Magpie

Saturday, April 24, 2004

When you're a yellow-dog Democrat, you really have to hold your nose sometime.

It's really hard to keep our eyes on the ball and work for Dubya's defeat when Democrat John Kerry endorses the Israeli government's plans to annex Palestinian territory while giving Gaza a meaningless 'autonomy' that sounds like the 'sovereignty' Iraq will get in June. Talk about opportunism ...

In an interview with NBC television, Kerry declared that he supports the separation plan, as well as President Bush's letter to the Sharon government. "Just because Bush is for it doesn't mean we have to be against it," stated Jay K. Footlik, senior adviser on Middle East and Jewish affairs in the Kerry campaign. "As long as it is good for the security of Israel and helps bring down the level of violence, then Kerry is for it."

In the stepped-up competition for American Jewish support, the message Kerry wants to send is that his commitment to the state of Israel is in no way inferior to the president's. "In what concerns the safety of Israel and its well-being, the U.S. is united, and even in an election year this is not a partisan issue," stresses Footlik.

Yeah. Right. [overwrought magpie eye-roll]

Via Haaretz.

| | Posted by Magpie at 8:01 PM | Get permalink

The 'war on drugs' takes another victim.

No, we're not talking about anyone you know, unless that person is an asparagus farmer. According to the NY Times, the latest casualty of the drug war is the US asparagus industry, which has been decimated as Washington pays Peruvian farmers to grow asparagus instead of coca.

In the early 1990s, the US started subsidizing a year-round asparagus industry in Peru in order to take a bite out of that country's coca crop and hopefully reduce the flow of cocaine to the US. Since 1991, however, that subsidy has led to the closure of US plants that processed asparagus and hundreds of US farmers being forced out of the asparagus business. In the same period, there's been better than a 25-fold increase in the amount of Peruvian asparagus entering the US, going from 4 million pounds to over 110 million pounds annually.

"The irony is that they didn't plow under the coke to plant asparagus in Peru," said John Bakker, executive director of the Michigan Asparagus Advisory Board. "If you look at that industry in Peru and where it's growing, it has nothing to do with coca leaf growers becoming normal farmers. Coca leaf is grown in the highlands. The asparagus is near sea level."

In a letter to the State Department in March, Peru's government said the asparagus industry employed 50,000 people and 40 percent came from coca-producing regions.

"It is important to understand that the war against drugs is another face of the battle against terrorism, and will be successful only if new legal jobs are created as an alternative to illegal activities," the Peruvian Asparagus and Other Vegetables Institute said in the letter.

Yet United States auditors, in a 2001 report to Congress, said the Foreign Agricultural Service "does not believe that Peruvian asparagus production provides an alternative economic opportunity for coca producers and workers — the stated purpose of the act."

Mr. Schreiber, of the Washington asparagus board, said he had made two trips to Peru and doubted many coca growers had turned to asparagus.

"I don't fault the Peruvians," Mr. Schreiber said. "We're in this situation because of what our government has done to us. They say it's a national security issue. Well, the cost of it has been borne on the back of the American asparagus grower."

| | Posted by Magpie at 7:25 PM | Get permalink

Welcome back!

For the first six months or so of this blog's existence, our favorite source of economic analysis and comentarywas General Glut's Globlog. Last fall, however, the General fell silent, and we finally had the sad duty of removing him from Magpie's blogroll.

But sometimes life surprises us. This morning, we find this one-line message is in our email:

FYI, I'm back in the game. Gen'l Glut

And sure enough, there's a small handful of new posts over at the Globlog, and the General is his usual cheery self. One of his new posts tells those of us who live in the US and still have a job why we're feeling like our paycheck doesn't go as far as it used to.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:37 AM | Get permalink

'A simple Palestinian story.'

We always keep an eye out for the writing of Isaeli journalist Amira Hass. Her latest article in Haaretz is about the life of a Palestinian woman in her 80s, and it's one of Hass' best pieces in awhile.

Nadia Abdullah was born in Acre in 1919. Her life has been divided between three main stations - Acre, Beirut and Ramallah - but she has also lived in Haifa, Nablus, Jaffa, Tiberias, Naqura, Al-Zib ("you call it Achziv," she says) and Metula. She has also resided in the villages of Samakh and Jisr al- Majama'a (villages south of the Sea of Galilee that have since been destroyed), and again in Tiberias and Haifa, and then in the village of Tubas, south of Jenin, where her husband comes from. The map then was of a single, open and expansive Palestine. Later, she lived in Damascus, Beirut and Amman - already the map of wars, partitions and restrictions.

Until the age of 18, her place of residence was determined by the location of the Christian schools she attended. When she married Fahim Abdullah, a customs official, she followed him to the various places where he was sent to work. Later, the education of her four children dictated where they would live. After Damascus and Beirut, they moved to Amman in 1982, when the Lebanese authorities expelled many Palestinians after refusing to renew their residency and work visas. A simple Palestinian story.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:10 AM | Get permalink

Friday, April 23, 2004

How low can spam go?

You undoubtedly know about phishing, which involves sending email messages that look like they come from a bank, eBay, or similar source. These messages ask the recipient to 'verify' personal financial information, which is then used to commit fraud..

This blog just got phished by someone with a poor command of English and a rather low opinion of the intelligence of their intended victims:

Subject : -Citibank- E_MAIL verification -

To_verifiaction of_your _E-MAIL_ address_ click on _the link :

http://[deleted]

and submit in the_ little winndow _your Citi_Bank Atm_ full card nummber and _PIN that you use on the local Atm Machine..

And this was a text-only message. No HTML or faked logos or anything.

Pathetic, huh?

| | Posted by Magpie at 4:21 PM | Get permalink

It's the logistics, stupid.

Slate has a very interesting article on why having 130,000 troops in Iraq can mean that the 1.4 million strong US military is overextended. According to former Army officer Phillip Carter, this seemingly counterintutive fact is due to the huge logistical effort involved in any military task:

Just consider what it takes to move a single tank company from Fort Stewart to Fallujah. Soldiers have to spend days inspecting and packing their vehicles before loading them onto trains that will take them to the port at Savannah, Ga. The trains will be met by more soldiers at dockside, who will work with longshoremen and contractors to put the tanks on a ship. Then the ship has to sail across to Kuwait, where it will be met by more troops and contractors. Only then can they roll north to Iraq.... Now imagine you want to move an entire unit like the 3rd Infantry Division, with hundreds of tanks and thousands of other vehicles. The size and complexity of the task is staggering. It may cost as much as $1 billion to send a division to Iraq. And it can't be done quickly. Major bases in the United States have a finite "throughput" capacity, meaning that they can only squeeze so many pieces of equipment out the door on any given day.

Ordinarily, the military would short-circuit this logistical nightmare by flying troops overseas to meet up with equipment and weapons it has stashed around the world in "pre-positioned" stocks ("pre-po" for short). However, senior Army officials told the House Armed Services Committee last month that the pre-po stocks were tapped for the Iraq war.... There are no pre-po stocks near Iraq for the 3rd Infantry Division (or any other unit) to borrow from. All the equipment will have to be brought from the United States, vastly increasing the cost and difficulty of the operation.

The gutting of the pre-po stocks bodes ill for future military operations. As long as all the gear is being used in Iraq, it can't be deployed anywhere else. Should the United States need to send troops quickly to another hot spot—say, a humanitarian crisis in Africa or flare-up in the Balkans—there are no pre-po stocks to draw on. That, in turn, will delay any U.S. response abroad, just as it will slow reinforcement of the forces in Iraq.

While we don't agree with Phillips main conclusion — that since it's too late to pull out of Iraq, the main solution for the the logistical problems is a bigger military — the information he provides about how the US military operates on a worldwide basis is certainly helping this magpie to make sense of what the that military is doing in Iraq.

We bet that the leadership of the insurgents in Iraq knows the stuff that Phillips' article lays out already.

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:39 PM | Get permalink

All shook up?

Then ask Elvis for the answer. The King knows all.

Via BBC and a tip from MetaFilter.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:07 PM | Get permalink

Hiding the human cost of war.

Two incidents in which photos of dead troops being returned to the US have been released to the public have Pentagon honchos fuming — and desperately trying to put their finger into the dike, so to speak.

The 'problem' incidents all involve a 1991 Pentagon rule that bans pictures of coffins being returned to the US. While the US military says this policy is to protect the privacy of the families of the dead, critics say the rule is designed to make war more palatable to the US public. (This magpie subscribes to the latter view.)

The first 'problem' the Pentagon has had to deal with was the publication in the Seattle Times of the photo below, which You've probably seen already in a newspaper, on television, or online.

Flag-draped coffins of US troops

This photo of 20 flag-draped coffins loaded for a flight back to the US was taken by Tami Silicio and originally appeared with this Seattle Times story about her work at Kuwait International Airport. Until very recently, Silicio was a cargo handler employed by Maytag Aircraft, a contractor for the US government. After the photo appeared in the Times, however, military authorities contacted Maytag with 'specific concerns,' after which Silicio was fired on grounds that she violated company and US military rules by photographing US dead.

Silicio is apparently not the only person to take pictures of coffins on their way home, however. Silicio told Reuters that other contractors and soldiers have taken pictures similar to hers. It's apparent to this magpie that Silicio lost her job because her picture was published at a time when Dubya's administration is taking major flak over its conduct of the Iraq, not simply because she broke a rule about picture-taking.

The second PR problem for the Pentagon is a bit bigger. About 360 pictures bigger, in fact.

The Memory Hole recently made a Freedom of Information Act request for any official photos taken when coffins return to the US, and finally was able to obtain 361 such photos. These photos were then made available online. [See end of post for mirror sites.]

In response to the posting of the photos, the US military has barred any further release of those photos to media outlets. And, although the AP story doesn't say this, we imagine that the military is going to dig in its heels and fight any future FOIA requests for similar photos.

The decision to block further release of the photos strikes us a bit like locking the barn door after the cows have left for the pasture, but — as events in Iraq show — the likelihood of getting the results intended doesn't seem to be a major factor in how the Pentagon makes its decisions. Given how difficult it is to access the Memory Hole right now, it's obvious that tens of thousands of people have gone there to view the 'forbidden' photos.

Update: Because of network problems caused by high traffic, it's almost impossible to access the Memory Hole. Courtesy of Warblogging, there's now a mirror site where the 361 photos can be viewed.

More: There's another mirror site here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:34 AM | Get permalink

Where do you turn for the news?

If you're an Iraqi living in Baghdad, it's almost certain that you're not watching the TV channel run by the Coalition Provisional Authority, says BBC Monitoring. Even though the CPA's Al-Iraqiyah is the main non-satellite station in Baghad, most of the city's residents choose to get their new from Aljazeera, Al-Arabiyah, or other satellite services originating outside Iraq. There are satellite dishes on houses in even the poorest parts of Baghad.

Al-Iraqiyah, the main terrestrial TV station in Baghdad, is funded and operated by the Coalition Provisional Authority. It has a limited number of viewers - mainly drawn from those who refuse to watch satellite channels for religious reasons.

The channel has often failed to provide up-to-date coverage of news inside Iraq, or it has proved inaccurate.

Ban, 39, a Unicef employee, says reports are often contradictory. She blames the young reporters, who she says lack skills and experience.

"Al-Iraqiyah should benefit from the experience of veteran reporters and journalists if it is to stand on solid ground," she says.

Others complain that most of its programmes have already been aired by Arab satellite channels.

"Al-Iraqiyah only quotes what other news agencies and channels have said. And it cannot call on any official source to confirm or deny news," says 25-year-old Sulayman, a civil servant.

"Frankly, I would rather go straight to these channels," he says.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:14 AM | Get permalink

Thursday, April 22, 2004

'Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to welcome you to Honolulu. Unfortunately, we are in Fresno.'

One of the worst parts of flying is having to sit through the boring, canned announcements that come over the PA system. Dull, dull, dull, almost without exception.

But there are those exceptions: When this magpie lived in the US Midwest, for example, we used to fly out to the west coast fairly often on Northwest Airlines. Frequently, we got this very chatty pilot who identified every point of interest larger than a breadbox between Minneapolis and the Bay Area. To this day, we're capable of boring the person sitting next to us on the plane with all those details.

There are much better stories out there, though, and the current installment of Salon's 'Ask the Pilot' column has some of the all-time best stories about airline PA announcements:

The annals of flight are full of humorous, if occasionally dubious, accounts of over-the-air insults, malapropisms and bloopers. Among my favorites is the one supposedly made by a flustered British Airways steward just after touchdown in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Assuming this story is true, an act so politically incorrect probably got the hapless steward fired before the doors were opened. As the plane turned clear of the runway, he clicked and spoke: "Ladies and gentlemen welcome to Riyadh. For the correct local time, please set your watch back three-hundred years."

[Paid sub or ad view req'd.]

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:18 PM | Get permalink

How important is it to learn [Irish] tunes properly? And what is 'properly' anyway?

That's the question that started out a meaty discussion of learing tunes, tune versions, and respect for tradition (among other things) over at TheSession.org. If you play Irish traditional music, the discussion is well worth checking out.

Here's a comment from the middle of the discussion, just to give you the flavor of things:

[To] my mind, the more important question is does the version sound right, and to whom? Surely the most important thing is that it sounds right to the player. Here's a quote from Kevin Burke "When I find something I love, I play it - when I fnd something I like I bend it out of shape until I love it." Somebody will now come back and say that we aren't all as good a KB - but perhaps that's actually one of the things that makes a great player great is INTEGRITY (as well as audacity). It's important that you craft what you are doing until you are totally happy with it.

Of course "happy" might be different in different contexts. You may wish to learn a particular setting or variant of a tune because of who you're going to play with or for. I agree that it's a great effect to hear 2 or 3 players going note for note, grace note for grace note, even greater when they do it naturally because they grew up with the same influences... but there is a charm to a looser effect sometimes.

Sometimes session players - and I've done this myself, so I know - feel pressed to learn a lot of tunes in a hurry, so they can join in, and especially if they know the genre quite well, or have a pretty quick ear and a bit of technique, they join in right away, playing what they think they hear. It's very easy to get a watered down version established then and possibly never realise how watered down it is. In a few cases I still prefer my watered down versions, but more often I look back and realise how wrong I was.

Back to integrity - it's a mixture of respect for the tune, and possibly the tradition (although that's another indefinable) and your listeners, but mainly self respect. Don't play that Fnatural if you really don't like it, leave that roll out if you don't think it sounds right. Listen to the players you think sound best - let them be your influence - judge yourself by your own high standards or don't bother.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:32 PM | Get permalink

The looting of the Iraqi National Museum, one year later.

In the early days of the occupation of Baghdad, the Iraqi National Museum was left unguarded by US authorities (unlike the Oil Ministry, for example). As a result, thousands of the museum's treasures from the earliest days of civilization in the Mideast were looted, and the US was deservedly the subject of international condemnation for its negligent attitude toward protecting cultural sites and artifacts. [For how the looting was reported at the time, see this Magpie post from 11 April 2003, and numerous others in the two weeks thereafter. Also see this 10 April post about warnings that looting was likely.]

In the first days after the looting, it was feared that as many ast 170,000 objects may have disappeared. However, that figure was soon revised downward as it became apparent that the museum staff had prudently stored away many museum objects before the war began.

Nonetheless, the losses to the museum (and to the world's cultural heritage) were substantial, as this article in the University of Chicago Chronicle explains:

As the year developed after the looting, reports both highlighted the damage and confused the issue. Some news outlets began to speak of "only 40" objects being taken from the museum.

Those reports, said [University of Chicago Oriental Institute research associate Clemens] Reichel, "only referred to objects on display in the gallery but omitted any reference to objects stolen from the storerooms and magazines of the museum. The losses encountered there were sizeable, though even now it remains difficult to put an exact figure on it."

The destruction of the archives that recorded information about the museum holdings complicated the job of totaling the loss. "By fall 2003, the figures quoted by Donny George, director of the Iraq Museum, and Col. Matthew Bogdanos, (U.S. Marine Corps) who led a U.S. team investigating the museum looting last year, put the number of objects stolen at over 10,000. This figure, however, has recently been revised by George to about 15,000 pieces, indicating this tally is far from final at this point," Reichel said.

The truly sad part of the article is that, despite the losses at the National Museum, the US-led 'coalition' has not done enough to protect the thousands of ancient sites in Iraq, and losses of irreplaceable artifacts continue almost unabated:

In terms of archaeological losses, the looting of the museum may well be dwarfed by the continual destruction of archaeological sites all over Iraq by looters. This looting has touched upon well-known sites such as Nippur, home of an archaeological expedition of the Oriental Institute, Umma, Lagash, and Isin, but many more unexcavated sites are destroyed by the unsystematic onslaught of pick axes used by the looters throughout the country.

The loss in archaeological data is impossible to quantify but clearly has reached disastrous dimensions. Although coalition forces have taken measures to protect some of the key sites in Iraq, archaeologists contend those measures have been inadequate.

Via MetaFilter.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:21 PM | Get permalink

In praise of borders.

That's the title of a short essay by Stephen Henighan in the current issue of Geist, this magpie's favorite Canadian magazine. While we're not sure were as enamored of the idea of international borders as Henighan is, we sure liked this part of the essay:

In August 2001 I used the last day of my Eurail Pass to board a train that crossed "borderless" western Europe from Amsterdam to central Switzerland. South of Frankfurt, the castles of the Rhine paraded past. At the Swiss border the train left the European Union without an immigration inspection. We passed through Basel and Zurich and rode along the edge of the Zürichsee, where swimmers frolicked in the water at fenced-in resorts. The mountains seemed to bleed greenness until, at the end of the lake, they grew taller, stretching into huge fractured- looking boulders. At 7:00 in the evening, the train reached the end of the line at Chur, in international jet-set country: local trains departed for expensive resorts like Davos and St. Moritz.

I had stepped out of my price bracket. Hotel rooms in Chur started at around $225 a night; I could find no pensions or bed-and-breakfasts. In search of a place to sleep, I returned to the station and hopped the next train back to Zurich and Basel. Night was falling. The waters of the lake, containing fewer swimmers now, had absorbed the greenness of the mountains. The train emptied in Basel at 10:00 p.m. Basel’s hotels, too, proved to be beyond my battered budget. Even the sleazy place over the strip joint cost $150 a night. I returned to the train station, approached three young backpackers and asked them where they spent the night.

"Across the border," they said.

Basel (Bâle, in French) lay at the junction of Switzerland, France and Germany. The train station straddled the border between Switzerland and France. By moving to the French end of the station, travellers left regimented Switzerland for a more expressive culture that accepted sleeping in train stations. As I watched, American and Asian backpackers showered in immaculate Swiss bathrooms, deposited their packs in vault-like Swiss lockers, then walked along the platform, displayed their passports to the official seated beneath the blue sign that said "France," and disappeared through the double doors of the border to bed down on the benches of the French end of the station.

And while you're visiting Geist, make sure to stop by the Fairytale Map of Canada.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, April 21, 2004

What a difference being across the border makes.

We doubt that a US wire service would have started a story about the official responses to the new Bob Woodward book the way the Toronto Star did here:

New book sparks litany of White House denials

WASHINGTON (CP) — It seems like there haven't been this many denials in the country's capital since Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.

We love it.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:23 PM | Get permalink

We wish all US senators were this blunt.

From a speech given earlier today by US Sen. Robert Byrd (D-West Virginia):

The fact is, while espousing hard-line rhetoric and iron-clad resolve, this Administration has ducked and bobbed and weaved at every opportunity. In the Administration's ever-shifting explanation for the war in Iraq, the face of our enemy has ricocheted over the past 12 months from Saddam Hussein and his Republican Guard to disgruntled Baathist dead-enders to foreign terrorists taking advantage of the unrest in Iraq to pursue their agenda of jihad to today's vague assortment of thugs and fanatics opposed to democracy for Iraq.

We hear the refrain: Stay the course. Stay the course. Exactly what course is it we are supposed to be staying in Iraq? The President failed to explain that to the American people at his press conference. How did we get from protecting the United States from the threat of weapons of mass destruction to the vague notion of fighting extremists opposed to democracy in Iraq? The President failed to explain that fact as well. Where were those extremists before the invasion? Why is it that they are emerging in force only now, a full year after the fall of Baghdad. Could it be that this Administration has created America's own worst nightmare because of its colossal arrogance, clumsy mistakes, and painful misjudgments on virtually every aspect of the war in Iraq?

These are not the questions of an unpatriotic or reckless opposition. These are not questions intended to demoralize America or hearten our enemies. Rather, these are the questions that a free and open society — the kind of democratic society we envision for Iraq — is expected to pose of its leaders. And these are the kind of questions that a democratic nation's leader is beholden to answer. Dogmatic admonitions and grandiose allusions will not suffice. In a democratic society, the people demand and deserve the simple and unvarnished truth.

Make sure to read the whole speech.

Via Common Dreams.

| | Posted by Magpie at 8:35 PM | Get permalink

How high is high?

About 130 meters (426.5 ft), if you're a coastal redwood in California, say scientists. A team led by George Koch of Northern Arizona University scaled the tallest trees in California's Humbouldt Redwoods State Park. Once at the top, the found that conditions at the top of redwoods put an upper limit on the height these trees can grow.

They discovered that despite the moistness of the ground far below, the leaves at the treetops struggle to get enough water, so they are effectively living in constant drought. The difficulty of getting water so far up into the sky is what ultimately constrains growth, suspects Koch's team.

For California redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens), the tug of gravity and the friction between the water and the vessels through which it flows mean that fluid cannot be dragged any higher than 122-130 metres...

Given the clement climate and nourishing soils of northern California, this may well represent the greatest possible height for any tree in the world. But even the record-breaking trees of Humboldt may not reach the calculated maximum, says Koch. "We are not saying they will grow that tall; we are saying they can," he explains.

The researchers think that their findings may apply to other tall trees, such as the giant eucalyptus (E. regnans) of Australia. (We posted here about the efforts in Tasmania to prevent the logging of some of the largest of these trees.)

Via Nature Science Update.

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:09 PM | Get permalink

That wretched liberal media.

Ted Rall fills us in on all those deaths in Iraq that the US media won't tell us about.

'Evil liberal media at work

Via Mikhaela.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:08 AM | Get permalink

Tuesday, April 20, 2004

The leaked memo about Iraq.

Today saw the publication in dozens of US alternative newspapers of an article by Jason Vest, in which he revealed the contents of a secret memo on the current situation in Iraq, leaked by someone in the Coalition Provisional Authority. Rather than try to summarize the article here, we'd suggest you read the whole article.

Then if you want to read the entire memo, the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies has posted the full text here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:45 PM | Get permalink

Can you say 'nepotism'?

Guess whose brother will be heading the new Iraqi tribunal that will try Saddam Hussein?

"Lawyer Salem Chalabi was named president of the court," said Entifadh Qanbar, spokesman for the Iraqi National Congress (INC).

Mr Chalabi is a US-educated lawyer and nephew of the head of the INC, Ahmed Chalabi.

You remember Ahmed Chalabi, don't you? He's the guy who has to stay out of Jordan because of a conviction for his role in a banking scandal. And who funneled all that bad intelligence to the US before the war? And the guy to whom the US seems to want to hand over Iraq as a reward for all of his services.

What a huge surprise that an organization headed by the elder Chalabi would name one of the kids to run the tribunal. (And why is the Iraqi National Congress — which is merely one of many political groupings in Iraq — in charge of the tribunal anyway?)

We're not even going to say anything about the possibility that Saddam Hussein could go on trial during the final days before the November elections in the US.

Via BBC.

More: At Talking Points Memo, Josh Reynolds has a bit more. Yeah, it's really cronyism and not nepotism. But what's a little favoritism among friends, eh?

Salem, you'll remember, earlier went into the war contracting and lobbying business with the law partner of Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith, a prime architect of the war, and the Pentagon official in charge of the contracting process.

| | Posted by Magpie at 4:45 PM | Get permalink

Oregon same-sex marriages are legal, says judge.

A judge has ordered Multnomah County to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples until the Oregon legislature has a chance to pass a new marriage law. However, Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Frank Bearden also ordered the state of Oregon to certify the marriage licenses already issued by the county, ending at least temporarily the legal limbo of 3000 recently married lesbian and gay couples.

Bearden's ruling also requires the Oregon legislature to enact a new marriage or civil union law within 90 days from the beginning of its next session. If that deadline isn't met, the order halting same-sex marriages in Multnomah County expires, and the county can resume marrying lesbian and gay couples. Since the next legislative session is expected to start at the beginning of June, Oregon's drop-dead deadline for same-sex marriage will be some time around the end of August.

The decision by Multnomah County Circuit Judge Frank Bearden marked the first time in the nation that a judge has recognized gay marriage. An immediate appeal of the ruling was expected.

"These are the first legally recognized gay marriages in the country," said Dave Fidanque, the ACLU executive director in Oregon. "In no other same-sex marriages that have taken place has there been a court order saying the state must recognize them. That's what's truly historic about this opinion."

Via AP.

More: The ACLU of Oregon has posted the text of Bearden's decision here.

[Post revised to reflect correct end of 90-day period.]

| | Posted by Magpie at 4:09 PM | Get permalink

Monday, April 19, 2004

Working for Dubya means never having to say you're sorry.

Last week, we told you how this sentence promoting Dubya's tax policies mysteriously migrated from a GOP campaign document to the bottom of IRS press releases:

America has a choice: It can continue to grow the economy and create new jobs as the president's policies are doing, or it can raise taxes on American families and small businesses, hurting economic recovery and future job creation.

A reasonable person might think that, once the IRS was caught using US taxpayers' dollars to promote Dubya's candidacy, the agency would apologize. Or just quietly eliminate the sentence in question. But in Dubya's administration, apologies are for wimps. According to the NY Times, the IRS says it's just fine for a federal agency to be campaigning for the prez:

"Stating our position is appropriate," said Rob Nichols, a spokesman for the Treasury Department, which oversees the I.R.S. "The administration's views on fiscal policy are that lower taxes have helped strengthen the economy and led to an environment of increased job creation."

No further comment needed.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:28 PM | Get permalink

Pentagon confirms that pre-9/11 miltary drills used airplanes as weapons.

According to a report in USA Today, before 9/11, the US military thought it possible that airplanes could be used as terror weapons, and considered the threat serious enough to consider running training exercises that dealt with such attacks. This news comes against the background of repeated denials by Dubya and Condoleezza Rice that nobody ever imagined such a thing could happen. Just this past Tuesday, in fact, the prez said at his press conference that 'Nobody in our government, at least, and I don't think the prior government, could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale.'

But as we posted here last Tuesday, an email message obtained by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), members of the U.S. military responsible for defending America's airspace expressed concern that a terrorist group would 'hijack a commercial airline [sic] (foreign carrier) and fly it into the Pentagon.' However, Pentagon officials told the NY Times that such a scenario had been rejected as 'unrealistic.'

Like a lot of verbiage coming from Washington, it seems that last week's Pentagon statement was true only so far as it went. Today, USA Today reports that in the two years before 9/11, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) held exercises simulating 'hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties.'

One of the imagined targets was the World Trade Center. In another exercise, jets performed a mock shootdown over the Atlantic Ocean of a jet supposedly laden with chemical poisons headed toward a target in the United States. In a third scenario, the target was the Pentagon — but that drill was not run after Defense officials said it was unrealistic, NORAD and Defense officials say.

NORAD, in a written statement, confirmed that such hijacking exercises occurred. It said the scenarios outlined were regional drills, not regularly scheduled continent-wide exercises.

"Numerous types of civilian and military aircraft were used as mock hijacked aircraft," the statement said. "These exercises tested track detection and identification; scramble and interception; hijack procedures; internal and external agency coordination and operational security and communications security procedures."

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:48 PM | Get permalink

Sunday, April 18, 2004

NY Times sows linguistic confusion.

While casting about for blog material this morning, we noticed the following headling on this NY Times story:

Rice Refutes New Book on Date That Bush Decided to Go to War

As you might guess, the story centered on Condoleezza Rice's claim that the new Bob Woodward book incorrectly puts Dubya's decision to invade Iraq in January 2003 (while Dubya was publicly trying to 'avoid' war), when the decision actually came in March 2003 (right before the war actualy began).

While we're sure that Rice's assertion will prove to be as false as her testimony at the 9/11 commission, what really disturbed us was the misuse of the word 'refute' in the Times headline. But since this kind of misused grammar is par for the course in US media, we just quietly gritted our teeth.

Unlike this magpie, however, Julia at Sisyphus Shrugged was not one to let the Times off the hook, and she put this headline on her post about Rice's comments:

a helpful note to our friends at the Times: rebut and refute are not synonyms

Julia is absolutely right, of course.

While both of our US dictionaries (American Heritage and Merriam-Webster) allow the use of 'rebut' and 'refute' as synomyms, this is a secondary usage. The main definitions are different:

• To rebut someone is to contradict them or to say that their argument is false.

• To refute someone, however, is to prove their agrument false.

While Condoleezza Rice definitely rebutted Bob Woodward's claim about the date for Dubya's decision to go to war, there is no documentation for her rebuttal other than her own say-so. Without records or impartial corroborating testimony, Rice has not refuted Woodward.

The NY Times editor who gave the nod to the story's headline should have been aware of the different meanings of the two words. And, we suggest, they should have chosen rebut. By using refute in the headline, the Times not only mangled the English language, but gave readers who only looked at the headline the false impression that Rice had proven Woodward's book wrong.

End of lesson.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:04 PM | Get permalink

And while we're talking about when Dubya decided to go to war.

Mary at the Left Coaster does an excellent job of rebutting Condoleezza Rice's claims about the decision date.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:03 PM | Get permalink

Bringing the (Spanish) troops home.

Spain has decided to drop out of Dubya's 'Coaliton of the Willing.' Sooner than expected, in fact.

Socialist prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has ordered Spain's 1300 troops in Iraq to be brought home in 'as short a time as possible.' Zapatero had said he'd hold off withdrawing Spanish troops in hopes that the UN would be assuming responsibilty for Iraq after June 30th, but recent events have obviously changed his mind.

"With the information we have, and which we have gathered over the past few weeks, it is not foreseeable that the United Nations will adopt a resolution" that satisfies Spain's terms, Mr Zapatero said.

The US is, of course not pleased, and is accusing the Spanish government of caving in to terrorism.

Via BBC.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 PM | Get permalink

The UK is not optimistic about Iraq.

The Telegraph reports that the UK military is worried about an uprising in Basra — especially if US forces enter Najaf. The paper reports that 'senior military officials' are also worried about some 'spectacular' action by Iraqi insurgents as the June 30th date for ending the 'official' occupation approaches.

[The] commander of British troops in southern Iraq, Brig Nick Carter, admitted that he would be powerless to prevent the overthrow of Coalition forces if the Shia majority in Basra rose up in rebellion. Brig Carter, of the 20 Armoured Brigade, who has been in Iraq for four months, said British forces would stay in Basra with the consent of local Shia leaders, or not at all.

Last month, 14 British soldiers were injured in Basra, at least three seriously, when they came under attack from demonstrators armed with petrol bombs, rocks and a grenade.

"A crowd of 150,000 people at the gates of this barracks would be the end of this, as far as I'm concerned," Brig Carter said. "There would be absolutely nothing I could do about that." [...]

British officers in Basra are also worried about the stand-off at the twin holy cities of Najaf and Kufa, where the fiery Islamic cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, has taken refuge from 2,500 American troops determined either to capture or kill him. "If the Americans go into Najaf, there will be 300 Fallujahs," said one officer. [...]

During an interview in Basra last week Brig Carter acknowledged that the Coalition's presence in southern Iraq was entirely dependent on the goodwill of the local Shia Muslim leader, Sayid Ali al-Safi al-Musawi. He represents Ayatollah Sistani, Iraq's leading Shia cleric. "The moment that Sayid Ali says, 'We don't want the Coalition here', we might as well go home," Brig Carter said.

Reports in the Telegraph have to be taken with a grain of salt. The paper has distinguished itself for reporting stories about Iraq that later turn out to be flawed or altogether untrue. However, the fact that the Telegraph is reporting such bad news from Iraq could in this case indicate that the situation might be even worse than the paper is reporting.

Via Juan Cole/Informed Comment.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:54 AM | Get permalink