When history is doomed to repeat itself

[The front page of the Seattle Star, July 26, 1919. That's Miller Freeman on the right.]

[Warning: This is a ridiculously long post. But I hope you find it interesting anyway.]

CPO Sparkey, meet your ideological forebear: Miller Freeman.

Sparkey, writing at the blog of Sgt. Stryker, has been working feverishly to justify the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Most of these arguments, of course, appear to be in the service of the growing conservative tide to at least preserve the option to do the same thing to Muslim-Americans in the wake of Sept. 11.

Notably, Sparkey has been making the patently ridiculous argument that race wasn't a major concern of Americans in 1942. It was, of course -- just not in the way it is today. Instead, race was a major concern voiced mostly by white bigots who were focused on maintaining the lily-white "purity" of American culture. [See my previous post on this subject.]

Moreover, Sparkey argues, the internment occurred not because of racism, but because of legitimate "national security" concerns. What doesn't seem to occur to him is that these concerns were inextricably bound up with deeply entrenched racist beliefs.

In support of his position, Sparkey has argued the following:

Unlike the attitudes towards the Black Americans, whose slavery was justified on the reed of racial superiority, the attitudes held by most pre-war Americans toward the Japanese was different. In talking to many of my parents' generation and reading what I have, the prejudice the average American felt wasn't racist in that the Japanese were inferior, but just the opposite, seeing the Japanese as a very capable resourceful people that looked different, behaved different, and believed different.

This argument has a more-than-familiar ring to it. Indeed, Sparkey is reproducing almost exactly the attitudes voiced at the time -- and as logic goes, it could not be more hollow.

The most vivid example of this can be found in the arguments offered by a gentleman named Miller Freeman, who was one of the founding fathers of what is now the large Seattle suburb of Bellevue, and one of the most influential Republicans of his time in Washington state.

Freeman was probably the foremost agitator in Washington against Japanese immigration from early on, beginning in about 1908, and he remained that way until his death in 1956. He was the founder of the Anti-Japanese League of Washington; he led the fight to pass the state's anti-Japanese Alien Land Laws in 1921; and he was, of course, one of the leading proponents of internment in 1942. He also happened to be an old friend of Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt, the Western Command general who was the person primarily responsible for the internment.

Here’s a passage from my forthcoming book, Strawberry Days: The Rise and Fall of the Bellevue Japanese-American Community:

There was one central reason why Freeman saw Japanese immigrants as a greater threat than any other: the "Yellow Peril." Like many of his contemporaries, Freeman ardently adopted a conspiracy theory holding that the Japanese emperor intended to invade the Pacific Coast, and that he was sending these immigrants to American shores as shock troops to prepare the way for just such a military action. As his counterpart in California, James Phelan, put it in 1907, the Japanese immigrants represented an "enemy within our gates." Freeman frequently cited a 1909 book promoting this theory, Homer Lea's The Valor of Ignorance, which detailed the invasion to come and its aftermath.

Freeman saw the rising rivalry over Alaska’s salmon fishery as an early salvo in this coming war. He declared in the pages of Pacific Fisherman: "If we follow the false doctrines preached by the pro-Japanese press, we will soon be making Japan a present of the Pacific Coast in order to preserve our friendly relations and build up a large American-Japanese commerce for Nippon steamships to handle."

Driven by fears of an invasion, Freeman's career soon moved into a military phase. After reading a 1910 article in Harper's Weekly calling for the formation of a Naval Militia in Puget Sound, he sprang into action. Freeman contacted the Secretary of the Navy and offered to spearhead the drive to form just such a body, comprised of ships provided by the Navy and a phalanx of yachting volunteers. He organized a meeting at the Seattle Yacht Club and lined up a muster roll and sent their names off to the Navy. In short order, the state Legislature made the naval militia an official entity, and Freeman was named its commander. The Navy provided the militia with an aging, modestly seaworthy ship dubbed the Cheyenne, and Freeman spent the next several years organizing drills and preparing for the Japanese invasion.

Such an event was nearly inevitable, in Freeman's view. He warned his recruits that they should enter the naval militia fully expecting to see battle action. "I want to warn you all that a conflict of arms with Japan is highly probable," he told the Seattle Times, adding: "The safety of the nation is in the people and the people must be aroused to action if our coast is to be saved from devastation by a foreign enemy."

Freeman sturdily denied that his campaign was driven by racial animus, saying that he "harbors no enmity toward the Japanese. They are a wonderfully bright people, frugal and industrious. But they are Orientals. We are Caucasians. Oil and water do not mix."

... Despite his contentions that he had no prejudice against the Japanese, this racial separatism was a cornerstone of Freeman's argument as he presented it in the pages of the Star. He voiced it largely by sprinkling his writing and speeches with popular aphorisms: "The Japanese cannot be assimilated. Once a Japanese, always a Japanese. Our mixed marriages -- failures all -- prove this." "East is East, and West is West, and ne'er the twain shall meet." "Oil and water do not mix."

And his conclusion became a political benchmark: "It is my personal view, as a citizen, that the time has arrived for plain speech on this question. I am for a white man's Pacific coast. I am for the Japanese on their own side of the fence. I not only favor stopping all further immigration, but believe this government should approach Japan with the view to working out a gradual system of deportation of old Japanese now here."

Freeman's views were quite typical of the time. Back then, economic competition was viewed as being part and parcel of racial competition -- a contest, it must be noted, that was almost solely instigated by whites who viewed Asians with repugnance and fear. There was also a significant sexual component to this fear; much of the agitation against Japanese was couched in terms of the "protecting the purity of our wives and daughters" sort of rhetoric that was also frequently inveighed against African-Americans, and in fact was used to justify the lynching phenomenon that was occurring concurrently.

Sparkey goes on to offer the following:

The odds are just as good that Miss Yamashita didn't even go to school with Jimmy or Teddy, but to an all-Japanese High School funded, staffed, and propagandized with Yen from Tokyo, and there was a 1 in 5 chance of her being educated in Japan. Encouraged by Tokyo, the Japanese community in the United States was insular, keeping to their own language, separate schools (or additional schools at the end of the regular school day); forming and joining a wide and varied array of clubs and associations (ranging from the notoriously pro-fascist Silver Shirt Society to the relatively benign Japanese American League); patronizing their own newspapers, stores, and businesses.

Of course, Eric Muller at Is That Legal? has already pointed out that this is just flat-out false:

Sparkey, there were no all-Japanese high schools funded by Tokyo along the West Coast. The Nisei (American citizens of Japanese ancestry) went to the public high schools in their communities, alongside all of the other American kids in their communities of various races and ethnicities. What I think you are referring to was the after-school programs in Japanese language and culture that many Nisei attended--at which (as you would expect with kids) most Nisei learned very little Japanese language and very little Japanese culture, in just the same way as my kids learn very little Hebrew and very little about Judaism at the after-school Hebrew School program I send them to.

Indeed, Sparkey's argument again almost perfectly replicates those raised by the anti-Japanese agitators of the time, presented not only during the internment debate but also during the debates favoring the Alien Land Laws and the 1924 Asian Exclusion Act, which had no small role in eventually bringing about World War II (as I've explained previously).

Here's another explanatory excerpt from Strawberry Days:

The Issei were also concerned about the growing gap between them and their children. Since many of the immigrants themselves had little education and were nearly helpless when it came to learning English, their first solution was to educate their children in Japanese language and culture as a way of strengthening communication as well as ties to their heritage. A Japanese language school had been started in Bellevue in 1921, but was shut down amid the Alien Land Law agitation. Though the main intent of the Issei was simply to close the language and cultural gap between themselves and their children, the schools consistently were a source of suspicion in Caucasian communities along the Pacific Coast, in no small part due to anti-Japanese propaganda claiming that the Nisei children were being indoctrinated into emperor worship and forced to swear loyalty to Japan. Those suspicions, at least in Bellevue, were utterly groundless; none of the Nisei can recall any lessons even remotely approaching such topics, other than geography and history lessons about Japan incidental to learning the language.

A second language school opened in 1925 and held at an Issei home in the Downey Hill area until 1929, when community leaders organized the first Japanese language school at a building in Medina, at 88th Avenue Northeast and Northeast 18th Street. Asaichi Tsushima was the first teacher.

Around the same time, leaders of the Japanese community began making plans to build their own center for gatherings. By 1930, they had built the Japanese Community Clubhouse at 101st Avenue Northeast and Northeast 11th Street and dedicated it in late July of 1930. It had 16-foot-high ceilings to accommodate the basketball court the builders installed as its main floor. Some 500 people, including the leading citizens of Bellevue, attended.

The language schools were consolidated at the clubhouse, which soon became the hub for the segregated community. The Seinenkai meetings were held there. And the language lessons at the schoolhouse, which initially were held only on Saturdays, were expanded to daily hour-long sessions after school.

The sessions weren't always popular with the young Nisei. Many of them, the boys especially, hated trudging the extra mile or so to the schoolhouse while all their classmates got to have the Saturdays off. And they weren't really interested in learning Japanese. They, after all, wanted to be Americans. Most of them recall being good students at regular school, but poor students in Japanese.

"I used to pack my lunch, go over there, get in fights, learn how to throw a baseball," recalls Alan Yabuki, whose parents operated a greenhouse in the Yarrow Point area. "That's what I used to do."

Tom Matsuoka did not make his children attend the Japanese school. "He says, 'I want you guys to be able to learn English, speak it well, because this is where you are going to live. Don't want to get muddled up in this' -- a lot of these people speak in mixed idioms once in awhile," recalls Ty Matsuoka.

"Oh, but those kids just go for eating lunch, that's all," says Tom now. "They don't learn nothing.They talk the English all the time back and forth, you know."

Still, Matsuoka chipped in and helped drive the teachers for the school from the ferry dock to the school, since by 1932 he had a car, which was frequently pressed into service chauffering youngsters and their mentors to and from activities of all kinds. "Mrs. Tajitsu and Mrs. Takekawa, they used to come teach at the Bellevue School on Saturday," Tom recalls. "And so they come on the ferry, and somebody have to go on the ferry and pick them up, and take them back to the ferry after the school. [But] I never sent the kids, and had nothing to do with the Japanese school."

In spite of this reality, the myths about the purposes for the school, as well as where their funding originated, persisted, and wound up playing a significant role in the debate over the internment in 1942. Proponents of rounding up the Japanese pointed to these schools as centers for indoctrination in emperor-worship and probable hotbeds of sabotage and espionage. And just as whites' economic concerns were bound up with false racial stereotypes, so now were the concerns about "national security" regarding their Japanese neighbors.

Among the foremost of these voices, of course, was Miller Freeman. He was the most prominent civic leader to step up and advocate internment during the Tolan Committee hearings in Seattle in 1942, which essentially rubber-stamped the decision already made by FDR to intern the entire Nikkei community. The presence of the schools played a major role in his arguments.

Freeman lived in Bellevue, and his activism naturally had a local angle as well. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, he organized a local committee of white civic leaders to determine what to do about all the Japanese in their midst, who comprised about 15 percent of the population and were quite visible, since they operated most of the farms in the area.

For the first meeting of this committee, Freeman summoned a group of mostly younger Nisei men to stand before the city fathers and face the music. One of the attendees later described it to me as Freeman telling them that they were going to get "the shitty end of the stick."

I reconstructed this meeting from minutes that Freeman’s secretary took at it:

"I am coming now to certain recommendation I want to suggest to you for consideration, which in view of your own background and training you may at first find it difficult to accept or even clearly understand, but I think we should face these things frankly," Freeman said. "These are not suggestions of the committee, but of myself.

"1. You should sever all connections with the Japanese Government -- that includes disbanding any pro-Japanese organizations designed to promote the Imperial Japanese government interests. There can't be any half-and-half business -- must be 100 percent.

"2. Stop all relationships with Japanese consular representatives.

"3. Stop using the Japanese language."

Kanji Hayashi, one of the only Issei at the meeting, interrupted, trying to explain to Freeman that he misunderstood the position of the Nisei. In halting pidgin, he told the gathering that "some people have the idea some of them are under obligation to the Japanese government, but that has never existed -- they have no relations with the Japanese Consul. The first generation cannot become citizens of this country and their country (government) must look after the welfare of those people. What they did was just to take care of them."

"Let us put an end to all that," declared Freeman.

(In fact, one of the facets of the "Yellow Peril" mythology was the notion that Japanese children born in the United States were automatically given dual citizenship in Japan, and that the Emperor considered all the Nisei to be his subjects. There was only a grain of truth to this; dual citizenship was indeed granted automatically until 1924, at which time the Japanese government altered its policy, allowing Nisei to gain such status only if their parents registered their names at a Japanese consulate within two weeks of their birth.)

Freeman then continued with the remainder of his points: "Now, I think that all Japanese language school should be stopped."

"Already stopped," Kanji Hayashi volunteered.

"You have had it up to now."

"Yes."

"May I ask now," Freeman queried, "what was the purpose of running those schools and the older people requiring that the younger people go to the Japanese schools?"

"Just teach them the Japanese language, that is all," Hayashi explained. "No other purpose, I think."

"Our feeling is that they were propaganda schools to teach loyalty to the Japanese empire," Freeman said. "I think we should stop all Japanese-language newspapers and publication in this United States of America. English is the language of this country. Use English and English papers."

Tok Hirotaka piped up: "Because our parents couldn”t speak English, so they had to teach children something about Japanese."

"I am going to suggest it was the business of older people to talk English rather than Japanese," Freeman replied.

"I wish someone could have told them before, we couldn't," said an exasperated Hirotaka. "People like Mr. Hayashi -- his children never did go to Japanese school, but they (the old folks) don’t all understand English like he does; or Mr. Takano. My mother is 65 -- here 40 years, longer than she was in Japan, but she can't talk English very well. Rest of us all talk English at home, but to her I still talk Japanese."

"I suggest that in the future no longer should older Japanese insist that these young students be raised and trained in the ways of the Japanese and their language," Freeman said.

Hayashi tried to explain why the Issei found the language so hard: "Japanese language is entirely different from other nations" and it is awfully hard for people to get mastery of it."

"English language is not hard to learn," replied Freeman.

"Italian or Swedish understand English better than Japanese," said Hayashi.

It's probably worth noting, of course, that Freeman was also a major landholder and developer in the Bellevue community; and after 1942, with the Japanese removed from their farmlands, he was free to proceed with his plans to convert the town into a lily-white suburb, which is what it was, until recently.

Now, with the growth induced by the Microsoft campus next door and the phenomenal growth of the tech industry on the Eastside, it again has a significant minority population -- about 10 percent Asian.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Bigots have always sought various means of seemingly reasonable arguments to hide their racial prejudices. But their reasoning never stands up to factual scrutiny. And unfortunately, even people who truly harbor no anti-Asian bigotry have been known to buy into their rationalizations -- though sometimes for other, perhaps equally questionable, motives.

The return of the anti-abortion terrorists

Here's a disturbing trend:

Plot to attack clinic detailed

A Ku Klux Klan leader charged with firearms violations told an undercover informant that he had converted his car into a suicide bomb, authorities said yesterday.

David Hull, 40, of Amwell, Washington County, was arrested last week by federal agents who said he built pipe bombs and had attempted to obtain hand grenades for an abortion clinic bombing.

Police: Woman fired on abortion clinic

Police charged a Cherokee County woman with misdemeanor damage to real property Thursday after she was accused of firing a .12-gauge shotgun into an Asheville abortion clinic. No one was injured.

Both Asheville police and FBI agents have questioned Murphy resident Brenda Kaye Phillips, 44, about the early morning shooting at Femcare, 62 Orange St. in Asheville.

Four years ago, police discovered a partially exploded bomb outside the same clinic.

Many of us who have observed the Bush administration's wink-and-nudge act with anti-abortion activists have feared that it would eventually encourage the extremists among them -- who largely were quiet during the 2000 campaign and have been largely subdued since then -- to resume their former activities. That may be starting to happen.

Other Republicans in key positions have made plain that the domestic terrorism engaged in by the American right would not be viewed as part of Bush's "war on terrorism." Florida Republican Porter J. Goss, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, explicitly said so during hearings on the Sept. 11 attacks.

"The trouble is, 'terrorism' is a very broad word, and it lends itself to a lot of mischief for people who would abuse common sense," Goss said. He then cited bombings of abortion clinics. "To me, that's not the kind of terrorism I'm talking about."

"That's criminal law enforcement," Goss said. "But it would fit most broad definitions of terrorism because the purpose [of those attacks] is to scare people."

Of course, the primary purpose of the 2001 anthrax attacks -- which are widely understood to be acts of terrorism -- clearly also was to scare people, but that point appears to have eluded Goss and the rest of the Republicans.

Going deeper

Eric Muller has a somewhat gentler and more thoughtful response to CPO Sparkey's nonsense at Is That Legal?:

So of course, Sparkey, race today plays an open role in policy debates and in public discussion and in popular culture in ways that were either very new or not yet existent in the early 1940s. But it is just wrong to say that racial issues were just “on a slow simmer” (Sparkey’s words) at that time, and that race did not play an important—and overt—role in public discussion and debate.

This is the underlying point I was trying to make when I said that CPO Sparkey's contention that race wasn't a major topic in the 1940s was laughable. But of course, Muller expresses it very well and clearly. There's a good deal more, of course. Go read it.

Finally, I owe both CPO Sparkey and Sgt. Stryker an apology for originally posting my criticism as though they were the same person; in fact, Sparkey is just one of the people who posts at Stryker's blog. My bad. I'm still a bit new at the blogging game and have tended to assume every blog is authored by one person, as this one is. Of course, I stand by the remainder of the post.

More right-wing terrorism

Militiaman arrested in bombing attempt

A 34-year-old Española militia member was arrested Friday on charges he placed a pipe bomb in the mailbox of Forest Guardians' Santa Fe office in 1999 and set the 5,100-acre Oso Complex Fire in the Jemez Mountains in 1998.

Again, one has to wonder why these kinds of incidents rate so little attention in the post-9/11 environment. Or is it not terrorism if environmentalists and public lands are the target?

Border crossings

Meanwhile, right-wing extremists continue to use 9/11 as an excuse to intensify their bigotry, and wage a little terrorism themselves:

Pride & Prejudice On Desert Border

"It's an invasion," said Chris Simcox, leader of the newest such group, the Tombstone-based Civil Homeland Defense, which says it is doing what the government has exhorted the nation to do since 9/11: be extra-vigilant about security. "There's too much crime coming over that border, and Americans are being victimized."

To critics, the rise of such groups - Simcox's is the third in southeastern Arizona - is an ugly and dangerous offshoot of 9/11, one that has racists arming themselves in the name of homeland security and drumming up support by preying on fears of terrorism.

"It has intensified incredibly since 9/11. They'll blame immigrants for anything," said Devin Burghart of the Chicago-based Center for New Community, which tracks anti-immigration groups' activities.

One of these days, they're going to kill someone -- if they haven't already.

Maybe they could clean the latrines

State militia group offers its services for unlikely call-up

"Our system calls for the militia to be called up in times of national need. This sounds like one of those times," he said.

Um, that would be the National Guard.

These guys would be more likely to be a true "fifth column":

"Militias are historically so anti-government that I don't think you would really want them in the fold," said Robert Snow, an Indianapolis police captain and author of the 1999 book "Terrorists Among Us: The Militia Threat."

"And none of these groups are organized enough so that you could count on them."

Marion County Sheriff Frank Anderson said police don't need the militia at this point.

"The different law enforcement agencies are meeting, and we have plans to deal with situations that might arise," he said. "We're not asking for any particular assistance, other than for citizens to report any suspicious activity."

Some militia members have engaged in enough of their own.

In 2001, police in Bloomington arrested two leaders of a militia group for allegedly planning the execution of a third member whom they suspected of betraying them. The plot was blown when the hit man they thought they were hiring turned out to be an undercover State Police officer.

More America-haters

British neo-Nazi converts to radical Islamism

Midland-based David Myatt, 51, was the political guru behind white supremacist group Combat 18 and has been the leading hardline Nazi intellectual in Britain since the 1960s.

Now the self-confessed Pagan and Adolf Hitler worshipper hails al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden as his inspiration and praises the World Trade Center attacks as acts of heroism.

Just in case anyone had forgotten just who, among whites, is in fact most likely to provide "aid and comfort" to the enemy.

Where's the outrage?

Is there a reason that Howard Coble’s remarks about the Japanese-American internment haven’t generated the same kind of outrage as Trent Lott’s similar nostalgia for 1940s-style racism?

You bet. It’s really very simple: Bigotry against Asians, for many Americans -- evidently, many of them Republican -- doesn’t count as real bigotry.

As Eric Muller has been reporting at Is That Legal?, the Republican leadership in the House has steadfastly refused to confront the issue of Coble’s decidedly unenlightened views on the internment, as well as his refusal to apologize for them. And for that matter, as Muller reports, the House Democratic leadership likewise is utterly failing to hold Coble’s feet to the fire (rather like the Senate Dems’ response to Lott’s remarks). Atrios points out that at least one Asian-American congressman, Michael Honda of California, is trying to press the issue, but the lack of concern from the pundits and the press is becoming remarkable.

For Asians, this scenario is all too familiar. It is common for slurs against them to go unremarked or to be merely shrugged off as unimportant. (Mind you, they’re not alone in this. Didn’t anyone else find it strangely hypocritical when, back in 1999, a white aide to Washington, D.C., Mayor David Howard was forced to resign for using the word “niggardly” -- this, in a city that steadfastly roots for a football team that uses an overt racial slur for its nickname?)

The previous most recent case of this, for Asians at least, occurred in December when Lakers star center Shaquille O’Neal, in an interview with Tony Bruno on Fox Sports Radio, made clearly racist taunts aimed at Houston center Yao Ming, the NBA’s first Chinese player. “Tell Yao Ming, ‘ching-chong-yang-wah-ah-soh,’” he said.

Worse yet, O’Neal merely shrugged off the resulting criticism (much of it originating with the magazine Asian Week) with a distinctly Lott-like disingenuousness: "I said it jokingly," he said, "so this guy [an Asian Week writer] was just trying to stir something up that’s not there. He’s just somebody who doesn't have a sense of humor, like I do.”

And -- following in the footsteps of Republicans before him -- he then issued a classic non-apology apology: “If I offended anybody, I apologize.”

To make matters worse, Bruno continued to play a recording of the taunt several times to his nationwide audience on Dec. 16 and 17. On the latter day, Bruno became an enabler of O’Neal’s bigotry, asserting that Shaq’s comment was “not racist.” He then invited listeners and radio commentators to call in jokes making racist fun of Chinese. For the next few hours, callers offered such knee-slappers as an offer of free bike parking to bolster Chinese attendance at NBA games.

Well, Yao Ming may have accepted O’Neal’s apology -- after all, he has to play against O’Neal, and he is still only a rookie in the league -- but not everyone else was quite so impressed. The Organization of Chinese Americans directed an official letter at O’Neal demanding an apology:

Your remarks show extreme ignorance and lack of concern over our nation's cultural diversity and how far we have all had to come to overcome dangerous stereotypes. Not only are these anti-Asian sentiments extremely offensive to the growing Asian Pacific American community, but they may incite anti-Asian sentiment that readily leads to racial violence.

The Asian Week writer who started it off, Irwin Tang, made a similar point in his column about the matter:

Forgive my bitterness. I grew up in Texas, facing those “ching-chong” taunts daily while teachers averted their ears.

Indeed, that very phrase is what caught my attention when I first heard it, because I’d heard it before, in a significantly different context. It arose in a trial I covered in the small Washington town of Ocean Shores about two years ago, in a case involving three young Asian men who were attacked by a gang of young white men who were presenting themselves as racist skinheads on the night of July 4, 2000, in what should have been a clear-cut hate crime (it wasn’t treated that way by local authorities, but that’s another story).

The ringleader of this gang, a 20-year-old named Christopher Kinison, and his friends used that very phrase to harass the three men on their way into a convenience store. As one of the three later testified:

He said "a man with a Confederate flag," (Kinison), yelled racial slurs at him as the group of white men mocked the trio's language with words like "ching chong" while the three Asian-American men walked by single-file.

(Kinison also stood at the window, rapped on it and drew his finger across his throat as they were inside the store; one of them stole a paring knife off the shelf for protection. When Kinison assaulted his brother as they were trying to leave, he pulled it out and stabbed Kinison to death. The jury voted 10-1 to acquit, and the prosecutor did not refile charges.)

Of course, one couldn’t expect O’Neal to know this. But he, like many other Americans, clearly has no idea, and clearly doesn't care, how such taunts sound to the ears of Asians -- how much fear, anger and resentment they engender, with due cause.

Moreover, as Tang observed:

If a white player had, for instance, made monkey sounds to taunt a black player, it would have been a national controversy.

Indeed, it isn’t hard to imagine what would occur if a white athlete were to make similarly bigoted remarks about minority players on other teams. Remember John Rocker?

However, the refusal to criticize Shaq isn’t merely because he is black, though undoubtedly that plays into the thinking that allows someone like Bruno to assert that the remarks weren’t bigoted.

I found a simple encapsulation of this mindset the other day at the blog of Sgt. Stryker:

Unlike the attitudes towards the Black Americans, whose slavery was justified on the reed of racial superiority, the attitudes held by most pre-war Americans toward the Japanese was different. In talking to many of my parents' generation and reading what I have, the prejudice the average American felt wasn't racist in that the Japanese were inferior, but just the opposite, seeing the Japanese as a very capable resourceful people that looked different, behaved different, and believed different.

I would argue that this attitude has not changed significantly in the intervening years. As John Tateishi, president of the Japanese-American Citizens League, put it when I interviewed him last week about the Coble affair:

“When Coble made that statement, what I recognized is that kind of age-old attitude about Japanese-Americans as perhaps exotic, certainly foreign, can’t be understood and they certainly are not one of us. And so because we don’t know them, this was a necessary act.”

Moreover, many Americans simply accept this bigotry for similar reasons. And there’s a real pernicious quality to this thinking, because it implicates their thinking about all minorities.

Ignoring bigotry about Asians in fact underscores white Americans’ unspoken attitudes about blacks as well. That is, they know that there is now a great social stigma attached to expressing commonly held views about blacks -- that they are stupid and lazy and inclined to criminality, especially. So of course they don’t dare to express it, even if they may privately believe it. And even if they don’t believe it, they’re perfectly aware that this is the baseline view of African-Americans.

But when it comes to Asians, they don’t hold those particular views. Thus, by this logic, their attitudes about Asians can’t be bigoted -- even though these views are that they are inscrutable and untrustworthy and, ultimately, insect-like.

As Tateishi put it to me:

“It happens so often in this country, that if you’re not white, you’re not seen as a real American. But we’re interlopers in this country even after four or five generations.

“I get people with accents, you know, European accents, saying to me, ‘Go back to where you come from.’ Well, I tell ‘em, ‘Hey, I came from L.A., I hated L.A. I left L.A. for a reason -- I don’t want to go back there. And by the way, where are you from?’

“A lot of this comes down to race. And Coble’s comments are precisely that. It was a comment about race. And it was a comment about how he views us as Americans. And even though he issued a statement regretting his comment, it’s not good enough. He still doesn’t see what’s wrong.”

And apparently, for that matter, neither do very many Americans.

Still falsifying history

Speaking of Sgt. Stryker, I’ve been forced to conclude that its author, CPO Sparkey, is either compulsively dishonest or someone who purposively limits his samples of history to those that reinforce his worldview. His recent distortions of history are really starting to pile up:

-- He reiterates the argument, frequently proffered by conservatives, that “Hitler was a Socialist.” Of course, that notion is not merely ahistorical, it is a form of Newspeak, as I’ve explained previously.

-- He defends his limited posts from the “Magic” cables with a long, convoluted and ultimately quite unconvincing rationalization. All the while, of course, his argument elides the point made here previously: That in fact the “Magic” cables not only discussed using Japanese-Americans as agents, but many more of them placed a high priority on the use of Caucasians primarily for this work -- a fact that, by the logic employed by Sparkey and other defenders of the internment, would have militated for rounding up all white people along the Pacific Coast. Why doesn’t Sparkey show us those cables?

-- Moreover, he also continues to ignore another pertinent fact regarding the Magic cables, also pointed out here previously: The FBI had in fact used the intelligence gathered from the cables to arrest about 1,500 Issei within the first few days after Pearl Harbor; FBI director J. Edgar Hoover opposed the internment because he believed any threat indicated by these cables had already been effectively dealt with.

-- He refuses to present even a scintilla of evidence that the cables had anything to do with FDR’s decision. He quotes at length the later testimony by internment architect John McCloy defending the decision. But McCloy’s own testimony indicates he was unaware of the “Magic” cables; and it is likewise clear that FDR signed off on the internment not by his own initiative but by that of McCloy and his cohorts. Though FDR was aware of the Magic cables, there is nothing in any of the documents regarding his discussions with others within the chain of command that they influenced his thinking at all. Instead, it’s clear the primary rationalization for the internment came from Lt. Gen. John DeWitt’s finding of “military necessity” -- which of course was built upon an amazing paucity of evidence and a large mountain of racist stereotypes.

-- He continues to deny that racism played a major role in the decision to intern Japanese-Americans, and even makes this suggestion:

Race as an issue was, at best, a local phenomenon, but not one the Nation's leadership was concerned about.

Even before Sparkey posted this rather laughable notion, of course, it was not only thoroughly debunked here, it’s also been effectively refuted at Eric Muller’s blog, Is That Legal? as well as at Monkey Media Report. It is abundantly clear that the racist stereotypes to which not only FDR but most of the rest of the nation subscribed were in fact prerequisites for the internment. Americans believed that Japanese-Americans would betray them because racist propaganda had been assuring them of this for the preceding half-century.

-- Finally, even if everything Sparkey said were accurate (and obviously it isn’t), then why has he been unable to answer the most basic question of all: Does wartime justify the suspension of the basic American right to a presumption of innocence?

Because even if the “Magic” cables were the primary source of the motivation to intern the Nikkei, they at best showed that only a tiny portion of that community were a sabotage/espionage risk. That would mean the United States incarcerated 70,000 citizens based on the presumption that a few of them were guilty of spying.

This isn’t, as Sparkey likes to flatter himself, a “New Historical” approach. It’s simply flat-out historical revisionism -- the same kind, frankly, practiced by the Holocaust-deniers at the Institute for Historical Review.

Bush's Class War: Back to the Future

It’s becoming increasingly apparent on a broad range of issues that the Bush administration intends to turn back the nation’s social clock by a century or so. This is no more evident than in the regime’s push to replace the corporate and personal income tax with a national sales tax.

I had a conversation about this Friday with Robert S. McIntyre, the economist who heads up Citizens for Tax Justice and writes the “Taxonomist” column for The American Prospect.

McIntyre probably explained all this best in a recent TAP column:

President George W. McKinley?

Prior to the 20th century, except under Abraham Lincoln, the federal government relied almost entirely on regressive consumption taxes to pay its bills. This system of high taxes on the poor and middle class and hardly any tax burden on the rich and powerful reached its apotheosis under Republican President William McKinley, who worked with GOP political boss (and Karl Rove hero) Mark Hanna to raise consumption taxes to almost 50 percent on many ordinary commodities in the 1897 tariff bill.

Thanks to such progressive leaders as William Jennings Bryan and Theodore Roosevelt, that cruelly unfair approach to taxation was eventually abandoned. But as CBS' Dan Rather brashly put it this past election night, conservative Republicans now control "the White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate and the Supreme Court." This ominous development may embolden Bush to try to turn back the clock a century or so on taxes.

McIntyre, as it happens, explored this point in even greater detail in his review in The Washington Monthly of Stephen R. Weisman’s The Great Tax Wars:

Tax and Fend

As he explains, this situation was made possible by a government that was wholly in the control of large corporate interests -- the president, the Congress and the Supreme Court were all defenders of Big Business. Sound familiar? Well, the arguments presented in defense of this travesty have an even more familiar ring:

In 1895, the court considered the newly passed income tax law, which was being challenged by corporate interests. By a 5-4 vote, the court declared it to be unconstitutional. There was no single majority opinion in Pollack v. Farmers' Loan and Trust Co., but rather several opinions, offering conflicting and wholly unpersuasive legal arguments for the decision. But the underlying rationale was clear: The income tax, wrote one justice, is "an assault on capital," a path to "sure decadence," and a "stepping-stone to ... a war of the poor against the rich." (The contemporary conservative tactic of attacking those who favor progressive taxes as indulging in "class warfare" is apparently nothing new.) It would take two decades and a constitutional amendment to undo the decision.

…

Entrenched business interests fought bitterly in places like New York, where a Republican newspaper argued that the tax would "divide the population into two classes, the class which contributes to the support of the Government, and the class which does not contribute." Again, one hears almost exactly this argument from conservatives today. One GOP lawmaker told The New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann in 2001 that unless Congress passed Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, "[t]he tax code will destroy democracy, by putting us in a position where most voters don't pay for government." The truth, of course, is that ordinary citizens pay dearly for government, not just through their share of the income tax but also through payroll taxes, state, and local taxes, and other levies that fall much harder on them than on the rich. The idea that the wealthy alone carry the burden of paying for government is as wrong today as it was a century ago.

There is in some ways an appealing aspect to “turning back the clock.” Indeed, many Americans are positively nostalgic for “the good old days.” But the reality of everyday life for Americans in 1900 was not quite so golden. In fact, most Americans were by today’s standards dirt poor, and the phrase “wage slave” was not merely a euphemism.

There were no limits on the length of the work week, and in fact the average laborer was often expected to put in between 60 and 80 hours of work per week. There was no such thing as overtime pay. Retirement plans were a distant fantasy. Child labor was very common. People of all sexes and all walks of life were so overworked, and their health care so marginal, that the average lifespan was 47 years (it’s now 75). Life, in Hobbes’ famous phrase, was “short, nasty and brutish.”

That’s the kind of world to which the Bush regime wishes us to return -- all for the sake of further enriching his fellow members of the wealthiest class of Americans.

When I talked with McIntyre, I wanted to explore the practical ramifications of the Bush tax-reform push not merely in terms of what history tells us about such systems, but what it will mean for us in the 21st century.

This recent push, he points out, is of course nothing new: “This has been a goal of the ultraconservatives, even before they put it in [the Council of Economic Advisers’ report].”

And it’s become quite clearly a major focus of the Bush regime’s rhetorical base: “You know: If only rich people had more money, we'd have a better country.”

But just as Angry Bear has been arguing at his blog, this plan will drive the economy into the toilet, perhaps permanently, because the resulting tax rate on goods will become insanely high (I offered some of the details of this point previously). And taxes do not stimulate the activity that they tax; they suppress it. A consumption tax will suppress consumption. An extreme consumption tax will drive it to minimalist levels.

Thus the great consumer society that Americans have known since the 1940s -- and which we obviously have come to take for granted -- will finally come to an end.

Nearly every economist with whom I’ve spoken confirms that, in order to replace the revenues provided by the current tax structure, a national sales tax would have to be in the vicinity of 50 percent. And that means other problems too -- the rise of a huge black market for all kinds of goods; increasingly lax controls over the public-health aspects of these goods; and ultimately, the near-impossibility of actually administering such a tax. Not to mention, of course, what effect the extreme pressure to reduce these taxes will have on the ability of government to provide services and, ultimately, the concomitant effect on the nation's infrastructure.

As McIntyre told me: “It becomes pretty hard to run when you get up to a rate big enough to replace the income tax, because you're going to have to have a 40 or 50 percent rate. That's what scared Bill Archer [the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, a fierce advocate of a consumption-tax approach] from ever putting a bill in. He was for it, but he didn't want anybody to know how high the rate would be. He asked his staff to analyze it, and they came back and they said, 'Well, if you taxed everything, you could do it at 42 percent.' He says, '42? Come on, I was hoping for 10.' And they said, 'Well, you've gotta tax everything, you understand.' And he said, 'Like what?' And they started going through this, you know, rents and everything. 'Oh shit!'

“We had exactly the same talk 20 years ago when the supply-siders in the Reagan administration wanted to do the same thing. And when they couldn't go that far, they would say, 'Well, we're going to make income-tax changes based on consumption-tax principles, i.e., tax breaks for investment.’ And that gives you the worst of all worlds.

“Because an income tax that doesn't tax investment income doesn't even end up being a consumption tax, it ends up being a consumption tax full of loopholes, all of them at the high end. You can make the borrowing tax shelters to make the thing not even tax your consumption.”

McIntyre explained this in more detail in the TAP column:

Without a tax on corporate profits, people could easily avoid taxes on their investment income simply by incorporating their portfolios. And as economists are fond of telling us, an income tax that doesn't tax investment income isn't an income tax anymore; it's a consumption tax. Indeed, it may well be even worse than that. Tax lawyers and accountants will inevitably come up with hard-to-stop schemes to let their wealthy clients go beyond indefinite tax deferral on investment earnings and actually spend the money tax-free -- say, by borrowing against their incorporated portfolios.

Of course, under a regressive system like this, the major tax burden will shift almost wholly off the backs of the wealthy, whose disposable income likely would at least double, to the backs of the middle class and poor, whose own disposable incomes would certainly shrink accordingly.

And in short order, we will indeed return to those halcyon days when Americans workers were caught in the death grip of the wealthy.

As McIntyre puts it: “It's pretty evil. But that's what they are.”

Confronting the inevitable

Light posting today, but here's another link definitely worth reading, from the Better Rhetor:

Shock & Awe/Build & Heal: Past and Future Fact in Iraq

But if we go this way, commit to war, then some things become inevitablly and inescapably certain: Appalling numbers of people will die, and a great many of these dead will be children. Some will be killed outright, as the missiles fly in during what the Pentagon triumphally calls Shock and Awe, and others, perhaps many more, will die of starvation and related diseases in the privations to follow. If they do not die, these children, they may be damaged emotionally and psychologically for the rest of their lives. This is the certainty to which we commit if we act against the possible.

Code Yellow, at least

From Zizka: Terror Alert!

The unnamed White House source, Ari Fleischer, laughed and said, "This is SO yesterday's papers. I don't know why Zizka even bothers. A simple look at the calendar will show that the Clinton penis investigation had nothing to do with the failure to respond appropriately to the Oklahoma City threats. Everybody knows that it was the later al Qaeda non-investigation which was impeded by the penis hunt."

Chortle.

Bush's Tax Increase

"It will raise people's taxes by $4-5,000 a year."

For those of us in the middle class, that's the bottom line of the Bush administration's proposal to eliminate the income tax and replace it with a national sales tax.

This estimate comes from Robert McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice, a tax watchdog organization that has been piling up the evidence that Bush's tax plans are nothing short of disaster for the nation. I chatted with McIntyre this afternoon and will post some more excerpts from our conversation this weekend, as I try to explore the ramifications of this proposal -- which are more profound than any domestic policy yet proposed by Bush, though it seems hardly anyone in either the press or the blogosphere has figured this out.

This is not merely a radical plan. It is one that will literally turn the nation's economic clock back to 1900 -- the days when the middle and lower classes were completely at the mercy of the nation's corporate leaders -- with a much lower standard of living, much longer hours for nominal pay, and virtually without any real upward social mobility.

Moreover, as McIntyre points out, in order to replace current federal revenues with this plan, the government will have to impose a tax rate of between 40 and 50 percent.

In the meantime, another economist (who goes by the pseudonym Angry Bear) has written me about this proposal -- and in fact has been inspired to start his own blog, in no small part because of it.

Here's the core of his opening post on the matter:

There are a number of reasons, including social justice, why a regressive tax is not a good idea, but that's a topic for a later post. Instead, the question is why a consumption tax is worse than an income tax. First, it will surely cost more than it is expected to. Why? Because naively setting the target consumption tax in a revenue-neutral fashion will actually lead to a decline in revenue. A consumption tax increases the cost of the final good to the consumer, meaning that for any price that stores charge, consumers buy less after the tax is imposed than before. Most states have sales taxes around 8%. To replace all income taxes with consumption taxes would require a federal consumption tax of at least 15% on top of the states' 8%. So things will change from the scenario in which, when a store sells a DVD player for $100, the consumer pays $108 to a situation in which the consumer pays $123. Consumers care about price after tax, not before (question: can you buy a $100 DVD player with only a $100 bill?)! So what happens when the effective price to consumers goes up? They buy less DVD players! But the government can not collect sales (consumption) taxes on unsold DVD players. As an economic aside, some, but not all, of the impact of the tax would be borne by sellers. In the current example, the retail price might fall to $95 ($5 less for stores) and the after tax price to consumers would be $95*1.23=$116.85 (an $8.85 increase). Stores get less and consumers pay more, as a result the total volume of goods traded will fall. More generally, any move to a consumption tax that proposes a neutral tax rate, one such that

"(the value of all goods sold * proposed rate) = Income Tax Revenue"

will not generate the same revenue as under the income tax because it fails to account for the fact that the volume of commerce will fall (economists call this "dead weight loss"). If this tax is actually pursued, look for this factor to be ignored by Fleischer, Rove, et al.

There's more; be sure to read it, and add Angry Bear to your regular reads. (I've added him to my blogroll too.)

This weekend I hope to tackle more of the details of the disaster that awaits, as well as some of the broader ramifications of the plan.

Much ado about not very much

After going over the recent AP stories (Part 1 and Part 2) about Oklahoma City carefully, and comparing notes with colleagues, I have to say I'm more perplexed than ever.

It appears the AP writer, John Solomon, "uncovered" material that those of us who've been doing ground-level research on it since Day One have known since very, very early in the investigation, then combined it with J.D. Cash's questionable conspiracy-oriented material -- the thrust of which, as anyone familiar with Ambrose Evans-Pritchard knows (readers of Gene Lyons' work may recall the name), was essentially a milder variation on the Patriot theories that the bombing was actually an inside job ordered by Bill Clinton; Pritchard's Oklahoma City theories relied heavily on Cash's work.

How did the AP come to think it had anything new here?

Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center had these thoughts:

You know, some of this stuff is interesting, but very, very little is new, and what there is certainly doesn’t amount to real proof. I’m not one who believes that every conspirator was necessarily caught -- there are a great many tantalizing suggestions that they were not -- but I also don’t think that this EC/ARA [Elohim City/Aryan Republican Army] scenario is anywhere near proven. It doesn’t inspire confidence when the writer of this series, for instance, confuses Aryan Nations (he wrote Aryan Nation) with the Aryan Republican Army. And I also can’t quite understand the breathless nature of some of this reporting. He acts like the McVeigh call to Elohim City is something he just discovered, via the FBI teletype that is quoted in several of these stories. Well, as most on this list will recall, that came out early on, in the months after the bombing. I personally went to Elohim City with a number of other reporters (I was with USA Today at the time) and heard Millar talk about that call. There are a number of other matters reported in this series in a tone that suggests a major scoop. I’m not dissing the series, but I fail to understand how AP’s A-wire can treat this like a major revelation. It certainly is not.

Unfortunately, as Mark is all too well aware (he is himself a former reporter and covered the OKC bombing for USA Today), what is carried on the AP wire -- because it literally appears in thousands of newspapers around the world -- becomes Writ Large, and in effect becomes a kind of reality. Particularly disturbing to me is the way the AP played up Cash as a kind of hero.

Talk Left notes McVeigh attorney Stephen Jones’ recent remarks on the case, which appeared in the second AP piece. What struck me as odd about these remarks is that Solomon neglected to mention that Jones has previously argued that the co-conspirators were probably Middle Eastern terrorists -- not the ARA or someone from Elohim City.

And then there have been all the Jayna Davis/Laurie Mylroie theories about a possible Iraqi connection getting all kinds of media play -- which were spun from Jones’ concoction -- notably in the Washington Times.

What's going on here?

Well, a lot of it has to do with the investigation itself. As I've explored in some depth in Salon, there are still some very important unanswered questions about the case. Some of them -- particularly the credibility of, and the circumstances surrounding, the eyewitness identifications of McVeigh and Nichols during the bomb-building phase in Kansas -- cut deeply against the government's own conclusions. (Mark mentions this in his note, and I know my colleague Kevin Flynn at the Rocky Mountain News feels passionately about this.) They are embodied, in fact, by the jury's finding in the Terry Nichols case.

And until the government takes another, longer, more thorough look at answering those questions -- including, I must add in all fairness, those raised by both the Carol Howe story and J.D. Cash's work -- then they will be out there.

Or, it could broker a deal with Terry Nichols to spill his guts in exchange for dropping the capital case pending against him in Oklahoma. That might work too. I am growing doubtful, however, that anyone in the Justice Department has either the cojones or the insight to pull that one off.

My friend Suzanne James puts it best:

For those of us who live within the bomb planning and building epicenter and who've spent a great deal of time doing *primary* research, there are simply far, far too many unanswered questions.

While any investigation typically leaves unanswered questions, the particular patterns of unanswered questions and apparently unexplored avenues is suspect and will remain so until those who assisted McVeigh and Nichols are identified and prosecuted.

We should already know that conspiracy theories thrive in an environment in which the government holds information back. That seems to be happening here as well.

They Stoop to Smear

Talk Left managed to interview Gary Hart, and certainly helped clear the waters that were being muddied by the suggestions from conservatives he had made veiled anti-Semitic remarks in a recent speech on American foreign policy.

Hart must be making someone nervous -- and perhaps it was that speech, which was very insightful -- if they're stooping to that kind of level to smear him. And the accusations themselves reveal not only a certain defensiveness, but something else.

What's that they say? -- "Dirty minds see dirty things."

A little white rice -- and a black bean

My friend Dan Junas, the semi-retired political researcher/analyst, sends a missive regarding my earlier post about Bush's declining polls. He points out that I referred to Bush's "approval ratings" when the poll I cited actually was about Bush's re-elect numbers. As Dan says:

It's an important distinction, because in wartime (or post 9/11) a respondent is more likely to support the President, but that does not necessarily translate into a vote. When I see polls that reflect Bush's approval rating, I find myself asking, "What's his re-elect number?" because I see that as a more accurate gauge of genuine political support. The political consultant's rule of thumb is that when a candidate's re-elect number drops below 50%, he's in trouble.

The point is, Bush is doing much worse politically than pundits are acknowledging. An unbiased press (as if!) would report that he is in deep political trouble.

He is getting relatively high approval ratings because he is commander-in-chief. But we know his approval ratings on economic issues are low, and the low re-elect number indicates to me that voters (who are much more important than people who simply answer polling questions) are giving more weight to economic issues. That's an underlying dynamic that is not going away for W.

Americans also have serious problems with a war that does not meet with international approval. Politically speaking, going without U.N. approval risks stirring quite a backlash. If the war is short and (from the U.S. point of view) sweet, W's ratings may get a bump. But Paul [de Armond, a mutual friend and another political analyst] told me he saw polling that indicates that if occupation is to last more than three months (the Administration is admitting it may take up to two years), support drops off the cliff. So whether or not W. gets the international approval that he needs to avoid backlash, the long occupation creates another underlying dynamic -- like the economy, which in turn would be drained by the cost of the occupation -- that undercuts W.'s political position.

Even guarding against wishful thinking, I'd say Bush is in a very perilous political position. Especially when you also consider the political risk of backing down.

Of course, as the Mexicans say, there is always a black bean in the white rice, and in this case it's the pathetic state of the Democrats that keeps me from betting my retirement account on a Bush defeat in '04.

Well, I'll take another few helpings of that white rice anyway.

Bush's Declaration of Class War

War with Iraq? How about war upon the working class?

There should be little doubt about the nature of the Bush regime's proposal to eliminate the income tax and replace it with a national sales tax: It is all about making the rich richer, and shifting more of the nation's tax burden onto the backs of the middle and lower classes.

Not only that, Bush's proposal -- by eliminating any progressive features of the tax code, and replacing them with an openly regressive system like the sales tax -- threatens to create a permanent crater in the nation's fiscal infrastructure. The long-term consequences of this act are to create a permanent underclass of citizens for whom upward mobility is a phantasm. The result, in other words, is the Latin Americanization of the United States.

It is really very simple: Bush has declared open class war upon the rest of us.

And it's going unnoticed because of Bush's other war.

I'll be writing more about this in the coming days, but let's start out by examining the core documents in this declaration. They are in this report, from the president's Council of Economic Advisers:

2003 Economic Report of the President

Most of this is economic gobbledygook, not the kind of thing average citizens are likely to grasp. The key phrases are euphemisms, particularly the use "consumption tax" -- which is nothing less than a national sales tax.

The key information appears in Chapter 5:

The major objectives of tax reform are to reduce complexity, improve economic incentives, and address fairness. The central theme that brings these objectives together is that household and business decisions should depend on the tax code as little as possible. Taxing all income, but taxing it only once, is a key ingredient of many reform plans. This would involve broadening the tax base while lowering tax rates. Some efforts have also focused on a shift from taxing income to taxing consumption or consumed income.
...
Some opponents of reform argue that taxing consumption rather than income would necessarily place a relatively heavier tax burden on lower income taxpayers. Conventional distributional analysis typically considers a snapshot of taxpayers' economic well-being at a particular point in time. Research has shown that, when a longer view is taken, differences in well-being, whether measured by income or by consumption, tend to be not as great, because of the fluidity of household incomes over time. Also, analyses of the distributional effects of moving to a tax based on consumption rather than income often do not recognize that a substantial portion of capital income, which is earned primarily by higher income taxpayers, is taxed under both income and consumption tax principles. The distributional effect of moving to a consumption tax looks considerably more progressive when the taxation of a substantial portion of capital income under a consumption tax is taken into account. Indeed, both an income tax and a consumption tax levy tax on the extraordinary (or what economists call supernormal or inframarginal) returns to capital.
...
Consumption, rather than income, has been suggested as another potential tax base. As discussed above, one rationale is the claim that consumption is more closely related to a taxpayer's well-being than annual income. Also, by taxing consumption rather than income, the tax system would not distort taxpayers' decisions about how much income to save. In contrast, because the income tax includes the return to saving in the tax base, it taxes future consumption (that is, current saving) more heavily than current consumption. Under an income tax, current consumption is tax-favored relative to future consumption, thereby discouraging saving.

These are the basic rationales. As we'll explore in the coming days, they are based on assumptions that are manifestly false. And like most such proposals, upon close examination it becomes clear that they're only pseudo-intellectual cover for the desire of the wealthy to free themselves from their historic tax responsibilities.

The agenda, ultimately, is to wipe out the gains the working and middle classes made during the long struggle for labor and human rights earlier last century, and the flowering of the American consumer economy that accompanied it -- all of which were built upon a foundation of progressive taxation.

All just so that the rich can stay rich -- and the rest of us can stay poor.

The Age of the Tax Barons

So long, progressive taxation. Welcome to the Empire of the Rich. Abandon all hope, ye mere working stiffs who live here.

While everyone is busy talking about the impending war with Iraq, the Bush regime has quietly trotted out probably its most radical economic proposal yet:

Eliminating the income tax. And replacing it with a national sales tax.

Amid a week's worth of terrorism alerts, the regime ran it up the flagpole last week in a Washington Post story:

Bush Report Hints At New Tax System

Though its thrust was not exactly clear in the text:

The document also departs from the staid, academic tone of past reports to detail what amounts to an endorsement of a simpler tax system aimed at taxing consumption while leaving savings and investment to accrue interest tax-free.

Well, at least George Will was kind enough yesterday to provide us with a brief translation, sort of:

And in a budget-related document, the administration floats the idea of scrapping individual and corporate income taxes in favor of a consumption tax.

What is a consumption tax? It's Newspeak for a national sales tax.

Of course, no story on a Bush initiative would be complete without the obligatory description:

"This one is more daring" than past reports, said Daniel J. Mitchell, an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "But that's because the president's agenda is really rather bold in terms of tax reform."

[See this post for our handy translation of this particular bit of Newspeak.]

Where is this proposal emanating from? Its primary proponents are an outfit called Americans for Fair Taxation. Their chief champion in Congress is a Georgia Republican named John Linder, who introduced a so-called 'Fair Tax' bill on the first day of this year's session.

Note that the group boasts that its proposals are viewed seriously by the White House:

Key lawmakers and activists who support fundamental tax reform and specific tax replacement initiatives are watching a consumption tax plan being reviewed behind closed doors by the Bush administration.

Judging by events of the past week, this boast is not idle.

Two years ago -- in a piece that likewise roasted the Bush campaign's tax proposals -- Robert McIntyre debunked the "Fair Tax" in unmistakable terms:

The wackiest witness of all had to have been Leo Linbeck, Jr., Texas multimillionaire and head of a group called Americans for Fair Taxation, which wants to replace all income taxes, estate taxes, and payroll taxes with a national sales tax. Linbeck claims that he can do all this, and provide rebates to the poor to boot, with a sales tax rate of only 23 percent.

Baloney. That 23 percent tax rate is both dishonest and impossible. For one thing, when Linbeck says 23 percent, he actually means 30 percent. He came up with the 23 percent figure by dividing the sales tax by the cost of a purchase plus the tax. So if the tax on a $100 purchase is $30, Linbeck prefers to call it a 23 percent "tax inclusive rate" ($30 divided by $130).

And that's only the beginning of Linbeck's credibility problems. Almost a third of his sales tax revenues are supposed to come from taxes the government will pay to itself. For instance, build a road, and pay yourself a tax. Buy some planes, and pay yourself some more. That's silly. So is his idea that we could draw a quarter of the remaining sales tax revenue from taxes paid on things like church services, free care at veterans' hospitals, and a variety of hard-to-tax financial services like free checking accounts.

More to the point, of course, is that a sales tax is the most regressive kind of tax, while an income tax can be at least reasonably progressive. The supposed "fair tax" actually will shift the majority of the tax burden almost completely off the shoulders of the wealthy and onto the backs of the middle class and poor.

Well, at least someone at the Post is paying attention, even if his first name isn't Howard.

Finding the Warts In Bush's Tax Plan

Had Bush run on a platform to eliminate all taxes on investment income and to make America safe for inherited wealth, we'd be discussing the budget proposals presented last week by President Gore. But by turning up the heat slowly, Bush has gotten the inheritance tax all but eliminated and has a good chance to get Congress to enact the rest of his program.

They say frog legs taste like chicken.

The unbearable gravity of wealth

I'm about a day behind everyone else in posting this article, but it's something I wanted to kind of chime in about. It's from Dave Johnson (who recently outed himself as the Issues Guy at Seeing The Forest) of the Commonweal Institute, writing about the financing of the far right by a handful of wealthy folks:

Who's Behind the Attack on Liberal Professors?

The upshot of Johnson's analysis finds a mere handful of wealthy conservatives are actually responsible for an outsize quantity of the conservative "thought" that gets spread around the countryside. The chief suspects: the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Richard Mellon Scaife, Joseph Coors's Castle Rock Foundation and the Olin Foundation.

So it turns out that every single right-wing source mentioned in their article owes some portion (if not all) of their livelihood to a very small core group of funders. In my experience, this is not atypical among conservative opinion-makers. It appears that the majority of the conservative experts and scholars writing newspaper op-ed pieces, books and magazine articles, and even the organizations that generate the "talking points" and position papers used by TV pundits and radio talk show hosts, are directly funded by, or work for organizations supported by this core group of funders.

This pattern of concentrated, interlinking financial backing is not found when you look into who is funding people and organizations that would not describe themselves as "conservatives".

One of the important things to note about the activities that all of these wealthy conservatives are busy funding lately has to do with intimidating dissent from the conservative party line. The arguments they raise do not address the points raised by the dissenters, but merely impugn the patriotism of the dissenters, and attempt thereby to silence them by raising the specters of the "war on terrorism" and "national security."

Johnson's article focuses on the attempts to stifle dissent emanating from academia and threaten the livelihoods of liberal antiwar protesters within the ivory tower. But these attacks are also occurring on a broader base against liberals generally, and are becoming increasingly threatening in tone.

These include:

-- William Bennett's Americans for Victory Over Terrorism, which has vowed to "take to task those groups and individuals who fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the war we are facing."

-- The recent letter (signed and then disavowed by Tom DeLay) from the National Right to Work Legal Defense and Education Foundation that called labor unions a threat to national security and accused firefighters and policement of exploiting the 9/11 tragedy for their personal gain.

-- Paul Weyrich and his Free Congress Foundation, which are currently in the process of whipping up war hysteria on two fronts: Framing the war on terrorism as a cultural conflict between Islam and the West; and attacking multiculturalism and liberalism generally as the source of a "fifth column" that is enabling Islamic terrorists' attacks on America.

-- Ann Coulter's frequently broadcast antics, including her calls for the "physical intimidation" of liberals and her suggestion that Tim McVeigh should have bombed the New York Times building instead.

-- Borderline extremist "transmitter" organizations like WorldNetDaily and NewsMax, as well as such talk-radio appendages as Michael Savage, come right out and call liberals traitors to America and vow to "do something" about them.

Of course, Johnson points out how the wealth behind these propaganda campaigns has given a handful of people an extraordinary amount of power over the national discourse:

Now, after 30 years of effort, this core FSFG has built a comprehensive ideological infrastructure. There are now over 500 organizations, with the Heritage Foundation at the hub, all funded by this core group. David Callahan's 1999 study, $1 Billion for Ideas: Conservative Think Tanks in the 1990s, found that just the top 20 of the organizations spent over $1 billion on this ideological effort in the 1990s.

... The right-wing movement's messages are orchestrated and amplified to sound like a mass "movement" consisting of many "voices." Using "messaging"--communication techniques from the fields of marketing, public relations, and corporate image-management--the movement appeals to people's deeper feelings and values. Messages are repeated until they become "conventional wisdom." Examples include lines like "Social Security is going broke" and "public schools are failing." Both statements are questionable, yet both have been firmly embedded in the "public mind" by purposeful repetition through multiple channels. This orchestration has been referred to as a "Mighty Wurlitzer, " a CIA term that refers to propaganda that is repeated over and over again in numerous places until the public believes what it's hearing must be true.

As a study by the People for the American Way, has put it: "The result of this comprehensive and yet largely invisible funding strategy is an extraordinary amplification of the far right's views on a range of issues ..."

And, of course, as Johnson points out, this apparent "consensus" and the seeming "broad trends" are nothing other than a carefully manufactured illusion.

I've mentioned previously that it has long been apparent that the extremist right in America -- the neo-Nazis and skinheads, tax protesters and "Patriots," gay-bashers and anti-abortion radicals -- are being quietly funded by some very wealthy right-wing "sugar daddies." These people may not necessarily share all the views of these extremists, but they deliberately underwrite their causes as a way of creating "wedge issues" -- mostly racial and class issues that serve to keep the working class firmly entrenched in the conservative camp -- that help drag the national center rightward and start a million fires that keep liberals busy extinguishing them.

As with Johnson's 'Four Sisters,' their money grossly distorts the national body politic by exerting a strong gravitational pull rightward, and helps put a broad array of extreme agendas into play in the mainstream, when they might otherwise be relegated to the fringes. The real danger, as I've been discussing, is that the commingling of all these elements in an anti-liberal right -- especially one that is being whipped up with the kind of rhetoric that traditionally escalates into physically violent reaction -- may bring about a genuine coalition of corporatism and proto-fascism, all bent on destroying liberals.

I'll be trying to get into this more in the next couple of days, with (I'm hoping) the latest installment in my series on fascism.

Crossed wires

This came across the AP newswires today:

U.S. Had Data Hinting of Okla. Bombing

Two federal law enforcement agencies had information before the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing suggesting that white supremacists living nearby were considering an attack on government buildings, but the intelligence was never passed on to federal officials in the state, documents and interviews show.

The bulk of this story is not necessarily new. Most of its outlines have been known for awhile, and were published in Kerry Noble's excellent Tabernacle of Hate: Why They Bombed Oklahoma City, which details very clearly how and why the white supremacists targeted the Murrah Building, especially on April 19.

I explored the Carol Howe matter among the other stories that I sifted through en route to preparing this piece for Salon. As I mentioned there, Howe's story was full of holes; there were many good reasons for law-enforcement officials to view her information with skepticism, and there still is. Kerry Noble, on the other hand, is highly credible.

What is new here is the confirmation of the failure for this information to be properly channeled to the agencies that would have been affected. As TalkLeft astutely points out:

We think the main value to the article is not in concluding that the white supremacists and separatists were involved in the 1995 OKC bombing, but that there is a dismal failure of communications between and within law enforcement agencies in this country when it comes to locating and sharing information about possible attacks.

I couldn't have said it better. There's more; go read it. I'll offer some further thoughts on these issues regarding law enforcement in upcoming posts, especially as this story develops.

Defending ignorance

Is That Legal is reporting that North Carolina Republican Rep. Howard Coble has refused to meet with three of his colleagues (all Asian-Americans) regarding his remarks claiming that the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II was justified.

[Is That Legal -- which correctly points out that "The silence of the Republican leadership has been deafening. And disturbing" --
remains the center of information in the blogoshere regarding this dust-up. Be sure to check out his documents related to the internment decision.]

Now it's becoming clear why Coble is digging in his heels: We learn via Yellowworld that in 1988 Coble not only voted against reparations for Japanese-Americans, but led the floor fight in the House against the measure, saying: "I do not believe that this Government can make restitution for every wrong committed by it during a time of global war."

As it happens, Coble was not the only North Carolina Republican who opposed the reparations measure. Leading the fight against it in the Senate was none other than the just-retired Jesse Helms. Helms, who argued strenuously that the internment was justified because of the intercepted "Magic" cables which revealed plans for a Japanese intelligence network on the Coast, offered an amendment to "provide that no funds shall be appropriated under this title until the government of Japan has fairly compensated the families of men and women killed as a result of the ... bombing of Pearl Harbor." (Of course, this argument manages to repeat the original mistake, that is, confusing American citizens with Japanese nationals.)

Helms' argument regarding the prewar "Magic" intelligence, as noted earlier, is receiving fresh life in the right-wing side of the blogosphere, as conservatives apparently are eager to defend Coble's woeful and willful ignorance. But the "Magic" cables, as I mentioned, have ultimately proven irrelevant, in no small part because they actually did play a role in the early phases of the internment.

Quoting John Hersey from his essay, " 'A Mistake of Terrifically Horrible Proportions' " (from the book Manzanar):

With great speed and efficiency, beginning the very night of the attack, the Justice Department arrested certain marked enemy aliens of all three belligerent nations. Within three days, 857 Germans, 147 Italians, and 1,291 Japanese (367 of them rounded up in Hawaii, 924 on the continent) had been rounded up. The arrests were made on the basis of remarkably thorough -- though in some cases inaccurate -- prior information that had been compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Military Intelligence Service. With respect to the Japanese, it was evidently of enormous help that United States cryptologists has, a year earlier, in an intiative called Magic, broken all the Japanese diplomatic codes and ciphers. Intercepted Magic messages had designated certain Japanese patriotic organizations in the United States as potential sources of intelligence for the enemy, and many of the Japanese aliens arrested in the first sweeps were leaders of those groups.

Indeed, this -- and the fact that he knew the evidence of Japanese-American espionage and sabotage was nonexistent -- was a large part of why J. Edgar Hoover opposed the internment. According to Hoover, all of the potential spies had in fact already been identified and arrested by the FBI.

Recall too that, as Personal Justice Denied points out, the "Magic" cables, in devising ways to create this intelligence network, actually recommended that members of the Nikkei community be used for espionage only as a final resort, because they would be highly likely to raise suspicions and wind up getting caught and perhaps betraying the network. The cables instead suggested recruiting whites to perform the espionage.

And that's pretty much what happened. By war's end, exactly ten people had been convicted of spying of for Japan. All of them were Caucasians.

Using Helms' argument, then, we apparently should have been rounding up every white person on the Pacific Coast and interning them first. After all, we couldn't have been able to separate the would-be spies from the innocent, right?

Catching a clue

I see via Atrios that Eugene Volokh is disturbed by the latest episode of the Washington Times' utter lack of ethics, and wonders why those on the left aren't up in arms about it. Both Atrios and Mark Kleiman correctly point out that this episode is nothing new; those on the left are probably unconcerned because they know that this instance is utterly in character.

Indeed, the pertinent question isn't why the left isn't jumping all over the Times for this, but why the ostensibly responsible mainstream right lends the paper even a shred of credibility in the first place. After all:

-- The editor-in-chief to whom Volokh refers, Wesley Pruden, has a long history of advocacy for the neo-Confederate movement and sundry "Southern heritage" causes (his father was a notorious arch-segregationist and leader of the white-supremacist Capital Citizens Councils in Arkansas) -- including interviews in the neo-Confederate magazine Southern Partisan and attending United Daughters of the Confederacy functions. And Robert Stacy McCain, the paper's assistant national editor, as Michelangelo Signorile has detailed, has a similar background, including associations with the white-supremacist American Renaissance magazine. Indeed, the rhetoric of these two combines to make Trent Lott look like Morris Dees.

-- The paper has promoted a wide range of groundless conspiracy theories for which it has never straightened the record, let alone apologized, ranging from Patriot-style "New World Order" claims and cockamamie "tax protest" theories to the "murder" of Vincent Foster to the Oklahoma City bombing. Indeed, Wesley Pruden himself was responsible for the paper publishing and promoting the utterly groundless smear about Bill Clinton's supposed black "love child," which the paper later refused to correct or retract.

-- Finally, as noted here previously, the Times' grossly unethical behavior may have played a significant role in the string of intelligence failures that ultimately resulted in the 9/11 attacks.

The pertinent question remains: When will the Eugene Volokhs of the world finally acknowledge that conservatives' "paper of record" is journalistically irredeemable?

Aid and comfort to the enemy

[Originally published 1/26; being republished due to technical difficulties.]

Speaking of the Rev. Moon's operations, here's a question worth pondering:

Did The Washington Times help cause 9/11?

With evidence now in hand, there's little doubt now that the Moonie-owned newspaper's flagrant irresponsibility in fact cost the United States its best shot at taking out Osama bin Laden before his infamous attack on America.

This is an excerpt from The Age of Sacred Terror, the marvelous study of fundamentalist-inspired terrorism by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, who both were leading counterterrorism officials in the National Security Council. It comes amid a description (pp. 260-261) on the Clinton administration's bombing of six Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and a poison-gas plant at al-Shifa near Khartoum, Sudan, in 1998:

For a brief moment, the operation appeared to be a qualified success. Al-Shifa was destroyed. Six terrorist camps were hit and about sixty people were killed, many of them Pakistani militants training for action in Kashmir. The Tomahawks missed bin Laden and the other senior al-Qaeda leaders by a couple of hours. This in itself was not a great surprise: no one involved has any illusions about the chances of hitting the target at exactly the right time. The White House recognized that the strike would not stop any attacks that were in the pipeline, but it might forestall the initiation of new operations as the organization's leaders went to ground.

The months that followed, however, were a nightmare. The press picked apart the administration's case for striking al-Shifa, and controversy erupted over whether Clinton was trying to "wag the dog," that is, distract the public from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The Washington Times -- the capital's unabashed right-wing newspaper, which consistently has the best sources in the intelligence world and the least compunction about leaking -- ran a story mentioning that bin Laden "keeps in touch with the world via computers and satellite phones." Bin Laden stopped using the satellite phone instantly. The al-Qaeda leader was not eager to court the fate of Djokar Dudayev, the Chechen insurgent leader who was killed by a Russian air defense suppression missile that homed in on its target using his satellite phone signal. When bin Laden stopped using the phone and let his aides do the calling, the United States lost its best chance to find him.

[A later Washington Post story confirmed that in fact the Times story was "a major intelligence setback."]

Way to go, Washington Times! Um, whose side did you say you were on?

[Post moved; technical difficulties.]

Just wondering

I noticed this is in Bush's speech to the National Association of Religious Broadcasters yesterday:

Last week, our nation lost seven brave Americans -- brave souls, six Americans and one Israeli citizen, aboard the space shuttle Columbia. Laura and I went to Houston. We were so honored to meet the families. There's no question in my mind they are finding strength and comfort because of your prayers and because of the Almighty God.

Wasn't Kalpana Chawla the first Sikh in space?

[Update: Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Electrolite sends in this info, from the Sacramento Bee:

Chawla was a Hindu but also reportedly visited Sikh temples.

Now, exactly which 'Almighty God' was comforting Chawla's family?]

Bzzzzzzt!

From Howard Kurtz's sycophantic profile of Bill O'Reilly, which somehow manages to omit O'Reilly's on-air meltdown last week against an antiwar protester, as well as his on-air use of a racial slur:

And O'Reilly doesn't pussyfoot around with conspiracy theorists.

Bong! That would, once again, make you wrong, Howie! What do we have for a booby prize, Johnny?

For the sake of the audience, let's roll the tape, courtesy of the fine folks at WorldNetDaily, which is where O'Reilly's online column originally appeared, and with whom O'Reilly has had a long association. WND, you may recall, displayed their own credibility back in 1999 by running numerous articles -- such as this one by the editor -- suggesting that the impending Y2K "apocalypse" was going to be the Clinton administration's pretext for declaring martial law. WND has long been a clearinghouse for a number of other "New World Order" style conspiracy theories.

This is from a piece dated March 21, 2001: Oklahoma City blast linked to bin Laden

A former investigative reporter for the NBC affiliate in Oklahoma City last night told Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly she has gathered massive evidence of a foreign conspiracy involving Saudi terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in the 1995 bombing of the federal building that killed 168 people.

This wasn't the only time O'Reilly touted this theory. From a story by Newsmax (another conspiracism-rich publication) later that year:

McVeigh's Trial Attorney Alleges FBI Blocked Conspiracy Probe

During an interview Monday night on Fox News Channel's "The O'Reilly Factor," host Bill O'Reilly asked Jones whether he believed McVeigh had acted alone.

It is worth noting, however, that this time O'Reilly at least interviews the source of all these theories -- McVeigh's attorney, Stephen Jones.

It has remained an O'Reilly favorite. From a Fox transcript of May 8, 2002:

Are the OKC Bombing & 9/11 Linked?

I've discussed this theory previously, and explained why it holds no more water than any of the theories promoted by a variety of conspiracists about Oklahoma City. Simply put, the evidence is not there.

Then again, viewed through the cockamie lenses of HowieVision, it all starts to make sense: If Rush Limbaugh is "mainstream," then surely Jayna Davis is not a "conspiracy theorist".

So why doesn't the Washington Post report, or give any credibility to, her claims?

[A side note: You'll note that for the 2002 piece, O'Reilly interviews, and gives great credence to, the views of one Larry C. Johnson, who is the former deputy director of the State Department's Office of Counterterrorism. Under Bush fils, of course.

Well, here is Larry C. Johnson, holding forth on the subject of the threat of terrorism:

Americans are bedeviled by fantasies about terrorism. They seem to believe that terrorism is the greatest threat to the United States and that it is becoming more widespread and lethal. They are likely to think that the United States is the most popular target of terrorists. And they almost certainly have the impression that extremist Islamic groups cause most terrorism.

None of these beliefs are based in fact. ...

It is time to take a deep breath and reflect on why we are so fearful.

... Terrorism is not the biggest security challenge confronting the United States, and it should not be portrayed that way.

Title of the article: "The Declining Terrorist Threat."

Date of publication: July 10, 2001.

Yep, a real font of credible and insightful analysis, that one.]

Falsifying history

CPO Sharkey at Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing believes he is delving into "real" historical research by devoting an amazing amount of energy attempting to cast the decision to intern Japanese-Americans as not the product of a half-century of undiluted (and historically irrefutable) racism (a thesis he calls "outrageous"), but rather a series of intelligence intercepts made at the time called the "Magic" cables, which were 1941 Japanese diplomatic cables deciphered by American cryptanalysts.

The good sergeant should avail himself of at least a copy of Personal Justice Denied: The Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, which in fact does address the "Magic" cables quite thoroughly (pp. 471-475):

In fact, review of the "Magic" cables does not alter the Commission's position. Rather, it confirms the views expressed by the Commission. Personal Justice Denied devoted several pages to analyzing the American intelligence views of Japan's espionage, sabotage, and fifth column capabilities on the West Coast in late 1941 and 1942. Several relevant points were made in that discussion. First, the intelligence sources reviewed assumed that Japan had a modest number of intelligence agents and perhaps potential saboteurs on the West Coast in 1942. Second, people familiar with the intelligence activities of Japan believed that the Japanese intelligence network employed many who were not ethnic Japanese. Third, the intelligence experts believed that any threat of sabotage, espionage or fifth-column activity was limited and controllable and did not justify mass exclusion of the ethnic Japanese from the West Coast. Nothing in the 'Magic' cables contradicts these basic points.

What the "Magic" cables show is an effort by Japan to develop an intelligence capability in the United States made up of both non-ethnic Japanese and ethnic Japanese. In fact, in sending instructions about who should be used in such an effort, the cables emphasize groups other than the Issei and Nisei [because they would be less likely to raise suspicions] ...

Among the more than 4,000 "Magic" cables in 1941, only a very small number reflect the collection of intelligence which was not clearly public information or data obtainable by legal observation ...

Next, there is no indication in the "Magic" cables of a sabotage or fifth column organization. The likelihood of sabotage and fifth column aid in case of an attack were, of course, major arguments advanced in support of the exclusion. ...

One reason that the documents were not located and reviewed is that there is no clear evidence that they played any part in the decision to issue Executive Order 9066 or to pursue the policy of exclusion and detention of the West Coast Japanese. ...

[The report then cites the congressional testimony of internment architect John McCloy, who indicated no known intelligence or evidence about sabotage or espionage actually played a role in the decision: "Whether it was espionage or not, I can't say. But this wasn't such a motivating factor with us ... There were suspicions and rumors but that's as far as I can go."]

In sum, the "Magic" cables confirm the basic analysis presented by the Commission.

It should also be abundantly clear that Sharkey's contention that "It was the decrypts of Japanese diplomatic traffic that convinced FDR, his cabinet, and ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court that drastic action had to be taken" is patently false. As the commission says, there is simply no convincing evidence the cables played any role in the decision at all.

That librul bias

Atrios calls it:

Racial Bias in Media Reporting of Terrorist Activity

David Neiwert just suggests it, but I think it's impossible to not come to that conclusion. This arrest of the white supremacists should be major news in a terrorism-obsessed country. The FBI says this is major and that the information they stole and distributed poses a serious threat.

I can't say that I disagree. I don't think there's any evidence of a conscious racial bias per se, but the outcome certainly suggests one of those unconscious racial/ethnic biases that, once upon a time, newspaper editors were scrupulous about avoiding.

As Al-Muhajabah later wryly observes in Atrios' comments:

I was just imagining the news coverage if Muslims had been caught doing the same thing the Davilas were. That seems to answer the question about bias.

This is exactly correct.