Pierre's Web

Boiling a Frog

Bruce Schneier has an excellent piece (Slouching toward Big Brother) in news.com about how we are gradually letting our civil liberties slip away without a whole lot of discussion.

Reminds me of the story about boiling a frog: if you drop a live frog in boiling water, it will leap out immediately. But if you drop a frog in tepid water and gradually turn up the heat, it won't notice and will eventually be frog soup. I don't know if that story is true, but it's certainly apocryphal.

That's what Bruce argues is happening to us. We're the frog, by the way.

This is also related to the point I just made about the tax cut debate, or lack thereof: we seem to have been doing a lot of things in this country since September 11th without a whole lot of discussion. That's understandable, but it's not right.

Don't Cut My Taxes, Please!

President Bush will unveil his budget next week. During his State of the Union address, he said he wants Congress to make his earlier tax cuts permanent. Remember those? Remember the $1.35 trillion tax cut?

They're the ones that helped take our country from a budget surplus of more than $200 billion in 2000 to a budget deficit of almost $500 billion in 2004.

The good news was that the tax cuts were due to expire in 2010. The bad news is that President Bush wants to make them permanent, at a cost of adding another $2.2 trillion to our deficit over the next 10 years.

Now, let's be clear. Lowering taxes for those that need the most relief is a good idea. But for people like me, tax cuts are a waste of money that could go to worthier causes. Bush's tax cut gave the top 1% tax relief nearly 90 times larger than those in the middle 20%. That's not only unfair, it's a waste.

If you want to have a real impact on real people, shift the cuts toward those that need them most. Not to people like me.

UPDATE: Here is the ad from Bush in 30 Seconds that most closely matches this topic.

TypePad

I've just imported my blog into TypePad. After my disk crash, I figure why not let somebody else worry about keeping the system up?

Disk crash

I had a disk crash and lost my MoveableType database... it's in the process of being restored from backups now but things may not be fully restored, since the disk had media errors that prevented successful daily backups for a few weeks, it looks like.

Let me know if you spot anything broken. Technology sucks.

Joe Trippi Out

First Clay Shirky suggests in an excellent piece that the Howard Dean campaign's exemplary use of the Internet (and social software) may have contributed to its disappointing showing in Iowa and New Hampshire. Then, Howard Dean's campaign manager, Joe Trippi, who was also the architect of Dean's Internet strategy, resigns (or is fired).

I guess political campaigns and the Internet have this much in common: instant feedback and near-instant reaction to that feedback. Let's just hope this doesn't diminish the perceived value of the kind of inclusive campaign Joe Trippi ran for Howard Dean.

Interview by Clark campaign

Wesley Clark's campaign web site posts a question-and-answer interview with me on why I'm supporting Clark for president.

Read on if you want to read the text of the interview here, copied and pasted from the above link.

When terrorists criticize terrorists

From Secrecy News:

AN ISLAMIST CRITIQUE OF AL QAIDA

The actions of al Qaida in its jihad against the United States
have measurably retarded the objectives that the organization
claims to pursue, as evidenced by the defeat of the Taliban
regime and continued U.S. military action in the region.

This assertion would be unremarkable, except that it is now
being advanced by leaders of the Egyptian Islamic Group,
al-Gama'at al-Islamiyya, which itself is designated by the U.S.
State Department as a terrorist organization.

The Islamist critique of al Qaida appears in a new book,
reviewed and excerpted this week in the London Arabic newspaper
Asharq al Awsat.

See "Egyptian Islamist Leaders Fault Al Qaida's Strategy,"
Asharq al Awsat, January 11-12, 2004, translated by the CIA's
Foreign Broadcast Information Service, here:

http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/ig_bk.htm

Wesley Clark bares all, fights secrecy

Last week Wes Clark made a speech on open government where he drew attention to the Bush Administration's obsession with secrecy, which I've written about here and here.

This week Clark bares all and challenges other candidates to do the same. He chooses a rather unfortunate name: the "Online Reading Room." Like we're going to while away the time, with a cup of tea, reading financial records.

He also described his plan to reverse the trend toward closed, secret government. Here's a summary:

Establish an Openness Doctrine:
1. Restrict the assertion of executive privilege.
2. Eliminate secret task forces.
3. Disclose all meetings with special interests.
4. Require lobbyists to reveal more.
5. Use the Internet to make government transparent.


Reverse Bush Secrecy Policies:
1. End hiding of documents through classification extension and FOIA rollbacks.
2. End the stonewall of the investigation of September 11th and Bush's Energy Task Force.

The plan is here in more detail. Needless to say, this is a good thing.

When you can't trust the people that make the laws

Democratic Party members of the US Senate Judiciary Committee were surprised to learn that Republican Party staff members had been reading and sometimes leaking to the media their secret internal strategy memos. For over a year. (From the Boston Globe.)

A few months ago I wrote about Trust and Government. How do the people who work in our government expect their fellow citizens to trust their government, if they act unethically and show they can't even be trusted by their fellow staff?

Not only that, the people who thought this was ok were staff for senators who serve on the Judiciary Committee. Presumably these folks know a little bit about the law. Or at least they're supposed to. Even if their actions are not shown to be illegal once the investigation is complete, this behavior, for over a year, was clearly unethical.

And these are the people who are supposed to decide who gets appointed to federal courts. These are the people who choose our nation's most senior judges. Regardless of internal political struggles, these staffers should be setting a higher standard of ethics. They should be ashamed of themselves. And the United States Senators they work for, some of our most senior legislators, should also be ashamed.

Are they ashamed? Senator Orrin Hatch says he is "mortified." At least one staffer who may have been implicated is no longer with the Committee. That's the good news. The bad news? He got promoted: according to the article, he is now the "chief judicial nominee adviser in the Senate majority leader's office."

Now that's setting a higher standard for ethical behavior, and inspiring trust.

Why I'm Supporting Wesley Clark for President

I've decided to support Wesley Clark for president. I'm registered as an independent, but I think Clark is the best candidate.

I'll probably have more to say about why I think we need a vigorous debate during this presidential campaign, and why I think our country needs a credible and effective challenger to President Bush. But for now, let me concentrate on why I think Clark is the best candidate.