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Salon has an article criticizing Dean’s “Internet strategy,” and it causes me to wonder if, perhaps, the young demographic of his campaign supporters was his downfall. Maybe young people just aren’t reliable. Maybe the younger folks who went to the Iowa caucuses for the first time were too easily persuaded to change their minds, lacking the confidence of maturity. Or maybe they have that set of ideas about commitments that I’ve seen with younger people in regard to accepting social invitations: “Yes” doesn’t mean “Yes, I will be there” but “Yes, if I don’t come up with something better to do, I might come.” Maybe the Dean “hard numbers” in Iowa were from younger people for whom “Yes, I’ll support Dean and go to the caucus” really meant “Yes, I’ll support Dean and go to the caucus if I don’t have anything better to do.”

Or maybe Dean has just not been doing very well as a candidate in the last couple weeks, as it seems to me. Until the beginning of the year, I was strongly behind Dean, but since then he’s seemed to me to be less articulate, less able to command attention with cogent, well-reasoned answers to the questions put to him.

William Saletan at Slate.com almost seems to get it in regard to the culpability of the media in ruining good candidates with unfair coverage. In his Iowa Caucus blog he writes:

3. Dean was Gored. Want to know how Al Gore lost the presidency in October 2000? You just saw it: a relentless focus on one candidate’s record and comments. That’s understandable (and I participated in it), because Dean seemed to be on his way to the nomination, just as Gore seemed to be on his way to the presidency in October 2000. You always scrutinize most carefully the person who, barring intervention, is likely to win. The catch is that you’re the intervention. Some of the criticism of Dean was way over the line. (The next pundit who scolds Dean’s wife for not campaigning should have to sleep on the couch for a year.)

If he’d stopped right there, it would have been the indictment that the media deserve. Unfortunately, he draws entirely the wrong moral:

But some of it was well-earned by Dean. Moral: When the camera’s on you, shape up

In other words, it’s not the media’s fault for intervening in the political process, it’s the candidate’s fault for making the mistakes that give the media the opening.

I am reminded of a meeting the officers of the Oberlin College Lesbian and Gay Union had with then-new college president, S. Frederick Starr, in 1984. Among other items on our agenda, we expressed our concern at some recent anti-gay incidents in the Oberlin community (a recent off-campus gay bashing of a student, an effigy burning, complaints about the Gay Union’s annual conference occuring on the same dates as a parents’ weekend) and asked what Starr felt should be done in the future. His response was to say that if we didn’t want public attention we shouldn’t be so visible. In other words, it was our fault when we were attacked, since we made ourselves vulnerable through visibility. And he had nothing to say about the culpability of the attackers.

It was morally bankrupt in 1984, and it’s just as odious 20 years later.

Bush’s space initiative is a huge fabrication of lies, since it can’t possibly be done for the amount budgeted. The facts are considered by Gregg Easterbrook, absolutely destroying the slim credibility of Bush’s Moon/Mars space plan, on the simple basis of cost alone. And, of course, the first casualty of the redirection of $12 billion of NASA’s budget, is the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Black & Brown debate in Iowa on Sunday evening was the worst ever. I simply couldn’t get through it. The questioners were sub-sub-standard, the questions themselves, far worse. Is the political process served by such amateur-night forums?

Well, I’ve been saying it for a long time, but now it’s being said by others: the media are doing to Dean what they did to Gore in 2000, reporting their canned story instead of facts. Salon has an article by Eric Boehlert today on The Media vs. Howard Dean, and it’s a stemwinder.

I’m actually troubled by a number of things about Dean’s responses to accusations of inconsistency. I am not entirely satisfied with the way he has handled any of the quibbles over his record (and they are quibbles — the same consistency is not being required of the other candidates).

For instance, I don’t think he handled the Confederate flag controversy as well as he should, though in that case, he was stabbed in the back by those who should have supported him. As has been widely reported, he originally delivered the remark to a minority audience in early 2003, who applauded him. When he delivered it again, and the media pit bulls grabbed hold of it, his original audience did not defend him, instead choosing to get all bent out of shape about Confederate flags. Free clue: he wasn’t supporting the Confederate flag — he was talking about people who do so and making an important point about how much those with whom we disagree might very well share economic interests. But Dean has not made this point and instead of showing that he could turn the flap into an opportunity to explore the whole issue, he caved and apologized. Perhaps he was just cutting his losses. In any event, he did do a better job explaining the issue in later debates without referring to the Confederate flag, so perhaps this was OK, after all.

The other main issue that bothers me is the middle-class tax cut. Dean proposes rolling back the entire Bush tax plan, which when it came to a vote actually included a number of middle-class tax cuts incorporated into the bill by Democrats. Other candidates want to retain these tax cuts (which average $300 or $1400 per year, depending on which candidate is talking). I can see an argument for both. Dean’s case is that retaining the tax cut won’t come close to restoring the net loss in services and benefits to middle class taxpayers that were necessary to pay for the huge tax cuts. Dean’s point is that the net gain to the middle class of rolling back the entire Bush tax plan as passed will be far greater than the meager benefits of the Democratic-sponsored middle-class tax cut. But he’s not making this case as forcefully as necessary. Yes, he’s making the argument, but he’s not closing the deal, he’s not drawing out the implications of the details — he seems to think that sticking with a rundown of all the things that cost more because of Bush’s global budget is sufficient, without closing the circle and making the point that it’s all connected, that you can’t look at one without the other.

It seems to me that currently the momentum is with John Edwards, who is not a terrible candidate (he’ll be a great candidate in 2008, I think). Edwards’ best talking point is the idea the Bush economic program is shifting the burden of financing government from capital to labor. By this, Edwards really means that the tax system is being made less progressive, shifting much of the tax burden from the wealthy (capital) to the worker (labor), as well as shifting the benefits the government provides more and more to the wealthy. It’s an excellent point, exactly correct.

And it’s the point Dean should be making when asked about his plan to repeal the Bush tax cuts in their entirety.

NPR reports that the ACLU is going to bat for Rush Limbaugh, filing an amicus brief in the case against the unsealing of Rush’s medical records for the purpose of determining if Rush went “doctor shopping” to get OxyContin.

I hear on Mike Malloy’s Friday night program (MikeMalloy.net, with archives at WhiteRoseSociety.org) that some in the media are calling George Bush’s space initiative a “Kennedy moment.”

What will really happen is, of course, that the whole proposal will be abandoned after the election (should he, unfortunately, win), and never funded, just as was the case with “No Child Left Behind.” If it isn’t, it’s because, as Malloy suggests, the real agenda is military: to create the first military outpost on the moon.

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate these people in the Bush administration (or the “Bush crime family,” as Malloy likes to call them)?

In Fixed Opinions, or The Hinge of History, Joan Didion makes a chilling comparison between the mood of the country she encountered on a recent book tour with the mood of August 1914. The article is well worth reading. It is both even-handed and humble in its posing of questions. Predictably, the ever-moronic Andrew Sullivan casts this subtle and telling meditation on the mood of the country towards war in the post-9/11 period as evidence of “a certain type of decay in thinking on the intellectual left.” Sullivan has always had a knack for writing lines that have no real meaning, no external logic, outside of his own restricted and massively contradictory worldview. For instance: “Their argument about where we should go from here is essentially, ‘We shouldn’t be here in the first place.’” Er, what is self-evidently wrong with declaring that US policy has been partly responsible for getting us into this mess in the first place?

I have always been bothered by the manner in which the US government, the government of my country, tends to claim to adhere to very high ideals, but then repeatedly acts in ways that are completely antithetical to those ideals. Individual responsibility is one of the basic tenets of all of American political and civil society, yet, we do nothing in our foreign policy to try to foster responsibility on the part of other governments. Nor do we respect the sovereignty of those nations. It’s not our business to be enacting “regime change” in Iraq, at least not through direct means. The world hates us precisely because of the arrogance and hubris of a nation that claims to know what is best for everyone else, while our own house is in such an incredible mess.

Sullivan, naturally, goes off on a tangent, criticising Didion’s article for not proposing how to get out of the current situation. Well, guess what, Andrew? Your reading comprehension is about zero, since that wasn’t the purpose of the article. Sullivan is, as always, peculiarly selective in his reading of the text he criticizes. He picks and chooses the parts out of context and then mixes and matches them to create messages that were not present in what Didion wrote, only so he can then have something to hold up to ridicule.

And the criticism that Didion is in a “liberal cocoon” is ludicrous itself, as Didion is largely reporting reactions from people she has met around the country during tours promoting her books. Yes, perhaps she is likely to encounter only people who are inclined to share her part of the political continuum, but since when are the opinions of those in that part of the continuum irrelevant? Sullivan may not want to hear it, but, in fact, public opinion polls, pointedly not limited only to one end of the political spectrum, have repeatedly shown huge doubts about the President’s war plans. The sentiments Didion relates are right in line with the positions held by the majority of Americans as demonstrated in those polls. Sullivan may very well think the polls are incorrect, but he doesn’t address them. He also chooses to ignore Didion’s distinction between what the American public thinks and what the administration in Washington and the media in Washington and New York are presenting as the spectrum of debate. It is Sullivan who is in the cocoon, because he is completely wrapped up in the Washington/New York political-media cocoon and can’t see that what Didion reports does, in fact, matter — that the American people are not really satisfied with the move to war.

But, it gets worse. Sullivan says the core of Didon’s argument is that Israel is the source of all problems. Well, that’s not at all what Didion said. Instead, she takes the situation of the US relationship to Israel and the history of it as one example of the kind of political subject that has become impossible to discuss rationally. Sullivan’s reaction demonstrates that Didion is spot on in her analysis, since he can only demonstrate exactly how far his knee jerks when anyone merely raises the question of whether or not the historical US policy on Isreal has been good or bad for the US as a whole.

I don’t know why I bother reading Sullivan. He is so clearly out to lunch and unable to think clearly on any issue that I should just do myself a favor and not read his articles. My blood pressure would be lower if I did, I think.

Well, I guess it had to happen eventually, but they’ve re-released the ETHEL MERMAN DISCO ALBUM. It’s not in record stores until the end of the month, but for right now if you’re dying to have it, you can get it online. There are even RealAudio samples of some of the tracks, which include some of those great disco standards like “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” and that old disco favorite, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” The samples don’t give you much in the way of Merman’s performance, but it does show off the “art” of the arrangers. There’s actually some pretty clever stuff in there, but whoever did the arranging does seem to have had only one way to start every piece. Was disco really like that? The material I’ve read about this album says that Merman recorded her track alone, without hearing the orchestrations. Given the pacing and rhythm of her performance, I can’t imagine but that some version of the rhythm track must have been laid down for her to go with, as her timing and style are just perfect. You can’t invent that kind of thing after the fact by wrapping an arrangement around it!

Well, I’ve tried the Phoenix browser for a few days now. Phoenix is a stripped-down browser built on top of the Mozilla code base (download it from here). It is extraordinarily fast. But in nearly every other respect, Mozilla is much more usable. The creators of Phoenix have implemented a philosophy that end users don’t need all the features that Mozilla provides so they’ve made choices about how things should work. The problem is that, for me, they’ve made the wrong choices. One of the best features of Mozilla is the tabbed browsing. In the original implementation, typing a URL into the Location box automatically opened the URL in a new tab, but then the Mozilla team changed that so that you had to hit Ctrl-Enter to open in a new tab. The Phoenix team have retained the original behavior, and I really hate it. I prefer to re-use tabs. For example, when I read Salon, I open the main page, then open new tabs for all the articles I want to read. Then I go back to the Salon main page and want to go to Slate and do the same with that. With Phoenix, I need to close the original Salon tab and move to the new Slate tab. This is annoying.

Two other areas really annoy me, the History window and passwords. I absolutely despise the practice that IE implemented of opening the history in a pane on the left of your browser window. If I browsed full-screen, this would make a certain amount of sense. If browsers did not hit the remote server again when they reformatted the page you are viewing, this would make a certain amount of sense (Mozilla is good in that it does not hit the server again, just uses the cached version). But I almost never browse full-screen. I prefer a browser window that is as tall as the whole vertical space above the TaskBar and as wide as about 2/3s of the screen. This gives a good line length on most pages while leaving room for other windows to be visible behind it. But when you hit Ctrl-H in IE or Phoenix, about 1/5th of your window gets taken up with the history pane, and that means that the document window is now too narrow, while the history window is too narrow to be useful. In Mozilla, you can do something that opens the History window in its own window, rather than in a “sidebar,” as the Mozilla team calls these panes. But in Phoenix that capability has not been implemented. Also, in Phoenix, they do not allow you to display the history in ungrouped layout, like the old Netscape 4.x history list (which I vastly prefer). This makes using the history list in Phoenix very unpleasant. I have checked to see if it is possible to change prefs.js or one of the preference files to fix this, but have had no luck with the history window (I was able to change the cache location with that method).

The other thing that drives me crazy is that you can’t tell Phoenix to never remember any passwords at all. I am philosophically opposed to a password manager and so in Mozilla (and IE) I tell the browser to never remember any passwords at all. In Phoenix, your only choices when you type a password is “Remember this password/don’t remember this password/don’t remember any passwords for this site.” The result is that I have to take the last choice for every password site I visit. Perhaps there’s something in prefs.js that would allow me to set it to never remember passwords at all, but at this point, what with Phoenix not saving a cookie for my Salon premium membership so that I have to log in every damned time, I just can’t be bothered. There are simply too many capabilities that are not there in Phoenix, capabilities that I think users need, even novice users. Simplifying the PREFERENCES dialog may seem like a great help, but, in fact, it really isn’t. Choosing good default settings is crucial for non-technical users. But the browser needs to be adjustable in areas that affect usability. Phoenix makes it much too hard to have a decent, personalized browsing experience.