We're off to go over to Grant's Pass and visit my son's mom and her partner for a couple of days.

Details at eleven.

Time to shift gears. The anonymous poster who's convinced Hindus are jihadists (I think) and is very concerned about what goes where when it comes to sex posted again. I baited him(her?) in reply. Taunted him(her).

Nah, that's no good. When people are burning with anger, dumping fuel on them is not a good thing to do. Bad karma. The poster has a lot of rage and needs...well, the opposite of disturbing the comfortable is comforting the disturbed. So, look, sorry I teased you. Life's rough enough without a lot of cross-tormenting.

Good luck.

A dozen or so posts back, I mentioned a truly fatuous story, about some "sacred" bull in an English hindu monastery. The bull has tuberculosis, so sacred or not, it's going to be killed.

Someone just posted a comment over that news item about fucking jihadists and suicide bombers and hamburger—nicely incoherent phrasing in the post. I think, repeat think, the poster believed the Hindus and jihadists were on the same track. Wow: if that's right, that's really an ignorant comment. Could it have been Billo? Rush? Tom Tancredo? One of the Minuteman gang?

Let us know, anonymous poster, let us know who you really are!

I try not to say much about Hillary Clinton—or Bill, for that matter. They're both classic late-20 Century Democrats. They’re somewhat-left-wing social democrat. Nothing radical, nothing really unusual. Where the far right gets the impression they are socialists or even farther left is beyond me: the reasons are matters for students of abnormal psychology, or maybe for neuro-biologists.

The Democratic Party (remember their logo is an ass) loves her: she’s a woman, competitive, smart, a lawyer, and is pleasant enough in appearance. And she likes things just the way they are, except she wants to be the president. She voted for the war and supported it. In a recent debate she said she would not, repeat not, go out on a limb and actually meet with various national leaders the US doesn’t like. She’d leave that to the diplomatic service. Right: all the little Kissinger-ians, the diplomats who still believe the Treaty of Vienna was a good deal.

Would she be better than Bush? Sure—but so would Baba Wawa. Lassie would be better than Bush. Hillary Clinton’s world is not the world of the average citizen—you think she eats macaroni and cheese, has to deal with crooked car mechanics, shop for groceries during the evening rush hour? Not a chance. Probably the only candidate who actually knows what those scenes are like is Kucinich. Edwards might have a clue. Obama might hear about it from his outreach workers, sort of. Can you imagine sitting down in a booth at Denny’s and having Hillary Clinton actually listen to you? Or Biden?

(For that matter, can you imagine having Giulianni or Fred Thompson or Dick Cheney actually listen to you? Let alone Tom DeLay or Newt Gingrich.)

The phrase that was running through my head before I started this little rap was the definition of insanity I first heard in AA meetings: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a different outcome.

Right now, the “same thing” we do over and over is vote for self-serving egotistical freaks—and we hope, once we elect people, they’ll actually behave in a way that benefits us and our country.

John A., over at America Blog, has a quick bite at “our” government’s on-going and pathological quest for knowning everything about everybody—expecially, though, everyone’s sexuality and religion.

It's "pathological," I say, because it's about control. The people in power want total control over people. It's sick.

Saturday, July 28, 2007

US demands, Europe agrees to provide, info on whether foreign travelers to US are gay, union members, religious beliefs
by John Aravosis (DC) · 7/28/2007 10:23:00 AM ET

http://www.americablog.com/

And what the hell business is it of the US government whether a foreign visitor is gay, let alone all the other new information they're demanding? And worse, how is this not a violation of EU privacy laws - how in the world did the European governments approve of this?

From the Washington Post:

The United States and the European Union have agreed to expand a security program that shares personal data about millions of U.S.-bound airline passengers a year, potentially including information about a person's race, ethnicity, religion and health.

Under the agreement, airlines flying from Europe to the United States are required to provide data related to these matters to U.S. authorities if it exists in their reservation systems. The deal allows Washington to retain and use it only "where the life of a data subject or of others could be imperiled or seriously impaired," such as in a counterterrorism investigation.

According to the deal, the information that can be used in such exceptional circumstances includes "racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership" and data about an individual's health, traveling partners and sexual orientation.

And what a surprise, the US is saying that if we only had this kind of information before September 11, we could have prevented the attacks.

If available at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Chertoff said, such information would have, "within a matter of moments, helped to identify many of the 19 hijackers by linking their methods of payment, phone numbers and seat assignments."

Uh huh. Had we only known which way Mohammad Atta swung in bed, maybe then George Bush wouldn't have gone on vacation for an entire month after having read a memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US." And in any case, notice how nothing Chertoff is saying has anything to do with your sexual orientation, philosophical beliefs, union status or anything else that is ACTUALLY on the list of info they're requesting.

There is nothing our government won't do, no rights they won't violate. But for Europe to agree to this mess, this incredible violation. It's time for you Europeans to have a little chat with your own governments.

Oh, and let me just say that had we a Congress that actually cared about privacy, perhaps we could have avoided this mess. Just saying.

Sweet Jesus:
People have just discovered that pro football players are not necessarily angels. That professional athletes can be assholes is about as profound an insight as learning that not all soldiers are John Wayne clones or very few politicians are like Jimmy Stewart. Wow, the sun comes up in the East! is about as profound.

I guess that's because most people seldom notice anything except themselves, one way or the other. The smart ones notice their own processes, but not much else; the dumb ones worry about how they look to others. Once in a while they can notice their families or lovers, but none of that is as facinating as themselves! Hey, we revel in that. Self-awareness, right? Somehow I think self-absorbtion is NOT what Socrates had in mind when he said "Know thyself."

Warm days here in central Oregon. Nights are warm, too, but down in the 50s; still pretty good for sleeping. Great weather.

If you make a list of the countries, U.S. allies, where repressive techniques were first tried out, and then later used in our country, it would be a long one. South Africa in the old days, Chile, Nicaragua, Salvador, Israel, Viet Nam, and now the country we consider the cradle of our civil liberties, Great Britain. Imagine, being hassled because of your t-shirt, and because of an utterly vague defiinition of “terrorism.”

Are we the greatest country in the world or what?

The answer is “What.”

Anti-war tea parties?

Another draconian attempt to curb Britain's civil liberties
By Nigel Morris, Home Affairs Correspondent
Published: 27 July 2007

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article2809172.ece

The attempt to prevent demonstrators from reaching Heathrow airport is the latest in a long line of erosion of civil liberties which started during Tony Blair's reign. ***

Section 44 of the 2000 Terrorism Act, which gives police the power to stop and search anyone in an area considered a likely terrorist target. It was used most notoriously to hold Walter Wolfgang, the veteran peace activist who heckled Jack Straw, when he was Foreign Secretary, at the 2005 Labour conference.

In the same year, John Catt, 81, was detained as he walked towards the seafront for an anti war demonstration near the conference hall in Brighton.

He fell foul of the police after he was spotted wearing a T-shirt accusing Tony Blair and George Bush of war crimes. The police record said the "purpose" of the stop and search was "terrorism".

***

It has also been used against Maya Evans, a chef who stood on the Cenotaph in Whitehall and read out a list of soldiers killed in Iraq and against Mark Barrett, a tour guide who staged an anti-war tea party opposite the House of Commons.

Buses. Transit. Free. What a concept. My thanks to both Alternet and The Tyee for a good essay that needs to be transited to every town and city.

AlterNet
Fare-Free Public Transit Could Be Headed to a City Near You
By Dave Olsen, The Tyee
Posted on July 26, 2007, Printed on July 26, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/57802/

The time has come to stop making people pay to take public transit.

Why do we have any barriers to using buses and urban trains? The threat of global warming is no longer in doubt. The hue and cry of the traffic-jammed driver grows louder every commute. And politicians are getting the message. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has ordered his staff to seriously examine the costs of charging people to ride public transit. And Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York, recently voiced to a reporter his top dream: "I would have mass transit be given away for nothing and charge an awful lot for bringing an automobile into the city."

Consider this sampling of communities providing free rides on trolleys, buses, trams and ferries: Staten Island, N.Y.; Island County, Wash.; Chapel Hill, N.C.; Vail, Colo.; Logan and Cache Valley, Utah; Clemson, S.C.; Commerce, Calif.; Châteauroux, Vitré, and Compiègne, France; Hasselt, Belgium; Lubben, Germany; Mariehamn, Finland; Nova Gorica, Slovenia; Türi, Estonia; and Övertorneå, Sweden.

Or speak, as I have, with transit officials in parts of Belgium and the state of Washington, where fare-free transit has hummed along smoothly now for years.

Raising fares kills ridership

As even conservatives like California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger trumpet a green agenda, more people are taking a hard look at just how many of their tax dollars subsidize the private car versus less polluting buses and trains. You have to figure in roads, parking and other infrastructure, tax breaks for car and fuel companies, as well as subsidies for car-carrying ferries and federal income tax reductions and write-offs for companies that use motor vehicles.

By some estimates, the government subsidy to each private vehicle owner is about $3,700, while a common cost for providing a single trip by transit is about $5.

Yet big or small, most transit systems are scraping by or on the brink of financial collapse, paradoxically because of their reliance on the farebox. Revenue for any system drops when ridership dips or when fares are increased. Yes, when fares are increased. This is so well proven it has a name: the Simpson-Curtain rule. Most often the dip in ridership is caused by a fare hike.

To understand this cycle better, let's imagine that you are in charge of a transit system. You feel pressure to increase service or to maintain service despite increasing costs. You need to raise more money. Politically and practically, for most systems, the easiest way is to raise fares. But soon after, ridership goes down. It drops 3.8 percent for every 10 percent increase in fares, researchers have found. Which means you either haven't gained much new revenue, or worse, you've started spiraling downward.

Just one example is Toronto's transit system, which went into a 12-year downward spiral throughout the 1990s after a series of fare increases and resultant service cutbacks. The authoritative Transit Cooperative Research Program in Washington, D.C., has clearly documented how fare increases always result in lower ridership.

Fare-free success stories

Recently I met the people who run Island Transit in Whidbey Island, Wash., and rode their fare-free bus system. It's a serious operation with 56 buses and 101 vans. Ridership tops a million a year. Its operating budget is $8,392,677 -- none of it from fares, all from a 0.6 percent sales tax collected in Island County.

Despite the pressure to conform, the pressure to make users pay and the pressure from conservative politicians at all levels, Island Transit has been fare-free from day one and is proudly so 20 years later. Not one Island Transit bus, shelter or van has advertising on it. All of Island Transit's buses are bike rack equipped and wheelchair accessible. For folks with disabilities, Island Transit also offers a paratransit service with door-to-door service.

Island Transit has developed a simple policy around dealing with behavior that is unruly or disturbing to others: "The operator is the captain of their own ship." This is backed up by a state law regarding unlawful bus conduct. A bothersome rider first gets a written warning. The next time, his or her riding privileges are revoked. These privileges are only restored after completing a Rider Privilege Agreement. Island Transit has further protected its employees by installing a camera system in every vehicle. The big brotherness of it is acknowledged, but the safety of their operators simply takes priority. "Show me another transit system in Washington state," said Island Transit operator Odis D. Jenkins, "where the teenagers more often than not say 'thank you' when they get off."

Done right, fare-free transit can transform society, says Patrick Condon, an expert on sustainable urban development who knows the system in Amherst, Mass. "Free transit changed the region for the better. Students, teens and the elderly were able to move much more freely through the region. Some ascribed the resurgence of Northampton, Mass, at least in part, to the availability of free transit. Fares in that region would have provided such a small percentage of capital and operating costs that their loss was made up for by contributions by the major institutions to benefit: the five colleges in the region," says Condon, a professor at the University of British Columbia.

Another success story, a decade old, can be found in Hasselt, Belgium. This city of 70,000 residents, with 300,000 commuters from the surrounding area, has made traveling by bus easy, affordable and efficient. Now, people in Hasselt often speak of "their" bus system and with good reason. The Boulevard Shuttle leaves you waiting for at most five minutes, the Central Shuttle has a 10-minute frequency, and systemwide you never have to wait more than a half an hour.

A prime lesson offered by Hasselt is the fact that it radically improved the bus system as well as its walking and cycling infrastructure before it removed the fareboxes. In 1996, there were only three bus routes with about 18,000 service hours/year. Today, there are 11 routes with more than 95,000 service hours/year.

The transit system in Hasselt cost taxpayers approximately $1.8 million in 2006. This amounts to 1 percent of its municipal budget and makes up about 26 percent of the total operating cost of the transit system. The Flemish national government covered the rest (approximately $5.25 million) under a long-term agreement.

Hasselt City Council's principal aim in introducing free public transport was to promote the new bus system to such a degree that it would catch on and become the natural option for getting around. And it did -- immediately. On the first day, bus ridership increased 783 percent! The first full year of free-fare transit saw an increase of 900 percent over the previous year; by 2001, the increase was up to 1,223 percent, and ridership continues to go up every day.

Planning essential

So how did Hasselt make it happen?

On Jan. 1, 1991, the Flemish Authority brought together three public transport companies and joined them into one autonomously operating state company. This company's raison d'etre is to provide transport for the whole of Flanders. That was the beginning of the Flemish Transport Co., since then generally known under the name "De Lijn." This structure allows it to buy buses more cheaply, and it can even share buses among the different city and regional systems whenever they're needed.

"To be successful," says Jean Vandeputte, the chief engineer-director for the City of Hasselt, "I think that the public transport system must not be crowded at the start. Our project was originally organized to attract more passengers and to have less cars in the city center. The buses also need separate lanes, because traveling by bus has to be faster than by car, so the infrastructure of intersections and streets has to be adapted. The buses have to be modern, clean ... you need to have more bus stops. And the shelters must be attractive."

By making public transport free of charge, it became possible to guarantee the right to mobility for all residents in Hasselt. Their position was that an improved public transport system simply means a better use of the public space that will not only improve the quality of traffic, but the quality of life in general.

The Hasselt experience before 1997 was not much different than anywhere else in the Western world. Car ownership in Hasselt rose by 25 percent from 1987 to 1999, while the population increased by only 3.3 percent during this same period. Although Hasselt is the fourth largest city in Belgium, it ranked first in car ownership during those years.

After implementing fare-free transit, over 40 percent of the people visiting hospitals switched from a car to the bus. Over 32 percent of the people "going to market" switched from using cars to buses. Overall, in November 1997, 16 percent of all bus riders studied previously drove a car. It is important to understand that this was achieved by the elimination of fares, the expansion of service and the implementation of bus priority measures such as bus lanes.

Karl Storchmann, a researcher at Yale University, has documented that even the 12 percent of bus riders that were previously cyclists, as well as the 9 percent that switched from walking to the bus in Hasselt, will produce a net positive change for society, since pedestrians and cyclists "belong to the most endangered road users, [and] every decrease in these modes will lead to a reduction of automobile-caused costs [i.e., deaths and injuries]."

Because Hasselt's policy makers understand that bikes are the most sustainable form of transport, today in Hasselt one can borrow a bicycle, tandem, scooter or wheelchair bike free of charge. On the Groenplein (behind the town hall) you can also borrow a stroller free of charge for your little one (as its website states, "Handy when your toddler can't make the distance"). And two wheelchairs are available for free loan from the tourism bureau. The city's center is cleared of cars, offering instead a network of pedestrian shopping streets."

This approach has saved the City of Hasselt millions of Euros on transportation infrastructure costs, and clearly the city isn't afraid to innovate. As Hasselt Mayor Steve Stevaert declared, "We don't need any more new roads, but new thought highways!"

The costs of collecting fares

A prime reason to quit charging people to take the bus is that collecting bus fares costs a lot of money. It takes both machines and people to sell, make and distribute tickets and collect, count and deposit cash.

King County's Metro Transit System, which includes the city of Seattle and an estimated population of just under 2 million, concludes, after a comprehensive assessment, that the cost of collecting fares will hit about $8 million this year -- enough to buy 18 new buses.

A major analysis of U.S. public transit systems found that for larger systems, fare collection costs can be as high as 22 percent of the revenue collected. Another study showed that New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority spends roughly $200 million a year just to collect money from transit riders. What about switching to "smart card" technology? Wouldn't that save money? In Toronto, the city's Transit Commission estimates the switch will cost almost $250 million (or about 520 new buses) for card readers, vending machines and retrofits, and over $10 million a year (22 new buses) after that, which has some transit authorities saying the money could be better used in improving service.

For similar reasons, some cities have decided it just doesn't pay to police people who don't pay fares. In 1996, the Maryland Mass Transit Administration (MTA) wanted to figure out how to stop those few riders that cheat; its Central Light Rail Line was "barrier free." MTA wanted to know whether it should start using barriers in order to force people to pay their fares.

The study found that more people would pay, yes, but the cost of making them pay would be higher than the revenue from extra fares collected. Much higher. The least expensive alternative would cost the MTA $18.54 for each potential fare dollar recovered over a 10-year period. In other words, if $1 million is currently lost to fare evasion, it would cost at least $18.5 million to collect that money.

Spread the burden and benefit

All of which brings us back to the logic of fare-free transit.

Whidbey Island's transit planners did their own studies two decades ago. In 1986 they did an extensive cost-benefit analysis of collecting fares and found that either no significant revenue would be generated for Island Transit, or that the costs of collecting fares would exceed the revenue generated.

Other systems that didn't plan well have had near disastrous experiences, in particular Austin, Texas. As one study from Florida State University concludes, "There has not been a full fare-free policy instituted on a systemwide basis since the experiment in Austin. The negative consequences of these experiments, the Austin experiment in particular, have left lasting impressions on transit operators throughout the country."

But a lot of opposition to the idea is grounded less in practicalities, more in ideology.

It's a matter of faith among most transit officials, for example, that if you remove the fare, the service becomes worthless.

"Be aware that when one moves the price of something to zero, in addition to challenging capacity, one is stating that the product or service is not an economic good -- that is, that it has no value," warned one transit official. "Pricing signals value. I would suggest you keep it nonzero."

Perhaps North America's transit planners need to switch jobs with builders of roads and bridges. Those transportation essentials are, after all, usually paid for through taxes or bonds, and we use them without being charged each time we roll over them.

Imagine if a government tried to put a farebox into every car. Each time drivers took a trip, they would have to dig into their pockets to find a couple dollars -- in exact change.

And yet, we force the poorest among us to live this way. In British Columbia's Lower Mainland, one of the most expensive places to live in North America, a family traveled from a suburb to Vancouver by public transit during spring break. It cost the mother and her three sons $26 in day passes.

For those without well-paying jobs, a bus fare of any amount can be a barrier to finding work, making it to school, visiting friends and relatives or even getting food to eat.

Wouldn't it make more sense to treat public transit the way we treat most road infrastructure and pay for it all by some method of taxation?

Reality check

But before we act, let's make a few important guiding principles clear:

Taking the farebox out of any bus without a plan is just a recipe for disaster. That's the lesson from Island Transit on Whidbey Island and Hasselt, Belgium, which proves beyond doubt that fare-free systems can be safe, clean and very friendly.

Making transit free of charge won't in itself allow huge numbers of people to abandon their cars. We'll need more public transit vehicles, running more frequently, too. The decade-old experience in Hasselt has shown that investing in the service prior to the removal of the fareboxes not only makes the transition smoother, it will get people on the bus and out of their cars.

We need to pay, one way or another. There isn't a transit system on the planet that pays for itself solely through the farebox. If we want a transit system that is adequate, reliable and gets those lonely drivers out of their cars, we need to find funding formulas that are adequate and reliable.

Let us remind ourselves of what really matters. We don't have much time left to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions before catastrophic climatic changes irreversibly occur. It seems absurd, therefore, to continue to make it more difficult than it already is for people to use the bus and train.

Fare-free transit is not only feasible, it may well be critical for us to survive as a species. It can save us money, and it contributes to a much more fair, equitable and mobile society.

The only thing left to do is to let your transit providers and elected officials know how you feel. Speak up now -- for our children and for our planet.

Sixteen reasons to stop charging

Consider the many benefits:

1. A barrier-free transportation option to every member of the community (no more worries about exact change, expiring transfers or embarrassment about how to pay)

2. Eliminating a "toll" from a mode of transportation that we as a society want to be used (transit is often the only way of getting around that charges a toll)

3. Reducing the inequity between the subsidies given to private motorized vehicle users and public transport users

4. Reducing the need for private motorized vehicle parking

5. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions, other air pollutants, noise pollution (especially with electric trolleys), and runoff of toxic chemicals into fresh water supplies and ocean environments

6. Reducing overall consumption of oil and gasoline

7. Eliminating the perceived need to spend billions on roads and highways

8. Contributing significantly to the local economy by keeping our money in our communities

9. Reducing litter (in some cities transfers and tickets have overtaken fast food packaging as the most common form of street garbage)

10. Saving trees by eliminating the need to print transfers and tickets

11. Allowing all bus doors to be used to load passengers, making service faster and more efficient

12. Allowing operators (drivers) to focus on driving safely

13. Giving operators more time to answer questions

14. Providing operators a safer work environment since fare disputes are eliminated

15. Eliminating fare evasion and the criminalization of transit-using citizens

16. Fostering more public pride in shared, community resources

Bear in mind that free public transit eliminates the significant costs of fare collection and combating fare evasion. It also cuts costs associated with global warming, air and noise pollution, litter collection and garbage removal.

Dave Olsen is a bicycle and public transit consultant, researcher and advocate who lives in Vancouver. You can reach him via editor@thetyee.ca.

This article is adapted from a five-part series published by The Tyee, Canada's leading independent source of online news and views. The series was reader-funded through charitable donations to the Tyee Fellowship Fund for Solutions-oriented Reporting.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

This is pretty much self-explanatory. Even the thuggish guy in fatigues.

CITIZEN-TIMES.com
Flag-defiling charge ends in fight, arrests
http://www.rawstory.com/showarticle.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.citizen-times.com%2Fapps%2Fpbcs.dll%2Farticle%3FAID%3D200770725118
Mike McWilliams
July 26, 2007 12:15 am

A couple who said they were protesting the state of the country by flying the U.S. flag upside down with signs pinned to it found themselves in jail following a scuffle with a deputy Wednesday morning.

Mark and Deborah Kuhn were arrested on two counts of assault on a government employee, resisting arrest and a rarely used charge, desecrating an American flag, all misdemeanors. The Kuhns were released from custody Wednesday afternoon.

***

Arrest reports show Buncombe County Sheriff’s deputy Brian Scarborough went to the Kuhns’ home on 68 Brevard Road about 8:45 a.m. Wednesday to investigate a complaint of an American flag on display after being desecrated.

State law prohibits anyone from knowingly mutilating, defiling, defacing or trampling the U.S. or North Carolina flags. Lt. Randy Sorrells of the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office said the Kuhns desecrated the flag by pinning signs to it, not by flying it upside down.

An upside-down flag typically is flown as a distress signal. The Kuhns said they flew it this way not out of disrespect but to symbolize the state of the country.

Deborah Kuhn said the signs pinned to the flag included an explanation on the meaning of an upside-down flag and asked to “help our country.” One of the signs was a photo of President Bush with “Out Now” written on it, they said.

The couple flew the flag for about a week before Wednesday.

***
Deborah Kuhn said a man dressed in fatigues came to the door to “harass my husband” about the flag. Someone also took photos of the flag, she said.

***

Use of this site signifies your agreement to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
Copyright 2007 Asheville Citizen-Times. All rights reserved.

With five days to go before the end of July, an Associated Press tally showed that at least 1,759 Iraqis were killed in war-related violence through July 26, a more than 7 percent increase over the 1,640 who were reported killed in all of June.

Look it up for yourself. I feel sick at my stomach.

A comment by a reader of a Harford Courant article about a librarian gagged by the Patriot Act caught my attention.

After the usual right-wing rambles about the Welfare-Warfare State, the poster said the solution was less government. Yeah: the smaller the government the less people will have to be involved, right? "Hey, the government's too big; it would only get bigger if I got involved."

Lazy man’s excuse for sitting back and not doing a damn thing. The story and the post can be found here

I’ve mentioned Dave Neiwert’s blog before. Today, he had a post regarding the actual dangers of Bush’s latest assertion (and assumption) of executive power. Looking down through his log, I came across the following quote, about how incremental change happens and there are seldom big, ah-hah power grabs. Spooky.

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/

As Milton Mayer explained in They Thought They Were Free:

"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have....

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

Six months ago, this would have had me cheering. Now, well, we’ll wait and see what happens. These guys ultimately protect their own, and they aren’t going to do anything that might seriously question the way this country works. At least how the government works—how it sustains itself. Like the Watergate hearings, anything that happens is ultimately going to claim to “restore the honor” of the United States government. Which is like, yeah, restoring the honor of a hooker.

2 Bush Aides to Face Contempt Citations
House Democrats Ready Contempt of Congress Citations Against Two Presidential Aides
By LAURIE KELLMAN
The Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=3411816
WASHINGTON

Heading toward a separation-of-powers showdown, House Democrats prepared contempt of Congress citations against two White House aides who have refused to comply with subpoenas for information on the abrupt firings of federal prosecutors.

The White House has said that Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former legal counselor Harriet Miers, among other top advisers to President Bush, are absolutely immune from subpoenas because their documents and testimony are protected by executive privilege.

House Judiciary Committee Democrats, led by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., reject that claim and have drafted for a vote Wednesday a resolution citing Miers and Bolten with contempt of Congress, a federal misdemeanor punishable by up to a $100,000 fine and a one-year prison sentence.

The panel's vote is the first step on the road to a possible constitutional showdown in federal court.

If history and self-interest are any guide, the two sides will resolve the dispute before then.***

In Nazi Germany, the domestic security agencies were very small. Almost everything they acted upon came from tips—informers. We know they’re unreliable. But busts look good when the Feebs go for more funding, whether or not the people they bust are actually guilty of anything.

Onward, Christian soldiers, and while you’re at it, better learn German.

The FBI's Domestic Spying
07.25.07 -- 2:01PM
By David Kurtz
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/015815.php
Justin Rood reports:

The FBI is taking cues from the CIA to recruit thousands of covert informants in the United States as part of a sprawling effort to boost its intelligence capabilities.

According to a recent unclassified report to Congress, the FBI expects its informants to provide secrets about possible terrorists and foreign spies, although some may also be expected to aid with criminal investigations, in the tradition of law enforcement confidential informants. The FBI did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

The FBI said the push was driven by a 2004 directive from President Bush ordering the bureau to improve its counterterrorism efforts by boosting its human intelligence capabilities.

The aggressive push for more secret informants appears to be part of a new effort to grow its intelligence and counterterrorism efforts. Other recent proposals include expanding its collection and analysis of data on U.S. persons, retaining years' worth of Americans' phone records and even increasing so-called "black bag" secret entry operations.

Just the sort of thing you would want Alberto Gonzales ultimately in charge of.

When you’re back is to the wall—or the cliff—you might as well... I believe this is all about b.s.—sacred b.s., perhaps...but b.s. nonetheless. Whatever.

U.K. appeals court sets bull's-eye on sick but 'sacred' bovine
Hindu monastery in Wales devastated by court's reversal

Last Updated: Tuesday, July 24, 2007 | 9:56 AM ET

The Associated Press
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2007/07/24/shambo-bull.html

The decision to slaughter a bull revered as sacred by his Hindu caretakers is justified, a British court ruled Monday, overturning a decision by a lower court last week.

The ruling could spell the end for Shambo, a six-year-old Friesian bull, whose life has been in jeopardy since he tested positive for bovine tuberculosis in April.

Local regulations stipulate that cattle suspected of carrying the disease be slaughtered, but Shambo's caretakers at the Skanda Vale monastery in southwestern Wales have mounted a campaign to save the beast. Hindus consider cattle sacred, and lawyers for the monastery argued that slaughtering the bull would interfere with their religious rights.

The monastery also took its case to the public, creating an internet petition, a blog containing Shambo's "daily thoughts," and even a webcast called "Moo Tube" that tracks the bull's movements around its hay-filled shrine.

Anyone out there remember HUAC? House UnAmerican Activities Committee? Joe McCarthy? All those days of rampant flag-waving and ruthless dissent-smashing? Not many, I guess, do. They might read about it in Howard Zinn or somewhere, but it’s obviously nowhere near as important as...hell...Lindsay Lohan or someone like that. Paula Abdul or Judge Judy. What’s happened, though, is that the blind vote-whoring and publicity sucking politicians are back in the saddle.

Ward Churchill is a man a lot of people don’t like. Big deal. A lot of people don’t like Hillary Clinton or Katie Couric or Brian Williams. That a person is popular or unpopular does not reduce her—or his—right to express an opinion. That’s a flat-out guarantee, that as citizens everyone has the right to express their thoughts and feelings.

Wrong. The old days of rabid Communist-hunting have returned. This time it’s wrapped in patriotism, of course rather than ideology. Ward Churchill got sacked from the University of Colorado because he said things that offended some politicians who needed votes and publicity.

I agree that the deaths in the World Trade Center were predictable and logical. We’ve fucked around in the Arab world for so long, there was a huge pile of instant karma ready to slam into us. I disagree that the people in the towers were Eichmanns, generally. Evil is banal, right? Maybe in the banality of their work, those people did enable a lot of evil...Most of us do, one way or another. We participate in a system that is ruthlessly exploiting as many of the world’s natural resources as we can. We’re vicarious participating in a mean and evil war—and if anything is evil, America’s war against Iraq is evil.

If I was a university teacher and some jerk-handed Republican read that, he might want my ass kicked off campus. Wouldn’t surprise me a bit.

We need to remember that the only university teachers who kept their jobs in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia or Maoist China were ones that utterly and loudly supported their governments.

Amy Goodman is a brave person. I'm grateful she's out there, speaking up.


Professor Ward Churchill Vows to Sue University of Colorado Over Controversial Firing

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/25/145254

The Board of Regents of the University of Colorado in Boulder voted 8-to-1 Tuesday evening to fire tenured professor of Ethnic Studies Ward Churchill on charges of research misconduct. But Churchill maintains that the allegations were a pretext to remove him for his controversial political views. One day after his firing, Churchill calls the charges a sham and vows a suit against the school. [includes rush transcript]

The Board of Regents of the University of Colorado in Boulder voted 8-to-1 Tuesday evening to fire tenured professor of Ethnic Studies Ward Churchill on charges of research misconduct. But Churchill maintains that the allegations were a pretext to remove him for his unpopular political views. Churchill has written a number of books on genocide against Native Americans and the US government's COINTELPRO program. After yesterday's verdict Churchill said he planned to sue the university.

Churchill has written a number of books on genocide against Native Americans and the US government's COINTELPRO program. After yesterday's verdict Churchill said he planned to sue the university.

The controversy dates back to early 2005 when a college newspaper reprinted Churchill's three-year old essay on the attacks on the World Trade Center. He described the attacks as a response to a long history of US abuses and called those who were killed on 9-11 as "little Eichmanns" who formed a “technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire."

Adolf Eichmann was a Nazi bureacrat convicted for war crimes who political theorist Hannah Arendt famously described as embodying the "banality of evil." Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly repeatedly attacked Churchill for his comparison. Soon after, Colorado Governor Bill Owens wrote a letter to the university calling for Churchill’s resignation.

A special panel at the university immediately conducted an investigation into Churchill’s comments. They concluded that he could not be fired for his statements, which were protected by the First Amendment. However, another panel later determined that Churchill plagiarized and fabricated material in his scholarship and recommended his dismissal.

Supporters of Ward Churchill organized a rally before the Regents delivered their decision to fire Churchill at 5.30 pm. They had been deliberating behind closed doors all day.

Churchill supporter Ann Erika Whitebird.

Ward Churchill joins us on the phone from Boulder, Colorado.

* Ward Churchill. He was just terminated from his tenured post as Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Churchill is an activist and author of a number of books on genocide against Native Americans and the US government's COINTELPRO program.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...

AMY GOODMAN: The Board of Regents of the University of Colorado in Boulder voted 8-to-1 Tuesday evening to fire tenured professor of ethnic studies Ward Churchill on charges of research misconduct, they said. But Professor Churchill maintains the allegations were a pretext to remove him for his unpopular political views.

Churchill has written a number of books on genocide against Native Americans and the US government's COINTELPRO program -- that’s Counter-Intelligence Program. After yesterday's verdict, Churchill said he planned to sue the university.

JUAN GONZALEZ: The controversy dates back to early 2005, when a college newspaper reprinted Churchill's three-year-old essay on the attacks on the World Trade Center. He described the attacks as a response to a long history of US abuses and called those who were killed on 9/11 as “little Eichmanns” who formed a “technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire.”

Adolf Eichmann was a Nazi bureaucrat convicted for war crimes, who political theorist Hannah Arendt famously described as embodying the “banality of evil.” Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly repeatedly attacked Churchill for his comparison. Soon after, Colorado Governor Bill Owens wrote a letter to the university calling for Churchill's resignation.

A special panel at the university immediately conducted an investigation into Churchill’s comments. They concluded that he could not be fired for his statements, which were protected by the First Amendment. However, another panel later determined that Churchill plagiarized and fabricated material in his scholarship and recommended his dismissal.

AMY GOODMAN: Supporters of Ward Churchill organized a rally before the Regents delivered their decision to fire Churchill at 5:30 last night in Boulder. They had been deliberating behind closed doors all day.

Today we'll be joined by Ward Churchill on the phone from Boulder, but first to a clip of yesterday's rally. We turn now to Ward Churchill, his lawyer David Lane, American Indian Movement activist Glenn Morris, and one of Churchill's students.

ANN ERIKA WHITEBIRD: And the decision to fire Ward Churchill is really sad for me. He's the only professor that I’ve taken a class, where I really felt empowered as an Indigenous person. And our history, the history of genocide against our people, the history, the policy, the US policy of extermination against our people, the forced sterilization of our women -- that was found out as early as the ’70s -- it was all something that Ward talks about in his books. So I’m not just talking about the class that he’s offered, the FBI at Pine Ridge, but, you know, other classes that he teaches and then the books that he's written is really affirming as a Native person.

The history that we hear growing up about the smallpox blankets, it's not something that you question. It's something that is part of our oral history. And it's part of the history of other indigenous peoples. So when I’m here at CU Boulder and I talk to other students who are Dene or from other nations, it's a common understanding.

AMY GOODMAN: That was a student talking about Ward Churchill. Now, we turn to the ethnic studies professor, who joins us on the phone from his home in Boulder. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Ward Churchill.

WARD CHURCHILL: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Your thoughts today on the morning after your firing?

WARD CHURCHILL: Well, a period of glaciation, which was this process of creating the illusion of research misconduct to cover a firing for political speech, has come to an end. That process has now run its course, so there's a new phase that's begun, which is, I suppose, for lack of a better way of putting it, my period of defensive posture has come to an end and the offense has begun, kicks off this morning with the filing of a suit.

AMY GOODMAN: Who will you be suing?

WARD CHURCHILL: Regents of the University of Colorado for accepting, in full knowledge at this point, a non-scholarly sham of an investigative report, creating the pretext. And I say “non-scholarly” because the university has withdrawn the entire investigative report from any scholarly scrutiny. They refuse to allow it to be subject to scrutiny by competent scholars. And there are research misconduct complaints in place at this point against the members of the investigative committee for serial plagiarism, wholesale falsification, outright fabrication -- in other words, fraud. It's a fraudulent finding.

So there is no defensible scholarly conclusions that anything I’ve said in my writing is even inaccurate, much less fraudulent, or that I committed the so-called plagiarism. All they've got is public outrage in the form of very well-organized rightwing, active-style lobbying blocks, and the statements of public officials, and so on, saying I should be removed as the basis for removing me.

JUAN GONZALEZ: The amazing thing about this is that the so-called -- the investigation focused on everything but the apparent reason why there was such a determination to investigate you. The essay having to do with 9/11, that wasn't even a subject, supposedly, of this investigation, was it?

WARD CHURCHILL: No. And a point to be made there is that while I was a target, was a target that would serve as a sort of conduit, in a way, they considered me to be, and said so, considered me to be kind of at the forefront of a sort of critical line of analysis, historically speaking. And they wanted to roll back that line of analysis altogether, to discredit it, so that you basically have a return to that triumphalis, celebratory white-supremacist interpretation of American history with all of the denial and falsification that that is known to entail. That's the reason, in part. And it's in large part for the charade that they have acted out over the last two-and-a-half years, the going after the historical analysis, as well as a purveyor of it. And so, this goes way beyond me. I’m intended to symbolize the cost and consequence of challenging orthodoxy in certain critical domains, at least.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And what has been the response of the press in Colorado? Have any of the newspapers or any of the press defended your right to speak your mind?

WARD CHURCHILL: Well, yeah. They've created this false dichotomy, in a way: Well, it's reprehensible, we disagree with it, blah, blah, blah, but he had a right to say it, however repugnant it may have been. On the other hand, he did all these things that constitute research misconduct. Basically he's pedaling lies to the public that cause discontent with the status quo. And that's what the issue is. The specific acts of research misconduct has nothing to do with that speech.

The press was instrumental in framing that. There's been a symbiotic relationship between the administration at the university and the press all along. The press really took the lead in drumming up furor. There were 400 feature articles on my case, or what is supposed to be my case, in the Denver metro area newspapers in barely sixty days. Pope died; I had the front page of the Rocky Mountain News. The Rocky Mountain News was at the very forefront of creating the appearance that there was scholarly impropriety involved in my work and to be able to separate that set of issues then, the scholarly impropriety from the speech issues.

AMY GOODMAN: Ward Churchill, we have to go. But in addition to the lawsuit you're filing, what are your plans now?

WARD CHURCHILL: Well, my plans now are to continue to do what it is that I’ve always done: I mean, being a professor at the University of Colorado hardly defines the nature of my life. In fact --

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to have to leave it there. I want to thank you for being with us from Boulder, Ward Churchill, just fired by the University of Colorado.

www.democracynow.org

Dave Niewert is one of the good guys: he stands up to the racist and radical right, he does his homework, and he's a good writer. His blog is always readable and pungent (!).

Today, there's a really nice analysis of Bush's latest "Executive Order" (that's officialese for "instance of arbitrary and authoritarian seizure of power"—or, simply, "dictatorial power grab), the one authorizing the seizure of assets of anyone who might support terrorists or not be appropriately supportive of Amerika's efforts to annex Iraq. It's slow reading, because it makes you think, and it's detailed. No easy explanations.

Read it. Then get hold of your elected rep in Washington and demand impeachment. Warning, doing so could possibly be determined to hinter "our" country's efforts in Iraq...

Here in Bend, we have a Wild Oats store. It’s over in a big east-side strip mall, between Costco and Barnes and Noble, not far from Safeway and Old Navy. You know the scene. We go there about once a month—I like to pick through their basket of little cheese pieces and get odd-ball cheeses I wouldn’t buy by the bigger chunks. Their smoked wild salmon is pretty good, too—a nice little once-a-month treat. Other than that, it’s an expensive place to shop. Expensive people shop there, too. Lots of gold jewelry and big SUVs.

A friend in Portland loves Whole Foods. She thinks they’re very reasonably priced. I don’t know. I haven’t been there—well, I take it back: we did a walk-through with our friend three or four years ago. I remember thinking it was expensive, too.

Hell, farmers’ markets are expensive, also. You don’t save money shopping there, but you do get better food. And their veggies are about the same as at the big groceries. Fruit’s more expensive. It’s hard to be poor and eat well—almost impossible.

And I always thought the justification for competition was lower priced goods.

Whole Market Foods?
Why the FTC is right to block Whole Foods' buyout of Wild Oats
BY TOM PHILPOTT
http://www.grist.org/comments/food/2007/07/19/monopsony/index.html?source=weekly
19 Jul 2007

In a high-profile exchange with Michael Pollan last summer, Whole Foods Market CEO and founder John Mackey took an avuncular approach to farmers' markets that might take business from his company.

"Whole Foods Market is committed to supporting local farmers' markets across the United States (and also in Canada and the U.K.)," he wrote.

Elsewhere, the executive has displayed a zeal to crush competition that might make his counterparts at Microsoft blush. Last spring, Mackey sent a blunt email to the Whole Foods board, explaining his intention to buy Wild Oats -- Whole Foods' only direct nationwide competitor -- for a price well above what many analysts thought Wild Oats was worth.

By taking over Wild Oats, he argued, Whole Foods would not merely be snapping up 110 fully functioning natural-foods stores across the nation. Grabbing Wild Oats would also buy Whole Foods the power to "avoid nasty price wars" in several markets, as well as "eliminate forever" the threat of a major nationwide competitor in the natural-foods space.
***

When I taught at Head Start, we often had pet rats in the classroom. They were great. They liked company, to be fed, and were affectionate. Never tried to teach them anything, but they seemed to learn stuff on their own.

And, of course, the "rat psychologists" (like the U of Oregon crowd) have taught us more about our own behaviors than any twenty-seven psychiatrists...The following article by Natalie Angier helps explain why this is...


The New York Times


July 24, 2007

Smart, Curious, Ticklish. Rats?
By NATALIE ANGIER
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/24/science/24angi.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=th&pagewanted=print

Between reading recent news reports about altruistic behavior in rats and watching the slickly adorable antics of Remy the culinary rodent in this summer’s animated blockbuster, “Ratatouille,” I’ve had a change of heart. My normal feeling of extreme revulsion toward rats has softened considerably, into something resembling ... a less extreme form of revulsion.

O.K., I still don’t like rats, and I’ll never forget the sensation of whiskers brushing my ankles when a rat in Central Park scampered over my feet. There are plenty of reasons to fear rats. They carry diseases like typhus, leptospirosis, hanta virus pulmonary syndrome, rat bite fever, salmonella poisoning, and of course bubonic plague, and they are ravenous Remys every one of them, feasting on our grains and meats, chewing our ratatouille and destroying as much as a third of global food supplies each year. ***our ratly transactions are not all woes and buboes. As the first mammals domesticated strictly for research purposes, scientists say, rats in the laboratory may well have saved at least as many human lives through the years as rats in the alley have taken. Rats are the preferred experimental animal for studies of the heart, kidneys, immune system, reproductive system, nervous system and other body sectors, and recent breakthroughs in manipulating the rat genome may soon allow the rat to displace the mouse as the geneticist’s darling, too.

***the similarities between us and Rattus extend far beyond gross anatomy. They’re surprisingly self-aware. They laugh when tickled, especially when they’re young, and they have ticklish spots; tickle the nape of a rat pup’s neck and it will squeal ultrasonically in a soundgram pattern like that of a human giggle. Rats dream as we dream, in epic narratives of navigation and thwarted efforts at escape: When scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tracked the neuronal activity of rats in REM sleep, the researchers saw the same firing patterns they had seen in wakeful rats wending their way through those notorious rat mazes.

Rats can learn to crave the same drugs that we do — alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, amphetamine — and they, like us, will sometimes indulge themselves to death. They’re sociable, curious and love to be touched — nicely, that is. If a rat has been trained to associate a certain sound with a mild shock to its tail, and the bell tolls but the shock doesn’t come, the rat will inhale deeply with what can only be called a sigh of relief.

When it comes to sex, the analogies between rats and humans are “profound,” said James G. Pfaus of Concordia University in Montreal. “It’s not simply instinctual for them,” he said. “Rats know what good sex is and what bad sex is. And when they have reason to anticipate great sex, they give you every indication they’re looking forward to it.”

They wiggle and paw at their ears, hop and dart, stop and flash a come-hither look backward. “We imbue our desire with words and meaning, they show us through actions,” he said. “The good thing about rats is, they don’t lie.”

***
The so-called fancy rats that people keep as pets are variants of the Norway rat, usually albino though sometimes mottled like calico cats, and bred to have docile temperaments.

***though the rats have been inbred into homogeneous strains with names like Wistar and Sprague-Dawley, they retain enough street credibility that when a scientist recently released a group of lab rats into a wilderness-type habitat and filmed their reactions, the rodents soon began acting like wild rats. They explored every crevice as rats can do so fluidly, by collapsing their rubbery skeleton down to the width of their snout. They found everything edible in the vicinity, and, though they’d been reared in metal enclosures, they began digging, digging, digging, stopping only to check out the opposite sex and maybe waggle an ear.

Rats have personalities, and they can be glum or cheerful depending on their upbringing and circumstances. One study showed that rats accustomed to good times tend to be optimists, while those reared in unstable conditions become pessimists. Both rats will learn to associate one sound with a good event — a gift of food — and another sound with no food, but when exposed to an ambiguous sound, the optimist will run over expecting to be fed and the pessimist will grumble and skulk away, expecting nothing.

In another recent study, Jonathon D. Crystal, a psychologist at the University of Georgia in Athens, and his colleague Allison Foote were astonished to discover that rats display evidence of metacognition: they know what they know and what they don’t know. Metacognition, a talent previously detected only in primates, is best exemplified by the experience of students scanning the questions on a final exam and having a pretty good sense of what their grade is likely to be. In the Georgia study, rats were asked to show their ability to distinguish between tones lasting about 2 seconds, and sounds of about 8 seconds, by pressing one or another lever. If the rat guessed correctly, it was rewarded with a large meal; if it judged incorrectly, it got nothing.

For each trial, the rat could, after hearing the tone, opt to either take the test and press the short or long lever, or poke its nose through a side of the chamber designated the, “I don’t know” option, at which point it would get a tiny snack. During the trials, the rats made clear they knew their audio limits. The closer the tones were to either 2 or 8 seconds, the likelier the rats were to express confidence in their judgment by indicating they wanted to take the lever test and earn their full-course dinner. But as the tones edged into the ambiguous realms of 4 seconds, the rats began opting ever more often for modest but reliable morsels of the clueless option.

Rats do not lie, and, when the stakes are this high, neither do they gamble.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Eugene and Rhonda:
http://pudgyindian2.blogspot.com
http://deathandconscience.blogspot.com/

A couple of good ones, yeah.

In the last post, I mentioned the psychiatrist, Eric Berne. He talked quite a bit about "gallows humor," and, as I recall, didn't think too much of it. I once heard him give a rap—forty-five years ago, at least—and I thought he was really sharp. I still do. But I disagree about gallows humor. When your back is to the wall, when it's either laugh or cry (Joannie Mitchell: "laughin' or cryin'—you know it's all the same release"), my own spirit is to laugh.

In case, just in case, any of you out there still think we have an honest administration...

USDA Sent $1.1B to Deceased Farmers
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20070723/subsidies-dead-farmers/diff_D8QIINGG0_D8QIJ8RG1.html

MARY CLARE JALONICK | July 23, 2007 | AP


WASHINGTON — The Agriculture Department sent $1.1 billion in farm payments to more than 170,000 dead people over a seven-year period, congressional investigators say.

The findings by the Government Accountability Office were released Monday as the House prepared to debate and pass farm legislation this week that would govern subsidies and the department's programs for the next five years.

GAO auditors reviewed payments from 1999 through 2005 in the report, which was requested by Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee.

"It's unconscionable that the Department of Agriculture would think that a dead person was actively engaged in the business of farming," said Grassley.

The auditors said they found that the department has not been conducting the necessary checks to ensure that subsidy payments are proper.

Of the identified payments to deceased farmers' estates or businesses, 40 percent went to those who had been dead more than three years, and 19 percent went to those who had been dead for seven or more years.

John Johnson, a deputy administrator for the Farm Service Agency, said there is no indication that the payments were improper, since some rules allow estates to continue receiving money after a two-year grace period. The department is hoping to rely less on self-reporting and is working with the Social Security Administration to boost its record keeping, he said.

Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said the report bolsters the argument there should be lower ceilings and stricter limits on farm subsidies.

"Given extremely tight budget restraints, it is no longer tolerable to permit billions of dollars in farm bill payments to go to individuals who in instances don't even farm or are no longer alive," he said.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., said he is looking into ways to stop estates from continuing to collect farm payments long after the designated recipient for them has died.

"They have plenty of people to check to make sure they aren't handing out payments to dead people, for God's sake," he said.

The GAO findings were first reported Monday by The Washington Post

My sleeping pattern has gone to hell. It takes almost nothing to wake me up after I’ve fallen asleep. I'm really vulnerable after about an hour's sleep. Then it’s really hard for me to go back to sleep.

Beth is a night person and she likes to watch TV late into the night—although not like our friend Becky who will stay up all night watching anything, even infomercials and Fox news—and it doesn’t take much to get me awake again. It’s depressing. She’s taken the summer off from working and for her that means sleeping as much of the day as possible; when she’s awake it’s often after dark. I don’t get it. Sleeping through the days is, for me, an indicator of daytime as being something to avoid. When I was younger and laid up with a broken bone, it seems like I spent a lot of time being awake late at night. It isn’t a good association.

I keep thinking of the old phrase from Eric (”Games People Play”) Berne, about Waiting For the Mortician as a way to structure time. I feel like time —and life—is slipping away. So, I'm awake and my mind is zipping along.

Here’s something I found while being awake too late at night. Actually, it’s pretty good. Maybe there is some benefit about to desperately looking for distraction...

CHOMSKY: The concept “anti-American” is an interesting one. The counterpart is used only in totalitarian states or military dictatorships, something I wrote about many years ago (see my book Letters from Lexington). Thus, in the old Soviet Union, dissidents were condemned as “anti-Soviet.” That’s a natural usage among people with deeply rooted totalitarian instincts, which identify state policy with the society, the people, the culture. In contrast, people with even the slightest concept of democracy treat such notions with ridicule and contempt. Suppose someone in Italy who criticizes Italian state policy were condemned as “anti-Italian.” It would be regarded as too ridiculous even to merit laughter. Maybe under Mussolini, but surely not otherwise.

Actually the concept has earlier origins. It was used in the Bible by King Ahab, the epitome of evil, to condemn those who sought justice as “anti-Israel” (”ocher Yisrael,” in the original Hebrew, roughly “hater of Israel,” or “disturber of Israel”). His specific target was Elijah.

It’s interesting to see the tradition in which the people you refer to choose to place themselves. The idea of leaving America because one opposes state policy is another reflection of deep totalitarian commitments. Solzhenitsyn, for example, was forced to leave Russia, against his will, by people with beliefs very much like those you are quoting.


I think what Chomsky is saying is that people who apply the term “anti-American” are closet fascists. They identify so strongly with the nation-state they really don’t have any selves other than as “patriots.” Oy.

Whatever: there're a lot of them out there, and most of them think the war is going well.

A little data from Reuters:

Bush decided to escalate (George W Bush told the nation, have no fear of escalation...) the war four months ago. In June, the average number of daily attacks was 178—against coalition troops, Iraqi troops, civilians, and infrastructure. That’s the highest average in over four years.

Thanks, you lying fool.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/23/141236

America is the land of positive thinking. It’s almost everywhere, from Old Age (Norman Vincent Peale) to New Age (Deepak Chopra). No matter what the clothes, what the jargon, it amounts to the same thing: if something is wrong in your life, it’s your fault. Cancer, poverty, a cheating spouse, bad neighbors or bad breath, the positive thinking folks say it’s up to you to change yourself, then everything will be groovy.

I have friends with diabetes and hepatitis C, multiple sclerosis and cancer, emphysema and bi-polar disorder. I have a genetic flaw that has resulted in extremely fragile bones. Positive thinking won’t cure any of these disorders. I’ve heard it said that children who are born with CP or mental retardation are paying for the sins of their parents. It’s all such a crock of shit, isn’t it?

The name of the game is “Blaming the victim.” The person doing the labeling is letting her/himself feel superior and virtuous.

Sure, to an extent we all do make our own reality. We’re dealt certain hands of cards at birth. How we play the cards is up to us—yet a bad hand is a bad hand, period. You can’t change deuces to aces, no matter how positive you think. It just won’t happen. All we can change is our attitudes toward ourselves and our conditions. We can blame all we won’t, but it won’t change reality. The largest chunk of reality is already laid out for us.

(And, no matter what the president thinks, Iraq is a disaster.)


The Huffington Post

Barbara Ehrenreich
What Causes Cancer: Probably Not You

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-ehrenreich/what-causes-cancer-proba_b_56983.html?view=print
Posted July 19, 2007 | 03:52 PM (EST)

The perennial temptation to blame disease on sin or at least some grave moral failing just took another hit. A major new study shows that women on a virtuous low fat diet with an extraordinary abundance of fruits and veggies were no less likely to die of breast cancer than women who grazed more freely. Media around the world have picked up on the finding, cautioning, prudishly, that you can't beat breast cancer with cheeseburgers and beer.

Another "null result" in cancer studies -- i.e., one showing that a suspected correlation isn't there -- has received a lot less attention. In the May issue of Psychological Bulletin, James Coyne and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania reported that "there is no compelling evidence linking psychotherapy or support groups with survival among cancer patients." This flies in the face of the received wisdom that any sufficiently sunny-tempered person can beat cancer simply with a "positive attitude." For example, an e-zine article entitled "Breast Cancer Prevention Tips" advises:

A simple positive and optimistic attitude has been shown to reduce the risk of cancer. This will sound amazing to many people; however, it will suffice to explain that several medical studies have demonstrated the link between a positive attitude and an improved immune system. Laughter and humor has [sic] been shown to enhance the body's immunity and prevents against cancer and other diseases. You must have heard the slogan 'happy people don't fall sick'.

So far no one appears to have read Coyne's study. On June 30, a month after its publication, all-purpose guru Deepak Chopra assured Sanjay Gupta on CNN that the mind can control the body: "...You know, of course, the ... study where women who supported each other in a loving environment with breast cancer the survival doubled." Gupta, last sighted seeking to discredit Michael Moore's SiCKO with his "fact-checking," simply nodded, although the study Chopra was referring to was discredited years before Coyne's research came out.

For the last decade or so, adherents of the new discipline of "positive psychology" have been insisting that not just cancer, but almost any health setback, can be conquered with optimism or a "positive attitude." But as Coyne and other critics point out, the science here is shaky at best. Even the theoretical linch-pin of the supposed happy-mind-healthy-body connection -- that a positive outlook strengthens the immune system -- took a kick in the teeth two years ago when Suzanne Segerstrom at the University of Kentucky found, to her own apparent surprise, that optimism can have a negative effect on the immune system when the stressors are intense, as in the case of serious disease.

Even if veggies and smiles don't cure cancer, aren't we still entitled to blame some people for their diseases? Lack of exercise and dietary indiscretions play a role in the development of diabetes and coronary heart disease, so we indulge in self-gratifying contempt for the fat lady scarfing down Doritos. But before you rush to judgment, ask yourself: What nutritional alternatives does she have? (And, yes, I know they have "salad" at Wendy's now, but they don't offer apples on Amtrak.) As for exercise, gym memberships easily cost $500 a year, and far too many of us are forced to spend 10 hours or more a day sitting in a cubicle, a car or a bus.

In the case of breast cancer, one victim-blaming theory after has wilted under scrutiny: The "cancer personality" theory, for example, which breast cancer victim Susan Sontag took on in her 1978 book Illness as Metaphor, and now high-fat diets and negative attitudes. Something other than genetics causes it, though, and one leading candidate is the Hormone Replacement Therapy that doctors pushed on menopausal women for decades as a supposed way of preventing heart disease, Alzheimer's and wrinkles. When, in 2002, HRT was found to be correlated with breast cancer and millions of women stopped taking it, the incidence of breast cancer plunged.

Which suggests that optimism, especially about the validity of the conventional wisdom, can be hazardous. What you need is a narrow-eyed, deeply skeptical attitude.

There are rising tides that lift everything and rising tides that are very selective—like wealth...

Just as there are more poor people than ever, more citizens without health-care, there are more millionaires, multi-millionaires, and billionaires than ever. An awful lot of the rich didn't start out digging ditches or selling newspapers.

Welcome to Richistan, USA

Guardian (UK)
July 22, 2007
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2131974,00.html


· There are 7.5 million households in America worth up
to $10m. A further two million are worth $10m-$100m and
thousands are worth more than $100m.

· There is now a two-year waiting list for 200ft
yachts. If put end to end, the boats on that list,
which cost $50m each, would be 15 miles long.

· Sebonack Golf Club in the Hamptons, Long Island,
charges $650,000 for membership. That doesn't include
the $12,000 annual dues, or tips for caddies.

· Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have a
private Boeing 767.

· John D. Rockefeller was America's first billionaire.
Adjusted for inflation, he had $14bn - less than the
net worth of each of Sam Walton's five children today.
There were 13 US billionaires in 1985. Now there are
more than 1,000. There are as many millionaires in
North Carolina as in India.

· 'Affluent' is Richistani for 'not really rich'.
According to Frank, you need about $10m to be
considered entry-level rich.

Other than giving jobs to itinerant fools and sexual predators, I have no idea what FEMA is good for.

---

FEMA Runs for Cover

It was Paul Krassner and The Realist that helped get many of us through the early ‘60s. He deserves as much honor as, say, Owsley or the Grateful Dead, Kesey, a half-dozen others. Those were bleak evil times: Nixon. That says it all. Nixon. Just like “Bush” is going to identify and label these bleak and evil times.

The Huffington Post

Paul Krassner

Assholes of the Week #2

Posted July 20, 2007

In the '60s, "Assholes of the Month" was a feature in my satirical magazine, The Realist. In the '70s, "Asshole of the Month" was a feature in Larry Flynt's Hustler. Currently, on MSNBC's Countdown, Keith Olbermann has a feature, "Worst Person in the World," which is usually Bill O'Reilly. And now I'm posting "Assholes of the Week" in this cyberspace. I avoid targets like President Bush and Cardinal Mahony, because they're such ongoing, obvious choices. The beauty of Comments is that readers can post their own asshole selections that I neglect to include. Here are mine for this week:

*Scholastic, publisher of the Harry Potter series, for setting midnight Friday as the opening salvo for sales of the latest book, thereby forcing countless children to stay up way past their bedtime. Just for that I'm going to reveal how it ends. Harry and his friends and enemies are all having dinner at the same restaurant, but when you turn over the final page, it's totally blank.

*Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, for telling reporters, "We say in full confidence that we are able, God willing, to take the responsibility completely in running the security file if the international forces withdraw at any time they want," but the next day his advisor announced that Maliki meant that efforts to bolster Iraq's security forces would continue "side by side with the withdrawal." Dick Cheney had called to remind Malaki that those videos of him humping a camel during Ramadan were hidden away in a safe place.

*The unknown White House official who ordered Dr. Richard Carmona -- George Bush's Surgeon General for four years--to mention Bush's name three times on each page of every speech he gave. He was fired for writing this sentence: "When it comes to abstinence, you can be sure that George Bush practices what he preaches."

*Lousiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, for signing legislation that penalizes doctors who perform a late-term abortion -- they would face fines up to $10,000 and prison up to 10 years -- making her state the first to restrict such surgery since the federal ban in 2003. The new law allows the procedure only when a woman's life would otherwise be endangered. However, it will be considered a crime if the pregnancy is expected merely to cause health problems. That's not a joke.

*The owners of several medical marijuana dispensaries in California, for -- if it's true, as alleged by the Drug Enforcement Adminstration -- profiteering from the illegal distribution of pot by charging patients two or three times the street value. Presumably, other government agencies will follow the lead of the DEA and coerce other businesses to stick to free-market protocols.

*Nebraska Judge Jeffre Cheuvront, for ordering a college student who was raped not to use the words "rape," "victim," "assailant" or "sexual assault" on the witness stand for fear of prejudicing the jury. Perhaps she can testify that "He stuck his thing in my thing against my will." George Carlin is expected to introduce a bit in his next HBO performance about "The five words you can't say in court."

*Food and Drug Administration commissioner Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, for insisting that the FDA's decision to close seven of its 13 laboratories would enhance the agency's ability to target unsafe food -- this in the face of severe criticism from Congress -- but he is as determined as salmonella swimming upstream.

-------

Paul Krassner is the author of One Hand Jerking: Reports From an Investigative Satirist, and publisher of the Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster, both available from paulkrassner.com.

Here I am, a sunny day in Bend, comfortable weather, Carlos Nakai on the stereo, good Columbian coffee in my cup.

In Baghdad it’s bloody awful hot, dusty, loud, there ain’t no electricity most of the time, and good luck on getting even water, let alone decent coffee—and, oh yeah, if you’re not real lucky, you’re going to get killed.

Am I lucky? You bet I am. I have a bone disorder that’s turning my skeletal structure to crumbles, but I am far far more fortunate than any Baghdad resident. When I hear a helicopter I know it’s Life-Flight and not an Apache gunship—or a medivac carrying some poor soldier with god-awful wounds. The rasp of a diesel engine isn’t a tank coming down my street. And the only gunfire is on the TV. If I break a bone, I can go to the emergency room without worrying about death squads coming in and shooting it up. I can go to Fred Meyer’s for groceries. And if someone knocks on my door I know I’m not going to get hauled off and shot.

Henry Miller called it "the air conditioned nightmare." It's more like an air conditioned delusion, because we should all be wide awake by now.


AlterNet
After Reporting in Iraq, America Feels Like a Bizarre Disneyland
By Dahr Jamail, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on July 20, 2007, Printed on July 21, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/57500/

"In violence we forget who we are" -- Mary McCarthy, novelist and critic

1. Statistically Speaking

Having spent a fair amount of time in occupied Iraq, I now find living in the United States nothing short of a schizophrenic experience. Life in Iraq was traumatizing. It was impossible to be there and not be affected by apocalyptic levels of violence and suffering, unimaginable in this country.

But here's the weird thing: One long, comfortable plane ride later and you're in Disneyland, or so it feels on returning to the United States. Sometimes it seems as if I'm in a bubble here that's only moments away from popping. I find myself perpetually amazed at the heights of consumerism and the vigorous pursuit of creature comforts that are the essence of everyday life in this country -- and once defined my own life as well.

Here, for most Americans, you can choose to ignore what our government is doing in Iraq. It's as simple as choosing to go to a website other than this one.

The longer the occupation of Iraq continues, the more conscious I grow of the disparity, the utter disjuncture, between our two worlds.

In January 2004, I traveled through villages and cities south of Baghdad investigating the Bechtel Corporation's performance in fulfilling contractual obligations to restore the water supply in the region. In one village outside of Najaf, I looked on in disbelief as women and children collected water from the bottom of a dirt hole. I was told that, during the daily two-hour period when the power supply was on, a broken pipe at the bottom of the hole brought in "water." This was, in fact, the primary water source for the whole village. Eight village children, I learned, had died trying to cross a nearby highway to obtain potable water from a local factory.

In Iraq things have grown exponentially worse since then. Recently, the World Health Organization announced that 70% of Iraqis do not have access to clean water and 80% "lack effective sanitation."

In the United States I step away from my desk, walk into the kitchen, turn on the tap, and watch as clear, cool water fills my glass. I drink it without once thinking about whether it contains a waterborne disease or will cause kidney stones, diarrhea, cholera, or nausea. But there's no way I can stop myself from thinking about what was -- and probably still is -- in that literal water hole near Najaf.

I open my pantry and then my refrigerator to make my lunch. I have enough food to last a family several days, and then I remember that there is a 21% rate of chronic malnutrition among children in Iraq, and that, according to UNICEF, about one in 10 Iraqi children under five years of age is underweight.

I have a checking account with money in it; 54% of Iraqis now live on less than $1 a day.

I can travel safely on my bicycle whenever I choose -- to the grocery store or a nearby city center. Many Iraqis can travel nowhere without fear of harm. Iraq now ranks as the planet's second most unstable country, according to the 2007 Failed States Index.

These are now my two worlds, my two simultaneous realities. They inhabit the same space inside my head in desperately uncomfortable fashion. Sometimes, I almost settle back into this bubble world of ours, but then another email arrives -- either directly from friends and contacts in Iraq or forwarded by friends who have spent time in Iraq -- and I remember that I'm an incurably schizophrenic journalist living on some kind of borrowed time in both America and Iraq all at once.

2. Emailing

Here is a fairly typical example of the sorts of anguished letters that suddenly appear in my in-box. (With the exception of the odd comma, I've left the examples that follow just as they arrived. They reflect the stressful conditions under which they were written.) This one was sent to my friend Gerri Haynes from an Iraqi friend of hers:

Dear Gerri:

No words can describe the real terror of what's happening and being committed against the population in Baghdad and other cities: the poor people with no money to leave the country, the disabled old men and women, the wives and children of tens of thousands of detainees who can't leave when their dad is getting tortured in the Democratic Prisons, senior years students who have been caught in a situation that forces them to take their finals to finish their degrees, parents of missing young men who got out and never came back, waiting patiently for someone to knock the door and say, "I am back." There are thousands and thousands of sad stories that need to be told but nobody is there to listen.

I called my cousin in the al-Adhamiya neighborhood of Baghdad to check if they are still alive. She is in her sixties and her husband is about seventy. She burst into tears, begging me to pray to God to take their lives away soon so they don't have to go through all this agony. She told me that, with no electricity, it is impossible to go to sleep when it is 40 degrees Celsius unless they get really tired after midnight. Her husband leaves the doors open because they are afraid that the American and Iraqi troops will bomb the doors if they don't respond from first door knock during searching raids. Leaving the doors open is another terror story after the attack of the troops' vicious dogs on a ten-month old baby, tearing him apart and eating him in the same neighborhood just a few days ago. The troops let the dogs attack civilians. The dogs bite them and terrify the kids with their angry red eyes in the middle of the night. So, as you can see my dear Gerri, we don't have only one Abu Ghraib with torturing dogs, we have thousands of Abu Ghraibs all over Baghdad and other Iraqi cities.

I was speechless. I couldn't say anything to comfort her. I felt ashamed to be alive and well. I thought I should be with them, supporting them, and give them some strength even if it costs me my life. I begged her to leave Baghdad. She told me that she can't because of her pregnant daughter and her grandkids. They are all with them in the house without their dad. I am hearing the same story and worse every single day. We keep asking ourselves what did we do to the Americans to deserve all this cruelness, killing, and brutishness? How can the troops do this to poor, hopeless civilians? And why?

Can anybody answer my cousin why she and her poor family are going through this?? Can you Gerri? Because I sure can't.

In recent weeks I had been attempting to get in touch with one of my friends, a journalist in Baghdad. I'll call him Aziz for his safety. Beginning to worry when I didn't receive his usual prompt response, I sent him a second email and this is what finally came back:

Dear old friend Dahr,

I am so sorry for my late reply. It is because my area of Baghdad was closed for six days and also because I lost my cousin. He was killed by a militia. They tortured and mutilated his body. I will try to send you his picture later.

Just remember me, friend, because I feel so tired these days and I live with this mess now.

With all my respect,

Aziz

Conveying my sadness, I asked him if there was anything I could possibly do to ease his suffering. As a reporter in that besieged country, he is constantly exhausted and overworked. I hesitantly suggested that perhaps he should take a little time to rest. He promptly replied:

Dahr, my old friend,

I really appreciate your condolence message. Your words affected me very much and I feel that all my friends are around me in this hard time. I live with this mess and I do need some rest time as you advise before getting back to work again. BUT, really, I have to continue working because there are just very few journalists in Iraq now, and especially in my area. I have to cover more and more everyday.

Anyway friend, everything will be ok for me. And I wish we can make some change in our world towards peace.

With my respect to you friend,

Aziz

I have also been corresponding with "H," who lives in the volatile Diyala province and has been a dear friend since my first trip to Iraq. He would visit me in Baghdad, bringing with him delicious home-cooked meals from his wife, insisting always that I be the one to eat the first morsel.

A deeply religious man, his unfailing greeting, accompanied by a big hug, would always be: "You are my brother."

He was concerned about the perception that there were vast differences between Islam and Christianity. "Islam and Christianity are not so different," he would say, "In fact they have many more similarities than differences." He would often discuss this with U.S. soldiers in his city.

Yet he was no admirer of imperialism. Last summer in Syria, he and I visited the sprawling Roman ruins of Palmyra. One evening, as we stood together overlooking the vast landscape of crumbling columns and sun-bleached walls in the setting sun, he turned to me and said, "Mr. Dahr, please do not be offended by what I want to say, but it makes me happy to see these ruins and remember that empires always fall because empires are never good for most people."

After several weeks when I received no reply to repeated emails, I wrote to "M," a mutual friend, and received the following response:

Habibi [My dear friend],

It has been very long since I have written to you. I'm sorry. I was terribly busy. I have some very bad news. [H] was kidnapped by the members of al-Qaeda in Diyala 25 days ago and there is no news about him up to this moment. It's a horrible situation. One cannot feel safe in this country.

When I pressed him for more information, he wrote me the details:

[H] was kidnapped as he was trying to get home. He was coming to Baquba to visit his parents, as he does every day. His oldest daughter who was with him told him that a car carrying several men was following them from the beginning of the street leading to his parents' home. So, when he stopped to get his car in the garage, they got out of their car covering their faces and asked him to come with them for questioning. People in Diyala definitely know that such a thing means either killing or arresting for few days. You may ask why I'm sure it is al-Qaeda. That is because no other group, including the U.S. military, dominates the whole city like they do.

We are the people of the city and we know the truth. They overwhelmingly dominate the streets and are even stronger than the government. So, there is no doubt about whether this was al-Qaeda or another group. You may ask how people stay away from these very bad people. People never go in places like the central market of Baquba. For this reason, all, and I mean all, the shops are closed; some people have left Diyala, some have been killed, while most are kept in their homes.

If someone wants to go the market, this means a bad adventure. He may be at last found in the morgue. Al-Qaeda fought every group that are called resistance who work against coalition [U.S.] forces or the government (policemen or Iraqi National Guards). Nowadays, there is fighting between al-Qaeda and other [Iraqi resistance] groups like Qataib who are known here as the honest resistance in the streets. By the way, I forgot, when al-Qaeda kidnaps someone, they also take his car in order that the car shall be used by them. So, they took his car, along with him. In case he is released, he comes without his car. I will tell you more later on.

I soon slipped into the frantic routine all too familiar by now to countless Iraqis -- scanning the horrible reports of daily violence in Iraq looking for the faintest clue to the whereabouts of my missing friend

3. Murderously Speaking

In McClatchy News' July 5th roundup of daily violence for Diyala, I read:

"A source in the morgue of Baquba general hospital said that the morgue received today a head of a civilian that was thrown near the iron bridge in Baquba Al Jadida neighborhood today morning.

"A medical source in Al Miqdadiyah town northeast [of] Baquba city said that 2 bodies of civilians were moved to the hospital of Miqdadiyah. The source said that the first body was of a man who was killed in an IED explosion near his house in Al Mu'alimeen neighborhood in downtown Baquba city while the second body was of a man who was shot dead near his house in Al Ballor neighborhood in downtown Baquba city."

The data for Baghdad that day read:

"24 anonymous bodies were found in Baghdad today. 16 bodies were found in Karkh, the western side of Baghdad in the following neighborhoods (7 bodies in Amil, 3 bodies in Doura, 2 bodies in Ghazaliyah, 1 body in Jihad, 1 body in Amiriyah, 1 body in Khadhraa and 1 body in Mahmoudiyah). 8 bodies were found in Rusafa, the eastern side of Baghdad in the following neighborhoods (6 bodies in Sadr city, 1 body in Husseiniyah and 1 body in Sleikh.)"

What could I possibly hope to find in nameless reports like these, especially when I know that most of the Iraqi dead never make it anywhere near these reports. That is the way it has been throughout the occupation.

On July 8th, M sent me this email:

Habibi,

Up to this moment, I heard that one of my neighbors saw [H's] photo in the morgue but I couldn't make sure yet. Traditionally, when a body is dropped in a street and found by police, they take it to the morgue. The first thing done is to take a photo for the dead person in the computer to let the families know them. This procedure is followed because the number of bodies is tremendously big. For this people cannot see every body to check for their sons or relatives. For this, people see the photos before going to the refrigerator. I will go to the morgue tomorrow.

The next day he wrote yet again:

Habibi,

Today I went to the morgue. I saw horrible things there. I didn't see [H's] photo among them. Some figures cannot be easily recognized because of the blood or the face is terribly deformed. I saw also only heads; those who were slayed, it's unbelievable. Tomorrow, we will have another visit to make sure again. In your country, when somebody wants to go to the morgue, he may naturally see two or, say, three or four bodies. For us, I saw hundreds today. Every month, the municipality buries those who are not recognized by their families because of the capacity of the morgue. Imagine!

In one of H's last emails to me sent soon after his return home from Syria earlier this summer, he described driving out of Baquba one afternoon. Ominously, he wrote:

We left Baquba, which was sinking in a sea of utter chaos, worries, and instability. People there in that small town were scared of being kidnapped, killed, murdered or expelled. The entire security situation over there was deteriorating; getting to the worse.

Now, that passage might be read as his epitaph.

4. Subjectively Speaking

The morning I receive the latest news from M, I crawl back into bed and lie staring at the ceiling, wondering what will become of H's wife and young children, if he is truly dead. Barring a miracle, I assume that will turn out to be the case.

Later, I go for a walk. It's California sunny and the air is pleasantly cool on my skin. I'm aware -- as I often am -- that I never even consider looking over my shoulder here. I'm also aware that those I pass on my walk don't know that they aren't even considering looking over their shoulders.

The American Heritage Dictionary's second definition of schizophrenia is:

A situation or condition that results from the coexistence of disparate or antagonistic qualities, identities, or activities: the national schizophrenia that results from carrying out an unpopular war [italics theirs].

That's what I'm experiencing -- a national schizophrenia that results from our government carrying out an unpopular war. It's what I continue to experience with never lessening sharpness two years after my last trip to Iraq. The hardest thing, in the California sun with that cool breeze on my face, is to know that two realities in two grimly linked countries coexist, and most people in my own country are barely conscious of this.

In Iraq, of course, there is nothing disparate, no disjuncture, only a constant, relentless grinding and suffering, a pervasive condition of tragic hopelessness and despair with no end in sight.

Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who has covered the Middle East for the last four years, eight months of which were spent in occupied Iraq. Jamail is currently writing for Inter Press Service, Al-Jazeera English, and is a regular contributor to Tomdispatch.com. Jamail's forthcoming book, "Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Independent Journalist in Occupied Iraq" (Haymarket Books) will be released this October.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/57500/

I don’t know much about Suzie Bright, but I sure like her insights and writing.

AlterNet
The Deeper Meaning in the Republican Sex Scandals
By Susie Bright, http://susiebright.blogs.com/
Posted on July 19, 2007, Printed on July 21, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/57392/

Another Gay-bashing, Klan-loving, Pulpit-Slurping, Republican has disgraced himself.

No, make that two.

Let's start with the Christian Coalition's favorite son, Louisiana senator David Vitter.

There's not enough Boudreaux Buttpaste in the world that can wipe-clean a career like Vitter's-- now better known as The Guy Who Frequents Prostitutes and Asks To Wear a Diaper.

Apparently the whores of New Orleans call him "Vitter the Shitter." And don't even ask about his love child -- who, one can only hope, is kept well-stocked with Pampers.

I hate the way a hypocrite like this can drag the good name of kinky sex through the mud.

Vitter refuses to resign, of course. He and his wife took the neo-Antoinette position at their recent press conference: "Let them eat shit."

David said God, and His Wife Wendy, were willing to move on -- and so should everyone else. After all, he still has plenty of gay marriages to wreck, and black voters to disenfranchise! Let the man get on with his work!

But his better half upstaged him. Wendy showed up for the cameras in a low-cut leopard print dress and giant hoop earrings, to say she's forgiven Davy for everything and it was time for the press to leave their family alone.

She needs more than sartorial assistance:


In 2000, Vitter was included in a Newhouse News Service story about the strain of congressional careers on families.

His wife, Wendy, was asked by the Newhouse reporter: If her husband were as unfaithful as Livingston or former President Bill Clinton, would she be as forgiving as Hillary Rodham Clinton?

"I'm a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary," Wendy Vitter told Newhouse News. "If he does something like that, I'm walking away with one thing, and it's not alimony, trust me."

"I think fear is a very good motivating factor in a marriage," she added. "Don't put fear down.


I'm scared.

Follow the Diaper investigation, load by load.

Or maybe you've been turned into a pillar of salt and find yourself unable to move.

Don't worry, there's another distraction. Vitter is momentarily overshadowed by Congressman Bob Allen of Florida. Allen is such a pest at the men's public toilets that that it was only after the THIRD time (in an hour) that he waltzed in to make a play, that an undercover cop finally busted him for solicitation.

And gee, Bob was offering men $20 to go down on them. Jeff Gannon must be wrending his garments:

...The 48 year old Republican Representative was arrested today on second degree misdemeanor charges for solicitation for prostitution. And the twist is that he's a married man, and was asking an undercover cop in a men's room if he could pay him to give him a blowjob. It's so GOP!

Allen was out for a little afternoon delight and got nabbed at noon in Titusville, Florida. "Officers say they noticed Allen acting suspicious as he went in and out of the men's restroom 3 times. Minutes later, he solicited an undercover male officer inside the restroom, offering to perform oral sex for $20."

He was first elected in 2000 and lists "water sports" as a hobby on his official state website.

The Christian Coalition loves loved Rep. Allen. Like Vitter (and Foley) and the rest of the Republican hypocrites, he was strong on the family values bullshit. In the last session of the Florida legislature, the Christian Coalition commends him for supporting their (extremist, hateful) positions 92% of the time. The Rainbow Democratic club also rates all the elected officials in the area. Allen? "Wicked Witch: Worst of the Worst."



The headlines and photos say it all. I don't know how The Daily Show could improve it. But I do have a couple of editorial comments:

1. Vitter's defiance, to refuse resignation, is the default Bush strategy, the corporate-politics vamp. You refuse to take responsibility for anything, and deny the obvious. If they can't force the scepter out of your hand, you hold on for dear life, and keep cashing the checks. You simply write your own reality.

2. A few sincere conservatives are calling for Vitter's scalp. But not most of his base. If you read the Times Picayune comments and stories, you'll see the general sentiment-- most people haven't budged from their original position, be it Democrat, Republican, or Indifferent.

The one thing that could change Vitter's standing with his supporters, sad to say, is if evidence appears that Vitter is a "race-traitor."

I wish I could laugh at such a quaint expression, but it's very much alive in this man's community. If Vitter is found to have had so much as a chaste vanilla kiss with a black woman over 21, he will be crucified by the segregationist, white supremacist freaks who put him into office.

This fear of "the unpardonable sin" may be why Larry Flynt still has a swarm of detectives interviewing the New Orleans sex trade to unearth the worst. Flynt's not looking for more diapers -- Louisiana good ole' boys don't care if Vitter walked around with a pacifier in his mouth -- as long as his momma was white.

Perhaps the most Gothic twist on American racism is that it has sat out its "politically incorrect" phase by hiding its language under homophobia and sex-bashing, which is still (marginally) more palatable.

"Code-switching" is exactly what Jerry Falwell did in his "make-over," along with all the other publicity-minded, "whites-only" conservative figures of the South.

In 1981, as he lay dying, Lee Atwater (Karl Rove's mentor) confessed the GOP's "Southern Strategy" to win elections. Note the use of the second person narative:

...You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger."

[But] by 1968 you can't say 'nigger' -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like "forced busing," "states' rights," and all that stuff.

You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things ... and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.


If I could raise Atwater from the dead, I bet he'd agree with me that when the GOP realized that "abstraction" didn't raise the passion/votes they needed, they turned to abortion-screaming and gay-bashing.

Not because of sentiment or faith! -- No, the South had a traditional tolerance for queers and hushed-up pregnancies -- read your Tennessee Williams. But this new kind of sex-fiend pandering is a device to proclaim, "nigger nigger nigger" without mentioning the forbidden words.

Every time a politician says, "Stop gays!" on his campaign literature, he's pressing euphemisms to make his racial position clear -- and no one needs a cheat sheet.

Susie Bright is an author, editor, and journalist known for her original and pioneering work in sexual politics and erotic expression. She writes about sex and politics every day at her blog.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/57392/

Thirty-five...yeah, thirty-five years ago, I lived in British Columbia’s Slocan Valley for quite a while. We try to go up and visit every year, see old friends, rehash nice memories.

Back then, the Slocan, like the west Kootenay area in general was a haven for people disgusted with the U.S.’s invasion and war against Viet Nam. Many went to the Slocan rather than get drafted into the killing machine of the U.S. Army.

I was in no danger of being drafted, but I was utterly disgusted with the war.

The Slocan remains a lovely area: sophisticated and rural, rugged and domesticated. If it wasn’t for the foul winters...I’d have a Canadian accent, yeah. More power to the folks in the Slocan Valley. Way to go!


B.C. Interior community goes for ring-tone-free zone
Last Updated: Friday, July 20, 2007 | 9:34 AM PT
CBC News
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2007/07/20/bc-cellphoneslocan.html
People in the Slocan Valley are trying to stop Telus from bringing cellphone service to their neck of the woods so they can market the area as a ring-tone-free zone.

'We see this as being a tremendous competitive advantage.'—Bill Roberts of the Slocan Valley Economic Development Commission

Telus has said it will decide whether to install technology, which would allow for cellphone service in the area, later this month.

But Bill Roberts, with the Slocan Valley Economic Development Commission, thinks becoming a cellphone dead-zone will attract tourists and new residents to the rural community in B.C.'s Southern Interior.

"We see this as being a tremendous competitive advantage that allows us to set ourselves apart from other areas that are practising the 'me too' form of development, saying, 'Well, they've got a bigger airport. They've got cellphones,' and following blindly down the same path," Roberts said Thursday.

Some residents have also expressed concerns about the potential health risks of having a cellphone transmitter within 500 metres of houses.

Telus, however, insists cellphone technology is safe, and spokesman Shawn Hall says the company has received requests from many valley residents for service.

"I think a lot of communities actually see cell service as a real economic driver that brings them into the 21st century," says Hall.

If Telus chooses not to provide cellphone service, the economic development commission plans to market the Slocan Valley as a cellphone-free area, says Roberts.

The commission argues there are other ways to improve communications — it's finalizing a plan to bring high-speed internet access to the valley.

Oregon’s history is no prettier than that of any other state. However, in the fame and fortune of today, McMansions, tourism, gourmet dining, and oh-aren’t-we-a-lovely-state thinking, the darker side has been shoved aside.
Over at Loaded Orygun there’s a nice rap about the Grand Ronde people—Grande Ronde is an Indian reservation originally set aside for the survivors of ethnic cleansing down in southern Oregon and in the Willamette Valley. They were given a reservation in the heavily timbered Coast Range. That was before anyone thought about the value of timber, since it was so common in early Oregon. Once timber became a valuable commodity, though, the reservation began to shrink. Eventually, back in the 1950s, Grand Ronde was “terminated.” “Termination” was such a nicer-sounded term than “stolen.” It was national policy to “terminate” as many Indian tribes as possible. The Klamath of of south-central Oregon were “terminated” in one of the great domestic scandals of the mid-20th Century.

The Grand Ronde, though, have rebounded from their once-destitute position. They’re located not far from the scenic Oregon Coast, and on one of the main routes from the population centers of western Oregon to the coast. They’ve been able to parlay their position into one of prestige and political power. I’m glad for them. I’m glad they’ve got good sense, too—a commodity that seems in short supply.

For more detail, check out the Grand Ronde web site, here.
And by the way, you folks over at Loaded Orygun, Grand is spelled without a terminal “e.” Yeah, I blew it, too, on a comment at their site...

Several doctors I know have expressed their support for single-payer national health care. Yes, that's why the repugs call "socialized medicine," but the rest of the modern world calls Normal.

Bush is going in, Saturday, to have a tv camera shoved up his ass. I'll bet they find his head—but we'll never know, because of, ah, executive privelege and/or national security... However, we know, don't we?

Here's a nice piece by Barbara Ehrenreich on health care, courtesy of The Nation:

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/ehrenreich

Healthcare vs. the Profit Principle

by BARBARA EHRENREICH

[posted online on July 12, 2007]

It's always nice to see the President take a principled stand on something. The man formerly known as "43"--and now perhaps better named "29" for his record-breaking low approval rating--is promising to battle any expansion of government health insurance for children, and not because he hates children or refuses to cough up the funds. No, this is a battle over principle: private healthcare vs. government-provided healthcare. Speaking in Cleveland recently, Bush boldly asserted:

I strongly object to the government providing incentives for people to leave private medicine, private health care to the public sector. And I think it's wrong and I think it's a mistake. And therefore, I will resist Congress's attempt ... to federalize medicine....In my judgment that would be--it would lead to not better medicine, but worse medicine. It would lead to not more innovation, but less innovation.

Now you don't have to have seen Sicko to know that if there is one area of human endeavor where private enterprise doesn't work, it's healthcare. Consider the private, profit-making insurance industry, which Bush is so determined to defend. What "innovations" has it produced? The deductible, the co-pay and the pre-existing condition are the only ones that leap to mind. In general, the great accomplishment of the private health insurance industry has been to overturn the very meaning of "insurance," which is risk-sharing: We all put in some money, though only some of us will need to draw on the common pool by using expensive healthcare. And the insurance companies have overturned it by refusing to insure the people who need care the most--those who are already, or are likely to become, sick.

I once tried to explain to a Norwegian woman why it was so hard for me to find health insurance. I'd had breast cancer, I told her, and she looked at me blankly. "But then you really need insurance, right?" Of course, and that's why I couldn't have it.

This is not because health insurance executives are meaner than other people, although I do not rule that out. It's just that they're running a business, the purpose of which is not to make people healthy but to make money, and they do very well at that. Once, many years ago, I complained to the left-wing economist Paul Sweezey that America had no real healthcare system. "We have a system, all right," he responded. "It's just a system for doing something else." A system, as he might have put it today, for extracting money from the vulnerable and putting it into the pockets of the rich.

But let's not just pick on the insurance companies, though I wouldn't mind doing that--with a specially designed sharp instrument, over a period of years. Sunday's Los Angeles Times featured a particularly lurid case of medical profiteering in the form of one Dr. Prem Reddy, who owns eight hospitals in Southern California. I do not begrudge any physician a comfortable life--good doctoring is hard work--but Dr. Reddy dwells in a 15,000-square-foot mansion featuring gold-plated toilets and keeps a second home, valued at more than $9 million, in Beverly Hills, as well as a $1.4 million helicopter for commuting.

The secret behind his $300 million fortune? For one thing, he rejects the standard hospital practice of signing contracts with insurance companies, because he feels that these contracts unduly limit his reimbursements. (In a battle between Aetna and Reddy, it would be hard to know which side to cheer for.) In addition, he has suspended much-needed services such as chemotherapy, a birthing center and mental- health care as insufficiently profitable. And his hospitals are infamous for refusing to treat uninsured patients, like a patient with kidney failure and a 16-month-old baby with a burn.

But Dr. Reddy--who is, incidentally a high-powered Republican donor--has a principled reason for his piratical practices. "Patients," the Los Angeles Times reports him as saying, "may simply deserve only the amount of care they can afford." He dismisses as "an entitlement mentality" the idea that everyone should be getting the same high-quality healthcare. This is Bush's vaunted principle of "private medicine" at its nastiest: You don't get what you need, only what you can pay for.

If government insurance for children (S-CHIP) isn't expanded to all the families who need it, there is no question but that some children will die--painfully perhaps and certainly unnecessarily. But at least they will have died for a principle.

Down at the Knott Landfill, there's a rule about loads being covered when they're brought in. Most dumps—er, landfills—have a similar rule.

But over at the landfill, off of Simpson, between Mt Washington and Century, where big trucks bring in debris from excavations—housing subdivisions, downdown, places like that—a constant string of dump trucks bring in uncovered loads of rock and dirt. It blows dust up here where I live, right off of Simpson. Lots of dust. Is it the dust of progress or lazy enforcement of the law, or is there even a law about loads being covered?

And, speaking of Simpson, if you want to watch late-night street racing (or hear it), this is definitely the place.

An Oregon group of churches and "conservative organizations" is running a petition drive to outlaw gay marriage and about everything else that treats homosexuals as human beings. What this is all about is flexing muscle: we'll show you how strong we are. It's sort of like having a night of window smashing or cross burning: we'll show you how strong we are...

It's gross, it's mean, and it really shows how little compassion is involved when it comes to religious and political conservative groups.

And here's another groovy site about hypocrites for Christ—

http://www.armchairsubversive.org/

Yes, I am in a foul mood. I got a phone call at an ungodly hour—ever since I got a call from the Portland coroner's office telling me of my son's death, early morning phone calls are bad. And I got an ambiguously vague and superficial email from a friend I've been worried about. Goddam.

http://www.republicansexoffenders.com/

Thanks, Bryan and Debbie!

And now for something...entirely weird.

I still have a large quantity of my son’s ashes. I’ve spread them in an Alaskan lake, a creek near the cabin where he was conceived, over in Tumalo Creek, not far from here, where he loved to take pictures, from the Port Townsend ferry up in Puget Sound. And I still have plenty.

My son had a sense of humor that I really liked. When I saw the following article, I looked at the container of his ashes and smiled.... Hmm....


Human Ashes Cause Airport Bomb Scare

http://www.rawstory.com/showarticle.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fapnews.myway.com%2Farticle%2F20070716%2FD8QDQE7G0.html
Jul 16, 1:11 PM (ET)

MIAMI (AP) - A Miami International Airport terminal was briefly evacuated early Monday after authorities found what appeared to be an explosive device but turned out to be a box containing cremated human remains.

A watch, the ashes and other items were spotted in the box, which at first appeared to be part of an explosive device, said Transportation Security Administration spokesman Christopher White. The box was in an X-ray machine scanning checked luggage near a United Airlines ticket counter, he said.

"It was a collection of items that, in total, raised our officers' suspicions to a level of contacting the Miami-Dade (County police) bomb squad," White said.

Hundreds of passengers milled around on the median outside Terminal F with their luggage from about 5:45 a.m. until police gave the all-clear around 7:30 a.m.

The terminal serves United, AirTran Airways and other carriers. The evacuation delayed six flights, affecting about 2,000 passengers, airport spokesman Marc Henderson said.

As a follow-up to that last post, here’s a Trotskyite essay on the implications of Bush’s don’t-need-to-listen-to-the-public position about the war. Would he follow-through on this? If god told him to, uh-huh. You bet.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/jul2007/bush-j16_prn.shtml

Bush’s assertion of executive power: The logic of presidential-military dictatorship
By Joe Kay
16 July 2007

At President Bush’s July 11 press conference a significant exchange took place that has received very little media attention. Edwin Chen, who writes for Bloomberg.com, asked Bush, “How hard is it for you to conduct the war without popular support? Do you ever have trouble balancing between doing what you think is the right thing and following the will of the majority of the public, which is the essence of democracy?”
Bush’s response was to emphasize the role of the military as a counterweight to public opinion. He outlined a concept of presidential power that upholds the military as a critical “constituency” rising above, and placed in opposition to, the American people. On this basis, Bush sought to justify a policy that has been clearly repudiated by the general population—not only in opinion polls, but also in the November 2006 midterm elections.
Bush began by attributing public opposition to the war to concerns that the US cannot succeed. “I can fully understand why people are tired of the war,” he said. “The question they have is, can we win it? And, of course, I’m concerned about whether or not the American people are in this fight.”
This was an attempt to dismiss and delegitimize the widespread opposition to the militarism, aggression and wanton destruction of human life that define not only the war in Iraq, but US foreign policy more broadly. There are millions of Americans who hate the war not because it has been mismanaged and may not “succeed,” but because it is a barbaric and criminal enterprise.
He then declared that the occupation of Iraq will continue regardless, and attempted to defend this policy by appealing to the military as against the general population. “If our troops thought that I was taking a poll to decide how to conduct this war, they would be very concerned about the mission,” he said. “If our troops said, well, here we are in combat, and we’ve got a commander-in-chief who is running a focus group—in other words, politics is more important to him than our safety and/or our strategy—that would dispirit our troops.”
To underline the point, Bush then declared that there are “a lot of constituencies in this fight.” In the list that followed, the American people figured as only one constituency. A strategy of withdrawing troops “may sound simple, and it may affect polls,” Bush said, “but it would have long-term, serious security consequences for the United States.”
He continued with the assertion that “sometimes you just have to make the decisions based on what you think is right. My most important job is to help secure this country, and therefore the decisions in Iraq are all aimed at helping do that job.”
Plainly put, this means that the “security” interests of the US take precedence over the will of the American people, which Bush disparagingly and contemptuously equates with a “focus group.”
When Bush speaks about the security interests of the US, he is not speaking about the safety and well being of the American people. He is speaking of the geo-strategic interests of the American ruling elite, which considers the establishment of a hegemonic position in the oil-rich Middle East to be central to those interests.
Moreover, every would-be dictator claims that his authoritarian measures are taken to ensure national security. Everything else must be sacrificed, including democratic rights. This is the basic line that has been utilized by the government since 9/11 to lay siege to constitutionally protected democratic rights, in the name of the “war on terror.”
Having thus dealt with the “constituency” of the American people, which he acknowledged was broadly opposed to his war policy, Bush moved on to that constituency on which he would rely to continue the policy. “A second constituency is the military,” he said, adding, “I’m pretty confident our military do not want their commander-in-chief making political decisions about their future.”
The “third constituency” Bush cited was “military families,” in regard to whom he said, “I don’t think they want their commander-in-chief making decisions based upon popularity.”
Thus, Bush advanced a conception that defines the “military” as a separate constituency which is more important than the American people as a whole.
When Bush speaks of the military, he is not referring to ordinary soldiers or their families, who are seen as little more than cannon fodder by the ruling establishment. In fact, US soldiers are generally no more supportive of the war in Iraq than the American population as a whole.
It is worth recalling one of the central grievances against King George III set down by the leaders of the American Revolution in the Declaration of Independence: “He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power.” Indeed, in the political and constitutional debates that ensued, figures such as Thomas Jefferson issued strong warnings of the dangers of a standing army, declaring that a permanent military presence that would pose a constant danger to the democratic rights of the American people.
Bush’s invocation of the military as a force to be invoked against the will of the American people was quite deliberate, and it should be taken very seriously. He made essentially the same argument at several other points in the course of the press conference.
He insisted, for example, that it was not possible to “let the Gallup poll or whatever polls there are decide the fate of the country.” After refusing to rule out the possibility of a further troop escalation, he said, “I just ask the American people to understand that the commander-in-chief must rely upon the wisdom and judgment of the military thinkers and planners.”
The content of this statement is a threat that the president will use his control over the military to impose the policies of the faction of the ruling elite that the administration represents—potentially including a further escalation of the war or its spread to other countries such as Iran—in the face of whatever popular opposition may arise.
Bush is explicit in declaring as a fundamental principle that politicians cannot be allowed to determine military policy—only generals can. This argument is as absurd as it is reactionary. First, Bush himself is a politician, and the top generals in charge of the military have been selected to carry out administration policy. Bush has repeatedly replaced or dismissed military officials when they came into conflict with certain aspects of administration policy.
Second, the argument overturns the basic principle of civilian control of the military. According to Bush, the president is “their [that is, the military’s] commander-in-chief,” in the sense that he must do what the military wants. If the president determines, therefore, that the military does not want to obey the results of an election, then there is nothing that can be done.
It is remarkable, though not surprising, that Bush’s statements elicited hardly a word of opposition from the Democratic Party or the media. The major newspapers did not report this portion of the press conference, and no prominent politician denounced the extraordinary attack on basic constitutional principles embodied in Bush’s remarks.
The silence of the political establishment in the face of the Bush administration’s appeals to the military as an independent force in American politics is hardly new. In fact, Bush came to power in 2000 based upon a stolen election in which the counting of invalid military ballots played an important role. Democratic Party candidate Al Gore responded at the time by saying he could not become president without the support of the military.
Since that time, the military has played an ever more prominent role in American political life. The Bush administration has asserted the right to hold US citizens and non-citizens in military custody indefinitely and without charges. It has created the Northern Command (Northcom), which, for the first time, coordinates military actions within the United States.
The administration has systematically sought to expand the power of the military to intervene in domestic affairs. In the National Defense Authorization Act passed last year to provide military funding, the administration had a section inserted that amends the Posse Comitatus Act to allow for the domestic use of the military in case of natural disaster, terrorist attack, or “other conditions in which the president determines that domestic violence has occurred to the extent that state officials cannot maintain public order.”
Top Bush administration officials only rarely speak before civilian audiences. Almost every major speech given by Bush or Cheney is before a military audience.
The silence of the nominal political opposition to these dangers is all the more remarkable given the fact that the threat is directed not only against public opinion, but also against the administration’s critics within the political establishment. There are escalating policy differences within the ruling elite, and support for the administration is hemorrhaging within Congress itself. No faction in the official debate in Washington opposes the war, but there are deep divisions over the policy required to uphold the interests of American imperialism.
All of the factions within the political establishment, whatever their tactical differences, are, in fact, united in their fear of the “constituency” of American public opinion. Under these conditions, the threat of a more open turn toward presidential-military dictatorship is very real.
If an election can have no effect on policy, and the power of the military is raised as a counterweight to any attempt to shift government policy, what alternative presents itself to the population? Here it is worth citing another passage from the Declaration of Independence:
“Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these [the rights of the population], it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness... [W]hen a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”

Copyright 1998-2007
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved

Here’s some excerpts from an op-ed in The Toledo Blade. It mentions, toward the end, one of my little unplesant fantasies, that the current junta will figure out a way to stay in power past 2008. A “terrorist attack” or some sort of national security “crisis” would give them the excuse.

What would anyone do about it? Take to the streets? Right. Stones against Humvees, uh-huh. Arrest the president and vice-president? Who? How? Congress would shit and make all kinds of threats, but in the end, they’d sputter and spew and not do much.

© 2007 The Blade. Back to: http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070718/OPINION04/707180321 Article published July 18, 2007

Vice president hurts GOP's chance to retain White House

Dan Simpson, a retired diplomat, is a member of the editorial boards of The Blade and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

THE DECISION of President Bush to keep Dick Cheney on as his vice presidential running mate in 2004 may have been the worst thing he has done to America.
***
Instead, Mr. Bush and the rest of his and Mr. Cheney's loyalists are continuing to hardline it with the same lies and fear-mongering they used to get us into the war in the first place. More practical Republican candidates whose seats will be at risk in 2008 are either jumping ship or drinking.
***
There is also the late-at-night, eerie concern that Mr. Bush has in his head some sort of scenario where, for reasons of national security - real or drummed up - the 2008 elections will have to be postponed and he will get to stay on.

My suspicions have at their base the feeling I have that, given their operating style now, this bunch will not leave the White House easily in 2009.
***
Dan Simpson, a retired diplomat, is a member of the editorial boards of The Blade and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Northern Idaho has been the home of the weird for a long time. All things change. For years and years I’ve seen places “off the grid,” survivalists’ shelters, either collapse or go on the market. The dream of self-sufficiency is appealing, but difficult to manifest. Even as a non-Bible-believing whatever, I like the idea of being able to ride out almost any storm.

I also remember some old old joke about emerging from your shelter after a major nuclear disaster, and seeing all the neighbors you machine-gunned as they came running for help. Hah-hah-h....

I wish this guy luck, but I can’t think of too many “Christian” nations that would want him.


Kamiah man selling home that's built to withstand just about anything
7/16/2007, 11:37 a.m. PT
By DEAN A. FERGUSON
The Associated Press
http://www.oregonlive.com/newsflash/washingtonstate/index.ssf?/base/news-30/118461149318630.xml&storylist=orwashington
KAMIAH, Idaho (AP) — Do you envision a dream home that shields you from nuclear holocaust? Marauding outlaws? Agents of Satan?

You're in luck.

A $230,000, two-story, three-bedroom beauty nestled amid rolling pastures eight miles north of here is on the market.

The "Survivalist Home," as advertised in north central Idaho newspapers, was built in 1998 on 21/2 acres and designed as a haven from nuclear fallout and roving bands of outlaws, said owner Mike (Big Mike) Molesworth, 62.

"You won't find another one like this up here," he said.

His self-sufficient home is in part of Idaho that has drawn many people seeking havens from the world, such as those who came 13 years ago with constitutionalist Bo Gritz to form the Christian covenant communities, Almost Heaven and Shenandoah, which are on 600 acres nearby in the Woodland area.

Anyone on a country drive on Caribel Road will spot Molesworth's property and know it's special.

The well-kept lawn, short gravel drive, outbuilding with storage for 10 cords of firewood and garden plot are enclosed by a 6-foot-tall fence topped with a vicious 2-foot whirl of concertina wire. The entrance has floodlights at a military-style checkpost.

"It was probably, maybe, a little extreme putting the razor wire up there," Molesworth said. "But if things go bad, you won't have time to put it up later, or even go buy things."

The Bible warns of tough times ahead, Molesworth said.

Sometime soon, someone is bound to detonate a suitcase nuclear bomb and spark mass unrest. In the ensuing chaos, the razor wire can keep starving neighbors from raiding the garden, he said.

The home's crown jewel is the bunker.

Behind 8 inches of rebar-filled concrete is a bathroom, bedroom with bunk beds, a kitchen, two walk-in food and supply closets and a room for tools and power generators. The opening to a 3,000-gallon water tank is inside and there's access to a 1,700-gallon cistern that fills from a stream that crosses the property.

The bunker makes up about a third of the 1,725-square-foot dwelling and is a bit tight, but homey. Until recently, Molesworth lived in it, allowing a needy family to live upstairs in the more conventional part of the home.

The bunker is stocked with reading material, such as the U.S. Department of Energy's 1987 "Nuclear War Survival Skills," as well as movies, music and board games.

"You don't want to sit in here going nuts with nothing to do," Molesworth said.

He has new clothes too.

"If we have an argument with China, they're not going to send socks and underwear to us."

Molesworth can use electricity from the power company or switch a couple of plugs to use his own propane-powered generator. He keeps 3 1/2 years worth of propane, food and supplies.

While the Bible warns of seven years of tribulation, only half that time will require self-sufficiency, he explained.

"The Bible says in the last 3 1/2 years, you won't be able to buy or sell anything."

Molesworth is a tall, large man, hence the nickname Big Mike. He grew up in Maryland, the son in a Catholic military family. He's been married twice but has no children and has held many jobs, including one as a computer technician. He also served in the U.S. Army from 1962 to 1965. He retired as a teamster in Las Vegas.

He's a jocular guy and doesn't proselytize. He heard about Idaho in Vegas from other truckers chatting on the citizen's band radio about "like-minded-thinking people, people that believe in Bible prophecy and all that."

He stayed out of the Christian covenant communities, saying he has friends there but isn't interested in the politics. And "like-minded" doesn't always mean pleasant.

"Don't get me wrong, you do get some nuts up here," Molesworth said.

So why sell the home he has sunk so much time into?

After some prodding, Molesworth admitted that he got cross-wise with the Internal Revenue Service a few years back and ended up with a felony. Now, he can't legally have a firearm and that doesn't sit well.

"I'm leaving the country."

He won't say where he's headed, only that his intended destination is a country with a good exchange rate, little crime and friendly, Christian people. His disability checks, for a back injury, and other Social Security will let him live well.

So far, he has shown the home to people from New Mexico and Washington. Another person from Utah plans to view it as well. The taxes on the place are $211 a year and his power bill, both for propane and the power company, comes to $40 a month.

Another reason he is leaving is because his elderly mother, who used to live with him, has recently taken ill and he needs $5,000 a month to pay for her nursing home. Now, he's alone in the bunker. He wants to start living again.

"I've just been sitting here waiting to die, waiting for the bomb to hit," Molesworth said. "I'm going to go start doing something."

___

Information from: Lewiston Tribune, http://www.lmtribune.com

Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

India is as plagued by fundamentalists as is Pakistan. Pakistan’s fundamentalists are Islamic, India’s are Hindu. We have our own rising tide of religious fascists. Our fundamentalists are trying to outlaw abortion and birth control. If they came to power, we could expect something like what’s happening in India.

BBC NEWS
'Indian register' for pregnancies
By Sanjoy Majumder
BBC News, Delhi

India banned gender selection and selective abortion in 1994
An Indian minister has proposed that all pregnant women register with the government and seek its permission if they wish to undergo an abortion.

Women and child development minister Renuka Chowdhury says the move is aimed at stopping the aborting of unwanted female foetuses.

Although prenatal sex determination and selective abortion are banned, far more boys than girls are born.

Critics warn that the new move could backfire and be misused.

Ms Chowdhury also wants abortions to be permitted only in specific circumstances, although she did not spell out what these may be.

Unable to stop

The minister says a register of pregnancies would allow the government to track them and crack down on the practice of foeticide which she says is widespread in parts of northern India.

Despite the ban on prenatal sex determination, the government has been unable to prevent the selective abortion of female foetuses and the practice of female infanticide.

According to the last national census, for every 1,000 boys, there are only 927 girls in India.

But critics say the new move is an infringement on personal freedom and could also be misused.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/6897564.stm

Published: 2007/07/13 12:38:32 GMT

© BBC MMVII

Someday, I hope, we’ll see a great compendium of the fuckups, thefts, and instances of simple incompetence during the regime of Bush and Cheney. It’s more than possible we won’t, because we may never get rid of the neo-cons...at least until there’s some sort of upheaval like those that toppled the dictatorships in Nicaragua, Argentina, and other totalitarian states. I mean, even if those clowns in Washington stay in power, eventually they’ll fall. They all do.

The problem is what to do until then. In the meanwhile, here's another blunder by our government. It seems, as most of us know, the military has been using deathtraps for vehicles for U.S. troops, in Iraq, while trying to upgrade Iraqi transportation. This war has already cost as much as the war in Viet Nam—without the air support Viet Nam was famous for—and yet the Pentagon keeps sending out troops in Humvees. We should make Bush and Cheney make surprise tours of Bagdad in U.S. humvees.

Imagine what that poor soldier looked like after being blown through the roof of a Humvee. Imagine someone you know and love looking like that.

USA TODAY

Pentagon balked at pleas from officers in field for safer vehicles
Iraqi troops got MRAPs; Americans waited

By Peter Eisler, Blake Morrison and Tom Vanden Brook
USA TODAY

Pfc. Aaron Kincaid, 25, had been joking with buddies just before their Humvee rolled over the bomb. His wife, Rachel, later learned that the blast blew Kincaid, a father of two from outside Atlanta, through the Humvee's metal roof.

Army investigators who reviewed the Sept. 23 attack near Riyadh, Iraq, wrote in their report that only providence could have saved Kincaid from dying that day: "There was no way short of not going on that route at that time (that) this tragedy could have been diverted."

A USA TODAY investigation of the Pentagon's efforts to protect troops in Iraq suggests otherwise.

Years before the war began, Pentagon officials knew of the effectiveness of another type of vehicle that better shielded troops from bombs like those that have killed Kincaid and 1,500 other soldiers and Marines. But military officials repeatedly balked at appeals — from commanders on the battlefield and from the Pentagon's own staff — to provide the lifesaving Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, or MRAP, for patrols and combat missions, USA TODAY found.

In a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates late last month, two U.S. senators said the delays cost the lives of an estimated "621 to 742 Americans" who would have survived explosions had they been in MRAPs rather than Humvees.

The letter, from Sens. Joseph Biden, D-Del., and Kit Bond, R-Mo., assumed the initial calls for MRAPs came in February 2005, when Marines in Iraq asked the Pentagon for almost 1,200 of the vehicles. USA TODAY found that the first appeals for the MRAP came much earlier.

As early as December 2003, when the Marines requested their first 27 MRAPs for explosives-disposal teams, Pentagon analysts sent detailed information about the superiority of the vehicles to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, e-mails obtained by USA TODAY show. Later pleas came from Iraq, where commanders saw that the approach the Joint Chiefs embraced— adding armor to the sides of Humvees, the standard vehicles in the war zone — did little to protect against blasts beneath the vehicles.

Despite the efforts, the general who chaired the Joint Chiefs until Oct. 1, 2005, says buying MRAPs "was not on the radar screen when I was chairman." Air Force general Richard Myers, now retired, says top military officials dealt with a number of vehicle issues, including armoring Humvees. The MRAP, however, was "not one of them." Something related to MRAPs "might have crossed my desk," Myers says, "but I don't recall it."

Why the issue never received more of a hearing from top officials early in the war remains a mystery, given the chorus of concern. One Pentagon analyst complained in an April 29, 2004, e-mail to colleagues, for instance, that it was "frustrating to see the pictures of burning Humvees while knowing that there are other vehicles out there that would provide more protection."

The analyst was referring to the MRAP, whose V-shaped hull puts the crew more than 3 feet off the ground and deflects explosions. It was designed to withstand the underbelly bombs that cripple the lower-riding Humvees. Pentagon officials, civilians and military alike, had been searching for technologies to guard against improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. The makeshift bombs are the No. 1 killer of U.S. forces.

The MRAP was not new to the Pentagon. The technology had been developed in South Africa and Rhodesia in the 1970s, making it older than Kincaid and most of the other troops killed by homemade bombs. The Pentagon had tested MRAPs in 2000, purchased fewer than two dozen and sent some to Iraq. They were used primarily to protect explosive ordnance disposal teams, not to transport troops or to chase Iraqi insurgents.

Even as the Pentagon balked at buying MRAPs for U.S. troops, USA TODAY found that the military pushed to buy them for a different fighting force: the Iraqi army.

On Dec. 22, 2004 — two weeks after President Bush told families of servicemembers that "we're doing everything we possibly can to protect your loved ones" — a U.S. Army general solicited ideas for an armored vehicle for the Iraqis. The Army had an "extreme interest" in getting troops better armor, then-brigadier general Roger Nadeau told a subordinate looking at foreign technology, in an e-mail obtained by USA TODAY.

In a follow-up message, Nadeau clarified his request: "What I failed to point out in my first message to you folks is that the US Govt is interested not for US use, but for possible use in fielding assets to the Iraqi military forces."

In response, Lt. Col. Clay Brown, based in Australia, sent information on two types of MRAPs manufactured overseas. "By all accounts, these are some of the best in the world," he wrote. "If I were fitting out the Iraqi Army, this is where I'd look (wish we had some!)"

The first contract for what would become the Iraqi Light Armored Vehicle — virtually identical to the MRAPs sought by U.S. forces then and now, and made in the United States by BAE Systems — was issued in May 2006. The vehicles, called Badgers, began arriving in Iraq 90 days later, according to BAE. In September 2006, the Pentagon said it would provide up to 600 more to Iraqi forces. As of this spring, 400 had been delivered.

The rush to equip the Iraqis stood in stark contrast to the Pentagon's efforts to protect U.S. troops.

In February 2005, two months after Nadeau solicited ideas for better armor for the Iraqis and was told MRAPs were an answer, an urgent-need request for the same type of vehicle came from embattled Marines in Anbar province. The request, signed by then-brigadier general Dennis Hejlik, said the Marines "cannot continue to lose … serious and grave casualties to IEDs … at current rates when a commercial off-the-shelf capability exists to mitigate" them.

Officials at Marine headquarters in Quantico, Va., shelved the request for 1,169 vehicles. Fifteen months passed before a second request reached the Joint Chiefs and was approved. Those vehicles finally began trickling into Anbar in February, two years after the original request. Because of the delay, the Marines are investigating how its urgent-need requests are handled.

The long delay infuriates some members of Congress. "Every day, our troops are being maimed or killed needlessly because we haven't fielded this soon enough," says Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss. "The costs are in human lives, in kids who will never have their legs again, people blind, crippled. That's the real tragedy."

Not until two months ago did the Pentagon champion the MRAP for all U.S. forces. Gates made MRAPs the military's top priority. The plan is to build the vehicles as fast as possible until conditions warrant a change, according to a military official who has direct knowledge of the program but is not authorized to speak on the record. Thousands are in the pipeline at a cost so far of about $2.4 billion.

Gates said he was influenced by a news report — originally in USA TODAY — that disclosed Marine units using MRAPs in Anbar reported no deaths in about 300 roadside bombings in the past year. His tone was grave. "For every month we delay," he said, "scores of young Americans are going to die."

One reason officials put off buying MRAPs in significant quantities: They never expected the war to last this long. Bush set the tone on May 1, 2003, six weeks after the U.S. invasion, when he declared on board the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."

Gen. George Casey, the top commander in Iraq from June 2004 until February this year, repeatedly said that troop levels in Iraq would be cut just as soon as Iraqi troops took more responsibility for security. In March 2005, he predicted "very substantial reductions" in U.S. troops by early 2006. He said virtually the same thing a year later.

Casey wasn't the only optimist. In May 2005, Vice President Cheney declared that the insurgency was "in its last throes."

Given the view that the war would end soon, the Pentagon had little use for expensive new vehicles such as the MRAP, at least not in large quantities. The MRAPs ordered for the Iraqis were intended to speed the day when, to use Bush's words, Iraqi forces could "stand up" and the United States could "stand down."
***
Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England, the No. 2 official at the Pentagon, testified on Capitol Hill in June that "as the threat has evolved, we have evolved. We work very, very hard to be responsible to our troops."

Taylor, the Democratic congressman from Mississippi, pressed England about why the Pentagon waited until May to request substantial numbers of MRAPs. "Are you telling me no one could see that (need) coming, no one could recognize that the bottom of the Humvee" didn't protect troops, and "that's why the kids inside are losing their legs and their lives?" Taylor asked.

"That is too simplistic a description," England replied. "People have not died needlessly, and we have not left our people without equipment."
***

Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20070716/1a_iedcoverxx.art.htm



Copyright 2007 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Over on Alternet http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/guest/56812/ Oliver Willis has a nice list of all the times Bush has said “we’re making progress” in Iraq. Yeah.

The problem is, of course, is this: American politicians want to posture, either pro- or anti- Iraq War, but they just don’t want to do anything, ahh, controversial. Like actually stand up to the Bush-Cheney Junta and take the risks that go with that. Do you hear me, Ms Pelosi? Mr Reid? Mr Wyden?

In the meanwhile, it’s still the OK Corral over there. Now everybody is shooting at everybody else.


The New York Times
July 14, 2007
U.S. Troops Battle Iraqi Police in East Baghdad; Rogue Lieutenant Captured, Military Says
By STEPHEN FARRELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/14/world/middleeast/14iraq.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=th&pagewanted=print

BAGHDAD, July 13 — In a rare battle between American and uniformed Iraqi forces, United States troops backed by fighter jets killed six Iraqi policemen and seven gunmen during a predawn raid in which they captured a rogue police lieutenant, the military said Friday.

***
The Iraqi police are widely thought to be infiltrated by the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias, as well as by Sunni insurgent groups, all of whom are accused of using their positions to plan and carry out widespread sectarian killings.

***

Speaking after American criticism of the Iraqi government’s progress on performance benchmarks set by Congress, Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president, insisted that there were “positive developments on the political level,” citing efforts within the government to create “a front of moderate forces committed to the political process and democracy.”

Mr. Talabani also claimed progress in intensive military operations carried out by American troops around Baghdad and central Iraq in recent months. “A successful campaign is on to eliminate terrorists, and so far large areas of Diyala and Anbar have been cleared,” he said late on Thursday.

A security official in the town of Muqdadiya in Diyala Province said seven men were killed Friday when gunmen attacked a house in the nearby village of Harbitila. The Iraqi Army also confirmed that a roadside bomb had killed a senior officer, Col. Abdul-Kareem Hameed, and three of his guards near Muqdadiya.

Farther south, in Wasit Province, the police found three unidentified bodies in the Tigris River. All were wearing civilian clothes, had been shot and showed signs of torture.

In eastern Baghdad, the Interior Ministry said five guards manning towers around the ministry had been killed in an insurgent attack with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns. Nine guards were wounded. The compound is near the Finance Ministry headquarters, from which five Britons were abducted two months ago by kidnappers posing as government officials and police officers.

The body of Khalid W. Hassan, an Iraqi journalist working for The New York Times, was found in the Saydia district of southwest Baghdad on Friday.

Mr. Hassan was killed in the district while driving to work. A witness in a nearby line for fuel said a car had overtaken Mr. Hassan, and a gunman inside shot and wounded him. Gunfire from a second vehicle then killed him.

Two Iraqi employees of Reuters were killed the day before. Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based group, says more than 191 journalists and news media assistants have been killed in Iraq since 2003.

Also in Saydia, police officials said they had found about half a dozen bodies, including those of an 11-year-old girl and two women. All had been blindfolded, bound and shot in the head. A car bomb also exploded in the area, killing two civilians.

The Iraqi police reported finding 21 unidentified bodies in Baghdad on Friday. Although the body count in such suspected sectarian killings has dropped since the start of the latest Baghdad security plan in February, in recent days the police have reported finding 20 to 30 bodies daily.

Mortar shells fired yesterday afternoon at Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, the seat of the Iraqi government and American Embassy, killed a senior Iraqi military officer, according to Iraqi Army officials.

Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Baghdad, Diyala and Kut.

www.ecoworld.com has a page with "10 Capitalist Myths." Private property is far less sacred than some would have us believe. This is a nice response—

Property is Sacred.

Never. Too much of the property we might consider sacred is also shared between us. If the air is unhealthy for people to breath, or the water too poisonous for fishermen to fish, some property owner's prerogative, and resultant pollution, is definitely not sacred. Productive assets necessary to society, especially when controlled by monopolies, cartels, or foreign financial interests, must be regulated to ensure sustainable practices and a safety net for the poor. Property rights defenders are correct to call regulations "takings," but that per se is not at issue. Governments must regulate trade to enforce "free trade," they must regulate commerce to encourage and enable competition, and they should help protect the weak; all of which can translate into "takings" in some form. The only question is when, and how much.

Got to love those champions of religiosity and the American Way. From men’s rooms to gay meth-head hookers to chasing after people saying “Suck it, baby, suck it,” they’re right out there. It looks like right-wing politics is almost as good a place to be a predator as being a youth group counselor.
And like predators always, they know where to hang out: where the prey is.

Almond Resigns From North Carolina House One Day After Allegations Surface

By MARGARET LILLARD
Associated Press Writer
http://www.wral.com/news/state/story/1584898/
Posted: Jul. 12, 2007
Updated: Jul. 12 1:07 p.m.

RALEIGH, N.C. — Rep. David Almond resigned Thursday from the state Legislature due to an unspecified personnel complaint filed with House leadership, a day after the chamber's GOP caucus said it was looking into allegations of "serious, improper behavior."

In a one-sentence letter to House Speaker Joe Hackney, the two-term Republican lawmaker from Stanly County immediately resigned his seat representing the 67th House District.

"A complaint has been filed against me with the Speaker. I intend to defend myself against these charges in whatever forum may be appropriate," Almond said in a written statement released by House GOP leaders.
***
Almond, 59, took his House seat in the 2005 session and was re-elected last fall, representing Stanly County and parts of Montgomery and Union counties. He is a vice chairman of the House committee on children, youth and families.

Republicans in the district will name a replacement for Almond to serve out the remainder of his two-year term.

So, assuming there are nuns who still wear wimples—and I presume there are—would they be kept out of court-rooms if they refused to uncover their heads?

I don’t think so.

Trust the south to come up with ever-new forms of segregation. This one is as odious as all the others. On the other hand, I may be too hard on the southern states: there were some instances of American Indian high school graduates who were not allowed to wear eagle feathers on their mortar-boards, recently. Was it Stokeley Carmichael that said, "Racism is as American as apple pie!" ?


International Herald Tribune
U.S. Muslim group meets with city officials about woman barred from court over head scarf
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/07/11/america/NA-GEN-US-Muslim-Head-Scarf.php
The Associated Press
Wednesday, July 11, 2007


ATLANTA: Members of a national Muslim advocacy group met Wednesday with local officials from Valdosta, Georgia, about a policy that barred a Muslim woman from wearing a traditional head scarf in a city courtroom because of "homeland security" concerns.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, based in Washington, D.C., said no resolution was reached in the case of 20-year-old Aniisa Karim, who said she was banned from entering the Valdosta municipal court building on June 26 unless she took off the scarf.

"There's no definitive change thus far, but we have agreed to further discussions," said Ahmed Bedier, director of CAIR's Tampa, Florida, branch. "There was a cooperative spirit, a healthy spirit, and everyone agreed from the beginning we were all cooperating together to achieve the same goal."

Karim, a Baltimore, Maryland, native who works for a Valdosta radio station, was attempting to contest a speeding ticket when she was stopped by a security officer. She said she explained that she wore the traditional garment for religious reasons, but was told she could not enter because of "homeland security" concerns.

I know a guy down in Arizona who’s pretty far to the right, politically. Maybe as far to the right as I am to the left. But, we have some similar interests and exchange photos stories and occasional jokes.

My friend, who’s a realtor, got me interested in the right-wing think tank in California, The Pacific Legal Foundation. I’m on their mailing list: it’s kind of advance notice notice of shit the lefties are going to write and yak about. "Property rights" is one of P.L.F.’s big issues. Along with anti-affirmative action, of course—and anti-desegregation of schools. I mean, they are right-wing.

I’m interested in property rights, too. But more as the cause represents a sort of American fetish. Property rights just about trumps everything else in this country. Want to pollute your stretch of the river? Sure, and if someone downstream complains, mention “property rights” in a reverent but strident tone and the right- wingers will come running. Want to dig a strip mine on the rim of Crater Lake? Wave the flag and a banner saying “Property Rights” and people will love to donate money for a court fight.

Here in Oregon, the sancity of private property has risen again, in terms of defeating attempts at land use planning. Even wanting to erect billboards is portrayed to be upholding a god-given right.

And the Pacific Legal Foundation, though with a much lower profile, is about as cozy with the Bush-Cheney junta as is the American Enterprise Insititue—or one of those whacked-out “family values” religious organizations.


Strange Bedfellows

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/seattlepolitics/archives/117865.asp

Bush fires U.S. representative to International Boundary Commission

In a bizarre twist to a dispute over a four-foot-high fence near the U.S.-Canada border in Whatcom County, President Bush on Tuesday fired Dennis Schornack as U.S. Commissioner to the International Boundary Commission and member of the International Joint Commission.


"I would like to extend my best wishes in your future endeavors," wrote presidential assistant Liza Wright in conveying Bush's order. The letter told Schornack that he is "terminated effectively immediately."

The firing came without warning. The legal counsel to the International Boundary Commission described Bush's order as improper. He argued that Schornack holds a quasi-judicial position with an international body.

"First of all, he can't fire him: He can appoint him but he can't fire him," said Elliot Feldman, the IBC's legal counsel.

Schornack was in Michigan and not available for comment. But Feldman had plenty to say when interviewed by the P-I.


"The President has a fight on his hands," he said. "There has been quite a lot of threats and bullying to the commissioner. We thought it was all rather hollow."

The IBC and IJC are low-key bodies, composed of commissioners appointed by the U.S. and Canadian governments.

They are charged with overseeing the world's longest peaceful border, and working out trans-boundary disputes between the two countries.

They're best known for midwifing settlement of a longstanding dispute between the city of Seattle and British Columbia over the raising of Ross Dam, and for intervening when the pollution from the Trail Smelter in B.C. killed trees on the U.S. side of the border.

But Schornack appears to have run afoul of a powerful right-wing legal group with deep, longstanding ties to the Republican Party.

Herbert and Shirley-Ann Leo of Blaine, who live just south of the border, built on their property a four-foot-high, 85-foot-long concrete wall. The wall intrudes into a 10-foot-wide "clear boundary vista" maintained at the 5,000-mile-long border.

The boundary vista area has been maintained for a hundred years, but has assumed additional importance due to an upsurge of smuggling of illegals and "B.C. Bud" marijuana across the border.

According to the commission, the wall was "severely hampering the ability of the U.S. Border Patrol and Royal Canadian Mounted Police to protect the border." The IBC asked the Leus to remove the wall.

The couple refused, and have received assistance from the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation on grounds their private property rights have been violated.

After being refused legal help by the U.S. Department of State, the Commission retained private legal counsel, which filed papers in the case in Seattle defending the Commission's right to protect the border.

At that point, however, a dispute broke out between agencies.

The U.S. Justice Department asked to take over the case, and negotiate a compromise that concedes the couple's private property complaints. But the Commission argued that it is an international body.

In its defense, the IBC said in a statement: "Sooner rather than later, the Administration will be seen to prefer private property rights over national security and ready to undo an international treaty with Canada to serve that preference."

Schornack has impeccable Republican credentials. He was a longtime aide to Michigan's longtime (1990-2002) Republican Gov. John Engler. But he became outspoken in the case of the four-foot border fence.

"We are not interested in taking the Leus' property," Schornack said. "We are only interested in keeping permanent obstructions, such as walls, away from the border site lines, a mere 10 feet."

The Treaty of Washington between the U.S. and Canada directs the Commission to keep the boundary vista clear. The 1925 treaty was ratified by Congress, making it a law of the United States.

The Commission offered to remove the Leus' wall at its own expense.

Feldman said he believes the Department of Justice and White House made a backstage deal with the Pacific Legal Foundation.

"We believe they have made a deal and are selling out the national security of the United States," he argued. "We know there is someone in the White House who went there from the Justice Department. This has all the same features and it involves the same people as the firing of the U.S. attorneys."

The Justice Department could not be reached for comment.

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

About the first thing I do, on the computer, every day is check my email, yeah. I sign on, open the mail account, go over to the browser and skim the news, then come back to see what's my mail.

It usually ain't much. I get a personal email once a day, if I'm lucky. It isn't like I'm a hermit: I know a bunch of people and I talk to some of them by phone on a regular basis. I don't really like using the phone all that much: I've spent a lot of years writing stuff, and the written word is what I like. I write a lot of emails; maybe four or five to every one I get back.

Truth is, I get lonely.

Snivel.

Simple answers for complex problems usually only satisfy simple minds. Yeah, I know there are dozens of aphorisms about simple solutions being the best, blah blah. Just not true, though.

In today’s Independent.UK, I found an essay that looks at why violent terror has hooked in various young men in Britain. The tone is: why is anyone surprised?
Violence fosters violence. We know that from studies in domestic violence: people who have been abused get nuts and do nutty things later on in life. Sometimes they become perpetrators of additional violence. Sometimes they become victims—or people who rescue others from violence...But they are bent by early experience. “Bent” can be a synonym for “twisted,” yes.

It’s depressing. Sometimes it’s glossed as “PTSD,” but that’s one of those terms that’s become nearly meaningless. Like “He has issues.” Huh? Depressing and complex.

And so much of it is tied in with weird perceptions of masculinity, which, well, good luck to all of us. The women's movement talked a lot about sex role stereotypes, and for a while there was a men's movement, and even a movement that looked at how sex roles were/are exploited to perpetuate our economic-social system. No, I don't know what ever happened to all that, either...

http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_m_z/joan_smith/article2753350.ece

***the authorities - the Home Office, immigration officials, the police and security service - have been so slow to recognise the likely effect of allowing into the country so many boys and men who have been brutalised in a series of terrible conflicts around the world, from Somalia to former Yugoslavia. It has long been recognised that civil wars are particularly traumatic, turning neighbours against each other and exposing civilians to massacres, rape and torture.

In the past couple of decades, there has been a steady flow to this country of teenage boys and young men damaged in such wars, without any recognition that they desperately need treatment if they are ever to control their violent impulses. Two of the men convicted of terrorist offences on Monday are from war-torn Somalia: Omar arrived in Britain via Kenya with his sisters in 1992, after their parents had almost certainly been murdered; Ramzi Mohammed fled Somalia at the age of 17 with his younger brother and was looked after by social services in Slough.

Hussein Osman was born Isaac Adus Hamdi in Ethiopia, and arrived in the UK in 1996, pretending to have escaped the Somali conflict in order to claim asylum in the UK. The leader of the gang, Ibrahim, grew up in Asmara, the capital of what is now Eritrea, and fled to Britain when he was 12 in 1990 to escape his country's war of independence from Ethiopia.

Not every young man who escapes from a war zone becomes a terrorist, but most will have experienced high levels of fear and anxiety, and are probably suffering from undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder. Such adolescents are often drawn to violence themselves, and there is anecdotal evidence that Somali gangs are fighting each other to control the supply of drugs in north-west London.

An 18-year-old man from another war zone, Kosovo, was among the half-dozen defendants convicted last year of the horrific murder of a 16-year-old girl in Reading. Indrit Krasniqi arrived in this country as an orphan at the age of 13 and should have been deported a couple of weeks before he took part in the murder of Mary-Ann Leneghan and the torture of her friend.

Since 52 people were killed in the 7/7 bombings in London two years ago, we are beginning to get a clearer picture of the kinds of young men who make easy recruits for Islamic extremists. Some are young Muslims, born in this country or brought here as small children, who are in search of a different and more radical identity than their parents' generation; others are converts, such as the shoe-bomber Richard Reid and the 7/7 bomber Jermaine Lindsay, to whom extreme Islam offers a sense of belonging and purpose. Last week we discovered the existence of another group, foreign doctors from a Muslim background who have allegedly been targeted by sympathisers of Wahabbi Islam and al-Qa'ida. The men convicted on Monday belong to a fourth, leading lives of minor criminality and easily turned against "Western" values.

There are common factors, not least DVDs and the internet, which are a very effective means of firing up young Muslims with a sense of injustice. One of the doctors arrested in Scotland is alleged to have spent hours at work looking at Islamist sites on the internet; in the case of the 21/7 bombers, Omar amassed speeches and videos of Osama bin Laden and Abu Hamza, as well as DVDs showing beheadings in Iraq and Russian soldiers being run over by Islamist fighters in Chechnya. Such images are common currency among extremists, both inciting and habituating them to violence.

Some commentators argue that the Iraq war is at the heart of this process, and there is no doubt that videos of suicide-bombings and atrocities play a part in radicalisation. But there is something else going on here, a crisis in masculine identity which leads some adolescent boys and young men in this country to carry knives and join gangs, while others are attracted by the extreme ideology of political Islam.

We need to ask ourselves not just how we can stop the recruitment of young men like Mukhtar Said Ibrahim, but how we can identify vulnerable young men before the recruitment process begins. And that means looking at the way in which this country has offered asylum-seekers a sanctuary, but not the means to develop a firm and healthy sense of masculine identity.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, when it’s good, is very good. What a treasure trove of reality sandwiches!

We’ve got a crop of “family values” politicians and preachers who turn out to be pious frauds, priests and pastors using their church position to prey on the innocent, school principals who enforce, on their students, anti-drug laws but who indulge in a bit of drug use themselves...What the hell? Henry Miller was right: this is the “air conditioned night-mare.”


SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/323307_psych12.html

Psychologist arrested in voyeurism case

Suspected of filming patients

Last updated July 11, 2007 11:48 p.m. PT

By CLAUDIA ROWE AND HECTOR CASTRO
P-I REPORTERS

A prominent Seattle psychologist, frequently used as an expert to evaluate child sex abuse cases, has been accused of installing a video camera in the bathroom at his office and secretly recording women using the facilities.

The 59-year-old man, a clinical affiliate professor at the University of Washington who also worked for a decade with the Seattle Archdiocese on abuse cases involving priests, was arrested July 3 for investigation of voyeurism and booked into the King County Jail. He was released two days later. No charges have been filed.
***
Nationally recognized as an expert in pediatric psychology, the therapist long has been known to regulators at the health department for a series of eight complaints reaching back to the early 1990s.

Though none has resulted in any disciplinary action, three of the allegations were resolved through a 1995 court proceeding in Thurston County, which has been sealed.
***
Kelley declined to elaborate on the nature of the prior complaints but noted that two now under investigation were filed after the therapist's arrest last week.

***

© 1998-2007 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Let's see: Bill Kristol thinks the US will/should invade Pakistan in the eternal quest for "terrorists;" Harriet Miers, Bush's...hmm, what is she, anyway?...ex-aide, OK, sure, may actually be in contempt of Congress if she follows his directions and refuses to testify. Hmm. Hmm.

What does it all mean, Mr Natural?

Don't mean shit.

Congress wants to look good: it doesn't give a rat's ass about doing good. The whole purpose of Congress, these days, is to make it look like the government is operating by all the rules. Kind of like what went on back during Watergate. The only thing Congress will do, wants to do, is save it's own ass. Those guys don't give a shit about the Constitution or justice or anything like that. They want their jobs. Keep things the way they've been. They'll only go after Bush and Cheney if it looks like—to their focus groups or whoever—they'll have to do that to stay in office. Again, like Watergate. The last thing they want to do is effect real change.

Smoke and mirrors, mirrors and smoke. Bush is one of them. And I mean "them" in the most class-conscious and most us v. them way I possibly can. We shovel the coal; we don't steer the ship.

Today's Oregonian has a story about the on-going rehabilitation of Celilo Village, up on the Columbia.

For millenia, the Celilo area was the largest gathering place for Indian people in the west—maybe in North America. Uncounted millions of salmon passed through a narrow stretch of the river, and native people came to fish, trade, hang out, marry—all the things people like to do in an area of abundant resources.

That stretch of river is now a slack-water lake. Nearly the entire Columbia, like the Mississippi River, is a string of turgid lakes. Whatever salmon make it up past the damn-dams at Bonneville and The Dalles, struggle on, mission-driven upriver to spawn and then to die—although, these days, it's more likely they just die.

America screwed the Columbia River Indians like it's screwed all the Indians, even the ones who played ball with the white folks. And, of course, the screwing is continuing, like down on the Klamath River...

But, once in a while, in order to salve the national karma, something happens:


Ancient place has new features
Celilo Village gets improved housing, water and sewer systems
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
ERIC MORTENSON
The Oregonian
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1184126124316030.xml&coll=7

CELILO VILLAGE -- The searing heat bakes the brown hills that rise up along both sides of the Columbia River, but the air conditioning inside the government-issue double-wide works perfectly. Village Chief Olsen Meanus Jr., shirtless and sweating from a day spent lugging box springs and dressers, sits for a moment as his children explore the white-on-white interior of their temporary home.

It's a better environment for the kids, Meanus muses. And all the recent village improvements -- the new longhouse, the new water and sewer systems, now the new houses -- all of that work honors the elders who have preserved the heritage of this ancient gathering place for Northwest tribes, he says.

The Meanus family and about 50 other village residents began this week moving into modular homes provided by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The families will live there for the next nine months while contractors build 14 homes and the first paved streets and sidewalks the village has seen. The village's existing residences will be torn down; many are decrepit shacks or trailers afflicted with lead paint and substandard plumbing and wiring.

The new homes will be two-, three-, or four-bedroom houses ranging from about 1,400 to 1,800 square feet, said George Miller, the corps' project manager. The housing will be owned by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which will issue residency permits. Village residents will live there free, taking on some responsibility for maintenance.

For most residents, even the temporary modular homes are a dramatic step up. Each has three bedrooms, two bathrooms and comes with washer, dryer and air conditioning in addition to the usual stove and fridge. A half-dozen homes are handicap-accessible.

Even so, Meanus will miss his old home. "It's the only house I've ever lived in," he says ruefully. "I have a lot of memories in that house."

Such is the hold Celilo Village has on Native Americans. Despite decades of poverty, neglect and broken promises, despite being cut off from reservation services and dealing with sketchy sewer, water and electrical service, even good change is unsettling.

But change is coming and fast. The work is part of a $67 million project that essentially represents an admission by the government that it did not abide by a series of agreements, beginning with an 1855 treaty that promised Northwest tribes access to "usual and accustomed" fishing sites.

Celilo, seven miles upstream from The Dalles, was a fishing, trade and cultural center for Pacific Northwest tribes for an estimated 10,000 years. Native Americans, perched on planks or platforms, netted migrating salmon as they milled and leaped in a series of pools and falls. Water backed up by completion of The Dalles Dam in 1957 flooded Celilo Falls and forced relocation of the original village. The Bonneville and John Day hydroelectric dams affected other Native American fishing sites.

To make amends, the Corps of Engineers in the past few years has rebuilt 31 traditional fishing sites along the Columbia, adding access roads, boat ramps or other amenities as needed. At the request of the Warm Springs, Umatilla, Yakama and Nez Perce tribes, the corps added the Celilo Village restoration to the project.

A 2003 corps report, written to authorize the village project, was unusually plain-spoken in its assessment of the government's responsibility. The corps contributed to problems at Celilo by providing inadequate housing and infrastructure to residents forced to relocate because of The Dalles Dam, the report said.

The agency's long involvement at Celilo "sets this site peculiarly apart as a corps responsibility," the report said.

"It's hard to think long term when you don't have decent water, electricity and sewage," said Miller, the project manager.

The home and street construction extend a flurry of improvements at Celilo. Contractors built a new village longhouse in 2005, and this spring it hosted a 50-year commemoration of the flooding of Celilo Falls. Since then, workers have drilled a new well, installed a 250,000-gallon water reservoir, built a new sewage lagoon and pump station, and added fire hydrants.

A Bureau of Indian Affairs administrative office and classroom will be built in 2009, Miller said.

The village work has been followed closely by Native Americans living on Northwest reservations and elsewhere. An estimated 2,000 people, most of them Native Americans, attended the 50-year commemoration at Celilo.

Amber Schulz, an employee with Cooper Zietz Engineers Inc. of Portland, a Native-owned firm, found herself doing technical drawings for the project. Her mother's family has roots in Celilo Village; the late renowned Chief Tommy Thompson was Schulz's great-great-grandfather.

"To rebuild those ties has been very important to me," Schulz said. "There's an innate place people need to go that is home. It's really powerful to reconnect; it's like re-meeting your family."

The corps' Miller, who is white, said the work has been particularly rewarding.

"It's a special place," he said. "What I felt was most interesting was that the people never left. They're tied to the river and the resource."

Eric Mortenson; 503-294-5917; ericmortenson@news.oregonian.com

©2007 The Oregonian

Now, if anyone still thinks American justice is equality-oriented...

Vernonia principal in hot water over pot
Drug testing - Since 1989, the school district has had strict anti-drug rules for its athletes
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
DAVID AUSTIN
The Oregonian
http://www.oregonlive.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/news/1184126109316030.xml&coll=7
For nearly two decades the Vernonia School District has been at the forefront of fighting student drug use, even taking its mandatory drug-testing policy of athletes to the U.S. Supreme Court -- and winning.

But a 41-year-old Vernonia elementary principal will keep his job, even after getting cited at Fort Stevens State Park last week for possession of marijuana.

Vernonia Superintendent Kenneth Cox said Tuesday that Aaron Miller has his "full support" and will stay on as principal of Washington Grade School and Mist Elementary School after telling a Clatsop County sheriff's deputy that he'd been smoking pot.

"It was an unfortunate mistake and a poor choice to make," Cox said. "But I've had a meeting with Mr. Miller, and he's planning on making things better, making things right."

Miller, who lives in Vernonia, said his attorney advised him not to comment on the case. "I will be speaking publicly on this issue in the future," he said.

The Vernonia district started mandatory testing of its athletes in 1989; students with drugs in their system couldn't play. School officials said they wanted to stem a growing drug problem.

Two years later, seventh-grader James Acton refused to take a drug test as part of a tryout for middle school football. Acton was banned from playing and his parents sued the school district.

The case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1995 and in a 6-3 decision justices upheld the district's policy.

Just received word that Corbin Harney, one of the grand elders, has passed on. Many of you know he was an outspoken voice for nuke disarmament and for native rights.

Prayers and smoke have been sent up for his journey. You can find more on the bay area indy web site.

I have to admit, I'm sad that so many women have sat quiet while the debate goes on about abortion. Maybe it's collective amnesia? I remember the problems women had when they got pregnant, forty or so years ago. Some of them...it was bad.

There’s a lot of bullshit around about how bad abortions are for mothers. The fundy right is spending millions of dollars and kajillions of hours spreading mis-information. They seriously want to turn back the clock and make pregnancy inevitable for women. For some bizarre reasons, they think this will preserve marriage—or maybe just punish people for fucking outside of marriage.

I found this guest editorial in today’s Seattle P-I and it’s good.


SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/323011_syndrome10.html

There is no post-abortion syndrome

Last updated July 9, 2007 4:59 p.m. PT

By SARAH PRAGER
GUEST COLUMNIST

Post-abortion syndrome doesn't exist. You won't find a scientific or medical description of it anywhere because it is not real ("Proponents of grief syndrome add fuel to the debate," July 2).

There is a large body of medical literature proving that the majority of women who have abortions suffer no negative medical or psychological consequences. On the contrary, most women are extremely grateful that the option of abortion is available to them. Choosing to end a pregnancy in abortion is not a decision that comes lightly to any woman, but it may very well be the best decision she can make for herself, and her current or future family.

In fact, abortion is far more likely to alleviate a woman's psychological angst than it is to cause it. Research by the American Psychological Association supports that claim, finding that 76 percent of women report feeling relief after abortion while only 17 percent report feelings of guilt.

Most people feel best about their decisions when they are presented all their options and are able to freely make a choice as to what is right for them. Pregnant women who make informed decisions about abortion are no different, and usually feel just fine about their choice.

Abortion is a difficult and divisive issue in our society, and it is attacked from all sides -- by the media, by politics, by the Supreme Court and by many people who are uninformed about the realities of unplanned pregnancy and abortion.

Abortion does not cause women to sink into despair or suffer long-term psychological problems. There are always going to be a few women who regret their decision, just as women (and men) regret other decisions that are made. And there are many who may feel sadness or grief about their decision, while still knowing it is the right decision for them to make at that time.

However, that does not translate into a syndrome that is given more credence than it even deserves by being given equal attention in this article. When there are two balanced sides of an argument, they deserve equal coverage. In this case, the weight is on the side of extensive research, which has shown repeatedly that the syndrome doesn't exist.

There are 1.3 million abortions performed every year in this country and one in four American women has at least one abortion while reproductively active. For the most part, those women continue to lead their lives without suffering from that decision.

Sarah Prager is an obstetrician/gynecologist in Seattle.

© 1998-2007 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Loaded Orygun has another good piece on Gordon Smith. It gets gooier and gooier for Gordon; More on his blatant farmer's ass kissing over the Klamath water struggle and his willfull ignoring of the Indian fishing rights. Well, yeah, they aren't voters in his state—assuming their votes are even counted, which is questionable.

Anyhow: http://loadedorygun.blogspot.com

I found this on the best of craigslist. I don't know what it's the best of, but it's like a reality sandwich to make me choke. The best argument yet against the war...

From an Angry Soldier

---

Date: 2007-04-10, 1:00PM PDT


I'm having the worst damn week of my whole damn life so I'm going to write this while I'm pissed off enough to do it right.

I am SICK of all this bullshit people are writing about the Iraq war. I am abso-fucking-lutely sick to death of it. What the fuck do most of you know about it? You watch it on TV and read the commentaries in the newspaper or Newsweek or whatever god damn yuppie news rag you subscribe to and think you're all such fucking experts that you can scream at each other like five year old about whether you're right or not. Let me tell you something: unless you've been there, you don't know a god damn thing about it. It you haven't been shot at in that fucking hell hole, SHUT THE FUCK UP!

How do I dare say this to you moronic war supporters who are "Supporting our Troops" and waving the flag and all that happy horse shit? I'll tell you why. I'm a Marine and I served my tour in Iraq. My husband, also a Marine, served several. I left the service six months ago because I got pregnant while he was home on leave and three days ago I get a visit from two men in uniform who hand me a letter and tell me my husband died in that fucking festering sand-pit. He should have been home a month ago but they extended his tour and now he's coming home in a box.

You fuckers and that god-damn lying sack of shit they call a president are the reason my husband will never see his baby and my kid will never meet his dad.

And you know what the most fucked up thing about this Iraq shit is? They don't want us there. They're not happy we came and they want us out NOW. We fucked up their lives even worse than they already were and they're pissed off. We didn't help them and we're not helping them now. That's what our soldiers are dying for.

Oh while I'm good and worked up, the government doesn't even have the decency to help out the soldiers whos lives they ruined. If you really believe the military and the government had no idea the veterans' hospitals were so fucked up, you are a god-damn retard. They don't care about us. We're disposable. We're numbers on a page and they'd rather forget we exist so they don't have to be reminded about the families and lives they ruined while they're sipping their cocktails at another fund raiser dinner. If they were really concerned about supporting the troops, they'd bring them home so their families wouldn't have to cry at a graveside and explain to their children why mommy or daddy isn't coming home. Because you can't explain it. We're not fighting for our country, we're not fighting for the good of Iraq's people, we're fighting for Bush's personal agenda. Patriotism my ass. You know what? My dad served in Vietnam and NOTHING HAS CHANGED.

So I'm pissed. I'm beyond pissed. And I'm going to go to my husband funeral and recieve that flag and hang it up on the wall for my baby to see when he's older. But I'm not going to tell him that his father died for the stupidty of the American government. I'm going to tell him that his father was a hero and the best man I ever met and that he loved his country enough to die for it, because that's all true and nothing will be solved by telling my son that his father was sent to die by people who didn't care about him at all.

Fuck you, war supporters, George W. Bush, and all the god damn mother fuckers who made the war possible. I hope you burn in hell.

• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

Last month, some studies were released on a relationship between SSIs—a common group of anti-depressants—and broken bones.

Yeah, I was thrilled. I've been taking anti-depressants—Zoloft-related and bubroprion—for ten years or so. I also have a congenital bone disorder that has resulted in lots of fractures. I take Fosamax for bone strength, and anti-depressant for...mood strength, I guess you could say. So maybe I'm cancelling out the Fosamax?

I hope not. I did break the tib-fib in my right leg last fall, so that has been nagging at me. A bone density scan a few months ago didn't look too good, although not too much worse than the one before that; and considering I'd been essentially laid up for four or five months, it wasn't too bad. I reallly don't want any more fractures Don't want to spend my days being bummed out, either. Don't want to be an invalid. I'm not really sure life gets simpler as we get older...

Aargh!

Here’s more on Gordon Smith and the Klamath fish kill.

He used his office to get water to the farmers; he then used the farmers he’d used the water for to get votes for himself. That nicely summarizes politics as usual.


Loaded Orygun
http://loadedorygun.blogspot.com/
Look while you still see us, move while you still have us...
Monday, July 09, 2007


Gordon Takes Credit for Carrying Their Water

Listen to what people were saying in 2002 about Gordon Smith's involvement in the Klamath water fiasco:

Some say you can't fight the federal government...they should meet Gordon Smith.

Water's our problem--and bureaucrats.

He took it straight to Bush.

He wouldn't take no for an answer.

That's Gordon. He stood up for us.

Gordon Smith carried our water.

Wow, for someone who wants to avoid scrutiny on this re-bubbling topic, those statements have to be a little inconvenient right now, don't they? The way these people tell it, when Gordon Smith found out that "bureaucrats" (read: federal biologists) wanted to give Klamath River water to fish instead of farmers, he not only got involved, he went right to the head of scientific inquiry in the US--President Bush! And somehow, though Republicans have been famous for taking whatever answer the President gives them, this time Smith wouldn't budge! He carried their water.

Could these people be any more obvious with what they're saying? Whatever it was that got the decision turned around in Washington to overrule the fish and slake the land's thirst instead, the people saying these things believe that Gordon Smith was instrumental in getting it done. Who could have put them up to say such things?

How about Gordon Smith?

***
There are only two things Gordon Smith really wanted his Klamath constituency to retain from that viewing experience: the name Gordon Smith, and chsh-chsh-chsh-chsh-chsh. It's like he's bragging to the farmers--"I got your water turned on, don't forget me this fall." Chsh chsh chsh.

I’m facinated by my Mormon ancestors. They were courageous and dedicated. Why else would anyone come from across the sea, to a land they didn’t know, because the Prophet told them? Or push handcarts across the prairie? They amaze me. The people in LDS amaze me. Utah amazes me.

On the other hand...

BBC NEWS

A 70-year-old US woman has been left bruised and bloody after an unexpected clash with police who came to arrest her because her lawn was dry and brown.

Trouble flared when Utah pensioner Betty Perry, 70, refused to give her name to an officer trying to caution her for not watering her lawn.

She says the officer hit her with handcuffs, cutting her nose, although police insist she slipped and fell.

Ms Perry said she was "distraught" after the incident.

He's just trying to cover his tracks, as far as I'm concerned
Betty Perry

She denied that she was resisting arrest, maintaining that she turned to go inside to call her son to fix the confusing dispute.

"I tried to sit down and get away from him," she told Utah newspaper the Daily Herald.

"I don't know what he's doing. I said: 'What are you doing?' And he hit me with those handcuffs in my face," she said.

"He's just trying to cover his tracks, as far as I'm concerned."

Set free

The officer had judged that Ms Perry's "sadly neglected and dying landscape" breached an Orem city guideline and was attempting to issue a formal caution when the 70-year-old was injured.

She was treated in a local hospital for the cut to her nose and for other bruises before being taken to jail.

But she was let go when police realised there were "other ways" of finding out her identity without taking her to jail, a police spokesman said.

The arresting officer has not been named but has been placed on administrative leave, he added.

Ms Perry, who says she has never had a run-in with police in the past, has been offered help by local church leaders to clean up her garden.

"I'm very distraught over all this," she said.

"I can't believe this happened. Do you ever just wish you could start your day over and it would all be different?"
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/6282348.stm

Published: 2007/07/08 15:27:35 GMT

© BBC MMVII

"Illegal immigrants," which is code for brown-skinned Latinos, is the big smokescreen, again. It's one the Republicans and conservative Democrats love to huff and puff and blow across the consciousness of America.

The immigrants are not, repeat not, the problem here. There are many problems that are much more important—we can tick them off: the lack of decent health care; the short-funding of schools; the war(s) we're fighting with invisible enemies, and the galloping erosion of our rights and liberties in the name of freedom.

However, here's a Sunday evening thought:

“Few of their children in the country learn English... The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages ... Unless the stream of their importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious...” Benjamin Franklin, speaking of German immigrants.

Today's Bend Bulletin carries the Washington Post story about Dick Cheney's involvement in the Klamath River Fish Kill Off. I'm glad to see it there; I hope the Klamath Falls paper carries it, too. The story reports how Cheney put the arm on the National Academy of Science to announce that the diversion of Klamath River water to the (mostly Republican) farmers in the Basin would have no negative effect on the fish population in the river.

Of course it did: tens and tens of thousands of salmon died subsequently. All the hotshot Republicans lined up next to farmers, militia members, and self-described "patriots" to send the water into the fields of hay and sugar beets. Hay and sugar beets, yes. Lots of water, low profits. But the water, like the farm land itself, is subsidized; if it wasn't for taxpayer money, nobody would be farming that land—it would still be a lake.

And nowhere in the article, or in the politics of irrigation water, is there any mention of the Indian people downstream, traditionally and treaty-guaranteed to Klamath River salmon. By extention, their treaties guarantee there will be enough river water to allow salmon and steelhead to make their necessary upstream migrations. But Indians are not agri-business, nor are they among the usual big -time party donors. The Klamath River tribes do not have wealthy casinos. If they did, maybe things would be different. Maybe.

No matter how many Indian casinos there are, and no matter how much money they donate to Republicans, they are still outnumbered by the farm lobbists and out -donated by agri-business. Besides, they don't have the right skin color to be considered equal to traditional Republicans.

As I’ve said, I’m an alcoholic, for whatever that’s worth. I spent a lot of time in 12-step meetings, and it’s been almost 20 years since I drank or smoked dope.

Sidenote: last summer I finally stopped using tobacco—that was the hardest, absolutely hardest of all to quit.

I don’t know how many meetings I’ve been in—I did the famous 90-meetings-in-90-days routine for about a year straight. It kept me busy, kept me from being bored, gave me a new social set to hang out with, blah blah. It worked—and believe me, I’m grateful it did. It doesn't always work for people, though.

Twelve step meetings are a world of their own. Most of you have seen enough movies or watched enough TV to know how they work. There are a lot of unspoken rules. But, because they’re unspoken, when they get broken that doesn’t get talked about, either. One of the most commonly broken rules involves something called “the Thirteenth Step.” Thirteenth-stepping is about hanging around with newly sobered or semi-sobered folks at the meetings and having sex with them. Usually, it’s men preying on women, but because it’s about damaged people, there’re a lot of weird dynamics. The rule against “thirteenth stepping” is a good idea. Just like the insistence on anonymity.

Here’s a story about that business (I think it's going to have a sad but predictable outcome) (and calling him "a counselor" isn't quite accurate—a Thirteenth Stepper is more like it, unless you want to say "predator"...):

The Huffington Post
July 8, 2007


AA counselor John Sundahl claims he is dating Britney Spears.

The recovered alcoholic says Britney chatted him up at their Alcoholics Anonymous meetings before asking him out more than two months ago.

Fooling the media was easy for the couple, Sundahl said. They simply used different cars and snuck into back entrances for romantic dinner dates shrouded in secrecy. And when he was recently in the hospital with an obstructed bowel, frantic Britney stayed by his side on all-night vigils.

"We are dating right now. I mean she is not moving in or anything but we are dating," the 38-year-old real estate developer said last night. "It is serious."

A little late, a sister, Kris, said, in forwarding this to an email list I'm on. I don't think it's a bit late, because it's relevant any day of the year. All nations are smug and self-righteous. America's problem is it's smug, self-righteous, armed to the teeth, controlled by a neo-conservative junta, and 99% of the citizens are nuttier than shithouse rats.



http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/07/03/18432845.php

U.S. | Global Justice and Anti-Capitalism

Our local daily, The Bulletin, published an editorial that called the Libby commutation "no big thing."

Well, yes, now that you mention it, The Bulletin is a Republican paper.

However, in a way Bush's action for Libby isn't a big thing: it's just the way things are with the executive branch. The Ruling Party is above the law: the law is for the rest of us. The Party knows that sometimes the law has to be avoided or even subverted in order to Keep Our Country Strong. It's been this way for a long time, and it doesn't really matter which party is officially ruling (you understand, I'm saying there are two wings of the same party, that's all). The executive branch is the boss, the locomotive. Congress is just the caboose.

The Bulletin also mentioned that Libby's career is over. Yeah, like Eliot Abrams', John Poindexter's, Ollie North's...crap, even Nixon was quickly "rehabilitated" after his faux pas. Being a conservative and getting busted is almost a smart career move!

Eugene, over on his blog, has a grim piece about how the US figured out the advantage of cluster bombs. Make them in colors most attractive to children and drop them where the children will find them. The children will pick them up and the bomblets will explode. This will cripple children and manpower will be used to take them to hospital; when the crippled children grow up, they will be a drain on their country's resources—therefore, the threat of that country is neutralized.

Now what is it about the Bush-Cheney Junta you don't understand?

http://pudgyindian2.blogspot.com

YES!

Big news: Dick Cheney is no friend of traditional American law. This is apparently a surprise to many people on the left, as indicated in the following article from Alternet. The question is: who ever thought he was?

For decades, there’s been a string of what might be called “revisionist cold warrior” movies and books. Chuck Conners. Rambo, Mission Impossible, Steven Segal, above the law, beside the law, under the law, and, most importantly, outside the law. You could argue that this is in the great tradtion of Robin Hood, Jesse James, Pretty Boy Floyd—the law is a polite fiction that is usually no help at all when it comes to justice. But, in the last twenty or so years, this myth has gone on steroids—and the “bad guys” have become international terrorists or conspiracy-members. The usual channels of law enforcement are utterly powerless, blah blah, so some sort of extra-legal actions are called upon.

These fantasies appeal to those of us who feel powerless, helpless, caught up in something way greater than ourselves. More malevolent, even. And there’s a sexual turn to all of this, too. Remember Wilhelm Reich?

Reich was a pioneering psychoanalist who saw the connection between sexual powerlessness and facism. Eric Fromm gave us a slightly more sanitized view, but nevertheless, those who feel sexually inadequate feel less macho, and identify with superman figures. This should be no surprise to most anyone in this era.

And so we have a bunch of stuffed-up aging white guys, nerds from birth, who worry and worry about the decline of their “powers.”

Who was that whacked-out Air Force general in “Dr Strangelove” who saw a conspiracy between the evil communists and flouride? The sad thing is, these are the kind of nuts who took over the Republican Party and are running the show.



AlterNet
Don't Misunderestimate Dick Cheney
By John Dean, FindLaw.com
Posted on June 30, 2007, Printed on July 2, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/55653/

Vice President Dick Cheney has regularly claimed that he is above the law, but until recently he has not offered any explanation of why.

In fact, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find a law that Cheney believes does apply to him, whether that law be major and minor. For example, he has claimed that most of the laws passed in the aftermath of Watergate were unconstitutional, and thus implicitly inapplicable. His office oversees signing statements claiming countless new laws will not be honored except insofar as the President's extremely narrow interpretation allows. He does not believe the War Powers Act should be honored by the President. Nor, in his view, should the President be bothered with laws like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). In fact, it appears Cheney has actively encouraged defiance of such laws by the Bush Administration.

For Cheney, the Geneva Conventions -- considered among the nation's most important treaties -- are but quaint relics that can be ignored. Thus, he publicly embraced their violation when, on an Idaho talk radio program, he said he was not troubled in the slightest by our forces using "waterboarding" -- the simulated drowning of detainees to force them to talk. There are serious questions as to whether Cheney himself has also conspired to violate the War Crimes Act, which can be a capital crime.

A man who can so easily disregard the War Powers Act, FISA, the Geneva Conventions, and the War Crimes Act is merely flicking fleas when it comes to complying with laws like the Presidential Records Act, which requires him to keep records. Yet as CNN and other news organizations have reported, Cheney ordered the destruction of the visitor logs to his residence. These, of course, are presidential records the law requires him to preserve and protect. (Indeed, neighbors of the Vice President were surprised when, in the past, a truck for a document shredding service would regularly visit the Vice President's residence at the Naval Observatory.)

Most recently, the Vice President has refused to comply with Executive Order 12958, as amended by his boss, George W. Bush. These orders were issued to implement the law adopted by Congress in 1995 to clarify the classification and protection of national security information.

Most interesting in Cheney's defiance is his absolutely absurd explanation of why the law is not applicable to him or his staff.

Cheney's explanation(s) for defying the National Security Classification orders

Henry Waxman, who may be the nation's most diligent and vigilant member of Congress, recently reported that Vice President Cheney claims he is exempt from the presidential orders requiring government-wide procedures to safeguard classified national security information because he is not an "entity within the executive branch." According to information provided to Chairman Waxman's Oversight committee, Cheney further claimed he was not an "agency" as set forth in the Executive Orders.

When Cheney was widely ridiculed by humorists, cartoonists, pundits, commentators and several members of Congress for his claim of not being an "entity within the executive branch," the Vice President's chief of staff and counsel David Addington responded by asserting that the Vice President is not subject to the order because he is not an "agency" as defined by the order. (Addington thus effectively dropped the claim that the Vice President is not an "entity.")

However, Addington does not cite any authority or language for his new claim that the Vice President is not an "agency." In fact, there is none. To the contrary, the order controlling national security classification states exactly the opposite of what Addington claims. Executive Order 12958 states that the term "Agency" means any "Executive agency," as defined in the statutory language found at 5 U.S.C. 105, and it includes "any other entity within the executive branch that comes into the possession of classified information." An entity is any "body" or "unit" or "thing" within the executive branch, and to claim the Vice President's office is none of these is an insult to common sense. So is Addington's claim that the Office of Vice President is not an agency under the law.

Section 105 of Title 5 of the United States Code states that an "‘Executive agency' means an … independent establishment" within the executive branch. Independent establishments are defined by Section 104 as "an establishment in the executive branch … which is not an Executive department [which are listed in Section 101, and include the Departments of State, Treasury, Justice, etc.], military department, Government corporation, or part thereof, or part of an independent establishment."

The Justice Department issued an opinion in 1994 that the Vice President was not an "agency" under the Freedom of Information Act. That opinion was largely based on the Supreme Court ruling, in Kissinger v. Reporters Comm. for Freedom of the Press, that "agency" does not cover "the President's immediate personal staff or units in the Executive Office whose sole function is to advise and assist the President."

However, the agency definition in E.O. 12985 is very different from that in the Freedom of Information Act. If, as Addington claims, E.O. 12985 was intended to exempt the Vice President's office, why did it not so state? Or, why did Bush not exempt the Vice President when he amended that order in July 2005?

Cheney's claim his office is neither an entity nor agency defies logic, but it is not surprising since he continues also to claim, with absolutely no evidence to support his claim, that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 and that terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi set up an al Qaeda operation in Iraq.

Needless to say, Cheney's claim -- or Addington's claim, since Cheney appears to be backing away from his chief of staff and counsel on this issue -- raises the question of what the vice president is. Legally, the vice president has only the most limited of powers and authority, unless the president empowers him.

The limited role the Constitution and a federal statute envision for the Vice President

The Vice President's very limited but vital roles are set forth in the Constitution. He is the next in succession to become President, should there be a vacancy or should the president suffer from mental or physical inability to serve. And he is the president of the Senate, which means he can preside over the Senate but under the Senate Rules, he cannot take part in debate, and under the Constitution, he can only vote to break a tie.

In the event of a vacancy in the office of the president, under Article II and the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, the Vice President becomes the Acting President. Also under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, the Vice President, when acting with a majority of the Cabinet, can also declare the president is "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office." If he so declares, then after so informing Congress, the Vice President becomes Acting President until the President notifies Congress that he is fine; if there is a dispute, the Congress resolves it.

The only other Constitutional duty of the Vice President is that set forth in Article I, Section 3, clause 4, which makes the Vice President the "President of the Senate, but [he/she] shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided." Not since the nation's second Vice President, Thomas Jefferson, decided it was a waste of time to preside over the Senate has any Vice President done so -- other than to break ties or for ceremonial events, such as the State of the Union or the tallying of electoral college votes.

Since 1947, the Vice President has been given a number of statutory duties, when President Truman recommended, and the Congress agreed, that the Vice President should be a member of the National Security Council. This, however, is the most significant of his statutory assignments.

Thus, beyond the limited constitutional responsibilities, and the few statutory tasks, the Vice President's role comes down to whatever the President assigns him. Vice Presidents can have no role greater than the assignments given by the president -- or in the case of Dick Cheney, whatever he has been able to convince the President he can appropriately handle for him.

The source of Cheney's power: influence, not a formal grant of authority

Washington insiders have long understood that Cheney's power stems from his knowledge of the way the White House and the Office of the President operate. This is knowledge he acquired as President Ford's Chief of Staff. With Bush's consent, much of the paper flow of the White House which heads up the chain of command toward the President goes through Cheney's office. In addition, Cheney's staff reaches down into the executive bureaucracy to shape the debate before it reaches the White House.

Those with whom I have spoken have serious doubt that Bush and the White House staff really knows what Cheney is doing, why he is doing it, or how he is doing it. From the outset of this administration, Cheney has been instrumental in placing people loyal to him throughout the Executive Branch. This is not to say that Bush in not "the decider," for he is, but by shaping the debate and controlling the paper flow, Cheney decides what the decider will decide.

It has long been apparent that Cheney's genius is that he lets George W. Bush get out of bed every morning actually believing he is the President. In fact, his presidency is run by the President of the Senate, for Cheney is its true center of gravity. That fact has become more apparent with every passing year of this presidency, and anyone who thinks otherwise has truly "misunderestimated" our nominal president and his vice president.

John W. Dean, a FindLaw columnist, is a former counsel to the president.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/55653/

Oh wotthehell wotthehell—It's that kind of a funky summer day:

The Guardian: Taser-equipped robot cop coming to a city near you soon

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Over the years, I've given money to various organizations and causes. I've never contributed to a politician. I've always thought the politicians I like are hopeless candidates. Not a chance. I can't remember the last time a national candidate I liked won an election—maybe back when I was younger and dumber, JFK. It's been downhill ever since.

And, no, I wouldn't support Kennedy again.

But, in a fit of hope, yesterday I sent some money off to John Edwards' campaign. He's hopeless, but not as hopeless as Kucinich. But it's Kucinich I really hope wins. OK. He gets ten bucks, too. Why not? What the fuck, to quote Hunter Thompson.