Wednesday, February 05, 2003

More Nonsense Over the Stars and Bars The Washington Posts's Terry Neal runs a curious column today about the fact that the Confederate flag is still flying over the South Carolina Statehouse. In the 2000 presidential campaign, the flag gave the Republican candidates fits as they danced around the issue. As Neal reports, it's now the Democrats presidential hopefuls getting in trouble. After some prodding, they uniformly condemn the flag but are squirming over the NAACP's call for a economic boycott until the flag comes down. I fail to see why this should be a partisan issue at all. If both parties simply say the truth -- that the Confederate flag is a symbol of white supremacy that has no business flying over any public building in the United States -- then the issue is neutralized to no party's disadvantage. And I suspect that, in these post-Lott times, even President Bush -- who uttered weasel words about the flag in 2000 -- will fall in line with that. 11:20:54 PM     Debating Iraq at the Council on Foreign Relations Some real brainpower on display at this event, which I watched via a Webcast. Look here to see who participated. Predictably, Bill Kristol was the first to launch an ad hominem attack when one of the opposing panelists made a funny crack about turning Iraq into a "gas station." The thing about the debate that really surprised me is that neither side made mention -- not a word, subject didn't even come up until an audience question at the end -- about enforcing the UN resolutions as a justification for war. Clearly, both sides regard the UN as irrelevant to US security interests. Legalistic me, I've always felt that enforcing Security Council resolutions against rank defiance to be something worth doing in a world we'd like governed by the rule of law. Anyway, I can't say that the debate helped me much. We're all just conjecturing about consequences. How can you know if you're replaying August 1914, or Munich 1938? 10:05:26 PM     His Fifteen Minutes of Fame Begins My old college acquaintance Tardon Lawrence appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal today in (yet another) story about the real-estate bust in San Francisco. Tardon was a DJ at KUCI, the UC Irvine radio station. I worked down the hall at the New University, the student newspaper. Let's just say that Tardon was an original. For example, he long ago abandoned his actual last name in preference to "Feathered." I can't link to the Journal story (requires a log-in), but see the relevant passages below. Here's the Web site of his recording studio, Mr. Toad's, situated in a magnificent live/work loft on Bluxome Street He gave me a full tour one memorable day in 1998 just as he was moving in. While Soma's economic frenzy may be gone, in its place are survivors such as the businessman on nearby Bluxome Street who calls himself Tardon Feathered. Sitting in a 7,200-square-foot loft cluttered with microphones, drum kits and speakers, Mr. Feathered (the name he has gone by for decades) considers the change in fortunes of his business, Mr. Toad's, a recording and video-production studio. During the boom, many of his aspiring-musician clients disappeared, nabbing steady paychecks instead from Internet companies. Adding to Mr. Feathered's strain two years ago: a threatened tripling in his rent. After the real-estate bust, that never materialized. In Soma, in fact, average annual rents for a common class of offices South of Market run only $17.08 a square foot, roughly a quarter the price several years ago, according to real-estate-brokerage firm Grubb & Ellis Co. Mr. Feathered's business has since picked up. Artists and musicians are "society's economic equivalent of cockroaches," he says, able to survive during meltdowns. 9:38:40 PM

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