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The End

2010-05-26T14:59:00.001-07:00

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Matthew Alexander Responds

2009-05-27T11:32:00.001-07:00

What I'm Doing Today

2009-05-20T16:27:00.001-07:00

Cool Water -- Sons of the Pioneers

2009-01-14T10:31:00.000-08:00

Detainee Tortured, Says U.S. Official

2009-01-14T08:41:00.000-08:00

Trial Overseer Cites 'Abusive' Methods Against 9/11 Suspect

By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 14, 2009; A01

The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a "life-threatening condition."

"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

Crawford, a retired judge who served as general counsel for the Army during the Reagan administration and as Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense, is the first senior Bush administration official responsible for reviewing practices at Guantanamo to publicly state that a detainee was tortured.

Crawford, 61, said the combination of the interrogation techniques, their duration and the impact on Qahtani's health led to her conclusion. "The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. . . . You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge" to call it torture, she said.

Military prosecutors said in November that they would seek to refile charges against Qahtani, 30, based on subsequent interrogations that did not employ harsh techniques. But Crawford, who dismissed war crimes charges against him in May 2008, said in the interview that she would not allow the prosecution to go forward.

Qahtani was denied entry into the United States a month before the Sept. 11 attacks and was allegedly planning to be the plot's 20th hijacker. He was later captured in Afghanistan and transported to Guantanamo in January 2002. His interrogation took place over 50 days from November 2002 to January 2003, though he was held in isolation until April 2003.

"For 160 days his only contact was with the interrogators," said Crawford, who personally reviewed Qahtani's interrogation records and other military documents. "Forty-eight of 54 consecutive days of 18-to-20-hour interrogations. Standing naked in front of a female agent. Subject to strip searches. And insults to his mother and sister."

At one point he was threatened with a military working dog named Zeus, according to a military report. Qahtani "was forced to wear a woman's bra and had a thong placed on his head during the course of his interrogation" and "was told that his mother and sister were whores." With a leash tied to his chains, he was led around the room "and forced to perform a series of dog tricks," the report shows.

The interrogation, portions of which have been previously described by other news organizations, including The Washington Post, was so intense that Qahtani had to be hospitalized twice at Guantanamo with bradycardia, a condition in which the heart rate falls below 60 beats a minute and which in extreme cases can lead to heart failure and death. At one point Qahtani's heart rate dropped to 35 beats per minute, the record shows.

The Qahtani case underscores the challenges facing the incoming Obama administration as it seeks to close the controversial detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including the dilemmas posed by individuals considered too dangerous to release but whose legal status is uncertain. FBI "clean teams," which gather evidence without using information gained during controversial interrogations, have established that Qahtani intended to join the 2001 hijackers. Mohamed Atta, the plot's leader, who died steering American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center, went to the Orlando airport to meet Qahtani on Aug. 4, 2001, but the young Saudi was denied entry by a suspicious immigration inspector.

"There's no doubt in my mind he would've been on one of those planes had he gained access to the country in August 2001," Crawford said of Qahtani, who remains detained at Guantanamo. "He's a muscle hijacker. . . . He's a very dangerous man. What do you do with him now if you don't charge him and try him? I would be hesitant to say, 'Let him go.' "

That, she said, is a decision that President-elect Barack Obama will have to make. Obama repeated Sunday that he intends to close the Guantanamo center but acknowledged the challenges involved. "It is more difficult than I think a lot of people realize," Obama said on ABC's "This Week," "and we are going to get it done, but part of the challenge that you have is that you have a bunch of folks that have been detained, many of whom may be very dangerous, who have not been put on trial or have not gone through some adjudication. And some of the evidence against them may be tainted, even though it's true."

President Bush and Vice President Cheney have said that interrogations never involved torture. "The United States does not torture. It's against our laws, and it's against our values," Bush asserted on Sept. 6, 2006, when 14 high-value detainees were transferred to Guantanamo from secret CIA prisons. And in a interview last week with the Weekly Standard, Cheney said, "And I think on the left wing of the Democratic Party, there are some people who believe that we really tortured."

"I sympathize with the intelligence gatherers in those days after 9/11, not knowing what was coming next and trying to gain information to keep us safe," said Crawford, a lifelong Republican. "But there still has to be a line that we should not cross. And unfortunately what this has done, I think, has tainted everything going forward."

"The Department has always taken allegations of abuse seriously," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said in an e-mail. "We have conducted more than a dozen investigations and reviews of our detention operations, including specifically the interrogation of Mohammed Al Qahtani, the alleged 20th hijacker. They concluded the interrogation methods used at GTMO, including the special techniques used on Qahtani in 2002, were lawful. However, subsequent to those reviews, the Department adopted new and more restrictive policies and procedures for interrogation and detention operations. Some of the aggressive questioning techniques used on Al Qahtani, although permissible at the time, are no longer allowed in the updated Army field manual."

After the Supreme Court ruled in the 2006 Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case that the original military commission system for Guantanamo Bay violated the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions, Congress rewrote the rules and passed the Military Commissions Act, creating a new structure for trials by commissions. The act bans torture but permits "coercive" testimony.

Crawford said she believes that coerced testimony should not be allowed. "You don't allow it in a regular court," said Crawford, who served as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces from 1991 to 2006.

Under the act, Crawford is a neutral official overseeing charges, trials and sentencing, with ultimate decision-making power over all cases coming before the military commissions.

In May 2008, Crawford ordered the war-crimes charges against Qahtani dropped but did not state publicly that the harsh interrogations were the reason. "It did shock me," Crawford said. "I was upset by it. I was embarrassed by it. If we tolerate this and allow it, then how can we object when our servicemen and women, or others in foreign service, are captured and subjected to the same techniques? How can we complain? Where is our moral authority to complain? Well, we may have lost it."

The harsh techniques used against Qahtani, she said, were approved by then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. "A lot of this happened on his watch," she said. Last month, a Senate Armed Services Committee report concluded that "Rumsfeld's authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at Guantanamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there." The committee found the interrogation techniques harsh and abusive but stopped short of calling them torture.

An aide to the former defense secretary accused the committee chairman, Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), of pursuing a politically motivated "false narrative" that is "unencumbered by the preponderance of the facts."

In June 2005, Time magazine obtained 83 pages of Qahtani's interrogation log and published excerpts that showed some of the extreme abuse. The report of a military investigation released the same year concluded that Qahtani's interrogations were "degrading and abusive."

Crawford said she does not know whether five other detainees accused of participating in the Sept. 11 plot, including alleged mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, were tortured. "I assume torture," she said, noting that CIA Director Michael V. Hayden has said publicly that Mohammed was one of three detainees waterboarded by the CIA. Crawford declined to say whether she considers waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning, to be torture.

The five detainees face capital murder charges, and Crawford said she let the charges go forward because the FBI satisfied her that they gathered information without using harsh techniques. She noted that Mohammed has acknowledged his Sept. 11 role in court, whereas Qahtani has recanted his self-incriminating statements to the FBI.

"There is no doubt he was tortured," Gitanjali S. Gutierrez, Qahtani's civilian attorney, said this week. "He has loss of concentration and memory loss, and he suffers from paranoia. . . . He wants just to get back to Saudi Arabia, get married and have a family." She said Qahtani "adamantly denies he planned to join the 9/11 attack. . . . He has no connections to extremists." Gutierrez said she believes Saudi Arabia has an effective rehabilitation program and Qahtani ought to be returned there.

When she came in as convening authority in 2007, Crawford said, "the prosecution was unprepared" to bring cases to trial. Even after four years working possible cases, "they were lacking in experience and judgment and leadership," she said. "A prosecutor has an ethical obligation to review all the evidence before making a charging decision. And they didn't have access to all the evidence, including medical records, interrogation logs, and they were making charging decisions without looking at everything."

She noted that prosecutors are required to determine whether any evidence possessed by the government could be exculpatory; if it is, they must turn it over to defense lawyers. It took more than a year, she said -- and the intervention of Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England -- to ensure they had access to all the information, much of it classified.

Crawford said detainee interrogation practices are a blot on the reputation of the United States and its military judicial system. "There's an assumption out there that everybody was tortured. And everybody wasn't tortured. But unfortunately perception is reality." The system she oversees probably can't function now, she said. "Certainly in the public's mind, or politically speaking, and certainly in the international community" it may be forever tainted. "It may be too late."

She said Bush was right to create a system to try unlawful enemy combatants captured in the war on terrorism. The implementation, however, was flawed, she said. "I think he hurt his own effort. . . . I think someone should acknowledge that mistakes were made and that they hurt the effort and take responsibility for it."

"We learn as children it's easier to ask for forgiveness than it is for permission," Crawford said. "I think the buck stops in the Oval Office."

Researchers Julie Tate and Evelyn Duffy contributed to this report.

Iraq's inability to destroy our nation a "significant disappointment" for Bush

2009-01-13T13:23:00.000-08:00

The fact that the things I did wrong weren't right was very disappointing.

This morning's final press conference from President Bush was some real must-see television for anyone who simply must see what denial in action looks like. But our favorite moment came during Bush's response to the inevitable (and ultimately useless) question about whether he can name any mistakes during his presidency. According to Bush, "mission accomplished" was a mistake, Katrina not so much. But the highlight came in the following quote concerning the invasion of Iraq:

Not having weapons of mass destruction was a significant disappointment.

Wait, what? Iraq's failure to be in possession of weapons of mass destruction was disappointing to you? Has anyone ever said such a thing out loud? Forget presidents. Has any American ever said they were disappointed that a hostile country did not possess the power to destroy America?

The president followed that with, "I don't know if you want to call those mistakes or not..."

Yes, we do. We REALLY want to call that a mistake. Not only was invading a country for possession of WMDs when they didn't have them an enormous mistake, but you may be the first man on the planet who was "disappointed" that Saddam Hussein never got around to that whole nuclear capability thing.

We don't mean to beat up on the guy, or to act surprised at his 9,466th bungled quote. So we'd like to be productive about this and help our president understand the difference between a mistake, and a disappointment. We put together this handy chart below for the next time Bush decides to take a look back:

-- Bob Power

Stacey's Bookstore closing down in S.F.

2009-01-07T12:32:00.001-08:00

Stacey's Bookstore, the iconic San Francisco shop that called Market Street home for all of its 85 years and had carved out a niche for technical publications, announced Tuesday evening that it would close in March.

Like other independent book sellers, Stacey's had been hurt over the past decade by the rise of national chains, like Barnes & Noble, and Web-based booksellers, such as Amazon.com. The store's general manager, Tom Allen, said sales had dropped 50 percent since March 2001.

But the final blow was the crumbling economy, which hit hard during the holidays. Stacey's sales in the fourth quarter of 2008 plummeted 15 percent from the same period in 2007.

"That in itself would not have spelled the end," said Allen. "But it came on top of several years of more gradual decline."

The store was founded in 1923 by John W. Stacey in the historic Flood Building on the corner of Market and Powell streets. Stacey specialized in medical books, a niche that made him a rarity at the time, Allen said. Over the years, the store would build its reputation as a home for technical books for professionals. It would expand, establishing other Stacey's Bookstores in Palo Alto, Modesto, Richmond, Cupertino, Los Angeles and San Bernardino - though the current Market Street location is now the last one standing.

In 1947, Stacey's started a series of professional books that included some of the first books on computers, a status that Stacey's claims earned it recognition in Publishers Weekly as "the most modern bookstore in the country." It moved to its current location, at 851 Market St., in the 1950s, when it also became a general interest bookstore.

Even today, the store has sections on engineering, chemistry, construction manuals, and complex math and science texts, though they only account for 15 percent of the sales. Allen said the era when technical books were obscure has vanished.

In many cases, "information available on the Web has made it unnecessary to buy a book on a technical subject," said Allen, who has worked at the store for the past 11 years.

The store's distinct location, on the edge of San Francisco's Financial District, gave it an unusual customer base. While suburban bookstores might have their busiest times on weekday evenings or weekends, Stacey's thrived on the lunch hour crowds.

Still, as word trickled out Tuesday evening, customers said they were stunned by the news.

"I'm devastated," said Melissa Davis, 37, who had picked up Spanish and Italian language CDs and an Italian grammar book and has shopped at the store regularly for eight years.

When other independent bookstores closed, Davis vowed to shop at Stacey's more. Still, she wondered how Stacey's survived.

"I guess they're hit by it as well," said Davis, a San Francisco resident.

Now, she hopes that a community effort will help save it, similar to what happened with Kepler's Books in Menlo Park. Davis said independent bookstores make sure that there's a diversity of opinion, and not one that's dictated by corporate mandates.

"If you lose an independent bookstore, you're losing an independent voice," she said.

John Himel picked up a book on digital video and another on internal medicine. The former electrical engineer said he feels like the store's closing reflects a shift in how society views learning.

"Books are the greatest obsession," said Himel, 43, a San Francisco resident who now works as an elderly caretaker. "You must have books to think and improve your life."

Igor Royzen understands that people can buy books on the Web. But the chess enthusiast is always amazed at how every time he went to Stacey's, there was a book on chess that he had never seen before.

"Yeah, you can do it on the Web, but it takes away from human interaction," said Royzen, 33, a computer programmer from Daly City. Standing in the third-floor reading area, which overlooks Market Street, Royzen added, "people can also sit here and enjoy a wonderful view. You don't have that on the Internet."

Matthai Kuruvila, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer

The Cultivation of Christmas Trees

2008-12-24T11:50:00.001-08:00

There are several attitudes towards Christmas,
Some of which we may disregard:
The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,
The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight),
And the childish -- which is not that of the child
For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel
Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree
Is not only a decoration, but an angel.
The child wonders at the Christmas Tree:
Let him continue in the spirit of wonder
At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext;
So that the glittering rapture, the amazement
Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree,
So that the surprises, delight in new possessions
(Each one with its peculiar and exciting smell),
The expectation of the goose or turkey
And the expected awe on its appearance,
So that the reverence and the gaiety
May not be forgotten in later experience,
In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,
The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure,
Or in the piety of the convert
Which may be tainted with a self-conceit
Displeasing to God and disrespectful to the children
(And here I remember also with gratitude
St. Lucy, her carol, and her crown of fire):
So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas
(By 'eightieth' meaning whichever is the last)
The accumulated memories of annual emotion
May be concentrated into a great joy
Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion
When fear came upon every soul:
Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming.

-- T.S. Eliot

Home Ownership and President Bush

2008-12-23T13:10:00.001-08:00

What Winter Feels Like

2008-12-17T11:32:00.001-08:00

Muntader al-Zeidi

2008-12-16T11:53:00.000-08:00

Over the past several years I've said a lot of things about President George W. Bush, few of them publishable anywhere except online, and even by blog-standards I've, um, pushed the envelope. So maybe I'm the wrong person to be calling for this. But I'm going to anyhow.

Mr. President, please publicly forgive Muntadhar al-Zeidi for throwing shoes at you, and please state, unequivocally, that the Iraqi journalist should not face charges or endure official harassment for his actions. If American values mean anything at all, this is the right thing to do.

According to press reports, al-Zeidi is currently being held by the Iraqi government in an undisclosed location. He faces quite serious, if as yet unspecified charges:

An Iraqi lawyer said Zaidi risked a miminum [sic] of two years in prison if he is prosecuted for insulting a visiting head of state, but could face a 15-year term if he is charged with attempted murder.

In the United States, "insulting a visiting head of state" is not a crime. Nor should it be. Throwing a shoe could certainly be illegal, and hustling a shoe-thrower out of a press conference would certainly be understandable. But pressing charges?

We value vigorous dissent in this country. So much so, that even when objects are publicly hurled at controversial speakers, we do not necessarily prosecute, and if we do, we do not consider the "insult" the specific crime at issue. Property damage as a result of such an incident might be a felony, but never an "insult."

According to al-Zeidi's brother, the journalist

"might serve two years in prison or pay a fine for insulting a president of foreign country unless Mr. Bush withdrew the case. "If they manage to imprison Muntader, there are millions of him all over Iraq and the Arab world," Maythem al-Zaidi said.

There are indeed. For political reasons, forgiving this man would be nothing but beneficial. It would show that Americans can be tolerant. It would show that Americans are not vengeful. And it would show that we do not consider "insults" to be a matter for imprisonment: we do not hold one set of beliefs and values for ourselves, and another set for others. But this man, a citizen of Baghdad, makes the case better than I ever could:

Dr. Lutfi Al-Obusi, a 58-year-old political science professor, said: "I disagree with [the shoe-throwing] because that is opposite of our Muslim and Arabic traditions. Because Mr. Bush was here to say bye for Iraq and Iraqis. And in the same time Bush is president of the U.S. and he called for the liberation and freedom. So I hope Mr. Bush will forgive Mr. Muntader al-Zaidi for what happened. And if Mr. Bush will not approve for releasing Mr. Muntader al-Zaidi that will create big problem."

President Bush, you need to avoid this "big problem." Do this one thing, this one small thing, for the sake of peace. Forgive Muntadhar al-Zeidi and call for his immediate release, and call for him to be protected against all forms of official harassment.

Do this one right thing before you leave.

www.alternet.org

Stocks Say Recession, but Bonds Say Depression

2008-12-11T09:40:00.000-08:00

Extraordinary things are happening in bondland lately. Tuesday's head-spinning news that Treasury bills had been auctioned off with negative interest rates is only the latest in a series of astonishing developments, surpassing even the more widely followed stock-market swings.

While the Treasury auction grabbed headlines, corporate bonds are doing equally amazing things: the average yield on lower-quality investment-grade corporate bonds — triple-B rated — is hovering around 10%, an unusually rich 7.5-percentage-point spread over Treasury bonds of similar maturity. (That spread has tripled over the past year.) Or consider junk bonds, as measured by Merrill Lynch's High Yield bond index, which yield a jaw-dropping 22%. Of course, junk bonds come from the riskiest borrowers, and a deep recession could drive up the default rate among those companies. But current lofty yields imply investor expectations that one-fifth of these bonds will default, according to Moody's, even though the recent default rate in this sector has been around 3%. Notes Kirk Hartman, chief investment officer for Wells Capital Management, a division of Wells Fargo bank: "Spreads [over Treasuries] in the bond market are pricing in a depression scenario, while the equity markets, despite a substantial decline, are pricing in a recession." (Read "The Recession Is Made Official [EM] and Stocks Take a Dive.")

Many factors weigh on the bond market, such as the falling price of oil — it closed at $43.52 per bbl. in Wednesday's trading — and the progress of the auto-industry bailout, not to mention every gasp from the housing market. And then there's the elephant in the room: the downward spiral of economic activity, including last week's chilling November employment report, which showed 533,000 more people out of work — "one of the worst ever," according to Morgan Stanley economist Ted Wieseman. As the various industry bailouts — banks, auto companies, credit unions and, next, states — seek to reassure investors, collectively they confirm just how bad things are.

But at its current extreme, bond-investor fear is myopic. In striving to avoid the falling stock market and the downdraft of the economy, investors are all but ignoring the longer-term inflationary implications of a monetary easing and explosive growth in U.S. government spending and what it could ultimately mean to bond yields. At Thursday's close, for example, the 30-year T-bond was yielding 3.07%, implying investor expectations for stable prices for decades to come. Inflation-protected Treasuries, known as TIPS, are yielding so little that money managers say they imply investor expectations for a deflationary environment for the next few years. All of which points to the fact that nobody really cares about inflation dangers at this point; it's all about safety.

So how should investors approach the bifurcated bond market? Should they run for the safety of Treasuries or consider the neck-wrenching yields now available in other sectors? Notes money manager Hartman: "From a relative-value standpoint, bonds offer an unusual investment opportunity" that he expects to pay off once the housing market bottoms and the financial outlook improves. "Investment-grade corporate bonds are very cheap, and high-yield bonds similarly offer great value at these levels," he says. Treasury bonds on the other hand, are widely viewed as overvalued on the basis of what can only be characterized as the Armageddon-anxiety rally of the past few months. They could wallop investors with losses should the economic recovery take hold next year.

-- John Curran (Time)

from: Geographical History of America or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind

2008-12-05T11:50:00.000-08:00

Now listen a minute.

If you fly over Salt Lake City it is exactly like flying over the bottom of the sea with the water not in it.

The water is not in it, and so is there any reason why the water should be in it. Sometime the water has been in it but now that the water is not in it it makes it more easy perhaps not to fly but to see what you see as you fly.

Now the reason for the water not being there is one thing but the water not being there is another thing.

Now suppose it is a detective story.

Well it is astonishing to see a pigeon where you had not expected ever to see one.

Not because a pigeon could not be there, not even because a pigeon had never been there but because you could never have expected a pigeon to be there.

Even the wind could not blow the pigeon away once it was really there where the pigeon is.

The pigeon almost falls off because suddenly there is another pigeon there and the pigeon had not believed it possible for another pigeon to be there.

Perhaps there is still another pigeon there but it can not be seen even if it is there and any way the first pigeon turns his back so that he will not be able to see them or the other one and then he changes his mind and turns around toward them.

Perhaps from now on pigeons will always come there. Very likely because that is what anybody can do.

So once more no pigeons being there never again can there never be any pigeon there.

Detective story no 2.

Suppose you know just what has happened does that make any difference if you tell it.

What is the difference between write it and tell it. There is a difference you can tell it as you write it but you can tell it and not write it. There is a difference and the next detective story is to detect that difference.

If the pigeon can come again and he has come again then he can surprise some one but he cannot surprise me.

A pigeon itself if anything is a surprise such as being there can be interested in anything being surprising.

Think how heavily a pigeon flies and alights and if he is there is he likely to think that the wind can blow him away. The wind does blow but does it blow as a surprise or anything to him. Has he a motive in being there and having been there does he come there again.

He does come there again and this has no connection with the wind blowing and there has been no motive for the coming there.

So then what does human nature do.

It does it because it does and having done it it is not because it has done it that it does it it does it because it is there again.

There they are again.

The three pigeons are there again. There is no reason for it.

But if looking at it you are to paint it, the pigeon is there again and turning his back on the two other pigeons who are below it. You only can see from the side where you are seeing everything you only can see the two heads of the other two pigeons and now there are three. That makes four in all.

That is why numbers really have something to do with the human mind. That they are pigeons has nothing to do with it but that there was one and then that there were three and that then there are four and that then it may not cease to matter what number follows another but the human mindhas to have it matter that any number is a number.

So then detective story number III

-- G. Stein

Late Echo

2008-12-04T08:56:00.001-08:00

Alone with our madness and favorite flower
We see that there really is nothing left to write about.
Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things
In the same way, repeating the same things over and over
For love to continue and be gradually different.

Beehives and ants have to be reexamined eternally
And the color of the day put in
Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter
For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic
Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting.

Only then can the chronic inattention
Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory
And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows
That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge
Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day.

-- John Ashbery

Global Warming Extinction?

2008-12-03T09:51:00.000-08:00

Scientists say a white possum native to the Daintree rainforest in the Australian state of Queensland has become the first mammal to become extinct due to man-made global warming.

The Brisbane, Queensland, Courier-Mail reports the white variety of the lemuroid ringtail possum, found only above 3,000 feet in the mountain forests of far north Queensland, has not been seen for three years.

Experts fear climate change is to blame for the disappearance of the highly vulnerable strain thanks to a temperature rise of up to 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit.

Researchers will mount a last-ditch expedition early next year deep into the untouched "cloud forests" of the Carbine Range near Mt. Lewis, three hours north of the city of Cairns, in search of the tiny tree-dweller, dubbed the "Dodo of the Daintree."

"It is not looking good," researcher Steve Williams said. "If they have died out it would be first example of something that has gone extinct purely because of global warming."

Bush Administration Fortifies Oil Shale Industry

2008-11-18T09:36:00.000-08:00

Firing off another decision that is angering environmental groups, the Bush administration has issued new regulations to develop oil shale deposits straddling almost two million acres of public lands in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.

The rules lay out the framework to develop these deposits over the next decade, including royalty rates, how to evaluate bids for leases, mitigation requirements and other procedural elements.

The announcement follows last September’s decision by Congress to allow the moratorium freezing the development of oil shale and offshore drilling to lapse.

But most experts had expected the rules on how to develop the deposits to be left to the next administration. They claim the Bush administration is fast-tracking a program that could damage the environment and emit much more heat-trapping carbon emissions without proper consultations.

The Bush administration, said Kevin Book, an analyst at FBR Capital Markets, seems intent on taking full advantage of a regulatory window that is about to close at the end of the week.

In 1996, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the “Congressional Review Act,” which gives lawmakers a 60-day window to repeal new rules issued by executive agencies. The law was intended to prevent outgoing administrations from passing “midnight” rules in their waning hours. In practice, Mr. Book says, this means the Bush administration has until Thursday, Nov. 20, to issue regulations.

“The Bush administration’s last, best chance for contentious executive branch policies arrives this week,” Mr. Book said.

Critics of the oil shale development plan, which was issued by the Bureau of Land Management, did not provide the public with a chance to protest the decision, and said the rules would also waive royalties for oil companies under certain circumstances.

“The Bush administration is maintaining an unlawful position by amending these resource management plans without providing the public with an opportunity to have their decisions administratively appealed,” said Melissa Thrailkill, a staff attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity. “We are considering all our options. That includes legal action in federal court.”

The administration said the decision would ultimately help develop more domestic sources of energy. The ban on oil shale development has been in effect for two years.

“Oil shale is a strategically important domestic energy source that should be developed to reduce the nation’s growing dependence on oil from politically and economically unstable foreign sources,” said James Caswell, the director of the B.L.M.

The agency, Mr. Caswell continued, “is taking extraordinary steps to improve our domestic energy security, including the establishment of regulatory regimes designed to boost geothermal, solar and wind development and protect our public land resources.”

The B.L.M. said the program could add up to 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil from lands in the Western United States. That figure is highly theoretical.

Oil shale is a controversial and environmentally damaging source of hydrocarbons since it requires vast amounts of energy and water to squeeze oil out of sedimentary rocks. The process emits far more carbon dioxide, which is responsible for global warming, than ordinary refining operations.

Plus, it would still be up to the next administration to decide whether to lease lands to develop the deposits, or to simply ignore the new rules.

“How can the administration write regulations for an industry that does not exist yet, using unknown technologies? They can’t,” said Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst for the National Resources Defense Council. “This is just a giveaway to special interests that will leave states to clean up the mess.”

It is not the first time this month that the Bush administration has sought to make the best of its last days in office. Earlier this month, the Bureau of Land Management expanded its oil and gas lease program in eastern Utah to include tens of thousands of acres on or near the boundaries of three national parks.

The decision angered environmental groups, who feared it would lead to industrial activity in some of the state’s renowned empty regions, like Desolation Canyon.

According to a report from Felicity Barringer in The Times earlier this month, officials with the National Park Service said that the decision to open lands close to Arches National Park and Dinosaur National Monument — and within sight of Canyonlands National Park — had been made without the kind of consultation that had previously been routine.

-- By Jad Mouawad (NY Times)

I'm Looking Back

2008-11-14T12:25:00.000-08:00

On time again.
so superficial
I know

Leonard Cohen
springs to mind
Then spurts away

I look for one
expansive thought
something

to sink my
teeth into:
even though

I have a
predilection for
here there and everywhere

I can't seem
to rewrite remember
or acknowledge my

own unwritten
history. here
there everywhere.

I'm looking for a few letters
for status
for the heat of the moment

really
to wonder all about
this forward movement

of life; what are they?
those forms of life?
I know you know

autumn rains down
too much heat this year
too much forbearance

so much unremembered joy
the old the new
testaments

the Vedas the Upanishads
who has all that much
time? or timelessness really.

-- jeff wietor

brains are back

2008-11-07T12:11:00.001-08:00

Michael Hirsh
NEWSWEEK

For two days now Americans have celebrated the idea that we may have atoned finally for our nation's original sin, slavery, along with its long legacy of racism. We have rejoiced in the world's accolades over the election of a multicultural African-American to the presidency after nearly eight years of cringing in shame as the Bush administration methodically curdled our Constitutional values and sullied our global reputation as a beacon of hope. Every once in a while, it seems, we Americans do manage to live up to our ideals rather than betray them. Hooray!

I am just as happy as everyone else over all this global good feeling. But there's something else that I'm even happier about—positively giddy, in fact. And the effects of this change are likely to last a lot longer than the brief honeymoon Barack Obama will enjoy as a symbol of realized ideals. What Obama's election means, above all, is that brains are back. Sense and pragmatism and the idea of considering-all-the-options are back. Studying one's enemy and thinking through strategic problems are back. Cultural understanding is back. Yahooism and jingoism and junk science about global warming and shabby legal reasoning about torture are out. The national culture of flag-pin shallowness that guided our foreign policy is gone with the wind. And for this reason as much as any, perhaps I can renew my pride in being an American.

I'm under no illusion that Barack Obama will turn out to be Barack Panacea. In terms of holding major office, he's the least experienced president in memory. He'll probably screw up a lot of things, especially at first. The problems he faces—from the economic crisis to Iran's nuclear program—are just too hard. And I occasionally worry that in his eloquent eagerness to empathize and reach across cultural barriers, Obama may overreach in the opposite direction from Bush, stumbling into the appeasement of adversaries like Iran (whose buffoonish president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, practically invited him to do so this week by sending him the first letter of congratulations from Tehran since 1979). Obama must also guard against the sort of intellectual arrogance that characterized the "best and the brightest" of the Vietnam era.

But, frankly, these are all risks worth taking after nearly eight years of a president who could barely form a coherent sentence, much less a strategic thought. We can finally go back to respecting logic and reason and studiousness under a president who doesn't seem to care much about what is "left," "right" or ideologically pure. Or what he thinks God is saying to him. A guy who keeps religion in its proper place—in the pew. It's no accident that Obama is the first Northern Democrat to be elected president since John F. Kennedy. The "Sun Belt" politics represented by George W. Bush—the politics of ideological rigidity, religious zealotry and anti-intellectualism—"has for the moment played itself out," says presidential historian Robert Dallek.

From the very start of his campaign, Obama has given notice that, whatever you might think about his policies, they will be well thought out and soberly considered, and that as president he would not be a slave of passion or impulse. While his GOP opponent, a 72-year-old cancer victim, was cynically deciding for political reasons that a woman who apparently did not know that Africa was a continent rather than a country should be a heartbeat away from the presidency, Obama was setting up working groups to study every major international issue and region of the world. Through three debates with John McCain, he refused to be baited into personal attacks. And the more we have learned about his transition process, the clearer it becomes that he intends to be that kind of president as well. Against the very political concerns of some of his loyalists that he, the candidate of "change," is bringing too many ex-Clintonites on board, he is dispassionately welcoming in the best brains (like Larry Summers, Laura Tyson and Gene Sperling) and most experienced hands (considering an extension of Bob Gates' tenure at the Pentagon, for instance). He is actively considering other Republicans for high posts.

How very presidential. And how very unusual.

One tragedy of the Bush administration is the amount of American brain power and talent that went unused, the options that went unconsidered, because they were seen to lack ideological purity. That era is over as we confront a desperate landscape—a serious recession and two prolonged wars. While he hasn't yet invoked Franklin Roosevelt, Obama seems to be embracing FDR's pragmatic approach in 1933—knowing that what the country may need, economically and politically, is not so much an organized program but a hodgepodge of bold experiments like the New Deal. "It is common sense to take a method and try it," FDR said back then. "If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." Obama is judiciously hurrying to push through another stimulus package—and will probably shelve his raise-taxes-on-the-rich plan for the moment—while he is just as judiciously avoiding the Nov. 15 economic summit Bush has scheduled for next week (because it will tie him too closely to Bush's failed policies). "I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face," Obama said in his acceptance speech in Chicago Tuesday night. If he holds to that pledge and nothing else, we'll be OK.

So anything seems possible now, even when it comes to the toughest issues. What might be the result if, say, Obama decided to put Richard Holbrooke (one of the toughest and smartest negotiators in the country) in charge of negotiating with the Taliban, and Bill Clinton in charge of hashing things out with the Palestinians, telling both of them to come back only when they've got a deal? Anything could happen. Maybe even something good.

Victors, it is said, write the history. Obama is now about to write America's new history. Unless I mistake my man, its theme will be that reason and sense and that cardinal American virtue—pragmatism—are going to rule once again. And that's really something to celebrate.

Catness

2008-11-05T09:50:00.001-08:00

Why Barack Obama is Winning

2008-10-23T10:07:00.000-07:00

General David Petraeus deployed overwhelming force when he briefed Barack Obama and two other Senators in Baghdad last July. He knew Obama favored a 16-month timetable for the withdrawal of most U.S. troops from Iraq, and he wanted to make the strongest possible case against it. And so, after he had presented an array of maps and charts and PowerPoint slides describing the current situation on the ground in great detail, Petraeus closed with a vigorous plea for "maximum flexibility" going forward.

Obama had a choice at that moment. He could thank Petraeus for the briefing and promise to take his views "under advisement." Or he could tell Petraeus what he really thought, a potentially contentious course of action — especially with a general not used to being confronted. Obama chose to speak his mind. "You know, if I were in your shoes, I would be making the exact same argument," he began. "Your job is to succeed in Iraq on as favorable terms as we can get. But my job as a potential Commander in Chief is to view your counsel and interests through the prism of our overall national security." Obama talked about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, the financial costs of the occupation of Iraq, the stress it was putting on the military.

A "spirited" conversation ensued, one person who was in the room told me. "It wasn't a perfunctory recitation of talking points. They were arguing their respective positions, in a respectful way." The other two Senators — Chuck Hagel and Jack Reed — told Petraeus they agreed with Obama. According to both Obama and Petraeus, the meeting — which lasted twice as long as the usual congressional briefing — ended agreeably. Petraeus said he understood that Obama's perspective was, necessarily, going to be more strategic. Obama said that the timetable obviously would have to be flexible. But the Senator from Illinois had laid down his marker: if elected President, he would be in charge. Unlike George W. Bush, who had given Petraeus complete authority over the war — an unprecedented abdication of presidential responsibility (and unlike John McCain, whose hero worship of Petraeus bordered on the unseemly) — Obama would insist on a rigorous chain of command.

Barack Obama has prospered in this presidential campaign because of the steadiness of his temperament and the judicious quality of his decision-making. They are his best-known qualities. The most important decision he has made — the selection of a running mate — was done carefully, with an exhaustive attention to detail and contemplation of all the possible angles. Two months later, as John McCain's peremptory selection of Governor Sarah Palin has come to seem a liability, it could be argued that Obama's quiet selection of Joe Biden defined the public's choice in the general-election campaign. But not every decision can be made so carefully. There are a thousand instinctive, instantaneous decisions that a presidential candidate has to make in the course of a campaign — like whether to speak his mind to a General Petraeus — and this has been a more difficult journey for Obama, since he's far more comfortable when he's able to think things through. "He has learned to trust his gut," an Obama adviser told me. "He wasn't so confident in his instincts last year. It's been the biggest change I've seen in him."

I asked Obama about gut decisions, in an interview on his plane 17 days before the election. It was late on a Saturday night, and he looked pretty tired, riddled with gray hair and not nearly as young as when I'd first met him four years earlier. He had drawn 175,000 people to two events in Missouri that day, larger crowds than I'd ever seen at a campaign event, and he would be endorsed by Colin Powell the next morning. He seemed as relaxed as ever, though, unfazed by the hoopla or the imminence of the election. Our conversation was informal but intense. He seemed to be thinking in my presence, rather than just reciting talking points, and it took him some time to think through my question about gut decisions. He said the first really big one was how to react when incendiary videos of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's black-nationalist sermons surfaced last spring. "The decision to make it big as opposed to make it small," Obama said of the landmark speech on race relations he delivered in Philadelphia. "My gut was telling me that this was a teachable moment and that if I tried to do the usual political damage control instead of talking to the American people like ... they were adults and could understand the complexities of race, I would be not only doing damage to the campaign but missing an important opportunity for leadership."

The speech was followed by a more traditional form of damage control when Wright showed up in Washington still spewing racial nonsense: Obama cut him loose. And while Obama has followed a fairly traditional political path in this campaign, his strongest — and most telling — moments have been those when he followed his natural no-drama instincts. This has been confusing to many of my colleagues and to me, at times, as well: his utter caution in the debates, his decision not to zing McCain or even to challenge him very much, led me to assume — all three times — that he hadn't done nearly as well as the public ultimately decided he had. McCain was correct when he argued that Obama's aversion to drama led him to snuggle a bit too close to the Democratic Party's orthodoxy. But one of the more remarkable spectacles of the 2008 election — unprecedented in my time as a journalist — was the unanimity among Democrats on matters of policy once the personality clash between Obama and Hillary Clinton was set aside. There was no squabbling between old and new Dems, progressives and moderates, over race or war or peace. This was a year for no-drama Democrats, which made Obama as comfortable a fit for them as McCain was awkward for the Republican base.

And at the crucial moment of the campaign — the astonishing onset of the financial crisis — it was Obama's gut steadiness that won the public's trust, and quite possibly the election. On the afternoon when McCain suspended his campaign, threatened to scuttle the Sept. 26 debate and hopped a plane back to Washington to try to resolve the crisis, Obama was in Florida doing debate prep with his top advisers. When he was told about McCain's maneuvers, Obama's first reaction — according to an aide — was, "You gotta be kidding. I'm going to debate. A President has to be able to do more than one thing at a time." But there was a storm brewing among Obama's supporters in Congress and the Beltway establishment. "My BlackBerry was exploding," said an Obama aide. "They were saying we had to suspend. McCain was going to look more like a statesman, above the fray."

"I didn't believe it," Obama told me. "I have to tell you, one of the benefits of running this 22-month gauntlet is that ... you start realizing that what seems important or clever or in need of some dramatic moment a lot of times just needs reflection and care. And I think that was an example of where my style at least worked." Obama realized that he and McCain could be little more than creative bystanders — and one prominent Republican told me that McCain was "the least creative person in the room at the President's White House meeting. He simply had no ideas. He didn't even have any good questions." Obama had questions for the Treasury Secretary and the Fed chairman, but he was under no illusions: he didn't have the power to influence the final outcome, so it was best to stay calm and not oversell his role. It was an easy call, his natural bias. But, Obama acknowledged, "There are going to be some times where ... I won't have the luxury of thinking through all the angles."

Which is why the Petraeus moment is so interesting. Obama's gut reaction was to go against his normal palliative impulse and to challenge the general instead. "I felt it was necessary to make that point ... precisely because I respect Petraeus and [Ambassador Ryan] Crocker," Obama said, after he reluctantly acknowledged that my reporting of the meeting was correct. "Precisely because they've been doing a good job ... And I want them to understand that I'm taking their arguments seriously." Obama endorses Petraeus' new post, as the commanding general at Central Command, with responsibility for overseeing both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. "He's somebody who cares about facts and cares about the reality on the ground. I don't think he comes at this with an ideological predisposition. That's one of the reasons why I think he's been successful in moving the ball forward in Iraq. And I hope that he's applying that same perspective to what's happening in Afghanistan."

Actually, Obama and Petraeus seem to be thinking along similar lines with regard to Afghanistan. I mentioned that Petraeus had recently given a speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation in which he raised the possibility of negotiating with the Taliban. "You know, I think this is one useful lesson that is applicable from Iraq," Obama said without hesitation. "The Sunni awakening changed the dynamic in Iraq fundamentally," he said, referring to the Petraeus-led effort to turn the Sunni tribes away from the more radical elements of the insurgency. "Whether there are those same opportunities in Afghanistan I think should be explored," he said. In fact, senior U.S. military officials have told me that there is a possibility of splitting Pashtun tribes away from the Taliban in the south of Afghanistan. "But we have to do it through the Karzai government," a senior officer told me, referring to the fact that the Army had acted independently of the Maliki government in creating the Anbar Awakening. "That is one lesson we've learned from Iraq."

Almost exactly two years ago, I had my first formal interview with Barack Obama — and he appeared on this magazine's cover for the first time. It wasn't an easy interview. His book The Audacity of Hope had just been published, but his policy proposals didn't seem very audacious. He actually grew a bit testy when I pushed him on the need for universal health insurance and a more aggressive global-warming policy — neither of which he supported. He has stayed with his less-than-universal health-care plan, and I still find it less than convincing. And his cap-and-trade program to control carbon emissions has taken a backseat to the economic crisis — although Obama insisted that he still favored such a plan, so long as consumers are cushioned with rebates when energy prices rise.

But Obama seems a more certain policymaker now, if not exactly a wonk in the Clintonian sense. He has a clearer handle on the big picture, on how various policy components fit together, and a strong sense of what his top priority would be. He wants to launch an "Apollo project" to build a new alternative-energy economy. His rationale for doing so includes some hard truths about the current economic mess: "The engine of economic growth for the past 20 years is not going to be there for the next 20. That was consumer spending. Basically, we turbocharged this economy based on cheap credit." But the days of easy credit are over, Obama said, "because there is too much deleveraging taking place, too much debt." A new economic turbocharger is going to have to be found, and "there is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy ... That's going to be my No. 1 priority when I get into office."

That sort of clarity is new. At the beginning of the year, Donna Brazile said of Obama, "We know he can walk on water — now where are the loaves and fishes?" The inability to describe his priorities, the inability to speak directly to voters in ways they could easily comprehend, plagued Obama through much of the primary season. His tendency to use big rhetoric in front of big crowds led to McCain's one good spell, after Obama presumptuously spoke to a huge throng in Berlin after his successful Middle East trip. Only a President should make a major address like that overseas. Obama seemed to learn quickly from that mistake; his language during the general-election campaign has been simple, direct and pragmatic. His best moments in the debates came when he explained what he wanted to do as President. His very best moment came in the town-hall debate when he explained how the government bailout would affect average people who were hurting: if companies couldn't get credit from the banks, they couldn't make their payrolls and would have to start laying people off. McCain, by contrast, demonstrated why it's so hard for Senators to succeed as presidential candidates: he talked about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the sins of Obama, and never brought the argument home.

But even with his new populist skills, Obama hasn't been as plain as he could be. If an Apollo project to create a new alternative-energy economy is his highest priority, as he told me, why hasn't he given a major speech about it during the fall campaign? Why hasn't he begun to mobilize the nation for this next big mission? In part, I suppose, because campaigns are about firefighting — and this campaign in particular has been about "the fierce urgency of now," to use one of Obama's favorite phrases by Martin Luther King Jr., because of the fears raised by the financial crisis and because of the desperate, ferocious attacks launched by his opponent.

If he wins, however, there will be a different challenge. He will have to return, full force, to the inspiration business. The public will have to be mobilized to face the fearsome new economic realities. He will also have to deliver bad news, to transform crises into "teachable moments." He will have to effect a major change in our political life: to get the public and the media to think about long-term solutions rather than short-term balms. Obama has given some strong indications that he will be able to do this, having remained levelheaded through a season of political insanity. His has been a remarkable campaign, as smoothly run as any I've seen in nine presidential cycles. Even more remarkable, Obama has made race — that perennial, gaping American wound — an afterthought. He has done this by introducing a quality to American politics that we haven't seen in quite some time: maturity. He is undoubtedly as ego-driven as everyone else seeking the highest office — perhaps more so, given his race, his name and his lack of experience. But he has not been childishly egomaniacal, in contrast to our recent baby-boomer Presidents — or petulant, in contrast to his opponent. He does not seem needy. He seems a grown-up, in a nation that badly needs some adult supervision.

-- Joe Klein Time Magazine

Joe the Plumber: Making Obama Look Very Good

2008-10-16T12:27:00.000-07:00

Anyone who watched last night’s presidential debate quickly heard more than enough references to “Joe the plumber.”

I know that McCain is displeased to the point of desperation over his recent showings in the polls and is scrambling for something, anything, to turn the trend around. Desperation apparently makes you stupid, because using Joe the plumber as the centerpiece of a debate strategy was as dirt-dumb a move as I’ve ever seen.

I had never heard of Joe the plumber before last night’s debate. With the candidates focusing vast amounts of time on him, I said “Who the fuck is Joe the plumber?” My sweetie said she’d tell me all about it after the debate.

Turns out that Joe the plumber is Joe Wurzelbacher of Ohio. Mr. Wurzelbacher showed up at an Obama campaign event in Toledo, Ohio a few days back. He talked with Obama outside the event venue about how he’s been a plumber for some fifteen years and is ready to buy a plumbing business that grosses a little over $250,000. The point of the encounter, of course, was showing that Obama’s tax plan would impose “higher taxes” on Joe for wanting his piece of the American dream.

Anyone who was the least bit curious about Joe the plumber could have found video of the encounter on youtube. Obama spoke with Joe politelty and in great detail for over five minutes. Check it out. I think you’ll agree that Obama did a superb job of addressing the guy’s concerns. Obama pointed out that that only the money earned above $250,000 would be subject to the higher tax rate. Toward the end Obama pointed out his proposed capital gains tax cut and noted that if Joe built his company to a $500,000-per-year business, he’d probably end up paying less in taxes under Obama’s plan than under McCain’s.

It was truly superb work on Obama’s part. Really. See for yourself.

Mr. Wurzelbacher had a “gotcha” look about him throughout the encounter, so it was pretty apparent that something was up. Sure enough, soon after the encounter Mr. Wurzelbacher was on the phone with Neil Cavuto of F[ederal]O[ffice of]X[enophobia] News blabbering about socialism and Robin Hood.

The last time I looked, some poll showed that 30% or so of respondents thought they were in the top 1% of income earners. In my own experience, many who know they aren’t in the top 1% think they will be within the couple of years or so.

And then there’s always a core group of dumbasses who don’t understand the marginal rate system we use to tax income. Those idiots are convinced that there comes a point when making more money actually means making less because tax increases outstrip income gains.

These, along with the VARR (violent, angry, racist retard) community, are the fools that McCain, Fox News and obvious shills like Joe the plumber are playing to. It’s all they’ve got left.

The sad part is, it may be enough.

-- Complete Defeasance

Alaskan Independence Party: The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel

2008-10-09T10:17:00.000-07:00

In 2004, America's malleable mainstream media allowed itself to be manipulated by artful Republican operatives into devoting weeks of broadcast attention and drums of ink to unfairly desecrating John Kerry's genuine Vietnam heroics while obligingly muzzling serious discussion of George W. Bush's shameful wartime record of evasion and cowardice.

Last week found the American media once again boarding Republican swift boats against this season's Democratic candidate armed with unfair and hypocritical attacks artfully designed by GOP strategists to distract attention from the cataclysmic outcomes of Republican governance. Vice Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin has taken to faulting Senator Barack Obama for his casual acquaintance with a respected Illinois educator Bill Ayers, who forty years ago was a member of the Weathermen, a movement active when Obama was eight and which he has denounced as "detestable." Palin argues that the relationship proves that Obama sees "America as being so imperfect that he is palling around with terrorists who would target their own country."

The Times dedicated a page one article to Obama's relations with Ayers and CNN's Anderson Cooper obliged Palin by rewarding her reckless accusations about Obama's patriotism with a major investigative report. Fox, meanwhile, is still riveting its audience with wall to wall coverage of this pressing irrelevancy.

But if McCarthy-era guilt-by-association is once again a valid political consideration, Palin, it would seem, has more to lose than Obama. Palin, it could be argued, following her own logic, thinks so little of America's perfection that she continues to "pal around" with a man--her husband, actually--who only recently terminated his seven-year membership in the Alaskan Independence Party. Putting plunder above patriotism, the members of this treasonous cabal aim to break our country into pieces and walk away with Alaska's rich federal oil fields and one-fifth of America's land base--an area three-fourths the size of the Civil War Confederacy.

AIP's charter commits the party "to the ultimate independence of Alaska," from the United States which it refers to as "the colonial bureaucracy in Washington." It proclaims Alaska's 1959 induction as a state "as illegal and in violation of the United Nations charter and international law."

AIP's creation was inspired by the rabidly violent anti-Americanism of its founding father Joe Vogler, "I'm an Alaskan, not an American," reads a favorite Vogler quote on AIP's current website, "I've got no use for America or her damned institutions." According to Vogler AIP's central purpose was to drive Alaska's secession from the United States. Alaska, says current Chairwoman Lynette Clark, "should be an independent nation."

Vogler was murdered in 1993 during an illegal sale of plastic explosives that went bad. The prior year, he had renounced his allegiance to the United States explaining that, "The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government." He cursed the stars and stripes, promising, "I won't be buried under their damned flag...when Alaska is an independent nation they can bring my bones home." Palin has never denounced Vogler or his detestable anti-Americanism.

Palin's husband Todd remained an AIP party member from 1995 to 2002. Sarah can be described in McCarthy-era palaver as a "fellow traveler." While retaining her Republican registration, she attended the AIP's 1994 convention where the party called for a draft constitution to secede from the United States and create an independent nation of Alaska. The McCain Campaign has reluctantly acknowledged that she also attended AIP's 2000 Convention. She apparently found the experience so inspiring that she agreed to give a keynote address at the AIP's 2006 convention and she recorded a video greeting for this year's 2008 convention. In other words, this is not something that happened when she was eight!

So when Palin accuses Barack of "not seeing the same America as you and me," maybe she is referring to an America without Alaska. In any case, isn't it time the media start giving equal time to Palin's buddy list of anti-American bombers and other radical associates?

-- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

The McCain-isms that Lost the Debate, If Not the Election

2008-10-08T09:15:00.000-07:00

Frameshop:

In presidential elections, winning and losing results less from the facts presented, than the keywords and key phrases repeated. At no time was this more true than last night's debate in Tennessee.

Second Debate Turns McCain-isms into Major Problem for Republican Chances
More than clarifying John McCain's policy positions, the second Presidential debate showcased the Arizona senator's idiosyncratic tendency to repeat (and repeat, and repeat) certain peculiar phrases while speaking to voters. Over the course of 90 minutes, these oft-repeated 'McCain-isms' not only sank any chance the Republican candidate might have had at winning the debate, but decreased significantly his chances of winning the election.

Without question, Obama appeared much more comfortable in the circular open stage of the Town Hall setting than McCain. Despite having called for more Town Hall debates, McCain seemed physically lost at times in the format. At one point, McCain walked backward while delivering an answer, creating an unmistakable image of anxiousness.

But beyond the staging, there were three phrases that McCain repeated, thereby binding himself over and over with the unfavorable trappings of an earnest, but ultimately untrustworthy politician.

McCain-ism #1: "My Friends" - The Neurotic
Last night, John McCain repeated the phrase 'my friends' 19 times:

MY FRIENDS, until we stabilize home values in America, we're never going to start turning around and creating jobs and fixing our economy
I know how the do that, MY FRIENDS
MY FRIENDS, do we need to spend that kind of money?
MY FRIENDS, we are not going to be able to provide the same benefit for present-day workers that we are going -- that present-day retirees have today
MY FRIENDS, some of this $700 billion ends up in the hands of terrorist organizations
MY FRIENDS, the last president to raise taxes during tough economic times was Herbert Hoover
So let's not raise anybody's taxes, MY FRIENDS
We know what the problems are, MY FRIENDS, and we know what the fixes are
MY FRIENDS, what we have to do with Medicare is have a commission, have the smartest people in America come together, come up with recommendations
Let's look at our records, MY FRIENDS
That's the good news, MY FRIENDS
MY FRIENDS, I know you grow a little weary with this back-and-forth
I vote against them, MY FRIENDS. I vote against them
We've got to drill offshore, MY FRIENDS, and we've got to do it now
MY FRIENDS, we have gone to all four corners of the Earth and shed American blood in defense
We don't have time for on-the-job training, MY FRIENDS
Well, let me just follow up, MY FRIENDS
There was a lot at stake there, MY FRIENDS
I'll get Osama bin Laden, MY FRIENDS
If there was any phrase that defined John McCain in last night's debate, it was not a phrase about foreign policy or the economy or the military. It was the phrase 'my friends.' So what does it say about McCain when he repeats this over and over--how does this quintessential McCain-ism ring in the ears of American voters?

In a word: neurotic.

I spoke to about a dozen people after the debate last night, and listened to about as many pundits. Almost everybody noticed McCain's repetition of the phrase 'my friends,' but not one person said that the McCain-ism made them feel positive about the candidate. Instead, people said that 'my friends' gave McCain an air of nervousness, phoniness--strangeness. Rather than connecting 'my friends' to some positive quality of McCain, debate observers used the phrase as a starting point for attempts at explaining what was 'wrong' with McCain in this debate and in general. Several voters voiced some version of thought in response to hearing 'my friends' from McCain:

McCain said 'my friends' so many times! But it's not like he actually is my friend. He sounds phony when he says that so much. Annoying.

One has to guess that McCain uses the phrase 'my friends' as part of a rhetorical strategy to connect with the audience, but the effect is the opposite. The phrase has a grating result on people, pushing them a way from McCain and towards a conversation about 'what is wrong' with the candidate and why a candidate would repeat such a phrase so often.

McCain-ism #2: "My Hero" - The Sycophant
Last night, McCain repeated the phrase 'my hero' only twice, but he impact was noticeable:

President Reagan, MY HERO
MY HERO is a guy named Teddy Roosevelt
For some reason, McCain peppers his campaign speech with references to 'my hero,' most often citing Ronald Reagan. In some instances, he calls someone 'my hero' in order to demonstrate that he bucked authority, while in other cases he is simply expressing admiration. But in both cases, the end result is very bad for McCain's candidacy.

The dictionary defines 'sycophant' as:

a person who acts obsequiously toward someone in order to gain advantage; a servile flatterer.

Perhaps Reagan and Roosevelt are McCain's 'heros,' perhaps not. Nobody can truly know what is in another person's heart. But what comes across to voters when McCain describes famous politicians as 'my hero' is a gut feeling that he is doing so to gain advantage--servile flattery.

No matter how old or young a voter may be, no matter where they were born, no matter what their ideological leanings may be, wealthy or poor, man or woman--we have all encountered a sycophant in or lives. And nobody--I mean absolutely nobody--observes a person engaged in servile flattery and thinks, 'Gosh, I really like this person.' We think instead, 'Yuck. Gross. Pathetic.'

Americans do not look kindly on people who flatter the boss to get ahead. Sycophants are ridiculed in thousands of movies and books because Americans believe that if you work hard you get ahead and that people who get ahead by calling the boss 'my hero,' are not really qualified or deserving of the job they landed.

McCain-ism #3: "I Know How To" - The Know-It-All
Over the course of last night's debate, Sen. McCain repeated the phrase 'I know how to' seven times:

I KNOW HOW TO do that, my friends
I KNOW HOW TO get America working again
I KNOW HOW TO fix this economy
I KNOW HOW TO do that
I KNOW HOW TO handle these crises
I KNOW HOW TO get him
I KNOW HOW TO do it
The funny thing about a 'know-it-all,' as any kid in grade school can already explain: they rarely know what it is they claim to know. Constantly telling someone 'I know how to' says less about one's skills than about one's deep need to be seen as skillful.

This was the impression McCain gave to voters each time he repeated 'I know how to': insecurity.

Why would someone who claims to be an expert in foreign policy, who claims to be an expert in military policy, who claims to be an expert in energy policy, who claims to be an expert in backroom politics--why would McCain be insecure? Because despite all his supposed skills, the 2008 presidential campaign has brought to light very little actual accomplishment in the record of John McCain. Despite all the accusations from the McCain campaign that Barack Obama 'has no experience,' the McCain campaign has offered virtually nothing as evidence of John McCain's accomplishment. McCain has a decorated record as a war veteran, no question, but as a man who claims 'I know how to,' he has nothing to show for having done much.

What Americans hear when McCain repeats 'I know how to,' is not a man with actual skill, but a man who wants to be at the center, at the top more than he knows what to do if he should get there. Ultimately, the know-it-all becomes the least trusted person in the room because with each claim of expertise, we grow less and less convinced of anything but their egotism.

McCain-ism: The Neurotic, The Sycophant, and The Know-It-All
If anything lost the debate for McCain it was the repetition of these three key phrases, each of which gave the the impression that he was an insecure politician rather than a confident leader.

Above all else, Americans in Presidential elections look for a candidate to project an image of confidence. In his performance last night, McCain did just the opposite. And the weight of those phrases, repeated on the stage and amplified in countless stories throughout the media, will likely sink his poll numbers even further.

In an age of internet politics, policy arguments are the stuff of campaign websites. In the debates, voters get a chance to hear what the candidates repeat. And last night, what we heard over and over from John McCain was not the stuff of a candidate who claims victory in November.

© 2008 Jeffrey Feldman, Frameshop

Is Palin Trying To Incite Violence Against Obama?

2008-10-07T11:33:00.000-07:00

MCCAIN CAMP TALKS 'CHARACTER ASSASSINATION,' SUPPORTERS SHOUT FOR REAL ASSASSINATION
At her last rally in Florida, Sarah Palin told the audience that Barack Obama "palled around with terrorists" adding,"I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America." Upon hearing the Republican VP candidate's concern that Sen. Obama might be a terrorist, a voice in the crowd cried out 'Kill him!'

McCain Campaign Amplifies Violent Rhetoric, GOP Crowds Threaten Obama's Life
The Washington Post's Dana Milbank reported an incident at a Palin rally that should open America's eyes to the central role violent rhetoric now plays in the McCain campaign. Milbank describes how Palin told the crowd in Florida that Obama has close associations with a terrorist who sought to bomb the Pentagon and the U.S. Capital, in response to which the crowd responded with a threat on Sen. Obama's life:

"Now it turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers...And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,'" she continued.

"Boooo!" the crowd repeated.

"Kill him!" proposed one man in the audience.
Palin went on to say that "Obama held one of the first meetings of his political career in Bill Ayers's living room, and they've worked together on various projects in Chicago." Here, Palin began to connect the dots. "These are the same guys who think that patriotism is paying higher taxes -- remember that's what Joe Biden had said. "And" -- she paused and sighed -- "I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America, as the greatest force for good in the world. I'm afraid this is someone who sees America as 'imperfect enough' to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country." (link)

Palin's new rhetorical strategy signifies an alarming new development in the 2008 Presidential election, and one that has been not only been documented by such high profile newspapers as the Washington Post, but confirmed by the McCain campaign itself.

"It's a dangerous road, but we have no choice," a top McCain strategist recently admitted to the Daily News. "If we keep talking about the economic crisis, we're going to lose." (link)

The 'dangerous road,' however, is not just a generic attack on Sen. Obama's trustworthiness or honesty. Rather, the McCain campaign has chosen to stand before campaign rallies and accuse Sen. Obama of hiding sympathies with domestic terrorists--to accuse their opponent, essentially, of being a terrorist.

With the McCain campaign now using the Palin stump speech to accuse Sen. Obama of hiding a terrorist agenda, the McCain campaign has staked its future on rhetoric that skirts the boundary between character assassination and incitements of actual violence against their opponent.

Meanwhile, while McCain is not yet accusing Obama of terrorism in his own stump speech, the crowds at his rallies are.

In a recent video clip from MSNBC, McCain asked a rally, "Who is the real Barack Obama?" In response to McCain's rhetorical question, a voice from the crowd can be clearly heard to shout in response, "Terrorist!" (link)

Since the start of the election campaign well over a year ago, voters have been subject to ongoing smear campaigns in emails and push polls accusing Sen. Obama of ties to and sympathies with domestic and foreign terrorist groups. No matter how many times these smear campaigns have been exposed, they continued. Now that John McCain and Sarah Palin have echoed these accusations--the idea that Sen. Obama is secretly a terrorist has the stamp of approval of a presidential campaign, but of a multi-term U.S. senator and a U.S. governor.

One wonders at this point how the various agencies charged with the responsibility of protecting the Presidential candidates from violence will respond to this latest tactic from the McCain campaign. If, for example, a McCain supporter threatens the life of Sen. Obama by shouting 'Kill him!' at a Palin rally, should Sen. Obama's Secret Service contingent launch an investigation? Having been accused of terrorist ties by the McCain campaign, will Sen. Obama's name be put on the 'No Fly' list, effectively making it impossible for him to engage in normal airline travel?

An even more basic question, perhaps: Is Gov. Palin trying to incite violence against Sen. Obama as part of an ill-conceived campaign strategy to change the topic from the economy at any cost?

Time will tell how law enforcement will respond, but one thing is already certain: the more Palin and McCain incite calls for violence against Sen. Obama, the more their chances of achieving a victory in November disappear.

-- Jeffrey Feldman

Blacker Monday

2008-10-06T09:27:00.000-07:00

Stocks Fall Sharply on Credit Concerns

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
New York Times

The selling on Wall Street began at the opening bell on Monday and only intensified as the morning went on. Shares moved sharply lower as the banking crisis tightened its grip on the global economy.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell below 10,000 for the first time since 2004 after losing more than 500 points in the first hour. The index has lost more than 1,100 points — or about 10 percent — in slightly more than a week.

Shortly after noon, the Dow was down 450 points or 4.3 percent.

The broader American stock market was down more than 4.9 percent, as measured by the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, its worst decline since last Monday’s 8.8 percent drop. At the same time, oil dropped below $90 a barrel.

The precipitous declines, which accelerated as the morning wore on, came a day after European governments were forced to scramble to save several major banks and lenders from collapse. The moves reinforced the global reach of the current crisis and alarmed depositors and regulators in the United States and abroad.

European stocks fell even further, with the major indexes in London, Paris, and Frankfurt down nearly 7 percent.

The sharp slides came despite a morning announcement from the Federal Reserve, which said it would significantly expand the amount of money it makes available to major banks. The Fed will now lend up to $900 billion in credit, an enormous sum that officials hope will reassure banks that the government will provide them with adequate capital.

The moves were aimed at resolving a problem at the center of the current credit crisis: the reluctance of banks to lend. The healthy functioning of the world’s economy is dependent on the easy flow of short-term loans among banks, businesses and consumers, a stream that has been cut off as banks become more fearful of giving out cash.

Borrowing rates remained very high on Monday despite the passage of the American bailout plan, although proponents of that package argue that its longer-term benefits will take time to carry out. Still, some gauges of anxiety in the market again reached record highs as the week began, and a benchmark overnight borrowing rate, the Libor rate, moved higher. A measure of volatility, the VIX index, jumped to its highest intraday level ever.

“It’s not just a question clearing problem assets,” said Bob McKee, chief economist for Independent Strategy, a research consultancy. “If banks don’t have enough capital they will be paralyzed.”

Oil prices tumbled nearly $4 a barrel to below $90, the first time it has fallen that low since February, before recovering slightly to $90.90 around 10 a.m. The euro continued to fall against the dollar.

Falling oil prices provoked a decline of just over 1,000 points, or nearly 9.9 percent, on the Toronto Stock Market. The drop brought the S&P/TSX index below 10,000 points for the first time since May 2004.

Energy stocks drove the decline, falling 13 percent. Financial industry shares were down 7 percent in mid-morning trading with the Royal Bank of Canada, the country’s largest bank, down 8.43 percent. That drop came despite the fact that the Royal Bank, like most of Canada’s major banks, has relatively little expose to troubled debt in the United States.

Strong prices for oil and gas as well as commodities like metals, have allowed most of Canada to escape the economic downturn in the United States. But the Bank of Nova Scotia report released on Monday said that weakness in the manufacturing sector, which relies heavily on exports to the United States, will push likely Canada into a recession.

In Europe, governments worked over the weekend to prevent the collapse of two lenders, Hypo Real Estate in Germany and the Belgian operations of Fortis. The German government also said it would guarantee all private bank deposits as it sought to avert the spread of the financial contagion.

The FTSE 100 index in London fell 5.6 percent; the Frankfurt DAX was down 5.2 percent and the CAC-40 in Paris lost 5.9 percent.

A similar sell-off occurred in Asia, the Nikkei 225 stock average in Tokyo fell 4.3 percent, while the Kospi index in Seoul fell 4.3 percent. The Standard and Poor’s/ASX 200 index in Sydney fell 3.3 percent, while the Hang Seng index in Hong Kong was down 5 percent.

“People are really disappointed by the inability of Europe to react on a concerted basis,” said Andrew Popper, a fund manager at SG Hambros in London. “It’s still very much a country by country approach. There is also a realization that we haven’t seen any effects on economic growth so far but that now is starting and that’s having an effect on non-financial shares.”

Steps by some European governments over the weekend to guarantee deposits may avoid a panic among consumers but will not help banks cope with their financing problems, said Adrian Darley, a fund manager at Resolution Asset Management in London.

“There are still a lot of issues out there,” Mr. Darley said. “Deposit guarantees are just a short-term solution. It does not necessarily help with interbank loans or if you have bad loans on your books. It will take a lot more than that.”

In Iceland and Russia, trading on banking shares was halted after indexes fell more than 14 percent.

Shares of industrial companies were hammered in Europe with EADS, the parent of Airbus, falling 7.5 percent, ArcelorMittal, the world’s biggest steel maker, falling 8.6 percent, and the German automaker Daimler down 5.8 percent. British Airways slid 10.3 percent.

BNP Paribas, which acquired a majority stake in Fortis for about $20 billion in an emergency deal late Sunday, was unchanged, while shares of Fortis were suspended. Trading in Unicredit, the big Italian bank, was delayed for an hour after the bank said late Sunday that it would seek about $9.1 billion in new funding and cut its earnings outlook. And Hypo Real Estate, the second-biggest German mortgage lender, fell 28 percent in Frankfurt after it received a new $68 billion bailout Sunday from German banks and the national government in Berlin.

Shares also dropped because many clients are pulling their money out of hedge funds and other investment funds with disappointing returns. “We’re seeing forced sales from redemptions,” Mr. Darley said.

Shares in HBOS, the British mortgage lender that agreed to be bought by Lloyds in a government-brokered deal, opened 20 percent lower on Monday.

Nicholas Bibby, an economist in the Singapore office of Barclays Capital, said that falling share prices showed that many investors were still worried that banking difficulties might spread even after the passage of the financial bailout plan in Washington. “It’s a fear of contagion,” he said, while adding that Asian banks were better positioned than most to withstand the current problems because the region’s high savings rate tends to mean that Asian banks are net lenders in international money markets.

Concerns about Asian exports have also been rising for months, as the region’s high savings rate means that it also has weak spending on consumption and remains heavily dependent on overseas demand.

CFC Seymour, a Hong Kong securities firm, pointed out in an investment newsletter on Monday that even before recent problems in financial markets, the combined trade balance of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines had gone from a surplus of $19 billion as recently as last October to a deficit of $2 billion in July. Only China is still running consistently large trade surpluses.

The realignment in the currency markets that has lifted the dollar and yen against the euro continued, as investors worried about Europe’s banks and economic health and continued their flight to the apparent stability of Japan’s financial system.

The euro fell to $1.3609 in Paris morning trading, from $1.3772 in New York late Friday. The dollar fell to 103.42 yen from 105.32, and the euro declined to 140.74 yen from 145.07.

The Shanghai stock exchange, closed for the last week for China’s National Day holiday, reopened on Monday with the Shanghai A-share market down 3.5 percent. The China Securities Regulatory Commission announced on Sunday that it would experiment with the introduction of short-selling and trading on margin on a limited basis, but did not say when the trial would begin.

Keith Bradsher, Ian Austen, David Jolly and Julia Werdigier contributed reporting.

The Legacy

2008-10-03T14:48:00.001-07:00

Among the many dispiriting things to come out of Bob Woodward’s quartet of books on George W. Bush is his observation that the president has not changed since he first started talking to Woodward in 2001.

No growth. No evolution. No regrets.

“History,” Bush replied, when asked by Woodward how he would be judged over time. “We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” Broke, as well.

It would have been nice to let Bush’s two terms marinate a while before invoking Herbert Hoover and James Buchanan from the cellar of worst presidents. But then — over the last two weeks — he completed the trilogy of national disasters that will be with us for a generation or more.

George Bush entered the White House as a proponent of a more humble foreign policy and a believer that government should get out of the way at home. He leaves as someone with a trillion-dollar war aimed at making people who’ve hated each other for a thousand years become Rotary Club freedom-lovers, and his own country close to bankruptcy after government did get out of the way.

It’s a Mount Rainier of shame and folly. But before going any further, let’s allow his supporters to have their say.

“He’s going to have an unbelievably great legacy,” said Laura Bush in an ABC interview, citing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Fifty million people liberated from very brutal regimes.”

Fred Barnes argues that Bush is a visionary on a par with Ronald Reagan and Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Bush is a president who leads,” he wrote in a 2006 book. “He controls the national agenda, uses his presidential power to the fullest and then some, prepares far-reaching polices likely to change the way Americans live, reverses other long-standing polices and is the foremost leader in world affairs.”

Finally, from Karl Rove, the Architect. Bush will be viewed “as a far-sighted leader who confronted the key test of the 21st century,” he said.

After wading through books with words like “fiasco,” “hubris” and “denial” in the title, historians will go to first-hand sources, the people who worked with Bush daily. There they will find Paul O’Neill, the president’s former Treasury secretary. In 2002, he sounded an alarm, saying Bush’s rash economic policies could lead to a deficit of $500 billion. This, after Bush had inherited a budget surplus, prompted many to scoff at O’Neill.

He was wrong, but only in one respect – the projected deficit, even without a financial bailout, will almost certainly be higher.

This means a lot, for every bridge not built, every Pell grant not given to a kid who may never go to college without one, every national park road left to crumble, every sick person who cannot afford to see a doctor in a country that wants to be known as the best on earth.

Historians will also go to Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary. Bush may not be a “high functioning moron,” as Paul Begala called him recently. He is “plenty smart enough to be president,” McClellan wrote this year. But McClellan, in his job as the president’s mouthpiece, found him chronically incurious. He also said Bush deliberately misled the country into war, and in that effort, the news media were “complicit enablers.”

Historians will recall that in each of the major disasters on Bush’s watch, there were ample warnings — from the intelligence briefing that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike a month before the lethal blow, to the projections that Hurricane Katrina could drown a major American city, to the expressed fears that letting Wall Street regulate itself could be catastrophic.

Voluntary regulation. That phrase now joins “heckuva job, Brownie” and “mission accomplished” among those that will always be associated with the Bush presidency.

It’s painful now to realize, just as the economy craters and the world looks aghast at the United States, that the other cancer from the Bush presidency – his failure to even start the nation on the road to a new energy economy – gets short-changed during the triage of his final days.

Bush has hinted that his legacy will be about the war. So be it. He never caught bin Laden, the mass murderer who launched the raison d’etre of the Bush presidency.

But he did topple a paper army in Iraq, opening the drainage for our currency, blood and global reputation. It may go down as the longest, even costliest war in our history.

In a survey of scholars done earlier this year, just two of 109 historians said the Bush presidency would be judged a success. A majority said he would be the worst president ever.

But if you don’t trust those elites in academia, consider the president’s own base.

Bush leaves with his party in tatters. In the 28 states that register by affiliation, Democrats have picked up more than 2 million new voters this year while Republicans have lost 344,000. It seems only fitting that it was the last of the Bush dead-enders in Congress earlier this week who jumped ship when presented with the final horrendous hangover from this man who doesn’t drink.

If ever there was an argument for voting against politicians who are confident about their cluelessness, Bush is it. So it was heartening to see that a majority of the country, in some polls, now views Sarah Palin as unqualified to be president.

We may have learned something, even if Bush has not.

-- Timothy Egan - New York Times

Lingo Cards for the Debates

2008-10-01T12:59:00.000-07:00

DEBATE LINGO CARDS

The End is Near

2008-09-29T13:14:00.000-07:00

Consider this exchange.

Hannity: What is our role as a country as it relates to national security?

Palin: Yes. That's a great question, and being an optimist I see our role in the world as one of being a force for good, and one of being the leader of the world when it comes to the values that -- it seems that just human kind embraces the values that -- encompass life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that's just -- not just in America, that is in our world.

And America is in a position because we care for so many people to be able to lead and to be able to have a strong diplomacy and a strong military also at the same time to defend not only our freedoms, but to help these rising smaller democratic countries that are just -- you know, they're putting themselves on the map right now, and they're going to be looking to America as that leader.

We being used as a force for good is how I see our country.

McCain proves he's unfit to serve

2008-09-26T11:40:00.000-07:00

John McCain's incoherent and opportunistic campaign, which he never "suspended" for 30 seconds, now poses an imminent threat to the world economy. Nobody in the McCain camp, including the policy-challenged candidate, seems able to articulate a firm position on how to restore the stability of the financial markets and prevent a catastrophic lending freeze.
Instead, the Arizona senator is running around trying to insert himself into photo ops and ingratiate himself with House Republicans whose only apparent objective is ideological obstruction. How can he provide leadership when his own viewpoint is increasingly opaque -- and the only thing that remains clear is his desperation about his worsening poll position?
Actually, McCain was clearer in his positions and objectives before he went to Washington for the White House meeting that blew up negotiations over a bailout bill on Thursday afternoon. When he showed up at the Clinton Global Initiative for a breakfast speech, he reiterated his promise to stop campaigning and return to the capital, where he hoped that Barack Obama would join him in "putting politics aside" and "dealing in a straightforward bipartisan way" with the bailout legislation. "I'm an old Navy pilot," he said, never missing a chance to mention his war record, "and I know when a crisis calls for all hands on deck."
The Republican nominee then went on to enumerate five critical issues that had to be resolved before the Treasury proposal could have any chance of passage: a bipartisan oversight board; a provision for taxpayers to recover at least a portion of the Treasury funds; a completely transparent process for expenditure of those funds; a rejection of any "earmarks" for favored companies or any other purpose in the bill; and a guarantee that no Wall Street executives will profit from taxpayers' money.
On those issues, as of approximately 9:30 that morning, McCain declared he would be unyielding and yet bipartisan. "In this crisis, we must work together again ... We must draw on the best ideas of both parties and work together for the common good."
Those particular clichés were irrelevant to the problem at hand on Capitol Hill, as he should have known by then but surely learned when he arrived in Washington -- where the ideas of Republicans and Democrats in the House are diametrically opposed. His Republican colleagues in the Senate were on the verge of agreement with the Democratic congressional leadership in both houses and the White House until the House Republicans decided to smash the bipartisan plan.
Amazingly, McCain decided to connive with the right-wing bloc -- in contradiction of his own stated objectives and his supposed bipartisanship, which Democrats in both chambers plainly shared. At the White House meeting he reportedly said almost nothing, except to indicate that he was working with the House Republicans (which their spokesman, Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, confirmed later). He sat passively while House Republican leader John Boehner sabotaged the agreement with a phony mortgage insurance proposal.
Yet the tentative agreement that the Republican minority capsized, with his assent, met all of the requirements that McCain had listed as necessary for his support only hours earlier! The original deal announced by the congressional negotiators, with the assent of the White House and the Treasury, stipulated that the bailout would be subject to strict oversight by an independent inspector general and regular Government Accountability Office audits. Any "inappropriate or excessive" compensation would be forbidden to executives whose firms received bailout funds, and the government would take equity shares in those companies to protect the interests of taxpayers.
Well before the end of the day, however, McCain had abandoned the positions he had taken at the Clinton breakfast -- and his spokesman was insisting that the senator had no firm position on the bailout bill because he wanted to be in a position to lead. Or something like that.
There was never any likelihood that McCain would make any independent intellectual contribution to the discussion at the White House, or anywhere else. But he could have helped herd House Republicans into an agreement that met the criteria he had claimed were important to him, in the bipartisan manner that he had demanded in such ringing words. He didn't, because he meant none of it.
By the time you read this -- and certainly by the time he appears in Oxford, Miss., for the first presidential debate -- the former straight talker will probably have adopted some new stance, in his panting eagerness to appear presidential. His attempts to game this dangerous situation, his waffling between bipartisanship and ideological rigidity, his shiftiness on the real issues and his obvious lack of concentration on the problems that must be resolved -- suggest that he is in fact unfit to serve in the office he desires. Once again he has proved that his claim to put country first is hollow. He was more than willing to take America down as he gambled for that prize.

-- By Joe Conason - salon.com

September 25, 2008 10:32

2008-09-25T12:49:00.000-07:00

John McCain faced another crisis yesterday--a political one, not the financial emergency he used as an excuse for his rash actions--and once again he overreacted. This is becoming a pattern (as is his "greatest crisis since..." formulation: yesterday, since World War II; previously--on Georgia--since the end of the cold war), and it is not very reassuring behavior in a potential President.

The political crisis was real. And it wasn't merely that he was slipping a bit in the polls. It was that he was being pressured on three sides. The responsible economic leadership of the Republican Party--people like his own economic advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin and, I assume, the corporate sorts he consults with--were urging him to support a modified version of the bailout package. At the same time, people like Bill Kristol--who can be a surprisingly amoral tactician when it comes to subjects other than foreign policy where he has firm, if mistaken, beliefs--were urging McCain to take a populist nutball Lou Dobbsian stand against the deal. A large number of House Republicans were leaning toward that position, which is why McCain suffered under the--mistaken, I believe--impression that the bailout was in some trouble. A third source of pressure came from those House Republicans who wanted to vote for the package, but didn't want to be hung out to dry by their standard-bearer: they needed to know if McCain was for or against.

It should be noted that Barack Obama was under no such pressure, since Democrats--reluctantly, angrily, to be sure--actually believe, as President Bush does, that there will be real pain on Main Street if some sort of bailout isn't achieved.

Happily, in the end, McCain did the responsible thing...but he did it foolishly, in a panicky fashion. He did support the emerging compromise. He took the Democrats' modifications--on oversight, homeowner and taxpayer protection, and restrictions on payouts to the executives who made these disastrous decisions--and made them his own. His support will help widen the majority of legislators who will support the bill.

What McCain didn't understand was that the legislative crisis was already receding when he made his melodramatic--and somewhat wild-eyed--suspension of campaign activities statement. (He didn't understand this because he has had no input into the process and, indeed, is neither respected for his financial expertise nor desired in the process because of his combative, peremptory negotiating style.)In any case, the crisis was receding because the Bush Administration was caving to the Democrats' modifications, as the President made clear in his speech last night. A Democratic Senator close to the negotiations told me after the speech, "We pretty much have a deal. The negotiations aren't over, but this is just too damn important to get snagged on a codicil."

Since it would have been fairly embarrassing to McCain for the crisis to end without his meaningless intervention, Bush laid on the White House summit and likely kumbaya session for this afternoon where the deal will probably be announced. And now, McCain faces a further embarrassment: what to do about his decision to pull out of the debate? It seems to me that if agreement is reached today, he has to debate tomorrow--and now, because of his "crisis" announcement, the debate will take place on turf less favorable to him: on economic as well as foreign policy. Even if an agreement isn't reached today, he will be hard pressed to explain why he isn't debating tomorrow. In any case, Obama's cool steadfastness has put him in the driver's seat on this one.

And that raises an interesting question: Why was McCain so quick to pull out of the debate? After all, with the momentum slightly in Obama's direction, he needed a game-changer--and foreign policy is, allegedly, his area of expertise. His peremptory actions yesterday was not the behavior of a confident man. It was the behavior of a man uncertain, despite all the macho bluster, about his chances in the most important theater of battle in any presidential campaign, one where gimmicks, diversions and untruths can be directly countered by his opponent. McCain may clean Obama's clock in the coming debates--but it seems entirely possible that the old fighter jock may be frightened that he's about to ditch another plane.

--Joe Klein TIME

Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror

2008-09-25T10:49:00.000-07:00

As Parmigianino did it, the right hand
Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer
And swerving easily away, as though to protect
What it advertises. A few leaded panes, old beams,
Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together
In a movement supporting the face, which swims
Toward and away like the hand
Except that it is in repose. It is what is
Sequestered. Vasari says, "Francesco one day set himself
To take his own portrait, looking at himself from that purpose
In a convex mirror, such as is used by barbers . . .
He accordingly caused a ball of wood to be made
By a turner, and having divided it in half and
Brought it to the size of the mirror, he set himself
With great art to copy all that he saw in the glass,"
Chiefly his reflection, of which the portrait
Is the reflection, of which the portrait
Is the reflection once removed.
The glass chose to reflect only what he saw
Which was enough for his purpose: his image
Glazed, embalmed, projected at a 180-degree angle.
The time of day or the density of the light
Adhering to the face keeps it
Lively and intact in a recurring wave
Of arrival. The soul establishes itself.
But how far can it swim out through the eyes
And still return safely to its nest? The surface
Of the mirror being convex, the distance increases
Significantly; that is, enough to make the point
That the soul is a captive, treated humanely, kept
In suspension, unable to advance much farther
Than your look as it intercepts the picture.
Pope Clement and his court were "stupefied"
By it, according to Vasari, and promised a commission
That never materialized. The soul has to stay where it is,
Even though restless, hearing raindrops at the pane,
The sighing of autumn leaves thrashed by the wind,
Longing to be free, outside, but it must stay
Posing in this place. It must move
As little as possible. This is what the portrait says.
But there is in that gaze a combination
Of tenderness, amusement and regret, so powerful
In its restraint that one cannot look for long.
The secret is too plain. The pity of it smarts,
Makes hot tears spurt: that the soul is not a soul,
Has no secret, is small, and it fits
Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.
That is the tune but there are no words.
The words are only speculation
(From the Latin speculum, mirror):
They seek and cannot find the meaning of the music.
We see only postures of the dream,
Riders of the motion that swings the face
Into view under evening skies, with no
False disarray as proof of authenticity.
But it is life englobed.
One would like to stick one's hand
Out of the globe, but its dimension,
What carries it, will not allow it.
No doubt it is this, not the reflex
To hide something, which makes the hand loom large
As it retreats slightly. There is no way
To build it flat like a section of wall:
It must join the segment of a circle,
Roving back to the body of which it seems
So unlikely a part, to fence in and shore up the face
On which the effort of this condition reads
Like a pinpoint of a smile, a spark
Or star one is not sure of having seen
As darkness resumes. A perverse light whose
Imperative of subtlety dooms in advance its
Conceit to light up: unimportant but meant.
Francesco, your hand is big enough
To wreck the sphere, and too big,
One would think, to weave delicate meshes
That only argue its further detention.
(Big, but not coarse, merely on another scale,
Like a dozing whale on the sea bottom
In relation to the tiny, self-important ship
On the surface.) But your eyes proclaim
That everything is surface. The surface is what's there
And nothing can exist except what's there.
There are no recesses in the room, only alcoves,
And the window doesn't matter much, or that
Sliver of window or mirror on the right, even
As a gauge of the weather, which in French is
Le temps, the word for time, and which
Follows a course wherein changes are merely
Features of the whole. The whole is stable within
Instability, a globe like ours, resting
On a pedestal of vacuum, a ping-pong ball
Secure on its jet of water.
And just as there are no words for the surface, that is,
No words to say what it really is, that it is not
Superficial but a visible core, then there is
No way out of the problem of pathos vs. experience.
You will stay on, restive, serene in
Your gesture which is neither embrace nor warning
But which holds something of both in pure
Affirmation that doesn't affirm anything.

The balloon pops, the attention
Turns dully away. Clouds
In the puddle stir up into sawtoothed fragments.
I think of the friends
Who came to see me, of what yesterday
Was like. A peculiar slant
Of memory that intrudes on the dreaming model
In the silence of the studio as he considers
Lifting the pencil to the self-portrait.
How many people came and stayed a certain time,
Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you
Like light behind windblown fog and sand,
Filtered and influenced by it, until no part
Remains that is surely you. Those voices in the dusk
Have told you all and still the tale goes on
In the form of memories deposited in irregular
Clumps of crystals. Whose curved hand controls,
Francesco, the turning seasons and the thoughts
That peel off and fly away at breathless speeds
Like the last stubborn leaves ripped
From wet branches? I see in this only the chaos
Of your round mirror which organizes everything
Around the polestar of your eyes which are empty,
Know nothing, dream but reveal nothing.
I feel the carousel starting slowly
And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,
Photographs of friends, the window and the trees
Merging in one neutral band that surrounds
Me on all sides, everywhere I look.
And I cannot explain the action of leveling,
Why it should all boil down to one
Uniform substance, a magma of interiors.
My guide in these matters is your self,
Firm, oblique, accepting everything with the same
Wraith of a smile, and as time speeds up so that it is soon
Much later, I can know only the straight way out,
The distance between us. Long ago
The strewn evidence meant something,
The small accidents and pleasures
Of the day as it moved gracelessly on,
A housewife doing chores. Impossible now
To restore those properties in the silver blur that is
The record of what you accomplished by sitting down
"With great art to copy all that you saw in the glass"
So as to perfect and rule out the extraneous
Forever. In the circle of your intentions certain spars
Remain that perpetuate the enchantment of self with self:
Eyebeams, muslin, coral. It doesn't matter
Because these are things as they are today
Before one's shadow ever grew
Out of the field into thoughts of tomorrow.

Tomorrow is easy, but today is uncharted,
Desolate, reluctant as any landscape
To yield what are laws of perspective
After all only to the painter's deep
Mistrust, a weak instrument though
Necessary. Of course some things
Are possible, it knows, but it doesn't know
Which ones. Some day we will try
To do as many things as are possible
And perhaps we shall succeed at a handful
Of them, but this will not have anything
To do with what is promised today, our
Landscape sweeping out from us to disappear
On the horizon. Today enough of a cover burnishes
To keep the supposition of promises together
In one piece of surface, letting one ramble
Back home from them so that these
Even stronger possibilities can remain
Whole without being tested. Actually
The skin of the bubble-chamber's as tough as
Reptile eggs; everything gets "programmed" there
In due course: more keeps getting included
Without adding to the sum, and just as one
Gets accustomed to a noise that
Kept one awake but now no longer does,
So the room contains this flow like an hourglass
Without varying in climate or quality
(Except perhaps to brighten bleakly and almost
Invisibly, in a focus sharpening toward death--more
Of this later). What should be the vacuum of a dream
Becomes continually replete as the source of dreams
Is being tapped so that this one dream
May wax, flourish like a cabbage rose,
Defying sumptuary laws, leaving us
To awake and try to begin living in what
Has now become a slum. Sydney Freedberg in his
Parmigianino says of it: "Realism in this portrait
No longer produces and objective truth, but a bizarria . . . .
However its distortion does not create
A feeling of disharmony . . . . The forms retain
A strong measure of ideal beauty," because
Fed by our dreams, so inconsequential until one day
We notice the hole they left. Now their importance
If not their meaning is plain. They were to nourish
A dream which includes them all, as they are
Finally reversed in the accumulating mirror.
They seemed strange because we couldn't actually see them.
And we realize this only at a point where they lapse
Like a wave breaking on a rock, giving up
Its shape in a gesture which expresses that shape.
The forms retain a strong measure of ideal beauty
As they forage in secret on our idea of distortion.
Why be unhappy with this arrangement, since
Dreams prolong us as they are absorbed?
Something like living occurs, a movement
Out of the dream into its codification.

As I start to forget it
It presents its stereotype again
But it is an unfamiliar stereotype, the face
Riding at anchor, issued from hazards, soon
To accost others, "rather angel than man" (Vasari).
Perhaps an angel looks like everything
We have forgotten, I mean forgotten
Things that don't seem familiar when
We meet them again, lost beyond telling,
Which were ours once. This would be the point
Of invading the privacy of this man who
"Dabbled in alchemy, but whose wish
Here was not to examine the subtleties of art
In a detached, scientific spirit: he wished through them
To impart the sense of novelty and amazement to the spectator"
(Freedberg). Later portraits such as the Uffizi
"Gentleman," the Borghese "Young Prelate" and
The Naples "Antea" issue from Mannerist
Tensions, but here, as Freedberg points out,
The surprise, the tension are in the concept
Rather than its realization.
The consonance of the High Renaissance
Is present, though distorted by the mirror.
What is novel is the extreme care in rendering
The velleities of the rounded reflecting surface
(It is the first mirror portrait),
So that you could be fooled for a moment
Before you realize the reflection
Isn't yours. You feel then like one of those
Hoffmann characters who have been deprived
Of a reflection, except that the whole of me
Is seen to be supplanted by the strict
Otherness of the painter in his
Other room. We have surprised him
At work, but no, he has surprised us
As he works. The picture is almost finished,
The surprise almost over, as when one looks out,
Startled by a snowfall which even now is
Ending in specks and sparkles of snow.
It happened while you were inside, asleep,
And there is no reason why you should have
Been awake for it, except that the day
Is ending and it will be hard for you
To get to sleep tonight, at least until late.

The shadow of the city injects its own
Urgency: Rome where Francesco
Was at work during the Sack: his inventions
Amazed the soldiers who burst in on him;
They decided to spare his life, but he left soon after;
Vienna where the painting is today, where
I saw it with Pierre in the summer of 1959; New York
Where I am now, which is a logarithm
Of other cities. Our landscape
Is alive with filiations, shuttlings;
Business is carried on by look, gesture,
Hearsay. It is another life to the city,
The backing of the looking glass of the
Unidentified but precisely sketched studio. It wants
To siphon off the life of the studio, deflate
Its mapped space to enactments, island it.
That operation has been temporarily stalled
But something new is on the way, a new preciosity
In the wind. Can you stand it,
Francesco? Are you strong enough for it?
This wind brings what it knows not, is
Self--propelled, blind, has no notion
Of itself. It is inertia that once
Acknowledged saps all activity, secret or public:
Whispers of the word that can't be understood
But can be felt, a chill, a blight
Moving outward along the capes and peninsulas
Of your nervures and so to the archipelagoes
And to the bathed, aired secrecy of the open sea.
This is its negative side. Its positive side is
Making you notice life and the stresses
That only seemed to go away, but now,
As this new mode questions, are seen to be
Hastening out of style. If they are to become classics
They must decide which side they are on.
Their reticence has undermined
The urban scenery, made its ambiguities
Look willful and tired, the games of an old man.
What we need now is this unlikely
Challenger pounding on the gates of an amazed
Castle. Your argument, Francesco,
Had begun to grow stale as no answer
Or answers were forthcoming. If it dissolves now
Into dust, that only means its time had come
Some time ago, but look now, and listen:
It may be that another life is stocked there
In recesses no one knew of; that it,
Not we, are the change; that we are in fact it
If we could get back to it, relive some of the way
It looked, turn our faces to the globe as it sets
And still be coming out all right:
Nerves normal, breath normal. Since it is a metaphor
Made to include us, we are a part of it and
Can live in it as in fact we have done,
Only leaving our minds bare for questioning
We now see will not take place at random
But in an orderly way that means to menace
Nobody--the normal way things are done,
Like the concentric growing up of days
Around a life: correctly, if you think about it.

A breeze like the turning of a page
Brings back your face: the moment
Takes such a big bite out of the haze
Of pleasant intuition it comes after.
The locking into place is "death itself,"
As Berg said of a phrase in Mahler's Ninth;
Or, to quote Imogen in Cymbeline, "There cannot
Be a pinch in death more sharp than this," for,
Though only exercise or tactic, it carries
The momentum of a conviction that had been building.
Mere forgetfulness cannot remove it
Nor wishing bring it back, as long as it remains
The white precipitate of its dream
In the climate of sighs flung across our world,
A cloth over a birdcage. But it is certain that
What is beautiful seems so only in relation to a specific
Life, experienced or not, channeled into some form
Steeped in the nostalgia of a collective past.
The light sinks today with an enthusiasm
I have known elsewhere, and known why
It seemed meaningful, that others felt this way
Years ago. I go on consulting
This mirror that is no longer mine
For as much brisk vacancy as is to be
My portion this time. And the vase is always full
Because there is only just so much room
And it accommodates everything. The sample
One sees is not to be taken as
Merely that, but as everything as it
May be imagined outside time--not as a gesture
But as all, in the refined, assimilable state.
But what is this universe the porch of
As it veers in and out, back and forth,
Refusing to surround us and still the only
Thing we can see? Love once
Tipped the scales but now is shadowed, invisible,
Though mysteriously present, around somewhere.
But we know it cannot be sandwiched
Between two adjacent moments, that its windings
Lead nowhere except to further tributaries
And that these empty themselves into a vague
Sense of something that can never be known
Even though it seems likely that each of us
Knows what it is and is capable of
Communicating it to the other. But the look
Some wear as a sign makes one want to
Push forward ignoring the apparent
NaÏveté of the attempt, not caring
That no one is listening, since the light
Has been lit once and for all in their eyes
And is present, unimpaired, a permanent anomaly,
Awake and silent. On the surface of it
There seems no special reason why that light
Should be focused by love, or why
The city falling with its beautiful suburbs
Into space always less clear, less defined,
Should read as the support of its progress,
The easel upon which the drama unfolded
To its own satisfaction and to the end
Of our dreaming, as we had never imagined
It would end, in worn daylight with the painted
Promise showing through as a gage, a bond.
This nondescript, never-to-be defined daytime is
The secret of where it takes place
And we can no longer return to the various
Conflicting statements gathered, lapses of memory
Of the principal witnesses. All we know
Is that we are a little early, that
Today has that special, lapidary
Todayness that the sunlight reproduces
Faithfully in casting twig-shadows on blithe
Sidewalks. No previous day would have been like this.
I used to think they were all alike,
That the present always looked the same to everybody
But this confusion drains away as one
Is always cresting into one's present.
Yet the "poetic," straw-colored space
Of the long corridor that leads back to the painting,
Its darkening opposite--is this
Some figment of "art," not to be imagined
As real, let alone special? Hasn't it too its lair
In the present we are always escaping from
And falling back into, as the waterwheel of days
Pursues its uneventful, even serene course?
I think it is trying to say it is today
And we must get out of it even as the public
Is pushing through the museum now so as to
Be out by closing time. You can't live there.
The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how:
Secrets of wash and finish that took a lifetime
To learn and are reduced to the status of
Black-and-white illustrations in a book where colorplates
Are rare. That is, all time
Reduces to no special time. No one
Alludes to the change; to do so might
Involve calling attention to oneself
Which would augment the dread of not getting out
Before having seen the whole collection
(Except for the sculptures in the basement:
They are where they belong).
Our time gets to be veiled, compromised
By the portrait's will to endure. It hints at
Our own, which we were hoping to keep hidden.
We don't need paintings or
Doggerel written by mature poets when
The explosion is so precise, so fine.
Is there any point even in acknowledging
The existence of all that? Does it
Exist? Certainly the leisure to
Indulge stately pastimes doesn't,
Any more. Today has no margins, the event arrives
Flush with its edges, is of the same substance,
Indistinguishable. "Play" is something else;
It exists, in a society specifically
Organized as a demonstration of itself.
There is no other way, and those assholes
Who would confuse everything with their mirror games
Which seem to multiply stakes and possibilities, or
At least confuse issues by means of an investing
Aura that would corrode the architecture
Of the whole in a haze of suppressed mockery,
Are beside the point. They are out of the game,
Which doesn't exist until they are out of it.
It seems like a very hostile universe
But as the principle of each individual thing is
Hostile to, exists at the expense of all the others
As philosophers have often pointed out, at least
This thing, the mute, undivided present,
Has the justification of logic, which
In this instance isn't a bad thing
Or wouldn't be, if the way of telling
Didn't somehow intrude, twisting the end result
Into a caricature of itself. This always
Happens, as in the game where
A whispered phrase passed around the room
Ends up as something completely different.
It is the principle that makes works of art so unlike
What the artist intended. Often he finds
He has omitted the thing he started out to say
In the first place. Seduced by flowers,
Explicit pleasures, he blames himself (though
Secretly satisfied with the result), imagining
He had a say in the matter and exercised
An option of which he was hardly conscious,
Unaware that necessity circumvents such resolutions.
So as to create something new
For itself, that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being. Parmigianino
Must have realized this as he worked at his
Life-obstructing task. One is forced to read
The perfectly plausible accomplishment of a purpose
Into the smooth, perhaps even bland (but so
Enigmatic) finish. Is there anything
To be serious about beyond this otherness
That gets included in the most ordinary
Forms of daily activity, changing everything
Slightly and profoundly, and tearing the matter
Of creation, any creation, not just artistic creation
Out of our hands, to install it on some monstrous, near
Peak, too close to ignore, too far
For one to intervene? This otherness, this
"Not-being-us" is all there is to look at
In the mirror, though no one can say
How it came to be this way. A ship
Flying unknown colors has entered the harbor.
You are allowing extraneous matters
To break up your day, cloud the focus
Of the crystal ball. Its scene drifts away
Like vapor scattered on the wind. The fertile
Thought-associations that until now came
So easily, appear no more, or rarely. Their
Colorings are less intense, washed out
By autumn rains and winds, spoiled, muddied,
Given back to you because they are worthless.
Yet we are such creatures of habit that their
Implications are still around en permanence, confusing
Issues. To be serious only about sex
Is perhaps one way, but the sands are hissing
As they approach the beginning of the big slide
Into what happened. This past
Is now here: the painter's
Reflected face, in which we linger, receiving
Dreams and inspirations on an unassigned
Frequency, but the hues have turned metallic,
The curves and edges are not so rich. Each person
Has one big theory to explain the universe
But it doesn't tell the whole story
And in the end it is what is outside him
That matters, to him and especially to us
Who have been given no help whatever
In decoding our own man-size quotient and must rely
On second-hand knowledge. Yet I know
That no one else's taste is going to be
Any help, and might as well be ignored.
Once it seemed so perfect--gloss on the fine
Freckled skin, lips moistened as though about to part
Releasing speech, and the familiar look
Of clothes and furniture that one forgets.
This could have been our paradise: exotic
Refuge within an exhausted world, but that wasn't
In the cards, because it couldn't have been
The point. Aping naturalness may be the first step
Toward achieving an inner calm
But it is the first step only, and often
Remains a frozen gesture of welcome etched
On the air materializing behind it,
A convention. And we have really
No time for these, except to use them
For kindling. The sooner they are burnt up
The better for the roles we have to play.
Therefore I beseech you, withdraw that hand,
Offer it no longer as shield or greeting,
The shield of a greeting, Francesco:
There is room for one bullet in the chamber:
Our looking through the wrong end
Of the telescope as you fall back at a speed
Faster than that of light to flatten ultimately
Among the features of the room, an invitation
Never mailed, the "it was all a dream"
Syndrome, though the "all" tells tersely
Enough how it wasn't. Its existence
Was real, though troubled, and the ache
Of this waking dream can never drown out
The diagram still sketched on the wind,
Chosen, meant for me and materialized
In the disguising radiance of my room.
We have seen the city; it is the gibbous
Mirrored eye of an insect. All things happen
On its balcony and are resumed within,
But the action is the cold, syrupy flow
Of a pageant. One feels too confined,
Sifting the April sunlight for clues,
In the mere stillness of the ease of its
Parameter. The hand holds no chalk
And each part of the whole falls off
And cannot know it knew, except
Here and there, in cold pockets
Of remembrance, whispers out of time.

--John Ashbery

Back in the Saddle Again

2008-09-24T14:25:00.001-07:00

Try giving all the details first; the dominant impression then is built from these details.

Check your details to be sure that they are consistent with the dominant impression. You might even want to write down the five senses on a scratch piece of paper and check to see that you have covered them all.

Try moving your reader through space and time chronologically. For instance, you might want to describe a train ride from start to destination, or a stream from its source to the point at which it joins the river.

Use a then-and-now approach to show decay, change, or improvement. The house where you grew up might now be a rambling shack. The variations on this strategy are endless.

Select an emotion and try to describe it. It might be more difficult to get started, but it can be worthwhile.

Because I Do Not Die

2007-12-04T09:52:00.000-08:00

I live, but not in myself,
and I have such hope
that I die because I do not die.

I no longer live within myself
and I cannot live without God,
for having neither him nor myself
what will life be?
It will be a thousand deaths,
longing for my true life
and dying because I do not die.

This life that I live
is no life at all,
and so I die continually
until I live with you;
hear me, my God:
I do not desire this life,
I am dying because I do not die.

When I am away from you
what life can I have
except to endure
the bitterest death known?
I pity myself,
for I go on and on living,
dying because I do not die.

A fish that leaves the water
has this relief:
the dying it endures
ends at last in death.
What death can equal my pitiable life?
For the longer I live, the more drawn out is my dying.

When I try to find relief
seeing you in the Sacrament,
I find this greater sorrow:
I cannot enjoy you wholly.
All things are affliction
since I do not see you as I desire,
and I die because I do not die.

And if I rejoice, Lord,
in the hope of seeing you,
yet seeing I can lose you
doubles my sorrow.
Living in such fear
and hoping as I hope,
I die because I do not die.

Lift me from this death,
my God, and give me life;
do not hold me bound
with these bonds so strong;
see how I long to see you;
my wretchedness is so complete
that I die because I do not die.

I will cry out for death
and mourn my living
while I am held here
for my sins.
O my God, when will it be
that I can truly say:
now I live because I do not die?

-- juan de la cruz

San Francisco Bay Area

2007-11-09T11:49:00.001-08:00

The black oil spreading for miles from the Golden Gate is staining one of the richest wildlife regions on the Pacific Coast and threatening hundreds of thousands of birds as well as marine mammals and fish that feed around San Francisco Bay.

Fuel oil, lighter than crude but heavier than gasoline, can kill birds, fish and other creatures. The 58,000-gallon spill into the delicate mouth of the bay comes at an unfortunate time for migratory birds, such as the 150,000 ducks that have just flown 2,000 miles from Canada's boreal forest to feed over the winter in the bay ecosystem, bird biologists said Thursday.

Dozens of dead and injured birds already have been found around the region, and hundreds more are likely to be spotted before the oil slick is mopped up, officials said.

By late afternoon Thursday, the oil had hit the Farallon Islands, and researchers spotted 20 oiled common murres. At nesting time, in late winter, the Farallones are home to 200,000 common murres, the largest colony south of Alaska, and the seabirds already are starting to arrive.

"This is going to be a mess. We'll see how big a mess," said Cheryl Strong, a biologist at the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. The islands are part of the refuge.

Oil washing up on the beaches in San Francisco, Berkeley, Albany, Novato and along the Pacific coast is covering prime feeding grounds for the dozens of species of shorebirds that forage on the edges of the bay. The disaster will remain a deadly threat for months and perhaps years to come, biologists said.

Fish will die if they eat the oil in the water or it gets in their gills, said biologists with state Fish and Game Department.

Harbor seals that come ashore at Point Bonita near the lighthouse under the bridge also are vulnerable to oil, as are Dahl's porpoises and harbor porpoises swimming off Rodeo Beach on the Marin Headlands. Also in danger are California sea lions that could swim through the oil to get to Pier 39, according to the Marine Mammal Center. Furry mammals are particularly vulnerable to spills because the oil interferes with their ability to keep warm. Ingesting the oil and breathing the fumes also can sicken them, particularly the pups.

"It's horrible," said Dr. Frances Gulland, a veterinarian at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito who could see the oil washing up Thursday morning on Rodeo Beach. She worries about the immediate and long-term injury to the animals.

"It is shocking that it can happen in the bay under our very eyes," Gulland said.

Off the bay lies an area of almost 6,000 square miles protected as three federal marine sanctuaries - Cordell Bank, Gulf of the Farallones and Monterey Bay. The sanctuaries are home to 36 species of marine mammals, 163 species of birds and five species of sea turtles.

By evening, at least three dozen oiled and dead birds had been picked up at Rodeo, Ocean and Stinson beaches, the Berkeley Marina and other beaches.

Injured birds can die quickly. The oil coats feathers that keep birds warm, causing them to get cold in the chilly bay water. When the birds get out of the water, they stop feeding even though they need a constant supply of food to keep up with their high metabolism. If they preen their feathers, the oil can poison them, said Dr. Mike Ziccardi, director of the Oiled Wildlife Care Network. The program, at UC Davis, organizes the wildlife aid response for the state Department of Fish and Game.

At the International Bird Rescue Research Center in Fairfield, the birds will be warmed and rehydrated, and workers will try to remove the oil using Dawn dishwashing soap.

Most of the birds found Thursday were surf scoters, a species of diving duck. Around 80,000 of the ducks arrive in the Bay Area every year by November, a majority of those wintering on the Pacific Flyway, an ocean feeding stop. About 80,000 greater and lesser scaups, two other species of diving ducks, also fly here to feed from Canada, arriving at the lowest weight of their life cycle.

"They come here from the pristine boreal forests down to the San Francisco Bay, an incredibly rich marine ecosystem that supports globally important populations of ducks and shorebirds," said Jeff Wells, a biologist with the Boreal Songbird Initiative, a Seattle nonprofit.

"They arrive after a journey of thousands of miles after making it through the Canada frost, passing through British Columbia mountains and then down the entire Pacific Coast from Washington expecting a safe place full of food and spend the winter," he said.

"Then they're fouled by oil and may die on the shores because they can't stay warm and get the oil off their feathers," Wells said.

Hundreds of reports of oiled birds from beaches ringing the bay and coast came into the hot line operated by the Oiled Wildlife Care Network. So many residents used the line to offer volunteer assistance that the network was temporarily shut down in midafternoon.

On Thursday morning, Josiah Clark, a consulting ecologist conducting a preliminary shorebird survey, saw two oiled ducks, a greater scaup and a northern shoveler as far north as Novato.

"We will be living with it for a long while," said Clark, a longtime birder with the Golden Gate Audubon Society.

Jay Holcomb, who leads the bird rehabilitation center in Fairfield, said his group went out Wednesday afternoon after it got the first report of a spill.

"When we got between the Golden Gate and the lighthouse at Point Bonita under the north end of the bridge, we saw a lot of oil in the water. We didn't expect that much oil from what had been reported. And then we knew we were going to see a lot of oiled birds," Holcomb said.

--sfGate.com

map kcbs.com

sub specie aeterni

2007-09-21T12:45:00.000-07:00

Engelmann told me that when he rummages round at home in a drawer full of his own manuscripts, they strike him as so glorious that he thinks they would be worth presenting to other people. (He said it is the same when he is reading through letters from his dead relations.) However, when he imagines a selection of them published he said the whole business loses its charm & value & becomes impossible I said this case was like the following one: Nothing could be more remarkable than seeing someone who thinks himself unobserved engaged in some quite simple everyday activity. Let’s imagine a theatre, the curtain goes up & we see someone alone in his room walking up and down, lighting a cigarette, seating himself etc. so that suddenly we are observing a human being from outside in a way that ordinarily we can never observe ourselves; as if we were watching a chapter from a biography with our own eyes, -- surely this would be at once uncanny and wonderful. More wonderful than anything that a playwright could cause to be acted or spoken on the stage. We should be seeing life itself. – But then we do see this every day & it makes not the slightest impression on us! True enough, but we do not see it from that point of view. -- Similarly when E. looks at his writings and finds them splendid (even though he would not care to publish any of the pieces individually) he is seeing his life as God’s work of art, & as such it is certainly worth contemplating, as is every life & everything whatever. Only the artist can represent the individual thing so that it appears to us as a work of art; those manuscripts rightly lose their value if we contemplate them singly & in any case without prejudice, i.e. without being enthusiastic about them in advance. The work of art compels us – as one might say – to see it in the right perspective, but without art the object is a piece of nature like any other & the fact that we may exalt it through our enthusiasm does not give anyone the right to display it to us. (I am always reminded of one of those insipid photographs of a piece of scenery which is interesting to the person who took it because he was there himself, experienced something, but which a third party looks at with justifiable coldness; insofar as it is ever justifiable to look at something with coldness.

But now it seems to me too that besides the work of the artist there is another through which the world may be captured sub specie aeterni. It is – as I believe – the way of thought, which as it were flies above the world and leaves it the way it is, contemplating it from above in its flight.

--L. Wittgenstein MS109 28: 22.8.1930

"The war as we saw it"

2007-09-14T13:16:00.000-07:00

Two of the active-duty U.S. soldiers who wrote a controversial Op-Ed in the New York Times questioning the direction of the Iraq war died Monday in Baghdad. Here are their words.

Sep. 12, 2007 | By Buddhika Jayamaha, Wesley D. Smith, Jeremy Roebuck, Omar Mora, Edward Sandmeier, Yance T. Gray and Jeremy A. Murphy.

BAGHDAD -- Viewed from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)

The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the "battle space" remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers' expense.

A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death of one American soldier and the critical wounding of two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. These civilians highlighted their own predicament: had they informed the Americans of the bomb before the incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families.

As many grunts will tell you, this is a near-routine event. Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias.

Similarly, Sunnis, who have been underrepresented in the new Iraqi armed forces, now find themselves forming militias, sometimes with our tacit support. Sunnis recognize that the best guarantee they may have against Shiite militias and the Shiite-dominated government is to form their own armed bands. We arm them to aid in our fight against Al Qaeda.

However, while creating proxies is essential in winning a counterinsurgency, it requires that the proxies are loyal to the center that we claim to support. Armed Sunni tribes have indeed become effective surrogates, but the enduring question is where their loyalties would lie in our absence. The Iraqi government finds itself working at cross purposes with us on this issue because it is justifiably fearful that Sunni militias will turn on it should the Americans leave.

In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear. (In the course of writing this article, this fact became all too clear: one of us, Staff Sergeant Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head during a "time-sensitive target acquisition mission" on Aug. 12; he is expected to survive and is being flown to a military hospital in the United States.) While we have the will and the resources to fight in this context, we are effectively hamstrung because realities on the ground require measures we will always refuse -- namely, the widespread use of lethal and brutal force.

Given the situation, it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.

Coupling our military strategy to an insistence that the Iraqis meet political benchmarks for reconciliation is also unhelpful. The morass in the government has fueled impatience and confusion while providing no semblance of security to average Iraqis. Leaders are far from arriving at a lasting political settlement. This should not be surprising, since a lasting political solution will not be possible while the military situation remains in constant flux.

The Iraqi government is run by the main coalition partners of the Shiite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance, with Kurds as minority members. The Shiite clerical establishment formed the alliance to make sure its people did not succumb to the same mistake as in 1920: rebelling against the occupying Western force (then the British) and losing what they believed was their inherent right to rule Iraq as the majority. The qualified and reluctant welcome we received from the Shiites since the invasion has to be seen in that historical context. They saw in us something useful for the moment.

Now that moment is passing, as the Shiites have achieved what they believe is rightfully theirs. Their next task is to figure out how best to consolidate the gains, because reconciliation without consolidation risks losing it all. Washington's insistence that the Iraqis correct the three gravest mistakes we made -- de-Baathification, the dismantling of the Iraqi Army and the creation of a loose federalist system of government -- places us at cross purposes with the government we have committed to support.

Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers. The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict -- as we do now -- will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run.

At the same time, the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably. Two million Iraqis are in refugee camps in bordering countries. Close to two million more are internally displaced and now fill many urban slums. Cities lack regular electricity, telephone services and sanitation. "Lucky" Iraqis live in gated communities barricaded with concrete blast walls that provide them with a sense of communal claustrophobia rather than any sense of security we would consider normal.

In a lawless environment where men with guns rule the streets, engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act. Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages. As an Iraqi man told us a few days ago with deep resignation, "We need security, not free food."

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are -- an army of occupation -- and force our withdrawal.

Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.

We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.

Buddhika Jayamaha is an Army specialist. Wesley D. Smith is a sergeant. Jeremy Roebuck is a sergeant. Omar Mora is a sergeant. Edward Sandmeier is a sergeant. Yance T. Gray is a staff sergeant. Jeremy A. Murphy is a staff sergeant.

Labor Day

2007-09-01T16:43:00.000-07:00

And Reason Remains Undaunted

2007-08-22T09:50:00.000-07:00

Searching for things sublime I walked up into the muddy windy big hills
behind the town where trees riot according to their own laws and

one may

observe so many methods of moving green—under, over, around, across,
up the back, higher, fanning, condensing, rifled, flat in the eyes, as if
pacing a

cell, like a litter of grand objects, minutely, absorbed, one leaf at a time,
ocean-furious, nettle-streaked, roping along, unmowed, fresh out of pools,

clear as Babel,

such a tower, scattered through the heart, green in the strong sense, dart-
shook, crownly, carrying the secrets of its own heightening on

up, juster than a shot, gloomier than Milton or even his king of terrors,
idol in its dark parts, as a word coined to mean “storm” (of love) or

“waving lines”

(architectural), scorned, clean, with blazing nostrils, not a servant, not
rapid, rapid.

-- Anne Carson

Driving Home

2007-08-17T12:36:00.000-07:00

Minister of our coming doom, preaching
On the car radio, how right
Your Hell and damnation sound to me
As I travel these small, bleak roads
Thinking of the mailman’s son
The Army sent back in a sealed coffin.

His house is around the next turn.
A forlorn mutt sits in the yard
Waiting for someone to come home.
I can see the TV is on in the living room,
Canned laughter in the empty house
Like the sound of beer cans tied to a hearse.

-- Charles Simic

The Burden of the Park

2007-08-13T11:40:00.000-07:00

Each is truly a unique piece,
you said, or, perhaps, each
is a truly unique piece.
I sniff the difference.
It’s like dust in an old house,
or the water thereof. Then you come
to an exciting part.
The bandit affianced
to the blind man’s daughter. The mangel-wurzels
that come out of every door, salute the traveller
and are gone. Or the more melting pace of strolling players,
each with a collapsed sweetie on his arm, each
tidy as one’s idea of everything under the sun is tidy.
And the wolverines
return, with their coach, and night,
the black bat night, is blacker than any bat.

Just so you know, this is the falling-off place,
for the water, where damsels stroll and uncles
know a good thing when they see one.
The park is all over.
It isn’t a knee injury, or a postage stamp on Mars.
It is all of the above, and some other things too:
a nameless morning in May fielded by taut observers.
An inner tube on a couch.

Then we floated down the Great Array river, each
on our inner tube, each one a different color.
Mine was lime green, yours was pistachio.
And the current murmured to us mind your back
for another day. Are
you so sure we haven’t passed the goal-posts yet? Won’t
you reconsider? Remount me to my source? Egad,
Trixie, the water can speak! Like a boy
it speaks, and I’m not so sure how little all this is,
how much fuss shouldn’t be made about it. When another boy comes
to the edge of the falls, and calls, for it is late,
won’t we be sorry for not having invented this one,
letting him fall by the wayside? Then, sure enough, waves
of heather recuse the bearers of false witness, they fly like ribbons
on the stiff breeze, telling of us: We once made
some mistake, it seems, and now we are to be judged, except
it isn’t so bad, someone tells me you’ll be let off the hook,
we will all be able to go home, sojourn and smile again, be racked
with insidious giggles like guilt. Meantime, jugglers swarm over
the volcano’s
stiff sides. We believe it to be Land’s End, that it’s
six o’clock, and the razor fish have gone home.

Once, on Mannahatta’s bleak shore,
I trolled for spunkfish, but caught naught, nothing save
a rubber plunger or two. It was awful,
at that time. Now everything is cheerful.
I wonder, does it make a difference?
Are the sailors waving
from the deck of their distraught ship? We aren’t
envious, though, life being so full of
so many little commotions, it’s up to
whoever to grab his (or hers). The violin slices life up
into manageable hunks, and the fiddler knows not
who he is moving, or cares why people should be so moved;
his mind is on the end, the extraordinary onus of finishing
what’s set out for him. Do you imagine him better off than you?
My feet were numb, I ask him only, how do you carry this
from here to over there?
Is there a flat barge? How many feet does a centipede have?
(Answer in tomorrow’s edition.) I heard the weeping cranes,
telling how time was running out. It was Belgian,
they thought. Nobody burns the midnight oil for this,
yet I think I shall be a scholar some day, all the same.
The hours suit me. And the rubber corsages the girls wear
in and out of class. Sure, I’ll turn out to be a nerd, and have to sit
in the corner, but that’s part of the exciting adventure. I know things
are different and the same. Now if only I could tell you ...

The period of my rest is ended.
I shall negotiate the fall, and then go crying
back to you all. In those years peace came and went, our father’s car changed
with the seasons, all around us was fighting and the excitement of spring.
Now, funnily enough, it’s over. I shan’t mind the vacant premise
that vexed me once. I know it’s all too true. And the hooligan
ogles a calla lily: Maybe only the fingertips are exciting,
it thinks, disposing of another bushelful of ripe nostalgia.
Maybe it’s too late,
maybe they came today.

-- John Ashbery

What I Want for My Birthday

2007-08-09T13:15:00.000-07:00

specialopswatch.com

Between Games

2007-08-03T10:51:00.000-07:00

Nobody rests

This one constantly shifts his eyes
Hangs them on his head
And whether he wants it or not starts walking
backwards
He puts them on the soles of his feet
And whether he wants it or not returns walking
on his head

This one turns into an ear
He hears all that won't let itself be heard
But he grows bored
Yearns to turn again into himself
But without eyes he can't see how

That one bares all his faces
One after the other he throws them over the roof
The last one he throws under his feet
And sinks his head into his hands

This one stretches his sight
Stretches it from thumb to thumb
Walks over it walks
First slow then fast
Then faster and faster

That one plays with his head
Juggles it in the air
Meets it with his index finger
Or doesn't meet it at all

Nobody rests

-- Vasko Popa

Tango II

2007-08-02T12:09:00.000-07:00

II. BUT A DEDICATION IS ONLY FELICITOUS IF PERFORMED BEFORE WITNESSES--IT IS AN ESSENTIALLY PUBLIC SURRENDER LIKE THAT OF STANDARDS OF BATTLE

You know I was married years ago and when he left my husband took my notebooks.
Wirebound notebooks.
You know that cool sly verb write. He liked writing, disliked having to start
each thought himself.
Used my starts to various ends, for example in a pocket I found a letter he'd begun
(to his mistress at that time)
containing a phrase I had copied from Homer: ... is how Homer says
Andromache went
after she parted from Hektor--"often turning to look back"
she went
down from Troy's tower and through stone streets to her loyal husband's
house and there
with her women raised a lament for a living man in his own halls.
Loyal to nothing
my husband. So why did I love him from early girlhood to late middle age
and the divorce decree came in the mail?
Beauty. No great secret. Not ashamed to say I loved him for his beauty.
As I would again
if he came near. Beauty convinces. You know beauty makes sex possible.
Beauty makes sex sex.
You if anyone grasp this--hush, let's pass

to natural situations.
Other species, which are not poisonous, often have colorations and patterns
similar to poisonous species.
This imitation of a poisonous by a nonpoisonous species is called mimicry.
My husband was no mimic.
You will mention of course the war games. I complained to you often enough
when they were here all night
with the boards spread out and rugs and little lamps and cigarettes like Napoleon's
tent I suppose,
who could sleep? All in all my husband was a man who knew more
about the Battle of Borodino
than he did about his own wife's body, much more! Tensions poured up the walls
and along the ceiling,
sometimes they played Friday night till Monday morning straight through, he
and his pale wrathful friends.
They sweated badly. They ate meats of the countries in play.
Jealousy formed no small part of my relationship to the Battle of Borodino.

I hate it.
Do you.
Why play all night.
The time is real.
It's a game.
It's a real game.
Is that a quote.
Come here.
No.
I need to touch you.
No.
Yes.

That night we made love "the real way" which we had not yet attempted
although married six months.
Big mystery. No one knew where to put their leg and to this day I'm not sure
we got it right.
He seemed happy. You're like Venice he said beautifully.
Early next day
I wrote a short talk ("On Defloration") which he stole and had published
in a small quarterly magazine.
Overall this was a characteristic interaction between us.
Or should I say ideal.
Neither of us had ever seen Venice.

-- Anne Carson

NegativeLand - Believe

2007-07-26T16:42:00.000-07:00

Dear Sally

2007-07-25T13:57:00.000-07:00

Folks, now here's the story 'bout Minnie the Moocher,
She was a red-hot hootchie-cootcher,
She was the roughest, toughest frail,
But Minnie had a heart as big as a whale.

Hi-de-hi-de-hi-di-hi!
Ho-de-ho-de-ho-de-ho!
He-de-he-de-he-de-he!
Ho-de-ho-de-ho!

Now, she messed around with a bloke named Smoky,
She loved him though he was cokie,
He took her down to Chinatown,
He showed her how to kick the gong around.

Now, she had a dream about the king of Sweden,
He gave her things that she was needin',
He gave her a home built of gold and steel,
A diamond car with a platinum wheel.

Now, he gave her his townhouse and his racing horses,
Each meal she ate was a dozen courses;
She had a million dollars worth of nickels and dimes,
And she sat around and counted them all a billion times.

Poor Min, poor Min, poor Min.

-- Cab Calloway

Andy Warhol's "Kiss" (1963)

2007-07-24T14:11:00.000-07:00

Warhol's Kiss

Andy Warhol - Empire

2007-07-23T14:33:00.000-07:00

Warhol's Empire

Andy Warhol - Blowjob (1964)

2007-07-22T12:52:00.000-07:00

Warhol's Blowjob

Gertrude Stein, “A rose is a rose . . .” several times over

2007-07-21T11:42:00.000-07:00

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. (“Sacred Emily,” Geography and Plays)

Do we suppose that all she knows is that a rose is arose is a rose is a rose. (Operas and Plays)

. . . she would carve on the tree Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose until it went all the way around. (The World is Round)

A rose tree may be a rose tree may be a rosy rose tree if watered. (Alphabets and Birthdays)

Indeed a rose is a rose makes a pretty plate . . . .(Stanzas in Meditation)

When I said.
A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun. (Lectures in America)

Civilization begins with a rose. A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. It continues with blooming and it fastens clearly upon excellent examples. (As Fine as Melanctha)

Lifting belly can please me because it is an occupation I enjoy.
Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
In print on top. (Bee Time Vine)

Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying “is a … is a … is a …” Yes, I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years. (Four in America)

-- Gertrude Stein

Reducing Planes

2007-07-20T10:36:00.000-07:00

1)
Trees. Snow. Trees further away.
In the grey light, they are as pasted on a board,
the snow merely empty white, the further away
just smaller trees. This is theory.

2)
I go out to the white fields pretending
not to be human. Then stop, wonder what it is
I attempt, or mimic. I founder in the snow,
falling through the crust.
The spirit beyond human doesn't carry enough interest.
There is choice here: a god whose skin shines,
or a hollow in a bank.

3)
It is not a matter of cruelty; just that,
swinging his arms, he knocks the man down.
He does not see the man or notice him until after.
Then he grieves.

4)
In the darkroom he burns snow into the photograph.
Too much light will make it drab; too little
and it remains empty. He works until late,
changing papers, exposures, chemicals,
going over it again and again.

-- Bill Mayer

from: My Life

2007-07-19T12:24:00.000-07:00

ONE BEGINS AS A STUDENT BUT BECOMES A FRIEND OF CLOUDS

Back and backward, why, wide and wider. Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality. The continent is greater than the content. A river nets the peninsula. The garden rooster goes through the goldenrod. I watched a robin worming its way on the ridge, time on the uneven light ledge. There as in that's their truck there. Where it rested in the weather there it rusted. As one would say, my friends, meaning no possession, and don't harm my trees. Marigolds, nasturtiums, snapdragons, sweet William, forget-me-nots, replaced by chard, tomatoes, lettuce, garlic, peas, beans, carrots, radishes--but marigolds. The hum hurts. Still, I felt intuitively that this which was incomprehensible was expectant, increasing, was good. The greatest thrill was to be the one to "tell." All rivers' left banks remind me of Paris, not to see or sit upon but to hear spoken of. Cheese makes one thirsty but onions make a worse thirst. The Spanish make a little question frame. In the case, propped on a stand so as to beckon, was the hairy finger of St. Cecilia, covered with rings. The old dress is worn out, torn up, dumped. Erasures could not serve better authenticity. The years pass, years in which, I take it, events were not lacking. There are more colors in the great rose window of Chartres than in the rose. Beside a body, not a piece, of water. Serpentine is fool's jade. It is on a dressed stone. The previousness of plants in prior color--no dream can come up to the original, which in the common daylight is voluminous. Yet he insisted that his life had been full of happy chance, that he was luck's child. As a matter-of fact, quite the obverse. After a 9-to-5 job he got to just go home. Do you have a compulsion to work and then did you have a good time. Now it is one o'clock on the dot, but that is only a coincidence and it has a bad name. Patriots drive larger cars. At the time the perpetual Latin of love kept things hidden. We might be late to the movies but always early for the kids. The women at the parents' meeting must wear rings, for continuity. More sheep than sleep. Paul was telling me a plot which involved time travel, I asked, "How do they go into the future?" and he answered, "What do you mean?--they wait and the future comes to them--of course!" so the problem was going into the past. I think my interests are much broader than those of people who have been saying the same thing for eight years, or so he said. Has the baby enough teeth for an apple. Juggle, jungle, chuckle. The hummingbird, for all we know, may be singing all day long. We had been in France where every word really was a bird, a thing singing. I laugh as if my pots were clean. The apple in the pie is the pie. An extremely pleasant and often comic satisfaction comes from conjunction, the fit, say, of comprehension in a reader's mind to content in a writer's work. But not bitter.

-- Lyn Hejinian

Muggy Day Muggy Mood Muggy Sex

2007-07-18T12:02:00.001-07:00

she stands in a cup of water and insists on
washing her atheistic trends with soapy
heretofore

unlike him
she is wearing a blue sarong
his green leaf
legging has yet
to be tied

henceforth three
powerhouse dancers
bruise jungle flowers
with muscularity worn over their
stealthy yet fruitful incompetence

slick. he's big
on robust fantasy
as a gaggle of ex-possible
lovers and hanger-ons
cavort greenly: thickly

exhausted after
too much too soon
he sits on the floor
holding his head
moaning about it

together they drink from
the cup of human kindness
but prefer feeding
walnuts to pigeons
alighting

she's very big
looming over
his prone
position

nestled now
together spent
prone backs to the ground
wet drying

are those
magnolia
in bloom
sure enough and more
a ginkgo sprouting

much to be happy about
especially
in warm weather
with a slight
cool
breeze

-- Jeff Wietor

Composition as Explanation" (1926)

2007-07-17T11:51:00.000-07:00

"Those who are creating the modern composition authentically are naturally only of importance when they are dead because by that time the modern composition having become past is classified and the description of it is classical. That is the reason why the creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic, there is hardly a moment in between and it is really too bad very much too bad naturally for the creator but also very much too bad for the enjoyer, they all really would enjoy the created so much better just after it has been made than when it is already a classic, but it is perfectly simple that there is no reason why the contemporaries should see, because it would not make any difference as they lead their lives in the new composition anyway, and as every one is naturally indolent why naturally they don't see. For this reason as in quoting Lord Grey it is quite certain that nations not actively threatened are at least several generations behind themselves militarily so aesthetically they are more than several generations behind themselves and it is very much too bad, it is so very much more exciting and satisfactory for everbody if one can have contemporaries, if all one's contemporaries could be one's contemporaries."
-- Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

The President Speaks

2007-07-12T09:06:00.000-07:00

Hemingway's Cats

2007-07-11T10:03:00.000-07:00

KEY WEST, Florida (AP) -- City officials have sided with Ernest Hemingway's former home and its celebrated six-toed felines in its cat fight with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Patches, a descendant of Ernest Hemingway's six-toed cats, is on the prowl in Key West, Florida.

The Key West City Commission exempted the home from a city law prohibiting more than four domestic animals per household.

About 50 cats live there.

The house has been locked in a dispute with the USDA, which claims the museum is an "exhibitor" of cats and needs a special license, a claim the home disputes.

The new ordinance reads in part, "The cats reside on the property just as the cats did in the time of Hemingway himself. They are not on exhibition in the manner of circus animals. ... The City Commission finds that family of polydactyl Hemingway cats are indeed animals of historic, social and tourism significance."

It also states that the cats are "an integral part of the history and ambiance of the Hemingway House."

A USDA spokesman did not return messages left late Sunday.

The cats are descendants of a six-toed cat given as a gift to the writer in 1935. All carry the gene for six toes, though not all display the trait.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Hemingway's Cats

Gertrude

Santiago

Cuba Darling

DiMaggio

Fishy

Hail Mary

Fat Spencer

Bobby J

Pretty Pablo

Jordan

El Sordo

Gitano

Agustin

Love Bait

Bell

Ezra

Scotty

Zelda

Perkins

Lady Brett

Sunny

Nicky A

Barney

Bobby C

Campbell Cutie

Pedro

Romero

Frances

Trip to Spain

Wounded Willy

Pampered Pamplona

Pamplo

Hey Jake

Princeton

Mippipopolous

Prentiss

Madame Duzinell

Woolsey

Krum

Belmonte

Girones

Edna

Dr. Valentini

Nurse Catherine

Mary

Kraut

Tough Boy

Shotgun

Ketchum

Mister 62

Picasso

2007-07-06T10:19:00.001-07:00

Coffeyville, Kansas

2007-07-03T10:20:00.000-07:00

The flood engulfing homes to the rooftops carried an extra curse Tuesday as a slick of 42,000 gallons of thick crude oil floated downstream with the mud and debris, coating everything it touched with a slimy, smelly layer of goo.

"My question is how are they going to get all that oil out of the environment," said Mary Burge, a heart surgery patient who had to breathe from a portable oxygen tank because the petroleum odor Monday was so strong it could be detected by the crews of helicopters passing overhead.

By Tuesday, the oil was nearing a large Oklahoma reservoir that supplies water to several cities.

The Verdigris River had crested and was beginning to recede Tuesday at Coffeyville, but it was kept high by water being released from the Elk City and Fall River Toronto Lake reservoirs upstream, said Jim Miller, Montgomery County emergency manager.

"It's going to come down the Verdigris until they shut that water supply off," he said. "So it's just a matter of time."

A malfunction allowed the oil to spill from the Coffeyville Resources refinery on Sunday, while the plant was shutting down in advance of the flood heading toward it on the Verdigris River.

Sharon Watson, spokeswoman for the Kansas adjutant general, said the EPA and state officials would work with officials at the refinery to measure the amount of contamination and help the refinery clean up. In the meantime, however, Watson said, "We're asking everyone to avoid the floodwaters."

That wasn't an option for Fire Department Capt. Mike Mansfield, who rescued eight dogs from water-logged homes Monday. He said all the dogs found outside were covered in oil.

The oil slick had been expected to float into Oklahoma's Oologah Lake, about 30 miles northeast of Tulsa, early Tuesday, said Dave Bary, a spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency in Dallas.

However, officials who flew over the river said that by late morning the slick was still about 5 or 6 miles from the lake entrance.

Tulsa is among the nine Oklahoma cities that get public water supplies from the Verdigris and Oologah.

The floating oil, which would enter the north end of the lake, wasn't expected to have an effect on water supply intakes located well below the surface at the south end, said Skylar McElhaney, a spokeswoman for the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality.

The oil joins other causes of misery for thousands of flood evacuees in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

"We do have health concerns," said Bret Glendening, city manager in Osawatomie, Kan. "You've got stagnant water. The water's been into the wood. You have mold issues. There's a whole host of concerns flooding causes."

"All our utilities are under water," Fredonia Mayor Max Payne said.

However, the water had receded significantly at Osawatomie by Tuesday morning, said Mayor Philip Dudley. Pumps provided by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were "making significant progress."

"I saw drops (in water level) on the sides of houses of about a foot and half," Dudley said. "It's looking a lot better than it did Saturday and Sunday."

On Monday night, President Bush declared a major disaster in Kansas and ordered federal aid for recovery efforts.

Flooding on the Marais des Cygnes river stretched from Kansas into western Missouri, where residents of two small farm communities were urged to evacuate because high water was cutting off their access by road. Most residents of Rockville and Papinville - total population about 140 - were believed to have left, said Bates County Emergency Management Director Tim Young.

Eleven deaths have been blamed on weeks of heavy rain and flooding in Texas, where two men are missing.

More thunderstorms hit parts of Texas on Monday, flooding some roads. The National Weather Service said about 10 inches of rain fell by noon at Corpus Christi.

Two youngsters were rescued from an Arlington, Texas, drainage channel, one after floating half a mile downstream through at least three viaducts, said Fire Department Battalion Chief David Stapp. A handful of people had to be rescued from flooded homes in Laredo.

In North Little Rock, Ark., about 30 homes were evacuated Monday when heavy rain and a faulty drainage system caused flooding up to 6 feet deep in some spots.

-- ROXANA HEGEMAN (Associated Press Writer)

Baghdad

2007-06-28T10:45:00.000-07:00

BAGHDAD - A car bomb killed 22 people Thursday in a bus station in western Baghdad, and police said 20 beheaded bodies had been discovered on the banks of the Tigris River southeast the capital. Government security officials raised doubts about the decapitation report.

The car bomb ripped through a crowded transport hub in southwest Baghdad's Baiyaa neighborhood at morning rush hour, killing at least 22 people and wounding more than 50, police said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized the release the information.

Many of the victims had been lining up for bus rides to work. Some 40 minibuses were incinerated, police said.

Baiyaa is a mixed area with a Shiite majority. It is one of a string of neighborhoods just south of the main road to Baghdad International Airport where sectarian tensions have been running high.

APTN video showed a square strewn with smoldering car parts and charred bodies with clothes in tatters. Bystanders, some weeping, gingerly loaded human remains into ambulances.

A pickup truck rumbled slowly away from the scene, with two pairs of legs - the dead bodies of victims - dangling out of the back.

To the south, two policemen from separate commands said the 20 decapitated remains were found near the Sunni Muslim village of Um al-Abeed, near the city of Salman Pak, which lies 14 miles southeast of Baghdad.

The bodies - all men aged 20 to 40 - had their hands and legs bound, and some of the heads were found next to the bodies, the two officers said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

One of the police officers who gave information is based at Interior Ministry headquarters in the capital, and the other is based in Kut, 100 miles southeast of Baghdad.

However, an official in Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's office said no such report had been received. He also spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not supposed to talk to media.

Al-Maliki's office normally would be informed of incidents of serious violence and some reports of attacks in the past have proven false.

Another police officer in eastern Baghdad said officials had heard the report and tried to send a force to the area to confirm it. But visit was called off because the area was too dangerous.

Sporadic clashes had been under way in the Salman Pak area for several days, between Interior Ministry commandos and suspected insurgents, the Kut officer said. It was unclear whether the discovery of the bodies was related to the recent fighting.

Salman Pak and its surrounding area has been the focus of new U.S. military operations to oust suspected al-Qaida fighters from the Baghdad's outskirts. American forces launched a drive into Salman Pak and neighboring Arab Jabour two weeks ago.

At the time, ground forces commander Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno said U.S. troops were heading into those areas in force for the first time in three years.

One U.S. soldier was killed and another was wounded by a roadside bomb Thursday during a combat patrol in eastern Baghdad, the military said.

At least 3,569 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes seven military civilians. At least 2,930 died as a result of hostile action, according to the military's numbers.

In other violence Thursday, three mortar rounds slammed into a popular shopping district in central Baghdad, killing three pedestrians, police said. The attack damaged shops in the Shorja market area and wounded 14 people, an officer said on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to talk to media.

Mortars also fell early Thursday in eastern Baghdad's al-Amin neighborhood, killing two civilians and wounding four others, police said.

It was unclear whether the mortars were aimed at the Shorja shopping area, or whether they fell short of an intended target. In recent months, tall security barriers have been built around popular marketplaces in Baghdad, preventing car bombers from entering. However, mortars can be lobbed over such blast walls.

Later Thursday, at least one mortar or rocket targeted the U.S.-guarded Green Zone, sending a huge blast echoing across central Baghdad. There was no immediate word on any casualties.

A car bomb exploded at a fuel station Thursday afternoon in western Baghdad's Mansour neighborhood, killing one person and wounding three others, police said. The victims had been lining up to buy fuel, they said.

In Nasiriyah, about 200 miles southeast of Baghdad, local police said two suspected militants were killed early Thursday when the bomb they were planting near a house of a U.S. translator detonated prematurely.

Also Thursday, the British military said three British soldiers were killed in a roadside bomb in southern Iraq.

The bomb exploded near the soldiers' vehicle late Wednesday southeast of Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, the military said in a statement. Another soldier was wounded in the blast and remains in stable condition at a military hospital, it said.

The death raised to at least 154 the number of British troops killed in Iraq since the war began in March 2003.

Britain has withdrawn hundreds of troops from Iraq, leaving a force of around 5,500 based mainly on the fringes of Basra, 340 miles southeast of Baghdad. The U.S. currently has about 155,000 troops in Iraq.

On Wednesday, outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair said his country would withdraw even more troops within weeks, but he refused to set a more specific timetable.

--SINAN SALAHEDDIN (Associated Press Writer)

Wade Robson

2007-06-22T12:14:00.001-07:00

Choreographer - Director - Music Producer

Summer Solstice

2007-06-21T13:07:00.001-07:00

The Bombed Bridges of Baghdad

2007-06-14T11:40:00.001-07:00

Unlike the film, The Bridges of Madison County, the bombed bridges of Baghdad are not a quaint romantic tale, but a warning sign of potential disaster for U.S. forces in Iraq. The ongoing attacks on bridges in and around Baghdad creates significant risks and logistical obstacles for U.S. forces in Iraq. In my opinion these attacks are part of deliberate strategy to create ambush chokepoints, degrade the capability of U.S. Quick Reaction Forces, and enhance the ability of insurgent forces to cut the U.S. lines of communication.

Juan Cole summarizes the latest activity:

Guerrillas blew up another bridge in Iraq on Monday, this time over the Euphrates in Diyala province. Its destruction will make drivers from northeastern Diyala who want to go to Baghdad take a route through Baquba, among the more violent cities in Iraq. Guerrillas are attempting to cause Iraqi society and government to collapse by hitting the infrastructure, and the bridge demolitions are part of that strategy. Late on Sunday, an overpass leading to a bridge south of Baghdad was destroyed, and 3 American soldiers were killed and 6 wounded.

These attacks continue a trend that started in April, with the attack on the Sarafiya Bridge in central Baghdad (see U.S. Policy in the Drink). The loss of these bridges represent more than increased inconvenience for commuters and travelers.

Traffic will be re-routed, which means there will be more traffic in a concentrated area. This is a boon for insurgents who can in turn concentrate their limited resources and simplify their planning for successful attacks. It also creates logistical nightmares for the United States forces. Most of the basic necessities required to sustain U.S. forces in Iraq are carried in truck convoys. The destruction of these bridges will further increase the transportation time for drivers and the maintenance requirements just to keep the vehicles on the road.

Beyond the inconvenience factor, we must recognize that the destruction of bridges can produce the defacto isolation of U.S. outposts and bases. If a U.S. unit is attacked and requires reinforcements, the loss of these bridges increase the difficulty of the U.S. Quick Reaction Force reaching the scene in a timely manner. Moreover, with fewer alternate routes available, insurgents can anticipate where to hit a responding American force. In fact, an attack on an outpost could be a feint intended to provoke a U.S. reaction and give the insurgents the opportunity to ambush the inbound soldiers.

It is incumbent on U.S. commanders to boost security around the bridges. But that is a manpower issue. If you do not have enough troops in country then you must divert troops from patrolling streets to sitting on a bridge and guarding its perimeter. The tactical job of protecting a bridge is fairly simple and straightforward--you need people with guns. But we do not have enough troops in Iraq to carry out the various missions required to make the surge work. The systematic destruction of bridges in and around Baghdad are the early warning signs that the mission for our soldiers in Iraq is going to get tougher and more deadly.

-- Larry C. Johnson

Сталкер

2007-06-11T13:00:00.001-07:00

A Painting of the Butterfly Dream by the Master Artist Li Tsai

2007-06-08T09:59:00.000-07:00

I used to dream of Chuang Tzu;
I read every word in his book.
Day and night I thought of meeting him,
"flitting and fluttering" before my eyes!
But Chuang Tzu cannot come back,
the butterfly cannot appear again:
so who put them into this painting?
I see them and feel we're old friends!
If Chuang Tzu could become a butterfly,
why shouldn't a butterfly be able to become me?
The dream of a thousand years, here on this paper --
how do I know it is not my own?

-- Chu Yun-Ming - Ming Dynasty (1460-1526)

When You Wish

2007-06-06T14:37:00.000-07:00

When you wish upon a star
Makes no difference who you are
Anything your heart desires
Will come to you

If your heart is in your dream
No request is too extreme
When you wish upon a star
As dreamers do

Fate is kind
She brings to those who love
The sweet fulfillment of
Their secret longing

Like a bolt out of the blue
Fate steps in and sees you through
When you wish upon a star
Your dreams come true

Hometown Baghdad

2007-06-06T14:06:00.001-07:00

The Truth Is

2007-06-02T11:23:00.000-07:00

"First I saw the mountains in the painting; then I saw the painting in the mountains."
-- Chinese Proverb.

"A man paints with his brains and not with his hands."
-- Michelangelo (1475-1564)

"Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things."
-- Edgar Degas (1834-1917)

"Painting is very easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do."
-- Edgar Degas

"Drawing and color are not separate at all; in so far as you paint, you draw. The more color harmonizes, the more exact the drawing becomes. When the color achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also."
-- Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), French Post-Impressionist painter. Quoted by Émile Bernard, L'Occident, July, 1904.

"PAINTING, n: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic."
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), American writer. The Cynic's Word Book, also known as The Devil's Dictionary, 1906.

"Whenever I see a Frans Hals I feel like painting, but when I see a Rembrandt I feel like giving up!"
-- Max Liebermann (1847-1935).

"There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning. An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature."
-- G.K.Chesterton (1874-1936), British writer. Autobiography.

"Painting is stronger than I am. It can make me do whatever it wants."
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), modern Spanish artist. A note written on the back of one of his sketchbooks.

"Painting is just another way of keeping a diary."
-- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), modern Spanish artist.

"Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen."
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Spanish artist. Quoted in: Jean Cocteau, Journals, part 1, "War and Peace" (1956)

"To me, a painter, if not the most useful, is the least harmful member of our society."
-- Man Ray (1890-1976), modern American photographer, artist. Self Portrait, chapter 6 (1963)

"The painting has a life of its own."
-- Jackson Pollock (1912-1956)

"Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings."
-- George Tooker (1920-)

Lake Tai

2007-06-01T16:53:00.000-07:00

BEIJING - Fast-spreading, foul-smelling blue-green algae smothered a lake in eastern China, contaminating the drinking water for millions of people and sparking panic-buying of bottled water, state media said Thursday.

The algae bloom in Lake Tai, a famous but long-polluted tourist attraction in Jiangsu province, formed because water levels are at their lowest in 50 years, leading to excess nutrients in the water, Xinhua said.

Officials in Wuxi, a city along the banks of the lake, called an emergency meeting Wednesday to discuss measures to deal with the situation and allay public fears, said a posting on the local government's Web site.

"The government calls for the residents facing the natural disaster to help each other to deal with the difficulties," the notice said, advising people to boil the water before drinking it.

"The situation has lasted three days already. It's so inconvenient," said Qin Yingxian, 53, a video store owner in Wuxi. "The smell of our tap water is just so awful. If you use the water to shower, the smell will stay on your body."

Residents swarmed stores in Wuxi, a city of 5 million, to buy bottled water Wednesday and prices skyrocketed from $1 to $6.50 for a two-gallon bottle, Xinhua said.

The city has placed a ban on price hikes and threatened hefty fines to violators, the report said. A Wal-Mart store imposed rations of 24 bottles per person, Xinhua said.

"Now we depend on bottled water for all our daily uses," Qin said. "People form long queues in the supermarkets for bottled water. Nobody expected something like this to happen. We aren't prepared."

State TV showed a yellowish trickle coming from taps and a restaurant worker said customers refused to eat there until they were assured that the water used was safe.

The Wuxi government said it was not authorized to give out information and referred all questions to provincial officials. A man who answered the telephone at the Jiangsu government office said authorities were "looking into the matter" and could not give any details.

Xinhua said the Wuxi government is planning to artificially induce rain in the next two days to dilute the lake water, and the provincial government has agreed to divert more water from the Yangtze River to the lake.

The local government is also using active carbon to filter the lake water and is importing bottled water from surrounding cities, China Central Television reported.

Lake Tai, famed for centuries for its beauty, is notoriously polluted from industries in the fast-developing region 80 miles west of Shanghai.

Blue-green algae often looks like green paint spilled on top of the water's surface. It is caused by factors such as run-off and excess nutrients in the water.

The algae, which scientists say are actually plantlike bacteria, are common in fresh water the world over. Some types can produce dangerous toxins.

Drinking toxin-tainted water can cause vomiting, diarrhea, headache, muscle pain, paralysis, respiratory failure and, on rare occasions, even death. Pets and livestock are especially vulnerable.

The incident is the latest to hit China's troubled waterways, which are dangerously polluted after decades of rapid economic growth and the widespread flouting of environmental regulations. Millions of people lacking access to clean drinking water.

In 2005, an accident caused a Chinese chemical plant to spew tons of toxic nitrobenzene and other chemicals into the north China's Songhua River, forcing authorities to cut water to millions of residents.

Blue Moon

2007-05-31T10:34:00.000-07:00

Blue Moon
You saw me standing alone
Without a dream in my heart
Without a love of my own
Blue Moon
You know just what I was there for
You heard me saying a prayer for
Someone I really could care for

And then there suddenly appeared before me
The only one my arms will hold
I heard somebody whisper please adore me
And when I looked to the Moon it turned to gold

Blue Moon
Now I'm no longer alone
Without a dream in my heart
Without a love of my own

And then there suddenly appeared before me
The only one my arms will ever hold
I heard somebody whisper please adore me
And when I looked the Moon had turned to gold

Blue moon
Now I'm no longer alone
Without a dream in my heart
Without a love of my own

Blue moon
Now I'm no longer alone
Without a dream in my heart
Without a love of my own

-- Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart

Women in Art

2007-05-30T17:01:00.000-07:00

Love

2007-05-25T11:51:00.000-07:00

To be
The first to come.

-- Rene Char

The monstrous vanity of wishes

2007-05-24T11:03:00.000-07:00

The monstrous vanity of wishes is revealed for instance in my wish to fill a nice notebook with writing as soon as possible. I get nothing from this; it's not that I wish it because, say, it will be evidence of my productivity; it is simply a longing to rid myself of something familiar as soon as I can; although of course, as soon as I am rid of it, I must start a fresh one & the whole business will have to be repeated.

-- L. Wittgenstein

Heraclitus says

2007-05-23T08:49:00.000-07:00

Heraclitus says that the waking share one common world, but when asleep each man turns away to a private one.

-- Plutarch

Socrates who always

2007-05-22T11:20:00.000-07:00

Socrates who always reduces the Sophist to silence -- does he reduce him to silence rightfully? -- It's true, the Sophist does not know what he thinks he knows; but that is no triumph for Socrates. It can neither be a case of "You see! You don't know it!" -- nor, triumphantly, "So none of us knows anything!"

Because I don't want to think just to convict myself, or even someone else, of unclarity I am not trying to understand something, simply in order to see that I still do not understand it.

-- L. Wittgenstein

My Thinking

2007-05-21T15:44:00.000-07:00

My thinking, like everyone's, has sticking to it the shrivelled husks of my earlier (withered) thoughts.

-- L. Wittgenstein

Baghdad -- Fallujah

2007-05-14T12:26:00.000-07:00

America

2007-05-11T16:22:00.000-07:00

"Let us be lovers we'll marry our fortunes together"
"I've got some real estate here in my bag"
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies
And we walked off to look for America

"Kathy," I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
"Michigan seems like a dream to me now"
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I've gone to look for America

Laughing on the bus
Playing games with the faces
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said "Be careful his bowtie is really a camera"

"Toss me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat"
"We smoked the last one an hour ago"
So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open field

"Kathy, I'm lost," I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I'm empty and aching and I don't know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They've all gone to look for America
All gone to look for America
All gone to look for America

-- Simon & Garfunkel

Give the Iraqis a Break

2007-05-10T12:34:00.000-07:00

Washington empties out every August as members of Congress and administration officials leave for their annual summer vacations. So why isn't this American political tradition good enough for Iraqi officials in Baghdad?

President Bush and Vice President Cheney have both now urged Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to discourage Iraqi lawmakers from taking a two-month summer break. The issue has become symbolic of the sad truth of the surge in particular and the war in general: We cannot make Iraq the country we would like it to be, and we cannot force Iraqis to act when we want them to.

Cheney met with Maliki in Baghdad yesterday to communicate the administration's sense of the gravity of the situation: The Iraqi government needs to make progress on security and move forward on reconciliation and governance far more quickly.

The vice president also pressed the prime minister to discourage the Iraqi parliament from taking its two-month summer recess. Bush appealed to Maliki on Monday not to let the lawmakers go on vacation.

"We believe it's very important to move on the issues before us in a timely fashion and that any undue delay would be difficult to explain," Cheney told reporters in Baghdad yesterday. He is not alone in his view.

"For the Iraqi parliament to take a two-month vacation in the middle of summer is impossible to understand," U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker said. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates also said that he pressed for the recess to be canceled. Sen. John Warner (R-VA) said a two-month recess is "not acceptable."

It's not just the prospect of U.S. troops dying while Iraqi parliamentarians vacation that bothers American officials. They also argue that the Iraqis should continue to work to resolve issues associated with oil revenue sharing and the status of former Baathists from Saddam's government, two outstanding questions that might held to strengthen Shia and Sunni unity.

Maliki signaled to Cheney that he was sympathetic to the American complaint. But some Iraqi legislators reacted angrily, including Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, who said members of Parliament were "busy with our own calamities."

One of those calamities is attendance: the security situation is so bad that many parliamentarians can't even make it to the sessions. Sometimes lawmakers show up, only to be turned away by bomb scares, lack of electricity or other impediments. Boycotts are also common.

Another problem is that when the parliament meets, it is often chaotic. With tens of "parties" representing not just Shia, Sunni and Kurd but also factions within each community, there is an absence of any party discipline or legislative coherence. Thus there is no reason to believe that even if the Iraqi parliament toils all summer, it will make any difference.

In fact, if it stays in session, capitulating to American pressure, it may well demonstrate to Iraqis that their elected representatives cannot even make their own schedule. And from an American political standpoint, canceling the Iraqi summer recess will also be unhelpful, allowing more pretending here in Washington that "progress" is being made and forestalling tough decisions.

So I say, let them go.

-- William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security
Washington Post

For My Brothers and Sisters

2007-04-27T12:56:00.000-07:00

How long can one man's lifetime last?
In the end we return to formlessness.
I think of you waiting to die.
A thousand things cause me distress -

Your kind old mother's still alive.
Your only daughter's only ten.
In the vast chilly wilderness
I hear the sounds of weeping men.

Clouds float into a great expanse.
Birds fly but do not sing in flight.
How lonely are the travellers.
Even the sun shines cold and white.

Alas, when you still lived, and asked
To study non-rebirth with me,
My exhortations were delayed-
And so the end came, fruitlessly.

All your old friends have brought you gifts
But for your life these too are late.
I've failed you in more ways than one.
Weeping, I walk back to my gate.

-- Wang Wei

tr.by Vikram Seth

Nora

2007-04-25T16:23:00.000-07:00

Why George Bush is Insane

2007-04-25T11:48:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year I had a major operation for cancer. The operation and its after-effects were something of a nightmare. I felt I was a man unable to swim bobbing about under water in a deep dark endless ocean. But I did not drown and I am very glad to be alive.

However, I found that to emerge from a personal nightmare was to enter an infinitely more pervasive public nightmare - the nightmare of American hysteria, ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and belligerence; the most powerful nation the world has ever known effectively waging war against the rest of the world. "If you are not with us you are against us" President Bush has said. He has also said "We will not allow the world's worst weapons to remain in the hands of the world's worst leaders". Quite right. Look in the mirror chum. That's you.

The US is at this moment developing advanced systems of "weapons of mass destruction" and it prepared to use them where it sees fit. It has more of them than the rest of the world put together. It has walked away from international agreements on biological and chemical weapons, refusing to allow inspection of its own factories. The hypocrisy behind its public declarations and its own actions is almost a joke.

The United States believes that the three thousand deaths in New York are the only deaths that count, the only deaths that matter. They are American deaths. Other deaths are unreal, abstract, of no consequence.

The three thousand deaths in Afghanistan are never referred to.

The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children dead through US and British sanctions which have deprived them of essential medicines are never referred to.

The effect of depleted uranium, used by America in the Gulf War, is never referred to. Radiation levels in Iraq are appallingly high. Babies are born with no brain, no eyes, no genitals. Where they do have ears, mouths or rectums, all that issues from these orifices is blood.

The two hundred thousand deaths in East Timor in 1975 brought about by the Indonesian government but inspired and supported by the United States are never referred to.

The half a million deaths in Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Argentina and Haiti, in actions supported and subsidised by the United States are never referred to.

The millions of deaths in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are no longer referred to.

The desperate plight of the Palestinian people, the central factor in world unrest, is hardly referred to.

But what a misjudgement of the present and what a misreading of history this is.

People do not forget. They do not forget the death of their fellows, they do not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget injustice, they do not forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism of mighty powers. They not only don't forget. They strike back.

The atrocity in New York was predictable and inevitable. It was an act of retaliation against constant and systematic manifestations of state terrorism on the part of the United States over many years, in all parts of the world.

In Britain the public is now being warned to be "vigilant" in preparation for potential terrorist acts. The language is in itself preposterous.

How will - or can - public vigilance be embodied? Wearing a scarf over your mouth to keep out poison gas? However, terrorist attacks are quite likely, the inevitable result of our Prime Minister's contemptible and shameful subservience to the United States. Apparently, a terrorist poison gas attack on the London Underground system was recently prevented. But such an act may indeed take place. Thousands of school children travel on the London Underground every day. If there is a poison gas attack from which they die, the responsibility will rest entirely on the shoulders of our Prime Minister. Needless to say, the Prime Minister does not travel on the underground himself.

The planned war against Iraq is in fact a plan for premeditated murder of thousands of civilians in order, apparently, to rescue them from their dictator.

The United States and Britain are pursuing a course which can lead only to an escalation of violence throughout the world and finally to catastrophe.

It is obvious, however, that the United States is bursting at the seams to attack Iraq. I believe that it will do this - not just to take control of Iraqi oil - but because the US administration is now a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary. Many Americans, we know, are horrified by the posture of their government but seem to be helpless.

Unless Europe finds the solidarity, intelligence, courage and will to challenge and resist US power Europe itself will deserve Alexander Herzen's definition (as quoted in the Guardian newspaper in London recently) "We are not the doctors. We are the disease".

-- Harold Pinter

U.S. brings a wall to Baghdad

2007-04-24T09:19:00.000-07:00

MEANWHILE, back in Baghdad, we're building a wall. Actually, quite a few walls.

While we were absorbed with the terrible tragedy at Virginia Tech -- and before that the Don Imus affair and the Alberto Gonzales tragicomedy -- the war in Iraq was pushed below the newspaper's page-one fold. While we weren't looking, the U.S. military started building high walls in parts of the Iraqi capital to separate Sunnis from Shiites.

Basically, we're turning Baghdad into Belfast.

This is supposed to be a temporary expedient, a way to tamp down Iraq's sectarian civil war -- in the capital, at least, which is the ostensible goal of President Bush's fraudulent "surge" policy -- by making it harder for the antagonists to get at each other's throats. The so-called "peace lines" in Belfast, separating Protestants from Catholics, were supposed to be temporary, too. That network of walls was begun in the 1970s.

The construction of barriers and checkpoints that turn Baghdad neighborhoods into what U.S. officers sardonically call "gated communities" is another sign -- as if more evidence were needed -- that Bush's "surge" is nothing more than a maneuver intended to buy time. His open-ended commitment for U.S. forces to patrol those barriers and guard those checkpoints will become the next president's problem.

The walls that have been built so far didn't prevent the car bombings in Baghdad last week, including at the Sadriya market, that killed nearly 200 people. Even the heavy fortifications surrounding the Green Zone, where the American presence and the Iraqi "unity" government are headquartered, couldn't keep a suicide bomber from detonating his explosives in the cafeteria of the Iraqi parliament.

But let's assume that if U.S. forces build enough walls and make it hard enough for Iraqis to move around their own capital, the violence in Baghdad may decline somewhat. In that event, the Shiite death squads and Sunni suicide bombers will simply do their killing elsewhere in Iraq. There's considerable evidence that this already is happening.

Both the president and his many critics say that the real problem in Iraq is political -- that there will be no genuine prospects for peace until Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his Shiite-dominated government reach a negotiated accommodation with the Sunni insurgency. The barriers going up right now -- the Washington Post reported that at least 10 Baghdad neighborhoods will be isolated behind walls -- likely will make Sunni-Shiite reconciliation a more distant goal. If anything, walls will accelerate the sectarian cleansing that has been purifying formerly mixed neighborhoods.

Walls divide; they do not unite. Walls give concrete expression to hatreds and prejudices, establishing them as artifacts not of the mind but of the landscape. When I was the Post's London correspondent in the early 1990s, I covered the Northern Ireland conflict. The first thing I went to see in Belfast was the notorious "peace line" between the Falls Road, a Catholic stronghold, and Shankill Road, a Protestant redoubt. Everything looked the same on both sides -- the houses, the shops, the people -- yet it was as if they were two different countries. Animosities had been passed down through generations. Even now, 15 years later, a civil exchange between two of the leading antagonists -- Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams -- is big news.

How many years will it take to get to that point in Baghdad?

Bush has enmeshed the United States in a civil conflict that will take years, probably decades, to resolve. The building of walls mocks the administration's happy-talk rhetoric about how much political progress the Iraqis are making. If the Iraqi government really is the exercise in inclusive democracy that Bush claims, walls would be coming down. Putting up new walls only makes sense if the White House foresees a substantial U.S. military presence in Iraq for many years to come.

Clearly, the Iraqi government is not ready to do the job of policing the enclaves that are being created. The government doesn't even want to do the job. Maliki complained Sunday about a new wall in Adhamiyah, a Sunni neighborhood, saying it "reminds us of other walls that we reject." Maybe he was thinking of Belfast, or maybe of Berlin, or maybe of the wall that the Israelis have built between themselves and the Palestinians.

Or maybe he is beginning to realize how easy it is to build walls and how hard to tear them down.

-- Eugene Robinson, Washington Post Writers Group

Bush asserts progress in Iraq war

2007-04-22T16:26:00.000-07:00

News Bulletin

2007-04-21T11:17:00.000-07:00

Evening clouds, the cathedral clock lit up,
dishevelled trees, cold, trash. You could still hear
shooting up in the hills. A little later
George arrived on a bicycle. He set down a guitar
that had broken strings. "We've carried the dead bodies," he said,
"down to the warehouse. No anthems or flags.
Hide this list at least, so that tomorrow we remember
their names, their ages -- I've even noted the size of their feet.
The three marble cutters were killed too. The only thing left
is that marble angel, headless -- you can put any head you want on it."
That's what he said, then went off. He didn't take the guitar.

-- Yannos Ritsos
written during the 1967--1974 Greek Dictatorship

City Life

2007-04-20T12:15:00.000-07:00

Aftermath of a Baghdad bombing: a reporter's view

2007-04-19T16:38:00.000-07:00

One day after a bombing killed 135 people in Baghdad's predominantly Shiite Sadriya market, correspondent Sam Dagher visited the market.

The most striking image, for me, was the old lady. She was wrapped in a black abaya, wandering through the wreckage of charred buses and mangled vehicles. She kept repeating: "This is doomsday. God is greatest."

I also saw utter anger and disbelief among the residents and shopkeepers. Government officials I had reached by telephone and heard on state television earlier in the day insisted that the capital's security plan was still on track, despite suffering the biggest breach since it was launched in mid-February.

The US and Iraqi forces may have reduced sectarian street fighting. But Al Qaeda is making its presence felt with major bombings. And the Iraqi government's comments only served to highlight the widening disconnect between the government based inside the well-guarded Green Zone and its people in what is commonly referred to by Westerners as the Red Zone.

At the open-air food market, I saw Iraqis desperately clutching to shreds of normalcy.

I entered Sadriya with my Iraqi colleagues through a pedestrian-only section that had been barricaded on both ends after a bombing on Feb. 3 that killed 137 people. The hustle and bustle resembled similar working-class markets I've seen in Amman, Cairo, or Damascus.

Vendors were hawking fresh lettuce, radishes, and tomatoes heaped up on wooden carts. Inside the arcades on both sides of the street, raw meat hung in the windows of butcher shops, pastry shops displayed enormous trays of syrup-drenched sweets, and the smell of grilled kabobs wafted from the many restaurants.

I saw defiant banners signed by the local branch office of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Construction laborers were back working Thursday, rebuilding shops destroyed in February's bombing.

In one shop, Abu Ali was busy preparing round meat balls known as kubbah.

"What happened yesterday was a catastrophe. The security plan is working in some areas of the city, but not here," he told me. "But I must work to feed my children; we have no other source of income."

His business partner Abu Jassim nodded in agreement. He had been through this once already. He pulled his shirt back, displaying wounds on his shoulder sustained in the February bombing.

At the end of the street and beyond white-painted barricades, I stepped into a panorama of destruction.

The entire square was covered in soot, and hundreds of people were gathered around a crater. Behind them, there was an outer ring of burned car and bus skeletons. Revered Shiite leaders, Imam Hussein and the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, stared down from giant posters on the walls.

Most of those killed Wednesday were laborers working in the market, pushing carts and running errands. They had boarded buses that were going to transport them home after a hard day's work. Most were going back to Jameela, a neighborhood within the Sadr City slum. They earned on average 10,000 dinars ($8) a day.

I walked past the crater crowd and into one of the destroyed shops on one side of the square, known to most as Al Nahda.

Jaber Saleh, an elderly bespectacled man, sobbed as he sat amid the ruins of his hardware store. His door was reduced to a surreal sculpture of twisted metal. Emptied boxes of nails and dented gallon paint cans were scattered on the floor.

"We were strangled by Saddam and now this," said Mr. Saleh as tears rolled down his wrinkled cheeks. He put his hands around his neck to make the point.

His helper, Aqeel Shouli, told him to calm down.

"All the leaders are stealing, no one is clean, and we are dying," resumed Saleh.

He claimed that he'd seen policemen at checkpoints near the market were sometimes bribed to let through pickup trucks filled with heaps of vegetables or boxes without checking them.

He then pointed to the other side of the square.

"That road leads to Al-Fadhil. The Americans were there two hours before the blast and arrested people, but still they come from there to kill us," said Salih referring to a predominantly Sunni Arab area adjacent to Sadriya that is the scene of frequent clashes.

Mr. Shouli interrupts him to say, "the security plan is a failure, full stop."

Back in the square Amna Sadeq a Shiite Kurd curses Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his government and parliament speaker Mahmoud al-Mashahdani, using words that are not fit to print.

"They have done nothing for us. They should make way for more competent people," she shouts.

At a bakery shop on another end of the square, Zaki Hashim, sits behind the counter. His face is bandaged.

"I was just handing bread out the window to a customer when a flame hit my face," he said.

He and all the other bakery shop workers are from the southern city of Nasariyah. They work in Baghdad and go back to their families once a month. They tell me they will remain in Baghdad despite the bombing and despite losing their friend three days ago to sectarian murder.

The dead man's photo is pinned to a giant poster of Imam Hussein behind the counter. Hussein ibn Ali is revered as the third Imam by Shiites, the grandson of Muhammad.

"The security forces are infiltrated and they even bombed the parliament, what do you expect," Mr. Hashim told me.

We had to wait in bakery shop until a funeral procession made its way through square. And faithful to Iraqi custom, some of those in the entourage were firing shots in the air.

Later, a trusted Interior Ministry adviser that often talks to me, without any of the official spin, agreed with the baker's assessment.

He said Iraqi forces are nearly helpless in the face of car bombs and suicide bombs. Their job was doubly made difficult by the fact that their ranks were infiltrated by insurgents, militias, and militants.

He nonetheless said the government needed to give the appearance it was making headway and winning through the media. "We have had some success in controlling roadside bombs and sectarian murders, so that's good and we need to say that loudly. It's a media war. The other side wants to grab the headlines with the mayhem its unleashing," he said.

Indeed, a report of the Sadriya bombing on state-owned Iraqiya television Wednesday night was followed by a statement from the spokesman of the Defense Ministry Mohammed al-Askari saying; "there may be bombs here and there, but the security plan is working."

After we left the Sadriya market, we saw municipal workers painting idyllic scenes of rolling pastures and galloping horses on a row of blast walls on Saadoun Street in the heart of Baghdad.

-- Sam Dagher - Christian Science Monitor

Insane: McCain's Public Behavior

2007-04-19T11:34:00.001-07:00

As president, making such a joke of war could make an already tense situation with Iran even worse. There's no doubt that the Iranians would use the tape of McCain to rile up anti-American sentiments, and terror networks around the world would gleefully use it as a recruiting tool.

The fact that McCain didn't hesitate to act so stupidly shows just how dangerous he could be as president to our own security.

Secondly, it shows complete disregard for our troops in harm's way, thousands of whom would be killed and wounded if we did take military action against Iran. As you can view on the video blogs VoteVets.org did with Wes Clark at www.stopiranwar.com, there's ample reason to believe that even air strikes against Iran would result in massive attacks on troops in Iraq. That McCain finds that scenario is worth yukking it up over demonstrates how far removed from reality - indeed dangerous - he has become.

I actually, surprisingly, agree with Secretary Gates on this one. Earlier in the week, he said in a press conference, "I stressed my view that it was important to deal with the Iranian nuclear problem through a diplomacy which appears to be working... With respect to the Iranian nuclear program and the diplomatic effort, I think first of all it's important that there have been two United Nations Resolutions, and that the international community is united in telling Iran what it needs to do with respect to its nuclear program. These things don't work overnight, but it seems to me clearly the preferable course to keep our focus on diplomatic initiatives and particularly because of the united front of the international community at this point."

The big questions are whether the president is listening to Gates, and whether John McCain even begins to grasp at how utterly stupid and dangerous his antics would be as president

-- Jon Soltz

g n o s t i c i s m v

2007-04-19T11:05:00.000-07:00

". . . what the little word after means . . ."
—I. Kant, Inaugural Dissertation, 2.399.4-6

Stuffed September night, the hot leaves bump
on swollen breezes and a fat
black moonlessness.
I got up (3 am)

to clean the house, there was
so much pressure on it forcing the butt end down.
I scrubbed counters and mopped floors.
I didn’t turn the lights on.
Cleaning

in the dark makes a surprise for later. By then
I will have
slept, woke, come striding back
from infuriated interiors—ah
now

recall
I dreamed Of Wordsworth—his little vials,
Wordsworth collected little vials,
had hundreds of them, his sister stored them on shelves
in the pantry—
and yes

to inspire me is why
I put in a bit of Wordsworth but then the page is over,
he weighs it to the
ground,
the autumn of him soaking my mop purple in the dyes of
what's falling
breathless under its own
senses.

-- Ann Carson

Car bombs kill 170 in Baghdad after PM's pledge

2007-04-18T09:41:00.000-07:00

Video

By Dean Yates and Paul Tait

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Car bombs killed more than 170 people in Baghdad on Wednesday in the deadliest attacks in the city since U.S. and Iraqi forces launched a security crackdown aimed at halting the country's slide into civil war.

One car bomb alone in the mainly Shi'ite Sadriya neighbourhood killed 122 people and wounded 155, police said.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, speaking in Tel Aviv on a visit to the region, called the bombings "horrifying" and indicated Sunni Islamist al Qaeda was to blame.

The apparently coordinated attacks -- there were four within a short space of time -- occurred hours after Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said Iraq would take security control of the whole country from foreign forces by the end of the year.

Maliki is under growing pressure to say when foreign soldiers will leave, but the attacks in mainly Shi'ite areas of Baghdad underscored the huge challenges for Iraq's security forces in taking charge of overall security from more than 150,000 U.S. and British troops.

The bombings wounded more than 200 people.

"I saw dozens of dead bodies. Some people were burned alive inside minibuses. Nobody could reach them after the explosion," said a witness at Sadriya, describing scenes of mayhem at an intersection where the bomb exploded near a market.

"Women were screaming and shouting for their loved ones who died," said the witness who did not wish to be identified, adding many of the dead were women and children.

One man waving his arms in the air screamed hysterically: "Where's Maliki? Let him come and see what is happening here."

U.S. and Iraqi forces began deploying thousands more troops onto Baghdad's streets in February.

Sectarian death squad killings have declined, but car bombs are much harder to stop, U.S. military officials say.

The bombings could inflame sectarian passions in Baghdad, especially among the Mehdi Army militia of anti-American Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, which has kept a low profile so far during the two-month-old Baghdad security offensive.

Al Qaeda is blamed for most of the major bombings targeting Shi'ites in Iraq and there are fears the Mehdi Army may take to the streets to retaliate.

The attacks came several hours after Maliki again appealed for reconciliation between majority Shi'ites and once-dominant minority Sunni Arabs who form the backbone of the insurgency.

"There is no magic solution to put out the fire of sectarian sedition that some are trying to set up, especially al Qaeda," Maliki said in a speech made on his behalf before the attacks.

EPICENTRE OF VIOLENCE

Among the other attacks on Wednesday, police said a suicide car bomber killed 35 people at a checkpoint in Sadr City, stronghold of the firebrand cleric Sadr.

At Sadriya, a thick, dark plume of smoke rose at the scene of the bombing. Fire fighters rushed to put out flames on burning bodies, while rescue workers tried to retrieve bodies from the blackened hulks of cars.

The Sadriya bombing was the highest death toll in a single attack in Baghdad since a truck bomb killed 135 people in the same area on Feb. 3.

Wednesday's attacks follow a suicide bombing in parliament last week that killed one lawmaker and also a truck bomb blast that destroyed one of Baghdad's most famous bridges.

In a speech at a ceremony marking the handover of southern Maysan province from British to Iraqi control, Maliki said three provinces in the autonomous Kurdistan region would be next, followed by Kerbala and Wasit provinces.

"Then it would be province by province until a full transfer had been completed by the end of the year," Maliki said in the speech, read by National Security Adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie.

Maysan is the fourth of Iraq's 18 provinces to be handed to Iraqi security forces, joining Muthanna, Najaf and Dhi Qar, all predominantly Shi'ite and relatively calm regions in the south.

Maliki says Iraq's security forces will only take back control from foreign forces when ready.

(With additional reporting by Ross Colvin in Amara, Aseel Kami, Ibon Villelabeitia, Yara Bayoumy and Waleed Ibrahim in Baghdad, and Kristin Roberts in Washington)

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

2007-04-17T12:25:00.000-07:00

BAGHDAD — Cars, minibuses and roadside bombs exploded in Shiite Muslim enclaves across the city Sunday, killing at least 45 people in sectarian violence that defied the Baghdad security crackdown, while a radical anti-U.S. cleric raised a new threat to Iraq’s government.

Two officials close to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr said his followers would quit their six Cabinet posts Monday — a move that could leave Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s already weak administration without enough support to stay in power.

And in a rare gesture of dissent from America’s partners in Baghdad, dozens of Iraqi policemen demonstrated in front of their station, accusing U.S. troops of treating them like “animals” and “slaves.”

The U.S. military command announced the combat deaths of three more Americans. Two British service members died when their helicopters crashed in midair north of Baghdad, and hours later a U.S. helicopter was hit by ground fire near Mosul but landed safely with no injuries.

Six powerful bombs, gunfire and artillery blasts enveloped Baghdad in a near-constant din that seemed a setback for the nine-week-old U.S.-Iraqi military campaign to pacify the capital.

U.S. commanders previously cited a slight decrease in violence since the crackdown began Feb. 14, but urged patience for what they warned would be a long, tough fight.

“Although we’re making steady progress ... we have a long way to go,” Rear Adm. Mark Fox, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, told reporters Sunday. “We will continue to face attacks from those who attempt to tear down what the Iraqi people have worked so hard to build.”

The crackdown is believed to have driven many insurgents from Baghdad, and violence has soared in areas outside the capital, such as the bombing in the Shiite holy city of Karbala that killed 47 people and wounded 224 Saturday.

But violence has spiked upward again in Baghdad, with Sunday’s six bombings coming just three days after a suicide bomber blew himself up inside parliament and killed a lawmaker.

“This week has been difficult for the Iraqi people,” Fox acknowledged.

The carnage caused some to voice doubts about the Baghdad crackdown.

-------------------------

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-- WB Yeats

Catch a Fire

2007-04-16T08:35:00.000-07:00

I arrive home to cyclones,
to trees broken like the heat
hasn't yet. Autumn
nowhere in sight except

a few leaves starting
their fall fire. Driving without
eyes for wreckage,
I don't notice right away—

Otis Redding sings A Change
Is Gonna Come and I sob
one last time you’re gone.
High up, the BILLIONS

SOLD sign mangled,
once golden arches turned
almost an ampersand—
a few miles along it dawns

what storms I've missed.
Signs ripped down.
Roofs made only of tarp.
Pink tongues of insulation

pulled from the mouths
of houses now silent.
Looking for a sign
from God?

one billboard asks—
This is it.
What's left
of the Hillview Motel

no longer needs say
VACANCY.
Only the hill
still here. The corn

brown and shorn.
In a few weeks who can tell
what's being built
and what torn down—

flattened, the fields
all look the same. For now
this charcoal smell
fluttering past the hill—

It's been too hard living

And I’m afraid to die—
the thick smoke billowing
from burning
what's still green

but can't be saved.

-- Kevin Young

Kurt Vonnegut

2007-04-13T09:19:00.000-07:00

Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007)

On pages 9 and 10 of his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Poems in Dialogue

2007-04-12T09:39:00.000-07:00

"They Flee from Me That Sometime Did Me Seek"

They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle tame and meek
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with continual change.

Thank'd be fortune, it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she caught me in her arms long and small,
Therewith all sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, Dear heart, how like you this?

It was no dream: I lay broad waking.
But all is turned from my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness,
And she also to use new-fangleness.
But since that I so kindely am served,
I would fain know what she hath deserved.

-- Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-42)

-------------------------------

Before Time

On one or two occasions
It was different: she lingered

At the window, turned—I was
Desirable because for a moment

I was anybody. The distance
Seemed to disappear without us
Moving but more than what followed

I remember the open window.
Taxis idling by the park.
Streetlights shining

Through the hemlock and the usual sounds
Of traffic, shouts—all of it
Starkly present and at the same time

Incomplete; as if a space I'd never
Wanted had been filled

At the moment
I wanted it: branches

Swirling at the window as
Her clothing dropped
To the floor. If I have chance

To thank for this moment
I'd like to know what she deserved.

-- James Longenbach (1959–)

3 Generals Spurn the Position of War 'Czar'

2007-04-11T10:09:00.000-07:00

Bush Seeks Overseer For Iraq, Afghanistan

The White House wants to appoint a high-powered czar to oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with authority to issue directions to the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies, but it has had trouble finding anyone able and willing to take the job, according to people close to the situation.

At least three retired four-star generals approached by the White House in recent weeks have declined to be considered for the position, the sources said, underscoring the administration's difficulty in enlisting its top recruits to join the team after five years of warfare that have taxed the United States and its military.

"The very fundamental issue is, they don't know where the hell they're going," said retired Marine Gen. John J. "Jack" Sheehan, a former top NATO commander who was among those rejecting the job. Sheehan said he believes that Vice President Cheney and his hawkish allies remain more powerful within the administration than pragmatists looking for a way out of Iraq. "So rather than go over there, develop an ulcer and eventually leave, I said, 'No, thanks,' " he said.

The White House has not publicly disclosed its interest in creating the position, hoping to find someone President Bush can anoint and announce for the post all at once. Officials said they are still considering options for how to reorganize the White House's management of the two conflicts. If they cannot find a person suited for the sort of specially empowered office they envision, they said, they may have to retain the current structure.

The administration's interest in the idea stems from long-standing concern over the coordination of civilian and military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan by different parts of the U.S. government. The Defense and State departments have long struggled over their roles and responsibilities in Iraq, with the White House often forced to referee.

The highest-ranking White House official responsible exclusively for the wars is deputy national security adviser Meghan O'Sullivan, who reports to national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley and does not have power to issue orders to agencies. O'Sullivan plans to step down soon, giving the White House the opportunity to rethink how it organizes the war effort.

Unlike O'Sullivan, the new czar would report directly to Bush and to Hadley and would have the title of assistant to the president, just as Hadley and the other highest-ranking White House officials have, the sources said. The new czar would also have "tasking authority," or the power to issue directions, over other agencies, they said.

To fill such a role, the White House is searching for someone with enough stature and confidence to deal directly with heavyweight administration figures such as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. Besides Sheehan, sources said, the White House or intermediaries have sounded out retired Army Gen. Jack Keane and retired Air Force Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, who also said they are not interested. Ralston declined to comment; Keane confirmed he declined the offer, adding: "It was discussed weeks ago."

Kurt Campbell, a Clinton administration Pentagon official who heads the Center for a New American Security, said the difficulty in finding someone to take the job shows that Bush has exhausted his ability to sign up top people to help salvage a disastrous war. "Who's sitting on the bench?" he asked. "Who is there to turn to? And who would want to take the job?"

All three generals who declined the job have been to varying degrees administration insiders. Keane, a former Army vice chief of staff, was one of the primary proponents of sending more troops to Iraq and presented Bush with his plan for a major force increase during an Oval Office meeting in December. The president adopted the concept in January, although he did not dispatch as many troops as Keane proposed.

Ralston, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was named by Rice last August to serve as her special envoy for countering the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, a group designated a terrorist organization by the United States.

Sheehan, a 35-year Marine, served on the Defense Policy Board advising the Pentagon early in the Bush administration and at one point was reportedly considered by then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He now works as an executive at Bechtel Corp. developing oil projects in the Middle East.

In an interview yesterday, Sheehan said that Hadley contacted him and they discussed the job for two weeks but that he was dubious from the start. "I've never agreed on the basis of the war, and I'm still skeptical," Sheehan said. "Not only did we not plan properly for the war, we grossly underestimated the effect of sanctions and Saddam Hussein on the Iraqi people."

In the course of the discussions, Sheehan said, he called around to get a better feel for the administration landscape.

"There's the residue of the Cheney view -- 'We're going to win, al-Qaeda's there' -- that justifies anything we did," he said. "And then there's the pragmatist view -- how the hell do we get out of Dodge and survive? Unfortunately, the people with the former view are still in the positions of most influence." Sheehan said he wrote a note March 27 declining interest.

Gordon Johndroe, a National Security Council spokesman, would not discuss contacts with candidates but confirmed that officials are considering a newly empowered czar.

"The White House is looking at a number of options on how to structure the Iraq and Afghanistan office in light of Meghan O'Sullivan's departure and the completion of both the Iraq and Afghanistan strategic reviews," he said. He added that "No decisions have been made" and "a list of candidates has not been narrowed down."

The idea of someone overseeing the wars has been promoted to the White House by several outside advisers. "It would be definitely a good idea," said Frederick W. Kagan, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "Hope they do it, and hope they do it soon. And I hope they pick the right guy. It's a real problem that we don't have a single individual back here who is really capable of coordinating the effort."

Other variations are under consideration. House Democrats have put a provision in their version of a war spending bill that would designate a coordinator to oversee all assistance to Iraq. That person, who would report directly to the president, would require Senate confirmation; the White House said it opposes the proposal because Rice already has an aid coordinator.

Some administration critics said the ideas miss the point. "An individual can't fix a failed policy," said Carlos Pascual, former State Department coordinator of Iraq reconstruction, who is now a vice president at the Brookings Institution. "So the key thing is to figure out where the policy is wrong."

By Peter Baker and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Study of Two Pears

2007-04-05T08:47:00.000-07:00

I
Opusculum paedagogum.
The pears are not viols,
Nudes or bottles.
They resemble nothing else.

II
They are yellow forms
Composed of curves
Bulging toward the base.
They are touched red.

III
They are not flat surfaces
Having curved outlines.
They are round
Tapering toward the top.

-- Wallace Stevens

Psalm and Lament

2007-04-04T08:32:00.000-07:00

Hialeah, Florida
in memory of my mother (1897–1974)

The clocks are sorry, the clocks are very sad.
One stops, one goes on striking the wrong hours.

And the grass burns terribly in the sun,
The grass turns yellow secretly at the roots.

Now suddenly the yard chairs look empty, the sky looks empty,
The sky looks vast and empty.

Out on Red Road the traffic continues; everything continues.
Nor does memory sleep; it goes on.

Out spring the butterflies of recollection,
And I think that for the first time I understand

The beautiful ordinary light of this patio
And even perhaps the dark rich earth of a heart.

(The bedclothes, they say, had been pulled down.
I will not describe it. I do not want to describe it.

No, but the sheets were drenched and twisted.
They were the very handkerchiefs of grief.)

Let summer come now with its schoolboy trumpets and fountains.
But the years are gone, the years are finally over.

And there is only
This long desolation of flower-bordered sidewalks

That runs to the corner, turns, and goes on,
That disappears and goes on

Into the black oblivion of a neighborhood and a world
Without billboards or yesterdays.

Sometimes a sad moon comes and waters the roof tiles.
But the years are gone. There are no more years.

-- Donald Justice

Tal Afar

2007-03-27T12:16:00.000-07:00

Chris Hondros Photos (previous event)

Bomb attacks killed 77 people in Iraq on Tuesday, including 50 who died in twin truck bombings in the northwestern town of Tal Afar, police said.

Among other attacks, suspected al Qaeda militants killed 21 people in bombings targeting police and Sunni Arab tribes who have formed an alliance against the militants, officials said.

The attacks follow an upsurge in violence in Baghdad and outside the capital in recent days. U.S. and Iraqi security forces have deployed thousands more soldiers in Baghdad to try to stem a sectarian war threatening to tear the country apart.

Outgoing U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said on Monday al Qaeda was trying to undermine efforts by the Iraqi government and U.S. commanders to court tribal leaders and some insurgent groups to collaborate against the militant network.

One of the blasts in Tal Afar, a mixed town of Shi'ites, Sunni Arabs and Turkmen near the Syrian border, was detonated by a suicide bomber near a Shi'ite mosque, police said.

Police Brigadier Karim Khalaf al-Jubouri said the bomber lured victims to buy wheat loaded on his truck. A second truck bomb exploded in a used car lot. The attacks wounded 120 people.

"There was a huge bomb in the street," said one resident, Akram Ali, 27, referring to the attack near the mosque.

"More than 20 shops and houses were destroyed and some are still burning. Firemen are pulling bodies from the rubble."

In 2006, U.S. President George W. Bush held up Tal Afar as an example of progress being made in Iraq after U.S.-led forces freed it from al Qaeda in an offensive the previous year.

Near Ramadi, in western Anbar province, a suicide bomber exploded a car outside a restaurant on a main road, killing 17 people and wounding 32, a hospital source said.

The restaurant was frequented by police in an area where local tribes have joined the tribal alliance against al Qaeda in Anbar. Many police were among the casualties, the hospital source said.

INSURGENT LEADER KILLED

Earlier four people were killed in two blasts in Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad. One of the dead was a military leader of one of Iraq's biggest Sunni Arab insurgent groups, the 1920 Revolution Brigades, the group said in an Internet statement.

The group identified the leader as Harith al-Dari, who is also the son of an anti-al Qaeda tribal leader.

The Brigades is believed to have given its tacit backing to Sunni Arab tribes who have formed the alliance against al Qaeda.

Relatives blamed al Qaeda for the attack. Al Qaeda has come into conflict with some tribes because of its adherence to a radical form of Sunni Islam and indiscriminate killings.

Dari's father is tribal leader Sheikh Thahir al-Dari, who is head of the al-Zobaie tribe, to which Deputy Prime Minister Salam al-Zobaie belongs. The deputy prime minister was the target of an assassination bid last week.

The Brigades is made up of mostly former military officers and is believed to mainly target U.S. soldiers.

Khalilzad, who left his post as ambassador to Iraq on Monday, said U.S. and Iraqi officials had held contacts with Sunni Arab insurgent-linked groups and were continuing to engage them to bring them into the political process.

In a move to address Sunni Arab concerns, Iraq's president and prime minister on Monday approved amendments to ease rules under which former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party were banned from jobs in government and the security forces.

A U.S. combat post was also attacked by two suicide truck bombs and about 30 gunmen west of Baghdad on Monday, but American soldiers repelled them and killed 15, the U.S. military said on Tuesday.

The attack on the post in the Garma area was unusual given insurgents do not typically launch such large-scale assaults. Eight U.S. soldiers were wounded.

Singalong

2007-03-26T09:32:00.000-07:00

You watch in street clothes. Why not
accept the easy way, the one
that's offered? The kind one?
Because it isn't easy or kind enough.
It has to be hard
to have brought us this far.

Any time soon
we'll manage to build barns,
paint, lock the padlocks, waive anything
dire. That way, we think it will keep
for us and for a while. Other
than that we sleep, nod
like reeds at the edge of a pond.
Those places left unplanted will be cultivated
by another, by others. Looking back it
will seem good. The majestic verandah.
All the ships numbered.
The hedges grazed
like autumn, or a blight,
like fruit.

-- John Ashbery

Shortbus

2007-03-24T08:59:00.000-07:00

In his aim to make an honest film about sex, John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) has taken a somewhat documentary approach to Shortbus, a film describing various New Yorkers' sexual pathos. Framed by shots roving a homemade diorama of the city, Shortbus is comprised of vignettes featuring actors who helped craft this story of people's disconnect in sexual endeavors. Jamie (PJ DeBoy) and James (Paul Dawson), a gay couple experiencing a lull in their relationship, visit Sophia (Sook-Yin Lee), a sex therapist whose inability to orgasm results in her clients inviting her to a sex club after which the film is titled. Sophia's husband, Rob (Raphael Barker), is also willing to experiment, so the two independently embark on adventures in self-pleasure. Dominatrix Severin (Lindsay Beamish) plays a crucial role in Sophia and Rob's lives, as her search for real humanity overlaps with their desire for passion. As each character's plot complicates, the viewer sees a similar melancholy bulldozing its way into these seemingly disparate lives. The depression is repeatedly used in comedic scenes, such as when James is asked on a date while still hospitalized for his attempted suicide. Yo La Tengo's score, which includes Animal Collective among others, lends this film a graceful ambience. Unlike porn, Shortbus has a resonance that encourages the viewer to consider one's own sex life as an important aspect of happiness. --Trinie Dalton

Shortbus

from : Girls on the Run

2007-03-20T11:42:00.000-07:00

VII

The thread ended up on the floor,
where all threads go.
It became a permanent thing, like silver:
Every time you polish it, a little goes away.
Then the ducks arrived, it was raining.
Such a lot of going around and doing!
Sometimes they were in sordid sexual situations;
at others, a smidgen of fun would intrude on our day
which is there to be intruded on, anyway.
Its value, to us, is incommensurate
with, let's say, the concept of duration, which kills,
as surely as a serpent hiding behind a stump.
Our phrase books began to feel useless‹for once
you have learned a language, what is there to do but forget it?
Each illustration changes us.

These were cloistered. They stayed
with us that winter, then went on a little while.
Soon they were back. It was partially time to go out in the opening.
Some enjoyed it.
Then, if they were true,
the blue rabbit heaped bones upon them. There was no going back,
now, though, some did go back. Those who did
didn't get very far. The others came out a little ahead,
I think. . . I don't know.

Look, this is what I am, what I was made of.
Am I therefore to usurp the rose
that blows on time's pediment, wrapping all wisps in a kind of bundle
of awe? But the sundial smiled in the rain, the stile
beckoned, the sign said it was three miles. In the lane the parson's
ambulance pestered gold pigtails, who were in for a shock
of course when the fox returned smiling, fanning his great tail in the corset
of the lighthouses the sausages were so concerned about.
Did the game of stealing please many? Here, on the other side, they were in sync,
their bowls of muesli crooning to the sidelong bats of evening, and then they were let out
to smoke a cigarette in the meadow. No one knew how many
tried to escape, or how many were successful. You had to read it
in the evening's news, and by then sea-cows were weary.
They taxed themselves out of existence. Our raft capsized
and they opined the day was bright with promise, though shut off
from what really happened. It was time for golf.

This was that day's learning.

Finally when Angela could retrieve her moorings they sent the tide out,
but it came back next day, increasingly bizarre.
Bunny and Philip weren't sure they wanted to see more. "But you must,"
Angela urged, breathing a little faster. Then they all wanted to know why it goes on
all the time, and the preacher answered it was due to bats. In the silos. Oh,
I thought you wanted to know, Philip said. We do, but other than you there are two
pails formally, and no one can figure out what is inside. Indeed? Well I'll
take the plunge Philip volunteered. He was always a brave little kid.
Now it was this side of sunset again. Nobody knew which was in error: the stove, or its waistband.
After which the elm buds chanced a summer intrusion
and all the nifty year was almost gone. Well isn't that a catastrophe, Aunt Clara gurgled,
or are some of you please going to take it outside? Aw, but it's raining, someone grumbled,
Why can't we stay inside and have school?
Yes but the quitter must go far out into the bogs. It's time for the badgers to nest
and who is that coming over the hill this time? It's
Spider, Angela suggested.

But as for leaving you all without a tale to tell, I would be daft,
nay derelict, not to insist on where the others have gone. Isn't there a place
to stop, that we'll all know about when we come to it?
Yes there is, she said, we'll just all have to back down
into the gloom, and bait our hooks with peanut butter
which is what they did
and so they left home that day.

-- John Ashbery

So Long, Santa

2007-03-19T12:19:00.000-07:00

You were good to us,
but we’ve got to think these things
out for ourselves, check in with you
later – why did I say that?
Not everything has to be
as big and full as earth.

After he found a million dollars in a slot
the boy persisted, dying without uncovering a lot.
It’s good to be painful
because it will come round again
and we won’t be ready:
Barbara Allen’s cruelty, the night wind
biting at scarves, pedestrians hurrying along.

And if I so longed for you as
to make the original millennial blush go away,
us back to our pets, things we had
to learn at school,
I’d be ashamed of my distance
from you, for being indispensable
at times and cures –
just getting the right thing right, for once.

After finishing everything up
I pay a formal call to the broker.
Sherry is drunk
and it will soon be time to think of the next set of circumstances.
Oh hell everything is that way,
this way, that way, twisted in the sun
of endurance –
the back way in then,
the assertion of formality without
a celebration next time.
That’s all any of us gets,
why I am happy with you, alone, just us.

-- John Ashbery