January 2005 Archives

In the news today...

A University of Central Oklahoma student group is planning what it calls "Straight Pride Week" on campus.

Members of the College Republicans said despite objections from some, they have every right to celebrate.

"The general gist is that if you are a straight student on campus be proud, be loud, this is your time to shine," said college Republican Kyle Houts.

The group has posted fliers on campus that read, "we're here, we're conservative, we're out."

I have an alternate slogan for them that I think may be more fitting:

"We're conservative! We're straight! We can't get a date!"

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/01/30/opinion/edtaxes.html



http://web.israelinsider.com/Articles/Briefs/4825.htm



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Interesting post on DailyKos.

My father was a freedom fighter in Iraq, a founder of several Assyrian pro-democracy groups, and was arrested and tortured; he was also the victim of an assassination attempt.

I write this to my fellow dKosers because I think it is important, in our observation of the war, to realize that many Iraqis did, in fact, support the war and continue to support the war effort.  Now, my father and I are both as Democrat-y as they come--I worked on Kerry's campaign, currently work in the Labor movement, and am otherwise active in progressive politics.

So it is important to understand that Iraqis support the war effort and do feel positively about the elections; however, as my and my father's comments on MSNBC make clear, that does not mean we think the Bush administration has handled the war correctly or that holding elections translates to success.  I think many Iraqis deplore the military situation over there--yet after 30+ years of Stalinist oppression, we were looking for anything to change the status quo.  Today is a day to be positive about what is going on there....

I agree. Also, I think there's something about people telling you "Don't do XYZ or we'll kill you," that, while it may scare you, may also make you react with a big, "SCREW YOU, I'm gonna do what I want and YOU'RE NOT GONNA STOP ME!" Ah, human nature... but in this case, perhaps it's a good thing. (And if it turns out voter turnout really was higher in Iraq than it was here, don't anyone get any ideas!)

In today's Chronicle Real Estate section, there's a story titled, "Separate, yet equal / 3 architects, 3 houses, same size, but designed for different buyers"

OK. Call me oversensitive, call me politically correct (I am from Berkeley, after all) but... doesn't that sound slightly, well, wrong? "Separate but equal" was the term used to refer to racial segregation in the bad old days in America, after all.

I was imagining other possibilities, though. Take a story about someone who keeps remodeling his or her house, and finally comes up with a design they like. "The Final Solution"! Or how people from different cultural backgrounds handle day-to-day tidying chores. "Ethnic Cleansing!"

Maybe I'm making too much of this. After all, I am the one who once suggested the headingline "ISH Happens" for a story about an international solar home show.

Well, President Bush may have won four more years, but victory hasn't made him any more confident, or any more able to handle criticism.

Read this story
'Brett Bursey, a long-time political activist, has been found guilty of violating a little-used federal statute that Congress passed in 1971 to protect the president's personal safety.  Bursey's "crime" was holding a sign that said,  "No More War for Oil" at a presidential campaign venue - without an invitation from the Republican National Committee.'

Read this one too
'As I was dictating from my notes, something flashed across my face and neatly snatched my cell phone from of my hand. I looked up to confront a middle-aged woman, her face afire with rage. "You ignored the rules, and I'm throwing you out!" she barked, snapping my phone shut. "You told that girl you didn't need an escort. That's a lie! You're out of here!"'

• If you have an iPod, you can be a DJ! Here's one bar that lets you play your tunes in San Francisco
• There's a website of Brazilian pop music from the 1960s.
• Also, here's how you can find out what other bands you might like, based on what's in your iTunes library.
• Heard of Podcasting? Here's a show of "forgotten vinyl".

I guess it was!

And I'm apparently one of the more senior members of the Slashdot community.

Letter to the Oakland Tribune, January 28, 2005

Bush's war

SINCE WE KNOW that Iraq had no WMDs and no connection to al-Qaida, lumping it in with Afghanistan under the headline of "Terror war costs jump $80 billion" (Jan. 25) seems really wrong to me.

I know that the Tribune doesn't have a lot of room when writing headlines, so here's a suggestion: Replace "terror" with "Bush's." It takes up exactly the same amount of space and puts responsibility for this terrible mess squarely where it belongs.

Katherine Falk
Oakland

Yay, Barbara!

Oakland's Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee, joined by Academy Award- nominated actor Don Cheadle and several colleagues, challenged the United States and the international community Thursday to help end the killing in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Lee and Cheadle, nominated for an Oscar for his role in "Hotel Rwanda'' as a hotel manager who saved 1,268 lives during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, were part of a congressional delegation that visited Darfur for five days, returning early this week.

All five House members of the group, which was led by Rep. Ed Royce, R- Fullerton (Orange County), said they came away saddened by the plight of the tens of thousands of Sudanese refugees they had seen, but determined to force action in Washington to improve the situation.

"We witnessed genocide last week,'' said Lee at a Capitol Hill news conference. "It was a human catastrophe that I have never witnessed before in my life.''

Hope she gets some results....

Andrew Sullivan has established a new "award" for people who engage in what he views as extreme hyperbole and partisan bashing. Need I saw it's named in honor of Michael Moore, who is not exactly his fave filmmaker? (This naming is not quite fair in my opinion, but whatever.) Two recent honorees:

"As for those in the World Trade Center, well, really, let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break." - University of Colorado professor, Ward Churchill. He also described the victims of 9/11 as "little Eichmanns."

OK, OK, that's pretty spectacularly awful. (Perhaps Andrew should print his contact details as well so 9/11 victims' relatives can share their opinions?) Then we have:

"The most important lesson of the Holocaust is that fear provides a power structure for political leaders. Hitler portrayed the Jews as the enemy and used it to instil fear and gain power. George Bush evokes the fear of terrorism and becomes a more powerful leader. The important thing moving forward is to look at history and understand. Only by seeing how such things develop can we be sure such atrocities will not happen again." British leftist aristocrat, Tony Benn.

Hmm. Wait a minute. Back up a second. Sure implying that Bush would institute a Final Solution in America would be going too far. There's no evidence he's even the least bit racist himself, whatever one thinks of his policies. But is that what Benn was actually saying?

Can anyone deny that the Bush administration markets its policies based on appealing to fear?

Go back and look at the news stories leading up to the Iraq war.

Or how Cheney basically said that terrorists were going to hit us again if Kerry got elected.

Or the way Bush and his "folks" are talking about the Social Security "crisis" using phrases like "Titanic heading toward an iceberg". Are they implying that thousands of people are going to drown and freeze to death in the North Atlantic again because of our fiscal policies?

During the run-up to the Iraq war, everyone I knew was sending that infamous quote by Hermann Goering. I saw it so many times I was sick to death of it. You know the one: "...The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

I was reading a blog earlier where some troll came on and told us all "With Americans like you liberals, America doesn't need enemies. America is being destroyed from within." That's not the first time I've heard that!

I think some of us are a bit too eager to cry "Fascist!" or "Hitler." It's not just the left, though. Both sides like to use World War II in general, and Nazi Germany in particular, as a stick with which to bludgeon opponents. It tends to torpedo any conversation, as pointed out by Godwin's Law.

On the other hand we've just observed the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. This is an opportunity to look at what happened and draw some conclusions. But it's a fine line between being too specific (and I think Sharon is too specific) and comparing every offensive statement and worrisome policy to Nazi Germany.

Tikkun Olam has an excellent post about how one organization, the ADL, cherry-picks its targets for complaint. They lit into Ted Turner for a rather stupid remark, but ignored Ann Coulter and Grover Norquist's even more stupid and offensive comments.

So how do we avoid using painful events as weapons against each other? When are we allowed to talk about history? When do we get to learn from history? If we're going to suffer through our mistakes, should we not take some lessons from them? How do we keep our most shocking episodes from losing their power to shock? Prince Harry isn't the only one who needs educating. Someday, will people be laughing at their friends when they dress up as victims in Darfur?

In conclusion: I have no frickin' idea. But I think Andrew Sullivan should reconsider his Moore awards. Because the Bush adminstration is trying to rewrite history and use our fears against us, and that's just not cool. Pointing out precedent and reminding us that such tactics end badly seems only fair.

And maybe the rest of us could do some more reading and learning, and remember ing that other overquoted quote about "the only thing we have to fear..."

After years of increasingly conservative college campuses, the percentage of liberal students is rising again. It's highest at UC Berkeley, but the trend is consistent nationwide.

The fall 2004 survey of entering Berkeley students found that 51.2 percent of them identified as liberal, compared with 12 percent conservative and 36.8 percent "middle of the road."

That's a jump from the earlier President George Bush administration in 1990, when liberal freshmen outnumbered conservatives 42.9 percent to 17.7 percent, and especially from 1982, the Reagan administration heyday of conservatism, when liberal freshmen were 32.9 percent to the conservatives' 20. 8 percent.

The latest findings approach the results of 1972, when anti-war protests still flared on campus and when 56.5 percent identified as liberal and 10.5 percent said they were conservative.

Berkeley freshmen also diverge more sharply from the national average today than they did in 1990, 1982 or 1972. Nationally, liberal freshmen edged out conservatives 27 percent to 22.7 percent for the class entering in fall 2004, compared with 20.7 percent liberal and 19.4 percent conservative in 1982. In 1972, freshmen nationwide were 35.2 percent liberal and 16.6 percent conservative.

Wal-Mart has changed its definition of "immediate family" to include same-sex partners.

The nation's largest employer is expanding the definition of "immediate family" in its ethics policy to include an employee's same-sex partner.

The Wal-Mart Stores Inc. policy change -- disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday -- accounts for the laws in some states that recognize domestic partnerships and civil unions, officials said.

(Even if they were forced to, it's still good news!)

Two of Zarqawi's lieutenants were captured in Iraq.

Iraqi authorities trying to safeguard Sunday's election said on Friday two leaders of al Qaeda's network in Iraq, including its head of Baghdad operations, had been arrested.

Kassim Daoud, minister of state for national security, gave few details of the arrests, but said capturing the members of Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's group had made Iraq safer ahead of the polls.

Zarqawi's group has claimed many of the deadliest suicide attacks in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein, and has beheaded several foreign hostages. Washington says Zarqawi is its most dangerous foe in Iraq and has offered $25 million for information leading to his death or capture.

(Of course, we don't know when this happened or why they're announcing it now... think it has something to do with the elections? Nah...)

Schwarzegger's popularity is starting to erode (and that was before this A&E movie aired) because people don't like what he's doing.

The poll found that voters care more about three issues -- education, the state budget and the economy. But they gave Schwarzenegger high marks only on the economy.

Fifty-five percent of voters said they are not satisfied with the governor's proposed spending plan, compared to 38 percent who are satisfied. Last year, 57 percent were happy with the governor's budget plan, while 30 percent were unhappy.

The latest poll found that 51 percent disapprove of Schwarzenegger's efforts for schools, while 56 percent said they like what the governor has done to improve the economy.

Thirty-five percent of voters said they would rather have the Legislature's Democratic majority making the tough funding choices with 29 percent saying Schwarzenegger should make the budget choices. A year ago, voters said they preferred Schwarzenegger to set the budget priorities over Democrats by 33 percent to 27 percent.

Hey, every little bit helps...

From Fafblog (thanks to BoingBoing)

Q: If we à ­re borrowing trillions of dollars, and the government already owes trillions of dollars, and the Social Security crisis is a debt problem anyway, how does this help Social Security?
A: Quick we have to act fast! We only have twenty years to go!
Q: I thought we had forty years.
A: Now we have ten! It is a ticking bomb.
Q: Oh no! In these extreme circumstances we have to privatize Social Security!
A: If we don't, the terrorists win.
Q: I Ã ­ll hold it down. You get the electrodes!
A: It à ­s so crazy, it just might work!

Q: I à ­m following you so far, but what if privatization à –
A: It à ­s not privatization it is private accounts.
à Q: Alright then, what if these private accounts –
A: They are not private accounts they are personal accounts.
Q: Okay, if these personal accounts à –
A: They are not personal accounts, they are privamatupilous splendiferacy.
Q: I forgot what I was talking about.
A: Oh good! Have a lollipop with your splendiferacy.

Harvard President Larry Summers made some remarks earlier this month to the effect that women were innately not as good as men at math and science, which set off a barrage of criticism. Deservedly so, for science doesn't back him up on this one, and the number of tenured professors at Harvard who are women has declined while he's been in office.

"It's just hard to avoid the conclusion that things have gotten worse in the last few years, and there's a climate of suspicion that we're going to appoint unqualified women, rather than a wholehearted search for the outstanding ones that are out there," said government and sociology professor Theda Skocpol. "Every time Summers talks about this issue he manages to share his worries that we might appoint unqualified women."

Others, however, say Harvard's administration has been lackluster on this issue for far longer than Summers' tenure.

The ongoing violence in the runup to the Iraqi election has dire implications for everyone, but are women bearing the brunt of the turmoil? Seems like it, according to women's rights activist Zainab Salbi:

The violence, Salbi says, has consequences far beyond the personal tragedies. It has driven many of Iraq's most prominent and talented women into their homes and out of public life, just when their participation in reconstructing the country is so crucial...

"I call it Code Orange in Iraq right now,'' said Salbi, president of Women for Women International, the D.C.-based organization she founded 10 years ago. "Women are barometers for how a society is going. Bad things in a society always start with women, and good things, too.''

She cites the Taliban as an example. When women were being persecuted, few paid any attention.

"People saw it as something that just impacted women,'' she said. "So we left it alone.''

But eventually the violence spread, turning Afghanistan into a toxic culture that bred a brand of terrorism that landed on our own doorstep. "In hindsight, you can see how it all started with women. I see it in all these places, a pattern that starts with women and spreads. Women are the softest door. The kitchen door. Nobody pays attention when it's opened.''

There's some hope.

Even those opposed to the prolonged presence of American forces say they have more freedom now. Karima Hashim Muhammad, an artist in her 40s, said she has "more personal freedom than before in spite of the (U.S.) occupation, which sooner or later will depart."

She said that when Saddam was in power she was afraid to exhibit work that the government might disapprove of. "I had a feeling that I was under observation."

Now teaching at an arts institute, she said she admires her fellow women candidates and believes many of them share the same goals -- even those representing the country's Islamic-based parties.

"We develop a kind understanding and admiration for each other," Muhammad said. "The difference between us is only that they are veiled and I am not."

Meanwhile, over at Guantanamo, women interrogators used sexual tactics to try to break their captives' wills.

Female interrogators tried to break Muslim detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay by sexual touching, wearing a miniskirt and thong underwear and in one case smearing a Saudi man's face with fake menstrual blood, according to an insider's written account.

---

Suspected Sept. 11 hijacker Hani Hanjour received pilot instruction for three months in 1996 and in December 1997 at a flight school in Scottsdale, Ariz.

"His female interrogator decided that she needed to turn up the heat," Saar writes, saying she repeatedly asked the detainee who had sent him to Arizona, telling him he could "cooperate" or "have no hope whatsoever of ever leaving this place or talking to a lawyer."'

The man closed his eyes and began to pray, Saar writes.

The female interrogator wanted to "break him," Saar adds, describing how she removed her uniform top to expose a tight-fitting T-shirt and began taunting the detainee, touching her breasts, rubbing them against the prisoner's back and commenting on his apparent erection.

The detainee looked up and spat in her face, the manuscript recounts.

The interrogator left the room to ask a Muslim linguist how she could break the prisoner's reliance on God. The linguist told her to tell the detainee that she was menstruating, touch him, then make sure to turn off the water in his cell so he couldn't wash.

Strict interpretation of Islamic law forbids physical contact with women other than a man's wife or family, and with any menstruating women, who are considered unclean.

"The concept was to make the detainee feel that after talking to her he was unclean and was unable to go before his God in prayer and gain strength," says the draft, stamped "Secret."

The interrogator used ink from a red pen to fool the detainee, Saar writes.

Why does it feel like we're going BACKWARDS?!?!

So I'm not the only one who is always coming up with band names like "Weird Meat Dessert!" From the Chronicle...

You're probably not capable of playing a musical instrument, if you've picked one up at all. You certainly can't carry a tune, as was proven during that toneless office party rendition of "Sexual Healing." There's a chance you don't even have enough friends to form a musical group.

But everyone, it seems, knows exactly what they would name their band.

It's a natural reaction, in part because the names of most mainstream bands are totally lame. While few of us will ever play an instrument or sing better than the members of U2 or Pearl Jam, anyone with a pulse could think up a better name for either group.

While I've picked up my guitar less than 10 times since college, I've become a sort of Dave Grohl of imaginary musicians, with enough names for a main band, several side projects and the supergroup I plan to form years from now with Dan the Automator and members of Journey.

My current Top 5 band names, in descending order of coolness:

5. Cabana Boy

4. Gondor Calls for Aid ... And Rohan Will Answer!

3. M.C. Gordon Getty and the New Kennedys

2. Bastards!

1. Surefire Harbinger of Doom

Lest you think you're the only one with a great name for a band, ask the people in the cubicles around you. The chances are they know exactly what they would name their band, and it's better than anything in the Top 40. Just among my colleagues who sit within 10 feet, future plans exist for Medulla Oblongata, Samoan Quincea à ’era, the Erectile Dysfunctions and a group called Breakfast, which I'm told will play only acoustic covers of songs from the Wu-Tang Clan.

But nobody, nobody rocks it like Weird Meat Dessert!

Nazis didn't have discussion boards. Nor did the KKK. Or the Taliban. (I understand Al Queda does.)

But if they had, we probably would have seen quotes likes these!

"Burning cigarettes in their ears." Don't they know cigarettes cause cancer? ... I'm getting sick hearing about the so-called torture at Abu Ghraib. Do you realize how much money some guys in Hollywood would pay to be led around by a chick in fatigues while wearing a collar? ... Plain and simple: Andrew Sullivan is an "enemy of the state." He has no concern for this nation, and like so many of the "liberal elite," would simply "give" our country away to those who would destroy it, if he had his choice. Three cheers for Heather Mac Donald for writing an article which demonstrates the true depth of Sullivan's anal-cranial inversion ... Many of Sullivan à ­s factual claims are tenuous at best. He asserts, for example, that 'we now know that in Guantanamo, burning cigarettes were placed in the ears of detainees.' Uh ... which END of the burning cigarettes were placed in the ears of the detainees? Filter Tip? Menthol? Low Nicotine? I can think of another place in a detainee I'd insert a burning cigarette ... wait, scratch that ... make it a Macanudo ... Is it still beyond the pale to suggest that Sully is in the throes of AIDS-related dementia? I mean, the evidence does keep piling up. Acknowledging that a person's apparent behavior may be the result of disease, when the person is known to have that disease, and when the disease (or its treatment) is known to produce a specific response, is not necessarily a smear.

While researching quotes from famous Jewish women, I learned that the first woman rabbi in America (and the world?), Ray Frank lived in Oakland! Pretty cool.

The excellent Body and Soul blog had an eloquent post yesterday about atrocity, and how we respond, or fail to respond, to it.

Pentagon documents released Monday disclosed that Iraqi prisoners had lodged dozens of abuse complaints against U.S. and Iraqi personnel who guarded them at a little-known palace in Baghdad converted to a U.S. prison. Among the allegations was that guards had sodomized a disabled man and killed his brother, whose dying body was tossed into a cell, atop his sister.

That was as far as I got before feeling an urgent need to deal with the laundry that's been piling up while I've been sick. I rub and rub and rub and the grass stains eventually disappear from the pant knees. I want to know that dirt comes out before I go back. I get a great deal more than normal satisfaction from watching the stain fade.

---

Today at least, the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee did what they were supposed to do. The people  I complain about met some minimal standard of decency. I plan to write every one of them a thank you note.

What concerns me is that it's ordinary Americans who aren't doing what they're supposed to do. No one expects every American to keep up with each twist and turn of politics, but I've always expected normal human reactions. I expect even politically clueless Americans to recoil at the image of an old woman stripped and ridden like an animal. Lately, that appears to be too much to ask.

Keeping up grassroots political pressure is extremely important, but as long as  Americans can read about Congo-like horror without getting furious, it's going to be very hard to claim this country back.

Not to mention our souls!

The excellent Body and Soul blog had an eloquent post yesterday about atrocity, and how we respond, or fail to respond, to it.

"Pentagon documents released Monday disclosed that Iraqi prisoners had lodged dozens of abuse complaints against U.S. and Iraqi personnel who guarded them at a little-known palace in Baghdad converted to a U.S. prison. Among the allegations was that guards had sodomized a disabled man and killed his brother, whose dying body was tossed into a cell, atop his sister."

That was as far as I got before feeling an urgent need to deal with the laundry that's been piling up while I've been sick. I rub and rub and rub and the grass stains eventually disappear from the pant knees. I want to know that dirt comes out before I go back. I get a great deal more than normal satisfaction from watching the stain fade.

---

Today at least, the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee did what they were supposed to do. The people  I complain about met some minimal standard of decency. I plan to write every one of them a thank you note.

What concerns me is that it's ordinary Americans who aren't doing what they're supposed to do. No one expects every American to keep up with each twist and turn of politics, but I've always expected normal human reactions. I expect even politically clueless Americans to recoil at the image of an old woman stripped and ridden like an animal. Lately, that appears to be too much to ask.

Keeping up grassroots political pressure is extremely important, but as long as  Americans can read about Congo-like horror without getting furious, it's going to be very hard to claim this country back.

Not to mention our souls!

Some good links on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz:

• http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/ 1/25/133032/577 (by someone who grew up in Germany after the war; very interesting history and perspectives)
• http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi? f=/c/a/2005/01/27/MNG8MB16Q91.DTL (The Chronicle profiles survivors and one of the soldiers who liberated the camp)

Also, I just started reading A Problem From Hell: American and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power. Very interesting so far... and very infuriating. "Never again" is really more like "Over and over and over again."

Speaking of which, you haven't heard much about Darfur recently, have you?

Karen Pike agreed to be a part of a children's show about families, and now she feels she's under attack.

This week, the new US secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, denounced PBS for spending public funds to tape an episode of a children's program that features Pike, a lesbian, her partner, Gillian Pieper, and their 11-year-old daughter, Emma. The installment of ''Postcards From Buster," which is produced locally at WGBH-TV (Channel 2) and which had been scheduled to air March 23, was promptly dropped by PBS, which is refusing to distribute the footage to its 349 member stations.

''It makes me sick," said Pike, a 42-year-old photographer in Hinesburg, Vt., who united with Pieper in a civil union in 2001. ''I'm actually aghast at the hatred stemming from such an important person in our government. . . . Her first official act was to denounce my family, and to denounce PBS for putting on a program that shows my family as loving, moral, and committed."

What the hell is wrong with Margaret Spellings, this country, the Bush administration, and PBS? Kudos to KQED for doing the right thing.

And in honor of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the American Family Association sends out this masterpiece of truncated garbage:

Marriage Protection Amendment To Be Introduced In U.S. House

Dear {Fellow Homophobe},

Within a few days, the Marriage Protection Amendment will be introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. This constitutional amendment would make marriage legal only between one man and one woman.

Take Action! Spiritual Heritage Tours - Tours of Washington, D.C. and Mount Vernon with an emphasis on America's Christian heritage, led by AFA president Tim Wildmon and AFR general mana

That's literally the whole thing. Guess their server couldn't take it anymore. Heh.

What's it gonna take?

We're going to see a bottom swelling from inside the ranks. You're beginning to see it. What happened with the soldiers asking those questions, you may see more of that. I'm not suggesting we're going to have mutinies, but I'm going to suggest you're going to see more dissatisfaction being expressed. Maybe that will do it. Another salvation may be the economy. It's going to go very bad, folks. You know, if you have not sold your stocks and bought property in Italy, you better do it quick. And the third thing is Europe -- Europe is not going to tolerate us much longer. The rage there is enormous. I'm talking about our old-fashioned allies. We could see something there, collective action against us. Certainly, nobody -- it's going to be an awful lot of dancing on our graves as the dollar goes bad and everybody stops buying our bonds, our credit -- our -- we're spending $2 billion a day to float the debt, and one of these days, the Japanese and the Russians, everybody is going to start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars. We're going to see enormous panic here. But he could get through that. That will be another year, and the damage he à ­s going to do between then and now is enormous. We à ­re going to have some very bad months ahead.

Seymour Hirsch:

About what's going on in terms of the President is that as virtuous as I feel, you know, at The New Yorker, writing an alternative history more or less of what's been going on in the last three years, George Bush feels just as virtuous in what he is doing. He is absolutely committed -- I don't know whether he thinks he à ­s doing God's will or what his father didn't do, or whether it's some mandate from -- you know, I just don à ­t know, but George Bush thinks this is the right thing. He is going to continue doing what he has been doing in Iraq. He's going to expand it, I think, if he can. I think that the number of body bags that come back will make no difference to him. The body bags are rolling in. It makes no difference to him, because he will see it as a price he has to pay to put America where he thinks it should be. So, he's inured in a very strange way to people like me, to the politicians, most of them who are too cowardly anyway to do much. So, the day-to-day anxiety that all of us have, and believe me, though he got 58 million votes, many of people who voted for him weren à ­t voting for continued warfare, but I think that's what we're going to have.

Today's Chronicle:

Bush said he is leading the United States toward an honorable goal -- in Iraq and across the world. "I firmly planted the flag of liberty," he said.

Ever read a novel, finish it, close the book, put it down, go about your day, and then find that you feel like you're somehow living in a continuation of that story?

I just finished reading Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (NY Times review) about what would have happened if Hitler sympathizer Charles Lindbergh had become president of the United States during World War II. Not a perfect book (the ending is a little rushed and wacky) but it does give an evocative picture of America during the 1940s and a vivid portrait of Jewish Newark neighborhoods. It also conveys that slow creepy feeling so well... how bad are things going to get? What does this or that politician's statement mean? Do people seem more hostile than they used to? Why are our family arguments about politics getting so nasty.... and so personal? Am I crazy to think there's a problem, or are my relatives crazy for ignoring it?

Have we "been taken over by a cult"?

There's a lot of anxiety inside the -- you know, our professional military and our intelligence people. Many of them respect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as much as anybody here, and individual freedom. So, they do -- there's a tremendous sense of fear. These are punitive people. One of the ways -- one of the things that you could say is, the amazing thing is we are been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way.

No, that wasn't from the novel; that was Seymour Hirsch...

From the International Herald Tribune...

The United Nations has urged all major industrial countries, especially Europe and Japan, to help the United States reduce its twin deficits by spurring their own economies to grow faster.

In its report, World Economic Situation and Prospects 2005, the world body said on Tuesday that the twin budget and trade deficits of the United States were throwing the global economy off balance.

It echoed warnings already issued by the International Monetary Fund and other financial institutions in saying that the United States cannot continue to maintain such huge debts.

Today's news...

Torture treaty doesn't bar `cruel, inhuman' tactics, Gonzales says

By Frank Davies
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Alberto Gonzales has asserted to the Senate committee weighing his nomination to be attorney general that there's a legal rationale for harsh treatment of foreign prisoners by U.S. forces.

In more than 200 pages of written responses to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who plan to vote Wednesday on his nomination, Gonzales told senators that laws and treaties prohibit torture by any U.S. agent without exception.

But he said the Convention Against Torture treaty, as ratified by the Senate, doesn't prohibit the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading" tactics on non-U.S. citizens who are captured abroad, in Iraq or elsewhere.

Gonzales, White House counsel and a close Bush adviser, described recent reports of prisoner abuse as "shocking and deeply troubling." But he refused to answer questions from senators about whether interrogation tactics witnessed by FBI agents were unlawful.

He warned that any public discussion about interrogation tactics would help al-Qaida terrorists by giving them "a road map" of what to expect when captured.

As someone commented on DailyKos...

Newsflash:  they already know what to expect when captured.  

Solitary confinement:  check.
Electrodes to testicles:  check.
Attack dogs:  check.
Black hood:  check.
Naked pyramids: check.
Sleep depravation: check.
Drugs: check.
Mental torture: check.
Physical torture: check.
Driven to suicide: check.
No rights: check.

Yep, I'd say the terrorists already have the "road map", and apparently, like the Bush administration, they don't give a shit about it either.

Un-bloody-believable.

OK, forget about the Kerry staffers who allegedly slashed the tires of the Republicans' voter vans. Forget about the shenanigans in Ohio. Those things were bad, but nothing compared to this:

The black sedan made its way down Madaris Street, the young men inside tossing leaflets out the window.

"This is a final warning to all of those who plan to participate in the election," the leaflets said. "We vow to wash the streets of Baghdad with the voters' blood."

Thus was the war over Sunday's nationwide elections crystallized in a single incident on Tuesday in Mashtal, an ethnically mixed neighborhood on the eastern edge of Baghdad, where many Iraqis say they would like to vote, and where a small, determined group of people are doing everything they can to stop them.

The leaflets, like many turning up on sidewalks and doorsteps across the capital, were chilling in their detail: they warned Iraqis to stay at least 500 yards away from voting booths, for each would be the potential target of a rocket, mortar shell or car bomb. The leaflet suggested that Iraqis stay away from their windows, too, in case of blasts.

"To those of you who think you can vote and then run away," the leaflet warned, "we will shadow you and catch you, and we will cut off your heads and the heads of your children."

What assholes. Hey, guys, want to fight Bush's occupation? Don't be a bunch of schmucks like him!

I got a free subscription to U.S. News & World Report, I think because I gave money to KQED. I've been less than totally thrilled with it, mainly because it's often so pro-Bush in its coverage. But I got a pleasant surprise in the January 31 issue, with an editorial by editor-in-chief Mortimer B. Zuckerman.

It is clear that President Bush's first "ownership" priority is Social Security. Typically, this is presented as "reforming" Social Security or "saving" it from collapse. But what are the realities behind the easy rhetoric? Social Security is the most popular and universal of any of our government programs because it guarantees a pension to anyone who has contributed to the system throughout his working years. It's the cornerstone of life for nearly 48 million people--retirees, dependents, survivors of deceased workers, and the disabled--all of whom receive a check like clockwork every month. Millions more of today's workers will come to rely on those checks in the years ahead. Many don't think much about that fact, and few realize just how much of a nest egg they're going to need. An American reaching the retirement age of 65 today has an average life expectancy of 18 years, which means that roughly half of those who reach 65 can expect to live longer than 18 years. Four out of 10 have no non-work-related retirement savings. Six out of 10 haven't even tried to estimate what they'll need. They rely vaguely on Social Security, but how far will it carry them into their 70s and 80s? How serious is the "crisis" they hear about? What are the implications of "reform"?

It's a good article. He goes through the basics of how the program is funded, what the projected shortfall is and how it could be rectified with some fairly simple changes, the issue that most of us don't know that much about the basics of investing and tend to make mistakes, and the startling fact that Bush's plan wouldn't save us any money for 45 years. Zuckerman then shrewdly gets to the heart of the matter, discussing the framing of Social Security in a manner that would make George Lakoff proud.

Of course, the idea of an "ownership society" is to change the relationship of Americans to their government so they look less to Washington than to themselves (and, just maybe, vote more Republican). No doubt some Americans could build savings and more wealth and have a nest egg for retirement. No doubt there is value in savings and self-reliance, in making private investment decisions, planning ahead, and increasing distance from the government. But there are other values in the very title of the program--Social Security. "Social" surely implies a contract to help manage poverty among the old and to know that our society provides a minimum income for all of our fellow citizens in their retirement years. And "security" means buffering the harshness and cruelty of the markets so that the well-being of the elderly is not dependent on shrewd stock picks and hot mutual funds that enrich some but fail the very people who need Social Security benefits the most.

Privatization thus gets things upside down. Social Security was not meant to re-create the free market; it was intended to insure against the vagaries and cruelties of the market and to permit Americans to count on the promise that the next generation will take care of them in their old age.

Read it. Tell a friend.

Why do so many spammers assume that 1) It's the goal of every man to produce great shooting gobs of spermatazoa, 2) men's partners strongly applaud this endeavor and 3) I'm male? It's so sexist, I tell you. Not to mention somewhat messy (I just had to remove dozens, if not hundreds, of spams on the subject.)

What is wrong with Joe Leiberman? The Hubble telescope couldn't figure out what planet he lives on.

"I've always believed that our responsibility to advise and consent does not mean that we have to agree with every opinion or every action that the nominee has ever taken," Lieberman said in his opening remarks.

"Our responsibility is to determine whether the nominee is fit for the position ... and whether the nominee, in our judgment, will serve in the national interest. And of course I conclude that Dr. Condoleezza Rice meets that standard at least and much more."

Why didn't I go to law school? Is this not the best legal headline ever?

5th Circuit Rules in Rappers' Battle Over Phrase 'Back That Ass Up'

OK, back to work.

From Juan Cole...

Helena Cobban, veteran Middle East observer and journalist and a dear friend, argues against my anxieties at her web log. She can't understand why I think things could get worse if the US withdrew precipitously. I can't understand why it would be hard to understand. The Baathists would begin by killing Grand Ayatollah Sistani, then Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, then Ibrahim Jaafari, and so on down the list of the new political class. Then they would make a coup. Once they had control of Iraq's revenues, they could buy tanks and helicopter gunships in the world weapons bazaar and deploy them again against the Shiites. They might not be able to hang on very long, but it is doubtful if the country would survive all this intact. The Badr Corps could not stop this scenario, or it would have stopped all the assassinations lately of Shiite notables in the South, including two of Sistani's aides. Had the US not dissolved the Iraqi army, I'd be out in the streets now demanding an immediate US withdrawal. The failures of the Fallujah campaign made it amply clear that the US armed forces are unlikely to make headway against the guerrilla insurgency, and in the meantime are just making hundreds of thousands of Iraqis more angry. You will note that Sistani, who is not shy about these things, has not demanded an immediate withdrawal of US forces. In fact, I was told by a US observer of the scene in Najaf that a member of the marja'iyyah asked the US to take care of the Mahdi Army for them last summmer.

There is a saying in Arabic, Ahl al-bayt a`lamu bima fi'l-bayt--the people of a house know best what is in the house. When Sistani says the US should set a timetable and go, then I think we should all support that. But the US has made a big enough mess in Iraq without compounding it by hanging the Iraqis out to dry and decamping suddenly. By the way, Iraqis have more than once pleaded with me to argue against precipitous withdrawal by the US.

He concludes by saying

Mind you, if the elected Iraqi parliament asks for a withdrawal timetable, I think the US has an absolute duty to comply. It is a different issue as to whether such a move is wise or could succeed without the Iraqis paying an even higher price than they have already paid.

From the Advocate:

"No Name-calling Week" takes aim at insults of all kinds, whether based on a child's appearance, background, or behavior. But a handful of conservative critics have zeroed in on the references to harassment based on sexual orientation. "I hope schools will realize it's less an exercise in tolerance than a platform for liberal groups to promote their pansexual agenda," said Robert Knight, director of Concerned Women for America's Culture and Family Institute.

I agree we should not ban name-calling. Because if we did, I wouldn't be able to call Robert Knight and the other members of Concerned Women "Troglodyte, anal-retentive, homophobic, mindless, inhumane, joy-sucking zombies who dishonor the religion and culture they claim to represent."

That, or winners of the "Taliban impersonation contest."

Also, their mother was a hamster and their father smelt of elderberries!

PPPPPPPPPPPPPTTTT!

OK, as Michael pointed out, California is partly in a crisis of its own making. We loves our low property taxesses, don'ts we, my preciousss? So that's off the table. Then there's all those ballot initiatives which locked up money for this project and that requirement. And we keep having more. We could raise state income taxes, but our job market is already crummy and that might make things worse. So there are very few options left.

However, there are options and there are options.

Which ones do you think Arnold likes?

1. Cut caretakers' payments from $10 to $6.75 an hour
2. Eliminate "enterprize zone" tax breaks for hotels in downtown areas
3. Remove the tax credit for elderly renters who earn more than $13,000 a year
   
4. Get rid of the tax credit for million-dollar vacation homes

If you guessed numbers 1 and 3, you're right! Never mind that the vacation home tax credit costs the state far more than the renters credit.

Kevin Drum points out:

...What strikes me as perverse is that all these stories about the GCBD (which are legion in California papers) overlook the biggest elephant in the room: the fact that Schwarzenegger actively created a huge part of the budget crisis himself. Just as George Bush seems to hope that tax cuts will create an artificial crisis atmosphere that allows him pursue pet projects like Social Security privatization, Schwarzenegger campaigned on a pledge to cut the auto license fee. This slashed $3-4 billion in revenue, an amount that would go a very long way toward eliminating California's problem. Like Bush, Schwarzenegger seems to actively like the idea of cutting taxes in order to create an ongoing crisis that provides him with a pretext to pursue his real agenda.

I guess he's making his own real-life disaster movie. Watch California self-destruct in slow motion! Wheeee!

And Jello Biafra thought Jerry Brown was a problem?

"Here's what a straightforward discussion of the philosophy behind the Social Security system would look like: Democrats support welfare for old people, on the grounds that it creates a safety net for capitalism's losers, who might otherwise live in poverty. Republicans oppose welfare for old people, on the grounds that it reduces incentives to work and save, it gives the government too much money to spend, and it makes people overly dependent on the government for their retirement. That's an honest debate. Let's have it." From Slate Magazine

This is a gratuitous cheap shot, but I'm so angry and I just can't resist. So there.

Bush yesterday, addressing an antiabortion rally:

I appreciate so very much your work toward building a culture of life-- (applause) -- a culture that will protect the most innocent among us and the voiceless. We are working to promote a culture of life, to promote compassion for women and their unborn babies. (Applause.) We know -- we know that in a culture that does not protect the most dependent, the handicapped, the elderly, the unloved, or simply inconvenient become increasingly vulnerable.

The America of our dreams, where every child is welcomed in law -- in life, and protected in law may still be some ways away, but even from the far side of the river, Nellie, we can see its glimmerings. (Applause.) We're making progress in Washington. I've been working with members of the Congress to pass good, solid legislation that protects the vulnerable and promotes the culture of life. I signed into law a ban on partial birth abortion. (Applause.) Infants who are born despite an attempted abortion are now protected by law. (Applause.) So are nurses and doctors who refused to be any part of an abortion. (Applause.) And prosecutors can now charge those who harm or kill a pregnant woman with harming or killing her unborn child. (Applause.)

We're also moving ahead in terms of medicine and research to make sure that the gifts of science are consistent with our highest values of freedom, equality, family, and human dignity. We will not sanction the creation of life only to destroy it. (Applause.)

What I'm saying is we're making progress, and this progress is a tribute to your perseverance and to the prayers of the people. I want to thank you, especially, for the civil way that you have engaged one of America's most contentious issues. I encourage you to take heart from our achievements, because a true culture of life cannot be sustained solely by changing laws. We need, most of all, to change hearts. (Applause.) And that is what we're doing, seeking common ground where possible, and persuading increasing numbers of our fellow citizens of the rightness of our cause.

This is the path to the culture of life that we seek for our country. And on its coldest days, and one of our coldest days, I encourage you to take warmth and comfort from our history which tells us that a movement that appeals to the noblest and most generous instincts of our fellow Americans -- and that is based on a sacred promise enshrined in our founding document that this movement will not fail.

Here's a photo that was in the paper (N.Y. Times?) last week. This little girl is crying because her parents got shot to death at a checkpoint in Iraq. I guess they didn't stop when they were told to, so the soldiers shot them. I can't really fault the soldiers, because they got put in a horrible situation where that's what they are forced to do. But President Bush put them there with his horrible policies, his pointless, bloody war.

Two pieces of news, each shocking in its own way. (And I'm not even talking about the latest revelation's of Rummy's super-secret spy group that he hid from Congress and the CIA.)

From Pew's new study:

Internet users are extremely positive about search engines and the experiences they have when searching the internet. But these same satisfied internet users are generally unsophisticated about why and how they use search engines. They are also strikingly unaware of how search engines operate and how they present their results.

Internet users behave conservatively as searchers: They tend to settle quickly on a single search engine and then stick with it, rather than switching as search technology evolves or comparing results from different search systems. Some 44% of searchers regularly use just one engine, and another 48% use just two or three. Nearly half of searchers use a search engines no more than a few times a week, and two-thirds say they could walk away from search engines without upsetting their lives very much.

I have trouble believing that. Partly it's because I'm such a Google whore myself. I joke that I don't actually know anything; I just know where to look it up online.

But (and admittedly, I haven't read the whole thing so I don't know their methodology) I wonder if it's a vocabulary problem. I've been talking to people on the phone at work and trying to talk them through the process of uploading files via their web browser. The problem is, you ask them what program they're using and they say "Yahoo!" or "Comcast!" They don't understand how all the pieces fit together. I think they just fire up their computers and then click on an on their desktop to get online. They then get the default start page their ISP has set up. That page has a search box on it.

So they're probably using search all the time, but they aren't thinking, "OK, now I'm using Google..." However, if their ISP were to cancel their contracts with Google, Yahoo, etc. and take away their little box, I bet they'd notice!

The other one was this report from CBS:

A recent study by researchers at the University of Washington found that 1 in 50 people die within one month of having gastric bypass surgery, and that figure jumps nearly fivefold if the surgeon is inexperienced.

Yikes. Those are terrible odds, and yet the surgery's popularity keeps increasing...

From Riverbend's blog:

Allawi à ­s people were passing out pamphlets a few days ago. I went out to the garden to check the low faucet, hoping to find a trickle of water and instead, I found some paper crushed under the garden gate. ÃUpon studying it, it turned out to be some sort of ¬Elect Allawi à ® pamphlet promising security and prosperity, amongst other things, for occupied Iraq. I'd say it was a completely useless pamphlet but that isn't completely true. It fit nicely on the bottom of the cage of E.'s newly acquired pet parakeet.

Oh, but freedom is on the march!

Boy meets girl, boy marries girl, boy meets photographer and immediately starts macking on her while his wife is in the other room, boy sets up blind date with boy on the Internets, boy meets girl, boy marries girl, other boy starts sleeping with other girl, girl confronts boy, walks out and starts working in strip club....

As Michael said, "Well, that's two hours of my life I can't get back."

We kept making fun of bits of the dialogue afterwards.

"Did you sleep with him? Where?"

"On our COUCH?"

"How many times did you come?"

"How did he taste?" "Like you, but sweeter!"

The Chronicle had given it a so-so review, but had put all the blame on Julia Roberts. But Julia was fine; she was just working with exceedingly lame material. Natalie Portman was terrific.

But the characters just didn't make sense to me. Their motives were murky and they kept doing really weird things, and why would anybody in their right mind dump Natalie Portman for Julia Roberts anyway? I'm just sayin'.

The Club For Growth website approvingly quotes this article from the Wall Street Journal:

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is probably the most Ãwell-known celebrity to drop in on today ­s inaugural festivities in Washington, but he left plenty of controversy back home in California. The editorial board of the liberal Sacramento Bee couldn à ­t believe their ears when the Governator dropped by Tuesday to push his ambitious plans for pension overhaul, redistricting reform and merit pay for teachers. One editor said that even when Ronald Reagan had occupied the executive mansion, no governor had ever been so forthright in explaining why government should be smaller. Mr. Schwarzenegger told the Bee that the public sector is a à ¬monster à ® that needs to be ¬starved.à à ®

The board tried hard to get the governor to say he would raise taxes to address the state à ­s budget deficit. He flatly rejected the idea. Raising taxes à ¬is out of the question because it will not work, à ® he said, explaining that trying to fix the state à ­s problems with Ãnew revenue would only be an excuse to defer needed reforms. ¬Taking money out of the private sector is a no-no, à ® Schwarzenegger reiterated. à ¬We don à ­t want to feed the monster. We don à ­t want to feed the state à ³ the public sector à ³ and starve the private sector. We want to feed the Ãprivate sector and starve the public sector. ®

Ah. The public sector? Would that be the public sector that includes public education? You remember all your promises about public education?

Yet another reason why he needs to be a one-term governator.

...Really is just a word for "Nothing left to lose." We've certainly lost any pretense of ethics or leadership... as Daily Kos points out so well.

Phyllis Bennis, Foreign Policy in Focus, and Hans Blix, too!

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council on February 5 wasn't likely to win over anyone not already on his side. He ignored the crucial fact that in the past several days (in Sunday's New York Times and in his February 4th briefing of UN journalists) Hans Blix denied key components of Powell's claims.

Blix, who directs the UN inspection team in Iraq, said the UNMOVIC inspectors have seen "no evidence" of mobile biological weapons labs, have "no persuasive indications" of Iraq-al Qaeda links, and no evidence of Iraq hiding and moving material used for Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) either outside or inside Iraq. Dr. Blix also said there was no evidence of Iraq sending scientists out of the country, of Iraqi intelligence agents posing as scientists, of UNMOVIC conversations being monitored, or of UNMOVIC being penetrated.

Further, CIA and FBI officials still believe the Bush administration is "exaggerating" information to make their political case for war. Regarding the alleged Iraqi link with al Qaeda, U.S. intelligence officials told the New York Times, "we just don't think it's there."

Katrina Vanden Heuvel

Powell's multimedia presentation contained many specific allegations but little new information or proof of the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There was no smoking gun. Instead, nearly all of the evidence was largely circumstantial or speculative. (Indeed, hours before Powell spoke, UN weapons inspections chief Hans Blix denied or discounted four claims central to Powell's indictment.) Minor violations were offered to justify a major war. And evidence of Iraq's links to al-Qaeda was played up despite CIA and FBI officials' charges that evidence is fragmentary and inconclusive and that the administration is exaggerating information to make a political case for war.

and best of all...

Colin Powell and Condi Rice!

The sanctions, as they are called, have succeeded over the last 10 years, not in deterring him from moving in that direction, but from actually being able to move in that direction. The Iraqi regime militarily remains fairly weak. It doesn't have the capacity it had 10 or 12 years ago. It has been contained. And even though we have no doubt in our mind that the Iraqi regime is pursuing programs to develop weapons of mass destruction -- chemical, biological and nuclear -- I think the best intelligence estimates suggest that they have not been terribly successful. There's no question that they have some stockpiles of some of these sorts of weapons still under their control, but they have not been able to break out, they have not been able to come out with the capacity to deliver these kinds of systems or to actually have these
kinds of systems that is much beyond where they were 10 years ago.

Kevin Drum on why not being a bigot isn't enough... and a fabulous video from Fox News (and a transcript if you can't view the clip) wherein new orifaces are ripped in the bodies of the Bush administration and the hapless interviewer, by a Vanity Fair writer.

Quinn: Don't you think that the president has given his proper respect to our troops? I mean, yesterday, as far as I can tell --

Bachrach: Respect means keeping them secure.

Quinn: -- the festivities opened with a military gala, they ended with a prayer service, there just seem to have, certainly been a tremendous effort over the past couple of days, and more than that, to honor our troops.

Bachrach: Well, gee, that prayer service should sure keep them safe and warm in their flimsy vehicles in Iraq. I'd rather see that money going to them, rather than to a guy who already is president for the second time...

Beyootiful!!!

Andrew, cut it out already, you're making me forget about your great posts on the torture scandal!

Given how much we know now about the deep corruption of the U.N. oil-for-food program, I'm even more relieved they are not the instrument for keeping Saddam contained. They were and would be the instrument for empowering Saddam and further impoverishing the Iraqi people. Bush was right to do what he did. And no amount of criticism of the conduct of the war will take that away.

Well, for starters, the United States knew about it. And Sullivan is grossly oversimplifying.

By virtually all expert accounts, the sanctions, backed by UN weapons inspectors, and the oil-for-food program achieved their major goals. Iraq's programs to make chemical, biological and nuclear weapons disintegrated, its military forces became a hollow shell, and the health of the civilian population improved. But right from the start, Iraq found ways to circumvent the sanctions, often with the tacit approval of the United States.

An analysis by Charles Duelfer, the chief American weapons inspector in Iraq, estimated that Iraq generated some $11 billion in illicit revenue and used the money to buy prohibited items. The main routes for these illicit transactions - $8 billion worth - were trade deals that Iraq negotiated with neighboring countries, notably Jordan, Syria and Turkey. By the Senate subcommittee's higher count, Iraq got almost two-thirds of some $21 billion through the trade deals or smuggling.

But these trade agreements had nothing to do with the oil-for-food program, and were hardly a secret. The United States actually condoned Iraq's trade deals with Jordan and Turkey, two allies whose economies suffered from the sanctions. This was a reasonable price to pay for maintaining their support on the main objective - denying weapons of mass destruction to Saddam.

American diplomats tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Syria to stop buying Iraqi oil outside of the oil-for-food program, but did little to crack down on that trade. Syria became a major supplier of military goods to Iraq. This was a failure of American diplomacy, not Kofi Annan.

The UN bureaucracy had no power to prevent these illicit oil or arms deals outside the oil-for-food program. It was the responsibility of member nations to adhere to sanctions imposed by the Security Council. Those members with the most diplomatic, economic and military power were obliged to help enforce them. Thus the primary blame for allowing Iraq to accumulate illicit billions lies with the United States and other Security Council members that winked at prohibited oil sales, mostly for sensible reasons.

So we should have gone to war because Saddam was cruel to his people? Well, there's lots of rulers who fit that description, and what the hell were we doing giving assistance in the 1980s? There was plenty of evidence that he was Bad News then.

So we should have gone to war because the UN member nations couldn't keep themselves in line? My head is spinning.

So it was OK to tell a million different half- and untruths about why we're doing this? Push for war on the basis of shaky evidence? It's all part and parcel of the same mess. You cannot separate the war from its outcome. You can't say "but our intentions were good." The Iraqi people are pretty darn impoverished by this war. They're also terrorized, demoralized, and furious. Not by Saddam anymore, though.

Oh come on, already. Stop the spinning. Every justification just makes it worse.

I keep picking on poor Andrew Sullivan. It's not fair of me, I know. But he embodies the frustrating tendency to say what so many keep saying about President Bush, which is some variety of "I know he's totally f**ked everything up, but he's a really nice guy and he gives pretty speeches."

Item: today's post on Bush's inaugural speech.

The speech was a deep rebuke to conservative foreign policy realists. Its fundamental point, it seems to me, is that security is only possible through the expansion of liberty abroad. In the long run, that's indisputable. In the short run, there are sometimes trade-offs to be made. What Bush was saying was that he will not trade liberty for security. Translation: he will stick to the democratization of Iraq. That was the main point of the address on the major policy issue in front of us. In that sense, it was an old-style liberal speech, about as far from the conservative tradition in foreign policy as can be imagined. And at its most ambitious, it was a fusion of liberal internationalism with realism - saying that the latter cannot be secured without the former. It was ecumenical; and it was rightly thematic. If I could offer one criticism, I'd say it could have been shorter. There were times when the liberty theme became repetitive. And, of course, the relationship of rhetoric to reality is, as always with Bush, problematic. How do you reconcile the expansion of freedom with Bush's expansion of government? How do you square domestic freedom with the curtailment of civil liberties in a war on terror? How do you proclaim that America is a force for freeing dissidents, when the government now has unprecedented powers to detain anyone suspected of terror across the globe and subject them to coercive interrogation techniques that the government will not disclose? Perhaps these questions do not need to be answered in an inaugural address. But they linger in the air, even as Bush's eloquence and idealism lifts you up and gives you hope.

The problem is that that little aside IS the very heart of the problem. It's not incidental to the speech that Bush says one thing and the effects of his policy are quite another. This is the story of his presidency, and it's a terrible story. There's a word for what Bush does... it's "hypocrisy." It's what George Orwell was talking about in 1984. It's lying to the American people. It doesn't matter that he's probably lying to himself at the same time.

We all fool ourselves sometimes about the consequences of our actions. It's not a good thing, but for normal people with a small sphere of influence, it only hurts ourselves, or a few loved ones. When you're president, it affects billions of people. There's no room for this kind of error.

Sorry, his benefit of the doubt got used up about three or four years ago.

I'm editing a newsletter and it's a very tedious process. So I'm listening to music as I do it. But that is not enough! I must procrastinate more!

So... what better way than to delay than via blog? That's what I thought!

Music I have been listening to lately

Left Of The Dial: Dispatches From The '80s Underground. Three-volume set of college radio music. Many of the songs I remember listening to, and many I don't, on KALX (whose call numbers appear on the cover artwork). It even has that weird bleepy song where people keep saying "Adrenaline" over and over. They left out the hip-hop that Davey D and Billy Jam used to play on their shows, but other than that, a great set.

Paris Combo. I now have four, count 'em, four Paris Combo albums. I wish I were in Paris right now. I also wish my French comprehension was better. But no matter. These songs are great.

A Girl Called Eddy. A little Sarah McClaughlan/Dido-ish, but without being the least bit annoying. Beautiful voice and pretty songs. None of them totally stand out for me yet, but the album is growing on me.

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zizzou Soundtrack. Now there's a mouthful of a title! Good compilation. I love the David Bowie covers in Portuguese, and I kept playing "Queen Bitch" over and over and over. Good song.

OK, back to work.

Michael told me this morning that while he was a student in Baltimore and Clinton got elected, he went to the inauguration festivities. No balls or anything, but apparently you could go right up the steps of the major buildings and the atmosphere was one big outdoor party.

This year: not so much.

Although no specific threats have been detected, authorities in charge of security were taking no chances for the first inauguration since the 2001 terrorist attacks. More than 100 square blocks of downtown Washington, D.C., were closed to traffic today, and thousands of police and U.S. troops were deployed.

The security, the tightest for any of the 54 previous inaugurations in U.S. history, included 7,000 members of the U.S. armed forces and at least 6,000 federal, state and local law enforcement officers.

In addition to D.C. police, more than 3,000 police officers from other jurisdictions were on hand to help secure the inaugural ceremonies. Having come from as far away as Seattle, the officers bolstered a force that authorities said would virtually line the parade route from the Capitol to the White House, with an officer stationed every seven to 10 feet along both sides of the road.

The security for the events was being coordinated from a field office in Northern Virginia, where officials from more than 50 federal, state and local agencies were overseeing the police and troops, as well as SWAT teams, sharpshooters, plainclothes officers, canine bomb-sniffing units, bicycle patrols, Coast Guard cutters and surveillance helicopters.

Some major streets were blocked off with D.C. buses, and miles of metal barricades were installed to keep pedestrians in approved areas.

Also, apparently lightbulbs got removed from lampposts (fear of breaking glass?), manhole covers were welded shut, cellphones are jammed (because they can be used to detonate explosives), and people with offices along the parade routes are being told to stay away from the windows. At least that's what I heard on the radio last night; I'm still trying to find a list of all the ridiculous security measures.

And then Bush gives his speech about freedom? What immense horseshit.

Sorry Andrew, but this logic is too tortured...

I have never said I don't agree with Bush's decision to go to war with Saddam. I've merely said the obvious - that we now know that, given Saddam's lack of WMD stockpiles, the urgency, with hindsight, was misplaced. Does that mean I have to apologize to Howard Dean? Sure, if Howard Dean had argued that there were no WMDs and that was why we shouldn't go to war, and I had trashed him for it. To Hans Blix? Sure, if he had said the same thing. But they didn't. And I didn't. Almost no one argued against the war on the basis that the WMD stockpiles didn't exist (except, hilariously, Baghdad Bob). So Bush was right to go to war when he did on the evidence in front of him. The only apology I owe is to those, like Jim Falllows, who correctly foresaw the immense difficulties after the liberation. But my apology must merely be for not taking his argument seriously enough. I never attacked it.

Well, actually, this is what Dean said on March 6, 2003:

...Tonight the President made another attempt to convince the nation and the increasingly skeptical world community that pre-emptive war against Iraq is necessary.

 Once again, I believe the President's rhetoric has fallen short of making a credible case that Iraq presents an imminent threat to vital U.S. interests. He continues to tell us what we all agree on: that Saddam Hussein is a ruthless, tyrannical despot. But he does not make the case that we should take on this crisis without the full backing of the United Nations. It is no wonder that we cannot convince our long-standing allies to go to war when we cannot demonstrate that an imminent threat exists.

So, OK, it's not "I have proof that Iraq has no WMDs." I still think an apology may be in order, though.

So tomorrow is inauguration day for Dubya, and 'tis also the day of Not One Damn Dime, a boycott on spending money anywhere for any reason. The idea is to express moral outrage against Bush's policies (especially the war in Iraq) but also to try to flex our progressive economic muscles.

I've been pretty torn about this one. Aside from the fact that my in-laws are in town and it's an inconvenient time to not buy anything (like food), there's the question of "Is this thing going to do any good?"

The boycott is a powerful tool when used right. I read Martin Luther King's final speech, which says in one part:

Now the other thing we'll have to do is this: Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we are poor people. Individually, we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively -- that means all of us together -- collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine. Did you ever think about that? After you leave the United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and I could name the others, the Negro collectively is richer than most nations of the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States, and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That's power right there, if we know how to pool it.

We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles. We don't need any Molotov cocktails. We just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, "God sent us by here, to say to you that you're not treating his children right. And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment, where God's children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you."

However, I think the key is that he was calling for a boycott specifically of businesses who were promoting discrimination. Not One Damn Dime is much broader, and the risk is that some of the businesses being boycotted are just as anti-war as their would-be boycotters. Also, not all businesses are created alike, and skipping Starbucks isn't the same as refusing to go to your neighborhood cafe. In all fairness, the NODD FAQ does address these concerns and others.

Alternet ran an article in which the author worried that the boycott would hurt small businesses; Snopes ran a piece opining that the boycott just wouldn't accomplish anything.

It's a matter of individual conscience whether to participate or not. There are good arguments on both sides. I would say that it would be good to call a Congressperson or Senator, write a letter to the editor, put a sign in your window, or just do something that actively communicates your thoughts on Bush, the war, and other current issues (that won't land you in jail.)

From the New York Times on January 17:

Deserting US recruits -- once a rarity -- are not alone in their search. Three months after being reelected and immediately prior to what is expected to be a triumphant inaugural party to mark the start of his second term, US President George W. Bush will be hard-pressed not to reevaluate the strategy for the deployment of US troops in Iraq. He faces massive doubts among the members of his own military, who are becoming increasingly vocal in their opinion that the US war with Iraqi insurgents is being conducted with insufficient manpower and equipment. Lieutenant General James Helmly, chief of the Army Reserve, warns that his troops in Iraq have "deteriorated into a broken force."

A revolt seems to be taking place within the ranks. Even though daily bomb attacks in Iraq and the latest death toll of 1,361 US soldiers have yet to trigger any significant reversal in US public opinion, and even though President Bush reiterated last week that the world is a safer place without Saddam Hussein, Bush's soldiers and officers seem increasingly convinced that the opposite is true. Almost without warning, America's armed forces, superior to any of the world's other militaries but faced with severe personnel shortages, are suddenly encountering almost insurmountable obstacles -- politically, strategically and financially.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld particularly faces growing criticism. In light of the disastrous situation on the ground in Iraq, even fellow Republicans are quietly demanding his removal and calling for a change in strategy. Rumsfeld bears the brunt of the blame for the precarious situation in which the US military now finds itself. The Iraq war has cost US taxpayers more than $150 billion to date, with the Pentagon spending $4.5 billion a month on its campaign in Iraq.

And there appears to be no end in sight, at least for the time being. Rumsfeld, in an attempt to boost morale among his frustrated troops, has said that he expects the Americans to withdraw from Iraq within his second four-year term as Secretary of Defense. However, only the most optimistic of the president's closest advisors believe that the situation in Iraq will improve in the wake of the January 30 elections.

Oh, we are in such big trouble. People just have no idea how big... and nobody but ourselves to blame.

"Social Security is America's promise that those who work hard
and play
by the rules will retire with dignity. Even the most pessimistic of
economists agree it will remain solvent for decades. There is no
crisis." Learn more at target="_self">thereisnocrisis.com

"Second chance for Bush to unite divided U.S."? Articles like this strike me as a colossal waste of space that could have been used for something more important... like Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston's separation. I mean, check it out y'all! Angelina Jolie's such a skank! Sorry, what was I saying?

Oh hell. Go ahead and read the article if you want. But as we all know, Bush says one thing and then goes and does whatever the hell he wants. He doesn't use any of his precious "political capital" on reining in the less "civil" of his party cronies. I expect the honeymoon to last as long as a Hollywood marriage. (Sorry, Angelina. I didn't mean to make cheap shots at your expense...)

I unexpectedly got to see one of my new favorite bands last night at the Great American Music Hall! Paris Combo is, as their name suggests, a group from Paris whom I discovered a few months ago on Calabash Music. Their music is largely cabaret jazz style, their lyrics are all in French, they sing about love, and about watching too much television, they remind me a bit of Pink Martini... and they're really fabulous in concert.

I guess a lot of other people "discovered" them too, because the Hall was packed. We got there early enough to snag a great table, but it was hard to see the stage through all the standing people (many of whom, but by no means all, spoke French. The people sharing our table, and the large party seated to the right of us, did chat in French). Still, I could catch a glimpse here and there of the singer, and could see the bass and guitar players off to the right. (They're all very cute.)

The lead singer spoke between numbers in charmingly accented English. People laughed at her remarks sometimes seemingly because of the accent, which seemed a little patronizing to me... I mean, I couldn't get up there and do an intro in French! No matter. The music was great. I particularly liked the way they'd harmonize their vocals on some of the numbers.

We ended up leaving early because we had to get home to bed, but not before I got a copy of their latest CD, which I am ripping as I type this!

(Michael commented, "I bet the Great American Music Hall sold more wine tonight than they usually do at their shows.)

Update: you can read more about Paris Combo in this SFGate article.

I was amused to look at the American Family Association's website and peek at their meta tags:

<meta name="description" content="The American Family Association exists to motivate and equip citizens to change the culture to reflect Biblical truth and traditional family values.">

<meta name="keywords" content="Judeo-Christian Values,family values,traditional values,afa,american family association,traditional values,don wildmon,morals,moral,morality,law policy,local affiliates,government affairs,foundation,afr,radio,Journal,pornography,homosexual agenda,pro-life,entertainment,television,radio, Christian,conservative,activism,legislative action,Tupelo,Mississippi">

So remember, folks, when you think of "pornography" or the "homosexual agenda", think "Tupelo, Mississippi"!

Oh, what the heck was I doing on their site, anyway?

Well, see, I got this email:

In November 2004, the FCC cut a backroom deal with CBS and its parent company Viacom.

In summary, Viacom agreed to donate a paltry $3.5 million to the FCC in exchange for dropping thousands of indecency complaints filed against it by taxpaying consumers.

Basically, the FCC cut a deal with CBS. What was the result? CBS immediately went back to their standard fare of lewd and indecency programs.

On December 31, 2004, CBS re-aired an episode of Without A Trace, complete with an extended teen-age orgy scene. The original broadcast of this episode had thousands of FCC complaints against it, which were tossed out in the November FCC/CBS "back-scratching" deal.

Click here to view the abominable Without A Trace scene for yourself! Be warned, it contains offensive and graphic scenes.

Because of these kinds of backdoor deals, the FCC continues to allow networks like CBS to flood the airwaves with indecency.

I'm asking you to do two things that I believe will start the ball rolling in the right direction.

1. Tell the FCC Commissioners to stop cutting deals with broadcasters of indecent material.

2. File a formal indecency complaint with the FCC against CBS' broadcast of Without A Trace.

I tried to click to see the abominable video, but darn it, it was in Windows Media format. Which is abominable in and of itself.

Anyway, maybe we should all tell the FCC to keep up the good work! More porn, please!

And if the AFA doesn't like what they see on TV, they could maybe do what I do... not watch.

Got some extra cash lying around? Then you need...

A toilet tank aquarium called "Aquariass". (From UrbanPeel)

Slightly more strapped for cash? Then perhaps "Darth Tater" is your thing... (From Starwars.com)

Sen. Barbara Boxer and secretary of state nominee Condoleezza Rice clashed at Rice's confirmation hearing Tuesday, with Boxer accusing Rice of lying and Rice hotly denying it.

"This is my personal view, that your loyalty to the mission you were given to sell this war overwhelmed your respect for the truth," the fiery California Democrat told Rice.

"Senator, I have to say that I have never, ever, lost respect for the truth in the service of anything, it is not my nature, it is not my character," Rice retorted.

More from the Chronicle

Give Barbara your thanks, appreciation, and luv here: http://boxer.senate.gov/contact/

From Knight-Ridder yesterday:

New intelligence reports raise questions about U.S. mission in Iraq

By Warren P. Strobel, Jonathan S. Landay and John Walcott

WASHINGTON - A series of new U.S. intelligence assessments on Iraq paints a grim picture of the road ahead and concludes that there's little likelihood that President Bush's goals can be attained in the near future.

Instead of stabilizing the country, national elections Jan. 30 are likely to be followed by more violence and could provoke a civil war between majority Shiite Muslims and minority Sunni Muslims, the CIA and other intelligence agencies predict, according to senior officials who've seen the classified reports.

A CIA spokesman, Tom Crispell, said he was unable to comment. A White House spokeswoman had no immediate comment. The federal government was closed Monday for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

A new public report by the National Intelligence Council concludes that instead of diminishing terrorism, U.S.-occupied Iraq has replaced prewar Afghanistan as a breeding and training ground for terrorists who may disperse to conduct attacks elsewhere.

Two senior intelligence officials with access to classified reporting said Islamic militants allied with or inspired by Osama bin Laden were forging ties to Iraqi nationalists and remnants of former dictator Saddam Hussein's regime. The linkage is similar to the one that so-called "Afghan Arabs" formed with Afghanistan's Taliban regime after the Soviet Union withdrew from that country, they said.

The Bush administration claimed before invading Iraq that Saddam had strong ties to international terrorism, but most counterterrorism experts dispute that and no evidence has been found to support the claim.

"The sad thing is we have created what the administration claimed we were intervening to prevent: an Iraq/al-Qaida linkage," one of the senior intelligence officials said.

The officials who were more pessimistic spoke on condition of anonymity, because the latest intelligence assessments are classified and their views are at odds with public statements from the White House.

and

The public report by the National Intelligence Council appears to contradict the Bush administration's contention that the invasion of Iraq struck a blow against terrorism.

The report by the council, an advisory board of top intelligence analysts that's independent of the CIA, says Iraq has taken the place once held by Afghanistan as a proving ground for terrorist leaders.

"The al-Qaida membership that was distinguished by having trained in Afghanistan will gradually dissipate, to be replaced in part by the dispersion of the experienced survivors of the conflict in Iraq," says the unclassified report, "Mapping the Global Future," which is an analysis of trends to the year 2020.

"Iraq and other possible conflicts in the future could provide recruitment, training grounds, technical skills and language proficiency for a new class of terrorists who are `professionalized' and for whom political violence becomes an end in itself," it says.

Seriously, how much are tickets to D.C. right now? Pass the rotten eggs.

"macrame deity". Tee hee...

From a very odd Washington Post interview which ran on Sunday:

The Post: Why do you think [Osama] bin Laden has not been caught?

THE PRESIDENT: Because he's hiding.

The Post: Our allies have done all they can do to help catch him?

THE PRESIDENT: We're on the hunt.

The Post: Do you think others are on the hunt, too? Are you happy, content with what other countries are doing in that hunt?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes.

The Post: Anyone you're not happy with? (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: Look, bin Laden is elusive, and he is in a remote part of the world. And we are -- I am -- I can't think of anybody in the world who is our ally who isn't willing to do what is necessary to try to find him. And so I am pleased about the hunt, and I am pleased that he's isolated. I will be more pleased when he's brought to justice, and I think he will be.

The whole thing is a must-read. It will also make you tear your hair out.

From CNN, which seems to be reduced to printing White House press releases in all their glory...

Inauguration week honors U.S. troops

As the first presidential inauguration since September 11, 2001 approaches, organizers are preparing a four-day wartime salute to the U.S. armed forces -- including concerts for troops, black-tie dinners and a special inaugural ball for military personnel.

"Celebrating Freedom, Honoring Service" -- the official theme of the inauguration -- will be underscored by colorful, military-dominated events, culminating Thursday night when President Bush hosts a ball for U.S. troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Tuesday's "Saluting Those Who Serve" event at Washington's MCI Center kicks off the week's official schedule.

"It will be a diverse showcase of entertainers from people like actor Kelsey Grammer, boxing promoter Don King and Gloria Estefan," said Kevin Sheridan of the Presidential Inaugural Committee.

Thousands of U.S. military personnel have been invited to the afternoon concert, which also includes Miss USA 2004 Shandi Finnessey.

Later Tuesday, singers Hilary Duff and "American Idol" winner Ruben Studdard will rock the city's Armory. First twins Jenna and Laura Bush are expected to attend.

Thank goodness for Reuters.

Critics attack "lavish" Bush at time of war

President George W. Bush is drawing heat over a $40 million (21.5 million pound) splurge on inaugural balls, concerts and candlelight dinners while the country is in a sombre mood because of the Iraq war and Asian tsunami.

As Bush prepares for his second-term inauguration on Thursday, his supporters plan to celebrate with fireworks and three days of parties, including a "Black Tie and Boots" ball and nine other balls.

Critics say the lavish celebrations are unseemly when U.S. troops face daily violence in Iraq and Americans are being urged to donate money to alleviate the suffering in Asia, where the December 26 tsunami killed 163,000 people.

All this, plus the fact that 90% of the people who live closest to Bush, i.e., Washington D.C. voters, opted for his opponent, adds up to the conclusion that Bush is deliberately sending a big "F.U." to everyone. What a class act he is.

Well, this is what happens when your election campaign message basically consists of "Vote for me because my opponent blows goats."

Bush said in an interview last week with The Washington Post that the 2004 election was a moment of accountability for the decisions he has made in Iraq, but the poll found that 58 percent disapprove of his handling of the situation to 40 percent who approve, and 44 percent said the war was worth fighting.

The survey also found that, although Americans overwhelmingly oppose delaying the upcoming elections in Iraq, scheduled for Jan. 30, they are pessimistic that the vote will produce a stable government. Nearly six in 10 said it will not bring a stable government, but 57 percent said they see the elections as a step to the day that U.S. troops can be withdrawn from the country.

The president's overall job approval rating stands at 52 percent, up slightly in the past month. Of all presidents in the postwar era who won reelection, only Richard M. Nixon had a lower job approval rating at the start of his second term. The other chief executives began their second term with job ratings of 60 percent or higher.

A majority of Americans express disapproval of Bush on other key measures of presidential performance. A slight majority -- 52 percent -- disapprove of the way Bush is handling the economy, and half or more also are dissatisfied with the way Bush has dealt with the budget deficit (58 percent disapprove), immigration (54 percent) and health care (51 percent).

People may hold their noses and vote for you, but when they unpinch their nostrils after the election, they notice things still stink! (Speaking of stinking... Bush's car got pelted with rotten eggs last inauguration. Wonder what's going to happen this time?)

But given that the source is Seymour Hirsch... I'm afraid it is.

George W. Bush à ­s re à Žlection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities ­ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that controlà à ³against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism à ³during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as à ¬facilitators à ® of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way.

I've been admiring Andrew Sullivan lately for writing about the issue of torture and continuing to demand that the Bush administration be accountable for what's happened. But he loses major, major brownie points for this feeble POS. "The Middle East could be transformed in the next four years - because of Bush. No, he shouldn't be left off the hook for his errors. But nor should he be denied credit for his tenacity in the war against Islamist terror."

Oh, come on. And Osama Bin Laden should get credit for his tenacity against Western imperialism? No, Andrew would have a problem with that. So would I. I have a problem with this kind of nonsense. Bush is just bad news, end of story. Stop bending over backwards trying to be fair. The fact that even now, he's still straining at the bit and hoping to go charging into Iran... it just beggars belief.

Oh, and I was so happy to read that Bush now says he's learned "I do have to be cautious about, you know, conveying thoughts in a way maybe that doesn't send wrong impressions about our country,"

Um, wha?

Never since his assassination in 1968 have I felt the absence of Martin Luther King more acutely. Where are today's voices of moral outrage? Where is the leadership willing to stand up and say: Enough! We've sullied ourselves enough.

I'm convinced, without being able to prove it, that those voices will emerge. There was a time when no one had heard of Dr. King. Or Oscar Arias Sanchez. Or Martin O'Brien, who founded the foremost human rights organization in Northern Ireland, and who tells us: "The worst thing is apathy - to sit idly by in the face of injustice and to do nothing about it."

Bob Herbert in the NY TImes

Apparently word has gone out that the DNC members are drowning in letters about Howard Dean. Darn, I didn't even get around to sending any myself!

I still hope they pick him. Terry McAuliffe seemed like a nice enough guy, but I never heard from him unless he wanted money.

OK, not that I really care that much (again, why does the world need the British Royal Family?) but did you know that the party Prince Harry got up in Nazi costume for was called...

'Natives and Colonials'?

I'd like to know if somebody dressed up as King Leopold of Belgium. He was responsible for the deaths of millions of Africans in the Congo. Or a soldier during the Boer War in South Africa. How about a figure in Algeria before the war for independence?

Good times...

Too bad a lot of the time, it sucks this hard:

• Egypt has defended a decision to renew "emergency" laws by referring to US anti-terror legislation
• Malaysia justifies detention without trial by invoking Guant  ·namo
• Russia cites Abu Ghraib to blame abuse in Chechnya solely on low-ranking soldiers.

But there are few signs in Washington of a change of approach. The White House secretly persuaded Congress to overturn legislation passed last month by a 96-2 Senate vote that would have imposed restrictions on extreme interrogation methods, the New York Times reported yesterday.

Here's more on that last one:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 - At the urging of the White House, Congressional leaders scrapped a legislative measure last month that would have imposed new restrictions on the use of extreme interrogation measures by American intelligence officers, Congressional officials say.

The defeat of the proposal affects one of the most obscure arenas of the war on terrorism, involving the Central Intelligence Agency's secret detention and interrogation of top terror leaders like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and about three dozen other senior members of Al Qaeda and its offshoots.

The Senate had approved the new restrictions, by a 96-to-2 vote, as part of the intelligence reform legislation. They would have explicitly extended to intelligence officers a prohibition against torture or inhumane treatment, and would have required the C.I.A. as well as the Pentagon to report to Congress about the methods they were using.

But in intense closed-door negotiations, Congressional officials said, four senior members from the House and Senate deleted the restrictions from the final bill after the White House expressed opposition.

Um... this is not a good thing. It's not a good thing when three incredibly repressive regimes cite our worst policies as examples to follow. They're supposed to be saying, "You know, that freedom of speech thing is pretty cool!" "Due process... maybe we should try it! It's so crazy, it just might work!" Not, "You call that torture? You're PUSSIES compared to the Americans!"

Here is their obsession du jour.

SEND THE PHILADELPHIA CHRISTIANS A THANK YOU LETTER OF ENCOURAGEMENT

Dear XXXX,
Four Christians in Philadelphia, PA, are facing 47 years in prison and fines up to $90,000 each. Their crime? They were reading from the Bible and sharing the Gospel on a public sidewalk. They stood up to protect their rights ³and oursà à ³and now they are being punished for exercising those rights.

 They were charged with eight crimes, including three felonies: possession of instruments of crime (a bullhorn), ethnic intimidation (saying that homosexuality is a sin), and inciting a riot (reading from the Bible some passages relating to homosexuality) despite the fact that no riot occurred.

 This is an example of pro-homosexual officials using the law to silence Christians who speak the truth about homosexuality. The American Family Association Center for Law and Policy has agreed to represent the Philadelphia 4 at no cost. In addition, we are encouraging Christians nationwide to send the Philadelphia 4 a "Thank You" letter of encouragement. They need to know they are appreciated Ãand aren ­t standing alone. The letter reads:

Just a note to say thanks for taking a stand to protect your First Amendment rights à ³and mine.

 There are, no doubt, some difficult days ahead. I will be praying for you. Your actions will encourage many, many others to take a bold stand in this battle.

Click here to send your thank you letter of encouragement. We will compile the list and present it to the Philadelphia 4 in person.

 Ask members in your church to go on line and sign the thank you letter. They can sign the letter by visiting www.afa.net, top center of the page. Pastors need to encourage every member to email the thank you letter. Put the email address in your church bulletins and newsletters.

 There is so much more about this case I don à ­t have room to put in this letter.  We have prepared a 25-minute VHS/DVD in which two AFA-CLP attorneys discuss the case in detail.

 When we made the VHS/DVD available last week, so many people tried to order it that our system quit working. We have corrected that problem.

 If possible, please help AFA with our expenses in representing these committed Christians. With your tax-deductible gift of $15 or more, we will send your choice of either the VHS or DVD. Watch the VHS/DVD, then share it with your Sunday School class and church. Every Christian in America should see and hear the information on this VHS/DVD. What has happened is a travesty of justice.

 Click here to get your copy of The Philadelphia 4 Story.

 Thanks for caring enough to get involved.  Please help get the word out by forwarding this to a friend.

Sincerely,

Don

Donald E. Wildmon, Founder and Chairman
 American Family Association

P.S. If you don't want to order The Philadelphia 4 Story but simply want to make a donation, Click Here.

I hadn't heard about this case before, and if you search on Google for "Philadelphia 4", you tend to get a lot of sports news. However, I did eventually find this news story in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Members of the group were arrested on charges including criminal conspiracy, rioting and ethnic intimidation after a loud, heated confrontation with a group of "Pink Angels" at the Outfest.

Lawyers for the city and District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham argued that Tucker should follow the U.S. Supreme Court's 1971 "Younger doctrine," which tells federal judges not to intervene in state court criminal cases unless there is compelling evidence that the prosecution was brought in bad faith or for purposes of harassment.

Fahling said a video of the Oct. 10 confrontation showed Marcavage speaking through a bullhorn while he and his supporters were being shouted down by irate gay activists.

City officials said the video did not show the start of the confrontation, when they said Marcavage tried to interrupt a performance with his antigay preaching and then disobeyed a police order to move to the perimeter of the Outfest to avoid the potential for violence.

I also found this discussion... on a sports website. Go figure.

Anyway, there you have it. 150,000 or so dead people in Southeast Asia, no WMDs for real y'all, Bush administration plans that will certainly have negative impacts on families all over America and the world, Christian and otherwise... but Donald Wildmon and the AFA say free the silly Philly 4. Word.

(It's too early in the morning for this.)

Oh, and the free speech implications: I can't tell what they are. But I know that if ACT UP interrupted an event, as I believe they did many times, they'd get arrested and charged too. (I just don't remember them telling straight people they were going to hell...)

This is more like it.

In our text, God does not say, Ã ¬Go [away from Me] to the wicked Pharaoh, Ã ® but ¬Come to Pharaoh,Ã Ã ® as if in coming toward Pharaoh, Moses would be, paradoxically, coming closer to God. The rebbe emphasizes the classic Chassidic teaching that God is present in every person, in every moment of experience, in all of life. God, then, is present in Pharaoh: in the tyrant, in the enemy, even in the raw face of evil. Still, God says, Ã ¬Come to Me, even when I am hidden deep within the face of your enemy, so veiled by layers of hurt and distortion that you cannot recognize Me. Ã ®

Hell, even Rabbi Boteach, of all people, gets it.

The human imperative is not to reckon with God à ­s secrets but to promote those values that He conveyed as being supreme, leading with the defense of human life.

Judaism sees death, illness and suffering as aberrations in creation. Suffering is not redemptive and affliction is not cleansing.

In Judaism, unlike in Christianity, nobody needs to die in order to bring about atonement for sin. Man à ­s mission is not to make peace with pain and await a better existence in the afterlife. Rather, we seek to perfect this world by filling in for God whenever He chooses to be overtly absent.

At the risk of offending my Muslim and Christian colleagues, I fully affirm that any doctor, even an atheist, who struggles to cure AIDS and save life is doing far more Godly work than a cleric who sacrilegiously asserts that the disease is a divine affliction for sexual sin.

What do these stories have in common?

From the Chronicle:

A federal judge Thursday ordered a suburban Atlanta school system to remove stickers from its high school biology textbooks that call evolution "a theory, not a fact," saying the disclaimers are an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.

 "By denigrating evolution, the school board appears to be endorsing the well-known prevailing alternative theory, creationism or variations thereof, even though the sticker does not specifically reference any alternative theories," U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper said.

 The stickers were put inside the books' front covers by public school officials in Cobb County in 2002. They read: "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered."

From the Washington Times:

Mr. Bush said he leans heavily on his religion every day that he is in the Oval Office and cannot imagine any man handling the pressures of the job without leaning on God.
   
"I fully understand that the job of the president is and must always be protecting the great right of people to worship or not worship as they see fit," Mr. Bush said. "That's what distinguishes us from the Taliban. The greatest freedom we have or one of the greatest freedoms is the right to worship the way you see fit.
   
"On the other hand, I don't see how you can be president at least from my perspective, how you can be president, without a relationship with the Lord," he said.

This book review by Andrew Sullivan in the New York Times

How do you break these people? According to the I.C.R.C., one prisoner ''alleged that he had been hooded and cuffed with flexicuffs, threatened to be tortured and killed, urinated on, kicked in the head, lower back and groin, force-fed a baseball which was tied into the mouth using a scarf and deprived of sleep for four consecutive days. Interrogators would allegedly take turns ill-treating him. When he said he would complain to the I.C.R.C. he was allegedly beaten more. An I.C.R.C. medical examination revealed hematoma in the lower back, blood in urine, sensory loss in the right hand due to tight handcuffing with flexicuffs, and a broken rib.''

Even Bybee's very narrow definition of torture would apply in this case. Here's another - not from Abu Ghraib:

A detainee ''had been hooded, handcuffed in the back, and made to lie face down, on a hot surface during transportation. This had caused severe skin burns that required three months' hospitalization. . . . He had to undergo several skin grafts, the amputation of his right index finger, and suffered . . . extensive burns over the abdomen, anterior aspects of the outer extremities, the palm of his right hand and the sole of his left foot.''

And another, in a detainee's own words: ''They threw pepper on my face and the beating started. This went on for a half hour. And then he started beating me with the chair until the chair was broken. After that they started choking me. At that time I thought I was going to die, but it's a miracle I lived. And then they started beating me again. They concentrated on beating me in my heart until they got tired from beating me. They took a little break and then they started kicking me very hard with their feet until I passed out.''

This other article in the Times

Always, there is a search for signs, as in the conviction of Rose Jayasuriya, 59, that her older sister Patricia, 74, still missing, died blessed because she had just taken communion when the sea invaded their church. Sri Lankan Buddhists believe that rebirth follows death, and that sin and good deeds determine one's future in this life and the next. Many Buddhists said they suspected that those who had lost children had done something wrong in a previous life.

M. Vilmot, 49, a baker whose 14 family members survived, was sure that those who had lost loved ones were being punished for some sin.

"We earn money the correct way," he said. "That's why it didn't happen to us." His bakery, perhaps 30 feet from the sea, was damaged but not destroyed. He said he followed the five Theravada Buddhist precepts of not lying, stealing, drinking, philandering or killing animals, while others only gave money to temples and then misbehaved."

So what do all these stories really have in common? For me, the answer is, "They all show the limits of religious faith."

What do I mean? I'll try to explain...

It seems that everywhere outside of my little liberal enclave, people treat certain kinds of religious faith as an absolute good. Believe in G*d and follow the rules.

So how does someone of such great religious faith get from point A to point B? Particularly when point B seems to involve condoning torture? Or telling your neighbors that they lost their children because they sinned? Or sending soldiers off to die for what is clearly a mistake? Or, less life-or-death, teach kids that the scientific method is hooey? How does promoting a narrow set of "Christian values" (or Muslim, or Buddist, or Jewish) become the most important thing? Who gets to decide what those values are?

As I type this, I feel some hesitation. Who am I to say which set of values should be most important? How do I know what values are "universally accepted?" Isn't it all just my narrow perspective? I start feeling like a very naive kid who can only repeat, "BUT IT'S WRONG! IT JUST IS!!!" over and over. Which isn't very convincing.

And yet, every religious faith (in its better moments) seems to strike the same notes. Try to not do harm, obey your higher power, whatever that is, tradition is important, killing is bad, except when it's necessary...

I am not exactly a religious person. I'm not exactly an atheist either. I do believe it's important to believe in something bigger than yourself, or you'll feel that life is pointless (and yes, you do have to have a "big picture" perspective to be president... but I don't see how Bush has got one). Maybe that "bigger" thing is G*d. Maybe it's just the planet. I don't know.

It's crazy to me to see people reject science because the scientific writings contradict the Word of the Lord. How small-minded. Why can they not think, "Wow, G*d is concerned with bigger things than whether or not George W. Bush gets reelected... he can move whole continents! He set in motion powerful forces like evolution!" How can you refuse to learn something new about how amazing this world is? If you believe G*d created us, you must believe s/he gave us minds to use.

I don't care what the religion in question is. If your religion tells you it's OK to treat some people like inanimate objects to be kicked around, your religion is f**ked up. If your religion tells you it's OK to set off explosions that kill people indiscriminately, your relgion is f**ked up. If your religion tells you that people who have bad things happen to them are only getting what they deserve, your religion is f**ked up. If your religion tells you not to expose yourself to other ideas, your relgion is f**ed up.

Just my opinion, of course...

My work has some upcoming events which it would like to promote with online videos. Last time I tried to post video, I kept running into compatability problems. I was able to copy the file off a DVD (yes, we did have permission to do this!), and then convert the DVD files into an AVI video (another story for another time, but there are free open-source tools that will do this). However, it's very difficult to post a video format that all computers and browsers can understand. QuickTime? Windows Media? AVI?

I kept hearing that the latest Big Thing was Flash video, because most people have Flash installed in their browsers. But I totally don't understand Flash, despite several classes and other attempts to learn it. Macromedia is happy to sell you a kit to create Flash video, but I'm not happy to spend more money when our budget is tight and I already need a bunch of other software upgrades.

So, long boring story short...

I just found this Windows-only application: Turbine Video Encoder, Free Edition. Works like a charm and the price is right. They do put a small logo in the upper right corner of each Flash video you create, but it's quite stylish looking and I can hardly begrudge them the link. Blue Pacific rocks.

(Now I can't wait to convert my digital camera movies. You've been warned.)

An excerpt from President Bush's 20/20 interview that's going to be aired soon:

As the president and First Lady Laura Bush sat down yesterday afternoon with ABC's Barbara Walters, Mr. Bush talked about his decision to go to war in Iraq, even though evidence now concludes that no weapons of mass destruction were there.

Barbara Walters: This was our main reason for going in. So now when we read, "Okay, the search is over," what do you feel?

President Bush: Well, like you, I felt like we'd find weapons of mass destruction. Or like many, many here in the United States, many around the world, the United Nations thought he had weapons of mass destruction, and so therefore, one, we need to find out what went wrong in the intelligence gathering. Saddam was dangerous. And . . . the world was safer without him in power.

Walters: But was it worth it if there were no weapons of mass destruction? Now that we know that that was wrong? Was it worth it?

 Bush: Oh, absolutely.

I can't wait to hear the rest of it. Bleh.

Howard Dean should be the next head of the DNC. He'll get people excited, he'll raise money, he'll light a fire under the Democrats. It's all good. Spread the word.

Stupid Virginia "miscarriage of justice" bill vanquished, thanks to bloggers!

So when is enough enough?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq ended last month, but the analysis of documents seized in the hunt continues, U.S. officials have said.

 Charles Duelfer, the CIA special adviser who led the investigation, has returned home and is expected next month to issue a final addendum to his September report that concluded pre-war Iraq had no WMD stockpiles, officials said.

 Asked if Duelfer's Iraq Survey Group, or ISG, had stopped actively searching for WMD, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said: "That's my understanding." He added, "A lot of their mission is focused elsewhere now."

 The Washington Post newspaper on Wednesday quoted ISG officials saying the violence in Iraq coupled with a lack of new information led them to fold up the effort shortly before Christmas -- nearly two years after President George W. Bush invaded the country, accusing it of a secret weapons program.

 "The physical search is over. The team that did the physical search is back. But the document exploitation of documents found in Iraq continues. We found tonnes of documents," one U.S. official said.

 But McClellan told reporters at a White House briefing that the ISG's mission in Iraq was not completely over.

 "That group is still in Iraq and the multinational forces continue to oversee that group, and if they have any reports of WMD, obviously they'll continue to follow up on those reports," he said.

Two thoughts:

1. Notice that although lack of evidence was one reason to stop the investigation, the violence in Iraq was the other reason given. The violence in Iraq that's happening as a result of our little "liberation."
2. When some of us keep saying "We think there was fraud in our elections. Let's investigate," they're told to give up, already, even though there's plenty of evidence that something was going on. But in the complete absence of evidence for Iraq's WMDs, it's still considered normal, healthy, and sane to keep on digging! What's wrong with this picture?
   

From the Australian:

"Australian feminist author Germaine Greer has officially quit Britain's Celebrity Big Brother household just five days in, after coming to blows with Brigitte Nielsen - the former Mrs Sylvester Stallone - over culinary concerns."

...or, "Small child 7, Sitter 0"


Wouldn't you do a victory dance if you'd succeeded in cramming three hats onto your sitter's head? Well, wouldn't you? Huh?

Read it. Just read it.

This past December, Republican strategist Jack Burkman appeared on MSNBC's "Scarborough Country" to back creationism in terms of populist democracy. "Why should the state and the federal government have a monopoly on defining what constitutes science?" he asked. "I see no problem with presenting a creationist view in the schools, given that 70 percent of Americans want that. The law should reflect democratic desires. It should reflect public desires."

 Of course, public desires don't determine the physical facts of the world. "The best argument that the creationists have got is that it's only fair to teach both sides," Matzke said. "The problem with that argument is that science is not a democracy and a lot of times there aren't two correct sides. There are people who believe that the sun goes around the earth. They're called geocentrists. That doesn't mean we should teach that."

These people are awful, and they are taking over the country.

And I thought we were falling behind already, in terms of education, technical prowess... what's it going to be like when our kids basically can't do any of the sciences, because they just don't believe in them, because they contradict the Sacred Word?

At the height of the Muslim empire, while Europe was in the deepest murk of the Dark Ages, Islamic mathematicians and scientists were making great strides. Their religious faith didn't keep them from being curious about the world around them, or in engaging in careful study of that world. Faith and knowledge aren't supposed to be enemies.

How do we get our sanity back, as a country, before it's too late?

OK, I'm really glad Social Security doesn't print your full SS# on their statements. Because this year, I didn't get my statement, I got Gregory M-----------'s. Oddly enough, it was addressed to me on the front.

This Greg dude was also born in March, though a few years before me. His work history seems similar, based on his income. But he makes a lot more than me now, and has paid more into Social Security... which is what clued me into the fact that I wasn't looking at my records.

So does that mean he's reading my records right now? How many other people got the wrong statement too?

Idiots.

Oh, and I really, really loved listening to the on-hold messages about how we need to do Something to fix Social Security. My tax dollars at work again?

To reiterate: idiots.

This Salon.com article does a great job of explaining what the individual companies represent and why this purchase shook up so many people.

...[O]ne of the things that makes LiveJournal special is that it is not just a set of software applications. There is also an extensive network of emotional support, both formally and informally...

----

Six Apart consistently provides excellent tools for those who want to be bloggers, but they started by building tools, not by building community. Whether LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick intended to or not, he created a community that exists far beyond his tools.

----

There is no doubt that Six Apart recognizes and values LiveJournal and the community that is embedded in it. At BlogTalk in Vienna, Austria, Mena Trott (the president of Six Apart) began her speech by stating that "I feel strongly -- and have always -- that personal weblogs are often marginalized because of their presumed triviality." She chastised self-identified bloggers for dismissing practices that appeared different from their own. But Trott also recognized cultural differences, noting that her original conception of bloggers reflected those who valued punditry and sought very large audiences to challenge journalism and politics. But through her work on TypePad -- a blogging service hosted by Six Apart -- she realized that there was an extensive population of bloggers who did not have these goals in mind -- they wanted to post only for their friends and family.

 It is the intimacy of friends, family and people-like-me that LiveJournal has fostered. When Six Apart bought LiveJournal, it did not simply purchase a tool -- it bought a culture. LJ challenges a lot of assumptions about blogging, and its users have different needs. They typically value communication and identity development over publishing and reaching mass audiences. The culture is a vast array of intimate groups, many of whom want that intimacy preserved. LiveJournal is not a lowbrow version of blogging; it is a practice with different values and needs, focused far more on social solidarity, cultural work and support than the typical blog... My hope is that Six Apart will learn from LiveJournal and treat LJers with nonpatronizing respect. In essence, the company must first value the social contract and culture that are LiveJournal and then let LiveJournal teach it how to make those better.

Mena Trott is no Bill Gates. I hope the LiveJournal and MovableType software are only improved by this merger... and that TypePad and LiveJournal get to continue to serve their very different user bases.

Edited to add: if you can't get to the Salon.com article (or don't want to view ads to get a free day pass), you should at least read Mena's latest post/speech on the subject of blogs. She gets it, or is trying to...

A Very Long Engagement: boring, MY ASS!

OK, maybe I'm not being fair. And I'm in danger of turning into one of those people like a Thomas Kinkade admirer, who tearfully opines that art critics Just Don't Get It, they're snobs who are jealous of his success and just don't get the beauty and how he paints what's really important in life... but sorry, this was a great movie, and the reviewer didn't get it.

Of course, maybe it helped that I'd read and loved the book for ten years. But the cast was terrific, the dialog was good, yes, it was visually pretty (when not showing people getting blown up), and as Lesley pointed out, The English Patient romanticized war. This one didn't. That alone makes this one worth seeing.

Humph.

I'm speechless.

It sounds preposterous to talk about criminalizing women who suffer miscarriages, but one Virginia legislator is proposing just that.  HB1677, "Report of Fetal Death by mother, penalty" is a bill introduced by John A. Cosgrove (R) of Chesapeake.  Cosgrove's bill requires any woman who experiences "fetal death" without a doctor's assistance to report this to the local law-enforcement agency within twelve hours of the miscarriage.  Failure to do so is punishable as a Class 1 Misdemeanor.

Just... wow. Really, it is time to reread The Handsmaid's Tale...

Why should I be surprised...

SACRAMENTO Ã ± Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has shocked education groups by not only breaking a deal that would give schools more money this year, but also proposing to weaken the Proposition 98 school-funding guarantee in the future.

A year ago, the newly elected governor was surrounded by beaming school officials as he announced a breakthrough agreement to save $2 billion by trimming the growth of school funding.

At a briefing by administration officials this week, however, the school groups were told that the budget the governor will propose Monday does not give schools $2.2 billion that they say was part of the deal because of increased revenue received by the state.

Arnold, the education ASSassin.

Read this...

JAN. 25 Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, in a memorandum to President Bush, said that the Justice Department's advice in the Jan. 9 memorandum was sound and that Mr. Bush should declare the Taliban and Al Qaeda outside the coverage of the Geneva Conventions. That would keep American officials from being exposed to the federal War Crimes Act, a 1996 law that carries the death penality.

and this in the New York Times.

Mr. Gonzales's request resulting in the original August 2002 memorandum was somewhat unusual, the officials said, because he went directly to lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel, bypassing the office of the deputy attorney general, which is often notified of politically delicate requests for legal opinions made by executive-branch agencies, including the White House.

Oh, and...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 (Xinhuanet) -- The White House refused Thursdayto provide the Senate additional documents over the role of attorney general nominee Alberto Gonzales had played in the decision to allow aggressive interrogations of prisoners.

Senate Democrats said the White House refused to give them all of the memos and documents they need to trace how that decision was made as the Senate began its confirmation hearing over Gonzales' nomination as attorney general.

And now the dude says:

"I will no longer represent only the White House. I will represent the United States of America and its people. I understand the difference between the two roles."

You shmuck, the White House is supposed to represent the United States of America. So you should have been representing American interests all along. And American interests do not include trying to find legal justifications for torture! Arghhh!

I went to see Travelling Jewish Theatre's Bright River at the Julia Morgan Theater last night. It's a bit hard to describe. Technically, I suppose it's a play, but it's more like storytelling set to music, though without being a musical. All the spoken performance is done by one person, the play's author, who mostly plays a detective who goes into the Afterlife to try to find a cop's daugher who died grieving over her soldier boyfriend, who was killed in Iraq. He also does monologues from the point of view of the soldier and a demon.

Very simple set, no costumes to speak of apart from a hat and basic clothes (and I have to confess to being mesmerized/distracted by a patch of sweat that stained the lead guy's t-shirt right on the belly-button about halfway through the play.)

The most extraordinary part of the show is the music. There's a bassist, a violinist, and the main guy plays the flute. But he doesn't just play the flute - he makes mouth noises on it, in such a way that he's playing percussion and melody at the same time. It's very cool. The others create interesting and beautiful noises with their instruments as well. At one point, they also pick up water bottles and blow on the tops. Who needs Pan flutes?

The real ace in the hole is "Kid Beyond", AKA Andrew Chaiken, formerly of the HouseJacks, though the program bio doesn't mention that band.  Last time I saw him, he was performing with them in a reunion concert, and the crowd went crazy during his solo. He is even more amazing now. No longer limited to being a hip-hop human drum machine, he sang in a high, ethereal voice, impersonated a gun battle, portrayed a bouncer at a bird conference (don't ask me to explain) and did a very convincing imitation of a bus station.

It's going to be at the Juiia Morgan for two more weeks, so check it out! (And Wednesdays and Thursdays are "pay what you can" nights...)

Way, apparently.

Six Apart to Buy LiveJournal

If this is true... my friends who wish that I was a real LiveJournal blogger will get their wish... and maybe MovableType will start supporting friends-locked posts.

"We're all in the same gang!"

When I was a kid, I had a couple of books called The Book of Lists which was pretty much what the title says it was. The lists were wonderful. I wish I could remember them better, but they included lots of odd factoids and historical tidbits. (Oddest presidential assassination attempts, that sort of thing.)

I've recently been informed of two websites that are also all about lists. They aren't nearly as informative, but I think I'll have a lot of fun with them too.

McSweeney's Lists
Sample list: "Alternatives to "Opening a Can o' Whupass" for the Less Confrontationally Inclined"
Sample item from list: "Unzipping a Fanny Pack o' Friendliness"

Merlin's Lists of Five Things
Sample list: "Five things it would probably be disingenuous for me to rap about"
Sample item from list: "my milkshake"

Excellent post giving some background (with links) on the situation in Aceh, pre- and post-tsunami. It's not good.

A second and equally pernicious tragedy besets Sumatra. And this one (almost) no one's talking about. Indonesia has one of the most corrupt, incompetent and repressive governments in the entire world. Life may not be too miserable for you if you live in a place like Java or Bali. But in the outlying provinces like Irian Jaya and Aceh (Sumatra), life can be a living hell. Subject to the exploitation of multinational mineral extraction companies which use the Indonesian military to bolster their overwhelming control, the local population lives in fear and poverty. Perhaps that is why there are serious insurrections in both provinces.

Best headline I've ever seen, I think. The Onion couldn't have come up with better:

"Yellow Journalism Stains Third Annual Interfaith Pagan Parade and Celebration"

OK, so it's from a letter to the editor, not a news story. Still, gotta love the Daily Planet.