Liberal-oriented columns, commentary and archived articles on national and international news, politics, and the communication arts--with emphasis on China--by Joseph Bosco, author, journalist, director and actor; Professor of Drama and Communications at Beijing Foreign Studies University. 

Thursday, September 30, 2004

Score One For The Good Guys

The USA Patriot Act is a little bit less of an abomination today than it was yesterday. The Patriot Act was as bad a piece of legislation as has come out of Congress since prohibition and was infinitely more dangerous to our vaunted personal freedoms. That noxious affront to liberty was a greater victory for the dark ages-bound terrorists than was all of their barbaric deeds including 9-11. American liberty can survive death and destruction with time, boundless hope, energy, and charity; it cannot survive totalitarianism without revolution.

While there is still much work to be done to excise the entire tumor that the Patriot Act is upon the land of the free, a federal court judge slapping down the government snoops hell-bent upon accessing your personal computer at their whim is a big step in the right direction. Below is the lead graphs and a link to an article in today's Los Angeles Times that sounds the glad tidings.
WASHINGTON -- A federal judge Wednesday curtailed the government's power in terrorism investigations under the USA Patriot Act, saying a widely used tool to obtain Internet and other electronic records from communications firms violated the Constitution by permitting "coercive searches" without any judicial review.

The 120-page ruling, by U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero in New York, came in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of an Internet service provider that had received a form of administrative subpoena known as a national security letter. The FBI has issued hundreds of these letters since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The letters have drawn fire because they are issued without any court oversight or finding of probable cause and prohibit the recipients of the letters from ever disclosing that they have been received. ...

"Today's decision is a stunning victory against the John Ashcroft Justice Department in striking down one of the major surveillance portions of the USA Patriot Act," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU.

The decision marks an unusual defeat for the department and other proponents of the Patriot Act, the terrorism-fighting law enacted within weeks of the 2001 hijackings and attacks that killed almost 3,000 people.

The law has been criticized as compromising civil liberties and spawned considerable litigation. Until Wednesday's decision, though, only one constitutional challenge had been successful: In January, a federal judge in Los Angeles, citing the free speech provision of the 1st Amendment, ruled against the part of the act making it illegal to "give expert advice or assistance" to foreign terrorist organizations.
There is much more at the Los Angeles Times
  

3:51 PM / Editor / permalink    2 comments



Wednesday, September 29, 2004

If Only They Could Vote...

Actually some of them have voted: with their lives and limbs and freedom. Who are the "Them" I am writing of? The large segment of the world populace outside of the American electorate who do not want to suffer four more years of that shoot 'em up, talk-later cowboy masquerading as the leader of the "Free World." Do you think I am writing only opinion here? The hyperbolic modifiers are subjective; the facts are another matter.

In The Washington Post today we learn a lot about those facts: we now have some hard numbers to go with the anecdotal evidence we ex-pats have been offering about how American foreign policy is perceived in whatever part of the world we are working and living.

Forgive me, here I go again with another "Must Read" pronouncement; but truly, the article excerpted below is important reading. It is important even though I know that if you are reading this you are most likely not the person who should be reading it: a misguided bushie. But, I do what I can; perhaps these words will reach into the hearts and minds of at least two or three folks with open-minds who at this moment are still un-decided.

PARIS, Sept. 28 -- From Canada to Mexico, from London and Paris to Jakarta and Beijing, President Bush is widely unpopular as a candidate for reelection, according to surveys and interviews conducted in 20 countries.

Sen. John F. Kerry appears to be the runaway favorite abroad, even though few people outside the United States know much about the Massachusetts Democrat or his positions on foreign policy questions.

"If foreigners could vote, there's no question what the result would be," said Guillaume Parmentier, director of the French Center on the United States. "Bush's image, even before the war in Iraq, was not good. The way he comports himself, the vocabulary he uses -- good versus evil, God and all that -- even his body language, most people think is not presidential." He added, "I've never seen such hostility."

Kerry's foreign fans say they like his attitude about consulting allies and respecting their views. To them, he seems worldly, with an African-born wife. He attended school in Geneva and speaks French. A first cousin of Kerry's, Brice Lalonde, is a Green Party mayor of a small town in western France.

Bush appears to have strong support in such places as Israel and Singapore for his stance against radical Islamic groups, and in some countries that are benefiting from world trade, such as India, for his free-market views. But elsewhere, a majority of people appear to be hoping he loses.

"Kerry! Kerry! Kerry!" said Eros Djarrot, a filmmaker and founder of a small political party in Indonesia, the world' s most populous Muslim nation. "Simply because Bush knows what is good for Americans, but he doesn't understand what is good for people outside America, especially people in developing countries." ...

Elsewhere, the American president is viewed as too quick to use force, with no concern for the consequences to others. "I don't like Bush," said Hao Zhiqiang, 42, a taxi driver in China. "He launched the Iraq war. The price of oil is getting higher because of that."

In Canada, a public opinion poll by the Globe and Mail newspaper conducted in July found that Canadians favored Kerry over Bush 60 percent to 29 percent. In Japan, an earlier opinion poll published in the Mainichi newspaper, conducted before Democrats had chosen a candidate, showed only 31 percent of respondents supporting Bush and 57 percent against him.

In Russia, an opinion poll showed Russians preferring Kerry by a ratio of almost 4 to 1, although President Vladimir Putin quipped to reporters that the Bush supporters "include a few very influential people," an apparent reference to himself.

And a survey by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, conducted June 6 through 26 in nine European countries, found that 76 percent of European respondents disapproved of Bush's handling of international affairs, up 20 percentage points from a survey in 2002. The poll also found that 80 percent of Europeans surveyed -- compared with half of Americans -- said the Iraq war was not worth the cost in human life and material loss.

The deep antipathy has produced a round of Bush-bashing magazine covers, books and television debates that many foreign policy observers say is unprecedented, stronger even than the widespread repudiation abroad of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

In Canada, the animosity has been running so high that the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. this month aired a program called, "Has Bush-bashing gone too far?" And in France, a popular Sunday television show, "Le Vrai Journal," has a segment devoted entirely to Bush-bashing, with Americans invited to explain to the French why they hate Bush and plan to vote against him.

At times, normally circumspect diplomats and politicians have found themselves swept up in the sentiment. A Canadian official called Bush a "moron." Britain's ambassador to Italy, Ivor Roberts, said at a conference in Tuscany last week that Bush is "the best recruiting sergeant ever for al Qaeda," according to the Corriere della Sera newspaper. And the Spanish prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, shortly after his upset victory in March, said he hoped Americans would follow Spain's electoral example and replace the incumbent president in November. ...

[...] Bush-bashing predates the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Many policy analysts date it to the administration's decision in its early days in office to reject the Kyoto protocol on climate change. That move affronted many people in the world, in part due to perceptions that it was announced in a high-handed way with no concern for world objections. His subsequent renunciation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty provoked similar dismay abroad. ...

Some world leaders on the other side of the issue are said to be quietly hoping for a Kerry victory in order to improve ties with Washington. One of them is President Jacques Chirac of France, who has had a frosty relationship with Bush since France lobbied against the Iraq war at the United Nations. One French official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, saying he could speak more candidly that way, said that if Kerry won, "I think it will change the atmospherics of the relations, because public opinion would say it's a new start."

The hopes for a Kerry victory sometimes extend to political parties whose ideology is similar to that of the Republicans. Britain's Conservative Party, for instance, is shying away from Bush this year.

The same is true in France, where most members of Chirac's ruling Union for a Popular Movement, or UMP are rooting for Kerry. "In my party, they are all pro-Kerry, except me," said Pierre Lellouche, a member of the National Assembly and a foreign policy specialist. "I am a very lonely voice here saying even if Kerry is elected, the fundamentals of U.S. policy will not change." ...

For all the rancor against Bush, he does draw strong support in some parts of the world. He has backers in Israel, for instance, thanks to a strong pro-Israel policy. A recent opinion poll by the Maariv newspaper found that 48 percent of respondents in Israel supported Bush and 29 percent backed Kerry. Bush also has a good reputation in the affluent Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore, whose government largely shares Bush's fears of Islamic extremism.

The Washington Post
 

2:39 PM / Editor / permalink    2 comments




For bush Forewarned Is Not Forearmed

Back when I was working the murder beat, there was an idiom that crime journalists used privately when talking about some cops and some prosecutors, it went: "Don't confuse me with the facts, can't you see I'm workin' here?" Well, if that old saw doesn't fit Shrub & Company then I'm not from Mississippi and Dubya's a Rhodes Scholar!

We now learn that not only should he have known how difficult winning the peace was going to be in Iraq, but that he did know but didn't like what he knew so he said to hell with it. Why not? After all, who needs facts when Gawd and Dick Cheney are backstopping you?

Below are excerpts of an article in The New York Times that indicts bush as one fact-denying son of Texas. It also reinforces what many of us in the news business have believed for a long time: Robert Novak might as well be on the pay-roll of the RNC and the DOD (some folks wonder if he hasn't been for years).

WASHINGTON, Sept. 27 -- The same intelligence unit that produced a gloomy report in July about the prospect of growing instability in Iraq warned the Bush administration about the potential costly consequences of an American-led invasion two months before the war began, government officials said Monday.

The estimate came in two classified reports prepared for President Bush in January 2003 by the National Intelligence Council, an independent group that advises the director of central intelligence. The assessments predicted that an American-led invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict.

One of the reports also warned of a possible insurgency against the new Iraqi government or American-led forces, saying that rogue elements from Saddam Hussein's government could work with existing terrorist groups or act independently to wage guerrilla warfare, the officials said. The assessments also said a war would increase sympathy across the Islamic world for some terrorist objectives, at least in the short run, the officials said.

The contents of the two assessments had not been previously disclosed. They were described by the officials after two weeks in which the White House had tried to minimize the council's latest report, which was prepared this summer and read by senior officials early this month.

Last week, Mr. Bush dismissed the latest intelligence reports, saying its authors were "just guessing" about the future, though he corrected himself later, calling it an "estimate." ...

The officials outlined the reports after the columnist Robert Novak, in a column published Monday in The Washington Post, wrote that a senior intelligence official had said at a West Coast gathering last week that the White House had disregarded warnings from intelligence agencies that a war in Iraq would intensify anti-American hostility in the Muslim world. Mr. Novak identified the official as Paul R. Pillar, the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, and criticized him for making remarks that Mr. Novak said were critical of the administration.

The National Intelligence Council is an independent group, made up of outside academics and long-time intelligence professionals. The C.I.A. describes it as the intelligence community's "center for midterm and long-term strategic thinking.'' Its main task is to produce National Intelligence Estimates, the most formal reports outlining the consensus of intelligence agencies. But it also produces less formal assessments, like the ones about Iraq it presented in January 2003. ...

The assessments were described by three government officials who have seen or been briefed on the documents. The officials spoke on condition that neither they nor their agencies be identified. None of the officials are affiliated in any way with the campaigns of Mr. Bush or Senator John Kerry. The officials, who were interviewed separately, declined to quote directly from the documents, but said they were speaking out to present an accurate picture of the prewar warnings. ...

Mr. Pillar, who has held his post since October 2000, is highly regarded within the C.I.A. But he has been a polarizing figure within the administration, particularly within the Defense Department, where senior civilians who were among the most vigorous champions of a war in Iraq derided him as being too dismissive of the threat posed by Mr. Hussein.

A C.I.A. spokesman said Monday that Mr. Pillar was not available for comment and that his comments at the West Coast session had been made on the condition that he not be identified. An intelligence official said Mr. Pillar had supervised the drafting of the document, but the official emphasized that it reflected the views of 15 intelligence agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the State Department's bureau of Intelligence and Research. ...

A senior administration official likened Mr. Bush's decision to a patient's decision to have risky surgery, even if doctors warn that there could be serious side effects. "We couldn't live with the status quo," the official said, "because as a result of the status quo in the Middle East, we were dying, and we saw the evidence of that on Sept. 11."
If you want to read more about bush as "patient," it is at: The New York Times.
 

1:56 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




How Stupid Does He Think We Are?

The "He" is george dubya bush and the "we" is every American citizen; and there are really two important questions: Why does he believe he has to lie to us? And how stupid does he think we are? The first question is easy: He can't help it, it is genetic, it is how the bush family has done public business for well over a century and each member of the clan is spoon-fed it from birth.

The answer to the second question should make every American, left, right, center, independent, libertarian, or sun worshipper, madder than hell: He thinks every damn one of us has the brain-wave activity of a cypress stump! And do you know why? Because he and his family have been getting away with their crap for a very long time and almost never have any of them been called on their lying.

Read The New York Times piece linked below and get mad -- or stay stupid. But, if you are reading these pages, I can pretty much assume you are in the former category. More's the pity that the right doesn't care about being lied to:
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 28 -- Over the past 30 days, more than 2,300 attacks by insurgents have been directed against civilians and military targets in Iraq, in a pattern that sprawls over nearly every major population center outside the Kurdish north, according to comprehensive data compiled by a private security company with access to military intelligence reports and its own network of Iraqi informants.

The sweeping geographical reach of the attacks, from Nineveh and Salahuddin Provinces in the northwest to Babylon and Diyala in the center and Basra in the south, suggests a more widespread resistance than the isolated pockets described by Iraqi government officials.

The type of attacks ran the gamut: car bombs, time bombs, rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades, small-arms fire, mortar attacks and land mines.

"If you look at incident data and you put incident data on the map, it's not a few provinces, " said Adam Collins, a security expert and the chief intelligence official in Iraq for Special Operations Consulting-Security Management Group Inc., a private security company based in Las Vegas that compiles and analyzes the data as a regular part of its operations in Iraq.
Read the whole damn thing in The New York Times.
  

1:18 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




bush's Hometown Newspaper Endorses Kerry

I kid you not, folks. Go have a look for yourself. Richard, at The Peking Duck, has this Believe-it-or-not scoop. It needs no commentary from me. Just go click, then read it and SMILE!
Crawford, TX newspaper endorses John Forbes Kerry
If for any reason that link doesn't work, you can read it here.
  

11:48 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Tuesday, September 28, 2004

An Article You Must Read: "America the Conservative"

The Los Angeles Times article reproduced in its entirety below needs no introductory comments by me. I know, I often say that an article or column is a "Must Read" and therefore run the risk of greatly diminishing the worth of my opinion when I do. But, dammit, this really IS a must read. If you find me wrong, so be it:
America the Conservative

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Whether President Bush is reelected or Sen. John F. Kerry prevails, the United States will be the most conservative developed nation in the world. Its economy will remain the least regulated, its welfare state the smallest, its military the strongest and its citizens the most religious.

According to data taken from the World Values Survey in the last decade, 60% of Americans believe that the poor are lazy (only 26% of Europeans share that view), and 30% believe that luck determines income (54% of Europeans say so). About 60% of Europeans say the poor are trapped, while only 29% of Americans believe they are. And roughly 30% of Europeans declare themselves to be left wing, but only 17% of Americans do.

Why is the U.S. such an exceptionally conservative nation?

It's tempting to think that American conservatism is the natural result of exceptional economic mobility in the country, but the odds of leaving poverty in Europe are higher than those in the United States, in part because European social democrats enacted national education policies that do a better job of looking after the poor than local schools in the U.S. Instead, American conservatism stems from political stability and ethnic heterogeneity.

The Constitution was designed with checks to protect private property and to ensure that change happens slowly. The U.S. elects its representatives by majority vote, which leads politicians to cater to the voter in the middle, not the poorest. By contrast, proportional representation in many European countries gives greater voice to politicians who stand for minority groups like the poor. In most European countries, proportional representation is also strongly related to spending on social programs.

The sharp separation of powers in the U.S., as the Federalist Papers predicted, has reduced the extension of government. Battles between Congress and the presidency -- such as President Franklin D. Roosevelt's fights with the Senate in the late 1930s -- have historically stymied the growth of the welfare state. The powerful, unelected Supreme Court has supported conservatism at many critical periods in our history. For example, in the late-19th century, it declared the income tax unconstitutional; in the 1930s, the court ruled that the New Deal was unlawful; and in 2000, it intervened to decide the presidential election. The nation's federalist structure, furthermore, limits states' welfare spending because they fear the flight of capital and wealthy residents.

One doesn't need to embrace Beardian conspiracy theories to believe that the Constitution was designed to limit the central government's ability to extract resources from wealthy citizens. As a result, it has succeeded in checking the rise of an American socialist state while all the larger countries in continental Europe have socialism-friendly political institutions.

It wasn't always so. At the start of the 20th century, the U.S. looked progressive compared with Europe's empires. The big difference between the U.S. and Europe is that the U.S. kept its 18th century Constitution, while most European countries discarded theirs. In a wave of revolutions and quasi-revolutionary general strikes, European countries, one by one, replaced their older conservative constitutions with ones often designed by socialist or labor leaders.

Some small nations introduced proportional representation before World War I in response to uprisings that threatened their governments' stability, but the war was a watershed for great powers like Germany, Russia and Austro-Hungary. These nations' armies had traditionally checked militant labor unrest, just as in the United States, but during World War I, mass mobilizations and steady demoralization broke the armies' will to fire on rioters. As the armies' policing power vanished, empires were upended by left-wing revolutions. The new constitutions of these countries were written by socialist leaders like Friedrich Ebert, who were determined to craft institutions, like proportional representation, that would entrench socialist power. France had a constitution drafted by a socialist-heavy group, but this had to wait until after its defeat in World War II.

By contrast, the U.S. has not lost a war on its home soil and thus has never faced the internal disruptions caused by such a collapse. The U.S. military and private armies, like Pinkerton's, have always been able to subdue agitators, such as the Homestead, Pa., strikers who faced off against Andrew Carnegie in 1892 and the jobless World War I veterans who marched to Washington in 1932 to ask for their bonus, and were dispersed -- with swords drawn -- by Army troops.

The nation's racial heterogeneity also partly explains its conservatism. U.S. heterogeneity sharply contrasts with the much greater homogeneity in Canada, Britain and continental Europe. People are much less likely to support income redistribution to people who are members of different racial or ethnic groups. Ethnic divisions make it easier for the enemies of welfare to vilify the poor, by making them seem like parasites who could be rich but prefer to live on the public dollar. The pro-redistribution populists were defeated in the South in the 1890s by politicians who stressed that populism would help blacks (which was true) and that blacks were dangerous criminals (which was not.) The enemies of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society also employed racial messages that conveyed the idea that welfare recipients were dangerous outsiders who should not be helped. The sharp racial division that runs through American society makes it possible to castigate poor people in a way that would be impossible in a homogeneous nation like Sweden, where the poor look the same as everyone else.

Across countries, ethnic heterogeneity strongly predicts a smaller welfare state. The U.S. states with larger populations of blacks have historically been less generous to the poor (even controlling for state per capita income). Work by Erzo Luttmer, professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, shows that people who live around poor people of their own races say they want the government to spend more on welfare. But people who live around poor people of another race say they want the government to spend less on welfare. Sympathy for the poor appears to be muted when the poor are seen as outsiders.

Increased immigration to Europe is making those societies more heterogeneous, and we have already seen opponents of social welfare, such as Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, Joerg Haider in Austria and Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands, use inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric to discredit generous welfare payments. We may like to believe that human beings are colorblind, but the reality is that American diversity has always made redistribution less popular here than in more ethnically and racially homogeneous places.

Edward L. Glaeser is a professor of economics at Harvard University, director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Kennedy School of Government, and author with Alberto Alesina, of "Fighting Poverty in the U.S. and Europe: A World of Difference."

The Los Angeles Times
  

2:04 AM / Editor / permalink    3 comments



Monday, September 27, 2004

Is Powell Breaking Ranks, Or Running Up A Baloon For His Boss?

George bush is genetically incapable of admitting mistakes or even processing information he does not want to hear. Perhaps that is why Colin Powell seemed to break ranks with Shrub's Pollyannaish view of his idyllic Iraq on the Sunday talk shows. W can't do it, yet Chief Eunuch Rove knows somebody has to do it or else folks will start wondering outloud if Georgie has not only started drinking again but if he's also started smoking his socks.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Secretary of State Colin Powell on Sunday said anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world had increased and the insurgency in Iraq was worsening, but the United States was taking action to improve security ahead of elections. ...

"We have seen an increase in anti-Americanism in the Muslim world ... I'm not denying this," Powell said on ABC's "This Week" program.

"But I think that that will be overcome in due course because what the Muslim world will see as well as the rest of the world is that in Afghanistan 10 million people who have registered to vote will vote on the ninth of October and bring in place a freely elected president, and I think we're going to do the same thing in Iraq if we stay the course, if we defeat this insurgency," Powell said.

Iraq plans to hold elections in January, but U.S. officials warn that insurgents will aim violence at preventing voting, including shooting at polling places.

"We are fighting an intense insurgency," Powell said. "Yes it's getting worse and the reason it's getting worse is that they are determined to disrupt the election."

"And because it's getting worse we will have to increase our efforts to defeat it, not walk away and pray and hope for something else to happen," Powell said.

"There is a military offensive under way now, you can see the aggressive action we've been taking in Falluja lately, there is a political and military offensive under way to take back Samarra," Powell said on CNN's "Late Edition."

"What we're going to do over the next several months is to go into these areas and bring them back under government control," Powell said. "Now it remains to be seen how successful we will be, but right now we are moving to have elections at the end of January of 2005."
Reuters.com
 

2:53 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




New York Times Staffer In Beijing Bureau Is "Detained" For Revealing "State Secrets"

I do not know why the detention of a New York Times staffer in their Beijing bureau has not been widely reported in the Living in China community--or perhaps it has and the new format of the blogzine has kept it from my wiew. Apparently it happened over a week ago; I just learned of it in Romanesko's column in Poynter Online. I find it particularly distressing because it seems that the background is a concern by authorities that The Times' inside sources were too good--a notion that I have noted frequently in these pages in words of praise, especially for Joseph Kahn. Below is the story from The New York Times:
Chinese research assistant in the Beijing bureau of The New York Times has been detained on suspicion of revealing state secrets.

The research assistant, Zhao Yan, was detained on Sept. 17 while in Shanghai on personal business. His family received formal notice on Sept. 21, from the Beijing State Security Bureau, that Mr. Zhao was "in criminal detention under suspicion of illegally providing state secrets to foreigners."

"We are deeply, deeply concerned about the detention of Zhao Yan," said Susan Chira, foreign editor of The Times. "We are doing everything we can to assure his safety and we are helping his family get legal assistance."

"We can state categorically that Mr. Zhao has not provided any state secrets to our newspaper," Ms. Chira said.

Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, has contacted the White House, the State Department and the Chinese government on Mr. Zhao's behalf.

Some Beijing journalists have speculated that the detention is linked to an article in The Times on Sept. 7 reporting the unexpected news that the former Communist Party chairman, Jiang Zemin, planned to resign his last position of power, as chairman of the Central Military Commission. The article cited unnamed sources with ties to the leadership.

Deliberations among party leaders are highly secretive in China, and leaks are considered a crime. In this case, the accuracy of the article was confirmed last Sunday, when Mr. Jiang relinquished his military post.

The Chinese authorities have not notified The Times about Mr. Zhao's detention and have not said what secret information he allegedly revealed, or to whom, Ms. Chira said.

Most foreign bureaus in China employ local people to help scour official sources, newspapers and the Internet for information, and to assist in translations. Some Chinese assistants have had trouble with the authorities over the years when the newspapers they worked for wrote on subjects considered politically sensitive.

But the criminal laws on leaking state secrets, while vague about the definition of a secret, are unusually severe, with lengthy prison terms possible for those convicted.

"We are eager to ensure that no local employee of The Times be held responsible for news coverage by our correspondents," Ms. Chira said.

Ms. Chira stressed that Mr. Zhao was employed as a researcher, to assist correspondents in gathering information, and that he had not functioned as a reporter or writer.

The Times's Beijing bureau hired Mr. Zhao in May of this year. He previously worked for China Reform, a magazine known for its articles on farmers' and labor rights, and he was known for aggressive reporting on government abuses of power.
The New York Times
  

1:01 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Sunday, September 26, 2004

Blogging is In the News In a Big Apple Way

With some inner discomfort at joining a herd, any herd, I have decided that I would be doing my readers a disservice if I did not link to the MAJOR blogging tome in today's The New York Times Sunday Magazine. So, without much comment on that blogging bouquet, here is the link (an rss userland link that won't go away, or so Dave Winer says):
Fear and Laptops on the Campaign Trail

By MATTHEW KLAM

The New York Times

However, there is another blogging article I would like to send you to. I have been meaning to put it up for almost two weeks but other deadlines kept me otherwise occupied. It is from the Poynter Institute's website, Poynter Online, which I have written about and linked to previously. The column I want to send you to today is from the POYNTER ETHICS JOURNAL and is titled: "Journalism in the Age of Blogs." It is written by Kelly McBride, a seasoned journalist now a resident Ethics faculty member of the Poynter Insitute in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Some parts of the column are dated due to the CBS scandal's wide and rapid coverage. But most of it is important reading for all bloggers and readers of blogs. Poynter Online is a free registration site for journalists, but most of their seminars are not free. I believe it is worth your effort to go there and register. Therefore, I will post only the lead graphs and hope you choose to click through:
Turbulence in the blogosphere will continue to affect mainstream journalism for the foreseeable future. Wind and rain, harsh criticism and second-guessing will remain part of the weather system influencing newsrooms throughout the country.

Get used to it.

Then figure out how to deal with it. ...

We journalists are no longer the gatekeepers in the marketplace of ideas. The doors have been flung wide open by the egalitarian nature of the Internet and when you look at the big picture you see -- chaos. You see a medium in its infancy, howling and kicking against the limitations of the world into which it was born.

The surplus of stories about the blogosphere reflects an attempt to explain and gauge this creature to ourselves, as well as to the many readers and viewers who don't participate and perhaps aren't even aware of the cacophony of commentary and criticism.
Poynter Ethics Journal
  

2:36 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




"Un-American," The New York Times Says To Bush

I have spent most of my life hating the hyphenated word "Un-American." It is with cause, I assure you. Joe McCarthy and his red-scare terrorized much of the educated class of adult Americans in the early 50's with the phrase, including my father. My father's crimes? He happened to get his BS Degree at CCNY in 1939 (that so-called "hotbed of American Communism"). Then some years later, when in the employ of the U.S. government, my father casually remarked over lunch with his fellow civilian scientists and writers attached to the United States Air Force, that, of course, the most populated country on Earth belonged in the U.N. My father survived the witch-hunt and spent many more years doing excellent work in his fields, radar and NORAD, and later the inertial guidance systems that helped put America on the moon.

Not too many years after that, the House Un-American Activities Committee, the vile left-over from Gunner Joe's days of shame, fattened a nasty file on me, happily delivered to them, piece by piece, courtesy of the FBI (and other agencies). My crimes? I was active in the Civil Rights movement in my home state of Mississippi. And I wrote and published youthful poetry and commentary against the war in Vietnam; but most dastardly to "them" was that I hosted a somewhat clandestine discussion group of U.S. Air Force officers who were also against the war. Yes, technically, under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the officers in attendance were crossing a fuzzy legal line. But I was not. Also, violent revolution was never a topic of discussion.

Not even once during those years did I take part in public protests against the war; I had too many friends fighting and dying in Nam and I just did not want any of them or their families to ever see me in effect denouncing their sacrifice. That was a personal choice and I greatly respected anyone else who chose to protest publicly and loudly. My main cause was the Civil Rights movement, within which I was a visible and vocal protestor, much to the pronounced displeasure of my friends and neighbors in Mississippi. I was also, then and now, a vocal supporter of the move to decriminalize most "victimless" crimes, i.e., to stop putting marijuana smokers in prison.

For these "Crimes" I was labeled "UN-American." So, yes, I hate the term. However, I embrace it today as used in The New York Times editorial below, which I am reproducing in full because I want a permanent record of it in these pages.
President Bush and his surrogates are taking their re-election campaign into dangerous territory. Mr. Bush is running as the man best equipped to keep America safe from terrorists - that was to be expected. We did not, however, anticipate that those on the Bush team would dare to argue that a vote for John Kerry would be a vote for Al Qaeda. Yet that is the message they are delivering - with a repetition that makes it clear this is an organized effort to paint the Democratic candidate as a friend to terrorists.

When Vice President Dick Cheney declared that electing Mr. Kerry would create a danger "that we'll get hit again," his supporters attributed that appalling language to a rhetorical slip. But Mr. Cheney is still delivering that message. Meanwhile, as Dana Milbank detailed so chillingly in The Washington Post yesterday, the House speaker, Dennis Hastert, said recently on television that Al Qaeda would do better under a Kerry presidency, and Senator Orrin Hatch, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has announced that the terrorists are going to do everything they can between now and November "to try and elect Kerry."

This is despicable politics. It's not just polarizing - it also undermines the efforts of the Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency to combat terrorists in America. Every time a member of the Bush administration suggests that Islamic extremists want to stage an attack before the election to sway the results in November, it causes patriotic Americans who do not intend to vote for the president to wonder whether the entire antiterrorism effort has been kidnapped and turned into part of the Bush re-election campaign. The people running the government clearly regard keeping Mr. Bush in office as more important than maintaining a united front on the most important threat to the nation.

Mr. Bush has not disassociated himself from any of this, and in his own campaign speeches he makes an argument that is equally divisive and undemocratic. The president has claimed, over and over, that criticism of the way his administration has conducted the war in Iraq and news stories that suggest the war is not going well endanger American troops and give aid and comfort to the enemy. This week, in his Rose Garden press conference with the interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, Mr. Bush was asked about Mr. Kerry's increasingly pointed remarks on Iraq. "You can embolden an enemy by sending mixed messages," he said, going on to suggest that Mr. Kerry's criticisms dispirit the Iraqi people and American soldiers.

It is fair game for the president to claim that toppling Saddam Hussein was a blow to terrorism, to accuse Mr. Kerry of flip-flopping and to repeat continually that the war in Iraq is going very well, despite all evidence to the contrary. It is absolutely not all right for anyone on his team to suggest that Mr. Kerry is the favored candidate of the terrorists. And at a time when the United States is supposed to be preparing the Iraqi people for a democratic election, it's appalling to hear the chief executive say that loyal opposition gives aid and comfort to the enemy abroad.

The general instinct of Americans is to play fair. That is why, even though terrorists struck the United States during President Bush's watch, the Democrats have not run a campaign that blames him for allowing the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to be attacked. And while the war in Iraq has opened up large swaths of the country to terrorist groups for the first time, any effort by Mr. Kerry to describe the president as the man whom Osama bin Laden wants to keep in power would be instantly denounced by the Republicans as unpatriotic.

We think that anyone who attempts to portray sincere critics as dangerous to the safety of the nation is wrong. It reflects badly on the president's character that in this instance, he's putting his own ambition ahead of the national good.
The New York Times
  

1:34 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




If His Lips Are Moving...

In an editorial titled, "Fool Me Once," The New Republic skewers shrub and company with the impolite accusation of being a liar. No ifs, ands, or buts about it, just a flat-out lying fool who is digging the nation deeper into a very dangerous hole. Like so many other idiots past and present, instead of ceasing to dig, bush tries to extricate himself by asking for a larger shovel. The editorial is reproduced in full below:
All politicians stretch truth to present accomplishments in the most appealing light. What President Bush has told the country over the past week about the deeply troubled Iraq occupation, however, is different. While an increasingly strong insurgency murdered 250 Iraqis last week, he portrayed the occupation as gliding to success. Last week, Bush told the Manchester Union-Leader, "I'm pleased with the progress." The template the administration is using for its portrayal of Iraq is the one the Johnson administration perfected during Vietnam: To win reelection, Bush is lying.

Not only has there been no recent progress in Iraq, there has been much backsliding over the past six months. Two weeks ago, a research team from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (csis) released the most comprehensive study about events on the ground. Originally invited to study Iraq at the behest of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, csis said, "In every sector we looked at, we saw backward movement in recent months." This is the opposite of "progress," and the administration knows it. In a July National Intelligence Estimate (nie), its own analysts reported that the best outcome in Iraq is a barely contained insurgency and tenuous stability. In other words, what last year was among the worst-case scenarios is now the best.

The president has a response to those who honestly depict the situation in Iraq: dismissal. "Just guessing," Bush shrugged at the NIE. The Iraqis "are defying the dire predictions of a lot of people by moving toward democracy," he said last week. In fact, the only predictions Iraqis have defied are his own. First they defied his prediction that they would accept instantaneous post-Saddam rule by expatriates. Then they defied his prediction that they would accept an open-ended occupation. Then they defied his prediction that they would accept an interim government chosen by convoluted caucuses. Then they defied his prediction that the U.S. military could rely on poorly trained Iraqi forces to combat the insurgency. Then they defied his prediction that the transfer of notional sovereignty to the interim government would destroy the insurgency's popular support.

And now it is dawning on observers that the latest prediction Iraqis will defy is that they are "moving toward democracy." "The Americans have created a series of fictional [election] dates and events in order to delude themselves," Ghassan Atiyya, director of the Iraq Foundation for Development and Democracy, recently told Newsweek. Even American ground commander Thomas Metz, commenting on the fact that most of Al Anbar Province is controlled by the insurgency, admitted, "I don't think today you could hold elections."

In response, the administration is telegraphing that, should it win reelection, it will insist on Iraqi elections nonetheless and call them legitimate, even if they are unfree and unfair. In a recent address to the National Press Club, Rumsfeld shrugged, "I've never seen an election anywhere that's perfect," as if Iraq were West Palm Beach. Iraqis are more honest. Interim President Ghazi Al Yawer declared last week, "We do not want to have elections for the sake of elections. It's the outcome of the elections that's most important." By which he surely means an outcome that will preserve his power. For that reason, the Association of Muslim Scholars, which represents about 3,000 Sunni mosques, has announced it will boycott the vote. Sheik Abdul Satar Abdul Jabbar of the Association told The New York Times, "If the election goes forward anyway, the body that will be elected will not represent the country." This decision virtually ensures that elections could move Iraq closer to civil war. With most Sunnis refusing to cast ballots, the new government would lack legitimacy and take on a sectarian character, fostering even greater factional conflict. As Atiyya recently warned, "Badly prepared elections, rather than healing wounds, will open them."

There are brave Republicans who understand how disastrous the Bush administration's Iraq policy has proved. Referring to Bush's predictions, the GOP chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar, remarked, "The nonsense of all that is apparent." But the nonsense has continued. Bush has enlisted Iyad Allawi to travel to Washington this week and claim the administration is delivering victory in Iraq. Unless more Republicans join Lugar and put truth above party, the lies will continue through Election Day and beyond.
The New Republic
  

3:24 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Bush Has Lost Sullivan...

I have been wanting to post Andrew Sullivan's "Reality Check" essay in last week's The New Republic since it came out on the 21st, but a busy schedule has kept me from it until these early morning hours. I do not often agree with Mr. Sullivan--which is a bit of an understatement. The prolific and popular essayist and blogger is a strange thinker to peg down. He is unquestionably a staunch neocon; in fact, one could say the term personifies him, he might have even coined the word, or at least lay claim to having done so for all of his priggish arrogance.

However, in the spirit of the old saw which holds that my enemie's enemy is my friend, Mr. Sullivan might as well be my best buddy these days. Apparently, we now share the same goal, preventing bush from serving four more ruinous years as our head of state. I say apparently because this wasn't the case only a short while ago and who knows if he won't switch sides again.

All that being said, I thoroughly enjoyed the piece below. Again, because TNR is a paid subscription service, I am reproducing the essay in its entirety.

DAILY EXPRESS
Reality Check
by Andrew Sullivan

At some point, this election race will tighten again, and, against the odds, it seems to me that John Kerry has finally found a way to do it. It's Iraq: not the reasons for going to war, not the relationship between Iraq and the war on terror, not the absence of promised WMDs, but the incompetence of the occupation from the fall of Baghdad onwards. This has always been the president's weak and blind spot. And the soundbites offered up on television last night showed why. Kerry was heard lambasting an occupation that seems to most observers to be coming unglued. Bush was seen again criticizing Kerry's record of inconsistency on Iraq. Advantage Kerry. Why? Because Bush has all but given up on trying to argue that things in Iraq are going fine. So he has to attack Kerry's credibility to conduct any kind of war in the region. It sounds campaigny and political, while Kerry at least is talking about a burning issue in the news every day. So, if this pans out, the debate will hinge on Bush's record in Iraq versus Kerry's longtime record in the Senate and dithering over the two years. If that's the battle, Kerry will surely gain--especially if violence in Iraq continues to swell in the next few weeks.

One way you can discern someone's weakness in an argument is to listen to what he does not mention. For a very long time now, the president and vice-president and all their spokesmen have not exactly been speaking about the occupation of Iraq. Yes, they have talked about the resolve to go to war with Saddam; they have spoken of how much safer the world is without Saddam; they have spoken of the imperative to move toward democracy in that country. But they have barely acknowledged--until recently and in asides--that the occupation is in deep trouble. The same goes, with a few honorable exceptions, for the conservative intelligentsia. Check out National Review Online this past week, or The Weekly Standard. There's been barely a mention of the occupation's growing travails. Two telling exceptions were a piece by John Derbyshire predicting a quick exit from Iraq after the election and a trial balloon by Robert Novak along the same lines in his syndicated column.

But the reality is unavoidable: Large swathes of Iraq have been ceded to terrorist insurgents; the multinational force is deeply unpopular in all the surveys of the general population you can read; barely a fraction of reconstruction funds has been spent; military and civilian casualties continue to rise; parts of Baghdad are not secure; the chances of national elections in January look iffy in the extreme; the White House's own internal reports are full of gloom. None of this was discussed at the Republican National Convention, and you can understand why. But the extremely rosy picture of Iraq sketched by that convention could well become a liability if the facts on the ground begin to make the commander-in-chief seem culpably out of it at best, and deceptive at worst.

The key for Kerry, then, is not to make the argument that this president is evil or a liar, as the Michael Moore left has stupidly done. And it is not to revisit the arguments for and against war in the first place. That merely traps Kerry back in the tangled rhetorical knots he tied for himself. It is to make the argument that this president is out of touch and incompetent. It's Dukakis again--competence, not ideology--but this time, with a real record of incompetence to point to. Take two simple issues: the training of the Iraqi military and the disbursement of reconstruction aid--two essential components of any success in Iraq. Both are way behind schedule in a conflict in which time is not on our side. Kerry focused on this effectively yesterday:
Last February, Secretary Rumsfeld claimed that more than 210,000 Iraqis were in uniform. Two weeks ago, he admitted that claim was exaggerated by more than 50 percent. Iraq, he said, now has 95,000 trained security forces. But guess what? Neither number bears any relationship to the truth. For example, just 5,000 Iraqi soldiers have been fully trained, by the administration's own minimal standards. And of the 35,000 police now in uniform, not one has completed a 24-week field-training program. Is it any wonder that Iraqi security forces can't stop the insurgency or provide basic law and order?
That's a devastating indictment after a year and a half of occupation. The rebuilding issue is even more potent:
Last week, the administration admitted that its plan was a failure when it asked Congress for permission to radically revise spending priorities in Iraq. It took 17 months for them to understand that security is a priority; 17 months to figure out that boosting oil production is critical; 17 months to conclude that an Iraqi with a job is less likely to shoot at our soldiers. One year ago, the administration asked for and received $18 billion to help the Iraqis and relieve the conditions that contribute to the insurgency. Today, less than a $1 billion of those funds have actually been spent. I said at the time that we had to rethink our policies and set standards of accountability. Now we're paying the price.
Kerry has been faulted for not offering an obvious alternative. But yesterday's speech had a plan; it was just a reiteration of the same kind of approach that the president has spoken about. The difference is that Bush has had 17 months to get things right and he has failed. And the bitter truth is that we have no good options in Iraq any more. Our main advantages were the removal of Saddam, a swift transfer of authority, and loads of rebuilding funds. But within only a few months of insufficient policing, growing anarchy, and fitful attempts even to get the electricity back on, the window of opportunity to win hearts and minds was lost. Without a strong central authority, the country's ethnic and tribal divisions have reasserted themselves, and the chances of a coherent, consensual national government have receded. The influx of foreign fighters--enabled by our inability to seal the borders--has made matters worse. Our only hope now is a brutal retaking of the Sunni strongholds, some kind of electoral process, and a slow war of attrition against a widespread insurgency with a new Iraqi government, shielded from its own people by a security fortress. Perhaps reconstruction can proceed through the violence. Perhaps we can slowly turn this around with the help of an increasingly bewildered and traumatized Iraqi populace. But when terrorists can destroy oil pipelines at will, why should they not also target any American-funded civil projects as well? Without progress on the political and security front, no amount of bribery will make a new Iraq arise.

What Kerry has to do is simply remind people that this is the reality. Yes, he needs to say how he would guide the country through the dark days ahead; and he failed to give concrete ideas about how or whether to, say, reconquer Falluja. But politically speaking, the reality of our present quandary will be eloquent enough. To claims that he isn't fit for command, Kerry simply has to ask, "You think I could run a war worse than this one?" And to every counter-sally by Bush on Kerry's own record of inconsistency, Kerry should simply say, "Stop changing the subject."

In the first debate, Kerry should keep hammering on specifics: Why have we spent almost no reconstruction funds? Why are we relying on the National Guard to do the army's work? How able are we to respond to other national security threats with our current troop levels? What are you going to do about Falluja? Kerry has to wrest the subject of Iraq from the past and the abstract to the present and the concrete. The American people will listen. Because they know a problem when they see one; and they don't appreciate a president who refuses to see what's in front of him.
The New Republic
  

2:28 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




What Does Sausage Have In Common With Journalism?

The Columbia Journalism Review CJR, published by Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, is a publication that many journalists use to keep abreast of their profession's shifting nuances in normal times. In troubled times such as these, many more will turn to the esteemed journal for a reality check and as a refresher source for the tasks still at hand. Once again CJR served its purpose well. I would like to share its take on MemoGate with you. Since registration is required, I am re-producing the article below in full. (If you are a blogger, it would not be a bad idea to register and frequent the online version of CJR.)
The Longer View

CBS Does Its Ben Hecht Imitation - and Pays For It

By Bryan Keefer and Steve Lovelady

There's an old saying that you never want to watch either sausage, legislation or journalism being made.

Now that we know a little bit about the internal machinations that led to CBS' Bill Burkett sausage, several things seem abundantly clear: First, the network rushed to judgment for no clear reason, falling victim to the scoop mentality that has bedeviled journalism for nearly a century and that has only been exacerbated by the 24-7 nature of the news cycle and the fragmentation and proliferation of news media in the Internet era.

Second, in that rush, CBS violated a tenet of journalism first heard by our ears 40 years ago from a crusty city editor who wanted his reporters to trust no source unless verified by independent reporting. (That city editor was one Eugene Sharp, and his gravel-voiced admonition to every reporter was, "Check it out -- even if your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.") In the case of CBS, it wasn't Dan Rather's mother that the network failed to check out, it was a considerably shakier source -- a disgruntled partisan who felt shortchanged by the National Guard and by President Bush's presidency and who warned CBS that the documents needed authentication even as he handed them over. The network compounded the error by making no effort to contact a secondary source whose name Burkett had reluctantly passed along. (Since there was no such person, that check alone could have saved the network the entire embarrassment to come.)

Now that Rather has admitted on air that the network should never have used the documents, and personally apologized to his viewers, we're left wondering: What was the untoward hurry? What made CBS apparently ignore the advice of its own experts about the authenticity of the documents? (After all, photocopies faxed from a Kinko's on the edge of Abilene, Texas, don't immediately scream "real.") What did the network gain by running the story before it had ironclad assurance that the supporting paperwork was authentic? Where was the skeptical nose of a Eugene Sharp (or a Ben Bradlee, who insisted throughout the Washington Post's Watergate investigation that Woodward and Bernstein nail down every fact with two sources, independent of one another) that might have overridden the first-at-all-costs mentality that leads to all sorts of factual errors, ranging from sins of omission (failing to fact-check the candidates, for instance) to errors as multiple as those of CBS? The pressure to get the "scoop" and beat everyone else to print (or on air) has time and again overwhelmed the better judgment of reporters and editors -- certainly it did in CBS' case. In short, the scoop got in the way of the story.

Next, enter hubris. For all its speed in putting the story on the air, CBS was incredibly slow to admit its mistake. Within moments of CBS' broadcast on September 8, internet sites and weblogs (conservative and otherwise) had raised questions about the authenticity of the memos. As it turns out, these were very similar to the doubts expressed by two of CBS' own experts before the segment even aired.

In a classic example of media schadenfreude, other news organizations, many of whom had piggy-backed off the original CBS report, reversed course and ran story after story playing up doubts about the documents.

Yet CBS hung on by its fingernails, putting Marian Knox, former secretary to the late Lt. Col. Killian, on the air last Wednesday to say, no, she didn't type the documents in question, and they didn't look authentic to her, although they did reflect Col. Killian's thoughts and fears at the time. (The first thought that came to mind was that CBS could have saved itself from itself by simply running its initial story past Knox before it aired it instead of after.) But even then, the tenor of Rather's queries to Knox was more in the vein of a slap at his critics than an admission of error. This was the flip side of the scoop mentality, exposed for all to see; having rushed to air with the story, CBS dug in and resisted yet another journalistic mandate -- that of thoroughly and promptly correcting the record when you've made a mistake.

In the long run, this story may be remembered as the culmination of a long slide at CBS that began nearly 20 years ago when CBS' then-new owner Lawrence Tisch imposed the first of many draconian budget cuts that decimated CBS's once-vaunted reporting and producing ranks. But the network's mistakes on the nitty gritty level of its reporting in the trenches are ones that are warned against in any beginners' textbook on reporting and they can't be blamed on budget cuts; step-by-step, they amount to a litany of failures to follow the most basic principals of responsible journalism:

-- If someone hands you a "gift" story, unwrap it very carefully, and vet the giver.

-- Even if you fear time is running out (only six weeks until that election, you know) and even if you feel the hot breath of your competitors on your neck, pause, take a deep breath and "check it out."

-- If your source clearly has an ax to grind, trace the story back to his source.

-- And if a second party is readily at hand to either confirm or deny the story (Marian Knox comes to mind), track her down before you rush to print or to air, not after.

There's nothing complicated about any of this. The real story here isn't political bias on the part of CBS or Rather. It's that of big news organizations still in the thrall of a scoop mentality that dates back to the 1920's and Ben Hecht -- and still reluctant to come clean even when a story unravels.
Columbia Journalism Review
  

2:16 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Why Is the Bush Administration So Compulsive About Secrecy?

Mother Jones magazine's Daily MoJo shines a bright light on an administration that loves to do things in the dark--as in keeping the congress and the American people in the dark about what it is doing with our money and our military. It is flat-out frightening, and you must read it:
The 'Secret' Scandal

The U.S. Constitution was originally designed to promote transparency in government, as Elaine Scarry reminds us in a recent essay on the USA Patriot Act. True, there has always been a lively debate over the need to balance national security with an open government, but the presumption has usually been in favor of openness. At least, until now. Under the Bush administration, secrecy has become standard fare, and most of it has very little to do with national security. The administration has withheld information from Congress, stonewalled public access to federal records, and embarked on a classification spree, often for the sake of petty politics. It's not exactly what the Founding Fathers had in mind.

The administration's penchant for silence, secrets, and cover-ups has been thoroughly documented in a new report, entitled "Secrecy in the Bush Administration", put out by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) from the House Committee on Government Reform. The report finds a "consistent pattern" in the Bush Administration's actions: "laws that are designed to promote access to public information have been undermined, while laws that authorize the government to withhold information or operate in secrecy have repeatedly been expanded." It's a reminder of how far we've traveled from the Constitution's original intent.
There are a great deal of important revelations--with links--which you will want to continuing reading about at the: Daily MoJo
  

1:44 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Saturday, September 25, 2004

Carl Bernstein On the State of Journalism In America

This past week, Carl Bernstein gave an important and timely speech about the state of American journalism at the University of Auburn-Montgomery. Mr. Bernstein knows of which he speaks. The now legendary journalist, along with his partner at The Washington Post, Bob Woodward, changed the face of investigative journalism forever--and not always for the better, he would surely say--when they broke and then drove the Watergate story that brought down a sitting president thirty years ago.

For all of the obvious reasons--CBS/MemoGate, Jason Blair/NYT, USA Today--and many reasons perhaps not so obvious to many of you, Mr. Bernstein's words should be known by all whom toil in the trenches of the Fourth Estate. They should also be known by all whom read, watch or listen to the news produced by those of us who once upon a time chose journalism as a noble calling.

I had meant to post this story several days ago, but deadlines kept me away from these pages much of this past past week. Since I cannot count on the link staying active for any length of time, I am re-producing in full the article that appeared in the Montgomery Advertiser on September 22.

The primary purpose of politics and journalism should be to serve the good of the people, but they have become dysfunctional, disconnected and have lost touch with their purpose, former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein said today.

"I do not remember a time I felt as unhopeful about politics and journalism as I do now," Bernstein said.

Bernstein, who broke the Watergate scandal in the 1970s with fellow Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, spoke during today's session of the business breakfast series at Auburn University Montgomery.

There is pressure among news organizations to compete with each other, Bernstein said. Each wants to be first and they do not want to miss stories.

Hurrying to be first can cause problems, he said. For example, had more serious questions been asked about the reports in the CBS story about President George W. Bush's service in the National Guard, the story might have been more sound.

"Obviously, the story should have been held until more reporting was done," he said, also noting that CBS executives have stripped their news operation of resources over the last several years.

The incident was a terrible error and is bad for journalism, he said.

When Jason Blair fabricated stories at the New York Times and Janet Cook at The Washington Post, those newspapers published pages of stories for several days on their errors and the failure in their procedures, he said. They ordered full investigations.

Bernstein changed gears. "I am waiting for Congress to investigate themselves the same way," he said.

And while the CBS story is dominating the news, people are forgetting about the real story: whether Bush actually fulfilled his military obligations, he said.

Bernstein asked the crowd how many people believed the Swift Boat advertisements about Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for president, and his service in Vietnam. A few people raised their hands.

"The basic element (of the ads) is just plain factually wrong," he said. "Read everything there is to know."

He also commented on what he called the "astonishing amount of untruth from the White House" and the need for the media to explore it.

"We're not doing enough to report on the untruth," Bernstein said.

On the war in Iraq, he said many Republicans, when talking off of the record, are "becoming convinced this war is a catastrophe."

"There is real debate to be had on this war," Bernstein said.

Bernstein also asked the crowd if they believed there was a liberal bias in the media and several people nodded their heads. He challenged the crowd to read the news pages of the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal and find a liberal bias.

If people read those publications, they are going to have a very different view on Iraq than they are hearing from the government, Bernstein said.

"There is plenty of information for voters to make a choice," he said. "There is not enough information on talk television."

In the last 10 years, a handful of corporations including AOL/Time Warner, Viacom, Bertlesman and Disney, have taken control of most television outlets, Bernstein said.

"They control so much of the agenda and their interest in the truth is largely secondary to profits," he said, noting that he receives checks from several of them for work he performs on their behalf.

"The agenda of television is driving the agenda of news," he said.

Bernstein encouraged people to seek out the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal and other independent sources of information. There is enough information in the news pages, not the editorial pages, of those publications for people to form their own opinions on issues, he said.

"It is impossible to be informed in a meaningful way without reading," Bernstein said.

With the World Wide Web, people have access to these outlets and to overseas publications, he said.

"We're not hemmed in except by choice as far as the best obtainable version of the truth," Bernstein said.

The most troubling aspect of television is the news shows, which have little news but instead feature people with ideological beliefs arguing about the issue, he said.

"Most of that 24 hours is talking heads shouting at each other," Bernstein said.

"Television, both local and national, is ceasing to serve the public," he said.

Despite that, there are some programs, such as 60 Minutes, and individuals including Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw with standards and integrity, Bernstein said.

Still, he said, television news has a lack of interest in real news. He talked about the "triumph of idiot culture," in which people would rather read about celebrities than important news and prominent political figures.

At some point, the general public, voters, readers, and viewers must be held responsible for what they know, Bernstein said.

"The news agenda of local news has nothing to do with the best obtainable version of the truth," Bernstein said.

There will be sensational coverage of car wrecks and shootings, but not the affects of what is really happening at city hall, with legislation or in the city neighborhoods, he said.

D'Linell Finley Sr., assistant professor in the Department of a Political Science and Public Administration at AUM, said he was not surprised by anything Bernstein said, but thought he pointed out real problems with the media and the public.

Finley said he has watched the situation progress with CBS. People have lost sight of the real issue, which is whether the president fulfilled his obligation, he said. That is a relevant question whether or not the document questioned in the CBS incident ever surfaced, Finley said.

"The public would like to know the real version of this," he said.

Finley agreed with Bernstein that people are responsible for much of the burden and they need to read and inform themselves.
The Montgomery Advertiser
  

6:36 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Chinese Dragon Actually Existed, Just a Lot Longer Ago Than Myth Would Suggest, A Lot Longer

I have quietly been working on a somewhat secret literary and archeological project that would take Chinese pre-history much further back than the obligatory 5,000 years so often invoked by Chinese and western scholars. Now, I'm talking about proving that the birth of China as a distinct culture and nation-state should perhaps be moved back a few thousands years...not millions. But, perhaps I should, based upon the discovery of, well...a creature that bares more than a little resemblance to the Chinese dragon. I kid you not. See the story below from China Daily.
Protorosaurs are a group of carnivorous (meat-eating) reptiles who lived in the Triassic Period about 206-248 million years ago.

Science magazine, the leading international weekly journal of science, published on Friday an article about the discovery of the Triassic marine protorosaur which has an extremely long neck in Southwest China's Guizhou Province.

It is the first time a protorosaur has been discovered in China, says Li Chun, the lead author of the article.

The strange long-necked fossil creature, named Dinocephalosaurus orientalis, has not been found anywhere else in the world, says the researcher with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Two fossil specimens of the protorosaur were found in a marine limestone formation dating back to the Middle Triassic Period (230 million years ago) near Xinmin of Guizhou Province in 2002 and collected by the institute. One is the reptile's skull and neck fossil and another is its trunk.

"They have been the only fossil evidence of the creature we've got so far," Li says.

Xu has studied the specimens and completed the article in co-operation with Olivier Rieppel from the Field Museum in Chicago and Michael C. LaBarbera from the University of Chicago.

They found the protorosaur, which has a 1.7-metre-long neck and a trunk less than 1 metre long, was a marine species. "So it is unlike most protorosaurs which were living on land," says Li.

According to him, neck elongation is a derived character of protorosaurs. Dinocephalosaurus share additional diagnostic characters with the other protorosaurs, such as elongated cervical ribs and very low neural spines on the neck vertebrae.

But its limbs indicate full marine habits - and different from all the other protorosaurs, which retain juvenile characteristics throughout adulthood, they are relatively short and broad.

Also, the researchers say although the fossil reptile has a long neck similar to the giraffe-necked protorosaur Tanystropheus found in Europe, its strange form evolved from an adaption mechanism different from the one that created its European relative.

According to the article, the neck of Guizhou's Dinocephalosaurus incorporates 25 elongated vertebrae while Tanystropheus in Europe has 12.

Tanystropheus adopted an extreme "giraffe-neck" developmental programme with only a moderate increase in the number of cervical vertebrae.

Dinocephalosaurus shows a lesser elongation of individual neck vertebrae but an increase in their number.

"That means the elongation of the neck is only convergent in the two species," Lu says.

Through research, the paleontologists also disclosed the unique hunting method of the strange creature.

As its slender neck positions the head well in front of the sturdy body, it could closely approach potential prey even before its target could make out the profile of the predator in dimly-lit waters.

Given the length and slenderness of the cervical ribs, the strange protorosaur was very flexible. Contraction of muscles and bridging the intervertebral joints would enable it to rapidly straighten its neck, while the ribs would simultaneously splay outward.

The consequent increase of the esophageal volume would create suction such that the animal would essentially swallow the pressure wave created as its head lunged forward. This would result in an almost perfect strike at prey in water.

Similar to crocodiles, the fossil shows concave-convex dental margins with fang-like teeth on both upper and lower jaws. The tooth arrangement would have helped the animal to secure its prey once caught.

According to Li, his research was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China.

During the past five years, the foundation has supported researchers to make field studies which have harvested a large amount of valuable fossil specimens from the Triassic Period. Many fossilized animals were found first in the country and Asia.

"We need more time to unveil the secrets hidden in them," he says.
China Daily
  

5:27 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The True Bush Family Legacy Finally Hits Mainstream...

I can hardly stay seated as I type these words because of the adrenaline rush that is commanding me to jump up and down and howl with excitement. Dear readers, for more years than you care to know about, I have been trying to get the story of Prescott Bush's long-documented history as Adolph Hitler's American banker from out of the Congressional Record and into the mainstream press. It has finally happened! I can take none of the credit, other than to know that my voice and keyboard were among the legions of other serious researchers of the shameful Bush family legacy always working the story, hoping to break through the strange crystal box that has long enveloped the Bush family, protecting it to a degree unlike any other American political family.

Oh, excuse me--who is Prescott Bush, you ask? He was the father of Bush 41 and the grandfather of bush 43. He was the man who was censured by the United States Congress in 1942 under the Trading With the Enemy Act and stripped of his Nazi businesses--almost a year into the war to defeat the Nazi killing machine! Prescott had been at it for a long time, too. He and a few of his confederates had financed Hitler's rise from a Munich beer hall in the mid 1920's to the pinnacle of murderous power as the Fuhrer of the Third Reich. Without cash and munitions there never would have been an effective Nazi Party. Prescott Bush and his anti-democracy cohorts made certain Hitler had plenty of both.

I prattle on--instead I want you to read the article below from today's The Guardian. There will be plenty of time for me to write further on this, after all, I have been on this story for many, many years.
How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power

Rumours of a link between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. Now the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy Act are still being felt by today's president.

Ben Aris in Berlin and Duncan Campbell in Washington
Saturday September 25, 2004
The Guardian

George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator's action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

The debate over Prescott Bush's behaviour has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet chatter about the "Bush/Nazi" connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis' plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler's rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.

Remarkably, little of Bush's dealings with Germany has received public scrutiny, partly because of the secret status of the documentation involving him. But now the multibillion dollar legal action for damages by two Holocaust survivors against the Bush family, and the imminent publication of three books on the subject are threatening to make Prescott Bush's business history an uncomfortable issue for his grandson, George W, as he seeks re-election.
Please read the rest of this quite lengthy article--I offer only one caveat, there is more they could have asserted with authority regarding motives and intentions but obviously chose not to do so in this litigious age: The Guardian

I want to thank Professor Paul Brennan, a colleague of mine at the Beijing Foreign Studies University for the heads-up; Paul spied the story earlier than I did and immediately alerted me via e-mail. A tip of the keyboard to you, Paul.
  

4:19 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




From The Experts: This Administration is "guilty of a gross military, administrative and moral failure."

I am, of course, preaching to the choir in these pages. As far as I know, Simon and Conrad are the only conservatives that frequent these pages, and that is out of friendship and the goodness of their hearts--yes, they both have good hearts and minds and, on social justice issues, they are certainly centrists if not flat-out progressives.

I wish I had more conservative folks with open minds dropping in. My meager efforts might at least begin to persuade some of them to consider the catastrophe of four more years of George W. Bush. As inconsequential as I know my words are in the campaign to prevent this looming calamity, I will soldier on in the good fight primarily because I do not know how to quit. Therefore, below you will find excerpts of a Paul Krugman column in today's The New York Times:
Long after it was obvious to everyone else that we were engaged in an escalating guerrilla war, Bush appointees clung to the belief that they were fighting a handful of dead-enders and foreign terrorists.

As a result, they casually swelled the ranks of our foes - remember, Moktada al-Sadr was never going to be our friend, but he didn't have to be our enemy. They even treated Iraqi security forces with contempt, not bothering to provide them with adequate training or equipment.

In an analysis titled "Inexcusable Failure," Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies details how the U.S. "failed to treat the Iraqis as partners in the counterinsurgency effort." U.S. officials, he declares, are "guilty of a gross military, administrative and moral failure."

That failure continues. All the evidence suggests that Bush officials still think that one more military push - after the U.S. election, of course - will end the insurgency. They're still not taking the task of fighting a sustained guerrilla war seriously.

"Three months into its new mission," The New York Times reported, "the military command in charge of training and equipping Iraqi security forces has fewer than half of its permanent headquarters personnel in place."

At the root of this folly is a continuing refusal to face uncomfortable facts. Confronted with a bleak C.I.A. assessment of the Iraq situation - one that matches the judgment of just about every independent expert - Mr. Bush's response is that "they were just guessing." "In many ways," Mr. Cordesman writes, "the administration's senior spokesmen still seem to live in a fantasyland."

Fantasyland extended to the Rose Garden yesterday, where Mr. Bush said polls asking Iraqis whether their nation was on the right track were more positive than similar polls asking Americans about their outlook - and he seemed to consider that a good sign.

Where is Mr. Bush taking us? As the reality of Iraq gets worse, his explanations of our goals get ever vaguer. "The security of our world," Mr. Bush told the U.N., "is found in the advancing rights of mankind."

He doesn't really believe that. After all, he continues to praise Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, even as Mr. Putin strangles democratic institutions. The subtext of Mr. Bush's bombast is that because he can't bring himself to admit a mistake, he refuses to give up on his effort to turn Iraq into a docile client state - an effort that is doomed unless he can figure out a way to come up with a few hundred thousand more troops.
The New York Times
  

1:05 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Friday, September 24, 2004

Texas Two-Stepping While Iraq Burns...

Of the many benighted traits of the Bush family during the 20th Century, self-delusion was not one of them. More than a little sadly, the same cannot be said about the current ranking member of the family. George the 2nd, the only admitted substance-abuser of the dynastic clan, has taken the archetypal delusions and denial of the addictive personality to new heights--primarily due to the fact that while American voters have elevated more than a few fools to lead us, there have been precious few addicts among them.

More's the pity, because this dangerous "dry-drunk" is delusional about the nation's worst foreign policy decision in almost half a century. And, by his own admission, he once knew better, back when he was still partying and therefore less arrogant and a great deal more human. Wet-drunks are hell on the furniture, spouses and automobiles, but a dry-drunk with his reactionary finger on the trigger of the United States military is Hell on Earth for one and all.

Please read Bob Herbert's column in today's The New York Times, excerpted below, and you will understand why I can write so disrespectfully of the man who is the leader of the country I love so dearly.

George W. Bush was a supporter of the war in Vietnam. For a while.

As he explained in his autobiography, "A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House":

"My inclination was to support the government and the war until proven wrong, and that only came later, as I realized we could not explain the mission, had no exit strategy, and did not seem to be fighting to win."

How is it that he ultimately came to see the fiasco in Vietnam so clearly but remains so blind to the frighteningly similar realities of his own war in Iraq? Mr. Bush cannot explain our mission in Iraq and has nothing resembling an exit strategy, and his troops - hobbled by shortages of personnel and by potentially fatal American and Iraqi political considerations - are certainly not fighting to win.

As the situation in Iraq moves from bad to worse, the president, based on his public comments, seems to be edging further and further from reality. This is disturbing, to say the least. The news from Iraq is filled with reports of kidnappings and beheadings, of people pleading desperately for their lives, of American soldiers being ambushed and killed, of clusters of Iraqis being blown to pieces by suicide bombers, and of the prospects for a credible election in January tumbling toward nil. ...

The president said he is personally optimistic and he delivered an upbeat assessment of conditions in Iraq to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday. Iraq, he said, is well on its way to being "secure, democratic, federal and free."

If you spend more than a little time immersed in the world according to Karl Rove, you'll find that words lose even the remotest connection to reality. They become nothing more than tools designed to achieve political ends. So it's not easy to decipher what the president believes about Iraq.

This is scary. With Americans, Iraqis and others dying horribly in the long dark night of this American-led war, the world needs more from the president of the United States than the fool's gold of his empty utterances.

Perhaps someone can dislodge the president from Karl's clutches, shake him and tell him that his war is a tremendous tragedy with implications far beyond the election in November.

At the moment there is no evidence the president understands anything about the war. He led the nation into it with false pretenses. He never mobilized sufficient numbers of troops. He seemed to believe the war was over in May 2003. And he seems not to know how to proceed now.

The tragic lesson of Vietnam is staring the president in the face. But he'll have to become better acquainted with the real world before he can even begin to learn from it.
The New York Times
  

10:38 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Value of Human Life Viewed Through the Distorted Mirror of Ethnicity, Geography and Wealth

Sometimes numbers say it all; sometimes cold, basic math best illuminates the most complex human issues when words and passion fail. This is one of those times. Indeed, this is a story of our times. A time when human numbers are as much in the news now as they were during the bad-old body-count days when I was a young man and for a decade the day-by-day American experience began and ended with the arithmetic of death. So important was it that a chant based upon its impact drove an incumbent president into a premature retirement. Some of you must remember it: "Hey, hey, L-B-J, how many kids did you kill today?"

Read the very short news article linked below and perhaps you can tell me what you think it says about our world and its priorities. The contrasting numbers that should jump starkly into your mind are not anywhere in the wire service filler. If my thoughts are too opaque--and they certainly are often enough--and you do not get it, start a comment string and we can hash it about a bit. Please...
BEIJING, China (Reuters) -- Floods in China killed more than 1,000 people this year, destroyed 650,000 village homes and caused 64.7 billion yuan ($7.82 billion) in direct economic losses, the official Xinhua News agency said.
China's flood season starts around June and ends in September. Widespread floods in 2002 killed more than 1,500 people.

This year's floods killed 1,029 people and affected about 114.7 million people, Xinhua said.

China put the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest hydro-electric project, on alert earlier this month as floods upstream on the Yangtze River in Sichuan province and in the huge Chongqing municipality killed more than 100 people.

The dam was built to stop centuries of flooding on the world's third-longest river, which did not overflow as much as in previous years, state media said.

John Sparrow, a spokesman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Beijing, said this year's disasters still showed prevention measures in China needed to be rethought.

Large investment in flood-control defences could help to control big rivers, but remote areas remained vulnerable to climate change and enormous rainfalls, he said.
A tip of the keyboard to a dear friend and reader for alerting me to this "little" story; he wishes not to be acknowledged by name.

CNN.com
 

6:28 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Wednesday, September 22, 2004

If You Love America, If You Love Inspired, Transcendent Writing, You MUST Read This Post, Please...

There are only a handful of American writers who can even approach the clean, elegant, powerfully compelling words that regularly flow from E.L. Doctorow. He has chosen to place a small piece of his finest prose in a very small newspaper, The East Hampton Star, in East Hampton, New York.

Because it is such a small newspaper, without a glitzy website--just great writing against a plain off-white background with nary a speck of html--for fear that it will not stay available for longterm linking, I am reproducing it here in its entirety. Please let me know what you think and feel after reading it. (I want to thank my lovely wife Ellen, of The Crackpot Chronicles, my New York gal, for spying the piece and calling it to my attention.)
The Unfeeling President

I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-Day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.

But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass destruction he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.

He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the 1,000 dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be.

They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life . . . they come to his desk as a political liability, which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.

How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that, rather than controlling terrorism, his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice.

He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to.

Yet this president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing -- to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends.

A war will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children. He is the president who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead, he does not feel for the 35 million of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the 40 percent who cannot afford health insurance, he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills - it is amazing for how many people in this country this president does not feel.

But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest 1 percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the quality of air in coal mines to save the coal miners' jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a-half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class.

And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it.

But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember the millions of people here and around the world who marched against the war. It was extraordinary, this spontaneous aroused oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over he world most of the time.

But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.

The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic trouble.

Finally, the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail. How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.
The East Hampton Star
  

7:11 PM / Editor / permalink    2 comments




There Is a Lesson Here For Us All...

As a journalist, and a teacher of journalism, there is much I want to say about MemoGate, but it will have to wait a day or two. My obligation to deadlines in both writing journalism and teaching journalism has me strapped for discretionary time to write in these pages.

What I am going to do is point you to a place where all of us who write nonfiction for public dissemination should spend some time in the wake of this journalism scandal: Ethics 101. It is courtesy of the Poynter Institute, a great place online for "Everything You Need To Be A Better Journalist."

I believe it will be more useful to you than another shrill screed--left or right--on the whole CBS/Memo affair at this moment. Give it a click. If you care about news and how it is reported--in every medium--this is a place you need to know about. Take my word for it. Please.
Poynter Online - What Journalists Can Learn From CBS News' Experience
  

1:32 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Monday, September 20, 2004

Shrub Taking Well-Deserved Hits From Friendly Fire

It's going to be difficult for Mr. Rove's attack-dogs to mute Shrub's most recent critics of his military leadership--they are major figures of his own party. They were out in force on the Sunday talk shows. Of course, the only one I could watch was "Wolf Blitzer's Late Edition" on CNN. There, South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham (of Monicagate/impeachment infamy) was particularly harsh on Shrub's military strategy in Iraq.

Mr. Graham refused, however, to even consider that the war in Iraq might be a "Civil War." He insisted that it was a war against "terrorists," "foreign fighters," and "enemies of democracy." What was striking, though, was his belief that the war in Iraq was the equivalent of World War II! He said the war could last years and that, like World War II, we must settle for nothing less than a total military victory. Yes, I kid you not.

The GOPers will slap down anyone who wants to use the Vietnam War as an analogy for Iraq, but it's okay to invoke World War II? A war fought by most of the sovereign nations on Earth against two major world powers who had attacked their neighbors with overwhelming military force in an attempt to capture and hold great swatches of world real estate. The only thing Iraq had in common with the Axis forces of 70 years ago was a sick, sadistic tyrant who mimicked Hitler in style but not in magnitude of murder and debasement of humankind.

To suggest otherwise is utter oral rubbish from people one would think should know better. To compare the war in Iraq to World War II is to debase history and the men and women who truly did save democracy with the sacrifice of their lives and limbs. Democracy was not under attack in Iraq--it's never been there, ever.

The United States wasn't under attack from Iraq, nor was Great Britain; none of Iraq's neighbors were under attack, they were not under even the threat of attack. Saddam's regime was too crippled by the Gulf War and more than a decade of economic sanctions to harm anyone other than his own people, which of course he did with a sadistic glee that is almost unfathomable to the normal human mind.

Folks, if anyone believes that a "total military victory" in Iraq is now possible I ask them to name me just one occupying army in history that was successful in defeating a nationalist guerrilla force in the long-run? Just one. Please. There was a time in Iraq when it was possible, before the insurgency and the fuel of "occupation-hatred" had time to congeal. Now? Forget about it.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Leading members of President Bush's Republican Party on Sunday criticized mistakes and "incompetence" in his Iraq policy and called for an urgent ground offensive to retake insurgent sanctuaries.

In appearances on news talk shows, Republican senators also urged Bush to be more open with the American public after the disclosure of a classified CIA report that gave a gloomy outlook for Iraq and raised the possibility of civil war.

"The fact is, we're in deep trouble in Iraq ... and I think we're going to have to look at some recalibration of policy," Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

"We made serious mistakes," said Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican who has campaigned at Bush's side this year after patching up a bitter rivalry.

McCain, speaking on "Fox News Sunday," cited as mistakes the toleration of looting after the successful U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and failures to secure Iraq's borders or prevent insurgents from establishing strongholds within the country. ...

After the CIA report was disclosed on Thursday, Kerry accused the president of living in a "fantasy world of spin" about Iraq and of not telling the truth about the growing chaos.

McCain said Bush had been "perhaps not as straight as maybe we'd like to see." ...

Sen. Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also criticized the administration's handling of Iraq's reconstruction. Sen. Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also criticized the administration's handling of Iraq's reconstruction. ...

Sen. John Kyl, like McCain an Arizona Republican, said, "Allowing the Iraqis to make the decisions not to go into some of these sanctuaries, I think, turns out to have not been a good decision, which we're going to have to correct now by going in with our Marines and Army divisions."

Democratic Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, speaking on ABC, accused the administration of delaying an offensive out of concern it would hurt Bush's bid to win reelection on Nov. 2.

"The only thing I can figure as to why they're not doing it with a sense of urgency is that they don't want to do it before the election and they want to make it seem like everything is status quo," Biden said.
Reuters


 

2:30 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Sunday, September 19, 2004

The Best Blog Quote of the New Century is at The Peking Duck

Some might quarrel with my hyperbolic ranking in the headline above, but I believe history will bear me out. I want to know what you think; even more importantly, I want you to go to The Peking Duck and read the post linked below. Please!

If only uncurious george had listened to pop:
If for any reason you have a problem with that link, go to: Urban Legends Reference Pages
 

11:40 AM / Editor / permalink    2 comments



Saturday, September 18, 2004

Judge Says To Hell With the "Memos," I Want Everything, Now!

This should be interesting. The military has redundancy built into just about everything. If files were "sanitized" in Texas a few years back at the behest of then Governor Bush, chances are copies are somewhere in DOD. Will we finally get 110% proof that Shrub was a no-show shirker of his obligation to the Air National Guard to go with the 100% proof that has been available for years?
WASHINGTON - A federal judge has ordered the Pentagon to find and make public by next week any unreleased files about President Bush's Vietnam-era Air National Guard service to resolve a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by The Associated Press.

U.S. District Judge Harold Baer Jr. handed down the order late Wednesday in New York. The AP lawsuit already has led to the disclosure of previously unreleased flight logs from Bush's days piloting F-102A fighters and other jets.

Pentagon officials told Baer they plan to have their search complete by Monday. Baer ordered the Pentagon to hand over the records to the AP by Sept. 24 and provide a written statement by Sept. 29 detailing the search for more records.

"We're hopeful the Department of Defense (news - web sites) will provide a full accounting of the steps it has taken, as the judge ordered, so the public can have some assurance that there are no documents being withheld," said AP lawyer David Schulz.

White House officials have said Bush ordered the Pentagon earlier this year to conduct a thorough search for the president's records, and officials allowed reporters to review everything that was gathered back in February.

Through a series of requests under the federal open records law and a subsequent suit, the AP uncovered the flight logs, which were not part of the records the White House released earlier this year. ...

The future president joined the Texas Air National Guard in 1968, when he graduated from Yale. He spent more than a year on active duty learning how to fly and then mostly flew in the one-seat F-102A fighters until April 1972.

The pilot logs show a shift to flights in two-seat trainer jets in March 1972, shortly before Bush quit flying. Former Air National Guard officials say that could have been because F-102A jets were not available for Bush to fly or because of other reasons, such as concerns about Bush's flight performance.

Bush skipped his required yearly medical exam in 1972 in the months after he stopped flying in April. Bush has said he moved to Alabama to work on the unsuccessful Senate campaign of a family friend.

Bush never showed up for Guard service between late April and mid-October 1972. He won approval to train with an Alabama Air National Guard unit during September, October and November 1972, but more than a dozen members of the unit at that time say they never saw him there.

The only direct record of Bush appearing at the Alabama unit's base is a January 1973 dental exam performed at that base. Bush's Texas commanders wrote in May 1973 they never saw him between May 1972 and April 1973, a time when his pay records show he trained on 14 days.

Although military regulations allowed commanders to order two years of active duty for guardsmen who missed more than three straight months of drills, that never happened to Bush. Commanders had leeway at the time to allow guardsmen to make up for missed drills.
Associated Press
  

3:25 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Some "Rather" Straight Talk About Journalism

I will weigh in more heavily on "RatherGate" when all of the facts are known. Mr. Rather, a journalist's journalist for as long as I've been a journalist, and for at least a decade or so longer than that--I'm old but Dan's really getting up in years--is taking an old-fashioned ass whupping from every corner of the business--and I'm not talking about bloggers. I'm talking about the professional, mainstream media; he's getting sliced, diced and hammered by practitioners of the art, craft and discipline of reporting news.

Of course, that is not the corner of the "news" world where his troubles began; that corner of a much larger world is made up of bloggers, a very new phenomenon in the long history of how humans disseminate information: self-styled, self-taught, self-edited, self-motivated non-professional "reporters" of "information." Please keep that in mind as you read the exceedingly insightful, provocative column below from The New Republic Online, written by Telis Demos, although the "blogging" of "Rathergate" is not the focus of the piece, quite the contrary. That is food for thought in posts to come. Since The New Republic Online is a paid subscription service, the essay is produced here in full.
Being a media critic this week has been pretty easy. The bloggers and pundits who studied kerning, superscripting, and IBM typewriters have been vindicated: Dan Rather and CBS most likely presented forged documents alleging that George W. Bush did not honorably complete his National Guard duties. From there, conservative critics have drawn their conclusions pretty easily: Stanley Kurtz of National Review Online argued that Rather violated journalistic ethics in order "to save the faltering Kerry campaign." In The Christian Science Monitor, Michael Caputo writes: "Only smart politics and hard work can recover a campaign in disarray. Somehow, John Kerry's allies forgot this rule. So did Dan Rather." In other words, Rather and CBS were doing exactly what Fox News, The Washington Times, and the rest of the right-wing shadow media do: advocating for their side under the guise of reporting the news.

But not all bad journalism is created equal. Dan Rather may have indeed been duped, but even if that is the case, his mistake was far less problematic than the offenses against journalism perpetrated daily by Fox News and other unabashedly conservative media outlets. CBS News may be many things, but it is not the left-wing equivalent of Fox News. And we ought to be much more concerned about the willful journalistic contortions of the latter than the alleged sloppiness of the former.

Let's start by taking as a given what conservatives have long assumed about Dan Rather: that he's a partisan Democrat whose political beliefs infect his journalism. Under these circumstances, Rather could be guilty of a particular kind of bias--namely, not vetting sources that supported his inclinations as closely as he would have vetted sources that contradicted them. At worst, Rather is guilty of sloppily fact-checking the veracity of forged documents because of his political views--and of therefore reporting lies as truth.

If this last offense sounds familiar, it's because the right-wing media does it all the time. In February 2004, for instance, Fox News broadcasters Brit Hume, Sean Hannity, and John Gibson all showed a photo of John Kerry standing next to Jane Fonda on a podium at an anti-Vietnam War rally in the 1970s. It turns out the photo was fake. Did hordes of media critics demand retractions from Hume, Hannity, and Gibson? Of course not. As a result, it seems likely that plenty of voters continue to believe the picture was real. Another example: Hannity, on May 18, said, "The only thing [John Kerry has] been consistent about in his entire career is raising taxes, because he supported tax increases 350 times." Hannity was using a number produced by the Bush campaign that was arrived at by allowing votes against tax cuts to count as support of a tax increase, and by double-, triple-, or quadruple-counting tax votes in budget bills with multiple parts. Hannity, of course, declined to present this contextual information.

Why did Fox News get away with presenting a forgery? Why does Hannity get away with recycling Bush talking points that don't stand up to any measure of intellectual honesty? Because Fox reporters hide behind the conceit that they are opinion journalists, and media critics therefore hold them to a lower standard--as if being in the business of opinion journalism frees Fox from the obligation to deal in facts.

And that's why Fox's particular brand of bias is so much more dangerous than Rather's: The (unfortunate) conventions of opinion journalism don't demand that they stick scrupulously to truth; nor are they expected to apologize when they report blatant falsehoods. And so the record as reported by Fox News goes uncorrected in the public's mind, and talking points enter our discourse with a pretense of truth. Let's concede, for argument's sake, that most Fox viewers know they are watching opinion journalism. Does this really lessen their expectation that the opinions presented will be based on evidence that is basically true? Of course not. Viewers watching "60 Minutes," of course, also expect that the reporting they see is true. The difference is that viewers of "60 Minutes" may soon hear a correction. And even if CBS doesn't offer a correction, media critics will let Americans know if they were entitled to one.

Rather's critics might say that his transgressions are worse than Hannity's because CBS presents itself as practicing news journalism, while Hannity does not. But Rather didn't offer on-air opinions. He presented possibly forged documents--and presenting forged documents is unacceptable whether you're a news journalist or an opinion journalist. In fact it's equally unacceptable in both cases.

It should be clear from this week's torrent of commentary that Rather is held to very high standards by his critics, which have included not only the blogosphere but The Washington Post, The New York Times, ABC, and NBC--in other words, everyone else in the mainstream media. No one at the Post, the Times, ABC, or NBC is doing the same for Fox's journalists. That, in the end, is the biggest distinction between CBS and Fox. It's also why, even if you believe the worst about Dan Rather, he's ultimately less of a threat to journalistic integrity than Sean Hannity.

Telis Demos is a reporter-researcher at TNR.
The New Republic Online
  

1:52 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Friday, September 17, 2004

Last Update: Ivan Hitting Home...

All is well in Ocean Springs; Ivan sidled a little bit east and came across Dauphin Island, Alabama--great memories from that little spit of party sand and surf--and came in on the eastern shore of Mobile. While that was still too close for comfort, and Ocean Springs got slapped around by hurricane force winds and tidal surge during the early morning hours, I spoke with my sister a short while ago and a lot of downed tree limbs was the worst of it for the old beach house I love so dearly. My mother slept through it all...I am greatly relieved.
  

2:58 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The "C Word" Comes Out of the Intelligence Closet -- As in "Civil War" in Iraq

Apparently I am not alone in saying that the thing that did not end with "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq might very well have a name at last: "The Iraqi Civil War." This non-news was in a classified National Intelligence Estimate that bush received in July, but is only now leaking out. In July! If there was that much official "pessimism" some two months ago, what in the hell is bush smirking and jiving so optimistically about these days? It's blood and body parts in hell from the news I'm reading and seeing on CNN! Or is that the "liberal media" using CGI and actors to manufacture unpatriotic news? If so, here is a dose of make believe from The New York Times:
WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 - A classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared for President Bush in late July spells out a dark assessment of prospects for Iraq, government officials said Wednesday.

The estimate outlines three possibilities for Iraq through the end of 2005, with the worst case being developments that could lead to civil war, the officials said. The most favorable outcome described is an Iraq whose stability would remain tenuous in political, economic and security terms.

"There's a significant amount of pessimism," said one government official who has read the document, which runs about 50 pages. ...

As described by the officials, the pessimistic tone of the new estimate stands in contrast to recent statements by Bush administration officials, including comments on Wednesday by Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, who asserted that progress was being made.

"You know, every step of the way in Iraq there have been pessimists and hand-wringers who said it can't be done," Mr. McClellan said at a news briefing. "And every step of the way, the Iraqi leadership and the Iraqi people have proven them wrong because they are determined to have a free and peaceful future."

President Bush, who was briefed on the new intelligence estimate, has not significantly changed the tenor of his public remarks on the war's course over the summer, consistently emphasizing progress while acknowledging the difficulties.
There is a whole lot more in this story in The New York Times

Addendum: If the "C Word" doesn't grab you, how about the "I Word"? As in "Illegal War":
UNITED NATIONS, New York The decision by President George W. Bush to go to war in Iraq was "illegal" because it didn't have UN Security Council approval, according to Secretary General Kofi Annan.

In an interview with the BBC World Service on Wednesday, Annan also said that the wave of violence engulfing Iraq puts in doubt the national elections scheduled for January.

There could not be "credible elections if the security conditions continue as they are now," he said.
International Herald Tribune
  

1:36 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Thursday, September 16, 2004

Update: Ivan Hitting Home...

I have just spoken with my sister, Sylvia, by telephone; she, her long-time boyfriend, John, and my mother chose to ride out Ivan in our family home on Front Beach Road in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. My beautiful sister is a trooper, with Ivan expected to make landfall in about three hours--almost smack-dab in our front yard--she was sleeping! I woke her up; of course, she and John had spent all day doing hard manual labor preparing the beautiful old beach house for the strongest storm to hit the northern Gulf Coast since Camille in 1969.

At the moment, Ivan is a little less than 100 miles south-southwest of Mobile Bay; it is expected to make landfall somewhere close to the Alabama-Mississippi Stateline. That's about 15-20 miles from mother's front door! In other words, with a storm of this size, that is a direct hit. If you click on the link below, you will see that the waves are already washing over the beach road in Pascagoula, Mississippi--and that was some hours ago, when it was still daylight. Pascagoula is the town that borders Ocean Springs on the east. It is the hometown of Trent Lott, my uncle's next door neighbor; yes, that Trent Lott. While he is a longtime "family friend," he and I have been sworn enemies for many years (see this link). In fact, the only thing I can feel good about right now is that Trent's house on Front Beach Road in Pascagoula is going to get hit at least as hard as mother's. Damn--but that means my Uncle's will too.

Now, why didn't my mom, Sylvia, and John evacuate? It is because my family has a great deal of experience with hurricanes. As long as you are not in any physical danger, the worst part of any hurricane is water damage to the inside of your home when the storm is gone. If you can't be in your home immediately afterwards, whatever water that gets into your home is going to leave you with a major restoration project. Sylvia, mother, and John are in absolutely no physical danger. The fortress-like strength of the old beach house is remarkable; it is even more so now after a major renovation was recently completed under the supervision of my incredibly gifted sister.

Much of the stunning beauty that Sylvia has added to a home that was already priceless would be severely damaged by just a small breach anywhere giving entrance to the torrential rain water that Ivan carries with it. The seawater cannot get up that hill: the tidal surge is estimated to be around 15 feet; Camille had a 21-foot tidal surge and it didn't get up to the house.

Am I worried about them? Damn right I am--because I am on the other side of the world and cannot be with them. This is the first time in my life that I have not been with my family when a major hurricane has hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast. If I was there I wouldn't be worried at all. If you prepare correctly, if you know what NOT to do during a hurricane, you will be just fine. Am I whistling past a graveyard? Will I want to drown myself if any one of them is harmed because they stayed? Yes! Oh, god, yes!
MSNBC - Gulf Coast feels Ivan's wrath; 2 deaths reported

Waves from Hurricane Ivan splash over the road Wednesday in Pascagoula, Miss. Residents of Gulf Coast towns have mostly been evacuated to avoid the storm, which is expected to make landfall near Mobile, Ala., on Thursday morning.
MSNBC

Here is the link to ABC Television in Biloxi, WLOX.

Here is the link to NBC Television in Mobile, WPMI.
  

2:28 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Ivan, Hitting Home...

If Hurricane Ivan follows its indicated path, sometime in the next 24 hours it will smash into my mother's front door. Yes, Ivan is heading directly at my little hometown of Ocean Springs, Mississippi, where my mother and sister still live in our family home on Front Beach Road. The only thing between them and the storm surge when it comes are a few feet of sand, the sloping grassy hill the old beach house sits on, and my mother's prayers.

As my readers know, I believe in no god other than humanity itself, but today I wished I did so that I could pray. Linda, my first wife, and my son, Joseph and his wife, Michelle, live in New Orleans, which is in at least as much danger--from flooding--as the Gulf Coast. The hours ahead of me will be anxious indeed.

I have spoken to my son and my sister within the hour. My sister, Sylvia, and my mother, will probably ride the storm out instead of evacuating--that was my advice and Sylvia agrees. Before you think us crazy, let me explain. The house was built in 1893 by carpenters and builders who knew what they were doing. The house, sitting on the lovely little hill that slopes gently down to the beach, has weathered every storm in the past 111 years. That includes Camille, which struck in August 1969--then, and still now, the most powerful hurricane to ever strike North America.

Camille hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast with 210 MPH sustained winds and a 21-foot tidal surge. Almost all of Biloxi, Mississippi, the big town just across the bay from Ocean Springs, was devastated; some 300 people died that terrible night. I and Linda and our 14-month-old baby son, Joseph, were alone in her family home in Biloxi on the back bay--Biloxi is a long, thin peninsula with the Gulf of Mexico on one side and Back Bay on the other. My father was alone in the beach house in Ocean Springs, facing the Gulf and Camille.

I was terrified for him, and he was terrified for us. He got the better of it. The old beach house took everything Camille threw at it and lost only some roof shingles; the tremendous pounding of the water turned the sloping hill that saved him and the house into a cliff with a cave. My wife, our baby Joseph, and I had a more eventful night. It should suffice it to say that at one point--right about midnight, when the peninsula that was Biloxi was no more, the Gulf had joined Back Bay and there was only raging seawater where once there had been streets and houses--I was trying to swim in what had been our backyard at the peak of the storm. My stupid mission was an attempt to save my brand new car from being swept too far away.

At a crucial moment, Linda's plaintive cries finally reached my mind and I realized the insanity of what I was doing: Even if I was able to swim through the waves and wind and reach the car, what was I going to do? Hook my arm around a part of it and go wherever it was going? With some difficulty I was able to swim back to the house; the next several hours were some of the longest of my life. The water kept rising, the wind kept roaring, and we had no place to go; the water was either going to rise too high and we were going to drown, or it was going to rise only so far, the house would stand, and we would be alright.

The water reached about three feet high in the house; but obviously we survived. In the morning we awoke to a Mississippi Gulf Coast that would mostly have to be rebuilt. We were under martial law for many weeks; with all the bridges damaged, we could not travel far. But a whole community pulled together and while it would never be the same, we learned much about our neighbors and ourselves.

The reason I do not want my mother and sister to leave the house is because I know the hill and the house can take this new storm, but the roads and bridges probably can not. If they leave, they may not be able to return to the house for a very long time.

New Orleans, my son and his wife, and Linda, are another matter: if the storm comes ashore too far west of Biloxi, around the Rigolets, then the old below-sea-level city will flood completely and the consequences will be catastrophic. However, it will have to make a perfect hit for that to happen. The Army Corps of Engineers have done many studies and we know exactly where a storm must strike for the worst to happen. So far no hurricane ever has. At the moment it does not appear like it will happen this time. But, they are ready to evacuate within a moment's notice; Joseph is prepared, rooms are booked in Galveston, Texas and the car is packed; he will protect his wife and his mother.

I know the hill and the old beach house will protect Sylvia and mother in Ocean Springs. Of course, my mother will surely believe it was her prayers.
 

3:38 PM / Editor / permalink    1 comments




Accurate Fakes...uh, Come Again?

The peculiar saga derisively referred to in the blogosphere as "RatherGate" took a truly bizarre turn today. The woman who typed Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian's memos back in 1972, says the sentiments expressed about Mr. bush in the "memos" broadcast on "60 Minutes" are accurate but that they were not typed by her. Folks, this is turning into one of the rousing best stories going; forget the news value, this is novel or movie territory! In the right hands, a story following the paths of the actual damaging memos typed by Marian Carr Knox for her boss in 1972, to the appearance of the "memos" on CBS this week would be better than the "Da Vinci Code"!

I must make a quick personal observation: I have admired Dan Rather for many years; my only personal relationship with him was brief and it came during the O.J. Simpson criminal trial when I was featured on the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather in a series of segments then running called "Eye on America." As a journalist I believe his ethics are above reproach.

He and I have disagreed for years on one issue: what he believes he saw and heard that awful day in Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963, the Kennedy assassination. I have never believed the "Magic Bullet" theory; he is adamant still that one bullet took some miraculous turns and entered and exited both President Kennedy and Governor Connolly--the governor twice!

Dan Rather, from southeast Texas, which is much more like Louisiana and Mississippi than it is Texas, is incapable of reporting a lie. He is capable of making a mistake. We all are. However, I will stack his credibility up against any living journalist in America, period. That's the end of that story.

The "Magic Memos" story is another matter entirely. Please read the excerpts below from The New York Times, and have some fun playing novelist:
HOUSTON, Sept. 14 - The secretary for the squadron commander purported to be the author of now-disputed memorandums questioning President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard said Tuesday that she never typed the documents and believed that they are fakes.

But she also said they accurately reflect the thoughts of the commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, and other memorandums she typed for him about Mr. Bush. "The information in them is correct," the woman, Marian Carr Knox, now 86, said in an interview at her home here. "But I doubt,'' she said, pausing, "it's not anything that I wrote because there are terms in there that are not used by Guards, the format wasn't the way we did it. It looks like someone may have read the originals and put that together."

"We did discuss Bush's conduct and it was a problem Killian was concerned about," Mrs. Knox said. "I think he was writing the memos so there would be some record that he was aware of what was going on and what he had done." But, she said, words like "billets," which appear in the memorandums, were not standard Guard terms.

Mrs. Knox, who was the secretary for the squadron at Ellington Air Force Base from 1957 to 1979, said she recalled Mr. Bush's case and the criticism of him because his record was so unusual. Mr. Killian had her type memorandums recording the problems, she said, and he kept them in a private file under lock and key. She said she had never voted for Mr. Bush because she disliked his record in office. ...

CBS has refused to say how it obtained the documents. But one person at CBS, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed a report in Newsweek that Bill Burkett, a retired National Guard officer who has charged that senior aides to then-Governor Bush had ordered Guard officials to remove damaging information from Mr. Bush's military personnel files, had been a source of the report. This person did not know the exact role he played.

Mr. Burkett declined to return telephone calls to his home near Abilene, Tex. His lawyer, David Van Os, on Tuesday repeatedly refused to say in a telephone interview whether the officer had played a part in supplying the disputed documents to CBS. Mr. Van Os said "the real story is and should be, where was George Bush?" and that Mr. Burkett "is not the proper object of attention."

Mr. Van Os called Mr. Burkett "a man of impeccable honesty who would not permit himself to be a party to anything fake, fraudulent or phony." He also said, in response to questions, and stressing that he was speaking only hypothetically, "If Bill Burkett were to later discover that something he was a party to were fake or phony, as a man of honor who lives by a code of honor of the military, he would not permit the falsity to continue." But, the lawyer hastened to add, "This is not intended to be any kind of specific statement."

Asked what role Mr. Burkett had in raising questions about Mr. Bush's military service, Mr. Van Os said: "If, hypothetically, Bill Burkett or anyone else, any other individual, had prepared or had typed on a word processor as some of the journalists are presuming, without much evidence, if someone in the year 2004 had prepared on a word processor replicas of documents that they believed had existed in 1972 or 1973 -- which Bill Burkett has absolutely not done'' -- then, he continued, "what difference would it make?"
The New York Times
 

3:05 PM / Editor / permalink    2 comments



Tuesday, September 14, 2004

The Nightmare Continues in the "Iraqi Civil War"...

From the Associated Press via The New York Times comes the news of another bloodbath. These marauders know that as long as the carnage continues no stable government of any kind will take root in Iraq. They, whoever they are, know that they will remain in the running for the race to determine who and what will rule Iraq.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- A car bomb exploded near a police station in the Iraqi capital early Tuesday as dozens of people were applying to join the force, killing at least 32 people and wounding 88, officials said.

The blast left a gaping 10-foot crater outside the station at the end of Haifa street, a main Baghdad thoroughfare that has been the scene recently of fierce clashes. Nearby shops and buildings were badly damaged and 10 cars parked nearby were completely wrecked.

Paramedics picked up body parts scattered across the street and put them into boxes. Anguished men lifted charred bodies and lay them gently on stretchers. Helicopters circled.

Health Ministry spokesman Saad Al-Amili said at least 32 people were killed and 88 wounded.

Angry crowds near the site of the blast denounced U.S. forces and interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's government for failing to protect police recruiting centers.

"Such places were targeted before," said Ali Abul-Amir, who was among those trying to join the force but had gone around the corner to buy a drink when the explosion went off.

"I blame Ayad Allawi's government for what happened because they did not take the necessary security measures," he said.

Angry residents also condemned President Bush.

"Bush is a dog," they chanted.

Iraqi police forces have repeatedly been targeted by insurgents who see them as "collaborators" with U.S. forces. Militants are bent on thwarting U.S.-backed efforts to build a strong Iraqi police force capable of securing Iraqi cities ahead of nationwide January elections.

A suicide attacker detonated a car bomb outside the police academy in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk earlier this month as hundreds of trainees and civilians were leaving for the day, killing at least 20 people and wounding 36.
The New York Times
 

5:45 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




It's All Part of Rove's Master Plan, Richard...

A tip of the keyboard to Richard, the author and proprietor of The Peking Duck, and a point to his post:
Jeb bush puts Nader on the Florida ballot

I'm in shock. But I'm not surprised.
The Peking Duck
 

5:19 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Thoughts on Blogging Priorities, China, and Simon World

I am somewhat betwixt and between in these pages of late. As an ex-pat living, teaching and writing in China, I feel guilty when I do not post more often on Chinese affairs. Yet, as an American author, journalist, and teacher of Journalism--at the Beijing Foreign Studies University--I am driven to write about and comment upon the news coming out of America and her wars, both political and military. I have justified this conflict--and it is a conflict, after all, the blogging community I call "home" is in fact China and things Chinese--by my certainty that what happens in America come November, and what happens for the duration of America's wars, will have great impact upon the world. China is the largest single unit of this world, so the affect of things American, politically and militarily, upon China will be substantial at the very least. That is my rationale; I hope you can accept it; I am trying to. I know it drives some readers away from these pages.

I also feel justified in my choice because there are so many excellent bloggers that are reporting emphatically and exceedingly well on China, and the whole of Asia. You know most of the ones I am speaking of, they are sometimes linked to and mentioned in these pages; the others are in my blog roll; and all of them are in the Living in China Blogzine and blogging community. However, there is one blog that I have not mentioned enough, if at all; that is an egregious sin of omission that I must rectify now:

That blog is Simon World; Simon's blog does not only cover matters Chinese and Asian, he makes sure that all of us know what our fellow bloggers are reporting on around Asia. Frankly, I do not know when Simon has time to sleep and maintain his livelihood, but I hope his stamina and dedication holds up, because we need him. In many ways, Simon World is what blogging should be, and will be, if it is going to have the impact upon the flow of information that so many bloggers believe it will.

As a journalist and author from the days before blogging--and even the pc--I do not know how much blogs and blogging will be incorporated into the profession of journalism. I do know that if it does come to play a significant role in the world of news reporting and Op-Ed commentary, it will be because of the efforts of bloggers such as Simon--and not Instapundit. I know I have just offended Simon by offending one of his "models" and perhaps even mentor; but Simon World has the Tennessee law professor beat six ways from Sunday when it comes to intellectual integrity, journalistic instincts, and tenacity in sticking with a story no matter where it might lead.

Oh, I almost forgot, here is Simon's latest edition of:
Asia by blog

The posts that matter by Asian blogs...
Simon World: East Meets Westerner
 

5:10 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Is It Really Worse Than We Think...?

Paul Krugman nails a bush screw-ball and drives it out of the yard. I probably shouldn't use a baseball metaphor in a post about what is going on in Iraq. My defense is that baseball is serious business, art, and passionate pleasure to me. My mind goes to the diamond first whenever I am trying to understand something myself, or I am trying to explain something I do understand to others--in other words, it is almost always my first frame of reference for just about everything in life.

Mr. Krugman's column in today's The New York Times connects with the twisting, diving junk-ball stuff coming out of the bush administration so squarely that his words are like a line-drive that never gets much higher than the leftfield wall but there is never any doubt it's a dinger. I am going to post it in full because I want it as a permanent record in these pages. He titles it: Taking On the Myth
On Sunday, a celebrating crowd gathered around a burning U.S. armored vehicle. Then a helicopter opened fire; a child and a journalist for an Arabic TV news channel were among those killed. Later, the channel repeatedly showed the journalist doubling over and screaming, "I'm dying; I'm dying."

Such scenes, which enlarge the ranks of our enemies by making America look both weak and brutal, are inevitable in the guerrilla war President Bush got us into. Osama bin Laden must be smiling.

U.S. news organizations are under constant pressure to report good news from Iraq. In fact, as a Newsweek headline puts it, "It's worse than you think." Attacks on coalition forces are intensifying and getting more effective; no-go zones, which the military prefers to call "insurgent enclaves," are spreading -- even in Baghdad. We're losing ground.

And the losses aren't only in Iraq. Al Qaeda has regrouped. The invasion of Iraq, intended to demonstrate American power, has done just the opposite: nasty regimes around the world feel empowered now that our forces are bogged down. When a Times reporter asked Mr. Bush about North Korea's ongoing nuclear program, "he opened his palms and shrugged."

Yet many voters still believe that Mr. Bush is doing a good job protecting America.

If Senator John Kerry really has advisers telling him not to attack Mr. Bush on national security, he should dump them. When Dick Cheney is saying vote Bush or die, responding with speeches about jobs and health care doesn't cut it.

Mr. Kerry should counterattack by saying that Mr. Bush is endangering the nation by subordinating national security to politics.

In early 2002 the Bush administration, already focused on Iraq, ignored pleas to commit more forces to Afghanistan. As a result, the Taliban is resurgent, and Osama is still out there.

In the buildup to the Iraq war, commanders wanted a bigger invasion force to help secure the country. But civilian officials, eager to prove that wars can be fought on the cheap, refused. And that's one main reason our soldiers are still dying in Iraq.

This past April, U.S. forces, surely acting on White House orders after American television showed gruesome images of dead contractors, attacked Falluja. Lt. Gen. James Conway, the Marine commander on the scene, opposed "attacking out of revenge" but was overruled -- and he was overruled again with an equally disastrous decision to call off the attack after it had begun. "Once you commit," General Conway said, "you got to stay committed." But Mr. Bush, faced with the prospect of a casualty toll that would have hurt his approval rating, didn't.

Can Mr. Kerry, who voted to authorize the Iraq war, criticize it? Yes, by pointing out that he voted only to give Mr. Bush a big stick. Once that stick had forced Saddam to let W.M.D. inspectors back in, there was no need to invade. And Mr. Kerry should keep pounding Mr. Cheney, who is trying to cover for the absence of W.M.D. by lying, yet again, about Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda.

Some pundits are demanding that Mr. Kerry produce a specific plan for Iraq -- a demand they never make of Mr. Bush. Mr. Kerry should turn the tables, and demand to know what -- aside from pretending that things are going fine -- Mr. Bush intends to do about the spiraling disaster. And Mr. Kerry can ask why anyone should trust a leader who refuses to replace the people who created that disaster because he thinks it's bad politics to admit a mistake.

Mr. Kerry can argue that he wouldn't have overruled the commanders who had wanted to keep the pressure on Al Qaeda, or dismissed warnings from former Gen. Eric Shinseki, then the Army's chief of staff, that peacekeeping would require a large force. He wouldn't have ignored General Conway's warnings about the dangers of storming into Falluja, or overruled his protests about calling off that assault halfway through.

On the other hand, he can argue that he would have fired Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary who ridiculed General Shinseki. And he would definitely have fired Donald Rumsfeld for the failure to go in with enough troops, the atrocities at Abu Ghraib and more.

The truth is that Mr. Bush, by politicizing the "war on terror," is putting America at risk. And Mr. Kerry has to say that.
The New York Times
  

2:39 PM / Editor / permalink    2 comments




Young Republicans Display Brain-Wave Activity Significantly Greater Than A Cypress Stump

Being a Yellow Dog Democrat, I'm not sure the following report of signs of intelligent life within the ranks of Republican college students is good news or bad news. Of course, how smart does one have to be to cancel a speaking engagement by the nuttiest female bigot in America--with apologies to Ms. Coulter. Read on of the most recent embarrassment to Michelle Malkin, it's in The Washington Post:
Flame-throwing syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin, whose latest book supports the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, was all set to appear at American University tomorrow as the year's kickoff speaker for the College Republicans. But her topic proved too hot for them to handle.

Abruptly canceling her speech last week, Mike Inganamort, president of the campus Republicans, told Malkin in an e-mail: "Our first priority for the next two months is ensuring President Bush be re-elected. Staff members for the Bush campaign have frowned on us for having an event centered on the internment of Japanese Americans." He also cited possible protests over "an issue we frankly cannot defend at our heart of hearts."

Malkin, who has also generated controversy for suggesting that one of John Kerry's war wounds was "self-inflicted," told us: "I'm disappointed but not surprised. I feel sorry for the AU students who got bullied by the Bush campaign's control freaks. . . . GOP operatives leaned on the kids to put the election over their education. Pathetic."

The daughter of Filipino immigrants, Malkin has drawn criticism from historians and Japanese Americans for her book "In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror." She agreed to speak to the students for free. By e-mail, she gave us a sample of what she wanted to say:

"I would have pointed out that Bush continues to employ the P.C.-addled [Transportation Secretary] Norm Mineta, whose misunderstanding of WWII history is the reason why grandmas and infants get groped at the airport under the guise of fighting terror....I would have assailed both Teddy Kennedy and Karl Rove for coddling the illegal alien lobby and the anti-profiling activists at the expense of national security."

Inganamort, 20, told us his note to Malkin about the Bush campaign's discomfort was based on "just a friend who interns over at the campaign" and not a directive from higher-ups. "We're not trying to shift blame....I take full responsibility for the decision to cancel Ms. Malkin's speech."

The AU poli sci major said he didn't know Malkin intended to talk about internment. He also expressed surprise that she released his e-mails. Clearly the lad has learned a lesson about the real world of politics and book promotion.
The Washington Post
  

2:07 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Out of Control...

Here is a pretty dismal assessment of the state of the "Iraqi Civil War" in a roundup of sources from the good folks at The Progress Report - American Progress Action Fund

IRAQ
Out Of Control

The mission in Iraq is far, far from accomplished. A surge in deadly violence this weekend brought the bloodiest day in Iraq in recent months; suicide bombings, mortar fire and fierce battles between insurgents and U.S. and Iraqi security forces, including a firefight between an Iraqi crowd and a U.S. helicopter crew, killed dozens, leaving even more injured. Attacks against U.S. forces now average 87 per day, the worst monthly average, reports Newsweek, "since Bush's flight-suited visit to the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003." Casualty figures keep escalating: the U.S. death toll passed 1,000 last week and over 7,000 have been wounded. Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted this weekend, "We did miscalculate the difficulty" of winning the peace in Iraq.

FALLUJAH FAILINGS: In a significant setback for U.S. efforts in Iraq, Fallujah, one of the nation's biggest cities, is now entirely under the control of rebel insurgents. This weekend, the Iraqi military force put in place in the explosive city by the Marines disbanded. There is strong evidence that many members have been working with insurgents against the U.S. forces that provided them with weapons and paychecks. Last April, the White House withdrew Marine troops from the city, hoping the newly created Brigade would work with the Iraqi government to fight the insurgency. The city quickly fell under the control of the insurgents, as many in the Brigade openly joined the rebel forces against the United States. Today, the city is a safe haven for insurgents, a place to "take refuge, plot attacks and run manufacturing centers for car bombs and other explosives."

GENERAL DISAGREES WITH APPROACH TO FALLUJAH: Lt. Gen. James Conway, the outgoing U.S. Marine Corps general in charge of western Iraq, said yesterday that he had disagreed with the hasty order that sent his troops to invade Fallujah in April as well as the subsequent decision to withdraw from the city and turn over control to the disloyal Brigade. Conway said the disastrous assault increased tensions while making the region more hostile to U.S. forces: "We felt like we had a method that we wanted to apply to Fallujah, that we ought to probably let the situation settle before we appeared to be attacking out of revenge." Instead, higher ups insisted on the attack, and then demanded troops pull out when the fighting grew fierce. "I would simply say that when you order elements of a Marine division to attack a city, you really need to understand the consequences of that, and not, perhaps, vacillate in the middle of that. Once you commit to do that, you have to stay committed." Marine Col. Jerry Durrant agrees: "The whole Fallujah Brigade thing was a fiasco."

LIGHTS OUT IN IRAQ: Nineteen months after the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration has failed to achieve significant reconstruction, contributing to the ongoing frustrations of the Iraqi people. According to Bathsheba Crocker, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, when it comes to economic opportunity, services, and social well-being, "Iraq is actually moving backward." The Los Angeles Times reports the job of restoring electricity to war-torn Iraq is "steeped in errors and misjudgment." Electricity for Iraqis was central to White House reconstruction plans, but today, Iraq's largest source of electricity, the Baiji power plant, "produces less than half the electricity it generated" two years ago. Why is the country still in the dark? Lack of planning, inconsistent leadership and an over-reliance on private contractors. The Bush administration "vastly underestimated the time, money and effort needed to restore the country's power grid." It's indicative of the failures of the entire reconstruction process, still marked by "tainted water supplies, limited sewage treatment and curtailed construction of public buildings." The ongoing failure has dire ramifications for the unstable security situation, producing "a deep reservoir of confusion and anger that feeds the country's deadly insurgency."

PROBLEMS WITH DEMOCRACY: The increased violence has serious ramifications for the scheduled elections. "We're dealing with a population that hovers between bare tolerance and outright hostility," says a senior U.S. diplomat in Baghdad. "This idea of a functioning democracy here is crazy. We thought that there would be a reprieve after sovereignty, but all hell is breaking loose." The Bush White House is blithely insisting elections will occur in January as planned. Security concerns, however, have left others less confident. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated this weekend on Meet the Press that "It would be lovely if they took place in January, but I sure don't see it." Iraqi officials are also increasingly skeptical. One senior Iraqi official told Newsweek, "I'm convinced that it's not going to happen. It's just not realistic. How is it going to happen?" Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari echoed that thought, saying, "The timetable really depends at the end of the day on the security situation." Some worry that the Bush administration, desperate to avoid the appearance of yet another setback, will stick to the schedule despite ongoing problems. Ghassan Atiyya, director of the independent Iraq Foundation for Development and Democracy, warns, "Badly prepared elections, rather than healing wounds, will open them."
The Progress Report - American Progress Action Fund
 

1:09 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Monday, September 13, 2004

Forget The Vietnam Comparisons, Iraq Will Win Its Own Stripes In "Quagmire" Nomenclature

Even though much of the DOD doublespeak is more than vaguely familiar to those of us over 50, it is no longer appropriate to use the analogy of the Vietnam War to mark wrong-way milestones in the Iraqi Civil War--there, I said it, if history ends up calling the guerrilla war now being waged throughout most of Iraq something other than that fine. Perhaps it will come to be known as the Iraqi Revolution, The Baath Rebellion, The Shiite Insurrection, The Foreign Fighters War of Attrition, whatever, and not the Iraqi Civil War, it does not matter much right now. What matters right now is that it IS A WAR--not just still a war--and it can't just keep skating on as it is, semantically and metaphysically convenient for the military P.R. handlers and newspaper editors as that thing that did not stop after bush told one and all that "major combat" was fini.

This Civil War is about who will rule a fractious Iraq in the long run--and the short run. The real question we really have to face is should we have a horse in this race now that "regime change" has been accomplished, albeit quite untidily? Because, as the few excerpts below from The New York Times starkly illustrates, this war is only getting worse. There aren't too many options when a "restricted" guerrilla war isn't going your way: Increase troop strength, widen your free fire zones, up the ante of military hardware you're willing to use, or, in this case, come home and wait a few years before diplomatically recognizing the winner or winners of the fight to fill the vacuum created by destroying one of the world's most evil tyrants.

None of those options are politically popular, I fully understand; but the consequences of sticking around until the bitter end is beginning to look like it could prove politically crippling to whichever party is in control of the White House as the mess gets messier and messier and the months and years roll by and the body count mounts. Perhaps someone should report what the American body count was in 1963 and early 1964 in that Southeast Asian country we should no longer use as a benchmark for the quagmire in Iraq. Although I just did; war, while it is still going on, is a slippery business to nail down with words:
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 12 -- In a series of tightly sequenced attacks, at least 25 Iraqis were killed by suicide car bombings and a barrage of missile and mortar fire in several neighborhoods across Baghdad on Sunday.

The attacks were the most widespread in months, seeming to demonstrate the growing power of the insurgency and heightening the sense of uncertainty and chaos in the capital at a time when American forces have already ceded control to insurgents in a number of cities outside of Baghdad.

The Associated Press reported that the total death toll throughout the country for the day reached 59, citing the Health Ministry and local authorities. Nearly 200 people were wounded, more than half of those in Baghdad. ...

In Baghdad, American military helicopters fired at Iraqis who were scaling a burning American armored vehicle. It was unclear how many Iraqis were killed in the airstrike. At least one television journalist was confirmed dead, and photographs immediately after the strike showed a group of four men severely wounded or dead at the site. American military commanders said the helicopters were returning fire aimed at them from the ground.

American forces appear to be facing a guerrilla insurgency that is more sophisticated and more widespread than ever before. Last month, attacks on American forces reached their highest level since the war began, an average of 87 per day.

In an appearance on Sunday on the NBC News program "Meet The Press," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell acknowledged that the United States faced a "difficult time" in Iraq but had a plan to "bring it under control" before nationwide elections scheduled for January.

"It's not an impossible task," he said.

The violence, which began before dawn, all but paralyzed this country's capital city, where portions of several central highways were closed, and traffic slowed to a crawl. ...

As the mortar shells were still falling early this morning, a suicide bomber plowed into an American Bradley fighting vehicle on Haifa Street in central Baghdad, not far from the International Zone, the American military said. The vehicle was hit at 6:50 a.m. as it was traveling to the area to help American forces that had come under fire from insurgents there.

In all, six soldiers were wounded in the attack, including two crew members of the armored vehicle.

No Americans were killed, but the confusion that followed showed the difficult decisions commanders here face as they push ahead in this increasingly organized guerrilla war.

After the attack, fighters and gleeful onlookers scaled the burning armored vehicle, said Hassan Lazim, assistant security director at nearby Karkh Hospital who said he saw the scene. Reuters reported that several young men had hung a black banner of the Unity and Jihad militant group, believed to be linked to Al Qaeda, on the barrel of the Bradley's main gun.

Helicopters that flew in to protect the Bradley were then fired on from the ground and fired back, the military said in a statement, adding that the aircraft then destroyed the armored vehicle as well. The helicopters "fired upon the anti-Iraqi forces and the Bradley, preventing the loss of sensitive equipment and weapons." The military stressed that the helicopters had not fired indiscriminately into the crowd, but said, "An unknown number of insurgents and Iraq civilians were wounded or killed in the incident."

In the fighting before and after the attack on the Bradley, 13 people were killed and 61 were wounded, the Iraqi Health Ministry said. A journalist for the Arabiya television network and a 12-year-old girl were among the dead, hospital officials said.
Al Arabiya showed compelling images that followed the journalist, Mazen al-Tumeizi, as he stumbled away from the scene of the airstrikes, yelling, "I'm dying, I'm dying!" ...
The sheer number of attacks left Iraqis here with a deep feeling of rage and helplessness.

"What can we do?" said Khalaf Shalesh, who was standing by the hospital bed of one of the wounded police officers. "We want to help Iraqis. But this keeps happening."

Another man, whose son was seriously injured Saturday night in a neighborhood in southwestern Baghdad that is between an American base and an insurgent hide-out, expressed similar frustrations.

"Rockets come from one side and Americans are on the other," said the father, Hassan Hamid. "We're a poor neighborhood, and it's getting destroyed. We don't want to fight."
There is much more to this story at: The New York Times
 

6:07 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Heroes Come In Shades of Grey...

There is a dynamic at play in the bashing of Senator Kerry's Vietnam War experience that to me is so obvious I have been baffled why no one else seems to get it, much less write about it. It takes a very special kind of courage to go to war and do the best one can in the service of one's country: Indeed to do it under fire, in close-quarter combat, is even more courageous; many, many soldiers in many, many wars never fired their weapons in anger during the entirety of their service. Studies by the military proved that only 25% of soldiers during World War II ever squeezed the triggers of their weapons during combat. Then, of course, there are the millions of soldiers who serve during wartime in support positions and never have the opportunity to find out if they have the moxie to not only stay present in the middle of a battlefield but also to take aim at a living enemy combatant, fire and kill. Forget war movies and novels, killing fellow human beings is painless only for psychopaths.

Conversely, it takes at least as much courage to do one's duty, to do it to the point of killing in the service of one's country, and then turn against the barbarity of war and speak out against it as publicly as one can. I know very few combat veterans who served and killed that did not come to hate war in all its manifestations. The vast majority of these combat veterans only let this terribly conflicting conundrum take voice when they are amongst those who likewise served and killed--or perhaps with a very close relative, or maybe a psychologist or counselor.

However, in every war I know the history of, there have always been a brave few who came back and spoke out their revulsion of what they did, what they saw, what they felt. They spoke out in the always futile hope that perhaps the politicians who start wars but do not fight them would think long and hard and then twice more before they sent young men to kill and be killed again. In almost all cases, these men were not castigated for it. To the contrary, they were and are remembered and revered throughout the ages. In truth, how can anyone honestly take issue with a soldier who has seen too much of war and speaks of its horrors as a cautionary tale?

Senator John F. Kerry had that very special courage to be a hero twice: In combat, killing human beings who were trying to kill him and his men; and when he came home and did what those few other brave men throughout history had done in the aftermath of their service in war: cry out for the carnage to end; cry out that the goals of any particular war almost never justifies the bloodletting, the destruction of so much young flesh.

I believe that the two shades of hero that Senator Kerry proved himself to be make him uniquely qualified to lead this nation at a time when bloodletting and the destruction of young life is more senseless than it has ever been. Below are a couple of graphs of a Frank Rich review of a new documentary film in The New York Times. He gets it:
LESS than 48 hours after Bill Clinton, speaking from his hospital room, advised the politically ailing John Kerry to start talking less about Vietnam and more about health care, seven American marines were blown up outside Fallujah. So much for the pipedream of changing the subject of this election. Vietnam keeps popping out of America's darkest closet not just because Mr. Kerry conspicuously served there and Mr. Bush conspicuously did not, but because of what's happening half a world away in real time: a televised war in Iraq that resembles its Southeast Asian predecessor in its unpopularity, its fictional provocation and its unknown exit strategy. That war isn't going anywhere by Nov. 2, even as it is sporadically obscured by Florida storm clouds, and its Vietnam undertow isn't going anywhere either. Everyone knows that a Tet offensive, Sunni-style, could yet tilt this election in a direction unknown. ...

The person who might most benefit from seeing "Going Upriver" is Mr. Kerry himself. "It takes a special courage to speak out against a cause for which you were once prepared to die," Jeffrey Smith, a West Point-trained C.I.A. man of the Kerry-Bush generation, wrote in The Washington Post last weekend.
The New York Times
  

11:11 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Sunday, September 12, 2004

They Did This In Our Name

Rob me, beat me, make me destitute, kill me if you must--but leave me "my good name!" I am paraphrasing the powerful closing lines delivered by John Proctor in Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible," a role that I played in my younger years as an actor. Why do those words come so forcibly into my mind and soul today? Seymour Hersh's long-awaited book on the torture and abuse dealt out to prisoners in the good name of the American people--you and me and that guy over there waiting for a bus--will be released tomorrow.

It will be a very long time before this taint upon us all will fade enough for the United States of America to have any moral authority to cast upon the true demons of this world--because, in the eyes of many citizens of this spinning rock we all share, we rank with the worst of them. And I am angry because I love America with every fiber of my being--but Goddamn them one and all who made me ashamed this day--particularly this day--to be an American abroad.

Below is the full article from The New York Times; it is not long and I want it as a permanent record in these pages:
WASHINGTON, Sept. 11 - Senior military and national security officials in the Bush administration were repeatedly warned by subordinates in 2002 and 2003 that prisoners in military custody were being abused, according to a new book by a prominent journalist.Seymour M. Hersh, a writer for The New Yorker who earlier this year was among the first to disclose details of the abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, makes the charges in his book "Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib" (HarperCollins), which is being released Monday. The book draws on the articles he wrote about the campaign against terrorism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Mr. Hersh asserts that a Central Intelligence Agency analyst who visited the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in the late summer of 2002 filed a report of abuses there that drew the attention of Gen. John A. Gordon, a deputy to Condoleezza Rice, the White House national security adviser.

But when General Gordon called the matter to her attention and she discussed it with other senior officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, no significant change resulted. Mr. Hersh's account is based on anonymous sources, some secondhand, and could not be independently verified.

Although a number of senior officials were briefed on the analyst's findings of abuse, the high-level White House meeting did not "dwell on" that question, but rather focused on whether some of the prisoners should not have been held at all, the book says. A White House official said Saturday that the meeting was held, but said that it was solely focused on whether people at Guantanamo were being improperly held. The official also said the C.I.A. analyst who visited the Guantánamo detention center filed a report that concerned only the question of improper detention, not abuses.

Mr. Hersh also says that a military officer involved in counterinsurgency operations in Iraq learned of the abuses at Abu Ghraib in November and reported it to two of his superiors, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the regional commander, and his deputy, Lt. Gen. Lance Smith.

"I said there are systematic abuses going on in the prisons," the unidentified officer is quoted as telling Mr. Hersh. "Abizaid didn't say a thing. He looked at me - beyond me, as if to say, 'Move on. I don't want to touch this.' "

But Capt. Hal Pittman, a Central Command spokesman, said in a statement Saturday, "General Abizaid does not recall any officer discussing with him any specific cases of abuse at Abu Ghraib prior to January 2004, nor do any of the officers of the Centcom staff who travel with him."

Mr. Hersh also says that F.B.I. agents complained to their superiors about abuses at Guantánamo, as did a military lawyer, and that those complaints, too, were relayed to the Pentagon.

Mr. Hersh's thesis is that "the roots of the Abu Ghraib scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists" who have been charged so far, "but in the reliance of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld on secret operations and the use of coercion - and eye-for-eye retribution - in fighting terrorism."

In particular, Mr. Hersh has reported that a secret program to capture and interrogate terrorists led to the abuse of prisoners.

In a statement posted on its Web site, the Pentagon said: "Based on media inquiries, it appears that Mr. Seymour Hersh's upcoming book apparently contains many of the numerous unsubstantiated allegations and inaccuracies which he has made in the past based upon unnamed sources."

The statement added that several investigations so far "have determined that no responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have authorized or condoned the abuses seen at Abu Ghraib."

That is essentially the same reaction issued by the Pentagon when Mr. Hersh first reported, in May, that Mr. Rumsfeld, with White House approval, established a secret program under which commandos would capture and interrogate suspected terrorists with few if any constraints, and that eventually that program's reach extended into the Abu Ghraib prison.
The New York Times
  

1:45 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Saturday, September 11, 2004

What's 1,000,000 Lost Votes Mean To A Man Whose Soul Was Saved? Defeat.

Mr. bush says go to the devil or Senator Kerry to a large voting block because he's got Gawd in his back pocket. Basically, he's trusting a real devil, Mr. Rove, whose math is adding up this way: Lose 1,000,000 gay and lesbian Republicans who voted for Bush in 2000, but pick up 4,000,000 evangelical fanatics who did not vote in part because the Republican Party wasn't demonizing gay folks strongly enough four years ago--going so far as to allow "the first openly gay delegate to address" the RNC in 2000, Arizona Rep. Jim Kolbe.

Mother Jones Magazine does a good job analyzing the trade off that might just cost Shrub his job. Let's face it, evangelicals are an irrational specie of humans; who knows what those crazed "ghost worshippers" might decide to do come early November.
Gay Republicans Come Out of the Cabin

One million of them voted for President George W. Bush in 2000 and many still support the president on everything from taxes to his terrorism policy. And yes, there are plenty of them in those crucial swing states. There's just one snag -- these Bush-backers happen to be gay and lesbian, and that, in the eyes of today's Republican Party, is a problem.

Wednesday, the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay and lesbian group, made it clear that it has had enough of Bush's pandering to the radical right, particularly on the issue of same-sex marriage, which the president supports a constitutional amendment to prohibit. Log Cabin announced that it will not endorse Bush this election, making it the first time it will withhold its endorsement from a Republican candidate. As Patrick Guerriero, executive director of Log Cabin Republicans, argues in the group's press release:
"There is a battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party, and that fight is bigger than one platform, one convention, or even one President…The President's use of the bully pulpit, stump speeches and radio addresses to support a Constitutional amendment [banning gay marriage] has encouraged the passage of discriminatory laws and state constitutional amendments across America. Using gays and lesbians as wedge issues in an election year is unacceptable to Log Cabin."
It was not supposed to be this way. Bush ran on a platform of "compassionate conservatism" in 2000 and got the Log Cabin's endorsement with the understanding that he would not turn back the clock on gay and lesbian rights. 2000 was also the year during which Arizona Rep. Jim Kolbe became the first openly gay delegate to address the Republican National Convention.

2004 couldn't be more different. At this year's convention, Log Cabin and other groups, could not even get the party to adopt a unity plank acknowledging disagreements on gay and lesbian rights as legitimate. Instead, the party platform not only endorsed the divisive constitutional amendment -- which could not muster enough support to bring the matter up for a vote in the Senate -- but denounced any formal recognition or benefits to homosexual unions. It also deemed homosexuality "incompatible with military service." This, mind you, at a time when the troops are overstretched and many gay and lesbians in the military are being fired already. As a recent University of California at Santa Barbara study concluded, from 1998 to 2003, some 9,682 gay and lesbian service members were discharged under President Bill Clinton's infamous "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
There is a lot more to this story, which you should read at: Mother Jones' Daily MoJo
  

11:39 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Friday, September 10, 2004

As the Screw Turns...

The irony of the following piece of news would be delicious if the stakes weren't so high. Torment by the turn of the screw and by it so you will be tormented. Funny how most everything evens out in the wash of time. The Daily-Mislead turns the thumb screws on the shrubs:
Bush Attacked Nat'l Guard Service of Others

The White House is currently attacking those who raise questions about President Bush's National Guard record. They say the questions about Bush's failure to fulfill his commitment are "dirty politics."1 Yet a look at the record shows that it was President George H.W. Bush -- and his top campaign strategist George W. Bush -- who tried to smear the National Guard and military record of their opponents.

As reported in the August 23, 1988 Los Angeles Times, then Vice President George H.W. Bush's campaign co-chairman John Sununu went on national television to impugn an opponent's dealings with the National Guard during Vietnam. Sununu specifically claimed Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D-TX) had improperly helped get his son into the Texas National Guard during Vietnam. Bentsen's son served in the very same National Guard unit at the very same time as George W. Bush. The Bush campaign's attacks came just days after Bush's allies on Capitol Hill launched a vicious attack on Gov. Michael Dukakis (D-MA) for receiving a draft deferment during the Korean War.2

At the time of the coordinated attack, George W. Bush was serving as a senior adviser to his father's campaign.3

Sources:

1. "New Questions On Bush National Guard Duty ," CBS2Chicago.com, 9/08/04.
2. "Report that Bentsen Got Son into National Guard Also Denied; Dukakis Angry about Charge of Avoiding Korean War," Los Angeles Times, 8/23/88.
3. GeorgeWBush.com, 9/04.
Daily Mislead
  

6:01 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




"Disgraceful" Is Too Kind of a Word...

No comment is needed. Just Read the editorial below and then think about what we have let America become under the present administration:
A Disgraceful Campaign Speech

There are some things a presidential campaign should steer clear of, through innate good taste, prudence or just a sensible fear of a voter backlash. We'd have thought that both the Kerry and Bush camps would instinctively know that it would be appalling to suggest that terrorists were rooting for one side or another in this race. But Vice President Dick Cheney seemed to breach that unspoken barrier this week in Des Moines. If John Kerry was elected president, Mr. Cheney warned the crowd, "the danger is that we'll get hit again." In a long, rather rambling statement, he said the United States might then fall back into a "pre-9/11 mind-set" that "these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts."

At the very best, Mr. Cheney was speaking loosely and carelessly about the area in this campaign that deserves the most careful and serious discussion. It sounds to us more likely that he stepped across a line that the Bush campaign team had flirted with throughout its convention, telling his audience that re-electing the president would be the only way to stay safe from another attack.

There is a danger that we'll be hit again no matter who is elected president this November, as President Bush himself has said on many occasions. The danger might be a bit less if the current administration had chosen to spend less on tax cuts for the wealthy and more on protecting our ports, securing nuclear materials in Russia and establishing an enforceable immigration policy that would keep better track of people who enter the country from abroad.

Immigration and homeland security strategies are policy fights, fair game for a political campaign. What's totally unacceptable is to tell the American people that the mere act of voting for your opponent opens the door to a terrorist attack. For Mr. Cheney to suggest that is flat wrong. There was a time in this country when elected officials knew how to separate the position from the person. The American people, we're sure, would like to return to it.
The New York Times
  

2:44 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Thursday, September 09, 2004

I Like Florida, too, But There Are Hundreds of Chinese Deaths From Flooding And It Can't Break the Top Ten Stories On the Wire Services...

I grew up in hurricane country. I survived Camile in 1969 and I was actually swept away in the 21 foot tidal surge and 210 MPH sustained winds--the worst storm to ever hit North America. But, damn, what's happening in Southwest China is a tragedy and it doesn't appear that it's going to get better any time soon.
SHANGHAI, China (AP) - The death toll from flooding and landslides in mountainous southwestern China rose to 177 on Thursday, as authorities warned beleaguered residents to brace for fresh storms.

A week of torrential rains has claimed 102 lives in Sichuan province, and another 75 in neighbouring Chongqing. A total of 50 people are missing in the two areas, located about 1,400 kilometres southwest of Beijing. The disasters have affected about 11 million people, with hundreds of thousands evacuated and about 10,000 sick or injured in Sichuan alone.

With more than 300,000 homes damaged, direct losses to crops and the local economy were estimated at 3.9 billion yuan ($610,000 Cdn).

Rain stopped over much of the region on Wednesday, allowing authorities to disinfect towns and residents to pick through their sodden belongings.

Streets were strewn with garbage, furniture and household items, and mudslides blocked mountain roads. Residents jostled to fill plastic pails with clean water being pumped from fire trucks, while utility workers went from building to building restoring electricity.

However, three new storms have been forecast for this month. A cold front expected on Sunday will likely result in more rain, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

"Local civilians are urged to speed up rescue efforts and take preparations for the expected rains," Xinhua said.

The storms have swollen the mighty Yangtze River, forcing the suspension of navigation through the Three Gorges Dam for the first time since it started operating last year.

The dam, the world's largest hydroelectric project, has been touted by authorities as a means of stemming disastrous flooding along the lower sections of the Yangtze.

Cities downstream, however, were ordered to shore up embankments as Dongting Lake, China's second largest, rose two metres above normal levels. The lake is part of a network of waterways in central China that both feed into and are fed by the Yangtze.

Elsewhere in China, the death toll from a mudslide in Yunnan province, south of Sichuan, has risen to eight. Continuous heavy rains in the past week caused the mudslide, which also damaged roads.
CNEWS
  

6:14 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Failure To Carry Out A Direct Order...that's not a parking ticket, Folks.

One does not have to grow up in a military family as I did--my father was a scientist and writer attached to the Air Force for three decades--to have a firm understanding of what a "Failure to carry out a direct order" can mean to the Airman, G.I.,Sailor, Marine or Coast Guardsman who is so accused. It isn't a traffic violation. Depending on the circumstances, the penalty can range from execution (in the most dire and exceedingly rare instance) to a lengthy stint in Leavenworth, to a Dishonorable Discharge, and many variations in between or lesser; but it's just about the worst charge a soldier can face.

I have one question: Does such an offense render the offender unfit to serve in command? I think the answer is not cut and dried. The failure to carry out an illegal order, or an immoral order, or an order that would subject those serving under you to unnecessary risk of grave bodily harm, the failure to carry out a direct order in any of these situations would have to be weighed against all of the evidence and circumstances. In certain cases, the failure to carry out a direct order would suggest great strength of character and prove one extremely worthy to command others.

But failure to carry out a direct order to just show up and be a trooper--excuse me, a fighter pilot who requested not to fight. I'm afraid that is another kettle of fish altogether. In this instance--mr. bush, of course--it's a pretty stinky pot of fish. Because we now know that not only was he AWOL, he was ordered to appear to take a physical and he refused. It seems he was otherwise occupied--in Republican politics--to even serve in the cushy position Poppy bush secured for him.

All of the evidence is out now, from every segment of the media, from "60 Minutes" on CBS, to Kevin Drum, to The Peking Duck, to MSNBC, and to the article excerpted below from the The Washington Post--I particularly liked the lead:
President Bush failed to carry out a direct order from his superior in the Texas Air National Guard in May 1972 to undertake a medical examination that was necessary for him to remain a qualified pilot, according to documents made public yesterday.

Documents obtained by the CBS News program "60 Minutes" shed new light on one of the most controversial episodes in Bush's military service, when he abruptly stopped flying and moved from Texas to Alabama to work on a political campaign. The documents include a memo from Bush's squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, ordering Bush "to be suspended from flight status for failure to perform" to U.S. Air Force and National Guard standards and failure to take his annual physical "as ordered." ...

White House officials dismissed the latest criticism of Bush's service as partisan attacks in the midst of a heated campaign. In an interview with "60 Minutes," White House communications director Dan Bartlett said "partisan Democrats" were "recycling the very same charges we hear every time President Bush runs for reelection" and added: "It is dirty politics." But he did not contest the authenticity of the documents, which could not be verified independently by The Washington Post.

A spokeswoman for "60 Minutes," Kelli Edwards, declined to say exactly how the new documents were obtained other than that CBS News understood they had been taken from Killian's "personal office file." In addition to the order to Bush to report for a physical, the documents include various memos from Killian describing his conversations with Bush and other National Guard officers about Bush's attempts to secure a transfer to Alabama. Killian died in 1984.

"Phone call from Bush," Killian recorded in a "memo to file" dated May 19, 1972. "Discussed options of how Bush can get out of coming to drill from now through November."

According to "60 Minutes," Killian's personal files show that he ordered Bush "suspended from flight status" on Aug. 1, 1972. National Guard documents already released by the White House and the Pentagon show that Bush was suspended from flight status on that day for "failure to accomplish annual medical examination" but do not mention his alleged failure to comply with National Guard and Air Force standards.

In another "memo to file," dated Aug. 18, 1973, Killian complained that he was under pressure from his superior, Col. Walter B. "Buck" Staudt, to "sugar coat" Bush's officer evaluations. "I'm having trouble running interference and doing my job," he wrote in a memo titled "CYA." "I will not rate."
There is much more to this story at the: The Washington Post
  

5:33 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Wednesday, September 08, 2004

Keep Off the Grass...you dirty, commie, hippie Democrats!

While I have you going to Alternet.org, stick around and read what Shrub & Twigs think about Democrats using National Parks and assorted federal landmarks for any electioneering photo-ops...
The Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, NASA headquarters, and the Washington Monument are among the many federal properties that may be off-limits to presidential and congressional candidates for campaign photo ops this election season, thanks to a guidance recently released by the Bush administration's U.S. Office of Special Counsel.

The OSC is an independent federal agency that investigates and prosecutes issues ranging from whistleblower complaints to concerns that federal employees are participating in campaign activities prohibited by the Hatch Act, which defines election-related political no-no's for people on the government payroll.

Kerry advisers and some environmentalists are royally peeved about the advisory, calling it at best deliberately ambiguous and misleading, at worst a deliberate maneuver to gain advantage over John Kerry 's presidential campaign.

The guidance is "an extraordinary reinterpretation of the Hatch Act," said David Hayes, who oversaw national parks as deputy secretary of the interior under Clinton, and who now serves as a senior adviser to the Kerry campaign. "It is a patently ridiculous and extreme measure that the Bush administration is taking to cover up its appalling record on funding and protecting national parks after promising in the 2000 campaign to make it a priority."
There is much more of this story at: Alternet.org
  

6:08 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




1,000...

What more needs to be said except, we mourn, we grieve, maybe we cry, and then we vote:
Their faces, smiling or solemn, have become all too familiar in our newspapers and on television. Their names sound a somber roll call -- Smith, Falaniko, Ramos, Lee -- a roster that seems to grow daily.

There have been more than 1,000 now, U.S. military personnel who have died in the Iraq war.

They are sons and daughters from city streets and rural hamlets. They are teens who went from senior proms to boot camp and battle and middle-aged family men who put aside retirement and grandchildren for the dangers of a war zone.

What they share is that they will not see home again.

What does the number mean? On D-Day alone, more Americans lost their lives. At the peak of Vietnam, hundreds of U.S. troops were dying every week. And in just one September morning three years ago, 2,792 people perished when two towers crumbled to the streets of New York.

Still, 1,000 is a grim milestone.

The conflict in Iraq has claimed almost three times the number of Americans lost in the entire Persian Gulf War. And this time, the vast majority of U.S. deaths — all but 138 — came after major combat operations were declared over. "Mission Accomplished," read a banner on the aircraft carrier where President Bush spoke on May 1, 2003.

Sixteen months later, the fighting goes on. So do the funerals.

The lengthening casualty roster reflects a front line that shifted from sandy deserts to shadowy streets, a stubborn insurgency, a conflict far bloodier than many expected.

Back home, there is another growing count: towns that lost future firefighters and policemen, churches left without Sunday school teachers, families where infants will never meet their dads.
There is much more of this moving article at: MSNBC
 

6:07 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The South Will Rise Again...But a Much Better One

Even though my father didn't come to America from Italy until he was 13 years-old--in 1932--I am a dyed-in-the-blazing-gulf son of deepest Dixie: Ocean Springs, Mississippi, thank you very much. As most of you know, my philosophy on racial matters did not endear me to most of my neighbors back in the 60's when I came of age; and there were bitter years indeed when I was not proud at all to say where I came from. There were dangerous times for me way back then when I did happen to be in my home state. But you know all of that.

What you probably do not know is how deeply I love the deep south--yes, Dixie--I love its dark, rich soul and soil that has given America so many of its finest artists in every field of the fine arts. Yes, I am a proud son of the southland. And today I stand a little bit taller and a little bit prouder. Why? Because things are changing in deepest Dixie, and they are changing in many ways that are more enlightened than many of the arrogant northern states that love to mock or manipulate a southern "bumpkin"--Goddamn, do I hate that word!

But why am I writing this today? Why not yesterday? It is because my lovely wife, Ellen, the author of the Crackpot Chronicles--a true Blue New Yorker, but I overlook that most of the time--read an article in Alternet.org and immediately put it in front of me. The title is more than a little bit of a cliche--"The South Will Rise Again"--but what it has to say about the "New South" is going to surprise many of you. I am only going to excerpt a few key graphs because I want you to discover Alternet.org if you haven't already; and if you have and you are well aware of its unique place in the media scheme of things but forget to check it out as often as you should--like me--then this is a good way to get you back into the habit:
On a recent trip through South Carolina, I visited the Museum of the Daughters of the Confederacy in Charleston. The charming curator there, June Murray Wells, is a trim 70-something raconteur who remembers being asked to pull tight the corset stays for bird-like nonagenarians in the 1940s whose daddies really had worn the grey in the Civil War.

With Hurricane Charley bearing down on us, Mrs. Wells reminisced about the last big hurricane to slam Charleston -- Hugo in 1989 -- and walked me over to a display case which, she said, held the single most precious object in the Museum’s entire collection, one that provoked thousands of concerned letters from across the South after the big storm, inquiring about its safety.

On a bed of red velvet, I saw what pearl of great price had survived. A single coiled yellow-gray strand of Robert E. Lee's hair, purportedly trimmed from the actual corpse's head.

Medieval relic worship cannot surprise anyone who has spent any time at all in the Palmetto State, where state legislators famously refused to take the Confederate flag down from the Statehouse dome in this new millennium. Charleston is, after all, home to the Citadel, whose towering pink faux-feudal crenellated walls still cloister fresh generations of Southern men who sport spit-shined swords and memorize the fine and not so fine arts of war.

That Old South, though, is crumbling away, notwithstanding the integrity of those walls. The change has not been sudden, but more of an erosion. Slowly, slowly -- as slowly as the hundred long years of Strom Thurmond’s life -- the reign of white and black men who came of age in an era of separate drinking fountains and burning crosses is ending.

Republicans -- as they are wont to remind black voters – freed the slaves under Abraham Lincoln. The South was dominated, though, by white male Democrats throughout the first half of the twentieth century, until LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Southern majority turned to the Republican Party, which has been quadrennially tossing racist red meat to poor whites ever since. LBJ predicted that was ahead, remarking, when he signed the law, "I have signed away the South for a generation." It turned out to be two.

But forty years later, with Thurmond’s death, the retirements of North Carolina's Jesse Helms and now, Sen. Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, and Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia in 2004, the old conservative bulls in the Senate who have retarded the South's social progress for decades are finally letting go.
Please read the rest of this at: Alternet.org
  

5:22 PM / Editor / permalink    1 comments



Tuesday, September 07, 2004

Is Hu on First, or Rounding Third and Racing For the Plate?

"May [we] live in interesting times," is a salutation one grants to another, and a private wish for one's self. I use it here as both: To all of you who live in China or observe it with interest from afar; and in congratulations to myself for having the good fortune to be in China now. While almost incalculable change has happened in the past 25 years, the days, weeks, months, and years immediately ahead promise to be at least as eventful and most likely a great deal more.

The intricate machinations that Joseph Kahn, writing for The New York Times, reports going on behind the scenes in Beijing may very well set the stage and the agenda for the next several years of the change that is coming--for good or for bad, substantial changes are coming. As much as the Chinese treasure stability and harmonious balance in all things natural and man-made, the genie of capitalism and instant communication of information will not go back into the bottle, and the changes that are coming--much of it dramatic--will come wearing many masks with many different actors behind them, some perhaps as yet unknown to us.

Will these "interesting times" be a play wrought with obstacles, tension, suspense, keen confrontation, and then a happy ending with curtain calls for all to stupendous applause? Or will these times to come follow the same dramatic structure but conclude in Shakespearean tragedy before a reeling 21st Century audience of some 6 billion people whose lives will be effected by what happens in the great Middle Kingdom?

For some speculative insight into the future, check out Mr. Kahn's reporting--the level of his inside sources is nothing less than remarkable:
BEIJING, Sept. 6 - Jiang Zemin, China's military chief and senior leader, has told Communist Party officials that he plans to resign, prompting an intense and so far inconclusive struggle for control of the armed forces, two people with leadership connections say.

Mr. Jiang's offer to relinquish authority as chairman of the Central Military Commission potentially gives Hu Jintao - who succeeded Mr. Jiang as head of the Communist Party and president of China in 2002 and is now vice chairman of the military commission - a chance to become the country's undisputed top leader, commanding the state, the army and the ruling party.

But people here who were informed about a bargaining session under way at a government compound in western Beijing said it remained unclear whether Mr. Jiang genuinely intended to step aside, or if he would do so on terms acceptable to Mr. Hu.

Chinese political battles are often waged by indirection, with senior officials rarely stating their bottom line and often relying on supporters to represent their interests. Thus, one official said, it is possible that Mr. Jiang, 78, has calculated that he will be called on to remain military chief or to hold another position of influence.

Still, Mr. Jiang's planned resignation, which he announced to a meeting of senior party officials late last week, is an indication that the horse-trading under way before the convening of a national party meeting this month is the most contentious since a partial transfer of power to younger leaders took place in 2002, the people who were told about the proceedings said.

If Mr. Hu, who is 62, were to gain control of the armed forces, he could potentially carry out an agenda that some analysts say is more open to change at home and possibly less truculent in managing local hot spots like Hong Kong and Taiwan.
There is much more of Mr. Kahn's fine reporting in: The New York Times
  

3:48 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Monday, September 06, 2004

A Head of State Admits To A Lie -- How Refreshing...And A Little Scary

My only firsthand knowledge of Russia's President Putin came via his KGB post under General Leonid Shebarshin, the last Chairman of the fabled Soviet espionage agency, and its longtime Chairman of the First Main Directorate (in charge of all foreign espionage). The General thought highly of him then, and I have learned to trust the instincts of the man whose biography has turned into a life-time endeavor for me. I have, however, questioned Putin's leanings towards becoming the "lifetime" ruler of the New Russia--a dictator without ideological portfolio?

I have also questioned his military decisions that have often turned sour leaving more dead victims than dead terrorists. Today, however, I applaud his candor, albeit he really had no other good options. But that has not prevented other heads of state from relentlessly pursuing bad options come truth or highwater--bush leaps instantly to mind.

Read about Putin's extraordinary change of pattern in today's Washington Post:
MOSCOW, Sept. 5 -- The Russian government admitted Sunday that it lied to its people about the scale of the hostage crisis that ended with more than 300 children, parents and teachers dead in southern Russia, making an extraordinary admission through state television after days of intense criticism from citizens.

As the bereaved families of Beslan began to lay their loved ones to rest Sunday, the Kremlin-controlled Rossiya network aired gripping, gruesome footage it had withheld from the public for days and said government officials had deliberately deceived the world about the number of hostages inside School No. 1.

"At such moments," anchor Sergei Brilyov declared, "society needs the truth."

The admission of an effort to minimize the magnitude of a hostage crisis that ensnared about 1,200 people, most of them children, marked a sharp turnabout for the government of President Vladimir Putin. In previous crises with mass fatalities, such as the sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk in 2000 and the 2002 siege of a Moscow theater, officials covered up key facts as well, but afterward never acknowledged doing so.

"It doesn't suit our president," a Kremlin political consultant, Gleb Pavlovsky, said on the broadcast. "Lies, which really acted in the terrorists' favor, did not suit him at all. Lies were weakening us and making the terrorists more violent."

The broadcast included no apology and referred only to the most blatant misstatement by officials, the claim that only 354 hostages were inside the school. It did not acknowledge that the hostage-takers had demanded an end to the war in Chechnya or that the government continues to give conflicting information about whether any of the guerrillas remain at large, who they were and how many were killed.

Nor did it mention that many residents of Beslan have been outraged that the government now appears to be understating the death toll, which stood officially at 338 Sunday night, although nearly 200 people are still unaccounted for.
Of course, Putin's bout of truth-telling wasn't total and it certainly won't last. Read the rest of this puzzling story in the: Washington Post
  

5:12 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Florida's Weather May Be the Big News, But Dozens Die In China's Sichuan Province Due to Torrential Rain

Bad weather is bad weather wherever it happens; news of it, though, is bigger if it is happening in the western world, particularly the United States. So, as Dylan said it so well, "you don't need a weather-vane to know which way the wind is [really] blowing." Or am I just being too cynical again?
BEIJING -- Rescuers in southwest China sought help from the military Monday as they searched for dozens of people missing in torrential floods. The death toll rose to 55, state media reported.

Days of heavy rain in Sichuan, a province prone to seasonal flooding, unleashed mudslides and mountain torrents that have trapped hundreds of people in their houses, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

The downpours began Thursday and were forecast to last through Tuesday, the agency said.

The beleaguered provincial government appealed for help from the nation's air force in reaching people trapped by the rising waters, Xinhua said.

In hard-hit Dazhou, floods caused roads to cave and destroyed highways, isolating the city's downtown, it said. In addition to the 55 people killed across the province, 52 others were missing, the report said.

The flooded area is about 700 miles southwest of Beijing.
AP News
  

4:19 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Golly Gee...Guess What's Missing From Shrub's Air National Guard File, Officially?

Yepper, the truth will always come back and bite you in the ass if you're attempting to hide behind a stone wall made of smoke and mirrors. Today bush-the-last will have trouble sitting comfortably anywhere without an inner-tube cushion now that the A.P. has received--and released--his complete National Guard file obtained via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. I would suggest that this puts the credibility issue right back into the dissembling mouth of the man who truly is unfit to serve this nation as Commander-in-Chief at a time when its soldiers--all volunteers--are fighting and dying daily in at least two wars the purpose and execution of which were, and continue to be, seriously flawed in the opinion of many military experts in and out of uniform.
WASHINGTON Sept. 5, 2004 -- Documents that should have been written to explain gaps in President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service are missing from the military records released about his service in 1972 and 1973, according to regulations and outside experts.

For example, Air National Guard regulations at the time required commanders to write an investigative report for the Air Force when Bush missed his annual medical exam in 1972. The regulations also required commanders to confirm in writing that Bush received counseling after missing five months of drills.

No such records have been made public and the government told The Associated Press in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that it has released all records it can find. ...

Challenging the government's declaration that no more documents exist, the AP identified five categories of records that should have been generated after Bush skipped his pilot's physical and missed five months of training.

"Each of these actions by any member of the National Guard should have generated the creation of many documents that have yet to be produced," AP lawyer David Schulz wrote the Justice Department Aug. 26.

White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said there were no other documents to explain discrepancies in Bush's files.
ABCNEWS.com
  

3:44 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Tipper Gore Would Love China...

Life in prison for peddling smut in China? And whether you get the max or a lesser sentence depends on how popular your product is, not how "obscene" it's judged to be? Very interesting. Any thoughts on this out there?
BEIJING (Reuters) - China has intensified its battle against Internet and mobile phone pornography by threatening distributors with life in prison, Xinhua news agency said.

"Depending on the seriousness of the cases, the sentences range from living under compulsory surveillance, detainment, taking into custody by the police, to various terms of imprisonment and life imprisonment," Xinhua said.

Beijing has stepped up its battle against smut in recent weeks, saying it is worried that the easy access to such material on the Internet and elsewhere will have a bad effect on youth and society.

Under the latest crackdown, which started in July, authorities have shut down hundreds of Web sites and arrested more than 300 people.

The new penalties were laid out on Sunday in guidelines issued by China's Supreme People's Court and the office of the country's top prosecutor, Xinhua said.

A pornographic Web site that had been clicked on more than 250,000 times would be considered a "very severe" case that could warrant a life sentence for its producers, Xinhua said. It did not elaborate.
Yahoo! News
  

12:17 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Saturday, September 04, 2004

Attempt To Steal Florida Vote In '04 Exposed

Shrub & Twigs must not trust the same American "Democracy" they are tring to export with bombs and bullets all that much. An attempt by the bush "patriots" to steal the Florida vote again has been uncovered. The good folks at The Daily Mis-Lead has the story with the sources linked:
Bush Tried To Install Crony At Florida Election Board

President Bush has said "Every registered voter deserves to have confidence that the system is fair and elections are honest."1 But according to a new report, the President is doing all he can to once again rig the election in Florida.

According to the Miami Daily Business Review, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) appointee at the Broward County Board of Elections hired a law firm headed by two close cronies of President Bush to fight any charges against it during the 2004 election. Specifically, the Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes hired the law firm Blosser & Sayfie.2 Justin Sayfie "is a former spokesman for Gov. Bush and currently is co-chair of the Bush/Cheney re-election campaign in Broward County." He is also a Bush Ranger (aka. someone who has raised more than $100,000 for the President's campaign).3 James Blosser is also "a top fund-raiser for President Bush's re-election campaign."4 Many observers expect the election will be extremely close in Florida and predict it will touch off litigation. County election supervisors and their legal teams could play a key role in deciding the election.

While Snipes has since been forced to fire the law firm,5 it shows just how far the Bushes are willing to go to throw the Florida election again. Earlier this summer, Jeb Bush attempted to purge thousands of voters from the Florida voting rolls, but was stopped after public pressure overwhelmed the effort.6 Additionally, Florida GOP operatives are going to naturalization offices to give new immigrants voter registration forms which are already pre-marked to register the voter as a Republican.7

Sources:
1. "President Signs Historic Election Reform Legislation into Law," WhiteHouse.gov, 10/29/02.
2. "Elections Supervisor Rapped for Hiring Lawyers With Bush Ties," Law.com, 8/30/04.
3. "Top Fundraisers Earn Right to Party," Los Angeles Times, 8/31/04.
4. "Elections Supervisor Rapped for Hiring Lawyers With Bush Ties," Law.com, 8/30/04.
5. "Broward elections supervisor fires lawyer over firm’s connection to President Bush," Sun-Sentinel, 8/28/04.
6. "State ceases felon voting purge," Miami Herald, 8/14/04.
7. National Public Radio, 7/25/04.
The Daily Mis-Lead
  

4:44 PM / Editor / permalink    2 comments



Friday, September 03, 2004

Kerry Comes Out Hard and Fast, Landing Body Blows and Jarring Uppercuts to the Disgraced Title-Holder

John F. Kerry does not run from a fight or a challenge. When men without honor--Cheney, bush, Z. Miller, etc.--attack him with all the cowardly tactics typical of pack-runners, he "stands and delivers":
The election comes down to this. If you believe this country is heading in the right direction, you should support George Bush. But if you believe America needs to move in a new direction, join with us. John and I offer a better plan that will make us stronger at home and more respected in the world. And we need your help to do that.

For three days in New York, instead of talking about jobs and the economy, we heard anger and insults from the Republicans. And I'll tell you why. It's because they can't talk about the real issues facing Americans. They can't talk about their record because it's a record of failure.

We all saw the anger and distortion of the Republican Convention. For the past week, they attacked my patriotism and my fitness to serve as commander in chief. Well, here's my answer. I'm not going to have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could have and by those who have misled the nation into Iraq.

The vice president even called me unfit for office last night. I guess I'll leave it up to the voters whether five deferments makes someone more qualified to defend this nation than two tours of duty.

Let me tell you what I think makes someone unfit for duty. Misleading our nation into war in Iraq makes you unfit to lead this nation. Doing nothing while this nation loses millions of jobs makes you unfit to lead this nation. Letting 45 million Americans go without health care makes you unfit to lead this nation. Letting the Saudi royal family control our energy costs makes you unfit to lead this nation. Handing out billions of government contracts to Halliburton while you're still on their payroll makes you unfit. That's the record of George Bush and Dick Cheney. And it's not going to change. I believe it's time to move America in a new direction; I believe it's time to set a new course for America.

And we have a specific plan to do just that. So tomorrow morning, John and Elizabeth and Teresa and I are hitting the road across America's heartland. From here, we'll go out and talk with Americans in towns across Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Michigan. And because a stronger America begins at home, we'll talk about our plan to create jobs, cut taxes for the middle class, lower health care costs, and make America safer and more secure.
Excerpted from Kerry's speech in response to bush's guttersnipe-ish, flat-out lying rant closing the RNC.
 

4:47 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Thursday, September 02, 2004

Can They Ever Give Him Back His Good Name...?

I am angry. Very Angry! Because I am angry, I will keep this brief and provide a couple of graphs and a link. "You cannot un-ring the bell," is a journalistic concept that I preach in one form or another in every media/journalism course I teach, and is included in every speech or seminar lecture I give. I now have another example with which to drive the point home--a very egregious example, to be sure: Mr. Kobe Bryant.

Whatever you may think of his admitted act of adultery, in all these months of talk-show blather, Mr. Bryant was outrageously, wrongfully convicted and sentenced for rape by a gillion talking heads--most of them my colleagues and a number of them my friends! That does not prevent me from crying out: Shame on you! Forget all of the "I told you so's"! I care not about being vindicated in my ethics of crime reporting. I care only about the bell that can never be un-rung that Mr. Bryant will wear around his neck all the days of his life this side of the grave. Any experienced forensic journalist should have seen what a prosecution panting after a trophy to hang on its wall chose to ignore--that there wasn't a case strong enough to indict, much less bring Mr. Bryant to trial.
Judge dismisses Bryant case

EAGLE, Colo. - The criminal case against Kobe Bryant case collapsed Wednesday as prosecutors said they had no choice but to drop the sexual assault charge because the NBA star�s accuser no longer wanted to participate. ...

The dismissal marks a stunning turn in the high-profile case against one the NBA?s brightest young stars. For months, prosecutors had insisted they had a strong enough case to win a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.

Instead, prosecutors backed away just days before opening statements were scheduled to begin on Tuesday. Jury selection was scheduled to wrap up this week.
You can read the whole story at: MSNBC
  

11:54 AM / Editor / permalink    4 comments



Wednesday, September 01, 2004

For We Illiterates, EastSouthWestNorth Begins To Decipher THE LIST: This Is A Do Not Miss Item

In an update by Xiao Qiang of China Digital News, we learn that EastSouthWestNorth has "compiled the list of filtered Internet Keywords into quick groupings" along with a "partial translation" for dummies like me:
And what a fascinating list! I could spend days just trying to classify and rationalize the system! And there are in fact quite a few things that I don't even know! This is a wonderful way to expand my politico-cultural indoctrination.
Click onto EastSouthWestNorth now before it gets blocked here in China.
  

4:04 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




A "Swift Boat Liar Against Democracy" Gets $40,000,000 Contract From Guess Who

The folks at the Daily Mislead have conveniently gathered all the links to a story that, frankly, doesn't surprise me--it does disgust me. My bet is that it will turn your stomach too:
Swift Boat Vet Got $40M Contract From Bush

The Bush White House has denied any connection to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth 1 - the group that has been airing factually unsupportable smear ads against Sen. John Kerry's war record. But a new report today shows that one of the key accusers in the smear ads was a lobbyist for a company that recently received a massive federal contract from the Bush administration.

As the Washington Post reports, Rear Admiral William L. Schachte Jr., the man who claims Kerry was not under fire when he received his first Purple Heart, is a top lobbyist for a defense contractor that recently won a $40 million grant from the Bush administration. According to a March 18 legal filing by Schachte's firm, Blank Rome, Schachte was one of the lobbyists working for FastShip's effort to secure federal contracts. 2 On Feb. 2, FastShip announced the Bush administration had awarded it $40 million. 3

Schachte has other connections to the Bush administration. The Washington Post notes David Norcross, Schachte's colleague in the Washington office of Blank Rome, is chairman of this week's Republican convention in New York. 4 Records show that Schachte gave $1,000 to Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns. 5 Additionally, Schachte helped organize veterans' efforts against Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and for Bush in the 2000 South Carolina primary. 6

This is not the first member of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who has been revealed to be connected to the President. The Bush-Cheney campaign's top outside lawyer was forced to resign after he admitted providing legal services to the veterans group. 7 The Bush-Cheney campaign's veterans adviser was also featured in one of the smear ads. 8

Sources:

1. "Press Gaggle by Scott McClellan," WhiteHouse.gov, 8/20/04.
2. "A Swift Shift in Stories," Washington Post, 8/31/04.
3. "FastShip, Inc. to Receive $40 million in Federal Support for Marine Cargo Terminal in Philadelphia," FastShipAtlantic.com, 2/02/04
4. "A Swift Shift in Stories," Washington Post, 8/31/04.
5. OpenSecrets.org, 8/04.
6. Charleston Post & Courier, 2/17/2000.
7. "Bush-Cheney Lawyer Advised Anti-Kerry Vets," Washington Post, 8/25/04.
8. "Bush Campaign Drops Swift Boat Ad Figure," Washington Post, 8/22/04.
The Daily Mis-Lead
  

11:57 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Lenny Bruce Would Surely Be Amused...

It is all over the China blogosphere, but I must post a link to an article on the list of words banned from Chinese cyberspace in these pages. Xiao Qiang has the whole story at China Digital News. I find it more than just interesting--I find it quite surprising. I expected to find a much more extensive list. Of course, my comment refers only to the English and Pinyin words on the list; to my great shame, going into my third year in China, I still cannot read Chinese.
The words you never see in Chinese cyberspace

It is an open secret that all Chinese Internet hosting services, including wireless and instant messenger services, filter user communication through key word blocking mechanisms. But overly vague and broad Chinese internet laws and the internet police force never made the forbidden words explicit -- Not until some Chinese hackers located a document within the installation package of QQ instant messaging software. The file contains over one thousand words, most of them in Chinese, which will be blocked by the service.
Read the full story at China Digital News
 

11:27 AM / Editor / permalink    1 comments



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Featured Articles
A Moment In Beijing
Twin Giants of Asia
Free Floating RMB
Mississippi Sorrows
Coming Full Cycle in
the Taiwan Strait




Blood Will Tell 

A Problem of Evidence

The Boys Who Would Be Cubs

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