Oh Judith, Oh Scooter....I can't believe they're still trying to sell that "faulty CIA" spin.

By now, I'm sure you've all gotten up to the stunning statement issued by Judtih Miller in the New York Times and the accompanying Times story about how they failed to cover the Plame-leak investigation because of her involvement in it.
In her statement, Miller is really working hard to help the Whitehouse with its story that it was misled by bad intelligence, rather than "fixing the facts around the policy."
As it becomes increasingly clear that many Americans believe the administration lied about WMD, Miller's statement is itself an attempt to help out the whitehouse, as she depicts Libby's motivations as being about an argument with the CIA who was trying to "shift the blame" for the "faulty intelligence" to the Whitehouse. Hmmm. Wasn't the earlier excuse (from Rove to Cooper that the effort was to correct Wilson 's incorrent story?) Now let's see, according to Miller's own story, and to the facts, Wilson found no evidence of uranium purchases by Iraqis in Niger on his 2002 trip there. The President, Vice-President, and National Security Advisor talked of the spectre of a mushroom cloud before the invasion of Iraq and well into the Summer of 2003, and the "Niger documents" widely denounced as forgeries by the UN, IAEA and any journalists who investigated, including the one who originally found them, played a big role in the administration's arguments about Iraq as nucelar threat.
However, the Whitehouse is STILL busy shifting the blame and working very hard to make the defense of ignorance of Wilson's trip. Even the Rove "correction" to Cooper related to whether or not Cheney knew Wilson. Here's how Libby is delivering the White House story through Miller, What was evident, I told the grand jury, was Mr. Libby's anger that Mr. Bush might have made inaccurate statements because the CIA failed to share doubts about the Iraq intelligence.
"No briefer came in and said, 'You got it wrong, Mr. President,' " he said, according to my notes
Oh really? This makes El Baradai's Nobel prize well-timed.
David Sirota and Christy Harvey of the Center for American Progress wrote an excellent piece called "They Knew" debunking this claim in In These Times almost a year ago. It's worth reading again, for a succinct rebuttal to Miller's lame claims that the CIA failed to communicate the inaccuracy of WMD reports to the admin.

If you want an even more detailed account against which to measure Judith Miller's (ie, Lewis Libby's) claims about the CIA/Bush admin. conflict, read what a real investigative reporter has to say. In the article linked above, Seymour Hersh goes over the original "yellowcake" story and how it made its way into the whitehouse. It goes back to the original effort to blame the CIA for "bad intelligence" and provides a thorough analysis of the yellowcake story's role in the lead up to the war. While Miller's statement reveals her chummy relationship with both the "Veep" and Libby, and her complete failure to even talk to any other sources, Hersh's article on the same events paints a much more complex picture. In her recent statement, Miller confessed in her piece that she was "fooled" about WMDs because of her bad sources. I guess she is counting on the public not to have more information than she did, because they were reading the crappy reporting done by people like her. Other reporters were...somehow able to learn more. Here's the most relevant section in relation to Miller's story:

What made the two-and-a-half-year-old report [on yellowcake sale in Niger] stand out in Washington was its relative freshness. A 1999 attempt by Iraq to buy uranium ore, if verified, would seem to prove that Saddam had been working to reconstitute his nuclear program—and give the lie to the I.A.E.A. and to intelligence reports inside the American government that claimed otherwise. The sismi report, [the Italian report on the possibility of a yellowcake uranium sale in Iraq] however, was unpersuasive. Inside the American intelligence community, it was dismissed as amateurish and unsubstantiated. One former senior C.I.A. official told me that the initial report from Italy contained no documents but only a written summary of allegations. “I can fully believe that sismi would put out a piece of intelligence like that,” a C.I.A. consultant told me, “but why anybody would put credibility in it is beyond me.” No credible documents have emerged since to corroborate it.
The intelligence report was quickly stovepiped to those officials who had an intense interest in building the case against Iraq, including Vice-President Dick Cheney. “The Vice-President saw a piece of intelligence reporting that Niger was attempting to buy uranium,” Cathie Martin, the spokeswoman for Cheney, told me. Sometime after he first saw it, Cheney brought it up at his regularly scheduled daily briefing from the C.I.A., Martin said. “He asked the briefer a question. The briefer came back a day or two later and said, ‘We do have a report, but there’s a lack of details.’ ” The Vice-President was further told that it was known that Iraq had acquired uranium ore from Niger in the early nineteen-eighties but that that material had been placed in secure storage by the I.A.E.A., which was monitoring it. “End of story,” Martin added. “That’s all we know.” According to a former high-level C.I.A. official, however, Cheney was dissatisfied with the initial response, and asked the agency to review the matter once again. It was the beginning of what turned out to be a year-long tug-of-war between the C.I.A. and the Vice-President’s office.
As the campaign against Iraq intensified, a former aide to Cheney told me, the Vice-President’s office, run by his chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, became increasingly secretive when it came to intelligence about Iraq’s W.M.D.s. As with Wolfowitz and Bolton, there was a reluctance to let the military and civilian analysts on the staff vet intelligence. The story continues by going through the details: Wilson went to Niger in February 2002, and made his report (found nothing) which was circulated. He said to Hersh:
Wilson returned to Washington and made his report. It was circulated, he said, but “I heard nothing about what the Vice-President’s office thought about it.” (In response, Cathie Martin said, “The Vice-President doesn’t know Joe Wilson and did not know about his trip until he read about it in the press.” The first press accounts appeared fifteen months after Wilson’s trip.)

* Finally, it definetely looks like Miller's notes have added something very significant to the investigation, which, based on Fitzgerald's questions still must be focused on the issue of the leaking of Plame's actual name. There are two important nuggets that reveal the direction of the investigation. The first is the discussion of "wife works at winpac" and second:
Mr. Fitzgerald asked me about another entry in my notebook, where I had written the words "Valerie Flame," clearly a reference to Ms. Plame. Mr. Fitzgerald wanted to know whether the entry was based on my conversations with Mr. Libby. I said I didn't think so. I said I believed the information came from another source, whom I could not recall. The other issue at stake, and I hope at stake in the investigation, relates to 2 years past Senate Intelligence Committee inquiry into "intelligence failures" and the scapegoating of George Tenet.
If it's down to "I could not recall," I don't know how convinced anyone, much less the Grand Jury will be.

Old Whine, New Bottle

I'm just sitting up, possibly finishing David Oshinsky's McCarthy tome by the end of the evening, and I keep wondering about parallels between him and Tom DeLay. I don't mean in the general way, but in the specific one. McCarthy's tactics for weilding power in the senate were all intimidation, even within the party. When the Cohn/Schine scandal finally broke, McCarthy's response was "I don't answer charges, I make them." In the end, he wasn't so successful.
I'm not the only one to notice a resemblance.
McCarthy's greatest skill was not in convincing his peers that he was right, but convincing them that he was invincible. He used the media to make it almost impossible to oppose him. To oppose McCarthy was to be a traitor, or a traitor-lover. ...until the day when he went too far, criticizing the army, criticizing the president.
Now, we can see how DeLay is attempting a McCarthy style reversal of his own by attacking Ronnie Earl as some kind of "McCarthyite" on a witch-hunt. In fact, the word McCarthyism showed up more in reference to Earl when I started my little google-fest, than it did in reference to DeLay. Despite this valiant, or desperate smear attempt on his part, I don't think that DeLay is currently in the position to browbeat that McCarthy was back in the fifties.
Moderate republicans were privately disgusted with McCarthy's bullying tactics, according to Oshinsky, but were intimidated out of acting. I don't think there are any moderate republicans anymore, but this may be finally leading to self-destruction on the republicans part. With the far right out-righting the president over Meiers, I think this is a question of the "revolution eating its children," not some kind of revalation of virtue by the values voters"" whom Grand Moff Texan so skillfully skewered in his Kos diary today.
When it comes to what they agree on, the corporations are it, and Democrats now are playing the role played by yesteryear's moderate republicans, and they are willing to take down DeLay in the name of the cause. Don't get fooled again though. HUAC kept going even after McCarthy's censure, and corporate power will still function in DC despite DeLay's fall from grace. If Democrats resent the wacked-out crazy corporatist tactics of DeLay Inc, they're still wedded to the same private interests. Perhaps they have their parallel in Eisenhower, who still killed Ethel and Julius Rosenberg,* despite his distaste for McCarthy's vulgarity.

* For those who think Ethel and Julius have recently been proven guilty. oy! The secret CIA cables that were not part of the trial in which they were convicted proved that Julius was a spy during a time when the USSR and the USA were allies. Nothing that he gave the Soviets would have made much difference in their development of Nuclear technology. Most people found guilty of that level of espionage are not executed. Ethel, executed along with her husband, was not a spy, and was known by the govt. to be innocent, but was used as a lever to make her husband confess.

Weather Update

Get out the arks, people. Just a reminder, here's today's almanac entry link. I'm gonna have to put this in my blogroll. We had record-breaking precipitation already. Check the numbers. Normal precipitation for Oct 14th was .12 inches. So far, the day's precipitation is 2.75. The record for precipitation from 1927 was 1.96 inches. Scariest, probably is that we are about 10X the normal "month-to-date" precipitation. For an indepth discussion of this week's rain, see this page on Ross Gelbspan's "heat is online."

On Rosh Hashonna It is Written, On Yom Kippur It Is Sealed

Do you know anyone who needs to atone? I do. But pointing out other people's sins is not the proper action for Yom Kippur. In fact, I'm sure blaming and finger-pointing are themselves sins worthy of atonement.
Despite this, I feel vengeful today and want to point out the liars that I see in politics, and the ones I've encountered personally. here's a nice proverb on lying:

The getting of treasures by a lying tongue is a vanity tossed to and fro of them that seek death. Prov 21:6
When leaders lie, they betray the trust of the people they are supposed to represent. When lovers lie, they destroy their connection to the other. When parents betray their children, they do the same thing, but even more seriously. They can can leave their children never trusting again. Lying is an awful sin because it takes advantage of our vulnerability. It can leave us on shaky ground, wondering what to believe about the world around us. Being lied to can damage our sense of reality in a profound way.
So, can I get a witness? Raise your hands if you hate being lied to.

Remember how the Republicans went mad over truth back in the 1990s? As you know, I'm no Clinton fan, but I think it feels especially bad to be lied to by those proclaiming Christian virtue, integrity, unusual openness and honesty, etc. Almost as maddening as being taken in by a liar is seeing other people believe liars that you see through. How many times have I sat with my mother in front of a television while she shouted, "he's lying! He's lying!" at whatever politician is there, as if the rest of the world that was watching could hear? Although we all agree that lying destroys relationships, because without trust, relationships are impossible,we've come to take lying for granted in politics.
A little righteous indignation, and a little exposure of the lying liars is in order, even on a day for quiet self-reflection. If being betrayed hurts, exposing the betrayor feels sweet.
For some top stories involving people irate about lying.....
For events involving standing up and sitting down, it appears that Scott McClellan's press briefing today was a brawl. You can also read about lies in Hunter's diary discussing the media coverage of the Plame-leak investigation this week on Chris Matthews' show Hardball.
While I was traipsing around on the technorati web-page, looking for other random stuff, I happened upon another sinner exposed. Find him here, at Hitchens Watch. For tireless exposing of lies, there's always "Mediamatters."
Readers, post your favorite reflections on lying, the worst lie you've heard lately, or any other comments here.

Beyond Dethroning Bush....and into a real discussion of US Foriegn Policy ?

Today, I was finally awake when Amy Goodman was talking to Murray Waas about the expansion of the leak investigation to cover the entire Whitehouse "Iraq group." The last time I heard that name mentioned was in the brilliant documentary from the Media Education Foundation, Hijacking Catastrophe. This news, coupled with the AfterDowningstreet poll that finds that between 44% and 50% of Americans favor impeaching Bush if he lied to them about the reasons for the Iraq war, fills me with hope.
However, if I read over my entries on this blog, I can see myself see-sawing between giddy glee over impending criminal indictments and convictions, (a glee which includes a fantasy of George Bush and his cronies bent over the Crown Victorias in cuffs), and cautious optimism, and finally, total despair of any consequences.
I'll try to be less reactive and more analytical about this today. As I get caught up in the excitement over the Plame leak investigation and the belief that perhaps Bush and co. will finally get "their comeuppance," I often notice the excitement and think quietly, "but will this really get to the heart of the matter?"
It's been all too easy to see in Bush and his cronies all that is wrong with American foreign policy and to imagine in his fall from grace some kind of redemption of America. So, without simply applying a pin to a balloon, I want to test this out a bit. Those in power would like to see their own imperial dreams lived out more smoothly and efficiently, so the question is, how will they react to the crisis, and how can those of us on the left prepare for a post-Bush reality? What will we do if we get what we want, whether it comes in the form of a lame-duck presidency or an actual criminal trial? The fall of the house of Bush will feel good, and will have an impact in real terms, but it alone is not enough. What it will create is a major opportunity to engage the public in a serious discussion of US foreign policy in general. If that discussion is limited to a choice betweeen Democrats and Republicans, between UN and unilateralism, it will be a squandered moment.
If we look at Nixon's fall from grace, it seems pretty clear that once the rats have departed the sinking ship, they are quick to strategize anew. There are studies of Jimmy Carter and the Trilateral commission, for example, that are not just wild "one-world government" conspiracy theories. Look at this one from the Cambridge series of studies in internatinal relations.
, or read this 1980 article from Holly Sklar on Third World Traveler. The discussion of whether or not there is a difference between Democrats and Republicans is a distraction that is beside the point. I've found that it's nearly impossible to even be heard in an argument if you begin provocatively with the statement of "no difference."
I think it is more productive to begin the discussion by talking about long-term trends and problems, and by focusing on different issues than those you see in the typical Washington-centric debates. If you are looking at whatever current issues are offered up for debate by legislators, lobbyists and mainstream media, you will see clear partisan differences on a number of issues: namely, social welfare policy, taxation, and issues of personal rights and freedoms. The debates around foreign policy are much more limited and immediate: "What's the best strategy for getting US troops out of Iraq?" and "How can we fix the situation in Iraq" both leave the door open for continued US presence there, in a kinder, gentler form that will involve more international corporations, eliminate blatant cronyism, but maintain a system of Euro-American corporate power nonetheless.
On the one hand, it makes sense to offer up a critique of Democratic party foreign policies, because my primary concern here is to prevent or circumvent the Democratic party from coopting the growing anti-imperialist sentiment provoked by the war in Iraq. Since most Americans see Empire itself as wrong and un-democratic, the job of those seeking international intervention to secure American financial interests has been to mask that intervention as something other than what it is. The Democrats have been successful in selling empire through compassion while the Republicans have used fear to do it. For the Republicans, whose base is less concerned with democracy and fairness, it's been an easy job. For the Democrats, whose base includes the Vietnam generation of anti-war activists, it's been a much harder sell. It seems to me that most of the Democratic party's job on foreign policy has been to "sell" an interventionist, corporatist foreign policy to the powerful voting block of liberal middle-class baby boomers, the people that Jerry Springer referred to as the "wine and cheese" crowd, the people who were anti-imperialist in the 1960s, and who will tend to oppose a foreign policy that is as blatantly imperialist as the one turned out by Bush and co.
Thus, Clinton's foreign policy presented US intervention as "humanitarian" and limited, intervention in the Balkans for example, to prevent ethnic cleansing, intervention in Somalia around similar issues. He effectively used the UN to achieve the appearance of global consensus. Rather than full-scale military operations, US troops have dispatched as part of international forces, thus lessening the appearance of imperial ambition. However, Clinton's and Albright's sanctions regimepaved the way for the present disaster in AIraq, and indeed, his policies paved the way for Bin Laden.
Partisan democrats should see the absence of discussion about foreign policy within the party (with the exception of Dennis Kucinich) as a part of the reason for the party's considerable political failures. Rank and file democrats are limited in their capacity to offer an alternative to Bush foreign policy because of this fundamental hypocrisy in the party's leadership. Individual democrats "on the street" are, to my mind, just as badly misled as Bush apologists when they try to justify these foreign policies, and as self-defeating. I don't think that this committment to the Democratic party is driven by intellect, but rather by some kind of emotional attachment. The defense of the Democratic party's foreign policy objectives, which ultimately contradict the values of everyone I know who defends them, is not rational. Is this a question of "not wanting to know," sort of like not wanting to see the things you don't like about your lover because you want to retain hope about your relationship? (this kind of willful blindness is something I'm familiar with in my own personal life.)
So, after that provocative exercise in anti-partisanship aside, I think that starting as I have here, with a discussion of dems and repubs is exactly the wrong way to talk to committed partisans, because it offends them off the bat. To say to a serious loyal Democrat that the Democratic party's foreign policy is little better (and possibly worse, because it's so much more competent) than the Republicans' is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. Immediately, the discussion turns to Nader, Chomsky and their personal flaws, and to accusations that you yourself are responsible for the election of the devil (ie, Republicans/Bush). So how does one articulate that vision of reality that is so clear when you see it front of you to someone who just refuses to acknowledge your perceptions as legitimate, and merely starts to yell at you as if your understanding is just perverse and contrarian, as if what you wanted was simply to be "different" and weird.
The trick is to talk about the policies themselves, rather than the parties associated with them, in the context of long-term trends, perhaps starting with post-WWII, and even Kennedy's role in Vietnam. It's easy for me to do this, because I teach history. That can be the groundwork for a real discussion of foreign policy reform that doesn't get side-tracked by the need to defend indefensible policies simply because of the emotions of party loyalty. The best place for this discussion of long-term policy issues to happen is within the anti-war movement, in teach-ins and the like. The discussions should not be tendentious, in the manner of ISO propaganda. It is in this realm that change is most likely to happen, at least in my experience. I went from Democrat to Marxist in college when I learned about foreign policy in South Africa, Central America, and the Middle-East, among people who were not particularly sectarian politically, but came from points of view as diverse as Nation of Islam, the YCL, and various Palestinian rights groups. In the long run, though, it may be that committed partisans are the wrong group with whom to have this discussion, and that the best post-Bush regime strategy of all may be to engage the "undecided" and non-voters, who are more likely to be of the class of people whose personal experience is not engaged by the limited discussions of policy elites. On the other hand, those who are not politicized in some way already, may just be tuned out entirely, and impossible to reach.
Tell me what you think, readers.

Break Up...Better?

OK, two different marketing slogans to start off the morning. Yesterday, I went back through some of my old break-up emotions (you remember February, right?), and did some dangerous googling, so it was a nice coincidence that they had Greg Behrendt on Morning Sedition plugging his new book, It's Called a Break Up Because it's Broken."" Sounds like reasonable advice.
The bad break-up coming may be that of Air America and Marc Maron, if what he says on the radio is accurate. So, if you want to see him live, better go to Florent next week. I'm mixed on the show, but mixed in the way that you are if you're enough of a fan to get up at five in the morning to go see them live. twice.
The only criticism I have is that they really don't "talk about the issues" enough. For that, you have to listen WBAI. I just wish that the people on WBAI were funnier, or not half-asleep. For entertainment value, "Morning Sedition" is great. It's like a hyped-up, urban, Prairie Home Companion for the thirty-something crowd. If they take Maron off, the show will die and there won't be anything left on the network to listen to. I must be the wrong target market, because I like Morning Sedition and liked "Unfiltered" and now one is gone and the other is threatened? It seems that Air America makes the same mistakes as the Democratic Party.
Like a man who's never satisfied with the girlfriend that he has, the management there seems to diss its base and look for someone else. As Nathaniel Livingstone writes in the article linked above, it's par for the course. He says,
In announcing his debut on Air America, Springer said the radio network had cornered the "wine and cheese" crowd but needed to reach out to the "beer and pretzel" market. If you think these sentiments mirror Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean's belief that Democrats should quit placating African Americans and start recruiting "white guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks" into the Party, you aren't alone.
My bro does tell me that Chuck D's new show "On the Real" is great, but I haven't listened to it yet. Maybe today on the subway, with the podcast.
And that's it for now. Time to go teach.

Not Just Crumbling on the Edges, Collapsing at the Middle

Juan Cole's website sent me to this Newsday article which describes the "grim disappointment" with the new Iraqui constitution at the most recent meeting of the American Enterprise Institute. The article features interviews and notes on comments from disheartened Iraqi exiles once associated with Achmed Chalabi's pro-war lobby. Now, they are concerned that the new constitution leaves too weak a federal government and absolutely no political power for the Sunnis.
In Salon, Russ Feingold criticizes Democrats for supporting the Iraq war.
Meanwhile, Mark Kleiman speculates on the Huffington Post that Miller will soon become a defendant in the Rove-Libby & who-knows-who-else conspiracy to defame whistle-blower Wilson.
In addition, controversy grows over Miers; Specter and Leahy are calling for James Dobson to testify at her confirmation hearings, erm....if she gets that far. Call me crazy, but I would LOVE to see James Dobson get questioned by congress.

Anxiety Index: Do you smell ice-cap in that rain?

It's nerve-wracking, this extreme weather. Look at this graph. I'm not imagining it. It says in this report from 1997 that in NYC, "the amount of precipitation on extreme wet (or snowy) days is likely to increase." For more of the same, check out Ross Gelbspan's "The Heat is Online" page or this recent article here, which connects heavy rainfall to global warming.
So what are the stats? Here is a chart with NYC's average rainfall between 1944 and 1995. According to this chart, the city averaged 44.4 inches per year, with 3.3 inches in the average October. Tropical Storm "Tammy" will be responsible, says the National Weather Service for dumping somewhere between three and five inches of rain on New York (state) this weekend alone. Hmm. When they report on the inches of rainfall for this October, I'll do an update.
You think a little rain is nothing serious? Last night, I was watching BBC news and saw damage in Central America that looked as bad as or worse than the aftermath of Katrina. So far, there are over 600 dead because of flooding there..here's another article.
Meanwhile, as always, capitalism leads to the very BEST solution for this problem.

Update: Rainfall averages and yesterday's rain:
Go to the "weather underground" weather statistics to see today's almanac entry. Yesterday, we had 4.26 inches of rain, which was close to the 1903 record of 4.30 inches of rain. Those 4+ inches compare to .12 as a normal October 8th rainfall. The rainfall for the first week of October has been 4.49 inches so far, in comparison with a normal number of 1.01 inches.
I'd call that worrying.
And what about you, what are you worried about today?

mid-day lyrics, Pride of the Mixtape

Despite the fact that I was horrified by his on-stage drunkenness at the Bowery Ballroom show back in August, I remain a dedicated fan of Craig Finn. He's a brilliant lyricist. I'm grading papers and listening to a mix that I made for my Aunt's birthday. While meant as a testament to my love for this auntie, I think it might be more of a testament to my obsessions with Craig Finn and Chuck Prophet.

It has this Lifter Puller song on it. It's a great one:

Back in Blackbeard:
first the guys)
it's not right to blame the guys who had the fights tonight
let's blame the girls that love the guys that like to fight
and don't blame the guys who did the drugs tonight
let's blame the girls who love the guys who live the druggy lives

(and now the girls)
it's not right to blame the girls who had the fights tonight
let's blame the guys that love the girls that like to fight
and don't blame the girls who did the drugs tonight
let's blame the guys who love the girls who live the druggy life

(and mom and dad)
don't blame your daughter's downfall on her dancin
don't blame your baby's binging on the bass bins
blame the boredom, blame the basements

(jenny looks on the brightside
she said i never saw the sunrise before i met all you guys
and now i've done it on the d-line and bathed in all your basslines
and i still ain't died, or have i?)

vampire fangs for bitin into cellophane bags
wasted on red, white and blue and the american flag
and the maple leaf rag
you're the star of every single afterbar
the condescending host to the post-game interview
blowin smoke in the post-show afterglow
rubbin up against the radio
yeah stranded on the couch with the super mario
and the papercut tounge from lickin on the centerfolds

Indicators and Shmindicators

When I hear economic news lately, I start to think about stagflation. Apparently, I'm not the only one. Bonddad on the Dailykos has posted a diary today that quotes a lot of bankers and federal reserve folks on the issue of inflation. We are living in the mode of the monetarists, and yet, the problem seems to be coming back. For views different from those of the bankers (who always like tight credit because they get a bigger return on loans) see this marxist glossary's definition of monetarism. If you're more ambitious, check out Hugh Stretton's 1999 book, "Economics: A New Introduction" from Pluto Press, which was reviewed by Doug Dowd (who also has a nice book on economic theory) in Monthly Review.
(I know, it's terrible of me to keep linking to amazon. Honestly, I love the way they create lists and I love reading the readers' reviews... and then I try to buy the books elsewhere if at all possible. The link to MR, which I got to through googling stagflation and Marxist, took me to Stretton, which took me to Amazon, which took me to this other book "Economics as Religion" which I feel now that I MUST read.)
Meanwhile, I'm listening to Robert Fisk read from "Pity The Nation." He should do all his books on tape, because he's a great live reader. It's WBAI's fall membership drive. Did you contribute yet?

I'm not in a Bad Mood but...

For a hilarious website featuring people who are, may I suggest that you read the "vent," which features this one to "my student." The ones from students to teachers are also enlightening. Apparently there are "christian" teachers out there who say God sent AIDS to kill gay people. There is one student who resents going to a Cinco de Mayo assembly and says it hurts his? patriotism to see Mexican flags waving in the school gym. There are a whole set of "to my ex-boyfriend" and "my ex-girlfriend" and my "ex-wife." Whoever came up with this thing, it's brilliant. Why is there no section "to my president"?

In fact, in that regard, I'm in something of a good mood...because of the collapse of the administration's fire wall, the chinks in its teflon coating. Whatever you want to call it, I'm eagerly awaiting indictments in the Plame case. Check out the Anonymous liberal blog, which has regular updates on all things Plame-leak related.

That's all for now. Time to work, I think.

Anxiety Index: Non-Native Species FSU in the Everglades

My animal-watching friend, Richard sent me the link to this news article and photo with the headline "Nature's version of Supersize me."

Thoughts on the OJ SImpson Verdict and the Frontline Documentary

I just got done watching tonight's Frontline documentary on the 10th anniversary of the OJ Simpson verdict. It was quite good, done by Ofra Bikel, who's done a number of intriguing documentaries for Frontline on race and the American criminal justice system. If you didn't get a chance to see the doc, the web-page linked above has a lot of the same material,including extended interviews, and a chance to comment on the whole thing. I liked the way that many (presumably white) viewers said that they understood African-American reactions to the jury's verdict in the case as a result of seeing the film.
I recall my reaction at the time of the verdict. Although I had ignored the case - with the exception of the Cochran's cross-examination of Furman and the closing arguments - I experienced the verdict the way many Americans did. I was in a meeting of (white female leftist) composition teachers...we turned on the radio to hear the verdict, and then all of sat with our mouths hanging open in shock. I had a lengthy conversation with my neighbor and friend in my South Minneapolis apt, where at that time I was one of few white tenants. He, an African-American stage manager and director in the local theater scene, had followed the trial much more closely than I had. I think this was also generally true, that Black Americans as a group knew more about the case than most whites did. He convinced me that there was more to the verdict than I thought, and I talked to him about my experience as a domestic violence crisis counselor, which was why I believed Simpson to be guilty. From the day I heard that Simpson had a history of attacking his wife, I assumed that the case was a typical murder by a husband determined to maintain control over his wife, for as these linked statistics show, 1/3 of all female homicide victims are murdered by boyfriends /or spouses. The overkill in Nicole Simpson's case suggested that her death was personal. Later on, after the Civil trial, which my neighbor also followed, he said he saw my point more than he had before.
But, as Bikel's documentary points out, mere feelings of someone's guilt, mere circumstantial leaps are not enough to convict a person of murder, beyond a reasonable doubt. I'm guessing that my experience as a domestic abuse counselor would probably have kept me from the jury because I would have been prejudiced against the defendant from the get-go, BUT, had I been on the jury, or had I followed the case, it's likely that I too would have found reasonable doubt and voted to acquit. It's one thing to speculate about guilt and innocence based on general patterns, it's another to see real evidence linking and individual to a specific crime.
It was up to the prosecution to establish the connection between domestic violence and murder and to not use tainted evidence in building their case, because they couldn't just count on people making the leap. Maybe the problem with the prosecutors was that they weren't used to the presumption of innocence actually working, especially with a Black defendant accused of killing a white woman.
As I was thinking back on that year at the U, and about that verdict, it did bring up all my old feelings about domestic violence and spousal murder. Those were intense years when I was often reminded of violence against women, which I don't encounter nearly as much as I used to. In the nineties in Minnesota, not only did I have a female student drop my class and leave town because her ex-husband was stalking her. Not only did I live next door to a woman whose husband used to smack her against the adjoining wall until she kicked him out, not only that, but I remember now how only a few months after the "Simpson verdict" we at the University of Minnesota were all affected by the murder of a student, Kami Talley who was murdered by her boyfriend on Valentine's Day 1996. He shot her in broad daylight while she was leaving work.
As Ann Jones explains it, there is a lot of ignorance about domestic violence. People often wonder why women don't leave, but might not know that the risk of murder goes up when a woman leaves an abusive spouse. It might be a bit dated, but it's still worth it to read Jones' book on domestic violence and murder, "Next Time She'll Be Dead."

Chili Pepper Fiesta -- More Fun than You Thought.

More fun than I thought, anyway. I got there at 3:30 after locking up my bike on flatbush and headed in to meet my former roomie at the ice-cream cart. We lickety split got some spicy food and sat down to listen to the bands. We heard the "Weary Boys" who were good, followed by the Lost Bayou Ramblers, of Lafayette, Louisiana. who I liked more. I haven't gone to any of the many Katrina benefits over the last month (but I did give money), so I had missed out on hearing that cajun sound that always makes me think of New Orleans. So, I was hugely impressed by the Lost Bayou Ramblers, but I wondered whether I knew enough to know what was what. Now that I've read their bio, I can see how it is that they can be so young and so good at playing traditional music. They learned it in the family; two of the players are brothers, and their Dad and his brothers were les Freres Michot. Interestingly, the senior Michots seem to have performed for a lot of Republicans (and a few democrats), but the sons named themselves "Lost Bayou" partly because of their environmentalist leanings, which is all good.
So, after watching young Ariadne, pictured below, cut a rug in the grass, we headed into the tent to watch the show. The music had a great effect on everyone around, as you can see from the pictures. Like a lot of Prospect Park events, The Botannical Garden's chili pepper fiesta brought people from every one of Brooklyn's communities out for a wonderful picnic. and the sauce.
IT was hard to pick a favorite in the tummy-burning tasting, but I'd have to vote for the habanero fig combination from ha ha hot sauce - of Philadelphia and the super hot habanero sauce from Guyank brand, which is meant to stand for the collision between Yankee and Guyanese. They say, Oour sauce is Tasty Hot as a result of a thirteen-year chemical reaction gone good between a Guyanese Woman and a Yankee Man; OH YEAH!!! Sweet! HOT! OUCH!! After tasting several sauces and finishing off with the fig and habanero (or maybe fig and jalapeno?) mixture which I think was called "Figgin Hot," my lips were on fire. In a nice way, I mean.

Brooklyn crowds approximating a cajun feel.  

The Lost Bayou Ramblers astride the bass at the end of the set at the Chili Pepper Fiesta in Brooklyn's Botannical Garden 

Ariadne, whose Mom said it was OK for me to put her picture on here, was having a great time at the Chili pepper fiesta. 

Who Said Hip-Hop Stopped Being Political?

Last night I was at "The Rub"-where everybody said hoooo when Kanye West would break into the mix with "George Bush Doesn't Care about Black People." What a rockin dance party that is. This afternoon, my favorite WFMU deejay sent me this music video link.
Here are the lyrics, as brought to you from Temple of Me.
This morning in the laundro-mat in my neigborhood in Brooklyn, we had a discussion about Bush and his incompetence because one of the washers was wearing the homeland security t-shirt he'd brought back from last week's DC march. Then, on the TV, it was Gil Noble's "Like It Is," which this week featured lengthy clips from Amy Goodman and Malik Rahim in New Orleans on Democracy Now.
"Look, there's Amy!" the man in the t-shirt said, pointing at the TV, as Goodman confronted National Guard members about the two-weeks neglected corpse that Rahim alerted her to.
I'm not that into hero-worship, but I love the way Amy Goodman has come to be a representative for all of us who want to see someone take "exception to the rulers." go, Amy go.
That's a hopeful start to the day. And now off to a chili-pepper festival in Prospect Park.

More Reasons to Take the Subway, Bus or Bike to Work

Did you read the NYT article about the new Connecticut fines for doing anything that distracts from driving while driving? I say, if people want to do all these things: talk on the phone, send text messages, watch videos, eat, or -the one thing not discussed in the article - read the NYT on their way to work, why don't they just take public transportation? Some might think of it as riding with the masses, but I say it's luxury: reading two-week old New Yorkers, drinking coffee, and listening to an mp3 player that shuffles between Chuck Prophet, Alejandro Escovedo, Wilco and about 100 other delightful artists while somebody else shuffles me around. When I'm feeling really low-brow, I drink the coffee, don't read magazines, but instead listen to pulp-fiction audio books (lately Sara Paretsky's Blacklist) while zipping around underground (the other best use of audiobooks is for doing household chores). The other day I was on the other side of things, reading Thomas Schoonover's Uncle Sam's War of 1898, and nearly missed my stop.
Cell phones are an evil in many ways of course. Another great thing about the NYC subway is that there is no cell phone reception there. Halleluja. One place were people aren't talking to unseen confidantes about their mothers, their boyfriends, their bosses, or Nate on "Six Feet Under."
But there are many benefits to the use of headphones and music at almost all times. We are too damn close together in this city, and there are times when you'd like a little private space, free from other people's conversations. While Clyde Haberman wrote about the need to turn off ipods and cellphone to "let minds and feet wander," I find that I use music to give me the space to think more often than not. It all started when I was a bus-rider in Minneapolis. Those eternally boring waits for buses in sub-zero weather were agonizing until I started carrying a walkman with me everywhere I went. My first year in NY, I had several different mixes of Beethoven, Bach and others that were to facilitate the reading of serious books on the train.
The last thing people in NY need is MORE sensory input from the outside world. For instance, since my upstairs neighbors' kids turned four, they have been in the habit of crying and whining about going to school, the doctor, the park, or wherever, right outside the door of my apartment while their parents try to coerce them out the door. "Maaaaah" one of them is screaming right now. As I listen to the escalating conflict, the frantic parental efforts to get the kids to do whatever it is that they're supposed to be doing, I cannot think about anything else. I find this to be the case when I am on the train and forced to listen to other people's conversations, and when I am in a coffee shop trying to read. I just can't concentrate. It's only the eavesdropping that I miss when I've got the headphones on, not the roses.
My best eavesdropping happens when I'm with a friend. Along with pointing out visual oddities or nice architecture, my friends and I do a lot of commentary on the overheard. Last night, I was walking with a friend and heard two men in the West Village, Said one, in a sort of routine way, as if describing a familiar happenstance, "So he goes to your place, you have sex, and then he leaves and"...Oh man, I was dying to turn around and follow them down the street to find out what happened next. The two of us speculated for at least the rest of the block.
Wouldn't it be funny, if one of those times that you found yourself silent and discreetly shushing your friend while trying to get a better grasp of the next table's conversation, it was only to hear someone at that other table say:
"Wait a minute....shh. I'm trying to hear the rest of what they're saying."
an infinitely receding mirror.
A final note. My favorite overheard comment of all time.
New Year's Eve 1999 at Tonic to see John Zorn & Masada. A woman looks at her boyfriend and says,
"is this the band that's supposed to be good?"

Corrections Department

I won't link to the previous entries here, but I regret being sucked in by the horror stories of rapes in the Superdome and Convention Center that I read in newspapers. I've been hearing over the last few days that it is increasingly clear that all of these stories were rumors and that none of them has been confirmed. A friend sent me a link to this article in the Arizona Daily Star this morning.
The story that I read about rapes and murders came from Reuters. In the original story, Reuters quoted a "National Guard" member about the rape of a woman and then of the beating to death of a man by the crowd. If you go to that link today, here is what it says. It still doesn't clarify whether the reports of rapes and murders were true or not. NOLA.com has a more detailed story that tries to sort out the origins of the stories of rapes and murders here.
There is another story there about the involvement of police in looting. According to the police department, they don't have video evidence of cops doing any looting, only of cops watching and not taking action against looters.
Here's the quote: He also said some officers helped themselves to clothing and food but that was "acceptable," he said.
"When we talk about looting, if someone took jewelry or a television, something like that, then we have a serious problem," he said. Riley took over the department after police chief Eddie Compass abruptly resigned on Tuesday. He confirmed reports that some officers were patrolling the city in Cadillacs but said the cars were recovered stolen property warehoused by the police department. The department lost 270 patrol cars in the storm, he said.
The Arizona Star criticizes journalists especially for failing to fact-check the stories they were told by evacuees and police. I wonder if these rumors will again become a way to blame the Louisianans for the mistakes. It seems to me that some of the worst rumors and exaggerations about "armed gangs" and "baby rapers" came not from the evacuees, but from the mayor, the police, and the National Guard. Here is a very good discussion of the rumor phenomenon from the lovely social psychology blog, Respectful of Otters.

Which is it, NYC, a Surplus or a Deficit?

I keep hearing from union leadership that NYC has a budget surplus and can easily afford to pay the faculty more. On the otherhand, I keep hearing the mayor talk about a deficit and call for austerity. So which is it? I'm confused.
The Gothamist report on the 2006 city budget notes a projected $3 billion dollar deficit. Similarly, Gothamist reports a state budget deficit. Is my union's leadership crazy or wrong? Where do they get this idea that there's a surplus?
According to the comptroller's office, there was an unprecedented budget surplus in fiscal year 2005, but that's being used to pay for the 2006 budget, which, they say is not in deficit, but is balanced. Where is all the money going then?
As the Daily News reports,
Some budget experts chided the mayor for allocating all of the surplus to next year, instead of distributing it over several years. Bloomberg projects a $4.5 billion deficit in the fiscal year beginning July 1, 2006. Nevertheless, the mayor wants to keep the $400 property tax rebate for homeowners, the centerpiece of his budget proposal from last year. He also proposed ending the sales tax on clothing and footwear purchases under $110, beginning June 1, a proposal that requires the Legislature's approval. If enacted, those changes would save taxpayers $500 million. Bloomberg proposed a slew of budget restorations to city agencies, including $50 million to the Education Department, $17 million to the Fire Department and $7 million to libraries. The mayor also reduced his federal aid request to $50 million from $250 million. He noted that the state failed to provide $183 million in requested aid. Randi Weingarten, head of the teachers union, blasted the mayor for saying yesterday he could look cops, firefighters and teachers in the eye and say "there is no money" for raises. "How can that possibly be when you have a nearly $3.3 billion surplus?" Weingarten asked. "It would have been more honest to simply say, 'You are not a priority.'"

Who else is getting our tax dollars in the projected 2006 budget? Isn't there a give-away to real-estate mogul, Michael Ratner in that budget? Does he REALLY need all those tax dollars? What about Goldman Sachs? Do they need the money? Even some republicans don't think so. And, as a final note, if you think that the budget surplus was there because of something called the Laffer curve (an economic theory that made it to the Wall Street Journal editorial page in the 80s from a cocktail napkin), you should read this article from the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities.

PSC CUNY Mass Contract Rally

Tonight there will be an important rally/meeting about the possibility of a job action"" in response to the CUNY administration's failure to offer the CUNY faculty a reasonable wage. The meeting is tonight at Cooper Union from 6:00 to 8:30pm. The faculty have been without a contract since 2002, and the university's offer to the faculty has been a raise below the rate of inflation, concessions on issues of governance - such as taking the Department chairs out of union bargaining unit and making them into administrative apointees (heavens!), and even asking that faculty come back a week earlier in the fall to "make up" for the tiny money that management would be willing to pay into our medical benefits fund. Since the city budget is actually in a SURPLUS* right now, we say that we should be able to do better. All of this doesn't even include the ridiculous management ideas about intellectual property. However, our anti-union mayor and Governor, and our anti-CUNY legislature don't want to pay CUNY faculty adequately. The situation of CUNY faculty now is nowhere near comparable to that of faculty at other universities. The only thing that keeps the school competitive in hiring is its presence in New York City, as many faculty, like myself, prefer to live in NYC than some small town in western Ohio, even if it means a gawdawful teaching load (that would be nine courses a year if you teach in a community college) and an inadequate salary.
As union president Barbara Bowen has argued,
In the late 1980s and the 1990s, this union signed off on a series of concessionary contracts. We all live the results: a 35-45% drop since 1972 in the buying power of our salaries, crushing workloads, increasing costs of healthcare. The 2000-2002 contract, the first negotiated under new leadership, broke the concessionary pattern. We won the first above-inflation salary increases in a decade and an increase in Welfare Fund contributions by CUNY management. The contract also brought new ideas: research time for untenured faculty, professional development grants for academic professionals, paid office hours for adjuncts to meet with students.
What does that mean? For this professor, it means not being able to afford a one-bedroom apartment and living with room-mates found on Craig's list at the age of 36. It means figuring out how to do a year's worth of research in the two and 1/2 months off in the summer time IF I don't try to supplement my meagre salary with a summer class. It means teaching THREE history surveys in a row one day and TWO on the other. It means not having enough money to attend conferences in my field. It means sharing an office which doesn't have enough space for books, much less two people. It means not having enough money to subscribe to professional journals. I have a feeling it means that jobs at CUNY will become less and less attractive to new PhDs if this sort of thing continues. It means not getting dental work done because the insurance doesn't pay for it. Clearly, it's time for action. The question I have is whether CUNY faculty are ready to demand better for themselves. A lot of people in the service professions, such as teaching, especially at under-funded public institutions tend to be a little bit too self-sacrificing.
* Read next post for discussion of whether city is in a defecit or a surplus.

A dolphin-loving friend sent me this picture of flipper w/a dart gun. 

Beware of Dolphins...Anxiety Index

I don't know about you, but I find covert operations to teach dolphins to fire "toxic darts" at "terrorists" to be pretty damn anxiety producing. Are there more highly trained aquatic mammals out there ready to go into action as well? How will all this be affected by global warming?
I thought that the training of dogs and horses was bad enough. Dolphins have a reputation of being so kind and gentle, so friendly to humans. How unsurprising that the US military would take advantage of that. Please note, however, that dolphins may not be the kindly creatures you thought they were, but are perhaps the psycho-killers of the sea. According to the article from the NYT, the killer dolphins began showing up in studies in 1990. When did the military start training bottlenoses to shoot those darts and what was Dolphin boot camp like?

Sheehan and fifty? others arrested at Civil Disobedience Action in DC

Here is a link to the BBC's coverage.
For more about this demonstration, which according to reports I read involved at least 500 people, read Mike Ferner's article about the CD in Counterpunch. I must say that I agree with him when he asks,
If nonviolent direct action is the most powerful tool we have to stop this war, what is the best time to exercise it? When a few hundred people surround the White House on September 26 for an orchestrated civil disobedience activity, or when a half-million (and more) people are in the streets September 24?
There was not enough publicity about the proposed "massive" civil disobedience action. Had I known about it sooner, I might have planned to participate myself. I wonder how the lobbying day went?
Meanwhile, I allowed myself to seriously procrastinate today. Instead of reading a book at least marginally related to my own project, I spent about two hours reading a long discussion about ANSWER on the Dailykos. I got het up.
Seems that CSPAN only showed the ANSWER speeches, which were boring polemics. People were pissed. According to one poster on kos, nicknamed "insane liberal," here's
Why ANSWER got CSPAN coverage:
Basically, ANSWER was able to come up with the cash to allow C-SPAN to cover their event. This is from an email I received from ANSWER: We have learned that C-SPAN is planning to cover this incredible assembly of opposition to the war. They will broadcast to millions - but there's a catch. The government is restricting C-SPAN's access on one side of our site, and their satellite trucks, which provide the live feed, are now only authorized to park much farther away.
In order for C-SPAN to have a live feed of the rally, we have to rent cable ramps as well as hundreds of feet of additional cable. This will cost many thousands of dollars, on top of the tens of thousands of dollars that we are having to spend for the joint rally stage and sound to reach the huge number of people assembling, for the thousands of placards, hundreds of thousands of flyers, port-a-johns, the buses, banners, flags and everything else that it takes to make a demonstration successful.
posted by : insaneliberal on Mon Sep 26th, 2005 at 02:27:26 EDT to the Dkos thread "
But as for the questions people ask about where ANSWER gets their funding...it sounds like they get a lot of it from donations if the above was a fundraiser.

Civil Disobedience in DC

I just heard Amy Goodman say that there were 40 arrests in front of the Pentagon this morning during the War Resistors' League protest. On DC Indymedia's web-page you can see continuing live updates. The last post I found there described 25 arrests.
The big UFPJ CD action, in which Cindy Sheehan will participate will be at 12:30 today in front of the White House. 6 Mass Civil Disobedience Action Against the Iraq War. The Press release was on the indymedia newswire:


Cindy Sheehan to Join Nonviolent Civil Disobedience at the White House on Monday, Sept. 26
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: CONTACT:
Sept. 25, 2005 Andrea Buffa (510) 325-3653
Alicia Sexton (818) 442-1463

MEDIA ADVISORY

Cindy Sheehan to Join Nonviolent Civil Disobedience at the White House on Monday, Sept. 26

Hundreds will be arrested as they express their opposition to the Iraq War

WHEN: Monday, Sept. 26, 12:30 PM

WHERE: Lafayette Park entrance to the White House

WHAT: In the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., hundreds of people from throughout the United States will participate in a nonviolent civil disobedience action on Monday, Sept. 26 at the White House. Cindy Sheehan will participate in the action and risk arrest as will members of the clergy and other military families.

Through the civil disobedience action, the participants will remember and mourn the precious lives lost on both sides of the war in Iraq while firmly placing the blame for the carnage and suffering on the Bush administration. The participants will insist that the President end the war in Iraq and bring the troops home, and are willing to go to jail if the President does not agree to their demands.

Also on Monday, nearly 1,000 people will be lobbying their Senators and Representatives, imploring them to end the war and bring the troops home. The war in Iraq has taken the lives of more than 1,900 US soldiers and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis. One billion dollars per week are spent on the war that could otherwise pay for housing, education, healthcare and other services needed in the US and in Iraq as well. There were no links between Iraq and Sept 11, nor were there any weapons of mass destruction.

Days of Protest Continue in DC

I just got back from the trip to Washington, DC for the massive march organized by both UFPJ and ANSWER (after much crossfire) on Saturday. Someone I know who was there took some great pictures, and happened to wind up very near Jesse Jackson and Cindy Sheehan. You can find his pictures here.
Although my friends and I were caught up in our reunion after nearly ten years of not spending time together, we did capture the spirit of solemnity and outrage while at the march, along with the sense that we were part of a very large protest with a great diversity of people. I was happy to see both size and diversity acknowledged in the NYT, the AP, and the Washington Post.
I haven't been to a big DC mobilization in a while, but I have gone to quite a few anti-war demonstrations. I think the first time I went on such a march was when I was in high school, and rode to DC with my parents for the march opposing US policy in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s. In 1991, my college room-mate and I went to the massive anti-Gulf War March, and I remember feelng a profound sense of futility as we passed the rows of military police in front of the Whitehouse gates. The chant, "This is What Democracy Looks Like" hadn't been invented yet, but if it had, we would have said it with an ironic eye-roll.
In Minneapolis, I protested a lot: in opposition to US military and financial support for the Mexican government, in numbers in the winter that were once so small that one of our organizers said that we "looked like some people grouped around a dead body on the corner." In Minneapolis again, in opposition to US intervention in Haiti, and at that time in full Jewish regalia and blowing a shofar. (It was Yom Kippur and we were denouncing the US's policy of holding Haitian refugees in detention in Guantanamo.) At the "No War for Ramadan/Stop the Sanctions" protests in NYC over Christmas when Bill Clinton bombed Iraq on some no-fly-zone violation pretext. The frequency of such protests and the numbers at them increased during the regime of Bush II. In NYC in October 2001 when the US began bombing Afghanistan. In DC in Jaunary of 2002? against the Iraq war to come. In NYC for the world-historic probably a million people against the war on February 15 of 2003. In NYC in the Spring of 2003. On the anniversary of the bombing start in 2004. In NYC during the Republican National Convention.
And still, the war goes on.
In my own experience, this demonstration stood out in one major respect. I felt the presence of the American war dead in a more immediate and personal way than I ever did at any of the demonstrations I described above. Undoubtedly, this feeling of personal reality is the result of Cindy Sheehan's courageus work all summer long at getting so many Americans to witness her intimate expressions of grief as she waited for the president to answer her question, "in what noble cause did my son die?" While I have always felt a sense of immediate cataclysm and crisis at anti-war protests, a feeling of maddening frustration at the inability of the large opposition to US foreign policy to have any tangible effect on that policy, I have rarely felt the presence of American deaths quite so personally in an anti-war demonstration, an rarely have I felt such a consciousness of being among the people grieving those deaths personally in an anti-war demonstration.
It's not only Cindy Sheehan...it's the number of casualties, the length of the war, and the momentum that's beginning to build as the war drags on. I have never been in alive during the foundation of groups like Iraq Veterans against the War, Military Families Speak Out, and Gold Star Families for Peace. I have never before heard so many testimonies from soldiers and their families in opposition to US wars and their cost. I have never before seen so starkly the impact of military spending and priorities as all of us did in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
I never thought that I would cry when I was hearing Joan Baez sing "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" since I had grown up hearing that song and considered it by now a "peace movement cliche." I have always felt the panic and the guilt, the tragedy and the hopelessness when I know that my government is off to bomb another country to punish its leaders for disagreeing with the American power elite's notion of the "way things ought to be," but not since Sept. 11th, when I felt personally that I was trapped between two juggernauts beyond my control, have I felt so strongly how much US foreign policy hurts people in the US, hurts "us" along with the more immediate victims of our policy. I can understand why, as Noam Chomsky interpreted the Powell doctrine, it was all about short, overpowering commitments of American air power that were designed to avoid the kind of anti-war groundswell that met the growing numbers of American casualties in Vietnam.
If we can feel the presence of the American dead so painfully in anti-war demonstrations in Washington, DC, it seems to me a signal of the failure of the Bush administration's efforts to hide the truth of the war's cost from the American people. I often feel hopeless at the conclusion of such protests, but maybe now is the time to feel hopeful.
Tomorrow, protests to continue....more later.

Here are my old friends from highschool, Amy and Valerie, as we get ready to march. We had just made the signs an hour before. 

Here's my friend as we started marching. 

We're in the thick of the march now, and I'm short enough that I can't see too far in front of me. 

The raucus crowd became silent as the parade of faces of dead American soldiers came through outside the White House. 

"I've got a million ideas," the woman holding this home-made poster said. 

From a DC Breakfast Table

My friend and I made it to DC yesterday afternoon, but we haven't yet hit the protest. My guess is that we'll start with the UFPJ march around noon. Either that, or we might join the CODEPINK women's march at 10:30. Last night, we didn't see too many signs of incipient protest, even though we went to a restaurant/bookstore called "Busboys and Poets" and dubbed by the Washington Post, the cool activist hangout of the ave. U corridor.
I would watch the DC indymedia web page for ongoing updates. My friend Val, just walked in with a paint tray and the question, "you guys want to make some posters? "
My slogan of the hour is "guzzle coffee, not gas!"

Pride of the Mix Tape

They're not tapes anymore, but CDs. I'm proud of the mix I stayed up late making for my friend and me to listen to on our way to DC this afternoon. She wanted new hip-hop. I'm pretty out of the loop on new hip-hop, but I had some choice old stuff, and I know she's a ska fan. I squeezed some other things in there too. Here's the track list:

Danger Mouse/Jay Z -"Change Clothes and Go"
Wilson Simonal- "Nem Vem que nao tem"
Neneh Cherry -Buffalo Stance
The Coup - Repo Man
Bob Marley - Mr. Brown
Snoop Dogg - Beautiful
Black Eyed Peas - They Don't Want Music
Beastie Boys - Pow
Sly& Robbie - Asian Roots Dub
Tony Tribe - Red, Red Wine
Desmond Dekker - The Israelites
Airto Moreira- the Happy People
The Coup - Wear Clean Draws
Chuck Prophet - What Can you Tell Me?
The Hold Steady- Knuckles
Peaches/Soulwax mix
Chaka Demus - Murder She Wrote
Cyprus Hill - Low Rider
Wyclef - Stayin Alive, Remix
Beastie Boys - Funky Boss
Prince Paul - Steady Slobbin
part two:
Michael Frante - Rock the Nation
The Coup - Everythang
The Ethiopians- Train to Skaville
Nara Leao and Elise Regina - Chega de Saudade
Black Eyed Peas - Don't Funk w/my Heart
Atmosphere - Nothin But Sunshine
Prince Paul - Vexual Healing
Michael Frante - Do You Love?
Chuck Prophet - Dying all Young
MIrah - Cold, Cold Water
Sean Paul - Like Glue
Dawn Penn - NO, No, no
Jorge Ben - Se, Segura Malandro
Serge Gainsbourg - Bonnie and Clyde
Big Star - September Gurls
Josh Rouse - 1972
Five Blind Boys of Alabma - You've Got to Move

DC Headcount Part Two

Hey,
I guess no one felt moved to respond to my question. Who's planning on going to DC for the big march on Saturday? My guess is that this one's going to be huge. What do you think?
One of my best highschool friends lives in DC. So, another great highschool friend and I will be heading out to her place on Friday and plan to combine "old-home-week" with protest. I can't remember feeling better about going to a protest, since neither one of these friends of mine is a "usual suspect" leftoid like myself.
What are your plans for the march? Are you going on the bus? Are you going with friends? And what's your guess, do you think it will be big, big, big? Has Cindy Sheehan mobilized the masses?
Updates about Saturday....
Codepink has a schedule of events here.
For non-violent civil disobedience see UFPJ here
For list of sponsors and participants go here
For anti-world bank, IMF actions during the same week in DC, go here and here
For the US Campaign to End the Occupation go here
For an interesting behind-the-scenes discussions about UFPJ and others see this discussion about anarchists and the UFPJ.
For some informed discussion of internecine ANSWER/UFPJ shennanigans, go to the angry white kid blog.
all for now, before my browser crashes.
once again....head count please? If you know of other important feeder marches that you think people might want to join, or if you know of groups going, please post them in your comments and I will add them to subsequent posts.

Open Thread: Are YOU going to DC?

Stand up and tell me, oh my millions of readers....are you going to DC for the march this weekend? I am!

More Reasons to Hate the New Nerve

I'm high on rebellion. Here's what Fast Cupid's customer service said to me....

Dear Member

Your account is part of Fast Cupid Networks, which runs several different co-branded websites. When you sign up on one of the Fast Cupid websites, your account will show up on the other Fast Cupid Network websites as well.

The website that you are complaining about is part of the Fast Cupid Network. At this time, there is no way to control which websites your account will be displayed on. Since your accont has now been deleted, it will be deleted on all of the websites.

If you have any further questions, feel free to contact us.




Is that fair? I guess I don't mind so much being on other websites, BUT what's the point of having a special "nerve" or "onion" personal ad, or a special "bgay" ad if they're all just going to be cross-listed? Where's the edge, man? Where's the corporate identity and brand loyalty? How will this work in the pseudo-rebellious world of hip upscale marketing? It seems like it will eventually turn the once hip Spring Street into the achingly boring, match.com. It will do to the personal ads world what (first Stern, then "Village Voice Media" did to the Village Voice, MPLS Reader and the City Pages (MPLS). Of course, the ownership of a personals'ad website is nowhere near as important as is the ownership of the "alternative" newsmedia, but it is part of the same general, "engulf and devour" capitalism that shapes the small details of our lives these days. The creepy takeover of Nerve certainly has gotten a rise out of people. In fact,
here are some other places to find discussions about nerve, in fact one of them referred a lot of people here. They are:
nerve in exile and
also listed there is the marvelous Susie Bright




I promise to write about politics in a minute.

Internet Dating News

Just a brief note, as in just a few minutes I have to run out the door. For the last few days, my browser (Mozilla's Firefox) has been crashing every time I log into blogger, but the problem seems to be solved. This was a good weekend for me guys, and it's been and will be another busy week. Today, I want to talk a topic I haven't addressed in ages: internet personals ads.
Over the past few weeks, hip, internet-using singles have been wrestling with the take-over of the once hip internet dating site, Nerve, and all others in the "Spring Street Networks" by the technologically clunky and personally invasive, Fast Cupid. Among the charming aspects of the new nerve is that the pictures are smaller, everything costs more, people can vote on your photos (gasp!) and you can see who's viewed your picture and who's "hotlisted" you. (one guy had also bookmarked me on Friendster, and looked cute, but didn't respond to my note.) I don't mind the visibility of the hotlisting/views thing. I think it's far superior to the cheap and annoying "wink" as a non-commital expression of interest. Also, I discovered that a number of guys I'd gone on dates with had recently viewed my profile.
I wound up going through a little Fast Cupid madness the other night, as I got a surprise email telling me that my personal ad on "bgay.com" had just been approved. Wondering what my profile had to do with all those discussions of gay marriage and pictures of guys in tightie-whities, I deleted the profile, unwittingly deleting my entire account with Spring Street. I finally joined again, using a new email address as the old one was still in their system despite the deletion of my account, and this morning I did see that a few credits had been added to my nerve account to make up for the 2000 I lost when I deleted my "bgay" profile. I never did get an answer to what the hell happened that I wound up with my personal ad on a network for which I never signed up. For discussions of the terrible new nerve under the Fast Cupid regime, go to: retrotrac's blog on nerve, which is frequently posted, but seems to disappear a lot, and this post from the urbanhiker blog. There's an ongoing discussion at the Bust lounge as well.
As a result of all these kinds of things, some websites are offering special deals to former Spring Street Denizens. Corante's Dave Evans has the story.
I'd love to tell dating stories, but to protect my upstanding professorial reputation, I will keep mum.

Anxiety Index, part two: More Where that Came From

I could call the whole blog the "anxiety index." Yesterday, as I was standing on the corner waiting for the crosstown bus on 23rd street, I had such a feeling of contentment. "I live in New York City," I thought, "I have an interesting job...my family is here." What else could I ask for? That sense of contentment had increased that day because of my joyful return to two-wheeled travel, at least within my home borough.(I haven't ever gone on a critical mass ride, though I have witnessed many, and now that my bike is oiled and adjusted after a five year stint in my father's garage, it's more likely by the week). And then I had a sad thought, as happy as I am now, I know that this existence is precarious and doomed. We have met the enemy and he is us.
Read Common Dreams' story on global warming and hurricanes.

Anxiety Index....Everything Fits

Everything is anixety-index worthy these days, but how about this one from a commenter: "Mice Infected With Deadly Plague are Missing in NJ" This doesn't sound that bad actually, as if you read on, the research people say that the little guys will be dead by the time they can get anywhere. However, pretty much everything about New Orleans is cause for worry. How about this fear of West Nile virus due to standing water?
And fear of the unknown is always good for anxiety. Who is our latest unknown known?
Read about him here. ..the choice, anxiety provoking quote is here:
As noted on Law.com Many who know Roberts say he, unlike Souter, is a reliable conservative who can be counted on to undermine if not immediately overturn liberal landmarks like abortion rights and affirmative action. Indicators of his true stripes cited by friends include: clerking for Rehnquist, membership in the Federalist Society[1], laboring in the Ronald Reagan White House counsel's office and at the Justice Department into the Bush years, working with Kenneth Starr among others, and even his lunchtime conversations at Hogan & Hartson. "He is as conservative as you can get," one friend puts it. In short, Roberts may combine the stealth appeal of Souter with the unwavering ideology of Scalia and Thomas.

Bored by and yet Addicted to...Senate Confirmation Hearings.

My room-mate and I just sat through hours of John Roberts refusing to answer questions. Instead of wasting time with that, I could have been reading any number of exciting tomes that are stacking up in my room. (They are, fyi: for "book group" - Kotlowitz's There are No Children Here; Doblin's endless, but awesome November 1918, Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo, Hugo's Les Miserables, and the obligatory stack of academic works I have deemed necessary, such as Christopher Waldrep's The Many Faces of Judge Lynch. What I would most dearly love to be reading right now relates not at all to my own, mysterious era of specialization, which actually includes almost all of the books listed above, but is from another era entirely.) I could also have been reading news and blogging.
Meanwhile, just remember Roberts' serious conflict of interest, which Russ Feingold brought up during the questioning. Says Bruce Shapiro in the afore-linked interview with Amy Goodman,
The crucial thing here is not just that this is a single victory for the White House and that Judge Roberts was part of it, but rather, if you look over his career, deference to the Executive Branch, a sense of favoring the power of the Presidency over the other branches, is the most consistent thread of his career. This is a man who, as a lawyer, served the Executive Branch of government for many years. This is a judge who in the last couple of years has issued some striking rulings. For example, in the case of a teenager arrested for eating a single French fry on the D.C. Metro, thrown into handcuffs and put in a police vehicle. Judge Roberts wrote that this was a reasonable policy on the part of police to discourage delinquency. This is a guy who is in love with the power of the Executive Branch, and I think what that says is that the deepest motivation of the Bush administration in choosing him, along with the questions of confirmability and so on, is, in fact, that he's a judge who will reliably extend presidential power in the war on terror. I think that's the bottom line.
Roberts confirmed Shapiro's judgement today in the hearings, during which he showed himself to be "Bush's boy" throoughout. At one point, as he refused to answer question after question, but particularly in his responses to questions about the Hamden case, I was reminded so much of the stonewalling on Rove and Plame. Remember that? It was supposed to bring the piggies down, but there has been little about it lately.
Roberts refused to reveal much of anything, and evaded nearly every question asked. He even refused to offer a strong opinion on whether it was a problem to threaten individual judges, but kept talking about the importance of freedom of speech.
Watching the Roberts hearings is only interesting as an exercise in reading between the lines. My guess was that in his refusal to criticize those rabid-right judge haters that he was trying not to "alienate the base. " That should seriously undermine his claims to impartiality. Meanwhile, Lindsey Graham said such odd things about Ruth Bader Ginsburg while he was questioning Roberts. I wondered if they were all true. I searched and found many a right-winger repeating the Republican talking point on Ginsburg. I found this article on the issue on Mediamatters. I wish that those dems would filibuster, but they are too scared.
I have finally lost any hope that anything will achieve the downfall of the Bush regime. After the fiasco in New Orleans, I can't imagine that there's any crisis too big for the Republican loyalists to ignore.

Is there a question he will answer?

I'm listening to the Roberts hearings on WBAI. Leahy is asking Roberts whether congress has the power to declare war. Roberts agreees to that. He seems to equivocate on everything else.
It's worth it to read Armondo on the Daily Kos about this stuff. It's also worth reading Jack Balkin's blog on this issue, which includes an article by Critical Legal Studies scholar, Mark Tushnet, whose book "Taking the Constitution Away from the Courts" is a left-populist critique of "judicial supremacy." Finally, you can keep up to date here.
and now, it's time for me to go, just as he's saying "deference to the legislature in appropriate cases."
On separation of powers alone, this guy is so dangerous. yikes.

Sigur Rose: Overrated .."Exorcism of Emily Rose" : transparent ideology. Or... Five Days of Pop Culture

Sorry guys...it's been five whole days since I wrote anything here. Life gets exciting, or at least busy, and my blog gets delayed.
To add to my complaints and excuses, just as I was finishing this entry, my computer crashed. Why? too much music downloaded and not enough space for it.

So, just for the hell of it, here are some music and movie comments.

Music: I just got back from seeing "Sigur Ros." They were fine, very soothing, very easy. They almost put me to sleep in fact. As each soporific song ended, there was a burst of thunderous, wild applause. It was one of the strangest experiences I've had at a rock show. I couldn't figure out why everyone in the audience was so crazy for them, screaming and carrying on. I wondered if there was something I was missing. Were those harmonies complex in some ingenius way? I decided no. Sigur Ros is, as one internet critic it, the indie version of Enya."" But how could anyone muster so much enthusiasm? I could imagine cheering for The Cocteau Twins, but they have beats, and they don't pretend to profundity.
Amina, part of the band who also plays on their own, was more interesting. Both groups and the two together reminded me not only of Enya, but of some hippy puppeteers I knew in Minneapolis. They loved doing their work, and their friends loved it too. But it was kind of boring to me sometimes, and dare I say it?...self-indulgent.

More interesting than either of these bands, and in the same experimental vein, but weirder, fuzzier, and cracklier is Phil Elvrum aka, "the Microphones. He is to under-rated what Sigur Ros is to over-rated. I became a Microphones fan because of that beautiful "Cold, Cold Water" that Elvrum did with Mirah. Now that is a recording that exhibits pop genius.


Movies: I like horror movies, so this weekend, I went all a-quiver to "The Exorcism of Emily Rose." I was sad to see that even more so than the last "Exorcist" movies, t's red-meat for the Schiavo and "Intelligent Design" crowd. What I found so aggravating about this movie, was the defense atty's closing argument, which claims that the jury should consider the possibility of the religious interpretation of the events because essentially, "who can say what is right and what is wrong?" Yes, when it comes to debates between religion and science, especially when we're in a court of law, let's just treat them as equally valid alternatives. This is the sort of pluralism that I don't believe in one bit; it reminds me of those arguments for teaching "intelligent design" in school.
I see that someone at Slate agrees with me.
But don't take it just from us secular types. Even some devout Christians don't like its message, which is that people can discover faith in God through their belief in the Devil. Is this really a good way to become Christian, to believe that some scary being can take over a devout, innocent creature?
And...to at least acknowledge what's going on in today's top news stories..., other than the downfall of the idiot, Brownie. What kind of Christian is that John Roberts? Maybe, like the fictional Emily Rose, he's been too influenced by those stories of saints and martyrs, and that's why he's So A-Ok when it comes to coercive interrogation." especially if it helps him get a job.
blech. more later.

Rumors and Truths

I got my portside mail this morning and saw this important article that suggests that some of the most horrific stories that came out of the Superdome about rapes and armed gangs might be simply rumors. If so, they would be the kind of rumors that would, as the Guardian story points out, confirm racist stereotypes and make the flood victims look bad and dangerous. The story also points out however, that the cluelessness of the feds. makes it hard to know what's true and what isn't. After all, they claimed not to know much of anything at every point along the way.
That's it for now. If you see any news that either confirms or denies the rape and murder stories from the Superdome, post them here. I posted a rape and murder story that I read on Reuters a few days ago. It was based on quotes from one National Guard officer who said a teen-aged girl was raped and killed and that the crowd then killed the person who had done it. Did this happen?