Last week, rumors surfaced that Apple was holding some sort of super-duper event Feb. 28, during which Steve Jobs would unveil some "fun" new products.

Think Secret reports that the product is probably the iPod Hi-Fi Boombox. Until now, Apple hasn't gotten into the iPod accessories business, leaving that to other companies like Griffin and Belkin. Now, though, if Think Secret is correct, Apple may soon start selling its own devices that "will deliver unique capabilities beyond what today's third-party docking speaker systems offer."

There are also rumors floating around that Apple's "fun" new product could be the touch-screen iPod. Rumors abound that the next generation iPod will feature a 3.5" screen and a touchscreen navigation wheel, eliminating the mechanical click wheel.

Posted by Mark at 9:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ned alerted me to a particularly ridiculous U.S. Supreme Court decision from last week, Buckeye Check Cashing, Inc. v. Cardegna, 04-1264 (2006). The case deals with contract law and arbitration clauses, which you might not think are relevant to you. But ask yourself: "Do I rent?" If you do, you signed a lease. A lease is a contract. Did the lease agreement contain illegal terms? Did it contain an arbitration clause? Maybe you should find out.

Petitioner Buckeye Check Cashing, Inc. is a Florida company that cashes your paycheck in advance and charges you exorbitant interest rates for doing so. Respondent Cardegna sued the company in Florida court, "alleging that Buckeye charged usurious interest rates and that the Agreement violated various Florida laws, rendering it criminal on its face." Usury is the word for charging outrageously high interest rates. It was a crime in the early Christian church, and it's still a civil crime today. Banks are not allowed to charge excessive interest rates, but the problem is that these check-cashing places aren't considered banks, and as such, aren't subject to the same usury laws that banks are. But that's a discussion for another day.

In contract law, if any term of the contract is illegal (e.g., your rental agreement requires you to sacrifice five virgins every month or pay a $1000 penalty, or to use Ned's more down-to-earth example, "breach of a lease resulting in liquidated damages equaling 2x monthly rent for the remainder of the contract’s term; requiring a tenant to pay for management’s attorney fees, etc."), then the entire contract is unenforceable. So, if the other party to the contract tried to take you to court, you could use as your defense the fact that the contract contains one or more illegal terms and thus the contract is void, and you are no longer obliged to adhere to the terms of the contract.

But Buckeye's contract was different: it contained an "arbitration clause." An arbitration clause says that if there's any dispute arising from the contract, the matter doesn't go to a civil court. Instead, it goes to an arbitrator. As Ned points out, this is a problem: "The problem is arbitrators do not employ the tenets of contract law, but rather make decisions in equity." This means that arbitrators will not concern themselves with whether or not a contract is void, or whether one party is completely in the right and the other completely in the wrong. "Equity" means that the arbitrator will not do what is legally correct, but rather, what is fair.

Buckeye filed a motion to compel arbitration at the trial court level. The trial court denied the motion, reasoning that if the dispute is whether or not a contract is illegal, then the dispute must be resolved by a court, even if the contract contains an arbitration clause. A state appellate court reversed that decision, but the Florida Supreme Court reversed the reversal. ("I remixed the remix. It was back to normal!")

But the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the Florida Supreme's Court's reversal of the reversal. Its reasoning was that "a challenge to the validity of a contract as a whole, and not specifically to the arbitration clause within it, must go to the arbitrator, not the court." Apparently, the Court believes, even if the contract may be illegal, and the contract contains a term requiring arbitration, then the contract must still go to an arbitrator, even if the clause that requires arbitration might turn out not to be valid.

Does this make sense?

Apparently so, if you're a contract junkie. The Court used as support for its opinion Prima Paint Corp. v. Flood & Conklin Mfg. Co., 388 U.S. 395 (1967), in which the Court ruled that an arbitration clause was "severable" from the rest of a contract. This means that an arbitration clause can never be voided, even if the rest of the contract is unenforceable. This is federal law. Justice Scalia, writing for a near-unanimous Court (Thomas dissented, O'Connor's opinion no longer counts, and Alito never heard the case), recounts the three tenets of arbitration established in Prima Paint:

First, as a matter of substantive federal arbitration law, an arbitration provision is severable from the remainder of the contract. Second, unless the challenge is to the arbitration clause itself, the issue of the contract’s validity is considered by the arbitrator in the first instance. Third, this arbitration law applies in state as well as federal courts.

That's great, but Ned points out a problem: the person writing the contract can fill the contract with illegal terms, and as long as there's an arbitration clause, the contract will go to an arbitrator before it goes to a court. (Although, realistically, the arbitrator will probably judge the contract void, but there's always the possibility that he or she won't. This is unfair to the person signing the contract, who deserves to be treated according to the tenets of contract law, not hippie "equity.")

Thomas disagreed that the Federal Arbitration Act applies to state courts. This opinion (the Court's, that is) should be slightly alarming.

Posted by Mark at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) has done some dumb things in his time, like trying to prevent people from "inducement" of infringement from copyright and then citing "the children" to support that bill (i.e., "We need to create a new theory of copyright liability so that kids won't have to deal with pornography on file-sharing networks. Can I get a woot-woot?")

But now, Hatch has forever earned my ire. In Cedar City, Utah, today, Hatch defended President Bush's illegal, poorly-justified, warrantless wiretapping on U.S. citizens:

"They're moaning and groaning in Congress because he didn't abide by what's called the FISA Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. That act is very important, but it was enacted in 1978 and it is not applicable to today's world," Hatch said. "The president is using every methodology that we know ... to try to track down those al-Qaida people or people affiliated with al-Qaida."

What? If FISA "is not applicable in today's world," then why did the USA PATRIOT Act amend FISA so that it became applicable to today's world? One of the good things the USA PATRIOT Act did was to bring FISA up-to-date so that the federal government could legally engage in foreign intelligence surveillance on packet-switched networks (i.e., the Internet), something that wasn't expressly allowed because FISA was enacted before the Internet. Hatch is wrong: FISA is not irrelevant.

What is Hatch doing? Either we repeal the USA PATRIOT Act and don't amend FISA, then engage in illegal wiretapping because FISA "is not applicable in today's world," or we don't repeal the USA PATRIOT Act and stop engaging in warrantless wiretapping. Bush wants both the USA PATRIOT Act and warrantless wiretapping.

FISA is applicable to today's world, but Hatch is so busy trying to play Bush apologist (so that the RNC won't destroy him when he goes up for re-election this year; cf. John McCain) that he ignores the primary problem with the Bush program: it's warrantless. Saying that FISA is irrelevant ignores the fact that the president broke the law. Arguing that a law is irrelevant and therefore shouldn't be followed isn't a defense for outright breaking it. If FISA were so irrelevant, why not amend it to make it more relevant, or to bring the president's wiretapping activities within the boundaries of the law? I'll tell you why: because the president is engaging in activities that would be reprehensible even to congressional Republicans, so much so that he knows he couldn't get support for such amendments, so he decided to go behind everyone else's backs.

Why couldn't he just go to a FISA court? Again, this is not an issue of "we need to catch the terrorists now; the FISA court moves too slowly." FISA allows the president to engage in wiretapping for up to 72 hours without a warrant, provided a warrant request is submitted to the FISA court within 72 hours. But even that wasn't good enough for Bush. Why? Presumably because his activities were so illegal that even the FISA court -- which has denied a total of four warrant applications since 1979 -- would turn it down. Bush couldn't risk the FISA court rejecting his wiretapping program, since they would then have known about its existence.

For defending Bush's illegal warrantless surveillance program and then purposely misrepresenting the issue, Orrin Hatch is a SEDHE Villain of the Forever.

Posted by Mark at 1:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Supreme Court ruled today that members of a Brazilian religion that involves drinking hallucinogenic tea are allowed to engage in their practice.

Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal, 04-1084 pitted the U.S. attorney general against a Brazilian church (abbreviated "UDV") that drinks hoasca, a hallucinogenic tea, as part of its religious rituals. A shipment of hoasca was seized by U.S. customs officials in 1999, as the active ingredient in hoasca, DMT, is classified as a Schedule I narcotic by the DEA. UDV filed suit against the government, alleging that confiscating the tea is a violation of the the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), which allowed members of the Native American Church to consume peyote as part of their religious rituals.

Lest you think the court is populated by crazy neo-cons who want to engage in a War on Drugs at all costs, prepare to be astounded: the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the government was wrong to confiscate the hallucinogenic tea!

The opinion, written by Chief Justice Roberts, focuses mainly on the procedural issue of whether or not a lower court was right to issue an injunction against the federal government. An injunction is a court order that prevents someone from doing something while the legality of an action is being decided in court. In this case, a federal district court issued an injunction against the federal government, barring it from enforcing the Controlled Substances Act while the case was being decided, allowing members of UDV to use the DMT in their religious practices.

At issue was whether or not lower courts erred in issuing an injunction against the government. Roberts and the other members of the court agreed that the lower courts were correct, since UDV demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits of the case.

Roberts and the court also dismissed the government's argument that "the Act's description of Schedule I substances as having 'a high potential for abuse,' 'no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States,' and 'a lack of accepted safety for use ... under medical supervision,' 21 U. S. C. §812(b)(1), by itself precludes any consideration of individualized exceptions such as that sought by the UDV," since exceptions have been made to the enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act regarding religious use of scheduled drugs.

So, maybe they're not that conservative, after all.

Posted by Mark at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Now that President Bush's illegal, warrantless wiretapping program is out of the bag, conservatives are on spin control the only way they can be: by suggesting that President Clinton also engaged in warrantless wiretapping. Many conservative commentators have made this accusation, which is designed to mark liberal critics as hypocrites (if they supported warrantless wiretaps under Clinton, but not under Bush, then they're clearly against Bush's warrantless wiretaps just because they don't like him). Even Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has suggested that President Clinton used warrantless wiretaps, as though President Clinton's use of warrantless wiretaps constitutes a justification for President Bush's use of warrantless wiretaps.

If it were true, it would be a weak and silly argument. Thankfully, it's a lie, which spares Gonzales the embarrassment of making such a weak and silly argument. Now he has only to deal with the embarrassment of lying.

Presidents Clinton signed an executive order in 1995 authorizing the Attorney General to approve physical searches without a court order for a period of up to one year in order to acquire foreign intelligence information. The order, however, only authorizes such searches "if the Attorney General makes the certifications required by that section." "That section" is 50 U.S.C. 1802(a), where the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is catalogued within the U.S. Code. "The certifications" the Attorney General would have to make are that the targets of such searches are not "United States persons."

Matt Drudge alleges that President Carter authorized warrantless wiretaps in 1979 just like Bush did. Also not true. President Carter, like President Clinton, authorized warrantless wiretaps only "if the Attorney General makes the certifications required by that section." Again, "that section" was 50 U.S.C. 1802(a), and the certifications were that the wiretaps would not intercept any communications "to which a United States person is a party.”

No orders regarding President Bush's program have been made public, so we have no way of knowing what is and isn't permissible. Some reports have indicated that "United States persons" accidentally had their conversations intercepted. Bush claims that "a few" people are being bugged by the NSA; Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff has indicated it could be thousands of people. Whatever the number, neither Carter nor Clinton authorized the same warrantless wiretapping that Bush did, since they both mandated that warrantless searches must be conducted within the confines of FISA. Bush has made no such requirement, and indeed, none of his orders are public in the same way that Bush's and Carter's were.

Posted by Mark at 1:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On Feb. 14, 1929, seven men walked into the offices of the S.M.C. Cartage Company in downtown Chicago. They thought they were meeting some other men there to talk about obtaining shipments of bootleg liquor. It was the height of Prohibition, and Al Capone's South Side gang was the leader in organized crime in Chicago. George "Bugs" Moran's North Side gang used to rival Capone's gang for power, but after the deaths of two of the North Side gang's leaders, it was in no position to rival anyone for power, especially with Moran in charge. Moran was no mob leader; he was a safe-cracker by trade who rose quickly through the ranks of the North Side gang.

The seven men who entered the S.M.C. Cartage Company's warehouse were from Bugs Moran's North Side gang. The S.M.C. Cartage Co. was a known front for bootleg liquor, so when the men were met by police officers instead of mobsters, they took it in stride. They probably wouldn't even be arrested. The Chicago police department, the attorneys' offices, the judges, and the juries were all owned by organized crime. Capone had been found not guilty several times of various crimes -- not because he didn't commit them, but because he paid off everyone who had the power to convict him.

The police officers told the seven men to stand with their faces toward a brick wall. The men complied, thinking this was just routine and that they would be out of here in no time after paying the cops off.

But the two men dressed like cops weren't cops. Two more men, dressed in street clothes, entered the warehouse. All four were armed with Thompson submachine guns. Without warning, they opened fire on the seven men facing the brick wall. Thompsons submachine guns fired .45 caliber slugs at 800 rounds per minute. The seven men facing the wall never had a chance. Only one survived long enough to crawl out of the warehouse and find help.

The Chicago newspapers called it "the St. Valentine's Day Massacre." Al Capone was blamed, since all the victims were from his rival gang. Capone, though, had quite an alibi: he was in his villa in Florida the whole time and found out about it by reading the papers. History, though, would understand otherwise. The hit was ordered by Capone. It was actually designed to kill Bugs Moran, who was on his way to the warehouse with the other seven men. Moran thought he saw a cop outside the S.M.C. Cartage Co. warehouse and fled, thinking it was a set-up. Nevertheless, a Capone lookout thought he saw Moran enter the warehouse (he actually saw someone else whom he thought was Moran) and gave the signal to go through with the plan.

The people of Chicago had put up with mob violence for a long time, but the St. Valentine's Day Massacre was more than they could handle. Vivid pictures of pools of blood and horrible descriptions of violence were the last straw: Chicago refused to tolerate mob violence any longer.

Capone would never be convicted of this or any other crime, save the crime of tax evasion. Eliot Ness and a team of accountants from the Department of the Treasury figured out that while Capone could easily weasel his way out of a variety of crimes because he didn't actually physically commit them, he did commit tax evasion. His mob empire pulled in millions of dollars each year, all of which was taxable, and for none of which Capone had ever paid any federal taxes. Capone was convicted of tax evasion on Oct. 17, 1931 and sent to the federal prison in Atlanta, Ga. Frank "The Enforcer" Nitti took over the operations of Capone's empire once Capone went to prison, but things were never the same. The mob took a hit in 1933 when the 21st Amendment was ratified, ending Prohibition.

Capone, a very high-profile inmate, was moved from Atlanta to Alcatraz in 1934. Syphillis slowly destroyed his mind, and when he was released from Alcatraz in 1939, the once-brilliant mob boss was "confused and disoriented." He died in his Florida villa in 1947.

Please read more about the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and the history of the 1920s Chicago mob.

If you want to watch a dramatized version of the 1920s mob saga, rent or watch The Untouchables, which doesn't refer to the lowest Indian caste, but rather to the nickname of Eliot Ness's treasury department team. They were "untouchable" because they couldn't be bribed.

Happy St. Valentine's Day!

Posted by Mark at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In case you haven't heard, AOL and Yahoo revealed last week that their solution to the problem of spam email was to charge users who send email from an aol.com or yahoo.com address.

The charge won't be mandatory, however. Using a technology called Goodmail, AOL and Yahoo will prevent mail from people who pay the fee from being marked as spam. Users of the service must assure Yahoo and AOL that they won't email anyone who hasn't requested to be emailed. After paying the fee -- which could be as high as one cent per email -- and giving Yahoo or AOL an assurance, senders' emails will never be marked as spam in AOL or Yahoo's mail systems.

Great idea, right? It will stop spam, won't it? I mean, a financial burden is a disincentive to engage in a particular practice (cf. Oakland's new ordinance regarding litter, or charging companies for polluting), right?

Not really.

First, all the system does is remove a barrier. It doesn't impose new barriers for spam emails. AOL and Yahoo have blacklists for filtering out spam emails. All this Goodmail system will do is remove XYZ Corporation from the blacklist. Spammers will continue to come up with new and innovative ways of getting around the mail filters.

Second, the system creates a slippery slope: charging for emails. While it only applies to people who want to use it, the precedent has been set. Companies are now charging for emails. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's legal director, Cindy Cohn, warns:

Even email senders who just want to reach Dad@aol.com may eventually be in trouble. Once a pay-to-speak system like this gets going, it will be increasing difficult for people who don't pay to get their mail through. The system has no way to distinguish between ordinary mail and bulk mail, spam and non-spam, personal and commercial mail. It just gives preference to people who pay.

"Payment" is, in this system, a proxy for "not spam." The problem is that this isn't always true. Things that are not spam might not be paid for. Things might be paid for that are spam. There's plenty of wiggle-room for false positives (something marked as "not spam" that is spam and something marked as "spam" that's not spam). In any security system in which you're trying to restrict access to just the people you want, false positives mean that the system isn't working, and a dysfunctional system might be worse than no system at all.

We have lots of proxies in our society. "Race" often stands in for "poverty." "Wealth" often stands in for "virtue." The beauty of the Internet is that those proxies don't exist. Putting the Goodmail scheme into place would create a new one: if you have to charge for it, then it must not be junk. Free is bad. Costliness is good. Except, the Internet functions on being free. This is why people run away in droves from websites that require pay subscriptions (except for porn sites, because the demand for porn is apparently perfectly inelastic). As Cohn notes in her blog entry, being free is "a feature that has driven the digital revolution. It allows groups to scale up from a dozen friends to a hundred people who love knitting to half-a-million concerned citizens without a major bankroll."

On a philosophical level, charging for email is a bad idea. On a pragmatic level, it's a bad idea: it won't solve the problem of spam email (or spammers will go to other ISPs for free email addresses, or they'll write viruses to turn infected computers into zombie mass-mailers).

Posted by Mark at 2:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

How do you improve U.S. higher education? According to experts who testified at an Education Department hearing yesterday, here's what we can do:

• Allow people to create “lifelong-learning accounts” in which they could make tax-deductible contribution toward funding their higher education. Employers could then match those funds, suggested Pam Tate, president of the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning. She estimated that individuals could save $1,000 a year between their own contributions and an employer match.
• Raise expectations for high school students. Students should take a full four years in core curriculum, such as math, said David Conley, director for the Central for Educational Policy Research at the University of Oregon. That would better prepare them, not just to get into college, but also to succeed once they enter.
• Establish communities of support within higher education institutions for underrepresented minorities. Universities should learn more about their students’ cultures and hire more diverse faculty members, said Pam Silas, executive director of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society.

My problem with the first bullet point was immediate: employers don't want to do that. Ever since United Airlines cajoled the government into saying that United didn't need to honor its employee pension plans, other major companies -- like General Motors -- have followed suit. Companies that want to increase the bottom line would like nothing more than to dump employee benefit programs. Health care and retirement plans cost the company money. We're a capitalistic society, right? Why can't people pay for their own health care? Why can't they contribute to their own retirement plan? Why do employers have to match employee contributions to a 401(k)? And now the government wants employers to match funds for a higher-education savings plan?

Not going to happen. Now that United and GM have gotten out of their contracts with their employees, expect more large companies to do the same. Why cut executive salaries or alter outdated business models when we could have the government bail us out? Just watch: if things keep going the way they have been, employer-sponsored health care will be a thing of the past. Education accounts won't even be on the radar. The executives, who can afford private health care, will be fine. The poorest Americans could never afford private health care, anyway, and it's unlikely that they're in jobs where they're provided with health care by their employer. <cough>Wal-Mart</cough> No, it's the middle class -- the people who live comfortably, but on the razor's edge between surplus and debt -- who will suffer the most. Right now, they try as hard as they can to appear well-to-do (the prevalence of Ikea is evidence enough of that), but their well-to-do lifestyle will take a hit when they have to pay for their own health care. They'll default on their mortgages and move into smaller houses owned by the executives. They'll go into bankruptcy because, under the new laws written by the credit-card companies, they will be penalized for events outside of their control, since the credit-card companies would like you to believe that bankruptcy happens because people are irresponsible and thus need to be punished for going into debt (it's the only way they'll learn).

And where will people turn once they're bankrupt? Why, to the Good Book, of course. To Evangelical Protestantism and the promise of a better life in heaven. To good Christian morality. To blaming the ACLU, abortionists, People for the American Way, and the gays for the problems they're facing. God is punishing us for allowing such secular ideals to pervade our City upon a Hill, and if we ever want to see the Second Coming or even get into heaven, we had better burn the ACLU, the gays, and the abortion doctors alive in the temple in Jerusalem. The smell of burning sinners will waft toward heaven, and God will smile upon those who are faithful to Him and reward them with a better life here on Earth and in heaven. (They might burn Jews, too.)

Thanks, America. You're a real peach. The world is a safer place.

Posted by Mark at 1:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

That's right; I said it. Brokeback Mountain, which critics everywhere are fawning over, isn't a great movie. I mean, sure, it's okay. But eight Academy Award nominations great? Not at all.

Brokeback Mountain is a story about two Wyoming cowboys and their homosexual love affair over the course of twenty or so years. It's based on a short story by E. Annie Proulx, who also wrote the source novel for 2001's The Shipping News. Unlike other films based upon previous works -- in which there's usually too much material to fit it all into a movie -- Proulx's short story didn't have enough material to fit into this movie. As a result, director Ang Lee fills the movie with sweeping vistas and a repetition of the same chords over and over again on the soundtrack. Seriously, how did this movie get nominated for Best Original Score? It's the same four measures of music over and over and over for two hours!

The second half of the movie feels forced, as Heath Ledger's wife, Michelle Williams, finds out about his love affair with Jake Gyllenhall, and eventually divorces him. Ledger becomes a loner and drops out of most sociable life. Gyllenhall marries the daughter of a farm-equipment salesman and becomes a successful farm equipment salesman, too. One could suspect that Ledger's lack of success is due to his constant fear of being discovered as gay. Plenty of opportunity is given to this film to explore Ledger's fear, but it is mentioned only superficially. Unfortunately, that would have been a better movie.

Also, the end of the film presents an interesting dilemma for the audience. It's perfectly ambigious -- "perfectly" in the sense that there is absolutely, 100% no way to figure out what really happens. (I'll leave this sentence ambiguous in case you haven't seen the movie.) It's either really good writing or it's really bad writing to leave an audience without any clues.

So, what do we have, here? A story of forbidden love? Extra-marital affairs? If it were any other movie, then Brokeback Mountain would have gone to video without a peep from anybody.

But they're gay, so it's a novel new idea! Holy crap! There are gay people? Jesus Christ, I had no idea! Oh, man; a movie about gay people! How bold! How daring! Never mind the mediocre story and obvious attempts by Lee to fill space; there's gay people! A tour de force! A triumph! Michelle Williams is "a revelation"! Brokeback Mountain will change the way films are made forever!

Except, all of that is overblown crap. To anyone who's been thinking in a progressive way for the last ten years, gay people aren't a novel idea. It's also not like they've never been represented on stage and screen before, either. This isn't a "triumph." Rent was hugely successful on Broadway, and there were gay people there. And in the movie version, too. Brokeback Mountain is, to Hollywood, what Margaret Cho yelling "Bush sucks!" is to one of her shows. It's an attempt at cheap applause. Of course the audience at a Margaret Cho show is going to scream and clap and get rowdy at the line "Bush sucks," because they all agree with it. Likewise, Hollywood is going to pat itself on the back for being progressive when Brokeback Mountain comes out, because they all agree with it. (Hollywood is pretty self-congratulatory, anyway. Who do you think are the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences?)

This film is either preaching to the Hollywood choir or to the choir of people who already know that there are gay people. Two groups of people won't see this movie: (1) people who don't think it looks interesting, and (2) people who hate gays, anyway. The second group is never going to see a movie that homosexualizes the cowboy, one of the sacred ideals of masculinity in the United States. Brokeback Mountain is novel in the sense that it takes one of American heterosexuality's greatest ideals and turns it on its head. But that's about it. The first group of people aren't going to see it no matter what, because they saw the trailers -- filled with Wyoming vistas -- and decided there weren't enough explosions. And the progressives? Hollywood will go to the movie and applaude itself. The other progressives will go to the movie and come out bored and frustrated. Bored that the movie was so boring. Frustrated that an important issue was portrayed so blandly. Seriously, if you remove the homosexuality, what is there to this movie? An extra-marital love affair? I wrote four of those movies before breakfast!

If you want to watch a movie and feel like you're being progressive, go watch Crash, which is a much better movie. Also, Munich, Syriana, and Good Night, and Good Luck are better movies. (Crash is pretty awesome, though.) And yet, Brokeback Mountain will win not because it's a good movie, but because it's a mediocre movie about an important issue. Aristotle said that the ideal play is both dulcis and utilis: pleasing to watch, but also filled with good lessons. Even though he was probably gay, too, Aristotle would fault this movie on dulcis grounds. Then he would go see Batman Begins, which has more explosions (and is actually a better movie).

Posted by Mark at 9:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Don't even think of asking about the State of the Union! If we were to tell you, that would help the terrorists.

The theme of President Bush's State of the Union address last night was, "Terrorism will just continue to happen, and I'm going to need to keep doing what I'm doing."

President Bush began by defending the War on Terr', suggesting that it has led to democratization in the Middle East. He also put his opponents on the defensive by labeling anyone who disagrees with the War on Terr' an "isolationis[t] and protectionis[t]."

He then defended his illegal, warrantless domestic surveillance program as necessary "to aggressively pursue the international communications of suspected al Qaeda operatives and affiliates to and from America." He justified his program by noting, "Previous Presidents have used the same constitutional authority I have," which is dubiously true, since the actions of the presidents who used this "constitutional authority" were questionably legal (and there is no such authority in the Constitution; Bush infers from his role as Commander-in-Chief that he has such authority). He also said, "Federal courts have approved the use of that authority." This is what Al Franken calls a weasel statement: a statement that is technically true but is designed to mislead. Federal courts have approved the use of that authority in the past, but they have later been overruled. The final word on the issue is that warrantless wiretapping is not allowed. Also, the statement may be designed to confuse viewers into thinking that a court approved his wiretaps. It didn't. The FISA Court didn't receive any applications for his warrantless surveillance program. The president broke the law; is someone going to enforce the law?

Turning to domestic issues, the president wants to make his tax cuts permanent (a bad idea), and yet he still plans to cut the deficit in half while still spending the same amount of money or more fighting the War on Terr'.

As I've said before, we are also engaged in a War on Math.

Following the failure of his Social Security plan, the president created a commission "to examine the full impact of baby boom retirements on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid." Okay, Congress, you didn't like my idea, so you come up with something.

Too-little, too-late, the president suggested we should look into alternative fuel sources. This on the same day that Exxon-Mobil reported the highest profits of any U.S. company in 2005. This is a far cry from his 2001 energy strategy, which involved continued reliance on fossil fuels and maybe, someday, a venture into examining the merits of alternative fuels, sometime in the future.

It was a standard-issue State of the Union address. Lots of policy suggestions, lots of self-promoting. "Bushie, you're doing a heck of a job."

But when Bush said the following, I nearly threw up:

I am pleased that members of Congress are working on earmark reform, because the federal budget has too many special interest projects. And we can tackle this problem together, if you pass the line-item veto.

Whaa? Whoosa--? Whaa? Line-item veto? That phrase again? In 1996, Congress gave Clinton the "line-item veto," the ability of a president to veto specific sections of a bill without vetoing the whole thing. The Supreme Court, however, took that away from him; they declared it unconstitutional. Does Bush now think that he has enough clout on the Supreme Court to be able to keep the line-item veto? It was a terrible idea under Clinton, and it's a terrible idea now. You think his "signing statements" are dubiously endowed by the weight of law? Watch what happens when he vetoes whole sections from bills. He won't be abiding by any torture restrictions. Is Bush really so brash as to think that he can get a line-item veto not only passed by Congress, but approved by the Supreme Court? (Curiously, Breyer, O'Connor, and Scalia were the three dissenters in that case -- quite a motley crew.)

This line-item veto thing is something to worry about. Legally, it's wrong, because it gives the president the power of a legislature. The Supreme Court has said as much. But if Bush packs the Supreme Court with enough people who want to see him have a lot of power (like certain brand-new justices, who helped invent the philosophy of the "unitary executive"), well, it's all over for the United States.

Posted by Mark at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)