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The "Friday Report"

by Mark Gisleson

Josh Marshall caught the real significance of the Iranian quake: building standards. On the Richter Scale, the 6.5 quake in Iran was identical to one in California last week. The difference? Stringent building codes that require quake-proof buildings in California. Just more of those damn irritating regulations.

Josh also has a nice bit up on tomorrow's David Brooks column: "The failure to do proper planning for post-war Iraq, it turns out, wasn't a matter of hidebound ideologues who ignored and attacked expertise and experience. It was the happy result of America's tradition of non-ideological pragmatism." Brooks, without a doubt, is one of the most clueless commentators of all time. More than anything, he reminds me of that politically astute accountant you met at an office party who almost passed his CPA exam last time around...

The corruption and horrors of war are bad enough, but now the Army is using bureaucratic redtape to compound their venality. It seems that even when you pay for it yourself, all armor upgrades must be Pentagon approved.

As noted at Babelogue, a California newspaper is "breaking" the news that there was a stealth signing of key provisions from Patriot Act II a couple weeks ago — just as Saddam was getting pulled out of his hole in the ground. This is bad news, very bad news.

If you follow online tech news, Joi Ito is a big name, and his blog is legendary. Since signing up for it a week ago, I haven't been too impressed — geek stuff mostly. But every now and then Joi has an interesting post, like these two on Dean answering machines (great idea!) and the Dean for Iowa game.

Mark A.R. Kleiman has an interesting aside on Mickey Kaus' latest dissing of Wes Clark:

[If anyone can explain to me what’s behind Mickey Kaus’s characterization of Clark as “creepy,” I’d be grateful. (Note that Kaus doesn’t bother to try to justify it, he just asserts it as fact. Dec. 24.) I think it just means that Clark is exactly the kind of Democrat Kaus keeps telling people he wants to vote for, and if Kaus couldn’t detect some character flaw he'd have to think about actually voting for a Democrat, which would make him very unhappy.]

Regular readers may have noticed that I never link to KausFiles. That's because, like a lot of online political junkies, I used to read Mickey's blog on a regular basis. Hell, I even corresponded with him, but when he wrote to remind me that he was a Democrat, I figured there was no point in further reading. It's an odd Democrat who always seems to back Bush, and never has a kind word for any Democrat except Joe Lieberman.

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Jay Jay the Jet Plane isn't something that was on my radar until I read Julie Salamon's article in this morning's New York Times. Apparently there are two versions of this kids show: one for PBS, and one for Christian audiences. Christ, even kids' show producers have a better sense of the separation of church and state than does our Clown Prince and his Crisco-coated Attorney General.

Also in the Saturday NYTimes is an interesting article about satellite radio. Frankly, the writer, Stephen Holden, strikes me as being just a bit clueless when it comes to contemporary music, but he's dead on when he says that the magic is long gone from our regular radiowaves. I'm sure many readers think my WYSO items and links stem from my willingness to promote a friend's employment situation, but the truth is I hate WYSO/Antioch management more for what they're doing to a once great radio station than I do for their betrayal of my buddy Vick. Employment in the U.S. is a friggin' nightmare, but that's just the result of our best bought and paid for minds in DC deregulating capitalism. What's happened to radio is an even better example of the liberal assertion that deregulated capitalism inevitably results in monopolies. In the case of radio, monopolies like Clear Channel mean limited listening opportunities. Admittedly, it's an Orwellian situation: the more freedom business has, the less freedom the rest of us have. Unfettered broadcasting has resulted in the ubiquity of schlock rock and the vanillification of hip hop.

I posted Vick's new list of the best music from 2003 yesterday in a special post, but to get an idea of just how special his programming was, check out last year's list (some of which you may have heard on the radio this year if you have a college station nearby). It's a tribute to the technological cluelessness of WYSO management that this page still exists on their website, but Google's caching feature will keep this page alive long after WYSO takes it down. Google caches also make it easy to reveal the Orwellian nature of 'net revisionism: here's the Excursions page as it now exists at WYSO's site, and how it looked just one month ago. (The person on the right is, of course, Leon Trotsky, or maybe Lavrenty Beria — I get my purged comrades mixed up sometimes.)

Posted by Steve Perry at December 27, 2003 9:12 AM

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