maps and legends

Stones Release Second Boot: Hampton 1981

2012-01-31T20:50:00.000-05:00

The Rolling Stones have released the second of six bootleg concerts planned for this year: Hampton, Virginia, December 18, 1981.

While Hampton was one of the better shows from the Tattoo You tour, the choice is a bit underwhelming, especially for fans like me, who were hoping for something like the two March 1977 club shows at Toronto's El Mocambo.

The Hampton show was one of six concerts taped for a King Biscuit Flower Hour broadcast. It has been available - nearly complete, missing only four songs - on various bootlegs over the years in excellent soundboard quality.

The new boot of the complete show is available only in the U.S. at the moment - $4.99 at 320 mp3 - but that should change soon. Oddly, it's not even listed on the Stones Archives site yet. Initial reviews report a stunning mix from Bob Clearmountain - similar to the fantastic work he did on the first release, Brussels '73 - with amazing separation, especially between the guitars. (You can hear most of the show right now at Wolfgang's Vault.)

Reading List

2012-01-16T10:23:00.000-05:00

Last 5 Books Read:

Running the Books: The Adventures Of An Accidental Prison Librarian - Avi Steinberg

The Shallows: What The Internet is Doing To Our Brains - Nicholas Carr

Fenway 1912: The Birth Of A Ballpark, A Championship Season, And Fenway's Remarkable First Year - Glenn Stout

It - Stephen King

The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky [current]

Is There True Freedom Of Religion In The United States?

2012-01-14T13:55:00.001-05:00

Consider Marcus Cederstrom's question in Salon: "What if Tim Tebow were Muslim?"

How would our society react if during every interview, Tebow said "Insha'Allah" or "Allāhu Akbar" rather than thank his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ? Or instead of falling to one knee and praying, Tebow pulled out a prayer rug and faced Mecca? ...

There is no way to separate the man and the religion. Some people praise him for it, others recoil. When this happens, avid defenders of Tebow invoke freedom of religion. But as Tebowmania makes its way into politics, sports, religion and the everyday life of the mainstream United States, it is important to think about how we approach religion in this country. How we approach religious freedom in this country. Do we accept freedom of religion, any religion? Or do we accept freedom of Christianity?

Reality

2011-12-31T10:52:00.000-05:00

Few writers combine literary power and level-headed fury better than than Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque:

In March 2003, the United States of America launched an entirely unprovoked act of military aggression against a nation which had not attacked it and posed no threat to it. This act led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It drove millions more from their homes, and plunged the entire conquered nation into suffering, fear, hatred and deprivation.

This is the reality of what actually happened in Iraq: aggression, slaughter, atrocity, ruin. It is the only reality; there is no other. And it was done deliberately, knowingly, willingly. Indeed, the bipartisan American power structure spent more than $1 trillion to make it happen. It is a record of unspeakable savagery, an abomination, an outpouring of the most profound and filthy moral evil.

Line up the bodies of the children, the thousands of children - the infants, the toddlers, the schoolkids - whose bodies were torn to pieces, burned alive or riddled with bullets during the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. Line them up in the desert sand, walk past them, mile after mile, all those twisted corpses, those scraps of torn flesh and seeping viscera, those blank faces, those staring eyes fixed forever on nothingness.

This is the reality of what happened in Iraq; there is no other reality.

These children - these thousands of children - are dead, and will always be dead, as a direct result of the unprovoked act of military aggression launched and sustained by the American power structure. Killing these children, creating and maintaining the conditions that led to the slaughter of these children, was precisely what the armed forces of the United States were doing in Iraq. Without the invasion, without the occupation, without the 1.5 million members of the American volunteer army who surrendered their moral agency to "just follow orders" and carry out their leaders' agenda of aggression, those children would not have died - would not have been torn, eviscerated, shot, burned and destroyed. ...

And so Barack Obama, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, the self-proclaimed inheritor of the mantle of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, went to North Carolina this week to declare the act of aggression in Iraq "an extraordinary achievement." ...

He did not say a single word - not one - about the thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of Iraqis killed by this "fulfilled mission," this "extraordinary achievement," this "success." These human beings - these sons and daughters, fathers, mothers, kinfolk, lovers, friends - cannot be acknowledged. They cannot be perceived. It must be as if they had never existed. It must be as if they are not dead now.

The divorce from reality here is beyond description. ...

My other favourite US blogger is Glenn Greenwald, who has two excellent post-Xmas posts: one on Bradley Manning's show-trial and one on Greg Miller's Washington Post report about Barack Obama's murder-by-drone program.

WaPo (my emphasis):

In the space of three years, the administration has built an extensive apparatus for using drones to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists and stealth surveillance of other adversaries. The apparatus involves dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force cockpits in the Southwest and clandestine bases in at least six countries on two continents. ... [N]o president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation's security goals. ...

Senior Democrats barely blink at the idea that a president from their party has assembled such a highly efficient machine for the targeted killing of suspected terrorists. It is a measure of the extent to which the drone campaign has become an awkward open secret in Washington that even those inclined to express misgivings can only allude to a program that, officially, they are not allowed to discuss. ...

When Obama was sworn into office in 2009, the nation's clandestine drone war was confined to a single country, Pakistan, where 44 strikes over five years had left about 400 people dead, according to the New America Foundation. The number of strikes has since soared to nearly 240, and the number of those killed, according to conservative estimates, has more than quadrupled. ...

Key members of Obama's national security team came into office more inclined to endorse drone strikes than were their counterparts under Bush, current and former officials said.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, former CIA director and current Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, and counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan seemed always ready to step on the accelerator, said a former official who served in both administrations and was supportive of the program. Current administration officials did not dispute the former official's characterization of the internal dynamics. ...

The only member of Obama's team known to have formally raised objections to the expanding drone campaign is Dennis Blair, who served as director of national intelligence. ... His opinion contributed to his isolation from Obama’s inner circle, and he was fired last year.

Greenwald:

In sum: the President can kill whomever he wants anywhere in the world (including U.S. citizens) without a shred of check or oversight, and has massively escalated these killings since taking office (...these attacks have occurred in at least six Muslim countries). Because it's a Democrat (rather than big, bad George W. Bush) doing this, virtually no members of that Party utter a peep of objection ... And even though these systematic, covert killings are widely known and discussed in newspapers all over the world - particularly in the places where they continue to extinguish the lives of innocent people by the dozens, including children - Obama designates even the existence of the program a secret, which means our democratic representatives and all of official Washington are barred by the force of law from commenting on it or even acknowledging that a CIA drone program exists (a prohibition enforced by an administration that has prosecuted leaks it dislikes more harshly than any other prior administration).

By whole-heartedly embracing and extending the inhumane and criminal policies of the Bush/Cheney administration, Obama has effectively cut off all debate and all protest. Democrats who raised hell when Bush did X now refuse to utter one peep when Obama does X. Indeed, they now praise Obama for X, showing that their initial condemnation was not based on principles of person or party, it was pure theater. These policies - blatant war crimes - have quietly become the new normal in the United States, fully accepted by both parties, embraced so completely that they are not even worth mentioning anymore.

This is one reason why I believe Barack Obama is a worse president than George W. Bush.

Pentagon Giving Billions In Military Equipment To Local Police Forces

2011-12-26T11:36:00.003-05:00

The militarization of the United States has taken a huge step forward in recent years as the Pentagon has been supplying local police forces (free of charge) with a wide array of military equipment - M-16 assault rifles, surveillance drones, helicopters, armored vehicles, and grenade launchers.

The recent designation by the Obama administration of the entire country as a battlefield in TWAT* was not a symbolic or procedural matter. The US government has declared war on its own people. And having seen the anger and potential power of the Occupy movement, it is busy making battle plans.

* - The War Against Terror

According to both the Justice Technology Information Network and the Virginia State Police website,

The 1033 Program (formerly the 1208 Program) permits the Secretary of Defense to transfer, without charge, excess U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) personal property (supplies and equipment) to state and local law enforcement agencies (LEAs).

The 1033 Program has allowed law enforcement agencies to acquire vehicles (land, air and sea), weapons, computer equipment, body armor, fingerprint equipment, night vision equipment, radios and televisions, first aid equipment, tents and sleeping bags, photographic equipment and more.

Dallas, Texas, SWAT team

Robert Johnson, Business Insider:

1033 was passed by Congress in 1997 [streamlining a law passed in 1994] to help law-enforcement fight terrorism and drugs, but despite a 40-year low in violent crime, police are snapping up hardware like never before. While this year's staggering take topped the charts, next year's orders are up 400 percent over the same period.

This upswing coincides with an increasingly military-like style of law enforcement most recently seen in the Occupy Wall Street crackdowns.

According to Benjamin Carlson, a reporter for The Daily:

Thanks to [1033], cops in Cobb County, Ga. - one of the wealthiest and most educated counties in the U.S. - now have an amphibious tank. The sheriff of Richland County, S.C., proudly acquired a machine-gun-equipped armored personnel carrier that he nicknamed "The Peacemaker."

This comes on top of grants from the Department of Homeland Security that enable police departments to buy vehicles such as "BearCats" — 16,000-pound bulletproof trucks equipped with battering rams, gun ports, tear-gas dispensers and radiation detectors. To date, more than 500 of these tanklike vehicles have been sold by Lenco, its Massachusetts-based manufacturer, according to a report in the Orlando Sentinel.

When asked why they need equipment that might seem better suited to Fallujah than Florida, many police point to safety concerns, even as violent crime nationwide has fallen to 40-year lows.

Sheriff Bill Hutton's department in Washington County, Minn., purchased a $237,000 BearCat four weeks ago using a federal grant. Hutton said it has already come in handy during a kidnapping. ... His department also received grants to buy a 3-foot-tall, $70,000 robot and a $75,000 riverboat, he said.

Andrew Becker and G.W. Schulz, Center for Investigative Reporting:

North Dakota's largest city [Fargo] has averaged fewer than two homicides a year since 2005, and there's not been a single international terrorism prosecution in the last decade.

But that hasn't stopped authorities in Fargo and its surrounding county from going on an $8 million buying spree to arm police officers with the sort of gear once reserved only for soldiers fighting foreign wars.

Every city squad car is equipped today with a military-style assault rifle, and officers can don Kevlar helmets able to withstand incoming fire from battlefield-grade ammunition. And for that epic confrontation - if it ever occurs - officers can now summon a new $256,643 armored truck, complete with a rotating turret. ...

Like Fargo, thousands of other local police departments nationwide have been amassing stockpiles of military-style equipment in the name of homeland security, aided by more than $34 billion in federal grants since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a Daily Beast investigation conducted by the Center for Investigative Reporting has found. ...

The buying spree has transformed local police departments into small, army-like forces, and put intimidating equipment into the hands of civilian officers. ...

"The argument for up-armoring is always based on the least likely of terrorist scenarios," says Mark Randol, a former terrorism expert at the Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan research arm of Congress. "Anyone can get a gun and shoot up stuff. No amount of SWAT equipment can stop that." ...

"I don't see us as militarizing police; I see us as keeping abreast with society," former Los Angeles Police chief William Bratton says. "And we are a gun-crazy society." ...

In Montgomery County, Texas, the sheriff's department owns a $300,000 pilotless surveillance drone, like those used to hunt down al Qaeda terrorists in the remote tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Augusta, Maine, with fewer than 20,000 people and where an officer hasn't died from gunfire in the line of duty in more than 125 years, police bought eight $1,500 tactical vests. Police in Des Moines, Iowa, bought two $180,000 bomb-disarming robots, while an Arizona sheriff is now the proud owner of a surplus Army tank. ...

[T]he Department of Homeland Security awarded more than $2 billion in grants to local police in 2011, and President Obama's 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act contributed an additional half-billion dollars. ...

Many of America's newly armed officers are ex-military veterans from the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan. Charles Ramsey, who was police chief in Washington, D.C., on 9/11, upgraded the weaponry when he moved to Philadelphia in 2008. Today, some 1,500 Philly beat cops are trained to use AR-15 assault rifles.

"We have a lot of people here, like most departments, who are ex-military," Ramsey says. "Some people are very much into guns and so forth." ...

Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio

Stephen Graham, professor of Cities and Society at Newcastle University in the U.K., and author of Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism:

There's been a longstanding shift in North America and Europe towards paramilitarized policing, using helicopter-style systems, using infrared sensing, using really, really heavy militarized weaponry. That's been longstanding, fueled by the war on drugs and other sort of explicit campaigns. But more recently, there's been a big push since the end of the Cold War by the big defense and security and IT companies to sell things like video surveillance systems, things like geographic mapping systems, and even more recently, drone systems, that have been used in the assassination raids in Afghanistan and in Pakistan and elsewhere, as sort of a domestic policing technology. ...

[S]urveillance is being used to try and track activist groups, permanently sort of monitoring them, using video systems, using database systems, and to allow infiltration. These are very much seen as movements that need to be infiltrated. ...

[W]hat the Occupy movement is so powerful at is demonstrating that by occupying public spaces around the world, and particularly these extremely symbolic public spaces, it's reasserting that the city is the foundation space for democracy. ...

[L]ast year, we moved past the moment where 50 percent of the world was living in cities. By 2050, 75 percent of the world's population will be living in cities. But too often, political and military power is controlled by people who see cities purely as threats, purely as sites of unrest, sites that need strong military and security control. And what's so wonderful about the Occupy protests is that there's a different, a much more hopeful idea of cities being pushed there, in a world where we have a really radical crisis and a radical sense of illegitimacy for the social model that we're all still having to live under.

The right of peaceful assembly, Toronto, June 2010

Tim Lynch, director of the Cato Institute's project on criminal justice:

The trend toward militarization was well under way before 9/11, but it's the federal policy of making surplus military equipment available almost for free that has poured fuel on this fire. ...

It's kind of had a corrupting influence on the culture of policing in America. The dynamic is that you have some officer go to the chief and say, people in next county have [military hardware], if we don't take it some other city will. Then they acquire the equipment, they create a paramilitary unit, and everything seems fine. But then one or two years pass. They say, look we've got this equipment, this training and we haven't been using it. That's where it starts to creep into routine policing.

Pecan Group:

Peter Kraska, a criminologist at the University of Eastern Kentucky ... found that by 1997, 90 percent of cities with populations of 50,000 or more had at least one SWAT team, twice as many as in the mid-1980s. The number of towns with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 with a SWAT team increased 157 percent between 1985 and 1996.

As the number of SWAT teams multiplied, their use expanded as well. ... According to Kraska, by the early 1980s there were 3,000 annual SWAT deployments, by 1996 there were 30,000 and by 2001 there were 40,000. The average police department deployed its SWAT team about once a month in the early 1980s. By 1995, it was seven times a month.

The Daily Bell:

The militarization of American society is a long-term project in our opinion. It began shortly after Vietnam when the Pentagon, confronting the wreckage of failed military policies, began a rehabilitation campaign that resulted in the formation of a private, volunteer army. In retrospect, this approach was wildly successful. The all-volunteer army provided a way for the military-industrial complex to separate itself from the larger society and build its own power-base and expand funding sources unconstrained by negative public perceptions.

It is almost a truism by now that those in the U.S. military are in some sense contemptuous of their civilian counterparts. They are in fact taught (in a sense) to be contemptuous because it is part of the process of breaking down a potential soldier's personality in order to remove the social, ethical and biological barriers to killing. The soldier during this process becomes profoundly "other" – which is one reason why so many have trouble reintegrating when they return to civilian life. The U.S. suicide rate among young military veterans is tragically high.

What is also true about the modern American military is that those who have a military background have been increasingly welcomed into the standing power structure of the United States. The CIA, FBI and myriad intelligence agencies recruit from a military pool and thus military attitudes increasingly pervade these government entities.

The militarization of America's leadership has numerous ramifications, among them the assumption that military activity itself can trump culture, economics and of course individual human action. ...

For the past decades, especially under the Bush administration, the trends seemed to run against civil society. Habeas corpus was attacked, torture was legitimized along with anonymous "rendition." Most recently, the Obama administration has claimed the right to shoot American citizens on sight (and without any form of "due process") if it considered them a "terrorist" threat, or aiding and abetting a terrorist war effort. ... [H]istory shows us that the battle to restore the liniments of civil society to a culture that has abandoned them is difficult and often unsuccessful.

The Boston Anticks: "Occupy Christmas"

2011-12-23T15:10:00.000-05:00

I demand a return to the traditional Christmas of the 18th and 19th centuries - the kind of Christmas that had led the Puritans to suppress and then outlaw the holiday: rowdy public displays brought on by excessive drinking, the mocking of established authority, the invasion of private, wealthy homes, and aggressive forms of begging (to the point of physical harm).

The rest of this post is taken from Stephen Nissenbaum's The Battle For Christmas: A Cultural History of America's Most Cherished Holiday (pp. 5-11, 38, 42-43, 53-55, 94, and 96-99; published in 1996 and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize):

In early modern Europe, roughly the years between 1500 and 1800, the Christmas season was a time to let off steam - and to gorge. ... Animals could not be slaughtered until the weather was cold enough to ensure that the meat would not go bad ... December was also the month when the year's supply of beer or wine was ready to drink. And for farmers, too, this period marked the start of a season of leisure. ...

Excess took many forms. Reveling could easily become rowdiness; lubricated by alcohol, making merry could edge into making trouble. Christmas was a season of "misrule," a time when ordinary behavioral restraints could be violated with impunity. It was part of what one historian has called "the world of carnival." ... Christmas "misrule" meant that not only hunger but also anger and lust could be expressed in public. ... Often people blackened their faces or disguised themselves as animals or cross-dressed, thus operating under a protective cloak of anonymity. ...

Here is how the Reverend Increase Mather of Boston put it in 1687:
The generality of Christmas-keepers observe that festival after such a manner as is highly dishonourable to the name of Christ. How few are there comparatively that spend those holidays (as they are called) after an holy manner. But they are consumed in Compotations, in Interludes, in playing at Cards, in Revellings, in excess of Wine, in mad Mirth...
[Reverand Henry] Bourne singled out two particularly dangerous seasonal practices, mumming and (strange to modern readers) the singing of Christmas carols. Mumming usually involved "a changing of Clothes between Men and Women; who when dressed in each other's habits, go from one Neighbor's house to another ... and make merry with them in disguise." ... As for singing Christmas carols, that practice was a "disgrace," since it was "generally done, in the midst of Rioting and Chambering, and Wantonness." ("Chambering" was a common euphemism for fornication.) It was another Anglican cleric, the sixteenth-century bishop Hugh Latimer, who put the matter most succinctly: "Men dishonour Christ more in the twelve days of Christmas, than in all the twelve months besides."

The Puritans knew what subsequent generations would forget: that when the Church, more than a millennium earlier, had placed Christmas Day in late December, the decision was part of what amounted to a compromise, and a compromise for which the Church paid a high price. ... From the beginning, the Church's hold over Christmas was (and remains still) rather tenuous. There were always people for whom Christmas was a time of pious devotion rather than carnival, but such people were always in the minority. It may not be going too far to say that Christmas has always been an extremely difficult holiday to Christianize. Little wonder that the Puritans were willing to save themselves the trouble.

The Puritans understood another thing, too: Much of the seasonal excess that took place at Christmas was not merely chaotic "disorder" but behavior that took a profoundly ritualized form. Most fundamentally, Christmas was an occasion when the social hierarchy itself was symbolically turned upside down, in a gesture that inverted designated roles of gender, age, and class. During the Christmas season those near the bottom of the social order acted high and mighty. Men might dress like women, and women might dress (and act) like men. Young people might imitate and mock their elders ... A peasant or an apprentice might become "Lord of Misrule" and mimic the authority of a real "gentleman." ...

The most common ritual of social inversion during the Christmas season involved something that is associated with Christmas in our own day - we would call it charity. Prosperous and powerful people were expected to offer the fruits of their harvest bounty to their poorer neighbors and dependents. ... But the modern notion of charity does not really convey a picture of how this transaction worked. For it was usually the poor themselves who initiated the exchange, and it was enacted face-to-face, in rituals that would strike many of us today as an intolerable invasion of privacy. ...

The poor - most often bands of boys and young men - claimed the right to march to the houses of the well-to-do, enter their halls and receive gifts of food, drink, and sometimes money as well. And the rich had to let them in - essentially, to hold "open house." Christmas was a time when peasants, servants, and apprentices exercised the right to demand that their wealthier neighbors and patrons treat them as if they were wealthy and powerful. ...

It was not enough for the landlord to let the peasants in and feed them. On this one occasion he had to share with them his choicest food and drink, his private stock. ... The historian E.P. Thompson has noted that landed gentlemen could always try to use a generous handout at Christmas as a way of making up for a year's accumulation of small injustices, regaining in the process their tenants' goodwill. In fact, episodes of misrule were widely tolerated by the elite. Some historians argue that role inversions actually functioned as a kind of safety valve that contained class resentments within clearly defined limits ...

Nowhere is the variety of forms in which New Englanders celebrated Christmas, and their occasional intersection or even conflict, better revealed than in the region's major urban center, the town of Boston. ...

Several sources, taken together, make it clear that a tradition of aggressive Christmas mumming (a variety of wassail) was practiced by some of Boston's poorer inhabitants over a period of at least thirty years, beginning no later than the early 1760s and continuing at least into the mid-1790s. These groups called themselves the Anticks, masked troupes who demanded (or forced) entry into the houses of respectable Bostonians at Christmas. Once inside, they engaged in a dramatic "performance" and demanded gifts of money in return.

The first piece of evidence of the existence of the Anticks is sketchy, taking the form of an oral report given to a folklorist late in the nineteenth century by a man whose mother - born in about 1752 - had told it to him. ... The man, Samuel Breck, belonged to a very wealthy family. He was born in 1770 and lived in a mansion in central Boston during the years when the Anticks paid their holiday visits (his recollections presumably date from the years around 1780). Breck recalled the Anticks as "a set of the lowest blackguards" who were "disguised in filthy clothes and ofttimes with masked faces." They "went from house to house in large companies, and bon gre, mal gre, obtruding themselves everywhere, particularly into the rooms that were occupied by parties of ladies and gentlemen." There they "would demean themselves with great insolence." ...

This often went on for half an hour. Breck remembered that even after the men finally left, "the house would be filled with another gang." (Apparently there were multiple bands of Anticks.) Breck concluded by recalling an especially significant cultural point, that the victims of such visitations did not feel entitled to expel the Anticks from their houses: "Custom had licensed these vagabonds to enter even by force any place they chose." ...

As early as 1772, a New York newspaper complained that the absence of "decency, temperance, and sobriety" at Christmas was so serious a matter that it belonged in the courts. The problem was caused by "[t]he assembling of Negroes, servants, boys and other disorderly persons, in noisy companies in the streets, where they spend the time in gaming, drunkenness, quarreling, swearing, etc., to the great disturbance of the neighborhood." The behavior of these rowdies was "so highly scandalous both to religion and civil government, that it is hoped the Magistrates will interpose to suppress the enormity."

By 1820 Christmas misrule had become such an acute social threat that respectable New Yorkers could no longer ignore it or take it lightly. ... [B]ands of roaming young street toughs, members of the emerging urban proletariat, were no longer restricting their seasonal reveling to their own neighborhoods; they had begun to travel freely, and menacingly, wherever they pleased. Often carousing in disguise (a holdover from the old tradition of mumming), these street gangs marauded through the city's wealthy neighborhoods, especially on New Year's Eve, in the form of callithumpian bands, which resembled (and may have overlapped with) the street gangs that were now vying for control of the city's poorer neighborhoods. Throughout the night these bands made as much noise as they could, sometimes stopping deliberately at the houses of the rich and powerful. In 1826, for example, such a gang stopped in front of the Broadway house of the city's mayor; there they "enacted" what a local newspaper termed "a scene of disgraceful rage." ...

In 1828 there occurred an extensive and especially violent callithumpian parade, complete with the standard array of "drums, tin kettles, rattles, horns, whistles, and a variety of other instruments." This parade began along the working-class Bowery, where the band pelted a tavern with lime; then it marched to Broadway, where a fancy upper-class ball was being held at the City Hotel; then to a black neighborhood, stopping at a church where the callithumpians "demolished all the windows, broke the doors [and] seats," and beat with sticks and ropes the African-American congregants who were holding a "watch" service; next, the band headed to the city's main commercial district, where they smashed crates and barrels and looted at least one shop; still unsatisfied, they headed to the Battery (at the southern tip of the city), where they broke the windows of several of the city's wealthiest residences and tried to remove the iron fence that surrounded Battery Park; finally they headed back to Broadway for a second visit. This time a group of hired watchmen were waiting for the callithumpians; but the band stood down the watch force, and, in the words of a local newspaper, "the multitude passed noisily and triumphantly up Broadway."

What are we to make of scenes like these? Once again, E. P. Thompson makes a convincing case that it would be misleading to interpret them either as wholly conscious political protest or as mere revelry that got out of hand, a kind of nineteenth-century frat party. Historians of American cities have agreed with that assessment. One of them puts it like this: "Riotous disorder, racial violence, and jolly foolery for neighbors and audiences existed side by side ... for decades. ... Customary Christmas license combined with seasonal unemployment made the winter holiday a noisy, drunken, threatening period in the eyes of the respectable." ...

[In 1828, there occured in New York a] New Year's Eve parade in which more than a thousand "persons of all ages" marched down "many of the principal streets of the city" committing "outrageous" acts. The mob
moved from one end of the city to the other, making the most hideous noises, committing many excesses, and for several hours in succession, disturbing neighborhoods where they thought proper to become in some measure stationary, to such a degree that sleep and rest, for the sick or for the well, were entirely destroyed. No nocturnal tumult or disturbance that we have ever witnessed, was in any measure equal to this. We understand that wherever the watch offered to interfere for the purpose of preventing mischief; they were either overpowered, or intimidated by numbers, and the mob had undisputed possession of the streets until a very late hour in the night. ...
To read the city's newspapers at mid-century is to encounter upbeat editorials about Christmas shopping and the joyous expectations of children juxtaposed with unsettling reports of holiday drunkenness and rioting. ... On December 26, 1840, a party of German-Americans (they were "engaged in fiddling, dancing, and making night hideous with their discordant din") engaged in a serious street battle with the police in which twenty-five people were arrested. But on the same day, the paper announced that "the holidays are at hand - the merry days to which childhood and youth look forward throughout the year with such anticipation and delight" ...

In 1848 George Templeton Strong was able to note casually that Christmas was "essentially an indoor and domestic festival," but when he took an omnibus to go shopping that same day, he noted that "[t]he driver was drunk and the progress of the vehicle was like that of a hippopotamus." Two years later, with accounts of Santa Claus and Christmas shopping plastered lavishly throughout the pages of the Tribune, gangs of youths were still roaming the streets at Christmas, making trouble wherever they went. By this time the gangs even had names, such as "[t]he Short Boys, Swill Boys, Rock Boys, Old Maid Boys, Holy Ch—s, and other bands of midnight prowlers [who] should have been in state prison long ago." New Year's Eve, 1851-52, was ushered into the city by what the Tribune termed "a Saturnalia of discord, by Callithumpian and Cowbellian bands, by musketry and fire-crackers, by bacchanal songs and noisy revels, which for two hours after midnight made sleep not a thing to be dreamed of." One man was arrested "for entering, uninvited, the house of Philip Herring, during his absence, and insulting his wife." And a group of about 150 men (most of them apparently Irish, and all of them drunk) invaded a fashionable Broadway restaurant and systematically destroyed the furniture, threw food and dishes around the place, and finally (before the police arrived) assaulted the owner, his wife, and their staff. All in all, upwards of one hundred men were arrested that night "for entering residences in which they never were before, and where they knew not a soul, and after eating and drinking without molestation to their hearts' content, maliciously breaking decanters, dishes, scattering the provisions about the premises, and not content with that, in many instances breaking windows, doors, and behaving more like fiends than like men."

At the heart of all this disorder, the Tribune reiterated, was the prevalence of alcohol during the Christmas season: "In the Eleventh Ward an unusual number of men were arrested for drunkenness, creating a mob, exciting a riot, insulting females, and other offenses to which men of low breeding, when intoxicated, are addicted." Such behavior was abetted by certain business establishments; local bars actually served drinks gratis on Christmas Day, in a holdover from the old English custom demanded of innkeepers ... The results, Horace Greeley reported, were obnoxious:
The first flash of morning discovered the liquor shops in full operation, with wassail bowls of smoking punch, and "medicine" of all sorts, free as water. This dangerous and wicked temptation was the means of setting a great many young men and boys in a state of crazy intoxication long before noon. As early as 10 o'clock we saw, in Broadway, between the Park and Broome-st., about a dozen parties of boys, each numbering from four to ten persons, nearly every one grossly drunk, and four fellows, in as many parties, entirely helpless, and being dragged along by neck and heels by their hardly less drunk companions.
What had changed, then, was not that the rowdier ways of celebrating Christmas had disappeared, or even that they had diminished, but that a new kind of holiday celebration, domestic and child-centered, had been fashioned and was now being claimed as the "real" Christmas. The rest of it - public drunkenness and threats or acts of violence, "rough music" - had been redefined as crime, "making night hideous." In part, this was accomplished through institutional means (in 1828 New York introduced a professional police force to replace the private "watch" that had failed to control the previous year's callithumpian riot). And in part it was accomplished through the manipulation of language itself. Henceforth, newspaper stories about Santa Claus would appear under the heading "Christmas," while stories about callithumpian activities would be relegated to the police column. In the terminology of a later age, those activities would be marginalized.

They Wrote A Book About It, Said It Was Like Ancient Rome

2011-12-21T16:09:00.000-05:00

Income inequality in the United States is higher than at any other time in modern history since the Great Depression.

Travis Waldron, Think Progress:

[The U.S. is] now more unequal than countries like Ivory Coast and Pakistan. While those numbers are startling, a study from two historians suggests that American wealth inequality may actually be worse than it was in Ancient Rome - a society built on slave labor, a defined class structure, and centuries of warfare and conquest.

Historians Walter Schiedel and Steven Friesen state that the top 1% of Americans control 40% of the country's wealth. In Rome, when the empire was at its population zenith (around 150 C.E.), that number was approximately 16%.

Income inequality is not only a problem in the U.S. The distance between the ultra-rich and everyone else has increased in 17 of the 22 countries for which the Organisation of Economic Development and Cooperation has long-term data. Those 17 countries include the United Kingdom, Germany, Finland, Israel, Sweden, New Zealand, Mexico, Italy, Japan, Australia, and Canada.

Here are some pie charts and some facts:

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the top 1% saw their incomes rise by 275 percent between 1979 and 2007, while the incomes of the bottom 20% of earners grew by only 20 percent.

The total net worth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans is more than that of the bottom 60% of Americans.

The six heirs to the Walmart fortune had the same net worth in 2007 as the bottom 30% of Americans.

The richest 1% of Americans now earn almost 24 percent of the country's income. In 1976, that figure was 9 percent.

As noted above, the U.S.'s income equality is worse than in Pakistan, the Ivory Coast, and Ethiopia. It is roughly on par with Uganda.

And while the situation in Canada is not nearly as dire, it is drifting in the wrong direction.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development reports that the richest 1% of Canadians saw their share of total income increase from slightly more than 8 percent in 1980 to more than 13 percent in 2007. A big reason for that is the top marginal tax rate has dropped from 43% to 29% in that time period.

Recent census data shows nearly 50% of all Americans are either living in poverty or classified as "low income" (defined as less than $45,000 annual earnings for a family of four). The U.S. poverty threshold in 2009 for a single person under 65 years of age was $11,161; the threshold for a family of four (two adults, two children) was $21,756. In 2010, the U.S.'s poverty rate rose to 15.1%.

If two parents work 40 hours week for 52 weeks and earn minimum wage ($7.25/hour), they would bring home approximately $27,500. Even if three of the four family members worked full-time at minimum wage, they would not crack the "low income" threshold, coming in at only $41,350. If both parents earned $12/hour, the family would still be "low income" ($43,264).

Many families who you and I would consider poor - $55,000 for a family of four, for example - are "too rich" to qualify for numerous U.S. tax credits and social programs. As the number of poor people rises, I await Barack Obama's (or his successor's) lowering of the poverty line, which would magically mean a much lower number of poor people. It worked for Ronald Reagan. Prosperity! Yay!

(Speaking of Reagan, during his two terms, he lowered the tax rate for the top 1% of income earners by 14.4% and raised the tax burden of the lowest 25% of workers by 16.1%. The U.S.'s current transformation into a third-world country began with Reagan and accelerated under Bill Clinton's administrations.)

Associated Press:

Mayors in 29 cities say more than 1 in 4 people needing emergency food assistance did not receive it. Many middle-class Americans are dropping below the low-income threshold ... because of pay cuts, a forced reduction of work hours or a spouse losing a job. Housing and child-care costs are consuming up to half of a family's income.

Think Progress, December 20, 2011:

The Occupy Wall Street movement has put America's staggering wealth gap front and center in the national debate. Between 1979 and 2007, average after-tax incomes for the top 1 percent rose by 281 percent while middle class wages stagnated. The top 1 percent controls roughly 40 percent of the nation's wealth. At the very top of the income scale, the 400 richest Americans have seen their share of income quadruple in the last 12 years, while their effective tax rates were halved.

In the 2010-11 school year, more than 31,000 homeless students attended school in Michigan - a 37% increase over the previous year. According to Jeff Seidel, an investigative reporter for the Detroit Free Press:

Overall, the number of homeless students in Michigan has jumped more than 300% in the last four years. Most experts say those numbers are low because many parents are embarrassed to admit they are homeless. And many school districts lack the resources to identify these kids, as required by federal law.

Advocates say there's also a disincentive to find homeless children. Once a district finds them, it has to pay to transport them to school and provide other services - a tough job for many cash-strapped districts.

In other Michigan news, Governor Rick Snyder on Monday signed into law bills lowering unemployment insurance and worker's compensation benefits - and regulations making it harder for workers to qualify for those ever-meager benefits.

Finally, Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, on the people of Occupy Wall Street:

Who gives a crap about some imbecile? Are you kidding me?

Not From Concentrate

2011-12-18T16:45:00.000-05:00

Nicholas Carr:

I'd sit down with a book, or a long article, and after a couple of pages my brain wanted to do what it does when I'm online: check e-mail, click on links, do some Googling, hop from page to page.

Carr's inability to concentrate led him to do some research and his subsequent article in The Atlantic - "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" - was expanded into a book: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

Carr's problems resonated strongly with me, as my own battles to focus have grown worse in recent years. Near the beginning of The Shallows, he writes:

I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article. My mind would get caught up in the twists of the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel like I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Two of Carr's friends admit to similar troubles. Bruce Friedman says his thinking has taken on a "staccato" quality:

I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print. I can't read War and Peace anymore. I've lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.

Scott Karp was a lit major and a voracious reader in college, but he confesses that he has stopped reading books of any kind:

What happened? What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read had changed, i.e., I'm just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?

Carr believes that the Internet has changed the way we read and process information. He cites studies that show the constant (and seemingly natural) interruptions of being online - of checking email, of doing a web search, clicking from hyperlink to hyperlink - has actually led to a re-wiring of our brains, making it maddeningly hard to, for example, lose ourselves in a book.

Recently, I was sitting outside with the dogs. It was a sunny day, and I had several hours of free time. I took a book outside, set up a chair on the patio and began reading. But every quarter-page or so, I would stop reading and look around the yard. I could not concentrate for an extended period of time. I had to actively resist getting up and going back inside to my desk/computer. There was no reason to do so; I wasn't waiting for any mail. And when I was reading, my eyes were often trying to skip ahead to the next paragraph. [This is in addition to my general fatigue when reading, the almost immediate watery eyes and long strings of yawns. But that is other subject for another day.]

Carr, to NPR:

Neuroscientists and psychologists have discovered that, even as adults, our brains are ... very malleable, they adapt at the cellular level to whatever we happen to be doing. And so the more time we spend surfing, and skimming, and scanning ... the more adept we become at that mode of thinking.

And presumably, that means we get worse at concentrating. The Shallows cites studies indicating that online reading yields lower comprehension than reading from a printed page.

Carr argues that as we hop from webpage to webpage, we lose our ability to employ a "slower, more contemplative mode of thought".

Chapter Four of The Shallows is both a short (but extraordinary) history, and a love letter to the act, of reading. Carr notes that developing the mental discipline to concentrate intently on a book was not easy.

The natural state of the human brain, like that of the brains of most of our relatives in the animal kingdom, is one of distractedness. Our predisposition is to shift our gaze, and hence our attention, from one object to another, to be aware of as much of what's going on around us as possible. ... Our fast-paced, reflexive skills in focus were once crucial to our survival. ...

To read a book was to practice an unnatural process of thought ... [Readers] had to train their brains to ignore everything else going on around them, to resist the urge to let their focus sip from one sensory cue to another. ... "The ability to focus on a single task, relatively uninterrupted," writes Vaughan Bell, a research psychologist at King's College London, represents a "strange anomaly in the history of our psychological development."

If the internet is returning us to our "natural state of distractedness"*, if prolonged, solitary thought - the act of "deep reading" - is merely an odd behavioural blip on the evolutionary timeline, then why is our inability to read more than two pages in a book so alarming? If the brain can forge new connections and adapt to new circumstances nearly on instantaneously - and the examples Carr gives of this are fascinating - is it simply a matter of retraining our brains to concentrate? Or does the ubiquity of computers in our life now make that an unconquerable hurdle?

* - A 2009 article in Discover magazine reported that the average mind wanders roughly 13% of the time, "which would be a substantial failure of control if not necessary".

I look forward to seeing if and how Carr answers these questions.

The distractions of the modern age are a popular topic. In addition to Carr's book, I have seen references to Maggie Jackson's Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (2008) and Winifred Gallagher's Rapt: Attention of the Focused Life (2009).

And there must be a connection between these ideas/thoughts/books and David Foster Wallace's theme of boredom and the hard and constant work involved in paying attention, which I hope to see more clearly as I read on.

Canada-US Border Deal A Threat To Rights And Freedoms

2011-12-18T10:00:00.000-05:00

The "Beyond the Border Perimeter Security and Economic Competitiveness Action Plan" agreement between Canada and the United States for 2012 means that Canada will adopt the draconian (and often unconstitutional) Bush-Obama positions on privacy, security, immigration, and surveillance.

For the first time in its history, the Canadian government will track each time anyone leaves or enters the country. In addition, all airlines will be obligated to divulge personal information on anyone flying out of a Canadian airport - regardless of destination - to Canadian authorities, and the US can receive this information simply by asking for it.

One of the stated goals of the agreements (which were announced on December 7) is to reduce traveler delays at the border. But the increased security measures will likely result in longer waits and harassment, especially for immigrants, refugees and racialized groups. The Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations has denounced the legislation for its failure to protect civil liberties.

Changes to border infrastructure will cost at least $200 million annually. What will move faster across the border is corporate trade. The border deal is not about surrendering Canadian sovereignty to the US, but enhancing the joint ability of both the Canadian and the US state to crack down on the civil liberties of citizens, immigrants and refugees, while promoting the flow of capital. The Canadian Council of Chief Executives enthusiastically supports the legislation for its "impressive range of practical, targeted measures" - which target people, not corporations.

As Council of Canadians chairperson Maude Barlow noted, "the business community was the only sector at the table with government and guided the process from the beginning". Groups concerned about health and safety, security and privacy issues, labour rights, and environmental protection were not consulted.

(Socialist Worker Canada)

Mission Accomplished Jr.

2011-12-17T14:19:00.000-05:00

Different president, same bullshit.

George W. Bush, May 1, 2003:

Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. ... [T]he tyrant has fallen, and Iraq is free. ... America is grateful for a job well done.

Barack Obama, December 14, 2011:

I've come to speak to you about the end of the war in Iraq. Over the last few months the final work of leaving Iraq has been done. ... [O]ver the next few days a small group of American soldiers will begin the final march out of that country. ... America's war in Iraq will be over. ... So today, as we mark the end of the war ... [T]he United States military is the most respected institution in our land ... [Y]ou, the 9/11 Generation, have earned your place in history.

Is the U.S.'s murderous occupation of Iraq and the emotional and physical torture of its people actually over?

No.

No.

No.

2014 Afghanistan Deadline "Not Absolute"

2011-12-12T21:59:00.000-05:00

In perhaps the least surprising news story of 2011, the United States ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan C. Crocker, said that U.S. troops would stay in that country beyond the White House's 2014 withdrawal deadline if the Afghan government asked them to.

U.S. embassy spokeswoman Eileen O'Connor said Crocker's comment was consistent with President Barack Obama's previous statements. "[T]he possibility of some troops still being here post-2014 is not a change in policy." However, Crocker's comments on December 10 referred to combat troops, a topic Obama has not previously acknowledged.

Crocker said 10,000 troops would be pulled out by the end of 2011 and an additional 23,000 by September 2012. However, that simply reduces the number of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan back down to the number before Obama's 2009 "surge". Crocker said that beyond 2012, "there are no decisions. I don't know what we're going to be doing in 2014."

The reduced number of troops has no effect on the ever-growing shadow army of military contractors. In August 2010, the Department of Defense stated there were roughly 112,000 contractors in Afghanistan. That number has likely increased in the last year.

In Canada, Steven Harper recently pledged $100 million of taxpayer money to Afghanistan each year for the next three years. Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird could not say how much money would be sent to Afghanistan after 2014.

Canadian forces also view the 2014 deadline as written in pencil. Col. Peter Dawe, deputy commander of the Canadian contribution to the NATO training mission, told Postmedia News in August 2011, "You can't view 2014 as an absolute deadline."

US Air Force Admits Tossing Remains Of Dead Soliders In Garbage

2011-12-10T01:51:00.003-05:00

Washington Post, December 7, 2011:

The Air Force dumped the incinerated partial remains of at least 274 American troops in a Virginia landfill ... before halting the secretive practice three years ago, records show.

The landfill dumping was concealed from families who had authorized the military to dispose of the remains in a dignified and respectful manner, Air Force officials said. ...

The Air Force had maintained that it could not estimate how many troops might have had their remains sent to a landfill [claiming it would take too much time and effort]. ...

The landfill disposals were never formally authorized under military policies or regulations. They also were not disclosed to senior Pentagon officials who conducted a high-level review of cremation policies at the Dover mortuary in 2008 ...

Senior Air Force leaders said there was no intent to deceive. "Absolutely not," said Lt. Gen. Darrell D. Jones, the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for personnel. ...

The total number of incinerated fragments dumped in the landfill exceeded 2,700.

I'd call the Air Force officials little more than pieces of shit, but that would disrespect shit, which can be used as fertilizer to help living things grow. I assume that the conservatives who cannot abide any criticism of the US military support the landfill burials, right? What's the saying - if you don't stand behind the military, then go stand in front of them?

Back in April 2008, current Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said the US should allow a terrorist attack to happen every so often to remind the American people how important the government's security measures are.

It's almost like they should every once in a while have allowed an attack to get through just to remind us - I mean, think about, think about, think about the psychology.

And the crowd laughs.

Little Richard - 1966 - Paris

2011-12-06T21:13:00.000-05:00

Pure sexual energy and some ferocious rock and roll - from one of the original masters. A revelation.

Willard (one of my favourite music bloggers) posted some studio material from 1957 and 1958 awhile back, subtitling it (wonderfully, and accurately) "So Much Rock, God Was Forced To Step In". The albums are

Little Richard's remarkable debut rock 'n' roll LPs, Here's Little Richard and Little Richard, practically greatest hits albums on their own. Recorded in 1957/58 for Specialty Records, just before Richard Penniman gave up rock 'n' roll to preach and sing the gospel around 1958. This music isn't the stripped down stuff that Elvis was exploring at the same time. Richard's madness was a direct out-growth of late 40s/early 50s group R&B, as evidenced by the full band's horn arrangements. Richard's voice, jamming needles into the red whenever he charges into the choruses, was clearly too much for 50s studio microphones. His screaming flamboyance was too much for TV & Top 40 radio, too. And to think 50s parents were afraid of Elvis. There are some non-essentials here, but Little Richard could turn any nonsense – from "A-Wop-Bop-A-Loo-Bop-A-Lop-Bam-Boom" to the old-timey "Baby Face" - into something unique. It was all so rockin' and so decadent that God himself was forced to step in and handle matters. After a lengthy, soul-searching stint with evangelicalism, Penniman would eventually come back to the dark side in the early 60s... but these albums are where the devil got his due.

touching the third rail - the beginnings of a second civil war?

2011-12-05T11:08:00.004-05:00

Down in the land of the free and the home of the brave, there is some scary shit going on.

Not the five (or six? or seven?) countries the United States is currently bombing - or the 120 countries in which it is conducting military operations.

Not the more than $8,000,000,000,000 the government has happily stuffed into the already bulging wallets of the nation's bankers, whose illegal business practices will lead to the repossession of more than 6 million homes by 2013.

This something that would effectively destroy even the lingering pretense that the United States is a democratic country.

The US Senate will cast a final vote this week on a bill that, if passed, would designate the entire nation (including your back yard) as a "battlefield" in the War of Terror™ and grant the president the unquestioned power to use the military to detain indefinitely anyone he chooses - without evidence, without charge, and without trial. In an initial vote, the Senate supported the bill 93-7.

The National Defense Authorization Act (S. 1867) was drafted by both parties and passed in secret, without any public debate. The bill would necessitate the need for permanent concentration camps, like the ones in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (A collection of news articles and discussion is here.)

Barack Obama has said he will veto the bill if it passes, but I have my doubts. Since taking office, Obama has "affirmed, continued and expanded almost all of the draconian domestic civil liberties intrusions pioneered under the Bush administration" – while casually authorizing the murder of American citizens. And being awarded - and accepting - the Nobel Peace Prize, of course.

Why is the government doing this? One reason is the Occupy movement.

This anti-capitalism movement has been articulate, despite media reports to the contrary, listing its concerns in a way that nearly all Americans can understand. The powers that be know that ignoring the movement and allow it to grow would invite a host of problems. The movement may wane in parts of the country during the winter months, but it will likely roar back to life in the spring. Writer Ted Rall says "2012 is shaping up to be our Year of Revolution."

Naomi Wolf, the author of The End of America (a short book; essential reading) recently recounted a number of assaults by police against the Occupy movement and came to a conclusion that echoes what I have been thinking. The Occupy movement, the crackdowns against it, and S. 1867 could be the opening salvos in a second US Civil War.

US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.

But just when Americans thought we had the picture – was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? – the picture darkened. The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that "New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers" covering protests. Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering, and penned far from the site in which the news was unfolding. Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being – falsely – informed by police that "It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk." ...

[T]he Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests. ...

Why this massive mobilization against these not-yet-fully-articulated, unarmed, inchoate people? After all, protesters against the war in Iraq, Tea Party rallies and others have all proceeded without this coordinated crackdown. ... I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response.

That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted. ...

So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organized suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.

Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square. Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us.

The political and corporate class is taking no chances, and is attempting to pass legislation under the guise of fighting terrorism - but can also be used against any political movement that threatens the status quo.

Some people have insisted the bill would not apply to Americans, but John McCain was quite clear that it applies to anyone: "An individual, no matter who they are, if they pose a threat to the security of the United States of America, should not be allowed to continue that threat."

The bill, if passed, would allow the president to detain such persons indefinitely without trial, or try them before a military court, or transfer them "to the custody or control of the person's country of origin, any other foreign country, or any other foreign entity".

Please note that last "or" clause. My reading of that - and Matthew Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive, agrees - is that any American citizen could be taken into custody from anywhere in the United Battlefield of America and transferred to any foreign entity in the world, presumably to be "disappeared".

The system is crumbling and the owners of that system are doing whatever they can to keep it standing as long as possible. But, as William I. Robinson writes that:

the immense structural inequalities of the global political economy can no longer be contained through consensual mechanisms of social control. The ruling classes have lost legitimacy; we are witnessing a breakdown of ruling-class hegemony on a world scale.

And things are going to get much, much worse before they get better.

Chris Hedges reports that the Arab Spring uprisings had a lot to do with increased food prices. Wheat prices had risen 100% over an eight-month period, making it next to impossible for Egyptians to feed their families. That same concern could spark more unrest in the US in 2012. On the day before thanksgiving, the Financial Times reported that more than 40% of food producers plan on increasing prices in the next few months. A week before that, it was reported that 100 million Americans - one-third of the country - is considered poor or near poor. If there is not already an agreed-upon definition of "third world country", that level of poverty, while the net worth of the richest citizens is skyrocketing - might serve as one.

Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, has studied the collapse of societies once thought to be indestructible. In 2005 he wrote:

I drive by gated communities guarded by private security patrols, and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to private schools. If conditions deteriorate too much for poorer people, gates will not keep the rioters out.

Ted Rall, on the US's "Fuck You System of Government":

Governments are supposed to fulfill the basic needs of their citizens. Ours doesn't pretend to try.

Sick? Too bad.

Can’t find a job? Tough.

Broke? Can't afford rent? We don't give a crap.

Forget "e pluribus unum." We need a more accurate motto.

We live under a f— you system.

Got a problem? The U.S. government has an all-purpose response to whatever ails you: f— you. ...

Doctors [have] noted a new phenomenon called "Zuccotti cough." Symptoms are similar to those of "Ground Zero cough" suffered by 9/11 first responders.

Zuccotti is 450 feet away from Ground Zero.

Which brings to mind the fact that the collapse of the World Trade Center towers released 400 tons of asbestos into the air. It was never cleaned up properly. Could Occupiers be suffering the results of sleeping in a should-have-been-Superfund site for two months?

We'll never know. As under Bush, Obama's EPA still won't conduct a 9/11 environmental impact study.

Sick? Wanna know why? F— you. ...

When people who lost their homes because their government said "f— you" to them rather than help turn to the same government to look for safe shelter, again they are told: "f— you."

And then, after days and years and decades of shirking their responsibility ... our "f— you" government has the amazing audacity to blame us, victims of their negligence and corruption and violence, for messing things up.

Which is why we are finally, at long last, starting to say "f— you" to them.

Frank Luntz, a leading GOP Strategist:

I'm so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I'm frightened to death. They're having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.

fighting perfectionism and turning off kfkd

2011-12-03T02:44:00.002-05:00

[B]ooks are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They are full of all the things that you don't get in real life – wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded ...

Anne Lamott says Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life contains "almost every single thing I know about writing". Some snippets from the book (her stuff is indented):

[How do you do it?] You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. ...

It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started. ... One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, "It's not like you don't have a choice, because you do - you can either type or kill yourself." ...

E.L. Doctorow: "Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard. ...

[T]hirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird." ...

I finally notice the one-inch picture frame that I put on my desk to remind me of short assignments. It reminds me that all I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame. This is all I have to bite off for the time being. All I am going to do right now, for example, is write that one paragraph ...

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.

Besides, perfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness ... Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived. Clutter is wonderfully fertile ground – you can still discover new treasures under all those piles ... Tidiness suggests that something is as good as it's going to get. Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation, while writing needs to breathe and move.

Thinking that you have to write an entire book can be a paralyzing thought. While writing 1918, I often felt like I had to write it all out in finished form. Which, of course, is completely impossible – and was guaranteed to make me feel like crap when it didn't happen.

In On Writing, Stephen King recalls being asked, "How do you write?" He answers, "One word at a time." He wasn't being a smart-ass. That is literally how it's done. It's a variation on the saying, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." There is that first step. And then a second step. And a third step. You cannot take 40 steps at once and get to your destination quicker. There are no shortcuts. Left foot, right foot, left foot ... One thought, one word, one sentence, one paragraph, one page. Do that, over and over – write enough words, take enough steps – and you will reach your destination.

The curse of perfectionism: somewhere in the back corner of your brain, you know how you want the sentence to read. (I have had dreams where I was writing entire articles or reading a finished article. More than a few times they were what I was currently working on. However, once awake, I had no idea what the dream article said.) But I felt that it was in my head somewhere and so it must be possible to get it out. I don't think I believe that anymore.

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something – anything – down on paper. A friend of mine says the first draft is the down draft – you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft – you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. The third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy. ... Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can't – and, in fact, you're not supposed to – know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing.

For some of us, three drafts is what it takes even before we show it to someone. Then we get some feedback and push ourselves through another draft or three. King also implied that three drafts is the standard amount, though obviously, there is no set number. David Foster Wallace was a "five draft man" – his first hand-written draft, two hand-written rewrites, and two more typed drafts.

Perfectionism goes hand in hand with what Lamott calls "shitty first drafts" (she meant it as a good thing in the quote, above). Getting something down on paper should make you feel good, but, for me, it often reinforces whatever negative feelings I have of not being able to write. My first draft of anything more extensive than addressing an envelope is a mess. Half-finished, simplistic sentences – which "proves" to me that I have no business calling myself a writer, and I should quit now before I waste any more time.

But I have finally learned to tell myself – okay, this is the part where I type a bunch of crap. No one will see it and the second run-through will be immeasurably better – because there is likely a germ or grain of something worthwhile in there, some phrase or sentence that can be built upon. Or I realize the draft is not really writing at all, it's more like evidence of thinking.

If you are not careful, station KFKD [K-Fucked] will play in your head twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, in stereo. Out of the right speaker in your inner ear will come the endless stream of self-aggrandizement, the recitation of one's specialness, of how much more open and gifted and brilliant and knowing and misunderstood and humble one is. Out of the left speaker will be the rap songs of self-loathing, the lists of all the things one doesn't do well, of all the mistakes one has made today and over an entire lifetime, the doubt, the assertion that everything that one touches turns to shit, that one doesn't do relationships well, that one is in every way a fraud, incapable of selfless love, that one has no talent or insight, and on and on and on.

The best way to get quiet, other than the combination of extensive therapy, Prozac, and a lobotomy, is first to notice that the station is on. KFKD is on every single morning when I sit down at my desk. So I sit for a moment and then say a small prayer - please help me get out of the way so I can write what wants to he written. Sometimes ritual quiets the racket. Try it. Any number of things may work for you ... Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it is time to kick in.

It is very comforting to know that these feelings are universal. Every book on writing addresses them in some way. Now I have to go re-read Art & Fear.

you must not come lightly to the blank page

2011-11-28T02:03:00.004-05:00

I have begun work on what I hope, in a couple of years, will be a book. Right now, my job is convincing someone to offer me a contract. As that process crawls on, I've been thinking about writing - and taking some books off my shelf that discuss the writer's mindset, and the many traps to expect and avoid.

The best book I have ever read in this regard is, hands down, Art & Fear: Observations On The Perils (And Rewards) Of Artmaking (1993), by David Bayles and Ted Orland. It was recommended to me years ago by someone I knew in New York. He said A&F got him through many battles with self-doubt, and waves of excessive and unwarranted self-criticism of both his work and artistic processes. The first half of the book is absolutely indispensable.

Other books I will be revisiting are Anne Lamott's Bird By Bird: Some Instructions On Writing And Life (1994), George V. Higgins's On Writing: Advice For Those Who Write To Publish (Or Would Like To) (1990), and William Zinsser's On Writing Well: An Informal Guide To Writing Non-Fiction (1976).

The book I am blogging about today is one I recently read: Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft (2000). Roger Ebert said it "had more useful and observant things to say about the craft than any book since Strunk and White's The Elements of Style". I also heard it compared favourably to Bird By Bird, so I figured I'd check it out (literally: from the library!).

Plus, I have been on some sort of sideways King kick lately. A month or two ago, I grabbed a couple of paperbacks from the communal book area at work. One was Desperation and one was The Running Man (which King wrote in one week and published under his Richard Bachman pseudonym). I have not read them, but I've read some literary essays on his work and themes. And my life-long attraction to 1,000+-page books has meant wanting to read either It or The Stand (which King republished in full some years ago, adding hundreds of additional pages) off and on for years.

I read a number of King's books in the early '80s: The Shining, Cujo, Christine, Pet Sematary, and the Nightshift and Four Seasons collections. I have skimmed some of his later work but much of it seems thinly-styled and hokey. I read The Green Mile in 1996, because I thought publishing a novel serially was a fascinating project. But it felt like a first or second draft, as though King needed more time to either tighten things up or fill out his narrative. Yet in some corners of the internet, TGM is cited as one of his best works.

King says On Writing is a guide for how "a competent writer can become a good one". Obviously, he focuses on fiction, which I do not write, but I still enjoyed his uncomplicated love and serious respect for the written word:

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut. ...

Reading is the creative center of a writer's life. I take a book with me everywhere I go ... the trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as in long swallows. ... [If you watch a lot of TV], it's time to question how serious you really are about becoming a writer. ... Reading takes time ...

[W]hen you find something at which you are talented, you do it (whatever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of your head. Even when no one is listening (or reading, or watching), every outing is a bravura performance, because you as creator are happy. Perhaps even ecstatic.

The act of writing, of recording your thoughts, recollections, and opinions, of making them more permanent, fixes them in your mind more concretely than merely thinking about them. Most people have a need to express themselves creatively - writing, painting, cooking, acting, teaching, having a trade, etc. (And I often wonder what works of art we have been deprived of because millions of people have more pressing concerns, like simply living day-to-day.) There is also a concurrent need to be read, heard, acknowledged. But when you write, while you may hope for an audience, you are, at the root, doing it for yourself. Being alone during the creative act - having it play out inside your head - adds to that, I think. And there can be great satisfaction, as King notes, in performing for yourself.

But writing in the hopes of publication can also be shitty. It can resurrect - and/or reinforce - your worst feelings about yourself. It can take serious effort to push those voices aside, and carry on. To show up every day - to exercise what talent you have like a muscle. When writing for yourself, or without a deadline, however, it can be hard to keep showing up. No one is waiting for your work. No one will miss it. There is no punishment if you take the day (or week, or month) off. Even thinking that you have to write in order to be a complete person does not make you immune to these other, seemingly contradictory, feelings.

King talks a lot about his own beginning as a writer, though I would not call it a mini-autobiography. He is quite blunt when it comes to addressing his years of drug and alcohol addiction. The most fascinating (and, honestly, hard to believe) statements is when he mentions four books - 'Salem's Lot, Desperation, Dolores Claiborne, and Cujo - and says, "In no case were they plotted, not even to the extent of a single note jotted on a single piece of scrap paper ..."

A first draft - King calls it "the All-Story Draft"; David Foster Wallace labelled his "Zero Draft" (so raw, it comes before the 1st draft) - is banged out as fast as you can, with as little conscious thought as necessary. Otherwise, there's opportunity for self-doubt or self-censorship.

King strives for 2,000 words a day - roughly six double-spaced pages (this post is 1,428 words). Do that seven days a week and you'll have 180,000 words in three months, about the time King says it should take to get a first draft down on paper. King is a rare specimen in that regard. Or maybe that's about right if you've got a clear idea what you want to do and the sailing is untroubled. If you simply want to write an entertaining story, nothing fancy - which is what King does - maybe that's about right. I have no idea. Outside of game stories of athletic events, I have not written anything for publication in that manner. And those rarely topped 750 words. Usually, there are interview transcripts, or microfilm printouts, or internet searches to conduct. I gather a lot of little parts and then try to connect them in a coherent, pleasing order.

Sudden Thought: In many ways, King is like Woody Allen. He's always working, with another book/movie in the pipeline every year or so. This current one may be good, or great, or bad, or boring, but by the time you are reading/watching it, he's already working on the next one. Just wait a bit and see what comes next, maybe it'll be more to your liking.

Three other King quotes from On Writing:

What Writing Is
Telepathy, of course. ... All the arts depend on telepathy to some degree, but I believe writing offers the purest distillation.

[I]f you don't want to work your ass off, you have no business trying to write well - settle back into competency and be grateful you have even that much to fall back on.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair - the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

Bird By Bird is next.

chill bumps appear and i am frozen in the web they weave

2011-11-25T00:18:00.003-05:00

In my recent REM post at JoS, I picked "Voice of Harold" as one of my favourite songs by the band. It was recorded during the Reckoning sessions in December 1983. Michael Stipe reads the back of an old gospel album over the backing track of "7 Chinese Brothers". The song was released as the B-side to So. Central Rain and collected on Dead Letter Office, an odds and sods album released in 1987.

Here is the album - The Joy Of Knowing Jesus by The Revelaires -- front and back:

Reverend Bill Funderburk sings "He Cared That Much For Me";
Charles Surratt introduces his own composition
"On Calvary For Me"; "The Joy of Knowing Jesus"
Is a song of pure delight featuring John Barbee;
The pure tenor quality of the voice of Harold
Montgomery gives a special interpretation to the grand
Old hymn "The Old Rugged Cross";
Chill bumps appear and I am frozen in the web they weave
As they reveal their innermost selves with the outpouring of their hearts.
On and on the songs roll on and soon you are caught up
In the sermon in each rendition as you come to feel
The devotion and dedication that is poured forth.
Suddenly, you know they are real, they mean it!
"Let your light so shine" could not be more aptly a-
Pplied as there shines a light from heaven on your heart
Through their singing. As an artist, Rhonda Montgomery
Exemplifies piano artistry. That's Rhonda! An artist!
This album can be the instrument to mend a broken heart
Or to straighten out your life.
Through the sincere testimony in the songs of The Revelaires.
A must!
J. Elmo Fagg (Founder and leader of
The Blue Ridge Quartet
For 23 Years) on Temple Records, LST 390
Planning to make a record?
We are associated with United Music World
Recording Studios, Incorporated,
West Columbia, South Carolina. The finest sound available anywhere
"The Joy of Knowing Jesus" pro-
Duced by Joel Gentry
Cover/Backliner Design/Reesor
The Revelaires. A must.
The Revelaires.
A must. In their home.

And this may be the original Revelaries song, but I'm not sure. It's hard to find any information on the album or the song.

Producer Don Dixon (why the song title is given as "Blues" and not "Brothers" is a mystery (even if this was an early title, it clearly was not the title on the day of the recording), but I'll keep it as is):

We were working on the vocal for "7 Chinese Blues," but Michael just wasn't into it. He was down in his stairwell. I hit the talk-back to let him know I was coming through to make an adjustment... This was just an excuse to take a look at him, see if I could loosen him up a little. While I was in the attic, I'd noticed a stack of old records that had been taken up there to die, local R&B and gospel stuff mostly. I grabbed the one off the top (a gospel record entitled The Joy of Knowing Jesus by the Revelaires) and as I passed Michael on the way to the Control Room, I tossed it down to him. I thought he might be amused. When I fired up the tape a few seconds later, Michael was singing, but not the lyrics to "7 Chinese Blues." He was singing the liner notes to the LP I'd tossed him. When Michael began to sing these liner notes, he was much louder than he'd been earlier and it took a few seconds for me to realise what was going on and adjust the levels. He made it all the way through the song, working in every word on the back of that album! I rewound the tape, we had a chuckle and proceeded to sing the beautiful one-take vocal of the real words that you hear on Reckoning. He seemed more confident after that day.

and 2,077 days later ...

2011-11-24T07:00:00.001-05:00

I have resurrected this blog for non-baseball stuff.

Stay tuned.

The End.

2006-03-19T13:24:00.001-05:00

This will likely be my last post to In Other News... (Although I may use the URL for something else in the future.)

I don't do a lot of analyzing or original writing here -- mostly posting links to items I think are overlooked and/or important -- but even so, it has become a chore. Pushing yourself to write is hard enough. It should never feel like a "job".

Also, continued evidence of the dark evil at the heart of the ruling party in the US, coupled with the noise about an inevitable attack on Iran (and the very real possiblity of another "terror attack" to re-rally the citizenry), has made me pretty depressed. It seems like that feeling has only increased since I left the US for Canada.

I urge you to bookmark some of the news links on the right. If you do, you'll probably find everything I would have posted here anyway. My picks for the best sites:

Attytood
Cannonfire
Cursor
The Huffington Post
Left I On The News
Media Matters
Rigorous Intuition
Unclaimed Territory

and especially the Latest Breaking News forum at Democratic Underground (and don't forget Top 10 Conservative Idiots).

And (naturally) Joy of Sox for all your Boston Red Sox needs.

The American Fascist

2006-03-10T14:30:00.001-05:00

US Vice President Henry Wallace, New York Times, April 9, 1944:

The really dangerous American fascist ... would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. ...

They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

The entire Op-Ed is fascinating reading. Thanks to uggabugga.

"A Recent Surge Of Violence"

2006-03-05T12:18:00.000-05:00

EarlG, one of the administrators at Democratic Underground, has compiled this list of media reporting "a recent surge of violence" in Iraq. Click here for links to each instance:

September 3, 2003: Meanwhile, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac were to meet in Germany on Thursday to discuss ways for the West to respond to the recent surge in violence in Iraq and the Middle East.

October 31, 2003: Ansar is believed to be channelling into Iraq the foreign fighters who are behind a recent surge in violence in the country, officials say.

November 3, 2003: Bush blamed loyalists to ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and foreign terrorists for the recent surge in violence in Iraq.

March 4, 2004: A wave of bomb attacks in Baghdad and Karbala killing at least 171 people earlier this week has highlighted the difficulties in rebuilding the country and restoring peace. But Mr Blair, speaking after a meeting in Rome with his Italian counterpart, Silvio Berlusconi, said the recent surge in violence in Iraq did not constitute civil war.

April 14, 2004: U.S. President George W. Bush held a major news conference at the White House on 13 April in the middle of the deadliest month for Americans in Iraq since Baghdad fell a year ago. He spoke of the recent surge in violence there, but urged his countrymen not to lose faith. He also said he would adhere to the 30 June deadline for handing over sovereignty to Iraqis.

April 15, 2004: Pace said the recent surge in violence in Iraq is being driven by "terrorists" who see the June 30 deadline for turnover of sovereignty approaching rapidly and are petrified by the promise of democracy.

April 26, 2004: Lt. Gen. David Barno, the top American commander in Afghanistan, said Monday that the military has seen a recent surge in violence, but that most attacks were directed against soft targets, such as civilians or isolated Afghan security outposts.

May 12, 2004: Despite the prison abuse scandal and the recent surge in violence in Iraq, a majority of the public (53%) continues to support keeping troops in Iraq until a stable government is established

May 25, 2004: In his speech to the Army War College here, Bush warned that "there are difficult days ahead and the way forward may sometimes appear chaotic." Yet he vowed the handover would take place on schedule and that the US-led coalition would not be defeated by insurgents blamed for the recent surge in violence.

June 24, 2004: Compelled by the recent surge in violence, US Central Command (CentCom) has informally asked Army planners for as many as 25,000 more troops in Iraq, the Baltimore Sun reports.

July 22, 2004: Despite a recent surge in violence, including kidnappings, car bombings and assassinations, senior U.S. and Iraqi officials gave a relatively optimistic assessment on Wednesday of the security situation in Iraq since the transfer of political authority from U.S. to Iraqi authorities June 28.

July/August, 2004: In the short term, ongoing help will be required with the maintenance of security within the country. The response to the recent surge in violence must emphasise political solutions and not be just a simple deployment of military power.

September 9, 2004: "The recent surge in violence has been especially surprising because in the weeks after the transfer of power there was a phase that, for Iraq, felt to some almost like a lull."

September 17, 2004: The assessments, made before the recent surge in violence in Iraq and the US military death toll there topping 1000, appear to conflict with Bush's upbeat description of the US-led effort to stabilise and democratise Iraq.

September 22, 2004: The Iraqi leader also said that despite a recent surge in violence in Iraq, it is "very important for the people of the world really to know that we are winning, we are making progress in Iraq, we are defeating terrorists."

December 18, 2004: Mosul has experienced a recent surge in violence. On Friday, a car carrying Turkish security guards was attacked in the city, in Iraq's far north near the Turkish border, and four people were killed, one of them decapitated.

January 4, 2005: The incident marks the most senior assassination since the death in May of Governing Council president Abd al-Zahra Uthman Muhammad and should be seen within the context of the recent surge in violence ahead of national and provincial elections slated for 30 January.

January 17, 2005: The area around Kut has seen a recent surge in violence. In a separate attack, two Iraqi provincial government auditors were shot to death late Sunday after armed gunmen stopped their car in Suwaira, about 25 miles southeast of Baghdad, an official at a Kut hospital said.

March 2, 2005: Most of the victims were Shiites, the targets of a recent surge in violence, most notably a series of suicide bombings and other attacks that killed nearly 100 people during the Shiite religious commemoration known as Ashoura.

April 27, 2005: But he added it was too early to say if a recent surge in violence amounted to a concerted campaign, and insisted that US-backed forces were "winning".

May 10, 2005: The most-recent poll, conducted by CNN, USA Today, and Gallup, interviewed 1,006 adults between April 29 and May 1, 2005, before the recent surge in violence.

May 16, 2005: The insurgents' choice of adversary is unusual. But the recent surge in violence, at least, follows a time-tested pattern.

May 19, 2005: A senior U.S. military official told reporters Wednesday that the recent surge in violence in Iraq followed a meeting in Syria last month of associates of the Jordanian insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi.

May 20, 2005: It's unclear how much of the recent surge in violence stems from tribal leaders, but as Metz points out: "Local elites recognize that in a secular, modernized Iraq, their power would be challenged."

May 23, 2005: Even despite the recent surge in violence, in some areas -- downtown Mosul, for example -- Iraqi forces have begun limited independent operations.

June 17, 2005: It is also believed to be the main hideout of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant whose al Qaeda-linked group has carried out many of the deadliest attacks in Iraq and who U.S. forces believe is behind a recent surge in violence.

June 20, 2005: Mr. President, we were told that you planned to sharpen your focus on Iraq. Why did this become necessary? And given the recent surge in violence, do you agree with Vice President Dick Cheney's assessment that the insurgency is in its last throes?

August 4, 2005: His comments came as the 15-nation council unanimously adopted a U.S.-drafted resolution condemning a recent surge in violence in Iraq that has killed hundreds, ...

August 12, 2005: But a recent surge in violence and reports of growing public hostility to the Japanese presence are prompting many to question the prospects for continued humanitarian assistance there.

September 13, 2005: It's unclear how much of the recent surge in violence stems from tribal leaders, but as Metz points out: "Local elites recognize that in a secular, modernized Iraq, their power would be challenged."

September 17, 2005: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, has reportedly said the recent surge in violence is in retaliation for a coalition offensive against the group's stronghold in the northern city of Tal Afar.

October 31, 2005: The fresh U.S. effort to crack down on insurgents followed a recent surge in violence caused by the passing of the new Iraqi constitution in a referendum held earlier this month.

January 7, 2006: US officials have sought to downplay a recent surge in violence that on Thursday alone claimed the lives of more than 115 Iraqis and 11 US servicemen.

January 8, 2006: The recent surge in violence is "an anomaly" and Iraq is not on the verge of civil war, the top US commander there said yesterday, after one of the country's bloodiest days since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

February 1, 2006: Recently, five other members of Congress and I sat on a C-130 transport plane surrounded by soldiers going from Kuwait to Baghdad. The backdrop is a recent surge in violence.

February 4, 2006: Dozens of bodies have been discovered in various parts of Baghdad gagged, bound and shot repeatedly in the past week, amid recent surge in violence, which analysts have repeatedly described as initial stages of an open-ended civil war between Iraq’s ethnic groups.

March 1, 2006: AP reports that he was giving an unusually frank assessment of the stakes in the country's recent surge in violence.

March 4, 2006: The top U.S. commander in Iraq said yesterday that he hopes to make an assessment this spring about whether to reduce the number of American troops in Iraq. But Pentagon officials speaking anonymously said a recent surge in violence there has dampened hopes that force levels can be cut anytime soon.

I love that January 8 clip: "an anomaly"!

Yup, those "insurgents" -- those straggling dead-enders -- are in their last throes. And we're "turning a corner". Obviously.

Note: Here's a new one with some slight editing:

March 6, 2006: Pressure mounted Sunday on Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari to give up his bid for a new term amid anger over a recent surge of sectarian killings that has complicated already snarled negotiations on a new Iraqi government.

What A Moron

2006-03-04T18:44:00.000-05:00

In a televised speech in New Delhi, George Dubai Bush referred to Pakistan as an Arab country.

A White House spokesman had to quickly explain (for the umpteenth time) that Shit-for-Brains simply "misspoke" -- like when he used the term "Pakis", called Greeks "Grecians", claimed that Africa was a country, referred to the "Great British" (which was actually cleaned up for WaPo readers), asked Brazilian president "Do you have blacks too?", etc., etc., etc.

He also called Pakistan -- whose president came to power through a military coup -- "a force for freedom" in the world. Which actually helps explain a few things about his characterization of the US.

In preparation for Bush's visit, the Pakistani government rounded up and imprisoned hundreds of people to prevent them from protesting. Freedom is on the march!

Toons

2006-02-26T10:08:00.000-05:00

US Has Tortured Thousands To Death In Iraq

2006-02-25T20:35:00.000-05:00

From the Times of Malta:

The US is "aware" of torture taking place in Iraqi prisons, according to the outgoing Maltese UN human rights chief in Iraq.

"Yes, torture is happening now, mainly in illegal detention places. Such centres are mostly being run by militia that have been absorbed by the police force," says John Pace, who retired last week as human rights chief for the UN assistance mission in Iraq.

In a frank interview with The Times, Dr Pace says photos and forensic records have proved that torture was rife inside detention centres. Though the process of release has been speeded up, there are an estimated 23,000 people in detention, of whom 80 to 90 per cent are innocent.

He says the Baghdad morgue received 1,100 bodies in July alone, about 900 of whom bore evidence of torture or summary execution. That continued throughout the year and last December there were 780 bodies, including 400 having gunshot wounds or wounds as those caused by electric drills. ...

The Memory Hole has graphic pictures of Iraqis being tortured by US troops (recently aired by Australia's public broadcasting station).

$1,600,000,000

2006-02-24T17:32:00.000-05:00

That's how many taxpayer dollars the Cheney administration has spent since 2003 on domestic propaganda.

The Department of Defense spent another $1.1 billion on media contracts.

Huffing

2006-02-23T18:42:00.000-05:00

Crusader Bunnypants visited the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. He knocked over some samples and then decided to get high.

From the AP:

"You're doing great work here," said Bush, who picked up a bottle of clear-colored ethanol and smelled it.

Later on, after Bush found some ether, he had to take a nap.

Bill O'Reilly Hearts Hitler

2006-02-23T18:28:00.000-05:00

November 30, 2005, NBC's Today:

It's a disaster for the world if we don't do well [in Iraq]. These pinheads running around going, "Get out of Iraq now," don't know what they're talking about. These are the same people before Hitler invaded in World War II that were saying, "Ah, he's not such a bad guy." They don't get it.

February 20, 2006, "The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly":

...[H]ere is the essential problem in Iraq. There are so many nuts in the country -- so many crazies -- that we can't control them. And I don't -- we're never gonna be able to control them. So the only solution to this is to hand over everything to the Iraqis as fast as humanly possible. Because we just can't control these crazy people. This is all over the place. And that was the big mistake about America: They didn't -- it was the crazy-people underestimation. We did not know how to deal with them -- still don't. But they're just all over the place.

School Bus Drivers On Terrorist Watch

2006-02-18T14:36:00.000-05:00

From the AP:

The war on terror has a new front line - the school bus line. Financed by the Homeland Security Department, school bus drivers are being trained to watch for potential terrorists, people who may be casing their routes or plotting to blow up their buses.

Designers of the School Bus Watch program want to turn 600,000 bus drivers into an army of observers, like a counterterrorism watch on wheels. Already mindful of motorists with road rage and kids with weapons, bus drivers are now being warned of far more grisly scenarios. ...

The program demands strong oversight, said John Rollins, a former senior Homeland Security intelligence official now with Congressional Research Service. Otherwise, he said, some bus drivers could think of themselves as undercover agents. ...

Animal Farm

2006-02-18T12:32:00.000-05:00

The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, is urging the UN Human Rights Commission to take legal action against the United States -- possibly through the International Court of Justice at The Hague -- if it fails to close Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay.

Sentamu's report states that the US's actions do not "appear to coincide with that of most civilised nations". And who could disagree with him?

The American Government is breaking international law. The main building block of a democratic society is that everyone is equal before the law, innocent until proved otherwise, and has the right to legal representation. If the guilt of the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay is beyond doubt, why are the Americans afraid to bring them to trial? ...

The US should try all 500 detainees at Guantanamo, who still include eight British residents, or free them without further delay. To hold someone for up to four years without charge clearly indicates a society that is heading towards George Orwell's Animal Farm.

Salon has recently obtained "more than 1,000 photographs, videos and supporting documents" from the Army's investigation into the torture at Abu Ghraib. And the Guardian says the leaked report includes "1,325 images of suspected detainee abuse, 93 video files of suspected detainee abuse, 660 images of adult pornography, 546 images of suspected dead Iraqi detainees, 29 images of soldiers in simulated sexual acts".

A Pentagon spokesman said (predictably) that the release of these pictures and videos "could only further inflame and possibly incite unnecessary violence in the world". .. Yeah, it would be alright if it wasn't for those pesky cameras!

Also: "Iraq's prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, while condemning the abuse at Abu Ghraib, noted that US soldiers had already been punished for it." ... Unbelievable.

Meanwhile, the US is building more torture chambers and concentration camps in Cuba.

Cheney Shooting: Lies, Contradictions, And Bullshit

2006-02-17T20:08:00.000-05:00

Check out these threads documenting the delays, contradictions, lies and plain ol' bullshit, thanks to many DU posters/researchers. Some of the topics:

Cheney's companion at fault in shooting, White House says

Texas shooting: was Cheney drunk?

This gets better - Cheney doesnt even HAVE the proper hunting license!

Smoking Gun has First Cheney Accident Report

The guy Cheney shot was involved in Funeralgate (gravedumping by Bush pal)

The Reason For the Cheney Coverup: He's Guilty of a FELONY under TX Law!

Cheney Shooting scandal hostess -- over $20 BILLION business w/ Bush admin.

MSNBC scrubs "beer or two" comment from its story...

Also videos threads with footage from Keith Olbermann, Jon Stewart, David Letterman, etc.

Uggabugga has links to more, including:

Cheney was out hunting with his girlfriend-on-the-side. (That's actually pure speculation, but it's a part of the overall story mix.)

Cheney had a liquid lunch, and was blotto that afternoon. (Had "only one beer" mid-day and a cocktail after the shooting).

He was sloppy and shot Whittington at close range.

Cheney was pretty detached afterwards, and instead of being closely focused on the accident, had a leisurely dinner that evening.

Because he was drunk, he hid from deputies that showed up that evening.

Rove was brought in to decide how to do the PR.

That meant putting out a bogus story that Whittington was merely "peppered". ...

Whittington has heart attack. Things get serious.

Cheney finally decides to talk about the incident in the ultra-friendly environment of Fox News with Cheney-supporter Brit Hume.

Was Cheney Drunk?

2006-02-15T00:02:00.002-05:00

Possibly.

Gone Shootin'

2006-02-13T14:56:00.000-05:00

Jeff at Rigorous Intuition on Dick Cheney's shooting of fellow hunter Harry Whittington.

The comments, which are also good, include these points: there was an odd 18-hour delay in reporting this story -- indeed, some have wondered if the White House planned to report it at all -- and the men were hunting from a car (which is illegal).

Also, how can a man with a shotgun sneak up on the Vice President with the Secret Service around?

What The Domestic Spying Scandal Means

2006-02-12T18:02:00.000-05:00

Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory has written an amazing overview (also here) of how and why the government's spying on American citizens is so dangerous. Here is some of it:

[The Administration's] argument is that they have the right to use all war powers –- of which warrantless eavesdropping is but one of many examples -– against American citizens within the country. And not only do they have the right to use those war powers against us, they have the right to use them even if Congress makes it a crime to do so or the courts rule that doing so is illegal.

Put another way, the Administration has now baldly stated that whatever it is allowed to do against our enemies in a war, it is equally entitled to exercise all of the same powers against American citizens on American soil. ...

The "war powers" which a President can use in war against our enemies are virtually limitless -- they include indefinite detention in prison with no charges or access to lawyers, limitless eavesdropping, interrogation by means up to and perhaps including torture, and even killing. ... Without hyperbole, it is hard to imagine a theory more dangerous or contrary to our nation's principles than a theory that vests the President -- not just Bush but all future Presidents -- limitless authority to use war powers against American citizens within this country.

Critically, these claimed powers are not purely theoretical or, as Gonzales claimed in response to questions from Sen. Feinstein, "hypothetical." Quite the contrary. Not only has the Administration claimed these powers, they have exercised them aggressively -- not just against Al Qaeda, but against American citizens.

In my view, the single most significant and staggering action of the Bush Administration -– and there is an intense competition for that title, with many worthy entries -– is the fact that the Administration already has detained an American citizen on American soil (Jose Padilla), threw him into a military prison indefinitely, refused to charge him with any crime, and refused even to allow him access to a lawyer, and then kept him there for several years. Then, the Administration argued that federal courts are powerless even to review, let alone limit or restrict, the Government's detention of American citizens with no due process.

And to justify this truly authoritarian nightmare -– being detained and locked away with no due process by your own Government -– the Administration relied upon precisely the same theory which Gonzales advocated on Monday to justify the Administration's warrantless eavesdropping on Americans. Like warrantless eavesdropping, indefinite detention is a "war power," and the Administration therefore claims that it has the right even to detain American citizens with no charges, and nothing can limit or stop that power. ...

Under the Bush Administration, that is the country we have become. Alberto Gonzales spent 8 hours on national television the other day justifying why we must be a country which lives under a system which operates in that manner. That is a system of government wholly foreign to how Americans understand their nation and how our nation has always functioned. There is no more important priority than making as clear as possible to Americans just how broad and truly radical are the powers claimed by this President.

The question now is how can a majority of Americans get this essential information? The Democrats aren't going to tell them.

Foiled Terror Plot -- Another Bush Lie

2006-02-11T23:12:00.000-05:00

On Thursday, the Chimp said that an alleged al-Qaida plot in late 2001 to use shoe bombs to blow open a cockpit door and steer an airplane into Los Angeles' Library Tower was foiled when Asian authorities captured the four men allegedly involved.

And get this -- Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was never told about the alleged attack or its disruption. "I'm amazed that the president would make this [announcement] on national TV and not inform us of these details through the appropriate channels. I don't expect a call from the president — but somebody."

Capital Hill Blue quotes a longtime CIA field operative as saying Bush is living in a fantasy world. Several intelligence officials wonder whether the plot "was ever much more than talk."

Keith Olbermann nails it:

My stomach is queasy as I ask this. In the context of this today and what you have seen, are we far enough removed from that component of the novel "1984" - the part where the government turns a kind of terror faucet on and off to scare the public in to acquiescing to whatever wants to do?

The whole thing sounds like bullshit to me. If it's true, why would Bush wait more than four years to crow about it? You'd think they'd be glad to report some actual success for a change. ... And these four guys who were arrested -- why haven't they been charged with anything?

Why should we believe anything Bush says?

Time Magazine: Unapologetic Bush Propagandists

2006-02-11T23:02:00.000-05:00

From Media Matters:

Summary: At least three reporters involved in an October 2003 Time magazine article that suggested Karl Rove was no longer under suspicion of outing Valerie Plame, and that contained Scott McClellan's denial that Rove was involved, knew at the time of the article that Rove had, in fact, outed Plame.

On October 13, 2003, Time magazine ran an article that included a quote from White House press secretary Scott McClellan insisting that White House senior adviser Karl Rove had nothing to do with outing undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame. As Media Matters for America has previously noted, at least two Time editorial employees involved in the article knew McClellan's denial was false: correspondent Matthew Cooper and Washington bureau chief Michael Duffy. Cooper knew the denial was false because Rove had outed Plame to him. Duffy knew the denial was false because Cooper had sent him an email relating what Rove had told him.

Former Time White House correspondent John Dickerson, in a first-person account of his knowledge of the Plame matter, now acknowledges that he, too, knew that Rove was Cooper's source well before the October 2003 article -- an article on which he, like Cooper, received reporting credit. ...

[I]n July 2003, Time reporters Cooper, Duffy, and Dickerson all knew that Rove had outed Plame. But three months later, all three of them helped produce a Time article (Duffy received a byline; the others were credited with having contributed to the reporting) that falsely suggested that Rove had nothing to do with it.

Dickerson has been trying to defend his deceptions.

Right Out In The Open

2006-02-10T21:52:00.000-05:00

Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, has received a contract worth up to $385,000,000 from the Army Corps of Engineers to build "temporary immigration detention centers" in the United States.

According to its press release, KBR is building the centers for the Homeland Security Department to provide

temporary detention and processing capabilities ... in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs.

I don't know what could cause a huge influx of US immigrants; the country certainly is not encouraging anything like that. And, naturally, left unsaid is what these "new programs" might be.

Anyone else remember Rex 84?

Let's Spend Some Time Together

2006-02-06T15:09:00.000-05:00

ABC felt obligated to bleep words in two of the three songs the Rolling Stones played yesterday evening at Super Bowl XL.

The deliciate sensibilities of the viewers apparently would have been offended by the word "come" in "Start Me Up" (as in "you make a dead man ..."), although you can hear the ribald, unexpurgated version umpteen times a day by surfing rock radio.

For "Rough Justice", we were denied the last word in the first verse:

One time you were my baby chicken
Now you've grown into a fox
And once upon a time I was your little rooster
Now am I just one of your cocks?

No bleeping sound, just dead air. ... The Stones agreed to the censorship ahead of time.

It was a decent performance* -- Ronnie Wood's guitar was inaudible at first (they probably wanted to make sure he was playing the correct key!) -- although it didn't take off until the finale, "Satisfaction". Good for short-sleeved Mick showing a bit of flab on his arms (he's 62, for christ sake). Plus, our halftime parents at ABC felt we could handle hearing "tryin' to make some girl".

Keef was Keef and Charlie Watts re-solidified his position as one of the coolest men on the face of the Earth.

*: Hoping for "Sweet Neo-Con" was likely asking for too much.

Female Soldiers Dying Of Dehydration In Iraq; Fear Being Raped by Fellow Soldiers

2006-02-04T13:42:00.000-05:00

Naturally, the US government is doing everything it can to cover it up.

Marjorie Cohn, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, has this report. Here is the beginning of the article, but you should absolutely read the whole thing.

In a startling revelation, the former commander of Abu Ghraib prison testified that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former senior US military commander in Iraq, gave orders to cover up the cause of death for some female American soldiers serving in Iraq.

Last week, Col. Janis Karpinski told a panel of judges at the Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York that several women had died of dehydration because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women's latrine after dark. ...

Karpinski testified that a surgeon for the coalition's joint task force said in a briefing that "women in fear of getting up in the hours of darkness to go out to the port-a-lets or the latrines were not drinking liquids after 3 or 4 in the afternoon, and in 120 degree heat or warmer, because there was no air-conditioning at most of the facilities, they were dying from dehydration in their sleep."

"And rather than make everybody aware of that - because that's shocking, and as a leader if that's not shocking to you then you're not much of a leader - what they told the surgeon to do is don't brief those details anymore. And don't say specifically that they're women. You can provide that in a written report but don't brief it in the open anymore."

For example, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, Sanchez's top deputy in Iraq, saw "dehydration" listed as the cause of death on the death certificate of a female master sergeant in September 2003. Under orders from Sanchez, he directed that the cause of death no longer be listed, Karpinski stated. The official explanation for this was to protect the women's privacy rights.

Sanchez's attitude was: "The women asked to be here, so now let them take what comes with the territory," Karpinski quoted him as saying. Karpinski told me that Sanchez, who was her boss, was very sensitive to the political ramifications of everything he did. She thinks it likely that when the information about the cause of these women's deaths was passed to the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld ordered that the details not be released. "That's how Rumsfeld works," she said.

"It was out of control," Karpinski told a group of students at Thomas Jefferson School of Law last October. There was an 800 number women could use to report sexual assaults. But no one had a phone, she added. And no one answered that number, which was based in the United States. Any woman who successfully connected to it would get a recording. Even after more than 83 incidents were reported during a six-month period in Iraq and Kuwait, the 24-hour rape hot line was still answered by a machine that told callers to leave a message. ...

My partner Laura writes:

Of all the hypocrisy and lies perpetrated by the US government, for me the worst, the absolute lowest, is the shameful treatment of the armed forces. Lie to these people, betray their trust, cut off their options so the military is one of the only ways to get an education, use them for propaganda - then spit them out. Cut funding for the ongoing medical treatment they'll need long after their dues have been paid, give their families only partial benefits because they were reservists, deny them even proper protection in combat - it's a long list.

It's hard to treat a human being more like a piece of shit than the US government treats the members of its military (and, sadly, that has been the case since the founding of the republic).

$100,000 A Minute

2006-02-03T19:17:00.000-05:00

That is (at a minimum) what the Iraq invasion is costing US taxpayers.

That's $144,000,000 every single day.

(Remember Paul Wolfowitz's infamous comment about Iraq's oil reserves? "We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction.")

Just another lie.

But it's worth it 'cuz some Iraqis (well, the alive ones) got purple ink on their fingers.

Addicted To Oil

2006-02-02T16:34:00.000-05:00

From Attytood

Supporting The Troops, Bush-Style

2006-02-02T16:23:00.000-05:00

Houston Chronicle, February 2, 2006:

Eager to reduce spending, the Bush administration falsely claimed savings of more than $1.3 billion in the Department of Veterans Affairs to justify cuts to health care services, congressional investigators say.

The report by the Government Accountability Office is the latest to document funding woes at the VA, which currently offers health care to 7 million out of 24 million eligible veterans. It found that the agency used misleading accounting methods and lacked documentation to prove its claimed savings. ...

"It's unconscionable," said Rep. Lane Evans, D-Ill., the ranking Democrat on the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, who requested the audit. "Veterans needing health care are being penalized because of an accounting deception promulgated by this administration."

Veterans get fucked over so Cheney/Bush can slip the rich another tax cut. On and on it goes.

Georgia Is Perfect

2006-01-31T16:13:00.000-05:00

There is no unemployment, no problem with pollution, everyone who lives in the state has healthcare, prescription drugs are affordable for all who need them, not one person is homeless or goes to bed hungry, the roads and bridges are in great shape, there is 100% literacy, schoolteachers are well paid ...

Yes, the fine state of Georgia must be Paradise on Earth, because otherwise, why would the state's representatives waste their valuable time on this stupid shit?

The Georgia House injected itself into the so-called "War on Christmas" today, passing a bill that prevents state and local governments from banning their employees and students from "verbal expressions" celebrating any public or legal holiday.

"Simply put, in the state of Georgia, it's going to be OK to say Merry Christmas in the public workplace and in our schools," said Rep. Clay Cox (R-Lilburn), the bill's sponsor.

The bill passed the House 136 to 25 and now goes to the Senate for consideration.

Coulter Suggests Murdering Supreme Court Justice

2006-01-29T14:34:00.000-05:00

In order to get more conservatives on the Supreme Court, neo-con circus freak Ann Coulter says "we need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice [John Paul] Stevens' creme brule".

According to 18 U.S.C. Section 115, Coulter is guilty of a felony for "threaten[ing] to assault, kidnap, or murder ... a United States judge ... with intent to impede, intimidate, or interfere with" that judge's duties.

I look forward to her arrest. ... You know, rule of law and all that.

London Police "Faked Evidence" On Shot Brazilian

2006-01-29T14:18:00.000-05:00

Undercover London police officers faked vital evidence to cover up their fatal role in the shooting of innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, mistaken for a suicide bomber ...

Special Branch officers from London's Metropolitan Police tried to change a surveillance log detailing the electrician's movements to hide the fact that they had wrongly identified him, the News of the World weekly claimed. ...

The alleged cover-up meant the blame for the tragedy would have been pinned on senior Met Police commanders or the armed police who fired the bullets -- leaving them open to murder charges ...

I wrote about de Menezes previously here and here.

Who Won, I Said, The Election?

2006-01-20T10:49:00.000-05:00

PRWeb:

The National Election Data Archive (NEDA) is the first mathematical team to release a valid scientific analysis of the precinct-level 2004 Ohio presidential exit poll data "The Gun is Smoking: 2004 Ohio Precinct-level Exit Poll Data Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount" available [here]. NEDA's analysis provides significant evidence of an outcome-altering vote miscount.

Al Qaeda Job Applications

2006-01-15T17:42:00.000-05:00

Further to my post about the treasure trove of AQ job applications found by the US military, some bloggers with better connections that I have posted the actual documents here and here.

Theft

2006-01-15T16:56:00.000-05:00

Los Angeles Times, January 15, 2006:

After more than 2½ years of sputtering reconstruction work, the United States' "Marshall Plan" to rebuild [Iraq] is drawing to a close this year with much of its promise unmet and no plans to extend its funding.

The $18.6 billion approved by Congress in 2003 will be spent by the end of this year, officials here say. ... With the country still a shambles, U.S. officials are promoting a tough-love vision of reconstruction that puts the burden on the Iraqi people. ...

"If they say they have spent money, where is it?" asked Salah Qaragholi, 30, a barber in the poor neighborhood called Zafraniya. "Where are the projects? The electricity is only four hours a day."

Baghdad's roads are an obstacle course of barriers, potholes and debris. Many government and office buildings are either still gutted or strung with webs of electrical wire connecting to generators that run 12 hours on good days. A brown haze fouls the air and pools of sewage overflow dot the streets.

Certain people got pretty fucking rich with that $18,600,000,000.

More Cheney Nonsense Masked As Coherent Speech

2006-01-15T12:53:00.000-05:00

Josh Marshall quotes Dick Cheney catapulting the propaganda on January 11:

And the Iraqis -- the fact is we know that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were heavily involved with terror. ... [A] lot of those documents that were captured over there that have not yet been evaluated offer additional evidence that, in fact, there was a relationship that stretched over many years between Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda organization.

The obvious follow-up question: How can Cheney know that a document which has not been evaluated offers additional evidence of anything? It hasn't been evaluated yet, you tool.

Bush Authorized Domestic Spying Shortly After Taking Office, Not In Wake Of 9/11

2006-01-14T20:38:00.000-05:00

According to Jason Leopold:

The National Security Agency advised President Bush in early 2001 that it had been eavesdropping on Americans during the course of its work monitoring suspected terrorists and foreigners believed to have ties to terrorist groups, according to a declassified document.

The NSA's vast data-mining activities began shortly after Bush was sworn in as president and the document contradicts his assertion that the 9/11 attacks prompted him to take the unprecedented step of signing a secret executive order authorizing the NSA to monitor a select number of American citizens thought to have ties to terrorist groups. ...

On orders from Defense Department officials and President Bush, the agency kept a running list of the names of Americans in its system and made it readily available to a number of senior officials in the Bush administration, these sources said, which in essence meant the NSA was conducting a covert domestic surveillance operation in violation of the law. ...

Eavesdropping on Americans required intelligence officials to obtain a surveillance warrant from a special court and show probable cause that the person they wanted to monitor was communicating with suspected terrorists overseas. But Bush said that the process for obtaining such warrants under the 1978 Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act was, at times, "cumbersome."

Obeying the law is hard work! Or maybe it's "a bit of a distraction", as Dick Cheney recently called the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina.

The declassified 42-page NSA report can be found here.

US: We Found Padilla's Al-Qaeda Application (!)

2006-01-13T20:08:00.000-05:00

Miami Herald, January 13, 2006:

After the U.S. military invaded Afghanistan to oust its Taliban rulers, authorities found a locker full of applications to join al Qaeda's holy war overseas. ...

"It was recovered by U.S. personnel in late 2001 after the United States began bombing Afghanistan," Justice Department lawyer Stephanie Pell said, referring to Padilla's alleged al Qaeda application.

She added it was found among 80 to 100 other mujahadeen (holy warrior) applications found in the country ...

His application? This is hilarious!

Some comments from various DU posters:

Was there a resume attached?

Can you imagine what Al-Qaeda's human resources dept. is like?!?!

What's the new employee orientation like, for instance? Are they cube rats? Are they required to sit through productivity meetings?

Al Qaeda! "Ask Us About Our Comprehensive Benefits Package!"

How long before they are 100% vested in their employer match virgins? Do they have to belong for five years before they attain the full 72?

Their reference checks must be a hoot. "Yes, I am calling about Mr. Padilla's experience as a terrorist. He claims he worked for you in 2001 as supervisor of terrorists. Could you please verify that statement?"

Where would one even GET an application? Seriously, online? Mail-in? This is BEYOND stupid.

Oh My God how much more of this shit will Americans take -- "a locker full of applications to join al Qaeda's holy war"

They must think we are all completely retarded.

And:

Prosecutors failed to produce al-Qaeda rejection letter

Dear Mr./Ms. PADILLA:

As you may know, we receive a large number of applicantions for the position of TERROR CELL MEMBER from qualified applicants all around the world. While we are currently pursuing other applicants for the position, we were impressed by your qualifications and drive. We will hold your application for six months, and contact you should a new position open up.

Thank you for your interest in al-Qaeda,

Atta-ur Rehman
Coordinator, Human Resources

This is as silly as the news reports every three weeks or so stating the US has killed "Al-Qaeda's #3 man". ... Oooh, they switched it to #2 this time.

Meet Finis Shelnutt

2006-01-08T18:11:00.000-05:00

The world is more bizarre than you thought.

Way more.

"The US Does Not Torture"

2006-01-08T13:43:00.000-05:00

The Observer, January 8, 2006:

New details have emerged of how the growing number of prisoners on hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay are being tied down and force-fed through tubes pushed down their nasal passages into their stomachs to keep them alive.

They routinely experience bleeding and nausea, according to a sworn statement by the camp's chief doctor, seen by The Observer.

... that the number of hunger strikers has almost doubled since Christmas, to 81 of the 550 detainees. Many have been held since the camp opened four years ago this month, although they not been charged with any crime, nor been allowed to see any evidence justifying their detention.

This and other Guantánamo lawsuits now face extinction. Last week, President Bush signed into law a measure removing detainees' right to file habeas corpus petitions in the US federal courts. On Friday, the administration asked the Supreme Court to make this retroactive, so nullifying about 220 cases in which prisoners have contested the basis of their detention and the legality of pending trials by military commission.

Why don't these prisoners love the chicken l'orange they are so lucky to be served every day? Ungrateful is what they are.

We Are Still Waiting

2006-01-07T20:22:00.000-05:00

Colin Powell interview with ABC News, September 23, 2001:

Powell: [W]e will put before the world, the American people, a persuasive case that there will be no doubt when that case is presented that it is al-Qaida led by Usama bin Laden who has been responsible for this terrible, tragic incident.

Q: So you are talking about something beyond simple assertions by US leaders? You are talking about assertions backed up by the evidence?

Powell: Yes.

1,568 days later ... still nothing.

What Will It Take?

2006-01-07T01:17:00.000-05:00

How can anyone defend this regime?

January 6, 2006
Extra Armor Could Have Saved Many Lives, Study Shows
Michael Moss, New York Times,

A secret Pentagon study has found that at least 80 percent of the marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to their upper body could have survived if they had extra body armor. That armor has been available since 2003 but until recently the Pentagon has largely declined to supply it to troops despite calls from the field for additional protection, according to military officials. ...

For the first time, the study by the military's medical examiner shows the cost in lost lives from inadequate armor, even as the Pentagon continues to publicly defend its protection of the troops. ...

The Army, which has the largest force in Iraq, is still deciding what to purchase, according to Army procurement officials. ...

Take your time. There's no hurry, no hurry at all.

To top it off, Paul Bremer, who led the US civilian occupation authority in Iraq after the invasion, pretty much admitted to being one of the stupidest motherfuckers on the planet, when he told NBC "we really didn't see the insurgency coming".

US Deaths: 2,193 and counting ...

Disinformation

2006-01-06T19:19:00.000-05:00

In late December, The Daily Howler gave us a lesson in disinformation:

Where does disinformation come from? Consider Bart Gellman's short report atop page 12 in [December 22's Washington] Post. Here's the headline, which helps to spread the latest RNC phony info:

WASHINGTON POST HEADLINE (12/22/05): Carter, Clinton Authorized Spying, RNC Says

You're right. Technically, that headline doesn't actually claim that Carter and Clinton "authorized spying." It only states that the RNC says so. Of course, Gellman knew how bogus that claim really is. But you had to read all the way to his final paragraph to ferret out that information:
GELLMAN (12/22/05): The RNC's quotation of Clinton's order left out the stated requirement, in the same sentence, that a warrantless search not involve "the premises, information, material, or property of a United States person." Carter's order, also in the same sentence quoted, said warrantless eavesdropping could not include "any communication to which a United States person is a party."
In other words, Carter and Clinton didn't "authorize spying" on U.S. citizens, as the RNC has been claiming. This matter has been discussed in detail at various outlets. For example, see this report from ThinkProgress.

Where does disinformation come from? If you're a reader of the Post, you get the impression, from scanning today's headlines, that Carter and Clinton "authorized spying." You had to read the full report, rather carefully, to find out that this claim is bogus. Even then, Gellman never explicitly raises the question of the RNC's dissembling. You have to piece the basic idea together: The RNC is at it again.

Why did Gellman write this report as he did? Why did the Post put this headline atop it? We don't know, but we do know this: Cheers rang out at the RNC when they saw their bunk at the top of page 12, with readers required to read very carefully to discern that the claim is pure hokum.

Sam Alito

2006-01-06T16:38:00.002-05:00

In the case of Kenneth Pirolli v. World Flavors, Inc., the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission intervened on behalf of Pirolli, a retarded man who complained of his workplace and presented evidence that "a co-worker attempted to insert a broomstick up his anus while another co-worker watched."

What was the reaction of Sam Alito, Bush's Supreme Court nominee?

Pirolli's brief never asserts that his work environment was one that a reasonable, non-retarded person would find hostile or abusive.

Just another kind-hearted friend of W. doin' the work of Jesus.

More information on Alito.

Right After 9/11, Bush Wanted War Powers For Use Inside The United States

2005-12-30T18:30:00.000-05:00

One aspect of Tom Daschle's recent op-ed in the Washington Post (which I linked to here) escaped my notice. Thanks to Will Bunch for pointing it out.

Let's look at Barton Gellman's story from last Friday's Post (my emphasis):

The Bush administration requested, and Congress rejected, war-making authority "in the United States" in negotiations over the joint resolution passed days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to an opinion article by former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) in today's Washington Post. ...

Daschle's article reveals an important new episode in the resolution's legislative history.

As drafted, and as finally passed, the resolution authorized the president "to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons" who "planned, authorized, committed or aided" the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Literally minutes before the Senate cast its vote, the administration sought to add the words 'in the United States and' after 'appropriate force' in the agreed-upon text," Daschle wrote. "This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas -- where we all understood he wanted authority to act -- but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens. I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused." ...

Republican legislators involved in the negotiations could not be reached for comment last night.

So ... has anyone bothered to get a comment from these fascists in the last seven days?

All Of These Things Have Happened

2005-12-27T19:31:00.000-05:00

Robert Steinback, Miami Herald:

One wonders if Osama bin Laden didn't win after all. He ruined the America that existed on 9/11. But he had help.

If, back in 2001, anyone had told me that four years after bin Laden's attack our president would admit that he broke U.S. law against domestic spying and ignored the Constitution -- and then expect the American people to congratulate him for it -- I would have presumed the girders of our very Republic had crumbled.

Had anyone said our president would invade a country and kill 30,000 of its people claiming a threat that never, in fact, existed, then admit he would have invaded even if he had known there was no threat -- and expect America to be pleased by this -- I would have thought our nation's sensibilities and honor had been eviscerated.

If I had been informed that our nation's leaders would embrace torture as a legitimate tool of warfare, hold prisoners for years without charges and operate secret prisons overseas -- and call such procedures necessary for the nation's security -- I would have laughed at the folly of protecting human rights by destroying them.

If someone had predicted the president's staff would out a CIA agent as revenge against a critic, defy a law against domestic propaganda by bankrolling supposedly independent journalists and commentators, and ridicule a 37-year Marie Corps veteran for questioning U.S. military policy -- and that the populace would be more interested in whether Angelina is about to make Brad a daddy -- I would have called the prediction an absurd fantasy. ...

What is there to say now? All of these things have happened. ...

I evidently have a lot poorer insight regarding America's character than I once believed, because I would have expected such actions to provoke -- speaking metaphorically now -- mobs with pitchforks and torches at the White House gate. ...

Meanwhile, the Republicans believe that the fan club of Bill Clinton's cat Socks was more worthy of investigation than George W. Bush's public admission of guilt regarding hundreds of crimes against the Constitution.

Wait a minute --

I have to post that paragraph again, this time in bold.

Meanwhile, the Republicans believe that the fan club of Bill Clinton's cat Socks was more worthy of investigation than George W. Bush's public admission of guilt regarding hundreds of crimes against the Constitution.

What a country.

"Little Red" Hoax; Muslims Monitored

2005-12-26T12:29:00.000-05:00

About a week ago, I posted the story of a UMass Dartmouth student who claimed to have been visited by Homeland Security agents after making a library request for Mao Zedong's "The Little Red Book". It turns out the story was a hoax.

However, this story remains true:

Mosques monitored for radiation

(Reuters) - U.S. officials have secretly monitored radiation levels at Muslim sites, including mosques and private homes, since September 11, 2001 as part of a top secret program searching for nuclear bombs, U.S. News and World Report said on Friday. ...

"In numerous cases, the monitoring required investigators to go on to the property under surveillance, although no search warrants or court orders were ever obtained, according to those with knowledge of the program," the magazine said. ...

At its peak, the effort involved three vehicles in the Washington area monitoring 120 sites a day, nearly all of them Muslim targets such as prominent mosques and office buildings selected by the FBI, it said.

The program has also operated in at least five other cities -- namely Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, New York, and Seattle -- when threat levels there have risen, it said.

One source quoted by the magazine said the targets were almost all U.S. citizens.

Glenn Greenwald sees through the bullshit. As does digby.

Year Of The Coup

2005-12-26T12:11:00.000-05:00

James Carroll has written one of the more clear-eyed assessments of the current regime in the mainstream media (though I would strongly assert that the year of the coup was not 2005, but 2000).

Again and again, in the year now ending, the American people have been told by their leaders that strategies based on a new "repugnant philosophy" are required if the nation is to survive the challenge facing it. Forbidden incendiary weapons must be used in urban settings. Prisoners of war must be deprived of Geneva protections. Aggressive interrogations of enemies must approach torture. Commitments to provide US combat forces with adequate protective gear must be forsworn. Extrajudicial kidnapping of bad people must be justified. Allies must be pressured into joining secret networks of detention camps.

Human rights standards must be jettisoned. Traditional obligations to the United Nations must be ignored. Treaties that limit action can be cast aside. Distinctions between foreign and domestic espionage must be left behind, with US citizens subject to unmonitored surveillance by military agencies. Public libraries must be regarded as government peepholes. The lawyer-client privilege must no longer be regarded as sacrosanct. The press must be recruited into the project of information management. Dissent must be labeled as treason. ...

Where is the shame in Washington today? How does Donald Rumsfeld not blush in the presence of the soldiers he so routinely betrays? How does Dick Cheney maintain that straight face, treating core values as a joke? The recasting of the nation's moral meaning -- a blatant embrace of ends-justify-the-means -- is happening in plain daylight. No shadows here.

Every time the Bush administration is caught in one of its repugnant purposes (Thank God, again this year, for Seymour Hersh), the White House declares its intention to stay the course. Torture? Wiretapping? Kidnapping? Deceit? The president's eyes widen: Trust me, he says with a twisted smile. Then he leans closer to display a snarling defiance. The combination reduces his critics to sputters.

Perhaps Bush's savviest achievement has been to make the public think that Rumsfeld and Cheney are the dark geniuses behind the administration's malevolence. If Bush is taken as too shallow to have a fascist ideology; as too weak to stick with hard policies that undermine democracy; as a religious nutcase whose apocalyptic fantasies don't matter; as a man, in sum, the average citizen can regard as slightly less than average -- then what he is pulling off will not be called by its proper name until it is too late. 2005? Oh yes, that was the year of the coup.

A Revolutionary Transformation Of Human Nature

2005-12-25T11:00:00.000-05:00

Chris Floyd:

Countless words of condemnation have been heaped upon George W. Bush and his hard-Right regime -- a crescendo growing louder by the day, with voices from across the political spectrum. But the most devastating repudiation of the Regime's foul ethos was actually delivered almost 2,000 years ago by the man whose birth is celebrated at this season of the year.

We speak, of course, of Jesus of Nazareth, whose Sermon on the Mount, as reported in the Gospels, called for a revolutionary transformation of human nature -- a complete overthrow of our natural instincts for greed, aggression, and self-aggrandizement. ...

Bush professes to believe that Jesus is the son of God, whose words are literally divine commands. Yet anyone who compares what Jesus really said to Bush's actions in power -- the abandonment of the poor, the exaltation of the rich; the dirty insider deals, the culture of corruption, the politics of smear and slander; the perversion of law to countenance murder, torture and predatory war -- can readily see that this profession of faith is a monstrous deceit. ...

"Blessed be ye poor; for yours is the kingdom of God. ... But woe unto you that are rich! For ye have received your consolation. ...

"Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you: Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you. Thus you may be the children of your Father which is in heaven ..."

And what would happen today if a swarthy Middle Eastern man without wealth or political connections suddenly appeared in front of the White House proclaiming such a radical doctrine of mercy, forgiveness, charity, self-denial and love -- love even for the "evildoers" who "want to destroy our way of life"?

Would he be targeted by the lawless spy gangs that Bush has personally loosed upon the nation, as the New York Time revealed last week? Would he be condemned as a terrorist sympathizer and expelled from the country? Would he be seized and "rendered" to some secret CIA prison or Bush-friendly foreign torture chamber for "special interrogation"?

What Would D. Boon Do?

2005-12-24T16:54:00.000-05:00

A love letter from GYWO's David Rees.

- That my career as a political cartoonist literally began the night I asked myself "What would D. Boon do?" before clumsily trying to make the comic-strip equivalent of a Minutemen song -- which therefore means I owe D. Boon my livelihood -- is, for me, as a childhood worshipper of D. Boon, the greatest fact of all time.

I have no doubt that Boon would have given GYWO a blurb-worthy endorsement.

The smooth jazz of genocide responses

Damn.

One Hell Of A Friday News Dump

2005-12-24T08:44:00.000-05:00

And a Christmas-Eve news dump at that (my emphasis):

Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report

Washington, Dec. 23 - The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

One thing the Cheney administration has claimed is that it's spying externally, not on US citizens. Obviously, that's a bold-faced lie.

Is the Pentagon Spying on Americans?
MSNBC, December 13, 2005

A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn't know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.

A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a "threat" and one of more than 1,500 "suspicious incidents" across the country over a recent 10-month period.

The Defense Department document is the first inside look at how the U.S. military has stepped up intelligence collection inside this country since 9/11, which now includes the monitoring of peaceful anti-war and counter-military recruitment groups. ...

"It means that they're actually collecting information about who's at those protests, the descriptions of vehicles at those protests," says [NBC News military analyst Bill] Arkin. "On the domestic level, this is unprecedented," he says. "I think it's the beginning of enormous problems and enormous mischief for the military. ... [M]ilitary intelligence is back conducting investigations and maintaining records on civilian political activity."

Also:

Many Americans' privacy is at risk, some say
Boston Globe

The National Security Agency, in carrying out President Bush's order to intercept the international phone calls and e-mails of Americans suspected of links to al-Qaida, has probably been using computers to monitor all other Americans' international communications as well, according to specialists familiar with the workings of the NSA. ...

"They have a capacity to listen to every overseas phone call," said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University ...

Other recent stories include the Pentagon spying on an anti-war demo in San Diego, a "Vegan Community Project" in Indianapolis and a PETA protest over llama fur.

Another report indicated Pentagon investigators labeled a gay kiss-in at the University of California - Santa Cruz a "credible threat" of terrorism.

But that widespread criminal activity isn't enough for these domestic terrorists:

Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday called for "strong and robust" presidential powers, saying executive authority was eroded during the Watergate and Vietnam eras. ... "I would argue that the actions that we've taken there are totally appropriate and consistent with the constitutional authority of the president. ... You know, it's not an accident that we haven't been hit in four years" ...

Sounds like a veiled threat. Gimme more power ... or else.

Extra bonus lie (again, my emphasis):

The Bush administration requested, and Congress rejected, war-making authority "in the United States" in negotiations over the joint resolution passed days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to an opinion article by former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) in today's Washington Post.

Daschle's disclosure challenges a central legal argument offered by the White House in defense of the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens and permanent residents. It suggests that Congress refused explicitly to grant authority that the Bush administration now asserts is implicit in the resolution.

The Justice Department acknowledged yesterday, in a letter to Congress, that the president's October 2001 eavesdropping order did not comply with "the 'procedures' of" the law that has regulated domestic espionage since 1978.

D. Boon

2005-12-22T10:34:00.000-05:00

Twenty years ago today, Dennes Dale Boon, guitarist and singer for the Minutemen, was killed in an auto accident in Arizona. He was 27.

D. Boon, bassist Mike Watt, and drummer George Hurley were an ambitious and prolific trio from San Pedro, California, who mixed punk, funk, folk, jazz, beat poetry, and leftist politics. Their creative peak was in 1984 -- when they released the 45-song Double Nickels on the Dime.

(If you don't know the band, you may have heard Boon's song "Corona" as the theme music to MTV's Jackass.)

Boon has always been, for me, one of rock's most compelling musicians. I love his treble-heavy guitar playing and he was an absolute joy to watch on stage. His political passion and commitment -- speaking out against the Reagan administration's illegal actions in Central America -- made me look critically at politics for the first time, setting me on a path that eventually led me to leave the United States for Canada.

Sadly, there isn't that much information on the Minutemen out there. A chapter in Michael Azerrad's book Our Band Could Be Your Life, which takes its title from one of the band's best songs, recounts the band's six-year history.

The band's page at Wikipedia is quite good and Sidemouse has some fanzine interviews and photos. You can download live recordings and video clips at Corndogs. Also, check out Mike Watt's Hootpage.

i'll put it into simple words
working men are pissed

More on the Times/Bush Wiretap Coverup

2005-12-20T13:08:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the always-informative Will Bunch at Attytood, we learn that the editors at the New York Times

were actively considering running the story about the wiretaps before Bush's November showdown with Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts. Top editors at the paper eventually decided to hold the story.

Because, really, why should the country's supposed "paper of record" bother with such silliness? And do you really think Americans deserve to know such things before they vote?

Not only that, check this out:

... Bush was so desperate that The New York Times not publish its story on the National Security Agency eavesdropping on American citizens without a warrant, in what lawyers outside the administration say is a clear violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ... on December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story. The Times will not comment on the meeting, but one can only imagine the president's desperation. (my emphasis)

As Bunch notes:

Since the article was published, Bush has given two speeches and answered questions in a lengthy news conference. Keller has issued a short written statement.

When George W. Bush is now more open than you are, that's a problem.

King George

2005-12-18T18:27:00.000-05:00

The thought of writing about the Cheney administration's admission that it has been illegally spying on thousands of Americans has been depressing me.

The "liberal" New York Times refused to publish news of this obvious criminal activity for more than a year. Why? Because the White House asked them not to.

I wonder what big political event was happening a little more than a year ago? Hmmm ...

Anyway, I've found that shanikka at My Left Wing has done my work for me. Go and read.

A Lesson In Totalitarianism

2005-12-17T21:41:00.000-05:00

More news from the Land of the Free:

A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's tome on Communism called "The Little Red Book."

Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library's interlibrary loan program.

The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand's class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number.

He was later visited at his parents' home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.

Awfully nice of those agents to give the student a first-hand look at "fascism and totalitarianism".

Not A Peaceful Welcome

2005-12-16T20:37:00.000-05:00

Brian Williams talks with the Chimp:

Williams: A lot of people have seen in this series of speeches you're giving on Iraq, a movement in your position. They call it an acknowledgement that perhaps the mission has not gone as it was originally planned — three points: That the U.S. would be welcomed as liberators, that General Shinsecki, when he said this would take hundreds of thousands of troops in his farewell speech, might have been right. And third, that it wasn't a self-sustaining war in terms of the oil revenue. Do you concede those three points might not have gone as planned?

Bush: Review them with me again.

Williams: Number one — that we'd be welcomed as liberators?

Bush: I think we are welcomed. But it was not a peaceful welcome. ...

Frank Rich: It Takes A Potemkin Village

2005-12-11T00:34:00.000-05:00

The Times has stuck Frank Rich's latest behind its TimesSelect pay service, but Maccabee (and Kos readers) have these snips (and more):

When a government substitutes propaganda for governing, the Potemkin village is all. Since we don't get honest information from this White House, we must instead, as the Soviets once did, decode our rulers' fictions to discern what's really happening. What we're seeing now is the wheels coming off: As the administration's stagecraft becomes more baroque, its credibility tanks further both at home and abroad. The propaganda techniques may be echt Goebbels, but they increasingly come off as pure Ali G. ...

Mr. Bush's "Plan for Victory" speech was, of course, the usual unadulterated nonsense. Its overarching theme - "We will never accept anything less than complete victory" - was being contradicted even as he spoke by rampant reports of Pentagon plans for stepped-up troop withdrawals between next week's Iraqi elections and the more important (for endangered Republicans) American Election Day of 2006. The specifics were phony, too: Once again inflating the readiness of Iraqi troops, Mr. Bush claimed that the recent assault on Tal Afar "was primarily led by Iraqi security forces" - a fairy tale immediately unmasked by Michael Ware, a Time reporter embedded in that battle's front lines, as "completely wrong." No less an authority than the office of Iraq's prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, promptly released a 59-page report documenting his own military's inadequate leadership, equipment and training. ...

But this variety of Bush balderdash is such old news that everyone except that ga-ga 25 percent instantaneously tunes it out. We routinely assume that the subtext (i.e., the omissions and deliberate factual errors) of his speeches and scripted town meetings will be more revealing than the texts themselves. What raised the "Plan for Victory" show to new heights of disinformation was the subsequent revelation that the administration's main stated motive for the address - the release of a 35-page document laying out a "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" - was as much a theatrical prop as the stunt turkey the president posed with during his one furtive visit to Baghdad two Thanksgivings ago. ...

As breathlessly heralded by Scott McClellan, this glossy brochure was "an unclassified version" of the strategy in place since the war's inception in "early 2003." But Scott Shane of The New York Times told another story. Through a few keystrokes, the electronic version of the document at whitehouse.gov could be manipulated to reveal text "usually hidden from public view." What turned up was the name of the document's originating author: Peter Feaver, a Duke political scientist who started advising the National Security Council only this June. Dr. Feaver is an expert on public opinion about war, not war itself. Thus we now know that what Mr. McClellan billed as a 2003 strategy for military victory is in fact a P.R. strategy in place for no more than six months. That solves the mystery of why Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey of the Army, who is in charge of training Iraqi troops, told reporters that he had never seen this "National Strategy" before its public release last month.

In a perfect storm of revelations, the "Plan for Victory" speech fell on the same day that The Los Angeles Times exposed new doings on another front in the White House propaganda war. An obscure Defense Department contractor, the Lincoln Group, was caught paying off Iraqi journalists to run upbeat news articles secretly written by American Army personnel and translated into Arabic (at a time when American troops in harm's way are desperate for Arabic translators of their own). ...

Though the White House doesn't know that its jig is up, everyone else does. Americans see that New Orleans is in as sorry shape today as it was under Brownie three months ago. The bipartisan 9/11 commissioners confirm that homeland security remains a pork pit. Condi Rice's daily clarifications of her clarifications about American torture policies are contradicted by new reports of horrors before her latest circumlocutions leave her mouth. And the president's latest Iraq speeches - most recently about the "success" stories of Najaf and Mosul - still don't stand up to the most rudimentary fact checking.

Face Transplant

2005-12-10T17:52:00.000-05:00

Pat Oliphant, December 6, 2005:

In related news, the Organic Consumers Association reports:

Public comments are now being accepted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on its newly proposed federal regulation regarding the testing of chemicals and pesticides on human subjects. On August 2, 2005, Congress had mandated the EPA create a rule that permanently bans chemical testing on pregnant women and children, without exception. But the EPA's newly proposed rule, is ridden with exceptions where chemical studies may be performed on children in certain situations like the following:

1. Children who "cannot be reasonably consulted," such as those that are mentally handicapped or orphaned newborns, may be tested on. With permission from the institution or guardian in charge of the individual, the child may be exposed to chemicals for the sake of research.

2. Parental consent forms are not necessary for testing on children who have been neglected or abused.

3. Chemical studies on any children outside of the U.S. are acceptable.

25 Years

2005-12-04T18:45:00.000-05:00

Congressman Jack Murtha on Hardball with Chris Matthews, November 30, 2005:

Matthews: What are the military folks you get access to saying about how long it will take if we continue on the president's course, to have an Iraqi army that can defend that government?

Murtha: I've heard estimates up to 25 years. Now we've already spent $277 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Matthews reminds us that the Cheney administration:

said that this war would be paid for not by us, the American taxpayer, but paid for by Iraqi oil. They said there were WMD there. They said they were involved in 9/11. They said they would greet us as liberators. On every point they've been wrong.

Back in September 2004, John McCain was asked how long the US military would remain in Iraq. He said "probably" 10 or 20 years, adding "That's not so bad. We've been in Korea for 50 years. We've been in West Germany for 50 years."

The US is building 14 permanent military bases in Iraq.

Seriouslythough.com:

Several military analysts agree that if the United States does not pull out of Iraq within the next year then the country will face a military draft for the first time in a generation. Lawrence Korb, Assistant Defense Secretary in the Reagan White House, claims that due to a significant dip in recruitment since the War On Iraq coupled with a decline in reenlistment, the "breaking-point" for the United States military will be in mid-2006.

Surprise!

2005-12-04T14:59:00.000-05:00

Now, a very great man once said
That some people rob you with a fountain pen.
It didn't take too long to find out
Just what he was talkin' about.

New York Daily News:

Hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid intended to help small downtown businesses that were reeling from the 9/11 attacks often went instead to huge international corporations, companies with little attachment to the stricken area and businesses that were never in jeopardy.

The beneficiaries included a stock brokerage firm that had closed more than a month before the terrorists hit, a giant real estate firm that repeatedly said it wasn't hurt by the attacks, scores of wealthy self-employed floor traders ...

The fast and furious distribution of nearly $1 billion in small business aid — part of the $21.4 billion promised to New York overall — was done by the Empire State Development Corp., a quasi-governmental agency with no experience in disaster relief. ...

The development corporation didn't require businesses to explain how the attacks, and not preexisting business problems, had caused the firms to lose money.

Charles A. Gargano is chairman of Empire State Development Corp.

Appointed by Governor George E. Pataki, Ambassador Gargano has served as the head of New York State’s economic development agency since 1995. The Governor also appointed him vice chairman of the Board of Commissioners of The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in 1995. ... Gargano's public service began in 1981, when he was named deputy administrator of the Federal Urban Mass Transportation Administration by President Ronald Reagan. In 1988 he was appointed Ambassador to the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago by President Reagan. He was re-appointed in 1989 by President Bush and served until 1991.

Solidly Republican -- "with no experience in disaster relief". Sounds like "Brownie" Part Deux.

Los Angeles Times:

On Their Own in Battered New Orleans

....Lost amid continued talk of billions in federal aid is the fact that most homeowners and businesses are being left to make the toughest calls on their own. Lost is that New Orleans' recovery — which President Bush once suggested would be one of the largest public reconstruction efforts the world had ever seen — is quickly becoming a private market affair. ...

The situation in which residents find themselves is an extreme example of a trend underway for a quarter-century, a shift of economic risk from business and government to working families, and an increasing reliance on free markets to manage society's problems.

Safety nets such as unemployment compensation, employer-provided healthcare insurance and pensions, and, recently, effective disaster relief have been reeled in or removed. Increasingly, families from the working poor to the affluent are left largely to buy and sell their own way to safety even when their individual efforts seem utterly outgunned, as they do in the case of Katrina.

What? All that money you paid in taxes? ... Suckers! [/republicans]

Moron Calls Press Conference; Attempts To Escape; Runs Into Locked Doors

2005-11-20T18:02:00.000-05:00

... Bush tried to make a quick exit from a news conference in Beijing on Sunday - only to find himself thwarted by locked doors.

The president strode away from reporters looking annoyed after one said he appeared "off his game".

President Bush tugged at both handles on the double doors before admitting: "I was trying to escape. Obviously, it didn't work." ...

An aide escorted him to the correct exit and on to dinner at the Great Hall of the People.

The video is hilarious!

Headline Of The Day

2005-11-19T14:15:00.000-05:00

Car Bombs Kill 48 In Iraq; Bush Says War On Track

Runner-Up:

Congress Helps Self to $3,100 Pay Raise

The Republican-controlled Congress helped itself to a $3,100 pay raise on Friday, then postponed work on bills to curb spending on social programs and cut taxes in favor of a two-week vacation.

White Phosphorus

2005-11-12T19:56:00.000-05:00

The US is without a doubt using chemical weapons on innocent civilians in Iraq.

Cannonfire has posted two gruesome photos of victims of white phosphorus. He also posts this comment from former US soldier Jeff Englehart:

The gases from the warhead, the white phosphorus will disperse in a cloud and when it makes contact with skin then it's absolutely irreversible damage, burning flesh to the bone. It doesn't necessarily burn clothes but it will burn the skin underneath clothes.

And this is why protective masks do not help because it will burn right through the mask, the rubber of the mask, it will manage to get inside your face. If you breathe it it will blister your throat and your lungs till you suffocate. And then it will burn you from the inside. ...

O'Reilly: Your Enlistment Papers Are In The Mail

2005-11-12T19:36:00.000-05:00

Imagine if Al Franken or anyone else on the left had said this:

[I]f I'm the president of the United States ... I say, 'Listen, citizens of San Francisco, if you vote against military recruiting, you're not going to get another nickel in federal funds.' Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead. And if al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.

The wingnuts loonies would be having a field day, accusing the speaker of treason, of inciting an attack on American soil. (Telling terrorists to "Bring it on!" in other words.)

When pressed, Falafel Boy stands strong and makes shit up up:

I'm from New York. There are dozens of people in my neighborhood, on Long Island, who are dead because of 9/11, and you people are telling me you're not going to allow military recruiting out there. Hey, it's serious, and I think you guys need a wake-up call.

Since he's so supportive of recruiting, I wonder if O'Reilly has ever served in the armed forces? ... I'll bet I know the answer to that one.

Actually, a poster at Democratic Underground says that O'Reilly has spoken in the past of his experience "in combat". It turns out that he was a reporter stationed in Buenos Aires during the Falklands War. ... Cannonfire also has some good comments.

Elsewhere, Bruce Willis is offering $1 million cash to any civilian who captures Osama bin Forgotten. I guess the $25 million reward that already exists needed to be sweetened a little bit. I love this: Willis is referred to in the article as the "hairless Hollywood he-man".

Rumsfeld: Gitmo Hunger Strikers Just "On A Diet"

2005-11-02T11:57:00.000-05:00

It's amazing that this obviously insane war criminal is let out to talk to anyone.

Asked about the 27 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay who are currently on hunger strikes, Donald Rumsfeld said they were doing it for the publicity:

Well, I suppose that what they're trying to do is to capture press attention, obviously, and they've succeeded. There are a number of people who go on a diet where they don't eat for a period and then go off of it at some point. And then they rotate and other people do that.

And we rag on Bush for being an idiot?!!

They Hate Us For Our Brontosauri

2005-10-27T14:06:00.000-04:00

Tampa Tribune:

The mermaids of Weeki Wachee Springs are probably not very high on the list of terrorist targets. Neither is the Styrofoam and fiberglass stegosaurus at Dinosaur World in Plant City.

Yet both facilities were on a list of sites the federal government wanted "hardened" under the $90 million Buffer Zone Protection Program, granted by the Department of Homeland Security as a way to help state and local governments secure "critical infrastructure" against attack.

2000

2005-10-26T13:42:00.000-04:00

Lifted directly from Billmon's Whiskey Bar.

Editorials

2005-10-23T00:06:00.000-04:00

From the Marysville-Yuba City (Calif.) Appeal-Democrat:

One of the smartest things President Bush did to reduce recovery costs in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita was to suspend Davis-Bacon Act rules in the hardest hit states. But Congress is frantically trying to overrule the president, which would add billions of dollars to the already staggering recovery costs.

From the Jacksonville (N.C.) Daily News:

One of the smartest things President Bush did to reduce recovery costs in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita was to suspend Davis-Bacon Act rules in the hardest hit states. But Congress is frantically trying to overrule the president, which would add billions of dollars to the already staggering recovery costs.

From the Kinston (N.C.) Free Press:

One of the smartest things President Bush did to reduce recovery costs in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita was to suspend Davis-Bacon Act rules in the hardest hit states. But Congress is frantically trying to overrule the president, which would add billions of dollars to the already staggering recovery costs.

Amazing! More here.

The Cheney-Rumsfeld Cabal

2005-10-21T16:22:00.000-04:00

From Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief of staff from 2001-2005:

[T]he case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardisations, and perturbations in the national-security [policy-making] process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. ...

You’ve got this collegiality there between the secretary of defence and the vice president. And then you’ve got a president who is not versed in international relations -- and not too much interested in them either. ...

If you’re not prepared to stop the feuding elements in the bureaucracy as they carry out your decisions, you are courting disaster. And I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran.

Billmon has a lot more.

Now What?

2005-10-19T13:24:00.000-04:00

Since The Move, I've been wondering what to do with this blog. Now that I'm living in Canada, I've been focusing less on US news. It hasn't been a conscious decision, but it's happening just the same. I still check out the Latest Breaking News page at DU several times a day, but I do not give the daily flow of events (such as the soon-to-be-announced Plame indictments (22 of them?!)) the same attention I did before.

Maybe with the Red Sox season over, I'll soon focus on some items. I honestly don't know. I'm submit a (music-related) book proposal in November, so I may be occupied with that project this winter.

In the meantime, the links at the right are where I get most of my stuff. Cursor should be daily reading, and Cannonfire often links to other investigative blogs.

Here's an excellent piece about Bush's staged chat with US troops the other day, the revelation that one of the main troops interviewed (Master Sgt. Corine Lombardo) is actually a military media spokeswoman, the Pentagon's propaganda TV channel, the astounding indifference of the major media to this manipulation, and how everything ties together.

Fuzzy Math

2005-10-14T12:14:00.000-04:00

In which the Cheney administration believes that 100 = 1.

Molly Ivins:

Liar of the week: George W. Bush said on his Saturday radio address a week and a half ago that Iraq has 100 battalions of battle-ready soldiers. By the time he got to his television address on Thursday, it was 80 battalions. (I guess it's worse to lie if they're taking pictures of you.) Unfortunately, the next day Gen. George Casey, who oversees U.S. forces in Iraq, said of those 80, the number of Iraqi battalions fit to fight independently of U.S. support had slipped from three to one. One, three, 80, 100 -- if this is Tuesday, it must be ...

Profit

2005-10-13T16:19:00.000-04:00

In the past year, Dick Cheney's Halliburton stock options have gone up in value 3,281%. ... Yeah, you read that right.

As Xymphora has written:

The Cheney-Halliburton connection has to be the largest and most blatant example of corruption in modern American history. Cheney is the effective President of the United States, and is clearly behind the awarding of massive contracts to a corporation that continues to pay him. If this were happening in Nigeria we'd sneer at the corruption, but in the American context it is beyond belief.

What Will It Take?

2005-10-09T10:17:00.000-04:00

Washington Post, October 9, 2005:

In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the government changed a contract to hire federal airline passengers screeners in a way that cost taxpayers an additional $343 million. More than three years later, officials cannot explain exactly why.

Homeland security officials say they have no memos, e-mails or other paperwork to document the reason for the change, as required by federal contracting regulations. They have also offered accounts of the decision that conflict with internal government documents obtained by The Washington Post. ...

Michael P. Jackson, deputy secretary of the Homeland Security Department, said in a recent interview that the agency does not have paperwork to back up its account and that he cannot recall the details surrounding the decision.

"Honestly, I have no memory of it," said Jackson, who said he was ultimately responsible for the contract as second-in-command at the Transportation Department in 2002.

Hey, but don't worry, US taxpayer.

The contract is now the subject of an investigation by the homeland security department's inspector general.

Besides recalling OJ's on-going search for the "real killers", this robbery story reminds me of a recent Get Your War On panel:

Projection

2005-10-07T14:32:00.000-04:00

The PNAC Puppet:

The civilized world knows very well that other fanatics in history -- from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot -- consumed whole nations in war and genocide before leaving the stage of history.

Evil men obsessed with ambition and unburdened by conscience must be taken very seriously, and we must stop them before their crimes can multiply.

Also checkout Laura's post on terror and fear.

Bill Bennett Dreams Of Genocide

2005-09-29T12:37:00.000-04:00

Former Reagan administration Secretary of Education Bill Bennett, September 28, 2005:

I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.

Let's look at Bennett's thought process:

Hey, genocide would work!

... Uh, but that would be so, so wrong.

... but still, it would be a solution, if you were so inclined.

Thanks to Empire Burlesque and Media Matters.

Pat Tillman

2005-09-26T16:30:00.000-04:00

From an extraordinary article on the former NFL star who was killed by US troops in Afghanistan (and the cover-up of how he died):

Interviews also show a side of Pat Tillman not widely known — a fiercely independent thinker who enlisted, fought and died in service to his country yet was critical of President Bush and opposed the war in Iraq, where he served a tour of duty. He was an avid reader whose interests ranged from history books on World War II and Winston Churchill to works of leftist Noam Chomsky, a favorite author. ...

[A] friend of Pat's even arranged a private meeting with Chomsky, the antiwar author, to take place after his return from Afghanistan -— a meeting prevented by his death. [Tillman's mother] said that although he supported the Afghan war, believing it justified by the Sept. 11 attacks, "Pat was very critical of the whole Iraq war." ...

Another soldier in the platoon, who asked not to be identified, said Pat urged him to vote for Bush’s Democratic opponent in the 2004 election, Sen. John Kerry.

Tillman subscribed to the Economist magazine, and a fellow soldier said Tillman created a makeshift base library of classic novels so his platoon mates would have literature to read in their down time. ...

An anti-Bush fan of Chomsky who believed the Iraq war was "so fucking illegal"?

I wonder what the mouthbreathers would say about Tillman if they knew that. ... Of course, they've probably forgot all about him by now.

Pathetic

2005-09-24T21:48:00.000-04:00

New York Times:

... Bush was supposed to land here [San Antonio] on Friday afternoon on the first stop of a tour intended to make clear that he was personally overseeing the federal government's preparations for Hurricane Rita's landfall. But the weather did not cooperate.

It was too sunny.

Just minutes before Mr. Bush was scheduled to leave the White House, his aides in Washington scrubbed the stop in San Antonio. ... Another White House official involved in preparing Mr. Bush's way noted that with the sun shining so brightly in San Antonio, the images of Mr. Bush from here might not have made it clear to viewers that he was dealing with an approaching storm.

9/11 Coverup Continues

2005-09-21T16:20:00.000-04:00

Why would the Pentagon refuse to allow

a group of military officers and intelligence analysts from testifying at an open Congressional hearing about a highly classified military intelligence program that, the officers have said, identified a ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks as a potential terrorist more than a year before the attacks?

Also (my emphasis):

Two military officers - an active-duty Navy captain and a reservist Army lieutenant colonel - have said publicly in recent weeks that they were involved with Able Danger and that the program's analysts identified Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian-born ringleader of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, by name as a potential terrorist by early 2000.

They said they attempted to share the information with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the summer of 2000, more than a year before the terrorist attacks, but were blocked by Defense Department lawyers. F.B.I. officials, who answer to the jurisdiction of Senator Specter's committee, have confirmed that Defense Department abruptly canceled meetings in 2000 between the bureau's Washington field office and representatives of the Able Danger team.

The Pentagon has said that it has interviewed three other people who were involved with Able Danger and who said that they, too, recalled the identification of Mr. Atta as a terrorist suspect. But Defense Department investigators said they could find no documentary evidence to back up the assertion; they acknowledged that much of the information might have been routinely destroyed.

topdog04 (at Kos) has more, with a lot of background:

First the Pentagon had never heard of Able Danger, then it was "merely" a planning effort that ran it's course in early 2001, now it is so top secret and vital to national security - more than four years after 9/11 - that no one can testify about it to Congress. ...

[Bryan Whitman, a Defense Department spokesman, said it was] "Not possible to discuss Able Danger in any great detail in an open public forum?" The Pentagon HELD A PRESS CONFERENCE ON IT two weeks ago. The only thing not possible is for the truth to get out about the mistakes of this administration and their culpability in 9/11.

Damn The Blind Eyes

2005-09-20T08:19:00.000-04:00

We have long had reason to suspect imperial instigation to Iraq's sectarian violence, but here, as clearly as we've ever seen it, is the provocateur state revealed: two British "undercover soldiers" in Arab dress, caught firing upon police from a car laden with explosives. And the British government all but admitting its culpability by breaking them out of prison. ...

I wonder what will be made of this story by those who think escalating bloodshed in Iraq is a measure of the failure of US policy, and not its success ...

Rigorous Intuition

Incompetence And Intent

2005-09-17T17:27:00.000-04:00

John Doe II has compiled a jaw-droppingly exhaustive list of mainstream media stories showing how FEMA, Homeland Security and other federal agencies bungled the Katrina rescue and relief effort.

It's one of the more mind-boggling collection of articles I've seen on the internets. What follows is a short sample:

"Virtually everything that has happened in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina struck was predicted by experts and in computer models, so emergency management specialists wonder why authorities were so unprepared."

"Government disaster officials had an action plan if a major hurricane hit New Orleans. They simply didn't execute it when Hurricane Katrina struck."

Another list of sources on that action plan -- and how it has been fine-tuned -- is here.

The Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war. ... Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans City Business.

"Dr. Ross Judice, chief medical officer for a large ambulance company, recounted how on Tuesday, unable to find out when helicopters would land to pick up critically ill patients at the Superdome, he walked outside and discovered that two helicopters, donated by an oil services company, had been waiting in the parking lot."

"Several states ready and willing to send National Guard troops to the rescue in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans didn't get the go-ahead until days after the storm struck."

A navy "ship rode out Katrina in the Gulf and was available with amphibious vehicles, hospital beds, and sailors who could come ashore to help. Waiting for orders that have yet to arrive."

The U.S.S. Bataan, equipped with six operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds and the ability to produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, has been sitting off the Gulf Coast since last Monday - without patients.

"Shortly before they were set to leave for Hurricane Katrina-battered states, a group of about 100 law enforcement officers from across Nevada was told to stay put by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA officials put the contingent on hold on Sunday afternoon for between one and three days ..."

"Three tons of food ready for delivery by air to refugees in St. Bernard Parish and on Algiers Point sat on the Crescent City Connection bridge Friday afternoon as air traffic was halted because of President Bush's visit to New Orleans, officials said."

Mary Landrieu, the Democratic US senator from Louisiana: "I understand that the U.S. Forest Service had water-tanker aircraft available to help douse the fires raging on our riverfront, but FEMA has yet to accept the aid. When Amtrak offered trains to evacuate significant numbers of victims - far more efficiently than buses - FEMA again dragged its feet. Offers of medicine, communications equipment and other desperately needed items continue to flow in, only to be ignored by the agency."

"A visibly angry Mayor Daley said the city had offered emergency, medical and technical help to the federal government as early as Sunday to assist people in the areas stricken by Hurricane Katrina, but as of Friday, the only things the feds said they wanted was a single tank truck."

Airboaters stand ready to go help hurricane victims but have not been allowed to do so.

"When Wal-Mart sent three trailer trucks loaded with water, FEMA officials turned them away ... Agency workers prevented the Coast Guard from delivering 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel, and on Saturday they cut the parish's emergency communications line, leading the sheriff to restore it and post armed guards to protect it from FEMA, Mr. Broussard said."

Homeland Security won't let Red Cross deliver food.

A group of firefighter from Houston, some with special expertise in oil rig repairs, and plenty of post-hurricane clean-up experience were stopped by FEMA from entering New Orleans and not allowed to go anywhere else, either.

Canadian plane and search and rescue teams stopped by Dept. of Homeland Security.

Various aid from Russia, Canada, Cuba, Sweden, Germany, and more than 20 European countries was all refused.

Looking at the wealth of evidence -- and the mindset of the people in charge -- these actions have to be deliberate.

Might As Well Jump

2005-09-17T00:05:00.000-04:00

MSNBC's Brian Williams:

I am duty-bound to report the talk of the New Orleans warehouse district last night: there was rejoicing (well, there would have been without the curfew, but the few people I saw on the streets were excited) when the power came back on for blocks on end. Kevin Tibbles was positively jubilant on the live update edition of Nightly News that we fed to the West Coast. The mini-mart, long ago cleaned out by looters, was nonetheless bathed in light, including the empty, roped-off gas pumps. The motorcade route through the district was partially lit no more than 30 minutes before POTUS drove through. And yet last night, no more than an hour after the President departed, the lights went out. The entire area was plunged into total darkness again, to audible groans. It's enough to make some of the folks here who witnessed it... jump to certain conclusions.

Bad News

2005-09-12T18:17:00.000-04:00

Evan Thomas, Newsweek:

It's a standing joke among the president's top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private ...

The bad news on this early morning, Tuesday, Aug. 30, some 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina had ripped through New Orleans, was that the president would have to cut short his five-week vacation by a couple of days and return to Washington.

The president's chief of staff, Andrew Card; his deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin; his counselor, Dan Bartlett, and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, held a conference call to discuss the question of the president's early return and the delicate task of telling him. Hagin, it was decided, as senior aide on the ground, would do the deed. ...

Four Years

2005-09-11T13:00:00.000-04:00

There are so many questions.

It's time for the truth.

DeLay to Children Left Homeless By Katrina: "Isn't This Kind Of Fun?"

2005-09-10T12:44:00.000-04:00

He also compared it to being on camping trip and told the young boys they were becoming famous all over the world.

Culture Of Life

2005-09-09T08:59:00.000-04:00

Republican Representative Richard Baker of Baton Rouge:

We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did.

What's Going On?

2005-09-07T22:09:00.000-04:00

The level of denial and delusion is off the charts.

[Nancy Pelosi] related that she had urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire [FEMA Director] Michael Brown.

"He said 'Why would I do that?'" Pelosi said.

"'I said because of all that went wrong, of all that didn't go right last week.' And he said 'What didn't go right?'"

AP

Or is it? ... Some argue that this is all part of the Junta's plan.

More On Katrina Non-Response

2005-09-07T16:48:00.000-04:00

FEMA Turned Away Aid, Rescue Crews, Cut Emergency Communication Lines: Witnesses

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, several witnesses have alleged that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) turned away volunteers who were ready to help New Orleans residents people trapped in their flooded homes. Other witnesses have said that FEMA turned away offers of aid, prevented water and fuel from reaching people on the ground, and cut emergency communications lines. ...

According to the Loudon [Virginia] Times-Mirror, "Sheriff Steve Simpson and his staff spent 12 hours trying to get the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the State of Louisiana Emergency Operations Center to act. They didn't, and the 20 deputies and six emergency medical technicians–all volunteers–turned around and came back to Loudon."

According to a report in the Orlando Sentinel, "up to 500 airboat pilots" volunteered to help rescue flood victims [and] "are physically sick, watching the New Orleans coverage and knowing that the resources to help these poor people is sitting right in our driveways." ...

Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard said that "we had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. The Coast Guard said, 'Come get the fuel right away.' When we got there with our trucks, they got a word. 'FEMA says don't give you the fuel.'"

Pentagon: USS Bataan Waited Days For Orders to Help Out

Lt. Commander Sean Kelly, a Pentagon spokesman for Northern Command, revealed on the BBC that NorthCom was prepared to send in search and rescue helicopters from the USS Bataan almost immediately after the hurricane hit. He said, "We had things ready. The only caveat is: we have to wait until the president authorizes us to do so." That authorization didn't happen for days even though the ship was docked just outside New Orleans. On board the ship had doctors, hospital beds, food and the ability to make up to 100,000 gallons of water a day. ...

The Cuban government has also announced that the U.S. State Department rebuffed its offer of aid. Last Tuesday Cuba offered to send 1100 doctors to assist in the crisis. Cuba said the doctors could have been on the ground by last Wednesday.

Media groups say FEMA censors search for bodies

When US officials asked the media not to take pictures of those killed by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, they were censoring a key part of the disaster story, free speech watchdogs said on Wednesday. ... "It's impossible for me to imagine how you report a story whose subject is death without allowing the public to see images of the subject of the story," said Larry Siems of the PEN American Center, an authors' group that defends free expression.

Rebecca Daugherty of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press found this stance inexplicable. "The notion that, when there's very little information from FEMA, that they would even spend the time to be concerned about whether the reporting effort is up to its standards of taste is simply mind-boggling," Daugherty said. "You cannot report on the disaster and give the public a realistic idea of how horrible it is if you don't see that there are bodies as well."

Has the Bush Administration banned all media from New Orleans? It sounds like no new media are being allowed in, and any media that leaves cannot return. ... What do they want to hide?

The incompetence by the Administration is so widespread, many people feel that it cannot be a coincidence (much like so many levels of US defense all failed at exactly the same time (and so completely) on September 11, 2001).

It is something I'd like to read a lot more about -- as well as the FEMA relocation camps -- but having been away from this story and its many threads for a week, I feel like I'll never catch up.

Those Lucky Duckies In New Orleans

2005-09-05T21:01:00.000-04:00

Ever wonder where George W. Bush gets his "compassion"?

Via E&P:

Accompanying her husband, former President George H.W. Bush, on a tour of hurricane relief centers in Houston, Barbara Bush said today, referring to the poor who had lost everything back home and evacuated, "This is working very well for them."

The former First Lady's remarks were aired this evening on National Public Radio's "Marketplace" program. ... In a segment at the top of the show on the surge of evacuees to the Texas city, Barbara Bush said: "Almost everyone I've talked to says we're going to move to Houston."

Then she added: "What I'm hearing is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this -- this [she chuckles slightly] is working very well for them."

This is the same woman, who, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq (March 18, 2003), went on ABC's "Good Morning America" and said:

Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?

I find it hard to fathom the pure hatred I have for these people.