Saturday, April 30, 2005

CSPAN2 lamely opted not to broadcast any live coverage of the LA Times Festival of Books last weekend. This weekend they are showing a few of the panels. Check it out. I don't know if over the next week or so they will show others, but as it stands now they are slated to show exactly five panels out of several dozen (again really lame).

# posted 7:44 PM

Woman gets wedding jitters. Stop the presses!

The poverty of television news is on full display this morning and apparently will be for the rest of the day. I guess this is what happens when the Michael Jackson trial breaks for the weekend.

# posted 8:53 AM

Friday, April 22, 2005

Vacation!!

I'm going to a vacation from posting until the first week in May. As always I recommend reading the Progress Report every day. Also, this weekend is the LA Times Festival of Books. It's a great event with some great panels on politics as well as a host of other literary things. You can see a lot of them live on CSPAN or CSPAN-2. I highly recommend tuning in if you don't live in the LA area. Here are some panels that look to be interesting:

Saturday
10:00 AM - Interrogation or Torture: Human Rights After 9/11
Moderator Mr. Steve Wasserman
Mr. Max Boot
Mr. Angelo M. Codevilla
Mr. Mark Danner
Mr. Robert Scheer

11:30 AM - Lies, Deceit, & Cover-ups
Moderator Mr. Larry Beinhart
Mr. Eric Alterman
Mr. John W. Dean
Ms. Maureen Dowd
Dr. Michael Shermer
Mr. Jon Wiener

12:30 PM - Islam Now
Moderator Mr. Zachary Karabell
Mr. Reza Aslan
Mr. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf
Mr. Adam Shatz

Sunday
10:00 AM - Searching for a Civil Society: America's Contemporary Political Culture
Moore 100 PANEL 2101
Moderator Mr. Michael Kinsley
Mr. Tom Hayden
Ms. Tamar Jacoby
Mr. Matthew Miller
Ms. Kay Mills
Ms. Katrina Vanden Heuval

10:30 AM - Madeleine Albright in Conversation with Samantha Power
I don't know if any of these will be the ones that CSPAN shows but you can't miss with the ones that they do.

# posted 9:50 AM

Monday, April 11, 2005

So John Bolton is getting a grilling in front of the Senate Foreign Relations committee. Much of the testimony today surrounded allegations that Bolton tried to get a State Department intelligence analyst fired for disagreeing with him. Of course Bolton has the usual Bush administration excuses -- I was taken out of context, it wasn't this it was something else, black is white, up is down, blah blah blah

Democrats repeatedly pressed Bolton, 56, to explain his criticisms of the United Nations, including those from a fiery speech about 10 years ago to the World Federalists. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) played a three-minute video clip in which Bolton said that "there's no such thing as the United Nations," and that if 10 floors of the 38-story U.N. headquarters building were eliminated, "it wouldn't make a bit of difference."

Bolton told Boxer: "What I was trying to do at that audience of World Federalists was get their attention. And the comment about the 10 stories was a way of saying there's not a bureaucracy in the world that can't be made leaner and more efficient."

"Well, that isn't what you said," Boxer replied. She told the committee, "I'm bewildered by this nomination."
Here's some of what the Washington Post says about the State Department analyst

Democrats also pressed Bolton to explain a 2002 incident involving a speech about Cuba. Bolton, who at the time held his current job of undersecretary of state for arms control, planned to announce that Cuba had a secret bioweapons program, although several intelligence officials considered the evidence ambiguous. Christian Westermann, the State Department's chief bioweapons analyst, refused to approve the language and recommended changes. Bolton berated him and tried to have him removed from his post.

Democrats said yesterday that Bolton wrongly tried to fire Westermann for refusing to back a questionable claim that Bolton wanted to make. Bolton said he merely wanted the official to work elsewhere because Westermann had inappropriately shared his concerns about the speech with others, and therefore "I'd lost trust and confidence in him."

Democrats said the episode carries echoes of failed U.S. intelligence reports regarding Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. Overstating unverified security concerns "is one of the things that got us in trouble in Iraq," Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) told Bolton.

Bolton said Westermann's superior -- Thomas Fingar, now head of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research -- sent Bolton an e-mail at the time saying that Westermann's behavior had been "entirely inappropriate" and that "we screwed up."

But Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) said that committee staffers recently interviewed Fingar about the incident and that Fingar said Westermann had not acted improperly or been disciplined. Dodd quoted Fingar as saying of Bolton: "I knew I was dealing with somebody who was very upset. I was trying to get the incident closed."
Of course Bolton is going to say, "well this isn't what happened. After all you live in a reality-based world where 2 + 2 acutally equals 4." Here's my question then. Put aside Bolton's ridiculous he said, she said story about what happened. Where did Bolton get his information on Cuba? Has it turned out to be true? Why aren't we invading since they obviously have a robust bioweapons program (it's not that far away and we can pick up some Major League pitching at the same time). Here's an issue for the senators to explore; we know Bolton is undiplomatic, gruff, and generally unpleasant (qualities that rightfully should disqualify him for the job). But it seems the greater issue here is that he's a liar. I haven't looked at the transcript yet, so maybe this gets covered. But if not, it seems to me this is the route to go in defeating this loser's nomination.

# posted 9:27 PM

Saturday, April 02, 2005

Fred Kaplan has an interesting piece in Slate on the "Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction." Kaplan brings up a good point

Reading beyond the executive summary reveals that the intelligence failure on Iraq had little to do with management, interagency disputes, or sloppy organizational charts. Rather, the main causes were twofold. First, on many points, well-placed intelligence analysts were simply wrong; it's as plain as that, and it's hard to see how any reshufflings or new directives might have overwhelmed human fallacy.
A lot of the discussion, debate, and criticism after the failure to find WMD in Iraq seemed to suggest that the intelligence community can never be wrong. It only stands to reason that when there is incomplete information, analysts are going to wrong sometimes. There doesn't seem to be any appetite for swallowing that fact but it only seems logical. Even in the best of worlds, when an analyst if forced to extrapolate from limited data or predict behavior, he or she is just going to be wrong sometimes. I don't remember the CIA predicting the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Too much of the public debate seems to think intelligence analysis works like magic. It doesn't and in a increasingly political climate, it only makes sense that something like the Iraq-WMD fiasco would happen.

# posted 10:59 AM