little things to wonder about

So:

2011-09-12T16:45:00.002-04:00

Once upon a time I used to post about politics and social issues.

Shifting the terror frame.

2006-11-12T10:48:00.000-05:00

If you get as tired as I do of the whole "terrorist, terrorist, they want to kill us, can't be reasoned with.." line of thinking and the subtle racism found in to whom and how the "T word" is applied, maybe its time to shift the frame. If corporate interests are going to sic their boys in Washington on environmental activists and forest defenders and start flogging "Eco-Terrorism" around, (Rep. Scott McInnis [R-CO] is yapping about "These are hardened criminals. They are dangerous, they are well-funded, they are savvy, sophisticated and stealthy, and if their violence continues to escalate, its only a matter of time before their parade of terror results in a lost human life.", and James F. Jarboe's [FBI] schpiell to McInnis's "Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health" is worth a read too.), I think we need to be talking about acts of violence by Anti-Choice extremists and White Supremicist hater groups as well.

Which is why I was so glad to stumble upon this article (by fellow Hampshire College Alum Jenn Pozner), "The Terrorists Who Aren't in the News", focusing on media coverage of actis of violence against abortion providers.

Here's an excerpt:

On Sept. 11, 2006, the fifth anniversary of the terror attacks that devastated our nation, a man crashed his car into a building in Davenport, Iowa, hoping to blow it up and kill himself in the fire.
No national newspaper, magazine or network newscast reported this attempted suicide bombing, though an AP wire story was available. Cable news (save for MSNBC's Keith Olbermann) was silent about this latest act of terrorism in America.
Had the criminal, David McMenemy, been Arab or Muslim, this would have been headline news for weeks. But since his target was the Edgerton Women's Health Center, rather than, say, a bank or a police station, media have not called this terrorism -- even after three decades of extreme violence by anti-abortion fanatics, mostly fundamentalist Christians who believe they're fighting a holy war.

If were going to talk about terrorism, lets talk about all of it.

ouch!

2006-10-31T01:40:00.000-05:00

I had a real "makes you think" moment with this story recently. As a white hip-hop fan its interesting to ponder the use and abuse of "the N word". You can talk "reclaiming" all you want, and dig out that old copy of Midnight Marauders and spin "Sucka Nigga" a few times but shit like this can still smack you hard enough to smart.

Without further ado:

My name is David Sylvester and I recently completed a charitable bicycle trip in Africa, riding over 7000 miles from Cairo, Egypt to Cape Town, South Africa . The trip made me the first and only African American to cross two continents on a bicycle. I have plenty of great and fascinating stories. Many are funny, others bittersweet, some are poignant, but all are entertaining. Surprisingly one story has stood out and if it was not for the fact that I have a picture of it, many would never believe it. and it is for that reason that I am sharing it with you.
While in Lilongwe, Malawi, I came across a store by the name of “Niggers” —that’s right “ Niggers”! The other riders, who were all white, could not wait to inform me of this to see my reaction. Initially, I thought that it was a very bad joke but when the other riders were adamant about the existence of the store, I had to see it for myself.
What I found was a store selling what the owner called ‘hip hop’ style clothing . It was manned by two gentlemen — one of them asleep! (Talk about living up to or in this case down to a stereotype) I asked the guys what was up with the store name. After hearing my obvious non - Malawian accent and figuring out that I was from America, the man thumped his chest proudly and said “P-Diddy New York City! we are the niggers!”

Like I said, you can read more on it here, and the site in general is worth a read too. I'm not here to make any grandiose statements one way or another about how black folk ought to address each other, and I'm definitely not interested in adopting an anti-hip-hop pose. Just something to think about when you feel like squirming a little.

wisdom from the mouths of babes.

2006-10-31T01:38:00.000-05:00

If only everyone reacted to these tactics as sensibly.

the oil we eat

2006-01-09T12:31:00.000-05:00

been meaning to post this stellar richard manning article from harper's for over a year now. titled "The Oil We Eat: Following The Food Chain Back To Iraq", its the best examination ive read yet of our global food system.

theres not much else to say except that i reccomend it highly. heres a few snippets to pique your curiosity:

Oil is annual primary productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts, built up over many thousands of years. On average, it takes 5.5 gallons of fossil energy to restore a year’s worth of lost fertility to an acre of eroded land—in 1997 we burned through more than 400 years’ worth of ancient fossilized productivity, most of it from someplace else.

...

What would happen when the planet’s supply of arable land ran out? We have a clear answer. In about 1960 expansion hit its limits and the supply of unfarmed, arable lands came to an end. There was nothing left to plow. What happened was grain yields tripled.

...

The common assumption these days is that we muster our weapons to secure oil, not food. There’s a little joke in this. Ever since we ran out of arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1. And this understates the problem, because at the same time that there is more oil in our food there is less oil in our oil. A couple of generations ago we spent a lot less energy drilling, pumping, and distributing than we do now. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today each barrel invested in the process returns only ten, a calculation that no doubt fails to include the fuel burned by the Hummers and Blackhawks we use to maintain access to the oil in Iraq.

...

Green eaters, especially vegetarians, advocate eating low on the food chain, a simple matter of energy flow. Eating a carrot gives the diner all that carrot’s energy, but feeding carrots to a chicken, then eating the chicken, reduces the energy by a factor of ten. The chicken wastes some energy, stores some as feathers, bones, and other inedibles, and uses most of it just to live long enough to be eaten. As a rough rule of thumb, that factor of ten applies to each level up the food chain, which is why some fish, such as tuna, can be a horror in all of this. Tuna is a secondary predator, meaning it not only doesn’t eat plants but eats other fish that themselves eat other fish, adding a zero to the multiplier each notch up, easily a hundred times, more like a thousand times less efficient than eating a plant.
This is fine as far as it goes, but the vegetarian’s case can break down on some details. On the moral issues, vegetarians claim their habits are kinder to animals, though it is difficult to see how wiping out 99 percent of wildlife’s habitat, as farming has done in Iowa, is a kindness. In rural Michigan, for example, the potato farmers have a peculiar tactic for dealing with the predations of whitetail deer. They gut-shoot them with small-bore rifles, in hopes the deer will limp off to the woods and die where they won’t stink up the potato fields.
Animal rights aside, vegetarians can lose the edge in the energy argument by eating processed food, with its ten calories of fossil energy for every calorie of food energy produced. The question, then, is: Does eating processed food such as soy burger or soy milk cancel the energy benefits of vegetarianism, which is to say, can I eat my lamb chops in peace? Maybe. If I’ve done my due diligence, I will have found out that the particular lamb I am eating was both local and grass-fed, two factors that of course greatly reduce the embedded energy in a meal. I know of ranches here in Montana, for instance, where sheep eat native grass under closely controlled circumstances—no farming, no plows, no corn, no nitrogen. Assets have not been stripped. I can’t eat the grass directly. This can go on. There are little niches like this in the system. Each person’s individual charge is to find such niches.
Chances are, though, any meat eater will come out on the short end of this argument, especially in the United States. Take the case of beef. Cattle are grazers, so in theory could live like the grass-fed lamb. Some cattle cultures—those of South America and Mexico, for example—have perfected wonderful cuisines based on grass-fed beef. This is not our habit in the United States, and it is simply a matter of habit. Eighty percent of the grain the United States produces goes to livestock. Seventy-eight percent of all of our beef comes from feed lots, where the cattle eat grain, mostly corn and wheat. So do most of our hogs and chickens. The cattle spend their adult lives packed shoulder to shoulder in a space not much bigger than their bodies, up to their knees in shit, being stuffed with grain and a constant stream of antibiotics to prevent the disease this sort of confinement invariably engenders. The manure is rich in nitrogen and once provided a farm’s fertilizer. The feedlots, however, are now far removed from farm fields, so it is simply not “efficient” to haul it to cornfields. It is waste. It exhales methane, a global-warming gas. It pollutes streams. It takes thirty-five calories of fossil fuel to make a calorie of beef this way; sixty-eight to make one calorie of pork.
Still, these livestock do something we can’t. They convert grain’s carbohydrates to high-quality protein. All well and good, except that per capita protein production in the United States is about double what an average adult needs per day. Excess cannot be stored as protein in the human body but is simply converted to fat. This is the end result of a factory-farm system that appears as a living, continental-scale monument to Rube Goldberg, a black-mass remake of the loaves-and-fishes miracle. Prairie’s productivity is lost for grain, grain’s productivity is lost in livestock, livestock’s protein is lost to human fat—all federally subsidized for about $15 billion a year, two thirds of which goes directly to only two crops, corn and wheat.

ok. read it yourself and tell me what you think.

incompetent design - the other ID.

2005-12-08T17:28:00.000-05:00

this is perhaps even better than the theory of the intelligent flying spaghetti monster.

univ. of mass. amherst geosciences professor, don wise, is advocating that if the universe was 'designed', it was done incompetently, not intelligently.

The thing that perhaps is closest to all of us is our own skeleton, and there are certainly all kinds of stupidity in our design. No self-respecting engineering student would make the kinds of dumb mistakes that are built into us. All of our pelvises slope forward for convenient knuckle-dragging, like all the other great apes. And the only reason you stand erect is because of this incredible sharp bend at the base of your spine, which is either evolution's way of modifying something or else it's just a design that would flunk a first-year engineering student. Look at the teeth in your mouth. Basically, most of us have too many teeth for the size of our mouth. Well, is this evolution flattening a mammalian muzzle and jamming it into a face or is it a design that couldn't count accurately above 20? Look at the bones in your face. They're the same as the other mammals' but they're just squashed and contorted by jamming the jaw into a face with your brain expanding over it, so the potential drainage system in there is so convoluted that no plumber would admit to having done it! So is this evolution or is this plain stupid design?

new tactics from the RIAA

2005-11-29T17:51:00.000-05:00

from the onion...

RIAA Bans Telling Friends About Songs

November 30, 2005 Issue 41•48

LOS ANGELES—The Recording Industry Association of America announced Tuesday that it will be taking legal action against anyone discovered telling friends, acquaintances, or associates about new songs, artists, or albums. "We are merely exercising our right to defend our intellectual properties from unauthorized peer-to-peer notification of the existence of copyrighted material," a press release signed by RIAA anti-piracy director Brad Buckles read. "We will aggressively prosecute those individuals who attempt to pirate our property by generating 'buzz' about any proprietary music, movies, or software, or enjoy same in the company of anyone other than themselves." RIAA attorneys said they were also looking into the legality of word-of-mouth "favorites-sharing" sites, such as coffee shops, universities, and living rooms.

as i once heard alice walker say, 'nothing is ever funnier, or frees the heart more, than the truth.' when satire feels the most effective is when it tells the truth, not necessarily of the actual events transpiring, but, like in this case, of the spirit behind the actions. i am continually astonsihed by the pure vindictiveness of the RIAA and its puppets in the music biz *(er, ahem, metallica) in their choice to agressively pursue people who download a few songs for home use or who share burned cd's with friends when they could be focusing on, say, people who bootleg for profit. why not just be smart like say, frank zappa and pearl jam and saturate the market with your own high quality 'official bootleg' recordings? in most cases, i think things play out best if listeners follow the advice or krs-one on his newest album - 'if you downloaded the album, then come to the concert!'

if this crap pisses you off too, probably the best way to keep up on the battle is to watch the news at the electronic frontier foundation, and, if you can, give em some money. a nickel for each downloaded song might be a good way to preserve open access to the musical 'intellectual property' you love.

the truth is stranger (and more fun) than fiction

2005-11-18T13:30:00.000-05:00

what is there to say about a senior police officer in uttar pradesh, india, who is convinced he is a reincarnation of krishna's bride, radha, and has taken to dressing in drag and hugging fig trees?

from bbc news:

TV news channels flocked to his home to film him worshipping Hindu deity Lord Krishna in the form of a tree.

Mr Panda says he is the reincarnation of Goddess Radha, Lord Krishna's beloved.

He has been spending his time embracing a peepal, or holy fig, tree in his garden, chanting mantras to his beloved Lord Krishna.

One room in his house is kept sacred and secret.

"That is my private bed room. Only Krishna can enter there," he says.

There is nothing unusual in a Hindu ascetic getting up early and quoting from scriptures, as Mr Panda does.

Nor is it uncommon for Hindu sects to worship deities as lovers, or for men to live like women devotees.

But Mr Panda's position is a tricky one, seeing as he is a senior police officer.

Colleagues kept his penchant for ladies' clothes a secret for years, but must now decide what to do with a man who has become a figure of ridicule.

cheney gets a scolding

2005-11-17T19:28:00.000-05:00

the fallout from the veteran's day speech continues -

rep. john murtha, a hawkish pennsylvania democrat who is a decorated veteran of wars in korea and vietnam, is calling for immediate withdrawl from iraq.

but my favorite part of what he had to say were his words for draft-dodger dick:

Seldom overtly political, Murtha uncharacteristically responded to Vice President
Dick Cheney's comments this week that Democrats were spouting "one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges" about the Bush administration's use of intelligence before the war.

"I like guys who've never been there that criticize us who've been there. I like that. I like guys who got five deferments and never been there and send people to war, and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done," Murtha said.

Referring to Bush, Murtha added, "I resent the fact, on Veterans Day, he criticized Democrats for criticizing them."

With a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts, Murtha retired from the Marine Corps reserves as a colonel in 1990 after 37 years as a Marine, only a few years longer than he's been in Congress. Elected in 1974, Murtha has become known as an authority on national security whose advice was sought out by Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

to be clear, i dont want to fall into the trap of thinking that murtha's veteran status in and of itself gives him more moral authority than cheney. i'd dodge the draft in a hot second if it came to that, either in this war or the one in vietnam. however, im not starting wars and sending other people off to fight them. im not calling for other people to do something i wouldnt do myself. cheney is.

when peacenik leftists (like myself) are calling to bring the troops home, they may well be right, but they're just saying what they always say. when purple heart decorated veterans who serve on defense committes and are friends with high ranking pentagon officials are calling to bring the troops home, it's really time to listen.

the veteran's day speech from hell...

2005-11-16T18:06:00.000-05:00

the bushco approval rating is now at, what, a chilly 36%?

he's backed into a corner, foaming at the mouth and lashing out at 'his opponents'. in his veteran's day speech, he goes back and forth between attempting to suggest that he hasn't slashed veteran's benefits, attacking his critics, and repeating his 'war on terror' mantra. i wont even comment on the attempts to paint the 'war on terror' as the new cold war.

read it, then read the commentary by former clinton speechwriter david kusnet here.

just a snippet:

At a time when Bush would benefit from sounding cheerful, forward looking, and above partisan politics, just as Ronald Reagan did during his second term even in the midst of the Iran-Contra scandal, Bush instead sounded like Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson during the worst days of the Vietnam War, although neither is remembered for flubbing a speech on a national holiday. It's as if Bush was reading from a cue-card that proclaimed, "Message: I'm embattled and embittered."

whats your fantasy?

2005-11-16T18:01:00.000-05:00

gallows humor

2005-11-02T14:53:00.000-05:00

George W. Bush is tossing restlessly in his White House bed.
He awakens to see George Washington standing by him.
Bush asks him, "George, what's the best thing I can do to help the country?"
"Set an honest and honorable example, just as I did," Washington advises, and then fades away. The next night, Bush is astir again, and sees the ghost of Thomas Jefferson moving through the darkened bedroom. Bush calls out, "Tom, please! What is the best thing I can do to help the country?"
"Respect the Constitution, as I did," Jefferson advises, and dims from sight.
The third night sleep still does not come for Bush.
He awakens to see the ghost of FDR hovering over his bed.
Bush whispers, "Franklin, What is the best thing I can do to help the country?"
"Help the less fortunate, just as I did," FDR replies and fades into the mist.
Bush isn't sleeping well the fourth night when he sees another figure moving in the shadows. It is the ghost of Abraham Lincoln.
Bush pleads, "Abe, what is the best thing I can do right now to help the country?"
Lincoln replies, "Go see a play."

money for nothing..

2005-10-22T12:40:00.000-04:00

when a recent cover story from American Conservative magazine sounds like i could have been written by Naomi Klein (well, if she were more focused on fiscal responsibility and less on social justice) you know bush and co. are not doing so great.

The American-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority could well prove to be the most corrupt administration in history, almost certainly surpassing the widespread fraud of the much-maligned UN Oil for Food Program. At least $20 billion that belonged to the Iraqi people has been wasted, together with hundreds of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. Exactly how many billions of additional dollars were squandered, stolen, given away, or simply lost will never be known because the deliberate decision by the CPA not to meter oil exports means that no one will ever know how much revenue was generated during 2003 and 2004.

Some of the corruption grew out of the misguided neoconservative agenda for Iraq, which meant that a serious reconstruction effort came second to doling out the spoils to the war’s most fervent supporters. The CPA brought in scores of bright, young true believers who were nearly universally unqualified. Many were recruited through the Heritage Foundation website, where they had posted their résumés. They were paid six-figure salaries out of Iraqi funds, and most served in 90-day rotations before returning home with their war stories. One such volunteer was Simone Ledeen, daughter of leading neoconservative Michael Ledeen. Unable to communicate in Arabic and with no relevant experience or appropriate educational training, she nevertheless became a senior advisor for northern Iraq at the Ministry of Finance in Baghdad. Another was former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer’s older brother Michael who, though utterly unqualified, was named director of private-sector development for all of Iraq.

in the interest of public safety..

2005-10-19T20:35:00.000-04:00

"The industry absolutely has been extraordinarily helpful [to law enforcement]," Pagano says.

quotes like the above scare me.

im glad the amazing folks over at the electronic frontier foundation are here to let us all know that the FBI can use secret information encoded in each document a laser printer or copier prints to track the activities of its citizenry.

In an effort to identify counterfeiters, the US government has succeeded in persuading some color laser printer manufacturers to encode each page with identifying information. That means that without your knowledge or consent, an act you assume is private could become public. A communication tool you're using in everyday life could become a tool for government surveillance. And what's worse, there are no laws to prevent abuse.

The ACLU recently issued a report revealing that the FBI has amassed more than 1,100 pages of documents on the organization since 2001, as well as documents concerning other non-violent groups, including Greenpeace and United for Peace and Justice. In the current political climate, it's not hard to imagine the government using the ability to determine who may have printed what document for purposes other than identifying counterfeiters. Your freedom to speak anonymously is in danger.

Yet there are no laws to stop the Secret Service -- or for that matter, any other governmental agency or private company -- from using printer codes to secretly trace the origin of non-currency documents. We're unaware of any printer manufacturer that has a privacy policy that would protect you, and no law regulates what people can do with the information once it's turned over. And that doesn't even reach the issue of how such a privacy-invasive tool could be developed and implemented in printers without the public becoming aware of it in the first place.

anonymous sources..

2005-10-19T20:14:00.000-04:00

..are not always the most credible ones, but this one says that bush knew that rove had leaked valerie plame's name to the media over two years ago when it happened.

As special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald nears a decision, perhaps as early as today, on whether to issue indictments in his two-year probe, Bush has already circled the wagons around Rove, whose departure would be a grievous blow to an already shell-shocked White House staff and a President in deep political trouble.

"Karl is fighting for his life," the official added, "but anything he did was done to help George W. Bush. The President knows that and appreciates that."

Other sources confirmed, however, that Bush was initially furious with Rove in 2003 when his deputy chief of staff conceded he had talked to the press about the Plame leak.

Bush has always known that Rove often talks with reporters anonymously and he generally approved of such contacts, one source said.

But the President felt Rove and other members of the White House damage-control team did a clumsy job in their campaign to discredit Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, the ex-diplomat who criticized Bush's claim that Saddam Hussen tried to buy weapons-grade uranium in Niger.

A second well-placed source said some recently published reports implying Rove had deceived Bush about his involvement in the Wilson counterattack were incorrect and were leaked by White House aides trying to protect the President.

"Bush did not feel misled so much by Karl and others as believing that they handled it in a ham-handed and bush-league way," the source said.

None of these sources offered additional specifics of what Bush and Rove discussed in conversations beginning shortly after the Justice Department informed the White House in September 2003 that a criminal investigation had been launched into the leak of CIA agent Plame's identity to columnist Robert Novak.

reclaiming public space can be luscious!

2005-10-19T19:53:00.000-04:00

god, how great is this:

When three professors from CalArts discovered that by California law, any fruit growing on or over public land is available to the public, they founded Fallen Fruit, a project that promotes urban food gathering. Fallen Fruit, based in Los Angeles, charts "public" fruit trees throughout the city, organizes group foraging expeditions, and plans to expand into other cities and venues, including a program called "Buddy Bags" in New York, which would collect bakery and restaurant refuse and assemble bags of clean, sanitary food to be given to the homeless.

http://www.fallenfruit.org

from the news of good things happening department.

another exciting day..

2005-10-19T17:35:00.000-04:00

...over at cnn. check out these three hot headlines.

Arrest warrant issued for DeLay
U.S. soldiers charged with murder of journalist
Miers' answers 'incomplete to insulting'

gotta love how we can look to our leaders in govt. to set a moral example to the masses.

"i do whatever the voices in my rice crispies tell me to."

2005-10-07T00:49:00.000-04:00

our president might want to have his hearing checked.

i feel a chilling effect...

2005-10-05T12:10:00.000-04:00

the irony is mindboggling - in this story (via www.dailykos.com) about a high school student doing a project on the bill of rights in north carolina.

Selina Jarvis is the chair of the social studies department at Currituck County High School in North Carolina, and she is not used to having the Secret Service question her or one of her students.

But that's what happened on September 20.

Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class "to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights," she says. One student "had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb's down sign with his own hand next to the President's picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster."

According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent.

But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect. An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service. On Tuesday, September 20, the Secret Service came to Currituck High.

"At 1:35, the student came to me and told me that the Secret Service had taken his poster," Jarvis says. "I didn't believe him at first. But they had come into my room when I wasn't there and had taken his poster, which was in a stack with all the others." She says the student was upset.

"He was nervous, he was scared, and his parents were out of town on business," says Jarvis. She, too, had to talk to the Secret Service. "They asked me, didn't I think that it was suspicious," she recalls. "I said no, it was a Bill of Rights project!"

At the end of the meeting, they told her the incident "would be interpreted by the U.S. attorney, who would decide whether the student could be indicted," she says.

The student was not indicted, and the Secret Service did not pursue the case further. "I blame Wal-Mart more than anybody," she says. "I was really disgusted with them. But everyone was using poor judgment, from Wal-Mart up to the Secret Service."

Jarvis uses one word to describe the whole incident: "ridiculous."

more flag waving!

2005-10-04T23:31:00.000-04:00

get your free flags from the wonderfully creative people at made you think.

the plot thickens...

2005-10-03T03:05:00.000-04:00

nyt reporter judith miller is out of jail after being granted permission to testify from her source - which appears to be not karl rove, but cheney's chief of staff lewis 'scooter' libbey. i cant say i have a clue what is really going on here. but i smell a fish of some sort.

im fascinated by this case for a million reasons, its pretty clear by now that bush co. is linked to the leak of undercover cia op valerie plame's name to the media, but not clear how. and of course dubya's promise that heads will roll remains unfulfilled. beyond that, theres the issue of of protecting confidentiality of sources, yet another right eroding away like the new orleans levee. and then theres the issue of judy miller's slimey journalism (theres a whole chapter eviscerating her in amy goodman's 'exception to the rulers'), which makes her taking an ethical stand rather suprising.

anyhow.. what is there to do but wait and see.

reaction rather than action.

2005-09-27T19:43:00.000-04:00

thats the problem with the dems. or so says sf chronicle's jon carroll. ive been suspicious from the beginning of a liberal tendency for excessive self-analysis, and mostly have steered clear of or been bored with all the 'whats wrong with the democrats?' articles. the 'stolen election' thing kinda eclipsed all that for me. still, this one stuck me as a little more interesting and useful.

I'm not sure when I first became fed up with the Democrats. Probably sometime during the Kerry campaign, although at that time I was being eaten up by the Fear and not noticing the flaws of the Kerry campaign so much. I feel foolish now. Many of us feel foolish now.
But here's the moment at which it all crystallized for me: It was at the beginning of what was then called "the great Social Security debate," which was a brief fad that hit America at about the same time as the 2005 Rose Parade.

Congressional Democrats solemnly announced that they were not going to come up with an alternative plan, because that would be politically unwise. It would be much better for the party to just snipe at the Republican plan. Yeah, I know, Social Security was not in nearly as bad shape as the GOP said it was, but could certainly have used -- still certainly could use -- a little help. Innovative thinking, maybe. Or, you know, the appearance of innovative thinking. Something other than "This plan is very terrible, and that's good for our side."

But it's typical. The party of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson is back on its heels. It is reacting rather than acting. It is getting sucked into pointless debates. It is providing zero leadership. Some individuals within the party are trying -- hello, John Edwards -- but there's no vision.

What do Democrats believe? Well, you know what Republicans believe. Well, Democrats believe the other thing. Democrats stand for a vision to be named later.

Poverty was not a secret before Hurricane Katrina hit. The plight of inner-city African Americans was not a secret before the storm hit. If Democrats had wanted an issue, that was always there. If Democrats wanted to stay on message, there was that message. It's not the only possible message, but it's a pretty good one -- and it's a message that reaches across ideological lines to the so-called "values voters."

Here's the first thing the Democrats should do. Stop taking the pundits seriously. Stop responding to every mini-flurry of gossip or speculation that eddies through the corridors of Washington. That is not real life. That is not what we care about out here in people-land.
In the last election, when the Swift Boat Veterans for I'm-With-Stupid started their well-financed reputation-smashing campaign, the Democrats should have appointed one politician as Authorized Bull Catcher. Every Democratic candidate would refer all rumors, allegations, thunderings, rumblings and billingsgate to the Bull Catcher. The Bull Catcher would hold eight-hour news conferences every day and keep talking until everyone walked away.

Meanwhile, the candidates would insist on talking about poverty and racial justice and the benefits of peace over war. (In peace: less killing. You'd think that would be a selling point.)
It would help, of course, if the idiot press would not go chasing after every whiff of a scandal-like odor. Ooh, Teresa Heinz Kerry has a temper. Ooh, Jenna Bush may have gotten drunk. Ooh, someone saw Rick Santorum in a gay bar. Ooh, Russ Feingold is getting a divorce. Are we running a country or a hair salon? I mean no disrespect to hair salons.

The right-wing attack machine knows no shame. It will slime war veterans like John Kerry. It will slime badly injured war veterans like Max Cleland. It'll slime grieving mothers like Cindy Sheehan. It's not a fight the Democrats can win; it's not a fight that any decent person could win. Solution: Get out of the fight. Takes two to have a shouting match.

And Democrats might want to get off the "values" horse too. The fights are mostly futile, anyway, at least short term. Abortion is not going to be outlawed in this country; it's just not. Prayers in schools are not going to be allowed in this country; they're just not. Gay marriage is never going to be the law of the land; it's just not.

And, at the risk of alienating my base and some of my relatives -- I don't think gay marriage is that important an issue. I mean, dead citizens in Iraq; tortured Muslims at Guantanamo; AIDS epidemic in Africa; ice caps melting and fish dying pretty much everywhere. Gay marriage freaks people out -- it shouldn't, but it does. Heck, I think the failure of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy is more important than gay marriage, and even that takes a backseat to, uh, some of the other problems the military is having.

I don't think the Democratic Party should be another talking-points-generating engine, as the Republican Party is. Democrats are always going to disagree; it's a good thing. But please, let us disagree about real things, about real policies and real ideas and real solutions. And, seriously, the Democrats really should find a candidate who's a uniter, not a divider. That job is definitely still open.

It's like, OK, I do not know how to fix this car, but I do know that sitting around hurling slogans rather than reading the manual is not the way to go about it.

again, no big surprise...

2005-09-19T17:57:00.000-04:00

.. you knew diebold was up to no good, so many flaws were being reported in their system (esp. on http://www.blackboxvoting.org/), but now, a diebold insider is talking (in an exclusive interview with 'the brad blog').

of course, this was out before the 'election', does anyone remember watching Howard Dean hack the diebold GEMS central tabulator (in just 90 seconds) on CNBC's "Topic A with Tina Brown"? there's never been any shortage of evidence.

still, this anonymous source is the first person to have anything to say about what it all looked like inside the diebold machine - the company who's CEO is a top GOP supporter, and promised to deliver ohio for bush.

no big surprise, but...

2005-09-16T20:06:00.000-04:00

... a recent ny times article reveals that the FAA and other govt. officials were warned as early as 1998 that Al Qaeda could "seek to hijack a commercial jet and slam it into a U.S. landmark". there you have it, folks - it doesnt get much more specific than that.

the information comes from previously secret (to protect national security interests, of course) portions of the 9/11 comission report. the specific warnings about al qaeda strikes and security lapses are interesting enough in and of themselves, but what really intrigues me is looking at what information was censored in the first release of the report, and wondering what information is still being witheld.

from the article:

Commission officials said they were perplexed by the administration's original attempts to black out material they said struck them as trivial or mundane.

One previously deleted section showed, for instance, that flights carrying the author Salman Rushdie were subjected to heightened security in the summer of 2001 because of a fatwa of violence against him, while a previously deleted footnote showed that "sewing scissors" would be allowed in the hands of a woman with sewing equipment, but prohibited "in the possession of a man who possessed no other sewing equipment."

Other deletions, however, highlighted more serious security concerns. A footnote that was originally deleted from the report showed that a quarter of the security screeners used in 2001 by Argenbright Security for United Airlines flights at Dulles Airport had not completed required criminal background checks, the commission report said. Another previously deleted footnote, related to the lack of security for cockpit doors, criticized American Airlines for security lapses.

Much of the material now restored in the public version of the commission's report centered on the warnings the F.A.A. received about the threat of hijackings, including 52 intelligence documents in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks that mentioned Al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden.

A 1995 National Intelligence Estimate, a report prepared by intelligence officials, "highlighted the growing domestic threat of terrorist attack, including a risk to civil aviation," the commission found in a blacked-out portion of the report.

transparency has never been a forte of the bush administration (it hasnt been a administration for that matter, but bushco. is perhaps the worst) but one cant help but wonder (hmmm...) how much of the secrecy is simply an attempt to obsure the facts of what went wrong and why - and specficially why the bush admin. didnt do more to prevent the situation.

as fellow texan molly ivins has said about dubya -

"the trouble with the guy is that while he is good at politics, he stinks at governance. It bores him, he's not interested, he thinks government is bad to begin with and everything would be done better if it were contracted out to corporations."

again and again, we pay the price.

"youre doing a heckuva job, brownie!"

2005-09-13T14:28:00.000-04:00

now that FEMA head michael brown has resigned, it may be easy to forget just how totally unqualified for his job he was, not to mention who put him there, and why. lest he become the administration's fall guy, and his resignation draw focus away from the ineptitude of others, let us not forget the old college buddy who hired him.

maureen dowd has a great new column detailing the stupidity.

I understand that politicians are wont to put cronies and cupcakes on the payroll. I just wish they'd stop putting them on the Homeland Security payroll.

At least Bill Clinton knew not to stash his sweeties in jobs concerned with keeping the nation safe. Gennifer Flowers said Clinton got her a $17,500 job in Arkansas in the state unemployment agency, though she was ranked ninth of 11 applicants tested.

W. trusted Brownie simply because he was a friend of a friend. He was a college buddy of Joe Allbaugh, who worked as W.'s chief of staff when he was Texas governor and as his 2000 presidential campaign manager.

Time magazine reported that Brownie's official bio described his only stint in emergency management as "assistant city manager" in Edmond, Okla. But a city official told Time that the FEMA chief had been "an assistant to the city manager," which was "more like an intern."

The breakdown in management and communications was so execrable that the president learned about the 25,000 desperate, trapped people at the New Orleans convention center not from Brownie, who didn't know himself, but from a wire story carried into the Oval Office by an aide on Thursday, 24 hours after the victims had been pleading and crying for help on every channel. (Maybe tomorrow the aide will come in with a wire story, "No WMD in Iraq.")

FEMA was a disaster waiting to happen, the minute a disaster struck. As The Washington Post reported Friday, five of the eight top FEMA officials were simply Bush loyalists and political operatives who "came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters."

'nuff said.

2005-09-13T14:08:00.000-04:00

click on the image to blow it up or look for it here.

reconstruction - the second hurricane?

2005-09-10T14:39:00.000-04:00

after katrina, what next?

a great naomi klein article, 'Let The People Rebuild New Orleans' , argues that reconstruction in and of itself is not necessarily a good thing. new orleans is now ripe for the picking by big money developers, who would likely take the already devastated poor of new orleans for another ride. seeing that Dick Cheney's esteemed colleagues at haliburton have already been awarded a contract it seems prudent to expect the worst.

naomi describes the precedent:

When I was in Sri Lanka six months after the tsunami, many survivors told me that the reconstruction was victimizing them all over again. A council of the country's most prominent businesspeople had been put in charge of the process, and they were handing the coast over to tourist developers at a frantic pace. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of poor fishing people were still stuck in sweltering inland camps, patrolled by soldiers with machine guns and entirely dependent on relief agencies for food and water. They called reconstruction "the second tsunami."

There are already signs that New Orleans evacuees could face a similarly brutal second storm. Jimmy Reiss, chairman of the New Orleans Business Council, told Newsweek that he has been brainstorming about how "to use this catastrophe as a once-in-an-eon opportunity to change the dynamic." The Business Council's wish list is well-known: low wages, low taxes, more luxury condos and hotels. Before the flood, this highly profitable vision was already displacing thousands of poor African-Americans: While their music and culture was for sale in an increasingly corporatized French Quarter (where only 4.3 percent of residents are black), their housing developments were being torn down. "For white tourists and businesspeople, New Orleans' reputation is 'a great place to have a vacation but don't leave the French Quarter or you'll get shot,'" Jordan Flaherty, a New Orleans-based labor organizer told me the day after he left the city by boat. "Now the developers have their big chance to disperse the obstacle to gentrification--poor people."

and the hope for something better:

Here's a better idea: New Orleans could be reconstructed by and for the very people most victimized by the flood. Schools and hospitals that were falling apart before could finally have adequate resources; the rebuilding could create thousands of local jobs and provide massive skills training in decent paying industries. Rather than handing over the reconstruction to the same corrupt elite that failed the city so spectacularly, the effort could be led by groups like Douglass Community Coalition. Before the hurricane this remarkable assembly of parents, teachers, students and artists was trying to reconstruct the city from the ravages of poverty by transforming Frederick Douglass Senior High School into a model of community learning. They have already done the painstaking work of building consensus around education reform. Now that the funds are flowing, shouldn't they have the tools to rebuild every ailing public school in the city?

For a people's reconstruction process to become a reality (and to keep more contracts from going to Halliburton), the evacuees must be at the center of all decision-making. According to Curtis Muhammad of Community Labor United, the disaster's starkest lesson is that African-Americans cannot count on any level of government to protect them. "We had no caretakers," he says. That means the community groups that do represent African-Americans in Louisiana and Mississippi -- many of which lost staff, office space and equipment in the flood -- need our support now. Only a massive injection of cash and volunteers will enable them to do the crucial work of organizing evacuees -- currently scattered through forty-one states--into a powerful political constituency. The most pressing question is where evacuees will live over the next few months. A dangerous consensus is building that they should collect a little charity, apply for a job at the Houston Wal-Mart and move on. Muhammad and CLU, however, are calling for the right to return: they know that if evacuees are going to have houses and schools to come back to, many will need to return to their home states and fight for them.

These ideas are not without precedent. When Mexico City was struck by a devastating earthquake in 1985, the state also failed the people: poorly constructed public housing crumbled and the army was ready to bulldoze buildings with survivors still trapped inside. A month after the quake 40,000 angry refugees marched on the government, refusing to be relocated out of their neighborhoods and demanding a "Democratic Reconstruction." Not only were 50,000 new dwellings for the homeless built in a year; the neighborhood groups that grew out of the rubble launched a movement that is challenging Mexico's traditional power holders to this day.

anyone looking to send money somewhere - the red cross is getting enough donations, try to send your money to more grassroots relief efforts. specifically related to a people's reconstruction, you can contact the Vanguard Public Foundation, 383 Rhode Island St., Suite 301, San Francisco, CA 94103. Checks should be earmarked "People's Hurricane Fund."
otherwise, check out the list at the sparkplug foundation.

honest obituaries

2005-09-10T14:16:00.000-04:00

probably to only reason to be sad that supreme court chief justice william rehnquist is dead is the fact that a bush appointee will likely be even more destructive to individual rights and civil liberties and the common good.

its a sad day what rhenquist looks appealingly like a moderate.

heres the scoop on The Real Rhenquist from the nation's david corn.

It's not hard to conclude that Rehnquist was on the wrong side of history and then lied about it - especially given actions he took later. In 1964, Rehnquist testified against a proposed ordinance in Phoenix that would ban racial discrimination in public housing. As The Washington Post notes in stories on his death, Rehnquist wrote at the time, "It is, I believe, impossible to justify the sacrifice of even a portion of our historic individual liberty for a purpose such as this."

In other words, people are not truly free if they are not free to discriminate. In his 1971 hearings, Rehnquist repudiated that stance. But did he really mean it?

Twelve years later, he was the only justice to say that Bob Jones University - that hotbed of racial discrimination and religious bigotry - had a legal right to keep African-Americans off its campus.

debunking the katrina media myths

2005-09-10T14:06:00.000-04:00

the best piece ive seen yet spelling out exactly how mainstream media reporting covered bush & co's collective ass and failed to check them on their outright lies.

Eight Big Lies About Katrina

read 'em and weep.

the wiley urban arayan hunter-gatherer of new orleans

2005-09-07T17:46:00.000-04:00

one of the most interesting aspects of watching the tragic effects of hurricane katrina play out in the media has been to watch the way race plays out in the coverage. the prime example has been the tendency to ascribe different names to the same survival oriented activities, depending on whether the people in question are black or white.

one of the most intersting instances of this was the story noting two photos from the yahoo news photo service. both photos show new orleans residents wading in chest deep water with hard-won groceries. one, featuring two white folks, is captioned, "Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store...". the other, a photo of a black man, reads, "A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans".

best copies of the photos here.

hmm..

yahoo has pulled one of the photos (the white guys) at the request of the photographer, and issued an apologetic statement, but since the photos and captions were from different sources, the point is not so much to cry 'racist' as to look at the underlying racism in our culture that leads ALL of us to read a black folks attempts to survive as 'looting'.

if anyone has missed kanye west's comments on this subject... well youre in for a treat. at a katrina benefit concert last week, kanye made mike meyers get all squirmy by departing from the standard tragedy script on the tele-prompter to talk a bit more about everybody's favorite president's handling of the disaster.

his comments included these gems:

"I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family, it says they're looting. See a white family, it says they're looking for food."

"America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off as slow as possible".

"George Bush doesn't care about black people."

video here.

now, some humor. as alice walker once said, 'nothing is funnier, or frees the heart more, than the truth.' thats why i like The Onion.

White Foragers Report Threat Of Black Looters

NEW ORLEANS—Throughout the Gulf Coast, Caucasian suburbanites attempting to gather food and drink in the shattered wreckage of shopping districts have reported seeing AfricanAmericans "looting snacks and beer from damaged businesses." "I was in the abandoned Wal-Mart gathering an air mattress so I could float out the potato chips, beef jerky, and Budweiser I'd managed to find," said white survivor Lars Wrightson, who had carefully selected foodstuffs whose salt and alcohol content provide protection against contamination. "Then I look up, and I see a whole family of [African-Americans] going straight for the booze. Hell, you could see they had already looted a fortune in diapers." Radio stations still in operation are advising store owners and white people in the affected areas to locate firearms in sporting-goods stores in order to protect themselves against marauding blacks looting gun shops.

(from the Onion)

'every day is apartheid day for chickens'

2005-08-20T00:31:00.000-04:00

excuse me for starting off with a tangent, but if you haven't already read tim wise's book 'white like me', do so. ok? prolly the best modern white dissection of american racism.

anyhoo, as much as i love god's lil' creatures the self-righteousness of the more vigilant in the animal rights movement has always kinda annoyed me, even way back when i was a vegan. tim's got a great article up on counterpunch called 'animal whites' that offers a dissection of some of the more offensive rhetoric used in defense of the fuzzy guys.

"To wit, Dawn Carr, PETA's Director of Special Projects, who has admitted that lots of folks are upset about her group "comparing black people to animals," but who, in PETA's defense, doesn't deny that that is what PETA is doing, but rather insists it's OK, because the exhibit also compares factory farming to other injustices, "like denying women the vote or using child labor." In other words, don't worry black people: you're not the only ones we're comparing to animals!"

kinda reminds me of people like this.

4:45 p.m.-6:00 p.m. Confrontation with Jennifer over birth control. She says pills are "synthetic" hormones. I say the only thing synthetic are my shoes—no leather here! I refuse to have intercourse until a non-latex-based, nonhormonal birth-control method is established. Jennifer rummages through vegetable crisper, retires to bedroom. I believe she is beginning to see the light.

7:45 p.m. Leaf through PETA catalog (new hemp shoes!), eat tofu stir-fry. Decide not to brush teeth after eating as I usually do to accommodate Jennifer's soy sensitivity. Give her sloppy kiss when she emerges from bedroom. Swear that resulting hives are from a built-up Midwestern resistance to healthful, nonmeat alternatives. She begins to cry. Finally, a breakthrough.

special sauce!

2005-08-19T22:27:00.000-04:00

stumbled across a satirical commentary on old mickey deez adverts on the website of StayFree! magazine... what really caught my attention was this piece of prophecy, foretelling the story of the 2004 election in an 80' burger ad:

EXT. MCDONALDLAND--DAY

MAYOR MCCHEESE arrives at the McDonaldland restaurant via a miniature train. A cheering crowd of children welcome him.
ANNOUNCER: Well, well! Election time in McDonaldland! Mayor McCheese is making speeches! MCCHEESE: Greetings, friends! What this place needs is more, uh . . . um . . .
RONALD: Uh, cheeseburgers!
MCCHEESE: Cheeseburgers, yeah! They're delicious, honest! Uh, self-winding, you know!
RONALD feeds MCCHEESE another line.
RONALD: Trustworthy!
MCCHEESE: Trustworthy!
HAMBURGLAR shoves a stack of ballots into the ballot box, then puts two hamburgers in a sack before escaping, pursued by BIG MAC.
ANNOUNCER: Meanwhile, the Hamburglar is stuffing the ballot box... and his pockets!
MCCHEESE: Uhhh, uhhh, how's about a Cheeseburger with every apple pie! (Children cheer this proposal.) Or maybe with every bag of french fries! In every glove compartment!
RONALD: No! No, no, no, no!
MCCHEESE: Every meal! In everybody, y'know!
RONALD counts ballots.
ANNOUNCER: Well, McCheese has been re-elected!
MCCHEESE: Thank you! Thank you, thank you!
RONALD: But nobody can beat a McDonald's cheeseburger!

ASSIGNMENT:
Write a short paragraph comparing the events of the commercial to the 2004 U.S. Presidential election.
Hints:
1. Notice the twitchy, disoriented candidate running for re-election who has to be fed lines. You may wish to pick a substance that the fictional candidate's head is made from and construct an epithet applying to his real-life counterpart.
2. Notice the campaign promises that sound appealing, but in the end will be bad for all of us.
3. In the ad, the only enemy of McDonaldland who manages to penetrate the nation's borders escapes unpunished. Could this observation serve your allegorical piece?
4. Note that the clear instance of electoral fraud is never rectified, and in fact the ballots are counted by a member of McCheese's own staff.
5. For a real slam-bang ending, express doubt as to which election is more obviously a farcical fiction designed to promote corporate interests.

tracking the iraq war dead.

2005-08-11T17:24:00.000-04:00

check out this map tracking coalition fatalities in iraq from the beginning of the war in 2003 to present. its a powerful visual representation of the human cost of war.

as some commie folk-singer once said, "how many dead will it take 'til we know that too many people have died?"

maybe we need a few more cindy sheehan's blowing in the wind.

feeling the space.

2005-08-03T18:07:00.000-04:00

ok, im back with a vengance and ive figured out how to upload images.

anyhow, my new cartoon love is www.mikhaela.net

full blown ninnies in a pod

2005-08-03T17:48:00.000-04:00

cartoon by mr. fish, courtesy of www.harpers.org

read bruce shapiro's commenatry on roberts in the nation:

"Perhaps most telling is Roberts's brief track record on the federal bench on individual rights, a threshold issue not just for the left but conservative libertarians. A few years back, Washington, DC, police arrested a child for eating a single french fry on the Metro, during a zero-tolerance crackdown on subway-rule violators: arrrested her, handcuffed her, fingerprinted her, threw her in the back of a squad car and held that 12-year-old in lockup for three hours. The child's mother sensibly pointed out in a lawsuit that an adult committing the same offense would have been issued a ticket, not treated like a dangerous felon. Judge Roberts rejected the mother's plea for sanity: Arresting a 12-year-old like a suspect on Cops for eating on the subway, Roberts wrote, advanced "the legitimate goal of promoting parental awareness and involvement with children who commit delinquent acts." Even in red states, parents may not spare much enthusiasm for a judge who would lock up their 12-year-old for public consumption of McDonald's fries.
The french-fry case suggests that behind Judge Roberts's famous amiablity--which has won him influential friends in both parties--lies a far more doctrinaire personality. Whiffs of that ideological rigidity leak out of his careful opinions and briefs. Hostility to environmental regulation? Yes, at least in his ruling in a California land-development case in which he sought to weaken the Endangered Species Act. Hostility to reproductive rights? As a deputy to solicitor general Ken Starr in the Reagan years, he curried favor with the antiabortion right by adding an irrelevant footnote to his briefs in a family-planning-funding case, arguing that Roe v. Wade was "wrongly decided and should be overturned." In his appeals-court confirmation hearings, Roberts said this footnote simply reflected Administration policy, adding that he regards Roe as settled law; but his willingness to go beyond the call of duty and politicize his briefs suggests, at a minimum, enthusiasm for revisiting the issue. "

wave that flag!

2005-08-03T17:36:00.000-04:00

the focus seems to be shifting from 'one nation' to 'under god' - for the radical sectarians, there is now an official Christian Flag of the United States of America:
http://www.uschristianflag.com/
heres a 'customer comment' from a fella named 'hillbillybob':
"every one says god bless america But when is america going to bless god He has done more than his share its about time we did ours this flag is a great start on doing our part god bless and love to all."
whatever happened to the good ol' blood of the lamb on the doorway thing?

the internet flat-earth theory...

2005-08-03T17:35:00.000-04:00

i seem to have dropped off the edge for a while.

Shop For Victory!

2005-06-16T14:49:00.000-04:00

just got turned on to the good christian shopping at www.misspoppy.com - 'where even your money is saved!' -

Protect our troops - from the womb to the war. What if the fetus you were going to abort would grow up to be a soldier bringing democracy to a godless dictatorship?

my new sexual orientation

2005-04-27T17:40:00.000-04:00

http://www.abstinenceonly.com/

Dear Bishop,
my girlfriend and I have an honest, loving relationship and have both agreed we want to wait until marriage to "do it." We like to go on long walks holding hands and kissing sometimes. When we're "in the mood" she'll let me masturbate her through her panties while she jerks me off until I ejaculate on her breasts and face (mouth closed, of course.) Could this be considered as "spilling my seed in vain"?
Yours Truly, Wondering

Dear Wondering,
Depends on what she looks like... (ha ha, just a little clerical humor there... ) All kidding aside, there's nothing "in vain" about firing your load all over your faith partner's face and tits. The bible specifically admonishes Onan for "spilling his seed upon the ground", so as long as your aim is good, you have nothing to worry about. Ditto for your faith partner, so long as she doesn't let any get into her mouth.
A few words for our readers regarding this practice, known in religious circles as a "facial cumshot." A common misconception is that this is some form of abasement or sexual humiliation when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. With the possible exception of the fingerprint, the human face is an amalgam of our most unique physical characteristics and as such represents a visual template of our DNA. The male desire to spray sperm all over people's faces is, in actuality, an expression of the natural desire to procreate, juxtaposing visually their literal DNA against the metaphorical DNA of their partners face. Along the same lines, ejaculating on a woman's breasts symbolizes your desire to have her lactate. if your faith partner seems reluctant or squeamish about such practices, simply explain this to her and everything should work out fine.

A Devil's Dictionary of Bush-Speak.

2005-04-05T18:55:00.000-04:00

our esteemed leader has a special talent for stealing words - ever notice how the folks who are captured in the 'war on terror' somehow dont count as 'prisioners of war'?

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2288

For the last few years we have been ruled by lexicographers. Never has an administration spent so much time creating, defining, or redefining terms, perhaps because no one (since George Orwell) has grasped the power and possibility that lay hidden in plain sight in the naming and renaming of words. In a sense, our post-9/11 moment began with two definitions: The Bush administration named our global enemy "terrorism" and called the acts that followed a "war," which was soon given the moniker "the global war on terror" (later reduced to the acronym GWOT, also known as World War IV), which was then given an instant future -- being defined as a "generational struggle" that was still to come. All this, along with "war" itself, was simply announced rather than officially "declared."

Given that we were (by administration definition) at war, it should have been self-evident that those we captured in our "war" on terrorism would then be "prisoners of war," but no such luck for them, since their rights would in that case have been clearly defined in international treaties signed by the United States. So the Bush administration opened its Devil's Dictionary and came up with a new, tortured term for our new prisoners, "unlawful combatants," which really stood for: We can do anything we want to you in a place of our choosing. For that place, they then chose Guantánamo, an American base in Cuba (which they promptly defined as within "Cuban sovereignty" for the purposes of putting our detention camps beyond the purview of American courts or Congress, but within Bush administration sovereignty -- the sole kind that counted with them -- for the purposes of the Cubans).

In this way, we moved from a self-declared generational war against a method of making war to a world of torture beyond the reach of, or even sight of, the law in a place that (until the Supreme Court recently ruled otherwise) more or less didn't exist. All this was then supported by a world of pretzeled language constantly being reshaped in the White House Counsel's office, the Justice Department, and the Pentagon so that reality would have no choice but to comply with the names given it.

(follow link to continue..)

united in intolerance - maybe there's hope..

2005-04-04T14:35:00.000-04:00

seems like theres one thing that leaders of the diverse communities in jerusalem can agree on - god hates fags. muslims, jews, catholics, and armenian orthoxies have all come together to speak out against a gay pride festival planned for this august, to be called 'love without borders'.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/31/international/worldspecial/31gay.html?ei=5065&en=149e1c8e0aa86a2c&ex=1112936400&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print&position=

of course theres a right wing american wingnut behind it all:

"Interfaith agreement is unusual in Israel. The leaders' joint opposition was initially generated by the Rev. Leo Giovinetti, an evangelical pastor from San Diego who is both a veteran of the American culture war over homosexuality and a frequent visitor to Israel, where he has formed relationships with rabbis and politicians."

"Mr. Giovinetti circulated a petition against the festival, titled "Homosexuals to Desecrate Jerusalem," which he said had been signed by every member of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party in the Israeli Parliament. Another American who helped bring together the opposition was Rabbi Yehuda Levin, of the Rabbinical Alliance of America, which says it represents more than 1,000 American Orthodox rabbis. At the news conference in Jerusalem, he called the festival "the spiritual rape of the Holy City." He said, "This is not the homo land, this is the Holy Land."

im all for interfaith alliances, but this isnt exactly what i had in mind.

sacrificing the virgins!

2005-04-04T14:19:00.000-04:00

turns out that not only is the current obsession with abstinence naive and misguided, its also actually destructive.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002212720_std19.html

"Teenagers who take virginity pledges — public declarations to abstain from sex — are almost as likely to be infected with a sexually transmitted disease (STD) as those who never made the pledge, according to an eight-year study released yesterday. "

hmm - people are still having sex. quel suprise.. further, teens are not being provided with the information they need to have sex safely. even in the rare case of an individual who is abstinent until marriage, information about contraception and protection from std's is still relevant. thats where the real harm comes is - the deliberate witholding of pertinent information.

"Not only do virginity pledges not work to keep our young people safe, they are causing harm by undermining condom use, contraception and medical treatment," said Bill Smith, public-policy vice president for the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. "

score another one up for bush and co. way to go, guys.

i am _so_ buying one of these

2005-02-15T17:55:00.000-05:00

TV-B-Gone is a keychain-sized universal remote that turns off almost any television. The device, which looks like an automobile remote, has just one button. When activated, it spends over a minute flashing out 209 different codes to turn off televisions, the most popular brands first.

only $15 - buy em here: http://www.tvbgone.com/

and read my friend steven's article about em for more info: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65392,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2

boys will be boys, and girls will be girls (or be fired).

2005-02-15T15:58:00.000-05:00

in a bold move to codify gender norms, the 9th circuit u.s. court of appeals ruled that a female bartender in a casino's sports bar could be fired for failing to wear make-up and style her hair.

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/colb/20050111.html

"In February 2000, Harrah's instituted a set of mandatory "appearance standards" for employees in guest services, including bartenders, and the standards were soon modified to require that women wear makeup.
The amended policy specifically stated that "make up (foundation/concealer and/or face powder, as well as blush and mascara) must be worn and applied neatly in complimentary colors," and that "lip color must be worn at all times." In addition, women had to have their hair "teased, curled, or styled every day," in addition to wearing stockings and nail polish.
In contrast, under the men's appearance rules, male service employees were, among other things, prohibited from wearing makeup and nail color. Men also had to keep their hair short and their fingernails clean and neatly trimmed."

im really too depressed by the implications of this to write any more about what this means for, say, the protection of transgender employees under law, and wont even mention the legal precedent esatblished here that could allow an employer to fire a male employee for wearing an earring.

from the 'truth is stranger than fiction' department

2005-02-15T15:44:00.000-05:00

apparently u.s. troops will soon have the option of microwaving iraqi citizens with a targeted weapon that beams low-level radiation at the 'target', causing "a burning sensation on the skin".

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m9462&l=i&size=1&hd=0

just hope they dont hit any gremlins...

thinking outside the two party system

2005-02-15T14:49:00.000-05:00

here's a look at a more playful politics being tried out (to great success) by the mayor of bogota, columbia. to me, this is somewhat of a vision of what we need to see - people breaking them mold of what is expected and really making change occur.

"Antanas Mockus had just resigned from the top job of Colombian National University. A mathematician and philosopher, Mockus looked around for another big challenge and found it: to be in charge of, as he describes it, "a 6.5 million person classroom."
Mockus, who had no political experience, ran for mayor of Bogotá. The fact that he was seen as an unusual leader gave the new mayor the opportunity to try extraordinary things, such as hiring 420 mimes to control traffic in Bogotá's chaotic and dangerous streets. He launched a "Night for Women" and asked the city's men to stay home in the evening and care for the children; 700,000 women went out on the first of three nights that Mockus dedicated to them."

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/03.11/01-mockus.html

dying for basic care

2004-12-29T11:11:00.000-05:00

this weeks "lip media picks"* has a great washington post article discussing a study from the american journal of public health showing that "over 886,000 deaths could have been prevented from 1991 to 2000 if African Americans had received the same care as whites."

"That means "five times as many lives can be saved by correcting the disparities [in care between whites and blacks] than in developing new treatments," Steven H. Woolf, lead author and director of research at Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Family Medicine, said in a telephone interview."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13690-2004Dec20?language=printer

i wouldnt want to dismiss big pharma's whines over money for r&d out of hand, but as this article points out quite eloquently, sharpening the cutting edge is nowhere near as important as picking up the folks dragging along the bottom.

*(if youre not on the list, i recommend them - http://www.lipmagazine.org/ - they call it 'the best of the rest of the web' and they're right)

p(R)esidential (S)election

2004-12-29T11:09:00.000-05:00

one of the nicest things about being a half-assed blogger that doenst get read is not having to comment on the darn thing at all.

so there.

must see..

2004-10-24T05:00:00.000-04:00

..anti-bush phone sex porn satire. oh the wonders of the internets.

http://www.liegirls.com/index.html

check out the movie.

damned by the fam-damily..

2004-10-20T22:55:00.000-04:00

good god, some of bush's family members have taken it upon themselves to come out publicly against his presidency. admittedly, theyre not the closest rellies, most are bush senior's sister's grandkids, but with a slogan like 'because blood is thinner than oil' and text like this...

"Bush Relatives for Kerry" grew out of a series of conversations that took place between a group of people that have two things in common: they are all related to George Walker Bush, and they are all voting for John Kerry. As the election approaches, we feel it is our responsibility to speak out about why we are voting for John Kerry, and to do our small part to help America heal from the sickness it has suffered since George Bush was appointed President in 2000. We invite you to read our stories, and please, don't vote for our cousin!

... thats bad, man, bad. georgie, the people who dont like you really dont like you. and theyres a lot of them.

http://www.bushrelativesforkerry.com

ooooh, now im mad!

2004-10-13T04:57:00.000-04:00

how come you never hear things like this about democrats? interestingly enough, this same firm has worked gathering signatures to get nader on the arizona ballot. which (tangent) im all for, nader has every right to be on the ballot, but it certainly is a case of strange bedfellows. which is kinda the theme for the nader campaign this year, but thats another post. anyways, man is this just wrong...

"Employees of a private voter registration company allege that hundreds, perhaps thousands of voters who may think they are registered will be rudely surprised on election day. The company claims hundreds of registration forms were thrown in the trash.

http://www.klas-tv.com/Global/story.asp?S=2421595&nav=168XRvNe

Thee focus of the story is a private registration company called Voters Outreach of America, AKA America Votes. The out-of-state firm has been in Las Vegas for the past few months, registering voters. It employed up to 300 part-time workers and collected hundreds of registrations per day, but former employees of the company say that Voters Outreach of America only wanted Republican registrations.
Two former workers say they personally witnessed company supervisors rip up and trash registration forms signed by Democrats.
"We caught her taking Democrats out of my pile, handed them to her assistant and he ripped them up right in front of us. I grabbed some of them out of the garbage and she tells her assisatnt to get those from me," said Eric Russell, former Voters Outreach employee.
The company has been largely, if not entirely funded, by the Republican National Committee. Similar complaints have been received in Reno where the registrar has asked the FBI to investigate. "

!!!!! UPDATE !!!!!

follow the trail of ripped up ballots to oregon...

http://www.oregonlive.com/newsflash/regional/index.ssf?/base/news-8/1097647496301300.xml&storylist=orlocal

and elsewhere..

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/10/13/15534/960

it all ties back to this one fellow, nathan sproul of sproul & associates, and is all funded by the republican national committee.

it feels like the 2000 election and we havent even voted yet.

kinda makes me proud to be from ohio..

2004-10-12T16:55:00.000-04:00

tim ryan, a young house democrat from ohio, on the senate floor.

http://homepage.mac.com/njenson/movies/timryan.html

"I would like to clarify something: we're not trying to scare kids. This president's foreign policy is what's scaring the kids of this country. And if people have said today "why are people believing this, why are people believing this big Internet hoax?" Well, its the same people that told us Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. Same people that told us Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Same people that told us we were gonna be able to use the oil for reconstruction money. Same people that told us that we'd be greeted as liberators, not occupiers. Same people, same president, that told us the Taliban is gone. Same president that told us that Poland is our ally two days before they pull out. Same president that tells us Iraq is going just great. Same president that tells us the economy is going just great. Same people that told us the tax cut was gonna create millions of jobs. Same people that told us that the Medicare program only costs $400 billion, when it really cost $540 billion. So please forgive us for not believing what you're saying. Please forgive the students of this country for not believing what you're saying. Not one thing, not one thing, about this war that has been told to the American people, or that has been told to these college students, has been true. Not one thing. Bremmer says we need more troops. The Pentagon says we need more troops. And this president can't get `em from the international community. There's only one option left. Let's be honest with the American people."

teenage lesbianism - another success for the homosexual agenda...

2004-10-12T16:24:00.000-04:00

or is it just a plot for a bad porn flick?

Listen to the Republican candidate for senator from Oklahoma say this:

"You know, Josh Burkeen is our rep down here in the southeast area. He lives in Colgate and travels out of Atoka. He was telling me lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom. Now think about it. Think about that issue. How is it that that’s happened to us?"

-Senate Candidate Tom Coburn, 8/31/04

and... of course... he's lying!

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2004/10/11/politics2023EDT0704.DTL

"I don't believe that," said Keith Ballard, executive director of the Oklahoma State School Boards Association. He said the group's attorneys "haven't said anything to me about that."

"We have not identified anything like that. We have not had to deal with any issues on that subject -- ever," McCulley said.

so why does this guy have teenage lesbians on his brain? oh, wait, dont answer that question.

"a huge pot of honey that's attracting a lot of flies"

2004-10-12T14:37:00.000-04:00

heres an amazing article by naomi klein in last months harper's:

www.harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html

its a good serious read, so print it out and take some time to go through it all. it is the most thorough and devastating account of the failure of the neo-con post war plan for iraq.

Baghdad Year Zero
Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia
Harper's Magazine, September 2004.
By Naomi Klein.

*exerpts*

Seeing the sign, I couldn ’t help but think about something Senator John McCain had said back in October. Iraq, he said, is “a huge pot of honey that ’s attracting a lot of flies. ”The flies McCain was referring to were the Halliburtons and Bechtels, as well as the venture capitalists who flocked to Iraq in the path cleared by Bradley Fighting Vehicles and laser-guided bombs. The honey that drew them was not just no-bid contracts and Iraq ’s famed oil wealth but the myriad investment opportunities offered by a country that had just been cracked wide open after decades of being sealed off, first by the nationalist economic policies of Saddam Hussein, then by asphyxiating United Nations sanctions.

*****

The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the war ’s ideological architects: that greed is good. Not good just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good for Iraqis. Greed creates profit, which creates growth, which creates jobs and products and services and everything else anyone could possibly need or want. The role of good government, then, is to create the optimal conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed, so that they in turn can meet the needs of the society. The problem is that governments, even neoconservative governments, rarely get the chance to prove their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological advances, even George Bush ’s Republicans are, in their own minds, perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and alarmist environmentalists. Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. A country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never seen. Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership restrictions. The people of Iraq would, of course, have to endure some short-term pain: assets, previously owned by the state, would have to be given up to create new opportunities for growth and investment. Jobs would have to be lost and, as foreign products flooded across the border, local businesses and family farms would, unfortunately, be unable to compete. But to the authors of this plan, these would be small prices to pay for the economic boom that would surely explode once the proper conditions were in place, a boom so powerful the country would practically rebuild itself.

*****

The tone of Bremer ’s tenure was set with his first major act on the job: he fired 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers. Next, he flung open the country ’s borders to absolutely unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no duties, no inspections, no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after he arrived, was “open for business. ”

*****

Some people were paying attention, of course. That autumn was awash in “rebuilding Iraq ”trade shows, in Washington, London, Madrid, and Amman. The Economist described Iraq under Bremer as “a capitalist dream, ”and a flurry of new consulting firms were launched promising to help companies get access to the Iraqi market, their boards of directors stacked with well-connected Republicans. The most prominent was New Bridge Strategies, started by Joe Allbaugh, former Bush-Cheney campaign manager. “Getting the rights to distribute Procter & Gamble products can be a gold mine, ”one of the company ’s partners enthused. “One well-stocked 7-Eleven could knock out thirty Iraqi stores; a Wal-Mart could take over the country. ”

*****

Take, for instance, Bremer ’s first casualties. The soldiers and workers he laid off without pensions or severance pay didn ’t all disappear quietly. Many of them went straight into the mujahedeen, forming the backbone of the armed resistance. “Half a million people are now worse off, and there you have the water tap that keeps the insurgency going. It ’s alternative employment, ”says Hussain Kubba, head of the prominent Iraqi business group Kubba Consulting. Some of Bremer ’s other economic casualties also have failed to go quietly. It turns out that many of the businessmen whose companies are threatened by Bremer ’s investment laws have decided to make investments of their own —in the resistance. It is partly their money that keeps fighters in Kalashnikovs and RPGs.

*****

From the start, the neocons running Iraq had shown nothing but disdain for Iraq ’s state-owned companies. In keeping with their Year Zero‒apocalyptic glee, when looters descended on the factories during the war, U.S. forces did nothing. Sabah Asaad, managing director of a refrigerator factory outside Baghdad, told me that while the looting was going on, he went to a nearby U.S. Army base and begged for help. “I asked one of the officers to send two soldiers and a vehicle to help me kick out the looters. I was crying. The officer said, ‘Sorry, we can ’t do anything, we need an order from President Bush. ’”Back in Washington, Donald Rumsfeld shrugged. “Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. ”

*****

With unemployment as high as 67 percent, the imported products and foreign workers flooding across the borders have become a source of tremendous resentment in Iraq and yet another open tap fueling the insurgency. And Iraqis don ’t have to look far for reminders of this injustice; it ’s on display in the most ubiquitous symbol of the occupation: the blast wall. The ten-foot-high slabs of reinforced concrete are everywhere in Iraq, separating the protected —the people in upscale hotels, luxury homes, military bases, and, of course, the Green Zone —from the unprotected and exposed. If that wasn ’t injury enough, all the blast walls are imported, from Kurdistan, Turkey, or even farther afield, this despite the fact that Iraq was once a major manufacturer of cement, and could easily be again. There are seventeen state-owned cement factories across the country, but most are idle or working at only half capacity. According to the Ministry of Industry, not one of these factories has received a single contract to help with the reconstruction, even though they could produce the walls and meet other needs for cement at a greatly reduced cost. The CPA pays up to $1,000 per imported blast wall; local manufacturers say they could make them for $100. Minister Tofiq says there is a simple reason why the Americans refuse to help get Iraq ’s cement factories running again: among those making the decisions, “no one believes in the public sector. ”

*****

I asked Nada Ahmed, the woman in the white coat, why the factory wasn ’t working a few minutes before. She explained that they have only enough electricity and materials to run the machines for a couple of hours a day, but when guests arrive —would-be investors, ministry officials, journalists —they get them going. “For show, ”she explained. Behind us, a dozen bulky machines sat idle, covered in sheets of dusty plastic and secured with duct tape.

*****

At the same time as al Sadr ’s followers were shouting “Down with America ”outside the Green Zone, something was happening in another part of the country that would change everything. Four American mercenary soldiers were killed in Fallujah, their charred and dismembered bodies hung like trophies over the Euphrates. The attacks would prove a devastating blow for the neocons, one from which they would never recover. With these images, investing in Iraq suddenly didn ’t look anything like a capitalist dream; it looked like a macabre nightmare made real.

*****

news from baghdad

2004-10-12T14:26:00.000-04:00

i got forwarded this sobering account of life in baghdad via the adpsr (architects, designers, and planners for social responsibility) list.. as they say, email forwards always raise a red flag in my sceptic mind, but this one seems to check out fine, and paints a similar picture of baghdad life as naomi klein's devastating article 'baghdad year zero'.

here ya go:

*************************
ADPSR Folk: Our skeptic radar always goes on high when we read something compelling, but various searches tend towards verifying that this letter is legitimate, and the Wall Street Journal lists the author as foreign correspondent for the WSJ.
**************************

A Wall Street Journal Reporter's E-Mail to Friends
By Farnaz Fassihi

------------------------------

Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest. Forget about the reasons that lured me to this job: a chance to see the world, explore the exotic, meet new people in far away lands, discover their ways and tell stories that could make a difference.

Little by little, day-by-day, being based in Iraq has defied all those reasons. I am house bound. I leave when I have a very good reason to and a scheduled interview. I avoid going to people's homes and never walk in the streets. I can't go grocery shopping any more, can't eat in restaurants, can't strike a conversation with strangers, can't look for stories, can't drive in any thing but a full armored car, can't go to scenes of breaking news stories, can't be stuck in traffic, can't speak English outside, can't take a road trip, can't say I'm an American, can't linger at checkpoints, can't be curious about what people are saying, doing, feeling. And can't and can't. There has been one too many close calls, including a car bomb so near our house that it blew out all the windows. So now my most pressing concern every day is not to write a kick-ass story but to stay alive and make sure our Iraqi employees stay alive. In Baghdad I am a security personnel first, a reporter second.

It's hard to pinpoint when the 'turning point' exactly began. Was it April when the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was it when Moqtada and Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it when Sadr City, home to ten percent of Iraq's population, became a nightly battlefield for the Americans? Or was it when the insurgency began spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most of Iraq? Despite President Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a 'potential' threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to 'imminent and active threat,' a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.

Iraqis like to call this mess 'the situation.' When asked 'how are thing?' they reply: 'the situation is very bad."

What they mean by situation is this: the Iraqi government doesn't control most Iraqi cities, there are several car bombs going off each day around the country killing and injuring scores of innocent people, the country's roads are becoming impassable and littered by hundreds of landmines and explosive devices aimed to kill American soldiers, there are assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings. The situation, basically, means a raging barbaric guerilla war. In four days, 110 people died and over 300 got injured in Baghdad alone. The numbers are so shocking that the ministry of health -- which was attempting an exercise of public transparency by releasing the numbers -- has now stopped disclosing them.

Insurgents now attack Americans 87 times a day.

A friend drove thru the Shiite slum of Sadr City yesterday. He said young men were openly placing improvised explosive devices into the ground. They melt a shallow hole into the asphalt, dig the explosive, cover it with dirt and put an old tire or plastic can over it to signal to the locals this is booby-trapped. He said on the main roads of Sadr City, there were a dozen landmines per every ten yards. His car snaked and swirled to avoid driving over them. Behind the walls sits an angry Iraqi ready to detonate them as soon as an American convoy gets near. This is in Shiite land, the population that was supposed to love America for liberating Iraq.

For journalists the significant turning point came with the wave of abduction and kidnappings. Only two weeks ago we felt safe around Baghdad because foreigners were being abducted on the roads and highways between towns. Then came a frantic phone call from a journalist female friend at 11 p.m. telling me two Italian women had been abducted from their homes in broad daylight. Then the two Americans, who got beheaded this week and the Brit, were abducted from their homes in a residential neighborhood. They were supplying the entire block with round the clock electricity from their generator to win friends. The abductors grabbed one of them at 6 a.m. when he came out to switch on the generator; his beheaded body was thrown back near the neighborhoods.

The insurgency, we are told, is rampant with no signs of calming down. If any thing, it is growing stronger, organized and more sophisticated every day. The various elements within it-baathists, criminals, nationalists and Al Qaeda-are cooperating and coordinating.

I went to an emergency meeting for foreign correspondents with the military and embassy to discuss the kidnappings. We were somberly told our fate would largely depend on where we were in the kidnapping chain once it was determined we were missing. Here is how it goes: criminal gangs grab you and sell you up to Baathists in Fallujah, who will in turn sell you to Al Qaeda. In turn, cash and weapons flow the other way from Al Qaeda to the Baathisst to the criminals. My friend Georges, the French journalist snatched on the road to Najaf, has been missing for a month with no word on release or whether he is still alive.

America's last hope for a quick exit? The Iraqi police and National Guard units we are spending billions of dollars to train. The cops are being murdered by the dozens every day-over 700 to date -- and the insurgents are infiltrating their ranks. The problem is so serious that the U.S. military has allocated $6 million dollars to buy out 30,000 cops they just trained to get rid of them quietly.

As for reconstruction: firstly it's so unsafe for foreigners to operate that almost all projects have come to a halt. After two years, of the $18 billion Congress appropriated for Iraq reconstruction only about $1 billion or so has been spent and a chuck has now been reallocated for improving security, a sign of just how bad things are going here.

Oil dreams? Insurgents disrupt oil flow routinely as a result of sabotage and oil prices have hit record high of $49 a barrel. Who did this war exactly benefit? Was it worth it? Are we safer because Saddam is holed up and Al Qaeda is running around in Iraq?

Iraqis say that thanks to America they got freedom in exchange for insecurity. Guess what? They say they'd take security over freedom any day, even if it means having a dictator ruler. I heard an educated Iraqi say today that if Saddam Hussein were allowed to run for elections he would get the majority of the vote. This is truly sad.

Then I went to see an Iraqi scholar this week to talk to him about elections here. He has been trying to educate the public on the importance of voting. He said, "President Bush wanted to turn Iraq into a democracy that would be an example for the Middle East. Forget about democracy, forget about being a model for the region, we have to salvage Iraq before all is lost."
One could argue that Iraq is already lost beyond salvation. For those of us on the ground it's hard to imagine what if any thing could salvage it from its violent downward spiral. The genie of terrorism, chaos and mayhem has been unleashed onto this country as a result of American mistakes and it can't be put back into a bottle.

The Iraqi government is talking about having elections in three months while half of the country remains a 'no go zone'-out of the hands of the government and the Americans and out of reach of journalists. In the other half, the disenchanted population is too terrified to show up at polling stations. The Sunnis have already said they'd boycott elections, leaving the stage open for polarized government of Kurds and Shiites that will not be deemed as legitimate and will most certainly lead to civil war.

I asked a 28-year-old engineer if he and his family would participate in the Iraqi elections since it was the first time Iraqis could to some degree elect a leadership. His response summed it all: "Go and vote and risk being blown into pieces or followed by the insurgents and murdered for cooperating with the Americans? For what? To practice democracy? Are you joking?"

--------------------------------------------------

Farnaz Fassihi, a Wall Street Journal reporter, sent this report as an e-mail to friends.