Anecdotal.
John points us to this anecdotal LiveJournal post:
Remember Ali, the Iraqi student I wrote about a few weeks before leaving for Italy when telling about going to the antiwar rally?
He’s gone. Disappeared.
His parents’ phone number is disconnected.
His mother cannot be reached at work.
His father disappeared first… and now, one of our babies is gone!
His counselor said to me this afternoon: “Either the parents have been called in by the government for questioning, or else they’ve all fled.”
Further anecdotes, to give you an idea of what it’s like to flee:
Like millions of immigrants, the Ahmeds had lived and worked in the United States illegally—but undisturbed—for years. That changed this year, when Pakistan became the latest country whose citizens are required to register with immigration officials in the United States, or face detention or deportation.
Immigrants who entered the country illegally, or whose visas expired, can be deported or detained when they register.
The registration, which includes people from 24 Middle Eastern countries plus North Korea, is causing an upheaval in Muslim immigrant communities across the nation as many decide to seek refuge in Canada.
It has turned border cities in New York, Michigan and Vermont into unlikely refugee camps for hundreds waiting to get into Canada before the March 21 registration deadline for Pakistanis. Aid workers estimate that 2,500 Pakistanis have left the United States for Canada, and another 1,000 are waiting to leave.
The numbers of people fleeing will grow, they predict, as more countries are added to the list and as Canada prepares to shut its doors this year to foreign refugees coming from the United States.
Anecdotes about what it’s like to stay:
“Everybody is stressed out. The FBI has assured us that they will do everything necessary to ensure our safety… but not everything raises to the level of a crime that you can report,” notes Basha, chairman of the American Muslim Council.
The ugliness has been sporadic so far: four women wearing the Muslim head-dress or hijab were verbally abused in a Venice, California restaurant in the past week, according to CAIR, an Islamic advocacy group that monitors hate crimes against the Muslim community.
In the Midwestern United States, a Muslim man and his son were refused service in a Michigan store, while in neighbouring Illinois, one mosque received a bomb threat, and worshippers at another were spooked when projectiles shattered a window during evening prayers.
Some anecdotes as to why they might be staying here in the first place:
“Which one of you would like to see Saddam removed?” An Iraqi immigrant asks this question in Arabic of fellow immigrants. All raised their hands.
“Saddam’s people shoot him and he lost his finger,” said the translator, pointing at the hand of one immigrant.
Man after man after man at a Shiite Muslim community center showed the scars of the Iraqi regime – physical and emotional.
“How many of you lost somebody because of Saddam?” the translator continued asking.
“Two brothers,” said one.
“Five brothers,” said another.
It’s obvious why so many here want Saddam toppled. But it’s how he’s being toppled that is causing some concern.
“Nobody would be happy to see his country being demolished and bombed. It’s a mixed feeling of doubt, fear and hope,” said Iman Husham Al-Husainy of the Karbalaa Islamic Center.
The federal government is declining to specify, however. So anecdotes on that score are rather, as they say, thin on the ground.
A plague on this House, at any rate.
Via Atrios—
Recognizing the public need for fasting and prayer in order to secure the blessings and protection of Providence for the people of the United States and our Armed Forces during the conflict in Iraq and under the threat of terrorism at home.
WHEREAS the United States is currently engaged in a war on terrorism in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001;
WHEREAS the Armed Forces of the United States are currently engaged in a campaign to disarm the regime of Saddam Hussein and liberate the people of Iraq;
WHEREAS, on June 1, 1774, the Virginia House of Burgesses called for a day of fasting and prayer as an expression of solidarity with the people of Boston who were under siege by the enemy;
WHEREAS, on March 16, 1776, the Continental Congress, recognizing that the “Liberties of America are imminently endangered” and the need “to acknowledge the overruling Providence of God,” called for a day of “Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer”;
WHEREAS, on June 28, 1787, during the debate of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin, convinced of God’s intimate involvement in human affairs, implored the Congress to seek the assistance of Heaven in all its dealings;
WHEREAS, on March 30, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, at the bequest of the Senate, and himself recognizing the need of the Nation to humble itself before God in repentance for its national sins, proclaimed a day of fasting, prayer and humiliation;
WHEREAS all of the various faiths of the people of the United States have recognized, in our religious traditions, the need for fasting and humble supplication before Providence;
WHEREAS humility, fasting, and prayer in times of danger have long been rooted in our essential national convictions and have been a means of producing unity and solidarity among all the diverse people of this Nation as well as procuring the enduring grace and benevolence of God;
WHEREAS, through prayer, fasting, and self-reflection, we may better recognize our own faults and shortcomings and submit to the wisdom and love of God in order that we may have guidance and strength in those daily actions and decisions we must take; and
WHEREAS dangers and threats to our Nation persist and, in this time of peril, it is appropriate that the people of the United States, leaders and citizens alike, seek guidance, strength, and resolve through prayer and fasting: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the President should issue a proclamation—
- designating a day for humility, prayer, and fasting for all people of the United States; and
- calling on all people of the United States—
- A) to observe the day as a time of prayer and fasting;
- B) to seek guidance from God to achieve a greater understanding of our own failings and to learn how we can do better in our everyday activities; and
- C) to gain resolve in meeting the challenges that confront our Nation.
—House Resolution 153, referred to the Committee on Government Reform by Todd Akin (R-MO).
Growing increasingly wrathful, God continued: “Can’t you people see? What are you, morons? There are a ton of different religious traditions out there, and different cultures worship Me in different ways. But the basic message is always the same: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Shintoism… every religious belief system under the sun, they all say you’re supposed to love your neighbors, folks! It’s not that hard a concept to grasp.
“Why would you think I’d want anything else? Humans don’t need religion or God as an excuse to kill each other—you’ve been doing that without any help from Me since you were freaking apes!” God said. “The whole point of believing in God is to have a higher standard of behavior. How obvious can you get?
“I’m talking to all of you, here!” continued God, His voice rising to a shout. “Do you hear Me? I don’t want you to kill anybody. I’m against it, across the board. How many times do I have to say it? Don’t kill each other anymore—ever! I’m fucking serious!”
Upon completing His outburst, God fell silent, standing quietly at the podium for several moments. Then, witnesses reported, God’s shoulders began to shake, and He wept.
—“God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule,” The Onion, 26 September 2001.
I want my country back!
I don’t want to listen to fundamentalist preachers anymore!
—Howard Dean, 15 March 2003.
SB 742.
Bump and update, as they say. Oregon State Sen. John Minnis (R-Fairview) had proposed SB 742, which would nebulously define terrorism and impose a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years without parole for said nebulous terrorists. It looks doomed to failure, but doomed like Jason or Freddie Kreuger or the Terminator: it’ll be back.
Minnis said he will rewrite portions of the bill in an attempt to address concerns about the broad language and role Oregon police agencies would have in federal terror investigations. No additional hearings have been scheduled on the bill.
“Unfortunately, there’s a lot of hysteria associated with some of the original language” of the bill, he said. “I will bring something back and see if it works.”
Forget the definition of terrorism that’s been the bill’s contentious flashpoint—
SECTION 1. A person commits the crime of terrorism if the person knowingly plans, participates in or carries out any act that is intended, by at least one of its participants, to disrupt:
(a) The free and orderly assembly of the inhabitants of the State of Oregon;
(b) Commerce or the transportation systems of the State of Oregon; or
(c) The educational or governmental institutions of the State of Oregon or its inhabitants.
Keep your eye on what Minnis does to get the real meat of the bill passed. Again, from the Statesman-Journal:
Representatives of racial and ethnic minorities said they are troubled by two other aspects of the bill.
One would require local police to cooperate with any state or federal agency investigating terrorism.
Critics said it would call into question a 1987 state law that bars local police from aiding enforcement of federal immigration laws. The functions of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service have been split within the new Department of Homeland Security.
“It is a known fact that if immigrant victims of crimes feel that the INS will be involved or called, then crimes will go unreported and immigrants will not feel safe giving information to police to help them investigate crimes,” said Ramon Ramirez, president of the farmworkers’ union PCUN, based in Woodburn.
Minnis said he proposed the change so there would be no repeat of what happened in 2001, when Portland and several other police agencies declined to assist the FBI with interviews of Middle Eastern men.
The other would allow police to keep records of terrorism investigations — although records of a joint task force on terrorism could end up in federal hands outside state law.
George Hara, a retired Portland physician, said that could lead to political surveillance and what happened to him and thousands of others during World War II.
Keep in mind that what Minnis doesn’t want to repeat was one of the very first stumbling blocks cast before Attorney General Ashcroft’s Big Brother blitzkrieg. Remember what political surveillance looks like, why it is anathema to a free society, and why Oregon passed laws against it in the first place.
Forget putting protestors in jail for 25 years; that’s dead in the water. This is the stuff to watch out for. Keep an eye on Sen. John Minnis and his HUACkian aspirations.
I swear, it’s enough to make you think of moving to New Mexico...
The grownups are (still) in the house.
Further gackery, this time from the antic muse: a quick sneak peek inside some of what’s passed for diplomacy in the Bush foreign policy, courtesy the Daily Telegraph. Want to know why Colin Powell didn’t pull a James Baker and travel the world convincing the Coalition of the Willing to actually pony up? “Powell was so busy protecting his position in Washington that he did not travel,” says Unnamed Source, a senior British official. (I wonder if there’s any relation to everyone’s favorite Bush administration spokesperson?) But the money quote, as Ana Marie points out, is the one which maybe gets to the heart of all our French troubles:
A few days later, Mr Bush delivered his key address to the UN General Assembly.
Another senior British official said: “There was tremendous in-fighting in Washington. The drafts of the speech went back and forth. I think there were 28 versions before the final text was agreed.
“For us the key phrase was Bush’s commitment to seeking a new UN resolution to disarm Iraq. We were only sure we had it 24 hours before the speech.
“For some reason this was left out of the text on the teleprompter as Bush was reading it, and he had to improvise.
“He managed to ad-lib a sentence saying ‘we will work with the UN Security Council for the necessary resolutions’. But instead of saying ‘resolution’ he said ‘resolutions’ in the plural. That’s how we got stuck with the French idea of two resolutions.”
Almost crazy enough to be true, isn’t it.
Cry havoc and let slip the jackals of war.
I haven’t been watching the mid-40s on our television, where the Vast Left-wing Media Conspiracy hangs out. Atrios has:
Literally every broadcast “journalist” should be ashamed of him/herself. I never talked much about shock and awe here because I assumed it was probably a scare tactic—something we could do, but not something we would necessarily do. But the whores on TV are pissed. They were promised their shock and awe and they aren’t getting it. Literally every report wonders when it is going to happen.
Pathetic.
Which reminds me of something posted to National Philistine back in January:
I find myself here, today, in an impossible situation.
I must speak to you—the press—with you and through you, using your kind of sentences and leaps of reason, letting you sell me like a precious but marginal commodity, so I can say what everyone already knows but a few vaguely important people in this city are unwilling to admit: that no one wants a war; that an attack against Iraq is no attack against terrorism; that an attack will in fact make the United States less safe; that the Iraqi people do not want a war to liberate them because they will not live through the liberation; that as Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said, “if we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.” I must convey all of this to you, sell it to you, all the while knowing that I find you despicable.
The wild dogs of Baghdad have more dignity and sense than you. You travel in packs and think the same way. You mistake quotes with facts and facts with meaning. You lack historical imagination and intellectual empathy. Your sentences are short and puritanical. In Baghdad you step over children and knock over speakers, reduce subtleties and ignore contexts. An American newspaper journalist in Baghdad told me with a gleeful sense of pride that journalists are lazy and under pressure to write, so issues and ideas have to be reduced into sound bites in order to function as media. Pathetic.
History rarely reads like a press release. And history is being made right now by those who have no time to issue statements. Get complex and get curious or get out of the way.
I think we are going to stop this one without you.
On the other hand, Raed abides; Christopher Allbritton isn’t on the ground yet; Kevin Sites still hasn’t updated. (One hopes it’s just more technical hell.) —Meanwhile, here in Portland, cops pulled guns on the drum circles of the Burnside Free State. Protestors turned highways into parking lots last night. And me, this morning, I just finished my coffee. It’s raining. Now I’m going to get on a bus and go downtown and spend the first day of spring helping one company sue another one.
The rules of engagement.
It is a joyous thing, is war . . . . You love your comrade so in war. When you see that your quarrel is just and your blood is fighting well, tears come to your eyes. A great sweet feeling of loyalty and of pity fills your heart on seeing your friend so valiantly exposing his body to execute and accomplish the command of our creator. And then you prepare to go and die or live with him, and for love not to abandon him. And out of that, there arises such a delectation, that he who has not tasted it is not fit to say what a delight it is.
—Jean de Bueil, Le Jouvencel (ca. 1465)
It’s an odd week to be reading Theodor Meron’s Bloody Constraint: War and Chivalry in Shakespeare. There’s a cognitive dissonance in reading the tusslings of 14th century philosophers with Saints Thomas Aquinas and Augustine and the very ideas that squirm beneath our op-ed pages, of a just injustice, a moral immorality, a gross crime committed, eyes opened and resolve firmed, for the greater good: a bellum justum; a just and proper war. There’s something so terribly odd in realizing Giovanni da Legnano back in the 1300s out-Orwelled the current powers that be, making a better case for the war in Iraq than Thomas Friedman ever could: war comes itself from divine law, he argues, with a “positive allowance” from God; because, he says, the “end of war…is the peace and tranquility of the world[, war] proceeded originally and positively from God.” —You read that, the bus stops, you close the book and you stand up and off you get, your brain kicked loose and floating numbly in your skull like a Sudafed high.
“The tinsel glint of chivalry.” That’s another good line, Meron quoting Maurice Keen, and I would have liked it a lot 20 years ago, or even 10; the slap at the cheapness of chivalry, the dishonesty of honorable brutality and the hypocrisy of tarting up slaughter with a surface sheen of civilized behavior, would have appealed greatly to me. I like it a lot now, too, but because it’s one of those perversely beautiful little paradoxes; I think of Christmas lights and cheap bits of foiled plastic. I mean, you don’t want to use too much, but judiciously apply it, then turn off the lights and squint just so: you get a heart-lifting thing of beauty. Chivalry—by which I don’t so much mean opening doors for ladies, no; I mean noblesse oblige, but more specifically the obligations imposed by differences in brute power and violence, not social standing (which, of course, is based implicitly on brute power and violence); obligations imposed not by anything inherent to power, no (power corrupts, after all)—but merely because we decided they should be. —Chivalry is hypocrisy, yes, but a necessary one, one that has tempered much brutality, horror, and bloodshed; as much as if not more than it has excused and endorsed, is my gut-level reaction. (Assuming one could ever even begin to measure such a thing.) Chivalry is a concept doomed to failure from the start by semantics and human nature, but nonetheless the attempt is made (was made? has been made?); and there is sometimes nothing so beautiful as clear-eyed stubborn folly.
“Force is the weapon of the weak,” maybe, is another way of putting it, but I’m reaching well past chivalry there. (“Power to the people! Teeth for shrimp! Plato was a fascist!” —Indeed, but also: “The People! United! Provide a bigger target!” Thereby demonstrating not only why I don’t do so well at rallies and marches, but also my penchant for sticking tangents in the spokes of whatever it is I’m wheeling at the moment.)
The Navy tried (not too terribly hard) when I was in high school to get me to come to Annapolis, and I must cop to having been tempted somewhat if not sorely. (Thereby proving in at least my own particular case that it’s not so much a particular extremism that attracts adolescents as it is extremity itself. Apocalypses and utopias [utopiæ?] [“Absolute Destiny Apocalypse!”] [another tangent; I’ll try to keep them quiet. Sorry].) I never would have gone—I even think I knew that, then—but there was something about—the power of it. A power tempered with restraint, or at least the illusions of restraint: the uniforms, the tradition, the discipline, the rules of engagement, the laws of war. Might in service of right. A power bigger than any one of us working for ideals great enough for all of us. And if it doesn’t take much to blow all that up into so much glittering tinsel, well—it’s still there. An impossible ideal, honored in breach more often than not, but a deep and abiding motivation in more than some of us would sometimes like to admit; never so clear-eyed as others would like to believe, but nonetheless tempering as much brutality in this world as it excuses and condones. If not more. —This flirtation with a great and aweful crossroads (not that I ever would have, not really, no, and the idea of me-then actually doing it fills me-now with a kind of rueful, wincing glee; a folly not at all clear-eyed or deliberate, that would have been) has stayed with me. I check in on the road not taken: I read enough of Clancy, say, to know he was enough of a partisan hack to make a lousy novelist but a useful non-fiction writer (with a shaker of salt to hand); I stumbled over David Poyer and snapped up his modern naval stuff like hotcakes; I was inordinately pleased when a friend, a naval alumnus, blurted, “Jesus Christ, you actually read the Bluejacket’s Manual? Without being forced?” —To list three touchstones pretty much at random.
(I’d sketched out that much at work, on breaks. A slow day. I got on the bus, rode home. “The bombs are falling,” someone said. I went shopping. Bought catfood. Wine. Feta cheese. “The bombs are falling,” someone said. “We’re doing this, aren’t we?” I went home. Made dinner. Here I am. The bombs are falling.)
I don’t know much, then, and none of it directly. But I know enough to know that though a “fair and lucky war” is impossible (has been impossible, since 1991; is always impossible, but, but), I still hope for a war as short and as deathless as possible. I know enough to know that I support our troops, for what that’s worth; I know enough not to be surprised when I hear from a friend of a friend that some of those troops have taken to referring to their commander-in-chief as “the Antichrist.” I know enough to know that this war is that most immoral and most unjust of wars—
Unnecessary.
I know enough to know the struggle for peace isn’t over. It has just begun. Just barely begun. Embarking on a war, someone said somewhere at some point, is like entering a dark room; there’s no way of knowing what will come. So curse the darkness—repudiate it, spit in its face, drag your heels against the hands that pull you into it, curse it—but light a candle, too. (You can do both.) Light a candle. Speak out. Forgive us all our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, but write the fall of every bomb on your heart, and never forget: Never again. Swear it.
Go, gentlemen, each man unto his charge.
Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls.
Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.
Our strong arms be our conscience; swords, our law.
March on, join bravely! Let us to ’t, pell mell—
If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.
Never again, goddammit.
Moral dilemma.
It’s been a popular conundrum for the pro-torture crowd: there’s a bomb, somewhere. And you’ve got this guy strapped to a chair. Never mind how he got there, chatter suggests he’s the man with the plan, it’s a fucking red alert, there’s a ticking goddamn clock and if you make him talk, make him tell you the what and the where and the how then you, my friend, can stop the countdown. Save thousands, maybe millions of lives. Pop quiz, hotshot: What do you do?
Burn this.
(Originally written in July 1997 for Anodyne magazine. Obviously the measures referred to are out of date—though election year perennials. Also, I can’t guarantee there haven’t been any changes to the local laws. And: a word to the wise: if you burn the flag before Palestinian children in an occupied settlement, Joe Grossberg will proclaim “Good fucking riddance” when you’re later run over and crushed to death by a bulldozer. Caveat incinerator.
(As for why—well, fuck. It fits my mood tonight. So.)
So you want to burn the flag.
Better jump on the bandwagon soon, folks. The House of Representatives just passed a measure that would outlaw “flag desecration” by amending the Constitution so that it is specifically exempted from protection under the First Amendment. The vote was 310 to 114, well over the two-thirds majority required for any amendments. From there it goes to the Senate; if they pass it with a two-thirds majority (and there’s a good chance they will), it will travel about the state legislatures. And if 38 of our 50 states approve it, it becomes our 28th Amendment.
What will happen to life as we know it? More than you might think. Past measures would have applied to any recognizable incarnation of Old Glory, and would have enforced the strict Boy Scout code of flag etiquette: don’t fly it in the rain, don’t fly it at night (without the proper spotlighting), don’t ever let it touch the ground, fold it in proper triangle shape when you put it away, and, oh yeah, don’t burn it. Or throw it away. Burial is the only acceptable method of disposal.
These rules would also have applied to T-shirts, neckties, comic strips (check out a memorable Doonesbury from the Bush years) or any other printed material with a flag on it—even postage stamps. Proponents claim that they’ve learned from past mistakes, and that the current measure isn’t nearly so sweeping. Even so, we can expect Young Americans for Freedom to be busted for hanging flags from dorm room ceilings; everybody who buys those little flags from Freddy’s must bury them after the parade, or face stiff penalties; and our neighbor, Phil, who hung a flag from his front porch for the Fourth three years ago and has left it up rain or shine ever since will be getting a visit from the flag police.
That’s if the laws are fairly enforced. Which they would be. Right?
So. While it’s still legal to torch the Stars ’n’ Stripes, here’s what you should do: first, if you’re burning it outside, you fall under the clean air regulations which Portland must follow, so you’ll have to apply to the Fire Department for a “permit for ceremonial fires,” usually granted for luaus and bonfires. There’s no fee. (Indoors is not a problem—as long as you burn it in a proper fireplace or woodstove.) And, of course, you’ll be wanting a flag. A 3’ × 5’ American flag will set you back about $30, but it’ll be made of nylon or polyester, and flame retardant. It’ll burn (with enough lighter fluid), but it won’t be very pretty, or safe—“You’ll end up with a liquid, plastic mess, kinda like napalm,” warns a friend who has had some experience in this area. Use a barbecue grill or some other flame-proof device to contain it. Remember, campers: Anodyne says, “Safety first!”
“Why would someone want to burn the flag? That’s so stupid!” cried one of the flag shop attendants we spoke with while researching this matter. The last serious spate of flag burning was so long ago—during the Gulf War—that nobody remembers it. But no one is seriously concerned about flag burning, here; this is really about financial improprieties, and ethics violations, and Congress wanting a little Mom and apple pie under its belt, and not giving a flying fuck what it does to the Constitution in the process. Who knows—if this “exemption” passes, we can perhaps expect more: another exemption to the First Amendment, granting freedom of religion to everyone but Satanists, or an exemption to the Fourth Amendment, so that everyone but convicted drug dealers is secure from unreasonable search and seizure. You’ve got to admire the brute force logic at work: the Constitution says we can’t, but hey presto, a little white-out and tape, and now it says we can!
Yeesh. Happy Independence Day, y’all.
Ac-cent-tchu-ate the contradictions.
Via the irrepressible Portland Mercury, we learn that State Senator John Minnis (R-Fairview) has offerred up a bill that would, in part, define terrorism:
The bill defines a terrorist broadly, as anyone who “knowingly plans, participates in or carries out any act intended to disrupt the free and orderly assembly” of Oregonians. In other words, anyone participating in an event—be it a protest or otherwise—that impedes traffic, business, or public assembly on any state property, including schools or universities. The minimum penalty for such an infraction? Twenty-five years without the possibility of parole.
So everyone who went to the march this past Saturday was a terrorist. Almost all of the events planned for the day war “begins” are acts of terror. Those monthly Critical Mass bike rides? Terrorism.
Never mind that V.I. Lenin would clasp Minnis to his waxy bosom for so alacritously taking up his end of the bargain to heighten the contradictions. No matter that Andreas Baader would pucker up his withered dead lips to kiss Minnis for playing his part so thoroughly to the hilt. (Issa giggle, ennit? Imagining those guys holding up a VP of Sales in traffic on the Burnside Bridge in a Lincoln Navigator?) —Don’t get in a semantic tizzy about conflating permitted protests and civil disobediance with hijacking passenger jets to slaughter 3,000 people. The terrorists won long ago; penny-ante shit like Senate Bill 742 is just counting coup. Instead, read the fine print: what’s also terrorism is planning, participating in, or carrying out any act that disrupts:
(c) The educational or governmental institutions of the State of Oregon or its inhabitants.
Senator Minnis. John. Think about it for a minute. Look at the chaos the Republicans have caused by refusing to fund the state budget properly. Look at the mess you’ve made of public education and higher education. (And that’s without crawling into the ever-more-likely conspiracy theory to demolish our public schools in favor of religious education.) John. Senator Minnis. Think about it for a minute:
Your own law condemns you as a terrorist.
You might want to take this one back to the drawing board.
The Portland Bill of Rights Defense Committee has some important updates and actions to take regarding this shameful travesty of a bill.
What if they gave a peace and everybody came?
“We are not at war,” he kept saying. We, the world community, are waging peace. It is difficult, hard work. It is constant and we must not let up. It is working and it is an historic milestone of immense proportions. It has never happened before—never in human history—and it is happening now—every day every hour—waging peace through a global conversation. He pointed out that the conversation questioning the validity of going to war has gone on for hours, days, weeks, months and now more than a year, and it may go on and on.
Thanks, Jeanne. Thanks, JoKer. Thank you, Dr. Robert Muller. My God, did I need that.
(At the very least, folks: light a candle this Sunday.)
Anyone here from Minnesota? How about Arkansas?
The bill to allow drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is one vote shy of passing in the Senate. It looks like Gordon Smith (R-Oregon) is in the “no” camp on this vote (“Not now, but not never”)—though sending him a love-note probably wouldn’t hurt. (Remind him of his environmentally friendly campaigning in 2002.)
The Cheneyites are putting the pressure on Norm Coleman, freshman Republican from Minnesota, and the Arkansan Democratic delegation of Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln. So if you’re one of these fine Congressfolks’ constituents, be so kind as to drop them a line. Their names are email links—swiped from Barry, who also has the phone numbers, if you’re feeling all personal-like.
Fun fact, though: there’s some arcana going on in how to frame the Senate budget item covering the drilling which will either allow a fillibuster, or not. But don’t for God’s sake trust that; we need all three (or four) fence-sitters on board. So send your email, buck ’em up, and shut it down.
River of shit.
Once more, I’m being asked to choke on my vote in the 2000 elections. —Meanwhile, the registered Democrats who voted directly for Bush get a free ride. (Presumably, their choice was in some fashion more moral? more honest? than mine.)
You know what? I just don’t care anymore. I don’t give a good God damn. I’ve had all the fights I can stomach and all the arguments I can stand and I know why I did it and given it to do all over again I’d do what I did, and let me tell you what you already know: the Democrats in power have not acquitted themselves terribly well in the past two years. There’s plenty of Congressfolk with Ds after their names who I myself hope have a hard time swallowing around some of their votes. But you need to piss all over me and mine to make yourself feel better, get it out of your system? Fine. Go right ahead.
Feel better?
Now. Can we each in our own way go do what needs to be done about our current situation? Or is that too much to ask?
Habeas pueruli.
Oh, we know how to make Khalid Sheikh Mohammed talk, boasted an unnamed American law enforcement official. We have access to his kids.
Kids? said the CIA. Sure, we’ve got the kids. Flew ’em to an undisclosed location in the States. No, not Cheney’s. We’re treating ’em with kid gloves. Legal guardian? Rights? What?
No, wait a minute, said the US. We don’t have the kids. We never had the kids. What are you, high?
Confused? Frustrated? Infuriated? Aw, heck. Don’t be. There’s a simple explanation: we (by which I mean thee and me) don’t even know for sure where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is. We (by which I mean them what represents us) have yet to habeas the corpus, so what’s a couple of kids compared to Public Enemy No. 22? I mean, 2?
Road to Surfdom (via TalkLeft) gives us a taste of how it’s playing in Paducah (as it were).
All of which makes this—more likely? Less likely? Utterly unfounded? Crazy—like a fox? Good? Bad? Indifferent?
“We have no information to substantiate that claim.” —Fills you with confidence, don’t it?
The only thing I can state with any certainty myself is that I’m highly skeptical of the claim that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s arrest—whenever and wherever it occurred—is itself an advertisement of the efficacy of the USA PATRIOT Act. But I’m a cantankerous and partisan sonofabitch on the subject, so you should maybe take that with a grain of salt, too.
Pardessus anglais.
Sneaky bastards. I’d forgotten another French item whose ill-considered boycott the “grownups” have been engineering: French letters.
Bring on the wild dogs.
It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that a significant number of America’s worst social problems would be alleviated by summoning the insurance industry’s top managers to an economic summit, and then setting packs of wild dogs on them.
—Patrick Nielsen Hayden, 6 January 2003.
Just two or three claims filed over the course of two years is now enough for many insurance companies to cancel a policy. Some count inquiries, even when no claim is paid. “It’s happening to everybody,” said Tim Schaefer, an independent insurance agent in Germantown. “It really is bad.”
That is why Matthew Rouhanian decided not to file. The snowstorm caused leaks in the roof of his North Potomac house after ice collected in the gutters. Instead, he decided to pay the $1,800 repair cost himself. The reason: He lost his previous insurance policy three years ago because he had filed three claims in two years.
“You pay for 20 years, and they never call you and say thank you,” said Rouhanian, who declined to name his insurance companies. “But if anything happens, they cancel you. Why do you have insurance anyway?”
—“Taking a Risk in Making a Claim,” the Washington Post, 10 March 2003, via MetaFilter.
Yeah, I know. There’s stuff rattling around in my head. Maybe in a bit. Elsewhere for now.
Right back inna jungle. On account of the breakdown of ethics
Which is why, of course, ethics are important.
First, you might want to read this account (via TBogg) of Sunday’s pro-war march on Washington. Specifically, one should make note of this quote from “B-1” Bob Dornan, re: Saddam Hussein:
“We are the good guys,” said Dornan, a former Air Force fighter pilot and longtime conservative firebrand. “Never again will we put up with this kind of person who tortures children in front of their parents.”
Got that? Noted it down? Good. Now, put yourself in mind of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Specifically, ponder the dilemma facing his interrogators (via blueheron, in a roundabout fashion), who have to get him to talk without, you know, violating the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. —Fret not; by our reading of the document, we can still lie to him, scream at him, play on his phobias, strip him, shave him, deprive him of religious items and toiletries, pretend to transfer him to a third country which hasn’t ratified the convention, or even, what the heck, go ahead and so transfer him. (Jordan has been suggested.) And, if all else fails:
US authorities have an additional inducement to make Mr. Mohammed talk, even if he shares the suicidal commitment of the Sept. 11 hijackers: The Americans have access to two of his elementary-school-age children, the top law-enforcement official says. The children were captured in a September raid that netted one of Mr. Mohammed’s top comrades, Ramzi Binalshibh.
We are the good guys. So we can do whatever we want. Because we’re the good guys. —As moral clarity goes, it’s pretty goddamn clear, isn’t it?
WYPSIDYOPINEPOL USA
Catchy, isn’t it? Just trips off the tongue. It’s a non-binding resolution I’d like to see passed: the Would You Please Stop Insulting the Dignity of Your Office and the Public’s Intelligence by Naming Every Piece Of Legislation with an Unbelievably Stupid Acronym Act.
The RAVE Act (Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy, HR 718) is back. It amends the federal crack house law to make it easier to fine and imprison business owners that fail to stop drug offenses from occurring on their property—even if they do take steps to stop drug use. (It’s the age of responsibility, after all. Intent doesn’t matter. We only care about results.) —It was shut down by an aggressive campaign of protests, fax blasts and open ridicule last year, but all that is needed for evil to triumph and constant vigilance and yadda yadda. RAVE is spreading like some kind of virus; its basic provisions are in HR 718, the RAVE Act, but over in the Senate they’re S 226, the Illicit Drugs Anti-Proliferation Act (IDAP?) and they’re still buried in the guts of Daschle’s S 22 domestic security bill.
The CLEAN-UP Act (Clean, Learn, Educate, Abolish, Neutralize, and Undermine Production of Methamphetamines, HR 834) has—beyond a semantically null acronym—a doozy of a provision tucked inside. Turn with me to Section 305, which would add Section 416A to the Controlled Substances Act:
Whoever, for a commercial purpose, knowingly promotes any rave, dance, music, or other entertainment event, that takes place under circumstances where the promoter knows or reasonably ought to know that a controlled substance will be used or distributed in violation of Federal law or the law of the place where the event is held, shall be fined under title 18, United States Code, or imprisoned for not more than 9 years, or both.
We don’t even need for a crime to have been committed. Or even alleged. If you promote an entertainment event where you reasonably ought to know that drugs could be used or distributed, you’re busted.
The fine folks at the Drug Policy Alliance have put together a fax for your representative. Go kick his or her ass, would you?
