August 2007 Archives

It can get pretty contentious in the peace and justice movement, and the same kinds of tensions exist on the ground and inside-the-beltway as exist within our small community here: incrementalism vs. revolution; support for what might happen vs. holding Members accountable; in-your-face actions that get you arrested and/or fined vs. calm discussions with the powerful wherein everyone is polite and not much changes.

But there is one part of the movement that gives me hope and I want to emphasize it to all of us who despair. That is the Iraq Vets themselves.

The veterans of this unholy war are speaking up and acting out. A few months ago, Geoff Millard and Garrett Repenhegan and a few others put on desert fatigues and took fake rifles and skulked around the Mall, acting out some of what they had done in Iraq. People knew it was theatre, but they made their points.

The effort is not new, as most of us know here, the Vietnam War was, in the end, brought to a halt not because of hippies in the streets, or students and professors on the campuses, or John and Yoko singing "All we are saying...", but because the soldiers began to refuse to fight poor villagers.

The film, Sir, No Sir, is a reminder of what DOES work. "We came to understand that the war would not end until soldiers put down their weapons and refused to fight", the narrator says. Watch the trailer, at least.

This week, on the National Mall, a young Iraq vet has constructed a tower, where he sits 24/7, in a vigil to bring attention to the Stop Loss program. He is garnering publicity and changing hearts and minds.

He even had the chance to speak directly to Alberto Gonzales as Gonzales announced his resignation. According to witnesses, Gonzales stood in front of Evan, while Evan recounted the horrors of the war and the torture program, with his hands folded and his head down.

We all have to listen now.

Can anyone stop Bush from going to war with Iran?

In anguish, I recommend Glen Greenwald's column in Salon today, in which he makes as clear a case as I have seen of how rapidly Bush is moving towards war with Iran. He was inspired by what he says "might actually be the most disturbing speech" of Bush's presidency.

Greenwald argues that Congress is incapable of stopping this next war. I wish I did not think he was right on this point, but unless there is bold, sustained leadership, it appears highly likely that Bush will launch a devastating air attack on Iran designed to literally "bomb them back into the Stone Ages."

A short time ago, Dianne posted an article about national security and the ports in Seattle. She included pictures and made a clear cut case that our ports are unsafe despite the money thrown to the Homeland Security Department and the refrain, "We're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here."

But what happens when products arrive in our ports legally via a corporation producing low-cost goods overseas? We have many more things that are unsafe and when confronted with the choice of keeping us safe from terrorism and keeping us safe from formaldehyde, lead, and arsenic in our products, isn't it our government's responsibility to protect our country from all potential hazards?

The free market will take care of things, right? I'm sure we can trust the free market; afterall, it's what we've been told.

But just the other day, I read an article discussing the tainted clothing from China, and this morning I read an article about tainted pet treats quietly being pulled from Walmart's shelves. And it wasn't very long ago that I was reading about poisonous pet food and killer toothpaste. All of these events qualifynot just as public health threats, but as national security threats.

In fact, if you want to measure the safety of the country by our legal corporate imports, from countries such as China, then we need look no further than this article from the Philidelphia Inquirer that lambasted the whole infrastructure of Chinese exports, the regulations of our government, and the ethical responsibility of corporations, as well as the self-responsibility of the consumers.

For the recent recalls, the first fingers should be pointed at the Chinese businesses and managers that produced shoddy products, along with failed oversight by the Chinese government. However, the answers are not that easy. The United States purchases nearly $300 billion worth of goods a year from China, and "phantom" sourcing makes it difficult to ascertain the origin of the tainted products.

Further, making deeper sense of this situation involves complex ethical questions.

Our society has clearly stressed the value of low-priced goods, even if those attractive prices come at the cost of quality. As such, have Western multinational corporations relentlessly pursuing a competitive advantage played a role by purchasing goods from a developing country? Could we implicate our own government for allowing those bad goods to enter our market? Might even we, as consumers who endlessly chase lower prices, play a part?

We've been led to believe that the free market will take care of things. And we're also led to believe that we should just 'deal with it' because we have a 'global economy.'

However, I argue that their 'global economy' actually means 'corporate economy', and as such, the corporate economy is dangerous to our national security.

We have a government by the people and for the common good of the people. Our government must treat all goods coming into our ports as if they are a potential threat to the well-being of its citizens, because they are.

Photo courtesy of Associated Press

DCPers - Let's welcome back Gob Ears with another installment on the vicissitudes of our nation's infrastructure:

A lot of interesting stuff is coming out in the wake of the I-35W bridge failure in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Now we learn that that state's transportation bureaucracy quietly lowered its goals for bridge maintenance in 2003 from 65% to 55% of bridges receiving a "good" or better rating. Here's a wonderful quote from one of the top bureaucrats there: "Once we started looking at what others were doing, we realized that 65 percent was an unrealistic number."

In other words, if we can show that we're no worse than others, it's okay.

[Editor's Note: This piece was written and prepared before today's Gonzales news, so let's continue the discussions and add these thoughts in]

As Marshall McLuhan prophetically wrote in the 1960s, "Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it. "

Political art comes in many varieties, from official government propaganda produced with a staggering budget to products of personal convictions of individuals working on a shoe string. YouTube and other video art are the latest phenomenon to emerge, but the pieces presented below are relatively low-tech and include seed art, car art, public space installation art, and personal marquee art.

These pieces were made of seeds and photographed by Kayakbiker at the Minnesota State Fair. The colors come from the type of seeds. (Artists: Kim Cope, Teresa Anderson)

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And let me be clear - I'm not talking about a Progressive alternative propaganda machine to Feaux News - I'm talking about an actual, factual news service. Like the news used to be. Remember? It was pretty much just the facts, ma'am.

Correspondents would reference WH positions by stating them as such, instead of stating them as the lead-in to their story, followed by who disagrees with said position.

Today I bring you, for our discussions, torture on the couch.

Last week, at the San Francisco meeting of the American Psychological Association, the ethical concerns of the members about any sanctioning of psychologists' presence at torture sessions at GITMO (or elsewhere), came up. Eight panels on the subject were formally scheduled. Countless conversations and strategy sessions ensued. As a result of overwhelming membership disapproval of the practice of having psychologists present at GITMO "information-gathering" sessions, the following was decided:

SAN FRANCISCO - The nation's largest group of psychologists scrapped a measure Sunday that would have prohibited members from assisting interrogators at Guantanamo Bay and other U.S. military detention centers.

The American Psychological Association's policy-making council voted against [editor's boldface] a proposal to ban psychologists from taking part in any interrogations at U.S. military prisons "in which detainees are deprived of adequate protection of their human rights."

A friend who attended the conference told me:

I just got back from the APA convention where I was a presenter on [one of eight] panels of an Ethics and Interrogations mini-convention and worked with my colleagues on the protest rally. We lost the vote but are winning the public relations war in the press except for a whitewash article in the Washington Post that reads like a puff piece put out by the APA. The meetings were constant, wild, tumultuous and exhausting. Specific APA collaborators with the DoD and White House were outed, leading to harangues and hate mail to the whistle blower [ ED note: presumedly from the WH and collaborators to the person who identified the collaborators].

They hoodwinked the Council of Reps with their completely scripted line and full court press, but they unleashed the floodgates as rank and file psychologists took notice and began to protest with us.

On a Friday morning, with not much to do (or rather, lots to do that seems so overwhelming, it's better to play some word games!), I decided to do a Google search for the word "democracy."

artwork by Phil Scroggs, for UCLA

There were 89,100,000 hits. I went through the first three pages of hits and made a spread sheet of the descriptor words for democracy, and the active verbs most closely associated with the concept of democracy. This seemed appropriate because the top sites are the ones most widely read, so I wanted to see what concepts we are associating with the idea of democracy, at least, this week.

I found, in those first three pages:

Democracy Now, the Democracy Journal, and a democracy game. Lots of blogs, including ours (although not in the first three pages), The Democracy Project on PBS (for kids), democracy.org (Bob in Washington, just a page with no links), the Center for Democracy and Technology, Democracy for America, democracy.com, the democracy channel, and, of course, de Tocqueville's essay on Democracy in America. Democracy is also a piece of apparently squirrely software.

But let's go to the videotape, so to speak:

["Clueless" poster image: Paramount Pictures]

I'm a proud Democrat. Most of the folks I know are proud Democrats. But the proud Democrats I know, are not particularly proud of the Democrats in Congress right now, and it's obvious to those of us in Realityville, USA, why this is.

Ask a Democratic politician why the approval ratings of this Democratic Congress are so low, and they will tell you that it's because of the Iraq War and Republicans. America has turned against the war, and it's dragging everyone's approval ratings down.

Wow. Is there a deeper level of willful ignorance anywhere in the world that surpasses that of Washington politicians?

I can't take it anymore. They're utterly clueless.

I had to write a letter to them:

Dear Congressional Democrats,

After reading that you blame the President and the Republicans for your low approval ratings, I feel compelled to write this letter and correct your mistaken beliefs about why people think you suck.

People think you suck, because you refuse to stand up to a president that is less popular than syphilis.

People think you suck because you swore to uphold the Constitution and protect us from all enemies, foreign and domestic, and you don't. I'm embarassed that Bruce Fein and Bob Barr understand this, and you don't.

People think you suck because you were sent to Washington to end the war and bring our troops home. Instead of the debate being about the date to begin leaving, you have managed to lose track of the discussion, and now it's about what happens if we leave, and how many troops to leave behind. Fortunately, Ari Fleischer is going to change the subject back for you. Who knew that Ari would come to the rescue of the message muddled democrats by delivering a straight and bold message from Republicans. Unfortunately for the Republicans, they are delivering a message that America has come to loathe and thinks is complete crap. You need to send a big thank you note to that man for doing what you folks couldn't.

People think you suck because you have no message machine at all. You have no coordination on agenda or debate. Here's a tip: We're not looking for a chorus. We're looking for a choir. Choirs need leaders, and you people don't know how to find them or grow them.

People think you suck because you seem to have no idea how people who live outside the beltway feel, and you don't seem to care much. Sure, you are somewhat less clueless when you get back from some time spent in your districts. But once you get back to Washington and start breathing the rarified air of power and privilege, well, the concerns of ordinary Americans fly out the taxpayer funded window.

But mostly, it's this--People think you suck because they sent you there to stand up for them, and instead, you drop to your knees. Look, it's not that difficult. We didn't send you there to fight the fights you can win. We sent you there to fight the fights that need fighting.

As Democrats, we'd rather die on our feet than live on our knees. Internalize that message. Needlepoint it on a pillow or tattoo it on your thighs. Whatever it takes for you to simultaneously be in Washington and remember why you were sent there, do it.

People don't think you suck because you lose. Losing we understand. We're Democrats, after all. No, they think you suck because you're not willing to fight.

If you don't want people to think you suck, try standing up for them. And then keep standing up for them. For as long as it takes to get the job done.

Yeah, it really is just that simple.

Yours truly,

Casey Morris, Proud Democrat

So...what's on your mind?

["The Scream", by Edvard Munch]

LATE UPDATE: It's 00:11:32 AM (EST) and there's still nary any reporting from Iraq on CNN or MSNBC's site. Not even about the 14 troops KIA. Down the memory hole. However, I learned that it looks like the cocaine charges against Lindsay Lohan may be dropped. Good to know that we have the news priorities in order.

And speaking of Groundhog Day, do we all remember what DOMINATED the news on September 10, 2001? Yes, that's right--stories of Anne Heche being nuts, and shark attacks. Today's version is Lindsay Lohan and pit bull stories. Like I said, it's Groundhog Day.

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Has anyone seen the War in Iraq recently? I ask this, because on my teevee, it seems to have gone missing.

I'm talking about actual reporting, be it from Baghdad or Bacquba. Right now I am looking at the CNN page and the MSNBC page and neither has a single story about the fighting in Iraq. Not one. I move on to the front page of MSNBC and again, same thing. Not a single story. And I've been looking for over 24 hours now.

War? What war?

Instead of reporting on the war, we are getting an awful lot of reporting on what's being said and written about the war. And if you were to listen to the latest written and broadcast exploits of the various pundidiots and elected officials fresh off the dog-and-pony tour of Al-Anbar, you would think "The surge is working! The surge is working!" Well, no, the surge isn't working. The "surge" was never in Al Anbar to begin with. This is like saying that rebuilding of New Orleans is taking place because a new bar opened in New York City.

I can only imagine that this rosy world view is what accounts for the lack of Iraq reporting. But hey, no news is good news, right?

Well, not exactly. Here's the "surge is working" view from Sinjar, near the Syrian border:

BAGHDAD, Aug. 21 — One week after a series of truck bombs hit a poor rural area near the Syrian border, the known casualty toll has soared to more than 500 dead and 1,500 wounded, according to the Iraqi Red Crescent Society, making it the bloodiest coordinated attack since the American-led invasion in 2003.

[...]With the latest figures, the attack has become the deadliest coordinated assault since the 2003 invasion by a factor of three. In July about 155 people died in a giant explosion in the northern town of Amerli.

Here's some more "the surge is working" news:

June-July-August 2003: 113 Americans killed June-July-August 2004: 162 Americans killed June-July-August 2005: 217 Americans killed June-July-August 2006: 169 Americans killed June-July-August 2007: 229 Americans killed (August not over yet)

I wonder how the surge is working for the families of the dead and wounded in Iraq and here at home. Probably not as well as it is for Ken Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon.

Last week’s revelation that our Pentagon (it does belong to us, the taxpayers, after all), had paid two sisters in South Carolina $998,798 for shipping for shipping two 19-cent washers to Fort Bliss earlier this year has provoked the usual barrage of outraged clucking.

But before we get our moral outrage fully in gear, I’d like to propose a small toast to the creativity of the Corley sisters, wishing them well on their tour of the federal prison system. After all, what did they do that any red-blooded market fundamentalist might feel called upon to do, once they realized that the Pentagon had created an automated payment system for any shipments to combat areas or U.S. bases that were labeled “priority” ?

It’s as if the sisters watched the first half of Office Space, when our heroes cook up a scheme to skim the rounding errors off every transaction, a sum they are sure will never be noticed. But the Corleys apparently did not finish watching the movie. Unlike the cubicle stiffs in Office Space, they reportedly started very small, and when the Pentagon paid their early bills, they sent in bigger bills. As one federal agent put it, “As time went on they got more aggressive in the amounts they put in.''

(photos by DiAnne Grieser)

It is enough to make a person crazy. On the one hand, some experts are reported to project an increase in the threat of domestic terror attacks, and the "fear factor" is a time-proven way to garner support for military spending and troop increases. At the same time, the Bush administration turns around and cuts domestic preparedness spending.

Recently, the Department of Homeland Security announced state and city grants to help increase their security against terrorism. My state of Washington had its funding cut by 10 percent from last year's levels. Probably your state has had a big cut too. One of my Senators (Patty Murray) is an architect of a bill which takes real security needs into account. That bill could easily be vetoed by the White House, even though it has broad support of Republicans as well as Democrats! It passed the Appropriations Committee with a unanimous vote! A 2/3 majority would be required to override a Presidential veto. The homeland security bill is the first of 12 spending measures that the Senate must pass before Oct. 1, when the 2008 fiscal year begins.

It was against this backdrop of conflicting and troubling information that I began to notice the brightly colored containers flanking the Seattle city skyline each time I approached the city from the south. Always my vantage point was from a bridge or overpass where I could not safely stop. Finally, I braved the industrial district in my little VW bug, carefully avoiding the Burlington Northern "yard bulls" and pulling over abruptly to get this shot. Then, just yesterday, I was down on the waterfront at a public event and watched this huge amount of container cargo enter Elliot Bay. These are underinspected and those that aren't unloaded here are shipped out by train.

What a travesty it is to hear about "fighting them over there so they won't chase us home" as these containers and the ferries are sitting ducks. This post is about my city, where our New Year's celebration was severely curtailed at the Millennium, and where terrorist Ressam was apprehended bringing in materials from Canada via the ferry system sufficient to blow up LAX. Wherever you live, consider that cuts in Homeland Security affect your first responders and domestic security adversely, which is a supreme hypocrisy given what is being spent to wage war overseas in the name of the global war on terror.

A village pub

This morning we talked over breakfast about summer plans, and I reminded Richard and Cleo that we might go back to Dartington, Devon, UK for a conference I am helping to run.

That led to a conversation about one of my visits there, back in 1995, when I stayed at the Cott Inn, a small thatched roof inn from the 14th century. Every day at 4:30, the pub opened for everyone in the village to come in and have a pint, or four. And every day I was there, I saw and spoke with the same folks: the college teacher, the gardener, the painter, and the "village idiot", a carpenter who had had a bad accident falling off a ladder and who sustained some brain damage as a result.

We are testing out the Canadian healthcare system on Richard’s oldest daughter. Cleo, an avid soccer player, rearranged the interior of her knee joint last year and after a valiant effort to treat the mess with physical therapy, she reluctantly came to the conclusion that surgical repair would be required.

So far, in comparison to the home-based healthcare system known fondly around our house as BC/BS CareLESS or Care-Not-At-All, I have to say that this system, while peculiar in its own ways, is a stripped down but effective process. No one actually has any additional information, such as where one is supposed to go and when, but a doyenne of French-Canadian efficiency, in blue scrubs, is obviously in charge and is good-natured and directive.

We decide to obey.

Cleo, who is more fluent in French than we are (years spent in Washington DC have inured us to most communicative language and our fuzzy brains scramble to remember the language of romance), translates the rapid-fire instructions: Sit and wait. You will be called in based on order of importance.

Finally! Honesty in healthcare!

Cleo is called and Richard retires to a sunny picnic table outside to nap. I have gone through all of the old People and Us magazines, noting which hot romances of a year ago are already kaput and which hot new fall movies of 2006 we never saw and have no memory of.

The newspaper reveals a little too much attention, for my taste, on Karl Rove’s imminent departure, but the Stephen Harper lampooning is reassuring. The French-Canadians sitting here with me seem, if nothing else, sensible and down-to-earth. The surgeon comes out to joke with the family members; this is not Gray’s Anatomy, the doctors are more Patrick Stewart than Patrick Dempsey.

We are grateful to be NOT-in-the-USA and relax into the sense of basic competence and straightforwardness that is Quebec.

The French are different, but their practicality overrides the tendency for the overly-dramatic and I am grateful for the simple time passing, waiting, the ease of it all without the billing dramas, the denials of coverage, the sudden arrivals of gunshot victims, etc. that is the hospital scene in DC too often.

C’est vie. We will check in later, post-surgically, to see how the lower America is faring this Friday.

MonKey points us in the direction of this disturbing story about the White House moving to limit the damaging potential of the Petraeus report.

Is the White House worried about Gen. Petraeus saying too much on Capitol Hill? Is that why it wants to limit the amount of face time he has with Congress? The Washington Post: "Senior congressional aides said yesterday that the White House has proposed limiting the much-anticipated appearance on Capitol Hill next month of Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker to a private congressional briefing, suggesting instead that the Bush administration's progress report on the Iraq war should be delivered to Congress by the secretaries of state and defense…The skirmishing is an indication of the rising anxiety on all sides in the remaining few weeks before the presentation of what is widely considered a make-or-break assessment of Bush's war strategy, and one that will come amid rising calls for a drawdown of U.S. forces from Iraq."

The antiwar group Americans Against Escalation In Iraq will begin running a TV ad campaign targeting GOP lawmakers Thelma Drake (VA), Phil English (PA), Mitch McConnell (KY), and Fred Upton (MI). The ads -- which will air in college towns in the states on MTV, ESPN, and local network stations -- attempt to tie these Republicans to the draft.

One of the ads goes: ”Thelma Drake has supported Bush's war in Iraq for four years”; it quotes War Czar Douglas Lute about a military draft possibly being on the table. And it ends: “Tell Thelma Drake to end this war.”

Is it too much to ask that the people get a public accounting of how someone spent our $97 billion?

Finally. The American Bar Association decides to stand up for the Rule of Law. It's about damn time.

SAN FRANCISCO -- The American Bar Assn. voted Monday to urge Congress to override a Bush administration order authorizing the CIA to use interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, and sensory and sleep deprivation.

The nation's largest lawyers' organization also called on Congress to give federal judges more oversight of government efforts to use the "state secrets" doctrine to throw out legal challenges to anti-terrorism programs.

[...] Like Opotowsky, Harvey quoted an article recently published by P.X. Kelley, a former Marine commandant, and Robert Turner of the University of Virginia's Center on Law and National Security, who in the past have been supportive of the administration's war on terrorism. In this instance, however, they wrote that they could not "in good conscience" support the executive order, saying it affords the CIA "carte blanche to engage in 'willful and outrageous acts of personal abuse.' "

Ya think?

Arrghh. One can only hope that this small trip into the painfully obvious position of supporting the Geneva Conventions may lead them to express a position on the attitude and actions of utter contempt from the law that abounds from the nation's top law enforcement official, Alberto Gonzales.

Photo by Jerry Holt, courtesy of Minneapolis Star Tribune

DCP Readers:

Please welcome Guest Blogger "Gob Ears", colleague and professional engineer addressing current affairs in infrastructure.--FB

On August 1 the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis collapsed suddenly and catastrophically dumping dozens of vehicles into the Mississippi River and stranding many more. There were an as yet undetermined number of people killed and dozens more injured. A vital transportation link in this major American city was destroyed.

We take our infrastructure for granted in this country with not much consciousness of how important it is to our health and well being. Consider the upheaval we in the Bay Area experienced when the Bay Bridge was out of service for a month in the wake of the Loma Prieta earthquake. People in the Twin Cities area will be without a similar transit link for a longer period.

Imagine the effect of losing our potable water supply for a month, or even a week. What would happen if a major sewerage treatment plant was knocked out of service?

Some ten years ago when I was working in downtown San Francisco, a garden-variety construction screw-up knocked out the electricity for six hours. Things came to a halt. Six hours! Imagine six weeks.

What the bridge in Minneapolis shows us, or should show us, is that all our infrastructure is vulnerable. Knowledgeable people working on these things have been saying for some time that we’re not maintaining our infrastructure and we’re moving into peril as a consequence. Yet, other than the typical run of bloviation from the political leadership, little gets done.

For five years, the NSA has been reading email and tapping phones without a warrant, forbidden activies according to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. Bipartisan Congress passed the "Protect America Act" (already nicknamed the "Police America Act") before the summer recess, to make such spying on citizens legal. (The latest excuse was that FISA had a backlog of foreigner-to-foreigner calls to approve.) The President can open the mail of private citizens, and the CIA can look at their financial records. National Security Letters can be sent requesting information on citizens from organizations such as libraries, under the Patriot Act. Organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union have filed lawsuits in federal court and filed Freedom of Information requests repeatedly, to expose wrongful spying. According to what they have found, files are kept by the FBI and Pentagon on peaceful activists and groups like Greenpeace and PETA are infiltrated by informants.

A study called Civil Liberties vs. Security: Public Opinion in the Context of the Terrorist Attacks on America was done at Michigan State University, funded by the National Science Foundation. The study surveyed Americans shortly after 9/11/01. The study found that the greater people's sense of threat, the lower their support for civil liberties. This effect interacted, however, with trust in government. The lower people's trust in government, the less willing they were to trade off civil liberties for security, regardless of their level of threat.

It is in this context that I read about what the British government is doing - treating climate change protesters using their law designed for terrorists. What do you think would happen in the US in a similar situation? What is the best balance between civil liberties and security in an era where terror attacks are a possibility yet we have a tradition of free speech and assembly as well as personal privacy and liberty? Are there not laws for when civil disobedients get out of hand, without resorting to "terror" law?

According to a document from Scotland Yard, obtained by The Guardian:

Police to use terror laws on Heathrow climate protesters
Government has encouraged use of stop and search and detention without charge

Armed police will use anti-terrorism powers to "deal robustly" with climate change protesters at Heathrow next week, as confrontations threaten to bring major delays to the already overstretched airport.

Up to 1,800 extra officers will be drafted in to prevent an estimated 1,500 people disrupting the airport over the period of the camp for climate change, which is due to begin on Tuesday. The police have been told to use stop and search powers against the protesters, who have pledged to take direct action on August 18 and 19 but not to endanger life.
(snip)

"Should individuals or small groups seek to take action outside of lawful protest they will be dealt with robustly using terrorism powers. This is because the presence of large numbers of protesters at or near the airport will reduce our ability to proactively counter the terrorist act [threat]," the document says.

The police report makes it clear that the government has encouraged police forces to make greater use of terrorism powers "especially the use of stop and search powers under s44 Terrorism Act 2000".

The law gives police powers to:

Stop and search people and vehicles for anything that could be used in connection with terrorism

Search people even if they do not have evidence to suspect them

Hold people for up to a month without charge

Search homes and remove protesters' outer clothes, such as hats, shoes and coats.

The civil rights group Liberty said it was alarmed at the police use of the anti-terrorism powers to deter peaceful protest. "Stop and search powers created to address the threat of terrorism should not be used routinely against peaceful demonstrators," said James Welch, Liberty's legal director.

(read the rest of the story below & see photo of armed airport cop)

Last week, on Tuesday evening, my neighborhood, like thousands of others across the U.S., held a National Night Out gathering. Jean and I were the hosts of our neighborhood gathering, and we held it in the parking lot outside Fabulous Fern's, where the DCP met for our annual meeting a couple years back.

We didn't know when we planned the event that the I-35 bridge would fall down, killing commuters and their kids in their cars. It felt good to get together with people for a GOOD reason, which was a marked departure from the sadness of the days preceeding the get together.

When Congress leaves town in August, many local residents of the District of Columbia clear out too. But for those who stay, for just a few weeks, we get our city and neighborhoods back.

There is still news to chew on and an occupation to fight and other boneheaded moves to prevent, but for today, take a walk with Richard and me through Capitol Hill, sans the Feds.

This morning was glorious: the first coolish day in a week, allowing for full inhalation. We took time to read the New York Times and the headlines of the Post before heading out for a stroll.

Capitol Hill rowhouses

People actually live in those houses; Senators and police officers, teachers and retired military, bureaucrats and young staffers. As we walked today, we saw quite a few houses being rehabbed: gutted and rewired and redesigned. The housing market here is still OK because war always provides for a bump, or at least a buffer, due to all those contractors who want to be in the 'hood so they can discuss their needs with Congress...

We noted the couple redoing their garden with beautiful purple flowers and the guy working on making the lower part of his house into what is called an "English basement" (aka "income").

We passed a friend's house and she was out, watering her garden. We talked about the kids, the water bills, and the weather.

As we neared Eastern Market, we heard music. A close harmony singing group was there, comprised of Cap Hill neighbors. They were letting it rip with their 3-5 year old kids sitting cross-legged in front of them, looking up attentively. Dogs barked along, and everyone was smiling.

Eastern Market itself is closed, due to the fire that happened there a few months ago:

but today the area looked as crowded as it ever was. The new temporary facility is almost finished; just awaiting the refrigeration equipment. We walked among the outdoor vendors, sampling hummous, bean dip, sliced peaches and tomatoes, candied pecans and almonds, and by the time we got to the crepe booth, we felt replete, so we headed off for iced coffees instead.

We ran into old friends and talked about the progress on both the temporary facility and the old market. Everyone feels a little proprietary about the Market. It is OUR market and we have to check on progress regularly.

Next we checked out the newly reopened library, which is like the old library, only lighter, brighter, cleaner, and containing computers and actual books. There were a lot of older folks and kids inside, and we noted that it is once again, a real community center.

We walked back through the market area, saying hello to the vendors we know, and picked up a basket of locally grown blackberries, which we ate immediately. They were gone before we had completed two blocks.

I share this vignette with you all because the sense of having lost a certain amount of civic life has been palpable here, ever since Jan. 2001, and certainly after September 11, 2001. The fire at the Market was just another in a long line of losses, including the closing of the local library for long-overdue repairs, but the biggest loss of all has been the sense that Capitol Hill belongs to the people and the community, if not the entire country.

Today was, for us, a glimpse of hope that the community is still here, underneath and despite all the criminal behavior and bullying that goes on the other eleven months of the year. Today it felt like *we the people* were back, singing and laughing and caring for the community and each other, and capable of keeping on keeping on.

At least, until September.

Last night Richard and I had another one of those long conversations about the State of Things, one in which we found ourselves once more easily distracted by the momentary needs of children and house, overwhelmed by the sheer number of activities we are asked to support, and challenged by the need to make more money than the world seems interested in rewarding us with.

Does that feel familiar to anyone else here?

So we watched a movie. (A Thousand Clowns, one of the great subversive flicks of the 1960s. We lamented the passing of a world with much simpler problems, but it was good to laugh).

This morning I woke up with the same questions as yesterday, however. The questions add up to something that is covered by the main question:

WTF are we doing here?

I swear, some days I have no idea where we are going or how we are going to accomplish anything, especially when I get requests to hep with events on Sept. 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 15, 26, 29.... none of which are coordinated by the same group.

David Swanson must be feeling the same way, because he sent along today's thread header, bless the man:

Chris Dugan, former military recruiter, countering
photo: K Bradley

Resistance of One

By David Swanson

There is something else we can try. If you've given up on staging marches and rallies, or if - like me - you haven't but you want to try something else as well, and if you've given up on lobbying Congress as pointless, or if - like me - you haven't but you want to try something else as well, and if educating your fellow citizens as to exactly how completely corrupt the whole system is seems like an incomplete answer, and if staging a general strike or taking over the capital only seems like a good idea if you can get millions of others to join you, there is another approach that can be taken right away by a single person, a small group, or a crowd.

I'm seriously thinking of running for the school board next year, and if I do, this is what I would like every voter to see and to think about:

I'd like to also know, what part of this video strikes you the most?

[Photo credit: Denver Open Source]

Is it ever acceptable to politicize tragedy, such as the Minneapolis bridge collapse, or the cave-in at the Utah mine?

Hell, yes. And I'm not afraid to put it out there as just that. I am absolutely willing to discuss these events as part of politics.

Why? Because it was politics that, if it didn't downright cause these tragedies to happen, it certainly aided and abetted the degree to which these tragic events were magnified. And it is politics that bears at least some responsibility for the deadly consequences that may continue to arise from both of these examples.

I have always felt a curious natal affinity for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The U.S. destroyed Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, 62 years ago. I was born a year after the war on August 8, and became aware early on of how the anniversaries of these bombings bracketed my birthday.

I grew up in Norfolk, VA in the 1950s. The city proclaimed itself the world's largest naval base, and whether it was or wasn't (it was), the presence of the Navy was overwhelming. Where else would it have been considered a romantic way to spend Christmas Eve driving your girlfriend down to the Navy base and riding along the piers with the destroyers, cruisers, battleships, subs, and aircraft carriers all decorated with strings of Christmas lights? (I doubt this quaint custom survived 9/11).

At my elementary school, which was located about 3 miles from the Main Gate of the Naval Base, we learned from Burt the Turtle about how to "Duck and Cover" if the evil Russians should launch a surprise attack on our wonderful Navy base.

Next year the YearlyKos convention will be expanded in order to accomodate more the idea of the progressive blogosphere in general. It will be called Networks Nation. Suz and I attended a Forum where bloggers were able to question some members of the mainstream and also alternative media and asked some hard questions. In the process of reading some of the current articles on the mainstream media and bloggers I came across this article by Juan Cole, who was one of the speakers at YearlyKos. He makes some thought-provoking points.

Mainstream Media and Bloggers
by Juan Cole

Matthew Haughey says he won't read our blogs if we use the term "mainstream media" (a.k.a. MSM).

A news flash for Matt: We don't care.

We don't care if you read our web logs.

The difference, Matt, is that we are independent actors, not part of a small set of multi-billion dollar corporations. The difference is that we are not under the constraints of making a 15% profit. The difference is that we are a distributed information system, whereas MSM is like a set of stand-alone mainframes. The difference is that we can say what we damn well please.

If we were the mainstream media (perhaps better thought of as corporate media), we would care if you threatened to stop reading us. Because although we might be professional news people, we would have the misfortune to be working for corporations that are mainly be about making money.

We would be ordered to try to avoid saying anything too controversial (and I don't mean "Crossfire" controversial), because we would be calculating what would bring in 15% profits per annum on our operating capital. Would hours and hours of television "reportage" and discussion of Michael Jackson or of Terri Schiavo or Scott Peterson (remember?) bring in viewers and advertising dollars? Then that is what we would be giving the public. Bread and circuses.

Would giving airtime to Iraq, where we Americans have 138,000 troops and are spending $300 billion that we don't have, be too depressing to bring in the audience and advertising and the 15% profit? Then we would dump it in favor of bread and circuses. We'd dump Afghanistan as a story even faster, since there are "only" 17,000 US troops in that country, and it is only a place where Ben Laden may be hiding out and from which the US was struck on 9/11, leaving 3,000 dead and the Pentagon and World Trade Center smouldering.

If we were the mainstream media as Ashley Banfield was, our careers would be over if we mentioned a little thing like the replacement of journalism with patriotism in the coverage of the Iraq War. Or if we said things like Ashley did of March-April 2003,

"You didn't see where those bullets landed. You didn't see what happened when the mortar landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me. There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism or was this coverage-? There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you're getting the story, it just means you're getting one more arm or leg of the story . . . I can't tell you how bad the civilian casualties were. I saw a couple of pictures. I saw French television pictures, I saw a few things here and there, but to truly understand what war is all about you've got to be on both sides. You've got to be a unilateral, someone who's able to cover from outside of both front lines, which, by the way, is the most dangerous way to cover a war, which is the way most of us covered Afghanistan. There were no front lines, they were all over the place. They were caves, they were mountains, they were cobbled, they were everything. But we really don't know from this latest adventure from the American military what this thing looked like and why perhaps we should never do it again. The other thing is that so many voices were silent in this war. We all know what happened to Susan Sarandon for speaking out, and her husband, and we all know that this is not the way Americans truly want to be. Free speech is a wonderful thing, it's what we fight for, but the minute it's unpalatable we fight against it for some reason."

If we were mainstream media we would be wholly owned subsidiaries of General Electric, the Disney Corporation, Time Warner, Rupert Murdoch, Viacom and so on and so forth. Ninety percent of cable channels are owned by the same companies that own the big television networks.

It isn't a matter of journalism being a business. How good journalism is when practiced in the service of a business depends on the owner's philosophy and economic goals.

(for continuation by Ted Turner, keep reading)
(photos of bloggers, young cameraman and Fox News cameraman by DiAnne Grieser)

Well, we've finally made it. Thanks to the sadistic leadership of the Bush administration, the United States has officially become a third world country - complete with a struggling, terrified public, a tyrannical hologram for a leader, and a crumbling infrastructure.

An infrastructure that began to officially crumble this week in Minnesota. And when I say "began," I mean we're just getting started.

It's the dog days of August and everyone, except the troops, of course, is lying back and sipping the 2007 recess refreshers. Here is our own version of 2007's summer drink recipes:

ImPEACHment Fizz: Our friend Diane from the Backbone Campaign handed out peaches at a progressive fundraiser the other night, inspiring this suggested combo:

1 part ImPEACHment Schnapps
1 part Gingerly Ale
Crushed Congress on ice

Mix well and serve to your elected officials whenever you run into them at home or on vacation. Do explain the ingredients.

Next, we whip up something we call the Oversight Sparkler:

1 jigger Kick-Some-Ass rum
2 jiggers Wake-Me-Up orange juice
1 jigger Pay-Attention-Already Tonic Water
Add, Limes-of-Spines

Mix well and serve to your elected officials whenever you run into them at home or on vacation. Do explain the ingredients.

The Election Reform Crush

Inspired by the last-hour efforts of PFAW and Steny Hoyer to compromise the Holt Bill (HR 811), which is not so great in the first place, and which was followed by a self-serving note from PFAW telling us how great our elections are going to be, albeit AFTER 2008, we offer up the following recipe:

Take one lemon and beat the hell out of it.
After you feel better, place the maceration in a blender
Add ice you have crushed in your bare hands
Pour in as much Jack Daniels as you can stand
Take the sugar canister and grab enough in your fist so you can sweeten up the mess, add to the blender
Whip it.

Mix well and serve to your elected officials whenever you run into them at home or on vacation.

And finally, if you find yourself worrying about Iraq or the troops sweltering in 2,000 degree-heat, being blown up by insurgents we pretty much invited in with our inability to secure what really needed to be secured -- the hearts and lives of the Iraqi people -- here's a ticket to oblivion we can all use:

Iced Petraeus

Scotch whiskey of your choice, for forgetting
Chamomile tea, for calmness
Kool-Aid, your choice of flavors
Fresh minty simple syrup, for optimism
Ice cubes to run over your face and neck before adding to the drink, for coolness under pressure

Drink one-two daily until September rolls around and we see if The Surge worked.

Do not serve the Iced Petraeus to your elected officials; they have been drinking it already and, unlike the rest of the drink recipes above, they already feel the effects.

Most of you know that occasionally I am asked to analyze the movement behavior of public figures for the mainstream media. I use something called Laban Movement Analysis. It is a nonjudgemental approach to analysis, although obviously interpretive conclusions can be drawn, mostly about how to improve communicative style or performance abilities.

So when Casey called me and asked me to take a look at Vice-President Dick Cheney on Larry King Live the other day, I was concerned about my abilities to overlook my judgments about his behavior and simply look at how he communicates.

The lunacy that bothers me is not the stuff you find in Bedlam - people raging at the walls: that's what sane people do now; it's the new variety that comes from poverty of spirit: the popular, well-dressed, well-heeled and well-spoken lunacy that elects mad leaders to make mad wars upon the unfortunate and the dispossessed - the lunacy of the soul; of cold human hollowness, emotional flatness and numbness, moral emptiness; all surrounded with a gargantuan, manic and carefully disguised greed as a remedy for pain and the fear of death: the clever, well-adapted madness that the world rewards and to which the world aspires.

Michael Leunig in The Age, thanks to woz. (Leunig's day job is as an editorial cartoonist for The Age.)

Karen Bradley introduced this quote a couple of posts ago. I found this paragraph deeply
troubling, and want to give it another reading.

At first glance, I took it as a spectacularly good summary of the mess that western civilization, capitalism, and globalization have made of the planet. At the macro level, the signs are all bad: global warming is accelerating as we pour more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere; we appear to be close to, if not past, global Peak Oil, after which energy prices will rise to heights we cannot imagine; and human activities are causing the 6th great extinction in the 4 billion year history of our planet.

[A couple of weeks ago, I posted a threader titled Two Funerals and A Waiting in which I quote four Erie Times-News reporters who filed some particularly well-written stories about fallen soldiers and their families in that small city on the edge of a great lake in what is sometimes referred to as "Flyover Country."

It takes a long time spent living lives of increasingly-unquiet desperation to finally make people from the silent majority stand up to be counted and to write letters like this one. That's why I think it's important to include it here as a followup to my earlier threader, because these are the people who we really need to listen to. These are the people who we really need to reach out and touch, if we're ever going to end this illegal, immoral war and depose the tyrants currently occupying the West Wing and the Pentagon...]