little things to wonder about

Shifting the terror frame.

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 15:48:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 06:40:00 +0000

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.

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 06:38:00 +0000

If only everyone reacted to these tactics as sensibly.

the oil we eat

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 17:31:00 +0000

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.

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 22:28:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 22:51:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 18:30:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 00:28:00 +0000

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...

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 23:06:00 +0000

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?

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 23:01:00 +0000

gallows humor

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 19:53:00 +0000

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..

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Sat, 22 Oct 2005 16:40:00 +0000

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..

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 00:35:00 +0000

"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..

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 00:14:00 +0000

..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!

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 23:53:00 +0000

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..

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 21:35:00 +0000

...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."

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 04:49:00 +0000

our president might want to have his hearing checked.

i feel a chilling effect...

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 16:10:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 03:31:00 +0000

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

the plot thickens...

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 07:05:00 +0000

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.

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 23:43:00 +0000

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...

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 21:57:00 +0000

.. 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...

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 00:06:00 +0000

... 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!"

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 18:28:00 +0000

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.

noreply@blogger.com (andy) — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 18:08:00 +0000

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