From Reuters:

CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) – President Bush, under pressure over the pace and scale of American aid to Asian tsunami victims, abruptly raised the U.S. contribution to $350 million on Friday, 10 times the amount pledged just two days ago.

Good. That’s up a lot from the ludicrous $4M we offered five days ago, the boost to a shameful $15M, and the upping of that to the merely disgraceful $35M. It’s still not nearly enough from a country that claims to be the world’s economic, military and moral leader; before the election, Congress allotted $13.6 billion to rebuild states after the horrendous hurricane season. I understand that no other countries were contributing to the Help Florida fund, and that countries have a first responsibility to their own, but how about a little proportionality here?

And why the hell did it take pressure to get Bush to begin to do the right thing? It took Bush three days to announce the $35M. He is addressing this catastrophe through press releases. What does it take to make George W. Bush’s heart hurt?

When Bush was first elected he had been out of the country once or maybe twice, to Mexico and Canada. He was the son of an ambassador and a man of enormous personal wealth, yet he never bothered to leave the continent. (The rumor is that when he was elected, he didn’t have a passport.) This is usually taken as an indication of his utter lack of curiosity, definitive of his own special brand of stupidity. But it is also a sign of his lack of caring, his lack of a sense of connection to those unlike him.

This is just further confirmation that whatever a person declares himself in public to be is exactly what he is not. As W likes to say, he’s a “compassionate conservative.”

I don’t claim to know W’s soul. I could be dead wrong about him. Maybe he’s crying himself to sleep. But his actions suggest not.

I’d like to see him get on a plane for Sri Lanka.

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…both on a per capita basis and as a percentage of the nation’s wealth, America’s emergency relief in Asia and development aid to poor countries actually ranks at the bottom of the list of developed nations…

…As of yesterday, the amount the United States has pledged is eclipsed by the $96 million promised by Britain, a country with one-fifth the population, and by the $75 million vowed by Sweden, which amounts to $8.40 for each of its 9 million people. Denmark’s pledge of $15.6 million amounts to roughly $2.90 per capita.

The US donation is 12 cents per capita.

So says an article in the Boston Globe. We have donated what we spend in five hours in Iraq.

Let’s call our representatives (Congress, Senate) and to see if we can aim high and beat Sweden by pledging $3 billion. And here’s a tip: If your Congressperson or Senator is a Republican, tell him/her that donating lots of money is a crucial tactic in the war against terror. It’s no joke.

[Congressional offices seem to be closed today. Sigh.]

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As Rayne points out in comments to my blog post on the administration’s support of torture, to many Americans the events look very different. America harbors duelling narratives.

The Blue Book’s narrative is a story of creeping fascism in which the torturing of captives and suspects is just Chapter One. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are Kristallnacht and the invasion of Iraq is the invasion of the Rhineland — not in their moral equivalences, which are impossible to calibrate perfectly, but as harbingers: We should be awoken by them as the Germans were not.

The Red Book’s narrative looks at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as signs of the seriousness of the threat facing us, and as indications that we are at last taking up the task of leadership we’ve avoided for too long. Our foes treat people far worse than we do, and to stop them we have to shed the crippling moral relativism that has been 20th Century liberalism’s legacy.

The Blue Book sees recent events as steps towards a totalitarian state in which all rights are sacrificed in the name of homeland security. The Red Book sees a world of bright new democracies that drastically narrow the terrorists’ freedom to operate.

The Blue Book fears a policy of appeasement being applied internally, so it wants to draw an early line. (“First they came for the Jews and I said nothing…”) The Red Book thinks we are now emerging from an international policy of appeasement, so it’s happy to see the old lines erased.

The Blue Book worries about America becoming Germany. The Red Book worries about America becoming France.

I am, of course, over-simplifying. But narratives are more stubborn than facts because narratives give facts their relevancy and meaning. I wonder if there is a narrative we can agree on that will get us past our differences.

I am not hopeful. But if a politician were to write such a narrative, I’d vote for her…

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Apparently no one told the Santa Clara Democratic Party that it’s supposed to lick Bush’s ankles and roll over to have its belly scratched. The blog is feisty the way an opposition party should be. Elisa Camahort, who writes it, is keeping a day-by-day count-up of Bush’s outrages. Good, partisan stuff – livelier and more frequent than the DNC’s Kicking Ass blog.

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My fellow Americans, in our name our government is torturing people scooped up indiscriminately — some were turned in for a bounty, not much of a guarantee of guilt. You and I are chaining them into a fetal position for 24 hours or more without food or water, letting them shit themselves. You and I are threatening people with vicious dogs. You and I are letting them roast in unventilated cells. And then there’s this: “I saw another detainee sitting on the floor of the interview room with an Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played, and a strobe light flashing.” Is this some Clockwork Orange technique to make triple sure they hate Israel?

Now the Boston Globe reports that an FBI email says that Paul Wolfowitz approved Defense Department personnel impersonating the FBI so the DoD could avoid blame. And, freed of accountability, the torture began. Wolfowitz should be ashamed, fired and tried, not necessarily in that order.

But there’s little reason to think that this un-American buck stops with Wolfowitz. Another email refers to an executive order signed by President Bush directly authorizing torture.

Impeach Bush.

(The documents were released thanks to requests by the ACLU. Don’t forget to renew your membership for the new year.)

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According to the NY Times, Bush has cut our contribution to global food aid by $100M. As Mathew Gross comments: “While he flushes billions into his war in Iraq and trillions into his senior-fleecing scheme. Nice man. Great moral values, there.”

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Chris Nolan publishes the second half of her critique of MoveOn.org at Personal Democracy. Lots of great information and an animosity I don’t share. MoveOn isn’t perfect, and if it were it still wouldn’t revolutionize politics or create a new movement, but I count it as an important ally in our joint struggle. Anyway, the two-part series is well worth reading. (Part 1 is here.)

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Fascinating back and forth over at Kos. Kos calls Zack Exley, who was in charge of Kerry’s Net campaign, “an idiot.” Zack is anything but an idiot. He’s a good guy personally who has spent most of his life working fulltime for his political beliefs. I respect him, and am grateful for what he did using the Net to do traditional things, like raise money. I am certainly more of a believer than he is in the power of p2p politics, but of course campaigns also have to get the offline basics rights; just ask Howard Dean the day after Iowa.

Zack posts a spirited defense in which he vows allegiance to the Internet vision, so long as it’s not seen as a replacement for the traditional tasks. Who could argue? And does anyone disagree that the Kerry campaign would have done better if it had also let loose the dogs of the Web?

Here’s a response by kmthurman with a long discussion thread.

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Well, he’s out now, but John Perry Barlow’s account of his arrest for carrying controlled substances in the rights-free zones we call airports is a must-read. Here’s one snippet that happens not to be part of the rollicking and terrifying narrative:

In general, the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security have been extremely unresponsive and have instructed Covenant Security to stonewall us as well. We have asked them whether they knew who I was when they searched my bag and whether my identity had any bearing on the exquisite granularity of their search methods. They’ve refused to answer on grounds of national security. We have asked them for the training manuals and search guidelines under which Covenant Security was operating. No dice. We asked whether their x-ray machines were tuned to identify drugs as well as explosives, a technical capacity some of these units possess. Sorry. That would be SSI (or Sensitive Security Information.) We have inquired whether Covenant Security had any incentive program which rewarded its employees for discovering evidence of illegal activity. Again, preserving the safety of all Americans prohibits a response. At one point, they were even insisting that it would be threat to national security if the Covenant Security employee who allegedly discovered the purported contraband were called upon to testify, thereby abrogating my constitutional right to confront my accuser, but they seem to have relented on this point.

JP is fighting this one. Here, in a roundabout way, is why I think it important that he win.

Last night, I wasd talking with a friend I love who said that he had been talking with Michael Turk, head of the Bush e-campaign. (Here and here on Turk.) My friend said that Turk said that the Bush blog had no commenting because they were afraid people would say things that would alienate Bush’s fundamentalist supporters. My friend said, “I was impressed. I’d thought that they’d shut off comments because they were into command and control. But they had good, political reasons for doing so.”

Of course they did. That’s how command and control structures get put in place. Generally, someone doesn’t say, “I favor control, so no comments!” Instead, there’s a direct reason that can be debated by reasonable people, but behind it is the impulse to control, and ahead of it is a system that’s locked down as tight as the bolts that stick your car seat to the frame.

In the same way, totalitarianism generally doesn’t happen because people say, “Gosh, isn’t totalitarianism great?” It happens through a series of steps that can be debated on their own grounds. The routine violation of privacy to prevent terrorism is one of those steps. Behind it is the idea that the dangers of the age justify the abrogation of each and every right of citizens. Ahead of it is a nation that values fear over freedom.

Fear the small steps.

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Glenn Fleishman comments on my blogging of Jeff Jarvis‘ interlineal rant against the FCC’s Michael Powell’s op ed in the NY Times. Glenn gets all reasonable and raises a key question:

is there a line that shouldn’t be crossed on air and on TV? That is, full-front nudity: yes/no? All obscenities: yes/no? Horrible violence: yes/no?

If the answer is no even provisionally, then you have to have objective standards and a body set up to help determine and enforce those standards.

If not, then, in the words of Marge Simpson in 2020, “You know, Fox turned into a hardcore sex channel so gradually, I didn’t even notice. Yeesh!”

[Note: I’m pretty sure what I say in the following is wrong. Unfortunately, it’s not wrong in interesting ways.]

As long as the “air waves” are licensed by the federal government — which I hope won’t be for all that long (see here and here, too) — then I’m not going to take the absolutist free speech position. IMO, there are lines that public broadcasters should not cross. Otherwise, I’d have to say that I think it’s fine if all the licensed broadcasters showed nothing but __________ (fill in the blank with whatever you think is bad bad content, e.g., Nazi propaganda, Playboy after Dark, Three’s Company re-runs, etc. ). I don’t mind the government exercising some control over what can be put over public “air waves” or on billboards in the public air. So, yes, I’m “merely” disagreeing over where to draw the line. I just don’t see anything “merely” about it.

So, for me the problem with the Janet Jackson fine wasn’t that all censorship is wrong. Rather, fining CBS so much money was ludicrous and inconsistent. I mean, broadcast TV is endlessly smutty. From blowjobs to taking it up the ass to dildos to how to remove semen from your grandmother’s dentures, there isn’t a joke that isn’t made on mainstream TV. And the jokes depend on the fact that this material is supposedly not suitable for TV. The jokes work by titillating us. So, why the big fine for showing a couple of square millimeters of Janet Jackson’s nipple? Why not even a nod toward the bottomless violence on TV? And why bow to the relative handful of people who complained?

In other words, I’m your basic namby-pamby liberal. But I disagree with the larger master narrative at work among many who think as I do. That narrative says that an unregulated market will tend towards coarseness and vulgarity: If the licensed broadcasters had no controls over acceptable content, they would escalate — tit for tat, so to speak — towards on-screen sex and violence, driving out all other content, if only because shock garners attention, and today’s shock is tomorrow’s been-there-saw-that.

I think that master narrative is probably wrong. In the unregulated world of cable TV, we get the realistic language of The Sopranos, the child-safe snot-based Nickelodeon, some science channels, and dickless softcore porn at 11 pm. As everyone has noticed, we also get 10x the innovation and 3x the quality compared with what comes over the public air waves. Cable’s relatively unregulated market has tended towards increased quality, not a race to the bottom.

And yet, so long as the licensed broadcasters have any claim to being the free, common denominator of mass communications in this country, I think it reasonable to expect them to enable the public to regulate their own viewing regimes. People shouldn’t routinely stumble across stuff that outrages their moral sensibilities. That means that if you spin the dial, you should feel confident that although your children may see a woman mounting a horse, they will not come across a snippet of the vice versa. If you enjoy Will and Grace‘s faux sauciness, you should nevertheless feel confident that you’re not going to come back from commercial to see Jack wiping cum off his chin. And if you’re watching the SuperBowl and think that breasts are immoral, you shouldn’t have to worry that you’re going to be flashed during the halftime special. (On the other hand, if you’re CBS, you probably didn’t even need to be told that that was inappropriate, much less be fined mass quantities.)

Who decides this? Ultimately the licensing agency, but only as a last resort. And in proportion. And using published guidelines and common sense — There’s a difference between “Fuck! I can’t feel my legs, Private Ryan!” and “Fuck me harder with your privates, Ryan!”

The strictly Libertarian view is attractive theoretically. But we don’t live in a theoretical world. Also, many Libertarians undervalue the role of the community in favor of the individual. I disagree. Communities are real and are valuable. Unfortunately, the USA is not a community, so applying community standards is difficult. Nevertheless, I’m pretty certain that videos of people blowing their pets shouldn’t be broadcast at 8pm on America’s Favorite Home Videos, and any theory that says otherwise I’m willing to declare a failed theory.

I’m actually pretty conflicted by this topic. (Hence the length of this post.) I recognize the argument that because cable has turned out well — a range of programming suitable for different tastes and a self-rating system more finely detailed than that for movies — maybe deregulating the content of the public airwaves would work out the same. And if the licensed networks were all we had, I’d be more concerned. But, broadcast TV is so bad and most of the country has better alternatives. So, I’m inclined to say: Keep broadcast TV relatively safe and let it suck itself to death.

So long as FCC is in the business of licensing spectrum, it probably also has to worry about content. But it should worry a lot less and a lot better.

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