NEWS THEY CAN'T USE
We now know why the administration really wants to keep the names of their "war" prisoners secret: you can hold a press conference about one of them when they don't want people to pay attention to the news. Following last week's announcement of a new Cabinet department on the day that whistle-blowing FBI agent Colleen Rowley was testifying before Congress, we now get a suddenly revelation that would-be terrorist Jose Padilla was arrested in early May. This on the same day that other stories let us know that the U.S. is renouncing its Cold War policy of not striking first with nukuler weapons and that just about nothing is going to be done about Enron, while the 9/11 intelligence hearings go on. There is even a movie tie-in; the number one film right now is "The Sum of All Fears," a Tom Clancy number that appears to involve "a radiological dispersion device" or "dirty bomb" wasting Baltimore. Whaddya know, that exactly the kind of bomb that John Ashcroft has discovered this "known terrorist . . . exploring a plan to build and explode."
It's not clear whether the administration claims that there was any substantive reason to relax their wall-to-wall secrecy on this occasion. It certainly doesn't seem like such great policework to make a big announcement like this is they hoped to use Padilla to find out more about such plans. On the other hand, it probably did a good job of making all moviegoers who just found out what a "dirty bomb" was over the weekend feel extra scared and dependent on the Bush administration.
I thought one really interesting moment in the "New York Times" story on this was where Paul Wolfowitz said Padilla was being held without charge "under the laws of war" -- you know, the ones that apply when we actually declare a war, as we have not done since 1941. The fight against terrorism may be a situation where some naked use of power is necessary, but one wishes that the Shrubbers wouldn't bother dressing these little power episodes up with lies like this, lies that are rapidly corroding what little public understanding seems to exist of the way that republics are supposed to conduct themselves.

MY OLD PAL THE IMMIGRATION "EXPERT"
The following from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
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Law professor from UMKC is shaping immigration policy

Kris Kobach was a relative unknown when he took a temporary job at the Justice Department just days before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. But immigration advocates have since become very familiar with the Missouri law professor's name -- as a detail man behind the department's controversial new immigration policies.

"He's quite well-known," said Angela Kelley, deputy director of the pro-immigrant advocacy group, the National Immigration Forum. "Many of the post-Sept. 11 actions by the Justice Department that take aim at immigrants have been attributed to him. He's the brains behind them."

Kelley and other advocates are not enamored of Kobach's work.

"He's showing a profound disrespect and disregard for the realities of immigrants and refugees in this country. He's come out of nowhere."

But the 36-year-old Kobach is getting major kudos from Justice Department leaders for his work. His academic credentials are impressive: a bachelor's degree from Harvard, a doctorate in political science from Oxford and a law degree from Yale. That resume helped catapult the professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City into an elite category of 12 White House fellows, chosen from hundreds of applicants nationwide. Their one-year fellowship began Sept. 1; each was assigned to a Cabinet member or the White House.

"We did not pick him. I actually didn't know him prior to him getting here, even though I'm from Kansas City," said David Israelite, Attorney General John Ashcroft's deputy chief of staff. "We learned about what his talents were, and then he got significantly involved in those areas. Kris Kobach comes to us with a very impressive legal background, and he's been working on a number of immigration matters. (He's) a very sharp guy."

Kobach did not respond to requests for an interview.

He's no stranger to controversy. Kobach, the son of a Topeka, Kan., car dealer, won his first political race in April 1999 - to the Overland Park City Council. The same month, he wrote an opinion piece for the Kansas City Star critical of both the Missouri and the Kansas legislatures suggesting that "sloppy lawmaking" was the result of the low number of lawyers in both statehouses.

The Missouri Legislature's response: a vote to cut $2.9 million from UMKC, where Kobach taught constitutional law. They thought better of it later and restored the funding.

Now, even the lawmaker who sponsored the cuts is a fan. Rep. Dennis Bonner, D-Independence, said he met Kobach that summer at the law school, where Bonner happened to be a part-time student.

"I was signed up for a fall class with him, and I went in and I said, 'I'll just drop it,' but he said no," Bonner said. "I have nothing but good things to say about him. Whatever impact he's had on these new policies, I'm sure has been one of professionalism. As Americans, I think we're all lucky to have him there. I'm sure the university will be glad to get him back, but I'll be a little surprised if he does."

Indeed, Kobach's brief tenure in public service is an ambitious one. Eleven months after his election to the city council, he filed to run for a Kansas state Senate seat but lost in the Republican primary. His resume says he was the "youngest faculty member to achieve the rank of tenured full professor" at UMKC.
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This Kobach is a childhood acquaintance of mine. Outing us both as recovering geeks, I will admit that we used to play in the same Dungeons & Dragons group. I have not seen him in 20 years and wish him well personally, but the mind reels at anyone with our mutual background making immigration policy. We are both from the 'burbs of Topeka, Kansas, specifically a whiter-than-whitebread spot called Lake Sherwood. On the shores of this man-made mudhole, the streets are demoninated according to some Kansas developers' notion of Ye Olde English place names. "Fountaindale" and "Dancaster," for instance. In this world, ethnic cuisine meant tacos and pizza. There were a couple of Chinese restaurants in town, but I do remember being taken to one. I don't think you could get falafel or hummos if you held the governor for ransom. Hell, bratwurst and asparagus were exotic.

There was a sizable Mexican-American community miles away from us in the city of Topeka, but most of us Lake Sherwoodites knew as much about immigrants as we did about the bus service in downtown Bucharest. The very word conjured sepia pictures of people in kerchiefs and big mustaches from the social studies textbook. While we would have had to admit that immigrant-y places like New York and Los Angeles were part of the United States, we were quite sure that the word American applied chiefly to we heartland WASP types.

Let's just say that diversity was not a big part of the culture. Had anyone answering to the description Muslim been so misfortunate as to show up in our high school, they would be considered de facto terrorists even without the FBI's help. Presuming, perhaps unjustly, that old Kris has retained this rich heritage, he is probably just the man to set the current administration's course as to foreign-type people.

I have "gotten over" the 2000 election, but just on the level of pure accuracy, I wish that the press would stop gleaning electoral truths based on Bush's alleged success with the voters, which as we know was hardly very smashing even if one does believe he won Florida on the merits. For instance in today's NYT, we see the following bit of false context, mixed with cliched metaphors:
Social Security Issue Rattling Races for Congress It is a debate largely touched off by the Bush administration's proposal to allow people to divert part of their Social Security taxes into private investment accounts. When he unveiled his idea in the 2000 campaign, Mr. Bush was considered to have boldly — or brashly — grasped the legendary third rail of politics and lived to tell of it. Congressional Republicans are far more wary.

Houses of the Holier-Than-Thou
Here is one of those quotations that explains why the rest of the word finds us so annoying.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch (from an AP report) Bush insists that Pakistan squash attacks in Kashmir Bush said after a Cabinet meeting: "We are making it very clear to both Pakistan and India that war will not serve their interests."

Obviously, we do not want another India-Pakistan war, but where does Bush (who doubtless knew Kashimir only as a Led Zeppelin tune before 9/11) get off telling these two longtime rival nations what their interests are? How we react to such a statement coming from the Russians or the French or the Indonesians? Or, hell, from omnipotent space aliens? "Nuts," I believe that hero general said at the Battle of the Bulge.

Just when I thought I could not be shocked by the Bush administration anymore, the German press (not ours) reports the following:

Bushs Allgemeinbildung: Gibt es Schwarze in Brasilien? - Panorama - SPIEGEL ONLINE Washington - It was Condoleezza Rice, national security advisor, who helped her boss out of the embarassing situation. During a conversation between the two presidents, George W. Bush, 55, (USA) and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, 71, (Brazil), Bush bewildered his colleague with the question "Do you have blacks, too?"
Rice, 47, noticing how astonished the Brazilian was, saved the day by telling Bush "Mr. President, Brazil probably has more blacks than the USA. Some say it's the Country with the most blacks outside Africa." Later, the Brazilian president Cardoso said: regarding Latin America, Bush was still in his "learning phase".

And remember, kids, Latin America was supposed to Shrub's lone area of foreign policy interest. But I guess that was based on liking tacos or something.

TRANSPARENCY IN ACTION
President Bush recently included a lack of transparency as one evil feature of the Iraqi government. True enough, though it seemed a bit hypocritical at the time given the Bush administration's tendency to keep secrets and angrily dismiss all questions and criticisms. But perhaps Bush was touting a different kind of transparency, the political kind where your administration's every action is determined solely by the imperative to help your friends and hurt your enemies. Has there ever been a policy decision no nakedly political as this most anti-environmentalist of presidents, whose administration has trashed regulations and pushed for more logging and drilling everywhere imaginable, whose Grand Vizier regards energy conservation as no more than a symbolic gesture, suddenly deciding to protect the environment in the one state where his up-for-reelection brother is governor? (Bush's foreign policy is done this way, too: He would be fast-tracking trade deals with Fidel today if the Miami Cuban emigre community was not such a huge constituency for Jeb's Florida Republican party.)

Sadly, the Bushes and the media seem to regard this as perfectly normal and natural, and even rather shrewd: Bush Wades Into Everglades (washingtonpost.com) "The Bush administration has been pushing to expand oil and gas exploration nationwide, but today's agreements should burnish the president's environmental credentials in the swing state that decided the 2000 election." The contempt in which both this writer and the president hold we the voters and readers is truly astonishing. One of the saddest things about modern political journalism is the way it always takes, and encourages the reader to take, the cynical political calculator's view of every question. This is called objective journalism because it avoids taking any ideological viewpoint. Karl Rove must be very pleased.

MY FRIEND SHRAK
One hopes that the president wasn't thinking about that movie where the ogre was in love with Cameron Diaz: The Independent: "On the environment. . the French President said all countries should learn to reduce pollution and the consumption of "resources that cannot be renewed".
Repeated at a joint press conference, this assertion brought a blank stare from the US president, who spent almost his entire career before politics in the oil industry."

"Mr Bush went out of his way, however, to respond to the frequent European complaint that the US – and his own administration in particular – makes constant demands on its allies without consulting them."

"'I appreciate this good man's advice,' he said, nodding towards Mr Chirac. 'I listen carefully. And I am proud to call him a friend.'
Mr Bush seemed, however, to be in a rather skittish and unfocused mood after a demanding five day tour to Germany and Russia. He referred twice to Mr Chirac as 'President Jacques' and pronounced the French President's second name throughout as 'Shrak'."

I'm back. Blogging during the last part of the semester is tough for those of us who actually teach!

Having once gotten sucked into a witless e-learning initiative at a certain Deep South university where I was once employed, I was gratified to read in the "New York Times" that online universities are mostly flopping badly. I always said that colleges where you could not drink beer, meet girls (or boys!), and bullshit sophomorically into the wee hours with your friends would be of little interest.

And yet, how the media that flogged all things Webbed for so long continues not to get it. The lone success, we read, is the University of Phoenix, which excels at "branding" we are told in Lessons Learned at Dot-Com U. "The trick now is finding a way for universities like Columbia, steeped in academic tradition, to make it work.
'In a way, that is the crux of the matter,' said Ms. Kirschner of Fathom [Columbia University's e-venture]. 'Are universities going to grow smaller and marginalized in a world teeming with sources of information, or are they more important than ever, as people seek to separate fact from fiction, knowledge from data?' Ms. Kirschner said she hoped the answer would be the latter."

There's little evidence for this growing smaller and marginalized jazz at all; state legislatures may be eviscerating budgets this year but there is no time to be in school like a recession. The "Times" is just allowing a diehard to recycle the same deluded rhetoric that buffaloed nearly every school in the country to throw money at distance learning in the 1990s. The real way for universities to find themselves marginalized would be to continue the behavior that led to these debacles in the first place: acting like corporations whose main mission is to compete in the marketplace and create profit centers. As many real corporations have found, losing focus on your "core business" -- in this case, expanding knowledge and educating students -- usually leads to disaster.

Joseph Ellis is creeping back from his "Why Wasn't I in Vietnam" scandal using his obviously excellent connections in the high-middlebrow press. It is rather sick to see him doing his oracle of the Founders number again in this week's "New York Times Book Review." Reviewing a book that he himself might have written on the rivalry between Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall, Ellis might be writing about his own work when he praises James F. Simon's ''What Kind of Nation'' as "a major contribution not because it breaks new scholarly ground, but rather because it moves across familiar ground with such clarity and grace." Ellis also shows some craftiness and grace himself by directing a bon mot at the press while invoking one of their favorite concepts regarding the academic world of which Ellis was once, and I believe still is, a card-carrying member. According to Ellis, the author "has the storytelling skills of a former journalist accustomed to writing for an audience that lives outside the groves of academe." The obvious joke about Ellis's own "storytelling skills" will now be omitted.

THE OH-SO-LIBERAL PRESS STRIKES AGAIN
In a story about a commission report critical of Amtrak (Advisory Panel Tells Congress That Amtrak Should Be Split) , the New York Times extensively quotes commission members who want to break up the railroad. Several versions of the thought that Amtrak should be "run like a business" were included, as well as arguments that passenger rail service should be privatized. Nowhere is it mentioned that Amtrak exists because privately-owned railroads abandoned passenger rail service in the 1970s, nor does the author of the story mention that Great Britain's railroad privatisation scheme, Railtrack, has been fraught with controversy and marred by declining safety and quality of service. Then the pro-privatization quotations are balanced only by the following half sentence: "Norman Y. Mineta, the Secretary of Transportation, who is a member of the commission, abstained, and a labor representative, Charles Moneypenny, issued a sharp dissent."