Straight Up |: June 2008 Archives

Does everyone know what the Straight Talk Express would bring to the White House if voters are stupid enough to elect Mr. Gasbag?

You would think so. Even The Wall Street Journal knows. It would mean "The Return of Dr. No."

And what does Dr. No (a k a Phil Gramm), the Gasbag's top economic adviser, regard as a signal achievement? "I consider defeating Hillary health care as one of my greatest accomplishments," he told The Journal in an interview published over the weekend.

Here's another of his greatest accomplishments:

His accusers charge that he nearly single-handedly torpedoed the housing and financial market when he wrote the laws that took down the Depression-era barriers between investment and commercial banks.

Or as David Corn put it last May in Mother Jones:

Eight years ago, as part of a decades-long anti-regulatory crusade, Gramm pulled a sly legislative maneuver that greased the way to the multibillion-dollar subprime meltdown. ...

But Gramm's most cunning coup on behalf of his friends in the financial services industry — friends who gave him millions over his 24-year congressional career — came on December 15, 2000. ...

In essence, Wall Street's biggest players (which, thanks to Gramm's earlier banking deregulation efforts, now incorporated everything from your checking account to your pension fund) ran a secret casino.

Dr. No once had presidential ambitions himself, but his 1996 bid for the BananaRepublican nomination failed. "I'm too ugly to be president," he says. (That didn't stop LBJ.)

Meanwhile, he remains as ugly as ever. Since leaving Washington in 2002, the former Senator has kept "intentionally invisible," he says, so he could "devote his full energies" to Wall Street wheeling and dealing.

He's also shameless:

I recently told Ed Whitacre [former CEO of AT&T, who retired with a $158 million pay package] he was probably the most exploited worker in American history. ... His severance package should have been billions.

"Almost certainly," The Journal says, Mr. Gasbag would make Dr. No the Secretary of the Treasury.

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

Postscript: July 19 — Not to excuse my staff of thousands for being laggard, but NYC's sweltering heat would put anyone to sleep. So here, finally, is an update: Dr. No's resignation as co-chairman of the Gasbag's presidential campaign makes a Treasury appointment very unlikely if, gawd help us, the Gasbag were to win the election.

In case you were sleeping, too, the reason for Dr. No's resignation was his shitbag remarks.

You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession.

We have sort of become a nation of whiners.

The mainstream commentariat deemed that insensitive and out of touch. Gee, ya think?

When Rupert Murdoch said The Wall Street Journal would target The New York Times in the competition for readers, he was talking about a lot more than prose style. But if you're taking aim at The Times it helps to show that WSJ reporters know how to write, really write.

Long before Murdoch took over The Journal, it had an enviable tradition of reporting and editing factual news in a "storytelling" format. This was not unique to The Journal -- "storytelling" has been a tiresome buzzword for years in the news business -- but WSJ reporters have been trained to do it better than most.

As a follow-up to yesterday's admittedly inexact NYT-WSJ comparison, here's a textbook example of two front-page ledes that offer a precise contrast in news writing. One is a grabber. It presents the facts in human terms, with dramatic appeal. The other is a dull recitation. It presents the facts as legal abstractions, with no appeal at all.

Exhibit A:

In the final act to a legal drama that began with the devastating Exxon Valdez oil spill 19 years ago, a splintered Supreme Court sliced $2 billion from punitive damages imposed on Exxon Mobil Corp., leaving fishermen, native Alaskans and local landowners with just 20% of the award approved by a federal appeals court.

The decision left Exxon pleased and the Alaskans frustrated, but its impact may reach well beyond the icy shores of Prince William Sound. Due to the unique area of law the lawsuit invoked, the justices had their first opportunity to reveal their approach to punitive damages when drawing on a blank slate, rather than applying state laws as they have in prior cases.

Exhibit B:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday reduced what had once been a $5 billion punitive damages award against Exxon Mobil to about $500 million. The ruling essentially concluded a legal saga that started when the Exxon Valdez, a supertanker, struck a reef and spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into the Prince William Sound in Alaska in 1989.

The decision may have broad implications for limits on punitive damages generally. Punitive damages, which are meant to punish and deter, are imposed on top of compensatory damages, which aim to make plaintiffs whole.

Exhibit A: is from today's Journal. Exhibit B: is from today's Times.

I should also mention that the entire stories bear out the contrast in spades.

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

Now that The Wall Street Journal is reporting general news as never before, one of my small pleasures is to compare matching stories in The New York Times. The comparisons are not always exact, but they are revealing just the same.

Here, for example, are two excerpts. Both show the so-called Straight Talker for what he really is — a pandering gasbag. But one story does it better than the other. You be the judge.

Exhibit A (160 words):

Sen. John McCain is putting energy policy at the center of his presidential campaign, embracing a diverse array of positions that defies easy categorization.

He is for more oil drilling and also for alternatives to oil. He wants to drill off the coasts but not in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He supports subsidies for nuclear power and clean-coal technology, but has opposed them for ethanol, solar and wind power.

He wants to lower gasoline prices by temporarily suspending the federal gas tax. But he wants to raise the price of gas with a cap-and-trade system that punishes polluting industries.

In environmentally conscious Portland, Ore., he praised wind power. In Texas oil country he supported more drilling. In rural Missouri he urged more nuclear power. In California he praised fuel-efficiency standards.

"It's all over the map," said Bob Ebel, a senior adviser and energy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "I'm just sort of scratching my head."

Exhibit B (162 words):

The electoral energy wars have raged from Florida — where Mr. McCain has proposed offshore oil drilling — to California and now Las Vegas. The candidates are trying to define how they would tackle the sharp spiral upward in gasoline prices and its ever more severe impact on the economy, and so far their policy proposals are poles apart.

Mr. McCain emphasizes greatly expanded drilling, offshore and on public lands. And he would revitalize the nearly moribund nuclear power industry, noting that France draws much of its energy from nuclear plants.

He suffered a bit of an embarrassment on Tuesday in Santa Barbara, Calif., as he heard his own invited panelist, Michael Feeney, executive director of the Land Trust for Santa Barbara, worry aloud about offshore drilling. "It makes me nervous to think about those who are proposing to drain America's offshore oil and gas reserves as quickly as possible in the hopes of driving down the price of gasoline," Mr. Feeney said.

Exhibit A is from yesterday's Journal. Exhibit B is from today's Times.

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

From The Writer's Almanac (last item):

On this day in 1215, King John of England put his seal to the Magna Carta, one of the first historical documents to state that subjects have rights beyond the power of their rulers.

The right to a trial by jury and the right of habeas corpus, which prevents one from being unlawfully imprisoned, have been extrapolated from the Magna Carta.

King John was more or less coerced into agreeing to the document by a group of barons who were upset at his disastrous and costly foreign policy.

Although actually a reactionary move by the barons to insure their feudal rights, the Magna Carta took on symbolic significance as one of the earliest instances of the law possessing greater authority than the king. "Magna Carta" means "great charter" in Latin.

Via Leon Freilich.

Postscript: June 18 -- Mr. Bush v. the Bill of Rights

In the waning months of his tenure, [the Bullshitter-in-Chief] and his allies are once again trying to scare Congress into expanding the president's powers to spy on Americans without a court order.

Which lede do you like?

1. Jess Bravin in The Wall Street Journal:

The Supreme Court ruled that foreign prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay may challenge their detention before a federal judge, a historic decision that rebuffs the Bush administration's years-long effort to curtail the legal rights of terrorism suspects.

2. Linda Greenhouse in The New York Times:

The Supreme Court on Thursday delivered its third consecutive rebuff to the Bush administration's handling of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, ruling 5 to 4 that the prisoners there have a constitutional right to go to federal court to challenge their continued detention.

3. Robert Barnes in The Washington Post:

A deeply divided Supreme Court yesterday ruled that terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have a right to seek their release in federal court, delivering a historic rebuke to the Bush administration and Congress for policies that the majority said compromised, in the name of national security, the Constitution's guarantee of liberty.

4. David Savage in the Los Angeles Times:

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected for the third time President Bush's policy of holding foreign prisoners under exclusive control of the military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, ruling that the men have a right to seek their freedom before a federal judge.

I like 1 and 4. (Oops, I meant 1 and 3.)

But Keith Olbermann offered the pièce de résistance, namely Jonathan Turley, on "Countdown":

Mark Morford usually gets it right. (He's one of the savviest, funniest columnists around.) This time he flubbed it, methinks. Musta taken a happy pill when he wrote his latest. It appeared this morning:

Barack Obama isn't really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway.

This is what I find myself offering up more and more in response to the whiners and the frowners and to those with broken or sadly dysfunctional karmic antennae -- or no antennae at all -- to all those who just don't understand and maybe even actively recoil against all this chatter about Obama's aura and feel and MLK/JFK-like vibe. ...

Don't buy any of it? Think that's all a bunch of tofu-sucking New Agey bulls-- and Obama is really a dangerously elitist political salesman whose inexperience will lead us further into darkness because, when you're talking national politics, nothing, really, ever changes? I understand. I get it. I often believe it myself.

Not this time.

Mark apparently believes in "Obama the Magic Negro," per David Ehrenstein, whose half blackness / half whiteness gives him a certain authority on the subject (not to mention his gayness, which isn't evident here, and his pop-culture expertiseness, which is). David wrote this back in March 2007:

As every carbon-based life form on this planet surely knows, Barack Obama, the junior Democratic senator from Illinois, is running for president. Since making his announcement, there has been no end of commentary about him in all quarters -- musing over his charisma and the prospect he offers of being the first African American to be elected to the White House.

But it's clear that Obama also is running for an equally important unelected office, in the province of the popular imagination -- the "Magic Negro." ...

Like a comic-book superhero, Obama is there to help, out of the sheer goodness of a heart we need not know or understand. For as with all Magic Negroes, the less real he seems, the more desirable he becomes. If he were real, white America couldn't project all its fantasies of curative black benevolence on him.

And then there's Manuel Otero, who also got it right earlier this week:

Doubtless, Obama's mission has a lot to do with an urgent need of the ruling class to transcend, at least perceptually, the race divide in the United States. Doubtless, this urgent mission has a lot to do with the changing demographics in the U.S., the growth of the so-called Latino minority, and the need to create a new integrated, post-racial majority, that could marshall the electoral processes towards a new "American" consensus.

Yet, Obama's mission has more to do with providing safe channels of political mobilization that creates the illusion of empowerment without actually going there. Obama, the master illusionist he is, could believe his own fairy tale, and attempt some ground-shifting ventures on his own, and then most probably he will be quickly disposed of, or he could try to play out his role as scripted, and be washed away by general frustration, cynicism and disillusionment.

Either way, the real owners of the U.S. will gain a few more years to clean up the Bush-Cheney mess, distract the masses, obscure any real political goals, and consolidate their hold on key strategic world resources.

A'course it was my friend Bill Osborne who pointed out the Otero to me.

Postscript: June 9 -- Not to queer the prospect of keeping the BananaRepublican heir apparent out of the White House, but I meant to post Ralph Nader's remarks from a recent interview in The Wall Street Journal. Like this one:

I think the central issue in politics in this country is the domination of corporations over our government, and over our elections, and over so many things where commercial values used to be verboten . . . What's happened in the last 25 years is an overwhelming swarm of commercial supremacy, and he, Obama, has bought into that.