The Next Hurrah

"NYPD Blue" Turns in its Badge

By JamesB3

"NYPD Blue" is ending a 12-year run with a barely heard whimper. Once one of ABC's cornerstones, many people don't even seem to realize the show is still on. Still, NYPD Blue won many awards, had many fans, and pushed a few limits.

My favorite cop show for much of the 90's was "Homicide: Life on the Street". The first 3 seasons of Homicide contained some of TV's all-time greatest moments. NYPD premiered a few months after Homicide and garnered all the attention. Homicide fans jeeringly referred to the show as "NYPD Butt" since so much emphasis was placed on the exposed backsides of various cast members. When Homicide began to turn into just another cop show, I took another look and  was impressed by most of the performances, and the diverse cast, even if the writing left me cold.

To me, NYPD Blue was a show that claimed to take bold risks but in reality took baby steps. The center of the show was (for the first few seasons at least) a bigot but he was usually presented as a good guy underneath. The show danced around racial and homosexual themes but the homosexual characters were usually very stereotypical (although a huge step up from that "Hill Street Blues" character who couldn't stop himself from hustling in public toilets even after Belker gave him a job). Some of the racial episodes seemed to end with variations on "can't we all just get along" or if a black man and a white men punch each other a few times, all the tensions wash away. Whereas the anchor characters on HSB (Lucy Bates, Frank Furillo) were normal people who were made interesting because their inherent sense of goodness and kindness overcame their insecurities, NYPD's central figure, Andy Sipowicz, always came across as little more than a blank canvas for a series of star turns, and later a Job who would lose another wife or son or second cousin if the show needed buzz. Everything came across as very scripted, stagey, and eventually, the writers clearly ran out of ideas.

One thing I always admired about NYPD Blue was its continued portrayal of cops as human beings, as being seriously flawed yet still committed to protecting the public and catching bad guys. All of the melodrama may have bordered on bad soap opera, but I prefer human beings to slaves of the assembly line ("Law & Order") or characters who are supposed to be so cool that even seeing one of their own gunned down rarely brings more than a tilt of the head and a change of sunglasses ("CSI"). In a post 9/11 world, people seem to prefer their TV authority figures as flawless and inhuman. "NYPD Blue", to its credit, never attempted to pander to a police state and instead reminded us that humanity does not start or stop when you put on a badge. They showed us the best and the worst of all aspects of life, and I can respect that, regardless of my other feelings on the show.

It's ironic that a show which was credited with breaking down barriers wrapped up its run when the networks are more gutless and childish than ever. In only a few short years all that progress, real or imagined, washed away, and Bochco had to remove scenes which never would have raised an eyebrow 5, 10 years earlier. All the work Bochco has done for the past 25 years, washed away by Janet Jackson's titty and desperate politicians looking for anything to hide their trail of blood, death, and lies.I can't help wondering when this new era of repression will end and in the meantime how many quality shows are going to be butchered or driven off the airwaves.

What are your thoughts on NYPD Blue? Who were your favorite characters? Least favorites? Moments? Stories? Will you miss the show?

Why Is Homeland Security Helping Bin Laden and Zarqawi?

By DHinMI

OK, this just seems bogus:

New intelligence indicates that Osama bin Laden is enlisting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, his top operative in Iraq, to plan potential attacks on the United States, federal officials said Monday.

Al-Zarqawi has been involved in attacks in the Middle East. He has not been known to have set his sights on America.

The Homeland Security Department issued a classified bulletin to officials over the weekend about the intelligence, which spokesman Brian Roehrkasse described as "credible but not specific." The intelligence was obtained over the past several weeks, the officials said.

The government has no immediate plans to raise its national terror alert level, Roehrkasse said. But, he said, the intelligence "reiterates the desire by al-Qaida and its associates to target the homeland." [Emphasis added]

The suggestion that Zarqawi presents a real threat of terrorism inside the United States is either pure propaganda or the people at Homeland Security are complete incompetents. If it were a serious threat, it would be cause to raise the national terror alert level. Therefore, I find it hard to believe it’s an actual threat.

Now, that’s not to say that Zarqawi isn’t a threat to spread terror outside of Iraq. The key piece of evidence in support of that theory is buried deep in the AP article:

Bin Laden, who is believed to be hiding on the rugged border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, is thought to communicate with his deputies by courier, taped messages and other means. In January 2004, Kurdish forces in northern Iraq detained one courier, Hassan Ghul, who was carrying a letter written by al-Zarqawi to bin Laden. In it, al-Zarqawi proposed starting a civil war between Iraq's Sunni and Shiite Muslim populations.

In that context, it’s far more likely that Zarqawi—who’s credited with terrorist acts in several Middle Eastern countries—could be taking his campaign of attacks against Shia beyond the Iraqi border. (Kuwait?  Maybe Lebanon?)

But here’s the real question with this story: why is Homeland Security letting bin Laden know that his communications lines have been compromised? Don’t these guys remember the stories about how bin Laden stopped using his satellite phone after it was used to target him in the cruise missile attacks? Is it really so important to do a little fear mongering right now that they waste the opportunity to try to monitor whatever communication lines have apparently been cracked and see what more they might discover?

After this announcement, any trust bin Laden and Zarqawi had in that communications line is gone. Like his satellite phone, bin Laden will abandon that system, and we’ll have to try to crack his new line of communications. In the meantime, what intelligence will we miss out on? Will we have lost the opportunity to prevent further attacks? How many lives might we have saved? What opportunities to capture bin Laden or Zarqawi are being squandered?

And will anyone in the press ask why we just revealed to bin Laden that, should he want to keep secrets from the U.S., he should find a more secure way to communicate with one of his most powerful and dangerous allies?

Lebanese Government Resigns; Real Story is Syria

By DHinMI

The news reports are already comparing today’s resignation amid street protests of Lebanon’s pro-Syrian Prime Minister with the Orange revolution that brought Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko into power. Undoubtedly the popular revulsion over the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri is a major factor in the decision of the ruling coalition to step down from power. But the real story in Lebanon today is Syria.

It’s hard to imagine that the pro-Syrian government would step down from power without the assent of their Syrian backers. Syrian views Lebanon as a buffer between it and Israel, and they have been the biggest power brokers in internal Lebanese politics since they occupied large swaths of the country in 1976. Lacking the buffer of the Golan Heights, the ability to send troops from the north against an Israeli flank provides some of the deterrent Syria lost when it lost control of the Golan Heights in 1967 during the Six Day War. But control of Lebanon, once imposed by a force of over 40,000 troops, is coming at a greater cost to Syria, and it appears that Bashar Assad is calculating those costs as not in Syria’s self-interest. The real question may become whether Assad can maintain his hold on power, or whether other forces will rise up to determine a different set of priorities for Syria’s self-interest.

More below the jump...

Torture Isn't the Crime; Publicizing It Is

By Meteor Blades

One thing about the ascendancy of the rightwankers has been positive. To capture the reins of power, they've employed disinformation techniques and dirty tricks that make Jeb Stuart MacGruder's and G. Gordon Liddy's underhandedness a third of a century ago look like pranks in a student body presidential election. They've deployed smears and misleading statistics and outright lies to further objectives as far away as the Iraqi oil fields and as close to home as your FICA deductions. When their nominees to high posts come around for confirmation hearings, suddenly their once-pithy opinions soften and blur and their memories fade.

But winning is the dad of hubris, and every so often, despite all the PR consultants' warnings, one of their minions, seeing decades of NeoImp rule ahead, slips up and gives us ... ahem ... a clear channel directly into their "thought process."

So it is with Jonah Goldberg's phone interview with Salon's Mark Follman regarding why the right has been so quiet on the issue of torture. [The boldface is mine.]

Did You Know?

By Trapper John

Wow.  We keep hearing about how lifting the earnings cap on SSI taxes only buys us seven years till we have to dip into the trust fund.  But, as they say on Sportscenter, did you know that lifting the earnings cap buys us 37 years more until the trust fund is exhausted?

Via Nathan Newman and Josh Marshall.   This is a critically important calculation -- it means that, with a simple change supported by the vast majority of Americans, payouts can continue unreduced until 2079.  There is so no crisis.

Love Me, Love My NASCAR

by Trapper John

Digby sez that the Democrats' real Southern problem isn't that Northern and Western Dems don't respect Southern culture:

Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Jimmy Carter were all southern white males, and we blue staters voted for them without a second thought. Before that, Lyndon Johnson won the blue states in a landslide.  As I recall, we rather rather liked their southern roots . . . It is not enough to be tolerant. We must adopt both their style and their policies before they are happy. Everyone must be a NASCAR fan. If you are not, they will take it to mean that you disrespect their love of NASCAR. Everyone must hunt. If you don't, then you are being intolerant of their love of hunting. If you don't talk about religion the way they talk about it, you are not properly religious. Rappers must wear cowboy boots, hispanics must speak English, we all have to drive American trucks with confederate flags on the back and drink Jack and be exactly like these macho, southern white men before they will feel secure enough to vote with us.

If that's the case, we're up against it in the South.  But we won't really know if we can win in the South until we try.  Kerry sure as hell didn't try -- and even if he had, his economic message wasn't populist enough to really distinguish himself from Bush.  To echo Tom Frank -- as long as the GOP keeps playing culture war against the Dems, the Dems will be screwed among white Southern/Great Plains men unless we make a compelling, black-and-white case on economic issues.

But who knows -- maybe Digby's right, and Southerners won't vote for non-Southerners.  I'm just not in a pessimistic enough mood today to buy it -- but it's a great post, nevertheless.

Brinksmanship at Bally's, or, What to Expect from This Week's AFL-CIO Executive Council Meeting

by Trapper John

Labor unions have been getting more press over the past month or so than they have in probably 20 years.  Unfortunately, most of the media attention is focused not on specific organizing campaigns or on new collective bargaining agreements, but on the internecine conflict spurred by the SEIU's Andy Stern and his threat to pull his union out of the AFL-CIO.   Even more disheartening is the manner in which labor's internal political squabble is being reported in the mainstream media; one of the less salient consequences of the decline in union density has been a concomitant decline in the number of journalists assigned either exclusively or primarily to the labor beat.   But organized labor is a highly specialized field, with an arcane jargon and an ever-present history that influences nearly all decision-making.  It's not an easy area for a political journalist -- even a very good one -- with little knowledge of the movement to cover. The result is muddled articles with major factual errors (e.g., the persistant misconception that the AFL-CIO -- which is a federation of labor unions -- is "the nation's largest labor union") and questionable assumptions.

This week is certain to set off a new spate of underinformed "Whither labor?" pieces, as the AFL-CIO Executive Council meets at Bally's Hotel in Las Vegas.  This will be the Executive Council's last meeting before June's AFL-CIO Convention.  I thought it might be a good idea to put together a backgrounder on the brouhaha at Bally's, so as to ensure better understanding of the garbled articles sure to be published later in the week.  I don't claim to be unbiased, or to have perfect information, but I do know a little bit about the lay of the land, and I'm not writing this as an advocacy piece for any one side of the debate.  Anyway, your briefing book is below the fold. 

Jailed Iranian Blogger Says U.S.-Funded Radio Outed Him

By Meteor Blades

A "revolutionary court" in Iran on Tuesday sentenced Arash Sigarchi to 14 years in prison on a string of charges, including espionage and insults to various leaders, including the late Ayatollah Khomeini. His real crime: dissidence.

Because Sigarchi was a blogger, which can be a scary vocation in Iran and other autocratic states, his cause was taken on by other bloggers and the day he was sentenced was called Free Motjaba and Arash Day. (Motjaba Saminejad is another Iranian blogger who is being held by Iranian authorities, although he has not yet been charged.) They are not the only Iranians in custody because of their on-line opinions. But, according to Another Irani online, Sigarchi may be locked up because Radio Farda blew his cover.

With an annual budget of $8 million, Radio Farda is a U.S.-funded station designed, supposedly, to spread democracy in Iran, and is a twin to the Arabic language Radio Sawa.

David Corn stands the First Amendment on its head.

by Kagro X

The Nation columnist David Corn, in his Feb. 24th article, suggests inter alia, that calls for Plame Affair investigator Patrick Fitzgerald to subpoena Talon News "reporter" James Guckert, a.k.a. "Jeff Gannon," may endanger the media's First Amendment protections. I think he's got it backwards.

Corn jumps into his free press arguments by starting with an examination of the likelihood that Guckert's implication that he had somehow gained access to a State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) memo claiming that Valerie Plame was in fact behind her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson's, assignment to the yellowcake case. Specifically, the likelihood that his knowledge of the memo could instead have come from reading an earlier-published Wall Street Journal article.

In much the same fashion as Daily Kos diarist Categorically Imperative, Corn compares the wording in the Journal's article to the wording of Guckert's questioning of Wilson in an October 28, 2003 interview:

What is striking is that the language Gannon/Guckert used to describe the memo during his interview with Wilson is nearly identical to the Journal's description. Here's the question Gannon asked Wilson:

An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do you dispute that?

Here's what the Journal had earlier reported:

An internal government memo addresses some of the mysteries at the center of the White House leak investigation and could help investigators in the search for who disclosed the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency operative, according to two people familiar with the memo.

The memo, prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel, details a meeting in early 2002 where CIA officer Valerie Plame and other intelligence officials gathered to brainstorm about how to verify reports that Iraq had sought uranium yellowcake from Niger.

Note the similarities. To ask the question Gannon/Guckert posed to Wilson, he did not need to possess that memo. He only needed to have read the Journal. It's possible he was leaked the same document. But the simpler explanation appears to be he saw it in the Journal.

[There's more below the fold.]

Welcome to The Next Hurrah

by DHinMI

We'll be ramping up to full speed over the next few days, and hope to have several posts a day for you to read, comment on, disagree with, or--should you chose--simply ignore.  But we're pretty confident you'll find plenty here to engage you and keep you coming back.  Please make yourself at home, and keep on the lookout for some new posts over the next couple days.