Posted 7/18/2003 03:49:35 PM by Edward Driscoll
FLASHBACK: Back in November, shortly after Republicans retook the Senate and kept control over the house, I linked to this Bruce Bartlett article about what it was like for them to be in the minority in the 1980s:

As Republicans and Democrats absorb the significance of last week's election results, a few things are starting to become clear. For one thing, Republicans are finally starting to settle into the idea that they are the majority party in this country. They have not thought so since 1932. I worked in the Senate in 1980, when Republicans won control there for the first time in almost 30 years, and I remember clearly the sense that this was all just temporary. In contrast to the Democrats, who treated Republicans like dirt, the latter were very deferential. They didn't treat Democrats with the same disdain, because in their hearts they knew it wouldn't last. The memory of 1946-48 and 1952-54, the last times that Republicans held either house of Congress, were very much in their minds. Although no one ever said so, I think most Republicans in the Senate thought they would probably lose the majority in 1982. Consequently, they were fearful of alienating the Democrats, whom, they thought, would soon be back in power, lest they be punished as a consequence. This sort of meek attitude toward one's oppressors is, sad to say, not uncommon. People who are kidnapped, such as Patty Hearst, have been known to fall in with their kidnappers. Republicans in Congress had somewhat the same attitude. They were so used to being beaten and abused that they thought this was the normal state of affairs. When they got the majority, some reacted like a caged bird suddenly set free: They simply didn't know what to do.

While Stockholm Syndrome doesn't seem to be a issue with the current minority party, they might want to take a course or twenty in dealing with anger management. UPDATE: Here's another article on today's free-for-all.

Posted 7/17/2003 04:16:03 PM by Edward Driscoll
DO DRIVING TESTS FOR SENIORS MAKE SENSE, asks Matt Welch, after yesterday's horrific car-on-pedestrian accident in Santa Monica.

Posted 7/17/2003 02:59:52 PM by Edward Driscoll
ANTI-SEMITISM IN ENGLAND: It's not just for universities anymore! UPDATE: Meryl Yourish has some further thoughts.

Posted 7/17/2003 02:48:01 PM by Edward Driscoll
I'LL HAVE WHAT JOE'S SMOKING: The New Republic reports:

After offering the NAACP another apology for skipping the candidates' forum and then ticking off his own civil rights credentials, Lieberman praised the NAACP for its work during the Florida recount. That's when things became absurd. "We didn't realize at the time, Al Gore and I, that we not only needed Kweisi Mfume fighting for justice here in Florida counting votes," Lieberman said, "we need him on the Supreme Court where the votes really counted. Maybe that'll happen some day." So Lieberman--a man who once questioned affirmative action--is now saying that he'll put Kweisi Mfume--a man who, according to his biography on the NAACP website, has not even attended law school--on the Supreme Court? Nothing like compounding an initial mistake.

There's a lot of that going around, it seems.

Posted 7/17/2003 10:55:59 AM by Edward Driscoll
BI-PARTISAN REVIEW: Glenn Reynolds gives good advice to the Democrats. Meanwhile, Peter Roff looks at advances made by the Republicans since emerging from their post-Watergate wilderness.

Posted 7/17/2003 10:46:18 AM by Edward Driscoll
VOIP-A-RAMA! I know what you're thinking: where can I go for the hippest, freshest, coolest look at voice-over-IP, that bitchin' 21st century technology that sends voice over the Internet? Well, my friend, look no further than my column today in Tech Central Station! It's VOIP-a-licious! UPDATE: Reader Ken Whelan had some feedback about the article that he emailed me:

Good article but I can tell you, now that Voice over IP is here, it has so many more positives that you did not mention. We are a small company. Probably 100 stations or so at the most and we just installed the Cisco solution. We are finding that things are so seamless, just tonight I brought home a phone, put it on the inside of my cable modem and VPN router (SOHO) and running the high bandwidth protocol (G711) had good voice quality. If I dropped it down to G729, there would be no problems whatsoever. We have several people working from a home office and soon you will not be able to tell as they will be on the same phone system. Another positive that you did not mention. We have a satellite office that is going to have 5 phones in it. It is connected to us by a 56k frame relay connection that in no way has enough bandwidth to carry the data and the calls. However, for the price of a router and phones, we can install a phone system down there and use the Call Manager Servers at the host site to manage the call switching, the only thing going over the frame connection will be the switching information. Now voice brings regular phone lines into the router and they will not be able to tell the difference. With a little bit of programming, it will appear that they are extension to extension dialing from the host site when really the connections are going out regular phone lines. I did not mention that as we install this, this particular office is in flux: they are in a temporary building now. In the next 6 months they are going to switch buildings 3 times due to construction. Rather than dig in phone lines from one building to the next, only to move them two more times in the next 6 months, we are using a Proxim point to point (directional) wireless solution to connect Ethernet to the remote building (the one that is moving two more times). Each time we move, we will just point the antenna at the new location and move the phones to the new building. This is one of those eminent domain situations where a road is taking half the lot, so we have to remove a building, move to a construction trailer and then build a new building. Every day we are finding new ways to save money because we put the infrastructure in place. The technology is here and it is mainstream. Nothing like having your voicemail arrive as an E-Mail attachment that you can pickup anywhere, anytime, without even having a phone; just find an internet connection. Cisco is going to be a very very very rich company. As big as they are now, when this VOIP really gets a foothold, they are THE only company with a fully VOIP solution the rest of them are hybrids that really don't end up being fully VOIP.

I appreciate his comments. I'm far from an expert on VOIP; like most of my articles, I tried to simply find the guys who are experts, interview, and quote them. But it does make perfect sense that VOIP systems will eventually dominate telecommunications.

Posted 7/16/2003 08:37:37 PM by Edward Driscoll
SORRY FOR THE LACK OF POSTS: I have multiple articles due in early August, and I've spent big chunks of the past couple of days with my ear pressed to a telephone, gathering quotes and background material for them. They're mostly for consumer electronics magazines. I feel like a police beat reporter, or maybe Jack Webb himself asking questions, getting the facts (and hopefully a lot more), and taking it all down on my trusty Radio Shack recorder. How I'd love to retire this thing for something digital. But I don't know of anything as reliable, that I could plug mini-plugs into, and then plug a phone into it. So I keep using this thing, and going through about a half dozen or so cassettes a week. This afternoon, I spoke with Bob Ryan and Steve Sabol of NFL Films for an upcoming article. I grew up near NFL Films--their main offices are in the Philadelphia suburb of Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, about 15 minutes away via Route #295, from where my parents still live. I went down a couple of times myself in the early 1980s, to purchase highlight films for that new fangled top-loading, rotary channel dial-equipped VCR that I talked my parents in buying. Ryan (who coined the phrase "America's Team", for a highlight film, and unwittingly boosted the Dallas Cowboys' promotional machine into the ionosphere) and Sabol were all business (and Sabol sounded exactly as he did on the numerous shows he hosts for ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Classics, and probably for the NFL Channel, which will debut this fall.) So I didn't get a chance to go into Full Gush Mode about growing up watching the shows his company has been putting out since the 1960s. What's amazing to me about NFL Films, is how radically they changed how sports documentaries are presented. The NFL is basically divided into before and after NFL Films. Watch a team's highlight reel from as late as the early-1960s, and it sounds like a college team: lots of "boolah-boolah" marching band music, a breathless newsreel-style narrator, and a combination of long shots watching a play unfold from scratch, and goofy, obviously-staged closeups of the clean-cut well-scrubbed, closely-shaved athletes looking clean cut and well-scrubbed (and closely shaved). Compare that to NFL Films' stuff: the plays are cut to the apex of the action, so there are view few long shots of the refs placing the ball, the snap count, the QB yelling "HIKE!". The players are shown in closeups from the bench, where their faces are caked with sweat, mud, blood, tears, pain and an occasional broken nose. Extreme closeups of the players in action alternate with slow motion tracking shots that would make Haskell Wexler blush. Arguably the most important element: the endless Winchell-style narration is replaced by the clipped, deep tones of "The Voice of God", the great John Facenda, the Man Born To Describe Football. Facenda was one of the first TV news anchormen in Philadelphia, but he had a burning passion about football. In the mid-1960s, a mutual friend introduced him to Steve Sabol, and Sabol's dad, who ran NFL Films. (Cue Strauss's "Zarathustra" from 2001: A Space Odyssey) When I was a kid, this was an irresistable combination. NFL Films made football players larger than life, men who could do no wrong. Men who made Batman and Superman look like pantywaists. Of course, now we know they're far from Supermen; indeed, their morals often appear far worse than average men fresh out of college who haven't been handed a multi-million dollar signing bonus, and who don't have his every move observed by minicams and sportswriters. To this day, during the fall, I watch several hours a week of NFL Films' material (in addition of course, to the regular network TV coverage of the games). Their technology has changed remarkably since then: they use synthesizers in their background scores, and computer-based editing tools in assembling their shows. But their basic story telling techniques remain remarkably similar to what they developed over 35 years ago--and it was great to talk to one of the men who created them.

Posted 7/14/2003 11:21:54 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE BIN LADEN-SADDAM HUSSEIN CONNECTION: It seemed pretty well documented in 1999. Why has it since vanished down the collective memory hole of the press?

Posted 7/14/2003 10:28:10 PM by Edward Driscoll
PRESIDENT REAGAN'S HANDLING OF THE AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS' STRIKE was one of the (many) moments of his administration that was greater than the sum of its events. In her book about Reagan, Peggy Noonan quoted the Gipper's Secretary of State George Schultz, who called it:

"One of the most fortuitous foreign relations moves he ever made". It was in no way a popular move with the American public but it showed European heads of state and diplomatic personnel that he was tough and meant what he said.

Perhaps learning from this event, in a similar, but preemptive move, the Bush Administration is refusing to allow the Transportation Security Administration to unionize:

Airport security screeners don't have the right to unionize, according to the agency handling labor issues for the federal government. The Federal Labor Relations Authority ruled that the screeners' boss, Transportation Security Administration chief James Loy, has discretion to decide the terms and conditions of their employment. Loy in January signed an order forbidding collective bargaining by screeners, saying unions are incompatible with the war on terror that screeners are helping the government wage. Union contracts could limit the flexibility needed to make sudden changes in shift assignments in response to terror threats, Loy said.

AP reports that "the screeners earn between $23,600 to $35,400 a year, with health care, life insurance, paid vacation and sick leave. Before Sept. 11, the private-sector screeners earned less and often had no benefits." An average salary of about 30K for work that could be done by any able-bodied person with little or no specialized training seems pretty darn good to me. What more could the unions bring them, other than increased red tape. And what happens when the inevitable strike occurs, just as it did with the air traffic controllers? As Calvin Coolidge said when he was governor of Massachusetts, "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, at anytime". Too bad the union who wants to represent the TSA doesn't get this.

Posted 7/14/2003 05:17:03 PM by Edward Driscoll
THIS ONE GOES TO ELEVEN! Why yes, I do have the cover story on Vintage Guitar magazine this month. It's Part I of the history of Marshall Amplifiers--and by God, it was fun to write! (Special thanks to Nick Bowcott of Korg USA for helping to arrange an interview with the great Jim Marshall himself.) See also my earlier (and much shorter) Blogcritics post for more Marshall mania. And be on the lookout for Part II of the story!

Posted 7/14/2003 05:12:50 PM by Edward Driscoll
SOMEBODY SHOULD HAVE TOLD JULIAN BOND to read James Lileks' latest Bleat.

Posted 7/14/2003 05:09:37 PM by Edward Driscoll
A TIME FOR CHOOSING: The Democrats face some hard choices, much like the Republicans of 1964, writes Orrin Judd.

Posted 7/14/2003 01:42:05 PM by Edward Driscoll
WELL, THAT DIDN'T LAST TOO LONG DID IT? Hollywood is set to release Buffalo Soldiers, a 2001 film starring Joaquin Phoenix and Ed Harris about "enlisted man running a profitable drugs and stolen goods business out of an Army base". According to the Internet Movie Database, the film debuted at the Toronto Film Festival on September 8, 2001. Not surprisingly, it was shelved after 9/11. But obviously, as this film, and the military bashing in The Hulk demonstrate, the brief moratorium in the war against "the Red States" (AKA, the people who buy the tickets) by Hollywood is over. By the way, Phoenix's biography on the IMDB says:

Once refused to wear shoes during a photo shoot for Prada because they were made out of leather. He is a strict vegan and will not wear costumes made out of animal skin.

Are army boots still made out of leather? How did Mirimax work around this issue with their temperamental star?

Posted 7/14/2003 01:16:34 PM by Edward Driscoll
FULL DISCLOSURE? File this one under "we report, you decide": We've linked to Andrew Sullivan plenty of times concerning the New York Times under Howell Raines. Sullivan owned the story, and did a thorough job of exposing the (numerous) problems at the Times. But James Panero of the New Criterion's "Armavirumque" Weblog says that Sullivan clearly has an axe to grind in this issue, and gives some examples.

Posted 7/14/2003 01:05:07 PM by Edward Driscoll
MEET THE NEW BOSS.... TimesWatch looks at Bill Keller, who will be replacing Howell Raines as executive editor of the New York Times, and finds his viewpoints are very much the same as Raines'. In other words, if you like doctrinaire leftism and plenty of gratuitous Bush bashing, whether he deserves it or not, the Times is still your paper. (And they're still cooking the books!)

Posted 7/14/2003 12:57:19 PM by Edward Driscoll
LIMBAUGH TO ESPN? In other football news, Matt Drudge is reporting that Rush Limbaugh will be joining ESPN's NFL Sunday Countdown pre-game show each Sunday this fall, where he will provide "a two-minute essay near the top of each show and participate in discussions during the show, sources say." This should be fun. Limbaugh will go on each week, and discuss nothing but football. Meanwhile, his detractors will start foaming at the mouth at what an evil, vile, racist, awful, dangerous, psychotic Nazi he is. Sort of a dispersed version of the how James Taranto described what the protests outside the Republican convention in New York will be like. UPDATE: Here's more, in a surprisingly low-key Reuters piece. UPDATE: By the way, will anyone who bashes Limbaugh note that Gregg Easterbrook of the liberal New Republic has been writing a column on ESPN's Website for over a year? (This one, where he ties himself into knots of liberal guilt over the Washington Redskins' team name, is a classic.) UPDATE: Here's Limbaugh's own page, with his announcement.

Posted 7/14/2003 12:48:44 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHAT WOULD JESUS PAY? According to AP, Deion Sanders, aka "Prime Time", the cornerback formerly with the Dallas Cowboys (and Falcons and 49ers and Redskins), blanched at a $4,265.57 repair bill for his 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible:

The owner of the repair shop says Sanders wanted to pay only $1,500 of the $4,265.57 bill, saying that Jesus had informed him that was all he needed to pay. "It's the 'Praise Jesus' discount,'' attorney Ed Edson told The Dallas Morning News in Monday's editions. * * * Anthony Montoya, a representative for Sanders, had contacted Compton and told him a 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible needed to be towed to his shop for repairs. The car had been repaired before by Compton. Papers filed in his lawsuit stated that he and his mechanics installed a new radiator and thermostat, flushed the engine, repaired the car's electrical system and gauges, replaced the starter motor, removed contaminated fuel and rebuilt the carburetor. Mechanics for Magrathea Inc., Compton's company, had replaced gaskets and hoses. Sanders had approved and Montoya had approved all the repairs, according to the lawsuit. But when the car was returned to the CBS sportscaster's home in Plano on Nov. 5, 2001, Compton said Pilar Sanders, the former Cowboy's wife, ``answered the door, took the keys and invoices, started the car to make sure it was working and went back into the locked house, refusing to return the keys or invoices.'' Sanders' bodyguards and housekeepers then moved their cars in front of and behind the Lincoln so that it couldn't be towed back to the garage, the lawsuit stated. When Sanders drove up, he refused to pay the invoice amount, handing Compton a $1,500 check and saying, ``Praise Jesus ... I follow what in my heart I'm told to pay.''

Wonder if Deion tries this with the IRS? UPDATE (10:54 PM): Sanders won the suit.