Iraqi PM Nouri Maliki has declared a month-long state of emergency in Basra, which has been plagued by sectarian clashes, anarchy and factional rivalry.
Visiting the city, Mr Maliki said he would use an "iron fist" to crush those who threaten security.
The prime minister has accused criminal gangs of holding the city's oil exports and other trade to ransom.
More than 100 people have died in the last month in Basra - until recently seen as one of Iraq's safer cities.
Relations between Basra's garrison of 8,000-odd British troops and the city's dominant Shias used to be cordial but have deteriorated rapidly in the past few months.
Nine British soldiers were killed in May alone.
Many Sunni mosques have also been closed amid rising sectarian divisions, and there are growing tensions among different Shia groups vying for political power and a share of the area's vast oil wealth, the BBC's Ian Pannell says.
A Shia faction has also threatened to sabotage oil exports through Basra to exert leverage over the Iraqi government.
As Congressman John Murtha prepares for the November election, on Wednesday his challenger headed to Washington, D.C., to deliver a message to him.
Washington County Commissioner Diana Irey and a busload of supporters headed to D.C. to demand Murtha apologize to Marines for recently accusing some of them of being cold-blooded killers.
Irey, 12th district challenger, said Murtha's stance on the war in Iraq is not her platform for the November election, but it is an issue.
"Mr. Murtha's comments, I believe, were irresponsible and they put our men and women serving overseas in greater danger," Irey said.
Murtha recently said several Marines killed at least 15 Iraqi civilians in cold blood last November and said action should be taken.
While the U.S. military doesn't dispute the congressman's claim, Irey said Murtha is in the wrong.
"Being a former Marine himself, he should know they have a process in place to take care of situation that may have happened that should not have happened," Irey said.
"By coming out and calling them 'cold-blooded killers,' he's already tainted the minds and possible jury of those who will be hearing these allegations.
Tainted a military jury? She should shut the fuck up. So I guess she's objectively pro-child murder.
But the best part is that her husband worked with a now murdered arms dealer in Iraq
I was watching Countdown tonight, with former Daily Show reporter Brian Unger (yes, it's weird on many levels) and there was a story about a specialist in counter intelligence, who had been wounded four times.
The piece made him out to be a determined young man. He's even quoted as saying "failure is not acceptable" and that he "wanted to finish the job".
And I'm thinking "where the fuck are his commanders"
He's been wounded four times, he's got the rest of his unit spooked and he's still out on patrol. I've never heard of someone with four purple hearts still in combat. Why hasn't someone sat him down, told him he's done his share and he has a family and life to get back to?
Luck runs out.
But what bothered me was the feeling that this guy was damaged and his bosses were turning their backs on it. There was just something about the kid which said he enjoyed this too much for their collective health. But because he did his job, they let him do his job. And the narration went against the vibe of looking at this guy. Which was unsettling.
Most guys talk about their friends as the reason to stay or come back.They can't leave their friends behind. Maybe this guy felt that way, but everything which came out of his mouth was about him. Then you see him cleaning his pistol. Most guys they interview off the line are writing e-mail home, talking about their kids, and usually aren't messing with guns.
I don't know. I've never dealt with this in real life. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe he's ok. But if that was my friend, I'd be worried as hell about him.
LONDON, May 29 — Will Wayne Rooney's broken foot heal in time for the second round? Can Sven-Goran Eriksson, the laconic Swedish coach, pull his nervous, egotistical players together? Will Melanie Slade, the 17-year-old girlfriend of the 17-year-old forward Theo Walcott, crumble under the pressure of having her figure and her fashion sense dissected daily by the tabloids?
Coach Sven-Goran Eriksson and midfielder David Beckham can expect either the credit or the blame for England's World Cup performance.
Such are the questions consuming England's soccer team before the World Cup, which begins June 9 in Germany and the outcome of which will lift, or destroy, a nation's fragile sense of self-worth. But amid the soap opera that is soccer here — the large personalities, the even larger paychecks, the outfits, the injuries, the tantrums, the expectations — lies a hard, sobering truth: England, for all its bluster, has won the tournament only once, in 1966.
That was 40 years ago, when Harold Wilson was prime minister and shillings were a legitimate form of currency. Since that great, shining day, English fans have been forced to hedge their expectations, approaching every World Cup with the brittle hopefulness of the chronically disappointed.
"They always invent new arguments to persuade themselves that this time they can do it, when form and logic show that it's highly unlikely," said John Carlin, a British soccer writer and the author of "White Angels: Beckham, Real Madrid and the New Football." Describing the importance of soccer, Carlin quoted Bill Shankly, the former Liverpool coach: "Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I'm very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that." ..................................
One: This will be the year their team finally realizes its massive potential and wins.
Two: Their team never wins.
This year, England's chronic angst is compounded by two facts. The first is that the tournament is being played in Germany, home of its bitterest rival and agent of some of its biggest defeats. In 1990, England lost a heartbreaking match to Germany in a penalty-kick shootout in the World Cup semifinals. In fact, after England's greatest victory over Germany — its 4-2 extra-time victory in the 1966 final — 24 years passed before the English beat the Germans again in a major competition.
The second problem is Rooney's foot. Rooney, a prodigy who rose from the rough streets of Liverpool to become a star at Manchester United, is England's most talented scorer and its greatest hope. But last month he broke a metatarsal bone in his right foot, and on Friday he was ruled out for the first round of matches.
Every day there have been conflicting reports, anguished speculation, hope on the heels of despair. Rooney's coach in Manchester, Sir Alex Ferguson, described it as "folly" and a "wild dream" to expect Rooney to be available, while Eriksson, the England manager, said he was "very positive" that Rooney would play at some point. But Rooney's teammate Gary Neville, who took 21 weeks to recover from a similar injury, said this month that "as it stands, we have to plan for Wayne not being available."
On Monday, The Associated Press reported that Eriksson requested a scan of Rooney's injured foot be moved up one week, to June 7, presumably to give him the opportunity to replace Rooney on England's roster if he will be unable to play. Teams are allowed to replace injured players up to 24 hours before their first game, which in England's case is against Paraguay on June 10.
Meanwhile, Eriksson is to leave his post after the World Cup, throwing the team into further instability. A seemingly inoffensive, even dull, Swede, Eriksson is known as much for his vigorous love life — his curious relationship with Nancy Dell'Olio, his indeterminately aged, perma-tanned, tight-outfit-wearing girlfriend, as well as his affairs with various other women, all of whom have been happy to discuss them publicly — as he is for the serene blandness of his public remarks and for his managing skills, or lack thereof.
Look, I will state openly that I root against England. I hate the fans, the attitude, jesus christ, WWII ended in 1945,and the circus.
But most of all, the England side may be the best collection of players on earth, but not only do they not play as a team, David Beckham loses his shit in crucial games.Henry keeps his cool,so does Totti. But no, Beckham will lose his shit at a crucial moment then England loses.
And the tabloids drag up WWII at every turn. Uh, the Germans have been your allies for 50 years.
England will win when they forget all the footballer wives nonsense and concentrate and play.
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times April Pointer, a part-time telemarketer who never completed high school, attends Rockland Community College in Suffern, N.Y.
It is a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland idea. If you do not finish high school, head straight for college.
But many colleges — public and private, two-year and four-year — will accept students who have not graduated from high school or earned equivalency degrees.
And in an era of stubbornly elevated high school dropout rates, the chance to enter college through the back door is attracting growing interest among students without high school diplomas.
That growth is fueling a debate over whether the students should be in college at all and whether state financial aid should pay their way. In New York, the issue flared in a budget battle this spring.
They are students like April Pointer, 23, of New City, N.Y., a part-time telemarketer who majors in psychology at Rockland Community College, whose main campus is in Suffern, N.Y. Ms. Pointer failed science her senior year of high school and did not finish summer school.
But to her father's amazement, last year she was accepted at Rockland, part of the State University of New York.
"He asked, 'Don't you have to have a high school diploma to go to college?' " she said. "I was like, 'No, not anymore.' "
There are nearly 400,000 students like Ms. Pointer nationwide, accounting for 2 percent of all college students, 3 percent at community colleges and 4 percent at commercial, or profit-making, colleges, according to a survey by the United States Education Department in 2003-4.
That is up from 1.4 percent of all college students four years earlier. The figures do not include home-schooled students.
The existence of such students — eager, yet at high risk for failure — exposes a split in education policy. On one hand, believers in the standards movement frown on social promotion and emphasize measurable performance in high school.
At the same time, because a college degree is widely considered essential to later success, some educators say even students who could not complete high school should be allowed to attend college.
Nowhere is this contradiction more evident than in California. This year, 47,000 high school seniors, about 10 percent of the class, have not passed the exit examinations required to graduate from high school. They can still enroll in many colleges, although they are no longer eligible for state tuition grants.
The President's butt boy is going to Harvard Business School with one year of college. Ms.Pointer deserves the same chance.
The U.S. military treat wounded at the scene of a car bomb in Baghdad's Tahariyat Square which targeted an American convoy, setting a Humvee on fire, in Baghdad, Iraq Monday, May 29, 2006. CBS cameraman Paul Douglas, 48 , and soundman James Brolan, 42, were killed in the attack and correspondent Kimberly Dozier, 39, was critically injured.
NEW YORK - Cameraman Paul Douglas had spent more than a decade covering the world's hot spots for CBS News. Freelance soundman James Brolan was part of a CBS team honored for its dispatches on the earthquake in Pakistan. Correspondent Kimberly Dozier had reported on the deteriorating situation in Iraq for nearly three years.
The two British men were killed Monday in Baghdad when a car bomb exploded as they were working on a story about American troops in Iraq on Memorial Day. Douglas, 48, and Brolan, 42, died at the scene, the network said.
The U.S. military said an American soldier and an Iraqi interpreter were also killed in the same blast and six American soldiers were injured.
Dozier, a 39-year-old American, was in critical condition at a U.S. military hospital in Baghdad and underwent two surgeries for injuries from the bombing, said Kelli Edwards, a CBS News spokeswoman. By early Tuesday, doctors had removed shrapnel from Dozier's head but said she had more serious injuries to her lower body, CBS News reported on its Web site.
"Kimberly, Paul and James were veterans of war coverage who proved their bravery and dedication every single day," CBS News President Sean McManus said in a statement. "They always volunteered for dangerous assignments and were invaluable in our attempt to report the news to the American public.
"Our deepest sympathy goes out to the families of Paul and James, and we are hoping and praying for a complete recovery by Kimberly," McManus added.
ABC did not want Elizabeth Vargas to face the same fate, which is why she was demoted.
I was listening to CBS tonight and imagined how Katie Couric would sound delivering such somber news.I'll put it this way: Les Moonves should have continued to fuck with Howard Stern.It made more sense. There are plenty of women who can deliver bad news. Katie Couric is not one of them.
Ted Nugent makes me ill. His gun fetish combined with his bragging about dodging the draft induces nausea in me. Now this bully with guns is running for governor, at least in his head. If he wanted to be a tough guy, he should have gone to Vietnam. Instead he chose to be a rock star. Now he wants to act like he has balls. The General is running this
I was delighted to see you announce your candidacy for Governor of Michigan this weekend. Overall, I though you did a splendid job in getting your message across and defining your political philosophy in this, your inaugural interview as a gubernatorial candidate. Even so, I thought I could offer you some helpful pointers that will maximize the utility of future interviews.
Handling the Media
When you announce your run for political office, consider doing so in a U.S. publication. While the readers of The Independent will, no doubt, become big boosters of your bid for Lansing, sadly, few of them will be eligible to vote in the Michigan election.
When doing political interviews, it is probably best not to preemptively deny rumors…particularly when the reporter has no idea what you are talking about. For example, this exchange:
Nugent: "Neither did I poke my erect penis through a map of West Virginia - did you read that?"
Reporter: "No."
During media interviews, refrain from teaching the journalist how to shoot an AK-47, and don’t pull out a hunting knife to trim your nails. These behaviors will not help with the urban vote.
I cringed a little while reading:
He fires at a Styrofoam bear using his weapon of choice, a traditional bow and arrow. "Straight through the heart... dead bear," says Ted, as his heavily pitted target submits to yet another onslaught. "Both lungs... dead bear." The arrows, which he makes himself, keep flying. "Dead bear... dead bear... dead bear."
I recommend that the next time you experience a maniacal bout, first ask any journalists to step outside the room. And, certainly avoid this type of behavior during a debate.
When a reporter asks:
"What do these deer think when they see you coming?" …"Here comes the nice guy who puts out our dinner? Or, there's the man that shot my brother?"
Reconsider your response:
"I don't think they're capable of either of those thoughts, you Limey asshole. They're only interested in three things: the best place to eat, having sex and how quickly they can run away. Much like the French."
I mean, just consider the heat that Arnold Schwarzenegger took from calling some legislators “girly men….”
The same can be said for your rather strongly stated philosophy:
"Remember the movie Old Yeller? Everybody loved him. He brought us our slippers. We gave him cookies. But when Old Yeller gets rabies, you shoot him in the fucking head."
This won’t play well among voters with young children--on a number of levels.
Finally, firing a .22 out of the window of your pick-up truck while shuttling members of the media may be constructive while running for office in Texas; however, voters in Michigan view this as falling outside the range of normal behaviors for a politician.
Foreign Policy
A well-formed foreign policy platform can be an asset in running for Governor of Michigan, but your statement that "[o]ur failure has been not to Nagasaki them [the Iraqi insurgents]," is just not really an appropriate start to such a platform.
As governor, your chief foreign policy issue will be trade. Saying that you "don't have to placate some Arab numb-nut because he holds all our fuel" doesn’t leave much room for trade negotiations.
You mentioned that you:
"visited Saddam Hussein's master war room. It was a glorious moment. It looked like something out of Star Wars. I saw his gold toilet. I shit in his bidet."
Certainly, the more conservative voter will be able to appreciate the rich metaphor of defecation on the “French throne” of the ex-dictator. However, scatological discussions are best avoided unless they somehow pertain to agricultural productivity.
Crime and Punishment
While being tough on crime is considered a positive attribute by Michigan voters, some might find disconcerting your statement:
“I say if somebody robs you, shoot 'em. I'd like all thieves killed. And all rapists. And carjackers. No more graffiti. No more ‘snatch-pursing.’"
At the very least, your suggestions of shooting graffitists will not play well with urban voters who would prefer to have fewer episodes of gun violence in the city.
Simple policy statements are always the most effective--especially with conservative voters. Even so, your statement
"How do you get peace, love and understanding? First of all you have to find all the bad people. Then you kill them."
will cause some voters to question your ability to work through complex issues.
I’m not sure you can refine the talking point:
"I saw the riding crop. A lot. I felt it, I think, just once. But corporal punishment is real good. It teaches dogs not to shit on the couch."
Consider leaving this out of future interviews.
Think about these points as your campaign progresses, Ted. With just a little refinement of your message (a little rephrasing here, a little behavioral modification there) I think there is an excellent chance that one day I will have the privilege of shaking the hand of the Governor of Michigan--the Governor who personally kills all the meat he eats.
I hate this shit. Now he's a big man, terrorizing kids on a reality show and blowing away bears. Real hard core. But when it came time to serve his country, he ran for the hills. So fuck all his gunslinging now. Bears don't carry RPG's and AK's. If they did, Ted's hunting forays might end differently. Ambushing his silly ass might make him reconsider his bloodlust. He's the kind of guy who makes hunters embarassed.
I mean, if you listened to his talk, you'd think he had a Silver Star in his closet.But when you realize only bullies talk like this, gutless scum who would run when facing someone who would shoot back, it gets pretty sickning, like listening to all bullies.
I had mentioned to the astonishment of the readers here that I had never had artichokes. So a couple of weeks ago Jen and I went to Three of Cups in the East Village Now I'd never had artichokes before, so I didn't know what to expect. No idea.
So when I ate the first one, it was interesting. The deeper we went, the better it tasted.Which was a surprise.The inside leaves are pretty tender. Jen, who had picked up a cooking brick for me on the way to dinner, had been at art galleries all day and had a liquid lunch. Now, there is something about eating artichokes with the tipsy which makes it a unique experience.
We also had stuffed clams, a pizza and a calzone, with chianti.
Then we went to d.b.a where we ran into a friend of hers. While I was sipping Anchor Steam porter on tap, my favorite beer, on tap, I spied a couple working on a Powerbook, which was fine. But they were drinking Amstel Light. Fucking Amstel Light. Huh? d.b.a sells cask conditioned ales, 40 kinds of single malt, and 20 beers on tap. And you drink what? Amstel Light. You can't hit people for being stupid, but they derserved a harsh lecture on what is appropiate behavior. Amstel Light. Jesus.
The next weekend, we went to the Beer Garden in Astoria on the oddest day of the year. It alternated between rain, wind and sunshine.We were with our blogger friends and eating central European food and drinking during this odd weather. Grilled Kielbasa is amazing. Jen had roast pork and dumplings. Good, hearty food.
Afterwards, Jen walked us to this greek mall a block away. She showed us the butcher and bakery. I bought some souvlaki she had mentioned as a possible barbecue treat and was impressed when I cooked it. The bakery had 10 kinds of biscotti and Greek pastries.
Now, Jen's enthusiasm for sharing is infectious, so she was eager to share her neighborhood treats with our friends. Which is of course, interesting. Of course, she realized that she didn't do her own grocery shopping, nor had I, so we left early.
The funny thing is that food adventuring can happen any place or any time.
I was running errands today and walked into a street fair. I saw this incredible barbecue thing with flank steaks being grilled. I passed on that, but I did get the zeppoles. Zeppoles are basically fried pizza dough covered in powerdered sugar, a New York street favorite. Now, truth be told, most street fair food sucks. Grilled Corn, zeppoles and the odd sausage sandwich are about it, even the lemonade isn't sweet enough.
But they're a nice way to spend a holiday afternoon.
In today's issue of The New York Times, Diane Cardwell discusses the possibility of a presidential run by Michael Bloomberg. How fitting, then, that the pundits apparently most open to talking about a potential independent candidacy by the billionaire and New York City mayor come from the DLC.
As Democrats and Republicans argue over the future of their parties and the national debate remains polarized, there are signs that voters are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with President Bush and the Republican leaders of Congress, and that they aren't necessarily energized by the Democrats, either.
"Most people are not satisfied with their politics and would very much like to see more politicians who just got things done," said Al From, founder and chief executive officer of the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist policy group. "Most people really aren't about ideology. Most people really are about, 'Let's get something done that's going to make my life better.' "
[...]
Marshall Wittmann, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, which is affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council, said that in many ways Mr. Bloomberg had been building on the political legacy of moderate New York Republicans like Nelson A. Rockefeller and Jacob K. Javits. "It's hard-headed, but liberal on social issues and fiscally responsible," said Mr. Wittmann, who has worked for Senator John McCain. "He very much fits that mold that's been dormant, even in the Democratic Party." [emphasis added]
I'm not sure to which Democratic Party Marshall Wittman belongs, but it's certainly not the one I'm a part of. Almost by definition, the Democratic Party -- particularly in the past two decades -- has been about fiscal responsibility and liberalism on social issues, the two planks Wittman says Bloomberg has going for him. In other words, that winning formula that Wittman proffers is simply the Democratic Party platform, though not in so many words.
What Wittman and the folks at the DLC like about Bloomberg is his policies, per se, but rather that he's a Republican who's really a Democrat -- or perhaps that he's a Democrat who became a Republican. With this "bipartisan" resume, how could Bloomberg possibly lose?
In a three-way race for the presidency, Bloomberg would likely split the center-left vote, handing the White House to conservative Republicans. Even if John McCain were the Republican nominee, it's not clear to me what conservative would vote for Bloomberg over McCain as the mayor is far to the left of McCain on social issues.
Things might get more complicated in a four-way race for President, with a Democrat, Republican, nativist/religious conservative and Bloomberg all in the mix. However, it's not clear to me that the Democrats -- or even someone on the center-left -- would end up victorious in this scenario.
I have no problem with Wittman, From and all of the DLCers working within the Democratic Party to enact change; after all, this is exactly what the netroots are attempting in a number of primary and general elections. That said, when they seek to undercut the party by peddling the possibility of a centrist independent like Michael Bloomberg for the presidency, they have no place in Democratic politics.
As racist and meanspirited as Rudy Giuliani is, he has charisma. Bloomberg was elected because he lacked charisma. Compared to him, Hillary Clinton is Bette Midler.
Mike Bloomberg is tacking left because Eliot Spitzer is going to be the next governorof New York, and the Senate may go blue also. The New York GOP is spiraling to a brutal collapse and Mike needs to move left.
Bloomberg isn't acting like he wants to run for anything, but let's face facts, the DLC needs a new poster boy, Lieberman is in trouble and they've quickly become a curse word in Democratic party circles. But the fact is that Bloomberg wants to get back to his company, to run for president, it would have to, at a minimum, be placed in a blind trust and more likely sold.
But he doesn't seem interested in any of that. Most of his tacking left is to prepare for his endorsement of Spitzer and a possible return to the Democratic Party.
There's a wonderful piece on chickenhawks on Kung Fu Monkey but there's a bit I want to rip to shreds without stealing the fine prose below it. It's parsing time, folks.
There is a term tossed about currently: "chickenhawk." It's understood to be a derogatory term for someone who avidly supports choosing war as an option while simultaneously avoiding any risk of personal harm in the ensuing conflict. It is an admittedly fuzzy invective; particularly now when we have a professional Army. I think that in most applications it's lazy. People who support the Iraq War -- it's often couched in terms of supporting the War on Terror, but let's face it, nobody's chasing Bin Laden in the Pakistani highlands, we're talking Iraq here -- have claimed the phrase is meaningless. The quote that brought this attitude into particular focus for me was, unfortunately, written by a casual friend, Warren Bell, over at the conservative website The Corner:
I am going to save you some time. You no longer need to email me every time I take some position in favor of the War on Terror , the invasions of Iraq or Afghanistan, or in fact any pro-military stance. I now am completely and thoroughly informed that I am a chickenhawk, that it is "easy" to support a war when I don't have to put on a uniform and fight, and that I am a coward who would only sacrifice other people's loved ones.
Nice for you to be up front about it.
And to save you further time, I am going to expose myself even more. I am a hypocrite and chickenhawk in the War on Crime, as I continue to avoid donning a badge and a gun and busting down doors to catch bad guys, even though I support sending in real police to do the job.
Uh, chickenhawk, there is a vast difference between supporting the police and advocating aggressive war. The difference is that you would be calling for the police to execute criminals on the spot, but refusing to identify the drug dealers on your block.
I am a complete coward in the War on Fire, because I have never put on a yellow slicker and an oxygen mask to go stand on the front line in the battle against a burning building. And that's while completely admitting that I would be great at squirting the big hose.
No, you are a complete coward if you send barely trained 19 year olds to fight fires, then cut the budget for the fire department.
Additionally, and this is a little painful, I am a loser, hypocrite, chickenhawk, and barely half a man in the War on Weeds. I tried digging them out of my yard, but found I didn't have what it takes, so now I sit in my comfy chair and watch while other people's loved ones put themselves at risk. I'm sorry.
Well, if weeds blew your leg off, and the dandelions sniped at you, then you might have a point.
But like all self-justifying cowards, chickenhawk Warren, trivializes service to the country to hide his own cowardice. Here's a man lucky enough to write for the NRO, and he thinks his cheap words mean something.
I could write all day, every day, on how badly I feel for the Iraqis, how my heart aches when I see another woman bending over a prostrate body. But I don't. Why? Because those words would be cheap. Sympathy without action is cheap. People don't need to hear cheap words. The Warren Bells of the world can cheerlead all they want, but it doesn't lessen their cowardice one bit.
They want war without sacrifice, well, their sacrifice, you can die for them. They try to minimize their cowardice because they know it is shameful.They know they cannotlook honest men and women in the face. So they turn it into a joke. The sacrifice of others, the destruction of families, compared to weeds.
An honorable man would be ashamed of such a comparison.
A KALAMAZOO grill can suck a standard tank of propane dry in two and a half hours. Not that backyard grill-users would want to crank every burner simultaneously and reach the full 154,000 B.T.U. capacity of this $11,290, six-and-a-half-foot-wide brute
.........................
"Our gas line had to be doubled in capacity from the house," said Connie Dove of York, Me. She and her husband, Mo Houde, took delivery last year of a Kalamazoo Bread Breaker Two Dual-Fuel grill with an infrared rotisserie cradle system and a side burner.
They hooked the 600-pound stainless steel hulk into their home's main propane supply, choosing not to mess with standard tanks, which each hold only four gallons of fuel. That's enough to allow a typical backyard grill to run at maximum for 15 hours, according to the Propane Education and Research Council in Washington.
"It is very, very powerful," Ms. Dove said. "A turkey you can have in an hour and a half."
The Bread Breaker, which has a temperature gauge that reaches 1,000 degrees, is one of an increasingly popular breed of supergrills that are becoming backyard status symbols, as Americans, mostly of the male variety, peacock with an object that harks back to the earliest days of human existence.
As Memorial Day marks the official beginning of grilling season, many men will find themselves almost genetically drawn to throwing hunks of raw meat onto a fire and poking them with tongs. It's a pull that some will spend almost any amount of money to satisfy, said Pantelis A. Georgiadis, the owner of Kalamazoo Outdoor Gourmet, the grill manufacturer based in Michigan. "There is a market segment we call the 'man cook with fire' types," he said.
When Daniel Conrad, a lawyer, moved to Dallas four years ago from Pittsburgh to join the woman who would become his wife, his parents bought him a small Weber grill. "It wasn't big enough for my ego," Mr. Conrad, 34, said. "So I got this giant enormous Weber grill."
Now, he rushes home to his wife — and to his baby, a Weber Summit Gold D6, to slow-cook ribs or experiment with smoking turkeys. "Grilling has become my creative outlet," Mr. Conrad said. "The only two extravagances I have in my life are my car and my grill." He drives a Mercedes.
And like luxury car owners, many people who splurge on a grill that can simmer, bake and fry are looking to impress.
Last fall, Dave and Allison Petrullo of Commack, N.Y., installed a custom-built Cal Spas grill on their patio with an outdoor refrigerator. They spent more than $100,000 renovating their backyard with a new synthetic deck, masonry, a whirlpool and a pool waterfall, so $6,500 more for Mr. Petrullo to have a brick sanctuary with a Cal Spas grill as its central altar seemed like nothing. "I told him to just go for it," Ms. Petrullo said. "And get your dream barbecue."
Though they have actually cooked on the grill only three times since they installed it, it has been a hit with Mr. Petrullo's friends, who congregate around it at parties and give it a going-over like a pack of high school boys around a Corvette, Ms. Petrullo said. "They like to lift up the hood and play with the knobs," she said. "They open the doors underneath, and they open the fridge next to it to check it out."
If you can't good results with a Weber and charcoal, then you can't do any better spending more money. It's in how you cook more than what you cook on.
NEW ORLEANS, May 27 — Representative William J. Jefferson has always liked to talk about growing up in an impoverished farm community, picking cotton for $3 a day and hitting the books hard enough to win his ticket out — a scholarship to Harvard Law School.
But even as Mr. Jefferson built a reputation as one of Louisiana's brightest, most effective leaders, a less flattering view began to emerge, one signified by his nickname in political circles, "Dollar Bill." Early in his career, as a state legislator, he was criticized for enriching his law firm with contracts from state and local agencies. He also ran stores that rented appliances by the month to poor residents, owned dilapidated apartment buildings and was sued by federal regulators over a defaulted loan. ....................
The raid on Mr. Jefferson's office took place barely a week ago. But in a sense, the questions circling him have long resonances in his career, which was shaped by a remarkable ascent from the deepest poverty and a quest for the comforts his family never had. .....................
"There was always a feeling among those who knew him as Dollar Bill that having grown up as poor as he did, his hunger for wealth always burned," said Allan Katz, a New Orleans political consultant. ...................... Standing outside a new post office that Mr. Jefferson helped bring to his district, one voter, Joyce F. Smith, said that if the accusations were true, "I'd be very disappointed because he's been a very good congressman."
But many people here have been joking about his "frozen assets" and "cold cash." And Ms. Smith added, it is "hard for me to believe" that he would have stashed legitimate earnings in frozen-food containers and aluminum foil.
......................
Friends of both men said the mayor thought Mr. Jefferson had tried too aggressively to collect legal fees for helping Mr. Morial win the election. But after Mr. Jefferson became a state senator in 1979, his political rivals began to use "Dollar Bill" to refer to his expanding financial ventures.
His rental business — which leased television sets and other appliances to people who could not afford to buy them — appeared on the delinquent list in a city sales-tax scandal in the 1980's. And a day after he was elected to Congress in 1990, the Resolution Trust Corporation, which was trying to clean up the mess from the collapse of savings institutions, sued him for $160,000 over an apartment-building loan on which he had quit making payments. He later settled the suit, with friends saying his investments had been hurt by a faltering economy. .................
Over the years, Mr. Jefferson has received campaign contributions and free travel from individuals and companies seeking business in Africa, including iGate. ....................
Government documents show that Mr. Jackson told the F.B.I. that when he met Mr. Jefferson in late 2000, the congressman voluntarily helped promote iGate's products — a normal and legitimate action for a government official involved in trade issues. But according to the F.B.I. documents, in early 2001, the congressman's actions became improper when he said he would continue to use his influence on iGate's behalf only if Mr. Jackson made payments to a company, the ANJ Group, run by the Jefferson family. The iGate payments were disguised as consulting fees, the F.B.I. said.
Mr. Jefferson says these were private business dealings that had nothing to do with his work on the House committee.
But as part of a 2003 deal to distribute iGate's products, a Nigerian company, Netlink Digital Television, agreed to pay the congressman $5 per subscriber, the F.B.I. affidavit said, "in return for Jefferson's official assistance if the deal was successful."
......................
Investigators said that in negotiating the deals, Mr. Jefferson had often cited his desire to provide for his five daughters, three of whom also have degrees from Harvard Law School.
From December 2004 through June 2005, the F.B.I. said in its affidavit, Mr. Jefferson increased his demands for equity in one Nigerian company, to 30 percent, to be split among his daughters. He also told an investor that one of his daughters had to be retained to do legal work, according to documents in the case.
Then, on July 30, 2005, when Mr. Jefferson met Ms. Modi at a Ritz-Carlton hotel, the F.B.I. said it supplied her with a briefcase with $100,000 in marked bills. Mr. Jefferson had told her the money would be needed to bribe Nigerian officials, the affidavit said.
As the F.B.I.'s video cameras zoomed in on him, the bureau said, Mr. Jefferson drove off with the briefcase on the seat of his Lincoln Town Car. And when agents raided his home four days later, $90,000 of the money turned up again, in the kitchen freezer.
Renting TV's to the poor is among the scummiest businesses in America. It's like you're stealing from them with near usurious rates. A slumlord? Getting work for family members?
Jefferson wanted to be rich without doing the work to be rich.His ego said politics, but his wallet said business deals. He could have practiced any kind of law, but chose politics and then wanted to make his family rich as well.
Other people do it, and it's as wrong, but it seemed like Jefferson liked to prey on the weak and poor to make his money
WASHINGTON - Peter Beinart is an advocate of liberal -- not "progressive" -- nostalgia. He wants to turn the clock back to 1947 at Washington's Willard Hotel.
Beinart, who was born in 1971, is editor at large of the liberal New Republic magazine and disdains the label "progressive" as a rejection of liberalism's useable past of anti-totalitarianism. An intellectual archaeologist, he excavates that vanished intellectual tradition and sends it into battle in his new book, "The Good Fight: Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again." It expresses Beinart's understanding of liberalism in 1948, 1968 and, he hopes, 2008.
His project of curing liberalism's amnesia begins by revisiting Jan. 4, 1947, when liberal anti-totalitarians convened at the Willard to found Americans for Democratic Action. It became their instrument for rescuing the Democratic Party from Henry Wallace and his fellow-traveling followers who, locating the cause of the Cold War in American faults, were precursors of Michael Moore and his ilk among today's "progressives."
Among the heroes of liberalism's civil war was Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who today is 88. He stigmatized their anti-anti-communism as "doughface-ism." Beinart explains: "The original doughfaces were 'Northern men with Southern principles' -- Northerners who opposed slavery, but who could not bring themselves to support the Civil War." Today's doughfaces are "progressives" who flinch from the fact that, as Beinart says, "America could not have built schools for Afghan girls had it not bombed the Taliban first."
Liberalism's civil war seemed won after Henry Wallace's Progressive Party candidacy failed to prevent President Truman's 1948 election. But the war broke out again in the Democratic Party's crack-up over Vietnam in 1968. Then, Beinart says, a "new liberalism" emerged that "questioned whether America had much to offer the world." Four years later the party nominated George McGovern, who had been a delegate to the 1948 Progressive Party convention that nominated Wallace. McGovern's trumpet sounded retreat: "Come home, America."
Since then, Beinart argues, liberals have lacked a narrative of national greatness that links America's missions at home and abroad. It has been said that whereas the right-wing isolationists in the 1930s believed that America was too good for the world, left-wing isolationists in the 1960s believed that the world was too good for America. After Vietnam, Beinart says, liberal foreign policy was "defined more by fear of American imperialism than fear of totalitarianism." ...................................
Ronald Reagan said he did not want to return to the past but to the past's way of facing the future. As does Beinart, who locates the pertinent past in 1947.
So when is Beinhart enlisting?
He is a coward who hides behind 19 year olds.
What Beinart forgets is that the people who formed the post-war policies fought in WWII. They didn't sit behind desks, typing their support.
Beinart's gutlessness reeks like shit in a warm wind. He wants to play war while people die. If Beinart believes in national greatness, he can lead a platoon in Afghanistan or join the foriegn service.If not, then he's a coward.
NEW YORK, May 26, 2006 (AP) Bernard Kerik once enjoyed a national reputation as a brash, self-made law enforcer. As New York's police commissioner, he was at Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's side during the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. By late 2004, President Bush wanted him for homeland security chief.
Kerik's fame faded after allegations of ethical lapses doomed his nomination. His troubles, however, have endured.
A grand jury in the Bronx has been hearing testimony about a possible corruption case against Kerik involving reputed mob associates, alleged influence peddling and a questionable home-renovation project.
The Bronx District Attorney's office refused this week to comment on speculation that the grand jury could soon charge Kerik with abusing his authority while a top city official, or to discuss any aspect of the case. But defense lawyers confirmed that their clients had testified during the past several weeks.
Among the witnesses was Timothy Woods, a contractor who supervised a project to convert two apartments — bought by Kerik in 1999 for $170,000 — into one home. Kerik, who was commissioner of the city's Department of Correction when the work was done, sold the home for $460,000 in 2002 after real estate advertisements described it as a "gem" adorned with marble and granite.
In a civil complaint filed last year, New Jersey authorities now working with the Bronx prosecutors alleged that most of the $240,000 renovation was secretly paid for by a construction firm in that state with ties to the Mafia, Interstate Industrial Corp. In return, Kerik allegedly vouched for Interstate with city regulators, charges both he and the company's owners, Frank and Peter DiTommaso, vehemently deny.
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There were questions about his $6.2 million windfall from exercising stock options in a stun-gun company that did business with the government. There also were reports that during his 18-month tenure as police commissioner he had simultaneous extramarital affairs with two women, including the publisher of his memoir. .................................. Kerik later met with a regulator at the city's Trade Waste Commission, which was investigating Interstate, telling him was interested in "alleviating the agency's concerns" about the firm, the papers said. (The official has said he didn't believe Kerik improperly tried to influence him, Kerik's lawyer said.)
The complaint said when the gaming division sought answers and documents from Kerik, he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Bwwaaaaaahhh.
Bernie loved to take things on the arm.And he was police commissioner. How is Rudy gonna escape this? Every sleazy thing Kerik did was mirrored by Giuliani. He recommened him to run Homeland Security. Kerik's indictment lands right in Giuliani's lap. Didn't he notice Kerik was living beyond his means? He even put the arm on people for his wedding.
My first task this weekend--break these bad boys in
Hello, all! Jen here.
Apologies for not posting/commenting more, but my work life has been like a slow-motion riot in a crowded white-collar asylum for the past few months, and most nights after work I'm trying to either a) keep what social life I have still alive to some extent b) do necessary things, like buy more toilet paper and pay bills, c) hit the gym or d) go to bed at 8 PM and sleep in the same position all night out of bone-crumbling exhaustion.
The irony is that for the first Memorial Day Weekend in about 5 years, I don't have some kind of Huge BBQ Party Thingie to go to. Gilly is getting ready for a family event in Boston, another close pal is home with his sister who just got home from the UK, and my other friends with jobs are pretty much doing what I'm doing--going face-down to rest and get shit around the place done. Even my Mom isn't doing anything at the house and is actually for once going to someone else's party. The ironic part is that this isn't the first Memorial Day in ages that hasn't had shitty, cold weather.
(Note for our non-US readers: Memorial Day is a holiday that always falls on a Monday. Ostensibly it is to honor the members of the US Armed Forces. Over the years it has become the official Start of Summer in the US, and is traditionally celebrated by barbeques, picnics, etc).
So, what is radical, super-exciting Jen doing this weekend?
Well, I rushed home Friday night after banging back 2 mudslides a the Continental to watch Get Color on HGTV. This was because I was exhausted from schlepping a new pair of sneakers and my new Doc Martens around town, in the damp, running chores after work. The Docs are for my upcoming summer vacation; the sneaks are because the last pair I bought for "just walking around" (as opposed to the gym--a lot of US gyms have "indoor sneaker only" policies) was something like 6 years ago, and the arches on my one street pair had totally collapsed. Yes, I got the sneaks in the funky pink and green shown. I woulda gotten New Balance, but my gym sneaks are those, and I have to say while they have the very best fit, they are ugly to the point of bordering on a wearble medical device.
But I digress.
When I got home, I collapsed in front of the TV after running to my bodega for milk--I have not set foot in a supermarket for almost 2 weeks, and was eating the nasty ends of whatever I had left in the fridge (and was too tired after work most nights to even think about opening the freezer, which by contrast, is full).
I had also managed to hit the drug store for silicon sneaker spray, Motrin, and other feminine supplies. So, after Get Color, I sprayed my sneakers, treated my Docs with Wet-Pruf, and collapsed into bed after the news.
Today all I did was sleep, get up and pee from time to time as the kids next door woke me up, highlighted my hair (need to get it cut but couldn't deal with it Friday--will do next week), and then...launched into Grocery Shopping. Hit my local greengrocer, got some sliced dried salami from Mike's Pork Shop, and dropped stuff off at home. Had a dinch (dinner/lunch) of fresh, raw veggies, a kaiser roll with a tad of olive oil on it, and some sliced sweet and hot salamis.
Then I watched the news and went back out to do my REAL grocery shopping, even though I was tired again, because I had one roll of toilet paper yet and was out of essentials like, oh, bread, cheese, canned tuna, and so on.
Got in around 9. Was going to go back out to some hotspot in LIC, but then I realized that a) it was hot b) I was tired and had been c) breaking in boots as hard as new body armor to do multiple staircase runs and chores around the 'hood, and my feet needed a break.
Tomorrow, I am due to go have dins with a good friend, whose dad was just diagnosed with cancer. I may go out later that night, or I may just flop.
At some point, I also have to go Shopping for Summer Staples like a few fresh layering T's to wear under a blazer at the office, as well as cheap shorts that fit. And, I have to Try On Stuff to see what Fits for a big fancy dinner that I am doing with family on Tuesday. I also have to try to call a bunch of folks overseas now that I finally remembered to get an STI Phone Card at my local bodega.
Yeah, I am the picture of decadant urban living. Woo Hoo. Exciting me. I may try to clear another level of 25 to Life or Black, or put in Brokeback Mountain or one of the Aeon Flux on episodes.
LONDON, May 27 — It has been a lethal and quirky climbing season on Mount Everest, with at least 15 deaths recorded or rumored so far.
But no episode seemed quite so strange as the story of Lincoln Hall, a 50-year-old Australian climber, who was a 16th. But only for a while. .................
That case revived a passionate debate over the ethics of high altitude climbing, particularly in what is called the death zone, where conditions, temperatures and the lack of oxygen combine to mean that rescuers may forfeit their own lives in trying to save a sick or incapacitated climber.
Mr. Hall, one of Australia's best-known climbers, was on an expedition whose members paid a minimum of $16,000, according to its Web site. The group included a 15-year-old Australian climber, Chris Harris, who had hoped to become the youngest climber to reach the summit.
He was forced to turn back after having problems breathing, but Mr. Hall and others made it to the top on Thursday.
Accounts on Saturday, pieced together from expedition Web sites and newspaper articles, said that on the descent, Mr. Hall suddenly collapsed. He was pronounced dead by the sherpa guides accompanying him and abandoned at 28,500 feet. The cause was understood to be cerebral edema — a swelling of the brain.
The next day, according to accounts from Mr. Hall's fellow climbers, he was seen by Dan Mazur, an American veteran of many Himalayan expeditions. Mr. Mazur, they said, realized that Mr. Hall was still alive. Almost incomprehensibly, he survived the night.
"Lincoln was motionless, but submitted weak attributes of life," Alex Abramov, the Russian leader of the expedition, said on its Web site (http://www.7summits-club.com/).
The expedition dispatched a team of 13 sherpas to rescue him. Three sherpas with "tea, oxygen and medicines have reached Lincoln," the expedition Web site reported Friday.
"Lincoln has a rest, drinks tea. He in consciousness, however not completely understands what happens," Mr. Abramov wrote on the Web site.
It ascribed his initial weakness on the mountain to an "acute edema and hypoxia," meaning he was not getting enough oxygen.
By 10 p.m. local time Thursday, Mr. Hall and his rescuers were said to have descended to a camp at about 23,000 feet on the North Col of Everest. And by Saturday, "Lincoln Hall was able to walk on his own" to the Advanced Base Camp farther down the mountain.
The fact that he had been able to walk unassisted was taken as testimony to a remarkable recovery and raised the question of what might have happened to the Briton, David Sharp, if he had been helped.
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The episode provoked a sharp dispute with Sir Edmund Hillary, the New Zealander who, with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, made the first verifiable conquest of Everest in 1953. Sir Edmund said that "people have completely lost sight of what is important."
"In our expedition, there was never any likelihood whatsoever if one member of the party was incapacitated that we would just leave him to die," he told a New Zealand newspaper, The Otago Daily Times
Yeah, it all comes down to that, leaving people to die like garbage on the side of the road.
In the mid-1990's two books were published about Germans and the Holocaust, Hitler's Willing Executioners, by Daniel Goldhagen and Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning.
Goldhagen felt that most Germans were at best indifferent to the Holocaust, and many were willing participants. Many felt he overstated his case.
However, Browning's book, Ordinary Men, was far better recieved. It showed how ordinarymen, policemen, could become murderers. One of his conclusions, and it was stunning, even in the mid-1990's, was that the burden of killing fell to relavtively few people. No one was punished for not killing. People who would rather hunt partisans or face the Russians in these units transfered out without punishment, but most neither killed nor stopped killing. They watched. A few men, with the power of life and death, were eager to kill, reveled in it, but most did nothing. They didn't kill, they didn't stop the killing. In essence, they were mute. Neither killers nor resisters.
A lotof people on the left who don't have experience with the military even on a historical level, tend to see the military as a monolith. But that is far from true.
The first thing to understand is that the infantry, the actual patrolling,killing 11B's are a minority in the army, a caste apart. Even other soldiers are wary of them. They live in a world apart. Most soldiers handle supplies and file papers, they never seeor handle a gun in their work day.
There are others who share the battlefield with them, but when infantrymen walk into a room with other soldiers, they are apart.
The men in Browning's book were policemen, in the rear. The only shots they heard were the ones they fired.
When Omer Bartov edited a book of pictures of Wehrmacht atroicities,Germans were none too happy to see the pictures. It had been easy to blame the fanatics of the SS for the crimes in the east, the wanton murders. These pictures showed ordinary men at murder.
The idea that ordinary men kill is an unacceptable one. When General Dyer massacred peaceful protesters ar Amritsar, people made him into a hero.
When we talk about Haditha, people need to understand something: there were a few killers and a lot of coconspirators. There were killers, eager, but few in number, and many willing to cover up their acts. Why? Sympathy for the killers, fear, loyalty, embarassment. Yet, there were people who would not accept this, who fought for it to come to light, despite the instutitional pressures.
The American military has killed civilians in Iraq in many ways, traffic stops, stray fire, aerial attack. But as wrong as that is, it is the byproduct of war. Cold blooded murder is not. Which is to say,when you send soldiers to solve problems, they do so violently.
But to walk into a home, and fire a round into a crying, begging woman and her child? That is murder.
People will either try to tar the Marines as a whole by this, or claim that they were driven to it. And both will be wrong. These men, if they did as they are accused of, decided to seek revenge, it was a conscious, purposeful act, one of deliberation. Others watched them murder in cold blood and refused to speak out. All active choices. All deliberate choices.
Other Marines, in the same position, in the same town,chose to do otherwise. The thought of blind revenge lingers in many minds. But to cross that line, to become a murderer, takes something.
Then, when faced with these facts, to cover them up? That is the most loathesome act of all. People will want to place the blame on the sergeant and his men, and they will deserve much of it. But not all. Those who hid this are culpable as well. Maybe even more so. Because they were given evidence of the murder of children and hid it. People who would never hide a child killer at home, did so in Iraq.
But before we get sanctimonious here, let's remember, these are oridnary men. They could be our neighbors, our friends, even us. It is easy to make them into monsters. But they are not. They chose to kill, and others chose to protect them. Monsters? No. Ordinary men. But the problem is that we are required to be more than ordinary to keep our souls.
OK, in the long essay on Iraq, there are just some stunning historical whoppers here which need to be addressed
Moktada Sadr's troops and commanders were appallingly inept, and were crushed in their abortive uprising. While other, more sanguine commanders, such as the Badr Brigade and the rump Fedayeen Saddam maintained an effective Mao-type insurgency, Moktada Sadr and his soldiery duplicated the disastrous techniques of the Vietcong in the Tet Offensive, and Sadr's troops were crushed by the same Marines who beat them to a pulp at Hue and Khe Sanh.
Uh, no. The VC were well-organized , but largely faced the US Army and Australians during the Tet Offensive, while regular NVA troops fought the US and South Koreans in the Northern two Corps of Vietnam. The Marines didn't face the VC at Khe Sahn or Hue.
John Dos Prados. history of Khe Sahn is a good place to start because it explains how US air power, especially large bombers, kept the NVA in the Laotian mountainside. When there were battles for Hill881N and 881 S, all hell broke lose and the Marines were lucky to fend off the human wave attacks. Survive is a lot better word than crush. Because the 1stCav had to eventually relieve the Marines at Khe Sahn
Giap's stupid gamble at Tet, (for which Giap was relieved of command) is now well-understood. General Odom and Jack Murtha seem quite willing to repeat America's parallel idiocy of unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam in Iraq. Walter Cronkite stood atop the Caravelle Hotel, with the smoke of Cho Lon rising over his shoulder, and told America the war was not winnable, leading LBJ to say, "If we've lost Cronkite, we've lost America".
Wrong again. Giap did not lose his job. And Cronkite said that after the VC sapper teams charged the US Embassy and were fended off only after hours of fighting. But the fact was that Westmoreland had been saying for two years that the VC were on the run, citing the hill fights, DakTo and Junction City, while the NVA was hiding in Laos and Cambodia waiting
So when Tet happened, people were astonished, no stunned, to see that after all of Westy's charts and numbers, the NVA and VC was alive and kicking ass. Giap and Ho expected a nationwide uprising, but the US had enough firepower to force most of the attackers back from places like Tan Son Nhut and Chi Lai. But fighting in Pleiku and other areas didn't end quickly
We left Vietnam because the army was pushing towards open revolt and the middle class no longer supported the war. There were fraggings and combat refusals and drug use. It was either leave Vietnam or destroy the Army
Reality Check: the smoke rising from Cho Lon was a city block on fire, set by the ethnic Chinese, burning out the Vietcong who had murdered hundreds of Chinese during the Tet Offensive. The Vietcong at Tet learned the ordinary Vietnamese had no interest in supporting the cause of Communism.
Please. The NVA had fully penetrated the ARVN. What Tet proved was that lightly armed guerrillas and light Infantry die when running into Arc Light, Armor and artillery, When the NVA came back in 1972, they did so with Armor , and took much of I Corps in the process and nearly took An Loc
The Tet Offensive, we now know from the historical record, nearly drove the North Vietnamese to surrender.
No we don't. They kept fighting into May, 1968. In fact, the pace of combat increased after Tet, the US reached peak combat strength in May,1969, at 543,000. The NVA was fighting a defensive war, but in a series of battles, like Hamburger Hill and battles in the Arizona Country, they were heavily engaged with US troops.
Ronald Spector's history After Tet, explains this clearly. To say this is to misread history.
Only the antiwar movement in the USA saved them from defeat.
In what fantasy world? The peak of the antwar movement came in 1971-72 as US troops were being withdrawn. The fact was that the US Army was collapsing in the field. After Hamburger Hill, the lead battalion commander had a $10,000 bounty placed on his head and was nearly assassinated seven times. Racial strife led to riots, smuggling and corruption exploded, drug use was endemic. Then you had the GI resistance to the war at home and in Vietnam. The antiwar movement didn't save the NVA. Armor did. By 1971, the NVA was better equipped, better led and far more professional, as was demonstrated in Lam Son 719, when they blew helicopters out of the sky and the ARVN panicked.
Nixon went to the Communists, and cynically sold the Vietnamese and Lao people into abjectest slavery. How could this be? We had achieved a stunning victory over an entrenched guerilla movement, heroic victories at Hue and Khe Sanh, the obliteration of the Vietcong. But by then, so many Bright Shining Lies had been told, the truth was not believed.
Because the South Vietnamese government was corrupt and lacked the support of the people. Officers were appointed because of favoritism, troops cheated out of pay, people refused to rally around the ARVN, while some bravery was seen.most of it was inept and poorly led.
Fantasy revisions of the Vietnam War doesn't explain Iraq.
Try not to bash me too hard, people. This isn't standard Democratic policy or received wisdom, and I hope you cut me some slack here. Odom's right, in the main.
Withdraw immediately or stay the present course? This presumes there are no alternate courses, no alternate exit strategies. I believe there are other options, this is a false dilemma. It is an ill wind which blows nobody any good: let us stipulate to the manifestly stupid proposition of staying the current course, and the further damnation of its authors for the present, however satisfying and true it might be. It is enough to say they have failed us. What alternate courses might prove wise? What do the Iraqis themselves want?
In short: we must retrain the Iraqi military and policemen, here in the USA, if need be. The Iraqi soldier gets 24 days of training. The Iraqis want security. Trained Iraqi troops and policemen are the only agents which could ever provide security. Work from there.
I translate Iraqi newspapers from Arabic to English, for DailyKos, and I am a Democrat, a Liberal Democrat. I soldiered, too. In differing with General Odom, I would preface my remarks with what may seem faint praise but it is heartfelt. General Odom is a sensible man, with sterling credentials, and though I differ with his opinions, his arguments are based on sound if different reasoning. His analysis is of the current situation is sound, yet I feel led to present my own thoughts on the matter: a cat may look upon a king, and this old soldier may address his betters.
General Odom correctly observes the American people have always hated war, and this prescriptive war in particular outrages them. It should. Like the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, this current war in Iraq is waged on the false premises of WMDs, and with similarly false expectations of a friendly government arising. The monstrous lies, exaggerations and happy talk surrounding this war provoke the American people as the Bright Shining Lies of Vietnam provoked them then. Yet I do not believe the entire story is being told: the way out of this conflict is also the way through this conflict.
A far better comparison and contrast to the War in Iraq is to the Balkans War, waged by Bill Clinton and Wesley Clark, a war where there were no Good Guys, and where we still have an ongoing occupation. In the Balkans, the European community, indeed the entire world stood by with its fingers in its mouth, while genocide and savage tribalism ensued upon the death of Tito. Wesley Clark cut through the Gordian Knot of a land invasion, and without a single casualty, won the most lopsided victory in the history of European warfare. This strategy was applied with good effect to the No-Fly Zones in Iraq, why the military planners did not duplicate the victory in the Balkans remains a mystery. The Kurds and Shii have used their time in the No-Fly Zone effectively, the rest of Iraq could have done the same, had we made the entire country a No-Fly Zone.
A priori, every sensible person agrees the solution to the Iraq conflict must be an Iraqi solution. This war has been badly micromanaged by Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush administration. The generals on the ground are all in agreement: the current war is untenable. The now-cashiered generals, Shinseki chief among these, had more pragmatic assessments of the war, and they were ignored. Now we are confronted with two pats of butter and forty acres of hot toast.
I have often said, as in the Balkans, the USA opened a jar of Tupperware, left in the refrigerator of history for forty years by Saddam Hussein. With the passing-away of the old regime in Iraq, (led by a brutally effective dictator from an ethnic minority), the world again found a foul anoxic science project of suppressed ethnic rivalries. It is instructive to note one ethnic group adores George Bush and his strategy, the Kurds. Those who would call Iraq a Descent into Civil War forget the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the still-suppurating decubitus of Chechnya on Russia's backside. Suppressing ethnic tensions does not attenuate them.
Of the terrorists, this may be safely said: they hate each other altogether more than they hate the Ameriki. They are essentially gangs, carving up the neighborhoods of the cities as Crips and Bloods do in this country, and the FARC does in Colombia, the Maoists in Nepal, the list continues ad nauseam. Obviously terrorism is not an exclusively Muslim problem. The solution to terrorism in Iraq is no different than the solution to gangs anywhere else: an effective police force and justice system is required. The Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence is driven by the same motivations, fears and allegiances which fill our morgues with drive-by shootings from gang-bangers in this country. Far more American civilians have died of gang violence and the concomitant epidemic of drug abuse in the USA than American soldiers have died in Iraq. We do not wage open war on gangsters in this country with soldiers and Marines: why we try this anywhere else is madness.
Al Qaeda is a hobgoblin, an ignis fatuus, yet another avatar of Qutbist Islamism, fathered by the Egyptian Islamic Brotherhood long ago. After the murder of a prominent Sunni sheikh in January of 2006, Sheikh Naser Abdul Karim al-Miklif of the huge al-Bu Fahad tribe in Anbar province, a price was placed on Zarqawi's head, and he has gone silent. While there is no love lost between the Sunnis and the Ameriki, the ordinary Iraqi is appalled by Al Qaeda's kidnappings and beheadings. The surviving Baathists are really no different than the warlords of the Balkans, gone into hiding: we know who they are, we can't get them, for the same reasons we can't grab Osama bin Ladin. The resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan are merely Pashtun tribesmen doing what they have always done, and do in Pakistan as well, re-establishing the grim Deobandi modus vivendi. In Iraq, where ethnic identity has long been suppressed, the vast majority of the violence is not civil war, but tribal factionalism reestablishing itself with dreary predictability, the natural state of mankind for thousands of years, and while its followers are nominally Islamic, they are a weed which only sprouts in the soil of a lawless state. The national boundaries of the Middle East were drawn up by Sykes and Picot, a pair of scheming liars who betrayed the Arabs, ensuring future internal discord for centuries. Africa, too, labors under onerous procrustean borders, the lasting legacy of colonialism. This is not civil war. This is the curse of tribalism writ large in our day.
General Odom questions the Iraqi military's allegiances: to whom will they be loyal? The Iran/Iraq War showed both Iraqi Sunnis and Shii united against Iran, and from that war was forged a national identity. The Arabic-speaking Shii clerics of Karbala and Najaf have been rivals of the Farsi-speaking clerics of Qom in Iran for centuries. Sistani, whose native language is Farsi, attempts to preach tolerance and forebearance, and in the main, it works where he has influence. To the Arabic-speaking Shii, Iran is a ruinous Mordor: no matter how bad things may become in Iraq, neither the Da'wa nor SCIRI factions would willingly abandon the current model, and devolve into a Hizb'allah (read Iran's Revolutionary Guard, the pasdaran) and Syrian-dominated Lebanon. We have set the stage for another Lebanon in the creation of a confessional democracy, if we cannot empower Iraq's constitutional powers effectively. Of course democracy in Iraq will not look like ours, it will more closely resemble Switzerland, with powerful cantons and a weak central government. The Swiss do not quarrel among themselves, nor does India's vast collection of tribes and languages: democracy has not yet failed in Iraq. It has not yet had time to fail. Our own history produced a Shay's Rebellion or two before we realized the need for an effective central government, and a constitution to that effect.
These things will sort themselves out in time, the American Revolution and the preceding French and Indian Wars featured many atrocities based on shifting political and tribal allegiances. What followed, in our country, was the wholesale slaughter of the Native Indians, let us not shriek too loudly about this sort of thing when cultures clash in the Middle East, it has always been so, where the rule of law fails mankind. Our own failure to address the issue of slavery in the Constitution led to divided loyalties, culminating in the Civil War. It has taken us more than 200 years to achieve our own More Perfect Union, and today the leaderless nation descends into a resentful apathy. The voice of reason is brought low with much shouting and recrimination, the War in Iraq has become a Blame Game. Our own allegiances are in doubt, and we follow witless leaders in both the White House in Congress, who lack vision enough to solve our problems, whose time is wasted on damnation of the other side and the prostitution of the good offices. Satmars and Lubovitschers get along better than our own Congress. It is a national disgrace.
The War on Terror is fundamentally a war on crime, and a soldier is not a policeman. He who washes plates with a hammer must not expect to eat off unbroken crockery. Once, I stood, a gawky trainee, listening to Drill Sergeant McFarlane expound on this topic: "War is what happens when politicians stop doing their goddamn jobs, and wars end when they start doing their jobs again. In the meantime, the in-between time, it's up to us."
The Iraqi soldier gets 24 days of training. This is actually an improvement. They used to only get 14 days of training. A current American recruit gets 9 weeks of Basic training and at least another 9 weeks of AIT, or 16 weeks of combined BASIC/AIT called OSUT, just for infantry. That's often followed up by more training. I was in training for far longer. General Odom says: "The problem in Iraq is not military competency; it is political consolidation." Every officer in TRADOC would disagree with his belief 24 days of training produces competent servicemen.
Moktada Sadr's troops and commanders were appallingly inept, and were crushed in their abortive uprising. While other, more sanguine commanders, such as the Badr Brigade and the rump Fedayeen Saddam maintained an effective Mao-type insurgency, Moktada Sadr and his soldiery duplicated the disastrous techniques of the Vietcong in the Tet Offensive, and Sadr's troops were crushed by the same Marines who beat them to a pulp at Hue and Khe Sanh.
Giap's stupid gamble at Tet, (for which Giap was relieved of command) is now well-understood. General Odom and Jack Murtha seem quite willing to repeat America's parallel idiocy of unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam in Iraq. Walter Cronkite stood atop the Caravelle Hotel, with the smoke of Cho Lon rising over his shoulder, and told America the war was not winnable, leading LBJ to say, "If we've lost Cronkite, we've lost America".
Reality Check: the smoke rising from Cho Lon was a city block on fire, set by the ethnic Chinese, burning out the Vietcong who had murdered hundreds of Chinese during the Tet Offensive. The Vietcong at Tet learned the ordinary Vietnamese had no interest in supporting the cause of Communism. The Tet Offensive, we now know from the historical record, nearly drove the North Vietnamese to surrender. Only the antiwar movement in the USA saved them from defeat. Nixon went to the Communists, and cynically sold the Vietnamese and Lao people into abjectest slavery. How could this be? We had achieved a stunning victory over an entrenched guerilla movement, heroic victories at Hue and Khe Sanh, the obliteration of the Vietcong. But by then, so many Bright Shining Lies had been told, the truth was not believed.
What, then, should we do to extricate our soldiers from Saigon-upon-Tigris? I would embark upon a massive retraining of Iraq's military and policemen, bringing them up to proper readiness levels, preferably in the United States. I repeat, the current Iraqi soldier has 24 days of training, and the policemen are worthless. We should send as many Likely Lads as possible to Officer Candidate School, here in the United States as will come. I believe the same should be done with Iraqi police officers.
A bit of Devil's Advocacy here: we've trained officers before. A great many tinhorn dictators and generalissimos have passed through the doors of the School of the Americas, and Norman Schwartzkopf's father, the celebrated policeman associated with the Lindbergh Baby would later train the Shah of Iran's dreaded SAVAK. My solution has serious shortcomings, I acknowledge them, but I cannot see a better solution for Iraq, which lets us withdraw in good order and provides some bulwark against the terrorists.
General Odom's assertion of a large officer corps with plenty of experience from the Iran-Iraq War is baffling: Iraq's prosecution of the war against Iran featured a horrible campaign strategy for every battle: Saddam's campaigns may be used as textbook examples of stupidity. The entire Iraqi Army, pushing towards Tehran, with every prospect of success, halted and dug in. Iran took appalling casualties, sending children forward to their deaths. The Iraqi soldiers were sickened to shoot them. Saddam Hussein's military commanders were Yes Men and Zampolit. Saddam's chief complaint, whilst he still had power, was that everyone would lie to him. He once asked one of his subordinates, after Gulf War One, what he thought of the war. The subordinate, in a moment of inspired bravery, replied "It was the most disastrous war in the history of the world." Saddam grumbled and replied, "That's your opinion." Find that subordinate, and install him as SecDef in the new Iraq.
A rapid reversal of our present course in Iraq would produce the same results as our rapid reversal in Vietnam. The lasting legacy of Vietnam was not the loss of external credibility, as General Odom asserts, it would be our belief in ourselves which was lost. The Cold War would continue well into the time of Ronald Reagan, and our cynical proxy war against the Russians in Afghanistan, and our subsequent cynical abandonment of Afghanistan to the Taliban, would sow the seeds which blossomed on 9/11. If the price of idealistic engagement is high, the price of cynical unilateral withdrawal will be higher, in the long run, for if Iraq is abandoned, I predict with absolute certainty we will find ourselves engaged in Egypt, where a largely unknown war on Islamism is going hugely awry, Algeria-style, one atrocity after another, in an escalating tit for tat between an undemocratic regime and a hardened insurgency. Cynicism has its price, and that price is the soul.
Of course we must leave Iraq, and the current course of action is hugely counterproductive. There is another way, we must leave a well-trained corps of policemen and soldiers behind to enforce the rule of law against the gangsters arising in its midst. It answers Iraq's own heart-wringing cry for security, it is all they ask, and they can do it themselves thereafter. And they will do it.
We have two problems here and this is a well-thought out essay.
1) The Mahdi Army was crushed and came back smarter and better trained. Sadr has more bodies than we do, three thousand dead is a small loss. The NVA wasn't just beat at Khe Sahn, they were defeated in a four month campaign which started there, continued through tet and ended at Dong Ha. Then the CIA went after the Viet Cong Infrastructure with the Phoenix Program. The Madhi Army is stronger now than in 2004 and controls Basra and East Baghdad.
2) Any Iraqi who comes to the US will have his family killed.
See,when you have shitty intelligence, bad things happen. Once that list is drawn up, you have a death list. They can't leave their families behind, and if they leave, they can't come back.
A lot of people forget the all-penetrating intelligence of the resistance. They can murder the french fry guy.Families kill those who inform to the US. Even delivering aid can get you killed. Imagine 1000 Iraqis leaving for the US. Their families would be instant targets.
The police are totally penetrated now. Training them in the US is just training Sadr's new police force as well as exposing their families to murder.
I'm sorry, but to say India's vast tribes don't fight each other is to be woefully ignorant of Indian history. Look, two Indian prime ministers were assasinated in the last 20 years.
But the core problem is that Iraq has no real government,just squabbling factions. All of the main players exist outside the government, but can control it. No one is loyal to it. Train the army, you get more effective militia fighters.
Haditha is what you get when you send people back to war over and over. The Army is about to lose NCO's and officers who like their wives enough to quit the Army and save their marriage. Most people want nothing to do with enlistment. So the clock is running before the Army falls apart.
All we can do is leave Iraq .We cannot save it and they aren't interested in doing so.
SALEM, Ore. — The debate over immigration, which has filtered into almost every corner of American life in recent months, is now sweeping through the woods, and the implications could be immense for the coming fire season in the West.
As many as half of the roughly 5,000 private firefighters based in the Pacific Northwest and contracted by state and federal governments to fight forest fires are immigrants, mostly from Mexico. And an untold number of them are working here illegally.
A recent report by the inspector general for the United States Forest Service said illegal immigrants had been fighting fires for several years. The Forest Service said in response that it would work with immigration and customs enforcement officers and the Social Security Administration to improve the process of identifying violators.
At the same time, the State of Oregon, which administers private fire contracts for the Forest Service, imposed tougher rules on companies that employ firefighters, including a requirement that firefighting crew leaders have a working command of English and a formal business location where crew members can assemble.
Some Hispanic contractors say the state and federal changes could cause many immigrants, even those here legally, to stay away from the jobs. Other forestry workers say firefighting jobs may simply be too important — and too hard to fill — to allow for a crackdown on illegal workers.
"I don't think it's in anybody's interest, including the Forest Service, to enforce immigration — they're benefiting from it," said Blanca Escobeda, owner of 3B's Forestry in Medford, Ore., which fields two 20-person fire crews. Ms. Escobeda said all of her workers were legal.
Some fire company owners estimate that 10 percent of the firefighting crews are illegal immigrants; government officials will not even hazard a guess.
The private contract crews can be dispatched anywhere in the country through the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho — and in recent years have fought fires from Montana to Utah and Colorado, as well as Washington and Oregon — anywhere that fires get too big or too numerous for local entities to handle.
The work, which pays $10 to $15 an hour, is among the most demanding and dangerous in the West. A workweek fighting a big fire can go 100 hours.
So Lou, what do we do now? Considering the Guardsmen they would use are shooting up Iraq?
Why, they can cross the border legally while the west burns to the ground.
Given weather conditions and the simple lack of bodies , things might be complicated. But that never stopped the Minutemen.
A Gregg Easterbrook review of Al Gore’s new film prompts Atrios to question the degree of contempt in which Slate Magazine holds its readers. I think I can help him out on this.
One indicator of how highly a publication regards its readers is in the quality of the content. Easterbrook’s review is borderline stupid. Media Matters provides perhaps too much detail on why that’s so: if you want the short course, it’s because Easterbrook finished reviewing the film in the second paragraph and filled out the rest of the column with factual errors and some truly bizarre straw men: “If Gore is so concerned about the environment, why does he still travel by air?” “If Gore is so concerned about poor people, why does he want to lower their standards of living by decreasing the use of polluting fuels?” Plus, he says Gore is a transsexual Martian who sighs a lot, as who among us wouldn’t.
You’ll notice I don’t link to Easterbrook’s review. This is because I’m taking a cue from Weisberg, who told New York University journalism students that his magazine “doesn’t believe in using quotations” because “quotations are there often to thank the sources, or for the writer to kind of congratulate himself on having talked to the person.” While I’m not prepared to dispense entirely with quotations, I do believe links are often used by writers to thank their sources or kind of congratulate themselves for having read the stuff they’re talking about, which interferes with the Weisbergian goal of keeping things “very tight and concise” and might lead some of my readers to check on things like whether or not Easterbrook actually called Gore a transsexual Martian.
As far as you know, he did. And if he didn’t, that’s okay too: Weisberg says my readers will catch it.
Another aspect unique to Slate is that its editors don’t believe in fact-checking. “We think it makes authors lazy and careless,” says Weisberg. “We like writers to be responsible for their facts. And we’ve also discovered that on the Internet, and particularly since the advent of blogging, mistakes get found out very quickly. So there’s a huge disincentive to making mistakes.”
Imagine how much grief the New York Times and Weisberg’s alma mater, the New Republic, could have avoided if editors hadn’t held out that fact-checking crutch to Judy Miller and Jayson Blair at the Times, and Ruth Shalit and Stephen Glass at New Republic. The poor kids were insulted by the implicit editorial assumption that they were lazy and careless, and we all paid the price.
At any rate, I’m covered: if I’m wrong about Easterbrook’s description of Gore, a reader will notice and tell me about it eventually, and if a few early readers don’t catch the correction, assuming I’m wrong, and go around thinking Easterbrook is even more of a demented flake than he actually is, well, that’s the nature of online publishing and that’s the cost of keeping things “tight and concise.” Why get it right the first time if someone will be along to fix it in a while?
Atrios’s specific question was “Um, Slate, do you really have such contempt for your readers that you publish Gregg Easterbrook under the title “Ask Mr. Science”?”
And the answer is, yeah, all that and more. Seems to work for them, though
Ah, fact checking. Why bother?
Because you can GET SUED for libel.
There is a reason besides writing I rely on news articles. They've been vetted. You can't get sued if the Times screws up.
So let's say Slate says I'm a child molesting cannibal. I can prove they made that up.What is their defense? We rely on our writers? Shit, I don't rely on myself. I check things I know are true just to make sure I remember it right.
So when I'm tooling around in my new Porsche and leaving my new Upper West Side brownstone, I'll be sure to thank the WaPo for my new fortune.
Uh, Mr.Weisberg, blogging is no excuse for lazy editing any more than it is for lazy writing.If the readers are catching factual mistakes, and they do catch them, that means I FUCKED UP. It isn't praiseworthy. It isn't a good thing. It is a BAD thing. It means I screwed up.
One the things I hate most on earth are people who claim military service when they have not served. It's weird, my younger uncles, cousins and fathers never saw combat, but they still have service-related issues, like jungle rot. You grow up listening to bad feet stories, forget the shit people told me later on, you can grow to despise frauds.
If people knew how combat vets and even support vets suffered, from everything from bad backs and feet to agent orange, lying about military service would be as shameful as stealing from a church.
But the other reason I'm posting this is that someone dared me to post up MacBeth's story and when people do that, I get suspicious.
One point, service records are public documents. Anyone can get them.
There have been several diaries on Daily Kos in recent weeks that have linked to comments made by and interviews with Jesse MacBeth, who claimed to be a former Army Ranger who committed war crimes and witnessed atrocities in Iraq. Several anti-war groups have used this individual as a poster boy and spokesman for the cause. He also was featured in a video discussing alleged war crimes in Iraq, and said video was disseminated widely on progressive, democratic, and independent websites.
Several veterans, including myself, raised questions about the credibility of this individual. Today, Iraq War Veterans Against the War has confirmed our suspicions - JESSE MACBETH IS A FRAUD. HE WAS KICKED OUT OF THE ARMY PRIOR TO COMPLETING BASIC TRAINING. HE WAS NEVER A RANGER AND NEVER SERVED ANYWHERE OTHER THAN FT. BENNING, GA, WHERE HE FLUNKED OUT OF ARMY BASIC TRAINING.
MacBeth came to Iraq Veterans Against the War in January 2006 asking for help, and the organization and its members extended itself to help him in various ways. Assisting veterans is one of the founding principles of IVAW and it is a mission that we take seriously. After looking into his recent claims, we have learned that Jesse is not what he represented himself to be. Accordingly, IVAW does not in any way endorse Jesse MacBeth or any of his accounts involving military service. He -- and he alone -- is responsible for them. IVAW was not aware of the creation of the video program featuring MacBeth, and did not authorize use of our logo in the program.
The timing of the widespread circulation of the MacBeth video interestingly coincides with the ongoing military investigation of the recent Marine massacre of two dozen civilians (including women and children) in Haditha, - what is being termed as an atrocity by one member of Congress (R). MacBeth's false statements unfortunately have played into the hands of those who would deny that any atrocities whatsoever are occurring in Iraq. While such murders by military personnel are reprehensible, ultimate blame for these actions must be placed on the responsible commanding officers, Donald Rumsfeld, and the Bush administration who have created the context for chaos in through an illegal and unjust war and occupation which they admit has no end in sight.
IVAW is a young and growing organization of courageous veterans and active duty soldiers in the "War on Terror" whose mission is to end the war in Iraq through immediate withdrawal of troops. We believe that veterans should be given the benefits they deserve upon returning home, and that the United States owes reparations to the Iraqi people for the destruction of their country. The invasion and occupation of Iraq was ill conceived and dishonestly sold to the American people, and IVAW members have the special vantage point of first-hand experience of the war to know why it's wrong and why we need to bring the troops home now.
For those who haven't seen this scumbag on video, here's one of the few remaining links.
It shows (1) MacBeth's "last" duty station was a Basic Training unit at Ft. Benning, GA; (2) his rank at the time of discharge to be a Private (E-1); (3) that he began active duty on May 1, 2003, and ended active duty six weeks later on June 13, 2003; (4) that he earned NO medals or honors (despite his claims of having earned, inter alia, a bronze star and several purple hearts; and (5) that he did not complete basic training, did not qualify with weapon or grenade, did not attend AIT, did not complete the occupational training for ANY military specialty, and did not attend or complete airborne or ranger training...despite his claims of having been an Army Ranger in Iraq.
The bottom portion of MacBeth's DD-214 states that he was discharged persuant to AR 600-235, Chapter 11, for "Entry level performance and conduct."
In reviewing this copy of the DD-214, it looks authentic to me. In the typical "Army" way, all letters are capitalized. Dates, computations, and military regulations cited are consistent.
Compare the aforementioned document with the DD-214 that Jesse MacBeth has posted on MySpace:
Here's an interview with the poser that was recently diaried on Kos and riled many anti-war Kossacks, while simultaneously raising questions by the military veterans amongst us:
The War the Media is Not Reporting -- An Iraqi Veteran Speaks Out
Apr 26, 2006 By Justice
Jesse Macbeth, formerly a Special Forces Ranger in Iraq, is now active with Iraq Veterans Against the War in Tacoma, Washington. The Rangers are elite units sent door-to-door in Iraq to combat the insurgency. They were also sent into Fallujah to crush all opposition to the occupation of that city. Justice recently interviewed Jesse.
First, there is no such thing as a "Special Forces Ranger" Special Forces is the army's counterinsurgency unit, which requires specialized training in specific combat skills like demolition and communications. The Medics course is one of the best regarded in the world.
Rangers are elite infantry, commandos, who work in platoons and comapnies to execute missions
The two units are seperate and while one can be a former Ranger and Special Forces soldier, there is no such thing as a Special Forces Ranger
Second, the Marines were and are in charge of Fallujah, which is in Al Anbar province. Marines elite units are Force Recon
How did you end up in the military? I grew up on the streets. I got into trouble for fighting. The same judge that I'd been dealing with my whole life told me that I wouldn't have to do adult time if I signed up for the military immediately. Sometimes I kinda wish I went to jail instead.
Someone facing a felony jail sentence cannot be accepted in the military. Congress outlawed that nearly 30 years ago. Also, acceptance to Special Operation units requires a security clearance.Someone with a criminal background is unlikely pass the secret clearance needed for admission to such a unit.
How did you become a Special Forces Ranger? Basic training was easy for me. Growing up on the streets, I was used to running from cops. I was used to not eating for days. I got picked to go to Ranger School.
Someone doing that is unlikely to be healthy enough to serve as a Ranger. One applies for Ranger training. You can apply when enlisting or after serving in another unit. The physical stress of RIP would probably wreak havoc on someone malnurished
What did your division do? I was in the Third Ranger Battalion. Our job was to strike fear in the hearts of the Iraqi people.
Well, he got that right. But the rangers job is to observe and attack guerrillas. Not just bust into people's homes
We would go into people's houses and plow down entire families. We would interrogate people. If we didn't like the answers that they gave, then we would kill the youngest child. If they gave more answers that we didn't like, then we'd move on to the rest of the family. They could've been innocent people.
Rangers do direct action, which is going into places and shooting things up. Kill a child? Highly unlikely from professional soldiers because that just gives people an incentive to kill them. It is the regular infantry which searches for guerrillas on a regular basis
We would leave the bodies in the streets and blame it on the Shi'ites or the Sunnis. [In Fallujah] we were ordered to go into mosques and slaughter people while they were praying. I won't go into full detail because I'm still haunted by the memories.
Uh, Rangers operate in US Army uniforms, if they are seen dragging bodies in the streets people would notice. Haditha has been an incident in Iraq for months. They may operate in small patrols, but not as a death squad.
What was the assault on Fallujah like? Fallujah is where we slaughtered people in mosques. We provoked the people there. Some people escaped from the mosques and saw us. We would dig holes and leave mass graves of children, women, and old men. We were ordered to let people die on the street. We were told that the Geneva Convention means nothing to us in combat.
Why would he know what happened in Fallujah, the Army was only called in at the end, Rangers would dig mass graves and no one called them on it? An officer who said this could be courtmartialed
We were ordered to fire on peaceful protesters in Fallujah. Somebody threw a rock at us, and an officer said that he thought it was a grenade. Then we were ordered to fire. When it's daylight in Iraq, it's daylight! Nobody really thought it was a grenade.
Uh, this happened with the 82nd ABN in 2003
What medals did you get in Iraq? I got a lot. I got a purple heart. Half of them, I don't remember. I got five or six medals just for landing. I got a bronze star.
How do you not remember what you did for a Bronze Star? Again, it's a public record with a public citation and you know why you got a Purple Heart
What injuries did you get? I got stabbed many times. I got shrapnel in my knee. I got shot in the back.
Stabbed? That means someone got close to you and past your body armor. Many times?
What do you think is the role of the U.S. in Iraq? The military is terrorists there. Soldiers thought we were going to fight terrorism, but we became the terrorists. We were told we were going to liberate the country and find weapons of mass destruction. The real aim is to have the U.S. own the country. The U.S. wants oil.
How has the government treated you since you got back? Like shit. I hate them. I'm not gonna be a terrorist or anything, but I hate them. They killed my battle brothers. They used me. They messed me up. They didn't care about me. They turned me into a beast, a machine.
Whatever
What Veteran's benefits have you gotten? I ain't getting nothing. A card and that's it.
Uh, no. With an honorable discharge, he is entitled to benefits, as well as his enlistment bonus.
Where do you work? I'm an Iraq vet, and I work at Wendy's.
How did you get involved in IVAW? Veteran's Affairs told me they had no money for me. I always knew the war was fucked up, but that motivated me to say something about it. The government throws us away. They did the same thing after Vietnam.
Why do you think people should get involved in the antiwar movement? Because it's gotta stop. Innocent people are getting killed. Bush says we have to stay the course and that it's hard work. Bush doesn't know what work is.
Anything else you want to say? Yeah. The news here is controlled. The military lets information out that serves their purposes. We slaughtered a sovereign nation. Reporters got killed.
When I was growing up, everyone thought I'd be a criminal, but they were wrong. I'm gonna be one of the leaders of the revolution.
IVAW was not the only group who was scammed by this poser. Respected journalist Dahr Jamail, who many of us here respect, was conned as well. Dahr has also issued a statement regarding MacBeth and removed the aofrementioned video and comments by MacBeth from his website. After Downing Street has also been fooled by the scumbag MacBeth.
As an Army veteran as well as the mother of someone who served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have NEVER made excuses for soldiers who violate the terms and spirit of the Geneva and Hague Conventions. I find someone like Jesse MacBeth who falsely claims to be a war veteran and indicts his "fellow" soldiers for committing war crimes to be as reprehensible as those who actually do commit such acts.
Please spread the word about this cretin to others in the liberal, progressive, and anti-war communities before he commits additional acts of fraud and/or bears false witness for fame and profit.
As of now, most of the debunking that appears online has been on right-wing affiliated websites. Those of us on the left, particularly those who are veterans, need to sound off loudly against individuals who falsely claim to be fellow veterans in order to give credence to allegations made against individuals in the military. [NOTE: Fellow Kossack Chuckvw posted a diary earlier today in which he also exposed MacBeth as a fraud, after having previously written a diary based on MacBeth's story. Yet again - the difference between Kossacks and many others in the Blogosphere...when we make a mistake or are fooled, we make sure that the truth gets out.]
People tend to take people at face value, especially when they say what people want to hear.In this case, acting like a member of an Einsatzgruppen.Why? Because it conforms to their stereotypes, all soldiers are evil, they murder Iraqis at will. Even vets can fall for this. Al Santoli, who wrote two oral histories ofVietnam fell for someone telling similar tales about Navy SEAL's
But even minor reasearch would show that his description of Ranger tactics is just wrong. Regular infantry do door to door searches, but the expensively trained rangers are trained to hunt guerrillas and discussion of their actions are fairly limited.What they are not doing is daily raids in town. Commanders have other use for their skills
There is always the suspicion of darkness when dealing with large institutions, that someone will reveal an ugly truth confirming our darkest suspicions. But his whole story sounds like bullshit because people don't admit to murders they could be charged for. Assuming he's still on IRR, he'd be likely recalled to active duty for an Article 32 hearing leading to a general courtmartial.
As soon as someone got their hands on his DD-214, they exposed him as a shitbird who didn't even complete basic. If people took 10 minutes to contact one of the Ranger alumni associations, people who served with him would remember him, especially if he won a Bronze Star. The Special Operations community is tight and if he was a former Ranger, people would know him, his squad mates and when they served with him. If he enlisted in 2003, he would have another year to go on his enlistment
But what made me think this didn't smell right was that e-mail. When someone challenges you to run something, it is usually bullshit.When you want someone's attention, you usually ask nicely.
People need to stop acting like the military is some magical world where anything can happen. It is anything but. It is a bureaucracy, with voluminous paper trails in public records. If someone says they're a Ranger who won the Bronze Star, that can be proven with a simple records search.
If you read what he says, it doesn't sound like he's a soldier, because all he talks about is himself. If you watch any documentary about Iraq, people talk about their friends, the people who didn't come back. All he talks about is killing, not those who got killed. He never menions friends and you do not serve in a Ranger unit without friends. The final selection is always based on finding people who fit in. Loners do not make it to the unit. It isn't just running hard and shooting striaght, it's also about your personality.
People have to be skeptical about any claims of service from anyone, especially those telling tales of brutality. They should be able to prove when and where they served and name people they served with, as well as their duty stations.
Now why did this guy make up shit? Maybe he feels the Army failed him, maybe he wanted attention, maybe he thought he would be a hero.
But people need to ask hard questions before signing on to any shit someone comes up with
(AP Photo/Brennan Linsley, File). In this Dec. 14, 2004, file photo, Gen. Michael W Hagee, the U.S. Marine Corps Commandant ,...flew to Iraq Thursday, May 26, 2006, to reinforce the need to adhere to Marine values and standards of behavior and to avoid the use of excess force.
An official involved in an investigation of Camp Pendleton Marines' actions in an Iraqi town cites `a total breakdown in morality.'
By Tony Perry and Julian E. Barnes Times Staff Writers
May 27, 2006
WASHINGTON — Photographs taken by a Marine intelligence team have convinced investigators that a Marine unit killed as many as 24 unarmed Iraqis, some of them "execution-style," in the insurgent stronghold of Haditha after a roadside bomb killed an American in November, officials close to the investigation said Friday.
The pictures are said to show wounds to the upper bodies of the victims, who included several women and six children. Some were shot in the head and some in the back, congressional and defense officials said.
One government official said the pictures showed that infantry Marines from Camp Pendleton "suffered a total breakdown in morality and leadership, with tragic results."
The case may be the most serious incident of alleged war crimes in Iraq by U.S. troops. Marine officers have long been worried that Iraq's deadly insurgency could prompt such a reaction by combat teams.
An investigation by an Army general into the Nov. 19 incident is to be delivered soon to the top operational commander in Iraq. A separate criminal investigation is also underway and could lead to charges ranging from dereliction of duty to murder.
Both investigations are centered on a dozen Marines from the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division. The battalion was on its third deployment to Iraq when the killings occurred.
Most of the fatal shots appear to have been fired by only a few of the Marines, possibly a four-man "fire team" led by a sergeant, said officials with knowledge of the investigation, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The same sergeant is suspected of filing a false report downplaying the number of Iraqis killed, saying they were killed by an insurgent's bomb and that Marines entered the Iraqis' homes in search of gunmen firing at them. All aspects of his account are contradicted by pictures, statements by Marines to investigators and an inspection of the houses involved, officials said.
Other Marines may face criminal charges for failing to stop the killings or for failing to make accurate reports.
Of the dead Iraqis, 19 were in three to four houses that Marines stormed, officials said. Five others were killed near a vehicle.
The intelligence team took the pictures shortly after the shooting stopped. Such teams are typically assigned to collect information on insurgents after firefights or other military engagements.
Investigators and top officers of the Camp Pendleton-based 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, which oversees Marine infantry, aviation and support units in Iraq, have viewed the pictures.
The incident began when a roadside bomb attached to a large propane canister exploded as Marines passed through Haditha, a town on the Euphrates River. Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, who was driving a Humvee, was killed and two other Marines were wounded.
Marines quickly determined that the bomb was a "line-of-sight" explosive that would have required someone to detonate it. Marines and Iraqi forces searched houses and other structures in the narrow, dusty streets. Jets dropped 500-pound bombs and a drone aircraft circled overhead.
Time magazine, in a report published in March, quoted witnesses, including a 9-year-old girl, Eman Waleed, who said that she saw Marines kill her grandparents and that other adults in the house died shielding her and her 8-year-old brother, Abdul Rahman.
An elder in Haditha later went to Marine officials at the battalion's headquarters to complain of wanton killings.
The Marines involved in the incident initially reported that they had become embroiled in a firefight with insurgents after the explosion. However, evidence that later emerged contradicted that version.
"There wasn't a gunfight, there were no pockmarked walls," a congressional aide said.
"The wounds indicated execution-style" shootings, said a Defense Department official who had been briefed on the contents of the photos. ................................. One Marine sergeant, in an interview after his unit had returned to Columbus, Ohio, remembered a raid in which he burst into a home and came close to killing two women and a teenage boy out of rage for the deaths of fellow Marines.
Sgt. Guy Zierk, interviewed in the documentary, "Combat Diary: The Marines of Lima Company," said he knew at that point that he had been in Iraq too long.
They send these kids back to Iraq with PTSD and wonder why this kind of thing happens. There is no excuse for murder, shooting children in the head?
But the descriptions sound familiar, like My Lai, a few killers, and a lot of liars. To say that the command broke down at the NCO level is a disgrace. Where was his platoon and company commanders? If he was going to snap and murder children, didn't anyone see this?
The NCO pulled the trigger, but a lot of people are guilty
SAN FRANCISCO, May 26 — A California appeals court ruled Friday that online reporters are protected by the same confidentiality laws that protect traditional journalists, striking a blow to efforts by Apple Computer to identify people who leaked confidential company data.
The three-judge panel in San Jose overturned a trial court's ruling last year that to protect its trade secrets, Apple was entitled to know the source of leaked data published online. The appeals court also ruled that a subpoena issued by Apple to obtain electronic communications and materials from an Internet service provider was unenforceable.
In its ruling, the appeals court said online and offline journalists are equally protected under the First Amendment. "We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish 'legitimate' from 'illegitimate' news," the opinion states. "Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment."
The ruling states that Web sites are covered by California's shield law protecting the confidentiality of journalists' sources.
.....................
"This ruling will probably prove instructive to other online writers," said Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organization, who argued the case in front of the appeals court last month. "It says that what makes a journalist is not the format but the function."
.....................
Friday's ruling is also significant because it addresses whether private e-mail is protected from subpoenas. "The court correctly found that under federal law, civil litigants can't subpoena your stored e-mail from your service," said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
'
Apple's position never made sense to begin with. Trade secrets? Please, these were products and release dates, not schematics of new machines.
Apple never even checked their own employees before trying to bully their fans. None of this needed to go to court, but it did, and Apple lost, as they should have.
What exactly is the distinction between online and offline media? According to the court, there isn't one. But then, Apple used the suits to bully the sites in the expectation that they would fold. Instead, and this is common, they went to EFF and got good legal counsel. Which is what happens. People fight for their rights and then what seems like a simple case turns into a major fight.
The irony is that these are diehard Apple loyalists the company went after, people who love Macs.
Instead of performing due dilligence on their own employees, they went after bloggers and got the expected result.
Huffington Post blogger Bill Scher caught CNN's Lou Dobbs in a bit of an innocent mistake Tuesday night. Seems Dobbs' show was citing someone they shouldn't have been -- the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist group that descended from the White Citizens' Councils of the civil rights era.
Oh, come on - you didn't think CNN meant to tell their audience that a white supremacist group's rantings were credible, do you? After all, in a statement released to Greg Sargent on Wednesday, CNN told us it was just an accident:
A freelance field producer in Los Angeles searched the web for Aztlan maps and grabbed the Council of Conservative Citizens map without knowing the nature of the organization. The graphic was a late inclusion in the script and, regrettably, was missed in the vetting process.
Wait a second - something doesn't sound quite right. The only thing CNN apparently considers regrettable here is that they broadcast a map produced by the CCC; the fact that they were even looking for a map of "Aztlan" in the first place escapes notice.
So, seeking clarification, I talked with with a CNN spokesperson, and asked specifically, "Does CNN stand by Casey Wian's statement of the same night that 'You could call this the Vicente Fox Aztlan tour, since the three states he'll visit, Utah, Washington, and California, are all part of some radical group's vision of the mythical indigenous homeland'? Second, does CNN stand by the accuracy of the statements made by Mr. Dobbs and some guests on his show that there is a 'reconquista' movement?" The spokesperson told me CNN feels there is no need for further clarification, and that it stands by the report. (I've offered them the chance to respond to this post if they feel it necessary - I will update or post again if they do so.)
CNN is trying to play this off as an isolated mistake. Don't be fooled: it's not. The fact that Dobbs and reporter Casey Wian showed the CCC map only makes the subtle pattern of racist fantasies given voice on Dobbs' show more visible. (By the way, relatively unnoticed - the same night Dobbs was citing the CCC, he was leaving unchallenged, even laughing along with, one guest's suggestion that in order to get rid of illegal Mexican immigrants New Yorkers should order pizza and then arrest the delivery person. Thanks, Lou. We'll get right on that.) For months now, Dobbs and Wian have been reporting on "reconquista" and "Aztlan" movements, movements that exist not in the minds of mainstream Mexicans but in the fever dreams of white supremacists. That Dobbs eventually aired material pulled directly from a white supremacist organization should surprise no one - when you're subtly citing them on a regular basis, the unfiltered truth is bound to bubble up at some point.
And make no mistake: reconquista is nothing more than a white supremacist fantasy. Indeed, according to journalist David Neiwert and the Southern Poverty Law Center, the term was first brought into the popular consciousness by Glenn Spencer, the leader of a white supremacist organization called the American Patrol. And though racists like Spencer and his cohorts in spreading this myth, like white supremacist affiliate Michelle Malkin, claim to have proof for their theories, that claim falls flat.
You'll hear proponents of the reconquista myth talking about Mexican immigrants who care more about Mexico than the United States, you'll hear them talking about Mexicans in pro-immigration protests carrying Mexican flags, you'll hear them talking about a "widespread" belief among Mexicans that the Southwestern U.S. used to belong to Mexico. (A belief, I should note, that is accurate - but what people like Dobbs, Spencer and Malkin always forget to mention is that noting that the Southwest used to belong to Mexico, which it did, is not the same as believing it should be part of Mexico again.)
What you won't hear them talking about is the Irish flags flying at Irish pubs here, or the Israeli flag that flew next to the U.S. flag in my old Hebrew school - actually, you probably will hear some of the supremacists, often no fans of Jews, talking about that - and you certainly won't hear anyone talking about the widespread flying of a certain flag representing a group that actually succeeded in taking over the southern part of this country:
And what you won't hear the proponents of the reconquista myth acknowledge is that this kind of rhetoric has remained essentially the same throughout U.S. history to demonize the groups. The only thing that's changed is who's being demonized - first it was the Catholics, like the Irish and the Italians (that one kept up for a while: as recently as 1960, JFK had to publicly deny that he was more loyal to the Pope than to the United States) then the Eastern Europeans, then the Japanese and Chinese. Each time, there was the era's Lou Dobbs, screaming that these new immigrants - the ancestors of nearly all of us "Americans" today - just plain refused to assimilate, to learn English, to be good Americans. And each time their complaints, steeped in racism, proved unfounded.
But even given that history, CNN apparently sees no need for fact-checking, sees no problem with letting Dobbs and guests rant unchallenged about Aztlan and reconquista as if they were legitimate topics instead of the latter-day version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Accuracy be damned - ratings are up! Well, good for CNN. You've gotten at least one new supporter out of this whole thing.
"Welcome Lou Dobbs," the webmaster of the St. Louis chapter of CCC (which is headquartered in St. Louis) wrote on the chapter's blog on Thursday. "I knew you were one of us all along."
Update: Wow, seems like I set off a bit of a comment firestorm here. Some people seem to be misunderstanding my position, so let me clarify a couple things.
A lot of people seem to think I'm taking one position or another on immigration. I'm not - frankly, I'm not sure I even have a position on the issue. Nor do I consider people who are anti-immigration (or just anti-illegal immigration) to be necessarily racist. And I don't think Lou Dobbs is necessarily a racist either, nor did I ever say that in my post.
What I am is a media critic, one who is concerned by what I see as a pattern in the media of the transmission of white supremacist ideology, either through surrogates like Michelle Malkin, or through the treatment of those ideologies, like the myth of reconquista, as fact. And I think CNN, by standing by Dobbs here, is helping to perpetrate that myth and spread the ideology of some truly vile organizations. I've made the comparison before - it's as if he was reading the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the fake plan for Jewish world domination cited by Hitler and other anti-Semites, on the air and treating it as fact.
As for the idea that some commenters have brought up that Aztlan and reconquista are not myths: I'm aware of the sites that have been cited. And I'm aware of El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan, the founding document of MECHA that some misinterpret as a call to arms or a call for reconquista. It's not - you need to place it in the historical context of the time; the document is a call for self-esteem and self-reliance in the face of oppression, set in the tradition of thinkers like Frantz Fanon. As for the sites, I don't deny that there are some fringe groups out there calling for reconquista. But that's what they are - tiny, ultimately insignifcant groups at a far fringe, being seized on to propagate the ridiculous notion that this is some sort of mainstream thought. It's not. I can show you websites from people who believe that "since 1971-72, the world has lived under an Anglo-Dutch Liberal tyranny," but that doesn't mean a mass of people truly believe that. Having a website doesn't mean you should be taken seriously, and it certainly doesn't mean you represent anything but yourself.
The comments here are well, intense. And since you can't jump in, this is what I would have said>
This debate didn't start out about race until Dobbs and Cafferty ignored one central fact, most of the people protesting were American citizens standing with the illegals. Yet, they attacked Mexican flags, questioned their patriotism, and allowed people to make racist jokes on air.
When some woman tried to make the same claims on Nancy Grace's show, she got nailed and shut up.
This quickly turned into the war on brown people, while ignoring that 94 percent of coyotes are NOT prosecuted. You would think trafficking in humans would land you in jail.
But the Huff Po readers swear Dobbs isn't racist, even when he makes statements like Mexicans bringing disease with themand Aztlan being some kind of theme in Mexican-American politics. It's about as serious as the Nation of Islam. The only reason to bring up such an idea which has a fraction of the support of repariations for slavery is to create fear.
When you get to jokes about pizza delivery guys and Dobbs self-rightious belief he alone is savingAmerica, you get problems, like the CCC map and the disregard for people you see on Dobbs's fear mongering show. The problem is that Dobbs and his allies are fostering a dangerous fantasy. You cannot ship back millions of people without using police state tactics. You would give employers incredible powers of exploitation when you need as many people to be dedicated to the US and have loyalty to it.
A University of St. Thomas honors graduate who scolded his fellow seniors at Saturday's commencement ceremony for being "selfish" apologized Monday for offending people during his politically charged speech.
Ben Kessler, an academic All-America football player who plans to become a priest, chastised students for using birth control, criticized them for a recent food fight and upheld the St. Paul university's controversial policy against allowing unmarried faculty and staff members in romantic relationships to room together on school trips that involve students.
"Then he got into other failures of society, and one of my classmates next to me stood up and left," said Daphne Ho, a graduating senior whose family traveled from Hong Kong for the celebration. ...................... Present for his 15-minute speech at O'Shaughnessy Stadium on the school's campus were Archbishop Harry Flynn, other dignitaries and more than 900 graduates.
The speech prompted booing and walkouts. .........................
"The heart of the speech was about making selfish decisions, so when I went up to get my diploma afterwards, I told him he made some good points about being selfish -- and he's the man that was selfish enough to ruin hundreds of people's graduations," Kearney said.
Several students were seen crying, while others hollered to get Kessler off the stage. Brandon Mileski, a 2002 St. Thomas graduate, was in the crowd to watch his girlfriend receive her diploma.
"Dozens of students literally started walking out when he brought up birth control issues and, at one point, I thought a riot would break out," Mileski said. "I give him credit because he kept on going when everyone started booing and heckling.
"At one point he was talking about the meaning of true happiness and someone stood up and screamed: 'I'll be happy when your speech in done!' "
..................
He wants to be a priest and cares about how people fuck. Hmmmm, great combination. What a little prick,lecturing people about something he has no plans on doing.
By Nelson Hernandez and Bassam Sebti Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, May 27, 2006; Page A17
BAGHDAD, May 26 -- Iraq's foreign minister said Friday that Iran had the right to develop nuclear technology for peaceful uses but that he hoped for a diplomatic solution to a crisis that has strained Iran's relations with the United States.
"We think there is a principle, which is that the Islamic Republic of Iran and other countries have the right to possess nuclear technology if it is for peaceful purposes," Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi foreign minister, said at a televised news conference in Baghdad with his visiting Iranian counterpart, Manouchehr Mottaki.
At the same news conference, Mottaki said Iran had changed its stance on holding direct talks with the United States on the Iraq situation. "The American side tried to use this decision as propaganda, and they raised some other issues," he said. "They tried to create a negative atmosphere, and that's why the decision which was taken is suspended for the time being."
While trying to assuage fears that the United States and Iran are headed for war, Mottaki renewed Iranian vows that force would be met with force.
"The risk of a confrontation is minimal," Mottaki said, "but in the event that Americans attack Iran from anywhere, Iran will respond by attacking them in the place that we were attacked from."
A U.S. Embassy spokeswoman in Baghdad declined to comment on the foreign ministers' statements.
Jesus, how's that bringing democracy to Iraq going?
Don't cha wish your daughter had a doll like me? Actually, no.
Toy giant Hasbro scrapped plans for a new line of dolls based on R-rated girl-group the Pussycat Dolls yesterday after coming under mounting pressure from a grass-roots parents protest.
The No. 2 toymaker, which had planned to market the racy dolls to girls as young as 6, bowed to a letter-writing campaign launched last month by Brooklyn mom Lisa Flythe.
"Every single person I spoke to was shocked that this would even be considered," said Flythe, 43, who has a 4-year-old daughter.
"It could be an appropriate adult entertainment product, but definitely not for kids."
Flythe wrote to Hasbro officials last month after hearing about the outrageous plans for the dolls based on the Dolls, a campy burlesque group of dancers.
The Dolls, who are hugely popular with teenagers, have a crossover hit with their song "Don't Cha" featuring lyrics about group sex.
The kids' dolls were supposed to start at $15 a pop and were slated to come out this fall, just in time for the holidays.
Believe me, those execs knew exactly what the Pussycats represented. That's why they signed them. They wanted a racy line of dolls because they saw that the doll department was getting racier by the day.
Look at Bratz - the No. 1 selling doll in America. Bratz left Barbie in the dust by dressing like little Paris Hiltons. Their pouts gleam with lip gloss. Their eyes peek out from lashes longer than their skirts.
If hussies are selling, Hasbro must've figured, we'll out-hussy the best of them!
What those execs hadn't realized was that there is a line you don't cross. Bratz may be brazen, but they aren't based on real women with real MTV air time who really sing on a beer ad, "Don't cha wish your girlfriend was a freak like me? Don't cha wish your girlfriend was raw like me?"
Aw, don't cha wish your 6-year-old was chirping about carnal knowledge?
Nope. You don't. That's why the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood and Dads and Daughters started their letter-writing initiative on Monday and won their victory just two days later.
Tom Suozzi says he's dead against tolls on the Long Island Expressway - but he still won't rule out the possibility of somehow charging drivers to use the traffic-plagued road.
The Nassau County executive and long shot competitor for the Democratic nomination for governor dropped jaws earlier this month when he raised the specter of charging people to use the LIE at peak times.
"I'm here today to make it clear that I have not completely lost touch with reality. I am opposed to tolls on the Long Island Expressway," Suozzi said yesterday at a Long Island damage-control news conference.
He also said he has formed a committee of traffic-savvy volunteers - including Daily News columnist Sam (Gridlock Sam) Schwartz - to come up with a fix for LIE congestion.
Some noted that congestion pricing, where motorists are charged more money to drive during peak periods, has reduced traffic in other cities. Another possibility raised - though not by Suozzi - was a HOT (high-occupancy toll) lane on the LIE, where drivers could pay to access a dedicated high-speed lane.
Charging to use the LIE? Dumber than trying to charge to enter Midtown. Did he forget how popular Spitzer is?
Fashionistas must have thought there was peyote in their popcorn Tuesday night when Vogue editrix Anna Wintour showed up at a VIP screening of "The Devil Wears Prada."
Could the imperious style queen have deigned to see the movie based on the book that had so mercilessly lampooned her?
But, sure enough, it was Wintour.
She felt brave enough to dispense with her signature runway safety goggles. But she took care to surround herself with a posse that included boyfriend Shelby Bryan and daughter Bee Schaffer.
Word is Meryl Streep, who plays editor Miranda Priestly, had persuaded Wintour to come by, assuring her that her character was an amalgam of other fashion arbiters - ladies like Diana Vreeland, Polly Mellon, Grace Mirabella and Liz Tilberis. Plus, Streep had been nice enough to strip Priestly of her Wintourish British accent.
It was fine to see Anne Hathaway, Stanley Tucci, Patricia Clarkson, Campbell Scott, Martha Stewart and Candice Bergen. But what if she got caught in an elevator with Lauren Weisberger, the former Vogue assistant who turned her stint at the mag into a best seller. Ever since the book's publication in 2003, Wintour had refused to dignify it with a comment.
What if Wintour ran into the willowy Weisberger? Organizers were determined not to let it happen.
"They purposely seated Lauren and Anna on opposite sides of the theater," says one source. "As far away as humanly possible."
Disappointingly, the plan worked. Wintour escaped the theater without a confrontation with the young woman who'd gotten rich off her.
"I heard she was there," Weisberger told us. "I haven't run into her since the book came out. We travel in different circles. All I know is that it was one of the most exciting nights of my life."
And how did Wintour like the film?
She thought it was very entertaining," said her spokesman. "It was satire. What's not to like?"
Like her or not, this is an act of balls. A true class act.
Why? Because let's be real, this movie is about Wintour. It mocks her without mercy. So what does she do? Show up and laugh.
With that one gesture, she not only upstages her former assistant, she shows she has more class in her finger than Weisberg has in her entire body.
It is no secret to the Muslim immigrants of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, that spies live among them. .........................
The trial's revelations, and its outcome for the defendant, Shahawar Matin Siraj, have brought a bitter reckoning among Muslims in the city. Many see the police tactics unveiled in the case as proof that the authorities — both in New York and around the nation — have been aggressive, even underhanded in their approach to Muslims.
And despite the conviction of Mr. Siraj, who was found guilty on all four of the counts he faced, some Muslim leaders remain convinced that he was entrapped, including an imam who knew the informer and had found him to be suspicious.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly declared the verdict a milestone in the city's fight against terrorism. Muslim leaders say they support efforts to safeguard the country, but many believe that the Siraj case may have set back another battle that the police have been waging: to win their trust and cooperation.
In Bay Ridge, Palestinian, Syrian and Egyptian immigrants have long engaged in their own form of surveillance, trying to discern the spies in their midst. It is a habit imported from the countries they left behind, where informers for the security services were common and political freedoms curtailed.
In the years since Sept. 11, as word of informers spread among the smoky sheesha cafes and tidy mosques of Bay Ridge, a familiar fear has fallen over the neighborhood. It asserts itself quietly, in the hush of conversation and the wary stares that pass between strangers.
"It's like a police state here," said Omar Maged, 34, an assistant teacher at a public high school. "We do not feel that we are living in the most free country in the world."
In the wake of the trial, police officials sought to dispel the notion that they are taking aim at the Muslim community.
Paul J. Browne, the Police Department's chief spokesman, said undercover officers were used only to investigate reports of possible criminal activity. This was the case, he said, with the detective involved in the investigation of Mr. Siraj. The officer had been sent to live in Bay Ridge for two years.
"The notion that he was in there gratuitously observing the Muslim community is false," Mr. Browne said.
The relationship between law enforcement and Muslims has long been fragile.
After Sept. 11, Muslims came under immediate and intense pressure by the authorities. Hundreds of men were detained for questioning and thousands nationwide were placed into deportation proceedings.
Over time, a necessary, if uncomfortable relationship emerged between Muslims and the police watching over them. Efforts were made by both camps to cultivate trust.
"We've been repairing the cracks steadily and gingerly," said Wael Mousfar, the president of the Arab Muslim American Federation. ............................
Others complained of what they see as a two-tiered approach by the authorities: on one level it is public, and on another, it is hidden.
"They want to formally be introduced to the community but they don't need to be," Ms. Sarsour said. "They already have their informants among us."
On May 12, in the middle of the trial of Mr. Siraj, Mr. Kelly met with 150 Muslims at a youth center in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. He showed them a 25-minute video that the Police Department created to train new officers to be sensitive toward Arabs and Muslims. He said he was there to hear their "concerns about issues of public safety," according to a transcript of his speech.
Only after several questions did anyone mention the trial. Debbie Almontaser, a board member of a Muslim women's organization, told Mr. Kelly that she was saddened that the police had resorted to "F.B.I. tactics," and that she thought this was polarizing the Muslim community.
Applause swept the room.
Mr. Kelly told the audience he could not comment on the case.
Whether it will seriously hinder relations between the authorities and Muslims in New York remains to be seen. Some were doubtful.
"This is a chance to enhance our relationship with the police," said Antoine Faisal, the publisher of Aramica, an Arabic and English language newspaper based in Bay Ridge. "These people are being paid to do their job."
An air of suspicion hung over Bay Ridge well before Mr. Siraj was arrested in August 2004. Some people stopped attending the neighborhood's two major mosques, preferring to pray at home. Others no longer idle on the street after work.
"The vibe is not the same anymore," said Omar, 22, a Yemeni immigrant who works at a bookstore and gave only his first name. "We're exposed."
Conversations are often carefully scripted. Several people interviewed said they no longer discussed politics in public.
"When you sit down and politics comes to your head, you think, 'Who's around?' " said Mohammad Gheith, 17, a high school senior who often visits the smoke-filled Meena House Cafe on Bay Ridge Avenue.
Several blocks away, at a grocery store along Fifth Avenue, Mahmoud Masoud said he sensed the presence of informers.
"Sometimes you look a person in the eye, there's a feeling," said Mr. Masoud, 65, a Palestinian immigrant. "You can say anything you want, but don't curse the system. That's what they care about."
..........................
They pulled down the metal gate and locked the front door. It was hours before the store's regular closing time.
"They hate us Muslims," said Mr. Siraj's mother, Shahina Parveen, steadying herself on her husband's arm. "My son is innocent. Eldawoody is criminal," she said, yelling out the last word. ...............................
Canada's Leader Won't Talk to National Media Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a Conservative, says the press corps is biased against him. By Maggie Farley, Times Staff Writer May 26, 2006
TORONTO — Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has declared he won't talk to the national media because they are biased against him, his latest move in a spat with the Parliament's press corps. ...........................
Since Harper's minority government took office after the Jan. 23 elections, his relations with the national media have become more and more strained. Determined to impose order on the traditionally chaotic press scrum in which reporters shout out questions, Harper said he would choose questioners from a pre-screened list.
The parliamentary media corps, which includes broadcast and print reporters from all over the country, worried that the new protocol would freeze out journalists perceived to be tough on the prime minister. After journalists refused to sign on to the list, Harper refused to take any questions.
On Tuesday, when Harper's press secretary announced there would be no questions after his announcement of aid to the Darfur region of Sudan, nearly two dozen reporters walked out, leaving the prime minister to make his statement in front of a single camera in a nearly empty room.
"We are responsible for asking questions, and he is responsible for answering them," said Yves Malo, the president of the Parliament's press gallery.
Malo acknowledged that the media culture in Ottawa was less decorous than other places, such as the White House, where reporters stand up when the president enters the room and don't interrupt while he is speaking.
He said that the once-unruly press corps had tried to compromise by forming a line behind a microphone, but even then Harper refused to recognize some questioners.
"Since the election, certain reporters have never gotten a question. No one is well served. We are not, the public is not, and the government is not," Malo said. ...............................
"I have trouble believing that, frankly, a Liberal prime minister would have this problem," he said. "The press gallery at the leadership level has taken an anti-Conservative view." .................................
This is the polar opposite of what the lapdogs in Washington do.
For someone whose White House job description demands pseudo-invisibility, Blake Gottesman has made himself a standout. And not just to President Bush and his team, most of whom have known him as a trusted young aide since he joined Bush's 1999 presidential campaign in Austin.
Since 2002, Gottesman has been the president's personal aide, a clean-cut, sweet-faced shadow who minds Bush's needs everywhere except at Camp David, at church, and on bike trails. In White House lingo, he's known as Bush's "body man" or, more colloquially, his "butt boy," sticking close behind the president for 14 to 18 hours a day in global palaces and presidential suites, in farm fields and disaster zones. He's always among the first to greet the president in the morning and the last on hand at night. In June, Gottesman will be leaving the White House to continue his education.
And that is where the story gets interesting: Harvard plans to welcome the 26-year-old Texas native as a graduate student in business this fall, despite the fact that Gottesman left California's Claremont McKenna College after his freshman year to join the Bush campaign.
Of course, the leader of the free world -- who snagged his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in 1975 -- helped out with a written endorsement. As an alum, the president also made a friendly call to Harvard on his aide's behalf, as did former White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, Gottesman's first boss in the White House, who counts a number of Harvard officials among his home-state friends.
Gottesman briefly dated Jenna Bush when he was a high school junior in Austin and she was a freshman, and her dad was governor. When Bush decided to run for president, Gottesman put college on pause. What he thought might be a brief interlude turned into a seven-year hitch. The president's nicknames for his $95,000-a-year special assistant have evolved from "Mini-Me," to "Soldier" and "Private" and "Peanut," to the more recent "Johnny Harvard," eventually simplified to "Harvard."
The Harvard Business School application instructions state that an M.B.A. candidate must have completed a four-year undergraduate degree "or its equivalent in another country." A spokeswoman declined to discuss Gottesman's admission, except to say that enrollment without an undergraduate degree is "highly unusual" but not unprecedented. According to published accounts, more than a dozen Harvard Business School alumni never received undergraduate degrees.
Friends report that Gottesman -- who prefers preparation to improvisation at work and in his personal life -- boned up on Harvard's history about nondegreed applicants. Even with the president's help -- "A letter from the president doesn't have to emphasize very much," deadpanned Logan Walters, Bush's previous personal aide -- Gottesman still had to score well on the grad school exam known as GMAT, ace two personal interviews, and craft seven short essays.
In solidarity with a long line of presidential aides who favor silence, Gottesman declined to be interviewed. .................................................
All of that suggests that someday well beyond 2008 -- after Gottesman finishes at Harvard and Bush moves back to Dallas -- the up-and-comer from Austin and the nation's 43rd president might find themselves reunited in a boardroom someplace, or at a benefit for a good cause. But as of this writing, Gottesman does not imagine ever needing George W. Bush for a political endorsement.
"He does not want a career in politics, which kind of surprised me," Tubb said. "With the talents he has, he would make a great politician or a great public servant. And he has the desire to do that, to serve, but Blake wants to do it through the business arena."
I'm sorry, Mr.Patel, we had to admit the president's butt boy despite your GPA. You'll love Wharton, really. Of course, he only has a year of college at a middle ranked school, but he served the President. The pretzels in Philly rock, Mr. Patel. Have a good time someplace else.
The fucked up part is that this guy isn't even close to qualifying to go to HBS, except for his boss. He should be going to Parris Island and then off to Iraq, but we can't have the King's manservant serve his country. So it's off to Cambridge and HBS, taking the spot of a qualified candidate.
Those of you who have been with me since the dawn of time know that I basically sat out the 2004 primaries and didn't officially take a stand on who the candidate should be. More than that I did my best to not let my discussion of the primary coverage be influenced by my personal preferences. I'm not claiming that I was perfect on that last part, or that I even tried to be (and lacking the Mullet of Objectivity possessed by our Tabloid Press Corps I lack the skills), but still it was something I sorta aimed for.
At the time the reasons were fairly simple. First, I didn't think that the all important Eschaton Endorsement was really going to make a damn bit of difference anyway, so why bother. Second, I didn't want to alienate readers (not because I was worried about traffic for business reasons, at that time the blog was providing beer money if that). Third, I didn't want to spend months fighting with other bloggers. Fourth, while I certainly had my personal preferences about who I'd prefer for president I didn't have any strong sense of who would make the best candidate.
Overall the lefty blogosphere managed to get through 2003 and early 2004 without too much rancor. I think I cried when The Editors got mad at me about something I said about Wes Clark because I was as big an Editors fanboy as he was a Clark fanboy, but aside from that it seemed blogland got through.
Still I worry that it's going to get a wee bit nasty this time. People are going to be understandably passionate about these things and there are certainly those out there who think it's unfair that the "big bloggers" have undue influence. I'm sure I'll be "on the take" of 5 different campaigns (I wish!) as will plenty of others. I'm sure various big bloggers will end up supporting different candidate, so we'll probably end up fighting with each other too. The various blog factions - wonks, netroots - will imagine the other faction is working out of ignorance and bad faith. And on and on.
So, do I pick a team?
This is as good a place as any to remind people that we, being Jen and I, do not endorse candidates. Sending me e-mail hoping for our endorsement is a lost cause. Because, as I said, this is the News Blog, not the politics blog. We have different philosophies towards charity, she's good for events and cash, I will give to campaigns in need.
I give money to the people we support as a site, Jen gives to causes. We don't as a rule, endorse people. You won't see us telling you to send money to Lamont or Menendez until that money is given to their campaigns by me. Why? Because we don't endorse candidates.
Why?
Because I want the right to criticize them when I don't agree with them. Once you start acting like a booster, you lose that ability.
Last year, someone wanted me to host something for a local candidate and I turned them down flat for two reasons. One, I personally supported someone else. Two, I don't endorse candidates.
So what is the big deal?
Well, I think a lot of people don't step back from politics and make it personal. Personally, I admire how Hillary Clinton has managed to step out of the shadow of her husband and make her own career without making it a public crusade against him. But that is way different than wanting her to be commander in chief. A lot of people see her uncritically, and I think that is a mistake.
Also, I think too many campaigns take us for granted. They want to see us as the unlimited bank, as some DC consultants have said as much. Uh, no. You want to order someone around, go hire staff. We are not a money tree. Candidates get money who need and deserve it. Not just because you ask for it.
The same thing with William Jefferson. Personally, I think he is entitled to his paranoia. But as we live in a world of hard decisions, he's gonna be left on the mountainside. You wanna argue about the FBI, fine, we can have that argument, as long as he's not an issue hurting the Democratic party. We can't afford him no more.
My goal here is not to be at the beck and call of consultants and campaigns. My editorial content isn't going to shift to make you happy. You're just buying space. When Tim Kaine yanked his ads from this site, that was his right. But as a response to the right? I don't work for him, I don't have to stand for his or any other camapign's insult. You want to respond to pressure from the right, well, there's gonna be pressure from the left.
It's the same thing with the telco ads. Send me money if you want. but that doesn't mean I'm going to change my opinions.
One other point: anyone can do a Kos diary, anyone can write a blog. Don't expect anyone else to represent how you feel or what you think. Maybe you aren't a brilliant writer, so what. This isn't TV, you can and should participate if you have something to say. Anyone worrying about big bloggers vs small is wasting their time and energy. I love running other people's writing,and I always find something worth running. If I were an egomaniac, Jen and I could write everything and that would be that. But that isn't fun.
Other people write well, other people have ideas that I don't. Sharing them makes sense.
LATTA, S.C. -- A 15-year-old girl led a small protest march Monday over her high school's ban on Confederate flag clothing, which she
is also challenging in court.
Candice Hardwick walked with about a dozen other people, about half of them relatives and some wearing Confederate T-shirts, a few blocks to Latta High School. Hardwick wore a Confederate belt buckle and button and had the Confederate flag on her cellphone cover. She removed those items before entering the school, where she is a sophomore.
Hardwick says she wants to wear the emblem to pay tribute to ancestors who fought for the South in the Civil War.
...............................
Among those marching with Hardwick was a black man, H.K. Edgerton, past chairman of the Southern Legal Resource Center's advisory board. The group filed a federal lawsuit in March on her behalf.
"She's made a stand for her Southland," Edgerton said. A former local NAACP leader in North Carolina, he is known for dressing up in Confederate gear to emphasize what he describes as the role blacks played in voluntarily supporting the South in the Civil War.
...........................
The high court has not ruled specifically on whether students can wear Confederate symbols. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta upheld a ruling allowing a school to ban the Confederate flag.
Jen
Gilly--note the picture. Why the FUCK is an NAACP member supporting this inbred idiot? I mean, even the Jewish ACLU lawyers who defended the Nazi scum at Skoakie didn't fucking DRESS UP with yellow stars and carry a swatstika flag.
Bullshit, she just hates black people. But the reason I'm posting this is the idiot negro in the Confederate gray, a color seen more in movies and with reenactors than on any battlefield, because the common uniform for the Confederate Army was butternut brown.
Many historians, and students of history, will agree that blacks served by the thousands in the Confederate Army. They will dispute, however, that these blacks served as soldiers, and will dismiss their service as that of servants—attached to the Army, but not soldiers in the Army. The thesis here is that black Southerners served as soldiers in the Army, not just with the Southern Army.
That evidence is clear: Black Confederates served by the thousands, and they served as soldiers. I present the evidence below in several categories. The strongest evidence concerns proclamations by Southern States governors, or authorizations by Southern State legislatures, specifically calling for black soldiers. Finally, near the close of the War, the Confederate Government reversed its official, if ignored policy, and enlisted thousands of slaves as Confederate soldiers.
Non-combat Job Classifications are Part of Today’s Army
Black Southerners served as teamsters, cooks, musicians, nurses, hospital attendants, blacksmiths, hostlers, foragers, wheelwrights in the Army of the Confederate States of America. Few dispute this assertion. We have these categories in today’s army. Therefore, by today’s standards, these black Southerners were soldiers.
To the Confederate army goes the distinction of having the first black to minister to white troops. A Tennessee regiment had sought diligently for a chaplain, but had been unsuccessful until “Uncle Lewis,” who accompanied the regiment, was asked to conduct a religious service. Soldiers were so pleased that they asked Lewis to serve as their chaplain, which he did from the time of Pittsburgh Landing to war's end. “He is heard with respectful attention and for earnestness, zeal, and sincerity, can be surpassed by none"-- Religious Herald 10 Sept 1863. To the men of the regiment as well as to the editors of the Richmond newspaper, the service of the black chaplain was a matter of great pride (Barrow, 2001).
Black Southerners served as laborers on fortifications: The National Park Service, with a recent discovery, recognized that blacks were asked to help defend the city of Petersburg, Virginia, and were offered their freedom if they did so. Regardless of their official classification, black Americans performed support functions that in today's army would be classified as official military service. The successes of white Confederate troops in battle was achieved only with the support these loyal black Southerners (Williams, “On Black Confederates” web site).
General Joe Johnston wrote in early 1864 to Senator Wigfall: “I propose to substitute slaves for all soldiers … as cooks, engineer laborers, pioneers, or on any kind of work. Such details for this little army amount to more than 10,000 men. Negroes would serve for such purposes better than soldiers” (Vandiver, 1970, p. 264). Again, in today’s army, these job classifications are filled by soldiers.
Applying today’s standards to the past, blacks did serve as soldiers in the Confederate Army. No historian, however, likes to apply later standards to earlier history, and we now move on to more substantive evidence. However, by today’s standards, blacks did serve as soldiers—as teamsters, cooks, musicians, nurses, and in other roles that are jobs in today’s army.
But we aren't talking about today's Army, but the Army of 1861-65. The only evidence of a black regiment in the South was the 1st Lousiana Guards, and they switched sides in 1862. The fact is that blacks were used as laborers, but many defected to the Union at the first opportunity, where they served as sailors, the Civil War Navy was 50 percent black, all enlisted, and the Union Army
A racist fabrication has sprung up in the last decade: that the Confederacy had "thousands" of African- American slaves "fighting" in its armies during the Civil War.
Unfortunately, even some African-American men today have gotten conned into Putting on Confederate uniforms to play "re-enactors" in an army that fought to ensure that their ancestors would remain slaves.
There are two underlying points of this claim: first, to say that slavery wasn't so bad, because after all, the slaves themselves fought to preserve the slave South; and second, that the Confederacy wasn't really fighting for slavery. Both these notions may make some of our contemporaries feel good, but neither is historically accurate.
When one speaks of "soldiers" and "fighting" in a war, one is not talking about slaves who were taken from their masters and forced to work on military roads and other military construction projects; nor is one talking about slaves who were taken along by their masters to continue the duties of a personal valet that they performed back on the plantation. Of course, there were thousands of African-Americans forced into these situations, but they were hardly "soldiers fighting."
Another logical point against this wacky modern idea of a racially integrated Confederate army has to do with the prisoner of war issue during the Civil War. Through 1862, there was an effective exchange system of POWs between the two sides. This entirely broke down in 1863, however, because the Confederacy refused to see black Union soldiers as soldiers - they would not be exchanged, but instead were made slaves (or, as in the 1864 Fort Pillow incident, simply murdered after their surrender). At that, the United States refused to exchange any Southern POWs and the prisoner of war camps on both sides grew immensely in numbers and misery the rest of the war.
If the Confederacy had black soldiers in its armies, why didn't it see black men as soldiers?
By the way, all the Confederate soldiers captured by Union troops were white men. If there were "thousands" of black soldiers in the Confederate armies, why were none of them among the approximately 215,000 soldiers captured by the U. S. forces?
If there were thousands of African-American men fighting in the Confederate armies, they apparently cleverly did so without Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, the members of the Confederate congress or any of the white soldiers of the Confederacy knowing about it. (I can just imagine some former Confederate soldier, told in 1892 that hundreds of the men in his army unit during the Civil War were black, snapping his fingers and saying, "I knew there was something different about those guys!") .....................
If, as some folks in the 1990s claim, there were already "thousands" of black troops in the Confederate armies, why were the leaders of the Confederacy still debating about whether or not they should start bringing them in?
The very accurate point made then by opponents of this legislation was, as one Georgia leader stated, "If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong." Southern newspaper editors blasted the idea as "the very doctrine which the war was commenced to put down," a "surrender of the essential and distinctive principle of Southern civilization."
The great taboo of the South was arming black men. The Confederates had no black troops.
Approximately 180,000 African Americans comprising 163 units served in the Union Army during the Civil War, and many more African Americans served in the Union Navy. Both free Africans Americans and runaway slaves joined the fight.
On July 17, 1862, Congress passed two acts allowing the enlistment of African Americans, but official enrollment occurred only after the September, 1862 issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. In general, white soldiers and officers believed that black men lacked the courage to fight and fight well. In October, 1862, African American soldiers of the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteers silenced their critics by repulsing attacking Confederates at the battle of Island Mound, Missouri. By August, 1863, 14 Negro Regiments were in the field and ready for service. At the battle of Port Hudson, Louisiana, May 27, 1863, the African American soldiers bravely advanced over open ground in the face of deadly artillery fire. Although the attack failed, the black soldiers proved their capability to withstand the heat of battle.
On July 17, 1863, at Honey Springs, Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, the 1st Kansas Colored fought with courage again. Union troops under General James Blunt ran into a strong Confederate force under General Douglas Cooper. After a two-hour bloody engagement, Cooper's soldiers retreated. The 1st Kansas, which had held the center of the Union line, advanced to within fifty paces of the Confederate line and exchanged fire for some twenty minutes until the Confederates broke and ran. General Blunt wrote after the battle, "I never saw such fighting as was done by the Negro regiment....The question that negroes will fight is settled; besides they make better solders in every respect than any troops I have ever had under my command."
The most widely known battle fought by African Americans was the assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, by the 54th Massachusetts on July 18, 1863. The 54th volunteered to lead the assault on the strongly-fortified Confederate positions. The soldiers of the 54th scaled the fort's parapet, and were only driven back after brutal hand-to-hand combat.
Although black soldiers proved themselves as reputable soldiers, discrimination in pay and other areas remained widespread. According to the Militia Act of 1862, soldiers of African descent were to receive $10.00 a month, plus a clothing allowance of $3.50. Many regiments struggled for equal pay, some refusing any money until June 15, 1864, when Congress granted equal pay for all black soldiers.
African American soldiers participated in every major campaign of 1864-1865 except Sherman's invasion of Georgia. The year 1864 was especially eventful for African American troops. On April 12, 1864, at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest led his 2,500 men against the Union-held fortification, occupied by 292 black and 285 white soldiers. After driving in the Union pickets and giving the garrison an opportunity to surrender, Forrest's men swarmed into the fort with little difficulty and drove the Federals down the river's bluff into a deadly crossfire. Casualties were high and only sixty-two of the U.S. Colored Troops survived the fight. Many accused the Confederates of perpetuating a massacre of black troops, and the controversy continues today. The battle cry for the Negro soldier east of the Mississippi River became "Remember Fort Pillow!"
The idea that black soldiers willing fought for their oppressors is silly.Blacks made up 10 percent of the Union Army by 1865. People who believed that blacks served in the Confederate Army have to play with definitions and make pretense because the reality is that when black men were given a chance to kill their former oppressors, they risked their lives for that opportunity. Southerners hated fighting black troops and would murder them on occassion.
Anyone who thinks blacks fought for the confederacy is an idiot.
c/o New York Times-Enquirer Open Letter to "Big Staff Man" and Reporter
Dear Mr. Patrick Healey,
Now that you've covered the sex lives of Hillary and Bill Clinton with a front page story in the New York Times, would you please dig into the sex lives of your boss, Bill Keller, the Times' Executive Editor, or the Washington Post's media maven, Howie Kurtz, or its lecherous old pundit and political palaverer, David Broder, all of whom stroked your Page 6 story into premature prominence.
Or better yet, the secret sex life of George W. Bush!
Has he always been heterosexual? Didn't he do a little walk on the wild side when he was younger, at Yale (check cheerleading, gay roommate, Skull and Bones, and Deke the drinking fraternity with sado-masochistic hazing like branding bare bottoms with hot irons or pouring honey and salsa into the initiates' butts)? Didn't he do some time at a faith-based clinic to "cure" him of his wayward ways before he married Laura? And is he completely "cured"? Look at the way he walks and talks even now? Have you ever seen a real man's man have such an obsession with fondling bald men's heads? What's that mean? Why does he surround himself with men who are clearly homosexual like Ken Mehlman and Jeff Gannon or of "dubious sexuality" like Scott McClellan and Karl Rove? What kind of sex do you think George W. and Pickles have? Robotic? Stepford like? What's she like off medication anyway? Enquiring minds want to know.
And if you want to talk about politics and sex, you really should look into John McCain and his wives (divorcing the loyal first one after getting out of prisoner-of-war camp to marry the rich, pill-addicted beer heiress just in time to go into politics) or Rudy Giuliani (who married his cousin -- unusual outside of Appalachia -- then divorced her to marry beautiful newscaster Donna Hanover -- and then announced their separation on television without first informing his children or his wife -- who had, by the way, just found Rudy dick-deep into his pharmaceutical saleslady/ mistress at the Mayor's office on Father's Day).
If this is the sauce you're going to pour over the Clintons and other Democratic candidates, how about cooking a little puree of Republican, too? You know that despite outward appearances, Republicans are a lot kinkier bunch than Democrats. They repress themselves (and others) so much that when it oozes out or spurts out under pressure, it's likely to be more fetishistic, more about sadism and domination, and, basically, more twisted.
Rush Limbaugh has his "hillbilly heroin" addiction. O'Reilly likes to talk dirty and caress naked women over phones with imaginary "falafels". And did you hear that when Chris "Tweety" Matthews lived in San Francisco he frequented a "Pre-op Tranny bar called the Black Rose"?.
Who knows what we'll find out about the sex lives of Bill Keller or Howie Kurtz or even the old goat and grandee of the Beltway, David Broder. However, I'm not sure I want to see the pictures.
Just know that you're not safe if you continue to fluff for the Republicans. You'll be caught up in their flotsam and drown in their jism.
Sincerely, David Wyles
Actually, Giuliani was dick deep in his then communications director, the sales lady was her replacement
Launching himself into the immigration debate, Mayor Bloomberg offered a radical Big Brother-style plan: Give every legal worker a fraud-proof identification card - sealed with a person's DNA or fingerprints.
In a column published in The Wall Street Journal and on two national news shows yesterday, Bloomberg called for the creation of a federal database that would allow employers to verify the immigration status of job applicants.
Companies that continue to hire undocumented workers would be hit with stiff penalties.
"The key to all of this is enforce the laws that are on the books," Bloomberg said yesterday on Fox News. "The law says you can't employ undocumented [workers], so don't let them employ undocumented [workers]."
Bloomberg's immigration plan also envisioned creating extra visas for professional and manual workers - and a formal way for them to eventually get permanent legal status by paying back taxes.
This is the second time this year Bloomberg has forcefully injected himself onto the national stage on a domestic issue.
His aggressive war on illegal guns has seen him conduct a sting on Southern gun dealers; appear at the Capitol with Sen. Chuck Schumer, and hold a national summit on the gun crisis at Gracie Mansion.
And in his comments yesterday, Bloomberg reiterated his criticism of federal lawmakers who are calling for the deportation of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, saying "they are living in a fantasy world."
"You have to wonder what world Congress is living in," he said on CNN. "Talk to any mayor who has to enforce the law and you'll find that none of these things are remotely possible."
As for the national employment cards, Bloomberg acknowledged the Big Brother concerns, but said "everybody's got a PC on their desk with Photoshop that can replicate anything."
I am an American. I don't carry identity papers with DNA on them
Mike Bloomberg should just shut the fuck up. This is a horrible and unconstitutional idea. Maybe he wants to be commissar of New York.
Imagine what this would mean. Every living adult would have to report to a central data bank, have personal data once only taken from people in custody, stored in a massive data base which anyone with access to the police could track you down. What would be the penalties for not having your papers? Arrest? A ticket?
Every minority in America would be stopped regularly and have their papers checked. Welcome to the electronic bantustan. Why? Because it is an employment document and God help you if you have an accent and leave it at home that day. Of if you're walking in the wrong neighborhood and forget it.
Unless Bloomberg sees a massive payday for his company, this idea is pretty damn stupid.
Once you start compliling a database of Americans,there is no limit to the abuses which can occur. Which is why we seperate identity, with a drivers license, and work ID with a social security card. Once you can combine them, all hell breaks loose and your rights are only what the government permits.
Look at the theft of the VA's databse,imagine that at a much more massive scale?
This idea is one of those things which needs to be killed early on.
REUTERS/Issei Kato Hey, Bob, have you seen Nightline?
Yeah, it fucking sucks. Watch me drop a load on the tourbots
I turned to Nightline tonight and instead of seeing a dissection of Bush and Blair's pray to Jesus meeting, I saw something on women choosing to have kids without a partner.
Interesting, they only showed upper middle class white women, but that wasn't the problem. It was, quite simply NOT FUCKING NEWS.
After Koppel quit, they split the hosting duties between Martin Bashir, Cynthia McFadden and Terry Moran. And the stories got mushy. Real mushy. We have two wars, a corrupt Congress and a weak president and all I found out tonight is that smart guys sperm cost more. Not a year ago, Koppel eviserated Michael Brown on live TV. Now we get taped pieces on the McFadden's neighbors.
The show lacks an editorial direction and seems to be shot in the dim haze of Times Square. Nightline was the one place for hard news which didn't make Jennings cut. Serious news by serious people. Now it's discussing shit best left for 20/20.
Hell, even Dateline has more aggressive chops, gathering up pedos like the lucky captains catch crab on Deadliest Catch.
Features have a home on ABC, we need news, hard news.
It will be the coldest day in hell before I will ever excuse corruption. Nothing kills civil society faster than la mordida, the bribe.
William Jefferson may well be innocent, but he needs to lose his committee seat until this is cleared up. End of story.
If he wants to play the race card, let me play it right here: as a black man with a Harvard Law degree, only possible by the deaths of other people, you owe something to the community more than sucking up to the DLC. You want the protection and soldiarity of blackness, but you tied up two trucks to get your suitcases out of your house while the people you represented had to be rescued by ad hoc teams from across the country. What a grotesque betrayal.
A crooked black politician doesn't only violate the civil trust of public office, he makes the burden of his people that much harder. Poor people fled New Orleans and aren't looking back, and part of the reason is that Jefferson was playing power games instead of helping his people.
So when people talk about Nancy Pelosi and the FBI, they're missing the point. Pelosi has no reason to protect Jefferson, nor should the CBC. Let the courts decide what canbe admitted from their search.
But beyond that, the thing is that we, as black people, as a nation, cannot tolerate corruption. It kills people, it murders democracy. If you can buy government favor, government preference, that means an honest person suffers. NewOrleans paid a heavy price for the long standing culture of corruption there, crooked cops, the worst schools in America, an incredible crime rate and so little opportunity that people drowned for lack of access to a reliable car. New Orleans suffering may have come from Katrina, but the seeds were set long ago.
Which is why Mitch Landrieu lost to Ray Nagin. No matter how inept Nagin was, he was free of corruption and that mattered.
Time and again, you see the inept and crooked blame conspiracies of the FBI out to get them. Except they aren't Fred Hampton and J. Edgar Hoover is dead. Many are embittered relics of their idealistic selfs, some are grifters, all are a burden.
Mr.Jefferson will get a good defense. But his problems are not just legal, but political. If CynthiaMcKinney's antics are not supported, why are his?
Clarence Thomas taught me a lesson: no one gets a pass. I no longer assume skin color means solidarity on some level. I knew when he spoke he was a lying bastard. Anita Hill was a church lady, the odds of her lying were about the odds of me voting Republican.But people gave him the benefit of the doubt. And look where that got us.
No more. If you want to call for solidarity, don't wait until the FBI is knocking on your door.
The fighting in Panjwayi in Afghanistan has sent up to 3,000 people fleeing to Kandahar city for safety, an International Organisation for Migration official said The battle spreads in Afghanistan By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - The bulk of the fighting in Afghanistan in the past week, which has claimed more than 300 lives among the Taliban, US-led forces, the Afghan National Army (ANA) and civilians, has taken place in the southern Pashtun heartland of the country.
However, the Taliban's spring offensive is fast turning into a massive resistance against the foreign presence all over Afghanistan, and already some influential characters are jockeying for a post-spring role.
And the indications are that the resistance could transcend a simple Taliban-led insurgency to evolve into a powerful Islamic movement.
Thousands of Taliban have emerged in the provinces of Helmand, Ghazni, Urgzan, Kandahar, Kunar and Zabul, and in all of them the story is the same: where allied forces have taken on the Taliban, the ANA holds the "fort". In places beyond the access of allied forces, the Taliban are in control.
In the less-populated Farah and Nimroze provinces, where the Taliban have a nominal presence, violent incidents against the ANA have begun. The same is true in western Herat province on the border with Iran.
Former acting Afghan premier Engineer Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai commented by telephone to Asia Times Online from Kabul, "There are now sporadic incidents of violence in northern Afghanistan. We are hearing news that rockets are being fired on coalition forces in Maidan Shahr [east of Kabul], and there have been incidents of bomb blasts and violence in the north. As to who is behind this, different people have different opinions. Some allege the Taliban, some allege Hizb-i-Islami-led [Gulbuddin] Hekmatyar and some call them unknown groups."
With regard to the "unknown groups", Asia Times Online spoke to a man who knows Afghan society and most of its characters inside out, former Pakistani army general and director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence Hamid Gul. Gul has for many years been associated with the various groups of the Afghan resistance, since the days it fought against the Soviets in the 1980s.
"Firstly, when this sort of mass resistance starts, it means that it is a collective decision of Afghans. So you can see that though the Taliban resistance is centered in a very specific area, sporadic incidents have erupted all over. To me, the Taliban may be one group, the HIA [Hizb-i-Islami] of Gulbuddin is a second and [Moulvi Yunus] Khalis' HIA would be another.
"But there are tribes as well who would be digging in against allied forces in their specific areas. This is a specific Afghan style of rebellion in which parties fight throughout Afghanistan under their flag, but the tribes restrict themselves to their areas. All fight for the same cause, but under their own disciplines. All fighting factions develop a sort of understanding with each other," Gul said .......................... Contacts in the Pakistani tribal areas of Bajaur and North Waziristan tell Asia Times Online that at least seven different tribal jirgas (councils) are meeting on a daily basis among the Afghan population.
And Miranshah Bazaar in North Waziristan is once again full of posters of Osama bin Laden and Hekmatyar, while slogans are written in support of the Taliban.
The jirgas are unanimous: there should be all-out war in Afghanistan.
Ooops. So what was Tommy Franks saying about victory? We don't have any extra troops to spare and we're gonna need them. Bush and Blair are transfiixed by Iraq and it seems that the Afghans are gearing up to kick us out.
Why? Because we have most of our combat brigades in Afghanistan, and Rummy restricted the NATO combat role early on. Speed would have been our ally here and we gave it away. What's worse is this is the invisible second front, like Italy in WWII, people are dying,Osama does his radio show and the Taliban is planning their spring offensive.
New Zealand adventurer Mark Inglis, who walked past a dying climber on his way to the summit of Mount Everest, says he would do the same thing again.
Inglis, the first double amputee to reach Everest's peak, was in a group of climbers who came across oxygen-deprived British climber David Sharp about 300 metres below the summit on May 15. Inglis' group and several others decided to push on. Sharp, who was climbing alone after unsuccessful attempts to reach the top in 2003 and 2004, later died.
Speaking by telephone to theage.com.au shortly after his arrival in New Zealand, Inglis said there was nothing he could have done to help Sharp.
"My sherpa sort of just pushed me on . . . that was the end of the situation really. I did nothing. I did nothing, you know. I did everything that I possibly could, which was essentially nothing," he said.
"I know that the situation that I walked past, that I saw, only had one ending. Of that I am confident. That's why I guess I sleep at night. . . David had been on the mountain for a long time . . . without oxygen, unsupported," he said.
Sir Edmund Hillary, who with sherpa Tenzing Norgay in 1953 was the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest, this week criticised Inglis for not abandoning his climb to help Sharp.
"I think the whole attitude towards climbing Mount Everest has become rather horrifying. The people just want to get to the top. They don't give a damn for anybody else who may be in distress and it doesn't impress me at all that they leave someone lying under a rock to die," Hillary was quoted as saying.
I guess it's just a Small Circle of Friends, the Everest version.
It's all about getting to the top, not the comradship of climbing. Walking past a man in distress is vile beyond words
By THOM SHANKER, ERIC SCHMITT and RICHARD A. OPPEL JR. Published: May 26, 2006
This article is by Thom Shanker, Eric Schmitt and Richard A. Oppel Jr.
WASHINGTON, May 25 — A military investigation into the deaths of two dozen Iraqis last November is expected to find that a small number of marines in western Iraq carried out extensive, unprovoked killings of civilians, Congressional, military and Pentagon officials said Thursday.
Two lawyers involved in discussions about individual marines' defenses said they thought the investigation could result in charges of murder, a capital offense. That possibility and the emerging details of the killings have raised fears that the incident could be the gravest case involving misconduct by American ground forces in Iraq.
Officials briefed on preliminary results of the inquiry said the civilians killed at Haditha, a lawless, insurgent-plagued city deep in Sunni-dominated Anbar Province, did not die from a makeshift bomb, as the military first reported, or in cross-fire between marines and attackers, as was later announced. A separate inquiry has begun to find whether the events were deliberately covered up.
Evidence indicates that the civilians were killed during a sustained sweep by a small group of marines that lasted three to five hours and included shootings of five men standing near a taxi at a checkpoint, and killings inside at least two homes that included women and children, officials said.
That evidence, described by Congressional, Pentagon and military officials briefed on the inquiry, suggested to one Congressional official that the killings were "methodical in nature."
Congressional and military officials say the Naval Criminal Investigative Service inquiry is focusing on the actions of a Marine Corps staff sergeant serving as squad leader at the time, but that Marine officials have told members of Congress that up to a dozen other marines in the unit are also under investigation. Officials briefed on the inquiry said that most of the bullets that killed the civilians were now thought to have been "fired by a couple of rifles," as one of them put it.
The killings were first reported by Time magazine in March, based on accounts from survivors and human rights groups, and members of Congress have spoken publicly about the episode in recent days. But the new accounts from Congressional, military and Pentagon officials added significant new details to the picture. All of those who discussed the case had to be granted anonymity before they would talk about the findings emerging from the investigation.
A second, parallel inquiry was ordered by the second-ranking general in Iraq to examine whether any marines on the ground at Haditha, or any of their superior officers, tried to cover up the killings by filing false reports up the chain of command. That inquiry, conducted by an Army officer assigned to the Multinational Corps headquarters in Iraq, is expected to report its findings in coming days.
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Military investigators have since uncovered a far different set of facts from what was first reported, partly aided by marines who are cooperating with the inquiry and partly guided by reports filed by a separate unit that arrived to gather intelligence and document the attack; those reports contradicted the original version of the marines, Pentagon officials said.
Assrocket adds at the bottom of Not Assrocket's post that "Jack Murtha is a disgrace," trying to rally support for his Republican opponent saying "Let's at least make that miserable *** sweat." (http://powerlineblog.com/archives/014127.php#014127)
Anyone who defends the murder of children and women isn't really much of a person. The US Marines are not the SS, when they kill civilians, they must be held accountable and if they murder the innocent, they need to face a general courtmartial if the charges can be tied to them.
It does not honor the men and women who patrol Iraq daily or the Marines to defend the murder of children. But Murtha, who left college to be a Marine, was a DI, then commissioned and returned to active duty in Vietnam would understand that. That isn't his idea of a Marine, and it isn't mine.
These pro-child murderers would not, since the only thing they do is type. They think soldiers are fragile and demanding justice for the murdered is cowardly.
They have no clue that the ONLY reason that this is a case is because a Marine made it one. Other Marines saw this, realize a crime had been committed and reported it, like any person of conscience. Enough people die in the byproducts of war, car stops, errant artillery strikes, stray rounds to leave a lifetime of guilt. But these young men saw murder and refused to shut their eyes and walk away, as the pro-child murder coalition would have had them do.
It doesn't make them heroes, although I suspect there's one in this, but it makes them citizens. I can't say what the pro-child murder people are.
Former Enron bosses Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling have both been found guilty on fraud and conspiracy charges.
Mr Skilling has also been found guilty of insider trading.
The two presided over the spectacular collapse of the energy giant in 2001 and are also accused of lying to investors about its financial problems.
The two men had denied 38 counts of fraud, conspiracy and insider trading relating to Enron's collapse in late 2001.
The firm started out as an energy trader, and expanded into the US's seventh largest company.
But in October that year it had to announce huge losses - and filed for bankruptcy in December, after allegations began to emerge of widespread accounting irregularities including the use of off-the-books offshore firms to hide losses.
But, but,it wasn't his fault.
Hope you enjoy jail, crook. Hope Karl and Scooter join you soon.
Another corrupt Republican, another jail sentence.
Furious black lawmakers, rallying behind Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.), were pulled back from the brink of open revolt against House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in an emergency meeting with her yesterday.
The meeting with a handful of CBC members was called after Pelosi wrote the embattled lawmaker, who is at the center of a massive bribery scandal, a curt note requesting his immediate resignation from the powerful Ways and Means Committee.
Outraged that one of its members was being picked on even though he has not been charged with a crime, the Congressional Black Caucus had intended to issue a defiant statement against their leader but agreed after the meeting to pause, at least briefly, for reflection.
Earlier this week, Pelosi approached Jefferson and told him that she thought he should resign, according to a Democratic aide. Later, at the Democratic caucus meeting yesterday morning, she took him into a side room and told him that she had prepared a letter calling on him to resign the committee seat and that she would allow him one hour to withdraw gracefully before she sent it, according to the aide. In both instances, Jefferson remained defiant.
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Yesterday's CBC meeting with Jefferson was well-attended, drawing nearly all of the caucus's heavyweights — Ways and Means ranking Democrat Charles Rangel (N.Y.), Judiciary Committee ranking Democrat John Conyers (Mich.) and Democratic Caucus Chairman James Clyburn (S.C.).
Most lawmakers would not comment afterwards, but a CBC aide summed up some members' frustration, saying, "Congresswoman Pelosi, by preemption without any legal justification, has now created a new precedent for how members are going to be treated. Unfortunately, she's chosen to single out an African-American for this honor."
Then the aide added an electoral threat, saying, "The African-American community, which overwhelmingly backs the Democratic Party, will not take this lightly. I hope she enjoys being minority leader."
Clyburn, who is both a member of the CBC and the third-ranking member of House Democratic leadership, was circumspect yesterday when asked whether Jefferson should step down.
"The leader speaks for the party," Clyburn said. "If that's what she feels, that's what she feels. If that's what [Jefferson] feels, that's what he feels. We all have to live with the consequences of our actions."
Absent from the CBC meeting was Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.), who has had an interest in securing a seat on the Ways and Means Committee. His spokesman said he had no comment.
"Congressman Jefferson is a friend. [Davis] admires his work during his time in Washington and doesn't feel it is appropriate to comment now," the spokesman said.
Meanwhile, Pelosi and House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) called in a joint statement for the Justice Department to return the records taken in the search of Jefferson's office.
Uh, folks, he had $90K in his freezer and a videotape showing him taking the money. You really want to wait for a court for him to quit?
Look, I didn't like it when bloggers jumped all over McKinney on the word of the capitol police, who seem to have different standards for black congresswomen and drunk Irish Congressmen. But this is way different.
Jefferson took two National Guard trucks which could have been saving New Orleanians to save his "luggage". God know what he had inside. If the CBC thinks people outside of the Hill gives a shit about Jefferson, they're insane. Black America has been plagued with corrupt leaders and they belong under the jail. When people lack resources and means, the last thing they need is someone sticking their hand out for payoffs.
They need to stop protecting their buddy and stop handing talk radio the next Willie Horton. Many of these same people were quick to leave Cynthia McKinney to her own devices with no evidence, yet, here the man is caught with $90K in his fucking freezer and now they want to hold a temper tantrum. I'm sure black voters will suborn their interests to save William Jefferson. That kind of insane threat could only fool white people who think blacks don't vote for their own self-interest
Anyone ever think that if Harold Ford didn't run for the minority speaker's job she just might have had better relations with the CBC?
Regardless, some asswipe of an aide making some threat which is impossible to carry out only seems like the act of a petulant child. People's kids are dying in Iraq and you want to defend a man caught with $90K in his freezer because Nancy Pelosi did the right thing?
First of all, he won't cooperate with the FBI, forcing their hand. Now, he wants to drag the CBC into this. When will you folks realize you're being played. When he was sucking up to the DLC he wasn't so concerned about black people, now that he's facing years in jail, unless he's got a receipt for that $90K in his freezer, he's H.Rap Jefferson. Now he wants to drag down the whole party to save his own ass.
That alone should cost him his Ways and Means seat. And part of the reason they're in this mess is because of Harold Ford and Albert Wynn playing cute with conservatives. It's clear that not everyone believes in unity, so Pelosi can do this. They created this situation on their own.Now they want to whine a black man was chosen first? Uh, Tom DeLay is resigning after being defended by the GOP caucus for months. Pelosi has a great issue in that, hell, Hastert is now being investigated by the FBI for his own Abramoff issues. Jefferson's color is green, not black.
But William Jefferson,who took a lifetime of good fortune and squnadered it, is now hellbent on saving himself at any price.
What would two more years of a GOP Congess mean? More dead in Iraq. Slowed reconstruction in New Orleans. More civil rights violated. Why should my future hinge on your grudge with Nancy Pelosi. If you win, you can vote against her for Speaker. She won't be running for that unchallenged.
Someone should ask this aide if Jefferson's hurt feelings are worth all that.
It's really simple: I hate crooked pols.Now, I don't know if Jefferson is a crook, but he doesn't look innocent and because of that, he needs to defend himself and stop hiding behind the CBC like a little bitch.
Yet I write to you today confused about the role that you have decided to play in our nation's immigration debate, and with the hope that you will use your tremendous influence to facilitate a substantive discussion about the impact of immigration on America's current and aspiring middle class.
With one in six middle-class Americans without health insurance, 1.3 million applying for bankruptcy in 2003 alone, the cost of higher education at public universities skyrocketing by a rate of almost 50% during the president's term, and wages stagnating while CEO profits increase, the middle class as we know it is at risk of disappearing.
Our nation is in need of comprehensive immigration policy that operates not from the agendas of special interests - big business, immigration advocates, the entrenched right-wing lobby - but from that of the current and aspiring middle class.
1. Recognizing that the American middle class relies on the economic contributions of immigrants, the first part of the test holds that pro-middle class immigration policy should bolster - not undermine - the critical contribution that immigrants make to our economy as workers, entrepreneurs, taxpayers, and consumers.
2. Further recognizing that, when immigrants lack rights in the workplace, labor standards are driven down and all working people have less opportunity to enter or remain in the middle class, the second part of the test holds that a pro-middle class immigration policy must strengthen the rights of immigrants in the workplace.
You recently wrote that "This president and Congress talk about bringing illegal aliens out of the shadows while they turn out the lights on our middle class." But in doing so, you are misconstruing the situation. Bringing illegal aliens out of the shadows is in the best interest of the middle class. The lights are turning off on the middle class in part because employers have found it so easy to exploit immigrants. And employers have found it so easy to exploit immigrants because the current immigration policy has forced them to stay in the shadows. Under the House's immigration bill, immigrants will only become even more vulnerable to exploitation. When Americans compete in the labor market with exploited immigrants, we risk driving down wages and workplace standards for everyone.
Americans need secure borders, yes. But they also need immigration. They benefit from the economic contributions of immigrants. They benefit from the taxes paid by immigrants, they benefit from the labor provided by immigrants, they benefit from the new businesses started by immigrants, they benefit from the consumer demand and new markets created by immigrants. But when it comes to public policy, what the middle-class needs above all is a comprehensive policy that both secures the borders and secures our bottom lines by protecting the rights of everyone in the workplace.
We share a distaste for Guest Worker Programs and other efforts that create a legalized underclass of exploited workers who have minimal enforceable rights and who will drag down the wages of American workers, just as currently undocumented immigrants who are vulnerable to exploitation already threaten to do. This "race to the bottom" is perpetuated by our broken immigration system. It must be fixed.
But the answer isn't to pit immigrant workers - who play a critical role in our economy - against Americans. Why not place blame where it belongs - not with immigrants who cross the border in search of economic opportunity, but with a private sector that is more interested in their bottom line than our nation's health, and with a complacent Congress that is detached from their responsibility to speak for its people?
The desperate quest on the part of big business for an influx of cheap labor is not just about immigrants. In fact, it is about a larger dynamic in an economy that has forsaken its middle class and the progressive policies that have helped to create it. It is about the damaging role of money in politics. It is seen in the dismantling of unions, in our dramatic rates of incumbency, in our failure to address globalization. You call your show "Broken Borders." Why not "Broken Economy?," or better yet, the "Broken Social Contract."
Your commitment to securing the borders needs to be matched by a commitment to creating good jobs in this country. Your call for a policy that enforces the border must be matched by a call for a policy that will strengthen the rights of all immigrants in the workplace, with the recognition that a permanent underclass helps no one, and that a massive deportation of those who are here will unsettle communities across this country and ultimately hurt the bottom line of the middle class (and with the recognition that a massive deportation will not work, leaving millions of workers ripe for exploitation). If, instead, we raise workplace standards and guarantee that everyone participating in our economy can exercise full workplace rights, there will be no more jobs "Americans won't do." I believe that we will still see demand for a larger workforce to fill jobs that are equally attractive to Americans and immigrants alike. But if I'm wrong, and there are no jobs available for new immigrants in the absence of exploitation, they will not come. As you know Mr. Dobbs, people come here in pursuit of economic opportunity. If economic opportunity isn't here, if a private sector willing to exploit isn't allowed to, and there isn't legitimate demand for a larger workforce apart from exploitation, they will not come.
Please consider spending as much time talking about employers deliberately violating the law as you do immigrants who sneak across the border. Please consider spending as much time talking about the economic contributions of immigrants to the American middle class as you do talking about fraudulent documents. If you engaged in a conversation about what a meaningful immigration policy could look like, you would use your enormous microphone to a constructive end.
We are as frustrated as you are by the limitations in the existing conversation about immigration. The way to address those limitations, however, is not to appeal to the easy press angle. It is to lead by facilitating a meaningful conversation about what kind of immigration reform would truly be in the best interest of the current and aspiring middle class.
J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times The new album by the Dixie Chicks (from left, Emily Robison, Natalie Maines and Martie Maguire) is being ignored by country radio.
At the Academy of Country Music awards on Tuesday night, the host, Reba McEntire, made an unfunny joke. "If the Dixie Chicks can sing with their foot in their mouths, surely I can host this sucker," she said. The setup was pretty awkward. And when you stopped to think about it, the punch line really wasn't one. But none of that mattered. The line earned one of the night's most enthusiastic ovations.
It has been more than three years since Natalie Maines, the Dixie Chicks' lead singer, told a London audience, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas." The comment, delivered less than two weeks before the invasion of Iraq, sparked a feud with Toby Keith and, it seemed, the entire country-music establishment.
Mr. Keith has since moved on, but country fans clearly haven't. As the Dixie Chicks promote their new album, "Taking the Long Way" (Open Wide/Columbia), they are clearly country-music pariahs. Country radio is snubbing the album. And you know you've got an image problem when even Ms. McEntire is piling on.
It's not hard to sympathize with Ms. Maines and her two band mates, Martie Maguire and Emily Robison. They say they have had to contend with violent threats, and former fans call them bimbos and worse. (For female stars being outspoken carries particular risks.) Against this backdrop the three are presenting themselves as free-speech heroes, pilloried for expressing their political beliefs.
But this isn't really a fight about President Bush or freedom of speech. This is a fight about the identity of country music. There's a contract that binds country singers to their fans, and the Dixie Chicks have broken it.
The Dixie Chicks were once considered too country for country radio. They didn't take off until Ms. Maguire and Ms. Robison, who are sisters, replaced their twangy old singer with Ms. Maines, who has always seemed like a pop star. Two brilliant albums — "Wide Open Spaces," from 1998, and "Fly," from 1999 — made them the era's top-selling country act. When their brash (and sometimes mischievous) songs crossed over to pop radio, many country fans felt proud to see a group of their own doing so well.
Country fans are loyal, but they're not low-maintenance. By the time Ms. Maines made her statement in 2003, many were already questioning the trio's commitment: would they leave their old supporters behind?
For mistrustful listeners in search of an answer, Ms. Maines's comments provided one. Forget about President Bush: she had used the words "ashamed" and "Texas" in the same sentence, and she had done it on foreign soil. She meant to insult the president, but some former fans thought they heard her insulting Texans, and therefore Southerners, and therefore nonmetropolitan listeners everywhere.
This interpretation may seem specious. And yet Ms. Maines and her band mates seem to be going out of their way to prove their detractors right. Instead of fighting for their old fans, the Dixie Chicks seem to be dismissing them.
On "60 Minutes" Ms. Maguire told Steve Kroft that their concerts weren't typical country concerts. "When I looked out in the audience, I didn't see rednecks," she said. (Did her lip curl slightly as she pronounced the r-word?) "I saw a more progressive crowd."
And in a Time magazine cover story she said the group would rather have "a smaller following of really cool people who get it," as opposed to "people that have us in their five-disc changer with Reba McEntire and Toby Keith." (It would seem Ms. McEntire got her revenge.) Perhaps there's a difference between this attitude and simple snobbery, but you can't blame country fans if they don't much feel like splitting hairs
Two words: k.d. lang
She was once a big country star and tossed it away for being openly gay and playing music which appealed to alternative audiences. The country music world is small and limited. Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson transcended it, but few others. Most, like lang, have to make an open break and walk away.
The Dixie Chicks, after being attacked so harshly in 2003, simply said fuck it, fuck Toby Keith and the rest of these assholes. We have more fans than this, we can reach a wider audience than this and that's where we're going. They aren't going to cut their hair and sing about longing for women, but they're going to pop music and to change their career.
They don't need country radio any more. By the time Country Radio realizes it, the Dixie Chicks won't be in country any longer.
LIBERTYVILLE, Ill. - High school students are going to be held accountable for what they post on blogs and on social-networking Web sites such as MySpace.com.
The board of Community High School District 128 voted unanimously on Monday to require that all students participating in extracurricular activities sign a pledge agreeing that evidence of "illegal or inappropriate" behavior posted on the Internet could be grounds for disciplinary action.
The rule will take effect at the start of the next school year, officials said.
District officials won't regularly search students' sites, but will monitor them if they get a worrisome tip from another student, a parent or a community member.
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Associate Superintendent Prentiss Lea rebuffed that criticism.
"The concept that searching a blog site is an invasion of privacy is almost an oxymoron," he said. "It is called the World Wide Web." ..................
When the ACLU has Ms.Lea in a deposition,and she will wind up in one, she can then have it explained to her that private conduct off school grounds is not subject to school discipline and students cannot sign away their rights to free speech and free expression as a condition for extracurricular activity. Drug tests were permitted on safety grounds.
The Student Press Law Center has a collection of cases where the school district tries to punish students for off campus expression.The average judgement is in the mid-five figures. Some judgements have been higher,when the kids have been denied the right to attent graduation or other punishment.
In one case, a student had a negative recommendation sent to colleges because of his online postings. He won a significant judgement against the school as well as an apology.
The problem is that the school is not in the position to punish people for "inapprorpiate" comments on an off school property owned by the student. They are in the position to be sued and pay them a five figure judgment, however,pledge or no pledge.
Invasion of privacy is not the issue, free speech is.
By Sarah Wildman, Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor Wed May 24, 4:00 AM ET
VIENNA - The night air in Vienna has finally turned warm, filling the city's trams with visitors. On the Ringstrasse, tourists take in the city, pointing out the City Hall and the parliament.
"Did you see that one girl - so young! And wearing a veil," a woman clucks in lightly accented English, staring out the window of tram D. "They will form a separate culture."
The sentiment isn't isolated. Earlier this month, Austria's Interior Minister Liese Prokop announced that 45 percent of Muslim immigrants were "unintegratable," and suggested that those people should "choose another country."
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In the years following the World War II, a chagrined US and Europe vowed to follow the Geneva Conventions and create safe havens for refugees. Yet such lofty ideals were hard to uphold after massive influxes of workers in the 1960s and early 1970s were halted during an economic downturn .................... Those immigrant populations - often Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East - swelled with family reunification, yet often remained economically and socially distinct from the societies that had adopted. The image of the immigrant began to change, and distinctions between those who came for work and those who came for safety began to blur.
Now, says Jean-Pierre Cassarino, a researcher at the European-Mediterranean Consortium for Applied Research on International Migration in Florence, Italy, "asylum seekers are viewed as potential cheaters."
................................ Collier points to the success in France - also this past week - of a strict new immigration law proposed by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. Mr. Sarkozy's proposal would institutionalize "selective" immigration, giving an advantage to privileged immigrants of better economic and education status who are more "integratable."
It would also change the rights of family reunification for workers already in the country; speed up the expulsion of undocumented immigrants who are discovered or whose applications for asylum are rejected; lengthen the amount of time it takes to apply for permanent residency status for married couples; and toughen visa requirements. Most controversial, Sarkozy announced deportations for undocumented immigrant school children.
"We speak of the need to fight immigration but we don't have a clear position on whether we need immigrants," says Mr. De Bruycker, noting the precipitous dip in population growth in European Union countries in the last half century. He adds that a series of recent incidents have affected the image of immigrants in the European mind. The murder of a Jewish man - Ilan Halimi - on the outskirts of Paris earlier this spring, for example, by a band of immigrant youths. Or the murder of a Malian woman and a Flemish child in Antwerp last week by the son of a founder of Belgium's most far-right party.
"In Europe, we are still unable to accept that we are a continent of immigration," says De Bruycker.
Within five years, these policies will be failures. Well, Sarkozy's Vichy-style deportation of children is likely to go before the European Court. But Europeans forget they have immigrants to do the jobs they don't want to do.
They isolated these people, then did little to intergrate them into the wider society, and then say "you don't fit in". You can't have it both ways. They want people to fit in, they have to make them fit in.
The US has emerged victorious in a blind tasting by experts in London and California pitting US and French wine against each other.
The contest recreated a tasting 30 years ago in which France was defeated after French experts decided wines from California were better that year.
The result was seen as a blow to French national pride and shocked the country's wine industry.
In recent years, new world wines have overtaken global sales of French wine.
The tasting took place at two locations.
One tasting was in London at the Berry Brothers and Rudd wine shop in St James's Street - one of the UK's oldest wine and spirits merchants.
The US tasting was held at Copia, the US centre for wine, food and the arts, in the Napa Valley, California, a region famous for its wine production.
Nine judges there sampled ten unlabelled glasses of decades-old wines.
The combined scores from both panels gave victory to wines from California's Napa Valley. A 1971 Ridge Monte Bello Cabernet from Napa received the highest praise.
"I'm very impressed," said Christian Vanneque, a French judge who was at the original tasting in 1976.
"I don't know if I will be able to go back to France," he added. "After a second time, they will kill me."
THE IMMIGRANT-rights movement, in addition to raising anxiety among blacks, has also renewed hopes for a black-Latino alliance. This is a lovely idea. It is also doomed to fail.
The mission of the moment — the subject of panels and forums flowering all over town — is how to bring together two ethnic groups that, after all, share so much: neighborhoods, public schools, economic struggles, experiences of racial bias. Coalitionists argue that black-brown unity is not blind idealism but visible reality. We don't have to create it so much as point it out. Once we all recognize how much we have in common, the theory goes, we'll be on more equal footing and better able to augment each other's political strengths. There will be a formidable front of people of color better able to effect changes that benefit us all.
The problem with this ideal is not just that it is simplistic. It also overlooks the same critical gray areas ignored by people such as homeless activist Ted Hayes, who persists in his campaign to get blacks to join the Minuteman Project, which monitors the U.S.-Mexican border. In the matter of black-brown alliances, the devil — and deliverance — has always been in the details.
The unity is seductive on the surface, but how deep does it go? Blacks and Latinos have different experiences and ideas — not only about what America is but about what it means. And these differences have been suppressed, not examined or celebrated, by the cult of multiculturalism that dominates race relations and fuels the renewed call for black-brown unity.
It gets even more complicated. Though blacks and Latinos live peaceably side by side in South L.A. and elsewhere, for example, blacks are alarmed by the steady erosion of the last of the city's black neighborhoods. Latino immigrants are not intentionally pushing us out; they are simply living where it's feasible. And many of us have left our neighborhoods voluntarily, fleeing the urban rat race for the (supposedly) greener pastures of the outlying 'burbs or even the "new" old South. Still, it feels as if we are being pushed out, and we react — not well, for the most part. But there you have it.
This is vastly different than how New Yorkers see black and brown issues. Most minority neighborhoods are a mix of black and latino to some percentage, so interests align on many issues. This kind of seperation doesn't exists for the most part. When 50 percent of Latinos voted for Bloomberg in 2001, 30 percent of blacks joined them. They didn't split like blacks did in LA with Hahn vs. Villagrosa.
But then in New York, most latinos are Puerto Rican and often emulate black culture to some degree. While there are differences, there are often grounds for working together on a major number of political and social issues.
They also share the same jobs and neighborhoods, and there are no real conflicts like the one in LA. Ted Hayes would be laughed at here, as Charlie Barron and Al Sharpton humiliated him.
Ok, so the House Judiciary is going to mark up Sensenbrenner's great net neutrality bill tomorrow. Many of the Democrats have been pressured by the Communications Worker's of America to vote down the net neutrality provisions. The CWA came out publicly against net neutrality just now because the telecom companies have convinced them that this is vital to their industry. The CWA has made a grievous error here, with SEIU taking the other side. I just learned that these are the members to contact on the Sensenbrenner bill. Here's what to say. Urge them to support the bipartisan Sensenbrenner-Conyers Net Neutrality bill (HR 5417) in the Judiciary Committee on Thursday -- and to support it without amendment. Saying without amendment is key.
Ok, time to remind these folks. all good liberals, that if the telcos get their way, they will be condemning millions of the poor to second-class status. Berman, Weiner, Wexler, are no blue dog Dems, they're liberals and this is an anti-democratic stand.
The Telcos want to establish a toll-road on the internet because they feel other companies are profiting on their lines. They want to be able to control what comes in the home, and no matter how benignly they make it sound, they will price internet access out of the reach of homes, schools and small businesses by placing a tariff on downloads, video and other services, like blogging.
The CWA is betraying the public at the behest of their employers because they do not understand the issues here. They have been lied to, and have wrongly taken the side of the telcos. The fact is that this is a money grab by the telcos, who are so desperate, that they have attacked internet pioneers like Vint Cerf andTim Berners-Lee.Then, they run around the Hill, saying Move On is being supported by Google, an outright lie, Move On is a membership-funded organization which does not accept corporate contributuions.
The fact is that the telcos want to control and price the internet out of the range of people who need it most, the children of the working poor, the people these Congressmembers represent. It is they who stand to gain the most from open access to the Internet and the most to losewhen it is restricted.
Opponents of Internet freedom seem shocked that the Google, MoveOn, the Christian Coalition, and 700 other diverse organizations are fighting on the same side to preserve the Internet that has revolutionized democratic participation, economic innovation, and free speech.
Telecom companies and their multi-million dollar lobbyists are so befuddled that their plan to put tollbooths on the Internet is losing support that they've taken to spreading absurd rumors.
Internet freedom opponents told one right-wing tabloid that "Google has become the single largest private corporate underwriter of MoveOn." That's news to us since MoveOn has never received a cent from Google - or any other big business. We're funded by the small dollar contributions of 3.3 million members.
Equally absurd, "sources" told the tabloid that "Some of that money has gone to an online petition drive and a letter-writing campaign." That may be AT&T's fantasy world - but right now, online activities that allow regular citizens to be participants in their democracy cost advocacy groups almost nothing. And that's a good thing.
Rounding out a trifecta of errors, the tabloid says MoveOn is funneling Google "Net Neutrality money" into a Senate race in Pennsylvania. That rumor isn't just paranoid - it doesn't even point at the right organization. MoveOn.org Civic Action, which is pushing Net Neutrality, is a separate organization from MoveOn.org Political Action, which does more political work
Unfortunately, these aren't the most egregious rumors going around.
Internet freedom opponents also try to fool Congress and the public with rumors that Net Neutrality means "regulating the Internet." They know full well that Net Neutrality has been in place since the Internet began, but the FCC recently put it on the path to elimination unless Congress steps in and pro-actively keeps the rules the same.
As Craig Fields of the Gun Owners says, when the left and right agree on an issue like Internet freedom, "it's been my experience that what Congress is getting ready to do is basically un-American." On the proposal to destroy Net Neutrality, most Americans would probably agree.
Why would Google need to fund Move On? They could simply use their vast public forum to denounce this and then buy all the lobbyists they need.
Second, Bob Casey doesn't need our help in raising money, he's doing OK.
Also, why blame Google, Microsoft is also opposed to this, as are the banks. Google is not funding any anti-telco campaign.
In a clever bit of genius, the Telcos dropped money on the same sites opposing them. AT&T has funded my anti-telco campaign. Anyone see any Google ads here? No?
It's like Soros, the right sees his money everywhere and we don't get it.
Seekers, a Christian group, has a presence at about 30 high schools in the city. At Stuyvesant High School, some Seekers hold a prayer during Jesus Day.
On a recent sunny afternoon at Stuyvesant High School, the track team warmed up in the lobby. On the sixth floor, the school newspaper staff assembled to listen to a speaker. Outside, a cluster of students gathered to pray.
The students were members of Seekers, the elite school's Christian club. Like Joshua marching around Jericho before the walls came tumbling down, they were walking around their building and praying in preparation for an event called Jesus Day. .....................
But evangelism in a public high school, especially in New York City, can be complicated. In a school like Stuyvesant, full of people with different beliefs and some with none at all, belonging to an evangelical group like Seekers can make members the objects of scorn from classmates and even teachers.
"There are a lot of people who respect that you're religious and you're involved in Seekers," Miss Chan said. "And there are also a lot of those who just kind of see you as someone who's a religious fanatic, that we don't care about science, that we're ignorant."
School administrators must also wrestle with difficult questions about where the right to religious expression ends and the separation of church and state begins. Some school officials have discouraged their Seekers clubs over the years from having Jesus Day, while others have imposed strict limitations on advertising for the event, including prohibiting groups from using the name "Jesus" in any literature.
.....................
At Stuyvesant, Stanley Teitel, the school's principal, has given the group wider latitude, saying he trusts other students at the school to be able to make up their own minds about Jesus Day. The school also has Jewish and Muslim clubs. The members of Seekers were free to post fliers for Jesus Day around the school and hold their event in the cafeteria after school. .......................
As a result, about a hundred students gathered last Tuesday in the Stuyvesant cafeteria for Jesus Day 2006. A colorful poster explaining "How do U get saved" covered one window. A poster in the middle of the cafeteria was decorated with pink hearts containing prayer requests. "Get into Yale. Get love," one read. "Stepmom, stepdad get saved," another read.
A book table offered Bibles and tracts. "The Atheist Test," was the title of one; another explained evolution, "The Evidence: For and Against."
Stuyvesant's is one of the largest and most active Seekers clubs in the city. During the school year, about 30 students meet every Thursday after school in a classroom, where they worship and study the Bible together, or just talk. At its essence, the group provides students, Christian or not, a spiritual and social refuge in the midst of what can be a difficult time, high school, members say.
Wing Wong, 17, a senior, who described himself as still searching spiritually, joined Seekers about two months ago after enlisting in the Marine Corps. He did it, he said, because he was looking for people who would genuinely care for him. "I wanted to look for a new group of friends who would always be there," he said.
The program last week got off to a shaky start. The group had scheduled several performances and "testimonies" by Mr. Seok and Miss Chan on what Jesus Christ had done in their lives. But the acoustics in the cafeteria made it difficult to hear. Many of the students appeared to be there just for the free food, goofing off, while others tried to hush them. Many started trickling out after the event began. ...................
The event drew to a close with a final musical number. But by then there were mostly only Seekers members remaining. Gone were the unbelieving friends many had invited. Gone were those on the fringes of the group who had come. The people left were family. They danced and sang together.
Jen
Note that in a school noted for its academic excellence, students are allowed to use faith-based groups to preach against evolution. Hint: We have the fossils, asshole, we win. I think ALL religious groups that activley prostletyze should be banned from the school system, period. You want to pray, flog yourself, whatever, do it in private.
Too bad Jen grew up in Rockland County, because if she had grown up in the city, she'd know how weird this is.
Why?
Well, to start, a few months ago, New York magazine ran a large piece on bisexuals at Stuy. Then of course, the article forgot to mention that Stuy has a large Jewish population in it's student's body. Being the city's second best high school, it is a highly desirable place to send your kids. I think both of Chuck Schumer's daughters, as well as Tim Robbins, Jerry O'Connell and the Beastie Boys are among the schools more famous alums.
The idea of having religious services there is amusing. The idea of it not pissing off people is more amusing.
The "non-believers" were more than likely.....Jews.
So what the article skips over was that these folks were trying to convert people. Given who goes to Stuy, Asian Christians and Jews being a sizeable proportion of the student body. They aren't holding Jesus Day for themselves. The reporter missed the question he should have asked, which is "are you converting people".
Oh, and that kid who joined the Marines has issues. Real issues. No school in New York could be less welcoming to the military as a career than Stuy. The school is geared for one thing, sending your ass to college. They will find a school you can afford and get into. Marines private is an option they discourage.
Armando started a nice little discussion of race here on Daily Kos, and I've been really interested to hear some of the personal perspectives represented. As a South Asian-American whose major area of research interest is racial disparities in health, I've been following these discussions on identity and racism with great interest. Ironically, I had a fairly shitty experience tonight, but I'm thinking late night blogging will be healthier than simply stewing. And hey, it happens to be germane right now.
One running feature of the diaries on race is this contingent of commenters who insist that we discuss inter-minority prejudice before any consideration of the larger society. The thinking seems to be that if we establish that minorities can be racist, the whole concept of "white privilege" suffers a fatal blow, and we can go back to talking about important things like who Hillary Clinton will pick as her Undersecretary of Agriculture. These posters don't seem to realize that, while racism between minorities is real and harmful, it's racism by white people that really counts. This is the racism that's actually enforced by the larger society-- the sentiment that can actually carry seriously negative consequences for you. But people don't see that. So allow me to provide an example.
This evening, my girlfriend and I enlisted two friends to help her move into a new place on the city's far north side. The neighborhood she's moving into was historically very diverse, but has lately become something of a mecca for wealthy white gentrifiers attracted by the relatively low housing prices. My girlfriend and one of the friends involved are of Irish descent. My other friend is Mexican-American. We're moving using an old pickup truck loaned to her by her family, that happens to have a ton of Irish symbols and bumper-stickers on it.
So we've just begun to unload the truck when a white man in a luxury sedan comes into the alley. He immediately pulls up alongside my Mexican friend and I and begins accusing us of waking him up last night, making too much noise, yelling, etc... Needless to say, this isn't true. As we protest, he starts making up things about how he'd seen us, and "our" truck. Consider the racial frames in play here. Clearly the vehicle covered with pro-Irish paraphernalia couldn't belong to the pale-skinned redheads standing next to us. The people he "knew" were making noise and being "uncivilized" were the two minorities in the situation. So I'm rolling my eyes and trying to placate this idiot, but my friend is more willing to express his annoyance and says, "Sir, I don't like your tone." To which the man responds, "Ok, I'm calling the cops."
And there it is, the moment that's been played out millions of times in the history of this country. The few seconds in which a misunderstanding turns into something bigger, with potentially huge consequences for the people involved. Granted, in this case the worst that could happen was probably just annoyance for us, but think about this in a historical perspective. An Indian brave mouths off to a white soldier. A young black man makes a sarcastic comment around a white cop. A Mexican kid in a border state says something in Spanish in the wrong tone around an Anglo. It's a few seconds in which a frustrated white person stops trying to interact with individuals and lashes out against a race just because he can. How dare we, these mud people sitting in an alley, dare to question his authority? The police will know what to do with us. And, frankly, given the class and race of the accuser vs. the accused, it's likely that he would have gotten a result he liked -- a fine, poor treatment, etc. Like I said, something small, but a victory nonetheless.
And yes, this is just majority mob behavior. It's happened in every society. It's what makes Hindu mobs kill Muslims, or made Serbs attack Kosovars. Any time you have an ethnically diverse population there's a potential for the majority to start claiming privilege and stop treating minorities as human beings. But in this case, in this country, the majority is white.
Luckily, cooler heads (meaning me) prevailed in this situation. I talked to the guy and got him to leave us alone, leaving him to roll his eyes and drive off to his oversized reserved parking space. But being able to talk the idiot down doesn't mean you don't feel that stab of anger. It doesn't mean you're automatically able to get over the fact that the man just reduced you to nothing but the few micrometers of skin cells covering your body. And after you feel that, it's hard not to react with some racial bias of your own. I for one will feel a lot less secure around the new wealthy white population of that neighborhood from now on.
I've been thinking about this stuff a lot lately, so it's curious that such a crystallizing moment occurred. For South Asians (and Arabs) in this country, the reality of white privilege is something that's gone from hidden to open over the last few years. Every few months you hear about a person accused of terrorism or openly insulted because of some totally innocent cultural norm. He wears a turban, she wears a hijab, they're talking in Arabic, they're reading a "scary" book. I myself have been accused of seriously terrible things, solely as a function of purely physical or cultural things. I'm talking in a non-English language. I didn't shave b/c it's a Saturday and I don't have to. I'm reading a book about the Middle East. When someone's accusing you in a situation like that, it's hard to communicate just how much terror there is beneath it. There is virtually nothing I could do to my accuser, but in an era where American citizens are held indefinitely without charges, where having brown skin means you're not a "real American" and the Constitution doesn't apply, where people have been jailed and tortured just for looking like I do, there's a whole lot he could do to me.
Once again, the idiot in the alley today could muster a nuisance at best. But the underlying feeling-- that he holds all the cards and you hold none, simply because of who you are-- is a symptom of that larger issue. So for those who are curious, that's what white privilege feels like.
The "net neutrality" debate has reached a fever pitch as Congress mulls legislation that would allow Internet service providers to charge Web sites for preferred delivery of digital content.
................... The Wall Street Journal Online invited Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist and a net neutrality proponent, and former White House spokesman Mike McCurry, who heads a phone industry group, to debate the issue. Their exchange, carried out by email, is below. [Mike McCurry]
Mr. McCurry begins: Our Hands Off the Internet coalition believes that the Internet of the future cannot carry the load we will put on it unless we substantially upgrade network facilities and capacity. Before too long, users are going to be streaming data-rich videos into the home, using the Web for online games, practicing telemedicine online, conducting voice conversations via [Internet telephony], you name it. ........................ The current Internet is creaky and will suffer congestion if we don't invest in improvements. The network operators prepared to make those investments need to get a return and one way is to charge a premium for managing huge bandwidth content differently. Face it, most users trying to get video want packets of video data to assemble differently than regular email content.
So we say, let the current rules govern. Let's not impose a new and cumbersome set of regulations on the Internet that might thwart the necessary investments. We have no clear evidence that content is being discriminated against and we have no real problem with quality of service that cannot be addressed under current law. We think the advocates of regulated net neutrality have not pointed to a problem that needs a solution. [Craig Newmark]
Mr. Newmark responds: Mike says "let the current rules govern" and that's what we're trying to do, trying to stop the big guys from changing the rules via the Federal Communications Commission. We're trying to preserve the level playing field. It's just fairness. Americans want to play fair, work hard and get ahead. That's what net neutrality is about.
Now, I've got to tell you where I'm coming from. My background is computer sciences and software engineering, and I still know a thing or two about network capacity, remembered from my lost youth. However, I do full time customer service, a very irregular 14x7 schedule, that's my gig. Over the years I've dealt with some thousands of people of all political persuasions, from the tens of millions of Americans who comprise our community.
Also, I've worked with a lot of people at mid and low levels at the big telecoms, handling matters of network capacity, and abuse, like scams or harassment. I also work with some of their engineers, talking about the way big telecoms operate and issues like network capacity. It turns out that they have lots of unused capacity for bandwidth, but the big telecoms have been very remiss in implementing the newer Internet protocols (IPv6) required for growth, due to bureaucratic inertia.
The telecom workers remind me that their companies are full of workers who really want to do the right thing. They're really good people who really want to serve, and they also want a level playing field. People at telecoms also remind me that they're aware that they're profiting from public property, like the airwaves and public rights of way... but that their bosses have forgotten that.
So, to preserve the level playing field, we need to prevent the powerful from paying people for special privileges. We're NOT talking about regulation, we're talking about preserving democracy.
Given my perspective, maybe the pivotal issue is trust? Given your own personal experience, say, with your phone company, what do you think? I can tell you what the telecom workers admit. You can also check out Walt Mossberg at The Wall Street Journal regarding this [and] cellphones. [Mike McCurry]
Mr. McCurry: Look, the Internet is not a free public good. We all pay something to make it work right and that's the issue here. We pay federal taxes for interstate freeways but we charge 18-wheel semi-trailers higher taxes because they put a heavy burden on the road.
The Internet needs investment. That investment will be spread across the market and the big companies that provide content will help pay the cost and work that cost into their business models. Or the consumer will get stuck with the entire bill. And my mom who uses the Internet to email and read news will have to subsidize the guy down the street who wants to stream HDTV movies 10 times a day.
Having the FCC regulate net neutrality (and what exactly is the definition of "net neutrality" anyhow?) will dampen investor interest in building bigger, faster, smarter pipes -- Wall Street has already made that clear. The best protection for the "little guy" is a robust market with lots of competition that will force those with "power" to make the best deal available to the consumer. [Craig Newmark]
Mr. Newmark: I agree, the Net ain't free. However, Google and YouTube and iTunes are already paying their fair share, a lot of cash. Their owners and consumers use the Internet, based on an underlying telecom structure based on public resources that we all own.
Do you believe Yahoo should be allowed to outbid Google to slow down Google on people's computers? That's the kind of thing that the big guys are proposing.
For that matter, the hard part of the infrastructure is already done: "The backbone was terribly overbuilt," says Fiber Optic Association President Jim Hayes [according to a September 2004 article published on StreamingMedia.com.] "Ninety-three percent of all the fiber that's been installed is still unused."
Mike, can I suggest some straight talk from your clients?
............................
Ok, the problem is that Newmark is a perverted sex vendor, allowing people to hook up for perverted sex and McCurry represents the largest porn vendors in America.
Now, with that out of the way, McCurry doesn't understand the issue or who he's dealing with. His sneering at young adults set the tone and it wasn't a good one.
What he refuses to understand is that his paymasters are trying to hijack the internet and not enhance it. They want to set up toll roads online because they want the mystical pot of money to fall into their laps. They see Google and they see money that should be in their pocket, not Google. The fact that their plans only make sense if you want to destroy the internet and exclude millions from participating online.
If this bill passed, millions would be driven away from using the Internet.
Rep. William Jefferson, whose career is now threatened by an aggressive Justice Department inquiry, came to Washington, D.C., in 1991 oozing ambition, a 43-year-old Harvard-educated lawyer who had just knocked off one of the most prominent names in New Orleans to win Louisiana's 2nd district House seat.
Positioning himself as a leader for the post-Civil Rights era, the mild-mannered Congressman joined forces with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council and declared himself a resolute free trader, ..................
But it was likely a different losing campaign, waged long before word of the ethics probe spread last summer, that actually marked Jefferson's transformation from a rising political star to a Member with little influence in the House but enormous behind-the-scenes clout in his home state.
It was after the 2002 elections when Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the incoming House Minority Leader, was confronted with one of her first decisions: whom to appoint as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. ..........................
Jefferson waged an aggressive — and public — campaign, with support from the influential Congressional Black Caucus. The timing seemed right, since Pelosi had just restored Rep. Jane Harman's (Calif.) seniority, a move that deprived Rep. Sanford Bishop (Ga.), a CBC member, of his perch on the Intelligence Committee.
CBC members told Pelosi she could make things right by tapping Jefferson for the DCCC, but she ended up choosing another Californian, Rep. Robert Matsui, who had been reluctant to take the demanding post but with whom she shared a close friendship. .....................
"He was clearly very pissed off," a former senior Democratic aide said, adding that it's not unusual for Members who have been denied plum assignments to lash out in such a manner.
But Jefferson's fury wasn't temporary, and the DCCC affair turned he and Pelosi into enemies. It also meant that he was unlikely to be a contender for a leadership post ever again. Jefferson had won a reputation as a skilled and influential legislator — he had, for instance, been a key player in the Clinton administration's push for the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 — but after '02, insiders say, his focus seemed to shift away from Washington and back to his home state.
In Louisiana, Jefferson was at the peak of his game, the highest-ranking black elected official in the state and the gatekeeper of an empire of campaign donors and political muscle in the New Orleans area.
.........................
"After the DCCC Chairmanship issue," a Democratic source observed, "Jefferson focused more on his Louisiana politics. He became the guy you had to go through in order to get political things done in New Orleans."
That said, he did retain his Ways and Means assignment in Congress, not to mention more than a few allies in the CBC. Now, even as his backroom power in Louisiana fades, Jefferson may be counting on that CBC support to keep Democratic leaders from stripping him of his Ways and Means seat — at least until and unless he is indicted.
"I can't say for sure how CBC members would react" if Pelosi pre-emptively removed Jefferson from the committee, said a source close to the CBC. "But my gut tells me they wouldn't be quiet on that issue."
First, all these "post-Civil Rights" leaders never really lead anyone. As Harold Ford is about to find out in his losing Senate race.
Second, they found $90,000 in cash in his freezer. You can argue all you want about the Feebs raiding his Hill office, but they found $90,000 in cash in his freezer.
Did he forget that Harold Ford waged a similarly aggressive campaign to be minority leader and lost in spectacular fashion.
Imagine if he was DCCC chair and not just another hand-in-the-till Louisiana pol? What kind of disaster would that be?
I thought the guy was a loathsome scumbag after he comandeered a deuce and a half during Katrina and removed suitcases, keeping the truck there so long that another truck had to pull it out because it sunk in the lawn.
The thing is that the CBC can't afford another Adam Clayton Powell or to have this guy become a target for the desperate GOP spin machine.
The problem is that Jefferson thought he was going to walk in the room and because he had that Harvard Law degree, get to run things. He sucked up to the DLC, and thought he was gonna get a plum position. And instead of playing nice and keep in the running for the leadership, he got pissed and self-sabotaged himself.
Now the CBC can either be loyal or smart. Loyal means that talk radio will make what happened to the honest but excitable Cynthia McKinney look like a walk in the park. They will make him the subject of corruption talk and the Kool Kids Klub, no fan of black people, will join in, with the racist Imus up front.
Or they can get him in a room, tell him that $90K in a freezer and ignoring the FBI means in the Abramoff era that the best service he can perform is to resign his seat and work on his defense. If he's found innocent, he can run and win again.
Don't make Pelosi act. Don't make this into a fight, encourage him to walk away and leave corruption to the Republicans. Don't become the Willie Horton of 2006. Loyalty is fine, but he needs to go and defend himself.
Update:Jefferson has refused to give up his seat.
I was thinking about how he got in this mess,and it's because of a sense of entitlement.
Here's this guy who comes from Northern Louisiana and finds himself at Harvard Law. He must have had his ass kissed from the day he returned home. Bright Shining Hope should be his middle name. No one told him no. He was a man on the make
He gets to Congress and things don't work his way, so he sulks. He hates Nancy Pelosi for standing in his way and now he wants to play the victim. Karl Rove is facing indictment for lying and not cooperating with the FBI. Jefferson refused to cooperate with the FBI, yet he won't resign.
This drama will be short and sweet. This guy is low-hanging fruit for the right. They jumped onMcKinney for less. He needs to go. It may not be fair, but so what, neither is politics
Shaken by the Asian tsunami, Katrina, gas prices and a literally explosive Middle East, many Americans now see the environment and conservation as the scintillating, life-and-death subjects that Al Gore has always presented them as, rather than the domain of cartoonish sandal-wearing, tree-hugging, New Age-y, antibusiness wackos.
As John Heilemann notes in New York, the Gore boomlet is also driven by "the creeping sense of foreboding about the prospect of Hillary Clinton's march to her party's nomination." Hollywood's top environmental campaigner, Laurie David, a producer on the Gore movie, argued, "It's not time to experiment with trying to put in office the first female president or with somebody people feel is such a polarizing figure."
Some Democrats are secretly compiling data to prove that Hillary is unelectable to derail the notion that she's inevitable. Gore loyalists suggest that they could be co-front-runners — a couple of raccoons in a bag.
The two hall monitors have always bumped against each other, first competing to be Bill Clinton's co-president, and then over Democratic money in the 2000 election.
So we are left with the prospect of a race between these two Democrats (Al, a popularly elected president; Hillary, a co-ruler). Neither was president, but both think they have been. Al's a seeker and Hillary's a triangulator (or you might say she's inflating her tires to the right pressure). They have shared the problem of stiff, situational personae, when they seemed to wake up every morning trying to figure out who they should be, how they should appear or how they should position themselves. By fashioning their identities all the time, they condemned themselves to being seen merely as identity fashioners.
.................................
This week's New Yorker has a long piece on the Democratic Party(offline). But what was clear from the piece was that no one really wants Clinton to run. She is seen as the ultimate liberal. Who could kill chances to pick up seats in the Midwest and South.
Can anyone point to a large bastion of Hillary support? Most people on Kos want nothing to do with her, I'm unaware of any large blogger who is pro-Hillary. In fact, only the DC Dems and the media are pushing her campaign, everyone else ranges from moderate worry to absolute opposition.
I mean, Richard Cohen was right to ask what she stands for. And the "third way" people, the people we more accurately call Vichy Dems, have no clue if they think Hillary is going to have some electorial blitzkrieg. Her popularity comes from name recognition alone, and 2008 won't let her run that way.
Steve Forest/Insight-Visual for The New York Times
Vendors in New York City Greenmarkets, like Sprout Creek Farm cheese at Union Square, can sell only what they raise. Farmers' Markets Go Beyond Green
By JULIA MOSKIN Published: May 24, 2006
IN 2004, Nina Planck, who had just been dismissed as director of the New York City Greenmarkets, wrote in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times: "Perhaps it is time Greenmarket itself had some competition."
Next month, that meditation will materialize when Ms. Planck opens two outdoor food markets in Lower Manhattan. Every Saturday, these "hybrid" markets, like weekly markets in Europe, will offer more diverse products than a strictly defined farmers' market. With local makers of guacamole and sorbet selling alongside organic farmers, Ms. Planck is striking a symbolic blow at the farmers-only Greenmarket model.
"I think the farmers' market movement has failed consumers in not making it possible to buy everything they need for Saturday night dinner," said Ms. Planck, whose tenure at Greenmarket was short and tumultuous. "It's time to be more inclusive. It all helps local farms find a market."
Many in the alternative agriculture movement are surprised to hear that Ms. Planck, a vocal and frequent defender of the American family farm, will be running a market that could sell guacamole made from Costco avocados.
"It can be very confusing to the public when farmers' markets start looking more like supermarkets," said Randii MacNear, manager of the farmers' market in Davis, Calif., and an expert in farm marketing. "What's the message?" ......................................
"For a long time it seemed very simple," said Rena Mikulski, a school administrator in Brooklyn, who was shopping for greens at the Union Square Greenmarket last Wednesday. "Organic was good. Farmers' markets were good. Everything else was not good. Now I don't know how to choose anything. Is it local? Is it sustainable? Is it organic? Which is better? I don't know."
What has to be kept in mind is that the Greenmarket keeps prices fairly low and takes food stamps. Will this hybrid market do the same?
Ms. Vargas, 44, said that her doctors had been hounding her to cut back on her work or risk being confined to "bed rest," and that their admonitions influenced her decision to begin her maternity leave later this month. When she returns to work in the fall, she said, she will limit herself to her other job at ABC, as co-host of "20/20."
Ms. Vargas said she had ruled out returning to "World News" as a co-anchor following her maternity leave because of the stresses of raising two young children.
"I don't think it's fair to a new baby to have a new mom who's off in Iraq or Iran all the time," she said. "I certainly intend to be doing that in a few years. But right now it's not realistic for me." (In February Ms. Vargas was quoted as telling The Philadelphia Inquirer that she expected to return to Iraq soon after her baby was born.)
But in an interview yesterday, Mr. Westin said he had also conveyed to Ms. Vargas that he did not see her as matching up with Mr. Gibson as well as she had with Mr. Woodruff, a conversation that Ms. Vargas recalled similarly. While Mr. Woodruff had been expected to lead "World News" regularly from the road, with Ms. Vargas often in the studio, Mr. Gibson is not expected to travel nearly as much.
"The one thing I never wanted to do was recreate something that had been done before, a man and a woman sitting together at a desk," Mr. Westin said.
The fact was that there was no way in hell they were going to send her to Iraq after Woodruff was injured so severely. But you know, the old boy network is far from dead. They made Vargas read the announcement of her own demotion during tonight's newscast.
Maybe it's better to get it out yourself, but I felt truly bad for her. I doubt a male anchor would be forced to do same.
And despite all the kind words about Bob Woodruff keeping his job, well, it's a business, even if he almost gets killed for you.
Bush Administration policies in Iraq have largely been a failure. It has created a failed state in that country, which is in flames and seething with new religious and ethnic nationalist passions of a sort never before seen on this scale in modern Iraqi history. The severe instability in Iraq threatens the peace and security of the entire region, and could easily ignite a regional guerrilla war that might well affect petroleum exports from the Oil Gulf and hence the health of the world economy.
The relatively small number of US fighting troops that the US has in Iraq, some 60,000 to 70,000, cannot possibly hope to provide security to a country of 26 million under such conditions of ethnic and political civil war. The much smaller British presence in Basra appears not to have been effective in halting that city's spiral down into insecurity, with tribal and militia grudge fights and assassinations having become common.
The inauguration of a new Iraqi government was marred by the enormous amount of time it took to form it (5 months!), by open US imperial intervention in the choice of prime minister and in other negotiations, by the walk-out of over two dozen parliamentarians from both the Shiite (Virtue Party) and Sunni (National Dialogue Front and Iraqi Accord Front) parties, and by the failure of the new prime minister to name three key cabinet ministers central to the country's security-- Defense, Interior, and National Security. The Iraqi government is among the more corrupt in the world, working by bribes and a party spoils system.
The new parliament is virtually hung, and Prime Minister al-Maliki governs as a minority prime minister, being able to count on less than 115 MPs from his own party, in a parliament with 275 members. He is therefore hostage to the Kurds, who want to move Iraq in the direction of having a very weak central government, a degree of provincial autonomy unknown in any other country in the world, and who want to unilaterally annex a fourth province, oil-rich Kirkuk, to their regional confederacy, despite the violent opposition of Kirkuk's Turkmen and Arab populations to being Kurdicized.
The Bush administration reconstruction project in Iraq has largely failed. In part, it was foiled by sophisticated guerrilla sabotage, so that billions have had to be diverted from actual reconstruction to security. And nor has security been achieved. In part, it was foiled by a degree of corruption, cupidity, embezzlement, lawlessness and fraud that is unparalleled in US history since the Gilded Age. And in part is has been foiled by a US insistence on making most often unqualified US corporations the immediate recipient and major beneficiary of funds, so that Iraqi concerns get much less lucrative sub-contracts and relatively little of the money benefitted the Iraqi economy directly.
Military engagements between Sunni Arab guerrillas and US troops of some seriousness have been fought at Ramadi in the past week, though little noticed by the mainstream US press. Fallujah is dangerous again. Neighborhoods of the capital, Baghdad are blown up every day. A nighttime hot civil war produces some number of corpses daily, sometimes dozens, to the extent that morning corpse patrol has become a central duty of Iraqi police. A lot of us suspect that some units of the police themselves are involved in these kidnappings and killings, so that often they know just where to look for the corpses.
The main US military tactic still appears to be search and destroy, a way of proceeding guaranteed to extend the scope and popularity of the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement. The guerrillas appear more well-organized, determined, and effective than ever, and no lasting and effective progress appears to have been made in counter-insurgency anywhere in the Sunni Arab heartland. The human toll of the war has been deeply depressing. The number of Iraqi dead in the war and its aftermath (killed in political violence by any side) cannot be estimated, but certainly is over 100,000 and could easily be more. The 30,000 figure often cited comes from counts of reports of deaths in Western wire services, which are demonstrably a fraction of the true total. None of the nearly 1,000 Iraqis assassinated in Basra during the past month, possibly with police involvement, appears in such statistics.
The US has lost over 2400 troops dead, and the number of wounded in action is over 17,000, some significant proportion of them seriously wounded, with long-term disabilities. Some Iraq War vets are suffering mental problems and were discharged because of them under circumstances that make it difficult for them to get VA care. Some Iraq War vets are showing up homeless in US cities already. Meanwhile, Halliburton is back from the brink of bankruptcy. US troops have fought bravely in unfamiliar terrain, and have often done unheralded community developoment work. Their enemies have included ex-Baathist serial murderers and Salafi Jihadi terrorists. Their sacrifices for the sake of removing Saddam and his regime, and attempting to stabilize Iraq, must be honored. But some of their enemies have been honorable resistance fighters, as recognized by the present Iraqi government itself, and US troops have had the profound misfortune of being ordered into an illegal war and then becoming caught up in a series of guerrilla wars for local autonomy, of a sort that no imperial power has been able to win since about 1960.
There is no evidence of the new Iraqi army and security forces proving themselves effective against the guerrillas. The security forces with the possible exception of the new army are heavily infiltrated by partisan militias. A recent news article quoted an approving US officer as saying that Iraqi troops in Baqubah fought a guerrilla attack right down to the point where the troops ran out of ammunition. These were almost certainly Shiite and/or Kurdish troops fighting Sunni guerrillas, so this was actually another battle in the Civil War. No wonder they fought to the bitter end. But what I take away from this anecdote is that the guerrillas have more ammunition than do the poor s.o.b.'s in the Iraqi army, and I don't see that as a good sign. A unified military is almost impossible to achieve in conditions of civil war, in any case. Lebanon had an army when the civil war broke out there in the mid-1970s, but President Elias Sarkis was unable to commit it, for fear it would split along ethnic lines. The same problems now exist in Iraq, and are unlikely to be resolved for some years, if ever.
Iraq cannot be stabilized without the active help of Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, the neighboring countries. But the Bush administration has actively attempted to alienate Iran and Syria, threatening them with regime change or military attack, and guaranteeing that they would be hostile to US success and continued presence in Iraq. The US has also alienated Turkey by allowing the violent leftist Kurdish guerrilla movement, the PKK, to base itself in northern Iraq and to attack Turkey and Iran from that safe haven. The US has alienated Saudi Arabia in a whole host of ways, from insinuations that the Wahhabi form of Islam is in an unqualified way a source of terrorism, to US insensitivity to Saudi fears of the rise of a Shiite Crescent.
Bush administration ineptitude, ignorance, and often stupidity is matched by some regional players. Saudi Foreign Minister Saud El Faisal came to the US in fall of 2005 and castigated the US for allowing Iraq to fall into the hands of the Iranians (i.e. pro-Iranian Iraqi Shiites), provoking a severe diplomatic tiff between Baghdad and Riyadh. Instead of being helpful to a fellow Arab country, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt alienated the Shiite south of Iraq by saying that Arab Shiites are more loyal to Iran than to their own countries. After these incidents, which enraged the Iraqi Shiites, the prospect for a fruitful role in Iraq for the Arab League have receded substantially, since Shiite Iraqis cannot see it as an honest broker.
The Bush Administration trumpets that a defeat of "al-Qaeda" in Iraq would be decisive for defeating terrorism in the world at large. But Bush and his policies led to there being anything like an effective Islamic radical terrorism in Iraq in the first place. The tiny Ansar al-Islam group that operated in the north before 2003 had been hunted by the Baath security and only survived because of the US no-fly zone that prevented Iraqi armor from being deployed against it. Bush has not shown any particular ability to put this genie, which he unleashed, back in the bottle. His war in Iraq has been an enormous boon to the international Salafi Jihadi movement, encouraging angry youths from all over the world to join it to fight to the US. Bush by his aggressive and inept policies is creating the phenomenon he says he is fighting, and so can never defeat it.
The prospect lies before us of years, perhaps decades of instability in the Gulf and eastern reaches of the Middle East. There is a danger of it doubling and tripling our gasoline prices. There is a danger of it forming a matrix and a school for anti-US terrorism for years to come. Are people in Fallujah, Tal Afar and Ramadi really ever going to forgive us? And there is no guarantee of the Shiites remaining US allies for very long, either. Many, of course, already have conceived a new hatred of America as a result of over-reaction of green National Guardsmen, who often have killed innocent civilians in the south, and as a result of iron fist policies when US troops were fighting the Mahdi Army.
The Bush administration has pushed us all out onto a tightrope in Iraq, 60 feet up and without a net.
The St. Louis-based Council of Conservative Citizens traces its roots directly to the racist, anti-integrationist White Citizens' Councils of the 1950s and 1960s. wanted poster for Abraham Lincoln
CCC's online "wanted" poster of Abraham Lincoln
Its current leader, attorney Gordon Lee Baum, was an organizer for the WCC and built the Council of Conservative Citizens in part from the old group's mailing lists. Like its predecessor, the CCC inflames fears and resentments, particularly among Southern whites, with regard to black-on-white crime, nonwhite immigration, attacks on the Confederate flag and other issues related to "traditional" Southern culture. Although the group claims not to be racist, its leaders traffic with other white supremacist groups and its publications, Web sites and meetings all promote the purportedly innate superiority of whites. Despite its record, the CCC has been successful in drawing southern politicians to its events: the 1998 revelation that then Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott had been a frequent speaker before the group drew substantial media attention. Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, Mississippi state senators and several state representatives have appeared in recent years.
Bigotry as Politics
Considerably more polished than traditional extremist groups, the Council of Conservative Citizens propounds its bigotry in the guise of hot-button conservative advocacy. Striking hard-right positions on such contentious issues as immigration, gun control and affirmative action, the organization has insinuated itself into the mainstream successfully enough to attract a number of prominent conservative politicians to its gatherings. However, an examination of the origins, membership and publications of the CCC suggests that it remains, despite its assertions to the contrary, squarely within Southern racist traditions. While not every CCC chapter may be equally extreme, all are founded on anti-minority bigotry.
.......................
Conclusion
By appealing to widespread resentments and successfully attracting prominent conservatives, the Council of Conservative Citizens has been able to recruit numbers of relatively moderate individuals into an organization that maintains strong connections with extremists. Its record demonstrates that CCC has not tried to break away from its racist antecedents. Instead, it has adopted not only its predecessor's racial attitudes but also its strategies, deriving from them the tools to advance a racist agenda from the grassroots to the senior levels of American government.
Now you would think an openly racist organization wouldn't have anything used by CNN or any other news organ.
CASEY WIAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This Mexican military incursion was fully authorized. A Mexican air force jet carrying President Vicente Fox was not just invited to Utah, but encouraged to visit by Governor Huntsman.
PRES. VICENTE FOX, MEXICO: We fully support the businessmen from Utah and Mexico.
WIAN: Last year, Huntsman traveled to Mexico, hoping to discuss business opportunities with President Fox, who is more interested in so-called immigration reform. Huntsman promised to promote a guest worker program and eventually help convince the Western Governors Association to support the idea. Now Fox is repaying Utah's governor and visiting a state with a growing reputation as an illegal alien sanctuary.
Last year, Utah approved a law granting driver's licenses to illegal aliens. They also received reduced in-state tuition rates at state colleges. And the governor wants to hire Mexican teachers to teach English to immigrants in Utah schools. Open borders advocates want even more.
TONY YAPIAS, PROYECTO LATINO DE UTAH: I hope we can strengthen those ties, we can strengthen the -- our cultural education and business relationships in Mexico.
WIAN: Utah's dominant religion, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, teaches that a lost tribe of Israelites are the ancestors of indigenous people in Latin America. Mormons have converted a million Mexicans to their faith, and many welcome them to Utah with no regard for legal status.
Utah's minutemen plan to protest Fox's presence in their state.
ALEX SEGURA, UTAH MINUTEMAN PROJECT: It seems the only thing he does is continue to push people towards America to help offset the costs of these people in his country. And he hasn't really come up with an economic plan in Mexico to help alleviate those very problems.
WIAN: It's estimated Utah has about 100,000 illegal aliens, and the number is growing rapidly. Utah is also a part of the territory some militant Latino activists refer to as Aztlan, the portion of the southwest United States they claim rightfully belongs to Mexico.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
WIAN: You could call this the Vicente Fox Aztlan tour, since the three states he'll visit, Utah, Washington, and California, are all part of some radical group's vision of the mythical indigenous homeland -- Lou.
What radical Mexicans? People chide Crazy Nancy for saying much more factually based things. I mean the tag line is um, problematic.
But it gets better.
LIONEL: Right, they're effete, they're feckless, they're impuissant. They are spineless, they don't know what to do. They realized that they had to do something. The Republicans are scared out of their mind. Their main leader, G.W., has absolutely abandoned them.
I don't know what the American people have to realize what this president is not about. First of all, he hit his own core with Dubai Ports World. Remember that one? Still trying to figure that one out. And this is a war about semantics. We're not about guest worker, we're not for amnesty. We're about -- it's a mess.
And the problem is you've got maybe 20 million, and let's face it, Lou, I know people talk about the Irish immigrants, but this is a Mexican thing, all right? And I have a very simple solution in New York. If you want to arrest an illegal alien, order a pizza. When they show up, arrest them, because they are all over here.
DOBBS: Mark, your thoughts?
MARK SIMONE, RADIO TALK SHOW HOST: Well, I mean, this is no way to debate. You can't disagree with anybody on this.
Jesus, what is Dobbs going to do next, stand on the border with a rifle? You could NEVER talk about Jews or blacks like that on CNN and keep your job. Here, you have Dobbs with some halfwits trading racially demeaning sterotypes like they're funny.
When is Jon Klein gonna step in and stop this shit. Dobbs has a right to have an editorial viewpoint, but does that include racist comments and the use of materials from a racist organization?
And Wian's report? What the fuck was that? If he's gonna claim Atzlan is real, he needs to talk to a proponent of the idea. Otherwise, it's on par with claiming black men have an organized plan to rape white women. A nasty bit of fiction.
When people say this isn't about race, someone on CNN opens their mouth and disproves this.
NEW YORK (AP) -- ABC appointed Charles Gibson as the new anchor of its struggling ''World News Tonight'' broadcast on Tuesday, replacing Elizabeth Vargas.
Vargas, who is pregnant and goes on leave later this summer, will return in the fall to co-anchor the ''20/20'' newsmagazine, ABC said.
ABC's announcement did not specify a role for Bob Woodruff, Vargas' co-anchor on the evening news until he was seriously wounded in a roadside bombing in Iraq on Jan. 29. Woodruff is still recovering from serious head injuries and broken bones.
In a news release, Woodruff called Gibson a mentor and friend, and said: ''I look forward to contributing to his broadcast as soon as I am able.''
Gibson starts on Monday. He will continue on ''Good Morning America'' for June, and then leave that broadcast to concentrate solely on the evening news.
ABC did not immediately name a replacement for Gibson on ''Good Morning America.''
ABC News President David Westin's announcement came less than a week after ''World News Tonight'' fell to last place in the evening news ratings for the first time since 2001, behind NBC and the resurgent CBS. CBS has hired NBC's Katie Couric to become its evening news anchor.
Westin had appointed Vargas and Woodruff in November to replace the late Peter Jennings in ABC News' lead anchor role. He had approached Gibson then about doing the job for a short period of time before the younger anchors took over, but Gibson balked at the deadline.
Hmmm, sounds like a palace coup to me.
Gibson churned up much money for ABC on GMA, much money, so much that they didn't want to give him the job he always craved. Koppel retired, leaving a mess behind at Nightline, with crappy stories and three weak anchors. Which will soon be dealt with.
Vargas wasn't bad, but she never seemed to really fit the job. The whole arrangement was a vote of noconfidence in her anyway. A youngish Latina woman as your main anchor? That was a risk to the suits from day one, then she got preganant again. And of course, Bob Woodruff got his brains blown in, so this was always a leaky ship.
But faced with the clear rejection of Vargas as an anchor by the audience, they had to do something.
And if Vargas, who had been doing hard news for a decade, since she didn't get the GMA job, is either too pretty or too insubstantial for news viewers, what is going to happen to Couric?
Morning TV has an odd balance, of smart, but non-threatening women delivering the news, and cooking tips. Couric looks like your office manager, not your husband's next wife. But the question is do you want to see a soccer mom deliver the news? Vargas's demotion, and it is a demotion, is not a good omen for CBS. . The minute the numbers went south, the minute they go back to one of the princes. Gibson could have taken the job he's wanted his entire career earlier, but why? Let the chosen ones fail, then they would have to come to him. If I was Chris Bury, I'd start to feel that way
Here's a 2000 article by Bill Bennett dug up by a Kos reader about Giuliani's wandering dick The humor here is massive. First, Bob Bennett was Clinton's lawyer. Second, gambaholic Bennett was rumored to have a special friend in LasVegas who had her own form of chastisement
As this article goes to print, it is as yet unclear whether Mayor Rudy Giuliani will withdraw from the New York Senate race. I believe he should—and not merely for health reasons. Given the events of the past weeks, it is the only honorable thing to do. I say this as a person who has admired Mr. Giuliani and considers his accomplishments as mayor of New York City to be among the most impressive governing achievements of modern times.
Yeah, watching the police murder innocent people,violating the first Amendment, Bush before he was Bush
It is worth briefly recapitulating here what has occurred. Just over two weeks ago, Mr. Giuliani all but conceded that he was having an affair with Judith Nathan, a woman he has been squiring about town and whom he calls his “very good friend.” Then, on May 10, Mr. Giuliani announced at a press conference that he was seeking a separation from his wife, Donna Hanover—without first informing her of his decision. Mr. Giuliani went out of his way to praise his mistress as a “very, very fine woman,” and said about his marriage with Ms. Hanover: “Over the course of some period of time in many ways, we’ve grown to live independent and separate lives.”
Well, not quite. He was on his second obvious affair with a woman while in City Hall. If they were living seperate lives, no one told his wife. She just found that out on TV like everyone else.
The mayor’s assertion was contradicted three hours later by his emotionally distraught wife, who said, “I had hoped that we could keep this marriage together. For several years, it was difficult to participate in Rudy’s public life because of his relationship with one staff member.” Ms. Hanover was referring to Cristyne Lategano-Nicholas, the mayor’s former communications director. The mayor and Ms. Lategano-Nicholas denied those allegations in the past, and continue to deny them now.
Yeah, but she did get that $250K job she still has as director of the city's tourist and visitor's bureau, one she was vastly unqualified for. But then, if Hanover hadn't caught him dick deep in Lategano on a father's day in City Hall, according to some widely circulated reports, she might have never had to been paid off
Even if Ms. Hanover’s account is not fully accurate, we know that Mr. Giuliani, the married father of two children, ages 14 and 10, is engaged in a very public, intimate relationship with another woman. This is troubling in itself. And if Ms. Hanover’s account is to be believed, we have a situation in which the mayor had an adulterous relationship with a staff member, lied about it, agreed to his wife’s efforts at reconciliation, only to leave her for yet another woman. This would be more serious still.
Public? Well, if you call going for a stroll on Mother's Day weekend with your new mistress along with a bunch of reporters public, yeah, I guess that counts. He would also take his mistress to a local bar, smoking cigars while his childrens friends and their parents strolled by. Lovely Mother's Day photos with Giuliani and his mistress.
Regardless of whose account you believe, Mr. Giuliani has publicly humiliated his wife, grievously hurt his children and behaved dishonorably. These acts, in my judgment, are why Mr. Giuliani should withdraw from the Senate race.
Public & Private Morality?
This incident once again raises the question of whether, and in what circumstances, a public official’s “private life”—and more specifically, his sexual conduct—is relevant to his public life. I have long argued that what matters are facts, circumstances and context, as well as principles. For example, past indiscretion, followed by an authentic change in ways and reconciliation with a wife, is vastly different from serial adultery while in office.
Was the affair marked by compulsiveness, carelessness and cruelty? Was there exploitation based on age and status? Did the affair involve a staff member? Did the person know his personal life would come under scrutiny and still decide to run the risk of an affair? These are factors to consider and weigh. We can’t have what many wish for: a manual on how to treat the almost endless array of scenarios. Reasoned moral judgments depend on the application of general principles to particular facts.
Hmmm, or just side trips to Vegas for a little chastisement?
Adultery, in short, ought not automatically disqualify a person from seeking elected office. But in some circumstances infidelity ought to be the subject of public concern. Infidelity often can reveal something important about a person’s character and judgment, his trustworthiness and prudence.
Yeah, unless we're talking about Bill Clinton
For those who think the standard I am applying to Mr. Giuliani is harsh, puritanical and atavistic, it is worth pointing out that this is precisely the public standard that applied in those ancient days of yore—1987. In that year, Gary Hart withdrew from the Democratic primary because of his relationship with Donna Rice. “Through thoughtlessness and misjudgment I’ve let each of you down,” Mr. Hart told his staff. “And I deeply regret that.” By saying what he said, and by withdrawing from the race, Mr. Hart (to his credit) affirmed an important public standard. At that time, it was widely agreed he should pull out of the race. According to Bill Clinton’s biographer, David Maraniss, even he ultimately agreed that Mr. Hart was right to withdraw.
Because he was caught in a lie after challenging the press to follow him around
Some Clinton acolytes like James Carville have attempted to compare the Giuliani affair to the Clinton scandal and accused Republicans of hypocrisy for condemning Mr. Clinton while not speaking out against Mr. Giuliani. Surely this much is true: Members of both parties ought to be more consistent in their application of moral standards.
But it must be said that while what Mr. Giuliani did was loutish, the mayor has not been cited for contempt of court, as has Mr. Clinton. Nor has Mr. Giuliani lied under oath in a civil deposition, provided false and misleading testimony to a grand jury, obstructed justice, or sent his aides to spread lies about, and destroy, the reputations of women with whom he is alleged to have had affairs. Nor has he agreed to pay more than three-quarters of a million dollars to a woman in return for her dropping a sexual harassment lawsuit. Nor has Mr. Giuliani been credibly accused of rape. So there are crucial differences between the two. Mr. Giuliani is no gentleman—but neither is he Bill Clinton.
Oh, were this so. No, Giuliani isn't accused of any of that. He did use city money to pay off one mistress, after firing a loyalist to do so, fired his wife's chief aide, then pulled her security, endangering his children, then illegally assigned police security to his own mistress. He then marched into court demanding that his mistress be allowed to visit him in the family home. On every level, Giuliani's behavior towards his own family was beastial
Ok. we are getting into some seriously weird territory now. This diary over at Kos about the Christian youth "Battle Cry" rally sounds so dangerous and creepy that I think we need to call in Dave Niewert to translate it for us:
BattleCry Philadelphia was more than just a vulgar carnival designed to suck donations into the coffers of Ron Luce's corporation "Teen Mania". Indeed, it had a point, to recruit the future elite "warriors" in the coming battle against the separation of church and state. It turned dark and frightening on Saturday afternoon. After Franklin "Islam is a Wicked Religion" Graham came out to thunder against the evils of homosexuality and the Iraqi people (whom he considers to be exactly the same people as the ancient Babylonians who enslaved the tribes of Israel and deserving, one would assume, the exact same fate) we heard an explosion. Flames shot out on stage and a team of Navy Seals was shown on the big TV monitors in full camouflage creeping forward down the hallway from the locker room with their M16s. They were hunting us, the future Christian leaders of America. Two teenage girls next to me burst into tears and even I, a jaded middle-aged male, almost jumped out of my skin. I imagined for that moment what it must have felt like to have been a teacher at Columbine high school. 10 seconds later they rushed out onstage and pointed their guns in our direction firing blanks spitting flames. About 1000 shots and bang, we were all dead.
WTF??? What does that mean (besides revving up a bunch teen-agers with violent sensationalism for no apparent reason?) It appears that the "Navy Seals" are a group of ex-special forces called Force Ministries who do this schtick at rallies and the like. Can you believe people make a living doing this stuff?
This story has been verified by others, who also report this little synergistic touch:
It began with fireworks so loud and startling I screamed. Lights and smoke followed, and a few kids were pulled up on stage from the crowd. One was asked to read a letter.
This was the letter that opened the event. Its author was George W. Bush. Yes, the president of the United States sent a letter of support, greeting, prayer and encouragement to the BattleCry event held at Wachovia Spectrum Stadium in Philadelphia on May 12. Immediately afterward, a preacher took the microphone and led the crowd in prayer. Among other things, he asked the attendees to "Thank God for giving us George Bush."
Yikes.
And how many kids enlisted from this?
It was just a magic show with guns. If recruiters had shown up, that crowd would havel fled like cockroaches with the light on.
They love the embrace of the military without the actual business of serving in the military and going to Iraq
Arise ye workers from your slumbers Arise ye prisoners of want For reason in revolt now thunders And at last ends the age of cant. Away with all your superstitions Servile masses arise, arise We'll change henceforth the old tradition And spurn the dust to win the prize.
So comrades, come rally And the last fight let us face The Internationale unites the human race. So comrades, come rally And the last fight let us face The Internationale unites the human race.
No more deluded by reaction On tyrants only we'll make war The soldiers too will take strike action They'll break ranks and fight no more And if those cannibals keep trying To sacrifice us to their pride They soon shall hear the bullets flying We'll shoot the generals on our own side.
No saviour from on high delivers No faith have we in prince or peer Our own right hand the chains must shiver Chains of hatred, greed and fear E'er the thieves will out with their booty And give to all a happier lot. Each at the forge must do their duty And we'll strike while the iron is hot.
From recent comments from everyone from Stu Rothenberg to some donated sperm in the Washington Post to the Wall Street Journal to Mark Salter they all blame us far left liberals for ruining any chance the Democratic party has of winning.
How dare we oppose the failed war, how dare we demand party loyalty from elected officials. How dare we campaign in all 50 states. That's the mark of a true radical. Doing the same things that groups like the Club for Growth have done for years.
We're angry, while the Minutemen are pefectly calm and rational sitting on the Mexican border with guns and cellphones hunting Mexicans.
Yes, we're angry college kids and we're going to hurt the Democratic Party for being so damn angry. We should support Joe Lieberman while he attacks other Dems and supports Bush and his war, even when the residents of his state don't.
The fact is that Lieberman is a Washington liberal who has repeatedly chosen to defend policies unpopular at home. He can't even get the support of the regulars. At every turn he has placed himself and his ideas above those of the party. But opposing him is some kind of attack on the party.The fact that he's one of the most ineffective members of the congressional party, constantly spouting Republican talking points isn't supposed to make anyone angry, ever.
The point is that people have moved to the center since 2000, not to the left.If you accept Ralph Nader as the hard left, his supported in 2000 included Michael Moore and Tim Robbins. By 2004, they were both supporting John Kerry. Nader, through a series of poorly timed alliances with right wingers like Grover Norquist, was largely abandoned by the left, his brand of ineffective politics seen as a luxury.
Howard Dean, in any other time, would be seen as a centrist, with his pro-gun, balanced budget stands. But his opposition to the war is being seen in a prism of the 1960's and that is far, far from the case.
The opposition to the Iraq war is based more on effectiveness than pacisfism. Jean Rohe's speech was no call for peace and unity, but an attack on the ineffectiveness in the campaign against Osama Bin Laden. There is wide spread support for the troops on the left, and those who attack them find little comfort in the left blogosphere. In fact the left's largest site is run by an Army veteran.
So SDS this is not.
The attacks on Dean for damaging the party are amusing. It isn't widely known, but Dean was hired as a reform candidate.Terry McAuliffe was hired to raise money, which he did. Howard Dean was hired to reform the way the DNC did business and one of his goals was to aid the state parties, which he has done.
The people complaining, like Paul Begala, are pissed for being out of the loop. The Clinton people are running around telling people Hillary has it locked, when all she has is money. They are fafr removed from the day in, day out combat waged in places like DailyKos and the Washington Post.
But when you look at the people in the left blogosphere, they are mostly middle-aged, professionally trained middle class adults. Not college students, not professional political people, but average, well-educated adults who are appaled at the actions of the Bush administration. Remember, Nader has largely been cast aside and groups like ANSWER are held in disdain. We're talking about the middle, many people new to political activism. To write them off as "the far left" is as silly as the art at the top of this post.
These folks were the volunteers and the small fundraisers of past campaigns, the election workers and the just plain, ordinary voter. And to now write them off because they don't like investing in failure, well, that's short sighted.
The problem is that the professional Democrats are not used to being told to piss up a rope. Joe Lieberman, had he taken care of home, would have eliminated any Ned Lamont challenge. The reason Chuck Schumer is still liked in New York State is that he comes home and his wife has been transportation commisioner for years. As much as you may oppose him on foreign policy and dislike the way he handles the DSCC, he delivers for New York. He's on TV all the time, local TV.
Lieberman's ego got ahead of his job and now he's paying for it.
It's like the Ghandi quote: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
They're fighting us now. The only problem is that they don't know what they're fighting. The blogosphere has supported Democrats with no litmus test, they have a straw man of Dean worshiping radicals, but that is all it is, straw men. The liberals I see are the same middle class liberals you see at soccer matches.
No one is worshiping Che or putting up pictures of Hugo Chavez. They just want a representative government which actually represents people over money.
Washington, DC, May 23 - Republicans say it is inevitable that some voters would be concerned and even distracted by the numerous personal indiscretions of the various candidates likely to seek the office of president, and express concern about whether they would be likely to repeat such behavior while in the White House.
While former New York mayor Rudi Giuliani's popularity increased after the events of September 11, pushing his personal issues into the background, Republicans worry he would bring to the White House the kind of activities which marred his tenure at Gracie Mansion.
Giuiliani's behavior led to a judge barring the presence of Judith Nathan, with whom he began having an affair during his last term as mayor, from the mayoral home. The judge's order also criticized Giuliani for the emotional harm he inflicted on his children.
Twice-married Virginia Senator George Allen faces questions over claimed sadistic treatment of his siblings and his fondness for confederate memorabilia despite his having grown up in California. While divorce alone may not disqualify him from the ballot in Republican voters' eyes - they overlooked it in 1980 when Ronald Reagan became the first, and only, divorced man to be elected president - it is still expected to impact his standing with conservative religious voters. Senator McCain of Arizona is in a similar position.
Thrice-married former Speaker of the House New Gingrich also concerns Republicans as he gears up for a potential presidential run. Gingrich, currently 62, began dating his geometry teacher, and future wife, while he was still in high school. He later served her divorce papers at her hospital bed where she was receiving treatment for cancer. He divorced his second wife after it was revealed that he had been having a long-running affair with a staffer 23 years younger than him during the Clinton impeachment saga.
Whatever else Katherine Dunham was in her long and productive life, which ended on Sunday at 96, she was a radiantly beautiful woman whose warmth and sense of self spread like honey on the paths before her.
How could anyone be stopped by the color of her skin after her invincibly lush sensuality and witty intelligence had seduced audiences on Broadway, in Hollywood films and in immensely popular dance shows that toured the world? And how could anyone cram black American dance into one or two conveniently narrow categories — or for that matter ignore the good strong roots that would one day grow green stems and leaves — with the vision of her company's lavishly theatrical African and Caribbean dance revues in mind?
Miss Dunham was one of the first American artists to focus on black dance and dancers as prime material for the stage. She burst into public consciousness in the 1940's, at a time when opportunities were increasing for black performers in mainstream theater and film, at least temporarily. But there was little middle ground there between the exotic and the demeaning everyday stereotypes.
Ms. Dunham's dance productions were certainly exotic, and sometimes fell into uncomfortable clichés. But a 1987 look at her work, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's "Magic of Katherine Dunham" program, confirmed that she also evoked ordinary lives that were lived with ordinary dignity.
Miss Dunham, as she was universally known, was by no means the only dance artist to push for the recognition of black dance in the 1940's, when Pearl Primus pushed, too, though a great deal less glamorously. But though Miss Dunham's academic credentials as an anthropologist were impeccable, including a doctorate from the University of Chicago, it was her gift for seduction that helped most to pave the way for choreographers like Donald McKayle, Talley Beatty and Alvin Ailey, who were the first wave of what is today an established and influential part of the larger world of American modern dance.
Ailey's first encounter with her, as a newly stage-struck boy in his mid-teens, says a great deal about Miss Dunham's appeal. Intrigued by handbills advertising her 1943 "Tropical Revue," he ventured into the Biltmore Theater in downtown Los Angeles, his hometown, where it was playing. There he was plunged into a world of color, light and heat that was populated by highly trained dancers with a gift for powerful immediacy, who were dressed in subtle, stylish costumes designed by John Pratt, Miss Dunham's husband. After the show, Ailey followed the crowd making its way backstage to her dressing room and was again stunned when the door opened on a vision of beautiful hanging fabrics and carpeting, paintings, books, flowers and baskets of fruit. And there was La Dunham, dressed in vividly colored silks and exuding irresistible gaiety and warmth.
WASHINGTON, May 22 — Democrats' plans to make Republican corruption a theme of their election strategy this year have been complicated by accusations of wrongdoing in their own ranks, leading the party to try on Monday to blunt the political effects of the unfolding case against Representative William J. Jefferson.
Representative William J. Jefferson, who has been accused of taking bribes, held a news conference Monday to deny any wrongdoing.
Democratic leaders sought to distance the party from Mr. Jefferson, the Louisiana Democrat who has been accused by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes. In doing that, the leaders tried to draw a distinction between the accusations against him and what they said was a much broader pattern among Republicans of trading legislative influence for campaign donations, trips and other perks.
Mr. Jefferson appeared on Capitol Hill to deny any wrongdoing. Facing a bank of television cameras down the hall from his Congressional office, which was raided by federal agents on Saturday night, Mr. Jefferson said that he would not resign and that he expected to be cleared.
In court documents made public on Sunday, the F.B.I. said Mr. Jefferson had taken bribes to help a small technology company win federal contracts and to help it with business deals in Africa. The F.B.I. said he had concealed $90,000 from the scheme in the freezer of his home in Washington.
Oh, come on, the guy backed up a Deuce and a half during Katrina to remove suitcases, from his house and was caught on Nightline. It's New Orleans, the land of corruption. Anyone thinks is the same as the organized corruption of DeLay and friends is kidding themelves. he was just a grifter on the make.
But I'll never forget how he placed his greed over the safety of people in New Orleans.
May 22, 2006 -- Jim McGreevey shockingly admits that before he became governor of New Jersey, he'd have anonymous gay sex at Garden State highway rest stops.
"All I knew was that my behavior was getting crazier and crazier," McGreevey says of his torrid truck-stop trysts in an upcoming book that details his tortured life of lies and sexual repression.
"With each new encounter, I was getting nearer and nearer to being caught - which surely would have generated headlines, especially after I became executive director of the state parole board" in the mid-1980s.
"The closet starves a man, and when he gets a chance he gorges till it sickens him," he writes in his book, titled "The Confession."
McGreevey revealed to The Post that he spent time in a psychiatric hospital at an Episcopalian monastery in the Hudson Valley after his stunning resignation as governor in 2004. .................
His turgidly written tale, whose subject matter sometimes seems better suited to a sleazy dime-store paperback than to a former governor's memoir, is due to be published next fall by Regan Books.
Excerpts from the tome - for which McGreevey reportedly will be paid up to $500,000 - were printed yesterday by The Star-Ledger of Newark after the newspaper obtained them at a publishing-industry convention in Washington.
McGreevey, who is now separated from Dina, currently lives with his boyfriend, financial adviser Mark O'Donnell. ....................
McGreevey felt such shame, he writes, that he "split in two" - living on the one hand a life "that stands for tradition and values and America," and another life that he pretended to ignore as "something spoiled, something disgusting."
But that duality only made his problem worse, and also made his forays into the world of illicit sex more risky and degrading.
"In my case it went from the simple passions of a young adult - for physical and romantic love and happiness - to a particularly rank, unfulfilling variety of lust. I felt it get ranker and less fulfilling with each passing year," he writes.
McGreevey longed to have a healthy relationship with another man, "with someone I love," whom he could kiss, hug and with whom he could plan a life together.
"I used to make long lists of guys I had crushes on, scribbling their names like a teenager," he writes. "But I never allowed my conquests to be anything like that.
"As glorious and meaningful as it would have been to have a loving and sound sexual experience with another man, I knew I had to undo my happiness step by step as I began chasing my dream of a public career and the kind of 'acceptable' life that went with it.
"So instead, I settled for the detached anonymity of the bookstores and rest stops - a compromise, but one that was wholly unfulfilling and morally unsatisfactory."
And if he hadn't used his wives and girlfriends to hide his homosexuality, it might not be such a problem.
He wants to be seen as a hero for coming out while hurting everyone around him, appointing his boyfriend to a critical state job and basically living a deceptive, dishonest life.
And then, after betraying the state party with his antics, he now drags out the dirtiest aspects of his sex life, sinking an even deeper knife into the back of his friends and family. Basically, he lived the life of a coward and liar, and wants to now explain himself.
I have no idea of how hard it is to be a gay man, but that is no reason to laud McGreevey's selfish, unethical life. I do know people make choices. He didn't have to remarry and then cheat. His wife has to feel like an idiot to not know any of this. He made some ethical choices, which gay or straight, a grown man does not get a pass on.
But despite the sleazy tone of the Post article, it only emphases how heroic an act it is for gays and lesbians to come out and live an open life. Because it takes courage, courage which was foreign to McGreevey until he had no choice.
May 22, 2006 -- Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión isn't taking any chances when the bids from developers who want to rebuild Yankee Stadium come in later this month.
Technically, the winning bid could come from a Boston company.
"We're putting together a task force to find any interlopers," Carrión jokingly told The Post. "They'll be asked to pronounce words like 'park' and 'car' and 'chowder' and they'll be required to watch Bucky Dent and Aaron Boone highlights over and over to see if they become despondent or enraged. .................
"I would refuse to register a contract with a Boston firm for public-safety reasons," said Comptroller Bill Thompson, who approves the winning bid. "Any stadium they build would collapse in the postseason."
Red Sox fans said they're happy to leave the job to a New York company. "They'll overpay and be disappointed - just like having A-Rod on their team," said Jim McGuire, co-owner of Professor Thom's, a Bosox-friendly bar in Manhattan.
And the Yankees travel to Beantown today for a three-game rumble with their perennial rivals.
Collapse in the post-season?
Who played the White Sox last year for the AL Championship?
Who lost four straight to the Red Sox in 2004?
The Yankees political lackies are talking might big for a team which came two outs of getting swept by a younger, better led Mets team, and if Billy Wagner hadn't lost his shit Saturday afternoon, we'd be talking about the Yankees being swept. The Mets beat up on Yankee pitching all three games.
It's not 1995 anymore.The Yankees haven't won a World Series in six years and the humiliation they suffered in 2004 was epic. They had the Red Sox on the ropes and the Sox came back to beat them silly,humiliate them at home.
So all this smug talk about how Boston sucks is well, Yankee delusions.
This is incredible, McCain's spokesman, in an act of raw,naked stupidity,launches a personal attack on the student who went after the Senator on Friday, thus making her another hero in the Colbertian vein.
Update, Holy shit I just got an email from Huffington post that said they confirmed my story and it is the top story at Huffington Post right now. Wow!!! Ok I am officially pissed! You know after Iraq, Tora Bora, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Katrina, obvious cronyism, tax cuts, being spied on, net neutrality, presidential signing powers, jailing of journalist, outing of a covert CIA agent, raiding the US treasury, and giving money to tax exempt religious institutions, I have finally hit the limit. This morning I was going to go run a few miles (I'm training for a marathon) and eat a healthy amount of whole-wheat pasta and watch the Bay Bridge Series. But all of that was shattered while I was on Huffington Post reading a blog by the woman Jean Rohe. Buried in a comment 8 pages in the post was a response from Senator McCain's chief of staff. (Well I cannot confirm 100% if he still is the chief of staff, but he still works for McCain. I am just too angry right now to sift through pages on google to find his exact current title.)
We all know what happened the other day at the New School graduation. (If not go here.)
Let me tell you a little bit about the Senator, the man you dismiss so derisively. Once upon time, even among the young, the words courage and hero were used more sparingly, more precisely. It took no courage to do what you did, Ms. Rohe. It was an act of vanity and nothing more. And please don't worry about the Senator's discomfort with you. He has managed to endure much worse
Ok, Mr. Mark Salter, I am looking for the right combinations of words in response to this...ah yes fuck you! Sorry I just de-evolved to your level, let me recompose my self.
First off who are you to say that a young woman who has just graduated, giving a commencement speech in front of thousands of colleagues, and in front of an international news presence, is a coward. Sorry you did not use that word, but you certainly implied it.
McCain was once offered release from imprisonment and torture because of his father's position as a senior military officer. He declined because he would not leave his comrades behind, and thus, willingly, accepted four more years of hardships life will spare almost all of us from. In his political career he has shown the same character he showed as a Navy officer all those years ago. He has, over and over again, risked personal ambitions for what he believes, rightly or wrongly, are in the best interests of the country. What, pray tell, have you risked? The only person you have succeeded in making look like an idiot is yourself.
Ok, hold on here. First off no one is disputing McCain's heroic duty to this country. Oh, wait, Karl Rove did, but you laid down like a good puppy. But I am sure that Ms. Rohe was not questioning the great sacrifice McCain made to this country. However, to call out his service to his country and compare it to a woman who is speaking her opinion to the largest audience in her life is beyond me pal. In fact, the words I find once again, oh yea, Fuck You. "What pray tell, have you risked?" Holy Shit. How can you say that!
You are the Chief of Staff for one of the strongest, and well known Senators in the United States, who will most likely being going for the Republican nomination for President. If elected that means you will hold Karl Roves position (well his former one). And let me tell you something, Mr. Salter, you have just given me a new purpose in life. I will do everything in my power to make sure everyone hears the words you wrote about a courageous young women who has, and is, continuing her pursuit to live the American Dream. The very dream your employer sacrificed so dearly to preserve.
So, let me leave you with this. Should you grow up and ever get down to the hard business of making a living and finding a purpose for your lives beyond self-indulgence some of you might then know a happiness far more sublime than the fleeting pleasure of living in an echo chamber. And if you are that fortunate, you might look back on the day of your graduation and your discourtesy to a good and honest man with a little shame and the certain knowledge that it very unlikely any of you will ever posses the one small fraction of the character of John McCain.
This from a man who claims naivety of youth. Sir, your statement to a fellow American is disrespectful, and an embarrassment to your character and standing as a human being. Never mind the fact you call yourself an American. Ughh, I am disgusted with your arrogant and naive view of the populace of this great country. You sir have no business in serving the public.
What you have just taught me, through your arrogant and naive attack upon an honest American, is that I will not stand for this any longer! I will not bow down, as your Employer did, to the pressures of the political elite. I will not stand by ideally as you attack the citizens and the articles upon which this nation is built upon.
Since I am an honest human, I will post your entire reply to Ms. Rohe. Thanks for the kick in the ass, and me missing the Giants, A's game!
The link is here, thanks DrReason. I cannot for the life of me get this link to embed. sorry. You need to scroll almost to the bottom of the page when you go to this link. The comment is obvious when you see it. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jean-rohe/why-i-spoke-up_b_21358.html?p=7#comments
I am employed by Senator McCain and I helped draft his remarks for the New School commencement ceremony. Ms. Rohe takes exception to the fact that the speech was written with all four commencements he has been invited to address. The Senator's intention was to discuss with Americans, not any particular subset of Americans, but his fellow countrymen, the things that he feels are important to remember in our political debates: that we owe each other our respect just as we owe each other our best advocacy for the things we believe are important for our country. He did not feel that the students of Liberty University were a more appropriate audience for his address than the New School's graduates. It was an act of respect. Although it is quite clear that part of his audience at Madison Square Garden had no intention of reciprocating.
Evidently, the Senator's regard for his audience was misplaced. Ms. Rohe and those of her fellow graduates who hailed their school's President as a war criminal and who greeted the Senator's reference to a friend's death with laughter proved only one thing, one sad thing, that they could learn a thing or two about tolerance and respect from the students of Liberty University. Like the protestors at the Garden, many in the audience at Liberty University disagreed with various of the Senator's views. Some disagreed with his support for campaign finance reform. Some disagreed with his support for comprehensive immigration reform with a path toward legalization for undocumented workers. Some disagreed with his position of climate change. Some disagreed with his opposition to the Federal Marriage Amendment. Whatever their differences with him they listened to him attentively and respectfully, as one American to another, divided in some respects, united in much more important ones.
Let me tell you a little bit about the Senator, the man you dismiss so derisively. Once upon time, even among the young, the words courage and hero were used more sparingly, more precisely. It took no courage to do what you did, Ms. Rohe. It was an act of vanity and nothing more. And please don't worry about the Senator's discomfort with you. He has managed to endure much worse. McCain was once offered release from imprisonment and torture because of his father's position as a senior military officer. He declined because he would not leave his comrades behind, and thus, willingly, accepted four more years of hardships life will spare almost all of us from. In his political career he has shown the same character he showed as a Navy officer all those years ago. He has, over and over again, risked personal ambitions for what he believes, rightly or wrongly, are in the best interests of the country. What, pray tell, have you risked? The only person you have succeeded in making look like an idiot is yourself.
You took exception to the paragraph in which he lightly deprecated the vanity of youth. Well, Ms. Rohe, and your fellow graduate's comical self-importance deserve a rebuke far stronger than the gentle suggestions he offered you. So, let me leave you with this. Should you grow up and ever get down to the hard business of making a living and finding a purpose for your lives beyond self-indulgence some of you might then know a happiness far more sublime than the fleeting pleasure of living in an echo chamber. And if you are that fortunate, you might look back on the day of your graduation and your discourtesy to a good and honest man with a little shame and the certain knowledge that it very unlikely any of you will ever posses the one small fraction of the character of John McCain.
Mark Salter
First, Ms.Rohe was a double major who not only is a professional singer, but has a day job working with preschoolers. Honest work is not her problem.
Second, this kind of personal reply is unbecoming of a Congressional staffer to a private individual. Insulting her character and intelligence is an act of bullying which will come to make your boss look like an asshole. The judgement here is so lacking, so beyond common sense, that it staggers the mind.
McCain went into the most liberal university in the US, one filled, not with naive kids, but working adults who didn't have the luck or money to attend NYU or Columbia. They were deeply offended by McCain's speech and found it offensive that he delivered it to them. If you want puppets, go to Liberty University. If you expect a New School audience to sit silently while you insult their intelligence and offend their sensibilities, well, you're in the wrong place.
What is even more comical is that he thinks he's talking about 21 year olds when I'd bet most of the graduates were pushing 30. The New School is a place for second chances, as I remember. So Salter is talking out of his ass, and probably offending a bunch of Iraq War vets in the process. Of course, this is going to probably cost him an apology if not his job. This is New York. We don't accept insults with a smile. Maybe they do in Arizona, but not here.If McCain can't handle it, then he needs to pick his audiences better, like Bush does.
Until there is some measure of justice for 9/11, don't expect New Yorkers to be happy with Osama being free.
At the risk of turning this into a battle between Mark Salter, Senator John McCain's staff-member, and myself, I'd like to comment briefly on his blog on the Huffington Post. I'm sad to see that Mr. Salter intentionally misinterpreted my writing, presumably to hurt my feelings and frighten me into silence.
I'd like to say first of all, that I don't believe that anything I've written to the public so far has been quite as nasty to Senator McCain as Mr. Salter was to me. On the contrary, I think that my writing clearly reflected my values, which is to say, never was I rude to the Senator nor did I show any disrespect. In fact, I think my compassion was made clear. To pick on me in such a bullying and sarcastic way is a clear admission on Mr. Salter's part that his fear is far deeper than any I might have felt when sticking up for myself.
The following is addressed directly to Mr. Salter:
Without taking issue with your statement point by point, I'd just like to draw attention for a moment to a few things you said. Firstly, it was clear to me why Senator McCain chose to give the same speech at every school. It was meant to show consistency in his message, and, contrary to what you suggested, there is no place in my speech or my other writing where I take issue with that. However, interestingly, it is precisely because the senator's speech had nothing to do with our graduation or anyone else's that it worked so marvelously in all settings. It was equally out of place no matter where it was delivered.
In addition, you make many assumptions about who I am and what I stand for. You assume that the words shouted from the audience reflected at all times my opinions and values. You assume that I have made myself look like an idiot, which, I can tell you, is just not true. You assume I have taken no risks. I'm curious to see which doors have been permanently closed to me in the future, simply because I've spoken up. You assume that I did what I did simply to draw attention to myself for my own personal benefit. I have said in my writing, and I will say it again, I would never have asked for this responsibility in a million years. The entire event was stomach-churning and unpleasant because it was something I didn't want to do, but knew I had to out of an obligation to my own values. You assume that I have no experience making a living. I have been a full-time college student and have worked a job to pay my own rent and my own expenses for the past two years. You assume that I live in an "echo chamber" of liberal head-patting, when, in fact, I live in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a neighborhood notorious for its cultural diversity and sometimes, conflict. I live in New York City where every human interaction is a test of our willingness to coexist as citizens. And finally, I think it is unfair to assume that I have not considered the hardships of Senator McCain's life. Indeed, one of my first feelings upon seeing him in the flesh was compassion for how much he must have endured in his time as a POW. If there's one thing that I know about myself, it is that I care for people, and in that sense I have a great deal of character. Please don't try to bully me anymore.
This is not 1986 when you would have the last word, Mr. Salter. Nope, it's 2006 and Jean Rohe can speak for herself and has plenty of people who will amplify her message.
Like I said, the New School is not for kids looking for frat parties, but people working through school. Smart people.
Now, Salter looks like an even bigger dick because he attacked this woman and she called himon it. A smart man would quit at this point.
KENNETT SQUARE, Pa., May 21 — Barbaro's racing career is over, but a valiant and costly effort was made Sunday to repair the right hind leg of the horse that sustained a catastrophic ankle break before an audience of millions early in the Preakness Stakes on Saturday.
On Sunday night at the University of Pennsylvania's George D. Widener Hospital for Large Animals, Barbaro emerged from an operation that lasted more than four hours and a post-operation recovery that took another three.
While the surgeon who performed the operation, Dr. Dean Richardson, was pleased enough with how things went to remark that Barbaro "practically jogged" to his stall, his prognosis was more grave. "To be brutally honest, there's still enough chance for things going bad that it's still a coin toss even though everything went well," Dr. Richardson said.
It was remarkable that the surgery was attempted at all. Most horses with injuries as severe as Barbaro's, Dr. Richardson acknowledged, would have been euthanized on the racetrack. Dr. Richardson said that the injury was far worse than originally thought.
But this colt was the Kentucky Derby winner with an estimated value of $30 million, and his owners, Roy and Gretchen Jackson, were well heeled enough to foot the bill for the costly, and risky, surgery and rehabilitation.
In the operating room, Dr. Richardson worked with a team of eight: two residents, an intern, two anesthesiologists and three nurses.
"I could see no evidence of pre-existing injury," Dr. Richardson said. "It was just a bad step."
Dr. Richardson praised Barbaro's jockey, Edgar Prado, for skillfully bringing the horse to a stop and preventing further injury Saturday.
Some Iraqi police officers in Basra joined the Mahdi Army, a militia led by the cleric Moktada al-Sadr, in August 2004. Much of the city came to be controlled by the Mahdi Army and another militia group.
This article was reported by Michael Moss, David Rohde and Kirk Semple and written by Mr. Moss.
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Jon Villanova had just arrived in Basra last spring to help build a police force in southern Iraq when bodies began piling up. Twenty or more Iraqi civilians were dragged from their homes, shot in the head and dumped in the streets.
The evidence pointed to some of the very people he and his team of foreign police advisers were struggling to train: a cluster of senior officers working out of a station called Jamiat.
But local officials resisted efforts to prosecute the officers. By the time officials in Baghdad intervened nine months later, the corruption in Basra had gotten so bad that the 135-member internal affairs unit, set up to police the police, was operating as a ring of extortionists, kidnappers and killers, American and Iraqi officials said.
"There we are, trying to build a police force that people can believe in, and they are committing murders," Mr. Villanova said. "It was a quagmire."
So was much of the rest of Iraq. An initial effort by American civilians to rebuild the police, slow to get started and undermanned, had become overwhelmed by corruption, political vengeance and lawlessness unleashed by the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
A year later, with the insurgency spreading with an unimagined ferocity, the United States military took charge of a second, broader campaign to reconstitute the police. On the ground, however, the military's plan for police units that could help restore order in Iraq would be no match for the forces tearing at the country in places like Basra and Baghdad. And along the way, it would help fuel some of those forces.
The Americans had to reconstitute the police since officers fled in droves after the invasion, ahead of gangs of looters. But the rush to replenish the ranks lacked proper controls, American, British and Iraqi officials said, and in the process political loyalists of the newly powerful were made officers, and there were reports of police jobs sold for kickbacks of $100.
In recent background checks, police investigators found more than 5,000 police officers with arrest records for crimes that included attacks on American troops, American officials said.
When the rebuilt skeletal force became a target of the rapidly spreading insurgency, Americans turned to heavily armed police commando units that had been assembled by the Iraqis. They added firepower, but at a price.
An Iraqi official who helped create the special units said he warned Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that they could become a weapon in Iraq's sectarian strife, much as Mr. Hussein's police had repressed the Shiite majority. Now, after a year in which a Shiite interior minister controlled the police, some special units stand accused by many Sunnis of operating as Shiite-dominated death squads.
The Iraqis have reined in some units, but others have received less attention. In one notorious incident, a brigade in northern Baghdad is suspected of kidnapping and killing 36 Sunni Arab men last August. Although a judge ordered the unit's commander, Brig. Gen. Bassem al-Gharrawi, arrested for murder, the arrest warrant was never executed, according to court records.
Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, who ran the military's police training program until last September, said he backed the creation of special police units "once we saw the fighting spirit and physical toughness of the units and the competence of their leaders." But he said he also sought to impose controls and vigorously pursue allegations of misconduct.
Like the rogue police units, other government security forces are also accused of having carried out massacres and violence on behalf of political or tribal groups. Turning all of those armed forces into an effective law enforcement mechanism is a prime challenge for the new Iraqi government formed over the weekend, and is central to the American strategy for exiting Iraq.
But reforming the police means overcoming a lot of history.
Under Mr. Hussein, the police were corrupt and ill disciplined, less an instrument of law than of repression. The police became targets of the mobs of looters that roamed Baghdad after Mr. Hussein's overthrow, and then of the insurgents, who have repeatedly bombed police stations and recruiting lines. A 2006 internal police survey conducted northeast of Baghdad found that 75 percent of Iraqis did not trust the police enough to tip them off to insurgent activity.
Before the invasion, the Bush administration envisioned the police as adequate for keeping the peace and rejected a proposal backed by the Justice Department to deploy thousands of foreign police advisers.
Now the Pentagon is spreading 3,000 police trainers across the country. Maj. Gen. Joseph Peterson, who is in charge of the Pentagon's current program to remake the force, said his top priority was to improve basic skills while preventing corruption. He said the new effort was making strides toward the goal of having a force of 190,000 officers by early next year with better training and an appreciation of human rights.
"Every day the Iraqis improve their capability to do their job," General Peterson said.
Yeah, to serve as the armed wings of their militia bosses
With football's World Cup just weeks away, the BBC's Jamie Coomarasamy visits a Major League Soccer match in Washington DC, to find out if footie fever has struck in a country where "football" is played by men in shoulder pads and helmets.
As the minutes ticked towards kick-off at the top-of-the-table clash between DC United and the Kansas City Wizards, the atmosphere at the RFK Stadium was closer to that of a school fete than that of any professional football game I have ever attended.
.....................................
USA team guide
"I never knew it would have so many family activities," she said. "We'll definitely be coming here regularly."
"But what about the USA World Cup team?" I asked her. "They're rated pretty highly."
"Are they?" she asked with a look that was initially blank, but clearly open to persuasion. "Well, I'm sure we'll be cheering them on."
Father and son fans
Just past a tombola stand, I met a more knowledgeable - and more conventional - football-going family: father and son Bob and Andrew Brown.
Bob, a civil servant in his 50s, told me that he had been going to DC United ever since they were formed 10 years ago.
He has travelled to England to see Liverpool, his club, and Chelsea play, and he could testify just how different the atmosphere was at Premier league games.
The Browns are - for the time being - a rare family in the United States, one where the father had passed his love of football down to his son.
The majority of fans milling around them were children - boys and plenty of girls - each wearing their favourite kit, each having dragged along unwilling-looking parents. ...............................
Free of fever
His 15-year-old son, Andrew, is a member of America's soccer generation.
Most of his friends play the game, he told me, although that does not necessarily mean that they have caught World Cup fever.
He will certainly be following Team USA, but I asked him how many of his school friends would be taking an interest.
"Oh, about 20 kids in my grade," he told me. "Out of 300." ...............................
If the United States win the World Cup, there may be a similar burst of enthusiasm from America's soccer moms and dads - although it is most likely to come from their kids.
Two points: 20 kids who care about the World Cup are about 10 more than who would care about the Stanley Cup, but the pre-Cup PR has just started. The SI issue and the newpaper features are at least two weeks out, so most people are still deep into baseball season. The Mets are making an incredible run, having spanked the Yankees, and the Red Sox in first place.
Then you have the fact that to many Americans, soccer is simply a new sport
