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Brad DeLong pens a “Platonic Dialogue on Eldred v. Ashcroft“, considering how the Supreme Court might rule on the case challenging Congress’s extension of the length of copyrights. Conclusion:

  The court won’t overturn the copyright extension. They won’t use the chainsaw. But they will take the chainsaw out of the garage and make sure its fuel tank is full. Its opinion will mean, “Congress, there are some limits, somewhere, to your copyright power.” It will mean, “Disney, you’ve bought your last copyright extension.” It will mean, “Congress, next time find someone more serious than Sonny Bono to lead the issue.” It will mean, “We’re not going to tell you where the line is exactly — that would be dicta, and we hate dicta, except when we don’t — but we are telling you that if you move to extend copyright again, you first need to ask yourselves the Clint Eastwood question: ‘Do you feel lucky?'”

Must read

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Simon Schama — the writer/historian whose lectures remain one of my most vivid memories from college days — writes in the Guardian about 9/11 one year on. Choice quote:

  Apparently, the dead are owed another war. But they are not. What they are owed is a good, stand-up, bruising row over the fate of America; just who determines it and for what end? The first and greatest weapon a democracy has for its own defence is the assumption of common equity; of shared sacrifice. That was what got us through the Blitz. It is, however, otherwise in oligarchic America. Those who are most eager to put young American lives on the line happen to be precisely those who have been greediest for the spoils.

Postscript: I see Joe Conason has also chosen to link to this today (hadn’t read his column before I posted). But hey, he chose a different passage to excerpt.

Salon Blog watch

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0ne of the refreshing things about cruising the Salon blogspace tonight: It’s not all about 9/11.

On Gnosis, Morgan Sandquist says OSX browsers aren’t rendering text very well. Do others find this so? I’m likely to take the plunge on a new Mac for home this autumn. Our old hardware won’t run OSX of course.
Stephanie Losi, who worked as Salon’s first intern many years ago and who has gone on to other illustrious things, has a new Salon blog: Neurotic Oasis Goes to School. Learn one new thing each day — today, HTML and Chicken Kiev. (She’s also been blogging over at Neurotic Oasis.)
Toby Sackton is blogging from Lexington, Mass., against war-on-terror hysteria. “What happened last year was real. What is being replayed today is not. When you feel your society being manipulated on a grand scale, a first reaction is to opt out, to withdraw. But if you don’t withdraw, you feel you are opposing an almost unbelievable power — like a storm that you cannot possibly influence or control.” He also reports from a “September Eleventh Families for a Peaceful Tomorrow” event in Boston.
Rob Salkowitz has unearthed a quote from E.B. White from 1949 that’s eerily prescient: “The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructable. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions.”
Mark Hoback’s “Green — a 911 Psychodrama” joins the fine “Plan B” in the rarefied realm of Salon blog-novels.
Child abuse among Jehovah’s Witnesses — Mike Pence reports on Dances with Cactus.
Susannah Breslin asks a funny “Ten Salon Blog questions.” “Who is Scott Rosenberg–really?” I’ve been wondering that myself.
Christian Crumlish’s Radio Free Blogistan is doing an awfully good job of keeping up with doings in blog-land, Salon’s and elsewhere. He beat me to the punch to mention that I will be talking on a panel at the UC Berkeley J-School on Sept. 17, along with a variety of other fine people like J.D. Lasica, Rebecca Blood, Meg Hourihan and Dan Gillmor, about blogging and journalism.

Rational markets? What rational markets?

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Market theory tells us that the stock market is a near-perfect gauge of the collected knowledge of participants. Now, everyone under the sun knows that we are approaching the anniversary of 9/11 and that there’s a heightened likelihood of a terrorist attack of some kind. This is not exactly a secret.

The market, you’d think, has taken this information into account, right? Wrong. Stocks, which were showing modest gains this morning, dropped suddenly after the government announced a heightened “orange” alert. Shouldn’t this have been a “duh, of course” moment? Are there really hordes of investors sitting there saying, “Ohmigod, I had no idea there was an anniversary of a terrorist attack coming up! Thanks, government, for warning me — excuse me while I put in my sell order.”

Not exactly. Instead, what today’s gyration indicates is that markets — in the sort term, certainly — are amazingly irrational. People buy and sell based on emotion, hunch, hearsay — even the color of a government terror warning that tells us what we already know.

The threat is urgent! But it can wait a month

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All summer, as the Iraq debate roiled and the Bush administration seemed locked on autopilot, springing leaks and exposing policy rifts, a mysterious question hung in the air. Why weren’t we hearing from the president himself? Did Bush intend war or not? Was his mind made up, or was he waiting to weigh the evidence and his advisors’ counsel? You could give him the benefit of the doubt, as the Iraq-policy news gyrated wildly, by assuming the latter.

But a story by Elisabeth Bumiller in Saturday’s New York Times suggests that, in fact, Bush’s mind has been made up all along, but that the delay in his communicating his views to the American people was the result of simple P.R. planning. Hear the words of White House chief of staff Andrew Card: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” And Bush political guru Karl Rove says, in the same piece, “There was a deliberate sense that this was not the time to engage in his process. The thought was in August the president is sort of on vacation.”

So: The product launch for Gulf War II had to wait a month because August is a lousy time to sell wars. And you didn’t want your President Bush to cut short or otherwise mess up his vacation — lord knows what he might do if he didn’t get enough rest.

All of which may actually make perfect sense in terms of poll-swaying realpolitik. The Sept. 11 anniversary no doubt does make a better occasion to whip up a war hysteria — and Rove has lined up some peachy, TV-friendly backdrops for Bush’s two major speeches this coming week.

There’s just one little nagging problem here: The Iraq hawks keep telling us that the threat from Saddam Hussein is so urgent that an invasion cannot wait for U.N. inspectors, sanctions, more evidence of Saddam’s possession of “weapons of mass destruction,” or a good old congressional debate (though Bush is now grudgingly accepting that need). Time’s a-wasting — we must have “regime change” now. But, hey, we can delay everything for a whole month if that makes things more convenient for White House TV consultants, and for Bush’s ranch schedule.

Salon blog watch

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Some very cool Salon blogs that I have somehow missed until now:

Calton Bolick is blogging from Japan. Check out this list of Japanese museums: My god, there’s a Ramen Museum!

Marcie Crofoot is running for Queen of America on this platform: “All garbage will be illegal. You’ll just have to create something from whatever you have left over. No exceptions. Okay. One exception. Diapers.”

Julie Powell is chronicling amazing culinary adventures over at the Julie/Julia Project.

Enaren: Culture and politics, emphasis on TV. (Is that Elvish in the title?)

The Reverse Cowgirl’s Blog is self-described as Susannah Breslin’s “attempt to justify the enormity of her porn collection.”

Music and book reviews from Paulapalooza.

More later!

The fog of “war”

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That’s the title of my essay over in Salon proper, posted tonight (it’s a Premium piece). It looks at how difficult it is to assess the U.S. progress in the “war on terrorism” in the absence of a clear definition of the war itself — who the enemy is/enemies are and what U.S. goals are. It also suggests that Bush has deliberately chosen to be vague, because it lets him retrofit “War on Terrorism” energies onto his pre-existing agenda — most obviously, the campaign against Iraq.

Ecco redivivus?

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Longtime readers of my column know that I’ve lamented more than once about the disappearance of Ecco, my favorite “PIM” (Personal Information Manager), a cool outliner/datebook/contacts manager that fell by the wayside as Outlook became the monopoly standard. Small communities of Ecco devotees have survived, and the program still works fine, but keeping the faith with a program that hasn’t been developed for five years is not easy.

My heart raced as I read the subject line on a reader e-mail that “Ecco Pro is back! ” It’s not quite like that. The good news is that NetManage, the company that purchased Ecco from its original developers and then orphaned it, has made the program available for free (it’s still copyright, still under license, but apparently anyone can go download it). There’s info here. But there doesn’t seem to be much more going on than that. Still, it’s a perfectly functional Win32 application. Go check it out if you’re looking for a good PIM.

Hope in the universe

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For decades American politics has been trapped in a cycle that benefits no one except the media companies that own TV stations: Politicians felt they had to advertise on TV to get elected (generally they were right). Politicians had to raise enormous sums of money to pay for those TV ads. The money went from contributor’s pockets directly into media coffers, with only a brief stop-off in campaign warchests. Politicians ended up beholden to contributors and devoting much of their energy to fundraising; the electorate got fed worthless “attack ads” and 30-second soundbites; only the TV station owners profited.

Today’s New York Times reports that, glory be, the era of TV political advertising may be beginning to fade:

  The once-overwhelming influence of television advertising on political campaigns is declining, Democratic and Republican leaders say, leading them to embrace aggressively old- fashioned campaign tools like telephone calls and door-knocking in this year’s Congressional elections. While candidates continue to devote most of their resources to television, they say the power of commercials to affect an election’s outcome is being diluted by the glut of cable television stations, the popularity of such commercial-free premium networks as HBO and the anesthetizing frequency and similarity of political advertisements.

If this trend story proves accurate, it could be the best news in a long, long time.

Postscript: In comments a couple of people are saying, “Hey, phone calls, knocks on my door? That doesn’t sound like an improvement.” I disagree. Politics, real politics, is about getting out and talking to people — neighbors talking to neighbors, politicians actually facing the human beings they represent, supporters of candidates trying to persuade voters. This is retail politics, and I’ll take it any day over the wholesale game of TV ads.