Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
Just after I noted the tricky matter between Keith Ellison and the Jewish community over in the Fifth District, I get an email from the Ellison campaign proclaiming that he's been endorsed by the local paper American Jewish World. They seem to think he's sort of a Muslim Wellstone, and that's pretty sweet. Here's the email in full:
Keith Ellison for U.S. Congress
Dear Friend,
Keith Endorsed by American Jewish World!
Keith Ellison’s historic campaign for Congress gained the extremely valued and valuable endorsement today of the influential Twin Cities newspaper American Jewish World.
Keith said, “I am humbled, and just plain thrilled, by the confidence the American Jewish World has placed in my vision of a just future where there are no throw-away people and peace is our guiding principle. Indeed, this is a collective vision of tens of thousands of us in our uniquely progressive district, a vision we have built together out of our most deeply-held values.
“I am proud that the American Jewish World has honored us with their support and has joined our extraordinary coalition of progressive people of good will who represent all faiths, all colors and all our neighborhoods.”
“This is how we will win – by creating a powerful force of real people unified behind a passion for justice.”
Below are excerpts from their endorsement, with our highlighting added:
“Regarding the 5th District DFL Primary, there are three fairly conventional candidates who would bring particular strengths to service in the U.S. House and would likely provide competent representation for their constituents. However, voters could make an emphatic statement – one that would gain national and international attention – by casting their ballots for Keith Ellison. The 43-year-old state representative would bring a singular passion and intelligence to the job of representing citizens of Minnesota Fifth District; in many ways, Ellison represents the progressive populist vision that Minnesota lost with the untimely passing of Paul Wellstone in 2002.”
“Ellison acted as the lawyer for the House DFL caucus in an ethics proceeding against former representative Arlon Lindner, who contended that gays were not victims of Nazi oppression in the Holocaust. Ellison understands the importance of guarding against Holocaust denial and revisionism, and links the lessons of the Shoah to more recent cases of genocide in Rwanda and Darfur. Further, he supports the State of Israel and the continuation of U.S. aid to Israel. He holds to the mainstream position of a negotiated two-state solution regarding the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
“We all know that nobody is perfect and no political candidate is without shortcomings. We are now in Elul, the last month of the Hebrew year and the month preceding Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur…During this period of heightened spirituality, we find ourselves considering the choices before us as citizens of a free nation. We cannot take our civil liberties for granted, especially in the face of well-reported government actions to curb our constitutional rights and consolidate political power. In the trying times ahead, we will need courageous political leadership and we must hold our elected representatives accountable.”
“We think that Keith Ellison has the attributes to be a dynamic and effective representative in Congress. In Ellison, we have a moderate Muslim who extends his hand in friendship to the Jewish community and supports the security of the State of Israel. He is a person with a vision of a more humane and equitable society and he is the candidate we favor in the Fifth District DFL election.’
In a subtle irony that only the Somalis could pull off, Mogadishu has been captured by Islamic militias after more than a decade of chaotic civil war. Apparently the kiss of death for the more secular warlords was when word got around that the CIA was paying them to keep fighting the Islamic guys. Summary from DailyKos: Bush searches for "Plan B" for Somalia.
While wandering around the Cedar-Riverside area last night (there was a benefit for the Arise Bookstore at Bedlam Theatre) I was reminded yet again that this little patch of Minneapolis has deep connections to a place on the most opposite pole of the international political system imaginable. I considered that the odds of an Islamic militia taking over the Minneapolis' West Bank area, given the HAMAS in the other West Bank, and Mogadishu, well, the odds must be up to like 3% by now.
WaPo reports that the guns have mostly stopped firing in the battered capital:
The thugs manning the roadblocks are gone. The warlords are on the run. And the guns in a city long regarded as among the world's most heavily armed have fallen silent. Most, in fact, have disappeared from view.
Since Islamic militias took control of this city last week, U.S. and other Western officials have worried that Mogadishu's new leaders would impose a severe, Taliban-style government and harbor terrorists. But after 15 years of deadly chaos, residents interviewed expressed jubilation that somebody has made their city safe, and that for now, the daily crackle of gunfire is finally gone.
"Our ears are resting now," said Diiriye Jimcaale, 45, who has been unemployed since the onset of inter-clan warfare forced him to close his small clothing shop in 1991. Anxiety remains, both about the militias' ability to maintain order and about the possibility that extremist elements within the movement will go too far in imposing Islamic rule. Residents speak of a wave of cinema closings after the militias took control of the city June 5. Rumors circulated that public showings of the televised World Cup soccer tournament would be banned.
But on this Friday night, sounds of the match floated through Mogadishu. The streets bustled with activity. The city's largest market, near the site where two U.S. helicopters crashed in 1993, as depicted in the movie "Black Hawk Down," hummed with business. Cab driver Yusuf Ali Muhammed, 39, felt so safe that he left his longtime bodyguard at home, saving himself $5 in security fees, he said. Wielding an AK-47 rifle, as his guard did each night as they drove through the city, is now prohibited. Yet even without it, Muhammed said that he could now go anywhere in the city at any time. Before, he stuck to the few neighborhoods he knew best.
More commentary about the new Somalia situation, and an op-ed from Omar Jamal in today's Star Tribune. Jamal is saying that it's gonna be Taliban-style:
Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaida, praised the bravery of the militia and its victory in kicking the "infidels" out of Somalia. He further infiltrated the militias by funding and sending experts to train them.
The warlords were oblivious to the Trojan horse that Bin Laden had sent them. Al-Qaida continued to try to get a foothold in Mogadishu, while the warlords continued to pillage and drag an already impoverished people into more suffering.
There's been good reporting in the Strib about the local reaction. Eric Black's story from June 10 ought to be read: Somalis ponder the possibility of peace: News that Islamic fundamentalists are behind the new calm in Mogadishu sparks a flurry of opinion among Minnesota Somalis:
Somali faces crowd around a coffeehouse table in Minneapolis, listening intently, speaking passionately, interrupting occasionally, expressing opinions about a swarm of questions that arise from the latest developments in Mogadishu. They believe, or maybe just hope, that peace may be breaking out in the war-ravaged capital of their homeland. Out pour the views:
Yes, the victory of an Islamist coalition in the battle for Mogadishu is a good thing. But not if they turn out to be Taliban-style Islamists. But they aren't. Well, some of them are. Are there Al-Qaida-linked terrorists hiding in Mogadishu? Yes, I know it for a fact. No, it's a rumor. Foreigners could never hide in Somalia, because everyone knows everyone. We hate terrorists. Make sure you tell your readers that. We are making new lives in America and grateful to be in Minnesota.
[.....]
The Starbucks Somalis don't have answers to the biggest questions. Can the Islamists hold the capital? Will they try to take over the whole country? Will they work with the transitional government? Are they harboring terrorists? Will Washington tolerate their rise? But almost every opinion is represented. Then a break in the cacophony as a new face arrives. The others defer for a trice to the respected editor of a Somali newspaper, the Warsan Times. The news is a mixture of good and bad, says editor Hassan Shabac. "The warlords who have put our people through 16 years of hell have been driven from their strongholds."
The killing has stopped, for the moment. The bus fare to cross Mogadishu has plummeted from 3,500 Somali shillings last week to 1,000 shillings, because buses don't have to pay the warlords for permission to pass. Most heads at the table nod.
The Union of Islamic Courts is a coalition of two factions, with very different characteristics, Shabac calmly continues. The moderate faction could probably work out a deal with the provisional government. Some around the table have voiced hopes that a deal between the provisional government and the moderate Islamists will complete the struggle to end Somalia's 16 years of stateless limbo.
But then Shabac drops the other shoe, which bodes ill for the young men's hopes and the old men's dreams. The other faction, Shabac says, is made up of Islamic hard-liners from the Al-Ittihad organization. Their agenda: Impose an Islamic caliphate on the whole country and eventually the whole region of Africa. Their Wahabbi-style Islam is so strict "it would make life under the Taliban look like paradise."
The locally produced Warsan Times, with a decidedly idiosyncratic website layout, opines:
US INVOLVEMENT IS SEEN NECESSARY TO END SOMALI CONFLICT
Us has been blamed for providing financial and military support to the anti terrorism coalition that are fighting to survive in Mogadishu against the powerful umbrella of Somali active religious zealots. It may be too late for US to get involved in Somali politics when the religious guys destroy Somali federal government and force Somali president Mr. You to ask Ethiopia for political asylum in six months from now.
It was well known that the Alitihad organization was training nine years in Marka, Somalia peacefully, so they can easily overtake Somalia without strong resistance. It is to my surprise that and also to many Somali scholars who are carefully studying Somali politics that anti terrorism terrorists where able to withstand the wrath of Islamic Para-military punishment this long.
Somali warlords have lost grounds so as popular support to defeat Islamic soldiers, because of them not finding a reasonable solution to Somali conflict, therefore, Somali people are willing to support religious guys because somehow they were able to bring peace and prosperity to those they rule. Somalis are tired of being jerked right to left by worlds with empty promises. These warlords are interest oriented while carefully drafting temporary agendas for the rest of the people they rule.
US have actively tried to facilitate food and rations to millions of displaced starving Somali people but they failed and lost many soldiers in the process. Now, for the world peace will it be easy for US government to stabilize Somalia by ending the Somali civil war and establishing responsible government in Mogadishu? For those who don’t remember this is how that good will ended.
US has lost many brave soldiers in the process of capturing elusive general Mr. Aided who was the most powerful general in Somali nation at the time, however, the liberal US government cut and ran after losing 18 exceptional brave US marines. Let me say this the withdrawal was important, because it gave the impression that America was vulnerable to terrorism and that if casualties were high enough they could be coerced into abandoning hazardous overseas commitments.
I don't know about that. What the hell could the US really have done to stabilize Somalia after the 'Black Hawk Down' incident anyway?
It's been a rough 15 years for Somalia, and I wish them all the best. It's too bad that the UN-organized provisional government (and its representatives who base themselves in Minnesota) couldn't bring about a better situation on their own terms, but it's quite possible that this new Islamic government is more interested in 'delivering the goods' of peace, quiet and prosperity than imposing harshly radical, Talban-style repression.
But if they do, it'll probably fall to the denizens of Cedar-Riverside to straighten things out. Time for another cup of coffee.
I really promise that there will be forthcoming photos and goodies from the DFL convention. Today I got a haircut and checked out some more job stuff. Now I am going to have a social life. I think we could say that the number of words on this site are inverse to Dan's productive activity, and for that I ought to be saluted so far this week. However I can still post a couple photos.
Sen. Becky Lourey gives a press interview after the first gubernatorial ballot. The intrepid MPR reporter Tom Scheck is the cue ball behind the guy in the green Kelley shirt.
The Teamsters were the muscle behind the event - controlling the doors and such. This was after the first ballot, during intense floor delegate lobbying operations.
Consulting with future Attorney General Matt Entenza about important matters - and making that Macalester grad look short!
I promise there will be updates later. For now, life rolls on.
Looks like I'm going to handle the booth a bit for Politics in Minnesota at the Republican state convention down at the Minneapolis convention center this afternoon, Friday & Saturday. I woulda been able to make some bank if I could do the DFL convention at Rochester, but it looks like I'll have to deal with the Chunkies graduating from high school next Saturday.
Mordred sends word that he's busy moving out of his apartment in Tucson and I think going to Santa Fe. But he sent along a REALLY sweet video of one North Carolina Republican's Vernon Robinson's ad for Congress.
His platform is basically pretty straightforward:
Vernon Robinson's Public Policy Views in a Nutshell
I am pro-Constitution, pro-national sovereignty, pro-military, pro-veteran, pro-growth, pro-business, pro-property rights, pro-marriage, pro-adoption, pro-farmer, pro-school choice, pro-states' rights, pro-religious freedom, pro-Pledge of Allegiance, pro-death penalty, pro-gun, and pro-life.
I will secure our borders and demand the vigorous enforcement of our immigration laws. I support market-based reforms of government entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
I am unabashedly and unalterably opposed to racial quotas, special rights for homosexuals, the United Nations, the proliferation of frivolous lawsuits, women in combat, pork barrel spending, useless government programs and agencies, onerous regulations, and all tax hikes.
Securing Our Borders
Our current immigration policy is a treasonable threat to both public health and national security. We do not need a wall to secure our borders. Five thousand Marines and 100 UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) can do the job tomorrow. We must also make English the official language of the United States. Any local government or college that interferes with immigration enforcement should lose its federal aid. Finally, automatic citizenship for those born here must be replaced with the baby adopting the citizenship of the mother. These steps must precede any guest worker program.
.....Defending Marriage and Traditional Values
I will always fight for what's right and you will always know where I stand. We cannot redefine marriage as any grouping of adults and children. I will vigorously oppose homosexual marriages, marriage-lite proposals and adoptions, as well as "gay" Scoutmasters. While my opponent believes that those in a drag queen parade and Rosa Parks are both civil rights leaders, I will join the dozens of Congressmen who sponsored an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that provides that "Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman."
There was also some funny stuff about stopping the "feminization" of the military and shutting down bases in Japan, Germany and Korea.
I can only hope that the denizens of the MN GOP are half as entertaining.
TomMahm, Copperfield Loses Not a Cent, Lots More Stadiums Seats to Put Butts In, I Have a Cat!
The above is an untouched photograph of the view West towards the Tucson mountains from my front yard on a weekday evening. The bar on the left was frequented by Jack Kerouac, I am told.
Introducing: Strega Nona
Abby and I have adopted Strega here, which is to say, Strega's owner forfeited his right to own her through gross negligence and she chose to reside with us instead. She is currently in heat, which has been a treat, as she begins yowling at five in the morning and gets louder until ten or so. Come Friday morning, entering into estrus will forever be a thing of the past for Strega, which is win-win for everyone. Mating screams and the demented rubbing exercises that accompany them notwithstanding, this is a very cool cat- gentle and loving without being needy, small, athletic and quite beautiful, she's ["Smitten Kitten" joke redacted- ed.]
I'm an illusionist!
David Copperfield was robbed at gunpoint in West Palm Beach Sunday night, and managed to convince the three teenage thieves holding a gun six inches from his face that he did not have any on him by performing his "reverse pickpocket" trick and pulling out his pant pockets in from of them without relinquishing possession of his scrilla and celly. He called the cops and the kids were busted "within minutes," and then magically transformed into a scale model of the Gateway Arch in a cloud of smoke. I kid, Mr. Kotkin (his real name), smoke machines are for hacks, of course! In related news, David Blaine is going to perform his next stunt, where he will be dangled from his toes while wearing the Shroud of Turin over a vat of warm marmalade, in New York City. The reason for the change of venue (he spent 44 days in a box starving himself in London two years ago) was the inhospitality of the British, who went so far as to dangle cheeseburgers from RC helicopters to torture him. So, in summary, David Blaine is a baby and David Copperfield belongs in her Majesty's Secret Service. Remember, not only did he fool the thieves and keep the cash, but we still don't know the trick, preserving his Alliance certification.
I don't even know what my point is here, other than that these guys is crazy...
Stadiums for Everyone!
Well, the VIkings' stadium deal is still in its infancy, but the Gophers and Twins are crowning as we speak. Though the Senate shifted around the Gopher stadium plans a bit, (removing the student fee and nixing TCF Bank's $35 naming rights contribution) it is still on track at the very same moment that a Twins stadium bill's passing is looking all but inevitable. I think we can probably call all three of these projects likely, which is exciting news. The Cities had to spruce up their sports infrastructure a bit both for the purposes of major events like the NCAA tournament and the Super Bowl and to, y'know, retain their teams in an era of bazillion dollar excesses on major sports venues. The price tag? $790 million for the Vikes, $522 million for the Twinkies (half a bill and no retractable roof?) and $248 million for Goldie to go toe-to-toe with the newer stadii of the Big 10; silly money, to be sure, but the resulting facilities, and the possibility of Hennepin County pursuing its imagined urban village in the footprint of the Huhuhu Metrodome, make the deal(s) too good to pass up. FYI- The Representative sleeping through the meeting on the allocation of a half a billion dollars is Representive David Dill (DFL-Crane Lake).
Welcome Back to America, Buddy...
Eat Up.
I apologize for the delay in this posting. I've been in Mexico, on the worst vacation of my life (more on that later). As we've seen little action from our merry band of HongPosters, I am going to offer up some Saturday Grab Bag™ action for anyone out there who's just looking for something to pick at...
Dean Johnson: I'm a Flippin' Idiot, Give Me Another Chance: Why oh why, Deanster? Had to laugh at this news item, actually. It seems that MN-DFL Senate Majority Leader Dean Johnson (or MNDFLSMLDJ for short) met with a group of Pastors in his constituency some time back to discuss the proposed ban on Gay Marriage (I assume this is the one being forwarded by the great Satan herself, Michelle Bachman) and told them that he had spoken to members of the state Supreme Court, who had assured him that the 1997 law that defined marriage as [blah, blah, blah] would be sufficient to hold off any advances on the homo-hitching front. Well, turns out that not only was Mr. Johnson apparently lying (no MNSC members recall ever discussing the issue with him) but he was being taped by one of the pastors in attendance. As you might have guessed, the Forces of Medievalism have already pounced on the issue as proof of the need for stricter anti-non-white-middle-class-suburban-protestants legislation and Johnson's essential unfitness in his role as Majority Leader. Well, they're right about one thing; Johnson is a hack politician extraordinaire, and hopefully this ugly episode will make room for someone too bright to lie to a bunch of spies for Jesus. [Story Here]
Navy Exchanges Fire With Sexy Pirates: Two American ships, the USS Cape St. George and the USS Gonzalez (A guided missile cruiser and guided missile destroyer, respectively) came upon a 30 foot fishing boat towing several smaller skiffs this morning while in a Dutch-led patrol off the coast of Somalia. When the American craft moved in to board the Somali boats, they were fired upon by small arms and possibly an RPG launcher. The Navy fired back, wounding five and killing one with no American casualties. I had to read the article a couple of times first in order to giggle, and then I had to find this picture (this is what I imagine the lead pirate to have looked like) before I could really consider where the pirates went wrong. I think I've got it now, though; Their first mistake was probably firing AK-47s from a 30-foot boat at 300+ feet of American military hardware, packed to the gills with a terrifying array of missiles, artillery and, apparently, more conventional heavy machine guns. Interestingly enough, Piracy is actually on the rise around the world, especially on the coasts of East Africa (where there were 35 attacks last year) and in the South China Sea, where large-scale piracy against major shipping craft and, in one case, a racing yacht have become commonplace in recent years. Personally, I think it is time to declare a Global War on Sexy Piracy, if only to hear all of Rummy's iterations on the theme as he fails to do anything about it- "Worldwide Struggle With Extremely Provocative Maritime Thievery", anyone? [Story]
Cheeseburger in Paradise
Mexico was a bust this Spring Break '06, for a variety of reasons. A trip to the Baja with Tha Fam went horribly wrong. Dreams of sandy beaches and great seaside food gave way to days of huddling indoors as the 50 degree winds whipped the windows of the darkened, unheated house we were staying in, forcing water under the doors and leaving all of our clothes smelling dank. The first problem was planning- the planner of the trip, who shall remain unnamed, didn't bother to find out that Baja California Del Norte is, as a rule, cold in March. Quite cold, really, rarely climbing out of the mid-60s during the day. Also, Baja California Del Norte sucks, a collection of corrugated shacks clinging to the side of a cliff along a steep, rocky, unprotected coastline, with no culture of any sort, a complete lack of any kind of shopping (other than, of course, I Fuck on the First Date t-shirts) and shitty restaurants whose defining feature is the zeal of their employees in their attempts to coerce you to eat at their establishment, including (no joke) jumping in front of the car in order to entice you to park (for free!) outside of the joint. Should you get in, you will be met by the likes of this gentleman above, fat southwestern types who come down in droves to sand race on the dunes in heavily-modified trucks and ludicrously overpowered sandrails. Apparently, driving around in circles on sand is a sport, not just something that ataxia-addled meatheads do in the absence of a real life. The less said about it the better, really. We left early, and it is 80-some degrees here in Tucson.
Hopefully Dan will be down here soon and we will keep you guys posted.
I'm going to toss in some brief bits, but first I have to tell about the recent dicey situation over here by Loring Park. Last week, as many students were milling around the Minneapolis Community / Technical College across the street, some people in a red compact rolled up off Hennepin. According to one anonymous local known as Papa Smurf who witnessed the event, suddenly a number of guys jumped out and started shooting at a group of people on the south end of the parking lot, as portrayed in a somewhat garish way here, from my living room window:
The targets took cover behind cars in the lot (there were more at the time), and the assassins sped off east down Spruce, towards Loring Park. If only I hadn't been working in St. Paul, I might have seen it from my window.
Papa Smurf said that one person was left limping around with an apparent gunshot to the leg, while most everyone else hid until the police showed up less than 5 minutes later. It was not featured on the news.
I told this to a friend, expecting some sort of 'oh wow.' Instead she was like, "Well they shot up the Tires Plus next to my house last night." You just can't impress some people.
Jane Cat, by the way, is fine now. The right ear healed up quite nicely.
On with the miscellaneous: DailySixer presents a sweet Reservoir Dogs poster and a Live Action Simpsons intro.
Alison and I got back to our East Metro roots at White Bear Lake's BearTown Lounge on Highway 61 for some really good cheeseburgers and $1 second beers in Happy Hour. The place is full of sculpted polar bears. This is exactly why East Metro beats the tar out of Edina and the West Metro.
Mordred sent over rrrrrrrrrrrrrnnnnnnnnnnhhhh.blogspot.com, which is a Chewbacca spoof blog, inserting Chewy into such internet pop culture icons as the famous Gary Busey mugshot. Also has a myspace profile. Kind of a sublime exercise in whatever art form this is.
Chewy has a link to mchammer.blogspot.com, wherein MC Hammer has apparently learned how to upload low-quality photos from his Sidekick camera-phone. It seems this is authentic, it looks like him. And, I can't believe I am saying this, MC Hammer is audio blogging.
The Agonist has a really sweet new website now geared up. For organized international news it really rocks. The new NewsWire thing is sweet. Right now, top story is NeoCon allies desert Bush over Iraq, such as William Buckley, Francis Fukuyama, Richard Perle, Andrew Sullivan, George Will. Well fuck you guys. Thanks for joining the regularly scheduled disaster. I hope you hate yourselves.
Sketchy Narcotics conspiracies: NarcoNews.com is featuring, as always, lots of controversial stuff on the drug war. Today we find some of the corrupt Democrat flip side. As with most things of this nature, take it with your grains of salt. Catherine Austin Fitts is someone I would classify as from the same general sector of the infowars as Michael Ruppert (they're tight). So check out Dillon, Read & Co. Inc. and the Aristocracy of Prison Profits: Part IV: The Clinton Years: Progressives for Private Prisons, HUD’s Corrupt Role in Centralizing Debt and Corporate Dirty Tricks.
Scooter your ass to jail:
Along the same lines as attempted homicides outside, the Scooter Libby Legal Defense Trust is pretty fucking great. Because nothing says freedom like outing a CIA agent, to intimidate the Washington bureaucracy into silence over the fake intelligence. Good times. And thanks for providing a list of evildoers such as Francis Fukuyama, Steve Forbes and Evil Emperor James Woolsey. And also apparently Dennis Ross. When the revolution comes, your crew will be first against the wall.
Quick batch of commentary & headlines: U.S. stuck with few options in Iraq. Preventing Iraq's disintegration. Outlook worsens in Afghanistan.
PENTAGON DISMISSES US TROOP POLL Thursday, March 02, 2006 - FreeMarketNews.com
The Pentagon has dismissed a poll's finding that 72 per cent of United States troops in Iraq believe the US should pull out within a year or less. "It shouldn't surprise anybody that a deployed soldier would rather be at home than deployed, even when they believe what they are doing is important and vital work," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said. The poll by Le Moyne College and Zogby International found that only 23 per cent believed US troops should stay in Iraq "as long as it takes," as US President George W. Bush has insisted.
As If There Were No Tomorrow: Sunnis Leaving Iraq by the adventuresome and indefatigable Iraqi journalist/blogger Khalid Jarrar. Juan Cole: Iraq's worst week -- and Bush's. Deep troubles as Iraq tries to form a new government. Al Ahram: The myth of civil war.
Subtle Irony Department: [via This Modern World and Under the Same Sun]: CommonDreams:
Two Iraqi women whose husbands and children were killed by US troops during the Iraq war have been refused entry into the United States for a speaking tour. The women were invited to the US for peace events surrounding international women’s by the human rights group Global Exchange and the women’s peace group CODEPINK.
In a piece of painful irony, the reason given for the rejection was that the women don’t have enough family in Iraq to prove that they’ll return to the country.
DKos: White House hunting down truth-tellers.
This is what happens when you pay too much of your credit card bill: Pay too much and you could raise the alarm:
They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn't move until the threat alert is lifted.
Nothing left to say.
This is belated:
Kirby Puckett
1960-2006
Considering the bandwagon jumping that has accompanied the passing of Kirby Puckett, I must lay claim to my rightful place in the pantheon of those who would honor him. I was nine years old when Kirby led the Twins to victory in what is widely considered the best World Series ever played. As anyone who lived within a 250-mile radius of Minneapolis that season knows, Kirby was... in a word... Jesus. Not on a scale seen more than a handful of times in major league sports, Kirby Puckett was a figure of such sterling reputation and staggering popularity that, as many hack journalists have been quick to point out, he probably could not exist in the modern, post-A-Rod contract, Pacers brawl, Barry Bonds era. To anyone growing up in the region, his status was a given, a sort of agreed-upon point of faith: Kirby Puckett is inherently and intrinsically good. His lovability factor was high- 5'8" tall, 210 pounds, he was a tiny boulder of a man capable of moving quickly and rather gracelessly, stubby twig legs and barrel body chugging along. His personal problems have tarnished his public image, but does little to diminish his power as an icon for several generations, whose psychic connection to him was formed during his years of hard work and spectacular play. Every article I've read since his passing has focused on the home run in Game 6, but it's the catch that made that home run possible that dominated my memory. It was always Kirby's defense that delighted the most, as he looked at his most Kirby when his entirely unconventional body was fully in motion- his vertical leap was basketball big and his timing was usually dead nuts on, allowing him to grab balls a foot and a half past the outfield fence in a motion that, for him, was quite graceful, practiced and nonchalant. His work ethic always impressed but, I think, the attachment I (we) had with him had more to do with the fact that he made it look like fun. Bye, Kirby.
Technorati Tags: Sports
I don't much feel like writing. Over at Politics in Minnesota they assigned me the job of handling the Morning Report, which is a roundup of political news around the state. I am thinking about going down to the Minneapolis DFL Caucuses tonight, although it's quite a random experience. It is one of those things that still makes Minnesota an outlier...
Conveniently, the caucus is across the street from me at the MCTC gourmet dining room. You've still got 30 minutes to find ya DFL spots here.
Kirby Puckett was on some other level. In my younger days, well, you could count on A) Paul Wellstone and B) Kirby Puckett. To go and hang out in the outfield seats, eat a hot dog, Kirby right out there to take care of things. Somehow he was able to fool gravity, no one could understand why but it always was for the right reasons.
Where the hell did this brand of celebrity go? An athlete with more than the typical pastiche of Bling and Assholery. Who made winning the World Series look easy. Who proved that you don't have to be a whippet to run faster than hell.
Something magic was happening. The identity was less cluttered, the virtue of the game was actually there to see. Nothing like that happens anymore. That's why sports are boring today.
Great times. Something to actually believe in. Good days, now gone all over again.
I Will Perform Many Covert Ninja Operations on Targets Unsuspecting
Hello,
I am coming to you from deep in my underground Dojo, an impenetrable fortress coddled on springs under 5,000 feet of bedrock. Day and night here I train, lathered in sweat while completing challenging maneuvers in tight cinematic sequences. I shoot and arm wrestle and do backflips; sometimes I garotte targets unsuspecting whilst they attempt to surveil my pad. I am no longer able to leave my Dojo very much due to the number of highly-skilled warriors looking for me "up there", but the arrangement has its advantages; while I have missed the chance to more readily apply my incredible fighting prowess in order to uphold justice and attract women, the reinforced steel walls in my blast-proof training center are the only surface thus far that has been able to absorb my punishing blows, thus allowing me to kick my already extreme neo-ninja self training up a notch. The passionate devotion I show for my way of life has given me great focus and, in turn, extreme mastery of the deadly martial arts.
I am now ready to face off with the best. I truly believe that under the withering fusillade of fists, almost no one could last for even a moment before being torn to pieces, laid waist by Badger Fist stance and in awe of the breathtaking aerial display that immediately proceeds the dealing of a deadly blow. Soon, I will begin, slowly at first, using my powers for the forces of goodness and purity, fighting the dregs of society in their own neighborhoods and hangouts- seedy lamp-lit joints with tawdry, disheartening embroidery fringing on the tattered, garishly colored lampshades. The sickness I feel towards those who spread evil and disharmony has transformed itself into both a mission in life and an outlet for my bewildering abilities in the arena of hand-to-hand combat.
I can't tell you when I will next communicate with you, if ever I do again. The information I will be privy to in my increased capacity as the protector of human decency for the entire globe won't leave me much time to go otter fishing, nor will I most likely attend weekly pizza and porn session from this point onward. At any rate, I am writing in order for you to wish me luck in my endeavors and, if circumstances allow, I will attempt to convey by some means that I am, indeed, alive and still on my quest for justice and equality.
Farewell (?)
Leroy Babolian
Technorati Tags: Leroy Babolian, the deadly arts
...I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in...
My condition is: Lots of Wisdom Tooth Vicodin + I hate Valentines Day.I have been laying low and taking Vicodin after my wisdom teeth operation on Wednesday. That's five straight days of codeine, and my moods are kind of weird and raw by this point.
Introducing:
From the depths of the Intarweb comes a shadowy character known only as Pixeldusted. S/He works in the shadows, interacting with the most arcane and mysterious parts of a vast and sprawling industrial complex.
Well sort of. I'll leave it to Dusty to explain. Pixeldusted is not a fictional character, though of course, in the current climate of Information Operations, a reader cannot assume such things.
So currently our stable of contributors includes:
And that's about it. Any of our regular visitors (and irregular confused lookers-on) are invited to contact me at NOdan.feidtSPAM@gmail.com if they would like to get an account here. I am trying to expand the operation a bit here. I have the inklings of long-term plan to design a better site. I would like to get friends contributing. There are no real hard and fast rules about it, because I don't really care that much. But I know a lot of smart people that could add some stuff.
So along with this polite general invitation to the visiting public, please keep my heavy recent course of painkillers in mind when reading the rest of this post.
Because yes, the structure of the site is antiquated and needs to be replaced. The HongWiki is probably not long for this world -- I look towards a better Content Management System setup like WordPress. In my day job, I am designing a new site for Politics in Minnesota's campaign coverage. Once that is done, I will actually have a very useful template for a new HongPong.com. Sweet.
*******
I looked at my web server logs for the first time in a while, and it turns out that well, things are going pretty well on the site. We are averaging 744 visits a day in February, of which I would estimate that 30% are spammers and 30% are search engines, but that's a rough estimate.
Here are the most popular search phrases of the last 13 days: (hits, then percentages)
And i don't even have the damn cartoons. Or a Mamoon falafel. Last month's search phrases were sort of funny:
"Amadeus Pegasus Watchtower" being the supposed three names of the CIA programs bringing cocaine into the United States, which Ruppert claimed to uncover (as we noted earlier). HongPong.com is now like #5 for that on Google.
U.S. Concludes 'Cyber Storm' Mock Attacks By TED BRIDIS
The Associated Press / Friday, February 10, 2006; 8:37 PM
WASHINGTON -- The government concluded its "Cyber Storm" wargame Friday, its biggest-ever exercise to test how it would respond to devastating attacks over the Internet from anti-globalization activists, underground hackers and bloggers.
Bloggers?
Participants confirmed parts of the worldwide simulation challenged government officials and industry executives to respond to deliberate misinformation campaigns and activist calls by Internet bloggers, online diarists whose "Web logs" include political rantings and musings about current events.[......]
There was no impact on the real Internet during the weeklong exercise. Government officials from the United States, Canada, Australia and England and executives from Microsoft, Cisco, Verisign and others said they were careful to simulate attacks only using isolated computers, working from basement offices at the Secret Services headquarters in downtown Washington.
[.....]Homeland Security coordinated the exercise. More than 115 government agencies, companies and organizations participated. They included the White House National Security Council, Justice Department, Defense Department, State Department, National Security Agency and CIA, which conducted its own cybersecurity exercise called "Silent Horizon" last May.
An earlier cyberterrorism exercise called "Livewire" for Homeland Security and other federal agencies concluded there were serious questions over government's role during a cyberattack depending on who was identified as the culprit _ terrorists, a foreign government or bored teenagers.
It also questioned whether the U.S. government would be able to detect the early stages of such an attack without significant help from private technology companies. [I sense a Blackwater Offensive Hacking contract in the works -Dan]
Please recall the "Fight the Net" Defense Department concept in the "Information Operations Roadmap" (PDF) from earlier. Let's add a bit from the BBC:
A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for "information operations" - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks.
Bloggers beware.
As the world turns networked, the Pentagon is calculating the military opportunities that computer networks, wireless technologies and the modern media offer. From influencing public opinion through new media to designing "computer network attack" weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war.
[.......]
The operations described in the document include a surprising range of military activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks.
All these are engaged in information operations.
Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.
"Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads. "Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.
The document's authors acknowledge that American news media should not unwittingly broadcast military propaganda. "Specific boundaries should be established," they write. But they don't seem to explain how.
"In this day and age it is impossible to prevent stories that are fed abroad as part of psychological operations propaganda from blowing back into the United States - even though they were directed abroad," says Kristin Adair of the National Security Archive.
So your own [American] brain is a target of military spending.
Accidentally.
Tax dollars >> Military-engineered thoughts.
Now that's what I call a feedback loop of sinister proportions. As for this site, well, it got 57 hits from the military just so far this month.
Jane Cat had surgery to repair his hematoma on the same day as my Wisdom Teeth, and the feline is now kinda tired, and pretty dusty. Tragic that a cat gets dusty when it can't groom its face.
Here, through my hydrocodone haze, Jane Cat is grabbing onto "Crossing the Rubicon" by Michael Ruppert, the conspiratorial work of parapolitical mega-non-fiction leading up to "Cheney did 9/11". I had pulled out this weird book because an old high school friend randomly stopped by today, and we talked about the likelihood that Wellstone was assassinated.
Could he have been Done In?
"People have been killed for less," I said. And Ruppert has an extended conspiracy theory about the subject, included in his book and featured on FromTheWilderness.com (and a followup). I tend to favor the electromagnetic pulse weapon theory – which explains the cell phone anomalies in northern Minnesota that day.
(My photo from a peace march in St. Paul on March 23, 2003)
The leading book on the Wellstone assassination theory, though, is apparently American Assassination by Don Jacobs and Jim Fetzer, a U of M professor. From a review:
Since becoming active in this issue, local residents have contacted Dr. Fetzer and related strange electronic interference in the area at the time of the crash. One experienced an odd cell-phone phenomenon with a form of noise unlike any he had heard before.
Its auditory pattern appears consistent with the use of "electro-magnetic" (EM) weapons developed by the Pentagon to take out computerized systems and wreak harm on human targets. It was part of the plan to bring down the plane using kinds of weapons of which most Americans are unaware.
These weapons can disable radio communications, stall warning systems, course deviation indicator, and electrical switches controlling the pitch of the props, causing substantial loss of control. They can render persons unconscious, incapable of muscle control, or even bring about their death.
In the wake of the crash, 69% of Minnesotans blamed a "GOP conspiracy" for Wellstone’s death.
I want to know where that statistic came from.
I got an oil change today and the mechanic noted my Wellstone bumper sticker. "We were just talking the other day about how great he was," she said. "It's always brought me good luck," I said. "Never been pulled over as long as its been on there."
And it is worth noting again that Wellstone was the only Democratic Senator to vote against the war who faced election that November. His political "survival" — assured in polls just before the election – posed a grave threat to the rationale for war - the rational public of Minnesota threatened to upset the spectacle.
And then there was all that damn bad weather (or not). Wellstone was afraid of planes, that's why he had the bus. And he was once sprayed with coca defoliant in Colombia. Tangle with the Establishment's cocaine friends in the Global South, who even knows what trouble you'd get into...
Amadeus, Pegasus, Watchtower. Information Operations.
The Vice President shoots a man, and they cover it up for 22 hours just for shits and giggles.
Time for another Vicodin. Official candy of Valentine's Day 2006.
There has been a lack of updates this week as I focused on getting real work done - and making the all-important bank. I have been redesigning the Politics in Minnesota website, so it looks much cooler. Our organization has gotten weird press this year, because of the MDE lawsuit - which is quite a strange subject that I really won't get into right now. However, I think everyone should check out what's going on with the PIM site, and we are working on making the whole thing really kick ass. And there will be a blog on the way, which will be way fun. Right on.
Check out the new page for the Politics in Minnesota: The Directory. Now you can actually see what Peter and I worked our butts off to produce. They're still on sale, so buy one already!!
Here in Minnesota we always have a special spot for the ironic political campaign. Wellstone and Ventura cut against the typical style, but they fit their times somehow. And now, another candidate has emerged from esoteric wiccan pentagrams and two (two!) covens. He also offers to impale terrorists and drug dealers at the state capitol, as a dramatic Star Tribune story detailed today.
Satanism and the Vampyres Witches and Pagans party: The Agenda:
6) Any one found committing an act of terrorism in Minnesota will be IMPALED by me at the State Capital. If the US DOJ wants to prosecute me for it, then I will take my chances in Court, for I do not believe an American Jury will convict me of brutally killing a terrorist!
I particularly liked how the capitol graphic was filched from the Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board.
Just like Anakin, my main concern was to help save the life of the woman I loved dearly. However, Susan returned my unconditional love and caring by having me wrongly incarcerated for 150-days (as a result of IUPUI Law Professor Joel Schumm) I was vindicated, almost 3-months after spending 150-days in jail!
As a result of Susan's actions, I fully turned to "The Dark Side" and dedicated my life to serving Lucifer.
Unlike Susan, I will not attack an innocent person through my hatred. I prefer to use the blessings and gifts that come from Vampyrism and WitchCraft to attack those who prey on the innocent.
[....]
My sister has a saying, "Evil Begets Evil!" Well, starting in 2007, it will be the criminals who realize first hand, that there is someone more evil than they are, who cares about the safety and well-being of the innocent!
WAR, WHAT'S IT GOOD FOR? There are also high plans as he intends to run for President.
Though my Magikal Path Name is: Lord Ares, I do not believe that Americans should die needlessly in Iraq or any other country.
As Governor of Minnesota I will NOT allow any of our National Guard soldiers to be deployed to Iraq or any other combat area in the world.Upon becoming President I will immediately recall ALL servicemen and women from combat areas around the world. Additionally, I will have President George W. Bush charged and tried for the murders of every American that has been killed in Iraq as a result of him sending them into War. Upon being convicted, I think everyone knows what his punishment will be.
That sets a new bar for rhetorical gestures in gubernatorial campaigns. Adjusting the discourse with guerilla ontology. He also goes way back with Jeb Bush, which is really quite strange. He has apparently been an apparatchik of the Florida Republican Party, so who knows what dark reaches his connections go to.
So we will surely follow this one as it develops. Jonathon Sharkey is a great name for a Satanist.
Well Sarah Janecek and Brian Lambert completed their first radio show on KTLK this evening. For the first time around it was pretty good -- nearly as good as my first time on WMCN back in 2002. There was good discussion of the 2006 elections, the NSA wiretapping thing, and a long talk with a guest about Mike Tice. There were even some call-ins. So it is all working out.
Emailed out to people:
It's been a strange turn of events this week. We lost a good friend from St Paul & my high school, Mike Flanagan, who passed away unexpectedly on Sunday. Mike was an excellent man, he was friendly to everyone and free of malice. He's the first friend my age to pass away, and it doesn't seem real. The service will be at 1 PM today (Weds).
I am sincerely sorry to let people know this through email. He was my friend for many years, and added a lot to our lives. I just want to wish everyone and their families and friends a much more safe and sane new year,
--dan
http://www.legacy.com/twincities/LegacySubPage2.asp?Page=LifeStory&PersonID=16047997
Flanagan, Michael T. Age 22
Beloved Son, Brother, Friend Died unexpectedly December 18. Beloved son of Don and Sarah, dear brother of Patrick, he will be greatly missed. From the quiet streets of Saint Paul to the hills of Northern California, Michael enriched the lives of family, friends, strangers, and fellow travelers with his puckish grin, generous spirit, and wonderfully original talent for language. His love of life, expressed in devoted concert-going and excited recommendations for where to find the best béarnaise sauce in the Twin Cities, allowed him to befriend almost anyone, regardless of background or social status. His loss is immense, but those he leaves behind take comfort simply in having known such a unique and joyful person. A memorial service will be held at O'Halloran and Murphy, 575 S. Snelling Ave, St. Paul, MN 55116. 651-698-0796 at 1:00 P.M. Wednesday December 21. Visitation from 11:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M Wednesday. In lieu of flowers, memorials are preferred to the Minnesota Humane Society or the Minnesota Literacy Council.
The Pioneer Press site has a 'guest book' to leave a note at:
http://www.legacy.com/twincities/Guestbook.asp?Page=Guestbook&PersonID=16047997
Nick Petersen and Adam Gerber are getting in town Tuesday afternoon. Nick & I decided to pull people together for a memorial party for the man. Nick has generated an Event on Facebook about it:
Dan is hosting an event Tuesday, December 20th at his apartment in downtown Minneapolis as a gathering to remember Mike Flanagan, who passed away on the 18th. Anyone who would like to may come.
Directions:
basic directions from 94: Get off Hennepin North exit. Drive up hennepin Ave going into downtown. the road curves right near the Basilica. You go just past the MCTC (mpls cmty/tech college) skyway, and take a right onto Spruce Place. Dan's apartment is in the Haverhill apartments right at the first corner, at Harmon & Spruce. (If you get to the Subway shop you've gone too far on Hennepin)
I will add that here is a map to my house via Google Maps. I will have the red stoplight in the window pointing towards Hennepin to mark the spot.
If you have any photos or other things about Mike, those would be good to bring.
Terrible, shocking news today that our high school classmate and dear friend Mike Flanagan tragically met his end last night.
I have not really absorbed the reality of this. Those of us in the Twin Cities have been calling the far flung members of the MPA class of 2001 about it.
Mike was awesome in his own way. He was certainly brave and daring. He was smart as hell and always had something clever to tell you, some cynical observation or moral principle or something.
Mike travelled on his own strange path, his own weird and savage journey to the heart of the American dream. He really wanted to get a spot somewhere quiet, somewhere 'off the grid' as he put it. He was always chasing that kind of freedom.
We are going down to the Groveland Tap right now. It seems like the right place to be.
We'll make sure that everyone knows what is happening with the services that will happen this week. Send me an email or call 651-338-7661. More info as things happen.
There is talk on local hiphop site D. U. Nation about the shootings at the Quest the other night. Citypages staffer Peter Scholtes just posted an interesting account of the concert & incident. Forum member Tanqueray_Loccsta adds the improbable MySpace + Gangsta fusion:
Man they aint gonna close the quest, they got Mark Webster back. He's gonna clean it up just like he had it when I was a bouncer there. I was gonna work there with him but I got my own drama, Anyway I only got time for my Muzic from now on.
But for those that dont Know this street shit is real it no movie or t.v shit its mufuccas out here like myself that really lived this shit or still are living it now. And most beef that happens aint about someones shoes getting stepped on, or getting bumped into.
Its about real shit that took place in the streets and then you so happen to see the mufucca that fucced you over and its on right there. aint no fuccin talkin just drama.
The only fucced up part about it is it makes it hard for niggaz like me to do shows cuz they be scared of the type of crowed that will come. so the only cats that get the good venues are backpack rappers. no offence to yall...
but the streets are real.. shit My big bro O.G K-Wood just got murdered july 31st 2005 over north. check out his muzic at
http://www.myspace.com/murda4hire
this shit is real man mufuccas is gangstas 4 real man...
and it aint all superficial like ppl think it aint about being cool or tuff only ppl think that is on the outside looking in.
Tanqueray Loccsta says he's performing on Dec 13 at Minnesota Snipe's CD release party. I'd never seen a MySpace site in memory of a slain guy from the North Side -- complete with some of his tracks. It seems like a good idea, to make sure there's a spot on the Internet where their loss is marked, with music that celebrates them.
DailyKos says today that there are rumors that Bush has considered a jolt of Joementum to replace Rumsfeld. Yes, Joe Lieberman could run the Pentagon. It doesn't really seem plausible. I can't believe they would go Joe rather than find someone more tough-looking. Lieberman is horrible, and kos points out it would free Senate Democrats from his the grip of his nasty faux-centralism, but I don't know.
Given the circumstances I would really like a SecDef who was A) competent and experienced B) not murderously senile. I actually believe that the Republicans could come up with someone like that, but sadly they probably won't.
Speaking of the DKos, the site went down for a while when the server was being moved in a van, and a dog sniffed an apparent bomb that was actually cologne or something. So the government got them down for a while on a false positive.
Everyone's on a hair trigger?
I sent this email out to lots of people. If you're reading it, well that means you care about my dear website so you are invited too! (I sure as hell don't have the email addresses of everyone I wanted to invite...)
**********
Long story short: the mess is over and I win. Rambling details below. We are having a Victory Party this Friday evening - at whatever evening time - at the new apartment @ 32 Spruce Place, Apartment 200, in downtown Minneapolis, and everyone's invited. I mean everyone. Forward this email around if you like - 'they' are invited too. Here's the GoogleMap to the Apt. - you just drive up Hennepin towards downtown, turn right at Spruce Place (a block before South 13th street) and then go a block to Harmon Place. The building's on the corner, and I'm going to put my red stoplight in the window as a beacon!
My contact info is: 651 338 7661, AIM: hongpong2000, http://www.hongpong.com (as always)
Last night I was walking to the Hennepin Ave. Davannis with my roommate Colin Kennedy, and a random dude asked us for a cigarette, as they do so often. He talked with us as we walked, about how good friends have to give hard advice (as a friend did about the case that night)... I told the dude my dilemma - that I had to go to court tomorrow and decide if I should plea bargain. He said he'd had his troubles with the law and had been caught with 17 ounces of cocaine (someone else's, of course!) and he'd had the option of a plea for 15 years or going up for 40. He said that going to jail was good for him, it forced him to change his life, and he spent 3 years reading law books. The state wouldn't fight hard to force a plea because it costs lots of money to impanel a jury, he said. He told me that I should stick it out and tell the truth, and whatever higher power I might believe in would see that the truth would set things right, and it would be plain for all to see. Best legal advice I'd gotten in a while!
It took almost seven full months, but we stuck it out in court and rotated through three judges in all. However, today I didn't expect anything would happen, except setting a court date with yet another judge. This time around, the new one, Judge Kathleen Gearin, talked with Gary Wood, my lawyer, and the city prosecutor Jeffrey Martin, for quite awhile in the Chambers.
When Gary came back it was some good news. He wasn't sure how the judge was feeling about it but they'd offered a Disorderly Conduct with a $50 fine. I compared that with the thought of hundreds more dollars on legal fees that I can't afford and I decided to go for the plea. We went back in to wait to finish this thing.
I'm recollecting this from memory here... So when we went up to the judge in court, she asked if I wanted to take the plea and I said something like 'Yes, because I can't afford to go any further.' She looked over the police statements and said that there was something about the issue of spoilage of evidence and a memory card. She asked the prosecutor if this memory card ever showed up at the property room and he said it never had. However, he never offered a particular defense or explanation of this.
She asked me to explain in my own words what happened, and what if anything was contained on the memory card. I said that we, as a senior class, had been on a riverboat cruise that day, and I'd taken around a hundred pictures of everyone gathered together for one last time ... and she said, alright get to the point... so I said that we'd been in a cottage, the police came in, I took a picture of that and took more pictures outside. I said that I know it is legal to take photographs from a public space as long as you obey lawful orders from police, etc. I told her that I took a picture of someone (Andrew Kracziewicz) being arrested, and then the police hit the camera out of my hand and I got arrested. I said that at the jail, the police had showed me the camera and asked if it was mine, and I said that it was, then I got it back when I was released, without the memory card.
She asked if the photos indicated something illegal by the police, and I said something like that they were being forceful and overreacting. Well, she said, they had to be forceful, and that it seemed from the police reports that some people had been out of control. I didn't try to defend the actions of everyone there and stuck to the matter of the pictures. I said that the existence of the pictures proved that I hadn't been shoving Officer Moore -- I'd been taking pictures. The prosecutor didn't try to defend or challenge this, aside from claiming that the police report was the state's full statement on the matter.
The judge said (I wish I had the exact quote) that, with a reference to a precedent of McGill vs. someone, that failing to produce the evidence was prejudicial to the defendant - and that she was bothered by the fact that these pictures never showed up. Citing some statute, she said that the charge of obstruction of legal process of force was dismissed. She seemed quite ticked about how they never brought the pictures. I had never expected such sharp words about it, so it was really great to hear after all this.
I didn't pontificate about any grand concepts of freedom of the press or claim that Macalester students are all saints because that kind of thing would not really resolve the situation. It was easier to deal with all this with no friends or family at the courtroom watching me - it simplified the whole thing mentally, and well, I hadn't actually expected anything at all to happen today, so I never suggested that anyone go with me.
In the end, at the very least I proved to the police that they can't just destroy photos and expect to totally get away with it. Gary thought that they'd fought so hard in this case because of some of the top city attorneys decided to pressure us - they had earlier demanded written apologies with the other plea bargains, but they forgot to do this in writing, so it's not going to happen.
After the case I bragged to my dear old roommate Alison Norman, who is going crosseyed squinting at law books at William Mitchell 60 hours a week, that I'd won one case and now she better catch up!
When all of this was over I remembered what one friend always used to say to me... "Now Dan, drive carefully. I know what your country does and I don't want to go to Guantanamo!" The terrible truth of what happened in this incident was that Audun, an international student, was assaulted by the jail personnel, and his lack of a US passport probably contributed to that. The police also maced Zeynep in front of her cottage. The experience ruptured their sense of what this country's about -- and with the news these days that Cheney is darting around the Capitol begging Republicans to let them keep torturing vanished foreigners, along with news of a secret network of CIA detention camps in Eastern Europe (why would anyone think badly of secret camps around there, anyway?) -- it seems that this contempt for the rights of non-citizens trickles right down from those policies at the top. Inside jail it's not too difficult to see that you're only a few cells on the spreadsheet away from Guantanamo. It turned out that my ever-cynical friend was quite correct.
There's some possibility of a lawsuit down the line, in the hopes that we could discourage the police and sheriffs from abusing people like this, but I won't make any predictions or plans, and I sure as hell don't want to worry about it that much, after having experienced this weird and time-consuming trip through the System. The odometer's finally rolled over on this mess, and I'm happy about it. Tomorrow I'll wake up free of Conditional Release, having won a piece by standing my ground, but oddly winning after I'd given up.
Cheers to all of you and thanks for your steadfast support, far flung you may be. I want to come and visit people sometime in the dead of winter... +1 for the good guys!
--Dan
I arrived in the middle of an antiwar rally at the University of Minnesota yesterday, as approximately 1000 people, mostly students, came to mark the 2000th US military death, the indictment of Lewis Libby, and a rapidly shifting national political situation.
When the newly-formed Youth Against War and Racism group met at the Loring Park Coffee House in March to plan a fall student protest, they couldn't have foreseen how America's view of the war would shift by then: the Downing Street Memos showed the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of invasion, I. Lewis Libby was indicted for damaging national security while trying to discredit a war critic, and worst of all, more than 2000 American service personnel were killed.
On Wednesday afternoon, activists staged dozens of protests nationwide, as about 1000 people, including hundreds of Minneapolis high school students, rallied on the U's East Bank to mark the strange year that's passed since Bush's re-election. YAWR students demanded that Minneapolis schools ban military recruiters (as a Minnesota Daily video documents), though such a move could endanger their federal funding under the No Child Left Behind Act. "War leaves every child behind," read one protester's sign.
As the protest spilled off the Mall into Washington Avenue, turning east towards the military recruiting offices, Minneapolis City Councilman Dean Zimmermann was spotted standing high atop a utility box, attempting to count the crowd. More than a dozen counter-protesters lined up in front of the offices with signs such as "Peace through Strength" and "The leaders of tomorrow should be in class today!" Protesters responded by shouting that "the leaders of tomorrow are getting practice today!"
Across the spectrum, America is becoming a majority anti-war country. 53% of Americans believe that the administration "deliberately misled the public" on WMD issues, a Gallup/CNN poll discovered last week. Meanwhile, reports in the Italian media suggested that before the war, Italian military intelligence and the Pentagon's secret Office of Special Plans channeled these lies, including the Niger uranium forgeries, into the White House.
Who could blame high school students for war anxiety? The same Pentagon bureaucracy that ruthlessly targets Sunni tribesmen selects students based on intelligence like their grades, ethnicity and income. What student could believe a war with 27 rationales? They see their friends and family disappear, only to return injured, psychologically damaged, exposed to depleted uranium and IEDs, or worse, draped under a flag.
One anonymous black-clad protester, masked with a bandana, told me that he and his associates represented the Minnesota branch of the Anarchist Black Cross organization. His principal reason for protesting? "Revolution," he said, revealing the core of our nation's spirit - to rebel, grow, prosper. It still flourishes: in October, Ipsos Public Affairs found that 50% of Americans agreed that "if President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable by impeaching him."
After the street protest, at the Oak Street Cinema a teach-in was held to teach students how to challenge recruiters in their schools. The protest was also organized by the Anti-War Committee, Socialist Alternative and the Anti-War Organizing League.
Hey all, I sent out this email to some people about the ongoing Senior Week legal case. I had to go down to court on Monday but nothing happened. Suffice it to say, this is a big pain in the arse:
From: Dan Feidt <dan.feidt@gmail.com>
Date: October 31, 2005 2:46:38 PM CST
To: everyone
Subject: Bounced to another judge
So I get down there and asked where Judge Ostby is hearing cases today. The woman at the desk said that Judge Ostby isn't hearing any cases today. What?! Apparently she has rotated from misdemeanors to felonies and she ditched this case like the rotten fish it is. So we got reassigned to November 8 with Judge Gearin.
Also, the city attorney is angry that the previous plea bargains for the other guys failed to include an apology, so they may try to 'undo' the plea bargains in order to try to secure an apology.
While they said that we had been sent notices that the court date had changed, neither I nor Gary Wood got one so it was totally a surprise. What an excellent bureaucracy. A little Kafkaesque.
Today I am working on Politics in MN stuff as well as Computer Zone things. There's obviously a lot to say about TraitorGate - I mean the Plame scandal. I promise there will be more. In the meantime go see Firedoglake.
Amazing Mike Luckovich cartoon illustrates the thousands of dead soldiers. Also as high-rez PDF.
The sun will dawn on a different world in a few hours. Finally the Law has pierced the flesh of that most dangerous of beasts, the Bush Administration, and they cannot keep telling themselves how immaculate they are with an indictment lodged in the corpus... (narcissism in the leadership leading to ego projection in the followers - doesn't lead to good things)
Great diary about Seymour Hersh speech, relating torture, the regular bombing of Turkic people in northern Iraq, etc. Many arguments these days about how the war wasn't a mistake, it was sedition!!!
Basic hypocrisy from the Powerline crew on Clinton scandals vs Bush madness.
To clarify, with the Pat Lang link earlier, evidently Lang has been posting stuff from an experienced journalist using this 'alternate channel.' An interesting approach which will help solve the problem of political pressure from editors. Anyway, the journalist Sale writes (via Lang):
According to the Times account, Cheney told Libby the covert name of the wife of Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. diplomat who had publicly alleged that the administration had mishandled of intelligence relating to Iraq's nuclear weapons programs.
But several former and serving U.S. intelligence officials strongly disputed this. "That is simply not accurate," a very former senior CIA official told this repoter. "Libby's notes on this are misleading and inaccurate or both."
This source, supported by three others, alleged that it was a telephone call from the Department of State that first gave Libby the name of Plame.
The name of the caller? No one is sure. But these sources said that the call defintely came from the State Department office of John Bolton, then the arms control chief of the department.
These same sources alleged that two employees of Bolton, David Wurmser, a virullent pro-war hawk, first told Libby that Valerie Plame had sent Wilson to Niger to attempt to discredit the administration's line on Iraq's nuclear weapons programs.
These same intelligence sources alleged that Wurmser, as Bolton's special assistant, got his knowledge of Plame's classified identity from a colleague in his office, Frederick Fleitz, a CIA officer detailed to Bolton's office from the agency who worked in the CIA's Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINIPAC.)
"We do not know yet which of the two called," the former very senior intelligence official said.
There are conflicting reports about the fate of Rove and the whole investigation (across LA Times, NY Times, the WaPo). So who knows how it adds up? The money question: is it true that Fitzgerald Expands Probe to Prewar Intel?
Nice little scandal index they got at Perrspectives.
Fortunately we have twits like Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard to blame the Wilsons for their perpetual mendacity. (Hayes himself has many sins to atone for in the intel disinformation game)
Norm is playing a role in Armed Forces Media. DailyKos: Ed Shultz Isn't Popular Enough: Norm Coleman. Galloway swats back against Norm.
Because Beyonce is too black, they had to retone her skin for a fashion magazine. Thanks.
Teams Fail To Recreate Archimedes' Fabled Death Ray. Go Mythbusters.
Peak Corn? As Wal-Mart Shifts from Petroleum to Corn, Farmers Flee the Crop
What the fuck does this even mean? "Metrosexual man bows to red-blooded übersexuals" Apparently now someone has decided that George Clooney is cooler than Jude Law. Well no shit!
Breathalyzers and Open Source:
Lawyers for 150 Floridians accused of drunk driving have asked a court to order the disclosure of the source code for software running in the breathalyzer machines used by police to analyze their blood alcohol level, according to a Tom Sanders story on vunet.
The defendants say they have the right to examine the machines that accused them, and that a meaningful examination requires access to the machines’ software. Prosecutors say the code is a trade secret.
I respect that. Get the code while you can!!!
Iraq: Quite full of explosions these days, even in the Green Zone.The New York Review of Books: Last Chance for Iraq: the forceful argument to let it break up. Sunnis try to merge it up. Abu Ghraib photo court appeal runs out - new torture photos soon to be released?
Google: Chinese dissident observes: My Experience of Google's Censorship. Also good ol Seth Finkelstein's Google Censorship - How It Works.
The Turkish alphabet: CNN:
DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuters) -- A Turkish court has fined 20 people for using the letters Q and W on placards at a Kurdish new year celebration, under a law that bans use of characters not in the Turkish alphabet, rights campaigners said.
Voter fraud: check out video footage of Clint Curtis saying that Florida Congressman Tom Feeney ordered him to make vote-rigging software. (the actual link - an odd site)
This was a set of stuff which I should have posted like a week ago. Well, enjoy. :-/
Some Minnesota blogs: I do not usually pay enough attention to blogs around the Twin Cities although it's a rich territory these days. City Pages big index. I think Kennedy vs. the Machine is amusing because, well, it just is. Anything idolizing Mark Kennedy is sort of like praising ketchup for daring to be different than mustard. Freedom Dogs is another right wing local one.
Then there are a couple college guys running MN Publius, which is pretty good. They are watching the upcoming election from afar. MN Lefty Liberal holding it down.
Secret Phone Numbers: escape the Labyrinth. Dial up real humans in corporate voice mail hell! This has the secret customer service numbers for many corps, including Amazon, which I used today.
Example of media manipulation & gullibility. FOX blimp tricks WCCO into covering it.
Scott McClellan Says Helen Thomas Opposes 'War on Terrorism' (featured on CrooksAndLiars). Har har har!!
[Helen Thomas]: What does the President mean by "total victory" -- that we will never leave Iraq until we have "total victory"? What does that mean?
[......]
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, Helen, the President recognizes that we are engaged in a global war on terrorism. And when you're engaged in a war, it's not always pleasant, and it's certainly a last resort. But when you engage in a war, you take the fight to the enemy, you go on the offense. And that's exactly what we are doing. We are fighting them there so that we don't have to fight them here. September 11th taught us --
Q It has nothing to do with -- Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, you have a very different view of the war on terrorism, and I'm sure you're opposed to the broader war on terrorism. The President recognizes this requires a comprehensive strategy, and that this is a broad war, that it is not a law enforcement matter.
Terry.
Q On what basis do you say Helen is opposed to the broader war on terrorism?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, she certainly expressed her concerns about Afghanistan and Iraq and going into those two countries. I think I can go back and pull up her comments over the course of the past couple of years.
Q And speak for her, which is odd.
MR. McCLELLAN: No, I said she may be, because certainly if you look at her comments over the course of the past couple of years, she's expressed her concerns --
Q I'm opposed to preemptive war, unprovoked preemptive war.
MR. McCLELLAN: -- she's expressed her concerns.
Who knew the CIA had a journal? Studies in Intelligence: VOL. 49, NO. 2, 2005 featuring Understanding Terror Networks and The Intelligence Officer's Bookshelf. Nice. Interestingly, the CIA defends itself from charges that they gave bad intelligence by an article published in this declassified journal. Here is an article about Goss crushing CIA analysts under political pressure.
Israel, Iran and nuclear war. Unpleasant thoughts that make me want to play computer games instead. WOPR knows you can't win Global Thermonuclear War anyway. But this article about how the US is prepping for the attack is spooky. US selling Bunker Bombs to Israel. They got some sweet jets too. Bush: "America would back Israel attack on Iran." Good old Cheney:
"Given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards," Cheney said. In 1981, Israel sent warplanes to destroy Iraq's nuclear reactor.
More on this later. Gotta love Threat Construction in the mideast.
Global: What is China Up to in the Western Hemisphere? Big things!
"Former U.S. ambassador in Bolivia Manuel Rocha recently remarked, 'Your children may have to start learning Mandarin ... if you wish to see them involved in business in the Americas.'"
UNPO: I like the idea of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, which is set up for the various smaller ethnic groups (From the Lakota Nation to Georgian Abkhazia, the Assyrians of Iraq and the Levant - who do not support the new constitution. Sweet flag too! - and the formerly independent Arabic Ahwaz people of southwestern Iran)
Talk about some pandemic. Personal Pandemic Preparedness Plan. "ASSUME FOOD AND SUPPLIES WILL BE UNAVAILABLE". Here is yr bird flu map over time. Uh oh! Rich people should be saved in disasters first, says yr typical rightwing idiot.
Syria under pressure, ringed by an Iron Wall. More details on this later.
New Service to Coordinate US Overseas Espionage. Oh good, more for Goss, less for Negroponte. Or not. Dammit!
Rebels in Russia! They are getting serious out in those quiet Caucasus areas. Also covered here but these sites may be some rightwing gibberish. Well DEBKA should bring an air of Sanity to the affair. (they say it was mostly locals, shocking). The choice quote:
Most of the province’s inhabitants are ethnic Circassian Muslims. The unrecorded chapter of the Chechen intelligence war of the 1990s relates how the Circassian community of Jordan, which was the security buttress of the Hashemite throne, was used by US, British and French intelligence as a pipeline into the Chechen breakaway movement for close surveillance of its conflict with Russia. Al Qaeda, which tracks and meets every American intelligence move connected with the global war on terror, countered by going into the remote and relatively affluent Kabardino-Balkaria to quietly acquire its own Circassian asset.
Iraq Boom. Bush is really alone. It would be funny if it wasn't such a horrible and devastating problem. 'The worst possible policy for Iraq'. The good news: perhaps Iraq's violence not yet civil war. Journalist Chris Albritton has the latest on the election results and suspicious indicators of electoral fraud in Nineveh province. Here comes sectarian warfare. Ah, Bush's staged Potemkin army.
Great moments in strategy, revisited: Vanquished Iraqi military disbanded; U.S. occupying force to set up new army. What a classic. How did that turn out?
Terror Letters O Love: We got this exciting Zawahiri letter. Jazeera: Al Qaeda claims US faked Zawahiri letter.
Condi still has some fucked up spin:
The fact of the matter is that when we were attacked on September 11, we had a choice to make. We could decide that the proximate cause was al Qaeda and the people who flew those planes into buildings and, therefore, we would go after al Qaeda…or we could take a bolder approach.
Vikings. Ouch. Talk about bumblefucking your way out of a new stadium, and then getting crushed by the Bears. Bitter Reusse:
As to what action Wilf should take in the wake of this aquatic Sodom and Gomorrah, the most popular suggestion has been to fire Tice now, rather than at season's end.
That's an idea worth serious consideration, but until nightfall today, Zygi has a higher priority:
Repenting for using the family fortune to buy this no-class operation.
Plame Flood [week-oldd news - sorry]! Plenty of news on this in the last couple days. I am glad it's become a major scandal again. Judith Miller certainly played things the nasty, dishonest and venal way she's handled them so far. No real admission from her great tell-all in the Times about how Libby mercilessly spun the war against intelligence community - with the Plame scandal as only a branch of the fallout. (AIPAC/WINEP and Chalabi being two other major branches yet to break off the tree)
But the tone of media coverage still doesn't fully link the fake intelligence with the attack that Libby et al. tried against Wilson. Miller's particular role in that fake intelligence, I would say, means that she was probably protecting Chalabi's people, "defending her other sources" ± as she seemed to put it in her article. But lets get to the Main Story, as the "other" Roger Ailes puts:
In today's column, Howie Kurtz illustrates what's wrong with most of the newspaper and television coverage of the New York Times' role in Traitorgate, including Kurtz's:
"Leave aside the criticisms of her WMD reporting."
The newspaper's purported coverage of WMD and Miller's relationship with the White House are inextricably intertwined. Miller's dealings with the White House and her agenda cannot be separated.
Howie can't seem to understand why the Times' reporting on its own reporter is so weak. He mentions the obvious conflict of interest, but doesn't address the equally obvious fact -- that the paper knew how corrupt Miller was and ran her articles anyway.
The paper either knew Miller's unnamed sources in the Administration and the INC, and published her articles anyway, or it published Miller's propaganda without knowing. In either case, the paper knowingly permitted Miller to lie to its readers. And that's why the paper's coverage of Traitorgate is not only weak -- it's non-existent. The paper can't publish the truth about Traitorgate without exposing its own role in the scandal and the parallel scandal of its own reporting on Iraq. It can't report the truth of Traitorgate and simulataneously maintain the fiction -- illustrated in the article quoted below -- that it was misled by the Administration and self-interested Iraqis and therefore can't really be faulted for its faulty reporting.
And that's why you can't "leave aside" Miller's WMD reporting when you consider the Times current coverage of Traitorgate. Howie is smart enough to understand this -- why he doesn't credit his readers with the same intelligence is an interesting question.
Ailes also has a good timeline of the various NY Times stories that Miller spewed forth for the trusting American public.
Ok there are a ton of links. Arianna (again and again). Judy made some obvious mistakes in her notes about Plame's role. The AntiWar blog is jolly these days. E&P are pissed. "The Law is on the Side of Valerie Plame," by pissed off ex-CIA dude Larry Johnson. Johnson also has some pieces about SISMI, the apparent original entry point of the forgeries into western intelligence communities. He alleges a prominent neo-con (Michael Ledeen in all but name) concocted the damn things. Nice! (also, why Fitz gets it) Pat Lang pissed off at that horrible Cohen column (as is Atrios and everyone else).
"My money is on the company, Pt. II". Victoria Plame? A fine reference to the whole case via the Left Coaster. Time for the Frog March? The Times newsroom has been tense. Fire Miller, dammit!
AIPAC still simmers: Raimondo considers the possibility that Israeli ambassador Danny Ayalon is one of the parties of espionage in the AIPAC indictments.
Texas two step: These guys have been making a Ronnie Earle documentary. Interesting.
GOP dissolves? Sure why not?
Once upon a time he was a Backstreet Boy, at the peak of the Internet bubble an international peddler of toilet paper sweepstakes, a college TV show host, and now he is going to save the world from the avian flu - while preventing an outbreak of martial law in the United States. Or something like that. Aaron works at the University of Minnesota's CIDRAP (Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy) these days, which I was reminded of when his director, Michael Osterholm PhD, appeared on CNN and NPR in the last couple days as the influenza outbreak spread to Turkey and Romania.
Aaron apparently coordinates coming up with the bling to keep millions from horrible deaths. not bad at all. His CIDRAP webpage:
Aaron Desmond
Mr. Desmond is the coordinator for licensing and new business development at the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP).
He previously worked at a marketing firm performing a variety of functions, including managing the production and distribution of a monthly communication to top executives across more than 50 divisions of a $19 billion company. Prior to this he ran his own Web marketing and consulting company, with the primary revenue stream generated through an international sweepstakes boasting more than 120,000 subscribers. Mr. Desmond has experience in business planning and development, opportunity recognition, market research, Web development, marketing, and law.
He serves on the board of directors for two nonprofit organizations, chairing marketing and membership committees. He graduated from the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota, with a BA in business administration, concentrating in entrepreneurship, and a legal studies minor.
Arthur Cheng, meanwhile, is currently deep in the interior of China perfecting the new SARS v2.0 Avian Swine pseudostreptococcus that will wipe out much of western Canada in 2008.
There have been so many scandals breaking this week that I've really got Intrigue Fatigue:
Frank Luntz, who helped develop the "Contract With America" message that swept Republicans to power in 1994, was on the Hill last week warning the party faithful that they could lose both the House and the Senate in next year's congressional elections.
Har har har... Blogs for Bush darkly rambles about Democrats wishing for civil war. Fortunately, I scored a new apartment at the edge of downtown Minneapolis with Colin Kennedy. The apartment windows are just above the street signs in this photo. It's at Apartment 200, 32 Spruce Place, the "Haverhill Apartments", which is around the Laurel Village area. Basically to get there, you drive up Hennepin past the Minneapolis Community & Technical College and take a left onto Harmon Place, then go a block. It is right there on the first corner in. Not bad!
First, the Covert Propaganda. Let's put that in bold. Covert Propaganda. It is not getting much bounce on the TV news because there is too much going on. But I like it. See AFP or NY Times:
Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.
In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated "covert propaganda" in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.
Then, Valerie Plame and the War Propaganda. Meanwhile they started a war based on fabricated propaganda. I think I know which is worse. But they didn't like it when uppity ponks like Joe Wilson tried to deflate some of their more outlandish claims, so they smeared him by outing his wife as a CIA operative, which in their demented cocktail-party worldview somehow was thought to be a good idea. But who did this? Michael Ledeen? (well he quite possibly involved with the Yellowcake forgeries themselves, but...) Joe Wilson wasted no time in insinuating that Karl Rove and I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby were involved, and I had this thing fairly well pegged back in 2003. Nearly two years ago, October 4, 2003, 'Everyone's National Disaster' I said:
The leaker went after Wilson to intimidate anyone else who might attack the Bush folks falsification of war intelligence. Let me offer a prediction about who was probably behind the leak: the Vice President's Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby. There have been insiders saying that the bad guy works in the Executive Office Building, where Cheney's people are. If I'm right about this, I definitely win a cookie.
(although on antiwar.com they had it pegged back then too - that was certainly one of my sources) I will award myself a cookie now. A fine headline from the WaPo: "Role of Rove, Libby in CIA Leak Case Clearer: Bush and Cheney Aides' Testimony Contradicts Earlier White House Statement". And so now they are saying, let's look at bringing in CONSPIRACY charges. Har har (via a happy Billmon)!
A new theory about Fitzgerald's aim has emerged in recent weeks from two lawyers who have had extensive conversations with the prosecutor while representing witnesses in the case. They surmise that Fitzgerald is considering whether he can bring charges of a criminal conspiracy perpetrated by a group of senior Bush administration officials. Under this legal tactic, Fitzgerald would attempt to establish that at least two or more officials agreed to take affirmative steps to discredit and retaliate against Wilson and leak sensitive government information about his wife. To prove a criminal conspiracy, the actions need not have been criminal, but conspirators must have had a criminal purpose.
Naturally folks are drooling over the opportunity to see who in the White House could actually be indicted. Dkos writer DC Poli Sci outlines how back in the Watergate days, the prosecutors wanted to avoid setting a precedent of indicting the President, so fortunately they had bi-partisan support for impeachment, an option not open these days. A very good place to start looking at the matter. An (actual) psychoanalyst looks at Bush's general destructive tendencies - and how he might lash out if Karl Rove et al. are threatened by Fitzgerald's CIA probe:
Why this matters now is the possible reaction of Bush to Fitzgerald's next serious move. My fear is that the inner emptiness in Bush will respond with absolute panic to the potential loss of Rove and his other pals. Panic in a sadist who believes in the apocalypse is something serious about which we all should be worried.
It would be funny if it weren't so obviously alarming. So would Fitzgerald bring charges against Libby? Froomkin in the WaPo has many bits about Miller's Big Secret.
Haaretz: U.S. officials eye possible Assad successors in Syria:
The sources added that senior American officials, in recent conversations with their Israeli counterparts, have expressed interest in Israel's assessments of Assad's possible successors, asking who Israel thought could replace him and still maintain Syria's stability. American officials said that their impression from these conversations was that Israel would prefer to have a weakened Assad, vulnerable to international pressure, remain in power, and is unenthusiastic about the possibility of a regime change in Syria.
The Israelis' impression was that America's main concern is the flow of terrorists into Iraq via Syria, rather than the threat posed by the Syrian-backed Hezbollah organization in Lebanon. But Washington, like Jerusalem, is eagerly awaiting the results of the Hariri investigation, and will not decide what to do about Syria until the findings have been published.
AIPAC Your ass, bitches!!! Funny stuff. Former Pentagon analyst (under Douglas Feith and the Office of Special Plans, part of the time) Larry Franklin is going to plead guilty to passing classified defense intelligence to AIPAC staffers, who in turn passed it along to Israeli intelligence agents at the embassy in Washington. AP story on it:
Rosen, a top lobbyist for Washington-based AIPAC for more than 20 years, and Weissman, the organization's top Iran expert, allegedly disclosed sensitive information as far back as 1999 on a variety of topics, including al-Qaida, terrorist activities in Central Asia, the bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia and U.S. policy in Iran, according to the indictment.
Presumably this means that he could really spill some beans on how AIPAC has operated as an agent of a foreign power (and probably as an espionage channel) while lobbying in DC. Justin Raimondo makes the 'maximalist' case that the Israeli government has, to some extent, been manipulating US policy. I think that "Israel's secret war on the US" goes a ways too far, but we are certainly looking at a serious Rabbit Hole of mysterious proportions. Raimondo puts his favorite pieces together in "AIPAC and Espionage: Guilty as Hell":
The chief beneficiaries of the conquest of Iraq, and subsequent threats against both Iran and Syria, have been, in descending order, Israel, Iran, and Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaeda has used the invasion as a recruiting tool and training ground for its global jihad against the United States. Iran has extended its influence deep into southern Iraq and has penetrated the central government in Baghdad. In the long run, however, Israel benefits the most, as a major Middle Eastern Arab country fragments into at least three pieces and the U.S. military is ineluctably drawn into neighboring countries.
While the U.S. imposes an occupation eerily reminiscent of Israel's longstanding occupation of Palestinian lands and prepares to deal with Israel's enemies in the region, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon makes major incursions into the West Bank, even while supposedly "withdrawing" from Gaza. In the meantime, the political and military bonds between the U.S. and Israel are strengthened, as the two allies present an indissoluble united front against the entire Muslim world.
Except the alliance is far from indissoluble, as the AIPAC spy scandal reveals. The U.S.-Israeli relationship, often described as "special," is rather more ambiguous than is generally recognized, both by Israel's staunchest friends and its most implacable enemies. This has come out in Israel's funneling American military technology to China, and the threat of American sanctions, but was also made manifest earlier by indications that Israel was conducting extensive spying operations in the U.S. prior to 9/11 – suspicions that are considerably strengthened by the AIPAC spy brouhaha.
Israel's secret war against America has so far been conducted in the dark, but the Rosen-Weissman trial will expose these night creatures to the light of day. Blinking and cursing, they'll be confronted with their treason, and, even as they whine that "everybody does it," the story of how and why a cabal of foreign agents came to exert so much influence on the shape of U.S. foreign policy will be told.
In the course of bending American policy to the Israelis' will, they had to compromise the national security of the United States – and that's what tripped them up, in the end.
Again, this is not my basic opinion about the situation, but it ought to be considered. On the flip side, Juan Cole reacts to Raimondo by pointing out that in Washington, it is ALL interest group politics, but when there is no wealthy counter-interest group to given foreign countries (like pro-Likud groups or anti-Castro Cubans) then U.S. policy gets incredibly one-sided and stupid. With the memorable headline "A Government of War Criminals, A Press of Agents Provocateurs, A Bureaucracy of Foreign Spies:"
I wish the argument were more nuanced, and there are many things in it with which I disagree (David Satterfield is likely to have been a relatively innocent bystander in this train wreck, e.g.). But because Raimundo pulls no punches, he forces us to consider the degree to which Congressional foreign policy on the Middle East in particular has become virtually captive to the Zionist lobby (just as US policy toward Cuba is captive to the Cuban-American community and its lobby). He clearly goes too far, but how far should an analyst of this case go? Billmon is almost equally scathing.
One thing must be said, which is that there is no sinister cabal, that all this is just single-interest politics. The American system is one of checks and balances, and takes it for granted that there will be lobbies on both sides of an issue. But because there are no wealthy, organized, well-connected lobbies on the other side of AIPAC or the Cuban-American National Foundation (e.g.), US government policy ends up being unbalanced and often irrational on those issues. And, AIPAC functions as a foreign agent in the US without having to register as such, and some of its major officers clearly have been deeply involved in espionage for Israel for years. The last two points are uncontestable. Is this really a situation that serves the American people? Franklin, the "go-to" man at the Pentagon for then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, was trying to get up a US war against Iran, and was soliciting AIPAC's help. We already know that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has tried as hard as he could to get the US into a war against Tehran. Do the rest of us, who already have one military occupation of a Middle Eastern country we're not comfortable with, have any say at all in this? Don't we need a PAC for Middle East Peace that could begin offsetting AIPAC, the War PAC? If the pro-Israeli lobby or the Israeli prime minister want wars in the Middle East, why don't they fight them themselves? By the way, AIPAC has for several years been attempting to get Congress to pass a law that would put it in charge of the Middle East professors, like myself, and in a position to punish our universities financially if any of us criticize it or Israeli policy. The most dangerous thing about key elements of the Zionist lobby is that they really do want to gut the US First Amendment when it comes to Israeli interests.
I hope everyone who reads this will consider writing their Congressional representatives and senators and asking them to work to see that AIPAC is made to register as the agent of a foreign power, given the repeated pattern whereby it acts as such.
So yeah, Billmon has had a couple things to say about the matter. I also liked this UPI bit "Analysis: Netanyahu: US Opposes? So what?" which talks about Netanyahu's campaign to capture some more settlements as part of his bid to take over the Likud Party. I won't quote it now, but if you want evidence of how an insane racial chauvinist campaigns in favor of territorial expansion, you've got it. On the flip side, reflections about the peace movement in the broader Jewish community.
To hell with Des Moines: Finally the oh so productive 'retail politics' of Iowa and New Hampshire are finished as Dems to Add Contests to 2008 Calendar (via the Kos). So two more states will join IA and NH in the early set of primaries. I hope it's New York and California, or maybe Oregon and Montana. Or Mississippi and Kentucky. Whatever. Anything would be an improvement. Montana governor Brian Schweitzer was named the nation's 2005 "Hot Governor" by Rolling Stone but his story got axed. "'Since Hunter S. Thompson left, Rolling Stone hasn't been worth reading,' Schweitzer said," according to the article.
Able/Danger mystery continues: Newsday writes that the Pentagon had some sorts of leads on lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta before the attack, but the defense intelligence program Able/Danger was shut down and huge amounts of data got deleted. I've got an exciting conspiracy linked below about this, naturally!
Shaffer explained in a telephone interview that although Able/Danger never had knowledge of Atta's whereabouts, it had linked him and several other Al Qaeda suspects to an Egyptian terrorist, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who had been linked to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and later was convicted for conspiring to attack the U.S. Atta arrived in the U.S. some seven years after that bombing. But Shaffer and his attorney, Mark Zaid, emphasize that Able/Danger never knew where Atta was, only that he was connected to Abdel-Rahman and Al Qaeda.
"Not to say they were physically here, but the data led us to believe there was some activity related to the original World Trade Center bombing that these guys were somehow affiliated with," Shaffer said.
...[Senator] Specter sharply criticized the Pentagon for refusing to allow Shaffer, Phillpott, Smith and others who recall seeing the chart to appear and answer the committee's questions. "It looks to me as if it could be obstruction of the committee's activities," the senator said. Specter added that he was especially "dismayed and frustrated" by the committee's inability to hear from Shaffer and Phillpott, whom he described as "two brave military officers [who] have risked their careers to come forward and tell America the truth."
Pentagon to permit testimony: Following the hearing, Specter announced that the Pentagon had agreed to allow Shaffer, Phillpott and three other witnesses to testify in public next month, though a Specter aide said Tuesday that the Pentagon now insisted the hearings be closed.
.....Able/Danger was an experiment in a new kind of warfare, known as "information warfare" or "information dominance." One of the program's missions was to see whether Al Qaeda cells around the world could be identified by sifting huge quantities of publicly available data, a relatively new technique called "data mining."
The data miners used complex software programs, with names like Spire, Parentage and Starlight, that mimic the thought patterns in the human brain while parsing countless bits of information from every available source to find relationships and patterns that otherwise would be invisible.
Weird. Anyway the article also features some classic pre-9/11 bits such as the Phoenix memo and the arrest of Zacharias Mussaoui (so on the day of 9/11, the Minneapolis FBI had Nicholas Berg's email password inside Mussaoui's laptop. Random but interesting......)
War Porn: A very disturbing site called nowthatsfuckedup.com features images sent in by U.S. soldiers of dead people, blown to bits and so forth, from overseas, and this has been characterized as "the new pornography of war" (also The Porn of War at The Nation). Like any incredibly shady site, it's hosted in the Netherlands, so it's unlikely that lawyers can really get to them. It is very disturbing.
It seems like this is part of a very disturbing glorification of violence, using the aesthetic of death to provide meaning -- in other words, a surface manifestation of the inner emotional state that drives wars and murder. In contrast are the (warning: very graphic links) other photo galleries that can be found online that are intended to illustrate the horrors of Iraq, in order to encourage an end to the conflict. And there are those photos of flag-draped coffins coming into Dover Air Force Base in the United States that Bush was always obsessed with hiding from us. (thememoryblog, by the way, is excellent for more news on censored and concealed news like this)
Zarqawi-Goldstein update: I found another story about the ghost-like, eerie quality of how the Abu Musab al Zarqawi figure continues to generate media reports, while everyday Jordanians doubt he's still alive at all. This was by Dahr Jamail, who also has the Iraq casualty photo galleries linked above.
IRAQ MESS - time to grab our marbles and book it: Reuters: "Reuters says US troops obstruct reporting of Iraq." Now they are saying there is ONE fully functional Iraqi battalion. Great. Time to produce some kind of really important strategic benefit by blowing the hell out of some town (Sadah) eight miles from the Syrian border. I'm sure this will produce the same fine effects as the fourth time that the U.S. captured Samarra. Classified documents are talking about withdrawal strategies. "US Generals Now See Virtues of a Smaller Troop Presence in Iraq." as in:
"the generals said the presence of U.S. forces was fueling the insurgency, fostering an undesirable dependency on American troops among the nascent Iraqi armed forces and energizing terrorists across the Middle East."
The WaPo says that well, Bush is under pressure because Iraq is dissolving, and the Saudis are getting more vocal about noting this in public, which is not their usual style at all:
For all the public confidence, however, the Bush administration in private is nervous about this sensitive last stage, which will establish whether Iraq’s disparate religious and ethnic factions can stay together in a single nation — and whether civil war can be avoided, according to U.S. officials and experts on Iraq.
The administration has come under growing pressure at home and abroad over the past two weeks, with dire warnings from Arab allies and a prominent international group about the looming disintegration of Iraq. In an unusual public rebuke of U.S. policy, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister called a news conference in Washington last week to predict Iraq’s dissolution. He said there is no leadership or momentum to pull Iraq’s Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds back together and prevent a civil war. Other countries have expressed similar concerns in private, according to U.S. and Arab diplomats.
IRAQ Withdrawal Options Summary: Retired Lt. General William Odom adds that the Iraq war was "greatest strategic disaster in United States history". I mentioned Odom's analysis of What's really wrong with 'cutting and running' earlier. Michael Schwartz had a widely read reflection on why immediate withdrawal would be the better option now. Juan Cole's list of ten war demands for Congress, Billmon's sullen yet wise perspective and Robert Dreyfuss' view represent an excellent cross-section of thinking about the options for getting the U.S. away from this sorry vortex. Billmon's view of the War Porn site finally pushed him over the edge about the war, giving him the mental picture of growing, incipient Fascist tendencies in this country:
So I've been promising myself for a while now that I would break cover and at least admit that I'm not sure withdrawing from Iraq is the morally right thing to do, and have deep doubts about the arguments in favor of it.
But something happened on my way to a confession: I came across the Nation article on nonwthatsfuckedup.com, which meant I had to take a good, hard look at the psychopathic side of the American spirit, and consider its implications not just for the war on terrorism and the occupation of Iraq, but its role in the emergence of an authentically fascist movement in American politics, one which feeds on violence and the glorification of violence, and which has found an audience not just in the U.S. military (where I think -- or at least hope -- it's still a relatively small fringe) but in the culture as a whole.
I don't have time at the moment to explain fully why and how this peek at the banality of evil changed my thinking, although I'll try to cover it in a future post. Suffice it to say that my visit to nowthatsfuckedup.com was a reminder of the genocidal skeletons hanging in the American closet. It left me with the conviction -- or at least an intuitive premonition -- that an open-ended war in Iraq (or in the broader Islamic world) will bring nothing but misery and death to them, and creeping (or galloping) authoritarianism to us.
Jim Lobe had an excellent article about whether "Can the US Military Presence Avert Civil War?" This article is required reading. (Also it's worth recalling that Niall Ferguson was at my table when I had lunch with Michael Ledeen):
The growing spectre of a full-scale civil war in Iraq -- and the likelihood that such a conflict will draw in neighbouring states -- has intensified a summer-long debate here over whether and how to withdraw U.S. troops. Some analysts believe that an immediate U.S. withdrawal would make an all-out conflict less likely, while others insist that the U.S. military presence at this point is virtually all there is to prevent the current violence from blowing sky-high, destabilising the region, and sending oil prices into the stratosphere.
The Bush administration continues to insist it will "stay the course" until Iraqi security forces can by themselves contain, if not crush, the ongoing insurgency. But an increasing number of analysts, including some who favoured the 2003 invasion, believe Washington will begin drawing down its 140,000 troops beginning in the first half of next year, if for no other reason than the Republican Party needs to show voters a "light at the end of the tunnel" before the November 2006 elections.
.....In fact, some of these analysts believe that a civil war -- pitting Sunnis against the Kurdish and Shia populations -- has already begun. "A year ago, it was possible to write about the potential for civil war in Iraq," wrote Iraq-war booster Niall Ferguson in the Los Angeles Times. "Today that civil war is well underway," he asserted. While that remains a minority view, the likelihood and imminence of civil war in Iraq is no longer questioned by analysts outside the administration.
Ferguson blames the situation on Washington's failure to deploy a sufficient number of troops in Iraq to crush any insurgency. But a report released Monday by the International Crisis Group (ICG) pointed the finger at the U.S.-sponsored constitutional process, which will culminate in a national plebiscite Oct. 15, as having further alienated Sunnis from the two other major sectarian groups. Barring a major U.S. intervention to ensure that Sunni interests are addressed, according to the report, "Unmaking Iraq: A Constitutional Process Gone Awry", "Iraq is likely to slide toward full-scale civil war and the break-up of the country."
......"We created the civil war when we invaded (Iraq); we can't prevent a civil war by staying," Odom wrote last month in an essay entitled "What's Wrong with Cutting and Running?" He and Bacevich both argued that, instead of creating a vacuum in Iraq that would draw in neighbouring powers, Washington's withdrawal would force neighbours and other great powers -- who have been relegated to the sidelines by the Bush administration's high-handedness -- to form a coalition to ensure a conflict would not get out of hand.
Some of the administration's critics, however, argue that an immediate withdrawal will indeed make things far worse, particularly for Iraqis. "I just cannot understand this sort of argument," wrote University of Michigan Middle East expert Juan Cole on his much-read blog (www.juancole.com). "The U.S. military is killing a lot of Iraqis, but whether it is killing more than would die in a civil war would depend on how many died in a civil war," he wrote. "A million or two could die in a civil war, and that's if the war stays limited to Iraq, which is unlikely."
"A U.S. withdrawal would not cause the Sunnis suddenly to want to give up their major demands; indeed, they might well be emboldened to hit the Shiites harder," wrote Cole, who favours both the withdrawal of most U.S. ground troops and, in the absence of NATO or U.N. peacekeepers, the maintenance of Special Forces and U.S. airpower in the region precisely to prevent sectarian forces from escalating the conflict into a conventional civil war, as in Afghanistan.
Bing West reporting from Fallujah for Slate.com talks about the Emerging Iraqi Army and life in Fallujah in a series of articles. He was a Pentagon official, so the tone is towards "Rah-Rah!!" but it's still well-done. Ah, the Berg/Zarqawi story pops up here too. Anyway. 'C', an anonymous officer who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, related to Human Rights Watch how he couldn't get those in the chain of command to do anything about widespread torture practices. This quote says it all:
[At FOB Mercury] they said that they had pictures that were similar to what happened at Abu Ghraib, and because they were so similar to what happened at Abu Ghraib, the soldiers destroyed the pictures. They burned them. The exact quote was, “They [the soldiers at Abu Ghraib] were getting in trouble for the same things we were told to do, so we destroyed the pictures.”
....My company commander said, “I see how you can take it that way, but…” he said something like, “remember the honor of the unit is at stake” or something to that effect and “Don’t expect me to go to bat for you on this issue if you take this up,” something to that effect.
"Officials Fear Chaos if Iraqis Vote Down the Constitution". The suspicious sentiment of the moment:
"Nobody will be surprised to lose Anbar, and maybe one other province," one Pentagon official said. "We're not going to lose three."
Juan Cole reflects on the recent war protests and spineless Democrats. Fred Kaplan in Slate writes that the damned Constitution coming down the line in Iraq will be a disaster, and he hopes it's defeated:
The basic fact about Iraqi geography is that the Kurdish north and Shiite south have lots of oil, while the Sunni center does not. Read in this context, the basic fact about the Iraqi Constitution is that it strengthens the north and south, lets them form semiautonomous regions and expand them into super-regions—in short, it lets them dominate the country's politics and economics—while leaving the Sunnis with nearly nothing. It leaves the very faction that needs to be assimilated, if Iraq is to be a secure and viable nation, unassimilated.
Former Iraqi Army officers sat around and discussed why they wished that the old Army was still in existence, by Patrick Cockburn:
It was meant to be a moment of reconciliation between the old regime and the new, a gathering of nearly 1,000 former Iraqi army officers and tribal leaders in Baghdad to voice their concerns over today's Iraq. But it did not go as planned.
General after general rose to his feet and raised his voice to shout at the way Iraq was being run and to express his fear of escalating war. "They were fools to break up our great army and form an army of thieves and criminals," said one senior officer. "They are traitors," added another.
.....The meeting, in a heavily guarded hall close to the Tigris, was called by General Wafiq al-Sammarai, a former head of Iraqi military intelligence under Saddam who fled Baghdad in 1994 to join the opposition. He is now military adviser to President Jalal Talabani.
His eloquent call for support for the government in his fight against terrorism did not go down well. He sought to reassure his audience that no attack was planned on the Sunni Arab cities of central Iraq such as Baquba, Samarra and Ramadi, as the Iraqi Defence minister had threatened. He said people had been fleeing the cities but "there will be no attack on you, no use of aircraft, no bombardment by the Americans". The audience was having none of it.
......The meeting was important because the officer corps of the old Iraqi army consider themselves as keeper of the flame of Iraqi nationalism. One of them asked General Sammarai to stop using the American word "general" and use the Arabic word lewa'a instead.
In conversation, the officers made clear that they considered armed resistance to the occupation legitimate. General Sammarai told The Independent that he drew a distinction between terrorists blowing up civilians and nationalist militants fighting US troops.
One of the Senior Fuck-Ups, Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers, is finally retiring to somewhere else that he can pointlessly bomb. Alex Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair bitterly lament the spinelessness of Democrats as they "Sink Deeper into the Ooze." A final bit about the AIPAC == War Party meme today:
For those interested in some of the reasons for this incredible abdication [of Democrats avoiding the recent war protest], we can cite former National Security Agency staffer and muckraker Wayne Madsen who reported two days after the rally that "according to Democratic insiders on Capitol Hill AIPAC put out the word that any member of Congress who appeared at the protest, where some speakers were to represent pro-Palestinian views, would face their political wrath."
Madsen wrote that three members of Congress had been scheduled to speak at the rally McKinney, Woolsey and John Conyers. "Word is that AIPAC will direct its massive campaign to Wolsey's neo-con and pro-Iraq war primary challenger, California state assemblyman Joe Nation, who has strong connections to the RAND corporation."
USS Cole-Wayne Madsen conspiracy time: Meanwhile Wayne Madsen has a new really exciting conspiracy theory involving the famous Israeli art students, John O'Neill, September 11, Douglas Feith and Marc Zell, Able/Danger, Islamic militants in Bosnia, Plame's Brewster Jennings front company, Sibel Edmonds, Michael Chertoff, the USS Cole bombing (actually an Israeli missile, according to Madsen's unnamed CIA source) and the rest. Not worth betting the lunch money on, but a very entertaining counter-narrative about the ideologies and paranoia of our times. Time for Deep Politics, Comrade. But Madsen takes heart with all the breaking scandals, as I do on his site:
After almost five years of incessant outrages by the Bush regime, I have never been more optimistic that the tide may be beginning to turn.
UK Times: "Iraq's Relentless March of Death." Via lies.com (love the banner pic) we get a bit about Statements from the Leaders (via Kevin Drum):
Asked whether the insurgency has worsened, Casey said it has not expanded geographically or numerically, “to the extent we can know that.” But he noted that current “levels of violence are above norms,” exceeding 500 attacks a week. “I’ll tell you that levels of violence are a lagging indicator of success,” he added.
So he is having trouble fully vaulting into lie territory, unlike Rummy. Lies.com also notes that surprisingly, adept liars' brains are built differently - with more white matter and less neurons in the prefrontal cortex.
Boeing and Bell Helicopter have apologized for running an advertisement for the V-22 Osprey aircraft that features soldiers invading a mosque. "It descends from the heavens. Ironically it unleashes hell... Consider it a gift from above." That's pretty fucked up. Apparently the building in the image says "Muhammed Mosque" in Arabic. Wow. Almost as ill-conceived as the boondoggle Osprey itself.
Abu Ghraib Photo Bomb: We are set for another batch of Abu Ghraib media to be released, much to the chagrin of the Pentagon leadership, who prefer to frame the issue as destabilizing and pointlessly inflammatory media. However, it is also excellent evidence for the American people that the Pentagon leadership does not deserve to keep their jobs, which is obviously the most important thing in the fucking world.
Former CIA dude Ray McGovern notes that the chain of command is constantly ducking responsibility for torturing people and all that. Stories of the 'New Boss' Iraqi security agencies are really scary, such as the story from Khalid Jarrar's detainment that I mentioned a while ago. You can almost taste the insanity and paranoia now generating inside those new Iraqi government agency buildings (actually, like Abu Ghraib, they're the same buildings as Saddam's day).
Paul Craig Roberts summarizes your basic reasons that Bush is stirring up some more wars with Iran and North Korea.
The Misc File: "India loses political credibility in anti-Iran vote" (IPS):
India, a country that aspires to be a superpower in Asia, lost its political credibility among the world's developing nations last week when it voted against Iran at a meeting of the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. The headline in a leading Indian national newspaper said it all: "India's shameful vote against Iran." The criticism kept snowballing, as the media, academics and mainstream and left-wing politicians in New Delhi crucified the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for abandoning one of its longtime political and economic allies in Asia.
Well that's enough fun for today. With a little luck, let this post stand as this website's high water mark of charting the World's Sordid Affairs, the sinister inverse point, the final crest of the high and terrible wave we've been on. The opposite of this:
And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting--on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right sort of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark--that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Time is on our side. I'm moving to Minneapolis.
Colin Kennedy emailed me this excellent Reuters photo. Apparently Bush noted to Condi Rice at the UN World Summit, "I think I may need a bathroom break?" Not exactly decisive sounding leadership for going to the Pot. But either way I think it sets the tone.
"Nightmare is over as study says cheese doesn't cause bad dreams." A weird little Apple story.
HongPong.com enters Google Blog Search, and finds out the site is enmeshed in other people's conspiracy theories... It seems to update pretty quickly too. Oddly enough, the first "hongpong.com" hit turns up a link to a story on freedomforyou.blogspot.com... the paragraph that follows is certainly a weird enough thing to say. Oh the places that link to me...
Israel, Mossad, Iran and a Nuclear False Flag Attack...
...Since the US Army War College already acknowledges that the Mossad "has capability to target US forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act," it may well be that the FBI has finally realized how dangerous the Israeli Fifth Column is, having begun to tighten the noose around the legendary Israeli spying operation in America by arresting Larry Franklin, Doug Feith's deputy in the Office of Special Plans, origin of the fraudulent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction intelligence. Not yet indicted, but identified as Co-Conspirator 1 and 2 along with Franklin are the two top AIPAC operatives to whom he passed higly classified intel: Steven Rosen, head of Policy and Keith Weissman, Iran specialist. Israeli sources expect Weissman and Rosen to be indicted for espionage in the coming weeks. [<--- that one is my link - Dan ]
Perhaps the two largest factions of the New World Order, Skull and Bones and the Zionists are now going into open warfare, as the Bush Administration attempts to clean out the neoconservatives, discipline the Israeli military and enforce the two state solution.
Uhm, for the record, I really disagree that Skull and Bones and "the Zionists" are the two major factions of anything at all... I keep looking around for this New World Order and all I seem to find are crazy people. Damn! :-) Nonetheless freedomforyou has a fairly classic conspiracy tale about Mohammed Atta, the "Able Danger" intelligence project that supposedly uncovered some of the 9/11 hijackers, and why not, a massive heroin smuggling operation being covered up by the government. Like I said, classic. Keep on going, Starfish Prime!
Katrina klusterfuck: Billmon tries to find enough Pepto-Bismol to swallow the nasty slime of spin and madness. As always Atrios is holding it down on the matter along with Josh Marshall, who is putting together a Katrina Timeline. William Rivers Pitt on "Washing Away the Conservative Movement" is very worth reading. In a nutshell his point is that the Grover Norquist "Starve the Beast" philosophy is dead because the first task of government is to look after the citizens, and it just don't work when you've starved it. Also "Wake of the Flood" is damn good. I liked this bit from Stirling Newberry:
The Days of Death and the Wings of Victory:
Every age buries the last, but the old age digs its own grave. And that is what Bush is doing, digging the grave of the 20th Century. It was a gleaming century that launched itself into space, it was a brutal century that killed millions. It was the century that fed more people, and cured more diseases than all the others. It was a century that saw more die in famines than in all the others.
The waste of that century has killed New Orleans. It is not the flooding, but the toxic wastes of decades that makes it uneconomical to rebuild the shattered streets of the Crescent City. It is not colonialism, but oil that drew us into Iraq. And we need not point out that Saddam came to power because of the Cold War realpolitick. But it is ours to bury the past, not to blame it. There are those who refuse to deal with reality, and think that simply distancing themselves from what was is enough - and there are many millions more who simply do not understand that the era of extraction, the era of oil and the era of a small closed affluent world surrounded by an ocean of dictatorships, deprivation and destitution is over.
........The coming weeks will strain the faith of those who have watched and waited so long. It will seem that so little of what needs to be done will be done. It will seem that the ponderous waith of putainous politics, and apathetic public opinion, will lumber only slowly in the direction of change. But the end is coming, and it will come with that shocking swiftness that the first wave of rain in a thunderstorm.
We should expect over the course of the next year, not a decline, but a crescendo of the corruption and cronyism that has marked this era and marred its politics. The thieves will be intent on throwing the last bags of loot before the robbery is over. Expect that the billions spent on Katrina's aftermath will leave Haliburton above the water, and hundreds of thousands below the poverty line. Piratization is the ethos of these last days of untrammelled and unchecked power.
And it is this that will overthrow them. The naked greed will shock a jaded public, one that will turn elsewhere, any where, for leadership and vision. They will recall in previous, even darker, hours, how the nation came together, and in that unity found achievement. They will ask why this time there was such a failure. They will not blame themselves - for in the minds of the public, they did what they were asked. Instead, they will blame the leadership to whom power was given.
Now, today, this instant, it is time to answer the call to arms. Some will protest, but more important is to contest. In 14 months time America will have a new revolution. Do not waste another minute, lest you be forced to admit that you were not there. The relief effort needs aid and comfort now. Candidates across the country need volunteers now. These two projects - to relieve the suffering and then to end it - must occupy every spare moment and ounce of energy. For it is the will of the people, that drives the wings to victory. And from victory to vindication of that which we have so long believed: that an America reborn, is an America redeemed.
Ah so then a few more links. Katrina, an economic tipping point. Good ideas for Principles of Reconstruction. Why is Blackwater there?! "Blackwater Mercenaries Deploy in New Orleans." The major media picks over the spin between federal and state officials about command of troops and the various chaotic snags. A million dumb things FEMA did. DomeBlog carries the news of evacuees at the Astrodome and George Brown Convention Center. Morgan Stanley on the Shoestring Economy. They seem to be starting to block the media. "The Thin Veneer of Civilization." Disturbing. As noted earlier:
Police in Suburbs Blocked Evacuees, Witnesses Report
By GARDINER HARRIS
Police agencies to the south of New Orleans were so fearful of the crowds trying to leave the city after Hurricane Katrina that they sealed a crucial bridge over the Mississippi River and turned back hundreds of desperate evacuees, two paramedics who were in the crowd said.
The paramedics and two other witnesses said officers sometimes shot guns over the heads of fleeing people, who, instead of complying immediately with orders to leave the bridge, pleaded to be let through, the paramedics and two other witnesses said. The witnesses said they had been told by the New Orleans police to cross that same bridge because buses were waiting for them there.
Instead, a suburban police officer angrily ordered about 200 people to abandon an encampment between the highways near the bridge. The officer then confiscated their food and water, the four witnesses said. The incidents took place in the first days after the storm last week, they said.
"The police kept saying, 'We don't want another Superdome,' and 'This isn't New Orleans,' " said Larry Bradshaw, a San Francisco paramedic who was among those fleeing.
What does an ethnic war in the Middle East look like? "Revenge Killings Fuel Fear of Escalation in Iraq." A relevant question these days. Anthony Shadid of the WaPo has an feature with TPMCafe about his new book on Iraq. The newspaper might tell you that the insurgents in Tal Afar are inscrutable evildoers, but a different moral frame (one where the Shiites and Kurds are not a bunch of Clark Kent do-gooders) suggests that the Tal Afar campaign is merely another episode in the splintering of Iraq. Prof. Juan Cole conceptualizes Tal Afar as Ethnic Civil War:
Much of the American press has reported the Tal Afar campaign as a strike by the new Iraqi Army, supported by US troops, against foreign infiltrators in the largely Turkmen city of 200,000.
As Jonathan Finer makes clear in the Washington Post, however, the operation looks different if we know some details. The "Iraqi Army" leading the assault turns out to be mainly the Peshmerga or Kurdish ethnic militia. Along for the ride are local Turkmen Shiites who are being used as informers and for the purpose of identifying Sunni Turkmen they think are involved in the guerrilla movement (apparently they sometimes make false charges to settle scores). Tal Afar was 70 percent Sunni Turkmen and 30 percent Shiite Turkmen. The Sunni Turkmen had thrown in with Saddam, and some more recently had turned to radical Islam. The Shiite Turkmen lived in fear of their lives.
So Kurds and Shiites are beating up on Sunni Turkmen allies of Sunni Arabs. That is what is really going on. The number of foreign fighters appears to be small, and US troops that had been guarding against infiltration on the Syrian border were actually moved to Tal Afar for this operation. It is mainly about punishing the Sunni Turkmen for allying with the Sunni Arab guerrillas. That the attack came in part in response to the pleas of local Shiite Turkmen helps explain why Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari (Shiite leader of the fundamentalist Dawa Party) authorized it, and went to Tal Afar on Tuesday for a photo op.
The US will never get stability in Iraq if it is merely an adjunct to a Kurdish-Shiite alliance against the Sunni Arabs and their Turkmen supporters.
As far as Iraq breaking into pieces is concerned, well the spooky new Constitution seems to have been finally tacked down, and there are key provisions that allow "super-provinces" to be organized. Probably Kurdistan and Sumer in the south would be organized to have federal-style power over many affairs, possibly including the all-important oil revenues. Again at juancole.com, guest writer Roger Myerson, a professor of economics who analyzes democratic structures interacting with economics, finds that the super-provinces would not help efficiency, but instead increase the likelihood of secession and breakup of Iraq:
Merging provinces into larger regions cannot increase the ability of local governments to adapt to local conditions. In the American federal system with its 50 states, the leaders of southern and northern states already have the ability to adapt their local administrative practices to their local variations of our southern and northern subcultures. Merging our state governments into larger regional mega-states could only decrease local adaptability. But such mergers could also seriously increase the possibility of secession. The leader of a regional mega-state that included a large fraction of America's population and resources would perceive more benefits and fewer risks in contemplating secession from the Union than any state governor would today.
In a well-designed federal system, the existence of small autonomous local governments can improve the performance of national democracy, because politicians in a federal democracy can prove their credentials for national leadership by serving successfully as leaders of autonomous local governments. Americans have regularly found strong candidates for president among our state governors. This effect of federalism on national elections may be particularly important for new democracies, where candidates with good reputations for responsible democratic service are likely to be scarce. For example, the PRI's long grip on national power in Mexico was broken by an independent state governor.
From this perspective, an ideal federal system would grant substantial autonomous power to local governments that are relatively small but are just large enough that successful management of a local government can demonstrate strong qualifications for national leadership. Given provinces that have this minimal size, the effects of merging provinces would be to decrease the number of such independent local leaders and to increase the chances of regional secession. So the principal beneficiaries of such mergers would be the politicians who expect to become leaders of the separate regions.
Israel business: Things are very wrapped up in Gaza and Palestinians are free to wander between Egyptian Rafah and Gazan Rafah (how did the line get down the middle of that city anyway?).
In New York where he was attending the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said he expected Egypt to bring the Egypt-Gaza border under control. "I imagine the Egyptians will get a grip," he said. "There is heavy American pressure on Egypt and the Palestinians on this issue." Palestinian Foreign Minister Nasser al-Kidwa on Wednesday blamed Israel for chaos at the border, as the frontier remained open for the third consecutive day and hundreds of people streamed freely from one side to the other. Addressing the GA, al-Kidwa said that the situation had been of Israel's making as it had insisted on a unilateral withdrawal from the area. Gaza's future, al-Kidwa added, would be determined by Israel's actions in the West Bank. Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said Tuesday that the government is going to make investing resources in developing the West Bank settlement blocs a top priority. Israel pulled the last of its troops from Gaza early Monday morning, marking the end of 38 years of miltiary rule in the area. Egypt initially said it was allowing free passage across the border as a humanitarian gesture, and pledged to restore order within days. On Wednesday, however, Hamas members blew a hole in the concrete fence that runs along the border, having cleared the area to prevent casualties. Palestinian police did not intervene. Egypt on Wednesday warned Palestinians crossing the frontier to return by sunset when passport controls were to be reimposed, and said it had found an arms-smuggling tunnel under the border. By nightfall, the border was still wide open.
So the Palestinians came in and whooped it up. There is even a bit of paranoia in Israel that Egypt is perhaps planning another war:
The Philadelphi route and the next war
There are quite a few policy makers in Jerusalem who believe that deploying several hundred Egyptian soldiers along the Philadelphi route is a strategic mistake, which will lead to disaster. .... Even 26 years after the signing of the peace treaty with Egypt, many believe, as does Steinitz, that the peace is temporary, and that Israel must prepare for the next war with Egypt. The strongest proof of Egypt's true intentions is its massive military armament. Why does Egypt need such a large and advanced army, they ask, if it has no intention of fighting Israel in the future? After all, Egypt has no other enemies whose military power justifies such extensive armament. And if Egypt is in fact planning war, why should Israel help it prepare, by allowing the deployment of an Egyptian military force on the border of the Gaza Strip?
......However, the reason for the military strengthening of Egypt is not the desire to wage war on Israel, but rather fear of Israel. It is hard for Israelis to believe that anyone is liable to consider their peace-loving country a military threat. But as is written in the annual report on the balance of power in the Middle East recently published by Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Egypt sees Israel as a genuine threat, for several reasons.
The first is that the Israel Defense Forces is stronger than Egypt's army. The Egyptian regime sees Israel as an unstable factor, which tends to use force to resolve political problems. Egypt believes that Israel has extremist forces, whose rise to power is liable to lead to belligerence. In Cairo they have not forgotten the declaration by Avigdor Lieberman, who as minister of national infrastructure in 2001 warned that the IDF could destroy the Aswan Dam. Egypt regards the building of a modern military force as a factor that will deter Israel and ensure the stability of the peace treaty.
A third reason involves Egypt's low self-image in relation to Israel. Israeli economic, military, scientific and technological superiority intensifies Egyptian frustration, and this gap spurs Egypt to compete with Israel in the area of arming itself.
The final withdrawal after all these decade prompts some reminiscing from Haaretz about why the hell the Israeli government tried to dominate it in the first place:
The sky did not fall down
By Tom Segev, Haaretz Correspondent
The nearly 40 years of Israeli rule in the Gaza Strip that have now come to an end leave behind a terrible heritage of oppression, bereavement and hostility. The occupation destroyed a number of the fundamental values of Israeli society. The cheap laborers that came from Gaza helped to heap wealth on some of their employers; but from many aspects, they also damaged the Israeli economy.
Many Israelis warned this would happen. Here's a story that requires a psychologist more than a historian.
On the eve of the Six-Day War, Israel Defense Forces officials debated the question of whether or not to conquer the Gaza Strip. Then chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin was opposed to the idea, commenting, "We can forgo the Strip." And then, "There's no point in getting involved with the Strip." At most, Rabin believed that the Strip could be conquered as a bargaining chip, with his idea being that immediately after its occupation, the area would be returned to Egypt in the framework of an agreement that would ensure free sailing in the Tiran Straits, and other terms too perhaps.
A number of the officers who participated in the discussions tried to persuade Rabin "to take" Gaza. "Brigade 60 will not have any trouble with the Strip mission," said then GOC Southern Command Yeshayahu Gavish, while deputy chief of staff at the time, Haim Bar-Lev, promising that "the cleansing" of the Strip would take no more than four hours.
At some stage during the discussions, then newly appointed defense minister Moshe Dayan joined the fray. He opposed occupying the Strip because of the Palestinian refugees who had settled there after fleeing and being evicted from their homes in 1948 and thereafter. According to Dayan, Israel had no interest in taking responsibility for looking after them. "Let others worry about them," he said, deciding that during the first stage of the war, at least, the IDF would not move into Gaza.
However, the minutes of the discussions (kept at the IDF archives) include an argument in favor of occupying the Strip, and it is an eye-opener because of its irrational nature. "It's a shame to forgo the headline: 'Gaza is in our hands,'" was Rehavam Ze'evi's contribution, which expresses the essence of most of the decisions that led to the occupation of the territories in the Six-Day War.
As long as the alternatives facing the state ahead of the Six-Day War were considered in a level-headed manner, most of the decision-makers agreed that most of the territory that Israel was likely to occupy shouldn't be occupied. Nevertheless, the territory was occupied, because when the battles began, the decision-makers acted on gut feelings and from the heart, and not from the head.
Also there was a story about Ehud Barak and the various rumblings of an Israeli Left trying to pull itself together, figure out whether or not is worth supporting Sharon if he leaves another couple West Bank settlements or not. This is the first I've heard in a while of Ami Ayalon, the pro-peace advocate who used to be the director of Israel's Shin Bet internal security service - the only director of a security agency I've ever met, save the time I saw Porter Goss in the Ft. Myers airport.
Along the far edges of Israeli politics, in a side alley far from the central stage, the Israeli left is trying to resurrect itself, to signal that it has not fled, that it still has something to say. In the view of some, this is a heroic struggle; in the view of others, a pathetic attempt. Who's got the strength for all this talk about a permanent settlement, about a Palestinian partner, about a Geneva agreement, about "peace," when everything is focused on Ariel Sharon and his battle for survival against Bibi.
The demonstration scheduled by the left for Saturday night, September 24, the day before the Likud Central Committee convenes, was planned to be the great show of unity of all of the bodies, organizations, and individuals with good intentions. But less than two weeks before the date, first cracks are already showing in the wall. Officials from Ami Ayalon's "People's Voice" announced a few days ago that they were pulling out of the joint committee organizing the demonstration. Its message - a permanent settlement, now - seems wrong to them. Even though the whole essence of the People's Voice is a permanent settlement. People's Voice representatives had other suggestions that were rejected by the Geneva agreement and Peace Now; for instance, declared support for Sharon, a call on Sharon to continue the evacuation of isolated settlements.
There is no way we could accept that, say the Geneva folks; if Sharon evacuates another three settlements in his next term, that is something for which we should support him? Besides which, say Yossi Beilin's people, who decided that the people are against a permanent settlement? As evidence, they present a poll conducted last week by the New Wave polling institute, in which the following question was asked: Are you for or against a permanent settlement between Israel and the Palestinians that would include the evacuation of most of the settlements in Judea and Samaria? Forty-seven percent said they backed the statement, and 42 percent said they were opposed.
It was a disturbing episode to see photographs of torched synagogues in the old Gaza settlements. Historically, no positive situations have followed from torched synagogues, but on the other hand, they were generally ugly, heavy concrete structures designed to withstand mortar attacks, more aesthetically bunkers than temples. it is easy to understand why the Israelis could not bring themselves to destroy the structures, (as the chief rabbi of Moscow reflects) but they really set up the Palestinians, who would obviously want to pick apart every settlement building. And now the Israeli police fear revenge attacks by right-wing Israelis against mosques in Israel.
Severance just messaged me to say hi from London. She added "never buy batteries in shepherd's bush." Not sure why. But there you go.
Randy Kelly got whomped in the St Paul mayoral primary, shocking as it is. They were gloating at the DailyKos about how his Bush endorsement bit him on the ass in a town like this. I added what I know firsthand of Kelly's self-justification for endorsing Bush last year:
Kelly endorsing Bush == Homeland Security cash
Let me relate a funny story about Mayor Randy Kelly. Earlier this year he came to talk to students at Macalester College (where i just graduated from) and there were a lot of annoyed Mac Dems wearing signs that said something like "I support real Democrats". So finally the question came, why the hell did you endorse Bush?
Well he said basically that he did it because he believed it would be the best for St. Paul, apart from his personal preferences. How would it be best? Well, he said, it makes it easier to get things out of Washington. So when the Department of Homeland Security was abruptly going to cut St. Paul out of a whole bunch of funding (it was probably for first responders, as someone noted above), he proudly said that he was able to go to Washington DC and get the money back - in other words, endorsing Bush made it easier to get back the patronage cash that is apparently being funnelled in the most political way possible through the damned Department that is supposed to keep all Americans safe.
I was taken back by the abrupt cynicism of this - it hadn't occurred to me that DHS money was being used to reward local politicians in such a way. Kelly was very matter-of-fact about this. I guess this is what federal-city realpolitik is all about, but his glib and direct statement on it shocked me.
(it is a little reminiscent of how FEMA seems to have been used to funnel cash into Florida in 2004 to warp the election)
This post is hyper long, but why not toss in a bit about "Lost at Tora Bora", published four years after 9/11? A fine account of how we surrounded Bin Laden in the cave complex with 36 Special Forces, and tried to buy off a bunch of goofy heroin-laden warlords without realizing that Bin Laden had paid many off already. I would quote this but really you should read about this critical opening episode of the War on Terror, the whole thing. Tom Watson reflects on it. it's never The End.
Via a good story in the Pulse this week by Burt Berlowe, I heard that there are three different gatherings about the state of Democracy in these United States over in Minneapolis this week. Maybe I should snoop around, see if I can get some of those sweet hackable voting machine memory cards. Pulse:
Forty years later, the right of people of color to cast their ballots freely and equally is still being questioned.
To find evidence of that, look no further back than the last two presidential elections, both of which were fraught with efforts to deny minorities their right to vote. Black names were purged from Florida voting lists; Ohio voters in minority precincts stood in line for up to 10 hours while their white counterparts had virtually no wait at all; and in our own Minnesota, Native-American ID cards were challenged.
In contrast to four decades ago, the culprits in this case have come not primarily from the White House but from the state houses—specifically the office of those in charge of running elections, the secretaries of state. In 2000, it was Florida Secretary of State Kathryn Harris who led efforts to keep blacks away from the polls. In 2004, Ohio’s Kenneth Blackwell drew fire for alleged discriminatory election practices. In Minnesota, secretary of state Mary Kiffmeyer has used various tactics to make voting more difficult for minority populations. All three of these secretaries were Republican Party activists—Harris and Blackwell both were state coordinators of George W. Bush’s presidential campaign. This weekend the ongoing conflict between the secretaries of state and voters of color will be played out in the Twin Cities. While the two entities will not meet face to face, their agendas will collide in separate but intersecting events. On Friday, Minneapolis will host one of a series of national public hearings sponsored by the Voting Rights Project, Lawyers Committee on Civil Rights (LCCR) and several other concerned organizations. It will be held all day at the Dorsey and Whitney Law Firm in downtown Minneapolis. The object of the event will be to assess the impact of the Voting Rights Act on individuals and communities as a proposed renewal of some its provisions draws near. The event will feature a series of panel discussions by experts in voting rights followed by open public testimony. Citizens are invited to attend and testify about their voting experiences.
[.......]
Beginning that same Friday and continuing through the following Monday, the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) will stage its annual summer convention at the Radisson Riverfront Hotel in downtown St. Paul. Some 300 to 400 secretaries and/or their representatives from 40 states are expected to attend the four-day conference. Voting rights and election reform issues of various kinds are among the items up for discussion. Minnesota will also host a third event with some relationship to the electoral process, immediately following those two mentioned here. There will be an international E-Democracy conference July 26 and 27 at the U of M Humphrey Center. Julian Bowery will be a featured speaker, and one session focuses on the use of computer technology in voting and data collection. Go to DoWire.org for more information.
[.......]
Most of the relevant election-related issues, including HAVA, will be discussed during the last day of the conference. The public is invited to attend any of the open sessions for a fee of $250 a day or $475 for the entire event by registering at the NASS web site. In addition to the conference business, delegates will be treated to cruises, tours and parties during the conference, most of which are paid for by conservative corporate sponsors, including voting machine manufacturers who sell their products to state election officials. Among them is Accenture, a company with a history of questionable electoral practices, including close ties to the Republican Party, a role in the purging of felons from the roles in Florida in 2000, and numerous breakdowns and failures. Ellen Theisen of Voters Unite, a national election reform advocacy organization, is critical of this practice. “Not only are the voting machine manufacturers directly sponsoring much of this conference, most of them are also corporate affiliates of the National Association of Secretaries of State, paying up to $20,000 a year for the privilege,” she said. “When the Secretaries of State are under this constant influence from the vendors, it’s difficult to see how they can make objective decisions about our voting systems.”
Take a look @ blackboxvoting.org and Velvet Revolution for the latest on the fine field of shady county officials and the voting machine companies that love them.
It's not just secretaries of state getting seduced by the voting machine manufacturers. Brad Blog reports that Franklin County, Ohio Elections Director Matt Damschroder was punished for accepting a nice $10,000 check from a Diebold lobbyist. More about Damschroder in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and RAW STORY. (Damschroder was closely involved with the interesting pattern of keeping voting machines away from non-whites around Columbus last November, instrumental in tilting the outcome of 'democracy')
Stay tuned here for one hell of a scandal.... Damn skippy, things are blowing up all over the place.
The Star Tribune just put up a pretty scathing editorial about Rove, Wilson and the case for war, for the July 14 newspaper, "Karl Rove/Real issue is the case for war". What do you know, they cut right to the chase:
The real issue, more serious and less glitzy than whether Bush will stand by his political adviser, is the extraordinary efforts the Bush administration made to protect a case for war in Iraq from all contradictory evidence -- in effect, as the British spymaster Sir Richard Dearlove put it, to "fix" the facts and intelligence so they would support a decision already made.
[.......]
In January 2003, however, President Bush asserted an Iraq-Africa uranium connection in his State of the Union message. Subsequently, it turned out that Bush was indeed referring to Niger. The Niger-Iraq connection became one of the pillars in Bush's case for war with Iraq.
After the start of the war, Wilson wrote a lengthy op-ed piece for the New York Times laying out the facts of his trip and saying he had "little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
Five days later, Rove told Time reporter Matt Cooper he should "not get too far out on Wilson." His trip to Niger, Rove said, wasn't approved by Cheney or CIA Director George Tenet. Cooper wrote to his boss, "It was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd issues who authorized the trip."
[.....]
This is a classic Rove technique: undercut a critic by planting the notion that he was off to Africa on a lark arranged by his wife. Rove's history as a rough political player is well-documented. But this wasn't about a political campaign; this was about a serious question of national security and the justification for a difficult war.
[......]
It is instructive to remember that the investigation into who revealed Plame's identity was initiated by Tenet, not by administration critics. Remember also that Wilson was correct; ultimately the White House had to retract Bush's State of the Union statement on the Niger connection.
In addition to discrediting critics of the Niger connection, the Bush administration, through the actions of John Bolton -- now nominee to be U.N. ambassador -- sought to intimidate intelligence analysts who objected to conclusions about Iraq's WMD, and to get a U.N. chemical weapons official fired so he wouldn't be able to send inspectors back to Iraq, where they might disprove more of the case for war.
In the scheme of things, whether Rove revealed Plame's identity, deliberately or not, matters less than actions by Rove, Bolton, Cheney and others to phony up a case for war that has gone badly, has cost thousands of lives plus hundreds of billions of dollars, and has, a majority of Americans now believe, left the United States less safe from terrorism rather than more.
The Republican communications team shifts into high gear trying to lay out a multi-pronged defense for Karl Rove, now that he's been outed for telling Matt Cooper of TIME that Plame worked at the CIA. It looks rather half-cocked, as Republican partisans try hard to spin while claiming they don't want to impede the investigation. President Bush and Scott McClellan have declined to answer questions about the matter. The RNC and its chairman Ken Mehlman are playing the attack dog role while the White House waits and hopes the story will blow over. As it very well could when Rehnquist suddenly turns into a pile of dust...
I started by reading a bizarre Wall Street Journal editorial today about how Rove should be rewarded for his valiant efforts against CIA nepotism -- or something like that. It all made more sense when I found out that this was a quite precise regurgitation of RNC talking points, with many WSJ points still in the same order. Happily, RawStory.com managed to get ahold of the RNC's actual talking points memo against Wilson. Mehlman said that Rove was merely "discouraging a reporter from writing a false story based on a false premise." A-haaa... It is so staggeringly unethical that some Republicans are complementing each other for supporting outing Plame. How weird. Maybe Rove should really have been more careful. So many of his past statements are now known to be lies.
A fairly good general summary of the mess. The Great Grilling of McClellan been going on for days now. On Monday, I spent several hours watching network news TV, for the first time in a few weeks. It was quite satisfying to see the normally emasculated White House press corps pounce on hapless, clumsy McClellan (QT video awesome!) about his past statements defending Rove. Nowadays he's not even willing to still uphold those statements. It would be funny, if this whole clusterfuck hadn't damaged America's ability to track weapons of mass destruction (let's not forget about the fallout for Plame's former fake CIA company).
ABC's quasi-insider memo The Note is happily framing the matter as Washington journalists acting like a pack of dogs. The Daily Show returns to skewer FOX News' fucking maniacal John Gibson (QT video) and the rest of the media reaction. Gibson is even more scary today (QT video). "Valerie Plame should have been outed by somebody and nobody else had the cojones to do it. I'm glad Rove did, if he did do it, and he still says he didn't." OMG it's crazy....
A transcript of TIME reporter Matt Cooper's public remarks after swallowing hard and going to the Fitzgerald grand jury today. Oddly enough, it seems possible that Cooper only secured that release from his non-disclosure agreement because Rove's blustering lawyer, Robert Luskin, fucked up. There is also some amusing background on Luskin (via TPM). Luskin is himself a somewhat shady operator, who once represented Stephen A. Saccoccia, a guy accused of laundering hundreds of millions in drug money through precious metal companies. He paid Luskin handsomely... with gold bars! (Luskin discussion thread)
The mess has even reached back to Minnesota, where Norm Coleman is yet again the cheesy Capitol hatchet man (as assigned), fresh off his Kofi-bashing tour-de-force. Norm has Karl himself to thank for the Senate seat, as Karl halted Pawlenty's quest to run against Wellstone.
There's plenty of bamboozlement and disinformation getting peddled. I don't really know how to get ahead of this story, except to push it back towards its most fundamental context--the mendacious attitude at the White House towards anyone in government who threatened the Administration's case for invading Iraq, as the Strib points out. The yellowcake uranium claims were a fairly minor pillar of their case, but what's interesting is that it was based on forged documents, apparently concocted by a former member of Italian intelligence (SISMI). As Josh Marshall points out, these documents seemed to take a weird path through the executive branch, different than most of the fraudulent parts of their case for war.
While most of the fabricated Iraq WMD/terrorism disinformation came out of the Pentagon (Office of Special Plans, Bill Luti, people under Douglas Feith, etc.), it seems that the Niger documents kept getting put back on the table and inserted into speeches by people in the State Department, which was hardly the neo-con's center of operations. But who in State would have known about Valerie Plame working on CIA WMD counter-proliferation? Then-Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton.
Indeed, the ever-watchful Steve Clemons at TheWashingtonNote has an update on possible links between Rove, Bolton and the Yellowcake case, and he has pushed this angle before. Former CIA officer Ray McGovern asserts a tie between Bolton and the Yellowcake matter, and of course I had a post about how Rep. Henry Waxman claimed that Bolton was involved with generating Yellowcake documents at State (Waxman's PDF letter). And Bolton also apparently instructed State personnel to lie to Congress about his role in the Niger uranium case. His assistants, John Hannah and David "Clean Break" Wurmser, who were also working for Cheney at the time, also were probably related. Scooter Libby and Hannah believed for years that the CIA was being unfair to Chalabi, so they were certainly not Agency lovers.
It seems that Hannah and Bolton likely helped to shepherd along these forged yellowcake documents through the process, stuffing them into Bush's speeches, and they could have known all along that they were forgeries. At various points, the yellowcake documents were debunked by State Department analysts, and Bolton would have had to throw away the analysts' objections and soldier forth. Hell, Bolton could have forged them himself.
And so when Wilson wrote his famous op-ed in the Times, Rove, Bolton and the rest of the inner circle quite likely perceived it as a political swipe at them coming from the rational CIA/State analysts, which explains why their counterattack took the improbable form of this famous leak, intended to make the CIA look bad. Otherwise, Rove probably saw it would be politically critical to scare the rest of the analysts and bureaucrats shitless about what would happen to them and their families if they stood up to the lies and disinformation winding through Washington. In my view, intimidating potential whistleblowers from stepping forward about war lies was the primary purpose of Karl Rove's attack on Wilson, Plame and the CIA. As Juan Cole wrote about the Plame affair last year:
We now know that the Niger story involved the forgery of documents by a man with ties to Italian military intelligence, and that, moreover, Italian military intelligence has ties to Michael Ledeen, Harold Rhode and Lawrence Franklin, pro-Likud neoconservatives, two of whom had high-level positions in the Pentagon and all three of whom were tightly networked with the American Enterprise Institute. Franklin (a neoconservative Catholic) is being investigated for spying on the U.S. for Israel. The nexus of Italian military intelligence, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and the neoconservatives in the Pentagon suggests a network of conspiracy aimed at dragging the U.S. into wars against Iraq and Iran.
[.......]
The neoconservatives around Dick Cheney, including Scooter Libby and John Hannah, were highly committed to the Niger uranium story as a casus belli against Iraq, and were furious when Wilson revealed that he had shown it false in spring of 2002. They were convinced that the CIA was behind this strike at their credibility, and that Valerie Plame had been the one who managed to get Wilson sent. That is, in their paranoid world, Wilson's honest reportage of the facts was a CIA plot against the Iraq War and perhaps against the neoconservatives around Cheney and in the Pentagon.
It has been being leaked for many months now that the FBI believes the leak came from persons in Cheney's circle, possibly John Hannah and/or Scooter Libby.
Juan Cole has even more nasty things to say about Karl right now.
Most people I've talked to seem convinced that Karl will get off somehow. Indeed, the spin is thick and heavy on that point.
The first key Republican argument is that Karl didn't use Valerie Plame's actual name when conversing with reporters. This is totally irrelevant, since anyone could have found the ambassador's wife's name on Google, as MediaMatters points out. David Corn debunks this stuff.
Second argument is that Karl didn't share anything classified. This could very well become the focus of the legal debate, but politically it really isn't that helpful for them. This is BS: it's not legal to leak a CIA agent's name just so that a reporter doesn't have the wrong idea. Corn again. Larry Johnson, a guy who went with Plame through CIA training, says that they were all "covert."
Another element in the Republican defense plan is that some intelligence committee report showed that the intelligence about Niger was still ambiguous. Consider Wilson's own rebuttal to that.
Yet another element is a claim that Wilson was already caught lying about why he was sent to Africa. Mehlman says that Wilson had earlier lied that Cheney had sent him there. But the news clip that Mehlman references actually says the exact opposite, according to TPM.
There's a great many Washington liberals finally pouncing on the Plame leak story. Some say that Karl may be guilty of conspiracy because he was conspiring to make it difficult for Plame to do her job. Maybe it made Bush a lame duck, although I think that's a little premature. On TPMCafe, Marshall Wittmann, a Heritage/McCain/Christian Coalition/DLC conservative, points out that Karl is too damn important for the President to cut him loose. (Yes you can go from McCain to the DLC. That's why they suck) Naturally tons of people on the HuffyPost. Buzzflash has plenty of stories. Josh Marshall has been doing a hell of a job this week. Murray Waas exclusive: "Novak co-operated with prosecutors" and totally spilled the beans.
Incredible. Whatever part of my body processes irony is totally burned out....
Technorati Tags: cia
It is nearly time to relocate into 1630 Selby. Kennedy is gone for the week, visiting family, and Alison has already moved out, so it is eerily quiet at both ends. My stuff is more than half-packed up. I bid an ambivalent farewell to dowdy plaid shirts that stuck with me far longer than they should have, and threw away old notes and bits of paper, signifying elements of the trail over the last four years.
The server may go down for a while here, and may take some time to come back. Hopefully quickly.
Many objects found in the room, a mapbook of Paris, cards and CDs, photos from the war protests and London. The Hongpong.com Gentoo Linux server, a Pentium 4 Dell Dimension that has performed admirably since I got it from Dan Schned's brother Alex last summer, has faced the challenge of websurfers from the CIA and thousands of virus attacks with great stamina and more importantly, almost unshakeable stability. The server will go down after 42 days in operation. Not bad, but not as good as its all-time record of 111 days.
The electrical problems in my room (bet you didn't know the Uninterruptible Power Supply was grounded by a wire I installed) never blew up the computers, and the dust from all the shit in here didn't quite kill me.
The room was sort of an overgrown projection of my personality, hodgepodge with sprinklings of conspiracy, David's crazy art, wires and components, Rhymesayers stickers, burnt matches, post-its and printouts, critical theory readings and Poli Sci books scooped from the free table, a bookcase topped by Marx, half the Illuminatus trilogy, scribblings and bizarre charts taped to the walls. Many a long night hunched over the computer, following hyperlinks into arcane trivia until three or four in the morning. I tried real hard to "Get it" even though all too often I felt totally disconnected, hostile to the America outside.
Those days are over now... there were fun times, strange times. Someone once claimed that the center of the universe passed through the corner where the TV used to be. For some reason, I tended to believe it.
Thursday was a very interesting day. I went to the Capitol to try to do some research about my grandfather, Daniel S. Feidt Sr., who once served in the Minnesota legislature. As it turned out, there was a GLBT rally that afternoon, with at least a few hundred gays, lesbians and their heterosupporters around on the Capitol lawn.
For older state archives I was directed to the Minnesota Historical Society across the freeway, where their top-notch library has all sorts of state resources going back before 1900.
I found my grandfather's sole published contribution to the state's library: a curious 15-page pamphlet entitled "Minnesota's Non-Party Legislature," a 1957 reflection on why he, as a serving senator, loved the non-partisan system. The piece rails against the party machines common in so many states, and he makes the compelling argument that an independent legislature, free of individuals 'subservient' to political parties, provides more sound, economical and progressive administration of the state.
It's a paean to a totally lost form of politics in America, written straight from its heart. This piece helped explain to me why I so distrust the arbitrary power of political parties and their cynical manipulations. Feidt's potshots at the political machines of the day show me how right it always is to whack at the bastards...
It's a rare sort of freedom he and his colleagues had: no national party shadowing them, no executive bureaux, no matrix of special interests to kowtow to. This piece forces us to ask: what the hell do political parties really do for us, anyway? As Minnesota swiftly becomes a scorched-earth partisan battleground, we could all use some more independent wisdom.
Minnesota's Non-Party Legislature
by Senator Daniel S. Feidt
Minneapolis, MN
April, 1957
FORWARD
The states of Minnesota and Nebraska have the unique distinction of electing their legislators without a designation of party affiliation of the candidate on the ballot. The Minnesota Legislature became non-party by a law enacted in 1913 and Nebraska by a constitutional change in the 1930's.
The purpose of this writing is to consider, in summary form,
(1) the historical background of the Minnesota law,
(2) the present system of electing public officials in Minnesota,
(3) the validity of arguments against the non-party elective system,
(4) the record of the Minnesota Legislature since 1913, and
(5) to evaluate the personnel, functioning and legislative results of the Minnesota system in comparison with her sister states who elect legislators on a party basis.
The author has been a member of the Minnesota Legislature for twenty-two years [ultimately twenty-six] which has included service in both its House and Senate.
GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE FIRST CONGRESS WERE ELECTED NON-PARTISAN
The federal constitution and the constitutions of the original thirteen states were drafted and adopted under the belief that these governments would function without political parties. George Washington and members of the first Congress were elected on a non-party basis, but by the close of Washington's second term as president, political parties were developing and thereafter for a period of about one hundred years the phenomenon of the American political scene was the strengthening of political party controls at all levels from the ward and township to the national capitol. By the early 1900's it was not the elected official who was making independent decisions in his representative capacity for the voters as had been intended by the founding fathers, but rather these decisions on public questions were frequently made by subservient public officials under party dictation.
WITH POLITICAL PARTIES CAME POLITICAL SCANDALS
Political scandals followed the rise to power of the political party in much the same way that scandals followed the rise to power of the unscrupulous labor boss. Domineering, graft-corrupted political machines of both parties, of which Tammany Hall in New York and Boyse Penrose in Pennsylvania were perhaps the most notorious. The party boss became an accepted figure in the American political arena. The party boss selected judges, dictated judicial decisions, determined entire legislative programs, and it is common knowledge that even presidents became subservient to party domination.
In the 1890's and by the early 1900's it was notorious that judgeships, postmasterships, seats in state legislature and even in Congress itself were being sold by political racketeers to the highest bidder. It was the heyday of the party boss and political racketeer.
POLITICAL BOSSISM TODAY
Despite the efforts of able men in many states opposing party bossism, we have seen much of it remain. Typical examples are Boss Crump of Tennessee, Boss Hague of New Jersey, Boss Pendergast of Missouri, Tammany Hall in New York, the Vare machine in Philadelphia and the Kelly-Nash machine in Illinois. Only in a state where party domination of candidates to the state legislature exists can party bosses gain control of political machines to the exclusion of the general public of a state.
REFORM LEADERS
By the early 1900's the great political reform movement of American History began to take shape. The reform leaders who today are best remembered are Senator Robert O. LaFollette of Wisconsin; President Theodore Roosevelt and somewhat later, William Allen White of Kansas.
There were two principal objectives to these reforms. The one was trust-busting, which doesn't concern this article, and the second was the breaking of the corrupting grip of party domination on government.
POLITICAL REFORMATION
Political reformation in other states has been the most successful as it has attacked party domination over the judiciary and to a lesser extent at the municipal and county levels. Many states have placed the election of these officials on a non-party basis; however, many states have not.
THE HISTORIC 1913 LEGISLATIVE SESSION
With the possible exception of Nebraska, political reform in Minnesota was carried further than in any other state. Minnesota's 1913 session was the most historic ever held. It enacted more laws of a fundamental nature than any other session during our one hundred year history. Included were the last reapportionment bill and our first Presidential Primary Law. No bill enacted by it, however, had greater political significance to Minnesotans than its Chapter 389 that gave Minnesota the distinction of being the first state to elect its legislature on a non-party basis.
The background of Chapter 389 of the 1913 session is interesting. It was at a special session called in 1912 that the election of the following was changed from party to non-party. There were: The Chief Justice and Associate Justices of the Supreme Court, District Court Judges, Probate Court Judges, Municipal Court Judges, and most significantly all county officers of all counties, and all municipal officers in cities of the first class.
It has been incorrectly said that during the 1913 session there was before the legislature a bill to place the judiciary on a non-party basis and that in an effort to defeat that bill, the election of legislators on a non-party basis was added by the Senate to a House bill, in the belief that the House would never re-pass such a bill. The story goes that support for the judiciary bill as thus amended came from legislators who did not believe in the principle of a non-party legislature with the result that passage of this art [sic] was a kind of legislative mistake.
OUR NON-PARTY LEGISLATURE WAS NO MISTAKE
An examination of the record, however, clearly establishes that the judiciary had already been placed on a non-party basis by the special session of 1912 and that the 1913 act that gave Minnesota our non-party legislature must necessarily have been drafted, considered, voted on, and signed by the Governor on its merits completely independent of the question of whether the judiciary should or should not be elected on a party basis.
WHO ARE ELECTED ON A PARTY TICKET IN MINNESOTA?
To what extent is Minnesota now committed to the non-party system of electing its public officials? What officials and how many are elected on a party basis and what officials and how many are not?
The following are elected on a party designated basis. They are the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State and State Treasurer and State Auditor, together with the three members of the Railroad and Warehouse Commission. Thus, Minnesota elects exactly nine of its public officials on a party basis.
The number of elective officials in Minnesota is difficult to determine, but the following figures have been supplied by the Information Service of the League of Minnesota Municipalities:
Kind of Unit Total Approximate Number of Elected Officials:
Counties 1,400
Towns 20,295
School Districts 12,300
Cities 1,075
Villages 7,845
District Court Judges 57
Legislators 198
===
Total 43,170
Minnesota is presently committed to the non-party system of election as against the party system by the astonishing ratio of approximately 43,170 to 9.
THE MINNESOTAN IS PROUD OF HIS POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE
The average Minnesotan is proud of his political independence, proud of his independence to vote for the man irrespective of party. He is accustomed to vote independently and he wants to continues that independence.
Party leaders through the enactment of this bill [?] will vest themselves with political power by gaining control of the legislature; yet, at the same time neither the Republican party nor the Democrat-Farm Labor party is the dominant party in Minnesota today. The dominant political party in Minnesota is the independent. As the independent votes, so goes elections in Minnesota, and you may be certain that the independent is not in support of this bill to turn control of the legislature over to political parties.
Just why those who advocate placing the legislature on a party basis do not also support the election of all officials on a party-designated ballot is difficult to understand, since their arguments, if valid, apply to all elective offices with the possible exception of the judiciary.
THE FOUR ARGUMENTS FOR PARTY DESIGNATION
Let us axamine [sic] the four reasons that are customarily advanced in favor of placing Minnesota's legislature under party domination. They are:
1. A PARTY DESIGNATED LEGISLATURE WILL PROMOTE AND STRENGTHEN POLITICAL PARTIES.
2. A LEGISLATOR SHOULD BE RESPONSIBLE TO A POLITICAL PARTY FOR HIS PUBLIC ACTS.
3. ELECTIONS ON A NON-PARTY BASIS IS ONLY A POPULARITY CONTEST.
4. CANDIDATES SHOULD BE PLEDGED TO A PARTY PLATFORM AND SHOULD STAND FOR ELECTION ON THAT PLATFORM.
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1.A PARTY DESIGNATED LEGISLATURE WILL PROMOTE AND STRENGTHEN POLITICAL PARTIES
The purpose of the legislature is not to build political parties. Reduced to simplicity, the function of the legislature is to enact such laws as will fairly and justly treat with state problems; that is, to enact such laws within the framework of the constitution as necessary if we are to enjoy an orderly functioning of the state government and its lesser political subdivisions, and also to levy such taxes and appropriate such amounts of money as are required to adequately perform the primary functions of the State. The legislature has no other purpose or duty. It follows that it is not and should not be the responsibility of any public official or group of public officials such as legislators to build or strengthen political parties.
2. A LEGISLATOR SHOULD BE RESPONSIBLE TO A POLITICAL PARTY FOR HIS PUBLIC ACTS
It is argued that a person elected to public office should be accountable for his public acts to a political party, and that one of the beneficial results that will flow from a party designated legislature will be what is called party discipline.
A writer in comparing politics in Minnesota with politics in Pennsylvania, a party dominated state, recently wrote as follows:
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"One must realize that Pennsylvania is a disciplined, party organization state where politics operate on a basis startling to Minnesotans, used to fiercely independent political behavior.
Pennsylvania is ruled by county leaders. . . party chieftains who win power by political brains and who remain in power by an ingenious system of rewards and penalties for their supporters and opponents.
Under their control are disciplined party organizations which can produce votes in massive quantities, like turning a spigot on and off. For all practical purposes, the select party candidates, establish governmental policy, fix tax rates and reward or penalize their followers.
They're a tough, intensely practical crew."
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It is understandable why party leaders desire to increase their power by gaining control of the Minnesota legislature, but the view of the independent voter is different, he does not want his legislator, alderman or school board member, to be subject to party responsibility. He does not want a political climate to develop where there might be brought back to Minnesota's scene the paid political hack, the ward healer or the ward boss. The independent wants Minnesota to remain as it is -- the cleanest political state in the nation and the independent wants his public official, be he legislator or alderman, to be responsible to the voters not to some party boss.
3. ELECTIONS ON A NON-PARTY BASIS IS ONLY A POPULARITY CONTEST
If this argument is valid as applied to the election of legislators, then it is also valid as applied to election of every one of the 43,000 public officials elected on a non-party basis in Minnesota today. But how sound is this popularity contest argument? Why should not the voters have the right of voting for the man they want rather than a hand-picked candidate who has, through some means or another, honorable or otherwise, secured the favor of the party boss? Most candidates stand for re-election and when they do, it is not a popularity contest. The candidate for re-election puts his every public act at issue at each such election. If he has not been responsive to the will of the electorate, he is not returned to office.
4. CANDIDATES SHOULD BE PLEDGED TO A PARTY PLATFORM AND STAND FOR ELECTION ON THAT PLATFORM
An examination of the platforms of political parties leads to the conclusion that platforms are drafted not necessarily in the interest of the people but rather they are designed for the purpose of attracting votes. The two devices most frequently used in the writing of party platforms are to grant concessions to every special interest group the party leaders believe will be of significance in the voting and the second is to garnish it with platitudes and generalities such as being for the old people, the youth, the farmer and the working man. What useful purpose would be served if legislators were to be pledged to such broad generalities or to the sops offered the spcial [sic] interest groups? Better legislation will inevitably result if legislators arrive to take up their duties at the Capital unpledged to any person or any issue, except pledged to honestly, fairly and to the best of their abilities represent their constituents and the people of the State. That they take up their duties with an inquiring mind determined to make no decision until they have had an opportunity of hearing in the committees and on the floor of the House and Senate all views on each controversial issue.
PARTY LEADERS IN MINNESOTA TODAY
No discussion of this subject would be complete without mention of political parties as the operate in Minnesota today. Present leadership of both the Republican and Democratic-Farmer-Labor parties is obviously drawn from our most able and public spirited citizens. They function in the manner you would expect from conscientious responsible leaders but without paid political hangers-on and all the rest of the tawdry, clap trap that has disgraced the name of politics in so many of the states that have party designated legislatures.
THE MINNESOTA LEGISLATURE HAS BEEN PROGRESSIVE AND LIBERAL
The laws enacted, the appropriations made and the record of our non-party legislature over the past forty-four years have been such that every citizen of our State can take pride in.
Scores of examples could be cited to establish the fact that during the forty odd years Minnesota has operated on a non-party basis, it has been a leader in progressive and liberal legislation. In the interest of brevity, I wlll [sic] cite only a few examples. It was the independent Minnesota senate that during the depts [sic] of the depression in the early 1930's conceived the idea and then drafted and passed the first state mortgage moratorium law. Later almost every state in the union adopted some form of this humanitarian law which was first produced by our non-party legislature. Another example that can be cited is Minnesota's labor relations law which, although patterned to some extent after Scandinavian laws, actually was an original piece of legislation. This act also has proved itself in operation and has been copied by many states. Other examples of how excellently the non-party legislature functions might well include our mental health program, our fine schools, outstanding University, and our Presidential Primary Law that has had such a profound effect on the national political scene.
WHO IS ELECTED TO THE LEGISLATURE?
One of the unusual results of our non-party system is that it favors the election of the legislature of outstanding citizens without regard for politics. This has been particularly true of elections held in rural areas. Often these candidates from rural areas have distinguished themselves in community service and are elected to the legislature as a reward by the community they have served and there is little or no political significance in their election. They are apt to be persons of proven character, experience and judgment and they make excellent law makers.
EXPERIENCE IN A LEGISLATOR IS AN ASSET
The non-party election of legislators also has had the beneficial result of giving Minnesota a more experienced legislature that her sister states. Non-party legislators are not as vulnerable to defeat on each occasion when voters change the political party in control of the state offices or the national administration. Those who work with legislatures will agree that experience is just as valuable as an asset to a legislator as it is to any other person who receives a responsible assignment in the professions, business or industry.
People who work with several legislatures including Minnesota have frequently said that the caliber of the Minnesota legislators, both in the House and Senate, and including members of the independent and liberal groups, is exceptionally high in comparison with party-dominated states. There is good reason for this. Scores of Minnesota legislators would find no challenge in serving as members of the legislature if their only function was to rubber stamp the decisions of a party boss. They stay with their work as legislators because the decisions they make are theirs alone and not those of some party politician whose only responsibility is to the party rather than to the people. The responsibility of the Minnesota legislator is to his constituents before whom he must stand for re-election.
LOBBYING EASIER IN PARTY LEGISLATURES
Legislative representatives, association executives and lobbiest [sic] who appear for their groups in Minnesota and also party-designated state legislatures say that in working in other legislatures, they have only to convince the majority party leader of their views since it is only he, and not the individual legislator, who makes the decision for all party members.
THE MINNESOTA SYSTEM IS NON-BOSS
This is not true of the Minnesota legislature where every measure is weighed by the individual legislator both in committee and on the floor of the House or Senate. Minnesota has the opposite of the party boss system; it has its own system -- a non-boss system, in which every legislator is free to decide what is in the best interest for his constituents and what is in the best interest of the state on each issue. The Minnesota system, in my judgment, is infinitely more in the interest of the public.
POLITICS IN MINNESOTA IS CLEANER & BETTER
We who have taken an active part in Minnesota legislature have been taking for granted the benefits of the Minnesota non-party system; yet, at the same time we have also been somewhat remiss in failing to adequately explain to those not actively working with the legislature how superior the Minnesota system is in operation. Many persons do not realize that in Minnesota we enjoy cleaner and better politics and, at the same time, give to our people a more economical, effective and responsive government.
Once the consideration of the proposed repeal of the non-party status of the legislature is focused on something other than the repetitious conclusions which we have heard over the years from proponents of the bill, such as "party responsibility" and the other well known arguments, and our people come to understand that the real issue is whether we are determined to retain better government in Minnesota, they not only will stand with us in demanding that we retain our non-party system, but, in my judgment, a movement might well take form whereby other states will be encouraged to adopt the Minnesota system.
EXPERIENCE SHOWS THE MINNESOTA SYSTEM IS BEST
Above all, we who have the experience of actually working under the Minnesota non-party system should be determined that we retain what we know to be in the best interests of good government in Minnesota and determined to resist all efforts, regardless of how well intentioned they may be to turn our legislature over to political party control.
Photo by Matt Entenza (D-St. Paul)
Today, we were running around collecting the feedback from the legislators on their profiles. The book is really getting close to finished now... So Peter told me that he has spotted Al Franken around the Capitol with Entenza and some of the other Democrats before the House session started.
Around 2:30 Franken went into a somewhat open (press allowed) Democratic caucus meeting and yukked it up with everyone. They finished a little after three, and there were various interviews with local media going on. Franken is apparently going to reestablish his residency here, and as has long been speculated, start teasing Norm Coleman. Now that would be an entertaining campaign to watch.
He insisted that I bend down a little bit so that everyone knows how tall he really is (as he stands on his tiptoes and I crouch my neck down). Entenza deftly handled the digital camera and it turned out quite nicely.
Well it sounds like Andy Tweeten Sev Adam and Alison just got back from a round o drinks.... Tweets is in town for the weekend, like the good ol days....
"How many more of these goddam elections are we going to have to write off as lame but 'regrettably necessary' holding actions? And how many more of these stinking double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me at the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils? I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing, this year, is Beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960 - and as far as I can tell, we've gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same."
I have been away for too long. Today was one of the better days of my life. We passed back to the Legislature the profiles for the next edition of the book. I've been hesitant to say anything about the whole adventure until after the Powers that Be approve what we wrote.
Now the deliberative body is deliberating about something far more important than the law: how they want themselves to spin, craft identity, in their profiles, whatever you want to call the process of how politicians present themselves. Working on the book looked sort of like journalism, it was really more the process of shaping the truth as they wanted it to appear.
Hunter probably would have thought it an amusing venture.
HST and the whole gonzo thing inspired me not to take vast quantities of drugs, but simply to refuse to accept the standard interpretation, to take some ground and stick with it. He was never afraid of fucking with people that shouldn't be fucked with, he was the friend and the connection between strange and crazy groups of people, he was a man who looked sideways at the spectacle and always took note of the degenerates and swine who run the spotlights.
This whole development has pitched me right back to some basic questions about myself and my motives... He was born in 1937, he saw a strange and fucked up century, he laughed at it. He stuck it out in spite of all the pomposity and evil our decadent empire could throw at him. He made it far.
NickP (DJiDontEvenGoHere to some) and I have decided to do a two-hour Hunter S Thompson tribute on my radio show this Friday at 2 to 4 PM. It can be heard online via the WMCN website or thru this nice little file here.
Seeing as how I have virtually abandoned the site with little explanation, I don't know who will actually read this, but hey, it's only Tuesday morning now.
First thing to do tomorrow is get some Wild Turkey.
(photo via gonzo.org)
* Fat City, by the way, was his proposed new name for Aspen, Colorado, when he ran for mayor on the Freak Party ticket in 1970.
It has been a rather unexpected venture in my life to go interview the Minnesota Legislature, and I'm tinged with a bit of sadness now that the experience will be encapsulated, finally, by finishing my last six legislator profiles going into tomorrow.. (It's 1:12, and I think I might be able to make it)
Two exciting matters on Monday: the class walkout scheduled for 1:10 and Randy Kelly coming to see the Mac Dems, in the wake of his really quite difficult to believe endorsement of Bush. Hopefully I'll make it around to both events, but it depends if I can get through the geographic additions that have yet to be made to the book.
Still remaining: Senator Satveer Chaudhary, Reps. Dan Severson, Loren Solberg, Jim Davnie, Kent Eken and Jean Wagenius. I just finished Rep. Mary Ellen Otremba. It would be difficult to imagine a more different set of people.
But I gotta keep going on.
Well, I have been going at this for a couple weeks now, and school officially starts today. The big concentration of interviews is mostly over with, but they've piled up to profile quickly. This entry is intended to as a way to console myself that I've already gotten a large chunk done, because by God it doesn't yet feel that way.
So here's the list of Minnesota legislators I've interviewed, and profiles I've written:
Interviewed but haven't written profiles:
Senators:
Representatives:
Profiles completed:
Senators:
Representatives:
Ugh, unfortunately I'm not quite on top of writing these damn things. But I'm getting there...
Starting Monday morning at 10, it's time for Senators Mee Moua (DFL-67) and Ellen Anderson (DFL-66), Reps. Michael Nelson (R-46A), Ruth Johnson (DFL-23) and Fran Bradley (R-29B).
I started a Wiki page for PoliticsInMinnesota info.
Hurray for final semester at Macalester! Yahoooo! I'm going to bed. My wrists are tired as hell from typing... Hah, it seems like I might have found the fix for the server's date sliding problem, finally. Or not. Time will tell.
A Summary: Straight from the Rambling Periphery to the Talkative Core
On Wednesday I quit Computer Zone Consulting and suspended my job at the library because I got a paid internship with an organization putting together a huge directory of the politicians in the state of Minnesota. This has chomped up all my time, and I won't have nearly the time to write on the site for probably about a month. Therefore some of those in Hongistan could perhaps offer a few tidbits to help keep us goin? And is it possible that Dan is working for.... a Republican??!!? More below...
An offer of 'Big Propz':
First of all, megadittoes to Nick for his quite clear and not at all spin-laden look at the social security mess. It does sound like a Ponzi scheme designed to help financial industry insiders shift giant mountains of government cash around to generate the appearance of prosperity, another great step forward in the Faith-Based Economy of the 21st Century.
In the field of major news, things have abruptly changed for me this week. Unexpectedly, last Friday Peter Gartrell got me a job with Politics in Minnesota, an organization which publishes a directory of all the legislators and key officers in the state. My job, which I've chosen to accept, is to go around and interview about a third of the state legislature, so that I can write their updated profiles for this term. It is a very challenging project, and the deadline is rolling around obscenely quickly.
On Wednesday I talked with a bunch of Republican representatives, and I was surprised to find that they were strong supporters of renewable energy, new state rail transit solutions and other kinds of policies that I think are quite important. It's a very new sort of thing for me, to say the least. I have had improbable talks with quite a few Republicans in my day, but I've never had to deal with multiple (R) representatives in a mere afternoon. Here, I'm trying my best to be professional about the whole undertaking, but it helps that I've been sort of indifferent to most of state politics for quite a while. Not reading the Star Tribune daily for a while really tamped it down...
Not a Likely Situation for Dan:
Well, the really ironic twist is that the publisher of this political Directory is one Sarah Janecek, a Republican lobbyist who's widely known and heard from in state media. She has only been around a little bit this week due to a business trip, but she is definitely one of the most interesting and informed people around these parts that I've ever dealt with. She's been telling some folks that Peter and I are her "Macalester liberal interns," which greatly amused some Senate Republicans. However, keep in mind that the whole operation has bi-partisan leadership, as associate publishers Blois Olson and David Erickson are DFLers.
So we've sort of been slotted into this little ideological gap where things look quite different than before. Essentially my role is first to prod the legislators into talking about themselves, their accomplishments in the last term, their policy interests and what they want to look at in this next term. As you might imagine, it is not insanely hard to get them to talk about themselves. Then I've got to write up or adjust the "analysis" section of their profile from last year, and send it in to get edited. I was a little nervous to get started on this, but my schedule has gone mad.
I've got to write stuff that reflects what the legislators want to see in the book, their basic story and situation as they see it, and has some kind of interesting zing to it. This does not require me to have an opinion about whether or not I support their positions. Just roughly 2,500 characters of text that would help illustrate to the interested everyday Joe just who their elected officials really are.
It does require me to get up ridiculously early in the morning. Real early. Ouch. It also eats up most of my time. As luck would have it, Arthur Cheng showed up in town during my first day running around the State Capitol. A shrewd operator in the field of economics is just who I need to help me sort it out at the beginning. So now I'm off to the races.....
Oh by the way, the Supreme Court o' the U.S. itself finally scratched the Hudson casino. Thank God.
Because of all this new internship stuff, I just can't spend much time working on posts here. It's too bad, I was hoping to put out some interesting information and weird links that I've linked to in the HongWiki, but haven't had the time nor inclination to further organize. Go to "Recent Changes" in there, and look at the various date entries like "8 January 2005." I guarantee you will find something interesting, though not necessarily truthful.
A Call to Rambling on the Internet:
So again I want to thank Nick for putting some excellent stuff together, but now I want to ask some other folks if they are interested in writing some guest posts for Shits and Giggles. Namely folks like A. Henry "Big Sky" Tweeten, Dan "what's all this now" Schwartz, Kellen "I live in Kirk 911, isn't that disconcerting in a postmodern apocalypse kind of way" Anfinson and the Gerberuses.
Of course there are a lot of other people who might be reading (or not), but those are just the cats that spring to mind right now. I am hoping we can get a few things going. I'm not even hoping for longer pieces of writing. Just a few paragraphs on the DNC race or what you've been hearing about lately would be extremely welcome.
In a final tidbit, something went a little weird with the date setting on the HongPong.com server over the last week or so. It kept setting back to 1901, although I don't quite know why, and haven't had the time to figure it out. I rebooted the server after a quite good 111 days of uptime, with a load average of 1.84 / 1.28 / 1.17. What does load average mean? Something to do with idle cycles in the user and system space. (the numbers tell how busy the computer was while serving Hongpong.com to the CIA, Pakistani spammers and whatever strange digital alter-egos of sketchy global characters happened to trip into here). Anyhow, with a reboot the date seems to be sticking to correctness.
While listening to MPR this afternoon I learned that they are in the process of purchasing St. Olaf College's non-profit radio station WCAL, another classical station on 89.3 FM, for $10.5 million. They don't have the cash on hand, so they are borrowing it. Gary Eichten just asked, "Is Minnesota Public Radio out to conquer the world?" in his classic way. Hahahahaaa....
I would say this will probably work out very nicely, but I'm not sure if such a nerdy thing as a St. Olaf classical station could ever become cool.
The press release has some helpful info:
WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH WCAL?On a tangent there's kind of a funny story in Haaretz about Ultra-Orthodox pirate radio stations in Israel.
We do not yet have specific plans as we did not expect this opportunity to be on the horizon this year. Over the years, we have explored several formats that we think would be valuable services for the Twin Cities. Now we will have the opportunity to work with the community to develop the best one.We will maintain the current classical music format until we are able to determine the best use for the frequency. We acted quickly because it was most important for us to save the frequency for public radio. For the long term, we will review other options, such as programming not currently available to the 2.6 million people within the range of the WCAL signal.
The future of signature WCAL national programs such as Sing for Joy and annual broadcast of the St Olaf Christmas Festival, which are St. Olaf's programs, is still under consideration.
[......]
WHY DID ST. OLAF DECIDE TO SELL THEIR STATION TO MINNESOTA PUBLIC RADIO?
St. Olaf said in its press release that it wanted to sell WCAL to an entity that would reflect the college's values and that would appreciate the 80 years of dedication and hard work that went into building the station's programming and broad listenership. President Christopher M. Thomforde noted Minnesota Public Radio's mission "to enrich the mind and nourish the spirit" and its 37-year history of operating public radio stations, and called it a "perfect partner" to carry on WCAL's legacy. St. Olaf said it would use the assets of the sale to strengthen the college's endowment and support programs that strengthen the college's mission.HOW MANY LISTENERS DOES WCAL REACH? HOW MANY MEMBERS? WHAT IS ITS HISTORY?
WCAL reaches more than 80,000 listeners each week in the Twin Cities and Rochester areas, with broadcast transmitters in Rosemount and Rochester. It began as a student physics experiment in 1918. It was licensed as an AM broadcast station in 1922 and received its FM license in 1968. WCAL has 8,000 members.
It's fitting that finally, at this late date, I saw this President we've heard so much about. The War on Terror came to Hudson, Wisconsin, and I posted up at Second and Locust, just outside the security perimeter. At least there weren't any of those 'free speech zones' today. Rather, Bush and Kerry partisans circulated freely. I was more agitated than usual because this was an infringement on my home turf.
The roads were blocked off by city dump trucks to block car bombs. Did that mean they weren't just dump trucks, but Dump Trucks in the War on Terror?
Three large Bush-Cheney buses came up from Exit 1 and I basically grimaced there. In 10 minutes they had gone up another block and turned down towards the river. Peering from my spot on Second Street down to the "HUDSON, WIS." archway at the end of the dike where they built the stage, the buses pulled up in tandem and for a blazing moment George W. Bush, in a blue shirt, worked the crowd lined up on the other side.
A whole crush of people were all around us, standing on railings around a pit reaching the basement windows of this corner building. I turned because Jon Lyons couldn't see a damn thing, so I crouched down and made a bridge with my hands, and Jon saw Bush ascend onto the stage and out of sight behind the buses. That was the end of our contact with the Officeholder.
In an interesting side story, my sister and some friends apparently sneaked most of the way through the security zone, in a sense proving that the war on terror is smaller than Lakefront Park. I will have to follow up on this exciting story.
In front of the theater on Friday there was a guy with a table set up handing out flyers and talking to people. He turned out to be one Thomas Harens, new pre-candidate for President here in Minnesota. He's started the Christian Freedom Party, a group opposed to the Christian right that would supposedly strip votes from Bush's right in Minnesota, perhaps a reverse Ralph Nader. Gotta love the beret on his campaign site.
There's something uniquely American about such a scene, that our system permits a guy from St. Paul to form a party, collect some signatures and get on the ballot. In Minnesota, the threshold is only 2,000 signatures, lower than most. Along with Alex Legge, we signed his petition to the Secretary of State. It's quite improbable to find a third-party presidential candidate getting started virtually on my doorstep. I talked with the guy, and I hope to get some interesting news out of this one...
Well well, it's the holiday weekend and things are crackin around here. I can't find a damn place to park now because Michael Moore's movie opened at the Grandview on Wednesday, and it has been really busy day after day (although I don't think it's been selling out). Most people coming out seem to have enjoyed it, which you've got to expect in a neighborhood like this.
Here is a night shot from the front of the light rail, speeding around past the Metrodome.
I will say more and I'm sorry there haven't been a hell of a lot of postings. It's been a very busy week and I am trying to keep my life on track between a couple classes and a new advertising project. Yummay!
Still figuring out what to do about the gallery. There are a lot of great photos. (Sorry for the insane load time. I may resave these down to a smaller size.)
For those of you just joining us, the twin cities now have a light rail line, about 8 miles, that will soon run from the Mall of America and international airport in Bloomington, up into Minneapolis, along to the Metrodome and Target Center, with a good deal of city between. This is the north end of the line or Warehouse District station, which is about 8 miles long now:
These pics are from Saturday night. This is approaching the Warehouse district station. I took this open-shutter shot over the shoulder (thru the cab window) of the driver.
This was earlier on Saturday. Metro Transit cleverly put free buses at each station so that more people could jump around and see the other stations. I jumped on this bus to skip ahead from Fort Snelling, where I would have been stuck for two or three trains, to the VA Medical Center one stop ahead, where I hopped on without delay. I couldn't believe that people were parked in the line at the Warehouse District station for hours, as it stretched two blocks.
These kids were riding with me on an articulated (bendy double size) bus that was travelling alongside the Hiawatha line between Fort Snelling and the VA. 
I call this one a development metaphor. The Metrodome is out of frame to the right and the Mississippi riverfront developments like the new Guthrie and condos are going up quickly.
Minneapolis City Hall at Government Plaza, photo taken from the Hennepin County Government Center.
Right after I got off at the warehouse district. The drivers liked talking to people. I am reflected:
Eager new riders. There were so many small children that I wonder if some will actually remember the LRT as their first memory...
I took a second pass at the train this evening, and got up right at the front of the cab, took some great photos and even a couple videos. There were tens of thousands of people attending the mega-multiparty throughout the city. I couldn't step out and get pictures at the southern stations on Hiawatha because of the huge lines and restrictions on time when I was cruising north, attempting to meet my friends to get back to St. Paul.
Driving back, I found that Fairview Ave. is about 3.1 miles from the Lake Street station, and the St. Paul border is 2.6 miles. There is a new bus route starting this week, the 53, which will take people along Marshall Ave. into Minneapolis, but it only stops 4 times in Minneapolis before getting to the station. Actually, that means that when I want to go downtown without paying an express fare, I can take just that line, although it takes quite a walk or getting dropped off by someone. If only they cruised up Grand right to the station...
The photos are importing right now. I don't have time to put everything together, and I am going out for another round tomorrow afternoon. I'll get some pics up here later. More to follow.....
Well, it was difficult to watch Fahrenheit 9/11 yesterday. We were in the first screening at the Mall of America theatre, which is an unreal enough place to begin with. On the whole, the movie was very upsetting, but that's the intent. It didn't play quite as fast and loose as Bowling for Columbine with the facts, and on the whole I think it works very well and will make buckets and buckets of money. I will get into more detail later.....
Because right now I am going to hop the bus down to Lake street and ride the new trains and take pictures. Excitement!!!! I will post them and put together a nice special feature page later.
I present a couple pictures --and a movie--that I took with a digital camera a couple nights ago.
The video is hosted from my new University web space. How nice! It should be fast. Click here for the movie! Here is a video frame of the train zooming by:
A couple more images, one from a station along Hiawatha (I shot this out of a momentarily stopped car) and another from the Metrodome station, towards downtown. It was the night before the solstice and the sun had just gone down. (That's how far north it sets here, and no further. Southward march has begun....)
In other news the almighty ANDAY (i.e. "the tweots") is coming around from Montana for the weekend. Perhaps we will take a cue from Mr Marshall and cajole him into some guest blogging about his political activities for the Democrats in Montana. Or not...
With regards to the war and all of that, I have been doing some ponderous soul searching and will weigh in on it before the Moore movie breaks out... I.E. Thursday.
Well right now it is Grand Old Day on Grand Ave., so I've got to get a move on.... this year the glorious beer gardens are open to me, hurray!!!
I was thinking about going to a camp near International Falls today, but I said I wouldn't if the weather looked terrible. Well, it does. There are tornadoes and crazy warnings all south of us, while the atmosphere has less energy and more slow moisture here.
These summer storms come zooming over us, and their power comes from the intensity of the summer heat--and how it picks up moisture. It's quite fitting that there's a movie about global warming and climate shifts, as the west dries up and the sun makes storms and tornadoes.
What is a pressure point of this global warming? Where are its effects felt the most heavily? Places in the desert that lack air conditioning. So global warming impacts Bush's policy in Iraq too.
Alison gets a lot of flack from people for the gas prices at SA. She is the last domino in a global chain of violence, market anxiety and schemery that stretches all the way to the top of the White House. Energy waves come right to the corner.
Bush is talking again tonight. Will he declare anything about Chalabi? Will he say anything about oil? Or is it just another one of those pop out of the shell for a moment, vanish, kind of things. There was a report in the NY Times today about how furious congressional Republicans are that they can't get the man's attention. If that's how their people in Congress are treated, who the hell is running this operation?
Yeah, it's the failure of a presidency before our very eyes, the rolling energy of all the horrible things he's done—all the failures to handle reality—jeopardizes the whole world. Yet that administration has christened itself. Literally, they map the situation onto theocratic ideas. Rick Perlstein reveals that they are synchronized with apocalyptic Christians in their mideast policy, in a sense. In the Village Voice:
The e-mailed meeting summary reveals NSC Near East and North African Affairs director Elliott Abrams sitting down with the Apostolic Congress and massaging their theological concerns. Claiming to be "the Christian Voice in the Nation's Capital," the members vociferously oppose the idea of a Palestinian state. They fear an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza might enable just that, and they object on the grounds that all of Old Testament Israel belongs to the Jews. Until Israel is intact and Solomon's temple rebuilt, they believe, Christ won't come back to earth.Abrams attempted to assuage their concerns by stating that "the Gaza Strip had no significant Biblical influence such as Joseph's tomb or Rachel's tomb and therefore is a piece of land that can be sacrificed for the cause of peace."
Three weeks after the confab, President George W. Bush reversed long-standing U.S. policy, endorsing Israeli sovereignty over parts of the West Bank in exchange for Israel's disengagement from the Gaza Strip.
......(snip).....
When Pastor Upton was asked to explain why the group's website describes the Apostolic Congress as "the Christian Voice in the nation's capital," instead of simply a Christian voice in the nation's capital, he responded, "There has been a real lack of leadership in having someone emerge as a Christian voice, someone who doesn't speak for the right, someone who doesn't speak for the left, but someone who speaks for the people, and someone who speaks from a theocratical perspective."When his words were repeated back to him to make sure he had said a "theocratical" perspective, not a "theological" perspective, he said, "Exactly. Exactly. We want to know what God would have us say or what God would have us do in every issue."
I don't know if the real world is reaching these people, or what. I don't know if they even perceive those who are dying, on all sides. What's the purpose?
Maybe Bush will announce the resignations of Douglas Feith and Rummy!!! I think he'll have to lay someone out tonight. These guys have stacked up their self-important authority so high, any fired political appointees would bring about the collapse of their whole legitimacy.
Yet they are whole, and their legitimacy has already collapsed rapidly. Where are the cracks going to come out? And what gets poured into all the policy? Religious fanaticism? Talk of "the enemy" and "terrorist clerics"? When does it end?
They've all got guns, Mr Secretary. Thanks for giving Chalabi and Iranian intelligence all of Saddam's secret files. Nice move in the war on Evil.
Its a horrible place to be for those young soldiers, and its going to get hot as the burned oil has become carbon dioxide trapping more thermal energy, where it joins the hot dust and burned substances, all heating the place, with no plan...
The former commanding general of Centcom, Mr Zinni, called it Niagara Falls. The energy waves rise and fall, dollars, gallons, bombs...
What do you do now? What can you do? Tell us, oh great secreted President, shaky and irritable.
Unexpectedly I went to the Timberwolves playoff game on Friday. It was fun as hell. They were winning in much of the first half, but it is hard as hell to get rebounds with Shaq around the basket.
I've been lying low this week, trying not to get too psyched out about the news of new photographs, war around the holy Shiite shrines, the wretched border cases in Rafah and along the Syrian border. What does it mean if Chalabi's intelligence was mainly a front for Iranian schemers?
Was the Pentagon that foolish? The answer seems to be that some agencies, such as the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, knew that the guy who talked about mobile bio-weapons labs was a liar, but somehow that sanity check got blocked by someone else in the Pentagon. The State Department and CIA certainly were never big into the Chalabi fantasy.
Chalabi's people were the ones who provided the lurid wallpaper of fear that surrounded us in the leadup to war. The hawks bought the silly garbage because they needed it to justify the unreal, hellish nightmare that has unfolded. They needed the false intelligence to fabricate fear in the public mind.
Finally, David's artwork for our wall came in. It is about damn time and maybe I will put up a couple photos of the drawings, which are made of chalk, ink, colored pens and pencils, all around some good stuff.
I will try to put together some of the new information, but my God it is hard to figure out which way things are spinning right now. One of the key questions is how fanatics like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson view this stuff. I found an interesting story in the Village Voice about 'theocratic' advice in Washington....
Also I haven't forgotten to explain the story of the lawn chair from hell, as an example of weird patterns, rather than a conspiracy. More later, ever later...... The story continues, whether I like it or not. I will have to go back into trying to deal with it, before it deals with me.
On Saturday afternoon, I wandered around by the river, followed some of the paths on the hillsides between the Mississippi and the east River Road. There is a waterfall in a steep limestone valley, where the road bends around, between Marshall and Summit avenues. The whole area is covered with trails up and down the hills, with outcroppings, micro canyons with cracked mud. Across, on the Minneapolis side, dudes were fishing. I walked up the River Road, past Marshall and into Minneapolis.
The crowd changes and everyone is wearing shaggier clothes, mysterious winos climb out of the park that has a boardwalk placed atop the river shore. I go further, towards the Melrose four-point megalithic student apartment complex. At least it complements the industrial plastic packaging facility next door, which has its own railroad car full of raw polymer goo—or whatever it was.
There are a lot of students moving things around today, and so it is yet again the time for comings and goings. I didn't go to graduation today because I felt stressed out about dealing with all the people, after all the weird stuff going on, and the various rifts that have formed around people at Macalester and the world as a whole. It is a shitty thing for my friends who are graduating, but I needed to get away for a little while and not hear anyone else's voice.
I have not written much here in a while, for the most part since finals started, and this last week of saying my seasonal goodbyes to friends that are winging it out of the Twin Cities for the summer. For some incalculable reason, Andy Tweeten has elected to ride out the national elections in Montana—until November—a sacrifice which only a hearty denizen of Big Sky like A. Henry could possibly handle. Apparently it is still snowing around there. Tell us when spring starts!! Then drink a six pack just in time to put your parka back on.
Arun Muthiah has also winged it to colder climes. He is in Australia somewhere, and might end up working at a swank hotel on the Gold Coast. This is much more pleasant in June and July than Oman. And yet will another country of white people really solve anything?
One of my professors is returning to Afghanistan this summer, and this is pretty exciting but ever so slightly alarming, because we all know how smoothly things work out over there.
There are a lot of people that are cycling home for a few weeks, until June, then coming around again, more than last year. That should be lots of fun.
In other news a couple friends are thinking of new ideas for websites and such. I am uncertain what might come of it, but I am happy to have a little time for such new ideas, if they can be prevented from sinking in that thick, crushing July haze, which this year promises to be thicker than usual...
It's a heart of darkness revealed and a grandiose, expanding theater of horror, where one obscene image after another chases grainy beheadings through a rippling poppy field of raving militant ex-officers who want to crush everything.
The lunatics have their hands on all the levers of power and words don't fit together like they used to. In the summer, it is hard to keep thinking along the same lines as before.
After a huge thunderstorm blew through this week, I darted off to drive around with Arun and look at how the whole river valley, and all the buildings, were bathed in a golden light. There were only a handful of cars, and the sky roiled with soft, rippling clouds arcing behind the storm, dark and receding on the eastern horizon. The sun sliced golden through heavy, roiled evening air. I dodged around the fallen trees, tossed branches and garbage bins strewing the roads.
As we came around to the northwest side of downtown Minneapolis, the glass towers glinted as if made of shining limestone under the dark sky. We drove into downtown, then along the Lake of the Isles as the sun finally came down. Minneapolitans were impressed, taking pictures. (I had no camera).
Finally, after the sun set, a chocolate ice cream cone at Sebastian Joe's, where I used to go when I was very little, living in Minneapolis. As we stood outside a man talked with his inaudible friend in a green compact.
"How are can we say we're liberating the people when we're killing them? Sixty percent of the people in that prison were innocent. How is that freedom?"
All my cynicism has been repaid a thousandfold, but is it gratifying?
Hahaaa, the war is a shameful disaster, as I suspected! What a bunch of cretins, now they've been laid low!!! Moral superiority r00t3d!! [Dance on ashes]
What a horrible idea. This turn of events does not bring me much gratification. Rumsfeld is an evil man, plain to see for all, now. At least things like that have been made clear.
So make no mistake, please. I am filled with anger and confusion about these turns of events. I am shamed that all the little kids in this country have to face these pictures of sexual humiliation, where my generation got the cracking of Berlin Wall, and those in between just had the dirty Clinton stuff.
This whole field of torture, this surreal complex of shame and sadomasochism was supposedly carried out by a half-dozen mountain hayseeds. No, As Sy Hersh peels back a third layer on the Onion of Hell, he says that a special operation was tasked with coercing War on Terror targets with a number of techniques, including sexual humiliation (and perhaps blackmail tied to the photos).
I had my suspicions. When I posted a link to this report on the suspicious deaths of Afghan prisoners from the Guardian last March, it felt oddly out of place with the narrative they gave us. Now it looks like one of the first icebergs spotted.
This whole stream has set off a 'logik bomb' in American identity, while already parts of Washington are trying to steam along again, and the rest of the world looks on with puzzlement and fear.
I went wandering around because the symbolic logic that underpins American 'moral authority,' hegemony, soft power, whatever you want to call the attractive force that binds together a system of rule, all of it has been supercharged by the flipping images and dozens of deaths—of poor Iraqi Shiites, a huge chunk of the population—spilling out, hitting holy sites, setting one Iraqi against another.
It seems that the environment of torture spilled out of the norms created by the Bush administration's War on Terror policies, as desperation and a failure of intelligence last year led the army to start abusing Iraqi they picked up for intelligence tidbits. The confusion of ends and goals spirals ever further, eroding our very ability to deal with reality.
Fortunately, everyone wants to get plastic surgery now, as the television commands!
What we claimed as The Order is vanishing, but life rolls on, albeit at higher gasoline prices. I rode the bus back along University on a Saturday afternoon, and people still existed, they haven't been wiped away by the confusion that spreads every day.
Apparently, that was the 'reality check' I was looking for. It is too damn easy to be a college student and get swallowed up in the bubble world of Macalester, something that the seniors always like to observe... and I am a senior now. Where did normality go?? Was it on the bus?
It's the damn summer. Grit your teeth. Get serious. Either the collapse is coming, or it isn't. Either Bush's administration bends and crumbles, or it whiplashes all over, civil war, Arabs, Christians, Jews, Pashtuns, Chechens, nukes, oil, heroin. Goddesses of greed and avarice in the sky. Merchants of war fill the cracks. Profits for the madmen of all sides...
Oh, I forgot. On my birthday they declared sanctions on Syria. Brilliant.
Andy sent me this link to the MNDoT online traffic report right now. The peak is coming down now, fortunately, but the West metro is really terrible. This afternoon I saw the Hiawatha project office, and it's coming along nicely. They will soon be officially announcing that the line partially opens in late June, as the plan stands so far.
Also the Northstar commuter rail line is coming together, as well, I think along Highway 10, which as you can see is badly jammed, even so far from the core of the metro, at 6 PM. Interesting stuff. Could two rail lines make a dramatic impact?
I have two term papers to write, so I probably won't be able to make posts for a while, perhaps until Tuesday. Yes that sucks, as there are exciting things going on with Bush's testimony, Iraq, Pakistan, etc. etc. I heard about Abu Ghraib prison torture and that's just incredible. I think I'll have to watch the 60 Minutes II special, which should be tonight. Also a large corp is preventing their TV affiliates from broadcasting the Nightline tribute to fallen soldiers. What the hell...
As ongoing sources I still recommend War In Context, Billmon, Talking Points Memo, Juan Cole, the Agonist.
Yes, folks, the light rail is now on its way back to us. I got ahold of a nice folding model of a light rail car. It is surprising how big the cars actually are. I visualized more bus-sized vehicles, but these are bigger. The bottom of the car has little printed factoids. Each car has a capacity of up to 190 passengers, with 66 seats. That's sweet!
For more info consult the DOT or MetroTransit Hiawatha website. (even WikiPedia?!)
Hurray that the strike is over--these things are going to be sweet! (I think more folding models might be available at the MetroTransit stores, and yes, the catenary arm is a little bent out of position on my pic)
Stay tuned for more light rail goodies.....
Walking to the Library this morning, the 63K line whizzed past me on Grand Avenue for the first time in well over a month.
I was so surprised that I hollered to the bus because finally they're back on the road!!!!
And now, finally, the Light Rail project can start moving closer to opening day. Thank God!!!!
The first serious thunderstorm of the season came over and WCCO switched to covering it during all these climactic moments in Bob Woodward's segment.
"And Cheney says to the Saudi Ambassador... Paul Douglas here--hailstorms and high winds in Sleepy Eye!!.... then the CIA director ran out of the room!"
Mike Wallace: "You don't say!"
It was disappointing. However most of the gritty details leaked out during the day and have been rounded up on the Internet.
We always knew the Saudis were venal Bush family supporters, but they actually promised to manipulate oil prices leading up to the election?! Damn!
Fun stuff will go down tomorrow, then.
A website did a poll of which Republican should hold the title of Honorariest Homosexual, and the winner was National Review dork John Derbyshire, but our illustrious Senator Coleman came in second with 25 or 22% of the votes. Way to go, Norm!
This via the entertaining wonkette.com.
I am supposed to write a proposal for my final paper in International Security class tonight. But given what's been happening the last few weeks, what can I address that isn't tearing apart like wet toilet paper? Where can I stand when the sands are shifting so? Is it possible to research and write on security in this snake pit? I'm hoping you guys might have suggestions!
This deserves to go first: a report from Haaretz that America plans to make 'implied' recognition of the illegal Israeli settlements. Holy land, gotta gotta get it!
U.S. assures Israel no retreat to 1967 lineBelow is my round-up on the Iraq and the Fallujah-mercenary issue, Pakistan, military-industrial corruption, the Uzbekistan aftermath, Clarkestorm 2004 and further Israel-Palestine tidbits. (crossposted on DKOS diary)
The U.S. will assure Israel that it will not have to withdraw to the Green Line in a future permanent settlement with the Palestinians.The promise appears in a letter of guarantees drafted by the American administration in exchange for Sharon's disengagement plan.
The U.S. rejected Israel's request to recognize the future annexation of the large settlement blocs in Ma'ale Adumim, Ariel and Etzion. Instead of referring explicitly to the settlements, the Americans propose a vaguely worded letter, which Israel would be able to present as implied recognition of the settlement blocs.
My special thanks go to those following the best of mainstream and alternative media every day at WarInContext. The Agonist is a news blitz all day long--they are making a full-time go at it. New frontiers of journalism or just obsessed people?
That's Robert Fisk reporting "Things are getting much worse in Iraq" today, a brutally honest British reporter who has given a totally different slant to the war, but then again he said it would be a quagmire from the very beginning. Juan Cole is an expert who just plain gets it:
Our hands were numb, recording all this, so swiftly did General Kimmitt take us through the little uptick [in violence].
A marine vehicle blown off the road near Fallujah, a marine killed, a second attack with small-arms fire on the same troops, an attack on an Iraqi paramilitary recruiting station on the 14th July Road, a soldier killed near Ramadi, two Britons hurt in Basra violence, a suicide bombing against the home of the Hillah police chief, an Iraqi shot at a checkpoint, US soldiers wounded in Mosul ... All this was just 17 hours before Fallujah civilians dragged the cremated remains of a Westerner through the streets of their city.
.....
But there was an interesting twist - horribly ironic in the face of yesterday's butchery - in General Kimmitt's narrative. Why, I asked him, did he refer sometimes to "terrorists" and at other times to "insurgents"? Surely if you could leap from being a terrorist to being an insurgent, then with the next little hop, skip and jump, you become a "freedom-fighter". Mr Senor gave the general one of his fearful looks. He needn't have bothered. General Kimmitt is a much smoother operator than his civilian counterpart. There were, the general explained, the Fallujah version who were insurgents, and then the al-Qa'ida version who attack mosques, hotels, religious festivals and who were terrorists.
So, it seems, there are now in Iraq good terrorists and bad terrorists, there are common-or-garden insurgents and supremely awful terrorists, the kind against which President George Bush took us to war in Iraq when there weren't any terrorists actually here, though there are now. And therein lies the problem. From inside the Green Zone on the banks of the Tigris, you can believe anything. How far can the occupying powers take war-spin before the world stops believing anything they say?
What would drive the crowd to this barbaric behavior? It is not that they are pro-Saddam any more, or that they hate "freedom." They are using a theater of the macabre to protest their occupation and humiliation by foreign armies. They were engaging in a role reversal, with the American cadavers in the position of the "helpless" and the "humiliated," and with themselves playing the role of the powerful monster that inscribes its will on these bodies.I was disturbed by the 'frenzy of violence' in Iraq, as the Star Tribune headline put it, although perhaps I see the frenzy occurring over a longer timeframe. The images they printed had a distinct Mogadishu overtone, it's hard to deny.This degree of hatred for the new order among ordinary people is very bad news. It helps explain why so few of the Sunni Arab guerrillas have been caught, since the locals hide and help them. It also seems a little unlikely that further US military action can do anything practical to put down this insurgency; most actions it could take would simply inflame the public against them all the more.
As recounted by Clarke in his book, and confirmed by documents provided to NEWSWEEK, Emerson and his former associate Rita Katz regularly provided the White House with a stream of information about possible Al Qaeda activity inside the United States that appears to have been largely unknown to the FBI prior to the September 11 terror attacks.In confidential memos and briefings that were sometimes conducted on a near weekly basis, Emerson and Katz furnished Clarke and his staff with the names of Islamic radical Web sites, the identities of possible terrorist front groups and the phone numbers and addresses of possible terror suspects—data they were unable to get from elsewhere in the government.
Experts say the bloodshed could signal the resurgence of the regional Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which has revitalized itself in the lawless Pakistan-Afghan border area, under the leadership of Tohir Yuldashev. Or it could point to a violent offshoot of the local, moderate Hizb-ut-Tahrir, fed up with years of brutal crackdowns by Uzbek President Islam Karimov on Islamic believers of all types.This Yuldashev character is being called the new "Al Qaeda leader" of the moment. Is he really internationally evil??
Well, that's about the most comprehensive war mosaic I can put together today.
So what the hell do I do about my final paper?
I've been wrapping up all kinds of things before break. This is shaping up to be a fantastic trip. Here are some scattered results of today:
After class today I helped Dan Schned work on the material he is putting together for the Hiawatha Line program, where he interns this semester. He has very exciting giant orthographic aerial photo composites of the Minneapolis-Bloomington route and all sorts of info on the planned corridor developments. I really like to see all these new development plans up close. If it works, then Minneapolis will start to grow up again, not further out.
Unfortunately, they were on schedule to open most of the light rail line in April, but the transit strike prevents drivers from training and the cars from being tested sufficiently. This really makes it hard for the LRT people to keep anything going.
With some time to waste this afternoon, I drove into Minneapolis to look at the rail line, along with a potential extension into the U of M. Both these places would benefit greatly from improved access. I went up to see the VA Hospital stop, as well. I'm not sure if people will enjoy riding in the big tunnel under the airport, though.
This evening, David has been over here adjusting his great artwork for the living room. Now he's adding colored chalk on some of the characters. I will post a photo of this when it's finally completed.
Arun is truly an iconic mack daddy of our times. That is all I can say.
I haven't done much reading about what the hell to do in London. Brits have advised me to ask at the pub.
Also I may try to go somewhere else for a day like Paris or Amsterdam. Wouldn't that be nice?
Sadly I won't have a digital camera to document things. I'll get a PhotoCD made, though.
I am probably going to stay up really late again tonight to adjust myself towards London time--I mean GMT.
It's the big campaign swing through town as John Edwards visits Carpenter Union Hall, at 700 Olive Street. it's down by the Capitol building, but east of 35-E. Dennis Kucinich will also be in town and down by the U. Is this all we're going to get, as they go after delegates in richer Super Tuesday pastures?
(MAP to the event)
A top story in the St. Paul Pioneer Press today described how Senator Dayton believes he was "lied to" by administration officials in briefings. (Dayton is fairly popular now) Dayton is on the Armed Services Cmte. I think it's high time that our often quiet senator stepped up and called them on it. Is it more a crime to lie to the people in the SotU or directly to senators in top secret committee meetings?
Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons, Dayton said he was told, and might be only a year away from having a nuclear bomb. And Saddam, already loaded with biological and chemical weapons, continued to plot with al-Qaida terrorists, Dayton, D-Minn., said he was informed.
"I think the American people were misinformed by assertions on the links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, and the state of the nuclear weapons program ? that Iraq had, or was about to obtain, an active nuclear bomb," Dayton said. "I felt lied to, I felt the American people were lied to, in both of those regards."...
From Dayton's viewpoint, the problem wasn't just raw intelligence data he heard during small meetings at the White House and in secure rooms in the U.S. Capitol. He's troubled by how the administration touted the most alarming scraps and rumors, he said, in an effort to sell the war -- and how he believes a false urgency was used in partisan ways to help the Republican cause.
Repeatedly in the fall of 2002, Dayton said, he heard intelligence professionals give measured, fragmented and sometimes speculative intelligence. But then, "Two or three days later, people (in the Bush administration) were representing that information (in public speeches) different than how it was presented to me.... They'd take something where the intelligence was making a qualified statement, and they'd make an unqualified assertion," Dayton said. Doubts about the information and contradictory data rarely surfaced during his dozen or so Iraq briefings with the Bush administration, Dayton said. In briefings of senators, few lawmakers got the opportunity to ask more than a question or two. Dayton said that limited opportunities to challenge the administration. "It was never suggested to us in any meaningful way that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction at all. ? That was presented as a given," Dayton said.
It's Julie Kim's birthday tomorrow. Happy Birthday Julie Kim!!!!! w00p w00p!!!
Katie approves of the exciting MovableType website engine. Yes.
Right now I've just sat down to write this major midterm paper for International Politics class, but I thought I ought to update the site quickly before I dive in. Fall break is coming right up, fortunately, and we are going to see Atmosphere at First Ave. this Friday, which should be excellent.
A significant event: Atmosphere makes a music video! You can see it here on Quicktime or via links on their site.
The big deal for me this week has been my Mac Weekly interview with Middle East expert, Columbia history professor and occasional Palestinian diplomat Rashid Khalidi, who presented his paper "The Past and Future of Democracy in the Middle East" at this year's Macalester Roundtable. I thought that he was an excellent and informed speaker, and it rather made my day when he spoke at length about the significance of that neo-con document, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," and how for him, it described a "template" for American-Israeli hegemony over the Middle East. This is decidedly a minority viewpoint today but I strongly believe it. When the history of the neo-con parlor game which produced the Iraq war is written, Khalidi's angle will be profoundly valuable. He also told me that Ahmed Chalabi is trying to purge Sunnis in Iraq and provoke a civil war. Also he told me that the Revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky provides much of the philosophical basis of neoconservatism. Want more?
Please look at my interview with Khalidi and the Roundtable story, which due to space had to be too short to provide details on his talk.
Also look at this collection of Iraqi children's drawings, which I found profoundly moving. (link Schwartz :)
Additionally there is Josh Marshall's review of "America Unbound," with an extensive critique of the neoconservative foreign policy experience, online now.
Soo now it's back to work. Damn midterms.
The Big cahuna himself is coming in to speak to Minnesota today at a microchip plant in Fridley. The plant is owned by a hardcore right winger who is on the board of the Center for the American Experiment, and a big wheel with the Taxpayers League. No surprise this cat was chosen.
Doubeya Troublya will be at the Micro Control facility, speaking at about 1:30. The facility is at 7956 Main St. NE in Fridley, just off University Ave. People are discussing what's to be done about the visit (maps are there), some carpools are going. The local Students Against War is running the carpools.
I'm going to try and check it out, we will see what this brings forth in Minnesota. Probably the same apathy as usual. Maybe not. I just personally feel I have to go express some discontent on behalf of all my employed friends.
Today's Star Tribune features a story on the conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Paul Wellstone. Most likely it was a random accident, but as Ted Rall said, we can't ignore the remote possibility of a harsh government killing its most powerful liberal opponent. Was Wellstone worth assassinating? I think so. i think my favorite theory is the electromagnetic pulse assassination:
Discounting weather, pilot error or mechanical problems in Wellstone's flight, Fetzer's articles have seized on the possibility of sabotage brought on by a futuristic electromagnetic pulse weapon that he said could have disabled the plane's computerized components. Evidence for this, he said in an interview, was the absence of any distress call from the pilots and the odd cell-phone experience reported by St. Louis County lobbyist John Ongaro.Ongaro, who was near the airport when Wellstone's plane went down, has dismissed the significance of his experience, in which he said his cell phone made "strange" sounds and then disconnected. "It's not unusual for cell phones to cut out, especially in northern Minnesota," he said.
The Democrats are conflicted, believe it or not. Kerry and Dean are dickering with each other, as Dean has been the most outspoken, grassroots oriented Democrat to run. Is there a conflict between the D grassroots, (Wellstone's bread and butter), versus the Democratic national leadership? (link Nick)
The contest for the 2004 Democratic nomination cannot be understood apart from two factors. One is the intense opposition to Bush at the Democratic grass roots. The other is the widely held sense that the party's older strategies and internal arguments are inadequate to its current problems. Candidates can't win if they address only one of these concerns. But addressing both at the same time will require a political magic that Democrats haven't seen yet.
Private schools in Minnesota are undergoing a growth spurt, according to an article in today's Strib. Would Mounds Park do something similar? Well, you gotta keep up with Blake and Minnehaha, dontcha?
Nick was happy with Thomas Friedman in the times yesterday, talking a big game about the whole theory of everything and generally disreputing the usual targets. Friedman is funny, I like to think of him as this guy from St. Louis Park, travelling about on an exciting personal journey to illuminate the whole everything (particularly the Middle East) for confused American liberals. Yet he seems to sugarcoat the corruption inherent in the way America has managed so much. Does he pull it off?
Why didn't nations organize militarily against the U.S.? Michael Mandelbaum, author of "The Ideas That Conquered the World," answers: "One prominent international relations school ? the realists ? argues that when a hegemonic power, such as America, emerges in the global system other countries will naturally gang up against it. But because the world basically understands that America is a benign hegemon, the ganging up does not take the shape of warfare. Instead, it is an effort to Gulliverize America, an attempt to tie it down, using the rules of the World Trade Organization or U.N. ? and in so doing demanding a vote on how American power is used."Oh dear, the lack of weapons of mass destruction is blowing a mess all over the place. Paul Krugman is pounding away as usual today on the Bush crew and their addiction to 'spin.'
There is another reason for this nonmilitary response. America's emergence as the hyperpower is happening in the age of globalization, when economies have become so intertwined that China, Russia, France or any other rivals cannot hit the U.S. without wrecking their own economies.
The only people who use violence are rogues or nonstate actors with no stakes in the system, such as Osama bin Laden. Basically, he is in a civil war with the Saudi ruling family. But, he says to himself, "The Saudi rulers are insignificant. To destroy them you have to hit the hegemonic power that props them up ? America."
Hence, 9/11. This is where the story really gets interesting. Because suddenly, Puff the Magic Dragon ? a benign U.S. hegemon touching everyone economically and culturally ? turns into Godzilla, a wounded, angry, raging beast touching people militarily. Now, people become really frightened of us, a mood reinforced by the Bush team's unilateralism. With one swipe of our paw we smash the Taliban. Then we turn to Iraq. Then the rest of the world says, "Holy cow! Now we really want a vote over how your power is used." That is what the whole Iraq debate was about. People understood Iraq was a war of choice that would affect them, so they wanted to be part of the choosing. We said, sorry, you don't pay, you don't play.
It's long past time for this administration to be held accountable. Over the last two years we've become accustomed to the pattern. Each time the administration comes up with another whopper, partisan supporters ? a group that includes a large segment of the news media ? obediently insist that black is white and up is down. Meanwhile the "liberal" media report only that some people say that black is black and up is up. And some Democratic politicians offer the administration invaluable cover by making excuses and playing down the extent of the lies.Sounds like nothing but liberal excuses to me. Bill O'Reilly and Al Franken got in a huge argument over liberal media bias on CSPAN. However what was shown on TV was edited to provide its own perspective. (The fair and balanced Fox News story) I can't seem to find a transcript of the argument around, but here is a story about the whole book fair they were at, which seems to have been overtly political this year. (AP)If this same lack of accountability extends to matters of war and peace, we're in very deep trouble. The British seem to understand this: Max Hastings, the veteran war correspondent ? who supported Britain's participation in the war ? writes that "the prime minister committed British troops and sacrificed British lives on the basis of a deceit, and it stinks."
Galleries of March 22 St. Paul events:
Then I went along the big protest march, starting at Macalester and going down Summit to Victoria St., through Victoria Crossing and back up Grand Ave. The protest got between 5,000 and 7,000 people going, with more onlookers. After starting out at the front of the march, I worked my way back taking tons of photos. It was huge and varied collection of people: families, anarchists, immigrants, Mac kids, Mr. Ethier, Arabs, hippies, true Christians and Buddhists. If you have some time I suggest you go straight through and look at all the pictures.
