Blog of Jeff

UN Watch is a non-profit organization based in Geneva that tracks the UN and measures it against its founding principles. The ED of UN Watch spoke truth to power and the head of the Human Rights Council couldn’t take it. This link will go to both the transcript and the video. (http://www.unwatch.org/site/apps/nl/content2.asp?c=bdKKISNqEmG&b=1313923&ct=3698367)

The head of the council refused to follow the UN’s time-honored tradition to thank the speaker, despite the fact that he has thanked countless dictators, butchers and petty tyrants over the years. The key points by the speaker are really good, especially about the council not doing anything about genocides, rapes and other human rights abuses around the world and yet somehow finding it possible to condemn Israel over and over for far lesser offenses.

It’s easy to find fault with America throughout history and in the present day, but we generally screw up trying to do the right thing or at least stop doing the wrong things when enough of us recognize them. It needs to be remembered that there are a lot of nations and individuals out there actively trying to do the wrong thing, frequently with international sanction and even protection.

UN Watch called them on it, so good for them. The council’s response of threatened censorship shows exactly what kinds of “human rights” matter to them, which are none except for those compatible with their self-interests.

Troy Patterson reviewed the new TV show The Tudors for Slate today (http://www.slate.com/id/2162994/). I haven’t seen the show (which is about Henry VIII in his youth) and Patterson didn’t give it much praise, but one scene he described from the show really struck my fancy.

“I’ve received a gift from the Duke of Urbino,” Henry broods to Sir Thomas More. “It’s a book called The Prince by a Florentine, Niccolò Machiavelli. … It’s not like your book Utopia. It’s less … utopian.”

I love humor by understatement, so that probably explains my enjoyment of this quote. It also gives me an opportunity to report with great sadness that one of my all-time favorite understatements appears to have been, in fact, mistranslated. I used to love reading the line in Beowulf that Grendel’s mother was a “monster of a woman.” Apparently, scholars now believe that the proper translation probably would have something closer to “warrior lady” and not implied any monstrosity at all. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grendel’s_mother for the full discussion.)

So, the one line that made the entire long, drawn out epic worth reading to me has been taken away. Thanks, Wikipedia. And thank you too, Beowulfian scholars. I have learned something and I am a lesser man for it.

Oh well, at least I still have Katherine Hepburn’s marvelous understatement in The Lion in Winter’s classic quote, “What family doesn’t have its ups and downs?” If you have never seen that movie, you need to find it. That line is one of the most perfect ever delivered on screen.

I just finished another page on the website. Hopefully, it will be complete in about two weeks and I can really start focusing on the writing and marketing side of the business. I also have a writing contest coming up in about 3 weeks. Aside from the obvious publicity and solid portfolio entry that a winning story would generate, it really is a fun concept and I am looking forward to it.

The contest is formatted so that 500 writers get an e-mail announcing the start of the contest, the topic and the allowable word limit. Then everyone has 24-hours to write their story and submit it. I like that concept and it is particularly helpful to people like me who can consistently start stories but fade on the finishing side. Knowing that is a one day event with a shot at winning something adds a little competitive juice.

Gonzales’ former chief of staff is scheduled to testify today and that probably means more bad news for the administration. Most likely, Gonzales will have to resign soon. I am not a big fan of his or the President at this point, but it seems like the public and media have been so focused on the White House that congress has received a free pass for their parts in this entire mess.

First, it still looks like congressmen took more direct action to influence political investigations than the White House. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/04/AR2007030400507.html Second, it was congress that was somehow surprised to learn that the Patriot Act changed how prosecutors are confirmed. http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002487.php Third, the President has always had the right to fire any and all federal prosecutors. He may have done it in the clumsiest, most awkward, ill-conceived fashion possible, but it was still his right.

Yet, here we are. Gonzales gave an already irritated congress every opening to put a bullseye on him and now they are firing away. I won’t shed any tears for him or Bush, but I think this will lead to a nasty confirmation fight for the next AG and for people of either party who think that our ongoing wars in two countries should be the government’s highest priorities, this is going to be another big distraction.

I was a little hard on Wolf the other day. Most media outlets covered the same silly story in that same silly way, so it would be more accurate to blast the entire TV news genre. The sad thing about Wolf is that I really liked him years ago. I liked the stories he covered and the way he covered them. Plus, he had that ultra-cool name. Then other news channels brought competition to CNN and everything went downhill.

In TV, competition means ratings and ratings mean entertainment. The news channels look for the stories that everyone wants to see and present those stories through the lenses they think will get the most people to watch it. This is why I think it is funny when I hear people complaining about media consolidation and how that will give people a one-sided view of the world.

There is competition now and the quality sucks. Whether we have 3 companies seeking maximum viewership through lowest common denominator reporting or 30, it is all still about sensationalism. When CNN was the only 24-hour cable news outlet, I think the quality was better. They focused on being a quality news outlet. Now they focus on being more watched than Fox News or MSNBC or Entertainment Tonight.

It’s funny to hear Jon Stewart respond to critics who mention that more people get their news from him than other sources. He always talks about the fact that his show isn’t trying to be a news show and shouldn’t be compared to news shows. But the sad truth is that the the “news” shows are really entertainment shows and should be compared to his. They shouldn’t be compared because he is a quality source of news; they should be compared because they are a lame source of entertainment. If you want to keep up on current events without meaningful analysis, you might as well watch someone funny. (And Stewart frequently get a little meaningful analysis into the mix as a bonus anyway.)

I ended up posting a lot of the following on another person’s blog a little while ago, because of an interesting posting there about health insurance. (http://medrants.com/index.php/archives/3152) The idea was suggested that it is OK to have a ”winners” and “losers” free market system where some people have access to medical care and some do not. I love the free market, but I think there are too many hidden costs in the current system that will not begin to be reduced until we really get the vast majority of people covered somehow.

The question of whether or not health care is a right is an interesting one, but in effect, it has already been answered. Those without health insurance turn to hospitals and charity run clinics where they are given health care, usually care that is more expensive than the preventative care that is available to the insured. The costs of that care are then passed along to everyone else through higher insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses. In a true free-market system with “winners” and “losers,” the losers would be denied care allowing the winners to avoid carrying the hidden costs of the losers.

I’m a free-market lover myself, but in the case of health insurance, I favor government intervention. If we acknowledge that the uninsured will not be denied treatment, then the question moves along to how we can get the uninsured into preventative care models that are more cost effective than having them show up at ER’s in critical condition.

Getting those people into a nationwide plan would be the simplest way to get more people into preventative care. The costs of those folks are in the system and we are paying for them anyway. A national health insurance plan is as much about redistributing and reducing existing expenses as it is income.

One nice thing about blogging is that I can post my ideas here and there and there and a little more here … I like this blogging thing.

I just saw Wolf Blitzer’s show on CNN (my first and last time of this year) and he was making a big deal about Senator Hagel’s interview with Esquire magazine. Basically, Hagel said IF the President continued to ignore Congress and public opinion, SOME people MIGHT start calling for impeachment. Those three words basically strip all meaning out of the sentence, which doesn’t even necessarily imply that Hagel would even go along with such a radical idea, but hey, it sounds dumb enough to be news. 

Well, SOME people have been calling for that for a while. Those people have been left-wing idiots who have apparently forgotten how stupid, expensive and internationally embarrasing it was when congress did it to their guy. Hagel speculating about the potential growth of that particular group of people to include some idiots from other parts of the political spectrum doesn’t change the fact that it is a STUPID idea. Bush only has 2 years left and we don’t need an international spectacle between now and then.

But that’s enough talking about the idea that is so stupid that it isn’t worth talking about in the first place. My main issue is with Wolf Blitzer somehow making this a news story. (And why does TV need magazines for source material anyway? Can’t they interview Hagel anytime they want for themselves? It ain’t like he’s hiding from any cameras these days. His need for camera time is why he chose to say something with silly shock value anyway. I’d take this story seriously if it was about how people say stupid things to get on TV, which would portray Hagel exactly they way he should be portrayed here.)

So then Wolf brings his crack team of political insiders into the conversation to give us the brilliant observation that being an unpopular President is not grounds for impeachment and that it is an extremely unlikely event. Of course, they did show Kucinich’s YouTube video explaining how Bush’s deceptions led us into war, so we can’t rule it out COMPLETELY. I mean, Kucinich on YouTube has got to rate pretty high as a reference for most constitutional scholars.

Here’s my suggestion for television news shows. Don’t make stories about completely unrealistic scenarios based on a Senator’s interview in Esquire magazine just because it contains an unusually stupid idea.

Oh goody, Wolf is jumping back to the excitement of Anna Nicole. I can’t wait for his show to track down whatever magazine interview has new information about that case. I hear GQ has some solid leads.

According to my fancy business plan, this blog is supposed to be attracting potential clients to my site. Since I have spent ten times as much time setting up this blog as setting up my site, it probably is time to regroup. I will cut back on blogging until more of the site is finished.

Ok, so I thought I would build a nice well-rounded blogroll with some conservatives and liberals. The problem is that I can’t stand most of the conservative bloggers. That would make perfect sense if I had a liberal worldview. However, when I consider that I am a native Texan, a veteran who voted for Bush (just once), a person with little to no faith in government, a free-market endorser with an MBA, a person who thought Saddam needed to be overthrown and a person with a natural instinct to hate all taxes, it seems that I should be in the center of the conservative movement. Yet, here I am not even willing to link to these people. Dear God, I have become the disenfranchised.

Deficits, a new giant-bumbling bureaucracy (Homeland Security), government-sanctioned torture (even places like Burma have the decency to make a token effort to hide/deny it), governmental appointments based on politics over competence, gerrymandering (Delay’s Texas sized gift to the republican party a few years back), throwing away diplomatic options with North Korea/Iran and so many more issues have just ruined my desire to have any part of the Republican party or the conservative movement any more.

I’m not even holding the decision to go to war against them, because I agreed that Saddam was a permanent threat that needed to be removed. But sending a bunch of inexperienced political operatives to oversee the reconstruction in those first years of the war was paramount to negligent homicide, both to our soldiers and Iraqi civilians. The reconstruction should have been handled by our best of the best, not snot-nosed kids with connected parents.

My other peeve with Iraq is that we keep forgetting about Afghanistan. We’re so focused on Iraq that we’re going to mess around and let the Taliban and drug lords take total control of Afghanistan. And that is the place where righteous fury about September 11 should still be targetted, especially since there are still a lot of people (both directly and indirectly) there that played a role in that attack.

Terrorists are like cockroaches. Yes, you kill them when you see them. But at the end of the day, it’s about taking away their hiding and spawning places. And I’m scared that we are on the road to a Middle East that has more hiding and spawning places than there were in existence prior to September 11. That would be total failure on both the military and foreign policy front.

So there it is. I’m probably going to be forever painted as a bleeding heart-liberal who supports the war, hates deficits, wants low taxes, prefers small government and likes free-market forces over governmental interventions. Where, oh where, did this train go off the tracks?

3 hours of playing with graphic options, putting stupid buttons on this page and testing out if this thing really works. Where’s the fun in that?