By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG Published: November 30, 2006
AMMAN, Jordan, Nov. 30 — President Bush today proclaimed Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki "the right guy for Iraq," and said the two had agreed to speed the turnover of security responsibility from American to Iraqi forces. But Mr. Bush dismissed a reported decision by an independent bipartisan panel to call for a gradual withdrawal of troops. ...............................
"I know there's a lot of speculation that these reports in Washington mean there's going to be some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq," the president said during a joint news conference with Mr. Maliki, referring to the panel's reports that are expected next week. "We're going to stay in Iraq to get the job done so long as the government wants us there."
Mr. Bush also said he and Mr. Maliki would oppose any plan to break up the country, which is riven by sectarian violence. The two appeared together after an hourlong breakfast meeting with aides at the Four Seasons Hotel here that was followed by a 45-minute one-on-one session.
"The prime minister made clear that splitting his country into parts, as some have suggested, is not what the Iraqi people want, and that any partition in Iraq would only lead to an increase of sectarian violence," Mr. Bush said, adding, "I agree."
The two leaders set no timetable for speeding up the training of Iraqi forces, which Mr. Bush described as evolving "from ground zero," and a senior administration official, who attended the breakfast and was granted anonymity to discuss it, said hurdles remain.
"This is not a simple process of passing the baton," the official said, adding, "This is not the United States and Iraq struggling for control of the steering wheel. This is the United States wanting Iraq to be firmly with the steering wheel in its hand, and the issue is, how do we get there as quickly as possible."
What happens, if after Congress has hearings, the ISG issues their report and Bush says no.
What happens, as US forces get attacked by all sides and the roads seized, if Bush says no to ANY changes. Because, right now, 150K servicemembers are relying on James Baker smacking the president into common sense. Because, right now, he's going to go down to the bitter end with other people's lives.
Do we really have to wait for the Mahdi Army to seize the government?
This is the Green Zone. If there is any sort of military action there, evacuation will be hard, if not impossible to accomplish, party because of the concentration of people and bodies. The main evacuation route to Baghdad Airport is a long, isolated highway the US calls Route Irish.
It is the most dangerous road in the world, and to travel it escorted is $3-5000 one way.
This is the route from the Green Zone to the airport. It doesn't seem far, but hundreds of people have died along it's length. Imagine trying to move the US infrastructure in Iraq with our Iraqi allies alone this highway
This is a close up of Route Irish. The red areas are open ground where the guerrillas have staged attacks for three years. In an evacuation by ground, the US military would have to move to the airport under fire.
Here's the point. Yes, the US can do a fighting retreat, but the complications of it are frightening. Look at the topography and you see a hundred ambush points.
Now there's talk of the US going after Sadr.
Jesus, look at the map. He can sit inside Sadr City forever. But it's three years too late anyway. They tried in 2004 and all hell broke loose. Now? We need to talk to him, not try to kill him so that all the Iraqis can fight us.
The Green Zone is a shitty place to defend, with it's back against the river and few open landing areas, tons of civilians and the security staffed with Shias. It's also a shitty place to attack for the few access points available. But once in, stopping an attack, especially with inside help, could turn this into Peking 1900 with no relief force on the way.
All these maps should show that a fighting retreat is a really, really bad idea.
Certain hard-partying patrons of Chelsea nightspot Bungalow 8 received the shock of their lives Monday when they awoke to find photos of Mike Oliver—the NYPD officer who squeezed off 31 of the 50 shots fired at a carful of unarmed men in Queens last weekend—splashed across the city's tabloids. For the past year, the 35-year-old detective has been a four-night-a-week regular at the Olsen twin-heavy haunt, where he is known to the late-night crowd as "Undercover Mike."
"Everyone there was freaking the fuck out when they saw the Post," says a Bungalow insider. "It was like, 'Holy shit, that's Undercover Mike!'"
Oliver, according to multiple sources, began frequenting the club on a regular basis sometime last winter—whether in the course of his duties as an undercover officer or on his own time was never quite clear. "Sometimes he'd come alone, and sometimes with a young lady, always in plainclothes and always with a gun on him," says another source, who knows Oliver casually from his visits to the club. "The door guys all knew he was a narc and would tell people that, but they had to let him in. We never knew if he was on duty or off."
Not that Oliver made trouble for Bungalow's patrons—far from it. To all appearances, sources say, he was a regular customer, partaking in all of the nocturnal activities of his fellow revelers. "He was really friendly with the staff and all the regulars, and hit on girls like every other guy there," says the Bungalow insider. "He'd have one drink and nurse it all night but talk about how wasted he was. It was clear to everyone who knew him that he was doing more than just drinking."
Ok, so if this story is corroborated, you have an armed, coke sniffing cop using his badge to get into a club he had no business in on duty. Who then unleashes 31 rounds into a car. His credibility as a witness will turn to shit. As will their defense.
Kelly should understand that all hell will break loose when this makes the papers.
Maybe he was acting, but four nights a week and no arrests from the club. And when they call you "Undercover Mike", how can you be undercover. It's like that episode of the Simpsons when Homer wears his snitch hat in the Frank Gehry designed jail.
This is going to break out and when it does, even an asshat like Sliwa, so despised, the Mafia got away with shooting him, is going to be silent. But I can assure you Sharpton, Barron, the family and the Black radio in New York will not be.
You know, it's been a fun three years watching you guys spout nonsense about Iraq. All you cheetos eating slobs. You haven't been right about one fucking thing since 2003 and you need to stop. We're not playing Risk.
But you need to shut the fuck up because you don't know what you're talking about. This is a time for sober discussion and not your vapid cheerleading.
I know it may not be the end that you want, but the war in Iraq is not only lost, but could be the greatest military disaster since Chosin. You may have gotten away with bullying people in the past, but the reality of Bush's war is coming home.
Yesterday, we detailed criticism by a number of right-wing bloggers of the Associated Press's reporting from Iraq. The criticism focused on a story about Shiites burning six Sunni worshippers alive in Baghdad. CENTCOM issued a press release disputing the legitimacy of the source of the story, police Capt. Jamil Hussein, and asking for a retraction or correction if the organization did not have "a credible source" behind it's reporting.
.................................
That report came last night. Here's a portion:
Seeking further information about Friday's attack, an AP reporter contacted Hussein for a third time about the incident to confirm there was no error. The captain has been a regular source of police information for two years and had been visited by the AP reporter in his office at the police station on several occasions. The captain, who gave his full name as Jamil Gholaiem Hussein, said six people were indeed set on fire.
On Tuesday, two AP reporters also went back to the Hurriyah neighborhood around the Mustafa mosque and found three witnesses who independently gave accounts of the attack. Others in the neighborhood said they were afraid to talk about what happened.
Those who would talk said the assault began about 2:15 p.m., and they believed the attackers were from the Mahdi Army militia loyal to radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. He and the Shiite militia are deeply rooted in and control the Sadr City enclave in northeastern Baghdad where suspected Sunni insurgents attacked with a series of car bombs and mortar shells, killing at least 215 people a day before.
The witnesses refused to allow the use of their names because they feared retribution either from the original attackers or the police, whose ranks are infiltrated by Mahdi Army members or its associated death squads.
Two of the witnesses — a 45-year-old bookshop owner and a 48-year-old neighborhood grocery owner — gave nearly identical accounts of what happened. A third, a physician, said he saw the attack on the mosque from his home, saw it burning and heard people in the streets screaming that people had been set on fire. All three men are Sunni Muslims. ....................................
The message between the lines in all this is that the AP believes the government is going to be more aggressive in challenging the press – even when they don't have the goods to back it up, as the AP believes is the case here. "I have infinitely more faith in the U.S. military than in the Associated Press, but that doesn't mean the military is always right or the AP always wrong," writes Powerline. "It seems that the AP believes it is in a strong position. I'm tempted to say that one institution or the other must emerge from this affair with its credibility damaged." This could be one fight that's just beginning.
Well, Powerline are idiots, because CENTCOM lies like a junkie. They lie about everything when they can, from hillbilly armor to suicides and nothing they say can or should be trusted.
What these mental children need to realize is that Bush has launched this country into a disaster and pretending Iraq is not an insane charnel house is a disservice to anyone with a brain. Yes, they burned people alive. Because they wanted them to suffer.
Your childlike worship of Bush was amusing when it didn't matter, but now, it's time for you to let the adults explain to you what a mess your cheerleading help create. Not that any of you deigned to actually serve, you were too good for that, for raising money for soldiers needs or discussing veterans.
So now, as we watch this play out, your silly, infantile, parsing or as you call it, fisking, comments don't fucking matter. You have no credibility left, the GOP has no credibility left, and the president has no credibility left.
FEMA has to restore housing assistance and pay back rent to thousands of Hurricane Katrina evacuees who had been deemed ineligible for long-term housing assistance, a federal judge ruled yesterday.
The judge, Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, wrote that the agency also had to improve an appeals process that evacuees had long said was confusing, contradictory and amounted to an arbitrary denial of help.
“It is unfortunate, if not incredible, that FEMA and its counsel could not devise a sufficient notice system to spare these beleaguered evacuees the added burden of federal litigation to vindicate their constitutional rights,” Judge Leon wrote.
The suit was brought by Acorn, a housing advocacy group that runs the Katrina Survivors Association. Michael Kirkpatrick, a lawyer with Public Citizen who represented Acorn, said that as many as 11,000 families could be affected based on numbers that the Federal Emergency Management Agency provided in court papers.
A spokesman for the agency, Aaron Walker, said it had not decided whether to seek a stay of the decision.
Last spring, the agency began notifying thousands of families given emergency shelter that they did not qualify for long-term help with rent and utility payments. That surprised many families who had been given housing vouchers valid for a year.
For months, families who had lost everything struggled to understand why they had been rejected and how to appeal that decision.
In a process that Judge Leon called Kafkaesque, families received notification letters with “reason codes” instead of actual reasons, were given different information each time they called the agency help line or found that the agency had erroneously determined that their house had “insufficient damage” or that someone else in their household (often a roommate) had already applied for assistance.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — When computer industry executives heard about a plan to build a $100 laptop for the developing world’s children, they generally ridiculed the idea. How could you build such a computer, they asked, when screens alone cost about $100?
Mary Lou Jepsen, the chief technologist for the project, likes to refer to the insight that transformed the machine from utopian dream to working prototype as “a really wacky idea.”
Ms. Jepsen, a former Intel chip designer, found a way to modify conventional laptop displays, cutting the screen’s manufacturing cost to $40 while reducing its power consumption by more than 80 percent. As a bonus, the display is clearly visible in sunlight. .............................................
Each machine will come with a simple mechanism for recharging itself when a standard power outlet is not available. The designers experimented with a crank, but eventually discarded that idea because it seemed too fragile. Now they have settled on several alternatives, including a foot pedal as well as a hand-pulled device that works like a salad spinner.
Ms. Jepsen’s display, which removes most of the color filters but can operate in either color or monochrome modes, has made it possible to build a computer that consumes just 2 watts of power, compared with the 25 to 45 watts consumed by a conventional laptop. The ultra-low-power operation is possible because of the lack of a hard drive (the laptop uses solid-state memory, which has no moving parts and has fallen sharply in cost) and because the Advanced Micro Devices microprocessor shuts down whenever the computer is not processing information.
The designers have also gambled in designing the laptop’s software, which is based on the freely available Linux operating system, a rival to Microsoft’s Windows. Dispensing with a traditional desktop display, the software substitutes an iconic interface intended to give students a simpler view of their programs and documents and a maplike view of other connected users nearby.
A video-camera lens sits just to the right of the display, for use in videoconferencing and taking digital still photos of reasonable quality. The computer comes with a stripped-down Web browser, a simple word processor and a number of learning programs. For e-mail, the designers intend to use Google’s Web-based Gmail service.
Only one program at a time can be viewed on the laptop because of its small 7.5-inch display.
Mr. Negroponte has been a globetrotting salesman for the project, winning Libya’s participation when he was summoned by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to a meeting in a desert tent on a sweltering August night. But there have also been setbacks. The Indian Education Ministry rejected a proposal to order a million computers, noting that the money could be better spent on primary and secondary education.
Mr. Negroponte said he had been re-energized by the recent arrival of the first 1,000 working prototypes. The prototypes, he said, will give him new ammunition to convince government leaders that his tiny machines can be a positive force for social development. [On a visit to Brazil on Nov. 24, Mr. Negroponte presented one of the prototypes to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.]
He said a program would be created to enable those in the developed world to underwrite a laptop for a child in a designated country and to correspond with the recipient by e-mail as a sort of “glorified pen-pal program.” But however attractive the idea of a $100 or $150 laptop, he said there were no plans to make it generally available to consumers.
“They should buy Dell’s $499 laptop for now,” he said. “Ours is really designed for developing nations — dusty, dirty, no or unreliable power and so on.”
Did anyone ask people in the third world what kind of machine they wanted? No.
Did anyone ask what kind of software they had on hand?
No.
They just want to shower this on the world and have it embraced. Gates has a point, is it what they need in the developing world. I would think addressing basic literacy might be the first point.
Tom Baldwin in Washington and Philip Webster, Political Editor # Damning verdict on one-sided US-UK relations after Iraq # State Department official says Blair is ignored by Bush
In a devastating verdict on Tony Blair’s decision to back war in Iraq and his “totally one-sided” relationship with President Bush, a US State Department official has said that Britain’s role as a bridge between America and Europe is now “disappearing before our eyes”.
Kendall Myers, a senior State Department analyst, disclosed that for all Britain’s attempts to influence US policy in recent years, “we typically ignore them and take no notice — it’s a sad business”.
He added that he felt “a little ashamed” at Mr Bush’s treatment of the Prime Minister, who had invested so much of his political capital in standing shoulder to shoulder with America after 9/11.
Speaking at an academic forum in Washington on Tuesday night, he answered a question from The Times, saying: “It was a done deal from the beginning, it was a onesided relationship that was entered into with open eyes . . . there was nothing. There was no payback, no sense of reciprocity.”
His remarks brought calls from British politicians last night for the special relationship to be rethought, but also attracted scathing criticism from one close supporter of the Prime Minister.
Dr Myers had hard words for his own Administration’s record in the Iraq war: “It’s a bad time, let’s face it. We have not only failed to do what we wanted to do in Iraq but we have greatly strained our relationship with [Britain].”
Dr Myers, a specialist in British politics, predicted that the tight bond between Mr Bush and Mr Blair would not be replicated in the future. “What I think and fear is that Britain will draw back from the US without moving closer to Europe. In that sense London’s bridge is falling down.”
The extraordinarily frank remarks will be seen as further evidence of the long-standing unease felt within some parts of the State Department over the direction of White House policy. They may also be an indication of the weakness of President Bush as he struggles to stop Iraq sliding into civil war and faces a Democrat-dominated Congress elected this month.
Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat leader, said: “These remarks reflect a real sense of distaste among thinking Americans for Mr Blair’s apparent slavish support for President Bush . . . The special relationship needs to be rebalanced, rethought and renewed.”
But Denis MacShane, Labour MP for Rotherham and a former Foreign Office minister, who supported the Iraq war, said: “After the Republican defeat in the midterm election, every little rat who feasted during the Bush years is now leaving the ship. I would respect this gentleman, who I have never heard of, if he had had the guts to make any of these points two or five years ago.”
Mr. MacShane, they made those points years ago, and you didn't hear them. Blair swore he had some kind of pull with Bush, some special relationship, and he was laughing at you behind your back.
Every car a potential bomb, every roof a potential RPG or sniper's nest.
Pick the emergency LZ
These are Google Earth images of Ramadi, a place the US does not control.
For some reason, people are allergic to maps, but since I was a Boy Scout, I love them, and nothing is better than Google Earth, not even the online Perry-Casteneda collection
Look at the first image. Every dot is a car.
And every car is a potential bomb.
Let's say, and the two sites are chosen randomly from the map, are two potential rally/evacuation points from the center of town.
The red line is the road, the white, access roads.
Blue Zone A is an open parking lot, and so is Green Zone B.
Oh, and that close up? It's of the buildings between the two lots. In peace time, a 10 minute walk, five minute drive. Now? They're pretty much isolated.
Now, A and B are on access roads. But A has low lying buildings and B has a warehouse. A has a slightly shorter flying time to the highway, which is the way out.
What you get to figure out is which will be easier to gather people in, get machines in and out and protect the landing zones for as long as needed.
Now, I have no answers. But what you need in mind is that if we have to fight our way out of Iraq, this is the kind of decisions we will have to make on the spot.
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG Published: November 29, 2006
AMMAN, Jordan, Nov. 29 —The first meeting in a scheduled two-day summit between President Bush and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki of Iraq was canceled at the last minute today, against the backdrop of threats by a radical Shiite cleric to boycott the Maliki government and the disclosure of a classified White House memo that was highly critical of Mr. Maliki.
In Amman, there were signs that President Bush would be greeted with a decidedly blunt message.
Mr. Bush and Mr. Maliki still intend to have breakfast together here Thursday morning, and to hold a much-anticipated press conference afterward.
But a joint session planned for this evening with their Jordanian host, King Abdullah II, was abruptly called off while Mr. Bush was in the air, flying to Amman from Riga, Latvia.
Mr. Bush’s counselor, Dan Bartlett, told reporters traveling aboard Air Force One that there was no need for the three-way session, since Mr. Maliki and King Abdullah had already met earlier in the day and Mr. Bush and King Abdullah were planning to have a separate, private dinner together later in the evening.
Mr. Bartlett said the cancellation had nothing to do with disclosure of the classified memo, reported in today’s issue of The New York Times. “No one should read too much into this, except for the fact that they had a good meeting,” Mr. Bartlett said, referring to Mr. Maliki and the king.
Meanwhile in Baghdad, lawmakers and cabinet members loyal to the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr followed through today on a previous threat to boycott the government if Mr. Maliki went to Amman to meet with Mr. Bush. They said in a statement today that they were suspending their participation in both the parliament and the cabinet.
Bush goes to Jordan, indicating some level of crisis in the US-Iraqi relationship, and the Iraqi prime minister refuses to meet with him?
Who refuses to meet with the US president? When he has troops in your country and is keeping your country on life support.
Read the lame excuse a humiliated White House came up with.
BARTLETT: The President is going to have a bilateral and dinner with the King of Jordan. Since the King of Jordan and Prime Minister Maliki had a bilateral themselves, earlier today, everybody believed that negated the purpose for the three of them to meet tonight, together, in a trilateral setting. So the plan, according to — since they had such a good, productive bilateral discussion, was just for the President to deal with bilateral issues and other issues with the King this evening in a dinner setting, and then the meetings set for tomorrow will still take place as scheduled.
Is that clear? No? Ok, here’s more Bartlett:
QUESTION: The King and the Prime Minister had a meeting, but the Prime Minister hasn’t seen the President since he got here, and the President changed his schedule to come here for this meeting.
BARTLETT: The President requested the meeting. This was the President requesting the meeting with the Prime Minister. And the substantive meetings on Iraq — look, they were not going to be doing a full detail discussion in a trilateral setting about Iraq and the future of Iraq and the strategy anyway, that just wouldn’t be appropriate. So it was going to be more of a social meeting anyways. But the fact that they had already had a good meeting together, felt like it negated the purpose to doing so. And the President and Prime Minister Maliki will have a very robust and lengthy dialogue tomorrow morning.
So the President flew to Jordan to have a “social meeting” with Maliki, which Maliki decided not to attend. There’s nothing more to it. That should put all the speculation to rest.
Can we cut the bullshit and admit that Sadr now runs Iraq.
At a recent White House reception for freshman members of Congress, Virginia's newest senator tried to avoid President Bush. Democrat James Webb declined to stand in a presidential receiving line or to have his picture taken with the man he had often criticized on the stump this fall. But it wasn't long before Bush found him.
"How's your boy?" Bush asked, referring to Webb's son, a Marine serving in Iraq.
"I'd like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President," Webb responded, echoing a campaign theme.
"That's not what I asked you," Bush said. "How's your boy?"
"That's between me and my boy, Mr. President," Webb said coldly, ending the conversation on the State Floor of the East Wing of the White House [...]
If the exchange with Bush two weeks ago is any indication, Webb won't be a wallflower, especially when it comes to the war in Iraq. And he won't stick to a script drafted by top Democrats.
"I'm not particularly interested in having a picture of me and George W. Bush on my wall," Webb said in an interview yesterday in which he confirmed the exchange between him and Bush. "No offense to the institution of the presidency, and I'm certainly looking forward to working with him and his administration. [But] leaders do some symbolic things to try to convey who they are and what the message is."
In the days after the election, Webb's Democratic colleagues on Capitol Hill went out of their way to make nice with Bush and be seen by his side. House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) sat down for a lunch and photo opportunity with Bush, as did Democratic leaders in the Senate.
Not Webb, who said he tried to avoid a confrontation with Bush at the White House reception but did not shy away from one when the president approached.
The Washington Post doesn't include Webb's desire to slug the president. Which was endearing in its own right.
But the article goes on and on about how Webb might be a liability because, well, because he's not a "polished" politician.
If he's a "liability" (inside the DC bubble), it's because Webb has a well-developed bullshit detector (soldiers develop those really quickly) and will call b.s. when he sees it. We saw that about him from day one, and it's one of the reasons the netroots was so gung-ho on drafting him into the race and into his candidacy.
That's what I want in D.C. Not more too-slick, too-polished presidential wannabees who see the Senate as a stepping stone to the White House, thus afraid to show real leadership.
OK, Webb is not some naif from the far west, this is a man with an adroit political sense combined with character. He was one of the most important Secretaries of the Navy in the post-war period and is a Hollywood producer. He knows politics.
But let's be honest. Without George Allen imploding , he'd be writing another book.
The fact is that Webb will probably be better in office than running for it. He isn't too good at making nice with people, which isn't always a bad thing.
But let's not pretend that a Navy Cross -winning, Annapolis grad and former Navy Secretary is somehow unschooled in the ways of Washington or isn't polished enough to succeed. He suceeded in publishing and the movies with people who didn't agree with anything he stood for. This is the same man who opposed Maya Lin making the Vietnam Memorial, yet has an Asian-American wife. So let's stop pretending he's Mr. Smith going to Washington.
His one sin, if it is that, is to say what he thinks, once, it was that women didn't belong in the military. Now, it's time to get his kid home. And unlike George Allen, he has the capacity to grow up.
Webb will be right on some issues, wrong on others, but let's just say he's a smart man with a proven record of character.
Kurdish warlord-turned-politician Talabani may have been US-protected during the days of Saddam Hussein, but quite a few players in the White House and Pentagon axis will have their reasons to regard the summit in Tehran as a pure "axis of evil". As for the helpless Maliki, there's not much for Bush to lecture him about; his days in power may be numbered. According to various and persistent reports, including from Western and Arab networks, a coup d'etat may be in the works in Baghdad: the US in the Green Zone may have enlisted four of Saddam's Sunni Arab generals with the mission of toppling the Shi'ite-majority Maliki government to install a regime of "national salvation". It would then restructure the Shi'ite-dominated ministries of Defense and Interior and finish off Shi'ite militias such as the Badr Organization of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr.
Call it the return of the Ba'athists - minus Saddam. Even before rumors of a coup began circulation, one could see the so-called diplomatic strategists of Baker's ISG coming up with the idea of trying to co-opt the resistance into entering a coalition government.
But that does not mean the plan will work. The US might invest in an Asian-style face-saving operation spun by heavy public relations by getting involved in direct negotiations with the Sunni Arab resistance. But only a Saddam-style dictator is capable of assuring a strong, stable central government in Baghdad in charge of security for everyone, with no discrimination. That would mean alienating the Shi'ite religious parties and their paramilitary factions to the limit. .................................
A web of myth continues to be spun by much of the world's press, according to which Iran, as an overpowering entity, uses the US occupation to crush the Sunni Arab resistance while manipulating Shi'ite militias. This is a two-pronged fallacy. The Pentagon's finest in Iraq are not crushing anything - on the contrary. Al-Qaeda in Iraq has all but installed an Islamic emirate in al-Anbar province, while the Mehdi Army reigns in Kufa, south of Baghdad, and in Sadr City in Baghdad itself.
The 10,000-strong Badr Organization - affiliated with SCIRI - may have been trained by the Revolutionary Guards in Iran, but it does not take any orders from Tehran. As for Muqtada's 7,000-strong Mehdi Army, it is split into at least three different factions (two of them don't even respond to Muqtada anymore). But all of them are opposed to Iranian interference.
..................... Maliki cannot order any kind of crackdown either on the Badr or the Mehdi Army factions. According to the Islamic Party - which has the majority of parliamentarians under the Sunni Concord Front - the police and the army are totally infiltrated by Shi'ite militias. The Sadrists for their part denounce the US "return of the Ba'athists" strategy - and defend the Mehdi Army as patriots who protect Shi'ites from the takfiris (Sunni radicals).
The Maliki government won't go down quietly, though, if judged by its current diplomatic frenzy. The US for its part will accomplish absolutely nothing by trying to take down Muqtada and the Mehdi Army, or even the Badr Organization. If the Pentagon somehow decided to go on an all-out offensive, it would be very easy for SCIRI/Badr - or for Mehdi Army commandos - completely to cut off the US supply route from Kuwait to Baghdad.
What the Shi'ite Islamic parties in power and Tehran agree on is a crucial point: the Sunni Arab resistance must be vanquished. But Muqtada's position is more nuanced: as a true Iraqi nationalist, he does not rule out agreements with Sunni Arabs with the supreme objective of kicking the occupiers out. Meanwhile, the US military will keep being caught in a deadly trap - between the sprawling, underground Sunni Arab resistance and the Shi'ite militias' non-stop rampage.
The fall of the Green Zone Everyone is guilty in the ongoing Iraq tragedy. The US-trained new Iraqi army is infiltrated by militias, by death squads and even by al-Qaeda in Iraq. The SCIRI, Da'wa and the Kurds are only worried about their own interests, not the interests of Iraq as a nation. And the US - always hiding under the dubious mantra of "Iraqi democracy" - totally evades its responsibility in provoking the appalling chaos in the first place.
Militia hell will remain impervious to any summit. Shi'ite clerical leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani may call for restraint. But Sistani does not control the Shi'ite proletarian masses anymore, Muqtada does. The Americans - attacked at least 180 times a day, every day - will keep "controlling" only one piece of real estate in the whole of Mesopotamia (although an extremely valuable one): the Green Zone ................................. The next big step for the Sunni Arab resistance - according to sheikhs of the powerful Shammar Sunni tribe - would be to take out the Badr Organization, holed up in the Ministry of the Interior, and the two most murderous factions of the Mehdi Army. That would mean an Iraqi nationalist purge of the hated "Iranians". And that implies an all-out attack on the Green Zone.
The return of the Ba'athists and the fall of the Green Zone: now that's a prime-time double bill to knock 'em dead.
BAGHDAD — Prime Minister Nouri Maliki will push for the U.S. military to relinquish control over his nation's security forces when he meets President Bush today to discuss a strategy to quell raging violence in Iraq, aides and political insiders said Tuesday.
Frustrated by U.S. accusations that he isn't doing enough, Maliki says his hands are tied as long as he does not have the authority to deploy forces as he sees fit. He wants Bush to accelerate the training of the army and police, fund more recruits and provide them with bigger and better weapons, lawmakers briefed by Maliki said.
The prime minister also will insist at the two-day summit in Jordan that his government should drive negotiations with Iraq's neighbors, Iran and Syria, they said.
Maliki's emboldened stand comes at a time of uncertainty for U.S. strategy in Iraq. Bush is under pressure to make changes after Democrats swept the midterm congressional election on a wave of unhappiness about the war's results.
I wouldn't considered the Mahdi Army to have a fixed number. I think if Sadr needs 70K bodies, he can get them.
But let's not forget, the US let the Shia die for stability in 1991. The Sunnis might get into the Green Zone, but the Army and police will come to evict them. With an enraged Sadr City behind them. A Baathist government cannot rule, cannot survive. Maliki may be unpopular, but the threat of a Sunni government is so great that the Shia would have to take to the streets armed to protect themselves.
One of the flaws of the Sunnis is that they believe that they are 40 percent of the population. If the US lets them try Diem II, they may find out the hard way they aren't.
(Luis Sinco / LAT) THIS IS WRONG’:Tennie Pierce addresses the Los Angeles City Council with his wife, Brenda, at his side. Standing with him at right are Willis Edwards, a national board member of the NAACP; Earl Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Urban Policy Roundtable; and, at far right, Eddie Jones, president of the L.A. Civil Rights Assn.
By Steve Hymon and Jim Newton, Times Staff Writers November 29, 2006
A torturous debate left the Los Angeles City Council sharply divided by race Tuesday as members weighed whether to restore a settlement offered to a black firefighter whose dinner had been laced with dog food.
For the first time, the council heard directly from Tennie Pierce, the target of the incident, who had filed a discrimination case against the city.
At their lawyer's recommendation, council members initially voted to pay $2.7 million to keep it from going to trial. But last week — amid a storm of public reaction — Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa vetoed the action, setting the stage for Tuesday's council session.
"Whatever anyone says about me, I've always tried to do what's right," said Pierce, holding back tears as his wife sat nearby. "This is wrong. If four black firemen did it to a white fireman, I would stand up [with] the white fireman and say it was wrong."
With a decision expected today, all three black members — Bernard C. Parks, Jan Perry and Herb Wesson — said they would vote to override the veto because the white firefighters who doctored Pierce's spaghetti committed an act that could be viewed as racist and because the city could lose more money in court.
But other members said they had come to view it as a firehouse prank, especially after photos surfaced showing Pierce taking part in hazing rituals banned by a Fire Department that has repeatedly been accused in audits and other lawsuits of subjecting blacks to hostile conditions.
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Later, Councilman Greig Smith ardently argued that he believed the dog food incident was serious but not racist.
"It is wrong, it is abusive, it is dehumanizing to all races and not just African Americans," Smith said. "I'm sorry, sir. The question here today is do we pay Mr. Pierce for his charge of racism or look at it for what it is."
Councilman Parks told Pierce that his comments had "brought tears to my eyes."
Parks said he had recently spoken on "The John & Ken Show" on KFI-AM (640), whose hosts have been prominent in fighting the settlement, and "I had the great pleasure of them hanging up on me.
"I said [to them], 'When's the last time that you ate dog food?' "
Pierce suggested to the council that the pranks he participated in were good-natured and said that, when they were over, "people would hug the person and take pictures with them. What they did to me at the Fire Station 5 was wrong because it was something I did not know. My mother worked three jobs to get me where I am today. At no time did she ever feed us dog food."
Pierce said that what bothered him most was that white firefighters watched him eat. And, when he complained, the Fire Department didn't help.
Are they kidding? You really think a federal trial jury won't find this racist? Feeding him dog food, and trying to write it off as a prank?
When they get to bring in racist acts within the department? LA is getting a bargain. You can't do this in New York. The City doesn't place settlements up for a vote. I think when the price is not only losing in LA County, but probably a much larger settlement they will have to pay, this is the cheaper and smarter solution.
IT happens at coffee bars. It happens at cheese counters. But most of all, it happens at bars and restaurants. Pregnant women are slow-moving targets for strangers who judge what we eat — and, especially, drink.
What amount? Signs bear a warning that some women choose to ignore.
“Nothing makes people more uncomfortable than a pregnant woman sitting at the bar,” said Brianna Walker, a bartender in Los Angeles. “The other customers can’t take their eyes off her.”
Drinking during pregnancy quickly became taboo in the United States after 1981, when the Surgeon General began warning women about the dangers of alcohol. The warnings came after researchers at the University of Washington identified Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, a group of physical and mental birth defects caused by alcohol consumption, in 1973. In its recommendations, the government does not distinguish between heavy drinking and the occasional beer: all alcohol poses an unacceptable risk, it says.
So those of us who drink, even occasionally, during pregnancy face unanswerable questions, like why would anyone risk the health of a child for a passing pleasure like a beer?
“It comes down to this: I just don’t buy it,” said Holly Masur, a mother of two in Deerfield, Ill., who often had half a glass of wine with dinner during her pregnancies, based on advice from both her mother and her obstetrician. “How can a few sips of wine be dangerous when women used to drink martinis and smoke all through their pregnancies?”
Many American obstetricians, skeptical about the need for total abstinence, quietly tell their patients that an occasional beer or glass of wine — no hard liquor — is fine.
“If a patient tells me that she’s drinking two or three glasses of wine a week, I am personally comfortable with that after the first trimester,” said Dr. Austin Chen, an obstetrician in TriBeCa. “But technically I am sticking my neck out by saying so.”
Americans’ complicated relationship with food and drink — in which everything desirable is also potentially dangerous — only becomes magnified in pregnancy.
When I was pregnant with my first child in 2001 there was so much conflicting information that doubt became a reflexive response. Why was tea allowed but not coffee? How could all “soft cheeses” be forbidden if cream cheese was recommended? What were the real risks of having a glass of wine on my birthday?
Pregnant women are told that danger lurks everywhere: listeria in soft cheese, mercury in canned tuna, salmonella in fresh-squeezed orange juice. Our responsibility for minimizing risk through perfect behavior feels vast.
Eventually, instead of automatically following every rule, I began looking for proof.
Proof, it turns out, is hard to come by when it comes to “moderate” or “occasional” drinking during pregnancy. Standard definitions, clinical trials and long-range studies simply do not exist
What happens if you're not honest about your drinking and get hammered?
Let me put it this way, if you're working class and someone sees you drinking while pregnant, you could lose your kids.
By Thomas E. Ricks and Robin Wright Washington Post Staff Writers Wednesday, November 29, 2006; Page A01
From troops on the ground to members of Congress, Americans increasingly blame the continuing violence and destruction in Iraq on the people most affected by it: the Iraqis.
Even Democrats who have criticized the Bush administration's conduct of the occupation say the people and government of Iraq are not doing enough to rebuild their society. The White House is putting pressure on the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and members of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group have debated how much to blame Iraqis for not performing civic duties.
This marks a shift in tone from earlier debate about the responsibility of the United States to restore order after the 2003 invasion, and it seemed to gain currency in October, when sectarian violence surged. Some see the talk of blame as the beginning of the end of U.S. involvement.
"It is the first manifestation of a 'Who lost Iraq?' argument that will likely rage for years to come," said Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University expert on terrorism who has worked as a U.S. government consultant in Iraq.
...............................
"I'm tired of nit-picking over how we should bully the Iraqis into becoming better citizens of their own country," former CIA Middle East expert Ray Close wrote in an e-mail to the other advisers to the study group.
Several other experts of various political stripes said this tendency to dump on Baghdad feels like a preamble to withdrawal.
"It's their fault, and by implication not ours, is clearly a theme that's in the air," said retired Army Col. Andrew J. Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran and longtime skeptic of the war in Iraq. It reminds him, he said, of the sour last days of the Vietnam War, when "there was a tendency to blame everything on the 'gooks' -- meaning our South Vietnamese allies who had disappointed us."
"People never understood the culture and the challenges that we faced in trying to build a new Iraq," a senior U.S. intelligence official said. "There's incredible frustration . . . but it also shows a great deal of ignorance."
Fucking morons.
Anyone with a good history book, and not a total cretin like Ken Pollack, would have known the end game in Iraq meant a Shia state allied with Iran.
Only in Bush's fantasy world did Iraqis share our interests. In reality, they wanted a Shia state and we paved the way for it.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 28 — A classified memorandum by President Bush’s national security adviser expressed serious doubts about whether Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki had the capacity to control the sectarian violence in Iraq and recommended that the United States take new steps to strengthen the Iraqi leader’s position.
The Nov. 8 memo was prepared for Mr. Bush and his top deputies by Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, and senior aides on the staff of the National Security Council after a trip by Mr. Hadley to Baghdad.
The memo suggests that if Mr. Maliki fails to carry out a series of specified steps, it may ultimately be necessary to press him to reconfigure his parliamentary bloc, a step the United States could support by providing “monetary support to moderate groups,” and by sending thousands of additional American troops to Baghdad to make up for what the document suggests is a current shortage of Iraqi forces. (Text of Memo)
The memo presents an unvarnished portrait of Mr. Maliki and notes that he relies for some of his political support on leaders of more extreme Shiite groups. The five-page document, classified secret, is based in part on a one-on-one meeting between Mr. Hadley and Mr. Maliki on Oct. 30.
“His intentions seem good when he talks with Americans, and sensitive reporting suggests he is trying to stand up to the Shia hierarchy and force positive change,” the memo said of the Iraqi leader. “But the reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action.”
An administration official made a copy of the document available to a New York Times reporter seeking information on the administration’s policy review. The Times read and transcribed the memo.
The White House has sought to avoid public criticism of Mr. Maliki, who is scheduled to meet with Mr. Bush in Jordan on Wednesday. The latest surge of sectarian violence in Baghdad and the Democratic victories in the midterm elections are prompting calls for sharp changes in American policy. Such changes are among options being debated by the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan panel led by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton.
A senior administration official discussed the memorandum in general terms after being told The New York Times was preparing an article on the subject. The official described the document as “essentially a trip report” and not a result of the administration’s review of its Iraq policy, which is still under way.
He said the purpose of the memo “was to provide a snapshot of the challenges facing Prime Minister Maliki and how we can best enhance his capabilities, mindful of the complex political and security environment in which he is operating.”
The American delegation that went to Iraq with Mr. Hadley included Meghan L. O’Sullivan, the deputy national security adviser, and three other members of the National Security Council staff. The memo, prepared after that trip, has been circulated to cabinet-level officials who are participating in the administration’s review of Iraq strategy.
There is nothing in the memo that suggests the Bush administration is interested in replacing Mr. Maliki as prime minister. But while Mr. Bush has stated that he has confidence in the Iraqi leader, the memo questions whether Mr. Maliki has the will and ability to establish a genuine unity government, saying the answer will emerge from actions he takes in the weeks and months ahead.
“We returned from Iraq convinced we need to determine if Prime Minister Maliki is both willing and able to rise above the sectarian agendas being promoted by others,” the memo says. “Do we and Prime Minister Maliki share the same vision for Iraq? If so, is he able to curb those who seek Shia hegemony or the reassertion of Sunni power? The answers to these questions are key in determining whether we have the right strategy in Iraq.”
In describing the Oct. 30 meeting between Mr. Hadley and Mr. Maliki, it says: “Maliki reiterated a vision of Shia, Sunni and Kurdish partnership, and in my one-on-one meeting with him, he impressed me as a leader who wanted to be strong but was having difficulty figuring out how to do so.” It said the Iraqi leader’s assurances seemed to have been contradicted by developments on the ground, including the Iraqi government’s approach to the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia known in Arabic as Jaish al-Mahdi and headed by Moktada al-Sadr.
“Reports of nondelivery of services to Sunni areas, intervention by the prime minister’s office to stop military action against Shia targets and to encourage them against Sunni ones, removal of Iraq’s most effective commanders on a sectarian basis and efforts to ensure Shia majorities in all ministries — when combined with the escalation of Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM) killings — all suggest a campaign to consolidate Shia power in Baghdad.”
Among the concerns voiced in the memo was that Mr. Maliki was surrounded by a small group of advisers from the Shiite Dawa Party, a narrow circle that American officials worry may skew the information he receives.
The last paragraph is fucking hillarious. Maliki has a small circle of advisors? What about Bush. Jesus fucking Christ. It's a 50-50 bet he shows up to meet Bush today. And if he does, he may not be able to go home.
All these educated people are as smart as a donkey. A newborn, mentally disabled donkey.
Why would a member of the Dawa Party want to create a Shia-dominated Iraq?
No clue, other than that's been their goal for 40 years.
Dumbasses.
Are these people making foriegn policy or are the biggest rubes on the planet?
Ok, let's take a look at the highway south of Baghdad.
The green line is the north south road, the blue, the east west road.
The red is the areas directly lining the road and the pink are areas indirect fire weapons can be shot from.
Now, let's say you have a convoy of a couple of hundred vehicles and you start taking fire.
So you call for the fast movers and you get an A-10. Lucky you.
So you set up the coordinates, make sure he knows you're on the highway, and call him out. He makes his gun run with that big cannon of his, everything around you on fire.
And then five minutes later, the mortars start up again and you don't see anything other than a couple of helicopters for the next five hours.
Why?
Because air support is like money, everybody wants some, but it is a finite resource. So, people think, yes, the US will do what it takes to get everyone home in a fighting retreat, but they can't carpet bomb their way home. The people they may be fighting can hide from bombs and bullets.
If there is a fighting retreat from Iraq, there will be more targets than the AF/Navy/Marines can handle.
No matter how many Air Tasking Orders are written, no matter how many CCT's are calling in strikes, they won't have enough, and they may face serious AAA opposition. All those guns sitting in depots captured after the invasion didn't go anywhere.
A recent IED attack has surfaced an ugly truth -- the Grunts doing the great majority of fighting and dying in Iraq are considered "more expendable" than their REMF comrades, and the people making this determination are themselves, you guessed it, REMF's!!
(Now, before I get a couple hundred emails protesting my use of "REMF's as disparaging of some of our military who are themselves at risk, let me make this point. There is "risk" back in an FOB, no question. Is it the same risk as those who work outside the FOB? Don't think so. Is risk outside the FOB spread evenly? No -- go to one of the infantry companies in Ramadi, or Fallujah, and then compare that risk with someone running convoys between Ramadi and Baghdad. Not the same, but one hell of a lot more than someone back in the TOC at the FOB. And, I fully appreciate the risk faced by our Combat Engineers as they clear roads, and our EOD studs as they deal with IED's/EFP's. A special salute to our Combat Medics/Corpsmen out in the killings fields while I'm at it. And, the drivers who haul ass through IED Avenue -- you've damn sure got my respect!! But,bottom line -- if I've offended anyone who has dodged the occasional mortar shell in route to Burger King, or who has to make do with a 36-inch plasma tv while others, in the Green Zone in Baghdad have 42-inch sets, then I don't apologize. If you want me to place you in the same category as The Grunts, change MOS's! Until then, have the intellectual honesty to admit that REMF's are not deserving of the same respect given to Hack's "Warriors," even if you get the same "Imminent Danger Pay." Let me make it clear that while I respect all who serve our great nation, I am not blind to the reality that not all who serve, share the same threat of death, or of crippling or maiming wounds. And, as to who is a REMF, and who is not -- it's between you and your conscience. If the "shoe" fits, wear it.)
So, imagine this scenario -- you and your buddies have finished another day of training Iraqi troops and are headed back to your FOB (Forward Operating Base) when an especially nasty IED (in the form of EFP, an "Explosively Formed Projectile") explodes into the lead Humvee in your column of three.
The blast is strong enough to flip the Humvee into the air, landing in a ditch on it's top.
Here's what happened, in the words of America's Grunts who where there.
To: Soldiers For the Truth
From: The NCOs of the 4th INP Brigade SPTT Team
The 4/1 SPPT Team was traveling back from Salman Pak to Camp Rustamiyah along EFP alley (RTE Pluto South) on Sunday May 14th about 5:15pm in a 3 vehicle convoy. About 3 miles from Camp Rustamiyah, the first Humvee was hit by a massive roadside bomb called an EFP. The bomb blew the HUMVEE into the air and created a giant cloud of debris, dirt and pavement. We stopped as fast as we could and when the smoke cleared enough, we could see the first HUMVEE had been completely blown off the road and was lying upside down in a ditch. To make matters worse it was also on fire. The rest of the team tried to free the driver and vehicle commander from the wreckage but the frame of the HUMVEE was bent and the door would not open. The two soldiers in the front were trapped inside the burning vehicle and died. We could only pray that they were already dead from the EFP blast and did not burn to death. We tried to pull the front doors off with a winch and a tow strap, but the burning ammunition inside the wreck started to explode and the entire vehicle caught fire and blew up. The gunner was pulled from the wreckage and was severely wounded with shrapnel wounds from the spalling. The Medic with the SPTT Team was able to start working on the gunner to save his life and we gave the interpreter aid as best as we could. A MEDIVAC was immediately called for the litter urgent and critical soldier and the QRF rolled from the FOB. About 10 minutes later the tanks and HUMVEES of the QRF got there and secured the area. What happened at this point is what we need your help with.
The MEDIVAC was denied because we could not guarantee the LZ was not hot. Even with the QRF securing the area, the MEDIVAC was not launched. We were told we had to transport the severely wounded soldier and interpreter back to the FOB, have the aid station stabilize them and the MEDIVAC would then fly to the FOB to pick them up. To complicate matters the QRF did not have an ambulance with them, because the medical until will not roll any of the 20 odd HUMVEE and M113 combat ambulances with the QRF because it is too dangerous outside the FOB. We had to put the soldier in a HUMVEE and drive him to the FOB, where the chicken shit medics were waiting inside the FOB gate to transport him, via ambulance to the TMC. Thank God this soldier is still alive and on his way to Landstuhl. The two soldiers were eventually pulled from the wreckage after a HEMMIT with a tank pump unit put out the fire that engulfed the wrecked HUMVEE. It took the HEMMIT almost an hour to get to the site, 3 miles away from the FOB, because the KBR contracted Fire Department and EMT unit refused to leave the FOB, because their contract states they will ONLY work within the protection of the FOB.
Their brand new fire engines and rescue vehicles were waiting inside the gate when we finally towed the wrecked HUMVEE back. By the time the HEMMIT arrived, both soldiers were burned beyond recognition. to the point where their own wives could not recognize them. Last night at 1:00am in the morning, we loaded the body bags on a helicopter to BIOP and to start their trip home
When we asked why the MEDIVAC would not land on a secured LZ to MEDIVAC the critically wounded soldier, we were told �the policy is that we cannot afford to lose a Blackhawk and crew flying into potentially hostile LZ.� We work in Salman Pak, which is almost an hour southeast of Baghdad. If a soldier is wounded, we are expected to self evac him back to Rustamiyah because �it is too dangerous to send a MEDIVAC, Ambulance or M113 combat medic vehicle (even if it is with the QRF). From he time we landed in Kuwait and after we arrived in Iraq, we were given MEDIVAC procedure cards and even given a MEDIVAC Freq . We were told that all we had to do is call and follow the procedures on the card and a MEDIVAC would be launched. This is BOGUS! ALL Soldiers need to know that unless they are at a FOB, the MEDIVAC will not be launched. Fire departments, EMT, combat medic vehicles, field ambulances all have orders not to leave the FOB because it is to :�dangerous.� The reality is if you are wounded, you are SOL until your own unit puts you into a HUMVEE and you get back to the FOB. Please help us contact [deleted] about this policy. 4th ID is telling us that �this is just the way things are.� That, �these things happen.� We need your help before this is swept under the rug.
OK, this means two things. One, 11B's are stuck in the sandbox and their bosses are too scared to dust them off. POG's as they call them, seem to be more valuable than grunts. So no one is going to send out a shiny helo to catch an RPG round.
People die over things like this and not just from wounds. Imagine your best friend dies because they didn't launch a dustoff. Your reaction might not be entirely rational.
In Vietnam, fragging started when people could no longer trust their superiors to act in their best interests. The same with combat refusals.
There is another, far more ominous implication here. US units only control as far as their guns can shoot. When commanders are afraid they can't protect dustoffs from ambush, much less an M113, whatever Bush is telling you about Iraq is a total and complete lie. It's easy to say gutless fucking POG's, but the reality is that they cannot secure those vehicles from ambush because they don't have enough armor or men.
This is another of those stories that I stay out of the way with my commentary/snark and let the story speak for itself:
From The Hill
President Bush has pledged to work with the new Democratic majorities in Congress, but he has already gotten off on the wrong foot with Jim Webb, whose surprise victory over Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) tipped the Senate to the Democrats
Webb, a decorated former Marine officer, hammered Allen and Bush over the unpopular war in Iraq while wearing his son’s old combat boots on the campaign trail. It seems the president may have some lingering resentment.
At a private reception held at the White House with newly elected lawmakers shortly after the election, Bush asked Webb how his son, a Marine lance corporal serving in Iraq, was doing.
Webb responded that he really wanted to see his son brought back home, said a person who heard about the exchange from Webb.
“I didn’t ask you that, I asked how he’s doing,” Bush retorted, according to the source.
Webb confessed that he was so angered by this that he was tempted to slug the commander-in-chief, reported the source, but of course didn’t. It’s safe to say, however, that Bush and Webb won’t be taking any overseas trips together anytime soon.
Sorry for the shortness, etc, but the content speaks volumes
OK, I won't bullshit you. If you read the story below this and aren't shaking, you're either on better drugs than I have seen or have no nerves. Bush is pretty much pissing in Jim Baker's face as our military options close in Iraq.
But since the next two days will be filled with ugly, more ugly than we can be expected to bear, I would like to create a happy space.
A space where we talk about what we want or will buy for others for Christmas. Or make, or grow.
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and JOHN O’NEIL Published: November 28, 2006
TALLINN, Estonia, Nov. 28 — President Bush today said Al Qaeda was to blame for the rising wave of sectarian violence in Iraq, which he refused to label a civil war. Mr. Bush said he would press Iraq’s prime minister during meetings in Jordan later this week to lay out a strategy for restoring order.
“My questions to him will be: What do we need to do to succeed? What is your strategy in dealing with the sectarian violence?” said Mr. Bush. “I will assure him that we will continue to pursue Al Qaeda to make sure that they do not establish a safe haven in Iraq.”The remarks, made at a press conference here with President Toomas Hendrik Ilves of Estonia, were Mr. Bush’s first on the situation in Iraq since a series of bombs exploded in a Shiite district of Baghdad last Thursday, killing more than 200 people. The bombing was the deadliest single attack since the American invasion. The following day, Shiite militiamen staged a vengeful reprisal, attacking Sunni mosques in Baghdad and in the nearby city of Baquba.
The growing cycle of violence have prompted warnings from world leaders, including Jordan’s King Abdullah and Kofi Annan, the United Nations Secretary General, that the country is at the brink of civil war.
But Mr. Bush, who heads to Jordan on Wednesday for two days of meetings with Mr. Maliki, dismissed a question about whether a civil war has indeed erupted.
“There’s all kinds of speculation about what may or may not be happening,” he said, adding, “No question about it, it’s tough.”
Mr. Bush also had harsh words for Syria and Iran, and reiterated his stance that he does not intend to negotiate directly with them to enlist their help in ending the violence in Iraq. He said he would leave such talks to the government of Iraq, “a sovereign nation which is conducting its own foreign policy.”The president acknowledged that there were high levels of sectarian violence in Iraq, but he put the blame for the disorder squarely on Al Qaeda.
“There’s a lot of sectarian violence taking place, fomented, in my opinion, because of the attacks by Al Qaeda, causing people to seek reprisal,” Mr. Bush said, adding that he planned to work with Mr. Maliki “to defeat these elements.”
Referring to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Al Qaeda leader in Iraq who was killed by American forces over the summer, he added, “The plan of Mr. Zarqawi was to foment sectarian violence.”
Boy, I don't envy Jim Baker.
It isn't AQ doing this, but Sunnis. And the largest militia is the Mahdi Army.
In the interest of reaching out, Mr. Bloomberg chose to overlook remarks made by Mr. Barron, a former Black Panther, who came awfully close on Sunday to threatening violence against the police. If the city doesn’t respond to the Bell case, “don’t ask us to ask our people to be peaceful while they are being murdered,” said Mr. Barron, ever the statesman. “We’re not the only ones that can bleed.”
That is true. Police officers also can bleed, not that Mr. Sharpton or Mr. Barron is known for speaking out when the spilled blood is blue.
Did they call a rally after two black undercover detectives, James V. Nemorin and Rodney J. Andrews, were shot in the back of the head in 2003 while trying to rid the streets of guns? What do you think? Even as the killing of Mr. Bell held center stage, a Staten Island man went on trial yesterday in the detectives’ murder.
Perhaps one result of the latest disaster will be a reordering of police undercover procedures. The Diallo case led to changes. But it may be worth noting that the New York police do not typically shoot at anything in sight, despite some of the overheated oratory heard in the last few days.
By any measurement — number of shooting incidents, number of rounds fired, number of civilians shot or wounded — police officers reach for their guns far less often than they did 10 years ago. And 10 years ago, under Mr. Giuliani, the numbers were well below those of previous decades.
In the early 1970s, an average of 63 civilians a year were shot to death by the police. The figure for 1996 was 30. Last year it was 9. Before the Bell episode, the 2006 total was 10.
Of course, statistics get you only so far. Inevitably, something like Mr. Bell’s death reinforces a perception among some New Yorkers that the police are trigger-happy and the ones who pay, almost always, are black men
See, there's a missing man from Haberman's article and it's former police captain Eric Adams. He, not Sharpton, has defined the response to police shootings, and other crimes. It's easy for Haberman to take a snide cheap shot at Sharpton and Barron, but it isn't so easy unless you leave out Adams and his former organization One Hundred Blacks in Law Enforcement who care.
When criminals shoot police, why would you hold a rally? They're going to jail and justice will be served. When police murder blacks in the streets of New York, the dead are smeared, their families forced to wage a publicity campaign to get justice and is most likely to get a civil settlement from the city, while the cops walk free.
It is Adams who Sharpton has relied upon to question police procedure.
What Haberman also forgets to mention is while making Barron out to be scary, is that the issue is not just the shootings. People aren't upset about the shootings alone, but the knowledge that it is likely that no matter how flawed the incident, a policeman will never do time for killing a minority. If a citizen shot a police officer 41 or 50 times, they would be under the jail.
But time and again, white police officers are excused for what are basically extrajudicial killings. In the most egregious case, Giuliani led the fight to move the trial from the Bronx to Albany, where the jury freed four murderers. Which was the expected outcome. The Dorismond case never got to a jury. And the feds, frightened of Giuliani, never persued the case in District court.
The ONLY case which got to a federal grand jury and trial was the sodomy case of Abner Louima. And then, the cops lawyers waged a years long media battle to get some of the defendents freed.
What Haberman ignores is the fact that when police are wrong, when they murder, they do not serve time.
He's not honest enough to admit that it isn't perception but fact that when black men are murdered in the streets of New York by the police, heaven and earth will be moved to help them escape justice.
He, like a lot of the media, do not realize that the anger over the Diallo and Dorismond murders have only receeded, not disappeared. Freddy Ferrer found that out the hard way last year. By saying the Diallo "shooting" wasn't a murder, he lost black New York, despite Sharpton's efforts to help him.
Bloomberg doesn't realize it either.
The police unions better realize that they are alone on this. When the head of the Detectives Association comes out and says it was a good shooting, it makes him look like a bloodthirsty racist. Now, he may be defending his members, but people no longer want to hear police excuses for dead black men in the streets.
If you look at the two maps, you see that the US can only move the bulk of their forces south, through the Shia heartland.
This is critical in understanding how ugly this fight could be.
The fact is that the Iraqi government could come apart by the weekend, actually mid day Wednesday, if the Sadrists leave the government. Maliki could be in Jordan and the Green Zone could have new owners.
Bush is now officially over his head and is unlikely to be president by this time next year if a forced retreat from Iraq is the result. Nixon was long gone by the end of the Vietnam War.
So let's go over the topography, starting in Baghdad.
See the green zone and the airport?
Notice the highway between them, the most dangerous highway in the world?
Looking at the area of the Green Zone east. Well, that's the infamous Sadr City. It goes on for a while and has half of Baghdad's population.
Leaving Baghdad will be hard, if not impossible, for all but US citizens. Iraqi collaborators will be at the mercy of Shia and Sunni mobs and their deaths will be gruesome.
Getting out of Baghdad by ground is almost impossible to imagine.
But that would be the easy part. It is 300 miles to the Kuwaiti border, with several chokepoints along the way.
This is Nasyriah. This is where the 509th Maintenance Company convoy broke down and the US Marines fought an intense battle to control both bridges. But that was in an advance. The US would have to hold both ends for as long as the convoys needed to cross it. Which means they would have to seize it at the start of any retreat. Any delay would lead to the bridges being blown.
It isn't just money which makes Sadr powerful, it's geography.
By Dafna Linzer and Thomas E. Ricks Washington Post Staff Writers Tuesday, November 28, 2006; Page A01
The U.S. military is no longer able to defeat a bloody insurgency in western Iraq or counter al-Qaeda's rising popularity there, according to newly disclosed details from a classified Marine Corps intelligence report that set off debate in recent months about the military's mission in Anbar province.
The Marines recently filed an updated version of that assessment that stood by its conclusions and stated that, as of mid-November, the problems in troubled Anbar province have not improved, a senior U.S. intelligence official said yesterday. "The fundamental questions of lack of control, growth of the insurgency and criminality" remain the same, the official said.
The Marines' August memo, a copy of which was shared with The Washington Post, is far bleaker than some officials suggested when they described it in late summer. The report describes Iraq's Sunni minority as "embroiled in a daily fight for survival," fearful of "pogroms" by the Shiite majority and increasingly dependent on al-Qaeda in Iraq as its only hope against growing Iranian dominance across the capital.
True or not, the memo says, "from the Sunni perspective, their greatest fears have been realized: Iran controls Baghdad and Anbaris have been marginalized." Moreover, most Sunnis now believe it would be unwise to count on or help U.S. forces because they are seen as likely to leave the country before imposing stability.
Between al-Qaeda's violence, Iran's influence and an expected U.S. drawdown, "the social and political situation has deteriorated to a point" that U.S. and Iraqi troops "are no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar," the assessment found. In Anbar province alone, at least 90 U.S. troops have died since Sept. 1.
The Post first reported on the memo's existence in September, as it was being circulated among military and national security officials. Several officials who read the report described its conclusions as grim.
But the contents have not previously been made public. Read as a complete assessment, it paints a stark portrait of a failed province and of the country's Sunnis -- once dominant under Saddam Hussein -- now desperate, fearful and impoverished. They have been increasingly abandoned by religious and political leaders who have fled to neighboring countries, and other leaders have been assassinated. And unlike Iraq's Shiite majority, or Kurdish groups in the north, the Sunnis are without oil and other natural resources. The report notes that illicit oil trading is providing millions of dollars to al-Qaeda while "official profits appear to feed Shiite cronyism in Baghdad."
Someone here was posting on how strong the Sunnis were.
They are scared witless.
Sadr is planning a pogrom to punish the Sunnis for all history's wrong. They haven't got the power to fend off Sadr and his militia.
By THOMAS WAGNER, Associated Press Writer 29 minutes ago
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Mortar rounds crashed into an oil processing facility near the northern city of Kirkuk on Monday, igniting a huge blaze, and a U.S. Air Force jet with one pilot crashed while supporting American soldiers fighting in Anbar province, a hotbed of Iraq's Sunni Arab insurgency.
The government fully lifted a curfew on Monday, allowing vehicles back on the roads and reopening the international airport on the fourth day after suspected Sunni insurgents used bombs and mortars to kill more than 200 people in Sadr City, a large Shiite slum, in the worst attack by militants in the war. Sectarian violence continued across the country with a total of 91 people killed or found dead.
The fire at the pipeline filtering facility shut down the flow of crude to the massive Beiji refinery to the southwest, according to an official at the North Oil Co., who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters. The flames erupted at 6:30 p.m. and burned for several hours before they were extinguished, the U.S. military said.
The facility is 15 miles northwest of Kirkuk, a city which sits amid some of Iraq's richest crude oil deposits.
Earlier Monday, a bomb exploded beneath an oil pipeline south of Baghdad and set it on fire, and Iraqi and American forces were deployed to secure the area, police said.
No injuries were reported in the 7:30 a.m. blast near Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad, said police 1st Lt. Haider Satar. The fire was put out about noon. The pipeline carries crude oil from storage tanks in nearby Latifiyah to the Dora refinery in Baghdad.
Since the U.S.-led war toppled Saddam Hussein in March 2003, the country's oil industry has suffered many such attacks on its pipelines.
The F-16CG jet that crashed was supporting coalition ground forces when it went down at about 1:35 p.m. in Anbar province, about 20 miles northwest of Baghdad, the military said in a brief statement. The statement had no information about the suspected cause of the crash or the fate of the pilot.
Mohammed Al-Obeidi, an Iraqi who lives in the nearby town of Karmah, said by telephone that he saw the jet flying up and down erratically before it nose-dived and exploded in a farm field. He said other U.S. warplanes rushed to the crash site and were circling around it.
Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, a U.S. military's spokesman, said he doubted the jet was shot down because F-16s fly very fast and have not encountered weapons in Iraq that are capable of taking them down.
The next major production block (Block 40/42), sometimes known as the "Night Falcon" because of its enhanced night/all-weather capabilities, appeared in 1989. It was unofficially designated F-16CG/DG when the USAF wanted to call the LANTIRN capable Viper an F-16G, but Congress wouldn't approve a "new" aircraft, which was politically seen as a threat to the F-22.
The first Block 40/42 F-16 rolled out of the Fort Worth facility in December 1988, and was delivered during the same month. Production ended temporarily in 1995, and will restart again in 1999 to build a 21-aircraft order for Egypt.
Block 40/42 (also part of MSIP III) introduced the LANTIRN navigation and targeting pods and the associated holographic HUD, the GPS (Global Positioning System) navigation receiver, APG-68V(5) radar (with a 100+ hour Mean Time Between Failures or MTBF) and ALE-47 decoy launchers, digital flight controls (replacing the old analog ones), automatic terrain following, and a diffractive optics heads-up display. Also included were a new positive-pressure breathing system to improve G-tolerance for the pilot, full provisions for internal electronic countermeasures, an enhanced envelope gun sight, and a capability for bombing moving ground targets.
Now, there have been a couple of combat crashes of the plane in Kosovo and Iraq, but Centcom is dishonest and has obscured the shoot down of several aircraft
Just another day at Minitrue From the Orwell classic, 2006*:
What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of web pages had been identified, that number would be edited and republished, the original html code destroyed, and the corrected pages placed on the web site in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to the web site, but also to official photographs, video, documents, reports, transcripts, films, audio files, graphics, -- to every kind of data or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All official history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. The largest section of the Records Department, far larger than the one on which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of reports, fact sheets, press releases and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction. A number of electronic files which might, because of changes in political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Our Leader, have been rewritten a dozen times still existed in protected files bearing their original date, and no other copies existed to contradict them. Reports, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably reissued without any admission that any alteration had been made. Even the emails which Winston received, and which he deleted as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy.
But actually, he thought as he reframed the video of Our Leader's speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln, it was not even forgery. It was merely the omission of another piece of nonsense. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie.
Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Army's recruitment forecast had estimated it needed 8,050 recruits for the month of May. The actual figure came in at a little over 5000. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the projected figure down to 6,700, so as to lesson the Pentagon's embarrassment. In any case, 8,050 was no nearer the truth about what was needed than 6,700, or 10,000 for that matter. Very likely no number of recruits would save the Army from being destroyed by incompetent leadership. Likelier still, nobody cared. All one knew was that every month astronomical recruitment numbers were produced on paper, while soldiers were deployed for their third or fourth tours in the battle zone. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.
* The title of George Orwell's novel is 2006. It has always been called 2006.
Bebe Moore Campbell, a best-selling novelist known for her empathetic treatment of the difficult, intertwined and occasionally surprising relationship between the races, died yesterday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 56.
The cause was complications of brain cancer, said Linda Wharton-Boyd, a longtime friend.
Along with writers like Terry McMillan, Ms. Campbell was part of the first wave of black novelists who made the lives of upwardly mobile black people a routine subject for popular fiction. Straddling the divide between literary and mass-market novels, Ms. Campbell’s work explored not only the turbulent dance between blacks and whites but also the equally fraught relationship between men and women.
Throughout her work, Ms. Campbell sought to counter prevailing stereotypes of black people as socially and economically marginal. Though critics occasionally faulted her characters as two-dimensional, her novels were known for their crossover appeal, read by blacks and whites alike.
Often called on by the news media to discuss race relations, Ms. Campbell was for years a familiar presence on television and radio. With the publication of her most recent novel, “72 Hour Hold” (Knopf, 2005), she also became a visible spokeswoman on mental-health issues. The novel, about bipolar disorder, was inspired by the experience of a family member, Ms. Campbell said.
Originally a schoolteacher and later a journalist, Ms. Campbell made her mark as a writer of fiction with her first novel, “Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine” (Putnam), published in 1992. Rooted in the story of Emmett Till, the book tells of a black Chicago youth killed by a white man in Mississippi in 1955. After the murderer is acquitted at trial, the narrative follows his increasing dissolution.
“I wanted to give racism a face,” Ms. Campbell said in an interview with The New York Times Book Review in 1992. “African-Americans know about racism, but I don’t think we really know the causes. I decided it’s first of all a family problem.”
Her last book, 72 Hour Hold is probably one of the bravest books written by a black author in the last 20 years. Because it dealt with the completely taboo subject of mental illness in the black community. Much of the addiction within the black community is driven by self-medication. It was the kind of subject which most blacks refuse to deal with.
Amid a growing barrage of front-page headlines, U.S. embassy officials "strongly suggested" President Bush's twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara Bush, cut short their trip to Buenos Aires because of security issues, U.S. diplomatic and security sources tell ABC News.
But the girls have stayed on, celebrating their 25th birthday over the weekend and producing even more headlines about their activities.
........................
Stories of the twins' visit took on wild proportions in the Argentinean press. One tabloid headline had the young women running nude in the hallway of their hotel, a report the hotel staff denied to ABC News.
...............................
But to the dismay and anger of some U.S. embassy and security staff, the girls stayed on.
Thursday night, an ABC News producer was able to walk into their hotel unchecked and engage Barbara Bush in conversation while she checked her e-mail on a computer in the lobby. Jenna sat talking with friends on a sofa nearby. No Secret Service agents were anywhere to be seen in the lobby, according to ABC News' Joe Goldman.
And yesterday the Bush twins were spotted at the Sunday soccer matches, wearing team jerseys and sitting in the owner's box, watching Argentina's top team Boca Juniors compete. Several games have been canceled due to violence in the crowds this year. In fact, last weekend no spectators were allowed to attend the match other than season ticket holders.
Sources tell ABC News the twins plan to stick to their original itinerary and stay in Buenos Aires until Thursday
Ah, selfish clowns? Why yes.
Not only is the State Department worried, Secret Service worried, but I bet the CIA as well. And then they went to a soccer match? Argentina's games are known for violence and even better, they wear Boca Juniors jerseys. I would bet State's Diplomatic Security is helping out on security.
I think that the smart thing would be to not take sides where people live, breathe and kill over soccer.
I know a lot of white people have this fantasy that Al Sharpton stirs up trouble and makes things worse when there is a racial confrontation.
But that is a fantasy.
Like waiting for the "shake down".
Sure, Sharpton can be bought, for the Jets, for any number of political causes. But that is night and day from a police shooting.
Let me explain this carefully. Al Sharpton saved a lot of lives in New York. Since his rise to prominance, there has not been a major riot in the city. Shaprton was on the outside of the Crown Heights Riot, and later walked the streets to calm people down. Whereas in other cities, full scale riots exploded (Miami in the 1980's).
His political power and street credibility has chaneled what could have been riots into lawful political protests and the courts.
The closest came during the funeral of Patrick Dorismond, where the Haitian community nearly charged the cops. Even during the most provocative actions of the Giuliani Administration, Sharpton and his supporters were able to prevent conflict with the police.
Look at the picture at the top of the post. Sharpton is talking to Bloomberg, but behind him is Councilman Charles Barron and to the right, Rev. Herbert Daughtry. Both longtime black activists, both with support in the city.
What people need to understand is that Sharpton has both a broad base of support and a great deal of respect. If people think his views are unrepresentative, they are delusional. While I make no excuse for his antics with the Dems or his hotel bills, there is a simple reason that he can still command respect among black New Yorkers.
It's because when things get tight, he doesn't run.
He stood by the Central Park Jogger defendents long after the case was no longer news. And he was vindicated as DNA cleared them. This took ten years.
While most people see the Tawana Brawley case as an abuse of power, many black people think she was raped by the police and it was covered up. So when the badly conducted libel trial took place, Sharpton was given credit for sticking up for her. Yes, he libeled innocent men, but what black women took away from that was that he refused to toss her under the bus.
Given the history of black women in this country, it's not a small deal. So while people are still ouraged by it, more than a few black people still believe she was telling the truth. So when white people bring this up in outrage, it means nothing. The effect of whites saying that as an allegation against Sharpton makes them look racist in many eyes. It is not an argument which has any validity.
I personally thought her story was bullshit and that the lawyers should have never thrown her on TV. I don't think they treated her very well. But politically, I think that whites think that it kills his credibility and for many blacks, she's a victim denied justice.
What the media has slowly realized, and politicians, is that Sharpton is not one to be ignored lightly. Why? Because he has a wide base of support from the poor and working class into middle class Queens.
Why do black families call on Sharpton?
First of all, politicians won't stand up against the NYPD, which has a tremendous public relations arm. They might for a day or two, but only the hard core will fight with them in the papers.
Second, he won't sell them out. He has stuck with cases for years, in the face of media attacks.
Third, families who try to deal with the system often get screwed. Simply put, if the Bell family hadn't gone to Sharpton, the Post version of the story would be the only version out there. New York's media still doesn't understand that their audience is no longer majority white. Without people like Sharpton and Barron out there, they would have no voice. Without political support, there is no chance of being heard.
What I find so amazing is that some people are astonished that people would seek his protection, like he's some kind of radical with views outside the community. He isn't. There aren't too many black people who don't think those cops murdered those men in a drunken rage. That may not be the case, but I would say that without Sharpton convincing people to believe in the system, we'd be talking about a riot in Southeast Queens.
Despite his flaws, Sharpton has managed to convince people that peaceful protest still works and that the city will respond to his demands.
And in black New York, the less white New York likes it, the more popular he becomes. But make no mistake, when he speaks, he's speaking for a lot of people
(AP Photo/Adam Rountree) Rev. Al Sharpton, upper right, New York City Councilman Charles Barron, upper center, and family members of the victims of a police shooting, Denise Ford, lower left, the mother of Trent Benefield, and Ebony Guzman, lower center, the wife of Joseph Guzman, are seen during a rally outside of Mary Immaculate Hospital in the Queens borough of New York on Sunday, Nov. 26, 2006. Bloomberg, Kelly respond to wedding day slay Politicians, activists speak against killing of man on wedding day, saying it’s reminiscent of past police brutality By Reid J. Epstein.
November 27, 2006, 7:45 AM EST
Mayor Bloomber and Police Commission Ray Kelly will meet with community leaders at City Hall Monday at 11 a.m. in response to out outrage over a police shooting that killed a Queens groom just hours before his wedding.
Saturday, undercover police fired 50 shots at a car carrying a Sean Bell, 23, a deliveryman and father of two, as he left his bachelor parts at the Kalua Cabaret in Jamaica about 4 a.m. and now protestors want answers.
By yesterday afternoon, the Rev. Al Sharpton and others were comparing Bell to Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima and other high-profile victims of police brutality.
"I have a feeling that this case is going to be a watershed case like Diallo and Louima," Sharpton said. "This is going to be a watershed on the vice squad and undercover policing."
Speaking outside the Community Church of Christ in Jamaica, Sharpton said Bell's death - and the serious injuries suffered by two friends who were in the car with him - has angered some people. At one of a series of rallies yesterday, crowds at Rufus King Park near Mary Immaculate Hospital where Bell's friends Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield are being treated, chanted "no justice, no peace" and counted together from one to 50 to simulate the number of shots fired.
"I'm going to keep this in the street," Sharpton said.
Outside the hospital, Guzman's wife, Eboni Guzman, said her husband was "holding up perfectly." She declined to elaborate, but said "everything will be taken care of through a lawyer."
A spokeswoman for the hospital said last night that Benefield's and Guzman's conditions remained the same as on Saturday. Benefield was listed in stable condition at that time, while Guzman was in critical condition.
NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said yesterday that Benefield spoke to police from his hospital bed Saturday and told them police began firing once he was inside the car.
Browne said the department would not discuss whether the victims have criminal records. A source indicated that some of those records are sealed by a court, which may mean they involved juvenile offenses.
Well, that's the story they gave to Newsday, the story they gave to the Post is quite different.
The undercovers, who usually worked in Manhattan, were on the last night of their two-month Queens job to try to nail the Kalua and other clubs on such violations as drugs and underage prostitution.
Inside the club, one of the plainclothes cops sat next to a woman he thought was a hooker and might proposition him, the sources said.
Suddenly, a burly man approached them and told the woman that he had heard she had gotten into a fight with a group of guys earlier in the club. It was unclear what it was over. .......................
The woman was overheard saying to the men arguing with Bell's pals, "I'm not doing you all. I'll do one or two, but not all," according to the sources.
Around the same time, the undercover said he heard Bell's friend Joseph Guzman tell his buddies, "Yo, get my gun! Get my gun! Let's get my gun from the car! Yeah, we're gonna f- - - him up!" the sources said. ...................... That's when the undercover put his right leg up on the hood of the Altima and began screaming that he was a cop, the sources said.
The cop was leaning over the hood of the car to try to see the hands of the people inside and make sure they didn't have any guns, they said. But Bell floored the gas pedal and headed for the cop, the sources said, striking him and badly cutting his knee.
One of the Altima's passengers - who possibly had a gun - jumped out of the back of the car, the sources said.
Around the same time, an unmarked Toyota Camry driven by a plainclothes police lieutenant and another cop behind him pulled up, but overshot Bell's car. A police van with an officer and the narcotics detective then managed to block Bell's car in. ...................... Bell was killed, Guzman critically injured, and a third friend, Trent Benefield, was shot. They are expected to live.
Benefield later told a friend from his hospital bed that he and his buddies didn't know the undercovers were cops.
He told investigators, "I got into the car, and there was all this shooting."
It was unclear when the other four men who were originally fighting with Bell and his pals fled the scene. They were spotted leaving in a black SUV.
Bell had been arrested three times in the past: twice for drugs and one on a gun rap in a case that was sealed. Guzman has been busted nine times, including for armed robbery. He spent two stretches in state prison in the '90s. Benefield has a sealed record as a juvenile for gun possession and robbery.
Some marijuana was later found near the Altima, and investigators believe that it may have been tossed out by the group before the gunfire. Two bullet casings also were recovered from the Altima, although cops said they do not believe they were from a police gun.
The shooting of Bell, who was black, has ignited racial tensions in the city - even though the cops involved included two blacks, a Hispanic and two whites.
The five cops who fired shots were put on administrative duty. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said it was the first time that any of the officers were involved in a shooting.
Detectives Endowment Association President Michael Palladino said the cops were justified in firing off a total of 50 bullets at unarmed men because Bell was using his car as a lethal weapon.
"Once the threat ended, so did the shooting."
I guess the records are only sealed for Newsday, because they certainly aren't for the Post.
Without ANY evidence, they now want to suggest the victims are high on drugs as well, trying to run down people they know are cops.
And the head of the Detectives Union wants to suggest that the dead driver was trying to kill a cop.
However other sources claim that the most shots, 31 out of 50, came from a white detective who reloaded
By SCOTT SHIFREL and ALISON GENDAR DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
The white detective who squeezed off 31 of 50 shots at three unarmed men outside a Queens strip joint had a clean record, never fired his gun in the line of duty and was known as a good street cop.
His unblemished history left fellow officers puzzled yesterday over what led the 12-year veteran to get down on one knee and empty two clips on the darkened Jamaica street early Saturday morning.
"He lost it. Four or five rounds - maybe. But to reload? It's hard to understand. Even in the heat of the moment, it's overkill," a law enforcement source said.
Hundreds rally as 5 cops put on leave and DA sets probe
BY ALISON GENDAR, SCOTT SHIFREL and BILL HUTCHINSON DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
...............
Kelly said statements an undercover officer overheard inside the club led police to believe the men were going to retrieve a weapon. No gun was found in Bell's car.
Trini Wright, 28, a dancer at the club, insisted the cops opened fire without identifying themselves. She was planning to go with Bell and his friends to a diner and was putting her makeup bag in the trunk of their car when the cops' minivan appeared.
"The minivan came around the corner and smashed into their car. And they [the cops] jumped out shooting," Wright told The News. "No 'stop.' No 'freeze.' No nothin
Michael Daly, long a pro-cop columnist, got another version of the shooting
"Yo, my man, come here, my man, let me holler at you," the figure was heard to call out.
The tall figure was holding something black by his side.
"He's got a gat! He's got a gat! Be out! Be out!" the young man climbing into the car shouted.
The figure was an undercover cop, but by one witness account neither he nor his comrades announced themselves as police officers until after Sean Bell tried in vain to drive away and six to 10 shots were fired.
"That's when somebody started shouting, 'Police! Police! Put your hands out! Put your hands out!'" recalls witness China Flores.
The shooting only intensified.
"That's when all hell broke loose," Flores says.
One cop fired 31 times, but regardless of how he is ultimately judged by the law, a harsher public judgment should be reserved for the senior commander at the scene. This lieutenant is said to have been so certain he was being fired upon he ducked under the dashboard of his undercover vehicle while the cops he was supposed to supervise fired a total of 50 rounds.
Flores says a fourth young man who was about to join the three in the Altima dashed off, making a cell phone call on the next block. Flores also says that one of the three in the car, Trent Benefield, staggered out holding his right upper leg.
"He's shouting, 'Stop shooting at me! Stop shooting at me!'" Flores reports.
Flores says a shorter plainclothes cop kept firing at Benefield after he hit the pavement.
"[The cop] is telling him, 'Lay down! Lay down!'" Flores recalls. "The guy's already on the floor. He's shot."
It is known in police parlance as “contagious shooting” — gunfire that spreads among officers who believe that they, or their colleagues, are facing a threat. It spreads like germs, like laughter, or fear. An officer fires, so his colleagues do, too. Skip to next paragraph
From top left, Robert Coombs, Stephon Donaldson and Dewan Seabrooks joined Nicole Paultre, bottom right, whose fiancé was killed, and the Rev. Al Sharpton. The shooting happened early on Saturday, hours before Ms. Paultre was to wed the victim, Sean Bell.
The phenomenon appears to have happened last year, when eight officers fired 43 shots at an armed man in Queens, killing him. In July, three officers fired 26 shots at a pit bull that had bitten a chunk out of an officer’s leg in a Bronx apartment building. And there have been other episodes: in 1995, in the Bronx, officers fired 125 bullets during a bodega robbery, with one officer firing 45 rounds.
Just what happened on Saturday is still being investigated. Police experts, however, suggested in interviews yesterday that contagious shooting played a role in a fatal police shooting in Queens Saturday morning. According to the police account, five officers fired 50 shots at a bridegroom who, leaving his bachelor party at a strip club, twice drove his car into a minivan carrying plainclothes police officers investigating the club.
The bridegroom, Sean Bell, who was to be married hours later, was killed, and two of his friends were wounded, one critically.
To the layman, and to the loved ones of those who were shot, 50 shots seems a startlingly high number, especially since the men were found to be unarmed. And police experts concede that the number was high. Yet they also note that in those chaotic and frightening fractions of a second between quiet and gunfire, nothing is clear-cut, and blood is pumping furiously. Even 50 shots can be squeezed off in a matter of seconds.
“We can teach as much as we can,” said John C. Cerar, a retired commander of the Police Department’s firearms training section. “The fog of the moment happens. Different things happen that people don’t understand. Most people really believe what it’s like in television, that a police officer can take a gun and shoot someone out of the saddle.”
The five officers involved in the shooting were placed on administrative duty yesterday — without their guns — as the Police Department and the Queens district attorney investigated the circumstances surrounding the shooting, and relatives of Mr. Bell, joined by the Rev. Al Sharpton, staged a rally and a march to demand answers.
The officers have not yet been interviewed by police investigators or prosecutors to give their account.
Again and again, the focus of the day returned to the number of bullets that went flying.
One of the officers fired more than half the rounds, pausing to reload, and then emptying it again, 31 shots in all, according to the police. Another officer fired 11 shots. The others fired four shots, three shots and one shot apiece, the police said.
But it is the total number of shots that shook and angered the families of the men and community leaders. “How many shots?” Mr. Sharpton asked yesterday, over and over, in a chant at a rally in a park near Mary Immaculate Hospital, where the wounded men were being treated. The crowd called back, “Fifty!
What I don't think Bloomberg or the cops understand is the underlying anger about this shooting. There is no Giuliani to deflect or blame for this. Bloomberg is trying to keep his head down, but the cop's story is going to be challenged by the surviving witnesses. When the Diallo and Dorismond murders went unpunished, that issues has been a discordant undernote within New York politics. Now, with what seems to be a reckless shooting, I seriously don't think that they know how angry people are about this.
Leaking sealed records are going to cause a rather nasty reaction fairly soon. I know why the cops wanted their story out in the Post,but they may soon regret trying to smear the victims.
Too many times white cops, and the main shooter, who was white, fired 31 times, have been excused for killing law-abiding black men. Trying to disclose their sealed criminal records to dirty them up didn't work with Patrick Dorismond, and may well blow up on Kelly and Bloomberg.
I think they are going to have a real problem substantiating that Guzman said anything about getting a gun. And suugesting that marijuana was near the car is more likely to make people think they were framing these guys than that they had dope on them.
The cops are also going to have a problem finding the mystery passenger who "may" have been armed. How could he flee on foot with so much survelliance around?
Unlike in past shootings, where there were no witnesses, the cops story will be challenged by the survivors.
While the GOP was exploiting the bigotry of the black clergy in the midterms, black piety was melting before America's eyes.
By Debra J. Dickerson
.................
The core understanding of blacks as easily disregarded guilt symbols who sing and pray while the white folks run most things has expanded little since the pre-movement days, mostly because the GOP officially scorned their vote. The only change of note in the story line was the spotlight that the GOP threw on non-GOP blacks' racism. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson of "Hymietown" fame and the racist lunacies of the Nation of Islam have been such reliable right-wing boogeymen that Clinton couldn't get elected president until he had his Sister Souljah moment. And what a masterful twofer that was: by disowning Sister Souljah at a Jesse Jackson event, Clinton sent the world's most unsubtle message to whites not to mistake his fondness for fried foods, round rumps and saxophones to mean he didn't know how to keep those people in line.
Now that political shoe is about to be on the other foot, because the GOP's black outreach was aimed directly at a black bigotry. First stop: homophobia. It's simply inarguable that the white right reached out to religious blacks via that most polarizing strand of their psyche and, in so doing, cynically elevated the unworthy and the untested to national prominence -- black ministers like the Rev. Dwight McKissic of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Texas. At 2006's high-profile right-wing Values Voter Summit, McKissic, attacked as "insulting, offensive, demeaning, and racist" any consonance between gay rights and civil rights. A well-known and vicious opponent of gay rights, he derided gays as "comparing their sin to my skin" and scoffed that they "can't reproduce so they have to recruit." While the civil rights movement sprang from holiness and righteousness, the gay rights movement springs from "the pit of hell itself" and is a "satanic anointment," birthed as it was from the anti-Christ who himself is, of course, gay.
The only wonder is that it took the GOP so long to mine this rich conservative vein when even liberal black ministers like the civil rights activist Rev. Willie Wilson of Union Temple Baptist Church in southeast D.C. channel Jesus thusly:
"'Lesbianism is about to take over our community ... I ain't homophobic, because everybody here got something wrong with him,' he said. 'But ... women falling down on another woman, strapping yourself up with something, it ain't real. That thing ain't got no feeling in it. It ain't natural. Anytime somebody got to slap some grease on your behind and stick something in you, it's something wrong with that. Your butt ain't made for that.
"'No wonder your behind is bleeding,' he said. 'You can't make no connection with a screw and another screw. The Bible says God made them male and female.'
"The congregation can be heard shouting its approval in the background during Wilson's sermon."
No wonder, then, given his parishioners shouted approval, that Wilson could only bring himself to call his remarks "intemperate" when the backlash began. Indeed, it turns out that rank-and-file blacks may exhibit a political complexity and potential for growth that their leaders don't: While two-thirds of blacks oppose, and voted against, same-sex unions, they also believe that the Democrats will handle the issue better than the GOP. And they voted accordingly: The black percentage of the Democratic vote remains virtually unchanged. Fifty-six percent of conservative Virginia's blacks voted to ban same-sex marriage, but only 15 percent went on to vote for Republican George Allen.
Black ministers like McKissic and Wilson may truly believe that homosexuality is blacks' most pressing problem, but there is reason to believe that not all those amens were sincere. Now that blacks are wiggling free from the echo chamber of irrelevance that kept them from hearing what their thoughts sound like to others, they may come to wish they could go back to rocking hymns while the real citizens got to make all the decisions. It's much easier being a plaster saint than a simple voter trying to hold on to his morality and humanity in a winner-take-all system. The humbling that blacks are about to undergo, as they engage in the same bruising consciousness-raising that whites have had to, will likely do wonders for the soul.
I would be impressed by this, except:
It was as clear as Tavis Smiley's State of the Union 2005, pre-Katrina, that this wasn't playing well, when Rev. Eddie Long got smacked down in his own church by Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. That homophobia was just dismissed out of hand.
After Katrina, well, I wish I had saved this picture of TD Jakes, Bush and a family. The father had a homicidal look of hatred on his face. Katrina killed this dead.
Basically, it's a leaner, stripped down movie which is almost gimmick free. What struck me about the new Bond, Daniel Craig, known more for dramas in Britain, is how different he looked from the other Bonds. It wasn't that he was blond or had blue eyes, but that he looked like a man far more comfortable in a knit cap and anorak waiting to blow a bridge with an SBS team than swanning around a casino.
There was a LOT of controversy when he got the role after Clive Owen turned it down. Owen is a classic Bond type, tall, dark, ruggedly hand
some. Craig meets the last one. But for the rest, he looks like the kind of man who reads professional trouble.
What came to mind was that this Bond, who in the novels was a naval officer, was a very different sort of fish. He was a hard man who looked every inch the part.
But that led to a larger point. In our fantasy idea of what spies are, Bond, with the fast cars and beautiful women come to mind. In reality, it is lonely men in small rooms getting other people to betray everything they stand for.
Ian Flemming created Bond as a composite of the SOE agents he knew during the war. The kind of men who solved problems violently. But of course, real spies rarely kill each other. They are more likely to chat and have a beer in a pub than fight to the death in a washroom.
Most people, the vast majority of men who have been spies, have been hard men blowing things up. From World War II on, it has been the secret airman and commando who has done most of America's spying. While some played the great game in Europe, most were running guns in Tibet or flying planes in the Congo. They weren't sitting in casinos betting government money and banging starlet pretty rich women.
The kind of man America has needed to be a spy is probably happier in a tent in the woods than a five star hotel.
The American spy isn't breaking up secret organizations and superweapons, but working in guerrilla wars with a rifle and a pot of beans.
But the West likes the image of the restrained savage, the educated hard man who can tell vintage champagne and kill at close range. The real spy, the hard man with the rifle and speaking Pashtu is not the image they have in mind.
How Moqtada al-Sadr Controls U.S. Fate in Iraq He can deal out death through his black-clad followers and roil the government any time he chooses. Why Moqtada al-Sadr may end up deciding America's fate in Iraq. By Jeffrey Bartholet Newsweek
Dec. 4, 2006 issue - One way to understand Moqtada al-Sadr is to think of him as a young Mafia don. He aims for respectability, and is willing to kill for it. Yet the extent of his power isn't obvious to the untrained eye. He has no standing army or police force, and the Mahdi Army gunmen he employs have no tanks or aircraft. You could mistake him—at your peril—for a common thug or gang leader. And if he or his people were to kill you for your ignorance, he wouldn't claim credit. But the message would be clear to those who understand the brutal language of the Iraqi Street.
American soldiers who patrol Sadr's turf in Baghdad understand. They can spot his men. "They look like they're pulling security," says First Lt. Robert Hartley, a 25-year-old who plays cat and mouse with the Mahdi Army in the Iraqi capital. The Sadrists use children and young men as lookouts. When GIs get out of their Humvees to patrol on foot, one of the watchers will fly a kite, or release a flock of pigeons. Some of Sadr's people have even infiltrated top ranks of the Iraqi police. Capt. Tom Kapla, 29, says he knows who they are: "They look at you, and you can tell they want to kill you."
Sadr is a unique force in Iraq: a leader from the majority Shiites who has resisted American occupation from the start. He's a populist, a nationalist and an Islamic radical rolled into one. Part of his power is simply that he's powerful. Large numbers of impoverished Shiites view Sadr as their guardian—the one leader who is willing not just to stand up for them but to strike back on their behalf. "People count on the militias," says Lieutenant Hartley, who deals with Sadr's thugs on a regular basis. "It's like the mob—they keep people safe."
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Sadr still insists his main fight is with foreign invaders. He's the one Shia leader who has opposed the U.S. occupation from the beginning, and who has continued to call for a strict timetable for American withdrawal. An overwhelming majority of Iraqis now agree with him. A September poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org found that 63 percent of 501 Iraqi Shiites surveyed supported attacks against Americans. Even in Baghdad, where ethnic tensions are worst, Shiites agree with Sunnis on one thing: the poll found that 80 percent of the capital's Shiites wanted U.S. forces to leave within a year. That number has changed dramatically in a matter of months. A January poll found that most Shiites wanted U.S.-led troops to be reduced only "as the security situation improves."
In Washington, some politicians still talk about "victory," while others aim only to stabilize the country and leave with some semblance of dignity. Many in the U.S. capital are dusting off yesterday's proposals for tomorrow's problems—more training, more troops, disarming the militias, more stability in Baghdad. The GOP presidential front runner for 2008, John McCain, would prefer to increase the number of U.S. troops in Iraq by 20,000, at least temporarily. He has also called for Sadr to be "taken out." But it may be too late.
The movement may now be more important than the man. Sadr "is faced with a common problem," says Toby Dodge of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. "He can't control the use of his brand name, the use of his legitimacy." Some elder followers of Sadr's father have broken away, disillusioned with the son. And some young toughs seem to be freelancing where they can. Renegade factions could eventually threaten Sadr's power. If he were to fall, "you'll end up with 30 different movements," says Vali Nasr, a scholar and author who has briefed the Bush administration on Iraq. "There are 30 chieftains who have a tremendous amount of local power. If you remove him, there will be a scramble for who will inherit this movement ... It's a great danger doing that. You may actually make your life much more difficult."
How the Mahdi Army Works For now, Sadr and his Mahdi Army have the initiative. They can stir up trouble without much fear of retribution. A case in point: When kidnappers grabbed an Iraqi-American translator in Baghdad last month, U.S. soldiers sealed off the Sadr City neighborhood where they believed he was being held. But Prime Minister Maliki—who depends on Sadr for political support—quickly ordered the Americans to remove their roadblocks. Maliki has also forced the U.S. military to release men picked up during raids in Sadr City on suspicion of belonging to Shiite death squads.
When the U.S. fails to respond to provocation, it loses credibility. And when it does respond, it can also lose. Last week, before the massive car-bomb attacks, U.S. and Iraqi forces carried out a pinprick raid in Sadr City to get intelligence on the kidnapped military translator, Ahmed Qusai al-Taayie. Like so many other U.S. military strikes in Iraq, however, it came at a price. American forces captured seven militiamen, including one who might have information on al-Taayie. But police said a young boy was among three people killed in the raid. A member of Parliament from Sadr's movement promptly showed up at the morgue, and held the corpse of the boy in his arms as he railed against the American occupation.
U.S. forces have tried hard to win hearts and minds. They've spent $120.9 million on completed construction projects in Sadr City, for instance—building new sewers and power lines—and projects worth an additional $197 million are underway. But the United States doesn't always get credit for the good works. When the Americans doled out cash to construct four health clinics in Sadr City during the past year, Sadr's men quickly removed any hint of U.S. involvement. They also put up signs giving all credit to their boss, according to Lt. Zeroy Lawson, an Army intelligence officer who works in the area.
The Mahdi Army has other sources of cash. It's taken control of gas stations throughout large parts of Baghdad, and dominates the Shia trade in propane-gas canisters, which Iraqis use for cooking. Sometimes the militiamen sell the propane at a premium, earning healthy profits; at other times they sell it at well below market rates, earning gratitude from the poor and unemployed.
A key source of Sadr's income is Muslim tithes—or khoms—collected at mosques. But his militiamen also run extortion and protection rackets—demanding money to keep certain businesses and individuals "safe." One Iraqi in a tough neighborhood, who did not want to reveal his name out of fear, says he pays the local Mahdi Army the equivalent of $13 a month for protection.
Analysts believe that Iran has also provided support to Sadr, but not much. Tehran began supplying Shia insurgents, including the Mahdi Army, with a special type of roadside bomb, using a shaped charge, in May 2005. These are often disguised as rocks and are easy to manufacture locally. But diplomats say they are made to the exact design perfected by Iranian intelligence and supplied to Lebanese Hizbullah in the 1980s.
Yet Tehran's main Shiite clients in Iraq are rivals of Sadr, who is often critical of Persian influence. Sadr worries that Iran may be trying to infiltrate his movement, and he's almost surely right. Fatah al-Sheikh, who is close to Sadr, says the boss sent a private letter to loyal imams around Baghdad in the past two weeks identifying 10 followers he believed were suspect. They had been using the Mahdi Army name, but Sadr believes they're really tools of Iranian intelligence, says Sheikh.
Sadr has tried to distance himself from atrocities, insisting that they're carried out by renegades or impostors. Many Sunnis, to whom Sadr has become a dark symbol of Shiite perfidy, don't buy it. "If he says, 'Kill Alusi,' I will be killed," says Mithal al-Alusi, a moderate Sunni member of Parliament. "If he says, 'Don't kill Alusi,' I will not be killed ... Nobody can go against his orders or wishes." The Association of Muslim Scholars, which is loosely linked with Sunni insurgents, says the Mahdi Army has attacked some 200 Sunni mosques, and killed more than 260 imams and mosque workers.
All the killings will be remembered, and it will be a miracle if they go unanswered. Memories of martyrdom—and the desire for revenge—can last forever. Last Friday marked the anniversary, on the Islamic calendar, of the killing of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr and his two eldest sons. After the previous day's bombings, Moqtada told government officials that he was out of the country. But that seems to have been a feint—to keep possible enemiesoff balance. In fact, heappeared at the Kufah Mosque, where his father used to lead worshipers in chants of "No, no to America; no, no to Israel; no, no to the Devil!"
As word spread that Moqtada would lead prayers, people crowded into the mosque, most of them clad in black as a sign of mourning. Sadr asked worshipers to pray for his dead relatives, and also for those who had been killed in Sadr City. He again called for the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. He urged a top Sunni sheik to issue three fatwas: one against the killing of Shiites, another against joining Al Qaeda and the third to rebuild the shrine in Samarra. He compared his father's followers to those of the Prophet Muhammad. "After the prophet died," he intoned, "some of his followers deviated from his teachings, and the same has happened with followers of my father." The "cursed trio"—Americans, British and Israelis—were trying to divide Iraq. "We Iraqis—Sunnis and Shia—will always be brothers."
No one in Iraq talks about arresting Sadr for the murder of al-Khoei anymore. That seems like ages ago—back when Sadr's armed supporters were estimated in the hundreds, compared with many thousands today. Now diplomats speak of trying to keep Sadr inside the political system, hoping he can tame his followers. He's a militant Islamist and anti-occupation, they say, but he's also a nationalist, and not as close to Iran as some of his rivals. Nobody knows whether Sadr is dissembling when he speaks about Iraqi unity, or preparing for all-out war. What is clear—more today than ever before—is that it's time to stop underestimating him.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 26 — President Bush leaves for Europe on Monday uncertain of the Washington he will return to, or even his place in it.
Certainly the pressure is on for Mr. Bush to right a presidency mired in low poll ratings, beset by an unpopular war and claiming few domestic accomplishments in his second term. And the moment would seem to call for something drastic.
But official Washington remains unsure of which way he may go in trying to salvage his legacy. Will he continue on as if nothing has changed, pursuing conservative policies he believes history will smile upon later, even if it means getting nothing past a Democratic Congress here and now? Or will he move to the political center and seek deals with Democrats that will sour conservatives but leave him with a longer list of accomplishments?
As his top aides meet to plan their first moves of the new year with a new Congress — focusing acutely on his State of the Union address — Mr. Bush seems to be hemmed in from both sides.
For all of their talk about bipartisanship, the newly elected Democrats still have fresh memories of six years of presidential attacks painting them as “wrong on taxes” and “weak on defense.” Already they are talking about investigations into the administration’s domestic wiretapping and terrorist detainee programs and the vice president’s consultations with energy officials, among other things.
The president’s own party remains angry with him for his handling of the war, the delayed ouster of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the low presidential approval ratings that contributed to this fall’s Republican wipeout.
Senior Republican staff members in Congress have voiced the fear that Mr. Bush will now put his legacy over the party’s immediate future, and take his cues from President Bill Clinton by “triangulating” when opportunity strikes — that is, making deals with Democrats, over Republican objections, on immigration, health care or Social Security.
“While the White House is trying to define their legacy, they’ll try to triangulate us,” said one senior Republican leadership aide who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “There is no sense of wanting to defend the Bush administration right now.”
Historians argue that losing control of the House and the Senate in 1994 had its benefits for Mr. Clinton. It gave him new purpose as he struck deals with Congressional Republicans on deficit reduction and changes in a bloated welfare system, but also offered a new foil that he railed against with regularity.
But Mr. Clinton was only two years into his presidency, with six years ahead in which to try to regain his political footing; Mr. Bush has just two years ahead of him in the White House. And Mr. Clinton’s moves to assert his own relevancy after the so-called Republican Revolution arguably came at the expense of his party; Mr. Bush and his longtime top strategist, Karl Rove, have put the Republican Party’s future vitality at the heart of their hoped-for legacy.
Still, Mr. Bush has pledged to find common ground with Democrats, notably on a new minimum wage, proposed changes in the immigration law and the reauthorization of his main education initiative, No Child Left Behind. “I intend to work with the new Congress in a bipartisan way to address issues confronting this country,” he said immediately after the election.
Bush is going to act as if nothing happened. He is convinced that he is on the right path.
As I have said for three years, we are in Iraq as long as the Iraqis suffer us. I think they have suffered enough.
Iraq is clearly suffering a period of disorder, the question is will it shift into civil war?
I am not predicitng a civil war. What I am saying is that there will be signs of a country slipping into civil war which should be clear. I don't know what will happen. Maybe the exiles and the US can build peace. I certainly hope so, because the alternative could be a catastrophy for both Americans and Iraqis.
* A lack of respect for civil institutions
The looting of hospitals is a bad sign. Taking things from a hospital, which is designed to help people, is not only mere greed. It is the suggestion that there is no respect for civil authority. Most people will loot a store or a government office, but a hospital? That's more than just greed. It means the people doing the robbing are either criminals looking to add to their loot, crazed teenagers, or people looking to create dependency on another source of power. Which is scary beyond belief.
The US military's easy going attitude towards the looting was amazing and amazingly self-destructive. It sends a message that they will not oppose groups of Iraqis breaking the law. This will not be seen as tolerance, but weakness.
* Rape and home robberies
There are reports of both according to the BBC in Basra and I can expect the same in Baghdad. That's the trigger to building home arsenals and then developing local militias. People will protect their families from harm. And this is where charsimatic leadership starts. The former Iran-Iraq War vet who beats a looter with his bare hands then becomes the local hero, starts gathering men around, and acquires a base of power.
Sound familiar? That's how the Taliban started in Afghanistan. The local warlords were pulling out teenagers and raping them and robbing the truck drivers. The locals, not into seeing their boys raped, formed a band of guerrillas. The rest, as they say, is history.
* The US Authority is slow to get off the ground
Iraq had a state-run economy. Most Iraqis depended on the state for food and work. Without a viable state, they will be able to get neither. That means illness and starvation. Starving, ill people will look to leadership from any quarter. The only way to prevent this is the timely delivery of security and food, water and healthcare.
*Factionalism starts to grow
We already have the indications of factionalism. The murder of an exile Shia cleric is a hint that the locals are not eager for their brethern to return home and start running things. Many of these exiles have been gone for decades. But the thing which could be worrysome is when the exiles start to gather local gunmen.
What could be a real problem is when the INC meets and Ahmed Chalebi starts to take a major role. The SCIRI, the largest and best armed of the exile groups, is clearly not interested in any role in an American-led occupation government. Its leader, Ayatollah Hakim Al-Bakir, has told anyone who asks that he would resist a US occupation. The murder of two Shia clerics, while not tied to him, could be a hint of what is to come.
The Kurds have two parties, the KDP and PUK. each who occasionally fight with each other. Both now occupy Kirkuk. Only one has agreed to leave. The US is promising to get them both to leave. There is no guarantee the US can make that happen. If the PUK leaves and the KDP doesn't, that's going to make one group look like a sucker.
Meanwhile, the Turks are watching and will invade if they have to. This is the key national security issue for Turkey. They will not tolerate a Kurdish state and if Iraq is slipping, they may feel obliged to move.
* Anti-Americanism coaleses into a coherent movement
It's one thing to have individuals come up to Marines saying go home. It's another to have a crowd marching saying that. Once you start to have groups come together over a central theme-opposing American power-you will be creating the circumstances for various groups to start funding these efforts. The Arab world is desperately unhappy about the US invasion. It would take very little for money to flow from one bank account to another.
The first signs of real trouble and things could get ugly quickly from here is if Shia clerics, remember Shias are 60 percent of the country, declare that their people must oppose the US. Once that moral and religious grounding is established, opposition will explode because it will be justified to the majority of people.
Money means power. It means you can get and keep an army functioning. The disappearence of the Iraqi Army means there are hundreds of thousands of trained, led men who could appear to bolster an anti-American movement clandestinely. The US intelligence would be slow to pick this up and could only realize it exists after a massive street march, where the kids march first and the hard men come behind, with AK's and RPG's in their hands. A naked challenge to US power could result in a bloody embarassement. The lack of social order and a police force would place crowd control in US hands. And with the widespread distribution of gasmasks and chemical suits, tear gas would simply be pointless.
Remember, both Syria and Iran need the US to fail. They could be ready sources of revenue for anti-Americans ready to act. Keep in mind, the Iraqi Army is in hiding. Even if they went home, they didn't just disappear. Their commanders can find them if they need to.
* The factionalism turns to violence
It will start small. Assassinations, maybe a shoot out or two in a distant province away from direct US control. Maybe a US official or an exile. Then the killings move to mob-style violence, car bombs, gunfights, kidnappings, murders. As the pace of the killings grow, you start to see organized formations. Maybe 1000 men, maybe 1500. They start to use heavier weapons, rockets, mortars, machine guns in their internecine battles. Neighborhoods, then towns, start to fall into disorder. Local militas now control the area. These areas start to spread. Instead of the looting and raping you see now, you see nothing but order. You don't steal a loaf of bread in these areas. People who do, get killed, publicly.
This means that there are now local groups who can provide a coherent oppsition to the US.
* There are moves to consolidate power
The groups grow, they bump up against each other, they keep killing. And then they choose sides. A group of Shia decide to openly challenge the occupation government and declare their own rule, the Kurdish parties start in against each other, the INC collapses and the wild card, Saddam supporters decide to throw their lot in with the Shia and reveal where their weapons are. The Army splits along ethnic lines and you have the Sunni divisions and Republican Guard against the Shia units and the generals decide to join one group or the other.
Now, some of these signs may blend together, but briefly put, the signs of civil war are when disorganized opposition becomes organized around a central theme and players with money and weapons join the cause. A civil war is organized killing, not just looting. I don't think Iraq is close to it, yet. But things can go either way. The INC can be accepted. Or it can be rejected violently. It depends on how and if the US can organize and feed the people.
If they can't, then these other factors can come into play. There are too many guns and too many players and unless the US can pay them off and bring order, people will create order and not in a way we would prefer.
Reverend Al Sharpton walks with Nicole Paultre (R), whose fiance is Sean Bell, the 23-year-old bridegroom who was shot and killed by police on his wedding day, at a rally to support Bell in New York November 26, 2006.
By VERONIKA BELENKAYA, ALISON GENDAR, MIKE JACCARINO and ROBERT F. MOORE DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
Cops blasted 50 bullets at three unarmed men near a Queens strip club early yesterday, killing a groom hours before his wedding, wounding two of his pals and spurring outraged relatives of the victims to call the shooting unjustified.
"Today was his wedding day - not his death day," said .Oniaja Shepherd, 43, whose nephew 23-year-old Sean Bell was slain by police gunfire. "We were supposed to go to a wedding. Now we're going to a funeral."
An undercover detective, three plainclothes detectives and a police officer in civilian clothes hit Bell's car with 21 rounds about 4 a.m. after the Queens man twice rammed his vehicle into an unmarked NYPD van, police said.
One cop fired 31 times, pausing to reload, sources said. .........................
"Our hearts go out to them," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said of Bell's family.
Bell was at the strip club with about 20 friends, police sources said. Two undercover cops, looking to make prostitution arrests, were also inside.
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One undercover stayed at the club and the other followed the men as they got into Bell's car on Liverpool St. Bell drove forward, brushing that officer before slamming into the unmarked police van as it rounded the corner, Kelly said. The undercover officer then identified himself as a cop and fired the first round, sources said.
Bell threw the car into reverse and slammed into a building, then drove forward into the van again. Plainclothes cops poured from the van. Five officers at the scene began shooting.
Kelly said the investigation was ongoing. He stopped short of judging the actions of the officers involved. In 2004, he had quickly characterized the shooting of 19-year-old Timothy Stansbury by a Brooklyn cop as unjustified.
Although NYPD sources said the undercover cop at yesterday's incident had identified himself as an officer before police fired, Kelly said no witnesses had confirmed that account and brass had not interviewed the cops, pending a grand jury probe.
"It's not a 'good shoot,' " one veteran investigator said. "It's a big mess."
Mayor Bloomberg issued a statement last night.
"Although it is too early to draw conclusions about this morning's shootings in Jamaica, Queens, we know that the NYPD officers on the scene had reason to believe that an altercation involving a firearm was about to happen and were trying to stop it," Bloomberg said.
He said he had been "in touch with community leaders" throughout the day, and a mayoral spokesman said the leaders included the Rev. Al Sharpton.
Bell's loved ones joined with Sharpton to condemn the cops' actions and demand information.
Lorenzo Kinred, who was at the bachelor party, said he spoke to a wounded Benefield before he was put into an ambulance.
"The police didn't identify who they were," Benefield said, according to Kinred, 32. "They just pulled guns out." .........................
Bell's 22-year-old fiancée was at a bridal shower on Long Island when the dad of her two kids was killed. Puffy-eyed, Paultre arrived at the scene of the shooting yesterday morning. "I am the intended bride," she said before collapsing.
At least two bullets fired during the altercation hit a parked car and another slug flew into a nearby house. A bullet also whizzed by a pair of Port Authority cops standing on an elevated AirTrain platform.
Bell's mom, Valerie, said cops hadn't told her anything about the shooting. "They're covering up, because they know the police did wrong," she charged. "You know how society works. They label all African-American men the same. They should have pulled out a badge before they started shooting."
Sharpton was the first pol they reached out to because they know he's not going to back down from challenging the city and the cops. Unlike the Giuliani era, where he acted as if blacks had no rights, Bloomberg was quickly seeking out Sharpton to make sure people understood that the city wasn't going to act as a hostile party.
BY WARREN WOODBERRY JR. and TINA MOORE DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
The Rev. Al Sharpton demanded a "fair and impartial investigation" yesterday into the actions of the cops who shot and killed a young man and wounded two others.
Sharpton pointed out that there was no immediate evidence that 23-year-old Sean Bell and his friends were armed, and condemned cops for arresting and handcuffing the wounded men to their hospital beds.
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Sharpton learned of the shooting while driving to his National Action Network in Harlem. His cell phone rang about 9:45 a.m., and the caller, a cousin of the man who was killed, said cops had shot three unarmed black men.
Sharpton headed to Jamaica Hospital, where Bell died on his wedding day. On the way, Sharpton called Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott, "to let him know I was very concerned and that I was going to the hospital."
"There's something about this that doesn't smell right," Sharpton told Walcott, whose office said he went to the shooting scene yesterday morning.
City Hall officials refused to say where Mayor Bloomberg was yesterday, but a source said he had been scheduled to play golf in Bermuda. "The mayor was briefed on the incident early this morning, and he and his senior staff have been monitoring the situation all day," Bloomberg spokesman Matthew Kelly said.
Last night, another spokesman said the mayor had spoken to Sharpton by phone.
Sharpton met with Bell's family and called back Walcott. He told the deputy mayor that he wanted police "to - as soon as possible - let these families know what is happening here."
The difference between the police murders of the 1990's, they have witneses alive and breathing here. And the team of cops was multiracial.
But the problem for black New Yorkers is that they are the only recipients of deadly force used on unarmed men, and the perception is that cops can kill black men and go unpunished.
BAGHDAD -- Angry Shiite Muslims pelted Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's motorcade with stones today after the Iraqi leader pleaded for national reconciliation at a memorial in Sadr City held for victims of a large-scale bombing attack last week.
Maliki, who is also a Shiite, left the scene after he tried without success to calm a crowd of mourners calling for revenge against Sunni Arabs. His pleas were met with shouts of "coward" and "collaborator."
Thursday's series of suicide and car bombings killed at least 215 people inside the Shiite neighborhood on the eastern edge of Baghdad, worsening the country's civil war.
Iraqi political leaders have sought to rein in the violence. Baghdad's international airport was closed on Thursday and a general curfew imposed, and the measures continued today.
The heckling by Maliki's fellow Shiites came after a Baghdad meeting at which he appealed for peace, standing alongside Iraq's Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani, as well as the speaker of parliament and a vice president, both Sunnis. However, even state television on today substituted its usual placid rhetoric with footage of the Shiite deputy health minister lashed out at residents of various Sunni neighborhoods, accusing them of fostering violence.
Mortars fired from the southern edge of Sadr City today hit an American military base, starting a fire. Others were directed at the predominantly Sunni neighborhood of Amariyah, a U.S. military spokesman said.
"I can confirm there was a strike, but I'm not going to give out any assessment," said Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, the spokesman for U.S. forces in Baghdad.
When asked about what the U.S. military is doing to counter the violence in the capital, he said he would not comment for "operational reasons." He added that American forces are "working hand-in-hand with the Iraqi security forces [to create] the most secure environment."
But Sunnis in several Baghdad neighborhoods say they have seen few American patrols and that Iraqi security forces are either not doing anything to protect the Sunnis or are even complicit in the killing of Sunnis.
In Hurriya, one neighborhood where Shiite militias have driven out most of the Sunni residents, Iraqi police and soldiers stood by Friday as other uniformed police men in police vehicles launched rocket-propelled grenades into houses and fired their guns at Sunni mosques, according to a policeman who was present.
The head of the Sunni bloc, Adnan Dulaimi, came under attack in Baghdad's Adel neighborhood today. For an hour, his guards held off armed men who had already lobbed mortar shells toward his house but missed. Eventually, Iraqi and American forces arrived and the gunmen fled, Dulaimi said in an interview later.
Reality check. It is a day or so away from when an Iraqi Army unit or men in Iraqi Army uniform kill a bunch of Sunnis.
We need to stop pretending that the Iraqi security forces are anything but militia in uniform. I'm sure Sadr and the Hakims are quite happy with our training.
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Followers of the militant Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr took over state-run television Saturday to denounce the Iraqi government, label Sunnis "terrorists" and issue what appeared to many viewers as a call to arms.
The two-hour broadcast from a community gathering in the heart of the Shiite militia stronghold of Sadr City included three members of al-Sadr's parliamentary bloc, who took questions from outraged residents demanding revenge for a series of car bombings that killed some 200 people Thursday.
With Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki relegated to the sidelines, brazen Sunni-Shiite attacks continue unchecked despite a 24-hour curfew over Baghdad. Al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia now controls wide swaths of the capital, his politicians are the backbone of the Cabinet, and his followers deeply entrenched in the Iraqi security forces. Sectarian violence has spun so rapidly out of control since the Sadr City blasts, however, that it's not clear whether even al-Sadr has the authority - or the will - to stop the cycle of bloodshed.
"This is live and, God willing, everyone will hear me: We are not interested in sidewalks, water services or anything else. We want safety," an unidentified Sadr City resident said as the televised crowd cheered. "We want the officials. They say there is no sectarian war. No, it is sectarian war, and that's the truth."
Militia leaders told supporters Saturday to prepare for a fresh wave of incursions into Sunni neighborhoods that would begin as soon as the curfew ends Monday, according to Sadr City residents. Several members of the Mahdi Army boasted they were distributing police uniforms throughout Shiite neighborhoods to allow greater freedom of movement. The government announced it would partially lift the curfew Sunday to allow for pedestrian traffic.
In the Diyala province north of Baghdad, Sunni insurgents stormed into two Shiite homes, lined up 21 men and shot them to death in front of women and children, police there said. Later in the day, a Shiite television station showed footage of the victims' burials.
And in the western province of Anbar, a suicide bombing at a checkpoint in Fallujah killed a U.S. serviceman and three Iraqi civilians, according to a U.S. military statement. Another American and nine Iraqis were injured.
Also Saturday, Iraq's most prominent Sunni cleric made an appeal in Cairo, Egypt, for Arab nations to withdraw recognition of Iraq's Shiite-led government and said U.S.-led troops were complicit in Iraq's sectarian crisis. Hareth al-Dhari, leader of the militant Association of Muslim Scholars, declared Iraqi efforts toward a unity government "dead" and said the current violence is political rather than theological.
"The occupying forces have been giving cover to the militias and criminal gangs," al-Dhari said. "The government has been seen setting the atmosphere for them with the curfews to aid them in catching the victims and carrying out their attacks."
Al-Maliki's administration acknowledged it was powerless to interrupt the pro-Sadr program on the official Iraqiya channel, during which Sadr City residents shouted, "There is no government! There is no state!" Several speakers described neighborhoods and well-known Sunni politicians as "terrorists" and threatened them with reprisal.
"We'll obviously try to control them as much as we can, but when they (kill) more than 150 people in bombings, they have the right to speak," said Bassam al Husseini, one of Maliki's top advisers. "What are we going to do? We can't stop this. It's too hot right now."
Ok, let's debate how powerful Sadr is, now, Ok? I'd say he's the most powerful man in Shiadom after Nasrallah, but that's just me.
But I think our puppet government is about to collapse.
CHICAGO, Nov. 23 — On weekdays, during what are normal school hours for most students, the Billings children do what they want. One recent afternoon, time passed loudly, and without order or lessons, in their home in a North Side neighborhood here.
Hayden Billings, 4, put a box over his head and had fun marching into things. His sister Gaby, 9, told stories about medieval warrior women, while Sydney, 6, drank hot chocolate and played with Dylan, the baby of the family.
In a traditional school setting, such free time would probably be called recess. But for Juli Walter, the children’s mother, it is “child-led learning,” something she considers the best in home schooling.
“I learned early on that when I do things I’m interested in,” Ms. Walter said, “I learn so much more.”
As the number of children who are home-schooled grows — an estimated 1.1 million nationwide — some parents like Ms. Walter are opting for what is perhaps the most extreme application of the movement’s ideas. They are “unschooling” their children, a philosophy that is broadly defined by its rejection of the basic foundations of conventional education, including not only the schoolhouse but also classes, curriculums and textbooks.
In some ways it is as ancient a pedagogy as time itself, and in its modern American incarnation, is among the oldest home-schooling methods. But it is also the most elusive, a cause of growing concern among some education officials and social scientists.
“It is not clear to me how they will transition to a structured world and meet the most basic requirements for reading, writing and math,” said Luis Huerta, a professor of public policy and education at Teachers College of Columbia University, whose national research includes a focus on home schooling.
There is scant data on the educational results of unschooling, and little knowledge about whether the thousands of unschooled children fare better or worse than regularly schooled students. There is not even reliable data on how many people are unschooling, though many experts suggest the number is growing.
Here in Chicago, a group called the Northside Unschoolers has 100 families registered on its online list. There are similar organizations coast to coast, including the San Francisco Bay Unschooling Network, Unschoolers Unlimited in Guilford, Conn., and the Unschoolers of the Ozarks, serving Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas, although accurate figures for the number of families they serve are hard to come by. Adherents say the rigidity of school-type settings and teacher-led instruction tend to stifle children’s natural curiosity, setting them up for life without a true love of learning .............................
“The important things that you need to know are important because they’re useful to know,” Ms. Tucker said. “We all desire to get up and learn to walk because it’s a useful skill to have. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to see that, just an infant. Will had never been given a lesson in reading, but he read at 7. I tell people it took him seven years to learn to read because all of his experiences added up to learning how to read.”
I'm no fan of home schooling. I don't know anyone who can afford to do it. Unless you're willing to be poor or have a really good job, it ain't happening.
But here's my point, well two: you sometimes have to do things you do not want to do, want to learn to do, but must learn. Also, you never know what you'll need to know.
Yes, some of these kids are very bright, but what if they have learning disabilities or even poor vision? How do you detect that?
One of the things I find is that kids need to develop their character away from adults. If your entire childhood is defined by adults, when do you learn to deal with your peers. Scouts and sports are adult directed activities. When do you learn to trade lunches or video games. How do you form bonds with your peers when no adults are around?
These parents seem obsessively involved in their kids lives. They don't have any room to breathe.
Even more disturbing, where is the parental leadership? Oh, do what you want and hope for the best? What if he wants to frag aliens, day after day, for months on end?
My best memories of school, and where my self esteem was developed, came from the ability to execute tasks I didn't want to. It was a challenge and I had to do more than I thought I could, to meet standards from people who didn't love me.
Everybody does things they're interested in well. Sometimes life isn't like that.
Mkay Jen here again...wildy overtired; Gilly, sorry to be a bug's ass and piggyback on your posts but this one is just too juicy to pass up. So, while I digest my vegetarian Thai tofu (man, that was hot...) and try to get un-overtired at 1:30 AM, let me speak thusly on the topic at hand:
1) Why does this come as a surprise to anybody? Rich, self-entitled white folks already seem to make a cult in some cases about not restricting or disciplining their kids, or providing any "adult time/kid time" divisions. Shit, I've met more yuppies who would let their precious fertility-drug crotch droppings run through a bridal store with a cherry sno-cone than you could shake a Taser at. This kind of "schooling" is just a more extreme version of the "I'm too tired/bored/stupid/selfish to parent properly so I'll just say I'm letting them find their own boundaries" parenting method.
2) These kids are going to grow up to be unemployable, unsocializable freaks. Case in point: One of my best friend's siblings has a child with obvious speech and neurological disabilities. He's very bright, but has a palette defect that would require surgery to correct. Well, Mom is too nuts to take him for an MRI. Or any other diagnostic test. This may upset the little darling, after all. Oh, and she refuses to vaccinate him. So, she is leaning towards "homeschooling" even though she has zero qualifications, and even less than zero RE the speech impediment. This kid will NEVER have any friends outside of his front door at this rate. If anything, this is a model case for saying that some kind of regulation of homeschooling needs to hapen, and at the most extreme, the kids' situation here could be seen as child abuse.
The sprogs in this particular story are already becoming functionally retarded compared to their peers.
Let me add that public schooling also helps point out where kids' deficiencies are, as they have a peer group to be compared to. I was reading at 18 months. No shit. Spoke in two-word sentences at 11 months. Freak of nature, yeah? Well, kindergarten changed that when it became clear that I couldn't do division or multiplication for shit compared to my age group. Yes, I got advance reading development at my public school but also the help in math when I needed it. Had I been homeschooled, I'm sure that folks would've just cooed over my verbal skills and let the crappy math slide. In "unschooling" I never would have had the challenges of pushing my limits early RE advanced reading and writing assignments.
Coddling kids and telling them that whatever they do is perfect is not an epiphany; it's just lazy parenting.
Then again, I'm sure that the 'rents here went to some tiny liberal arts college that cost a fortune but gave out lots of A's. Slide through life on excuses for your shortcomings and you certainly wouldn't want any objective measures for your kids.
Is it just me or has George W. Bush checked out of the stumbling national crisis we know as 'Iraq'?
I know his name shows up in the headlines. He's meeting Iraq Prime Minister Maliki next week in Amman. Vice President Cheney is shuttling to Saudi Arabia. And all of this is being billed as a part of a new and broader 'regional' approach to getting the conflict under some measure of control.
But I don't hear the president. Not his voice. The one thing that's been a constant over the last three and a half years is the president as the voice of American Iraq policy. Whether he's the author of it is another question entirely. But the voice and pitbull of it, always.
And yet since the election he seems to have disappeared from the conversation entirely. Like he's just checked out. It's not his thing anymore.
To a degree, this has been the case since early 2004 -- the point by which it was clear the entire effort was a failure. But politics -- first his reelection and then the 2006 election -- has kept him powerfully in the game, constantly arguing staying the course or cutting and running or how a rebuke for his policies would amount to a win for the terrorists.
But now the rebuke has been given. And what is more than that he validated it, confirmed the rejection by summarily firing his Defense Secretary. By doing so, he admitted (even if he can't quite admit it to himself) that his war policy has been a failure.
With that admission out of the way, there's really no more cheerleading to be done for the whole effort. It's a hard slog, a tortuous battle to find some least bad outcome to the whole affair.
Back when he was riding high President Bush used to say that he 'didn't do nuance' -- a point on which he was unquestionably right. And that being the case, there's just nothing left for him to say. No more chest-thumping or rah-rah or daring his opponents to say he's wrong. So he's just gone silent. Like it's not his problem any more.
Can the Democratic Party become fully competitive? Is American liberalism dead, the 2006 election a last twitch of life before rigor mortis sets in? The answer to both questions is yes. (More on this next week.)
For the Democratic Party to revive, major tenets of American liberalism, economic and sociocultural, will have to be discarded. The party can join Studebaker and the Glass Bottle Blowers union, it can trudge along as No. 2, or it can undergo a painful transformation — without guarantee of success.
To stay in the fight, Democratic leaders will have to acknowledge political realities affirmed by the electorate in 1994 and 2006. Many Democratic constituencies — organized labor, minority advocacy organizations, reproductive- and sexual-rights proponents — are reliving battles of a decade or more ago, not the more subtle disputes of today. Public sector unions, for example, at a time of wide distrust of government, are consistently pressing to enlarge the state. For these players, adapting to a re-emergent center will be costly.
Democrats won on Nov. 7 by carrying a 59 percent majority of independent, moderate voters angered by the Iraq war and Republican corruption. These voters demonstrated 12 years ago that they can easily turn against Democrats.
An example of the reality that Democrats refused to face the last time they had a shot at consolidating power materialized during the fight to pass Clinton’s 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill, legislation that sought to burnish the party’s justice credentials by increasing the number of felonies subject to the death penalty. Instead, amendments added to win support from the left — most visibly, $40 million for midnight basketball leagues — caught fire on conservative talk radio, spread to the establishment media, and soon became a liability.
When Democrats bend to the will of liberal interest groups, even in pursuit of laudable goals, the damage to the party’s credibility can be devastating. President Clinton succumbed to such pressure, and Democrats in the House and Senate paid the price. Democrats now have a chance to regain public trust, but even a minor miscalculation can push the party off the tightrope. Its House majority is tenuous: 17 of the new Democrats represent districts that voted for Bush in 2004 by at least 54 percent, according to the political scientist Gary Jacobson.
The public will desert Democrats placing a disputed cultural or spending agenda above the broader public interest. This is especially true at a time of extreme uncertainty: lethal struggle in the Mideast, nuclear proliferation, mounting skepticism toward free trade, and a rising non-marital birthrate — now at 37 percent — that concerns moderate voters.
What an asshole.
First of all Dems won in conservative districts not only on the war but on social justice issues. People are going backwards economically and to ignore that is to ensure defeat.
After a record change in the House, Senate and governorships, the first thing that Tom Edsall says is ignore your base.
Despite the fact that the GOP base got a anti-contraception doctor as head of family planning, the Dems are supposed to seek a mythical middle and not press for anything too demanding?
So South Dakota didn't just affirm abortion rights? Didn't Arizona just defeat an anti-gay marriage bill?
After a striking Democratic victory, he asks if liberalism is on it's death bed
ATLANTA, Nov. 24 — Some cities will do anything they can think of to keep young people from fleeing to a hipper town.
In Lansing, Mich., partiers can ease from bar to bar on the new Entertainment Express trolley, part of the state’s Cool Cities Initiative. In Portland, Ore., employees at an advertising firm can watch indie rock concerts at lunch and play “bump,” an abbreviated form of basketball, every afternoon.
And in Memphis, employers pay for recruits to be matched with hip young professionals in a sort of corporate Big Brothers program. A new biosciences research park is under construction — not in the suburbs, but downtown, just blocks from the nightlife of Beale Street.
These measures reflect a hard demographic reality: Baby boomers are retiring and the number of young adults is declining. By 2012, the work force will be losing more than two workers for every one it gains.
Cities have long competed over job growth, struggling to revive their downtowns and improve their image. But the latest population trends have forced them to fight for college-educated 25- to 34-year-olds, a demographic group increasingly viewed as the key to an economic future.
Mobile but not flighty, fresh but technologically savvy, “the young and restless,” as demographers call them, are at their most desirable age, particularly because their chances of relocating drop precipitously when they turn 35. Cities that do not attract them now will be hurting in a decade.
“It’s a zero-sum game,” said William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, noting that one city’s gain can only be another’s loss. “These are rare and desirable people.”
They are people who, demographers say, are likely to choose a location before finding a job. They like downtown living, public transportation and plenty of entertainment options. They view diversity and tolerance as marks of sophistication.
The problem for cities, says Richard Florida, a public policy professor at George Mason University who has written about what he calls “the creative class,” is that those cities that already have a significant share of the young and restless are in the best position to attract more.
“There are a dozen places, at best, that are becoming magnets for these people,” Mr. Florida said.
That disparity was evident in a report released this week by the Metropolitan Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, which showed Atlanta leading the pack among big cities, while other metro areas, like Philadelphia, hemorrhaged young people from 1990 to 2000. (In this competition, surveys that make a city look good are a favorite opening salvo.)
In that decade, the Atlanta study said, the number of 25- to-34-year-olds with four-year college degrees in the city increased by 46 percent, placing Atlanta in the top five metropolitan areas in terms of growth rate, and a close second to San Francisco in terms of overall numbers. Charlotte, N.C., also outperformed Atlanta, with a growth rate of 57 percent, the second highest in the country after Las Vegas.
(Demographers point out that Las Vegas started with very small numbers and still ranks last among major cities when it comes to the percentage of its 25- to 34-year-olds with a college degree.)
Well. Las Vegas is the last city where you can get a union job and make a good living without a degree.
A lot of black people, a high school friend was one, was lured to Atlanta and lasted four years. Why? Because it was still Atlanta. People still judged you by the church you went to and there were still some jobs you couldn't get if you were black.
The problem is cities are looking at superficial means to attract residents, when the deeper issues, poor services, bad schools, determine were people decide to live. Austin will always be cooler than Dallas because Austin has a thriving tech community, artistic scene and music industry.
And people make that decision early in life. UT Austin, NYU, UCLA, Berkeley, Boston College get a lot of people who plan to make their lives in those areas, at least to establish their professional life.
I met a ton of people who went to NYU so they could live in New York City, I never met anyone who went to Cornell or Colgate to live in Ithaca. People dream of living in New York or the Bay Area since childhood. Atlanta isn't one of those places.
I have a friend who grew up in New Orleans. Still loves the place. But it was too poor to support his future.
Atlanta had become a black mecca from the 1980's, but the problems living there are evident, traffic , the school system, jobs.
If given a choice between Portland and Seattle, what would most people choose? Portland is a wonderful city, but it is isolated. Seattle is on the water a short hop to Vancouver, BC. It's less isolated.
A lot of these cities would do better to improve local services than trying to appeal to people who want to kayak to work, windowshop at Tiffany's or see Steve Earle live.
Jen here. Had to throw in on this one.
First, let me say that this article makes me want to barf. The fact that some city official would say that (young creative class folks) "view diversity and tolerance as marks of sophistication" right along with "downtown living" shows a complete lack of understanding as to how "creative" neighborhoods really happen. NO, it's not a "build crappy coffeehouses and overpriced foodie boutiques and they will come." In Real Life, you need a pervasive culture of tolerating difference and learing for its own sake in the first place. You also need affordable, equitable housing, not $1800/month slumlike studios that used to house lower-middle class workers before they got evicted when the 'hood got "hip."
Something about the whole article reminds me of suburbanites who live in parts of Westchester and Rockland that were once wooded and full of wildlife, but now paved over with uniculture lawns and nearly identical landscaping. Of course, these are the first folks who set up birdfeeders and butterfly gardens and other crap to imitate a tamer version of the "great outdoors" (and then go to national parks and try to pet the grizzly bears).
Yeah, take ultra-conservative social policies, push back some former slums and repave it, throw up a few prefab "museums" or a gallery "district" where there was none, build luxury condos, and pretend that the best and the brightest are going to start fleeing New York, SF, LA, Seattle, Portland, Boston, Research Triangle, etc. to live in your little zoo for fancy queers and exotic darker folks who eat funny food. 'Cause remember, a taco stand run by illegal Salvadoran contractors is a symbol of the decay of the American way of life, but Thai food is sophisticated (until the proprieter's kids start to do better in school than the locals and make them look bad).
Gack.
Oh yeah let me add--my Dad got re-married in Lansing, and you know what? All I saw was a typical little college town with all of the generic trappings of hipness--a decent bookstore, the inevitable "alternative culture/hippie knicknacks/polite headshop," and a cafe or two. I think that anyplace with an aggregate IQ of over 100 is going to have its little "alternative/queer/artsy" district. That doesn't mean anyone would want to live anyplace outside of that little artificial knot.
.......... Because while I do not believe in the draft as a apparatus for democratizing or destratifying our class system, it is also undeniable that the military is most definitely our National Jobs Program, and has been for decades.
Army ads and recruiters since I was little certainly mentioned duty and honor, but the real Hard Sell was always jobs and college. The guys I grew up with, the ones that joined did so almost universally because they were bright and poor and had no scratch for college.
Hell, when base closure debates boil over, the argument is virtually never about risking national security.
It’s about jobs.
It is always, always, always about the economic impact of yanking X-number of soldiers or sailors out of my district.
And let’s be crystal clear. I am not arguing that the military should be a jobs program; I am arguing that it is, and has been for as long as I can remember.
So let’s talk about jobs and service for a little bit.
Some time ago, owing to some very weird circumstances, I had occasion to listen in on some hotel guys talking about their business.
Some depressed hotel guys.
There are lots of problems in their industry, but a lot of it comes down to this: Ideally, the people you want to manage properties have to go through what amounts to a long apprenticeship before they to get to the top. And once there, they aren’t going to make a ton of money.
So basically candidates are being offered the chance to slog through years of long, hard labor for the chance to make a salary they could otherwise get the day they walk out of a decent MBA program or law school. Or so they believe.
The hotel guys’ “solution” so far as I could tell (It was dim. There was liquor.) circled around these dual propositions:
1. Salary isn’t everything, and 2. Service to others is an honorable calling that needs to be revived in this country.
My reactions were:
1. You’re right. 2. You’re screwed.
Because any business plan that begins “OK, first we’ll reverse American culture to make people want to work for us” is doomed to fail.
Doomed, I tell’s ya, because we have done far, far too good a job in this country explaining to people in every social class, using words of one syllable, that if you do your thing for love or the common good, you’re a mush-skulled hippy idjit destined for a work farm, or a cardboard box on Super Lower Wacker, or a pauper’s grave after your cherce meats have been harvested.
We don’t have hero teachers and RNs here. I profoundly wish we did, but we don’t. We have “Wall Street” heroes. We have rock star pro athletes and CEOs who are paid like pashas for what are basically culturally irrelevant skills, and then celebrated for their salaries.
We honor privilege and bling, not service.
We tell people here, in no uncertain terms, that you aren’t what you do; you are what you’re paid, regardless of what iniquities you may commit to make your nut. And if you don’t play our American Game knives-out, you ‘re stupid.
And stupid people deserve what they get.
It is a perfect, brutal little downward spiral that makes us less humane and more bestial every day. And you can take the measure of a man – friend of foe – quick and easy by finding out if he stands opposed to this perversion of honorable living, or if he is counseling that we grease the skids, crank up the RPMs and make the abattoir run faster and more efficiently.
In other words, downsize and outsource faster!!
The WalMart model of keeping everyone too poor to shop anywhere else, working three jobs and skimping on health care to afford even that -- increasingly practiced in industry after industry from Detroit to Denver -- is the apotheosis of this vision of America: A few at the top, tens of expendable millions at the bottom, and nothing but statistical freaks and outliers in between.
By Peter Whoriskey Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, November 25, 2006; Page A03
MIAMI, Nov. 24 -- Dressed in camouflage and brandishing what looked like a submachine gun, the cartoonist for this city's leading Spanish-language newspaper strode into the office of the top editor Friday morning and told startled staff, "I am the new executive editor, and that is my new office."
It was not a joke.
Employees of the Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald clustered near the papers' building as a negotiator placated a disgruntled Nuevo Herald staffer.
The demands of El Nuevo Herald cartoonist José Varela to see the editor, with whom he had unspecified grievances over ethics and what he told police were censorship issues, set off a tense 3 1/2 -hour standoff at the offices of the Spanish newspaper and the Miami Herald, which share a six-story building on the northern outskirts of downtown. Executive Editor Humberto Castelló was not in.
"He said, 'Just bring me the editor,' " said Gus Perez, director of operations for the newspapers, who confronted Varela on the sixth floor. "He said, 'I have 30 rounds.' I said, 'I'm really asking you to point that at the floor,' and he did."
Perez said he had been told that Varela was carrying a "toy gun," and police corroborated that later, saying it resembled a MAC-11. Authorities added that Varela was also carrying a knife.
What people don't realize about Sadr is one very simple fact.
While everyone else was in exile, he watched his father get killed because he wouldn't stop opposing Saddam.
He and his family survived the worst of Saddam like the majority of the Shia.
He has the moral authority to lead any Shia movement. And while he cannot control every militia loyal to him, he has far more control than the Sunnis.
Sadr drew the line on meeting Bush for a simple reason: cross it, Sadr can force him from office.
Everyone seems to be worried about a Sunni coup. They haven't the power for a coup. If Sadr said, the faithful must surround the Green Zone, you would have 100,000 people there the next day.
But the Shia do. They can either force Maliki to do their bidding, by refusing to deal with Bush, or they can expose him as an American lackey.
That is a strong position to be in.
The Shia have been demanding the right for a pogrom against the Sunni for months. This could be their way of forcing the issue.
The raid against the higher education ministry was the hint of worse things to come. The next thing may be Army units going off against the Sunni.
FORT RILEY, Kan., Nov. 18 — This wind-swept stretch of Kansas has become the hub of a major new push by the United States Army to overhaul its effort to advise Iraq’s fledgling sectertian forces
Following a refusal to follow US orders by many Iraqi units and complaints that earlier efforts to train American advisers had been handicapped by bureaucratic inertia, the Army has handed the mission to Maj. Gen. Carter F. Ham, who had a previous stint as a commander in Iraq.
Along with nearly 1,000 soldiers from his First Infantry Division, General Ham has sought to improve the training of the advisers as the Army has moved to upgrade the quality of these teams.
The revamped effort began with little fanfare this summer, but has gained prominence in recent weeks as experts inside and outside the government have recommended that the military expand theadvisers’ ranks as part of a renewed push to strengthen the Iraqi death squads
The more training we give the Iraqi forces, the more power we give to Sadr and his militias. People have this idea that the Sunnis are some kind of efficient military machine. The Shia have never fully mobilized the forces they could if things got tight. The vast majority of Ba'athist were Shia, the vast majority of the Army were Shia. Most have avoided taking up arms.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 24 — Defying a government-imposed curfew, Shiite militiamen stormed Sunni mosques in central Iraq today, shooting guards and burning down buildings in apparent retaliation for a series of devastating car bombs that killed hundreds of people the previous day in a Shiite slum, residents and police officials said.
All day today, funeral processions wound through the crowded streets of the Sadr City section of Baghdad that is home to more than 1.5 million people, mostly Shiites.
As the death toll from those bombings rose above 200, gunmen drove through several neighborhoods in Baghdad and the nearby provincial capital of Baquba, taking aim at mosques with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades on the Muslim holy day, when many Iraqis go to mosques to pray.
The wreaking of vengeance unfolded while a powerful parliamentary bloc loyal to firebrand Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr threatened to boycott the government if Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki attends a meeting with President Bush scheduled for Wednesday in Jordan. The legislators said the American presence was the root cause of the spiraling violence in Iraq.
But it was Mr. Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi Army, that Sunni residents blamed for the attacks today. From morning until afternoon, at least four mosques were attacked in a single mixed neighborhood in the capital. Two were completely destroyed, and at least five Sunnis were killed and 10 wounded, an Interior Ministry official said. Iraqi security forces were absent, unwilling or unable to stop the gunmen.
“I live near Akbar al-Mustafa Mosque, which came under attack by gunmen around 7 this morning,” said a man who gave his name as Abu Ruqaiya and lives in Hurriya, the Baghdad neighborhood where violence raged all day. “Around 3 in the afternoon, those gunmen bombed this mosque and destroyed part of it. They left only after American and Iraqi soldiers arrived.”
Some fighting continued into the evening, as gunmen in the neighborhood battled the invading fighters, the Interior Ministry official said. President Jalal Talabani urged calm at a news conference after an evening meeting of Iraq’s top leaders and said the defense minister had told him no mosques had been destroyed. Mr. Talabani also said he was postponing a weekend trip to Iran because the government had shut down Baghdad International Airport.
In the far north, a suicide car bomber and a suicide belt bomber detonated their explosives at an outdoor car market in the insurgent-rife city of Tal Afar, killing at least 20 people and injuring at least 42.
The bloodletting over the 24-hour period amounted to one of the worst spasms of violence since the Americans toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.
The wave of revenge attacks in Baghdad came despite a traffic ban the Iraqi government had imposed across the capital starting Thursday evening. Most of Baghdad remained quiet today, with children playing soccer in the empty streets, but the attacks nevertheless underscored the ineffectiveness of the Iraqi security forces in tamping down on violence that is widening the Sunni-Shiite sectarian divide and pushing the country toward full-scale civil war. The assaults against Sunnis today evoked the rampages by Shiite gunmen that took place in the hours after a revered Shiite shrine was bombed by insurgents last February in Samarra.
The Sunni guerrillas can block the highways, but they cannot stop the Shia in or out of Baghdad. The Sadrists are the single most powerful block in Iraq.
Sadr has decided to confront the US, but in a clever way. If Maliki doesn't show up or Bush cancels, he's seen as the man behind the government. If he does, Maliki might as well travel back with Bush because he's a dead man in Iraq.
But Sadr knows if Maliki doesn't meet with Bush, any rational for staying in Iraq ends. No matter what any pentagon option or Baker report says.
How bad the situation is in Iraq is suggested by this email I just got from a professional who used to be in Iraq but now is in a nearby country:
' It is desperate in Iraq, worse then ever and there is no end in sight. I had lunch with [a former high ranking medical educator in Iraq] two days ago. [He]noted that Iraq no longer has neuro-surgeons, no cardiac surgeons, few pediatric doctors - they are all gone, killed or fled to neighboring countries like him. He was given seven days to get out or be killed. He is one of the lucky ones. He and his family have an opportunity for a new life in the US. But what about all the others. Where are they to go?
Another friend, a Sunni sheikh of the Shammar tribe noted to me that thousands of former officers are prepared to assault the G[reen] Z[one]. It is no longer a matter of can they do it, they are only mulling over the timing. The breach of the Green Zone security the other day was a test of their ability to get in, and not a real attempt at a coup, though it is reported as such. Every Iraqi I talk to says unambiguously that the resistance attached to the former regime would take out the Shiite militias with barely a fight, but that the resistance will not commit wholesale revenge against the Shiite population. They just want to get rid of the "carpet baggers" from Iran. '
Muqtada al-Sadr, the young Shiite nationalist cleric, is said to be afraid that he cannot constrain his Mahdi Army militiamen from taking revenge on the Sunni Arab community for Thursday's mass slaugher.
Iraq Sunni constantly overestimate their ability to deal with the Shia. It isn't just the militia, but the new army which they have to factor in. The "carpetbaggers from Iran" means SCIRI, but the fact is that if the Sunnis try an overrun of the Green Zone, the Shia will fight them and so will the US, having no choice.
What that would do is set the state for a full scale civil war
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD Published: November 24, 2006
For years, Roger Barnett has holstered a pistol to his hip, tucked an assault rifle in his truck and set out over the scrub brush on his thousands of acres of ranchland near the Mexican border in southeastern Arizona to hunt.
Hunt illegal immigrants, that is, often chronicled in the news.
“They’re flooding across, invading the place,” Mr. Barnett told the ABC program “Nightline” this spring. “They’re going to bring their families, their wives, and they’re going to bring their kids. We don’t need them.”
But now, after boasting of having captured 12,000 illegal crossers on land he owns or leases from the state and emerging as one of the earliest and most prominent of the self-appointed border watchers, Mr. Barnett finds himself the prey.
Immigrant rights groups have filed lawsuits, accusing him of harassing and unlawfully imprisoning people he has confronted on his ranch near Douglas. One suit pending in federal court accuses him, his wife and his brother of pointing guns at 16 illegal immigrants they intercepted, threatening them with dogs and kicking one woman in the group.
Another suit, accusing Mr. Barnett of threatening two Mexican-American hunters and three young children with an assault rifle and insulting them with racial epithets, ended Wednesday night in Bisbee with a jury awarding the hunters $98,750 in damages.
The court actions are the latest example of attempts by immigrant rights groups to curb armed border-monitoring groups by going after their money, if not their guns. They have won civil judgments in Texas, and this year two illegal Salvadoran immigrants who had been held against their will took possession of a 70-acre ranch in southern Arizona after winning a case last year.
The Salvadorans had accused the property owner, Casey Nethercott, a former leader of the Ranch Rescue group, of menacing them with a gun in 2003. Mr. Nethercott was convicted of illegal gun possession; the Salvadorans plan to sell the property, their lawyer has said.
But Mr. Barnett, known for dressing in military garb and caps with insignia resembling the United States Border Patrol’s, represents a special prize to the immigrant rights groups. He is ubiquitous on Web sites, mailings and brochures put out by groups monitoring the Mexican border and, with family members, was an inspiration for efforts like the Minutemen civilian border patrols.
“The Barnetts, probably more than any people in this country, are responsible for the vigilante movement as it now exists,” said Mark Potok, legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks the groups. “They were the recipients of so much press coverage and they kept boasting, and it was out of those boasts that the modern vigilante movement sprang up.”
Jesus Romo Vejar, the lawyer for the hunting party, said their court victory Wednesday would serve notice that mistreating immigrants would not pass unpunished. Although the hunters were not in the United States illegally, they contended that Mr. Barnett’s treatment of them reflected his attitude and practices toward Latinos crossing his land, no matter what their legal status.
“We have really, truly breached their defense,” Mr. Vejar said, “and this opens up the Barnetts to other attorneys to come in and sue him whenever he does some wrong with people.”
But they are not the police. They have no business acting like police. He even mistook Mexican American hunters with kids for illegals. He's going to lose his life because of his antics. His home, his business, will all be owned by other people.
He could have made his point with a camera, not by actually detaining people and risking their safety or his safety. What an amazingly scary way to deal with people. If he had documented the crossing of his land, he might have gained some sympathy. But going illegal hunting is only reflective of racism
Modern communications creates the illusion of intimacy. Millions of people think they know what Brad Pitt would or wouldn't do, or how he left his wife or what he's like as a person.
And they don't.
You have no idea of Pitt beats his woman and kicks his dog. I doubt that he does, but we don't know him. Everything we see of him is second hand, or crafted to create an image.
Now, personally, I don't think he's better or worse than most people, but that is a guess, not experience.
The problem with that is people, needy, desperate people, can become famous and no one who isn't working with them realize how dark and unpleasant they can be.
Everyone assumed that Michael Richards was Kramer, his TV character. They saw him in that way, and assumed it reflected his personality.
But he's an actor. In real life Jimmy Stewart was fearless and John Wayne booed by wounded Marines as a phony.
So we assume that Richard's outburst is some kind of odd outburst and not part of him. But we don't know the real him, the him protected by money and fame. We don't know what is in his heart and if that heart is as black as night.
So when people try to say he's not a racist, or he just lost his temper, or that the audience provoked it.
Wrong.
His tone was deeply racial and mean. I've been called nigger before, but never has anyone said I should be lynched. That kind of hate comes from a feeling of racial superiority, that other people are lower than you (e.g Borat and the Gypsys) and that is the natural order of things. When the two neatly dressed men walked in the group, he said as they did "here comes the blacks and mexicans" They weren't in hoodies, they looked like young professionals. Yet they were racially abused.
But it's not that Richards is or is not a racist which is the issue. It's misanthropy. The hatred of everything, of every one.
Someone who says Afro-American in 2006 is stuck in the past. I would bet this is hardly his first disgusting outburst when challenged. If he had called someone a fat cunt, he might have slid, because that's just bad taste. But his repeated slurs and his imperious comments means more than just disliking black people.
I don't think this is a man who handles failure or correction well. Even with hecklers, you don't call for them to be murdered. This is an unhappy man, who got rich but never grew up. He lives in a white world, and his outbursts have been ignored for years. You don't see his former cast members running to say "this isn't the guy we know". Only Seinfeld, who has a financial relationship with Richards, jumped in.
Probably, because that IS the guy they know. One who can rant at will. One who has some pretty ugly ideas about the world. It's one thing to say "fuck you nigger". which will get you a punch, it's another world to say "50 years ago we would have hung you from a tree with a fork in your ass"
We? Most people would have said, they or the Klan. Not we. We is pretty twisted.
At another point, he says to one of the young men, "Tomorrow, when I wake up, I'll still be rich and you'll still be a nigger."
That's hate, real hate, hate which comes from within. And it probably goes beyond race.
(AP)WASHINGTON The White House says President Bush and his family are planning a quiet Thanksgiving at the Camp David retreat in Maryland.
Guests will include Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former personal assistant Blake Gottesman and his parents.
The menu has free-range roasted turkey, cornbread dressing, zucchini, sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie
OK, so why would the Secretary of State be invited to eat with the President on a family holiday? Did Bill Cohen chow down with the Clintons?
I know we pick at everything Bush does, but he invited the Secretary of State to a family dinner.
And the tabs have been filled with rumors since summer that there was real tension between Bush, his wife and Condi. So he has to have his office wife with him for a family dinner, which the kids might or might not be around for. What the hell is going on with him?
Oh, and his other guess, former body man Blake Gottesman, the luckiest Republican in America. He got into Harvard B School with about 30 credits of undergraduate work. 30. You try that and see how far you get. My guess, a recommendation you attend U Mass Boston.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest attack on a sectarian enclave since the beginning of the Iraq war, suspected Sunni-Arab militants used three suicide car bombs and two mortar rounds on the capital's Shiite Sadr City slum to kill at least 150 people and wound 238 on Thursday, police said.
The Shiites responded almost immediately, firing 10 mortar rounds at the Abu Hanifa Sunni mosque in Azamiya, killing one person and wounding 14 people in an attack on the holiest Sunni shrine in Baghdad.
Beginning at 3:10 p.m., the three car bomb attackers in Sadr City blew up their vehicles one after another, at 15 minute intervals, hitting Jamila market, al-Hay market and al-Shahidein Square. At about the same time, two mortar rounds struck al-Shahidein Square and Mudhaffar Square, police said.
Brig. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, told state-run Iraqiyah television that other than the vehicles that exploded, one car was captured and three were still on the run. He gave the license plate numbers of each car, asking residents in Sadr City to inform police if they saw them.
As the three fiery explosions sent up huge plumes of black smoke up over northeastern Baghdad, and left streets covered with burning bodies and blood, angry residents and armed Shiite militiamen flooded the streets, hurling curses at Sunni Muslims and firing weapons into the air.
Sadr City is the home of the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
Ambulances raced to burning wooden fruit and vegetables stalls in Jamila market to rescue dozens of wounded people. Rescue workers also removed burned bodies from mangled cars and minibuses and took them away on wheeled carts. But many other corpses of adults and children remained in the streets.
Shortly after the attack, Mahdi Army militiamen deployed around the area, setting up checkpoints and roadblocks in the area to keep all strangers away.
The government imposed a curfew on Baghdad beginning at 8 p.m. Thursday, saying that all people and vehicles must stay off the streets of the city until further notice.
In addition, top government officials held an emergency meeting at the home of Shiite leader Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim that also was attended by Kurdish President Jalal Talabani, Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi and U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, an aide to al-Hakim said. The officials were believed to be discussing the deteriorating security situation in Iraq.
The coordinated attack was the deadliest in Iraq since the U.S.-led war began in March 2003.
Two things: the resistance is getting back at the Sadrists for their little raid at the higher education ministry, most of the kidnap victims surely are dead.
The second, they picked a day where US patrols would be curtailed and US troops hunkered down for their national holiday. Why?
Because they know this will dominate the US news today.
I dislike parades intensely. I dislike the Thanksgiving Day parade most of all. Stupid fucking balloons, goobers from the 'burbs in their fur coats crowding the streets, the same brand name balloons taking up TV time.
Let me tell you about the parade: it sucks. It's usually cold, windy and they jam the streets with tourists who look up like they just came from the rain forests of Brazil.
I guess it's fun for kids, but to me, it is just an annoyance.
By Zachary A. Goldfarb Special to The Washington Post Thursday, November 23, 2006; Page A37
The eight people sitting on the basement level of a Beltsville complex are talking turkey all day long. Sometimes, they are called the moms of the federal government.
On Monday, Maribel Alonso, a food expert at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was on the phone with a woman fretting that her one-day-old turkey would spoil before Thanksgiving. Turkeys stay fresh for only a day or two, Alonso warned. The woman, lamenting having bought the bird so early, asked, "Why did I do this?"
"I'm sorry," Alonso said sympathetically. Then she offered advice: Cook the turkey today and refrigerate it with the juices, keep it covered in ice in the refrigerator, or put it in the freezer for a few hours every day until the day before cooking it.
The Agriculture Department runs a meat hotline -- 888-674-6854 -- to call with questions about food safety, and it is Alonso and several other information specialists who answer those calls. This Thanksgiving season, they have fielded thousands of questions about how to prepare turkey and other holiday foods. The exchanges are often practical, sometimes humorous and occasionally moving.
People can call at any time to hear automated answers to common questions, and they can reach specialists from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Today, representatives are available from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. People can also visit the department's Web site, called Ask Karen, at http://www.askkaren.gov.
The specialists will respond to about 400 questions a day this week, and half that number the rest of the year.
There are questions about deep-fried turkeys, electric-roasted turkeys, oven-cooked turkeys. Callers want to know how long a turkey can safely be kept in a freezer, the safest way to defrost a turkey, whether it's safe to stuff the bird the day before, how long leftovers can be kept in the refrigerator and other Thanksgiving-related ponderables.
Several specialists have worked for the hotline for more than a decade. They undergo a two-week training program and receive a 150-page turkey manual, but their experience comes from their backgrounds as dieticians, food technologists and home economists.
Diane Van has been a specialist at the hotline for 20 of its 21 years and now oversees the project. She said the Thanksgiving meal is about more than cooking meat -- it is about bringing together families, and that is one of the reasons she enjoys the job. "So often people don't get to talk one on one with someone in the federal government," Van said. "We give them as much time as they need to answer their questions."
By Robert D. Novak Thursday, November 23, 2006; Page A39
Donald Rumsfeld, one week after his sacking as secretary of defense, was treated as a conquering hero, accorded one standing ovation after another at the conservative American Spectator magazine's annual dinner in Washington. The enthusiasm may have indicated less total support for Rumsfeld's six-year record at the Pentagon than resentment over the way President Bush fired him.
Rumsfeld had recovered his usual aplomb as he basked in the Spectator's glow. But the day after the election he had seemed devastated -- the familiar confident grin gone and his voice breaking. According to administration officials, only three or four people knew he would be fired -- and Rumsfeld was not one of them. His fellow presidential appointees, including some who did not applaud Rumsfeld's performance in office, were taken aback by his treatment.
In the two weeks since the election, I have asked a wide assortment of Republican notables their opinion of the Rumsfeld sacking. Only one went on the record: Rep. Duncan Hunter, the House Armed Services Committee chairman. A rare undeviating supporter of Rumsfeld, Hunter told me that "it was a mistake for him to resign." The others, less supportive of Rumsfeld, said they were "appalled" -- the most common descriptive word -- by the president's performance.
The treatment of his war minister connotes something deeply wrong with George W. Bush's presidency in its sixth year. Apart from Rumsfeld's failures in personal relations, he never has been anything short of loyal in executing the president's wishes. But loyalty appears to be a one-way street for Bush. His shrouded decision to sack Rumsfeld after declaring that he would serve out the second term fits the pattern of a president who is secretive and impersonal.
This is a point I have made for years, especially when people think Bush is going to issue a raft of pardons.
God knows Rumsfeld should have been fired, but the way Bush did it was, well creepy and slimy. Novaukla is right, Rumsfeld's loyalty has been above reproach to Bush. Yet, he was fired without any consideration, and fired in a way which couldn't help Republicans.
Loyalty means nothing to Bush, except when he expects it.
U.S. soldiers from 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment and Iraqi soldiers from 4th Iraqi Army Division gather near rocket-propelled grenade launchers they recovered while on patrol in a village north of Samarra Flaws Cited in Effort To Train Iraqi Forces U.S. Officers Roundly Criticize Program
By Thomas E. Ricks Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, November 21, 2006; Page A01
The U.S. military's effort to train Iraqi forces has been rife with problems, from officers being sent in with poor preparation to a lack of basic necessities such as interpreters and office materials, according to internal Army documents.
The shortcomings have plagued a program that is central to the U.S. strategy in Iraq and is growing in importance. A Pentagon effort to rethink policies in Iraq is likely to suggest placing less emphasis on combat and more on training and advising, sources say.
In dozens of official interviews compiled by the Army for its oral history archives, officers who had been involved in training and advising Iraqis bluntly criticized almost every aspect of the effort. Some officers thought that team members were often selected poorly. Others fretted that the soldiers who prepared them had never served in Iraq and lacked understanding of the tasks of training and advising. Many said they felt insufficiently supported by the Army while in Iraq, with intermittent shipments of supplies and interpreters who often did not seem to understand English.
The Iraqi officers interviewed by an Army team also had complaints; the top one was that they were being advised by officers far junior to them who had never seen combat.
Some of the American officers even faulted their own lack of understanding of the task. "If I had to do it again, I know I'd do it completely different," reported Maj. Mike Sullivan, who advised an Iraqi army battalion in 2004. "I went there with the wrong attitude and I thought I understood Iraq and the history because I had seen PowerPoint slides, but I really didn't."
Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top U.S. military commander for the Middle East, told Congress last week that he plans to shift increasing numbers of troops from combat roles to training and advisory duties. Insiders familiar with the bipartisan Iraq Study Group say that next month the panel will probably recommend further boosts to the training effort. Pentagon officials are considering whether the number of Iraqi security forces needs to be far larger than the current target of about 325,000, which would require thousands more U.S. trainers.
Most recently, a closely guarded military review being done for the Joint Chiefs of Staff laid out three options for Iraq. It appears to be favoring a version of one option called "Go Long" that would temporarily boost the U.S. troop level -- currently about 140,000 -- but over time would cut combat presence in favor of training and advising. The training effort could take five to 10 years.
Despite its central role in Iraq, the training and advisory program is not well understood outside narrow military circles. Congress has hardly examined it, and training efforts lie outside the purview of the special inspector general on Iraq reconstruction. The Army has done some studies but has not released them. Even basic information, such as how many of the 5,000 U.S. military personnel involved are from the National Guard and Reserves, is unusually difficult to obtain.
The fact is that MTT's are a popular political statement, but most careers are not enhanced by them. You don't get points for working well with the Moroccan Army. It doesn't get you a write up in Army Times.
In Vietnam, advisory tours were often used to season young officers. Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf both did advisory tours in Vietnam, but most hard chargers did not. One gets promoted in the US Army by leading US Army formations in combat. Which is why outside special forces, most soldiers are not eager for this job unless they can get promoted doing it.
Training is not a mission everyone can do. Lt. Col Paul Ciesinski, a former advisor with the Iraqi Army describes some of the problems he had with his American team
Some of my soldiers had problems with it. For example, during my first week in Iraq I lost a captain for the entire year. He became ineffective. In the first week he was in tears. He couldn’t understand how these Iraqi soldiers could sleep on the ground; he felt they should have cots.
He was basically in culture shock, and I had warned them all about this. One of my subordinates had gotten an SF contractor-produced, non-doctrinal and unofficial guide on advising; it was the only thing we had on advising. We were the only team that had it so I gave it out electronically to some other MiTTs. There was a section on culture shock.
One of my captains, who I thought would be extremely effective because he came from a background that would lend to being particularly effective in advising, within the first week he was utterly ineffective and remained that way for the entire year. He could not adapt to their culture. The second week we were there he saw Arab and Kurdish soldiers sleeping on the floor of the tent. He broke into tears and said, “How can they live this way? I have to fix this.”
It’s not that easy to just come up with 500 cots, and they didn’t necessarily want the cots anyway. Then as we started doing cordon and searches in the villages, we started seeing that people just sleep on the floor. It didn’t upset them. But this captain could not handle the fact that these soldiers were sleeping on the floor, that they were eating the way they did and that they were defecating where they did – which, by the way, was nowhere near as bad as we had been led to believe.
The Arab and Kurd soldiers were a lot cleaner than we were led to believe they were. I couldn’t see what the big problem was. I’d heard such horror stories, but when we got there the level of cleanliness may not have been what we expect, but when you live that way your entire life, your body is able to handle it. So the biggest surprise my soldiers had was just dealing with people from a different culture who value different things – and we had minimal cultural training in CONUS. None. Nothing for soldiers lower in rank than master sergeant for NCOs and major for commissioned officers, and precious little for those more senior in rank. I made my officers read a book called The Arab Mind written by Raphael Patai. I would recommend that anybody who goes to Iraq read that book. It was an eye opener. It helped me.
This is another problem. Special Forces has a rigorous training program for their members because they need to know a great deal before advising other soldiers. Language training is key among them.
There are soldiers who were great at the military aspects of the SF Q Course who don't get selected because they simply cannot deal with cultures other than their own.
But because the US Army now wants to send advisors into many more Iraqi units, people who may not be suited to the mission may be sent to do it.
JA: I’d have to start with a couple assumptions. I’d have to start with the assumption that the people who were selected to go would know how to do training, training management, understand training, those types of things. That being said, most of that is done now. All the battalions are trained. Now there is a schoolhouse, kind of like we have here – you know, basic training that’s done with a replacement individual augmentee as you take casualties or whatever.
The battalions are formed and now you fill in one-sies and two-sies as they come. So the model now is a little different than it was. But working off the model I went through, again, the assumption that the training methodology was fairly well understood. You would have to have courses that were focused on the culture and the capabilities and interacting with the Iraqis – or whatever culture you were dealing with.
So language, cultural training, you got a little bit of that at CRC but not nearly enough – that would have been critical. If I could have gone in and had a conversation with an Iraqi in Arabic – and I don’t need to be proficient. I’m not proficient in Turkish, but if you spoke Turkish, I could talk to you and get my point across. There was no language training whatsoever. So that would have been critical, because of the fact that interpreters were a commodity and in very short supply. Probably a review of training methodology, leadership, be, know, do – all those types of things.
..........
Another complaint that Maj. Allen had was the way the Iraqi units actually were staffed
JA: I’m sorry, a proportional mix. Twenty percent of the population was Kurd, so 20 percent of each of the units should be Kurd, and so on. We did face a challenge early on that, as the battalion filled – they would come from recruiting centers and I gave very clear instructions early on that as the soldiers started arriving, fill the companies equally. So if a busload of 40 soldiers comes in, Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Delta each get 10 soldiers.
They didn’t do that. That did lead to problems down the road because of the fact that, on a certain day, we might have gotten all of the guys from Baghdad. Tomorrow we might get all of the guys from Mosul. So you put all of the Mosul guys in one company and that created some challenges, especially when you had all the guys from Mosul under a guy that was former Republican Guard. That’s huge, huge problems.
After our mid-cycle break, I had them reshuffle the companies. I didn’t realize they had done that that way – again, because of the language barriers and everything else – until we had started basic training. And so we’re totally reshuffling everybody in one day, and tomorrow you’re in a different company. We said, “We’re going to go on leave and when you come back, you’re going to reshuffle the companies.”
And I thought that would do a couple things. One, realign them so that it was equitable. Two, potentially break up any little cells of less desirables that might be forming, which we did have. We had insurgents that we detected and arrested in the battalion that were planning an operation against me and my team. So that helped. This is something I’d trust to my team and then asked them to use the same model, that when the soldiers were on break and you’re observing training, to grab the interpreter or somebody that speaks English – because we were short interpreters – and talk to the collective group.
Try to impress upon them that, “Look to your left and your right: These are the guys you’re going to combat with. It doesn’t matter if you come from Basra or Mosul or Baghdad, because you have to trust the guy on your left and right and they are now your new family. You have gained another family. You haven’t lost your family or your clan or your tribe that you’re a member of back home. They’re still there, but now you’ve gained another family. You’ve gained in this process.” Try and take the Iraqi and Arab culture of belonging to a clan and translate that into a military context. Sure, there was still infighting, there were still challenges with that – and my Kurdish officers always felt downtrodden – but they were dedicated to staying the course because this was their hope for a new future for them.
By Steve Gilliard, AlterNet. Posted November 22, 2006.
Progressives are drawn to Charlie Rangel's call for a draft, but a draft only inducts people. Class determines what job they will be assigned once they are in the military and, often, how happy they will be.
"You bet your life," says Charlie Rangel when asked if he's still prepared to reinstate the draft. With the Democratic takeover of the House, the 18-term representative from New York is slated to chair the powerful Ways and Means Committee giving him a powerful seat from which to push his legislation.
As recently as August, word that the Marines were calling up their last line of reservists had reignited draft chatter for the first time since Rangel's previous draft push during the run up to the 2004 elections. "This move should serve as a wake-up call to America," said Jon Stoltz, former Army captain in Iraq and head of VoteVets.org, who called it "proof that our military is overextended," and "one of the last steps before resorting to a draft."
There's a temptation among progressives and liberals to view the draft as a potentially positive force, both in bringing about an end to the war and in evening the playing field in terms of whose children actually have to fight. Unfortunately, to the extent that it ever was true, this simply isn't the case anymore. The draft will only pull more unfortunate men and women from the ranks of the underprivileged and underrepresented.
The Vosges Mountains, Fall, 1944
They had been in classrooms only a few months ago, now they were tramping down some muddy road in a strange place, flinching from explosions. Annoyed by their flinching, someone would explain they were outgoing rounds, nothing to worry about.
Shipped overseas, sent to a replacement depot, greeted with indifference by their new platoon mates, expected to be dead or wounded in a few days, they were infantry and all their problems boiled down to surviving the German Army. Thousands would find themselves in Belgium, France, Italy, the Pacific, fighting on the front lines.
Too bad it takes more than wishing to execute the recipies we all hold dear for Thanksgiving.
It takes shopping.
This year, I divided my shopping into three parts. Most of the stuff I got from my local supermarket. I got the organic stuff and turkey from Fresh Direct and the rest from my local Pathmark.
Sounds simple, right?
Remember the scene in Apocalypse Now where Willard enters Kurtz's compound and they're all staring at him, that moment of dread?
Well, that's the feeling any sane person should get when entering a supermarket Thanksgiving week.
Because the market is a zoo, with people trying to round up their meal. Stove Top sells like weed at a Dead concert, shit you couldn't imagine eating, like canned Egg Nog mix, is flying off the shevles. There are people who spent $250 over the last month collecting their frozen turkeys and hams. There are the last minute shoppers, the people who are getting everything, with the kids they just picked up from day care in tow. And the topperoffers, picking up that one last item or two, like me.
The aisles are crowded, the people trying to remember what they don't have, what they need to get and to make sure little Kayla doesn't throw in an extra package of cheese. It is, in short, organized mayhem.
What is amazing is what people by, heavy cream, which has never been neccessary for our meals, collard greens by the bundle, pounds of sweet potatoes, macaroni, oil, and the ham.
When we had the large thanksgivings, a ham was as much a part of the meal as the turkey, on Thanksgiving morning, I will smell pernil, roast pork, because you can't have a Puerto Rican holiday without roast pork. But the ham matters.
Oddly, the shopping is the domain of the mother, from young to middle age, they seem to predominate, with a dad or two along for the ride. Because she isn't going to miss what she needs. Now, most cultural observations are silly, but here is one, there are few black women who will trust the provision of a thanksgiving meal to anyone without the closest supervision.
My mother once burst into tears over a too large turkey and made me return it. The replacement was suitable.
When I was in Fairway one year, looking for cheddar cheese for the baked macaroni, I asked the guy behind the cheese counter if they had any cheddar. He said, well, we have white cheddar. Now I love white cheddar, but as I said to the man behind the counter, "man, I'm making baked macaroni, I bring that home, they'll kill me."
He laughed knowingly and and pointed me to the precut cheddar.
Because I would have been killed if I did that. And he knew that. Show up with white cheddar for baked macaroni. Shit.
Even though my mother rarely did the shopping, her supervision was exacting. And I could see that on display. Men may have been along for the ride, but if the women were going to spend hours cooking, they wanted what they needed. In my family's case, if Bell Seasoning is missing, it is enough to send me into the streets on Thanksgiving morning in panic mode.
As I was standing in the checkout, this woman was going on about how she was going to cook her ham and her over roaster chicken, the Perdue brand name for capons, which I actually like. I looked at her and thought, that would be fucked up for those who liked Turkey. Then she explained that they were going to a relative's house for Thanksgiving. Then it made sense.
Ok. Someone on the Food Blog asked what kind of music they should play over Thanksgiving dinner.
The people I asked, laughed and said "Music? Why? Isn't there football on?"
I mean it is thanksgiving. If you don't hear John Madden in the background, it's like having a treeless, Santa free Christmas.
This month, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg delivered the keynote address to a conference of philanthropists at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Ark. He took the opportunity to extol his administration’s efforts to reform the New York City school system. And he singled out the Leadership Academy, a $77 million program intended to develop new principals, calling it “a huge success.”
Closer to home, at Lafayette High School in Brooklyn, there may be some difference of opinion. There, a graduate of the academy, Jolanta Rohloff, has managed in well under two years as principal to antagonize a large number of students, teachers and alumni. The ill will, she says, is a result of her efforts to improve a troubled school.
Ms. Rohloff has dismantled the school’s program for gifted students and pushed scores of recent immigrants into English-only classes that they say they cannot understand. She has reduced students’ grades in classes based on their marks on Regents tests, provoking several formal grievances by teachers whose original grades were overruled. She has made a series of provocative statements, including one comparing Lafayette to a Nazi death camp.
The list of complaints goes on to include having a student mural painted over and distributing textbooks two months into the term.
A common theme emerges in all, which is the view by Ms. Rohloff’s many critics that she is an abrasive, autocratic leader, bent on imposing her agenda and intolerant of dissent.
“The morale here is well into negative figures,” said Patrick Compton, a social studies teacher at Lafayette for 21 years.
His colleague, Rick Mangone, chapter leader of the teachers’ union at Lafayette, said, “Teachers are worried about how she’ll react, not how to teach.” He added, “She uses fear tactics.”
Kamilah Brathwaite, 16, a junior who represents Lafayette on a citywide council of high schools, offered a strikingly similar observation.
“The majority of the students are not pleased with her,” Kamilah said in an interview. “She brings out policies by just throwing them on students. She doesn’t consult with us. She doesn’t want to hear anybody else’s input. It’s whatever she says, goes.”
Ms. Rohloff does not deny or disavow her actions. In an interview this week, she portrayed herself as an educator who had to act swiftly and decisively to reverse a “culture of failure” at Lafayette before the Department of Education decided to close the school entirely.
What is undeniable is that Lafayette was a mess before Ms. Rohloff took over in September 2005. Under her predecessor, Alan J. Siegel, the school registered a graduation rate of about 45 percent and Regents scores below those even at schools with a similar profile of largely poor, largely nonwhite students.
......................................
Adana Austin, 16, a junior, had chosen to attend Lafayette because of its Gateway honors program. When she heard last spring that it would be shut down, she went with other students to plead with the principal to restore it. At that meeting, Adana recalled, she said Ms. Rohloff asked, “What’s wrong with you, coming to public school expecting a private-school education?”
In the last few weeks, several dozen recent immigrants from China signed an open letter beseeching Ms. Rohloff to reverse a policy that moves them rapidly into classes like social studies and physics that are taught entirely in English. As a result, the letter stated, they are failing courses and falling behind in graduation credits.
“I paid 200 percent attention to what teacher was lecturing, still could not understand anything,” said a translated version of the letter, which was written by Mei Ling Chen. “When everybody finished their class assignment, I was still looking for the definitions of the new words using my electronic dictionary. With the help of my dictionary, I got all the words that I need to ask a question. Yet it turned out I could not even understand the teacher’s explanation.”
Ms. Rohloff explained her stance on the gifted and immigrant students the same way: Lafayette needs to become one school, not a collection of separate groups. The gifted program, she added, was too expensive to operate because some classes had only a dozen students.
As for the faculty members, the principal faces nearly 10 grievances related to both the grade changes and accusations that she pressured teachers not to seek help from their union on various matters. Ms. Rohloff said, on the latter issue, that she was offering personal assistance and was misunderstood.
Relations probably reached a nadir several weeks ago, when Ms. Rohloff held a meeting to respond to the widespread criticism. During that session, by her account as well as that of several teachers, Ms. Rohloff said that just as her father had survived Auschwitz, she would survive Lafayette.
“The real question,” said Mr. Compton, the social studies teacher, “is can Lafayette survive her?”
Things white people feel free to say to black people
“What’s wrong with you, coming to public school expecting a private-school education?”
The odds of her saying that to a white child are close to zero.
This is an increasing problem with the Bloomberg school system. Too many autocratic prinicipals and no ability to redress grievences. Parents have been shut out of the system under Bloomberg. Principals have decided they can do anything within their schools and there is no parental way to object.
Which is why I'm suprised why people don't get the cellphone ban and it's corosive effects on the way the city schools are run.
The City had to be sued, and they still refuse to actually talk to parents to work out a solutuion. Which is ridiculous., But it's not only cellphones.
Consultants are not only getting more than a million dollars apiece from taxpayers to find school cost savings - they're also getting as much as $500 a day for expenses.
And they don't even have to submit receipts.
It's an arrangement City Councilman Robert Jackson (D-Manhattan) called "outrageous" and vowed to investigate when the Education Committee he chairs convenes a hearing today on the use of no-bid contracts in the city schools.
School officials last year awarded a record-breaking $121million worth of contracts without the public review required of most city agencies, a Daily News analysis found.
One of the largest and most controversial contracts put the city-based Alvarez & Marsal in charge of school finances for 17-1/2 months to find ways to cut bureaucracy.
The contract - which was initially posted publicly for $17 million but later modified to $15.8million - includes 19 consultants billing at rates ranging from $275 to $450 an hour, including seven whose total bills will top $1 million.
It also includes an 11% flat fee totaling $1.6 million for expenses, mostly "costs of living in New York, including hotels and flights," said Education Department spokesman David Cantor.
Some of the consultants, including project leader Sajan George, do commute from other states. George is billing $500 per day for expenses - $190,575 in all - on top of the $1.7 million he's billing for his time.
Bloomberg and Klein are spending money and using public resources without any imput. This is not the kind of money the city should be spending on consultants, period.
They treat the school system as if it is a business and they serve customers, not a public resource which serves the community. Parents have no role and little say in the decisions which affect their children.
Which is why it is the height of idiocy that parents have to sue the city to let their kids carry cellphones. Because in one of a series of autocratic decisions, Bloomberg says no, and no one is supposed to actually object.
This is going to be a problem for Spitzer. He can't hand over $4b to a city which thinks parents have no say in their kids education.
By JIM KRANE, Associated Press Writer Tue Nov 21, 2:23 PM ET
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates - Former President George H.W. Bush took on Arab critics of his son Tuesday during a testy exchange at a leadership conference in the capital of this U.S. ally.
"My son is an honest man," Bush told members of the audience harshly criticized the current U.S. leader's foreign policy. ...................................
"We do not respect your son. We do not respect what he's doing all over the world," a woman in the audience bluntly told Bush after his speech.
Bush, 82, appeared stunned as others in the audience whooped and whistled in approval.
A college student told Bush his belief that U.S. wars were aimed at opening markets for American companies and said globalization was contrived for America's benefit at the expense of the rest of the world. Bush was having none of it.
"I think that's weird and it's nuts," Bush said. "To suggest that everything we do is because we're hungry for money, I think that's crazy. I think you need to go back to school."
The hostile comments came during a quesion-and-answer session after Bush finished a folksy address on leadership by telling the audience how deeply hurt he feels when his presidential son is criticized.
"This son is not going to back away," Bush said, his voice quivering. "He's not going to change his view because some poll says this or some poll says that, or some heartfelt comments from the lady who feels deeply in her heart about something. You can't be president of the United States and conduct yourself if you're going to cut and run. This is going to work out in Iraq. I understand the anxiety. It's not easy." ...................................... Bush said he was surprised by the audience's criticism of his son.
"He is working hard for peace. It takes a lot of guts to get up and tell a father about his son in those terms when I just told you the thing that matters in my heart is my family," he said. "How come everybody wants to come to the United States if the United States is so bad?
The parents are always the last to know their son is an asshole. Only Poppy Bush would be surprised that a Muslim audience would detest his son as a earthly Satan. They hate him, they hate him deeply. They feel he lives to kill muslims.
Which may be wrong, but it is how they feel. It is what Bush has done to our reputation around the world.
Bush's greatest weakness is that he never made W stand up and be a man. Maybe because their first child died of cancer, whatever, but W has never looked at his son and saw the weakling coward before him.
First Daughter Barbara Bush had her purse and cell phone stolen as she had dinner in a restaurant in Buenos Aires, Argentina, even though she was being guarded by a detail of Secret Service agents, according to law enforcement reports made available to ABC News. .................................
A Secret Service agent on the advance detail got into an "altercation" with someone after a night out and was badly beaten, according to the law enforcement reports. The Secret Service said today the incident was an attempted mugging that occurred while the agent was on his own time. The agent is doing fine.
The purse snatching took place on Barbara's first night in town while she was dining in the picturesque San Telmo neighborhood. According to the reports, the Secret Service agents failed to notice the incident. ...................................
Here's why this looks bad.
Bush's family is galavanting around the world, while he makes Iraq out as the most important battle of our time.
Yet not one of the draft age members of his family have enlisted to serve in any branch of the military nor do they oppose the war. It gives an air of calous indifference to the suffering of many
These women don't even have regular jobs, two years after graduating college. It seems that there is no clue as to how the party girl reputation of Bush's daughters make him look.
By BEVERLEY LUMPKIN, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 18 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - Nearly all air travelers entering the U.S. will be required to show passports beginning Jan. 23, including returning Americans and people from Canada and other nations in the Western Hemisphere.
Michael Chertoff in an interview with The Associated Press. The Homeland Security Department plans to announce the change on Wednesday.
Until now, the department had not set a specific date for instituting the passport requirement for air travelers, though the start had been expected to be around the beginning of the year. Setting the date on Jan. 23 pushes the start past the holiday season.
The requirement marks a change for Americans, Canadians, Bermudians and some Mexicans.
Currently, U.S. citizens returning from other countries in the hemisphere are not required to present passports but must show other proof of citizenship such as driver's licenses or birth certificates.
Visitors from most countries in the hemisphere are required to show passports. However, people from Canada, Bermuda — and those from Mexico who enter the U.S. frequently and have special border-crossing cards — have been allowed to use other forms of identification, including driver's licenses.
"Right now, there are 8,000 different state and local entities in the U.S. issuing birth certificates and driver's licenses," Chertoff said. Having to distinguish phony from real in so many different documents "puts an enormous burden on our Customs and Border inspectors," he said.
In a few cases, other documents still may be used for air entry into the U.S. by some frequent travelers between the U.S. and Canada, members of the American military on official business and some U.S. merchant mariners.
Under a separate program, Homeland Security plans to require all travelers, including Americans, entering the U.S. by land or sea to show a passport or an alternative security identification card starting as early as January 2008.
Here's the problem.
Most Americans never get a passport. Many, I would say most, who travel overseas, do so on a US military ID, which is accepted as a passport for the military and their dependents. It is believed that only one out of six Americans have a passport.
Most other Americans travel on their drivers licenses and birth certificates. The imposition of the cost and need for a passport, which is over $100, is going to be challenged, because it is a clusterfuck waiting to happen.
Congress is going to come under pressure to end this requirement, quickly. Someone sat in an office and thought this up without realizing how uncommon a passport is among Americans.
Almost immediately after we heard Britney Spears was finally going to ditch her leach of a husband Kevin Federline, we heard of the now famous sex tape.
Federline has already been approached by a porn mogul in the U.S. to buy the tape, but choose to pass on the deal.
Now Britney Spears says she may just “give away’ a copy of the sex tape the couple made on their honeymoon two years ago. .....................'
“Brit figures she’ll beat that sucker to the punch, just like she did by giving away pictures of Jayden James,” said Spears family friend Nyla Price, 55, the owner of Nyla’s Burger Basket.
“Half of nuthin’ is nuthin’, and that’s what her lying skunk of a husband will get if she gives that video away before he can find some sleazeball to buy it.”
Federline has been saying the sex tape is four hours long, however, Price says the tape is closer to forty-five minutes.
Excellent.
When Spears met the new Vanilla Ice she was banging a married guy. But once she realized that she had a bum of a husband, months after the world realized same, her gambit to stop the freeloader by releasing a sex tape is both clever and funny. Like it would hurt her career. It would be a boon, look what it did for Pam Anderson.
Well, the bum has one pay day, a New Year's Day asskicking by John Cena of the WWE. live on RAW. Maybe his fake wigger ass might find a new career, punching bag.
Looking to draw attention to what they call the "worst form of bigotry confronting America today," Boston University's College Republicans are circulating an application for a "Caucasian Achievement and Recognition Scholarship" that requires applicants be at least 25 percent Caucasian.
"Did we do this to give a scholarship to white kids? Of course not," the scholarship reads. "Did we do it to trigger a discussion on what we believe to be the morally wrong practice of basing decisions in our schools and our jobs on racial preferences rather than merit? Absolutely."
The scholarship, which is privately funded by the BUCR without the support of the university, is meant to raise awareness, group members say. BUCR member argue that racial preferences are a form of "bigotry." The group has a similar view on affirmative action.
The application for the $250 scholarship, due Nov. 30, requires applicants be full-time BU undergraduate students and one-fourth Caucasian and maintain at least a 3.2 cumulative GPA. Applicants must submit two essays, one describing the applicant's ancestry and one describing "what it means to you to be a Caucasian-American today."
BUCR President Joe Mroszczyk said he spoke to Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore before publicly releasing the scholarship to make sure it would be legal. Mroszczyk said BUCR members also talked to others beforehand, some of whom were initially "agitated or upset" but understood the point after members explained themselves, he said.
Let's see, white surburan kids going to one of the most expensive private universities in the US feel victimized.
They should stop in the library and look at some yearbooks. See how many non-white faces are there from before 1980.
What the hell is wrong with the College Assholes? Every stunt they come up with is racist to an extreme level. If it isn't hunting Mexicans, it's making fun of blacks. I mean, most colleges don't have a Klan chapter, but they have a College Assholes chapter.
They repeatedly define the GOP as the White party with their actions and no one calls them on it.
Charlie Rangel's call for a draft has had people flipping out. Not that even his own constituents are for conscription, they are emphatically are not.
But there is one reason to let him bring his legislation up
Hearings.
For three years, we have been lied to about recriuting, stop-loss and basically every personnel issue with the armed forces.
Once Rangel is allowed to get people under oath on the Hill, we could get some very interesting answers, like what recruiters do to fill their quotas, why gays are still being expelled from the military, the abuse of IRR and stop loss.
Oh, the questions which would flow from a hearing on the draft would be amusing and place any talk of a longer stay in Iraq on the table.
The Pentagon would swear everything is fine, but then we get the ex-recruiters, the academic experts. Oh, it would be a cavalcade of fun calling the Pentagon on their bullshit.
What happened in 2003 is that the GOP brought the bill to a vote without hearings. Hearings changes the whole game. The testimony would be out in the open and the bullshit would stop. Rangel and the Congress would have the evidence of the obvious, as long as the war in Iraq continues, recruiting will be a problem.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 20 — Pentagon officials conducting a review of Iraq strategy are considering a substantial but temporary increase in American troop levels and the addition of several thousand more trainers to work with Iraqi forces, a senior Defense Department official said Monday.
The idea, dubbed the “surge option” by some officials, would involve increasing American forces by 20,000 troops or more for several months in the hope of improving security, especially in Baghdad. That would mark a sharp rise over the current baseline of 144,000 troops.
But some officials and senior military officers are arguing against the idea, saying that it could undercut a sense of urgency for Iraqi units to take on a greater role in fighting the insurgency and preventing sectarian attacks. Gen. John P. Abizaid, the head of the United States Central Command, told Congress last week that the military was stretched so thin that such an increase could not be sustained over the long term.
“There are people who believe that a short-term surge would have a beneficial impact, but there isn’t universal agreement on that yet,” said the senior official, who said that President Bush was scheduled to be briefed in the next several weeks on the developing options, which were first reported Monday in The Washington Post.
There is far more consensus within the Pentagon on the need to increase the number of American trainers, more than 3,000 of whom are working with Iraqi Army, police and border units. General Abizaid endorsed that idea in general terms in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week.
I think the day is coming when an Iraqi unit kills or captures their American trainers.
Left, Bettman/Corbis; Heidi Schumann for The New York Times
The TV show “Mythbusters” made models of the Hindenburg to see what role its skin had in the disaster, left. Jamie Hyneman, a host, said he and the team “don’t have any pretense of teaching science.” The Best Science Show on Television? By JOHN SCHWARTZ Published: November 21, 2006
ALAMEDA, Calif. — “This is where we blow stuff up.”
Jamie Hyneman — who, to be honest, did not actually use the word “stuff” — stood in front of a two-story, blast-resistant ruin of a building at the back of the former Alameda Point Naval Air Station.
Mr. Hyneman and his colleague, Adam Savage, are the hosts of “Mythbusters” on the Discovery Channel. It may be the best science program on television, in no small part because it does not purport to be a science program at all. What “Mythbusters” is best known for, to paraphrase Mr. Hyneman, is blowing stuff up. And banging stuff together. And setting stuff on fire. The two men do it for fun and ratings, of course. But in a subtle and goofily educational way, they commit mayhem for science’s sake.
As the name implies, the program tests what the creators call myths, hypotheses taken from folklore, history, movies, the Internet and urban legends. Can a skunk’s smell can be neutralized with tomato juice? Did the Confederacy come up with a two-stage rocket that could strike Washington from Richmond, Va.? Can a sunken ship be raised with Ping-Pong balls? Could a car stereo be so loud that it would blow out the windows?
Mr. Hyneman and Mr. Savage, who produce Hollywood special effects and gadgets for a living, come up with ways to challenge each thesis and build experiments with a small crew. If fire and explosions or, say, rotting pig carcasses happen to be involved, well, that’s entertainment.
What they came here to do on a clear and crisp October morning, with San Francisco posing magnificently across the bay, was set the Hindenburg on fire. Three Hindenburgs, actually, to address a debate over what actually doomed the hydrogen-filled zeppelin on May 6, 1937, in Lakehurst, N.J. Hydrogen, of course, is highly flammable and was the obvious culprit in the disaster.
But a counterargument had arisen that the doping paint used to toughen the craft’s skin of fabric contained aluminum powder and other materials that combined to resemble an explosive called thermite. That, the theory goes, made the fabric as combustible as rocket fuel.
To test the theory, the “Mythbusters” crew built three 1/50-scale models over three days. Two had re-creations of the skin on the original craft, and a third — well, we’ll get to that one.
The three members of the “build team,” Tory Belleci, Kari Byron and Grant Imahara, were not on the set the day of the shoot, but a small video team was. Cameras captured the action from several angles. Mr. Savage had also placed one camera on the ground, facing up toward the mini-blimp, with tiny models of people placed nearby to mimic the newsreel scenes.
It was time to make a disaster happen. Mr. Hyneman stood by an open door of the building to manipulate a long pole with a gas torch that he used to ignite the mini-zeppelin, which was more than 10 feet long, hanging inside. Mr. Savage pinballed between peeking through the door and sitting under a canopy outside watching video monitors.
The first blimp, not filled with hydrogen, burned slowly at its tail end for a minute and a half and then foomph! Fire raced along its length in just a few seconds. Mr. Savage shouted, “Oh, my God, look how fast it’s going!”
“Say it again,” the sound man said, moving in closer.
“Oh, my God, look how fast it’s going through the top!” Mr. Savage exclaimed again. And then, as if forgetting that the camera was still rolling, added softly, “It’s so beautiful.”
Mythbusters is one of my favorite TV shows. Mostly because it's clever. And they blow things up and shoot them.
Seriously, cable allows for more diverse shows which don't follow the NOVA model of hour long documentaries.
There are other clever shows, like How Things Are Made, Intervention and Dirty Jobs Work.
The shift to more creative programs on cable started with a UK series on ancient battles which used the Total War computer program to depict the battles. Military Channel, part of Discovery, has a new series, 20th Century Battles, which uses massive, but simple, computer animation.
What these shows do is make the difficulr easier to understand. You may not get the physics of ballistics, but when a bullet breaks up on hitting water, you get that.
BY KENNETH R. BAZINET DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
WASHINGTON - James Carville's attempt to topple Howard Dean as chairman of the Democratic National Committee failed after state party officials and even a vocal critic of Dean crushed the coup, officials said.
Insiders from the Clinton camp winced at Carville's untimely remarks last week calling for Dean's ouster in favor of unsuccessful Senate candidate Harold Ford of Tennessee.
"It was not coming from [Sen. Hillary Clinton] and they made a real effort to distance themselves from James' comments," said a source close to the Clintons.
The Clintonistas don't want an undeserved backlash from the activist wing of the party that overwhelmingly supports Dean, especially because some anti-Clinton Democrats have blamed Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) for the attack by Carville, a longtime Clinton insider. Those forces claimed Carville's motive was to topple Dean in favor of a chairman more favorable to Sen. Clinton's bid for President.
Carville's remarks last week came as House Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) bungled the race for Democratic majority leader. Party operatives acknowledged the Carville and Pelosi sideshows were detracting from their election victories.
"We applaud Chairman Dean for his commitment to ensuring Democratic candidates and state Democratic parties have the resources and tools needed to compete and win, and we remain committed to the hard work of rebuilding our party for the future," said Mark Brewer, president of the Association of State Democratic Chairs.
What attempted coup?
It was more like drunk Uncle Jim demanding the car keys to get more beer. Finally, someone pulled him aside and told him to shut the fuck up and eat more cornbread.
Carville was spouting off because he thought he had power. I mean it's an arrogant thing to run down the immensely popular Dean and think you can get him fired. But the fact is that after Jon Stewart made the Crossfire crew his bitches, they were revealed for the clowns that they are. When you look at moments in TV history, that's going to be one of the key ones.
But because the Beltway crowd kisses his ass and he has his Hollywood friends, he thought he could spout any bullshit he wanted and it would happen. That people would toss Dean aside on his word.
Jesus. To call this a coup insults coups.
Schumer, to his credit, realized quickly that he needed to be on the right side of this, and Emmanuel also jumped in. Why? They got phonecalls. State people told them straight up that any move to get rid of Dean was going nowhere and Carville needs to shut the fuck up and eat some cornbread.
The fact is that Hillary Clinton, which Carville was trying to manuever for, has no chance to be president. Most Dems outside the Northeast won't be seen with her, crowds laugh derisively at her name, and even progressives don't trust her. I know they have this plan to convince people she's really a moderate church goer, but you know, to this day, despite a book on his wartime exploits, people still call George McGovern a peacenik. It isn't about the truth, but what people believe.
Then there is the fact that only 72 percent of Americans will vote for any woman to be president. It's like the idea that Condi Rice could be vice president.
Look, they like her, but she is a single black woman with no boyfriend. Or the president as her boyfriend. Either way, Ken Blackwell has a brighter future in elective politics than she does. They won't be pushing her to be VP, unless the GOP changes hands
Posted Nov 20th 2006 8:30AM by TMZ Staff Filed under: Train Wrecks Michael Richards at the Laugh FactoryWARNING: WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO SEE IS PROFANE AND RACIAL
Michael Richards, who played the wacky Cosmo Kramer on the hit TV show "Seinfeld," appeared onstage at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood. Kyle Doss, an African-American, told TMZ he and some friends were in the cheap seats and he was playfully heckling Richards when suddenly, the comedian lost it.
The camera started rolling just as Richards began his attack, screaming at one of the men, "Fifty years ago we'd have you upside down with a f***ing fork up your ass."
Richards continued, "You can talk, you can talk, you're brave now motherf**ker. Throw his ass out. He's a nigger! He's a nigger! He's a nigger! A nigger, look, there's a nigger!"
.....................
One of the men who was the object of Richard's tirade was outraged, shouting back "That's un-f***ing called for, ain't necessary."
After the three-minute tirade, it appears the majority of the audience members got up and left in disgust.
He can't handle a heckler? So he launches into an obscene racial tirade which calls for murdering someone.
His apology with the help of Jerry Seinfeld sucked as well.
Well, he won't have to worry about working for a while. He's lucky he didn't get his ass kicked on the stage. Did he think the audience was on his side?
Update: Lower Manahattanite shares his feeling on the subject
Oh, boy.
I knew this was something really bad when I got up this morning and my writing partner in L.A. was up e-mailing me about it--at 9:30 a.m. my time--6:30 Pacific. I've never heard from him that early in the day Pacific time.
Then a producer friend sent me the TMZ link a few minutes later. Before I knew it, I'd gotten about six or seven e-mails with variations on "Well...at least it's out in the open", or "Most people just THINK it" in the subject line.
Have f*cking mercy.
Before going on about this, in full disclosure, I've written comedy--for television, for radio and independent film. I've performed comedy on TV and the stage--before some of the most legendarily rough audiences you've heard about. I've written stand-up--for others. And for several years had as part of my job the duty of seeing maybe 400 different stand-ups up and down the eastern seaboard to vet them before going on the TV projects I worked on. I'm something of a student of comedy and its history and can count among my friends several comics. I can appreciate Dusty Fletcher's classic "Open The Door, Richard" routine and Patton Oswalt's rip on NPR vs. Conservative Talk Radio, so I consider myself pretty open-minded on the parameters of comedy.
Okay. Now. That said, let's just break it down into the simplest bits possible, shall we? Richards' wig-out wasn't comedy. It was a frustrated, ill-equipped comedic oddball who got lucky in being cast on a TV juggernaut, having been forced back into playing these clubs due to his inablity to transcend a role--or his limits having been exposed by said role, freaking out and going for the jugular of hecklers when he found himself floundering. The dude's a f*cking failure beyond one charitable and lengthy dance with serendipity. And up on that stage, when he couldn't handle something that EVERY COMEDIAN WORTH A F*CKING DAMN KNOWS WILL HAPPEN MULTIPLE TIMES IN HIS PERFORMING CAREER, went totally "nuclear" in his comeback. Unfortunately, "nuclear" war is usually...a doomsday proposition, ending with both sides blown the f*ck up. And that's what he did here.
Comedians have lines they use for hecklers. Richard Pryor destroyed many a heckler--in character often. Robin Williams f*cking verbally drowns his antagonizers. I heard Chris Rock years ago stun a heckler into silence with a forlorn look heavenward while asking "WHY didn't I wear a sc*mbag when I f*cked this dude's mama twenty years ago? Damn!"
Or you trot out the old stand-by, "Hey, take it easy...little respect. I don't come down to your job and:
a.) Slap the d*ck outta your mouth in the bus station bathroom when you're givin' blowjobs.
b.) Interrupt you and your mom's live sex act at the peep show.
Or some such variation thereof. What so-called professional comedian or person familiar with stand-up comedy doesn't have an idea of how to deal with something as common to the game as hecklers? What he did wasn't satire, alá Sam Kinison--who could really push the envelope while being ironic, or heady wordplay like George Carlin, or even wild performance art in the Andy Kaufman mode. Richards bugged out. And bugged out on the whackdoodle racist tip because he couldn't cope and had nothing in his arsenal but the ultimate weapon against somebody who got to him. Is he a racist? I dunno. I do know, and everybody on earth now knows that racist thoughts evidently bubble up real easy in him, so that speaks volumes. Really.
And let's get a few things clear here for his defenders and apologists--f*ck the Def Jam, Pryor, and Gangsta Rap comparisons. This is a dodge from the real issue and an attempt to obfuscate and give lame-*ss cover for racists. It is one thing for the "N"-word to be used in what I'd call artistic context, i.e. Larry David's use of it in the third season of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" in his dealings with Wanda Sykes' character's rapper boyfriend's character. It was as funny as f*ck. Pryor--when he did use it pre-'79 and the Def Jam usage is within the actual routine.
What Richards did was bust the routine and go after audience members in a rage-fueled tirade. Hardly within what we'd call "The Performer's Compact With The Audience". There is NO ARTISTIC, COMEDIC, PERFORMANCE excuse to fall back on when you bust the routine and go after the audience. You're on own, then. And you have to take the lumps you f*cking get for it. It was a total loss of professionalism, and there's no cultural or sociological excuse that explains it.
Now, putting on my performer's hat, part of me almost feels bad for him. When you go out on a stage, you sort of join a fraternity, and you empathize with your fellow performers. I have sat in theaters and clubs and cringed--unable to look when a comedian bombs out badly. Your heart sinks. You feel the crushing silence along with the dying comic. Every catcall is a studded whip coming down. I didn't see what transpired before the video. But I have it on good authority that he was awful, and when the hecklers started in with the "You're not funny"s, he first played the class card--"I'm rich and can have you arrested just like that!" against his tormentors. And when that didn't silence 'em, he went "nuclear" and blew up everything. No night's bombing is worth going off the rails like that. I've been to The Laugh Factory on Sunset (on the Tuesday Black Comic Nights) and found it no more heckle-worthy than Caroline's.
What's not being addressed here is that Richards...is not a very good "comedian" in general. He gets laughs when he lapses into "Kramer" schtick--head snaps, jerking limbs and the odd Cosmo-lian yelps. Little else from his act rouses real laughs. Chuckles from familiarity--not hi-larity. And my guess is that it f*cking eats him up. But the sad truth is that if you aren't a good comic, and can't handle criticism, then you shouldn't be on stage. You will fail, and it will destroy you...as it did this poor, f*cking half-a-clown.
As to his "apology" tonight. It was bullsh*t. Seinfeld's unctuous *ss was scheduled to be on to promote his DVD and I'm pretty sure Letterman said "There's no way I ain't gonna ask you about this, Jerry.", and I'm pretty sure Seinfeld said, "Look, I don't wanna discuss this, okay? But if you've gotta do it--take it up with the guy who said it. I'll arrange it, just don't f*cking zing me about it!". And thus came Racistman on Letterman. Seinfeld was p*ssed at Richards for strictly selfish reasons--that outburst damages the Seinfeld "brand". Remember, that's all the show was called--"Seinfeld". So Jerry simultaneously tosses his buddy to the wolves while damage-controlling a bit via the "apology" with his imprimatur. Canny...but craven. I'm waiting for the first *sshole comic to actually "defend" Richards' words and deeds, though. Will it be the two-steps-from-chasing-a-n*gger-onto-a-busy- parkway Colin Quinn? The misanthropic Norm McDonald, or a buzz-starved Dennis Miller? You know the right's setting this up as a "but when n*ggers say 'n*gger' or rip white folks, nobody says anything" paradigm--which doesn't apply, so at least one attention-crazed/racism defending idiot will raise his ugly, pointed, percaled head. I'm just wonderin' who.
And lastly, we live in an age when idiocy is harder to hide than ever. It's wild to see a meltdown like that "captured". Not mere hearsay, or a Hollywood story/urban legend handed down from person to person--no, rather...a full-tilt sh*t-fit caught on video for all history. Goes to show ya--the great God "Videopolis" is everywhere, and watching us all.
Think "Michael Richards" now, and that nakedly racist clip is what you'll remember. "Video May Have Killed the Radio Star", kiddies...but you know what? It f*cking put the one-time television star in a Schiavo-esque vegetative state too.
..........................
On the crowd's "reaction":
The initial laughter? Perfectly understandable. Realize that a stand-up audience for the most part comes there wanting to laugh/ready to laugh. They are generally on the performer's "side", and willing to give benefit of the doubt.
Once Richards started in with his side 2, band 4 classic bit "Possessed By Bull Connor", a stunned portion of the crowd did laugh.
Why?
Because it was probably the first "out of the box" moment he had all night. The first thing he said that jarred them awake. And they probably gave him a laugh hoping he'd springboard off it into saomething actually funny. When he didn't--and that was about twenty seconds thereafter, they turned on him--badly. Understand that some of the people calling him out verbally were not the hecklers--just p*ssed-off patrons reading him rightfully.
And then walking out en masse.
An odd by-product of the Andy Kaufman school of comedy is that thanks to his confrontational approach, audiences nowadays aren't as immediately shocked when someone does go off the rails. They think there'll be a witty, ironic payoff. Richards got that moment (a unit of time I'll call a "Campanis") to trampoline somewhere funny. Trouble is, he soon did spring off...right onto a f*cking picket fence.
I can't front. I really liked watching "Seinfeld", but damned if when I watch it now, I won't be looking at Richards' 120 volt-haired *ss and thinking about his racist freak-out. Which means I won't be enjoying the show--and sh*t I don't enjoy, I don't watch.
Do they have any incentive to negotiate a shared power agreement?
Did the Sunnis, since the end of the Ottoman Empire, negotiate a shared power agreement with the Shia?
Why won't the Shia share?
Because they feel cheated. They were the majority, yet they never got the resources.
What will the Shia do?
Eventually, kill enough Sunnis and Kurds to control Iraq.
Why can't the government stop this?
Uh, the government is doing this. Well, the militias who actually run the government.
Can't they stop the militias?
That's like asking Steve Jobs to stop making his employees sell iPods.
Doesn't the government have any power?
No. Power in Iraq comes from the barrel of a gun and the militias control the gun.
Can't the US bring order?
No.
Why?
Too many enemies, not enough friends, too few troops and no hope of getting many more.
Do people know this?
Yes, except in one place, the Oval Office.
Why?
Because our president has failed his entire life, and is not exactly living in the real world. He's trying to avoid failing one last time, by getting Americans killed.
Will it work?
Notice the muhajadin in Afghanistan? The red star flag of Vietnam? Well, the locals won and the invaders left humbled. No it won't work and only the President refuses to admit that.
Why?
Because he's a "dry" drunk failure and this would ruin him. He's never had the ability to face up to his failures and his daddy has saved him, and here he is again.
Last week, I was in a studio in midtown where a popular program for black youths was being filmed. I found myself surrounded by black men, ages 18 to 35, and I was appalled.
As a father with a daughter nearly 30 years old who has never been close to marrying anyone, I was once more struck by what my offspring describes as "a lack of suitable men." She has complained often about the adolescent tendencies of young black men, as will just about any young black woman when the subject comes up.
Those who believe that America is perpetually adolescent will point at the dominance of frat-boy attitudes among successful white men and will say of the black hip-hop generation, "So what? How could they not be adolescent? They are not surrounded by examples of celebrated maturity. The society worships movie stars, wealthy athletes and talk show hosts. These are not the wisest and most mature of people."
There is more than a little bit right about that. Our culture has been overwhelmed by the adolescent cult of rebellion that emerges in a particularly stunted way from the world of rock 'n' roll. That simpleminded sense of rebelling against authority descended even further when hip hop fell upon us from the bottom of the cultural slop bucket in which punk rock curdled.
Hip hop began as some sort of Afro protest doggerel and was very quickly taken over by the gangster rappers, who emphasized the crudest materialism in which the ultimate goal was money and it did not matter how one got it. The street thug, the gang member, the drug dealer and the pimp became icons of sensibility and success. Then the attitudes of pimps took a high position and the pornographic version of hip hop in which women become indistinguishable bitches and hos made a full-court press on the rap "aesthetic." .................... The way she understood it was that these young black men do not see growing up as having any advantages to it. One is either current or old-fashioned and outdated. The only success they think they can believe in is had by either athletes or rappers. Young black men. So they hold on to adolescence and adolescent ways as long as they can.
I'm sorry, but this is a crock of shit.
Crouch has no respect for anything but jazz, and as a result has no ability to actually be respected by anyone who does anything else.
Hip hop and punk had different roots and come from very different cultural impulses. Punk was the reaction to art rock and it's bloat, while hip hop was the democratization of music. Anyone could take part. Which I think he finds offensive.
He has made a living depicting black men as idol worshiping ignorants, ignoring the vast majority who actually work for a living and care for their kids and pay their bills. There is a temeptation by the black elite to blame all our collective problems on the poor, the young and black men. Bill Cosby made fun of people's names without even looking across the room.
If he thinks blacks are the only people who lionize criminals, I suggest he watch the Sopranos or see the Departed. It took people in Boston two decades to admit Whitey Bulger was a scumbag crook.
Many of the same problems seen in black America are seen in all American ethnic groups.
He thinks black men are immature, he should come with me to watch football on a Sunday. Please. Trust me, white people drinking act just as silly.
One of the things he misses in his myopia is how hip hop has changed. Most of the rappers want to be empire builders, own companies and run them. Not just do music.
But even more than that, the idea that black people see success in sports and music is not untrue, but it isn't the only signpost for success. I mean, Barack Obama isn't an ex-football star, is he? Al Sharpton hasn't thrown any passes, has he? So this idea that all our heroes are entertainers is silly.
Look at American culture. There is a half hour of national news and an hour and a half of celebrity news. It is easier to find out about the Cruise "wedding" than Iraq.
But the reason such self-hatred gets published, is because too many upper middle class blacks look down at their poorer cousins and feel shame and fear being lumped in with them, so they make these half-baked attacks and pray that people will see "we're not like them, we can fix them".
Are the messages objectionable? Sure. But you can't have a discussion when someone won't respect you. Which is why many rappers have a problem with Oprah. Instead of actually engaging them, she simply won't deal with them. She once had the Klan on her show. She's had child molesters and adulterers on her show. But black men don't even merit an audience.
She lionized James Frye for being a junkie criminal, yet Ludacris is unfit for her audience. Now, you can object to his sexism, but what message does that send to black men, that they are devalued.
It would make more sense to make him defend what he does than to treat him as a pariah, while granting criminals an audience.
Ok, about 10 years ago, Calvin Butts decided to wage a war against rap music. Butts is the head of Abyssinian Baptist Church, the most prominent black church in New York City. He took a bunch of CD's and smashed them in the street. Al Sharpton was nowhere to be seen. Yet.
Now, he agreed with Butts, but not his methods.
So, when Butts got on TV, rappers ran to Sharpton and said "why did he have to disrespect us like that. We work, we raise our families, what did we do to deserve such treatment".
Now, even though Sharpton didn't like the lyrics any more than Butts, he had their respect. So when he made the same points, but without the grandstanding, they listened.
What this is really about is the discomfort with working class black life. As anyone can tell you, rap is not the most popular music among black teens, it's R&B, the vast majority of the rap audience is white. But instead of talking to these young men as human beings, asking about their attitudes, instead, they act as if they are shameful and need to be fixed, without even knowing what is in their heads.
Last week, Katie Couric mentioned her love of Dunkin Donuts Munchkins, a pleased DD franchise sent over a few boxes of the donutty wads, plus coffee. And because this is the world we live in, the blog commenter outrage began:
A[n] honorable journalist would have said thank you and turn[ed] the munchkins back. ... The whole affair gives the impression of being paid off. ... I was under the impression that CBS had standard[s] for getting gifts.
The CBS News Public Eye blog tried to kick this conflict up the chain of command, since if there's one thing every media executive wants to know about immediately, it's angry blog commenters. No response as yet from the senior vice president in question, but could this be Couric's Dan-Rather-like fall from grace? Developing!
It wouldn't have been a problem on the Today Show. It isn't a problem on Howard Stern.
But Katie Couric is an anchor at CBS News. Taking gifts from a corporation should be prohibited. It seems like a small deal, but people have lost jobs over this. Journalists must be careful in taking gratuities other people are not offered. I know this is a nice gesture, but it isn't one CBS News should participate in without offering to pay.
The lie that won't die. In an interview of former Rep. and Blue Dog founding member Glen Browder, the following fantastic claim is made:
The Blue Dogs are back big-time. Of the more than two dozen Democrats who knocked off sitting congressional Republicans on Tuesday, most if not all line up with the centrist Blue Dog Coalition, meaning these new congressmen will be to the right of their more liberal House leaders.
Out of 29 Democrats that have won thus far (barring further recounts), a grand total of five might be ideologically lined up with the Blue Dogs -- the three new Indiana reps, Nick Lampson in Texas, and Heath Shuler of NC. Shuler, however, is far to the left of the Blue Dogs on economic issues. Maybe Harry Mitchell in Arizona. Maybe.
Not to mention the two Blue Dogs who ran for Senate -- Harold Ford and Ed Case (in Hawaii) lost.
So "most" of the new Dem reps are Blue Dog material? Like progressive hero Jerry McNerney in California? Like Ed Perlmutter in CO-07? The two new Connecticut Democrats -- Courtney and Murphy? The two new New Hampshire Democrats -- Shea-Porter and Hodes? Tim Mahoney and and Ron Klein in Florida? Braley and Loebsack in Iowa? Yarmuth in Kentucky, who was supposedly too liberal to win a southern House seat? Tim Walz in Minnesota? Arcuri, Gillibrand, and Hall in NY? Space in Ohio? Altmire, Sestak, and Murphy in PA? Even Carney in the conservative PA-10 doesn't line up well with the Blue Dogs. Kagen in Wisconsin? Giffords in Arizona?
So "most if not all" line up with the Blue Dog Coalition? Can people be more ridiculous?
Browder makes this idiotic claim:
The Democrats did not achieve a majority in Congress without Dixie, and “there would be no new Democratic Congress without southerners.
Sounds great, but it's not true.
In the South, we picked up a gift in Texas, two seats in Florida, one seat in North Carolina (thus far), and one seat in Kentucky.
That's five seats. Given that we have a 30-seat majority, I think we'd still have a Democratic congress without the South. Same in the Senate, with the only Southern pickup being Jim Webb in Virginia.
That's not to denigrate the South, but to inject a bit of realism into the discussion, as Tom Schaller attempts to do. There is definitely a CW that claims that Dems can't win without the South. Well, we did. The results are quite clear and uncontroversial on the matter.
[H]ere are the "flip rates" of GOP-held seats, by region: Northeast, 30.6%; Midwest, 15.0%; Far West, 9.5%; South, 5.5% [...]
85% of Democratic gains at all levels in 2006 came outside the South [...]
[T]he only two Democrats who almost lost House seats despite the blue wave--which means we had to waste resources on defense rather than spending it on offense--were in Georgia;
We don't want to abandon the South and we won't. But the short-term path for a Democratic progressive majority runs through our coastal strongholds, and then through the swing Midwest and purpling Mountain West. The South is a long-term reclamation project.
I know you folks hate when I make predictions, but I will make one and suffer the slings and arrows of misfortune for this.
George Bush, around the first of the year, will start another campaign to privatize social security.
What? He can't, that would be insane?
Well, the Ardennes offensive was insane, but it happened.
Why?
Because this is Bush's passion and has been since Harvard. He ran on this in 1978. He doesn't understand it as being one of the building blocks of failure for the GOP and an early Democratic victory. No one, not even Lieberman, was going to support this seriously because of the potential disaster which it would have led to.
Bush and Cheney are sending ominous signals that they are going to try and end run the Congress, on Iraq, Iran and on policy generally.
But to do that, they cannot say "we will attack Iran", they need a diversion. And Social Security will be it.
Bush genuinely believes that people would do better investing social security money in the stock market, and the new deputy head of Social Security is a pro-privitization advocate.
What people need to understand is that Bush isn't connected to reality. He sees Indonesian protestors, and it's what happens to men "who make hard decisions." So early in January, he's gonna propose the same failed social security plan which died last year. Despite Max Baucus's warning that it's DOA. Despite the fact that the chairman of the key house committees are bitter opponents of Bush's plan.
Bush will go to his potemkin audiences and hear the cheers of the chosen and then try to push this plan. Because no one in the WH will tell him it's a loser. So he will mount this campaign, for a week or so, get bad press, and then wonder what happened. Meanwhile, they will plan to ignore the Baker finding and come to Congress looking for more troops and money.
So while the media is looking at the Bush social security clown show, the real battle, over Iraq, will be launched.
While Baker will be trying to rescue Bush, Bush will be acting as if nothing is wrong. Meanwhile, the social security battle will basically have the effect of an Indian raid on the frontier, pissing off the natives and sending them to arms.
What his people don't realize is that the opposition to this insane plan will morph into opposition to Iraq. Because the tone deafness and parallel to Iraq policy will be clear
BOGOR, Indonesia (Nov. 20) -- President Bush shrugged off protests that greeted him on Monday in the world's most populous Muslim nation, calling it a sign of a healthy democracy.
"It's not the first time, by the way, where people have showed up and expressed their opinion about my policies," the president said. "But that's what happens when you make hard decisions."
Appearing with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, whose countrymen turned out by the thousands to show their displeasure with Bush's staunch support of Israel and the Iraq war, Bush added: "People protest - that's a good sign."
Pressed by reporters, Bush said he hasn't decided whether to send more troops to Iraq or begin bringing them home, saying he is awaiting the military's recommendations. He also
The Indonesian leader, a close ally in Bush's war on terror, called for other nations to do more to help find ways to ease the Iraq conflict. "The global community must be also responsible for solving the problems in Iraq," not just the United States, Yudhoyono said.
But despite the deep dislike of the war in Indonesia and other Muslim countries, Yudhoyono declined to directly criticize it or call for an immediate end to the U.S. presence in Iraq. He advocated only "a proper timetable" for "the disengagement of U.S. military forces and other coalition forces from Iraq."
Bush was asked about proposals by some members of Congress, including 2008 presidential hopeful John McCain, R-Ariz., to send more troops to help the roughly 140,000 already there stabilize the country and curb rising sectarian violence.
"I haven't made any decisions about troop increases or troop decreases, and won't until I hear from a variety of sources, including our own United States military," the president replied.
Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is at work on a thorough review of options for Iraq, which figured heavily in the loss of control of Congress by Bush's Republican party earlier this month. As a result, many Democrats are calling for a phased withdrawal - something Bush has refused - and an independent bipartisan panel is compiling recommendations for the president, too.
Through sheets of sometimes heavy rain, Bush flew by helicopter from the capital of Jakarta to this lush hilltop suburb for talks with the Indonesian leader, discussions with education officials and moderate civic leaders, and a state dinner. Bush did nothing outside the confines of Bogor Palace, a graceful presidential retreat.
The six-hour trip to court Indonesian favor was the second stop here of Bush's presidency. Neither time has he spent the night, nor more than a few hours, the result of safety jitters in a place where anti-Bush emotions run hot.
Braced for local reaction to the visit, thousands of police and rifle-toting soldiers patrolled streets, jammed mobile phone signals and deployed water cannons.
Demonstrations by Islamic hard-liners, students, housewives and taxi drivers alike have been staged every day this month, including a march Sunday by nearly 13,000 through Jakarta, where Bush was denounced as a "war criminal" and "terrorist." Nearly 10,000 marched Monday - though far from the palace and out of Bush's sight - carrying posters showing victims of violence in Iraq.
Anti-Bush protesters tried to seal off American-owned restaurants in two Indonesian cities, witnesses said, and demonstrations were held in at least 10 cities.
Andrew Councill for The New York Times Brian Stelter, a college student and the blogger behind TVNewser, a must-read in the television news world. The Kid With All the News About the TV News By JULIE BOSMAN Published: November 20, 2006
TOWSON, Md. — When people in the television news business want to find out what’s going on in their industry, they turn to a blog called TVNewser. But while the executives obsessively checking TVNewser are mostly high powered and highly paid, the person who creates it is not: he is Brian Stelter, a baby-faced 21-year-old at Towson University here, a few miles north of Baltimore.
“I’ve heard people joke that when TVNewser is dormant, the kid had a final or a big family dinner that he couldn’t get out of,” said Brian Williams, the NBC news anchor and a TVNewser devotee. “People from entry level to high and mighty check in on it.”
When his postings dropped off last month after his girlfriend dumped him, Mr. Stelter found himself fielding complaints from powerful network executives about when he was going to get over his romantic travails and get back on track. “I was dealing with drama,” he said.
Mr. Stelter’s blog (tvnewser.com), a seven-day-a-week, almost 24-hour-a-day newsfeed of gossip, anonymous tips, newspaper article links and program ratings, has become a virtual bulletin board for the industry.
It is read religiously by network presidents, media executives, producers and publicists, not for any stinging commentary from Mr. Stelter, whose style is usually described as earnest, but because it provides a quick snapshot of the industry on any given day. Habitués include Mr. Williams and Jonathan Klein, the president of CNN’s domestic operations, who long ago offered up his cellphone number to Mr. Stelter.
“The whole industry pays attention to his blog,” said Jeffrey W. Schneider, a senior vice president of ABC News. “It would not surprise me if I refreshed my browser 30 to 40 times a day.”
In April Mr. Stelter attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner as a guest of MSNBC.
“He was quite a celebrity,” said Jeremy Gaines, a spokesman for MSNBC. “Literally two tables over was George Clooney, and at our table was TVNewser, and people were waiting in line to see him.”
Perhaps this is what the techno-geeks had in mind when they invented the Internet — a device to squash not only time and space, but also social class and professional hierarchies, putting an unprepossessing Maryland college student with several term papers due in a position to command the attention and grudging respect of some of society’s most famous and powerful personalities.
Or maybe it just worked out that way.
Mr. Stelter chronicles the gossipy New York-Hollywood television industry from the tiny, leafy campus at Towson, where he is a senior majoring in mass communication (he has a 3.5 grade-point average) and the editor of the student newspaper. He started the blog in 2004 on a whim during winter break, and not long after he was hired by a journalism Web site to keep it going. These days, by 9 a.m. he is awake and blogging, sometimes in class, courtesy of a campuswide Wi-Fi connection, as well as from his apartment, the student union and his cluttered desk in a corner of the newspaper office.
Mr. Stelter has earned the grudging trust of many of his readers, who e-mail him hundreds of tips a day that often translate into scoops, like the early warning that Peter Jennings, the former ABC News anchor, was near death or, more recently, the discovery of a Photoshopped publicity shot of Katie Couric, the “ CBS Evening News” anchor, that made her appear a dress size or two smaller.
How much does television care about Mr. Stelter’s little blog?
“The biggest TV executives, the men and women who run the top networks, look at this kid’s Web site all the time,” said Joe Scarborough, the host of the talk show “Scarborough Country” on MSNBC. “And the genius of it is that everybody thinks they own him. Everybody says: ‘Oh, I’ve got a great relationship with Brian. Let me leak it to him.’ ”
The best ideas come from the people willing to execute them, not from committees. Let him try to get a real job in media and the knives would come out. Sure, they'll hire him to run his site, but to make him a TV trade columnist, never happen
FORT HOOD, Tex., Nov. 13 — Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, who returns to Iraq next month to take charge of the day-to-day fight as commander of the Multinational Corps-Iraq, says he departs for Baghdad with a clearer, perhaps even diminished, set of expectations of what the military can be expected to accomplish now, more than three years after the invasion.
“You have to define win, and I think everybody has a different perspective on winning,” General Odierno said during an interview at the Army’s III Corps headquarters here.
“I would argue that with Saddam Hussein no longer in power in Iraq, that is a partial win,” he said. “I think what we need is an Iraqi government that is legitimate in the eyes of the Iraqi population, an Iraq that is able to protect itself and not be a safe haven for terror. That’s what I think winning is.”
As a bugle sounded across Fort Hood with the call to lower the flag at dusk, General Odierno paused, and added, “Notice I left out a few things, such as a democracy in the sense that we see a democracy in the United States. We have to allow them to shape their own democracy, the type of democracy that fits them and their country.”
It has become a truism of the war in Iraq that there can be no military victory without a political solution, which requires the coordinated efforts of the entire United States government and of the Iraqi one, as well.
“The longer we stay in Iraq, the less of a military fight it becomes,” the general said. “We have to understand that.”
General Odierno has spent the past several months preparing for his new command, assigning his staff several histories of counterinsurgency efforts in Malaya, Algeria and Vietnam; meeting with academic experts on the Middle East and Islamist terrorism; and holding sessions with officers from the other armed services and from the Iraqi ground forces, with whom he will be working.
He outwardly carries the lessons — and the private, internal scars — from his first tour, at both the professional and personal levels.
General Odierno commanded the Fourth Infantry Division as insurgents carried out three-quarters of their attacks nationwide in his area of north-central Iraq, which included Saddam Hussein’s volatile home region of Tikrit.
It also was on his watch that a Special Operations task force and conventional troops under his command captured Mr. Hussein, producing a briefly shining moment in which the counterinsurgency effort appeared to be gaining traction.
But insurgency, terrorism and factional violence verging on civil war have continued.
He has felt criticism from some officers, especially among marines, that made it into the public debate via op-ed columns and books by noted military affairs writers, including “Cobra II,” by Michael R. Gordon of The New York Times and Bernard E. Trainer; and “Fiasco,” by Thomas E. Ricks of The Washington Post.
The Fourth Infantry Division focused too much on traditional combat operations in 2003 and 2004, the critics argued, saying that those efforts, with an emphasis on capturing and killing adversary fighters rather than on rebuilding the country and winning the confidence of Iraqis, actually fueled the insurgency
Ricks rips him a new asshole in Fiasco. Some of his battalion commanders were, well, insane.
By Thomas E. Ricks Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, November 20, 2006; Page A01
The Pentagon's closely guarded review of how to improve the situation in Iraq has outlined three basic options: Send in more troops, shrink the force but stay longer, or pull out, according to senior defense officials.
Insiders have dubbed the options "Go Big," "Go Long" and "Go Home." The group conducting the review is likely to recommend a combination of a small, short-term increase in U.S. troops and a long-term commitment to stepped-up training and advising of Iraqi forces, the officials said.
The military's study, commissioned by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Peter Pace, comes at a time when escalating violence is causing Iraq policy to be reconsidered by both the White House and the congressionally chartered, bipartisan Iraq Study Group. Pace's effort will feed into the White House review, but military officials have made it clear they are operating independently.
The Pentagon group's proceedings are so secret that officials asked to help it have not even been told its title or mandate. But in recent days the circle of those with knowledge of its deliberations has widened beyond a narrow group working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"Go Big," the first option, originally contemplated a large increase in U.S. troops in Iraq to try to break the cycle of sectarian and insurgent violence. A classic counterinsurgency campaign, though, would require several hundred thousand additional U.S. and Iraqi soldiers as well as heavily armed Iraqi police. That option has been all but rejected by the study group, which concluded that there are not enough troops in the U.S. military and not enough effective Iraqi forces, said sources who have been informally briefed on the review.
The sources insisted on anonymity because no one at the Pentagon has been permitted to discuss the review with outsiders. The review group is led by three high-profile colonels -- H.R. McMaster and Peter Mansoor of the Army, and Thomas C. Greenwood of the Marine Corps. None of them would comment for this article.
Spokesmen for the chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not return calls or respond to e-mails seeking comment.
"Go Home," the third option, calls for a swift withdrawal of U.S. troops. It was rejected by the Pentagon group as likely to push Iraq directly into a full-blown and bloody civil war.
The group has devised a hybrid plan that combines part of the first option with the second one -- "Go Long" -- and calls for cutting the U.S. combat presence in favor of a long-term expansion of the training and advisory efforts. Under this mixture of options, which is gaining favor inside the military, the U.S. presence in Iraq, currently about 140,000 troops, would be boosted by 20,000 to 30,000 for a short period, the officials said.
The purpose of the temporary but notable increase, they said, would be twofold: To do as much as possible to curtail sectarian violence, and also to signal to the Iraqi government and public that the shift to a "Go Long" option that aims to eventually cut the U.S. presence is not a disguised form of withdrawal.
The problem is that the go home option is the only viable one. The American public doesn't support this war, will not send their kids to fight it, will not permit a draft for it, and want their soldiers home.
Bush may not realize that a go big option may face bitter, bitter opposition in Congress and here's why:
The Iraqi miliary is growing more factionalized, more unruly as we speak. Giving them better arms and training will not make them more responsive to our needs, but their own agenda. The Iranians can make our stay in Iraq impossible, with few fingerprints, but the fact is that the Iraqi government is a fiction of our making.
The Iraqis want no part of our war, but want to fight their war. Which is a war to see who runs Iraq. Bush tried to rebuild Iraq and convince us that was a worthy goal. The public is war weary and there is no success on the horizon. There is an intense dishonesty about how the faltering, corrupt Iraqi Army and police are depicted. They are not going to fight for a central government which defines the word useless.
At some point, our Iraqi auxillaries will turn on us and show us their true intentions
I know, I know, all your sacrifice for the GOP came to naught. You thought this was your year, that you would finally get the respect you deserve.
The problem is that IS what you got.
Let's be frank. It isn't that being Democratic is being black, it isn't, but being a Republican means you're a grovling Uncle Ruckus, always seeking to diminish black people for the sake of whites.
Doubt it?
Who aired radio ads claiming that the Dems founded the Klan and the GOP was the party of Lincoln. When the NRO's house negro Deroy Murdock tried that, he looked every inch the fool he was. When you tried to convince black Marylanders of that, they were offended. You try to talk down to black people and it pisses them off.
Then you have the grovelling of Michael Steele, too stupid to conceed when it was clear black people would no more vote for him than Frank Rizzo. He had based his entire campaign on blaming black people and acting the fool.
He won't ever admit he slandered the students of HBCU Morgan State and created the flying oreo incident to gain sympathy from whites. He won't ever admit his cowardice in refusing to confront Bob Erlich about anything. He was a coward and a shame to the race from the minute he entered public life. Tomming and shucking for the white folks and a lot of them forgot to vote for him anyway.
He thought black people were so stupid that he thought they would think he was a Democrat.
But he's not the worse. That's Ken "I ain't no negro" Blackwell. He did his master's bidding by denying blacks the right to vote in 2004, thinking his white masters would be so pleased. Sitting up in his big willie chair, with a cigar in one hand, talking like the white folks would let him run the show. They could trust him, he'd done what they'd asked, he'd kept them coloreds away from the polls, now he'd be on the way to the White House. First, a stop in Columbus, then in a few years, he'd be running to be the first black president.
Yeah, right. They used your silly, football playing ass to keep your people down and then let you think you could run for something. Sure, you were on the team. Until they had to do something for you.
You even got that mega church lunatic Rod Parsley to back your play. Too bad most of his parishoners would no more vote for your black ass than root for Michigan. They didn't care if you were a Godly man, you were a nigger, and that mean you wouldn't get their vote. No matter how much they smiled in your face.
What? You think black people would forget your junior grade Bull Connor antics? No, fuck no. You lost in a landslide and took Mike Dewine with you. Now, Ohio has a Senator it can be proud of again. Thanks to you.
If you're a young black Republican, see these examples and be warned. Down the path of the GOP lies on contempt and scorn. You don't want to wind up defending a gambleholic like Bill Bennett, and have people laugh at you. You don't want to be accused of placing your career ahead of your people.
Just because they smile in your face and talk about Jesus, you will pay a fearsome price for going down that road, the scorn and contempt of your fellow men and women. Nothing is worth that.
So, you've been experimenting with being a Republican, and you find some of their ideas appealing.
Keep this picture in your mind. That really is former Sen. George Allen in a confederate uniform and he really, really hates black people. No, really. The rest is photoshopped, but that is him.
And they thought he would run for president. He always seemed like an idiot to me, but he was popular.
Until he called someone macaca, which translates to nigger. A word Allen likes.
And that's pretty much what they think about you.
Republicans like to use you, but they will not sacrifice one thing a white person needs to help you along. Not one.
So what to do?
You need to regain your pride.
First, you can stand on your own. You don't need white patrons to pay your way, then tell you how to think. A proud black man or woman can do on their own. When they offer you a lot, they expect a lot. And if you get in trouble, they won't know who you are,(see, Williams, Armstrong, Allen, Claude)
Second, don't let their appeal to religion fool you. They say God, but they mean votes. As long as you vote for them, they will tell you what you want to hear.
Third, don't let them use your bitterness against you. Just because you have an issue with this leader or that, don't let them encourage you to run them down. They are just using you to gain credibility
Fourth, don't be ashamed of being black. I know many of you secretly hold that in your heart, that life would be easier if you were white. That black people never do anything right. That isn't true. Throw away the Alice Walker and embrace reality. Every day, strong black men and women contribute to America. They work, they raise families, they love their country. And they don't have to grovel or embarass themselves to do so.
Never forget that black people built this country, as slaves and as free men. Even when we were treated as less than people, even when they hung us from trees. Take pride in your heritage. Do we have poor, ignorant people? Sure, but so does everyone else. Don't let those few make you renounce your birthright and history.
Once you have done that, you can place yourself on the road to recovery.
Listen to the music which made this country, Robert Johnson, Charlie Mingus, James Brown. Throw the junk you've been listening to away. See what we can create. Say it loud isn't a song, but a way to live.
Read about our heroes, flawed and imperfect, and the odds they overcame. From the heroes who fought at New Market to the freedom riders, the brave black men and women who challenged their degredation and disrespect.
Then finally, embrace you, and all around you. Don't think you have to be someone else to be a better you.
You don't have to wear a beret and sunglasses to be proud of your heritage. All you have to do is hold that pride in your heart.
By JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated Press Writer 1 minute ago
WASHINGTON - Americans would have to sign up for a new military draft after turning 18 if the incoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee has his way.
Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said Sunday he sees his idea as a way to deter politicians from launching wars and to bolster U.S. troop levels insufficient to cover potential future action in Iran, North Korea and Iraq.
"There's no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm's way," Rangel said.
Rangel, a veteran of the Korean War who has unsuccessfully sponsored legislation on conscription in the past, said he will propose a measure early next year.
In 2003, he proposed a measure covering people age 18 to 26. This year, he offered a plan to mandate military service for men and women between age 18 and 42; it went nowhere in the Republican-led Congress.
Democrats will control the House and Senate come January because of their victories in the Nov. 7 election.
This is a way to call the GOP's bluff.
Rangel has two recruiting stations in his district, the neighboring ones have none. When you look at who gets killed in Iraq, no one from Dalton and the Upper East Side is included. But immigrants from Queens, firefighters, and a bunch of working people are.
He knows it's shitting the punch bowl, both for the GOP and liberal advocates of national service. People seem the draft is good for other people, but a draft of people 16-42 would take people older than the WW II draft, which ended at 36. Let's see what they do when a bill is on the floor, vote it down of course. So we need to stop talking about wars as if we're willing to fight them.
In control of every statewide office, Republicans are targeting illegal immigrants by proposing to cut their benefits and even deny citizenship to their U.S.-born children
Posted Friday, Nov. 17, 2006 With the Democrats in charge in Washington, conservatives in Texas are wasting no time on a pity party. Republicans, after all, are still in the majority here, controlling every statewide office and the Legislature as well as the top courts. To press that advantage, conservatives plan to put their imprint next year on a variety of issues ranging from abortion to school vouchers. Their biggest push by far, however, will be passage of a host of bills dealing with illegal immigrants, including one that just might challenge the 14th Amendment, which defines citizenship and requires states to provide civil rights to anyone born on U.S. soil.
The opening salvo in the fight was made this week by Farmers Branch, a suburb of Dallas which is nearly 40% Hispanic. Despite protests in the streets and threats of lawsuits and boycotts, the city council voted to make English the official language and fine landlords who rent to illegal immigrants. In Austin, meanwhile, Republicans began trooping into the state Capitol with stacks of bills aimed at cutting off benefits to illegal aliens, taxing their remittances south of the border, and requiring proof of citizenship at the voting booth. The harshest bill would deny welfare and other benefits even to the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens — rights supposedly given them under the 14th Amendment. Latino groups, who were only recently being wooed by Republican candidates, were left aghast at the onslaught, calling it "a hate campaign" against immigrants and "anti-human being" to boot
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Just how far are conservatives willing to go? Far, according to a bill pre-filled this week by Republican state Rep. Leo Berman, who serves a onservative constituency in the east Texas town of Tyler, "the rose capital of the nation." Under Berman's bill, children born in Texas to illegal aliens would be denied state unemployment or public assistance benefits like food stamps as well as professional licenses. In Texas alone, he argues, there are an estimated two million illegal aliens whose U.S.-born children get these benefits, which go largely un-reimbursed by the federal government. "This is costing us a fortune," Berman argues. Although he had to back down on plans to deny education and health care (the feds require it), the central tenet of his bill remains: to challenge the automatic birthright of citizenship given to children of illegal aliens — all the way up to the Supreme Court, if necessary.
How could Texas deny benefits to U.S. citizens, even if they were born to illegals? Berman notes that the 14th Amendment was a late addition to the Constitution, written after the Civil War to assure citizenship for the children of slaves. The courts later extended the amendment to include the children of illegal immigrants. But times have changed, he says. "There are 20 million illegal aliens in the U.S. who have benefits that most U.S. citizens don't have," says Berman. "One of the most lucrative benefits is that pregnant illegal aliens can give birth in a U.S. hospital free of charge and be rewarded with citizenship while breaking the most basic of U.S. laws." To pay for all that free hospital care, he wants to tax all money transferred south of the border by individuals at 8% (citizens could apply for reimbursement). The fee could raise $240 million a year, he estimates
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Hispanics in Texas plan to challenge the Farmers Branch ordinance in the courts and will battle bills like Berman's on every front. "This is a dark time for Latinos," says Rosa Rosales, a San Antonio resident and newly elected president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). "Can you imagine blaming children, trying to deny them medical care?" LULAC's former president, Hector Flores, who lives in the Dallas area, claims such conservative measures are "DOA on arrival" with the winds of change blowing through Washington. "These odious types of ordinances target Hispanics because of our growth. It is a hate campaign. That's not the American dream that we learned about in school," says Flores. What's needed instead, he says, is comprehensive immigration reform to regulate the flow of people, not just from Mexico but other countries. "Bottom line: this is up to federal government not the state legislature.
This is amazingly stupid. It's not only going to cost the GOP the West, but increasingly, parts of the South and Midwest have growing hispanic populations.
Were they asleep when Randy Graf and JD Hayworth lost?
This is a racist campaign on it's face, because they are clearly targeting Mexicans, and then planning to create a second class American citizen who would be stigmatized because of their birth.
What I don't get is that they seem not to understand that if one third of Americans now are minorites, how a concerted campaign to attack them is good politics. It isn't just the illegals, but their legal family members who react badly to these measures.
The US border needs to be secure, but you can't have an anti-Mexican pogrom and call it immigration policy
Here's some more for you on Rudy Giuliani's preparations to sell himself to social and religious conservatives, which we wrote about below. Terence Jeffrey, the editor of the conservative weekly Human Events, has dug up some old quotes from Rudy on abortion and same-sex marriage, and in a piece called "Forget It, Rudy," Jeffrey concludes that Rudy doesn't have prayer, as it were, of surviving the GOP primary:
He has no chance of winning the Republican nomination, and, even if he did, he would not make a good president. His views on core cultural issues are too radical.
Giuliani is not just pro-abortion, he is pro-partial-birth abortion. He has not flinched from defending the legality of the gruesome practice that the late Democratic Sen. Patrick Moynihan of New York described “as close to infanticide.”
“I am pro-choice. I’m pro-gay rights,” Giuliani said in 1999, when he was contemplating a Senate campaign. When a reporter asked if he at least favored a ban on partial-birth abortion, Giuliani said, “No, I have not supported that, and I don’t see my position on that changing.”
Giuliani’s pro-gay rights position is so extreme, he advocated stripping away the special legal status of traditional marriage. In 1998, he pushed a municipal ordinance that wiped out all distinctions between married and unmarried couples in New York City law, regardless of their gender. The late Cardinal John O’Connor gave a sermon from the pulpit of Saint Patrick Cathedral condemning Giuliani’s proposal. “It is imperative, in my judgment,” said the Cardinal, “that no law be passed contrary to natural moral law and Western tradition by virtually legislating that marriage does not matter.”
Giuliani did not back down. “What it really is doing is preventing discrimination against people who have different sexual orientations, or make different preferences in which they want to lead their lives,” he told the New York Times in response to O’Connor’s sermon.
Giuliani understood the link between allowing people to urinate on the streets with impunity and New York City’s overall decline. Outside New York, on the Republican campaign trail, he is sure to meet many voters who understand that his positions on abortion and marriage do to our national culture exactly what the street people and pub crawlers did to New York.
As noted below, Giuliani is telling his big-bucks fundraisers that his positions on these issues are not as black and white as they've been made out to be. But those above quotes are nothing if not black and white, so it will be interesting indeed to see how he goes about persuading people to see shades of gray in them.
Well, considering he abandoned his family and moved in with a gay couple so he could continue to see his mistress, this might be a problem.
By David Segal Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, November 19, 2006; Page D01
Subtle it was not.
Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes were married yesterday in a medieval castle 25 miles from Rome, surrounded by celebrities, a horde of paparazzi and hundreds of rain-soaked fans.
We hear you loud and clear, Mr. and Mrs. Cruise. You are super duper married. You are this-time-it's-for-real married.
Yessiree. What could possibly go wrong?
There are quieter ways to tie the knot than a Hollywood A-list wedding with guests including Will Smith, J.Lo and business partner Dan Snyder, then dispatching paramilitary police to keep prying eyes away from the service. It was as though Cruise were needling skeptics who guffawed when he claimed that he couldn't wait to wed the 27-year-old actress and mother of his newborn child.
You know, the same people who claimed that TomKat was just some publicity stunt. The dummies who argued that Ms. Holmes agreed to this union to resuscitate her flagging, post-"Dawson's Creek" career. .........................................
Ah yes, Scientology: Cruise's religion and the wild card of this whole event. Italy doesn't recognize weddings performed by Scientologists, so for a brief moment of on-air coverage yesterday there was the open question of whether there was enough Catholicism in the mix to earn the host country's imprimatur. But the couple's publicist later helpfully clarified: The pair already had submitted paperwork in the States needed to "officialize" this marriage.
That left just the question of whether the vows included the traditional Scientology promise to the bride of clothing, food and for reasons that you would need an expert to explain, a pan, a comb and a cat? Was the bride referred to as a "girl," as is customary, and was there the suggestion that men deserve a little room to, you know, stray?
We'll know soon enough. But who other than Cruise could orchestrate this totally public but totally private wedding and leave commentators to wonder aloud whether he was actually married?
What's known for now are the mundane details. That Jim Carrey got lost outside the castle barricades and ended up swarmed by fans. That the colors at the ceremony and the table settings for dinner were white, red and gold. That the cake was rigged with some kind of special effect that spewed rose petals when the couple made the first cut.
We know that onlookers were mostly disappointed, because the celebs arrived in limos with darkened windows and nobody got a really good look at them.
And yet we watched the wedding, as we watch everything Cruise-related, with a curiosity that borders on the forensic. Because, first and foremost, he is one of the most successful movie stars ever, with a lifetime box office gross of more than $2.6 billion, according to boxofficemojo.com. Also because we sense that despite all of his strenuous grinning, despite all the talk-show nattering about how everything is great and I do my own stunts and this is love, baby, love-- despite all this we know that there is something else going on here. We just don't know what. Cruise is the country's mystery patient and he has turned us all into befuddled doctors.
We see the symptoms -- the intermittently controlled rage, the odd way he mishandles fame, the couch-punishing interview he did with Oprah, the anti-psychiatry rant to Matt Lauer on "Today" -- and we scratch our heads.
With the wedding, just as with his life and movie work, the theme is overcompensation. From the (alleged) lifts in his shoes to his semaphore approach to professing love, to the freakishly rigid way he sprints in action movies, there are always signs of drive and determination that seem anabolic.
How Katie fits in is anyone's guess. Maybe the couple are every bit as in love as they claim. Maybe the tabloids run photos of Katie only if they have that distressed, what-have-I-done look she always seems to wear during her shopping sprees. Maybe her family really loves Tom, as he claims they do.
But we can't watch the TomKat show without wondering if this whole thing is, in fact, a show. No matter how many color photographs Vanity Fair runs of Tom, Kate and baby Suri frolicking on a hill, the possibility that this is all a charade never goes away.
Every career reaches a fork in the road.
If you ever wonder why you see the achingly handsome Brad Pitt in movies like Babel, why George Clooney gains weight for Syriana, and why it was so hard to cast the current Bond, you can look no further than Tom Cruise.
Pitt worked with Cruise early in his career and seemed to have chosen a path away from that kind of plastic superstardom. Clooney also took a hint and has charted his own path as well. No one wants to be trapped in Cruise's career, simplistic movies, badly acted. Even his action films seem to be less inspired than calculated.
Compare Mission Impossible to The Bourne Identity, and which seems more inspired, even with Matt Damon playing a gray man, a man who can fade into the woodwork, despite his blond hair.
Cruise is a cautionary tale for many in his profession. He is rich, he is famous beyond words, but he's also weird and unlikable. Not in the sullen Russell Crowe way, which is tolerable, but in a disturbing way.
But that isn't why I'm posting this. It's because this wedding was the media trying to convince people Cruise is a heterosexual man who got his new "wife" pregnant, and it just seems phony. Katie Holmes, who's had a reasonable career, seems to have been cast in the role of young wife, not someone he actually fell in love with.
The media kept trying to hype this nonsense as something people would care about, and instead, there was the feeling that it was just a bad play designed to make us care about people we increasing find creepy and stagemanaged.
As a media event, it seemed to come off poorly. It was as if they had been trapped in this act and they had to carry it to some kind of conclusion. Media events need an air of excitement to be worthy of attention. This whole noxious wedding, with a woman seen as a gold digger and a man who many thinks attentions lie elsewhere, was a failed media event.
Oddly, the more Cruise defends Scientology, the more criticism it comes under, the weirder it seems. It's like Cruise and his circle are harming his chosen faith more than helping it.
WASHINGTON -- President Bush's political advisers are urging Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele neither to seek nor accept a Cabinet post but instead find a national platform on television or radio.
While losing for the U.S. Senate, Steele attracted favorable attention across the country as an eloquent African-American Republican. Bush political strategists have told Steele a high-ranking post in the administration's last two years would curb his independence and cramp his style. Instead, they advised, he could be "a black Rush Limbaugh."
Steele was interested in heading the Republican National Committee, but his independence displayed during the 2006 campaign was not what the White House wanted there. The decision had been made weeks earlier to name Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida as general chairman and Kentucky National Committeeman Mike Duncan as national chairman.
Well, all that means is they got nothing for no niggers like you. "Curb his independence"
ROTFLMAO
All that means is "don't look to us for a job".
Instead, we want you to sell yourself in a tight market, get a deal for a radio show, and then tom for us. We can't help you, but we wish you well.
Bush doesn't think he's loyal. Therefore, he's not gonna get any government job from them. Even though he did what they ask.
The fact is that he's an assclown and an idiot to boot. They aren't going to hire him because they want no part of his ass. Because he's an idiot.
I have always been a vocal critic of the occupation of Iraq.
The problem is--now that I look back on it--my opposition was always been based on broader geopolitical or national paradigms. Things like inflaming Islamic radicalism. Or the cost of the war and what those costs were preventing us from achieving at home. Or the idea of an Iraq-Iran Shi'a superstate alliance. Or any other negative geopolitical consequence.
I'm not saying that the "human cost" of the war never factored into my calculations of whether to support or oppose it. Of course the figure of nearly 3,000 dead American soldiers hits me at an emotional level--as does the idea of about 500,000 dead Iraqis a fortiori. And I still get a few hits from my own personal blog from my writings about Abeer Qasim Hamza Al-Janabi, the 14-year-old Iraqi girl who was raped and murdered during the massacre at Mahmoudiya.
But I just now learned that nothing can cement your opposition like knowing the human tragedies up close and personal.
I just spent half an hour consoling one of my best friends--who just found out that her cousin was just killed in Iraq.
Tung Nguyen was a Sgt. 1st class Green Beret based in Fort Bragg, N.C.--from what I understand, he was assigned to a Special Forces unit:
The Department of Defence said in a statement that Nguyen died when his unit encountered enemy forces using small arms. Special Forces Command said in its report that initial indications were his "wounds may have resulted from friendly fire."
I never met Tung--but my friend mentioned him occasionally during her stories about her childhood. I remember some stories about him taking my friend hunting when she was a little girl. More recently, though, I remember a different type of story from when Tung was home on leave visiting h
