Here and There

Former White House lawyer John Dean, author of Worse Than Watergate (a book written about Bush administration mismanagements other than the illegal NSA wiretapping), testified today on behalf of Feingold’s censure resolution.

Orrin Hatch, crusty self-righteous Utahan, accused Democrats of trying to “score political points” by passing the resolution. I wonder: Would he say the same if the Democrats were in court trying to get a $50 fine imposed on Bush for mutilating and eating babies? I’ve heard of diplomatic immunity, sure. But isn’t the point of the role of president to have one of us in there? The (ostensibly) most-qualified of us? But, at the end of the day, one of us, beholden to same laws and the same Constitution?

But seriously, who am I? And what do I know?

Thanks to Jesus, who tipped me off to Brad Blog, who was good enough to have finally posted the Feingold Daily Show Clip. It’s good stuff.

Feingold/Stewart ‘08! Campaign Slogan: These Jews Can’t Loose!

Carrying on the new-found tradition of Here and There Music Surveys, I have a new one: Blonde Redhead.

This band has been a favorite since the days of waking up at 4 a.m. to open up a café in Austin. They’ve never let me down, recorded or live.

But I feel I’ve set some standards with the survey, so I’ll narrow it down to my top three favorite albums, in no certain order:

Fake Can Be Just As Good
In An Expression of the Inexpressible
Misery Is A Butterfly

Just like last time, feel free to write in a contender of your own.

Okay, I’m off to listen to every song I own by them now…

Saw Broken Flowers finally. A few days earlier, I finally got around to watching Coffee and Cigarettes.

As a career-long Jim Jarmusch fan, I have to say Coffee and Cigarettes didn’t do it for me. But Broken Flowers did, kind of.

First, as many reviews have noted, Coffee and Cigarettes is a movie better viewed for its trees than its forest. It’s a collection of vignettes centered around or having to do with people sitting down drinking coffee, talking, and/or smoking cigarettes. Jarmusch seems to be reminiscing for a time when more of us did that. Your blogger is guilty, to be sure.

So I went into the film with a certain nostalgia-bias.

Still, some of the trees are worth climbing and sitting in, while others are better chopped down and discarded.

The good:

“Somewhere in Californa,” starring Iggy Pop and Tom Waits
“Jack Shows Meg His Tesla Coil,” starring White Stripes members Meg and Jack White
“Champagne,” starring Taylor Mead and Bill Rice
“Delirium,” starring GZA, RZA, and Bill Murray

Honorable Mention:

“Cousins?” staring Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan

The rest? Eh…

On to Broken Flowers.

This movie is Murray at his tragic/comic best.

Brief capsule (by way of avoiding the spoiler):
Slightly-older-than-middle age man Don Johnston gets dumped, again. Same day, he gets a mysterious letter from a past flame announcing a son he never knew he had. Johnston is lethargic and indifferent (two of Murray’s top acting attributes), but is spurred by his neighbor, the unstoppable, ebullient Winston (Jeffrey Wright), a self-tailored private eye.

The movie unfolds as Johnston searches for the author of the letter, taking him to the homes and workplaces of girlfriends from 20 years prior.

The most memorable of the exes is actually Laura, played by Sharon Stone. Maybe it was the primacy effect, or maybe it was her teenage daughter’s naked ass parading around the living room.

Of course it was Murray who stole the show, although Wright’s Winston cast a pretty large shadow in scenes shared by the two actors.

Overall, Broken Flowers, true to the Jarmusch mold of uncomfortable, realistic silence and inertia, did a good job of tracing one man’s tragic past in a comedic light. Not a bad movie…

Oh, and the soundtrack is excellent, featuring several tracks from Mulatu Astatqe and their album Éthiopiques, Vol. 4: Ethio Jazz & Musique Instrumentale (1969-1974).

Where’s Russ?

We web-viewers were promised a glimpse of Russ Feingold on your program this week. Where the clip at?

Update: Far as I can tell, this was a giant tease. No clip has been posted still. I was informed by a trusted source that the appearance was via satellite, but that doesn’t seem reason enough not to post it online. For shame, Daily Show…

Just noticed that Feingold was on the Daily Show tonight. I’ll link as soon as the clip is available.

Can’t wait to see this one…

Okay, that’s it: I’m starting a Russ Feingold subcategory, under another new one—politics. Why not? It’s nearly half of what I write about.

But man oh man is Russ racking up points with yours truly.

Read about Feingold’s appearance on Charlie Rose over at Blogging Out Loud, who got it from Digby. (Crooks and Liars has video.)

Feingold isn’t afraid to say what needs to be said, and he’s not just blowing hot air:

“The idea that Democrats don’t think it’s a winning thing to say that we will stand up for the rule of law and for checking abuse of power by the executive—I just can’t believe that Democrats don’t think that isn’t something, not only that we can win on, but it does, in fact, make the base of our party, which is so important, feel much better about the Democrats. The Republicans care deeply about making the base of their party feels energized. What about the people of our party who believe in the Democratic Party especially because they fight for the American values of standing up for our rights and civil liberties?”

He also suggested that the reaction to the censure motion reeked of October 2002, only this time there’s not an election next month, just a bunch of Democrats with their tails stuck between their legs.

With Bush’s approval ratings resting just south of hell, the Democrats’ handling of these issues (censure, Iraq, the economy) is precisely what they should fear. Not standing up, not being the forceful minority gives the public (political consumers, as it were) no incentive to buy the product to replace the one that so obviously doesn’t work. Why not just duct tape the broken model up instead?

The Democratic party would do well to rally behind Russ Feingold now, not necessarily as its presidential candidate (way too early—wait till January 2007 at the earliest), but more as its national spokesman. Dean does a good job of articulating, but not of rallying. The public stopped caring about that guy years ago. Feingold combines a fresh face with a spotless record on all the big issues.

My mom and her generation had Kennedy. My generation pretty much had/has Clinton. I’d love to see a new generation of young people start learning about Feingold, and come to some sense of approval that he has what it takes to lead the party.

Update: Daily Kos has a new straw poll showing Feingold way, way out ahead of the next closest contender (Clark, whom I think would make a great running mate).

The San Francisco Examiner is still alive and kickin’.

Hard copies can be found in boxes and BART cars all over town, always free-of-charge.

And their website hasn’t missed a beat.

A few weeks ago, the site’s redesign was unveiled, porting it into the early twenty-first century. Here’s what it looked like until then:

Looks and feels a lot like the dead-tree version, much the way a site like www.nytimes.com/ does.

This new iteration of the Examiner online might as well not be associated with the version littering MUNI buses citywide. It looks like a combination blog/generic email forward, with an almost total lack of personality, but easy maneuverability. While they’ve retained the Examiner red in their logo:

…they’ve stripped the site of almost all color (except in ads) and removed all serifs and other typographical decoration.

Yes, much like some other freshly renovated sites, the paper has chosen to tone it down, sacrificing flare for usability.

I have to agree with ess-eff.com that the disappearance of RSS sucks hard.

But I don’t think this redesign of the Examiner makes the site any less attractive in the long run. They still do a better job than their competitors at local news. And they stay on par when it comes to national and international coverage, with feeds from the AP.

It’s unclear what owner Phil Anschutz’s ultimate plans are for the paper. But I applaud its effort to stay competitive in a town dominated by such a failure of a paper (Chronicle). Anschutz’s personal conservative leanings aside, I hope to see the Examiner stick it out, one day rising to the stature of its glory days.

Just how divorced from reality do you have to be to keep your job in the Bush administration? Well, I guess if the point is to emulate and worship (deify) your boss, Donald Rumsfeld tops the list of loyal sheep.

In an op-ed in today’s Washington Post, the secretary of state who should’ve resigned years ago has the gall to claim that history will see our little “adventure” in Iraq as a success. He dismisses the trees for the forest, basically, warning his readers not to trust “daily headlines, blogs on Web sites or the latest sensational attack” for a true sense of how things are going.

Yeah, what a stupid, stupid move that would be. Daily car bombings can’t overshadow the fact that the electrical grid still isn’t operating anywhere close to 100 percent.

And don’t let those pithy body counts get in the way of the fact that former Prime Minister Eyad Alawi today asserted that Iraq is, indeed, in the midst of a civil war.

Rumsfeld says, “Another significant transformation has been in the size, capability and responsibility of Iraqi security forces. And this is vitally important, because it is Iraqis, after all, who must build and secure their own nation.” But these Iraqis are still getting killed, and must obviously need our help for the foreseeable future. Otherwise…uh, why are we there?

While Rumsfeld is not wrong to accentuate the positive, he cannot rightly dismiss the hard facts of what’s going on day-to-day. American military, Iraqi military, coalition military, Iraqi civilians and politicians…they’re all increasingly getting caught in the crosshairs of a bloody struggle. And it’s so very arrogant to sit at your desk in Washington and utter statements like, “To be sure, violence of various stripes continues to slow Iraq’s progress.” Much of what has gone wrong can be directly tied back to Bush administration incompetence and/or ignorance. It’s the same story we saw just off our own gulf last August and September with Hurricane Katrina.

The point is Rumsfeld and Bush are lighting the candles on this third anniversary of the war in Iraq, when in reality they should be doing everything in their enormous stock of power to try and put the fires out. And they shouldn’t be eating the cake, either.

In yet another lame attempt to see who’s reading, as well as to give Here and There a (possibly) needed first makeover, I’ve decided to test out some themes.

In the world of WordPress-powered blogs, themes can make or break your site. Well, maybe it’s not so extreme. But themes are just as vital to the personality of a blog as is the content.

And since I only write Here and There, and so rarely read/visit it (as my many typos will attest), I’m gonna leave it up to you, dear reader, to weigh in.

I’m gonna change the theme on a weekly basis, hopefully every Sunday night, until we all settle on something we can really use. Please give me your thoughts via comments. I want this to be a public discussion. This first one is called “Flex,” which was designed by Phu Ly. I know…terrible name, but I think I like it. What do you think?

Also, in general, I’m pretty good about taking suggestions, criticism, and recommendations when it comes to this slice of the Internet.

Thanks.

Love, Jeff

Now that Senator Russ Feingold has called for the censure of Bush, it’s time (for me, at least) to take a closer look at the only person I’ve said I’d choose for president in 2008.

Feingold is often short-bio’d as the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act, one of a few against the Iraq war from the beginning, and being solidly against the Bush tax cuts. In liberal legislative politics, that’s the triumvirate no other member of our upper house of Congress can claim.

He opposed Condeleeza Rice as secretary of State. He opposed Alberto Gonzalez as attorney general.

He is the co-author of the last great attempt to rid politics of a disproportionate big business influence. With John McCain, he wrote legislation (since known as the McCain-Feingold bill) that attempted to prohibit soft money (from Wikipedia: “indirect, unregulated…donations to organizations that support a candidate but are not officially affiliated to his or her campaign”), ban third party ads funded by soft money, and required the reporting of donations over $10,000, among other provisions.

Here’s Feingold debating Gonzalez on the legality of wiretapping this past January.

And now, the censure motion. Monday, shortly after Feingold introduced the motion, Senate Majority Leader Bill “Psychic Diagnoses” Frist pushed it to the Senate floor for a vote.

And, typically, a large majority of the Democratic caucus in the Senate watched the ball hit the ground.

(I have to wonder if the hypocritical Republicans impeached Clinton for lying about a blow job only so the nation and Congress would grow weary of the process, allowing this President to get away with the true crimes he’s getting away with.)

The NYTimes editorial page, averaging a zero-sum this week, advocates against censure, arguing that an investigation is needed instead. That may be true, but we have a confession from the suspect. That shouldn’t be discounted.

There’s also the argument (espoused by, among others, my representative in Congress, Nancy Pelosi) that we’re a mere eight months from midterm elections, so let’s just let the legislative process take hold and the people will correct the system. I just won’t comment on that, as much as I believe in the importance of voting.

If censure is mostly a symbolic legislative gesture, why not go forward, Republicans and Democrats alike? The president is close to being a lame duck, with ratings in the mid- to low-30s and his beloved majority party showing obvious signs of fracture. Censure shows those constituents you need this November that you have the independence and the principle to stand up to acts of criminal overreach by the Executive Branch. The facts are already in, and they say overwhelmingly (despite Arlen Spector’s objections) that the administration broke not only the law, but the Constitution.

A lot of groups are trying to draft Feingold to run for President in 2008. I think it’s a great idea, but a little early. I like Feingold where he is, in the Senate, raising a nice amount of calm, collected hell.

I know as much about architecture as I know about wine. But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate both, does it? I know a good building when I see it, much as I know a good vintage when I taste one.

I was up at 20th and Church today, looking toward downtown and SOMA, and I once again noticed the new federal building, which is still under construction, but is starting to really take shape. The building was designed by Morphosis architect Brandon Welling and team.

The models are gorgeous, and the actual building doesn’t disappoint, with a mostly glass skin covering a concrete and steel skeleton. The panes are placed at very odd and attractive angles that draw your eyes all over the place. Kind of dizzying, in fact. Kind of like our federal government.

In a couple of past posts, I’ve extolled the architectural virtues of another new building in SF—the de Young museum. For me, this new building rivals the de Young in its risky, edgy “behavior.” In fact, I like using that word to describe this new movement in architecture—building with attitude. Haha…

Polls are like reports from the DEA: they’re constantly in flux, and offer contradictory data over time.

Not lately, in the case of President Bush’s approval ratings. The latest number is 37 percent, and it’s been under 40 percent for at least five months now.

Two thoughts.

First, where have these six-in-ten people been the last five years? Paul Krugman wrote a smarmy op-ed in today’s Times about Bruce Bartlett, a wonky author who speaks for some of them (available through the paper’s online subscription service). Smarmy because Krugman poses the same question, and refers to the time a few years ago when Bartlett derided him as unpatriotic, among other things.

Glad to have Bartlett and the others with us finally, but come on….

Second, who the hell are the 37 out of 100 who still approve of Bush’s work, if it can be called that? I mean, sure, the country is big. The interior fly-over states are immense. I’m sure of that, otherwise a trip to New York from here would take 45 minutes. But I also figured they were sparsely populated and hardly registered a blip on the polling radar.

What I always forget is that these are the people responsible for Bush’s time in office. They’re the hard-and-fasters, the “stay the course” folk who are searching and searching for a designer to graft W.’s face onto Mt. Rushmore. They exist, often as close as the Sacramento Delta, and they’re not changing their minds.

It’s only possible in America, the most blissfully ignorant nation in the history of the world. After all, Nixon enjoyed 39 percent at the height of Watergate, and an astounding, truly mind-boggling 24 percent (one in four, for those not doing the math) when he resigned.

True, you’ll never poll 100 percent or anything close to it. But there’s a frustration that stems from “how do they not see it the way I do?” that will always weigh on personal political opinion. It’s nice to see Bush’s deeds starting to catch up with him, and to stick with public mood. But the fact that it took so long, and that there are still so many stragglers, is enough to make me want to…resign.

I refuse to go into why I haven’t been writing. It’s not like anyone is actually reading anyway. I mean, my inbox is full of angry complaints and forwards and animated gifs, but that’s all from the same deranged teenager in South Dakota who recently knocked up his girlfriend. I told this poor soul, he and his lady have bigger fish to fry, but he insists I update.

Honestly, the thing with Here and There is that I write when I feel like it, so I don’t ever imagine having a loyal, devoted following, some mass of people screaming and rioting and RSS-feeding.

The other day it did occur to me that I don’t write about what I do for a living. Well, what I do when I can do it. When there’s work.

That “thing I do” is copyediting (one word). I could be called a copy editor (two words). I really hope those of you who’ve found grammatical errors and typos in these posts are having a hearty laugh right about now, in case you didn’t already know this about me.

So, there’s that.

There’s a copyediting topic I think about a lot. It often comes up in questions people ask of me, maybe when I’m walking down the street and don’t have Chicago 15 right in front of me.

When questions seem unanswerable, and when the cause of that lack of attainability is due to conflicting or unclear rules, and house style can’t come to the rescue, what are we to do?

My thinking is that colloquialisms should dictate. True, the written and the spoken word are distant cousins, once- or twice-removed even. But theirs is a blood relation, and the head voices with which we read are strikingly similar to the voices emitting from our mouths. So why not write like we talk? (This is meant as a rhetorical question, but if you care to, let me know your two cents.)

That’s all for now. As for those mistakes you see in these pages, give me a break. Everyone needs an editor.