This is the kind of thing I really dislike when I come up against it: seasonal sales that don’t last the season. Recently, I’ve been having cold feet. No, it’s not that I’m ditching something out of fear, I literally have cold feet at night. So I figured that I’d do the logical thing: go buy an electric blanket.

So I went to the local store to buy one–only to be told that I couldn’t. The store was out, and was not getting any more in. Why not order more, I asked the shopkeeper, only to be told that the manufacturer had shut down for the season. I guess I just don’t understand the logic of that, because it sounds real dumb to me. After all, it was the first day of February, and there were at least a few more cold months in store. How could they be out? The shop guy explained that it was a colder winter than usual, but that still didn’t sound right to me. I mean, how long does it take to produce an electric blanket? From raw materials to shipped product, does it really take two months? I would guess more like a matter of days, if the factory was geared up right. So why would a factory shut down before they knew whether they had produced enough, or too much for that matter? However, I’d run into this kind of thing before. I ride a scooter in to work, and the wind chill can get fierce. So I go to the store to buy long johns. It’s December. And they’re sold out. Wha??

Besides which, I just don’t like being told that I can’t do something. A week before, I’d decided to start eating apples. I’d have liked a peeler/corer/slicer, the kind sold commonly in the U.S., but I’d settle for just a peeler. Now, in Japan, everyone peels their apples. I don’t know if it’s just a preference (almost all fruit here is eaten without skin in Japan, including grapes, by the way) or if it’s because of stronger pesticides used here, but I didn’t want to chance it, so I want to eat my apples sans peel. Problem is, most Japanese people peel their apples with a knife. For me, that’s simply too laborious and slow. Not worth it. So I assumed that since Americans eat apples with skins more often and apple peelers are not too hard to find, then in Japan, where everyone eats apples peeled, apple peelers must be a dime a dozen. Not so, apparently. I had told a Japanese friend that I wanted to buy an apple peeler, and they said that they simply don’t exist here, that someone they knew had looked and couldn’t find one. But since I don’t like being told I can’t do something, I went and looked anyway. And I found one. Just one, mind you, at the one store most likely to carry that kind of thing (Tokyu Hands). But I was stubborn, and I got what I wanted.

So when the guy at my local store said I couldn’t get an electric blanket, I was stubborn then, too. So I went to another larger store, a department store in a nearby town. They didn’t have them. So I went to a more specific big store, an electronics store (the kind I’d been told was most likely to have electric blankets). They didn’t have them. I asked if they could order one. Nope, they said. All out. No one has them. The factory shut down for the season.

Again, this just seems dumb to me. How can an industry simply shut down and have its product off the shelves for months in peak season when people out there want to buy them? So I went to the big, big stores, the electronic superstores in Shinjuku, and the second store I went to had a few.

So now I have toasty feet. Mmmmmm. It works great, too. But it still makes me wonder what these people are thinking. It’s not like a shop running out of umbrellas when a big storm hits–we’re talking about weeks and months of lead time to get more product out.

This is just one of those situations where you can’t be sure if there’s actually a good reason for something or if they really are just being dumb.

I vote for dumb, though.

There are still so many misconceptions about Japan, many of them dating back to Shogun and before. An article on ABC News’ web site provided a good example of this in its opening paragraph:

If there were an international competition for good manners, Japan would always score highly. In what other country is one expected to bow before strangers unless meeting royalty, and where else does making hot tea constitute a formal ceremony?

I mean, please. Has this person never been to Japan, or are they just trying to suck up to the common American perceptions about Asian culture? “Making hot tea a formal ceremony”? I’ve seen lots of people make hot tea, but I’ve never seen the cha-no-yu ceremony here. Of course it’s performed somewhere, sometimes, but not in the everyday experience of most Japanese. That’s more of something performed by artisans or hobbyists, like glass-blowing or calligraphy.

And the whole thing about bowing–note the use of the word “before” in “bowing before strangers.” It should be “bowing to strangers,” but “before” sounds more obsequious. Bowing is simply like a handshake or a wave, it’s what people do in certain situations. But when it’s mentioned in the U.S., it’s as if it’s some unusual, self-deprecating act, some sign of increased humility or formality. That’s simply how Americans might see it relative to our own customs; it’s not that significant in Japan. We make a deal about how bows can be different in Japan, variations of angles and head-up or head-down, as if that kind of variation in formality is something that we’d never do. But of course we do–look at handshakes. There are the same variations there, we just don’t think about them. From manly hand-crushers to ladylike fingers-only handshakes, from single-shake deal-makers, to the three-shake standard, to the vigorous damned-glad-to-meet-you variety. Just like handshakes with Americans, Japanese do bows naturally, and would have to stop and think about it if you asked about the different forms.

Besides which, don’t get the idea that Japan is all about politeness, as the ABC article would lead you to believe. In fact, if you walk the streets of any Japanese city, you might be surprised by the apparent rudeness you’d see. People bumping into you, sometimes even almost knocking you over, without so much as an “excuse me”; men loudly hawking and spitting on the sidewalk you’re about to tread; people casually throwing trash on the street (especially smokers with the butts and cigarette wrappers, or kids with soft drink cans). In Japan, as I like to say, politeness is something that happens when your shoes come off. That is to say, it’s when you have some kind of direct social interaction. And not always even then.

We say that Japan is a culture of contrasts, but the contrasts are only relative to our own. In some situations, Japanese are more “well-mannered” than Americans. In other ways, they are more reserved, and in some cases, much more impolite. Overall, things are not that different. But emphasis on situational differences or attention to old preconceptions make us believe that things are more different than they really are.

It’s like the translation of the honorific “san” applied to names; when translated into English, “Mr. Hashimoto” is sometimes translated as “Honorable Hashimoto.” It sounds almost servile, with an “Oriental” flavor, denoting thousands of years of samurai culture or something. But a better translation is simply “Mr. Hashimoto.” Same thing. Certainly Japanese people do not feeling the fawning or solemn tone that we get from the word “honorable.” That’s so Charlie Chan.

The thing to understand–actually, we probably understand it, the right word is more like internalize–the thing to internalize is that Japan is not all Mt. Fuji and Shinto shrines. You have to abandon the image and the preconceptions you have about the people and their culture, and start new with the simple understanding that things just work in ways that vary from our own, though many of the basics underneath are exactly the same. Japan is probably not much more “steeped in its rituals and virtues” than America or any other culture is–it just looks that way when measured relative to ours. We each have our different ways of doing the same things, our own idiosyncrasies, but we’re not quite so alien from each other in the end.

And I suppose that’s why I like it here, why some people from abroad fit in and some don’t–because our idiosyncrasies match to the culture, or they don’t.

You may have heard that two people were ejected from the State of the Union address earlier this week. One of them was Cindy Sheehan, for wearing a shirt that read “2,242 Dead. How many more?” and the other was Beverly Young, wife of Rep. C.W. Young (R-Florida), whose shirt read “Support the Troops — Defending our Freedom.”

These ejections were later called a “mistake,” but one is a mistake–two is a policy. Clearly there was a policy in force that called for the ejection of anyone who wears a T-shirt with writing or a political statement of any kind. And it’s not new, either–in fact, it’s clearly recognizable as the exact same policy practiced at Bush and Cheney campaign appearances in the 2004 elections, also occurring when the speeches were made at public venues paid for by the taxpayers.

Such a practice is illegal, by the way; in 1971, the Supreme Court ruled in Cohen v. California that wearing a T-shirt in court with unapproved-of language constituted free speech–which is likely why charges against Sheehan were subsequently dropped.

But this is a gambit commonly executed at Republican events–to eject someone unlawfully from a public event for any one of a number of charges such as trespassing or disturbing the peace, then later dropping the charges and claiming an “error” was made. But in the end, it is a successful strategy because it allows them repeatedly to eject people they don’t want at events. The “oops” strategy never tires.

It is also of note how the two different cases were handled by the Republican-run Congress: Sheehan, someone opposed to Bush, was treated very roughly, handcuffed, and was arrested. The officer shouted, “Protester!”, roughly grabbed Sheehan and quickly pushed her out. The Republican woman, on the other hand, was asked to leave and was not arrested–despite the fact that she uttered a “stream of profanity” at the officer who took her out.

So why the difference in treatment?

Boy, it just doesn’t get more telling than this. How much more could you ask for to show the GOP as the party of election fraud when their own in-house first vote for Majority leader garnered more ballots than there were voters? Roll Call Via DKos.

The day before yesterday, in his State of the Union address, Bush said the following:

Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.

However, Bush was apparently confused, as his senior advisors corrected him almost immediately:

One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America’s dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic advisor said Wednesday that the president didn’t mean it literally.

Um, how’s that? He didn’t mean specific percent and date targets literally? How did he mean them? Figuratively? What, is “more than 75%” a metaphor or something? Perhaps “2025” is an allegory regarding some future time.

Didn’t these guys vet the State of the Union, for crying out loud? Their correction didn’t really make it clear, either:

What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025.

Um, and how is that different, except for replacing “more than 75%” with “most”? Are they scaling it down from 75%+ to anything above 50%? Why? We’re talking twenty years in the future, it’s not like Bush will take any political heat if the numbers are off then. But they tried again to clarify:

‘This was purely an example,” Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said.

Well, that clears it up. Like hell. If it were meant to be an example, then an expression like “for example” would have been used. But Bush made it a clearly stated “great goal.” Last I checked, “goals” are not “examples.”

My guess is that the administration took heat from the oil industry, which saw the potential for people to stop investing in them, so Bush’s subordinates released this info just loud enough for the markets to hear but not loud enough for the public to take notice.

Not that any of this matters. To Bush, “alternate energy source” just means a different place to drill for oil. Even if they weren’t already reneging, it’s easy to see that this is yet another of his sound-good-means-nothing proposals that will eventually fade away. The fact that he claimed it loudly one day then had his hacks quietly take it back the next is simply confirmation of this.

Many people, some commenting in this blog, feel that they are willing to give up their 4th Amendment rights when it comes to warrantless wiretapping. Bill Maher, in fact, was a surprise entry in this category. You know how I feel about this, especially when it comes to the bogus reasons Bush has given regarding how it will supposedly aid in the War on Terror™.

So let me ask this: How far would you go? How far would the president and the security agencies have to go before you did object?

How about, for example, a specific wiretap on your phone and the NSA recording all of your calls without a warrant to do so? Is it just that the NSA data-mining project is generalized and you feel it doesn’t really apply to you personally?

No? Still OK with that? All right. Then how about the FBI coming to your home and performing a search through your possessions, again without a warrant, again under the logic of it being necessary for fighting terrorism? If you were okay with the wiretap, then you should be okay with this: it’s the same level of rights violation, an unwarranted search. But if it crosses the line for you, then you should re-evaluate your acceptance of the wiretapping.

But if we still haven’t crossed the line, then how about an arrest without a warrant? We are assuming, after all, that you are being arrested in good faith, that the FBI truly believes that you are a possible terror suspect, and that secrecy and speed are vital to performing their task. So the charges and evidence against you are a secret (just like the wiretapping program was), and they don’t bother to get a warrant for your arrest (it would slow down the process, they claim, and besides, the president signed a finding or something, all just like in the wiretapping case). And since (again, like the NSA wiretapping) it’s giving an advantage to the terrorists to know we’re going after them, all the details of the arrest–and the fact that there has been one–are classified and no one is told. If someone does tell, that’s endangering national security. So as far as anyone else knows, you’ve simply disappeared.

Still okay with it? Still trust the government to protect your rights and serve justice to you without judicial oversight or public scrutiny? Again, note that all of this is precisely in line with the logic of keeping the wiretaps warrantless and classified; the only variable I’m changing here is how much it affects you personally. Everything else is constant.

So once more, if anywhere along the line, you feel that the government does not have the right to do any of these things to you, then you should, in principle, object just as strongly to the NSA wiretapping without warrants.

But if you are okay with all of that in the name of national security, then welcome to the new police state. Personally, I don’t want to live there, but then I like to live dangerously.

Keith Olbermann, on MSNBC’s “Countdown” segment to the day’s “Worst Person in the World,” designated Bill O’Reilly to receive the honor. Crooks & Liars has the video segment, which is hilarious. Take a look.

I just didn’t have the stomach to watch it live this time. Good thing, too–seeing Bush acting all solemn while hypocritically invoking Coretta Scott King’s passing earlier that day would have turned my stomach in the first few seconds of the address. So I’ll have to wade through the toxic waste of his speech by transcript instead.

In a system of two parties, two chambers and two elected branches, there will always be differences and debate. But even tough debates can be conducted in a civil tone. And our differences cannot be allowed to harden into anger.

Good freaking holy God. How to even begin to address this ultimate hypocrisy, except that from Day One five years ago, Bush made claims to bipartisanship, and yet from Day Two, he has incessantly carried out every single act of his presidency in such partisan fury as to boggle the mind. Good grief, who’s got Karl Rove as his chief advisor? Do even ardent Bush supporters buy this horse manure?

In a complex and challenging time, the road of isolationism and protectionism may seem broad and inviting, yet it ends in danger and decline. The only way to protect our people, the only way to secure the peace, the only way to control our destiny is by our leadership.

As Kevin Drum points out, Bush kept referring to “isolationism” without being specific. What, is he referring to Pat Buchanan? Bush and the Republicans were the ones who said that they didn’t need approval from the U.N. to invade Iraq and ignored that almost all the rest of the world was against him. He dismissed the world stage as “irrelevant,” alienated us from most of the world, mocked our allies who refused to go along with him, and abrogated international treaties right and left.

And now he’s trying to cash in on his world leadership and make others out to be isolationists?

Abroad, our nation is committed to an historic, long-term goal: We seek the end of tyranny in our world.

Like the tyranny in Saudi Arabia or and other of dozens of tyrannies we ally ourselves with? Um, yeah.

On September the 11th, 2001, we found that problems originating in a failed and oppressive state 7,000 miles away could bring murder and destruction to our country. Dictatorships shelter terrorists, and feed resentment and radicalism, and seek weapons of mass destruction.

You think he’s talking about Afghanistan and the Taliban, but a closer look shows that he’s trying to reference Iraq, again spreading the lie of Iraq=9/11 through false implications. A bit later in the speech, he also refers to “retreat” as being dishonorable, taking another sideways swipe at Democrats–fully in the spirit of bipartisanship, of course.

We remain on the offensive against terror networks. We have killed or captured many of their leaders. And, for the others, their day will come.

Can you name one that we’ve killed or captured? I can’t. We’ve captured the “number three” man of al Qaeda a half-dozen times, but no one who is key. I was surprised that he actually mentioned bin Laden’s name twice, and made a reference that should remind Americans that Bush has failed over the last four years to even come close to capturing or killing him. But I suppose by now most people have become used to the idea, and Bush can comfortably invoke bin Laden as part of his manner of instigating fear among Americans so as to coerce acceptance of his agenda and his lawbreaking.

First, we are helping Iraqis build an inclusive government, so that old resentments will be eased and the insurgency will be marginalized.

That’s funny, according to Cheney and Rice, the insurgents were already “losing steam” and in their “last throes,” but now Bush is saying that they have not yet been “marginalized.” The Iraqi insurgency’s demise has been called by the Bush administration almost as often as Apple Computers’ demise has been called by the Windows world. How much do you want to bet that a year from now, Bush will tell us that we will soon start to make a dent in the insurgency?

As Bush goes over all these points, two things stand out: first, in almost every area he mentions, Bush has screwed up and failed miserably; and second, he speaks in terms of “confidence” and “will” and intentions–with little of significance already accomplished. And yet he tries to make all this sound like a victory.

Fellow citizens, we are in this fight to win, and we are winning.

I wish I could believe that, but the insurgency and terrorist groups thrive, and our soldiers continue to die with increasing regularity. Even Bush cannot state a clear exit strategy. It is painful to face, but we are not winning, and that is due chiefly to Bush’s mismanagement.

Hindsight alone is not wisdom. And second-guessing is not a strategy.

No, but plenty on the left were pointing out the lack of wisdom or strategy on Bush’s part before the invasion of Iraq. Hell, even I could see it, when I wrote in August 2002 that there was not enough of the strategically necessary international support; that it would cost us in money, lives, and international respect and influence; that the intelligence about WMD and terrorist ties were flawed; that Bush had no exit strategy. This is not hindsight or second-guessing. Bush’s plan was a failure from the start and it was easy to see and predict well before he plowed ahead with it.

But Bush insisted that he was right, and, disgustingly, once again used fallen soldiers as political fodder, trotting out one’s (undoubtedly heavily vetted) family for show, quoting the Marine’s letter home last month, as if challenging anyone to criticize his own plans so he could smear it as a criticism of brave soldiers who died for their country. He of course never quotes soldiers with viewpoints just as opposed, of whom there are many–which is significant when you consider that soldiers in the field are almost by necessity heavily invested in seeing and portraying the conflict they are in as being necessary.

And, tonight, let me speak directly to the citizens of Iran: America respects you and we respect your country. We respect your right to choose your own future and win your own freedom. And our nation hopes one day to be the closest of friends with a free and democratic Iran.

After you stop being so evil, of course.

It is said that prior to the attacks of September the 11th, our government failed to connect the dots of the conspiracy. We now know that two of the hijackers in the United States placed telephone calls to Al Qaida operatives overseas. But we did not know about their plans until it was too late.

So to prevent another attack — based on authority given to me by the Constitution and by statute — I have authorized a terrorist surveillance program to aggressively pursue the international communications of suspected Al Qaida operatives and affiliates to and from America.

Previous presidents have used the same constitutional authority I have and federal courts have approved the use of that authority. Appropriate members of Congress have been kept informed.

The terrorist surveillance program has helped prevent terrorist attacks. It remains essential to the security of America. If there are people inside our country who are talking with Al Qaida, we want to know about it, because we will not sit back and wait to be hit again.

This is more or less pure BS. Bush is directly implying that FISA prevented the Bush administration from catching those terrorists and therefore causing 9/11. That is a knowing lie. FISA did not slow it down, rather the phone calls–which were, after all, intercepted–were not translated in time. Saying “we did not know their plans until it was too late, so we started warrantless wiretapping” is like saying, “I forgot to feed the cat, so I’m going to get cable TV installed.” It’s a non-sequiter. Warrantless eavesdropping was not the solution, hiring more translators was. And yet, a few years ago, Bush’s Pentagon actually fired 37 strategically priceless Arabic translators–because they were gay.

Furthermore, Bush’s statements about his wiretaps being legal by statute and Constitution are patently false; they violate the 4th Amendment and the FISA law. Bush gives utterly no reference to which law or which part of the Constitution grant him the authority he claims, just as he provides not one whit of evidence that any of the data collected has foiled any terrorist attacks. It’s all complete and utter bullshit he’s talking here, folks.

Update: and that’s backed up by the LA Times, which reported that Bush’s statements contradict the facts. The “previous presidents” Bush cited were apparently Lincoln, Wilson, and Roosevelt, but the power they practiced was ruled unconstitutional in 1972 by the Supreme Court. Bush also said he’d want the line item veto, but the Supreme Court also ruled that unconstitutional, in 1998. The article said it well: Bush “backed up assertions with selective uses of fact, or seemed to place a positive spin on his own interpretation.”

Whew. that’s not even half the speech, and I’m already exhausted. I’m sure there’s a lot more I didn’t catch in the parts I covered, partly because I’m trying to hit the high points and not trying to expose every single mistruth in the speech–a colossal task if anyone decides to take that on. I’ll try to get to the second half soon, if I have the energy to do so.

But in short, I was right not to watch the speech live. Anyone who is aware of the facts of the administration would undoubtedly choke in disgust at what was presented tonight; it’s hard enough just to read it, much less to actually watch this abomination of a president abuse his standing and the prestige of the position to further his goals and continue to wreak havoc on our country.

Just a few minutes ago, we had a fairly strong quake. Not things-falling-off-of-shelves strong, but certainly should-I-rush-for-a-doorway strong. It was a 5.1 to 5.3 on the Richter scale, centered just northeast of Funabashi City.

I was surprised to discover that in over 1600 posts, I had not dedicated one to public and private schools and the whole voucher matter. Or at least not that my search engine can detect.

I cannot understand the strange attraction to universal private schools and the desire to dismantle or discount the public school system. It seems so obvious that such a plan would not work. I can only assume that the apparent success of a few private schools just dazzles many who do not think the whole thing through.

In the 60’s, we knew different. It was the space age, and we were funding education well. We encouraged kids (well, at least boys) to study math and science. We built good college systems–California had a great one, still good today, but deteriorating. In the 70’s, people started grouching about property taxes, Prop 13 got passed, and things went downhill from there. I still recall hearing an educator back then predict that Prop 13 would be the beginning of the end.

It also revolts me as to how right-wingers can be all about giving huge amounts of money in the form of tax breaks to rich people and corporations as if that were the cure to everything, and then squeal about how education problems can’t be solved by “throwing money” at them. Somehow, paying a corporate executive $50 million a year instead of $20 million a year will solve all our problems, but the principle apparently never applies when it comes to teachers’ salaries. And somehow, our economy can be fixed by giving already-flush oil companies billions of dollars in new tax breaks, but when schools can’t afford to buy textbooks for their students, “throwing money at them,” as if it would only go to waste, is never a solution. Clearly, that doesn’t track. And just as clearly, education must be funded far better than it is. And even more clearly, to me at least, is the fact that private schools and vouchers simply will not work.

The most apparent reasons include the illusion of success and the availability of resources. Let’s talk about illusion first. Private schools are regarded as superior. We all feel a touch of awe if someone says they went to a private school, especially one of the expensive ones. Different attitudes apply to parochial private schools, but those aren’t the ones we usually imagine when we hear the words “private school.” So how do these schools get to be so successful? One of the major reasons is the fact that they can screen their students. They have waiting lists a mile long. They can pick and choose who they take in. They can accept the best and the brightest, the most promising kids. Which means that the fact that kids in private schools perform better on average is a self-fulfilling image. It’s a matter of input and output: you admit only smart kids, and smart kids will come out. Surprise!

In fact, a recent government study (don’t know how Bush let this one slip through) found that once you factor out the artificial weeding of poorer students at private and charter schools, kids at public schools actually perform better than at private schools. Kevin Drum has a good chart showing the results, taken directly from the study (PDF file).

But it’s not just admitting the good, it’s also keeping out the bad and the costly. Private schools are not required to take difficult cases. Kids with problems. Kids with attitude. Kids with special needs. Kids with disabilities. Kids that the public schools have no choice to take. These kids require special attention, and they can wind up costing a lot of money. Most private schools simply reject them, which increases their own productivity while burdening public schools. Not because they teach better, but because they get to pick the best and easiest to teach.

Which leads us to resources. Private schools can charge a lot of money. Even parochial schools, which are cheaper, often depend on church staffs, which cuts costs for them by large amounts. By weeding out the needful and disruptive kids, these schools can avoid many of the costs that, in the end, must be borne by someone else. Furthermore, public schools are weighted down by politicians, who sometimes use the school system as a cash register, or burden the schools with expensive and often useless mandates; private schools can start clean, negotiate much tighter contracts and policies, and save a lot of money that way. And the private schools can hire better teachers.

Now, those resources sound pretty real, no illusions. So why not have all schools go private? The answer is simple: those resources are both artificially supported and they are severely limited. There are only X number of people who can pay those kinds of fees; few families can support those costs. There are only X number of the best teachers; try to expand and you lower their quality. And if you go universal, then the artificial supports created by accepting only the best kids disappear.

Trying to apply the benefits of private schools to all students is like trying to give all workers an above-average salary. It is simply mathematically impossible.

Those are the quick points, the ones that are immediately apparent to me. I don’t understand why most people don’t see them.

From there, you can predict what would happen if conservatives got their way and we started handing out vouchers nationwide. The first effect would be tied to the factor of availability: private schools are already swamped. If the government suddenly announced that they would make billions of dollars of government vouchers open to everyone, there would be few established private schools that could take any students, much less a few million of them. Suddenly you would have millions of parents trying to put their kids into private schools, and no schools with openings. As a result, thousands of new “private schools” would open up nationwide as entrepreneurs scrambled to take those billions out of the hands of parents. These schools would likely not be held to any standards, and as a result of that, profit-taking, and overnight industry-building, their average quality would be poor, much poorer than public schools today. Unlike most people imagine, we would never be able to take the most prestigious private schools and clone them everywhere.

Another problem would be costs: vouchers would rarely, if ever, pay the entire bill. Few private schools provide full education for the amount the government will be willing to pay, which means that many families with little income will be forced to pay thousands of dollars per year per child for a few decades in order to participate. As time goes on, that will only get worse as people want more tax cuts and inflation cuts into the budgets.

Public schools, in the meantime, would find themselves in dire straits: they would be forced to deal with the lowest-scoring, most expensive and most problematic students. To add insult to injury, public schools would also have their budgets slashed mercilessly because of the lowered number of students. As a result, the students who need the most help would be abandoned to a public gutted school system without the resources to serve them. However, the courts might rule that any private school that takes government money must take in any child that applies. If that happens, then the advantages of private schools will be even further reduced, and the costs higher.

Meanwhile, market forces would dominate the private school sector. The schools that do a decent job teaching children would find themselves in high demand. As a result, they would raise their prices. Which means that in addition to paying taxes to fund the vouchers in the first place, parents would have to pay a premium to get their kids into a school that comes close even to today’s public school standards. This would fuel a class divide, with upper-class and upper-middle class parents being able to get a decent education for their kids, while lower-middle class and poorer families are left in the cold, having to choose either a substandard private school, or send their kids back to a decimated and hellish public school system.

There are all kinds of other problems that would arise as well. Either the private schools would go unregulated (and as is true with any unregulated business, the quality would suffer in many as the school tried to become more profitable), or there would be government regulation and sooner or later the private schools would be bound to the same expensive and troubling bureaucratic morass that public schools find themselves in. And since profit-taking would become part of the equation, a large chunk of money that would not be needed in a public school system would be subtracted, further degrading the quality of education for most, or it would alternately jack up the price.

In short, universal private schools are a dangerously attractive illusion which would destroy the public school system and replace it with something far worse. And, as mentioned above, even private schools today don’t deliver a better result than public schools in any case.

So what’s the solution? Easy: face reality, and understand that you get what you pay for. There’s no free lunch here. You want a good education for our kids, then pay for it. And a public school system, well-run, is the best answer to that.

Already we have class divides in the public school system because most of the funding comes from the local level. Poorer districts, especially urban ones with high costs, deliver poorer education; wealthier neighborhoods fund their own local districts, meaning better schools. This is spread out a little because such varying neighborhoods are often mixed in the same district, but overall there is definitely a class division effect that penalizes children from poorer families. The answer: switch funding to the federal level, and distribute money on the basis of the cost of local resources. If people want a better education for their kids, then all the schools would have to be bumped up, making for better incentive.

Next: streamline the schools. This might take an act of Congress or something even more drastic, but the current state of public schools must be re-evaluated and re-written from the ground up. One example is staffing, faculty and administrative, and pay scales. Some school districts have more administrators than teachers, and administrators usually get higher salaries, not to mention control. Supposedly, we respect and prize good teachers, but that’s not true. As Bill Maher says, we call them heroes, but we pay them like chumps. Reverse that. A new teacher would have minimal classes and a high administrative load at the lowest pay scale. If the teacher performs well in class, they will be awarded more classes, fewer administrative duties, higher pay, and more say in decision-making in the school. The post of full-time teacher should be the highest-paid and most sought-after position, and talent should be the means to achieve that position. The position of public school teacher should be one that young adults aspire to.

Next: de-politicize education. The politicians from the local school boards to the Congress must be cut out, completely, from the curriculum decision-making process. We don’t want politicians making our medical decisions for us, why should we want them to make educational decisions for us? Only practicing educators, the professionals, should be making those decisions.

Next: fix the curriculum–but as covered in the previous point, this should be left to the experts. One thing they’d likely do first is throw out standardized testing for the failure that it is. But all that is a whole ‘nother post.

And finally: throw money at it. Lots of money. Tons of money. Throw money at education until it hurts, and then throw some more. Teachers must be paid handsomely. Schools must be outfitted with the materials they need. I’m not saying just dump the cash on the school doorstep without a plan, but fully fund the program, dammit. Education is one of the best investments you can possibly make. It pays off a thousandfold twenty years down the line. Stop bitching about your taxes and realize that your penny-pinching today will cut the legs out from the national economy a generation from now. Along with public infrastructure and the space program, education is the most profitable investment we can make.

And in the long run, the public school system is the only way to cash in.

Remember the Nixon years, when the IRS was let loose to harass and destroy the president’s enemies? Well, we’re seeing it again under Bush. In 2004, before the election, a liberal-leaning church in California called Bush’s doctrine of pre-emptive war a “failed doctrine,” and urged parishioners to take all they knew about Jesus into the voting booth. The IRS responded by threatening the church with taxation, that it would lose its tax-exempt status and be virtually destroyed by the IRS if it did not apologize and cease any such talk in the future.

Now, frankly, I am against the intervention of any church into political matters. The difference here, however, is one of singling out a liberal church. I mean, if you look at that election, the Catholic church intervened big-time when it made a national call to refuse Kerry communion for his views on abortion–only in the election year, and only Kerry, and not Republican politicians with the same views. Or how about the countless southern churches which are heavily involved in elections, which collect large lists of parishioner voters and send them to the Republican party headquarters, and which regularly offer “voting guides” which condemn stands taken by left-wing politicians and praise the right-wing agenda? As far as I am aware, they do not get this treatment.

In fact, a Baptist pastor in Arkansas praised Bush for his performance while slamming Kerry for his views, while showing photos of both candidates on the church’s AV system–the Bush portrait flattering, the photo of Kerry degrading. The IRS declined to investigate or take any action. Furthermore, the progressive church in California which is under siege by the IRS did not endorse either candidate, nor did the man who gave the sermon, who was just a guest speaker and not formally attached to the church. The Arkansas pastor was formally attached to the church and was far more blatant in his politicization. So why leave the Arkansas church alone, and go full-blast after the California church? According to reports, the California church was not even given the usual obligatory initial warning; the IRS came after them, guns blazing, from the very start.

In fact, the IRS has gone after other left-leaning churches as well as the NAACP for political speech, but not Pat Robertson or a host of other tax-exempt conservatives. Even the Catholics, famous for their intervention against Kerry during the 2004 elections, at the very same time called for the IRS to go after a liberal church in Florida. This article demonstrates two churches with heavily political speakers, one liberal (with Bill Clinton), one conservative (with Jerry Falwell and invited Republican representatives)–but only the liberal church was investigated by the IRS. Falwell was not investigated or punished even though he openly endorsed George Bush in a ministry newsletter.

As a principle, I think all churches should be forbidden this kind of political rhetoric. But if the IRS only goes after the churches critical of Bush and ignores the ones condemning Democrats, then what you have is a corrupt and, I believe, illegal state of affairs with the IRS being used as a political weapon.

Twenty years ago today, I had a class at the Computer Senmon Gakkou school in Toyama. I recall coming into the front office for the school, out of the snow. The staff there was excited, and asked if I’d heard the news. What news? They pointed to the TV mounted from the ceiling, where the news was playing. Very soon, they showed the clips available at the time, of the space shuttle Challenger blowing up. It was a devastating blow for me, as I had always been a fan of the space program. They showed it over and over again. Then I had to go to class.

I’m not one for conspiracy theories, usually. But I am not one to dismiss them out of hand, either. From the evidence out there, I believe that Flight 93 was shot down and a panicked Bush administration didn’t want to admit it. I don’t believe, however, that Bush or his people knowingly manufactured 9/11. If the evidence is strong enough or compelling enough, then I’ll give credence to a theory, and will not allow fear of ridicule or popular disbelief sway me.

The Challenger disaster has always been a matter of suspicion for me. Before the shuttle lifted off, engineers from Morton Thiokol, the company that made the twin boosters on either side of the main fuel tank (the big orange tank the shuttle rides on), warned that the cold temperatures could lead to the erosion of the O-rings holding the booster segments together. If the O-rings went, the shuttle would explode. NASA officials dismissed the warnings and went ahead with the launch.

The question is, why did they do that? NASA has been famous for canceling launches at the drop of a hat. Now they were receiving warnings that the shuttle might explode (in fact, Rockwell engineers also warned about ice damage to the orbiter), and they dismissed them? Mainstream reports hold that NASA had been embarrassed by delays and cancellations in 1985, and that was what compelled them to override safety concerns and launch anyway. However, I don’t fully buy that; it’s out of character with NASA protocols and past actions. And there is an alternate explanation which makes much more sense.

Politics has always influenced the space program. Presidents and other politicians, though disdainful of the money spent and often ignorant of the commercial value of the space program, are always instantly ready to bask in its light and use it to their political advantage. The selection of Morton Thiokol and the segmented booster design, in fact, was influenced by Thiokol being based in Utah, the home state of the senator in charge of the committee which made the decision to buy.

But the major political influence of that day was the fact that President Reagan was set to make his State of the Union address just hours after the launch, and boast about how we had just sent a schoolteacher into space. That administration was famously known for its love of theater and backdrop, and was intensely committed to playing up such drama to the hilt. Education was to be featured in the address, a schoolteacher was on the flight, and already NASA had pushed back the launch by a week. The week-long space flight was originally scheduled to be ending just as Reagan gave his address. Another delay, and Reagan would not be able to use the majestic flight and historic teacher-in-space to his political advantage. The wording from the address that he was scripted to use was this:

Tonight while I am speaking to you, a young secondary school teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, is taking us all on the ultimate field trip, as she orbits the earth as the first citizen-passenger on the space shuttle.

Christa McAuliffe’s journey is a prelude to the journeys of other Americans and our friends around the world who will be living and working together in the permanently manned space station in the mid-1990s, bringing a rich return of scientific, technical, and economic benefits to mankind.

Mrs. McAuliffe’s week in space is just one of the achievements in space which we have planned for the coming year.

Adding to the legitimacy of administration pressure to lift off on Tuesday was the abortive flight cancellation the previous weekend. Challenger was schedule to take off on Sunday. Usually, because weather at the Cape is so volatile, the shuttle would be fueled up and the astronauts would board and the decision to launch would be made at the last minute. However, on Saturday night, bad weather was predicted for the next day, and NASA made an uncharacteristic decision to cancel the night before. The reason: if the launch was scrubbed on Sunday, then the unloading of fuel from the shuttle would mean they could not try again until Wednesday–which would be too late for Reagan’s address. The fact that NASA cancelled early is a persuasive indication that the State of the Union address was a strong factor in the decision to launch.

Tragically, Sunday’s weather was perfect, and had it lifted off then, Challenger would most likely have been safe. Instead, it was delayed until Tuesday. There was pressure from the engineers to scrub. There was pressure from the top to go. The question is, did the pressure from the top come from NASA, which was predisposed to safety? Or did it come from the White House, with Reagan chief of staff Donald Regan reportedly demanding, “Tell them to get that thing up!”

Unless someone makes a deathbed confession, we’ll probably never know. But I do know which is more likely, and certainly which is much more in character.

If you try to tell people that the government is using fear to manipulate them, they will not accept it. That’s partly because few people want to admit to being fearful, but it’s more because they have the image of “fearful” as nail-biting, shaking-in-your-boots, pants-wetting terror, which it is almost always not. You can feel perfectly calm and rational and still have fear and be manipulated through that fear. We all have fears. In fact, if you deny having fear, you’re likely more easily manipulated. It’s a question of whether you consciously recognize and acknowledge your fears, and then whether you allow them to change your behavior, not to mention whether you accept as real all the claims about things you should fear. Still don’t think you have fear? Do you buy into the idea of the “War on Terror”? If so, how can it be “terror” and yet you have no fear?

Here’s a small reality check. What concerns you more, terrorists or street traffic? If you answered “terrorists,” then you not only have fears, you have irrational fears. Street traffic is far more dangerous for you. The chances of you encountering a terrorist attack is way, way down on the list of things that are likely to harm you.

Next test: are you willing to give up some measure of your privacy and liberty because the government says that it will try to protect you in exchange? If the answer is “yes,” then you win the grand prize: you are being manipulated by fear. And in the current case, outright false fears at that; the perceived safety you gain as a result of surrendering your privacy and liberty is minimal if it even exists at all, and is more than displaced by other internal dangers you have opened yourself up to by surrendering those freedoms.

Franklin D. Roosevelt told us not to fear, and carried us most of the way to our grandest victory over fascism. George W. Bush is telling you to be afraid, constantly afraid, and tells you that you should give him virtually unlimited power, similar to what the fascists wielded, because we are in a “war.” And while he makes sounds as if we will win this “war,” a reasoned observation will inform you that the “war on terror” is, by definition, unending and unwinnable. In short, you’re being conned.

Read this. I’m not kidding.

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. Here goes.

Bush is out on the stump now, try another “Bamboozlepalooza” tour to get the public on his side. Before it was Social Security, so it is heartening that the results will be the same as he lamely tries to convince the public, through sheer gall, that his blatant violation of the 4th Amendment and the FISA Act, not to mention his unprecedented grab for authoritarian power (which makes Nixon look like a Boy Scout) is somehow not only in the best interests of the country, but actually legal as well.

It’s legal, Bush tells us. No it’s not. It violates the 4th Amendment. You can’t get more illegal than that. But Bush is apparently hoping that by stepping up to the mic often enough and declaring it’s not illegal, people will believe him solely because they won’t believe the president would lie so blatantly. And it will work with a lot of Americans who believe that the press would surely point out he is lying or is simply wrong, if he is. But if you’ve been paying attention the last four years, that isn’t what’s been happening. The press today counts statements like that from Bush as “opinions” and reports them with stenographer-like efficiency.

It could have stopped 9/11, it could have caught the terrorists in time, but FISA got in the way, Bush claims. No, FISA would have fully allowed 9/11 to be stopped–it would not have gotten in the way, and in fact did not get in the way. Bush’s inattentive and negligent mishandling of security did. FISA didn’t stop the warrants, the Bush administration never asked for them. I covered that in this post and in this one.

“If I wanted to break the law, why was I briefing Congress?” Bush asks, smirk firmly planted. Because he wasn’t–not fully, and not as much to Democrats as he was to Republicans. Not to mention that Democrats, no matter how they felt about it, were prohibited by law from speaking of it. They still are, to an extent–Nancy pelosi had to plead for a letter she wrote on the matter to be declassified, and when it was, we could see that Bush’s “briefing” was less than enlightening. And then there’s the possibility that Bush might actually believe that he is above the law, in which case he wouldn’t blink at briefing anyone. Whatever the case, he damn well knows now that it’s illegal, and whatever his views, past or present, on what laws the president can ignore, what he did and is still doing is illegal. Ignorance is not an excuse. Nor is megalomania.

I went over most of the Bush administration’s scattergun defenses in this post a month ago, go take a look.

Remember those pictures I mentioned recently which featured corrupt and felonious “Bush Pioneer” (major fundraiser) Jack Abramoff introducing his lobbying clients to Bush in a photo op? Josh Marshall is all over the fact that a right-wing photo sales firm deleted those photos from the archive of Bush images that they hawk on CDs. And Laura Rozen at War and Piece has an excellent post on how this rings so similarly to the Stalinist days of the old USSR when photographs of Stalin were altered to delete persons that had become inconveniently embarrassing, and the parallels to Bush and his practices today. And no, I’m not saying Bush is equal to Stalin (though I am certain he wishes he had that much power), but it is always of value to note when our leaders adopt the habits and practices of homicidal dictators of the past. God forbid we should take that kind of thing with due consideration.

Thank God that at least Bush is on the case keeping the peace in the Middle East. Oh wait, he’s not.

Ambitious politicians hoping for a second chance at least have some utility. Too bad the Dems are too wimpy civil to brandish the flag for the cause.

“I‘m fully prepared to use the veto if they [Congress] overspend,” Bush announced today. Just in time!

Of course, he won’t. Or if he does, it’ll be because the Republicans weren’t able to slash Democratic programs enough while pushing their own record pork-barrel through, and a veto would help.

“Bush touted a five-year bill to cut spending on social welfare and other programs by $39.7 billion,” the article reported. Now there’s fiscal discipline! Except for the fact that Bush is pushing for another $90 billion tax cut for the wealthy, on top of the hundreds of billions already granted and the trillions that Bush and the GOP are trying to make permanent. And Bush is trying to claim that the Katrina cleanup–which he has all but forgotten about and is not funding adequately–is the reason why deficits are remaining in the $400 billion range every year, as if he spent anywhere near that amount (even though he lied at the time and promised a lot).

So now Bush is claiming fiscal discipline because he wants to gut social programs to feed, clothe, house, and give medical care to the poor. What a saint. And this is the guy who claims that liberals are waging a class war because we see these things and complain. Well, when one side is stealing billions from the poor and showering billions on the rich, and the other side is objecting, it’s not hard to see who is in fact waging the real class war.

In the meantime, Halliburton posted their highest profits ever. Best in their 86-year history. Gee whiz, really? How did that happen?

So much corruption, so little time to note it all. And imagine, if this is all stuff that we’re seeing, how much is there that we aren’t seeing?

Addendum: Just as the Abramoff case is picking up steam, Bush appoints the chief prosecutor to a federal judgeship, vacating the position immediately, in mid-investigation. Bush claims the appointment is “routine,” but that’s bull. When someone who you are associated with, a big donor, is being investigated, “routine” promotions which interrupt the investigation are no longer “routine.” You wait until the conflict of interest has subsided, otherwise it smacks of obstruction. Which this does.

You know how in TV shows, when they want to show a phone number, it always begins with the “555” prefix so that it won’t accidentally reflect a real number? Well, now it’s moved on to IP Addresses as well. Not the number “555,” but something less noticeable unless you know about IP addresses. On CSI Miami–a few times, so far–they’ve shown “IP Addresses” on-screen, and I always get a giggle out of them. Their addresses always read something like, 631.260.356.0. Which, if you know about IP, is an impossible address. Each of the four numbers in any IP address is 8-bit, which means they range from 0 to 255. So any number above 255 is impossible, you never see it.

Which is not the only thing they fake. The techno- and forensic-babble on the show might sound legit, but wait till they stray into an area which you know something about. Suddenly they’ll look ridiculous. Like when they so easily “lift” separate sounds from a recording. “Get rid of that voice talking over the other voice in this recording,” Hiratio will instruct, and with a single click-and-drag, the CSI will easily accommodate–in a ridiculously impossible task.

Mixed in are a few real things, to give it the sheen of legitimacy–like a laser-produced virtual keyboard.

Addendum: my father tells me that a lot of prosecutors are having to fight what is called the “CSI Effect,” essentially juries who’ve watched and believed the shows too much, and expect far too much from the forensics that the police are actually capable of achieving in reality.

Talking about “coincidences,” the right-wingers like to debunk and mock global warming as often as possible. Recent weather patterns, they tell us, are just the high end of a “normal” weather cycle, nothing to be concerned about. Well, if that is so, then explain this:

Last year was the warmest recorded on Earth’s surface, and it was unusually hot in the Arctic, U.S. space agency NASA said on Tuesday.

All five of the hottest years since modern record-keeping began in the 1890s occurred within the last decade, according to analysis by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. In descending order, the years with the highest global average annual temperatures were 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2004, NASA said in a statement. “It’s fair to say that it probably is the warmest since we have modern meteorological records,” said Drew Shindell of the NASA institute in New York City.

“Using indirect measurements that go back farther, I think it’s even fair to say that it’s the warmest in the last several thousand years.”

So, is that a “coincidence”? If it’s the high end of a weather cycle, then it’s still the highest end in thousands of years. And it’s not just that and the fact that we had a record number of hurricanes last year, there is wild weather all over. How long will we live in the fantasy that we can dump 22 billion tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the earth’s atmosphere each year, year after year, and not see any adverse changes in global temperatures?

And to those who guffaw and talk about how it’s snowing more where they are, the overall warming trend does not mean it’s getting warmer everywhere, it means that the overall increase is affecting and shifting weather patterns and creating global climate change–which includes more cold weather and snowfall in some areas. Like, say, here in Japan. “Global warming” is almost a misnomer; “global climate change” is perhaps more accurate.

Perhaps a little bit more serious consideration is in order.

Last week, House Speaker hastert made the rather ridiculous claim that Jack Abramoff was unknown to D.C. politicians, despite being one of the most powerful lobbyists in town with iron-clad Republican credentials.

Now, despite the fact that around half a dozen different photos exist showing President Bush with Abramoff, Bush is now claiming that he also has never heard of the guy before. This, apparently, despite the fact that Abramoff was a major Bush/Cheney fundraiser in 2004, one of their special “pioneers,” a status which usually guarantees face time with the president.

The photos, according to Time Magazine, show at least three different occasions where Bush and Abramoff were photographed together, including one that had them together with an Indian tribe that Abramoff was representing. Another set of photos has Bush posing with Abramoff, and alternately with two of Abramoff’s sons. And then–get this–one with Bush, several of Abramoff’s children, and Speaker Hastert–the other prominent Republican who has recently claimed never to have heard of Abramoff before.

Bush’s explanation? Their mutual appearance in the photos was a “coincidence.”

Um, yeah, that’s right! A coincidence! Abramoff just happened to raise more than $100,000 for Bush, and then just happened to appear in photos with Bush and his lobbying clients! And on other occasions! How could that possibly be construed as any kind of relationship? What an absurd thought! Never mind that Bush remembered the names of Abramoff’s children on a successive meeting! Just another coincidence! Nothing to it!

When I left home at the end of vacation recently, my father gave me three John Grisham novels to read. I had only asked for one for the airplane, but I didn’t turn down the extras. I’ve enjoyed the movies made from his novels (The Firm, The Client, A Time to Kill, The Rainmaker and The Pelican Brief), and figured it’d be interesting to see how the novels read. I was given The Broker, The Street Lawyer, and The Last Juror. They were certainly good enough. So I moved on from there.

I have a strange set of reading habits. I’ll read books all the time, two or three per week, until I tire of it. Then, for another indeterminate amount of time, I’ll read nothing. I tend to stay with certain authors and go through as much of their work as I can. When I was a kid, I went through science fiction that way–Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Niven, Pournelle. As a young adult, I got into Varley, Pohl, some of Zelazny (mostly the Amber series), Farmer (mostly the Riverworld series), and non sci-fi with Clavell and Clancy. Later, I got into Neal Stephenson, Brin, Chricton, Card, and others, and now Grisham. I’m leaving out a lot, but there are the highlights. Card I tore into at first, with Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, and Pastwatch. But then, as I started to read more of him, I quickly tired, especially of the repetitive abusive-older-brother theme. Stephenson was great for a lot more novels, like Snow Crash, Interface, and The Diamond Age, but a little during and more after Cryptonomicon, he started getting way too meandering and hard to follow. Clancy started going steeply downhill around the time of Debt of Honor, and became utterly unreadable.

Anyway, though I tend to re-read books often (a habit acquired in my early days in Japan when English-language media was scarce), I often “run out” of material, of books I want to read. So getting on to a new author is a good thing, and Grisham’s got enough of a library built up to keep me busy for a while. I got back to my Amazon.co.jp account, and ordered three more–The Firm, The Runaway Jury, and The Partner. The last I’ve never heard of before, but the other two are movies–one I’ve seen, and the other one not yet. Today I finished The Firm, and found the story differences between the book and film are quite interesting. By the way, if you haven’t read the book and/or seen the film, and you don’t want the plot described, then do not read ahead.

Though there are, naturally, some additional scenes in the beginning, as you’d expect from a long novel translated into even a two-and-a-half-hour movie. Mitch enters the firm, gets busy, is approached by the feds, and starts scrambling to save his butt. But about halfway through the book, you can see where the filmmakers started to stray. It starts when McDeere makes the decision about what to tell his wife–he never tells her in the novel, and the reverse in the film, which changes a lot of the story after that point–and then there’s a much bigger turn when, in the film, McDeere finds a way to satisfy both the FBI and the Mob, and keep his lawyer’s license. In the book, that never comes up; in fact, he not only turns on the mob, he steals from them as well, big-time. A pretty big difference, one that made the entire last half of the novel completely new if you’ve only seen the film before.

The question is, which is better? And in a way, they both are, for their respective media. But I have to admit a preference for the film version. Though the whole “promise of you” ending was a bit too melodramatic along the lines of a Jerry Maguire ending, the rest is wrapped up into a neat package, a smart solution which keeps McDeere alive and kicking, and probably safe and in business. The solution for (and portrayal of) Ray McDeere is also more satisfying. The whole thing comes across more as a well-executed con game, at least a cleverly orchestrated plan, with the little guy playing the players at their own games and winning all around. The novel’s ending seemed a bit too much of a break for the character, going from tax lawyer to millionaire outlaw sailor on the run from the Mob.

It should be interesting to do the reverse with another Grisham novel, reading The Runaway Jury first, and then seeing the movie.

Via Josh Marshall, a story about how the Telecoms are trying to find new ways to put new toll booths on the information superhighway. In short, they want to artificially slow or speed up the connections of retailers according to how much they are willing to pay. If, for example, Google outbids Yahoo, then Yahoo will slow to a crawl on your computer while Google speeds away.

This is, of course, nothing less than a will to gouge:

AT&T Chairman Edward E. Whitacre Jr. complained that Internet content providers were getting a free ride: “They don’t have any fiber out there. They don’t have any wires. . . . They use my lines for free — and that’s bull,” he said. “For a Google or a Yahoo or a Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes for free is nuts!”

A false argument, of course: everyone already pays for the pipes. You think Google pays no money to connect to the Internet? Do you get a free connection? Of course not. We all pay, and the big corporations which do their business online pay a premium for fast connections and massive bandwidth. This is nothing less than the Telecoms realizing that they have a potential stranglehold on the livelihood of super-rich businesses–if the laws are changed so as to allow them to artificially punish any user that does not cough up exorbitant wads of cash for the privilege. It’s kind of like power companies figuring that they could charge businesses a lot more for electricity than regular consumers: it has nothing to do with the actual cost of providing the service, rather it has to do with the service provider seeing customers with loads of money are figuring they can extort a lot of that cash their way by threatening to cut off an essential service.

The telecoms claim that they’re just charging for what they provide, but their statements belie this easy falsehood, like when a BellSouth executive said they wanted to charge Apple 10 cents for every iTunes Music Store download. That’s not charging for bandwidth, that’s asking for a cut of all business profits. A high-definition movie trailer now provided free by Apple can take up twenty to thirty times more bandwidth than a song; will they charge Apple two or three dollars for each of these? Obviously not–so it’s not about bandwidth, it’s more of a ‘protection racket,’ like neighborhood thugs demanding shops to cough up a percentage–such a nice business you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it.

In the end, if this is allowed, the consumer will naturally be the one to foot the bill in the form of higher prices and lesser services, even due to less competition. And you have to remember that we presently have a Congress that cares nothing of your needs when rich lobbyists bring bags of bribes contributions to their doors, as we witnessed when Congress passed laws that screwed the public royally but granted multi-billion dollar boons to the pharmaceutical and credit card industries at our expense. So just because this works against the interests of consumers does not mean Congress won’t consider it. After all, the Republican majority has it’s own protection racket, and the telecom lobbyists are far better entrenched in D.C. than the dotcoms are. But at least the dotcoms are businesses that can cough up cash in the end, so there’s a fighting chance that they’ll be able to fight it.

The GOP likes to pretend as if it’s a big tent and is tolerant of other opinions, but saying it and doing it are two different things. In a recent political move in response to his getting his ass kicked last election, California Governor Schwarzenegger hired a Democrat as his new chief of staff. So are Republicans okay with the “big tent” in practice? Hell, no. They’re setting up to give Arnie an ultimatum: fire the Democrat, or get kicked out of the party.

Republican activists disenchanted with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Thursday that they will try to strip the governor of the party’s endorsement unless he fires his new chief of staff, Democrat Susan P. Kennedy.

Restive Republicans said they would rally conservatives behind a resolution, to be offered at the state GOP convention in San Jose next month, that may give Schwarzenegger an ultimatum: Dump Kennedy by March 15 or the party will withdraw its backing of his reelection bid.

In the past, Republicans have never really had a big tent. If you oppose the fundamentalist core, then you don’t get to speak at the conventions and you don’t get a voice in the party. The real working policy has been, if you disagree with us, then we’ll let you cast your vote for us, but otherwise shut the hell up and hide in the kitchen when guests come to visit. Heck, I’m surprised they aren’t demanding that Arnold divorce his wife because she’s a Kennedy.

In other GOP news, Republicans are reacting badly to Bush’s “guest worker” program. It’s a proposal to supposedly fight illegal immigration by giving temporary work visas to immigrants as an alternative to coming here illegally.

America has long used illegal immigrants to do labor most Americans wouldn’t do, in particular farm and textile work. These people, often risking their lives to come and take jobs that Americans offer them, are commonly taken advantage of, paid inferior wages while their employers skip their responsibilities to pay taxes. The law has penalized workers when caught, but rarely the Americans who employ them.

I have always believed that we need to admit as a nation that we need these people, and so treat them with respect, granting visas and making sure they are paid decently. But that would require not just the start of a visa program, but also the establishment of harsh penalties and even jail time for employers who hire illegals. Without the latter, any guest worker visa program would be a sad joke. But these are the same people who demand obeisance from the GOP, and so any hope of the GOP cracking down on these people is slim to none.

I’ve stated before that one of the things I admire Bush for is his long-standing stated goal of instituting a guest worker program–though at the time I noted that he’d long talked about it, but never acted on it. Well, after a string of humiliating political defeats and low poll numbers, he finally started doing something… but, of course, he’s not saying anything about the penalty for employers who still hire illegals once the guest worker program is active. And the attempt to gain popularity through such a measure appears to be failing. Neither Democrats nor Republicans like the proposal, for different reasons of course. Some Republicans are vehemently against it, saying that it will only increase crime. And it looks like businesses are set to abuse the program, using it to hire more immigrants in the IT industry so they can displace available American workers who demand to be paid more.