Justice Dept "Influence of Drug Trafficking Organizations" in the United States; Various theories connecting 9/11 to Sibel Edmonds, drug money, heroin, PROMIS and those Israelis watched by the DEA

"When I ran into the drugs I was told that if I mentioned the money to the drugs around 9/11 that would be the end of me."

--Indira Singh

The 9/11 terror plot itself, intersected with the activities of a drug trafficking network of international scope, in ways that form a "crystal clear" picture of what was going on -- to quote Sibel Edmonds.

Fintan Dunne, Editor BreakForNews.com (at this link, Daniel Ellsberg's support of Edmonds is noted - Ellsberg was cool on Colbert Report this week)

SIBEL: Essentially, there is only one investigation – a very big one, an all-inclusive one. Completely by chance, I, a lowly translator, stumbled over one piece of it. But I can tell you there are a lot of people involved, a lot of ranking officials, and a lot of illegal activities that include multi-billion-dollar drug-smuggling operations, black-market nuclear sales to terrorists and unsavory regimes, you name it. And of course a lot of people from abroad are involved. It's massive. So to do this investigation, to really do it, they will have to look into everything.

CD: But you can start from anywhere –

SIBEL: That's the beauty of it. You can start from the AIPAC angle. You can start from the Plame case. You can start from my case. They all end up going to the same place, and they revolve around the same nucleus of people. There may be a lot of them, but it is one group. And they are very dangerous for all of us.

'The Stakes Are Too High for Us to Stop Fighting Now', An interview with FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds by Christopher Deliso

Now THIS is what I call a map. This comes directly from the National Drug Intelligence Center in the Department of Justice, National Drug Threat Assessment 2006, January 2006. Today I'm going to post a lot of stuff that I certainly don't consider the Gospel Truth. It's purely for your careful consideration with barrels of salt. So let's kick things off with the DOJ:

And this is just funny. I suspect the purple patches are notorious 'rebel zones' in the War on Drugs, where the federal and state government policies have split apart entirely. But they forgot eastern Tennessee... and of course everywhere else.

We will be returning to the one about the Russian-Israeli crime organizations. Florida drug money is connected to some of the loose ends around 9/11. The 9/11 drug money connection has many potential angles, but first note here that the DEA marks Miami as a key heroin and cocaine distribution area.

Now we're going into stuff that seems hard to believe, and beyond here, I don't claim that any of these people are telling the truth.

This is just a small slice of the material on the internet about how the rich & powerful skim huge amounts of cash out of the addicted masses of America through the profitable geopolitics of illicit drugs. Some people claim there is a strong connection between drug trafficking and 9/11 financing. Certainly all the players in Afghanistan since 1979 have been up to their ears in it, including the CIA and its favored contractors (who make up around half the CIA personnel these days).

This is certainly part of a trend towards the criminalization of war, which corresponds to the increasing privatization of war. We will have more on this angle in the coming days. Even if there are no operational links to the real September 11 conspiracy itself, the drug-militarization angle really needs to be investigated seriously, perhaps by a Democratic Congress with subpoena and immunity powers. Even snooping at possible loose 9/11 connections immediately reveals a world awash in drug money, with Bush and the Establishment generating vast cash flows from conflict zones - and enforcing loyalties among players from Afghanistan to South America by aligning these cash flows with military force. Sometimes privatized paramilitary forces. Why not?

"Kill the Messenger:" Sibel Edmonds is on the radar a bit more than usual, as they have apparently whipped up a documentary to expose more of her surreal role in the weird world of intelligence after 9/11, named appropriately enough, Kill the Messenger. (perhaps she shouldn't be trusted, one guy suggests) A blog supporting Edmonds' film, sibeledmonds.blogspot.com is operated by Lukery at wotisitgood4.blogspot.com, who has covered her case in detail. To recap what I have posted before, Edmonds worked as a translator at the FBI, where she discovered a conspiracy within her unit to cover up a Turkish espionage ring in the United States. One of her co-translators was spoofing the wiretaps for FBI agents, and when Edmonds tried to bring this to her superiors, they suppressed the whole thing. Also Dennis Hastert was taking big bribes from the Turks, and there is some kind of global nuclear parts trafficking conspiracy connected to the AQ Khan network and some Israeli mobster types - probably Marc Rich type guys. The guys running the secret nuclear trafficking network were enemies of the CIA's Brewster-Jennings counter-proliferation operations and Valerie Plame, adding yet another twisted concourse to that scandal. And the AIPAC stuff and Chalabi are laterally related, since so much of it revolves around the same neo-con cats in DC and their foreign allies.

Lukery summarized:

Sibel makes 2 specific related claims: a) Sibel claims that she has information which proves that senior officials knew that there were plans to attack America months before 9/11.

Specifically: "There was general information about the time-frame, about methods to be used but not specifically about how they would be used and about people being in place and who was ordering these sorts of terror attacks. There were other cities that were mentioned. Major cities with skyscrapers." and "President Bush said they had no specific information about 11 September and that is accurate but only because he said 11 September," she said. There was, however, general information about the use of airplanes and that an attack was just months away."
b) Sibel claims that she has evidence of a global multi-billion dollar smuggling/dealing network of weapons and drug which is hidden in plain view. Of course, there is also the requisite money-laundering infrastructure. She claims that the network comprises senior american government officials, terrorists, and 'unsavoury regimes.'

and they merge, giving us: "drug trafficking, money laundering, foreign names and American names directly involved in the financing of the 9-11 attacks on WTC (World Trade Center) and the Pentagon."

After a mere 3 months in the FBI, Edmonds publicly claims that all this stuff was going on, covered up at numerous levels in the federal government – though Ashcroft-era gag orders prevent her from sharing many aspects of the story. A virtual hailstorm of individual criminal conspiracies, involving top neo-cons, drug trafficking, all kinds of crazy shit. She has mentioned Coleen Rowley as an ally in the whistleblower field.

There is another potential side to this: Edmonds is herself possibly a red herring, a player or a dupe in the conspiracy, posing as an opponent. Conspiracy gurus suggest she might be a "limited hangout," or a channel to expose parts of the story, and fill other parts with disinformation. Edmonds comes from a prominent family in Turkey, so perhaps she has a bit of Turkish partisanship against some groups back home. One blogger named xymphora suggested she speaks the conspiracy-ese a bit too well:

"Edmonds sometimes makes me a bit nervous as she seems overly adept with the terms and arguments of conspiracy theory for someone who is supposed to have been a lowly FBI translator (it's like she's been reading Peter Dale Scott!). Is she part of the battle in Washington between the Bush Administration enablers involved in the drugs/arms business who don't mind directly or indirectly supporting al Qaeda if it is good for business, and those old-fashioned types who still consider that dealing with American enemies is treason?"

And she gives interviews with patently crazy people like Tom Flocco. Here is a fragment tying some of the neo-cons to some nasty shit:

Although Grossman "has not been as high profile in the press" FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds cryptically told me the other day, "don't overlook him – he is very important." She was not speaking about the Plame affair, though Grossman did indeed have a key role there, as we will see.

According to her, Grossman was one of three officials – the other two, she says, are Richard Perle and Douglas Feith – who had been watched by both Valerie Plame's Brewster Jennings & Associates CIA team, and by the major FBI investigation of organized crime and governmental corruption on which she herself was working until being terminated in April 2002.

Marc Grossman has served in a number of interesting countries and positions over the past 29 years. From 1976-1983, at a pivotal point in the Cold War, he was employed at the U.S. embassy in Pakistan – America's key regional ally, through which millions of dollars in weapons and other "aid" were delivered by Pakistan's ISI intelligence service to the mujahedin following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

Grossman is definitely part of the Valerie Plame scandal, no doubt.
Well, it all still makes her story worth adding to the mixture. Here is the documentary trailer. Please let's take some bets if this will be aired in the United States.

Florida drug money angles (and there are many!) There was this funny story about one of the flight school proprietors in Florida who trained the 9/11 hijackers. The flight school owner was caught with 43 pounds of heroin just after the 9/11 hijackers got to his school, and somehow this story never got fully explored. See MadCowProd.com for a lot of amusing tales of south Floridian drug trafficking. It's worth considering what the site's proprietor Daniel Hopsicker says, "THE 9.11 HEROIN CONNECTION" is "The Biggest Censored Story of the 21st Century." He cites Thomas Pynchon: "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers."

More recently, and quite funny, is the "SkyWay Aircraft" case, where Tom DeLay's buddy + Homeland Security defense contractor accidentally getting busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine on a DC9 connected with the Titan defense contractor. Naturally, the DEA ducking and covering from obvious political pressure ensued. Good times. And perhaps this link is connected to Zacharias Moussaoui and 9/11 financing. (Bonus: MadCowProd says Adnan Kashoggi finances the 9/11 Truth Movement? Now that's what I call a conspiracy!)

Ruppert on Hawalas, PTECH, PROMIS, 9/11 and some heroin networks, BCCI-style. From Mike Ruppert's FromTheWilderness.com last year, "PTECH, 9/11, and USA-SAUDI TERROR: PART II" which offers some evidence that PROMIS software connected to 9/11, and possible narcotics / heroin money connections to 9/11. Ruppert himself offers a theory that advanced software like PROMIS was capable of manipulating computers throughout the financial sphere and the federal government. Ruppert's book Crossing the Rubicon suggests that Dick Cheney could have executed 9/11 himself by using PROMIS and other whizbang technologies to, for example, insert extra radar blips in air traffic control towers across America. It seems kind of like a Deus Ex Machina conspiracy argument to me, but it is still an interesting, if far-fetched hypothetical argument that raises serious questions about how PROMIS and the rest of the fed's information technology really is run. At a dense 675 pages, crossing the Rubicon is one hell of a book, summarized thusly:

"In my book I make several key points:
1. I name Vice President Richard Cheney as the prime suspect in the mass murders of 9/11 and will establish that, not only was he a planner in the attacks, but also that on the day of the attacks he was running a completely separate Command, Control and Communications system which was superceding any orders being issued by the FAA, the Pentagon, or the White House Situation Room;
2. I establish conclusively that in May of 2001, by presidential order, Richard Cheney was put in direct command and control of all wargame and field exercise training and scheduling through several agencies, especially FEMA. This also extended to all of the conflicting and overlapping NORAD drills -- some involving hijack simulations -- taking place on that day.
3. I demonstrate that the TRIPOD II exercise being set up on Sept. 10th in Manhattan was directly connected to Cheney's role in the above.
4. I also prove conclusively that a number of public officials, at the national and New York City levels, including then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, were aware that flight 175 was en route to lower Manhattan for 20 minutes and did nothing to order the evacuation of, or warn the occupants of the South Tower. One military officer was forced to leave his post in the middle of the attacks and place a private call to his brother - who worked at the WTC - warning him to get out. That was because no other part of the system was taking action.
5. I also show that the Israeli and British governments acted as partners with the highest levels of the American government to help in the preparation and, very possibly, the actual execution of the attacks."
"There is more reason to be afraid of not facing the evidence in this book than of facing what is in it."

Approach #2: Peter Dale Scott's "The Global Drug Meta-Group: Drugs, Managed Violence, and the Russian 9/11". haven't looked through all of it, but it seems an interesting source to begin looking at how the gears really turn in Central Asia and thereabouts.

it also seems possible that the U.S. government might contemplate using Hizb ut-Tahrir and the meta-group for political changes in Russia itself, even while combating the Islamism of al-Qaeda elsewhere. This would be far from the first time that the U.S. Government had used drug-trafficking proxies as assets, and would do a lot to explain the role of the U.S. in 2001 in restoring major drug traffickers to power in Afghanistan. Dubious figures like Nukhaev, Khodorkovskii, and Khashoggi have already shown their interest in such initiatives; and western business interests have shown their eagerness to work with these allies of the meta-group.

It is fitting to think of most U.S. intelligence assets as chess pieces, moved at the whim of their controllers. That is however not an apt metaphor for the meta-group, which clearly has the resources to negotiate and to exert its own influence interactively upon the governments it works with.

Since first hearing about the meta-group's role in the Russian 9/11, I have pondered the question whether it could have played a similar role in the American 9/11 as well. At this point I have to say that I have found no persuasive evidence that would prove its involvement. The fact remains that two informed and credible witnesses, Sibell Edmonds and Indira Singh, have spoken independently of the importance of international drug trafficking in the background of 9/11.

The Bush Administration has paid Sibell Edmonds the tribute of silencing her on the grounds of national interest. She has nonetheless made it clear that what she would talk about concerns that part of the world where the meta-group has influence:

SE [Sibel Edmonds]: It's interesting, in one of my interviews, they say "Turkish countries," but I believe they meant Turkic countries – that is, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and all the 'Stans, including Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and [non-Turkic countries like] Afghanistan and Pakistan. All of these countries play a big part in the sort of things I have been talking about.

CD [Chris Deliso]: What, you mean drug-smuggling?

SE: Among other things. Yes, that is a major part of it. It's amazing that in this whole "war on terror" thing, no one ever talks about these issues.[120]

Indira Singh, who lost her high-tech job at J.P. Morgan after telling the FBI about Ptech and 9/11, was even more dramatic in her public testimony at a Canadian event:

I did a number of things in my research and when I ran into the drugs I was told that if I mentioned the money to the drugs around 9/11 that would be the end of me.[121]

The False Dilemmas of 9/11 Theories

I said earlier that by suppressing awareness of the role of drug-trafficking in our society, we give drug traffickers a de facto franchise to exert political influence without criticism or opposition. An example of this is the discussion of 9/11 in America, which usually fails to consider the meta-group among the list of possible suspects.

I have tried to suggest in this paper that in fact the meta-group had both motive – to restore the Afghan opium harvest and increase instability and chaos along the trade routes through Central Asia – and opportunity – to utilize its contacts with both al-Zawahiri in al Qaeda and the CIA in Washington. It is furthermore the best candidate to explain one of the more difficult anomalies (or indeed paradoxes) of the clues surrounding 9/11: that many of the clues lead in the direction of Saudi Arabia, but some lead also in a very different direction, towards Israel.[122]

Here it is worth quoting again the well-informed remark of a Washington insider about the meta-group's predecessor, BCCI: "Who else could wire something together to Saudi Arabia, China, Israel, and the U.S.?"[123] The current meta-group fills the same bill, for it unites supporters of Muslim Salafism (Saidov) with at least one Israeli citizen (Kosman).

The meta-group's involvement in the Russian 9/11 of course does nothing to prove its involvement in the American one. However awareness of its presence – as an unrecognized Force X operating in the world – makes previous discussions of 9/11 seem curiously limited. Again and again questions of responsibility have been unthinkingly limited to false dilemmas in which the possible involvement of this or any other Force X is excluded.

An early example is Michael Moore's naïve question to President Bush in Dude, Where's My Country: "Who attacked the United States on September 11 – a guy on dialysis from a cave in Afghanistan, or your friends, Saudi Arabia?"[124] A far more widespread dilemma is that articulated by David Ray Griffin in his searching critique of the 9/11 Commission Report:

There are two basic theories about 9/11. Each of these theories is a "conspiracy theory." One of these is the official conspiracy theory, according to which the attacks of 9/11 were planned and executed solely by al-Qaeda terrorists under the guidance of Osama bin Laden....Opposing this official theory is the [sic] alternative conspiracy theory, which holds that the attacks of 9/11 were able to succeed only because they were facilitated by the Bush administration and its agencies.[125]

Griffin of course is not consciously excluding a third possible theory – that a Force X was responsible. But his failure to acknowledge this possibility is an example of the almost universal cultural denial I referred to earlier. In America few are likely to conceive of the possibility that a force in contact with the U.S. government could be not just an asset, but a force exerting influence on that government.

My personal suggestion to 9/11 researchers is that they focus on the connections of the meta-group's firm Far West, Ltd. – in particular those which lead to Khashoggi, Berezovskii, Halliburton and Dick Cheney, and Diligence, Joe Allbaugh, and Neil Bush.

As a grain of salt, we should remember that Florida is so thoroughly laden with drug money that it is quite likely people would catch false leads to September 11 among the huge forest of shady people getting rich from the Business. The loose end about how the DEA was tracking Israelis who lived virtually around the corner from the 9/11 hijackers is an interesting one, but perhaps the density of shady business in Hollywood, Florida is just that high, one block of criminal enterprises after another. This IS Florida we're talking about.

The Israeli 9/11 angles are still worth checking out – the supposed Mossad front company Urban Moving Systems and the rest. From one of America's most respected Jewish periodicals, Forward:

Spy Rumors Fly on Gusts of Truth: Americans Probing Reports of Israeli Espionage
MARCH 15, 2002
By MARC PERELMAN, FORWARD STAFF

"Despite angry denials by Israel and its American supporters, reports that Israel was conducting spying activities in the United States may have a grain of truth, the Forward has learned.

However, far from pointing to Israeli spying against U.S. government and military facilities, as reported in Europe last week, the incidents in question appear to represent a case of Israelis in the United States spying on a common enemy, radical Islamic networks suspected of links to Middle East terrorism.

In particular, a group of five Israelis arrested in New Jersey shortly after the September 11 attacks and held for more than two months was subjected to an unusual number of polygraph tests and interrogated by a series of government agencies including the FBI's counterintelligence division, which by some reports remains convinced that Israel was conducting an intelligence operation. The five Israelis worked for a moving company with few discernable assets that closed up shop immediately afterward and whose owner fled to Israel.

Other allegations involved Israelis claiming to be art students who had backgrounds in signal interception and ordnance. (See related story, Page 8.)

Sources emphasized that the release of all the Israelis under investigation indicates that they were cleared of any suspicion that they had prior knowledge of the September 11 attacks, as some anti-Israel media outlets have suggested.

The resulting tensions between Washington and Jerusalem, sources told the Forward, arose not because of the operations' targets but because Israel reportedly violated a secret gentlemen's agreement between the two countries under which espionage on each other's soil is to be coordinated in advance.

Most experts and former officials interviewed for this article said that such so-called unilateral or uncoordinated Israeli monitoring of radical Muslims in America would not be surprising. In fact, they said, Israeli intelligence played a key role in helping the Bush administration to crack down on Islamic charities suspected of funneling money to terrorist groups, most notably the Richardson, Texas-based Holy Land Foundation last December.

"I have no doubt Israel has an interest in spying on those groups," said Peter Unsinger, an intelligence expert who teaches justice administration at San Jose University. "The Israelis give us good stuff, like on the Hamas charities." According to one former high-ranking American intelligence official, who asked not to be named, the FBI came to the conclusion at the end of its investigation that the five Israelis arrested in New Jersey last September were conducting a Mossad surveillance mission and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, N.J., served as a front.

After their arrest, the men were held in detention for two-and-a-half months and were deported at the end of November, officially for visa violations. However, a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI concluded that at least two of them were in fact Mossad operatives, according to the former American official, who said he was regularly briefed on the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials.

"The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it," he said. "The conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local Arabs but that they could leave because they did not know anything about 9/11."

However, he added, the bureau was "very irritated because it was a case of so-called unilateral espionage, meaning they didn't know about it."

Spokesmen for the FBI, the Justice Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to discuss the case. Israeli officials flatly dismissed the allegations as untrue. However, the former American official said that after American authorities confronted Jerusalem on the issue at the end of last year, the Israeli government acknowledged the operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington.

The five men — Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Omer Marmari and Yaron Shmuel — were arrested eight hours after the attacks by the Bergen County, N.J., police while driving in an Urban Moving Systems van. The police acted on an FBI alert after the men allegedly were seen acting strangely while watching the events from the roof of their warehouse and the roof of their van............

A retired corporate lawyer, Gerald Shea, put together all the government reports on Israeli DEA groups he could find, and corroborated the locations of Israeli groups the DEA monitored and where in Florida the 9/11 hijackers lived when they were training. The results had interesting geographic distribution (which correlates with the Russian-Israeli organizations in Florida admittedly monitored by the Department of Justice as I noted above). These maps are from the Shea's PDF file:

All righty then. That's a lot of heady stuff to consider. I'll note again that I am not a true believer in anything in today's post. I just want to offer some of the interesting things out there on the internet today. I strongly believe that the Republican establishment in America today is very complicit in international drug trafficking – especially since we've got a lot of the same guys who ran cocaine angles in Central America during the Iran-Contra affair. Past behavior is a guide towards future actions, if not ironclad proof.

Arbitrage is power: the buying and selling of goods across geographic space supports the global "shadow economy" that makes up a huge proportion of economic activity. Whoever controls the space, controls the money. Half of Afghanistan's economy is heroin production, for example. Follow the cash: it's one heck of a loose end of September 11, and the war on terror.

Go vote in the primary already!

Primaries are going on in Minnesota today and you should roll over to that.

The Star Tribune has a nice feature on their site called MyVote that tells you where to go and what the choices are.

Turnout is usually pretty low so your vote makes a bigger difference than the general, and for matters like the DFL 5th district (of which I am not a part), it's way more important than the November election. Best of luck to all the candidates, especially, here, Judge Ostby, who threw out my charges after I got arrested because the police tampered with evidence!!

Ellison endorsed by local American Jewish World paper

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.’

Somalia: D'OH! Another fine moment in foreign policy; Odds of Minneapolis West Bank Islamic militia takeover = 3%

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.

Pawlenty: Shrewd Moves in MN transportation, Borat movie on the way

The long promised Lots of Goodies:

Dear Leader Pawlenty has seen the massive 35W-Highway 62 crosstown rebuilding/redesign fall apart, because for some reason he thought that since the state doesn't have the money, he could convince contractors to shoulder the costs themselves, and pay them back later.

I am drinking two cups of coffee now so I can drill through all-a this. First of all see the Ali G video with TV news anchor Sam Donaldson. He's a game guest, in particular with repeating Cohen's obscene gestures. There was a trailer for a new Borat movie this fall but it got taken down by Fox within hours. JAGSHEMASH! Can Cohen stay sharp with Borat and Ali G, or will people be sick of it by then? I don't know, but the many Borat clips on YouTube are sweet.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone's "Favorite memo ever": watering down the South Park movie to satisfy the MPAA: (via the excellent celebrity-jabber What Would Tyler Durden Do? site)

More coming in a bit. The coffee is making me flush so I'm gonna take a shower

Sometimes you gotta have a life

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.

What am I doing here?

There is another round of the Minnesota state Republican Convention at 8 AM today (Saturday). I'm crashing now, got up hella early at 8 Friday too. David (i.e. "Roy")'s fan belt ripped apart when he stopped by to check the scene. Therefore he's snoozing on the futon now. More later. In the meantime, look at this Hades-esque situation. Pawlenty was speaking at the time. There are a lot of strange details to say later. For now, this photo says it all. No editing here at all - Blood Red is Gubernatorial.

State Republican convention investigations

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.

Northstar, Red Rock rail lines score $$ from Legislature, but Bupkis for Central Corridor

Quality times at The Artists' Quarter last night. B3 Organ Night, AKA AQuesday, is pretty much the cornerstone of St. Paul culture, Mickey's Diner being the other cornerstone.

At the end of this session, fairly good news all around for transit in the Twin Cities, and the relatively astronomical gas prices definitely seem to be pushing these projects past the Legislature's tipping point. Every day I see lots of people commuting downtown on the buses belonging to the various suburban transit authorities like Maple Grove. The Strib reported that basically ridership is WAY up right now, to the point where some suburban routes are almost breaking even. Delightful! (I don't feel like talking about the stadiums. As always, circuses win over bread. Shocking.)

I got a happy notice yesterday from the Northstar guys:

Dear Daniel,

This weekend, the Minnesota Legislature overwhelmingly approved a bonding bill that includes $60 million for Northstar Commuter Rail. This was the final state commitment needed for construction of the state's first commuter rail line. The Governor is expected to sign the bill into law in the coming days, which will allow the state to seek federal matching funds for construction of the Northstar project.

The Northstar Corridor Development Authority (NCDA) will complete its application to the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) for a 50 percent federal funding match. The FTA recently provided encouragement for the project to proceed with final design and hopes to lock in its funding by this fall.

Northstar's success at the State Capitol is in large part due to the help of thousands of supporters like you. Thanks for your support! We're on track for Northstar to begin carrying passengers in 2009!
Duane Grandy
NCDA
Chair

For more local advocacy on this check Transit for Livable Communities. The Red Rock Corridor also managed to get some preliminary planning funding from the Legislature. Red Rock would run from downtown St. Paul to Hastings:

Unfortunately, the Central Corridor, the planned rail or rapid bus connection between downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul, did not score any cash at all for preliminary funding.

There are currently public meetings on the Central Corridor, so things will take a while to shake out, I guess. More on that stuff here and here in the PioPress and Strib here. People seem mostly positive., Literally right now, as I was about to post this, I got the following email from Transit for Livable Communities:

Dear Dan,

The final public hearing on the Central Corridor Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) is tonight. TLC encourages transit advocates to testify at this hearing and get your voice heard.

TLC endorses light rail transit as the best alternative on the corridor, and we urge you to support this position strongly in your comments. However, we agree there are many additional issues that must be addressed by the counties and cities over the next two years. We suggest that you identify them in your comments as well.

For more information, please see the resources below that explain TLC's support for LRT and present other key issues that need to be addressed for the corridor's success. (The links will take you to our website.)
TLC's Position Statement on Central Corridor
TLC's Tips on How to Testify
TLC's Talking Points For LRT on Central Corridor
Other Resources (Maps, FAQ's, and more)

Background on the Central Corridor DEIS Process

The Ramsey County Regional Railroad Authority is required to complete a Central Corridor Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS). The statement provides a description of current transportation conditions in the corridor and describes three transit options for the corridor:

1: Improvements to the current bus system
2: Bus Rapid Transit - BRT has buses running on a separate, dedicated right of way or on city streets but separated from other traffic. BRT could run on University Avenue but would be mixed with traffic at the University of Minnesota and in the downtowns of Minneapolis and St. Paul.
3: Light Rail Transit - LRT features electric trains running on tracks, located either on city streets or separate from streets and traffic. The trains can be relatively short, with two or three cars. LRT could run on University Avenue.

The DEIS document is available on the Central Corridor website www.centralcorridor.org and at local libraries in print form. The DEIS answers five key questions:

1. What do Central Corridor stakeholders say they need from a transit system?
How does each option enhance mobility and accessibility for area residents and visitors?
2. What is the effect on economic development?
3. What is the impact on nearby communities and the environment?
4. What is the cost to build each option?

How can the public get involved?
It is important for this planning effort to reflect the community's views about this issue. The final public hearing for the Central Corridor Draft Environmental Impact Statement is tonight:
Wednesday, May 24, 6:30 PM, Central High School, 275 North Lexington Parkway, St. Paul. An open house for questions and answers will precede the hearing from 3:30 to 6:30 PM.

How to Comment on the DEIS:
You can submit your comments during the 45-day comment period, which ends on June 5, 2006[......]
What happens next?:
After this comment period, and in consideration of comments received, the Central Corridor Coordinating Committee will make a recommendation on a preferred alternative to the Metropolitan Council in June. The Metropolitan Council will select the locally preferred alternative. The Preliminary Engineering phase, once federal approvals are received, can then begin on the selected alternative--this process is expected to take 2 years.

Maybe I will go to that but probably not. I suppose I would see folks I know. Well, the gears are definitely turning and all that shit in the Mideast is helping push it along. I guess there is a small local advantage to total national catastrophe?

Daily Kos makes it to Minneapolis today

I am going over to see Markos Moulitsas Zúniga at Arise Books at noon. Hell yah. Then probably go drinking. That's as good as it gets in the Blogosphere. MNSpeak notes:

Internationally known blogger and new age political pundit Markos "Daily Kos" Zuniga will be in town today for his "Crashing the Gate" book tour. Markos will be autographing books starting at noon at the Arise! Bookstore. Then he will be doing an interview on All Things Considered at 2:30 until 3:00 pm, and finally the Lambert and Janecek Show from 5:00 until 5:30 pm. Following that, he will be swinging by Drinking Liberally at the 331 Club in the evening for the after party.

Minneapolis, MN
Tuesday, May 2nd, 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
Reception at 331 Club
Hosted by Drinking Liberally - Minneapolis Chapter
331 Northeast 13th Avenue
Minneapolis, MN

Also tomorrow:
St. Paul, MN
Wednesday, May 3rd, 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m.
Breakfast at Louisiana Cafe
613 Selby Ave
St. Paul, MN

Winning the Macalester Lottery and seeking Global One World Government approval: I shake Kofi's hand; plus antiwar protest notes

This is a belated note from the Springfest/Kofi/CheebaDANZA weekend. Springfest kicked ass, the weather held out, the organizers put on an excellent event. I couldn't say any more without risking a federal indictment. And the next day, my roommate offered me a ticket to go see Kofi Annan. I was pretty scrubby, which was exactly how it ought to be.

I still have some backdoor access around Macalester, so when I got rejected (ticket in hand) from the Kofi speech, after marveling at the bitching donors who believed their millions could get them into the Fieldhouse, I managed to sneak into the lunch, and get a seat way up near the front. This, in turn, has caused me to appear in Macalester Propaganda:

As the least well-dressed lunch guest, with the filthy jeans I grabbed running out the door at 8:20 that morning, all was right. The venerable and well-dressed Alex Flores (looking up at far right in the photo above) took three good photos.

As he went down these stairs, surrounded by shrewd members of the State Department security detail, I went to Kagin's side elevator, down to the ground floor. A Mac guard ushered me out of the building with some other folks, but I lingered near the entrance. In no time, Kofi popped around the corner, I asked if I could shake his hand, and I wished him luck.

Along with Springfest and a variety of shadow activities, I pretty much hit the Macalester triple bank shot that weekend... Finally mastered the damn place, about two years too late.

As for the University antiwar protest, well damn, it was really rainy. But still entertaining. I would say that I liked it when the protesters hit the military recruiters' office with metaphorical red paint. (photo from MN Daily story)

However, as recent news stories about police investigations of protests at the 2004 New York Republican convention reveal, the cops look at any potential illegal protest conduct as a probable cause to search you and wiretap you and whatever else. Therefore if a dangerous internet anarchist terrorist like me were to say "that was pretty sweet when they painted the recruiters' office," this would apparently justify total surveillance for the rest of my life.

In any case, I thought it was ironic that they arrested several protesters while the adjacent police horses pooped all over the sidewalk. Red paint and manure was everywhere. But we ought to call it "terrorist latex" and "freedom cakes".

Ducking probable cause and pneumonia - photo by Jenny @ the U

Concert at MCTC nixed, student walkout organizers threatened

I'll throw in this bit from Citypages. looks like the news broke that the concert was cancelled yesterday. Fucking weak, it's CheebaDANZA all over again:

City Pages - The Blotter - Kids Don't Follow: April 27, 8:48 PM

Kids Don't Follow

In what is being described by organizers as "the largest youth antiwar demonstration in Minnesota since the Vietnam era," thousands of students are planning to walk out of classes tomorrow in protest of the war in Iraq and military recruitment in schools. But at least two area schools (Central and Jefferson) are threatening students with suspension. The students will hold a press conference this afternoon at 3:30 at Minneapolis Technical and Community College (1501 Hennepin Ave., Mpls.), the site of a proposed peace concert for tomorrow that also got unplugged. Here are the students' statements:

Appeal from Jefferson High students

We are three students from Jefferson High School in Bloomington, MN. We are being threatened with suspension for passing out fliers advertising the April 28 walkout. We aren't allowed to wear shirts that say "I'm walking out for peace." We aren't even allowed to SAY the word walkout.

First we attempted to get posters approved through official ways. We got called in and told that advocating the walkout by distributing any material or voicing any knowledge of it happening was going to cause a disruption to the school learning environment.

We got a National Lawyers Guild lawyer to write a letter to our principal explaining that Tinker vs. Des Moines gives us the right to organize the walkout in school, but this made no difference. In our meeting with the Principal today [4/26] their lawyer had given them a response to the NLG letter, claiming that it does not fall under protected free speech.

Our right to free speech and protest, as well as the rights of our fellow Youth Against War and Racism chapter members, have been denied. Basically we refuse to be censored for our right to practice our political freedoms including telling people an event is going on. We will continue to pass out leaflets and they will probably continue confiscating or suspending people handing them out.

Here's what we'd like for you to do: call our administration. Demand that our rights are supported. Flood their offices with phone calls and emails reminding them that teenagers are people with rights, because they seem to have forgotten. The numbers are below.

Bloomington Schools Superintendent,
Gary Prest
952-681-6402
gprest@bloomington.k12.mn.us

Peace and Love,
Alex Uhrich, Libby Tousignant, Ben Zabel
Jefferson Youth Against War and Racism
Contact us at: nirvanaguy18@gmail.com

Appeal from Central High Students

At St. Paul Central High School, our chapter of Youth Against War and Racism has been planning for the antiwar walkout on Friday, April 28 in solidarity with other Twin Cities YAWR chapters. We are protesting against military recruiters in our schools as well as against the war as a whole.

We have produced a variety of leaflets explaining our cause and encouraging students to join us. Over the past week, we have begun to pass the fliers out more intensely. As a result, our school administrators and our principal, Mary Mackbee, have attempted to prevent us from passing them out.

On Wednesday, April 26, before school, many of our fliers were confiscated by Ms. Mackbee while they were being distributed. We were told that we would be punished if they were found passing out any more fliers. The school staff have been instructed to assign detention to any student caught distributing fliers. Later in the day, when we attempted to get back the fliers that had been confiscated, we were then told that, if we were found passing out leaflets, we would be suspended for "willful disobedience."

Our First Amendment rights cannot be ignored. Regardless of any claims made by the school that we are under their supervision, our fundamental democratic right to freedom of expression cannot be abridged. The schools might claim that we are creating a disruption, however a much greater disruption is being created for us by the military recruiters in our schools and by the loss of funding that our schools must deal with due to taxpayer money being spent on war instead of education.

We cannot allow them to continue to prevent us from expressing ourselves. For this reason, we ask that you help us to protect our democratic freedom and our right to free expression.

We ask that you call or e-mail our District Superintendent, Lou Kanavati, and demand that we be allowed to exercise our basic right to expression and distribute antiwar fliers, brochures, or other documents free of censorship or threats.

Superintendent Lou Kanavati
651/767-8150
Lou.Kanavati@spps.org

Thank you,
Sean Foltin and Shane Davis
Central High Youth Against War and Racism
Contact us at: acolyteofthecpc@yahoo.com

Yet another student walkout Friday in my neighborhood, but does it do any good?

There is another student walkout today and it will wind from the University campus to my very own neck of the woods at Loring Park. I would probably like to take photos, but a certain shady lawyer type has my camera. It's probably just as well, so I can take in the scene, instead of trying to Document it as usual. But the visuals will surely be good.

It is a paradox or something. Street marches are a fairly outdated way of attempting to change policies, and the typical media blackouts – or worse, the caricatures that the participants unwittingly blunder into – really don't move the ball down the field. Just some more fucking students looking for a skip day, as someone put it to me.

But on the other hand, the news is all around us that a war in Iran is already gearing up, the United States has decided to fuck over the Palestinians in another shrewd move, and of course the Iraq meat grinder continues to rip apart families near and far. There has to be a way to transform this crisis into a physical manifestation that can offer resolve and hope to the counter-movements against it.

Some of the people in that crowd will have family and friends inside the machine somewhere, trying to stay alive until the tour is up, and it is the responsibility of those left behind to try to swipe at the war policy. And the protest serves another purpose too: it reminds this oh-so-'radical' – now really a majority – of the American public that we are not alone in this fight, not separate, not just alone, shrouded in the darkness of our computer screens, following the latest disaster.

It reminds us that there is a society with real bonds that can't be broken... Not by recruiters, not by Tony Snow, not by the pervasive fear that blankets this sad nation.

Details from the U AWOL group here:

twin cities antiwar
** W A L K O U T **
Friday April 28

** Noon Rally at University of Minnesota, Northrop Plaza
(map: http://yawr.org/april28/map.html)
** High schoolers: leave class 10:30am. Bus, carpool, or march to U of M rally
* Rally followed by march through downtown Minneapolis to…
* Free Concert at 3pm at MCTC by Loring Park, featuring Desdamona, Kanser, I Self Divine, A New Day, Two Wurds, more. Bring a bag lunch.

We are walking out to demand:
* END the occupation of Iraq NOW! to fund education and social needs
* NO! to military recruitment in our schools
* YES! to equal access to higher education
* YES! to living wage jobs for youth
* STOP racist attacks on immigrants and civil liberties

Last November 2nd, thousands of Twin Cities students - from over 40 schools in 16 districts - walked out to protest the war. Up to 2000 rallied and marched at the U of M, and a new youth movement was born.
But the war has dragged on and the violence in Iraq has increased dramatically. More and more young soldiers are coming home dead or maimed. Conservative estimates suggest over 100,000 Iraqis have been killed in the three years of occupation. Over 70 percent of U.S. troops in Iraq think the occupation should be ended, reflecting the opinion of U.S. workers and youth at home. Yet Congress keeps giving Bush hundreds of billions more for this corrupt war for oil and empire. Meanwhile our schools crumble, tuition rises out of reach, living wage jobs are disappearing, and the politicians are whipping up anti-immigrant racism to deflect the blame for these problems from themselves. Its time to step up our resistance!

Organized by:
** Youth Against War and Racism / 612.760.1980 / http://yawr.org
** U of M Anti-War Organizing League / http://www.tc.umn.edu/~awol/ / umnawol@gmail.com
** Socialist Alternative / 612.226.9129 / http://www.socialistalternative.org/
** MCTC Students Against War and Racism

Endorsed by: La Raza Student Cultural Center, Women's Student Activist Collective, Equal Access Coalition, Belfry Center for Social and Cultural Activities, Anti-War Committee, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, Daybreak Newspaper, North Country Co-op, Arise! Books and Resource Collective, Welfare Rights Committee, Twin Cities Peace Campaign, Green Party (4 th and 5 th Districts), Counter-Propaganda Coalition, Jack Pine Community Center

Among the huddled masses, yearning to breathe free; taking Zarqawi PSY OPS to Clear Channel ain't easy, nor good for my perceived character

The whole psy ops thing last week distracted me from what I wanted to write about, the immigration rally in St. Paul a week ago. I randomly ran into Eliot Brown in an alley in St. Paul on Saturday and he said he'd happened to take a photo of me among the crowd. Thanks!

I have gotten a haircut since the photo. But anyway. I gotta go to Wisco now for a family dinner; my uncle Dan got engaged, which is nice. On Wednesday I took the PSY OPS case to my Republican boss' call-in radio show on KTLK. In a segment about 7 minutes long, I was somewhat surprised to receive a Sean Hannity-style 7 or 9 blathering ad hominem attacks from my employer that I had no opportunity to rebut. I have the recording and will probably post it up, but altogether it was disheartening yet somewhat amusing. I informed the ClearChannel audience that the military was doing psychological warfare on their brains, and there's evidence out there. This made her panic, and my age (22) and my status (graduated) from a college (Macalester) were the only available battering rams to attempt to discredit what I was saying and fill up time.

Upon hearing the recording, a wise friend pointed out to me she's right, what the hell have I got to back up my credibility? The same basic bag of tricks will be employed against people like me, and it requires a more agile response, simply because the truth, in and of itself, rarely works these days.

Yah, it was disheartening. But the clanging bells of the Basilica last night and today helped remind me what Hunter Thompson entered on his typewriter before he blew his brains out.

Counselor.

This seems to have been a reference to the Gospel of John (ch. 14), as a contributor to RawStory explained.

“And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you.”

As the RawStory guy said (and I posted last August):

Thompson surely would have felt drawn to the Gospel of John, the most lyrical and mystical of the four Gospels. It’s there that we find the pronouncement: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It is a decree that has resonated with writers from Twain to Whitman to Fitzgerald to Miller—a revelation that words are transcendent, that a writer’s vocation is more than just a job. It should be a calling, wherein the “Spirit of truth” (Counselor) is followed unfailingly. No mean trick.

For following your Counselor often means discovering things that aren’t fit for polite company. It’s never pleasant to find evil growing among the peonies. Or in the hearts of your elected officials. Better to be “vaguely happy” than uncomfortable. Thompson, though, never fell for that devil’s lie. He knew that even though the truth often cuts like a razor, it also serves as a “Comforter” when the jackals begin circling. Because as Thompson recognized, the jackals don’t really give a damn whether you speak the truth or not. They are coming after us all one day. But facing the bastards down is a whole lot easier when you’ve got the truth by your side.

We are faced with annihilationist ideology, applied for partisan Republican political purposes. I find it plainly disturbing that my education on the Holocaust has been the key to unlocking the meaning of the Zarqawi figure. Those rare occasions when I have caught the current of history and made it halt for a moment, have been among the key times I really felt fully alive, intervening in the flow of events. The radio bit doesn't rise to that level, but it shows me how rocky and difficult the road ahead will be.

The top defenders of the Republican empire know their myths are shallow and evaporating daily. I know because I can hear the fear in their voice.

At that level, the truth makes a good Counselor.

Politics in Minnesota.com is Big Pimpin

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!!

Jonathon 'The Impaler" Sharkey: Satanist for MN Governor: The new Jesse for our times

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.

His turn to THE DARK SIDE:

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.

Jesse Mortenson's Green bid for 64A Macalester legislative district featured in Star Tribune

I had heard that my former Macalester classmate Jesse Mortenson '05 was considering a run for the State House — and indeed, he is not the only recent Macalester grad to consider a run. Apparently, Jesse is the first Green Party candidate to shoot for a spot at the Capitol, which makes me wonder what the hell the rest of them are doing. (official Green Party press release on it)

Fortunately for Jesse, his campaign got some good press with a Doug Grow column in the Star Tribune today ('Pol's fundraiser won't be typical DFL bean feed'), mentioning a planned vegan fundraising dinner next month. The column rambles on about the difference between Republican and Democrat food fundraisers, mentions the Al Juhnke "hotdish law."

Anyway, I think it is great that Mortenson is going for this. Certainly in 64A, he has a better shot of winning Green than almost anywhere else in the state, save Dinkytown or the relative Green strongholds of Minneapolis.

He is only two years younger than the House's youngest, freshman Rep. Andy Welti (D) of the Rochester countryside area. And his core platform — anti-Wal-Mart & Big box retail organizing, single-payer health care, more renewable energy and demanding an end to the Iraqi occupation — all of these issues will certainly find their supporters around Macalester. (needless to say, I pretty much agree with his take on these issues)

The main potential problem is that some older, richer Macalester graduate in the neighborhood could likely snap up the DFL endorsement. If s/he is not such a hot candidate, Jesse would certainly have a sporting chance in November. City Hall Scoop reported that Ian Keith, an elementary school teacher, announced for the race in November. In that case, with no other contenders (?), Jesse is the more interesting candidate, hands-down.

In our time at Mac, Jesse and I found ourselves aligned in cliques that were sometimes mutually hostile — namely his occasional spats with some in The Mac Weekly, in particular during my time as an editor there during the controversial 'need-blind' days. Mortenson was criticized for talking too much at Macalester College Student Government LB meetings, for throwing monkey wrenches rather than working constructively, in other words all the usual accusations leveled against the activist set around Mac. I secretly never saw any of this as a problem, because the MCSG is often something of a farce, and I supported anything improving the quality of the theatre therein. In any case, he did a lot to raise awareness of broader problems that many preferred not to face.

So Jesse had a mixed public image among some at Macalester. In person, I always found him friendly, informed and connected, a kind of utilitarian progressive who took a keen interest in the activities and structures of governments and corporations. There are quite a few protesters-of-the-week at Macalester, who talk a lot of talk. Jesse is not of that class: as a grassroots progressive, he seriously walks the walk.

After the Brian Rosenberg wars, I can only imagine the fun of seeing Jesse squaring off against Phil Krinkie and Steve Sviggum. With a little luck and a lot of elbow grease... If he has been up at Midway building some kind of stealth coalition among small business owners and activists at the Midway Citizen Consumer Community Coalition and Metro Independent Business Alliance, he might be able to pull off an unlikely pro-business Green campaign that other progressives could try nationwide. Where did all the people on that stage come from?

Naturally, Sociology chair Terry Boychuk had nothing but glowing things to say about Jesse's candidacy in the Dec. 9 (or Dec. 2?) Mac Weekly story that announced his campaign.

After all, Macalester students only end up running the whole world, so what chance could Mortenson have in one of Minnesota's most liberal districts? My grandfather, Daniel S. Feidt, was elected to the Minnesota House in 1936 at age 28, on his second try. He got to the Senate two years later, where he stayed until 1961. Like Mortenson, he was of an independent streak and was wary of party machines, preferring the independent structure of the Legislature in those days.

I'll add a bit from his 1957 pamphlet, Minnesota's Non-Party Legislature, an ode to the dead nonpartisan system. I think that Mortenson would appreciate it:

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.

…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.

So my warmest regards to Jesse Mortenson's independent effort in 64A. It will be a difficult year, but surely a rewarding one. I'll be following this one closely.

(Campaign photo shamelessly ganked from Jesse's official announcement entry on his campaign site, JesseMortenson.com)

Janecek & Lambert not quite yanked off the air

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.

Dan awake at 4 AM, dealing with China

Sorry for the lack of updates. I have decided that the Internet was better off without my collected musings the last few days.

Meanwhile in the middle of the night, I am working on managing the photos from the Minnesota trade mission to China as Sarah Janecek sends them over. I was surprised to find that AOL Instant Messenger works through the Great Red Firewall....

Anyway I am very tired so I am going to bed now. But it's an interesting thing to be checking out. See PoliticsInMinnesota.com for the blog of the trip. Night!

November 2 Antiwar rally at University

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.

Bush at UN: it might be time for a bathroom break; Tal Afar as Ethnic Civil War; Iraqi Super Provinces; Gazans visit Egypt

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.

HongPong.com [OK]: Back in Black + Quad RAM; Gentoo Linux still r0x0rs the b0x0r

A mercilessly geeky tale: I am recording this so that myself and others may deal with similar problems better in the future. I will soon forget the details of how I fixed it, so it is best to write it down now.

It took a couple days, but the Linux server (Tarfin), a reliable Dell Dimension 4400 running Gentoo Linux, is back from its brush with Hardware Hell. The problems began after I found out about my new mysterious Politics in Minnesota project... The work at this stage would best happen using MediaWiki, I reckoned. MediaWiki has performed well as the HongWiki platform, and has reliably served wiki pages that have done Real Well on Google, although with the service problems it's gone south a bit.

So my new WordPress-powered HongPong website (under development) takes a lot more RAM to serve PHP files than this current MovableType-powered HongPong.com, and as I sat down to get the Politics in Minnesota project going, I noticed that Tarfin was basically maxed out for RAM. It only had 128 MB, which is really way too low for this. It only had a few megs of RAM available and had 80 MB in the swap partition (which is the same as Virtual Memory on a PC or Mac). Gridlock.

So in other words the stress of serving had totally maxed out the RAM, which I noticed when the site -- which is usually lickety-split quick over the LAN here -- was going much slower. More RAM, always a good solution. I looked up my usual suspects, namely Tran Micro and General Nanosystems on University, whose prices will pretty much always beat Best Buy type places. Only Nano had the type of RAM for Tarfin, PC2100 SDRAM. So I got two 256 chips (though I'd have liked a 512, they didn't have).

The Dell only has 2 slots, thanks Dell, so I pulled the old 128 and put these in. Turned it on, it booted fine, and I ran 'emerge sync', the nice Gentoo command that permits me to update all the various Linux software packs I have running. This streamlines one of the bitchiest problems in systems administration - tracking down the damn software packs and keeping up with their security patches.

It ran alright until suddenly it hit a Segmentation Fault, followed shortly by a Kernel Panic, the hardest Crash that Linux can Go Down with - it's real ugly, gibberish and Hex codes spilling all over.

So I have to reboot. The file system checker program, fsck, auto-scanned the main partition and found all sorts of horrible errors. I tried to have it fix, but then it hit another Segmentation Fault:

A segmentation fault occurs when your program tries to access memory locations that haven't been allocated for the program's use.

Therefore I should have thought that maybe it was the damn new chips. I had a flashback to the death of the first Hongpong.com (the one that got me suspended from MPA) - which was an old PowerPC 6100/60 running a hacked old Linux, whose hard drive abruptly refused to come back from a nasty death right around when I graduated from high school. And I had no backups. In other words, the first HongPong server died almost exactly four years ago, and took with it the great contributions of everyone in that strange season of 2000-2001. It couldn't happen again, could it?

So I started looking around the various forums for a solution to a sudden filesystem corruption, one of the true hells of computing. To compound this, I hadn't backed up all the new HongPong site stuff, nor the Mysql databases that run the sites, in quite a while. Fortunately I had just exported this entire site a few days ago to put it into WordPress (as it is now - mostly purged of the spam), so if it truly crashed, the Bulk would be safe.

After reboots, I could come back to the low-level emergency maintenance fsck (file system check) shell, and from there I could READ the messed up drive, but not write to it without risking more damage. And I could see that most files seemed ok. But I couldn't get the file sharing, or Apache webserver, or MYSQL database running again, without risking wrecking it. And I couldn't figure out what was really wrong. The solution?

Install a brand new Gentoo Linux setup on another old hard drive I had sitting around, and then pull the old stuff of the messed-up drive in Read-Only mode. After I put the drive in, the handy BIOS error light told me something was dreadfully wrong and it wouldn't boot at all. I found that on a Dell you have to only set the 'cable select' ATA hard drive jumper pins - the machine automatically takes the last drive on the ATA cable to be the Master drive. So I did that but it was still stuck.

I had pulled out the new RAM earlier, but I'd put it back in by this point. Then I tried taking out one of them. It booted! I pulled that one out, and put the other in. It halted! When I put both in, it would boot, but if I switched them, it would halt. In other words, the Dell could detect the bad RAM when it's by itself, but NOT necessarily when it's with others, BUT this depended on their order.

So I returned the bad RAM to Tran Micro the next day, and they nicely exchanged for another one and tested it there in the store. It was OK, so I was on my way, and everything went smoothly afterwards. (Other than this incident of random bad RAM, Tran Micro are fine folks - this could happen anywhere - their service was all right)

I used the memtest86 memory checker on the Gentoo Linux install CD to Make Very Sure they were ok - i wish I'd done it earlier. So it took a few more hours, especially since when I installed Gentoo on this machine a year ago, I hardly took any notes about it. There are some weird things about the Dell machine - in particular, (some/all?) Dells have a strange first boot partition or /dev/hda1 in Linux parlance, which makes the Dell screen and some BIOS stuff happen. I think I destroyed this partition last time, and it's a huge pain in the ass to repair with floppy disks and stuff.

The problem is that Gentoo Linux install instructions tell you to put GRUB, the bootloader, on /dev/hda or /dev/hda1 , and this time I almost commanded grub-install /dev/hda before I caught myself. That would have taken hours to fix. Instead it must be on /dev/hda2 or /dev/hdb1. hda2 is I think automatically loaded up after the Dell thing is done. But I did it right, and so I was able to reboot Linux and finish installing the system.

Downloading & installing the key web programs was easily done with 'emerge apache php mod_php' and the correct USE flags. Other various things were properly updated and recompiled.

I was able to get back into the messed-up drive using read-only mode, which doesn't touch the filesystem. All the elements of the site easily copied to the new drive. Happily, the Mysql database -- which can really be a bitch to put together from a crashed system, if you don't export it cleanly first -- went over VERY easily. All I had to do was 'cp -av * /var/lib/mysql' from the old /var/lib/mysql. Then a reboot, plugging it back where it belongs in my bedroom, and All Systems [ OK ].

So now, in short, I have a TON of Actual Real Professional Work for both Politics in Minnesota and Computer Zone. I don't have time to say much else about the Gaza situation and so forth. sry!

A sudden burst of employment leaves Feidts well placed

A most unusual day. I went to the St. Paul City Hall/Ramsey County Courthouse, a building with incredible, Gotham-like style in the lobby. But our adventure with the Robed branch of government was on the 14th floor.

As most people reading this probably know, I was arrested along with a number of other Macalester students on the evening of my 22nd birthday, May 11, 2005, outside one of the cottages at Mac, in a weird and improbable incident with police from St. Paul, Minneapolis and the freakin airport. I was charged with Obstructing a Legal Process with Force, and my police report is an exciting work of fiction, although for entertainment the report of Mike Dannenburg's 'threatening' clipboard-wielding is a laugh Riot (in the 3rd degree).

I believe these reports are a matter of the public record, and down the line I'll probably post them here on the site.

I can't really get into main details of the incident & our current situation. So now we have three lawyers, and are trying to get the case dismissed. Today we arranged to have another hearing called a Florence hearing, with witnesses (some seniors, for us, and possibly cops, for the city), sometime in early September. Also the judge ordered the prosecution to produce the digital pictures I was taking as I was arrested a week before the hearing. I am eagerly looking forward to getting them back.

That was pretty much all that happened downtown today. After things wrapped up, Andrew from Computer Zone Consulting called me up, and it sounds like I have finally got some more web developing projects to do.

I went out to see the family in Hudson this afternoon, because my dad got the job he was after at Blue Cross Blue Shield of MN today. My sister Sasha just started at the Hudson Target store. My brother Johnny 'Cakes' is a counselor at YMCA Camp Warren right now, and my mom looks after a space at Abigail Page Antiques in downtown Hudson.

As far as I can tell, this is the first time that the entire Feidt family has been employed at once. Suddenly that horrible Abyss we call the Bush Economy seems a little further off.

So when I get back from this evening with the family I discover that Sarah Janecek of the ol' Politics in Minnesota gig has left me an exciting message that I've got some work to do. In one day I shift from itinerant Selby dweller to dual employment, and my dad is set with a salary again (and a bit of a raise). It has been a most excellent day, and I must sign off to get some rest, because it seems like things may gear up Real Well tomorrow.

Three Voting Rights / tech conferences come to Twin Cities this weekend, Ohio election official caught taking $10,000 from Diebold

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')

E-mail officially changes to dan.feidt AT gmail.com

Right now I'm listening to the new Murs & Slug album, Felt 2: A Tribute to Lisa Bonet. Not bad.

I finally got around to changing the email address on this page to my new email address, dan.feidt AT gmail.com.

Also I'll note that I had a few glasses of Diet Dr. Pepper the other night in honor of Elizabeth Severance's six-month trip to London. Have fun Sev!!!

In other news I am working on a bit for the Politics in Minnesota newsletter based on the piece I put in the Mac Weekly about interviewing the Minnesota Legislature.

Then I really really really need to have this damn Job thing sort itself out. Augh.

More very bad things for Karl Rove, and Bolton was probably involved with Yellowcake as well

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

The Terror of the View

So much for the flypaper theory. Let's think about why the hell it was ever taken seriously in the first place.

Ok then, I am going off for the weekend real soon. So here is a bunch of links yall should check out.

Israel and Palestine: The Pullout is a real big deal, but Sharon is also trying to lock in the West Bank settlements as far as possible. There are 38 days until the pullout. I am suspicious that the recent money handed to the Palestinians may be used to build fences, checkpoints and shit in the West Bank on the premise that it "improves their quality of life" by allowing more streamlined processing around the vast chunks of stolen land. Haaretz has a furious editorial about detatching Jewish religious fundamentalism from secular Israeli politics. It is spooky:

While Gush Katif residents are trying to postpone the Gaza Strip's closure to visitors until the last possible moment, the Yesha Council of settlements has its own agenda, no longer focused on thwarting the disengagement, but on seizing the moment to arouse the entire settler camp.

It is doubtful that anyone in the settler leadership thinks protest can prevent the evacuation of Gush Katif. After all, they know Ariel Sharon better than anyone, and they know that the more spokes put in his wheels, the more determined he becomes. The settler leadership's political goal is to exploit the fire that has already been started in the youth, the yeshivas, the girls' schools, the road blockings, the prisons, the army and even the ultra-Orthodox camp to ignite a huge conflagration to prevent further evacuations. This blaze is also liable to destroy any remaining empathy that the Israeli public has for the settlers' concerns.

Given that we are dealing with brainwashed youngsters, who from their infancy have been spoon-fed the belief that it is forbidden to give up any scrap of land, grew up on memories of Sebastia and learned from their parents that breaking the law always pays, any attempt to direct and moderate the protest is doomed to failure.
[......]
The mass march to Gush Katif, like the scale of refusal by religious soldiers, will determine not only the future of the hesder yeshivas, but primarily whether religious Zionism in its current incarnation is not a Trojan horse that has infiltrated Zionism in order to destroy it from within.

The hardcore settlers and their supporters are going to have a mass march towards Gush Katif in Gaza pretty soon, and will attempt to overwhelm the Israeli military. It is interesting that the whole area is so small, that such tactics are viable.

Right-wing protesters set up new Gush Katif stronghold
Right-wing protesters have begun establishing a new stronghold in the settlement of Shirat Hayam, bringing in large amounts of equipment over the past few days and carrying on construction work, in contravention of the order issued last week by GOC Southern Command Dan Harel.

Far-right activist Moshe Feiglin, head of the Jewish Leadership faction in the Likud Party, moved there yesterday.

Israel denies the press reports about their getting intelligence (or providing it) to the British government. However we should point out the key sentence:

"After the first explosion, our finance minister received a request not to go anywhere," Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom told Army Radio.

We need to know for certain when the British actually determined they were experiencing a terror attack -- because it apparently wasn't after the first explosion. This timeline the thing that a lot of 9/11 conspiracy theorists dwell on, and if we're to parse out this whole crazy theory -- again, based on an AP story and a Stratfor report -- the timeline matter.

IDF gives Amuna outpost 48 hours to evacuate 9 homes (built illegally on Palestinian land). Sharon's London statement and more on the denials. Radical stories from Right wing: More soldiers say "I cannot expel Jews". Israel wants US Aid for Pullout Plan. New border crossing system. West Bank barrier construction accelerated.

Iraq: Now it's being claimed that the Iraq insurgency may be directly tied to the bombings, besides a whole swath of people that are just quite happy about it because the British illegally invaded their country and helps continue blowing it up.

It's too bad though--if the American military leadership had been forced to take more cues from the Brits, it surely wouldn't have gotten so bad in Iraq. For example, the British initially accepted -- as the Americans finally came to accept -- the Shiite sheiks in southern cities that threw the Baath off and took relatively calm control of their areas immediately.

So it's all gone to hell. I usually count on Juan Cole to offer finer-grained details about the disaster. His line these days, "sometimes you are just screwed." In this Salon article, he remarks on the message the bombers posted, "the time of revenge has come".

Minnesota: /bin/shutdown --stategovernment now

It pisses me off. I also feel somewhat embarrassed because I helped put together the Politics in Minnesota index for a Legislature, that for whatever else, caused the state's first shutdown. BLAH. Why do they think that evaporating the government is useful? <That zap sound you're hearing is my neurons killing themselves in despair.>

Damn Judy Miller: Why the hell does she have to be the saint of journalism, after putting out all of Chalabi's WMD disinformation for the whole damn country to swallow? The WaPo says its a bad case for the fight. Although their editorials are usually ridiculous these days. Some say she should go to jail.. No one in White House press corps questions Rove.

Misc: ok we;re shifting to Linkdump:

Scarborough is crazy. Durrr. FOX's bombing reaction is fucking scary. FUcking SCARY. Again SCARY. Do conservatives believe in revolution? Yes it was practically an attack on London Muslims... "It's Up to the Anti-War Movement to Restrain the Thirst for More Blind Revenge". Fisk: "Bush was right, but too late"
Info Clearing House is good. Watch the Antiwar blog.

For some fun, NewsBreakers awesome!

Well I am sorry, that is all the links I have time for. MUST GO NOW. Damn... as always time's a bitch.......... Have a good weekend all.

To know the ending would be pretending...

1957: "Minnesota's Non-Party Legislature" by Daniel S. Feidt

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.
---
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:
----

"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."

----
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.

What happened?

Well, that was crazy... It's been a very rapid month and a half, and now the book is set for the publishers tomorrow. On this last weekend I contributed some fantastic floor maps of the capitol, and all the nice state symbols we know and love... or don't know at all. The official state tree is red pine, and we used a red pine photo from my great-grandparents' farmstead, which is now the Silver Bay Country Club golf course.

The book is over 600 pages long, it was a real tough one to figure out... We had a lot of fun, it didn't go at all like I expected, because I never knew what to expect.

I can't wrench any more words out about this tonight. I am going down to the Artists Quarter to drink and listen to jazz. I think you'd agree that its about time to kick back....

Al Franken sighted at Capitol near a hongpong

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....

A suicide in Fat City *

"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.

Just six profiles to go

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.

PoliticsMN: The list of state legislators so far

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:

• Satveer Chaudhary (DFL-50)
• Chris Gerlach (R-37)
• Pat Pariseau (R-36)
• David Hann (R-42)

Representatives:

• Phyllis Kahn (DFL-59B) (that was an especially interesting one, yes)
• Paul Thissen (DFL-63A)
• Mary Ellen Otremba (DFL-11B)
• Connie Ruth (R-26A)
• Karen Clark (DFL-61A)
• Loren Solberg (DFL-3B)
• Mark Olson (R-16B)
• Mindy Greiling (DFL-54A)
• Bud Heidgerken (R-13A)
• Jim Davnie (DFL-62A)
• Dan Severson (R-14A)

Profiles completed:
Senators:

• Yvonne Prettner Solon (DFL-7)
• Betsy Wergin (R-16)
• Linda Scheid (DFL-46)
• Gary Kubly (DFL-20)

Representatives:

• Dean Urdahl (R-16B)
• Greg Blaine (R-12B)
• Gene Pelowski (DFL-31A)
• Ann Lenczewksi (DFL-40B) (pronounced Len-CHESS-key)
• Joe Atkins (DFL-39B)
• Michael Paymar (DFL-64B)
• Laura Brod (R-25A)
• Paul Marquart (DFL-9B)
• Bruce Anderson (R-19A)
• Morrie Lanning (R-9A) (22-year mayor of Moorhead)
• Joe Hoppe (R-34B)
• Randy Demmer (R-29A)
• Michael Beard (R-35A) (Christian publisher who got us drinks until 2 A.M.)
• Duke Powell (R-40A)
• Chris DeLaForest (R-49A)
• Aaron Peterson (DFL-20A)
• Dean Simpson (R-10B)
• Doug Magnus (R-22A)
• Denny McNamara (R-57B)
• Lyle Koenen (DFL-20B)

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.