If you'd like to know how close the coming presidential election might be, take a look at this article by Ronald Brownstein.

Saturday evening, C-Span says they're broadcasting an hour-long panel discussion entitled, "Political Humor and Campaigning" that was taped in Aspen at the recent U.S. Comedy Arts Festival. The dais includes Garry Trudeau and some people who don't draw comic strips. The current schedule says it airs at 8 PM Eastern time and runs 65 minutes…but C-Span has been known to juggle shows around so I'd suggest checking their website as late as possible if you want to catch or record it.

Hey, remember how I waxed (somewhat) enthusiastic about the Panasonic DMR-E80H DVD Recorder? It was back here if you don't recall. Well, the machine has worked flawlessly until today when it has begun working…well, whatever the opposite of "flawlessly" is. Suddenly having big problems. I'll let you know if and when the Panasonic folks straighten things out but for now, I hereby put my recommendation on hold.

To the surprise of few, Charles Holland has stepped down as President of the Writers Guild of America, West. Holland was elected Vice-President in our last election and ascended to the presidency when it was determined that the elected President, Victoria Riskin, was ineligible for the job. Daniel Petrie, Jr. was named Vice-President when Holland moved up and now Petrie will be Prez as we head into what looks to be a very nasty contract negotiation.

Holland came under fire when it was charged that he has told numerous lies about his past, including claiming military service and some football honors that never occurred. Fibbing about your past is not actually against the WGA Constitution but a pretty loud group of Holland's detractors circulated e-mails and demanded that he do the "honorable thing" and step down. The premise here was that in the coming battle, it would not do to have the WGA led by someone so controversial. From a practical standpoint, that's probably true…but there is something unbecoming all around. There is a due process for removing someone from office and this ain't it.

Petrie is a good choice as he has unquestioned credentials as a writer (most famous credit: Beverly Hills Cop and its sequel) and he has been President before, so he knows the territory. The Board will probably appoint someone equally credible — like Frank Pierson or John Wells — to be the new Veep.

I still think the WGA is facing a down-and-dirty round of bargaining which could lead to either a long, destructive strike or a short, destructive collapse. Most folks in Hollywood think it's time for the "talent unions" (the Directors Guild, the Screen Actors Guild and us) to get a larger share of DVD revenues…but SAG recently settled without getting into that issue, and the DGA never sets precedents that help other unions. So the WGA is out there fighting this battle on its own at a time when the economy is not good. And it's going to be bloody.

Dennis Donohoe writes…

I am one of many (I hope) who find Saletan's shrill hostility against Bush unpersuasive. I am curious, and I bet a lot of your other blog addicts are also, what you find compelling about Kerry that would get you to vote for him. If it is just an attitude of "anybody but Bush", I can sort of understand that since that is what I thought about Clinton. If it is something else, who knows – maybe if you blog it you could persuade people over to the Kerry side, not that you have any obligation to do that. I hope your leaning toward Kerry is not just knee-jerk voting for the Democratic candidate, regardless of the merits. Somehow I can't believe that is the case.

No, it isn't. I've voted G.O.P. at times and long disdained party-line voting. (I always think it's high on the ridiculous scale when we see "news stories" that Bill Clinton has endorsed the Democrat in some race or that Bob Dole has endorsed the Republican. Like those guys have taken an unencumbered look at the contest and honestly come to the conclusion that the guy from their party is by far the best choice.)

You have not seen me post much positive here about Kerry because, frankly, I haven't seen anything yet that gives me a reason to cheer on his candidacy. Then again, I haven't seen anything particularly negative…so I guess to some extent, I am operating in "Anybody but Bush" mode. Perhaps between now and November, I'll find reasons to get enthusiastic about Kerry. If not, I'll probably vote for him with the same "lesser of two evils" motivation that has underscored too many of the ballots I've cast in my lifetime.

I don't find Saletan "shrill" by any definition. In the last piece I linked to, he quoted Bush and his crew, then cited what seemed to me like pretty solid evidence that those charges are not true. He didn't call anyone a pathological liar or a "scumbag" or any of the hysterical insults that too often infect political discussions. Do you think Saletan was wrong? If he wasn't, then he was doing his job as a political commentator. If he was wrong, then that's the problem with his piece. (I should confess to another of my prejudices here: I think about 90% of all political "attack" ads are not only nasty but are written with the deliberate intent of distorting the record and quotes of the attacked candidate.)

For reasons I've mentioned and others that will be posted here between now and November, I think Bush has been a terrible president, making things worse in almost every category. The one thing I'll give him is that he's done a good job of convincing a large segment of the population that he's being "tough" and that Daddy is in charge and protecting us from the mean ol' terrorists. That is not a small thing but I do think a lot of it is illusory. When I finish a deadline I'm presently battling, maybe I'll write more about this.

[The above message was updated at 7:05 PM to clean up some sloppy phrasing.]

William Saletan does a pretty good job of disassembling the current Bush-Cheney attempts to sell a negative caricature of John Kerry to America.

Anyone who reads this page knows I hope George W. Bush does not win the election this November. But if he does, I really hope he wins a clean victory and not one that winds up going to the Supreme Court.

As you may have heard, Justice Antonin Scalia today declined to recuse himself in the matter of the Sierra Club's suit against Dick Cheney. Even to a legal layman, his 21-page memorandum [Adobe Reader required] has to raise some eyebrows. He claims, for instance, that if Justices recuse themselves, there can too easily be 4-4 tie decisions. Okay, fine…but isn't a tie preferable to a 5-4 decision that will widely be perceived as dishonest or tainted? More to the point, when a Justice retires or dies, we always go through a long period where we have eight members on the High Court. If an even number of Justices is so undesirable, why has no one proposed whatever legislation would be necessary to hasten the confirmation process and get us back to nine? And of course, during those long periods of eight Justices, one recusing him or herself eliminates the possibility of a tie, so recusal doesn't always result in judicial gridlock.

The following passage also struck me as flailing about to find some way to argue his side…

…while friendship is a ground for recusal of a Justice where the personal fortune or the personal freedom of the friend is at issue, it has traditionally not been a ground for recusal where official action is at issue, no matter how important the official action was to the ambitions or the reputation of the Government officer.

Perhaps there are few (if any) precedents but I don't see the distinction here. If Dick Cheney loses this case and is forced to reveal that which he has fought to keep hidden, he could suffer enormous personal embarrassment. He could be sued or even lose his job. What the heck difference does it make to argue that — well, technically — it's his official action not his personal fortune. One could also make a pretty good case that Cheney's personal fortune has been enhanced in huge amounts by his official actions. Wait 'til later, when it's too late for Bush to drop him from the ticket and the Democrats begin unleashing the "war profiteering" accusations. At some point, we're going to hear Democrats saying things like, "Dick Cheney isn't really that interested in a second term. He wants to hurry back to Halliburton and collect his commission on the war."

In any case, it seems to me that recusal is not about the technicalities of a conflict of interest but about making sure that the court's decisions are above suspicion. Is there anyone today who feels, in light of Scalia's attitude, America is more likely to embrace the next 5-4 decision that favors the Bush administration with Scalia among the five?

The terrorist actions in Spain and Baghdad are, of course, terrible tragedies. And it bothers me more than it probably should that as I surfed the Internet, the overriding discussion points for those two horrible incidents seemed to be how they could be used in our current presidential election. You have articles that say what happened in Spain makes the case for the defeat of George Bush and you have articles claiming that it proves we should not elect John Kerry. And in discussion groups on both sides, there's a lot of talk of how their guy can use this to get votes. It's going to be a long time 'til November, people.

I can't recall a stupider proposal than a bill that was recently introduced to give Congress a veto power over Supreme Court decisions. Can't think of one less likely to ever become the law of the land, either. Here's Dahlia Lithwick with just some of what's wrong with this idea.

The folks at moveon.org took a lot of heat over a pretty trivial matter…the fact that two of something like a thousand proposed political commercials in a contest they ran compared George W. Bush to Hitler. Neither spot was ever even a finalist but in today's political climate, if your opponents give you even the teensiest lapse which you can inflate and use to hammer them, you do so. This is practiced by all sides.

Now, moveon.org has come up with one of the most powerful political commercials I've ever seen, and it's one that they actually endorse and are putting money behind. I can't wait to see the ways in which Republicans will try to discredit this one. Here it is.

Larry Boocker sent me this e-mail which advances another point-o'-view on the matter of Martha Stewart's conviction…

A lot of people seem confused about the nature of Martha Stewart's crime and more generally, the reason why insider trading is illegal. They think it's a victimless crime or a trivial crime or a "technicality" crime. Let's start with the immediate victims. Those are the people who bought her shares of Imclone stock when she knew with certainty that their value would drop sharply. Well, that's just her good luck and the buyers' bad luck, right? Kind of like when a gambler puts money on 17 red at a roulette wheel and the casino knows for sure that that number won't hit this time around. Isn't that equally fair?

And that's what this is all about, protecting the integrity of the game. How many people will go to a casino if they suspect the games are fixed? How many people will put their money into the stock market if they suspect it's rigged so that a small number of insiders can make money and everybody else loses. Regulation of the stock market goes back to the New Deal. There were a lot of shady practices before the 1929 crash. When people lost a lot of money in the market, they also lost confidence in the fairness of the market. For years, they were
afraid to put their money back in. This was bad for our economy and for our country. So the SEC was created, not to protect investors, although that's the claim. It was created to protect the stock market, to convince people it's safe to put their money there. Insider trading is
illegal, not to protect investors, but to protect the reputation of the market.

Yes, Martha wasn't directly convicted of insider trading. Kind of like when Al Capone was convicted of failing to pay taxes on his illegal income rather than the illegality of his income. Wasn't that a terrible injustice? I don't think so.

So we had all these business scandals involving Enron and Worldcom and investors got hurt by their shady dealings. (Their employees took a double hit since many of them were invested in their employer.) The government needed to do something to restore confidence in the integrity of the stock market. So they went after Martha. Is this fair? I think so. I've never been impressed by criminals who argue that they weren't the only ones doing the crime or that others were doing worse.

I don't see any reason to chortle over her conviction. I certainly hope that the Enron and Worldcom guys get punished more severely. But I don't think any injustice was done to Martha.

This is not something about which I feel that strongly, but my inclination is in a different direction. I'm not one of those disputing that insider trading is and should be illegal…but Martha wasn't convicted of insider trading. They couldn't prove that, and it's not like they couldn't prove it for the same reasons that prosecutors couldn't prove Al Capone was bootlegging. Capone was having witnesses killed or threatened. He was bribing cops and judges and juries. He had erected an elaborate series of front companies that masked his involvement with the rackets. No one has suggested they couldn't convict Martha Stewart of insider trading because she had a couple of stockbrokers bumped off. In Capone's case, the one weakness in his shield from illegal activities was that he had received the money…so they prosecuted him for that. That, at least, was an actual crime.

Looking back for a famous precedent, the Martha Stewart conviction might in some ways remind me of what Jim Garrison tried to pull after Clay Shaw was acquitted of charges that he conspired to murder John F. Kennedy. The acquittal was swift and total, and rather than accept that, Garrison spent the next year or two trying to charge Shaw with all sorts of niggling little technicialities…finding the slightest discrepancy in the man's testimony, for example, and trying to frame it as perjury. There was a very powerful attitude of, "We'll be embarrassed if we don't convict this guy of something" and I fear that kind of thing happens more in our justice system than it ought to. I don't have one handy but I used to casually track cases where the prosecutors couldn't prove the reason they arrested or targeted a subject, and it then became a matter of plea bargaining — "Plead guilty to this one thing or we'll keep this investigation going forever" — or convicting them on some trivial ancillary detail. (Just thought of one: The McMartin Pre-School fiasco. They charged those people with 208 counts of child molestation and couldn't prove one, but they kept it going for years, hoping someone would crumble and plead guilty to something so the D.A.'s office wouldn't look completely inept. Which in this case, it was.)

I'm not convinced that kind of thing occurred with Ms. Stewart but I'm also not prepared to accept that she was the equivalent of Al Capone so we should rejoice that she was convicted of something, even if it might have been the wrong thing. You're right that it's no justification for wrongdoing to say that others did worse. But it also won't be right, if the Ken Lays of the world get away with their crimes, for prosecutors to say, "What do you mean we didn't nail the big guys committing stock fraud? We got Martha Stewart, didn't we?"

As I said, I'm not set in my view of this, so I appreciate the discussion. I'm just leaning in the direction of something here not being right.

Can you pass a third grade Geography test? Can you identify the 48 states that make up the continental United States? Well, here's your chance to prove it.

Henry Waxman, who happens to be my Congressman, has set up an online database of faulty statements made by Bush administration officials about the war in Iraq. It's called Iraq on the Record.

I happen to think Democrats are making too great an effort to take every statement that turned out to be untrue (or even possibly untrue) and portray it as a deliberate, premeditated lie. Much of America is not going to buy that grown men and women in the White House conspired to be so inaccurate. They will, however, accept that all these predictions and unsupported facts show some sort of massive screw-up; that this country went to war with its leaders believing and acting upon a shocking amount of bad intelligence, and ignoring an awful lot that turned out to be accurate. If I were Kerry, I'd be talking a lot less about lying and a lot more about good, old-fashioned incompetence.

Stephen Beals sent me this e-mail this morning and I thought it was worth sharing…

Like you, I don't get the animosity towards Martha Stewart. True, I'm not really into decorating and all that, so it's not like I've been paying attention, but I really don't understand where the flat-out hatred is coming from. The same goes for Kathie Lee. Like most public personalities, their behavior in their private lives really doesn't mean much to me. I suppose somebody can remind me of a mean boss I've had, or something, but I try and be objective.

I work in advertising and get a lot of daily newspapers here at my office. I'm just amazed at some of these articles. It's obvious that a lot of people who are angry at Martha, apparently just for being Martha, are now allowed to poke at her.

One Associated Press story interviewed previous inmates at the prison Martha will be going to and focuses on the drab concrete which she cannot decorate and the thread count of the blankets that she will have to use. The article goes on to say that her website directs customers to high thread count blankets, but she won't have that option. It points out that the (once again) drab concrete walls cannot be decorated and that she will have no choice about what to wear.

Couldn't this kind of anger be useful if it was applied to something more socially important? As a whole, I guess our country gets passionate about Martha Stewart and not about the boring things in life. Like Education.

Just had to get that off my chest. Thanks!

There are a lot of folks out there who are unhappy with their stations in life and this unhappiness manifests itself in schadenfreude, especially towards someone who seems snooty and above us. I can understand that, I guess. And I suppose I can also understand making the leap from "I don't like this person" to "she must be guilty," though I think that's also intellectually dishonest. I can even understand and agree with those who are happy because a blow was dealt to the premise — too often true in this country — that you can never be convicted of anything if you can afford a good-enough lawyer. Even on this one though, I wish I were more convinced that Ms. Stewart had committed a "real" crime instead of some technicality. The way the counts read, it's almost like they knew they couldn't nail her on a crime so they nailed her on conspiracy to commit that crime and lying to conceal that crime. It reminds me of my old complaint about accusing someone of "the appearance of impropriety" because you can't find a real impropriety to accuse them of.

Oh, well. If this is a warm-up to going after more of the Ken Lays of the world then, assuming Martha actually committed a crime, maybe it will make more sense. If it turns out to be a diversion, then I'll really think she got railroaded on a prosecution that served no purpose other than to "get" someone famous. Thanks for the comment, Stephen.

Jonathan Weisman tells us that there is no cause-and-effect connection between employment levels and the raising or lowering of taxes.