Barack Obama, Train to Nowhere

Not everyone's drinking the Kool-Aid these days.

Larry Carlton, a guitar player's guitar player, happened to be doing a series of shows in the Village this weekend, at the Blue Note.

He played masterfully for an hour and a half, with a pick-up bassist (apologies -- can't recall his name) and drummer (Billy Kilson, "one of the world's best," according to Mr. Carlton) . It was a rather smoothy-jazzy affair, without the ass-kicking solo work I'd hoped to hear, but after all it was a Sunday night, 8pm show (for those unfamiliar with Larry Carlton, he's the ace that played the great solo on the great "Kid Charlemagne" by Steely Dan).

At one point, Mr. Carlton, who is called "Mr. 335" after his signature axe, but could also just as fittingly be called the nicest guitar player alive, encouraged a little audience participation. He asked us to think of a name for the tune they were about to play.

Mr. 335, Larry Carlton.

Now let's set the context. It's 2008, an election year. It's New York City, but not just New York City, it's Greenwich Village, the hipster capital of the world. In order to get to the place, I had to walk past a half-dozen tattoo parlors, sex-toy shops and a movie theatre playing something called "A girl cut in two," in addition to the usual assortment of chic-ee bistros and sidewalk eateries. Every single one of these places was milling with people on a Sunday eve. If Texas has a polar opposite, it might be right here.

You wouldn't be too surprised, then, if you were in the audience and heard the first suggestion for the name of the song: "Barack Obama's Running for President Song!" Oh. My. God. I've often said life is like a "B" movie. There's one of it's lines. I was aware of a smattering of applause.

A couple more names were offered as Mr. Carlton bantered with the audience. "Train to Nowhere" was suggested.

"Oh," said the guitarist. "So, if I put this together with that, we've got, "Barack Obama, Train to Nowhere!"

Through a great, big, charming smile, he assured us, "Oh, I'm only kidding..." The nicest guitarist alive, and not afraid to tell it like it is. Right there in the Village, a few of us clapped. Really loud. It's not all bad, the Village. Although it did feel like the very butch doorman was projecting unfriendly vibes in our direction for a long moment afterwards.

May I humbly suggest calling it "Train to Nowhere," and dedicating to Mr. Obama?

Rock on, Larry Carlton.

[edit: it's actually in Greenwich Village.]

Out of the Mouths of Babes.

Every so often, an issue that seems to be hopelessly bound up with partisan (and fruitless) reasoning has a laser-light shined on it; the bondage of biased premises is effortlessly cut through, and the matter is made undeniably plain.

Often it only takes a simple observation, "out of the mouth of a babe", as it were, to demolish a bad argument. Of course, that doesn't prevent those with an interest in denial from denying the ruins, but for the rest of us, it's like a breath of fresh air to the suffocating when it happens.

I think Peggy Noonan is too dignified to simply be called a "babe," at least in the popular sense. But in that other sense, her recent Op Ed seemed to effortlessly unravel all tangled and obfuscatory debate around the abortion "issue" -- debate that has worn on and on for decades. Debate that has drilled down into ever finer divisions of opinion, ever finer and more obscure definitions of "life" -- no, make that "denials of definitions of life." Debate that has droned on even while, in the US alone, roughly 3,000 babies per day are pureed and dumped into garbage bags (by the professionals; the amateurs are much more barbaric).

That's a pretty sickening word-picture, isn't it?

It's a sickening truth.

Yet with a simple observation, the crux of the matter is put before us. Writing in the Wall Street Journal of the bizarre offering on the macabre subject by Sen. Barack Obama at the "Rick Warren" debate, Noonan said:

We know when life begins. Everyone who ever bought a pack of condoms knows when life begins.

Yes, it really is that simple. It's as plain as the nose on your face. You may not like your nose, but it's there. You ought to get used to it.

If writing were pitching, Ms. Noonan delivered, in this piece, a 1-2-3 inning in the tiebreaker at the World Series. It was a crucial inning, and she showed us all the stuff that the Majors are made of, with which she decimated the opposition.

As I watched I thought: How about "Let the baby live"? Don't parse it. Just "Let the baby live."

Listen to that chin music! And to this:

As to the question when human life begins, the answer to which is above Mr. Obama's pay grade, oh, let's go on a little tear. You know why they call it birth control? Because it's meant to stop a birth from happening nine months later.

To put it another way, with conception something begins. What do you think it is? A car? A 1948 Buick?

How much simpler can it be than it really is? None. She goes on:

If you want to argue whether legal abortion is morally defensible, have at it and go to it, but Mr. Obama's answers here seemed to me strange and disturbing.

Strange and disturbing, indeed. Just like Obama's line about "being punished with a baby." It makes one wonder what sort of mental machinations produce propositions so hostile to the gentlest, most innocent, most tender and beautiful of all creations: a baby.

Thank you, Ms. Noonan, for a masterful effort. The opponents haven't yet figured out what hit them.

We all know when life begins.

Uncle Sam in Your Pocket

No, even more so.

Remember that nifty "Foreclosure prevention and relief" law that was sponsored by Sen. Chistopher "VIP Mortgage Client" Dodd, written by Bank of America and Countrywide Credit, and signed into law by the president recently?

Remember how it carried a mandatory -- yet rather tangential -- provision for federal government monitoring of all automatic payment transactions? You probably thought, "hmm."

And maybe then you thought, "why'd they do that?" And then, "well, they must know what they're doin'."

But some of us thought, "OK, what are the pickpockets (with the full force of the federal government) up to now?" And some others of us posted it on our blogs.

Well, now The U.S. Department of Education -- that's a federal agency -- is notifying those with outstanding student loans, thusly:

NOTICE OF PROPOSED TREASURY OFFSET AGAINST ALL PAYMENT STREAMS AUTHORIZED BY LAW, EITHER CURRENTLY OR IN THE FUTURE. THESE PAYMENT STREAMS MAY BE PAYMENTS TO WHICH YOU ARE ENTITLED TO RECEIVE EITHER NOW OR IN THE FUTURE.

There is a bit of clarification on the Loan Statement, but not much. It reads, in part, "These payment streams may include (but are not limited to) Federal and/or State tax refunds, Social Security Benefits, and/or Federal travel reimbursements."

Since they're already hitting Federal income tax refunds, and have been for years, I can't imagine why they feel the need to remind people, unless something has suddenly changed. Something, for example, in the "but are not limited to" category. Could that "something" be the sweeping new "payment stream" monitoring stipulation provided by Sen. Dodd's recently enacted "foreclosure prevention" law?

This apparently applies to past due and defaulted loans. These are fair game, I suppose. But the methodology is a bit ominous.

I hope we're not moving closer and closer to the day when you don't have to pay a bill, it's all done by Uncle Sam's monitoring of your "payment streams," and all you have to do is show up for work.

Or else.

(some very interesting Student Loan Default statistics here.)

innocent, until.

A reprise of this post follows:

The New York Post, presumably egged on by the major slander wire services, continues its daily article containing details of Dr. Bruce Ivins' Internet records, emails, myspace and other social networking site posts -- at least, posts that have user names that resemble his, and so they must be his, right?

This pursuit of theirs raises questions about the veracity of the "documents" they cite, to be sure. And if they indeed originated with Dr.Ivins, where on earth are they getting them? Who has an exhaustive inventory of all Dr. Ivins' online activity, requiring access to private, password-protected user accounts?

Who sought and obtained the required access? Who granted it? What are the implications for any Internet user? And, is an Internet citation that is made by a user name that can be imagined to be somehow linked to someone really conclusive evidence of anything?

Conclusive evidence. Indeed, that's the rub. Dr. Ivins' every utterance has been aired publicly in the context of "mad scientist" for over a week now. Has it proven anything?

It has. It's proven that there is apparently not enough information to convict the man of anything in a just court. Not yet, at least. So who's behind the relentless smear campaign? We already know that tabloids like the New York Post are enabling it, but who initiated it, and who continues to feed it, and why?

It only takes a few hit pieces to obtain a conviction in the court of public opinion. And yet, it seems, judging from blog and website comments, that all the jury is sure of in Dr. Ivins' case is that his apparently weird behavior seems to stem from the effects of being a fragile person in a pressure cooker of suspicion. Weird, perhaps, but not quite malicious. He yapped a lot, so it would appear, but an Internet post isn't exactly a smoking gun.

If Dr. Ivins turns out to be guilty, let it be proven. His lawyer doesn't think so, and nobody ever accused a lawyer of being naive. His surviving co-workers don't believe he is, and they understood completely the sort of pressure he was under. His family seemed oblivious to it, if he was, and that seems to be very unlikely.

On the other hand, the FBI has a track record of pursuing the wrong person, even to the point of having to pay millions of dollars for damages they wrought in his life. As to the notion of an agency of government making malicious use of the media, we have the recent example of the disgraced former governor of New York, Elliot Spitzer, who had quid-pro-quo relationships with the news media which he used as a weapon to harass those he decided to make "suspects." It wouldn't be a terrific stretch to imagine that the FBI, presumably at least as long on power and short on accountability as Governor Spitzer was, might employ the same despicable tactics.

In fact, the evidence suggesting that is less circumstantial than the littany of innuendos offered up by the news media to suggest Dr. Ivins' guilt as a postal-anthrax-mad-scientist-murderer. If the government really has a case against him, why continue to feed the media suggestive gossip?

A state of mind, however unstable, is not a crime. A crime is a provable criminal act. The man is innocent until proven guilty, despite the childish tale-bearing of the New York Post and its peers in the slander trade. And if he is innocent, the act of harassing a man until his state of mind grew unstable, and then using that as evidence against him, will not likely be subject to justice in this life. But in the next, it might be.

suicide by cop. conviction by tabloid (posthumously).

If this piece had a soundtrack, it would be "Pressure."

By now you've heard the "news." Dr. Bruce Ivins was the Feds' main suspect in the Anthrax-by-mail murders following 9-11.

Consider the damning evidence, as enumerated in a recent NY Post article:

He was an Anthrax expert.
He was "nerdy."
A shrink said he was "homicidal" (he actually had thoughts of killing someone).
He played the organ in Church.
He was pro-life.
He was against euthanasia.
His brother hadn't spoken to him in over twenty years.

And the Baltimore Sun alleges that he stood to gain "tens of thousands" of dollars from an Anthrax scare, as if that's a compelling reason to go on a killing spree.

Clearly the FBI need look no further. And the clincher, is, of course, that the prime suspect is dead, having killed himself. If that isn't proof enough of is his guilt, what is?

Unfortunately, you have to wait for the very end of the article before finding any balance, like this:

"The relentless pressure of accusation and innuendo takes its toll in different ways," said Kemp, Ivins' attorney. "In Dr. Ivins' case, it led to his untimely death."

Or this:

A co-worker, Dr. W. Russell Byrne, added, "I think he was just psychologically exhausted by the whole process . . . If he was about to be charged, no one who knew him well was aware of that, and I don't believe it."

Good job, Feds. After failing to produce a case against Steven Hatfill, and having to pay him $5.8 million for slandering him, you harass a man to the point of suicide and launch a PR campaign to convict him in the court of public opinion. Symptoms of a very flimsy case, indeed.

But, we should all feel safer, as the case is neatly closed.

Dr. Bruce Ivins.

Or not. We just don't buy the "nerd next door is a freak" angle. We can't see how this man had time to orchestrate, execute, and cover up a mail-order serial killing. We don't think this prosecution-by-innuendo answers the questions raised by the post 9-11 "suicides" of several other bio-weapons researchers, now forgotten by the media.

To be relentlessly harassed by heavy-handed gun- and subpoena-toting Storm Troopers might indeed prove to be too much for a gentle soul.

The known, verifiable facts are that Dr. Ivins is something of a scientific prodigy whose pastimes spoke of doing service for the benefit of good: he served his country by his work (36 years an expert in his field), his community through Church and the American Red Cross, the cause of life by his convictions. Those are the facts. Innuendo, suspicion and systematic character defamation cannot outweigh them.

Somebody at the FBI probably won't lose his job if they can pin this on someone. But Dr. Bruce Ivins got crushed, and his reputation, and the dignity of his surviving wife and twins, publicly demolished.

Editorial here.

[edit] August 3, 2008 5:40 pm:

To be sure they aren't outdone in trash journalism, the New York Post picks up on the Baltimore Sun theme above and raises the level of character defamation a few notches, quoting Tom Ivins referring to his tragically deceased brother as a "wussy." This is the same gentleman who stated that the accomplished Dr. Ivins "thought he was God." Perhaps the real story is a case of malicious sibling rivalry.

Also, the Post couldn't resist the "...and he bought a handgun!" angle, complete with pictures.

So, there you have it: nerdy scientist who was pro life, owned a handgun, had thought about killing someone (and was innocent enough to admit it), has a paranoid social worker, has comments added to his social worker's file in pen (as in, ex post facto, perhaps), had a jealous brother, and stood to make "tens of thousands of dollars" by carrying off an evil letter-writing campaign, somehow managing to keep it all hidden from his wife and two children for 7 years.

Case closed?

Hardly. The WaPo runs this: Ivins could not have been attacker, some say.