think they can behave like Roman emperors?  Perhaps the tradition of youthful pages and interns needs to be suspended until we can start electing less grandiose leaders.