born live love die

He stands on tip-toe, nose over the silvery bowl, plucking the popped kernels into his plastic box. The TV sounds in the room adjacent; Bookzilla and JMan are watching some TV show that I find boring. Some cartoons, like Spongebob, can be quite devious, but others are rather plain.

I lean over him, rest my cheek on the top of his head and pat his side. I am often surprised when it sounds hollow. I know that it isn’t, as he is muscle and bone and skin. He and fat are distant acquaintances.

“I love you.”

“Excuse me”, and he is off to the couch with his popcorn.

106 US military personnel have died in Iraq this December.

May God have mercy on us.

The Bush Administration’s attempts to establish a theocracy have been as well managed as just about anything else they have tried. How about this one?

Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees.

What is this all about?

In August 2003, Park Superintendent Joe Alston attempted to block the sale at park bookstores of Grand Canyon: A Different View by Tom Vail, a book claiming the Canyon developed on a biblical rather than an evolutionary time scale. NPS Headquarters, however, intervened and overruled Alston. To quiet the resulting furor, NPS Chief of Communications David Barna told reporters and members of Congress that there would be a high-level policy review of the issue.

According to a recent NPS response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by PEER, no such review was ever requested, let alone conducted or completed.

So, they are selling a book that says that the Grand Canyon was caused by Noah’s flood. And for support?

Park officials have defended the decision to approve the sale of Grand Canyon: A Different View, claiming that park bookstores are like libraries, where the broadest range of views are displayed.

Really?

In fact, however, both law and park policies make it clear that the park bookstores are more like schoolrooms rather than libraries. As such, materials are only to reflect the highest quality science.

Makes sense to me.

These guys can’t even get the spin right.

Pathetic.

Our prisons are filling up and we have the highest incarceration rate among industrialized nations. This is a problem that has no easy solution. But it is good to see that some religious conservatives are seeing the error of having politicized this and are trying to actually make changes for the better.

Not too long ago, you could tell whether an election was under way by watching prime-time television and counting the number of ominous recitatives about prisoners and ex-prisoners in the commercials. This fall, however, the seven million Americans who are in the custody of the state — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — did not loom large on nightly TV; in fact, as has been the case for nearly a decade, they barely received any notice at all. Prisoners are no longer the charged political symbols and campaign-season scapegoats they once were.

Amen to that, brother.

Referring to mandatory-minimum sentences, Representative Bob Inglis of South Carolina, whose district is home to Bob Jones University, declared on the floor of the House: “I voted for them in the past. I will not do it again.” Perhaps most remarkably, the outgoing Republican-controlled Congress came tantalizingly close to passing the Second Chance Act, a bill that focuses not on how to “lock them up” but on how to let them out. The bill may become law soon, if Democrats continue to welcome the new conservative interest in rehabilitation.By some measures, the Second Chance Act is a small bill. It authorizes less than $100 million over two years to address a significant problem: about 700,000 ex-offenders (the population of a good-size American city) will leave prison in 2007 — and two-thirds of them are likely to be rearrested within three years. The bill would provide states with grants to develop model programs for prisoners returning to society. Those states that accept the grants will be asked to re-examine any laws and regulations that make it unreasonably difficult for ex-offenders to reintegrate themselves into their communities — the classic example is the ban on allowing felons to receive a barber’s license.

Central to this reform should be a reexamination of our drug laws. We don’t understand drug use, abuse or addiction very well, but throwing people into jail for long periods of time is regressive. (As a side note, Iran was on our side right after 9/11. They helped isolate the Taliban in Afghanistan. Why? Because Afghani heroin is a thorn in the side of the Iranian theocracy. In this society of perfect communion with Allah, heroin is a major problem. Is there a connection?)

One of the sticking points is the inclusion of faith-based workers among the programs aimed at reducing recidivism.  Republicans are for them and Democrats want more oversight.  There are faith based programs that are successful with some addicts and other malefactors, but not all.  All avenues of treatment should be explored.  The goal should be to make our society better, not prove a point about which method works best.

I don’t know what the answers are, but I’m glad that this political football has been put to rest, at least for the time being.

Electronic product companies like to show adverts on the telly where people are using their products to enhance their lives.  The actors in the adverts show a wonderful life, gleaming smiles and personal connections, all rendered honest by hardware.  But what is the reality?

Veronica Brown is a hot fashion designer, making a living off the virtual lingerie and formal wear she sells inside the online fantasy world Second Life. She expects to have earned about $60,000 this year from people who buy her digital garments to outfit their animated self-images in this fast-growing virtual community.

Got that?  She makes virtual lingerie.  There are those among us who would say that the best lingerie is virtual, but that is a different post.

What is a virtual community?  It is a place where people can go to not be themselves.  Or rather, to be not themselves.  See  Second Life for an example of what I am talking about.  All of the characters are idealized in some way.  But they all have large chests.  Pecs for men, melons for women.  The men often have artful facial hair that you carve rather than grow and shave.
This article talks about property rights in this virtual world, and this is a topic that will allow us to reexamine the relationship between property rights and civil liberties in the future.  Now?  Not so much.

In Second Life, Linden Lab executives wanted to avoid this confusion, believing that users needed clear ownership for economic activity to thrive, recounted Cory Ondrejka, chief technical officer. Otherwise, users would have little incentive to invest.

But he stressed that this ownership did not extend to full property rights — creators have intellectual property rights to the software patterns used in making virtual objects but no rights to the objects themselves. Under this formulation, Brown owns her designs but not the individual dresses and pieces of underwear. Nor do her customers “own” the apparel they purchase and hang in their virtual closets.

Right now, it is about virtual thongs.

Sidney Blumenthal gives us another “say no more” moment.

The Iraq Study Group’s report, released Wednesday, calling the situation in that country “grave and deteriorating” is hardly the first caution that President Bush has received. Two years ago, in December 2004, two frank face-to-face briefings were delivered to him from the field. In the first, the CIA station chief in Baghdad, who had filed an urgent memo the month before titled “The Expanding Insurgency in Iraq,” was invited to the White House. The CIA officer had written that the insurgency was becoming more “self-confident” and in Sunni provinces “largely unchallenged.” His report concluded: “The ease with which the insurgents move and exist in Baghdad and the Sunni heartland is bolstering their self-confidence further.” He predicted that the United States would suffer more than 2,000 dead. Bush’s reaction was to remark about the station chief, “What is he, some kind of defeatist?” Less than a week after the briefing, the officer was informed he was being reassigned from his post in Baghdad.

A few days after that briefing, on Dec. 17, 2004, Col. Derek Harvey, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s senior intelligence officer for Iraq, was ushered into the Oval Office. Harvey, who had “conversed repeatedly with insurgents, and had developed the belief that the U.S. intelligence effort there was deeply flawed,” according to Thomas Ricks in “Fiasco,” briefed the president about the insurgency: “It’s robust, it’s well led, it’s diverse. Absent some sort of reconciliation it’s going to go on, and that risks a civil war. They have the means to fight this for a long time, and they have a different sense of time than we do, and are willing to fight. They have better intelligence than we do.” Harvey also explained that foreign fighters, jihadists and al-Qaida were marginal elements. Ricks reported that after the briefing, Bush in his speeches still “would refer to setbacks only in vague terms.”

In comedy, timing is everything and comedians learn to wait for the right moment to deliver the punch line.  This isn’t comedy, but there is always a follow up to Bush stories.  Wait for it.

But there is more to the story. A former high-ranking intelligence officer and close associate of Harvey’s told me that during Harvey’s briefing the president interrupted, turning to his aides to inquire, “Is this guy a Democrat?” Harvey’s warnings, of course, were as thoroughly ignored as those of the CIA station chief.

Democrat.

Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars

So let me see if I have this straight: We invaded a country for whatever reason du jour (WMDs, Saddam an evil dictator, 9/11, terrorists, etc.), without the people at the top having the foreknowledge of the history of the area or the difference between various Muslim sects, took out the relatively secular (although admittedly dictator-based) government in favor of a far more Islamic (but democratically elected) government and continued to occupy said country, fighting in some cases FOR the Shia (being assisted by our sworn enemies, Iran) and against the insurgent Sunnis (that our allies, the Saudis, support). Have I got that right?

What she said.

One of the results of fighting all the time is that the equipment is being used up.

Field upon field of more than 1,000 battered M1 tanks, howitzers and other armored vehicles sit amid weeds here at the 15,000-acre Anniston Army Depot — the idle, hulking formations symbolic of an Army that is wearing out faster than it is being rebuilt.

The Army and Marine Corps have sunk more than 40 percent of their ground combat equipment into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to government data. An estimated $17 billion-plus worth of military equipment is destroyed or worn out each year, blasted by bombs, ground down by desert sand and used up to nine times the rate in times of peace. The gear is piling up at depots such as Anniston, waiting to be repaired.

Here is the bottom line: we are less safe and our military is less ready because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This was the chain of events:

• 1998, Bush considers a run for office.  House Republicans gin up the impeachment proceedings against Clinton, and Bush and his team decide to run on a theme of restoring greatness to the Presidency.
• 1999, Bush is hooked up with the neoconservative movement.  The idea is that they will fight a very winnable war and then have all of the political capital they need to enact long term changes to the American political landscape.  The primary goals are to push through a reform of Social Security that effectively guts it and eliminate taxes on investment.  The net result of these changes will be to reduce the number of services available to the people while increasing the tax load on wages from labor.
• 2000, Cheney anoints himself as Vice President and takes over the foreign policy portfolio.  Cheney and Rumsfeld establish an organization that parallels the State Department and co-opts State when it wants.  Iraq is the war they want to fight because they think they can win it.
• 2001, after the terrorist attack, Cheney, et. co., start planning to invade Iraq, even though they haven’t got a plan for Afghanistan.
• 2002, Special ops forces are removed from Afghanistan and inserted into Iraq to pave the way for invasion.  The Air Force starts flying missions intended to provoke attack.  Saddam doesn’t bite.  Bush gets a resolution from Congress authorizing him to use force if needed, even though American forces are already operating inside Iraq.

That is how we got here.

Sucks.

This account of a battle in Baghdad shows how out of touch the Bush Administration is.

BURSTS of AK-47 fire hissed past them from several directions at once, showering the U.S. and Iraqi soldiers with pulverized cement and slapping spider-web fractures into their Humvees’ bullet-resistant glass turret-guards.

The joint security forces, undertaking what officials described as a major counterinsurgency operation, were in pursuit of 70 “high-value targets” in Baghdad’s crowded Fadhil quarter, a Sunni Arab neighborhood of multistory tenements along the east bank of the Tigris River.

Instead, the soldiers of the Iraqi army’s 9th Mechanized Division and their American trainers had walked into a deadly ambush Friday. From upper-story apartments, insurgents stopped the soldiers’ advance with grenades and shoulder-fired rockets. Others launched coordinated mortar strikes, hitting one of two nearby Iraqi field posts.

By the time the 11-hour battle was over, one Iraqi soldier had been killed and six others wounded, including one who shot himself in the foot. A U.S. soldier was also wounded and, according to American troops interviewed, additional casualties were averted only because U.S. Apache attack helicopters were called in and American trainers shot their way out of the ambush.

Bush, et. co., used to say that “We’ll stand down when they stand up.”  The lie in that statement is that the ‘they’ to which Bush was referring was not some unifying military force, but primarily Shia military/militia units.  There is no Iraqi army.  There are Shia units and Sunni units.  And militias have infiltrated them.

No count was made of the number of civilians killed in the densely populated neighborhood, but U.S. and Iraqi soldiers acknowledged a significant amount of “collateral damage.”

Good God.

Those crafty Oregonians have done it again.

This month, as controversies emerged in other parts of the country over polling place problems and malfunctioning touch-screen machines, we here in Oregon prepared to swear in a new crop of elected officials with nary a question about the legitimacy of the count or the functioning of our electoral process. We accomplished this with a turnout on Nov. 7 that was, once again, among the highest in the nation. How? With Vote by Mail.

Since the vote is the only voice the people have in government, it should be protected and sought out, proclaimed and nurtured.

By the way, why do we vote on Tuesday?

Election days were originally scheduled on Tuesdays because that was when farmers brought their crops into town to sell. Today on an average Tuesday people balance multiple jobs, soccer practice and child care. Voting by mail gives them ample opportunity to stay engaged in our most crucial democratic process.

Amen. Tuesday is the day I bring a bunch of fresh computer programs to town. Yeah, right.

I wish that we would have vote by mail here in Washington.