Mitch Townsend

In an Op-Ed piece entitled “It’s Time to Get Tough,” Robert Kuttner rallies John Kerry’s supporters to the faltering campaign. He says “Five big things are wrong, and each can (belatedly) be fixed.” The piece is addressed to the major components of the Kerry campaign: the candidate himself (or “himselves”? he has taken enough different positions to qualify as plural), his campaign staff, and to the media, which Kuttner feels has not been sufficiently active on Kerry’s behalf:

Hostile Media. The press (with some heroic exceptions) continues to cut Bush and the right-wing smears a lot more slack than they cut Kerry. There is no offsetting left-wing Fox.

It has been raining up and down the East Coast, Florida has had hurricanes lining up at Disneyworld instead of tourists, but it’s nice in Chicago. I wonder what kind of weather they have on Kuttner’s planet?

Well, never mind. The Boston Globe rises to the challenge with a front-page Spotlight Team investigative article on – ready? – George Bush’s National Guard records. Wait, didn’t we cover this in 2000? The Globe has all the answers, including the one to that question:

The 1973 document has been overlooked in news media accounts. The 1968 document has received scant notice.

Oh. So this has actually been looked at, but we just didn’t pay enough attention at the time. So it’s still news. That must be why NPR decided to cover it again, too.

A Pulitzer Prize for Kitty Kelley? It’s a lock.

I’ve been following this story for several years. The major record companies, with the connivance of the union representing the performers (AFTRA, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), failed to pay into the artists’ pension fund. This came to public attention when some of the great R&B performers of the 1960’s went to retire and found they would get either nothing or very little from the AFTRA pension plan, which was supposed to be administering the funds. Sam Moore, of Sam and Dave, found out that from 1965 through 1992, Atlantic Records had contributed exactly nothing towards his pension, and he was entitled to only $64 per month. Jackie Wilson and Mary Wells died in poverty and without health insurance. In 1994, Moore, with Lester Chambers (Chambers Brothers), Curtis Mayfield, Wilson’s estate, and others, brought suit against the RIAA and the record companies. USA Today had an update a couple of months ago. The suit is still going on, ten years later.

Also, the recording industry had been holding on to about $50 million in royalties owed to artists they could not find, and so could not pay. The missing artists included David Bowie, Dave Matthews, and Sean Combs. NY State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer persuaded them to try harder.

I was reminded of this when I read this story about the RIAA suing another 744 people for file sharing, along with about 4,000 others in the past year. This is the sort of thing that gives capitalism a bad name.
The RIAA website has an anti-piracy statement with this noble sentiment:

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the creative artists lose. Musicians, singers, songwriters and producers don’t get the royalties and fees they’ve earned.

It’s nice to know they care.

I started posting comments to this thread at David’s Medienkritik, and found out that Ralf Goergens was there before me — he was advocating calm, while I was frothing like one of those talk radio callers.

The subject was the US pullout from Europe (mostly from Germany). Ralf correctly points out that the US has already drawn down its forces by about 3/4. The withdrawal will include the last American armored division (1st AD) and the 1st Infantry Division. The army strength will probably bottom out at two brigades. The Ramstein AFB is likely to remain. Small installations will probably be built in Eastern Europe as staging areas. There will also be a movement of US forces away from the DMZ in Korea. Seoul is quite close to the line, and the area has become too built up for military use. The US forces will move farther south for defense in depth, but there will also be a net withdrawal from Korea.

I have to agree with Ralf that the economic impact on Germany is likely to be localized and small. The Bush administration denies that there is any punitive aspect to the decision, which is really just one in a series of adjustments to the end of the Cold War. Maybe, maybe not.

According to the Washington Post, the SEC is thinking about delaying some of their other corporate reforms because of the effect Sarbanes-Oxley is having. The documentation, testing, and evaluation of internal controls is costing more money and taking more time than predicted. Everything does, doesn’t it? Among the initiatives that may be delayed are treating stock options as an expense, another dubious reform.

As previously noted, the Chicago Boyz are not big fans of Sarbanes-Oxley. Maybe the only thing worse than shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater is shouting “Don’t just stand there, do something!” in Congress.

One thing that immediately struck me about the nomination of Porter Goss for Director of Central Intelligence was that he spent decades as an operative, running agents and working undercover. He was neither an analyst nor a bureaucrat; he worked in human intelligence. Other than as an item in his capsule biography, none of the news sources I’ve read has considered why this might be significant.

Back in the 1970’s, the American intelligence services were cut back and placed under additional restrictions. A combination of Vietnam fatigue and a series of weak presidents created the opportunity for Congressional mischief, and Congress took full advantage. Partly as a result, the intelligence services switched to signals intelligence. Signals intelligence is gathering information by intercepting communications, monitoring energy signatures, and visual surveillance from a distance. It was cheaper, it was more palatable to the politicians, and it had less chance of turning into an international incident. Human intelligence — the kind Goss practiced — got less attention and money. You probably remember the boasting about how this satellite or surveillance airplane could pick out a license plate from umpteen miles up in the whatchamacallitsphere. It sounded good and made a great slide show.

The problem is that while a spy satellite can read a license plate, only a human on the ground could know where the car was going next. An agent needs to be present, dealing with other people who may have one precious nugget of information. It’s messy and dangerous, and absolutely essential. When the Islamist threat came into being, we had no one in place to notice what was going on. No one on our side had gained entry to their camps or was privy to their planning. Al Qaeda even began using our electronics against us. For example, one Al Qaeda member boasted after being captured that he had taken Osama bin Laden’s satellite phone out of Tora Bora to act as a decoy. They have notoriously stayed away from cell phones lately. Human messengers are considered more reliable. Also, steganography, the technique of hiding messages in minute changes to images, is very difficult to detect. Images containing messages can be posted to a website like eBay, then accessed and decoded by the intended recipient. The image would look normal to anyone, or to any computer without the key (usually the unaltered image). Al Qaeda and its allies have been using this technique. As far as I know, there is no effective countermeasure for this.

I take it as a good sign that Goss was nominated. Good intelligence requires human intelligence, signals intelligence, and analysis. We have been deficient in all three, but the human factor is in the worst shape. Bush made an excellent choice.