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How low can you go?

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Andrew Sullivan is outraged at how personal the vitriol against President Bush can be:

  I’m not saying that opposition to Bush and the war policy is illegitimate. Of course not. Much of it is important and helpful. But the coarseness of some of it is truly awful. In some conversations I’ve had with people who strongly oppose war, I keep hearing this personal demonization of Bush…

Those of us with memories that stretch back to the 1990s will remember that we first descended into the trenches of “coarseness” and “personal demonization” when Bill Clinton took office. Here at Salon we took years of unbelievably “coarse” and vicious e-mails from Clinton-haters: They dreamed up elaborate fates for us, the president and most particularly his wife, deranged fantasies of four-letter-word-driven vitriol, detailing sexually explicit and bloody scenarios that would make a drill sergeant blanch. The anti-Clintonites took the politics of “personal demonization” to incredible new lows in American life, and, fueled by the rise of the Net and right-wing media, made it the norm.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, and I’m sure that the fringe of the opposition to Bush uses rhetoric and imagery that goes overboard in unpleasant and unjustifiable ways. But it was the Clinton-haters — outraged first at a supposed financial scandal that never amounted to anything and then at a sex scandal involving consenting adults — who rolled us into this gutter. The people who are mad at Bush, by contrast are upset about, first, an election that was arguably stolen, and now a likely war that has yet to be justified. There may be no excuse for “personal demonization,” and I won’t defend it, but at least there’s some substance behind what Bush-haters are mad about.

How green was my astroturf?

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The blogoverse is abuzz with people exposing the Republican approach to “astroturfing” letters to the editor that praise the president. The funny thing is, We’ve been receiving these for months at Salon, and it’s a piece of cake to identify them, at least in e-mail. (Snail mail is no doubt a different story.) When you get dozens of e-mails from different people that all start off with “President Bush is demonstrating genuine leadership,” you get the idea pretty quickly. And in e-mail, the tip-off is that the letter comes in formal letter form, with the “to” address neatly at the top. Who writes e-mail like that? They go straight to the Trash.

The new Salon Premium

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Blogging has been scant because we’ve been working feverishly on our new setup for Salon, which is now live. (David’s letter announcing this is here.)

The idea here is an extension of our Salon Premium plan, with a twist. We’re offering two ways to access our original content. You can pay to subscribe. Or you can look at an ad and then get a “day pass” to the site.

We already have close to 50,000 current subscribers (with close to 60,000 who have ever signed up). That’s not enough on its own to get us to the break-even point — but it’s far more successful than the choir of Salon naysayers would ever have given us credit for. We never wanted to move to an “all-subscription” site without providing some means for people to read our articles who couldn’t afford to — and for newcomers to sample what we do here.

I know that there are people who still feel that Web content should be free. Certainly the Web is built on linking, and linking isn’t easy when sites throw up subscription gates. That’s why we offer a precis of every subscription-only story on the site; it’s not full-content but it’s more than just a headline.

The truth is that free, professional journalistic content, content created by people who get paid for it, only makes sense if you’re selling something else — subscriptions to a print magazine, say. For Salon, or any other standalone independent that needs to pay not only for content but for bandwidth and software and health plans for employees and so forth, some variation on the subscription plan is the only way to go. We’ve tried to make ours open and flexible — to keep our gates passable even as we try to support our business.

We’re fortunate enough that such a large group of Web readers think what we do is worth paying for. And we’ll keep working like crazy to make as many of our subscribers as we can feel like they’ve gotten more than their money’s worth.

When is a warhead not a warhead?

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I have been scratching my head all afternoon trying to understand the latest wrinkle in Iraq-WMD rhetoric.

“WARHEADS FOUND,” screams the headline on MSNBC’s home page. The story page, slightly more soberly, is headlined, “Empty chemical warheads found.”

The New York Times, even more carefully, has a headline now that reads: “Inspectors Find Empty Warheads Able to Carry Chemical Agents.”

Now, technically speaking, a “warhead” is the part of the missile, typically the head or tip, that gets loaded with whatever weaponry payload the missile is supposed to deliver. So an “empty warhead” is not a weapon at all but a delivery system.

Presumably what has been found in Iraq is a kind of warhead that is specially designed for chemical weapons. That’s certainly worth paying attention to, and we’re told that the U.N. inspectors will next try to determine whether these warheads show any evidence of having ever been loaded with chemical weapons.

But in the meantime, the media frenzy conveys the distinct impression that today’s news represents a smoking-gun finding of actual chemical weapons — when the truth seems considerably more complex. But then blurring these complexities has been a part of the Bush war plan from the start.

Look closely — you may find “empty warheads” in the White House, too.

Is deflation a Chinese import?

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Today’s Journal contains a sobering economic report suggesting that the December producer prices report contains further evidence of a deflationary trend. (If you thought inflation was bad, deflation is its evil twin — a descending spiral of prices and wages that economists have very little clue how to end once it’s begun.) While prices for energy and services are up, manufactured goods continue to drop.

Now, I’m no macroeconomic expert, but there’s one confusing aspect to all this. The month-to-month price-report stories that tend to deal with these matters never bring up what I can’t help imagining is the elephant in the room: China. In the past few years Chinese manufacturing has gone global in a huge way. When you walk into your Costco, your Home Depot, any store that sells large quantities of manufactured goods, virtually everything for sale is now manufactured in China. China has an enormous labor force and, by Western standards, extremely low labor costs. The result: cheap goods.

I can’t help thinking that the long-term downward pressure on manufactured-goods prices comes from the simple fact that the Chinese economy is now plugged into ours. What I would love to have a thoughtful economist explain (wave arms in Brad DeLong‘s direction) is whether deflationary trends caused by such low-priced imports and competition are to be feared as greatly as other kinds of deflation that we’ve been reading about — the “Japan trap” that Paul Krugman and others have warned about. Are these phenomena similar or different?

From the consumer-in-the-street perspective, you think, hey, this is great — my furniture, tools, DVD player and so forth all cost less than they used to! Then you start wondering whether those low prices mean that your neighbor — or the entire population of the Midwest — now faces unemployment, and it doesn’t feel as good.

So, Saddam, when did you stop beating your wife?

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Confirming evidence that our government is now taking its rhetorical plays directly from the pages of “1984” comes with this CNN report from defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s press conference yesterday:

  The failure of U.N. arms inspectors to find weapons of mass destruction “could be evidence, in and of itself, of Iraq’s noncooperation” with U.N. disarmament resolutions, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Wednesday….

The chief U.N. weapons inspector, Hans Blix, told the U.N. Security Council last week that his teams had found no “smoking gun” in nearly two months of inspections but urged more “active cooperation” from Iraq.

“The fact that the inspectors have not yet come up with new evidence of Iraq’s WMD program could be evidence, in and of itself, of Iraq’s noncooperation,” Rumsfeld said.

Commentary seems almost superfluous. Iraqis! If we find evidence of your WMD program, we will invade you! If we do not find evidence, that is evidence that you have not cooperated — so we will invade you!

What’s really going on here, I suppose, is that Rumsfeld never wanted inspections to resume in the first place, always wanted to invade first and ask questions later, and is now trying to exploit the situation by closing a Catch-22 pincer upon the Iraqi dictator. Unfortunately for him, Rumsfeld’s contortions wind up painting himself as a purveyor of paradoxical doublethink more worthy of “Dr. Strangelove” than the real world of geopolitics.

Orwell’s reminder

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Slow blogging here as we gear up some new projects for the new year at Salon.

For a side project I have just re-read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” I used to read this once a year or more but have fallen out of the habit. Take ten minutes out of your week to read it if you haven’t lately. In the era of Iraq war cant it provides a good bucket of cold water to the face.

  If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin, where it belongs.

The art of gaming

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My old friend (old as in long term: we were high school classmates, and attended many a science-fiction convention together) Greg Costikyan, the veteran game designer who has written some fine pieces for Salon about gaming, has started a blog of his own. “I want to talk about games, and game design, as art,” he says. Anything he has to say on the subject should be worth reading.

Am I missing something?

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Today’s Wall Street Journal has a lengthy and useful lead article about California’s $35 billion budget shortfall and how it happened. Like all articles on this subject, it talks about how California ratcheted up spending during the tech boom and is now facing tough choices.

And also, like all articles on this subject, it makes absolutely no mention of the fact that California spent many billions of its citizens’ money during the energy crises of a couple years ago to keep our lights on. As we’ve learned since, these shortages and price hikes were the direct result of market manipulation by companies, including Enron, that were engaging in fraud.

Why isn’t this connection being made? I doubt the energy dollars alone would fill the budget gap but they might have made a significant difference. The silence here remains puzzling.