Inskeep at one point does mention that “we’ve had our share of critics” (ah, yes, “one’s share” again — meeting some minimum obligation to defer to the minority view that doesn’t fit conveniently in the two sided volley that they’d prefer, I guess) in questioning the Republican guest who voted against the bill.

But the critiques Inskeep has apparently been informed of (I am most familiar with those of Dean Baker, not sure if he was a guest) do not seem to inform the questions. Shouldn’t they? Shouldn’t Inskeep ditch the verbage that defers to Capitol Hill back rooms and actively try to reconsile all the assertions, including those beyond the default false dichotomy?

If there is a bias, shouldn’t it be towards those who don’t have a vested interest in the power structure and who have a track record of getting things right? Shouldn’t there be less deference for those who have been repeatedly wrong or massively inconsistent without rationale?

Instead Inskeep sounds like he is play-acting sounding puzzled that the two party machines could not keep the game playing the way the normally do and making little effort to go much further. Backroom tactics can be news but they should either be equal or second to routing out the facts of the issue, reconsiling the assertions about the public policy and the problems.

That most Americans opposed the bailout seems to be a footnote: often mentioned as an aside, never explained in as many words are given to all the tactical explanations.

Much emphasis has also been given to Wall Street’s reaction to the vote — but what do we expect? It is the trader’s own industry that is affected, whatever the real meaning for the rest of us is. I know so many have their futures tied-up in mortgages and investments, and this is real for a lot of regular Americans, but it seems like the casino of Wall Street is prone to manic behavior. Perhaps Wall Street isn’t unlike a three year old who just ate all the cake, is sick, wants more cake still, and is throwing a tantrum of impatience because typically capitulating parents can’t come to any other agreement as to how to handle the infantile beast.

A rough metaphor perhaps. But what I mean to say is that Wall Street is not a purely rational actor in this case (if it ever is), as it is not remotely observing other parts of the system and then making projections based on it. Its own profits, treasure, is at stake, and whether or not things could work without a bailout of this sort, the analysts and traders seem to have an incentive for the market to behave “badly” at worst and little perspective to be level-headed at best. The stock market cannot be relied upon — again — this is problematic for a lot of people who are tied up in it as other guaranteed benefits have been stripped away (by bought lawmakers and Wall Street lobbyists). If help should get to anyone, perhaps to them.

But let the traders thrash about a bit more. For all those who need real help, let us consider other ways for the State to spend $700 billion, so long as it can be done and we still have this state around to cajole into helping the people it allegedly exists to serve.

One was a report by David Kestenbaum about the tricky politics of inviting the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to perform a “check-up” on U.S. government economic policies and practices.

The ostensible rationale behind such an inspection seemed sensible to me, a layperson. There is merit in the idea of collaboration to facilitate the implied goal of transparency for stability and accountability. But that would be granting too much on the face of things, and there is cause for skepticism (though likely not the same flavor of skepticism and resistance that might come from Bush’s economic advisers).

The IMF is not known for being at the vanguard of sustainable development. The report cites Argentina as an example where the IMF has come to “help,” and, well — that appears to have been a complete failure until Argentina rejected IMF policies.

The IMF’s most influential practices are not that far away from those that helped cause the housing bubble and the credit crunch in the U.S. to begin with. In fact, there seems to be significant overlap in the global private institutions that have exploited the domestic situation and who also invest in IMF-led “development.” Additionally, the U.S. is a major influence on the governance of the Bretton Woods institutions (it gets more explicit control over the IMF’s sister institution, the World Bank).

If your general understanding doesn’t extend that far, then you might not have laughed until you heard the end of the report. Someone is quoted, summing up how simple it would be for someone to spot the impending housing crisis, as saying my 6 year old daughter knows you don’t lend money to people who can’t pay you back.

This is exactly what the World Bank and the IMF are infamous for: lending money to dictators of poor nations, or muscling its way into vulnerable economies, and then as some see it, extorting payback at the expense of sovereignty and development of resources essential to human rights in favor of projects that involved multinational corporations cosy to the largest investors in the WB/IMF regime. Not too much unlike a family feeling forced to pay back a loan shark at the expense of medicine or food.

The funny thing is, this is all tacitly acknowledged earlier in the piece when Kestenbaum refers to the IMF as a global loan shark.

Again, this is not to disparage the entire rank and file of these organizations, of which I know little about, and among which — I presume — there are those who are passionate about solving real problems. But these are for-profit institutions, and the associations of their power brokers along with the general record of these organizations are so conflicted as to not warrant placing faith in them, and to highlight the irony when it is suggested they advise the U.S.

I am not encouraged as the two hundred and thirty two years old litany of complaints echoes through my head and I compare them to the nature of the recent news an analysis (see the clippings at the side) relating to the same issues in this country today. From the latest uses of the police and the military and intelligence, to the further co-opting of corporations, to the short-sighted capitulation of politicians who have proclaimed solidarity with the principles of of this document and our Constitution, we seem to be going backwards.

Washington is so full of contrasts between principles and actions — that is, hypocrisy — that one becomes weary rather than more indignant. One feels foolish to get riled up sometimes. The culture encourages the belief that to repeatedly ask for such discrepancies — obvious to all who bother to look — to be reconciled is to be “biased” (like everyone else, and therefore hardly worth paying attention to) or merely to pedantic to be relevant.

But if today has any meaning at all, then it is to raise such things in even higher relief. Perhaps it is the inherent nature of the State?

The way Carvin tells it, he was first asked what he was doing and left alone, seemingly with permission, to go about his business. Then security returned giving conflicting messages about what he could and couldn’t do, and why (read his account). He was threatened with arrest multiple times. After pressing for a coherent explanation and to talk to bosses, he still had to pack-up and leave.

Before I express my solidarity, I do want to say Carvin should not have been surprised that he’d get some trouble: The Gigapan requires a tripod and rules against tripods have been common for a while, well before the so-called post-9/11 era.

Aside from security issues, more mundane rules and bureaucratic measures that require special permission for some photography in the name of safety and congestion have been in place for some time in many public and private spaces, particularly in Washington, DC. If one is going to use a tripod and is involved in any sort of media making, they should expect to be challenged by those responsible for the space if nothing is pre-arranged. I do think such policies are sometimes questionable and are often arbitrarily enforced but as an employee of NPR, he might have more easily obtained special permission to use his tripod. That said, the conflicting permission and conflicting reasoning Carvin recounts sort of balances that out.

Fundamentally, I think indignance over this treatment is justified. Often in the name of security, and sometimes in the name of private property, civil liberties are aggressively curtailed by security officials who often seem to know less about the rules they’re apparently enforcing than the bill of rights some of them (at least when they’re police) are sworn to protect. That isn’t saying much.

I have witnessed and experienced similar situations myself.

In Washington, the hostility towards photography in open spaces by tourists and amateurs, even members of the press and others seems particularly intense. On Washington’s metro system I’ve been approached by police and asked to show them the photos I had just taken. Another time, I was told I could not take a photo in the Metro because there was an elevated security level — but the rules publicly available did not back this up.

Often I was subject to scrutiny while others who were taking pictures were not. The only discernible difference I could imagine is that I often carried a Digital SLR camera body — so I either appeared professional (still not a crime) or somehow more competent (not a guarantee by any means) and the nature of my photography was apparently supposed not only to be different (a weak assumption) but extra-legal (false).

This year in Union Station, while I photographed an anti-war flash mob, I saw videographers get repeatedly approached by Amtrak police and suited officials and told they could not film. Enough seemed to challenge, in front of enough witnesses, that the authorities seemed to relent.

In 2002, while covering World Bank and anti-war protests as a then-contributor to an incarnation of DC Indymedia (which had been recognized by DC’s police department — which took our applications and had just begun to issue credentials to many of us) and collaborating with the DC Radio-Coop (a project of organizers with Washington’s Pacifica station WPFW and DC Indymedia), I was swept up in a mass-arrest. Other other press, legal observers, medics, passers-by, and demonstrators — were all illegally arrested. I’ve been shown video of cops pointing to me, and arresting me out of sequence from the crowd they corralled after I had held my camera up above my head in trying to get shots of the arrests at the other end of compressed block of people I was in.

I spent hours in buses and hog-tied on mat, spending time with AP, Newsweek, and Magnum photographers. All but the Magnum photographer and myself got released early, apparently after negotiations between their employers/sponsors and the authorities. When those who could be were contacted, all those who were sprung early with the help of their boss were reluctant to join a free-press oriented lawsuit a credentialed videographer and I tried to organize. Eventually we joined a different suit that included protest participants, which the Magnum photographer also eventually joined coincidentally, and we settled without pressing the issues specific to our journalist status. The Committee to Protect Journalists included mention of the arrests in a press release.

It isn’t just Washington, DC, though: After Boing Boing picked up on Andy Carvin’s story, they shared a couple more similarly themed accounts from the Los Angeles area, one involving the FBI.

Similar instances of arbitrary rules or baseless enforcement of allegedly applicable rules or laws regarding photography have been reported on in the past too. Including twice in the past couple of years where the New York City Metro Transit Authority and the city government was subject to a public backlash after the respective authorities expressed the intent to implement more restrictive rules on the basis of security and public safety.

The example of Union Station raises concerns both about the civil liberties associated with photographing that which is plain view to the public, and the encroachment of civil liberties in general by places that seem public but which are not. This isn’t always a factor of increased privatization of what was public. Sometimes the entities that own or control certain spaces that were always technically private and [mis?-]understood to be public seem to exploit the murkiness of places that are — by most perceptions — seen as public because of their association with public spaces and public or government-subsidized services.

I know there are lawyers will say my qualifiers are going too far, but when we’re talking about subsidies, public-private corporations, and hubs of public services, I think the equivocation on the “privateness” is deserved. In the case of Union Station, I’m talking about Amtrak and the Washington Metro system.

This is likely to get edited for clarity and updated for the addition of sources after I get some sleep and Twitter comes back up.

You may parse the term anti-American differently than I, and if it is truly that subjective, I think that only gives more cause to use the term sparingly. To me the terms signifies a general disdain for all things American: Americans, American culture, the actions and policies of the US government. I’m not convinced that is accurate in the case of Muqtada al-Sadr. When you can isolate the sentiment to some subset of those categories a more accurate term can almost always be found, or qualifiers need to be deployed.

One of the additional instances was on May 2. I posted a “tweet” shortly after I heard it. My recollection is that in this case it came from a presenter, not in the voice of a reporter in the field. I visited the NPR site and went through the Morning Edition stories for that day and I cannot find the use in the only story in that day’s archived line-up about Iraq. It was a discussion about an interview with a member of Sadr’s militia.

It seems most likely that I heard the use in the presentation of news headlines by Carl Kasell (the headlines are a part of the broadcast which is not apart of the show per se, and not publicly archived as thoroughly as the show itself). Less likely, but not ruled out (as stories do sometimes seem to get tweaked before they’re rebroadcast for the second time on the East Cast or for the West Coast), perhaps I did hear it in this story and it got edited out.

In fact, the May 2 story was a reasonable piece that judiciously used qualifying terms and appears to be an honest attempt at figuring out what the “Sadrists” are all about. It effectively pokes holes in the idea that Sadr or his followers are truly “anti-American.”

But then, this morning, May 5, I heard the term used again by Tom Bowman in a news piece (again, not archived with Morning Edition and only select audio eventually shows up in the “News” section of the NPR web site).

I’m sure there are more than these three instances in the span of time between Brian’s first notice of the use and today.

This may seem to be nit-picky, but I think this is symptomatic of a broader problem where motivation is ascribed to subjects without due qualification or substantive evidence. Sometimes it comes in the form of accepting stated motivation (say from official spokespersons) other times it comes in the form of the inaccurate use of language. Both phenomenon are, at best, lazy and at other times malicious.

In this case, given the evidence of the nuanced reporting that can sometimes be found in the more in-depth segments of the show, I’m going to go with “lazy.” It seems to be shorthand slang to fit into those seconds-long spots in the brief newscasts. But it is inaccurate. If we return to Brian’s comment, that Sadr is not “anti-American” but “anti-occupation”, we find in his complaint a solution — the equally short but more accurate term “anti-occupation.”

There’s another problem of inequity, which I don’t have time to get into: That of a general trend of accepting the stated motivation of certain actors — say President Bush — and not accepting the stated motivation of others — let’s say, Osama bin Laden, in spite of evidence that both are just as believable, or that the accepted position actually isn’t supported whereas the stated motivation not accepted might be the most supported by evidence. But that’s worthy of an essay of its own and I’m hardly the first one to highlight these issues.