Magpie

Saturday, March 25

No, this isn't an anti-war march.

It's more than ~~100,000~~ 500,000 people marching in Los Angeles today to oppose GOP-backed changes to US immigration law.

More than 500,000 people in the streets of LA

More than 500,000 people in the streets of LA

Taking to the streets, sending a message to Washington.
[Photo: Bob Chamberlin/LA Times]

Tens of thousands of immigrant rights advocates from across Southern California jammed downtown to march Saturday in protest of federal legislation that would build more walls along the U.S.-Mexico border and make helping illegal immigrants a crime.

Protesters, many with their families and wearing white shirts symbolizing peace, came from as far away as Riverside County for a mass rally. They thronged the steps of City Hall, perched in trees and sat atop bus kiosks, chanting "Mexico!""U.S.A.!" and "Si se puede," an old Mexican-American civil rights shout that means "Yes, we can."

The crowd was estimated at 100,000 and growing at noon, police Sgt. Lee Sands said. There were no arrests or injuries....

It was the largest of a series of school walkouts and work stoppages that were held Friday and Saturday around the country. They are expected to culminate in a "National Day of Action" April 10 organized by labor, immigration, civil rights and religious groups.

The US House of Representatives has already approved HR 4437, which would make it felony to be in the US illegally and impose tougher penalties on employers who hire undocumented workers. The Senate will start its debate on its version of the House bill this coming week.

TalkLeft has more background on the proposed immigration law here.

Via AP.

More: The LA Times has extensive coverage of today's march and rally here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 4:29 PM | Get permalink

Are you a terrorist suspect?

You might be, and you'd never know it.

Over at the other roost, this mapgie's blogmate Mary has an excellent post on the TALON database run by the US Defense Department. Under the guise of protecting the country from terrorism, the database is accumulating information — much of it wrong — about thousands of American. Or maybe hundreds of thousands. Or millions. Since the program is secret, no one really knows.

Once of the things I found scariest is how easy it is to get your name into the database:

The Pentagon also now has a toll-free number for citizens to report suspicious activity directly to the military. The number of the hotline is 1-800-CALL-SPY:

You have reached the U.S. Army Call Spy hotline. You may remain anonymous. Please leave a detailed message of the incident you wish to report. Your call is important. If you wish to be contacted, please leave your name and telephone number. If this is an emergency, please contact your local office of the F.B.I. Thank you.

Yes, I called the number and it's for real. And no, I didn't give them your name. But I did have to wait for three rings before the hotline answered, which was more than long enough for the feds to know which phone number I was calling from.

Go over and read all of Mary's TALON post, and then go visit the website for PBS' NOW program, where you'll find much more info about TALON here.

The ACLU has more details on how the government is spying on US residents here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:59 PM | Get permalink

Sometimes people are out ot get you.

And sometimes you're just ~~paranoid~~ nuts.

Former Reagan-era Pentagon official Kathleen "KT" McFarland stunned a crowd of Suffolk County Republicans on Thursday by saying:

"Hillary Clinton is really worried about me, and is so worried, in fact, that she had helicopters flying over my house in Southampton today taking pictures," according to a prominent GOP activist who was at the event.

"She wasn't joking, she was very, very serious, and she also claimed that Clinton's people were taking pictures across the street from her house in Manhattan, taking pictures from an apartment across the street from her bedroom," added the eyewitness, who is not involved in the Senate race.

Via NY Post.

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:01 PM | Get permalink

Buck Owens, 1929 – 2006.

Buck Owens [left] and the Buckaroos.

I always had a lot of driving-type music in my bones.
I always loved music that had lots of beat.
I always wanted to sound like a locomotive comin' right through the front room.
— Buck Owens, 1992

Legendary country singer and musician Buck Owens died in his sleep early today at his home in Bakersfield, California. He was 78.

Although these days he is mainly remembered for his work as a cast member of the long-running country music TV show Hee Haw during the 1970s and early 1980s, Buck Owens was country music's biggest star in the 1960s. He had twenty #1 records on the US country charts, including 'Together Again,' 'Waitin' in Your Welfare Line,' and 'Act Naturally' — the last of which brought Owens to a wider audience when it was recorded by the Beatles. With his band the Buckaroos [which included guitarist and collaborator Don Rich], Owens crafted a rhythmic, hard-driving sound that audiences and radio listeners found irresistable. He was responsible for giving young ex-convict Merle Haggard his first big break [Haggard played in Owens' band briefly] and had a major influence on the sound of a generation of younger country musicians, notably Dwight Yoakam and BR5-49.

Owens was a product his Dust Bowl-era upbringing in California, and never fit in well with the Nashville style that came to dominate country music by 1960. Robert Price of the Bakersfield Californian fills in some details:

Elvis Presley changed the world in 1956, but by that time Owens, along with bandmates like Bill Woods, Henry Sharp, Oscar Whittington and Sanders, had been playing a loud, driving, danceable version of country music for a half-decade.

Poster for Owens show at San Francisco's Fillmore West, 1968. [Artist unknown]
So it shouldn't have been a shock to Nashville or anyone else when, starting in 1965, Owens and his Buckaroos started cranking out rock and rock-pop songs such as "Memphis," "Johnny B. Goode," and even Simon & Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water."

Owens brought in a rock drummer for 1964's "My Heart Skips a Beat," and a fan wrote to tell him he was going to stop buying Buckaroos records unless Owens starting cutting back on the beat. Buck used a fuzz-tone guitar-distortion device, popular among rock bands of the era, for 1968's "Who's Gonna Mow Your Grass," and in the process started a similar revolt.

"People would get upset if it wasn't what they thought country was," Owens said. "And there's no latitude for deciding that. I've had different influences from time to time in my life, and I'm almost 70 years old, but as I look back, my biggest influences might have been (western swing fiddler) Bob Wills and Little Richard. What do you make of that combination? But that's where I was coming from."

When Owens' success came, it came fast and furious, like a Tulare dust storm. Starting in 1963, the No. 1 songs started piling up like junk mail after a two-week vacation. (Owens had 19 consecutive No. 1 hits from 1963 to 1967 alone.) He was making three albums a year and appearing on TV with Dick Clark or Ed Sullivan every other month, it seemed. As a result, Owens had increasing carte blanche with his style and song selection.

"Each time I would release one of those things, the label would shudder: ?Oh my God, all these weird things he's doin' ... Why don't he just do what he does?' But doin' what you do makes you stagnant. ... I was always afraid, but never afraid enough not to try it."

His confidence peaked in 1967 when he released "Johnny B. Goode" as a single. It went to the top of the country charts, but Owens won some enemies in the process.

"Man, there were guys burning me in effigy," Owens said. "Guy from a radio station, WPLO in Atlanta, sent me pictures of a bonfire - this is the truth - with the explanation, ?This is a bonfire we held last week, and we burned every Buck Owens record in the radio station.' They were really upset with me.

"But how could they say that song wasn't country? ?Way down in Louisiana, down by New Orleans ...' Go on, listen to his lyrics. If that ain't country, tell me what that is. My opinion was, and always has been, if Chuck Berry had been a white man, he'd-a been a country singer."

But the country music establishment wasn't ruffled merely because of Owens' electrified twang, or his tendency to push at the boundaries of the genre. It was the way he went at things in general, building his own mini-empire in California instead of buying a Nashville mansion like everyone else who was anybody.

"My problem with Nashville was simple," Owens said. "I don't like the way they do talent, and I don't like the way they cut records. ... I tried to record there two or three times and I never had any luck at it because I never had my band. I had a band that was good enough to make records, so I used 'em. The people in Nashville always wanted to pick the musicians themselves."

Owen's most productive period came to a halt in 1974, when Buckaroos guitarist [and Owen's arranging and songwriting collaborator] Don Rich was killed in a motorcycle accident. Without Rich at his side, Owens lost direction and enthusiasm, and his string of hit records came to a screaming halt. Although he continued on as cast member for Hee Haw until the mid-1980s, Owens' creative period had effectively ended — at least for the moment — and he was without a record contract after 1980.

Owens was persuaded to come out of retirement by Dwight Yoakam in the late 1980s, and their duet recording of 'The Streets of Bakersfield' was a #1 country record in 1988. Owens had another, smaller hit the next year when he dueted with Ringo Starr on a new version of 'Act Naturally.'

Owens recorded two final albums in the 1990s, one of which — Hot Dog — has moments which [in this magpie's opinion] can stand up next to the classic material from the 1960s.

The AP obituary for Owens can be found here. A much more extensive obit is here at the Bakersfield Californian. [Registration req'd, but you can get a password from BugMeNot here.]

Buck Owens honky-tonkin'

Buck Owens [left], Oscar Whittington, and Bill Woods performing
at Bakersfield's Blackboard Nightclub sometime in the 1950s. [Photographer unknown]

Salon ran an excellent profile of Buck Owens in 1999, which you can find here. A 1997 profile [with some cool photos] is here. Good short bios of Owens can be found at here at the Country Music Hall of Fame and here at CMT.

The homepage for Owen's Crystal Palace nightclub in Bakersfield is here, including several recent videos of Owens performing here. You can watch an excerpt [on a teeny tiny screen] from a 1966 performance on Buck Owens Ranch Show if you go here.

If you were only going to have one Buck Owens album in your collecton, the obvious choice is Rhino's Buck Owens Collection, a 3-disc set that covers his career from 1959 to 1990. But I'm partial to Buck Owens and the Buckaroos Live at Carnegie Hall, recorded in 1966 when Owens and his band were at the top of their form and fianlly made available in 1989 by the Country Music Foundation.

MusicMatch Guide has an excellent annotated discography (just click on any album title) here. There's another version of the essentially the same info [but organized more attractively] over here.

You can listen to audio samples of many Buck Owens hits here at Amazon.

For more on the 'Bakersfield Sound' — of which Owens was its foremost example — I highly recommend browsing the treasure trove of articles and photos here and at the Bakersfield Californian's Bakersfield Sound website here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:33 AM | Get permalink

About that good news from Iraq ...

The other day, we posted about what happens when you try to find good news in Iraq. Over at the Booman Tribune, Stephen D has another take on the same subject. Just go read it, paying special attention to what he says at the end of the post.

Via WB42 5:30 Report With Doug Krile.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:35 AM | Get permalink

What could possibly go wrong?

This magpie's favorite cartoon in the current New Yorker:

Nothing could possibly happen

[Cartoon: Tom Cheney]

Prints and t-shirts of the cartoon are available here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:18 AM | Get permalink

Keeping score in Iraq.

At Asia Times, Syrian political analyst Sami Moubayed appraises the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq on its third anniversary. Among his conclusions are that the main beneficiaries of the occupation were not the ones that Dubya administration and Pentagon bigwigs had planned on back in 2002 and 2003:

The first and ultimate victor is the Islamic Republic of Iran. What more could Iran want than the downfall of a dictator against whom it had fought for eight years in the 1980s, and his replacement with Shi'ite politicians who had been created by and in Iran in the 1980s?

The mullahs of Iran once viewed Iraq as a dangerous and aggressive neighboring country, ruled by a hostile and brutal dictatorship. Today, Iraq is viewed as a friendly neighbor, ruled by loyal allies who want to advance Shi'ite nationalism, export the Islamic revolution and strengthen Iranian-Iraqi relations....

The second victor is Iraqi Shi'ites, who have been transformed from a suppressed majority into a power group that controls key posts in the government and military, as well as the powerful job of prime minister....

Third on the victory list — much to the surprise of the Americans — are some of the Arab regimes that neighbor Iraq. These countries were expected to collapse, according to the domino theory, once the Iraqi Ba'athists were toppled and replaced by a true democracy. Had democracy been successful in Iraq, then these regimes would have faced the wrath of their own people, who would have aspired to create similar democracies in their own countries.

But Iraq today is an ultimate failure, giving ammunition to Arab regimes that are telling activists in their own countries: "Look at what the Americans achieved in Iraq. Is this the democracy you want? It is a democracy where 30,000 people have been killed, by war and sectarian violence."

You'll undoubtedly disagree with some of Moubayed's conclusions about Iraq [I did], but his article makes very interesting reading.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:09 AM | Get permalink

How stupid is this, we ask you?

One of the obvious alternatives to petroleum for powering internal combustion engines is ethanol, which can be produced from all sorts of crops. In Brazil, for example, most of the vehicles in the country run on ethanol. Even in the US, General Motors has been running an extensive TV ad campaign hyping vehicles that use ethanol fuels made from corn.

To run all those vehicles, a lot of corn is going to have to be turned into ethanol in a lot of plants. And, in fact, up to 190 of those plants are under construction or planned for the US alone. There's a problem, though, easily seen at the ethanol plant that opened last year in Iowa: To make wonderful, clean-burning ethanol, the plant burns 300 tons of coal each day. Coal burning produces carbon dioxide [CO₂], which is a potent greenhouse gas. Coal-fired plants also produce sulfur dioxide [SO₂], which causes acid rain, and mercury, which causes neurological damage [especially in infants and children].

If natural gas were used instead of coal, ethanol plants would emit less carbon dioxide, almost no sulfur dioxide, and no mercury at all. But coal was chosen to fuel the Iowa plant anyway and, even worse, most of the ethanol plants in the pipeline will be coal-fired as well.

So, to produce fuel that will help cut greenhouse gases, big industry wants to burn coal, which will produce at least the volume of greenhouse gases that ethanol is supposed to eliminate — and emit sulfur dioxide and mercury as a bonus.

Smart, huh?

Via Christian Science Monitor.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:05 AM | Get permalink

Do you have a brass Republican?

It's a new version of a very old joke, but it still cracked this magpie up to no end.

I'd skip listening to the song, though.

Via MetaFilter.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:03 AM | Get permalink

A gentle reminder.

The US isn't necessarily the most important country in the world. And the countries of Europe aren't such heavyweights, either.

Who lives where

Viewed this way, the US doesn't seem all that big, does it?
[Map: Worldmapper]

The map above shows the relative proportion of the world's population that lives in each country. The more people, the bigger the size. Notice where the countries with the really huge populations are. There's a much larger version of the map here.

I got this map from Worldmapper, which has a number of other interesting thematic maps that you can view. The series on world population since 1500 is especially interesting.

Via MetaFilter.

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

Friday, March 24

It's a system, George.

On March 24, 1976, the Argentine military overthrew the elected government of Isabel Perón, in a coup that was at least tacitly supported by the US. This coup began the seven years of the Argentine 'Dirty War,' during which the right-wing military dictatorship ran a witchhunt against 'radicals', 'communists', 'terrorists', and 'Jews' — literally grabbing people off the streets or out of their homes. Those desaparacidos [disappeared ones] were tortured and, commonly, murdered by their captors. It's estimated that between 10,000 and 30,000 people were killed during the Dirty War, but no one really knows.

Did this man disappear?

Argentine soldiers frisking a civilian
at a checkpoint in Buenos Aires in 1977.
[Archive photo: AFP]

The brutal policies of the dictatorship eventually turned the nation against its military rulers. In a last-ditch effort to keep themselves in power, the generals attacked the Malvinas [Falkland Islands], a UK possession, thinking that a successful war would turn things around politically. They had over-reached, however, and the quick UK victory over the Argentine forces occupying the Malvinas led to the end of the military regime. Since then, successive Argentine governments have grappled with the legacy of the Dirty War, both in terms of trying to find out what really happened during those years and in terms of bringing the perpetrators of the Dirty War to justice.

On the 30th anniversary of Argentina's coup, Chilean writer and critic Ariel Dorfman offers some advice to Dubya regarding his own Dirty War:

For starters, given that Bush obdurately claims that the United States has been called upon by God to spread "democracy" around the globe, he could use a good history lesson and examine how his country propped up the terrorist regime in Argentina. Bush's father, who was the director of the CIA at the time of the coup in 1976, could tell his son a thing or two about the American role in supporting that dictatorship and some other tyrannies all through the twentieth century. More crucial to Bush Junior, however, and more urgent, would be to examine how the Argentine military, in the years since their country returned to democracy, have slowly and painfully dealt with their massive human rights violations.

That torture and exile, those executions and vast maltreatment, has been recognized, first by the army of Argentina in 1995, then by its navy in 2004 and a few days ago by its air force, as horrors for which the institutions themselves need to be held responsible. Not a few "bad apples". Not "excesses". Not a solitary dog trainer who happened to wake up one morning and decide to unleash his pets on cowering prisoners. Not a sergeant who decided one day to hood his wards and waterboard them, apply electricity to their genitals, make an inmate drink his own urine.

The armed forces in Argentina have proclaimed that everything that was done as part of their own "war on terror" was systemic. Systemic.. The decision to torture came from the top. Systemic. The decision to "take the gloves off" (no more Mr Nice Guy, right?) was created and encouraged by the highest authorities, was deemed inevitable by those who wanted to pacify a recalcitrant population, scare them into submission, demand that the soldiers on the ground extract more information, more "intelligence", stop the next "terrorist" attack.

Dorfman goes on from there, and he's stirred up quite a hornet's nest in the comments about his post.

[Dorfman, incidentally, had to flee his home country, Chile, when another US-backed coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. The military regime that replaced Allende was guilty of atrocities like those that would occur later in Argentina, although not on such a large scale.]

Via the UK Guardian's Comment is free blog.

| | Posted by Magpie at 7:04 PM | Get permalink

I Ain't Marching Anymore.

Julia told me to do this. And, like Jeanne, I'm old enough to remember when the song was new.

He wasn't marching then, either.

Phil Ochs singing to the crowd at the Vietnam Day demo in Berkeley in 1965.
[Photo: Ron Enfield]

I Ain't Marching Anymore [Words/music by Phil Ochs]

Oh I marched to the battle of New Orleans
At the end of the early British war
The young land started growing
The young blood started flowing
But I ain't marchin' anymore

For I've killed my share of Indians
In a thousand different fights
I was there at the Little Big Horn
I heard many men lying
I saw many more dying
But I ain't marchin' anymore

It's always the old to lead us to the war
It's always the young to fall
Now look at all we've won with the sabre and the gun
Tell me is it worth it all

For I stole California from the Mexican land
Fought in the bloody Civil War
Yes I even killed my brother
And so many others
And I ain't marchin' anymore

For I marched to the battles of the German trench
In a war that was bound to end all wars
Oh I must have killed a million men
And now they want me back again
But I ain't marchin' anymore

(chorus)

For I flew the final mission in the Japanese sky
Set off the mighty mushroom roar
When I saw the cities burning
I knew that I was learning
That I ain't marchin' anymore

Now the labor leader's screamin' when they close the missile plants,
United Fruit screams at the Cuban shore,
Call it "Peace" or call it "Treason,"
Call it "Love" or call it "Reason,"
But I ain't marchin' any more.

I heard Phil Ochs sing this song at the rally after an anti-Vietnam War march in LA in [I think] 1973. I can still hear him.

| | Posted by Magpie at 4:56 PM | Get permalink

Dubya to Congress: Drop dead.

After all the wrangling over the renewal of the Patriot Act, and all the assurances that the GOP-crafted 'compromise' would ensure that Congress keeps tabs on how the FBI and Justice Department use the act's surveillance provisions, Dubya says that he'll just ignore those oversight requirements.

[After] the reporters and guests had left [the Mar 9 signing ceremony], the White House quietly issued a "signing statement," an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law.

In the statement, Bush said that he did not consider himself bound to tell Congress how the Patriot Act powers were being used and that, despite the law's requirements, he could withhold the information if he decided that disclosure would "impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive's constitutional duties."

Bush wrote: "The executive branch shall construe the provisions ... that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch ... in a manner consistent with the president's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information ... "

Basically, the prez is once again telling Congress that it's irrelevant, that he'll do exactly what he wants no matter what laws are passed. And once again, sadly, the GOP-controlled Congress will roll over and play dead.

This magpie suspects we're all going to need to familiarize ourselves with the words 'authoritarian government.'

You can read the full text of Dubya's signing statement and of the parts of the Patriot Act that he claims he has the right to ignore if you go here.

Via Boston Globe and Free Government Information.

| | Posted by Magpie at 4:11 PM | Get permalink

The slow death of US newspapers.

Our favorite Texan, Molly Ivins, says that a good part of what's killing newspapers is self-inflicted.

That Molly

We haven't posted a photo of Molly Ivins in a long time. Here's a nice one.
[Photographer unknown]

So we're looking at a steady decline over a long period, and many of the geniuses who run our business believe they have a solution. Our product isn't selling as well as it used to, so they think we need to cut the number of reporters, cut the space devoted to the news and cut the amount of money used to gather the news, and this will solve the problem. For some reason, they assume people will want to buy more newspapers if they have less news in them and are less useful to people. I'm just amazed the Bush administration hasn't named the whole darn bunch of them to run FEMA yet.

What cutting costs does, of course, is increase the profits, thus making Wall Street happy. It also kills newspapers.

Aside from my own sentimental attachment to newspapers, I have no objection to all of us shifting over to the Internet and doing the same thing there. You'd still have the two big problems, however: A) How do you know if it's true? And, B) how do you put a lot of information into a package that's useful to people? If newspapers were just another buggy-whip industry, none of this would be of much note -- another disappearing artifact, like the church key. But while Wall Street doesn't care, nor do many of the people who own and run newspapers, newspapers do, in fact, matter beyond producing profit -- they have a critical role in democracy. It's called a well-informed citizenry.

We are in trouble.

Ivins has a lot more to say on the subject. And, given the effects that the recent sale of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain is going to have on the news available to those of us in the US, we strongly suggest reading the whole thing.

Via AlterNet.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:44 PM | Get permalink

Another myth debunked!

Despite what your teachers and parents may have told you, High Times is not a 'gateway magazine' and will not lead you to the 'harder stuff'.

Researchers tracked the daily reading habits of 120 occasional and regular High Times readers and found that by the end of the eight-month study, none of the subjects had any interest in reading National Book Award finalists, historical nonfiction, or political biographies.

"Our study subjects were in no apparent danger of a literary overdose," said Kunkel.

Via The Onion [who else?].

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:06 PM | Get permalink

Falling apart.

Southern Greenland during mid-winter, looking toward the pole from the US space shuttle. The only difference you'd notice during the summer is that ice and snow cover would disappear from very narrow bands in some coastal areas. [Photo: NASA].

That's what's happening to Greenland's ice sheet, which is being rocked by 'glacial earthquakes' as meltwater seeps to the bottom of the ice and speeds the progress of glaciers to the sea. What this new finding means is that Greenland's ice sheet will disappear faster than scientists had expected.

The 'glacial earthquakes' were discovered by a scientific team led by Harvard University seismologist Göran Ekström. According to Ekström, these earthquakes differ from 'regular' quakes in that they are caused by slips within the ice sheet, rather than along an earthquake fault. Glacial quakes can be quite large — a slip of just 10 meters by an ice slab the size of Manhattan can generate a magnitude 5 quake.

Ekström's team found that the number of glacial quakes has been increasing. Between 1993 and 2002, there were between six and fifteen per year prior to 2003. However, the number has increased to the point that 32 glacial quakes were detected during the first 10 months of 2005 alone.

The new findings show that temperature increases can affect Greenland's ice sheet far more reapidly than han had been believed:

Models that treated glaciers like giant ice cubes had predicted very slow melting. But recent studies of Greenland glaciers have shown much faster effects when meltwater causes glaciers to slip easily over rock.

"Within a few years after temperature warms, you get a big increase in discharge," says Ian Joughin of the polar science center at the University of Washington in Seattle, US. "If temperature rises two or three degrees in Greenland, things are going to start falling apart," Joughin told New Scientist. Antarctica is not as sensitive to rising air temperature because it is too cold for surface melting, which accounts for about half the mass lost from the Greenland ice sheet. [Emphasis added]

Via New Scientist.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:04 AM | Get permalink

We're here, we're queer, and the death squads are killing us.

Acting on a fatwa issued last fall by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, death squads from the Badr Corps — the military arm of Iraq's largest Shi'a political group — is persecuting and killing gay and lesbian Iraqis. When asked for help or to give sanctuary, US forces are reported to be 'met with indifference and derision.'

Exiled gay and lesbian Iraqis have told journalist Doug Ireland that the Badr Corps is 'is committed to the "sexual cleansing" of Iraq, and they accuse Iran of providing support and advice to the death squads.

Just some of the dead

Left, Ammar, aged 27, was abducted and shot in back of the head in Baghdad by suspected Badr militias in January 2006. Right, Haydar Faiek, aged 40, a transsexual Iraqi, was beaten and burned to death by Badr militias in September 2005.
[Photo: OutRage! London]

Speaking by telephone from London, [Ali Hili of the Abu Nawas Group — an organization of exiled gay Iraqis] said that "there is a very, very serious threat to life for gay people in Iraq today. We are receiving regular reports from our extensive network of contacts with underground gay activists and gay people in Iraq -- intimidation, beatings, kidnappings and murders of gays have become an almost daily occurrence. The Badr Corps was killing gay people even before the Ayatollah's fatwah, but Sistani's murderous homophobic incitement has given a green light to all Shia Muslims to hunt and kill lesbians and gay men."

Hili says,"Badr Corps agents have a network of informers who, among other things, target alleged 'immoral behavior'. They kill gays, unveiled women, prostitutes, people who sell or drink alcohol, and those who listen to western music and wear western fashions.

Those still in Iraq tell a bleak story:

Tahseen is an underground gay activist in Iraq, and a correspondent there for the British Abu Nawas Group. A 31-year-old photography lab technician, Tahseen told me by telephone from Baghdad this weekend that, "Just last week, four gay people we know of were found dead. I am afraid to leave my room and go out in the street because I will be killed. We all live in fear." Tahseen said that men who seem obviously gay "cannot walk in the street. My best friend was recently killed for being gay."

Tahseen confirmed the murderous efficiency of the Badr Corps' Internet entrapment program. "Within one hour after they meet a gay person in an Internet chat room, that person will disappear and be found dead," he said, adding that "since Sistani?s fatwa, the life of a gay person is worth nothing here, and the violence and killings have gotten much, much worse...."

"We desperately need protection!" pleaded Tahseen. "But, when we go to the Americans, they laugh at us and don't do anything. The Americans are the problem!" The Abu Nawas Group's Hili confirmed from London that representations to officials of the U.S. occupation in Baghdad's famous "Green Zone" had been made by underground gay activists, only to be met with disdain and indifference.

Ireland's post has many more details about the current situation for lesbians and gay men in Iraq, and links to other of his reports on LGBT people in Iraq and Iran. What I've presented in this post barely scratches the surface.

You can read Ireland's full story here at his blog, or at here at Gay City News.

How you can help: The Abu Nawas Group desperately needs money for its work to protect and publicize the plight of gay men and lesbians in Iraq. The Abu Nawas Group works closely with the British gay rights group OutRage!, so checks should be made payable to "OutRage!", with a cover note stating that you want the money to go to "Abu Nawas Iraqi LGBT - UK". Mail donations to: OutRage!, PO Box 17816, London SW14 8WT, England, UK.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:23 AM | Get permalink

Justice delayed but justice at last.

It's perhaps the best-known song to come out of Africa in the 20th century, but neither the composer of 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' — Solomon Linda — or his children got any part of the millions of dollars that the song made for others around the world. As we posted last month, however, the years-long legal struggle of the Linda family ended when the current holder of the song's copyright agreed to pay Linda's heirs an undisclosed amount of past royalties, generally beleived to be millions of US dollars.

Better late than never, the NY Times has run a story on the song and the legal dispute, and it fills in some details that this magpie hadn't heard before:

Elizabeth Nsele, one of Linda's daughters. [Photo: Naashon Zalk]

By 1939, a talent scout had ushered Mr. Linda's group, the Original Evening Birds, into a recording studio where they produced a startling hit called "Mbube," Zulu for "The Lion." Elizabeth Nsele, Mr. Linda's youngest surviving daughter, said it had been inspired by her father's childhood as a herder protecting cattle in the untamed hinterlands.

"The lion was going round and round, and the lion was happy," she said. "But my father was not happy. He had been staying there since morning and he was hungry." The lyrics were spartan — just mbube and zimba, which means "stop" — but its chant and harmonies were so entrancing that the song came to define a whole generation of Zulu a cappella singing, a style that became known simply as Mbube. Music scholars say the 78 r.p.m. recording of "Mbube" was probably the first African record to sell 100,000 copies.

From there, it took flight worldwide. In the early 50's, Pete Seeger recorded it with his group, the Weavers. His version differed from the original mainly in his misinterpretation of the word "mbube" (pronounced "EEM-boo-beh"). Mr. Seeger sang it as "wimoweh," and turned it into a folk music staple.

Among the many other versions of the song since then were the 1960's recording by the US group The Tokens and the version used in the Disney animated film, 'The Lion King.'

Solomon Linda died penniless in 1962, having received the equivalent of only 38 US cents for the rights to his song. One of his daughters died five years ago, without seeing the successful end of her family's lawsuits.

You can read earlier Magpie posts about 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' here [June 2003] and here [Feb 2006].

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:18 AM | Get permalink

Katrina plus 7 months.

In what's billed as the first survey of Katrina evacuees taken, the NY Times reports that most evacuees are still without a permanent home, have used up their savings, and think that their life is worse than before the hurricane hit the Gulf coast. The survey of 300 evacuees also found that blacks have suffered 'a heavier economic and social burden' than have whites.

And evacuees believe that the rest of the country doesn't care what happens to them.

The blacks interviewed were more likely to have had their homes destroyed or to have lost a close friend or relative. Although a majority of both blacks and whites left their homes before Hurricane Katrina hit, blacks were more likely to have been separated from family members.

And while a majority of whites and blacks reported that they had depleted their savings since the storm, blacks were more likely to have done so, and more likely to have been forced to borrow money. Whites were more likely to have kept their jobs or found similar or better employment, and were also more likely, by a wide margin, to have already returned to the New Orleans area.

A central question for New Orleans has been how much of its population would return, and 4 in 10 of those interviewed said they definitely or probably would. Another fourth were already back.

The situation of evacuees could be substantially worse than what is portrayed in the article. Some of the poorest evacuees were missed by the survey because the Times couldn't find them.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:10 AM | Get permalink

Echidne's modest proposal.

A war on Easter, no less.

Fox News has nothing to talk about, because we have been lax on our recent culture war efforts. I propose a strong offensive against Easter, especially the little yellow chickens. They should not be displayed prominently in the public sphere, not even if it is established that the Founding Fathers loved them. We are adamantly and defiantly opposed to little yellow chickens, and we are ready to spend money and time to fight them. Or anyone who likes them.

Over at Pharyngula, PZ Meyers has heard Echidne's call, and has come up with more ammunition for the fight:

The only good thing about Easter is that it is a fertility festival. I suggest that we emphasize good, conservative, traditionalist values, and insist that it be celebrated properly: everyone gets naked and frolic in the nearest freshly plowed corn field and, ummm, "plows the field" some more.

[When you go off to read Echidne's and Pharyngula's posts, don't forget to read the comments!]

This magpie also stands ready for battle in the war on Easter. After all, how many chances do you get to help make Bill O'Reilly's head explode?

More: Uh-oh. It looks like those nasty homosexuals have enlisted in the war on Easter, too.

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

Acceptance of US lesbians and gay men is on the rise.

And this is going on despite the religious right's continuing anti-gay drumbeat.

According to a new survey from the Pew Research Center, public acceptance of same-sex marriage has increased markedly over the past two years {see table to left]. With the exceptions of the period around when same-sex marriages became legal in Massachusetts, and another during the final months before the 2004 election, these increase continues a trend that has shown up in Pew surveys since the mid-1990s.

Pew also asked questions about lesbian/gay service in the military and adoption by same-sex couples. Similar increases in acceptance have occurred with both of these issues as well, with the public split almost evenly on adoption — and almost two-thirds favoring an end to the ban on lesbians and gay men serving openly in the military.

Of course, the blips upward during 2004 show how volatile public opinion can be when scare tactices are employed by the religious right, but it appears that the long-term trend is away from a continued acceptance of legal discrimination against lesbians and gay men.

Keep your fingers crossed.

Via Feministing.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:04 AM | Get permalink

We've all heard about the Great Firewall of China...

... which keeps Chinese internet surfers from accessing websites and information that the Chinese government finds 'inconvenient' or politically objectionable.

But it turns out that Australia may be getting a Great Firewall of its own, under the guise of protecting children from sex and violence on the web. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, PM John Howard's right-wing government is currently running a test of internet filtering in the state of Tasmania, and 'has not ruled out' mandatory ISP-based filtering for the whole country.

The really sad part of the story is that even Australian Labor Party — the ostensible 'opposition party' — supports filtering.

Via Null Device.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:01 AM | Get permalink

Jeez, I just can't make up my mind.

Luckily, there's someone like South Dakota state senator Bill Napoli to help all us poor gals make those difficult decisions.

Oh dear! Whatever should I do?

[Cartoon © 2006 Stephanie McMillan]

You can see the rest of the cartoon here, at Stephanie McMillan's website.

If Napoli's name isn't familiar to you, he was one of the main backers of the almost-total ban on abortions recently enacted in South Dakota. Our man Napoli is a firm believer in traditional values and in the ability of men to make decisions for their womenfolk, as is evident from the comments that he made to a reporter from PBS' News Hour:

When I was growing up here in the wild west, if a young man got a girl pregnant out of wedlock, they got married, and the whole darned neighborhood was involved in that wedding. I mean, you just didn't allow that sort of thing to happen, you know? I mean, they wanted that child to be brought up in a home with two parents, you know, that whole story. And so I happen to believe that can happen again.

Given Napoli's opinions, you might want to take McMillan's advice and give ol' Bill a phone call. Or two. Or more.

Via Broadsheet.

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

Thursday, March 23

Pop quiz!

Quick! What are those guys eating in the photo below? [I promise that the image has not been manipulated.]

More fat and salt than you can imagine

Heart attack on a stick!
[Photo: Newley Purnell]

It's that Korean favorite, hot dogs covered in french fries, available on the streets of Seoul for US $1. And yes, they are deep-fried. And, swear many, really good.

There's another photo and a bit more information here.

Via Grow-a-Brain.

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:32 PM | Get permalink

Where is all the good news from Iraq?

One of the ways in which Dubya's administration and its right-wing supporters try to undermine the credibility the US media's reporting on Iraq is to claim that there's this huge trove of 'good news' from Iraq, but that the bias of the US media keeps that news from getting reported. Instead, readers and viewers are subjected to a drumbeat of bad news that distorts the 'real' picture.

A good example of this tactic came yesterday, as Dubya gave his performance at another one of those 'town hall' meetings that only the prez's supporters are allowed to attend:

Q [My husband's] job while serving {in Iraq] was as a broadcast journalist. And he has brought back several DVDs full of wonderful footage of reconstruction, of medical things going on. And I ask you this from the bottom of my heart, for a solution to this, because it seems that our major media networks don't want to portray the good. They just want to focus -- (applause) --

THE PRESIDENT: Okay, hold on a second.

Q They just want to focus on another car bomb, or they just want to focus on some more bloodshed, or they just want to focus on how they don't agree with you and what you're doing, when they don't even probably know how you're doing what you're doing anyway. But what can we do to get that footage on CNN, on FOX, to get it on headline news, to get it on the local news? Because you can send it to the news people -- and I'm sorry, I'm rambling -- like I have --

THE PRESIDENT: So was I, though, for an hour. (Laughter.)

Q -- can you use this, and it will just end up in a drawer, because it's good, it portrays the good. And if people could see that, if the American people could see it, there would never be another negative word about this conflict. [Emphasis added]

We could go into all the reasons why the good news is totally swamped by the bad, but Gal Beckerman has already done the job for us. Here's a sample:

We're left with this nagging feeling, however, that the overwhelming reason why we see so much "bad news" coming out of Iraq is that, in spite of a halting start-and-stop sort of progress toward democratic institutions, things are not going well on the ground. (As the New York Times noted last week, both the number of insurgents, the number of foreign terrorists and the daily number of attacks by those groups more than tripled from February, 2004 to February of this year. And during that period, both oil and electricity production in Iraq have dwindled, as has household fuel availability. Which is why Bagdhad is darker than it was two years ago.)

We'll leave you with an example of the kind of story [former Columbia Journalism Review editor Michael] Massing longs for, but be warned: It isn't encouraging. It comes from ABC News and it goes like this: The other day: in search of a "good story," Jake Tapper visited the set of a popular sitcom, "Me and Layla" filming in the streets of Baghdad and starring the "Iraqi Danny Devito." Tapper was going to focus on the head of the entertainment company producing the show, a man named Hamid, in an attempt to highlight those "who are trying to make the Iraqi people laugh." Just as the ABC crew was taping a segment showing the sitcom being filmed, Tapper captured the director running to take an urgent phone call. Hamid, the man who had greenlighted "Me and Layla" and arranged for ABC to do the story, had just been assassinated.

What did Tapper learn?:

"It just goes to show, even when you are trying to do a story about comedy in Iraq, tragedy inevitably intervenes."

Via CJR Daily.

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:47 PM | Get permalink

Civil war or not civil war?

Dubya and the apologists for the ongoing disaster in Iraq keep insisting that, while there may be danger of the country falling into civil war, Iraq isn't there yet. Journalists such as Chris Albritton and Mideast experts like Juan Cole have argued that, not only is there an Iraqi civil war now, but that war has been going on for awhile.

In an article at Salon, Cole tries to settle the civil war argument once and for all. For this magpie, the following source quoted by Cole does the job:

"Sustained military combat, primarily internal, resulting in at least 1,000 battle-deaths per year, pitting central government forces against an insurgent force capable of effective resistance, determined by the latter's ability to inflict upon the government forces at least 5 percent of the fatalities that the insurgents sustain." (Errol A. Henderson and J. David Singer, "Civil War in the Post-Colonial World, 1946-92," Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 37, No. 3, May 2000.) '

If you want to shut down those Dubya apologists and right-wingers, reading Cole's whole article will give you plenty of ammunition.

[Paid sub or ad view req'd at Salon]

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:36 PM | Get permalink

Still 'not nice' after all these years.

After a long silence, the Dixie Chicks have a new album coming out.

Those Chicks.

And from their new single, 'Not Ready to Make Nice,' it seems that the controversy over Natalie Maines' comments about Dubya back in 2003 haven't made the Chicks pull any punches:

I made my bed and I sleep like a baby
With no regrets and I don?t mind sayin'
It's a sad sad story when a mother will teach her
Daughter that she ought to hate a perfect stranger
And how in the world can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they'd write me a letter
Sayin' that I better shut up and sing
Or my life will be over

I'm not ready to make nice
I'm not ready to back down
I'm still mad as hell and
I don't have time to go round and round and round ...

You can listen to 'Not Ready to Make Nice' here.

This magpie has been a big Dixie Chicks fan since they were just another scuffling country/bluegrass band on the state fair circuit. [Back in the early 1990s, I helped set the weirdest radio interview that the Chicks ever did — sometime I'll get around to posting the story.] Back then, they said they were going to move to Nashville and get real famous, and damned if they didn't. I've always been happy to see that they've been able to make it without selling themselves out.

Via Atrios.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:56 PM | Get permalink

If you think you're having a rough time in Dubya's US ...

... try being an African American man.

While the rest of the country — even those at the bottom — was getting ahead during the 1990s, the educational, income, and employment status of black men was getting worse. And, if you were a young black man, your situtation was the worst of anyone's in the country.

The US is now almost halfway through Dubya's second term and, to no one's surprise, the prez's 'ownership society' hasn't done anything to change the 1990s situtation. In fact, a bunch of new studies show that the possibilities for African American men are far worse than they were a decade ago.

Here's some of what the newest studies have found:

The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990's. In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20's were jobless — that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated. By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts. Even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their 20's were jobless in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000.
Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990's and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20's who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30's, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison.
In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school.

Of course, since Dubya's administration doesn't care what happens to any person of color anywhere, it's not surprising that the feds aren't doing anything about the problems faced by black men.

But what we find particularly disturbing is that this topic has apparently become so passé that the US press isn't finding these new studies on black men worth reporting. I just googled both the first sentence in the NY Times story cited in this post and the search term 'black men' and found only two dozen hits. Hopefully this story will get more exposure, but I'm not holding my breath waiting.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:28 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, March 22

Keeping the troops in the dark.

A while back, I posted about how the US Marines have been censoring the web sites that the troops in Iraq are allowed to look at. Today, via PEEK, we found out more aout how news is being kept from servicemembers.

Meet dreadcow, who's serving in the Army infantry in Iraq. When he was on the phone to his parents in Minnesota recently, he received an interesting bit of news:

Me: "I sure miss home, I really would like some snow just to see it for once? so how's Grandma/rest of family/friends? it's starting to warm up here finally, how's it back home?...."

Parents: "Well, everyone misses you. People ask about you all the time and how you're doing. Your Dad is sick right now. The weather is miserable; it's below zero in Minneapolis right now. Iraq almost fell into civil war today. You sure you want to buy a truck with these gas prices? When you get home we'll get you wasted on Margaritas.

Me: "Come again?"

Parents: "Oh, I was saying with gas prices over two bucks a gallon, are you sure you want to get a truck?"

Me: "No, the civil war part."

That was the first I'd heard about the mosque getting blown up and this was two or three days after it happened. I'm IN Iraq and have no idea what's going on. A few months back I came to the conclusion that I'm fed nothing but propaganda and now it seems like my theory is dead on. I was always skeptical about the paper around here, Stars and Stripes. It's the newspaper for soldiers that's published by the military and widely available overseas. It's been around since WW II, maybe prior to that for all I know.

Anyhoo, I can't say that I've ever read much overtly negative press except the "letters to the editor" page or articles on soldiers getting waxed. Yeah, you'll see an article about IEDs or riots, but ninety percent of the pages that are focused on the war talk about how "great" the Iraqi Army/Police are becoming, how we built some school or water plant and how Haji is so grateful for it, or how such and such a unit found the mother of all weapons caches in some garden in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere....

Back to the newspaper. The only reason I even pick up a copy of Stars and Stripes is for two things: the crossword puzzle and su-do-ku; I think the Army makes me more stupid everyday so I try to keep my mind somewhat active and maintain a somewhat geared up vocabulary (I need to count how many times I say "fuck" in any given day and publish the results). I usually skim through the paper over dinner, directing everyone else to the humor I find in the blatant propaganda articles....

But the way our media talks about the war it sounds like a stroll through Candy Land. A hot, dusty, ghetto Candy Land. The muffin man lives in downtown Baghdad in a mud house that has a plastic tarp for a door and in his spare time watches bakery porn on satellite television.

I can tell you that this place isn't Candy Land. Car bombs are going off killing civilians, people are blowing up mosques, the kidnapping and subsequently beheading of people, these fuckers don't wear identifiable uniforms, and friends of friends are getting killed over here. I personally find it insulting that what little amount of news I'm given isn't realistic. I feel like the main character in "Clockwork Orange" with his eyelids held open while being brainwashed....

Pretty much speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Via Fun with Hand Grenades.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:00 PM | Get permalink

Carnival of Feminists 11.

Is time ever flying this month!

It seems like we posted about the last Carnival of Feminists only a couple of days ago, but it's really been two weeks. Which, of course, makes it time for the 11th Carnival. You can read the new edition in all of its feminist bloggy glory if you head over here to Angry for a Reason. If you haven't caught the Carnival before, it's a roundup of the best feminist posts from around the web, appearing twice a month. Hell, it's a roundup of the some of the best posts around, period!

As usual, the 11th Carnival shows that it's hard to pigeonhole femininst bloggers, and the post topics go all over the place. This time, there was no way this magpie could pass up a group of posts under the heading 'What the hell is wrong with you?':

The Anonymous blogger, at Sivacracy.net, asks why some people think sexist comments are somehow funny when leveled against conservative women in Humorless Feminism.

Ann Bartow, at Feminist Law Professors, discusses the case of a female felon who was included at The Smoking Gun for looking "foxy" "Foxy Felons" and the Unexpected Consequences of Crime.

Veronica, at aldahlia, discusses the difficulties of discussing revolutionary thought with some (ok, most) men in Revolution.

Terry at I See Invisible People writes about problems overcoming our conditioning not to speak up and call people out on their sexism in Why is it so hard?

Dark Daughta, also known as One Tenacious Baby Mama comes with a hard hitting look at the popularity and prevelance of male bloggers in the feminist blogosphere. Are we giving the too much credit for not very much work? (I agree with her.) You can hear her very perceptive view of the situation On Patriarchal Male Feminists.

You can read the rest of the 11th Carnival if you go here.

The 12th Carnival is coming up on Wednesday, April 5th, and it will be hosted by Written World. The themes for the 12th edition are influences, inspirations, and culture reversal, but any posts that address a woman's place in the world from a feminist point of view are welcome. To nominate a post, — and it's definitely okay to nominate one of your own — send an eamil to ragnellthefoul AT gmail DOT com or include the Technorati tag carnival12 to your post. The deadline is April 3rd.

And if you want to keep posted on what's up with the Carnival of Feminists, bookmark the home page.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:42 AM | Get permalink

Ooooooh, shiny!

Mexican cinema lobby cards by Ernesto Garcia Cabral!

Lobby card by Ernesto Cabral

Lobby card for Dos Charros y Una Gitana [Two Cowboys and a Gypsy],
Ernesto Garcia Cabral, 1956.

From Stephen Worth of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project:

Ernesto Garcia Cabral (nicknamed Chango) was one of Mexico's greatest political cartoonists and illustrators. He studied art in Paris just before WWI, and became well known there as a cartoonist. He returned to Mexico in 1918 and quickly became one of the country's premiere illustrators. He was known for his expressive caricatures, which illustrated the posters for Mexican film comedies throughout the forties and fifties.

Cabral is almost unknown outside of Mexico, but that is changing. A recent book, Cine Mexicano: Posters from the Golden Age 1936-1956 featured some of his best work.

If you find this stuff as interesting as we do, there's more of Cabral's poster art here and here.

Via A-HAA!

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:45 AM | Get permalink

All the lies that fit.

Mikhaela puts some perspective on VP Cheney's latest comments about all that 'progress' being made in Iraq.

Liberating Iraq to death

[© 2006 Mikhaela B. Reid]

To see the full cartoon full-size, go over here.

If you want to see more of Mikhaela's political cartoons, take a look over here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:46 AM | Get permalink

Helen Thomas nails Dubya to the wall.

As we noted earlier, Dubya made the mistake of calling on Helen Thomas during his press conference on Tuesday. True to form, Thomas asked a basic question that no other member of the White House press corps had the nerve to ask: Given that all the stated reasons for invading Iraq turned out to be untrue, what was Dubya's real reason for attacking Iraq? Watching how uncomfortable that question made the prez was worth suffering through his tortured evasion.

Helen Thomas gives Blitzer more than he wanted to know

Helen Thomas gives Blitzer more than he wanted to know

Helen Thomas being interviewed by Wolf Blitzer
on Tuesday's Situation Room. [Image: CNN]

Later in the day, Thomas was interviewed on CNN's Situation Room, during which interview Wolf Blitzer eventually got around to asking her whether she believed Dubya's answer:

BLITZER: And you asked him a tough question. Did you accept his answer? Namely, that he didn't come into the presidency believing he was going to go to war against Saddam Hussein, but after 9/11 his world view changed?

THOMAS: It doesn't -- it doesn't parse. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, it certainly had -- was secular, it was not tied to al Qaeda.

I think he wanted to go into Iraq because he had all the neo- conservatives advising at the top of their agenda for Project for a New American Century. First Iraq, then Iran -- then Syria, then Iran, and so forth.

BLITZER: So you believe even before 9/11, he was about -- he wanted to take out Saddam Hussein? THOMAS: Oh, I think this is very clear. You couldn't sit in that press room day after day. Every time -- every time it was mentioned by Ari Fleischer or Scott, they would say in one breath, 9/11, Saddam Hussein, 9/11, Saddam Hussein.

I don't -- I don't blame the American public for thinking there was a tie.

BLITZER: So you don't accept his answer today? You think, what, he was still spinning? Is that what you're suggesting?

THOMAS: It wasn't that. I think maybe in his own mind he didn't, but I think that everybody knows, everybody who was in the know, knows that Iraq was on target, it was on the radar screen from the moment he came into office. The Treasury secretary says it, people in CIA say it, and so forth .

Nothing would deter him. It was a very big goal.

If only the rest of the Washington press was as honest and direct as Thomas.

You can watch the Situation Room segment containing both Thomas' question to Dubya and Blitzer's interview of Thomas if you go here. [Thanks to Brad Blog for making the video available.]

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

Being 'reasonable.'

As the 'debate' over abortion continues in the US, one of its most striking characteristics is the way that ostensible supporters of a woman's right to control her own body are willing to 'moderate' their language and lower their expectations in the guise of 'being reasonable.' Being reasonable when the health, safety, and well-being of untold numbers of women are at stake pisses this magpie off, to be honest.

And we're not the only one. Media Girl has been thinking about the subject, too, and she's come up with a list of the assumptions that underly 'reasonableness':

Women are incapable of making "moral" decisions (and therefore we need laws to control women).
Women don't have any "self-evident" or "inalienable" rights when it comes to their reproductive parts.
Men know more about the issue than women (and therefore women cannot decide for themselves).
Women who have sex are somehow "less than" everyone else (and therefore not entitled to even claim a right to their own bodies).
Men's sperm have constitutional rights (and therefore women who've permitted sperm to enter them have ceded their constitutional rights).
Men must decide how much control, if any, women shall have of their own bodies (and therefore all these laws are only a natural outgrowth of the natural order of things).

With the exception of some of the religious right, very few people are willing to come out and say that they agree with this stuff — even when their actions make it clear that they do. Instead, these assumptions lurk under public statements about abortion even by many people who claim to be 'pro-choice.' Unfortunately, this one case where if you're in by an inch, you're in by a mile. If you buy into the assumptions above to any degree, you've ceded control of the debate to abortion opponents. And, in politics, controlling the terms of a debate gets you most of the way to winning.

As I said earlier, what's at stake in whether abortion remains legal and available in the US is the lives of women. Being 'reasonable' is a poor defense of those lives.

Via Media Girl.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:04 AM | Get permalink

Tuesday, March 21

You ~~don't~~ have mail.

This is amazing: The FBI has 2000 employees at its New York bureau. About 25% of them don't have email accounts. And they won't all have them until the end of the year.

How come? Cost-cutting measures ordered by FBI honchos in Washington.

So if you see Osama bin Laden walking around Times Square, don't send the FBI an email, OK?

Via AP.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:40 PM | Get permalink

January 20, 2009.

That's the date when the next president of the US will take office. And, if Dubya's words at this morning's press conference are to be believed, it's also the earliest date on which US forces will leave Iraq.

Q Will there come a day -- and I'm not asking you when, not asking for a timetable -- will there come a day when there will be no more American forces in Iraq?

THE PRESIDENT: That, of course, is an objective, and that will be decided by future Presidents and future governments of Iraq.

This magpie suggests that it's anybody's guess as to whether people in the US will fall into line and acquiesce to two more years of the ongoing carnage. Our guess is 'No way.'

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

If his mouth is open, he must be lying.

Dubya on 19 March 2003:

U.S. forces launched an airstrike against "targets of military opportunity" in Iraq, President Bush said Wednesday night.

"On my order, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to Saddam Hussein's ability to wage war," Bush said during a four-minute address to the nation. "These are the opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign...."

Minutes before Bush's speech, an internal television monitor showed the president pumping his fist. "Feels good," he said. [Source: Knight Ridder News Service, 20 March 2003]

Dubya at his press conference earlier today, responding to a question from Helen Thomas:

Q I'd like to ask you, Mr. President, your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime. Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is, why did you really want to go to war? From the moment you stepped into the White House, from your Cabinet -- your Cabinet officers, intelligence people, and so forth -- what was your real reason? You have said it wasn't oil -- quest for oil, it hasn't been Israel, or anything else. What was it?

THE PRESIDENT: I think your premise -- in all due respect to your question and to you as a lifelong journalist -- is that -- I didn't want war. To assume I wanted war is just flat wrong.... [Emphasis added]

Dubya has just finished saying 'I didn't want war.'
Note that funny pouty sneer that the prez gets when he's lying.
{Image: CNN]

As Paul Waldman suggests, some reporter needs to ask the prez why, if he didn't want to go to war in Iraq, he was apparently so excited about going to war in 2003?

Inquiring magpies sure would like to know, too.

[If you have any doubts about whether Dubya's pre-speech behavior really happened, check out the original Knight Ridder story. The version of the story that we found via an online database was carried in the Bergen County [NJ] Record on 20 March 2003.]

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:29 PM | Get permalink

Monday, March 20

Forget about that third anniversary thing.

You know, that marking of the third anniversary of the Iraq war by many of us here in the US [including this magpie], dating it to Dubya's invasion of Iraq in 2003.

We were all wrong, says Joshua Holland. He says that the real date slipped by us in January — Jan 17, to be exact; the fifteenth anniversary of the beginning of the 'first' Gulf war under the administration of Dubya's daddy. Holland suggests that the earlier war and the current one are really the same extended conflict, which he suggests we call the 'Persian Gulf war.'

Because seeing George W. Bush's war as distinct from that of his father is a luxury only Americans can afford. For the Iraqis, it has been fifteen years of hell at the hands of the world's Great Powers, with the U.S. in the lead.

In the twelve years between what we like to think of as the first and second Gulf Wars, coalition aircraft -- mostly American and British, but also French and Turkish in the early stages -- flew over 115,000 combat missions over Iraq. They bombed targets about every other day.

Two major bombing campaigns occurred during the war's twelve-year lull: Operation Desert strike in 1996 and Operation Desert Fox in 1998. Another intensive air campaign, Operation Southern Focus, began in June of 2002 to "soften up" Iraq's defenses prior to the re-escalation of the war in March of 2003.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died (PDF) between 1991 and 2003 under the most punitive sanctions regime in history.

Holland suggests that there is an important commonality between the 'first' war and the current one that links them: The stated reasons for each war were lies.

Holland's piece is very much worth your time. Read it here.

Via The Gadflyer.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:22 PM | Get permalink

What's wrong with the Democratic party?

The Daily Show knows.

View the answer here [Quicktime] or here [Windows Media].

Via Crooks and Liars.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:10 PM | Get permalink

Tired of crap from media pundits?

Ted Rall sure is.

A bit of advice for the media

[Cartoon: © 2006 Ted Rall]

And he's got a number of modest suggestions for the media, too, which you can read if you go here. And if you want to see more of Rall's work, check out his website.

Via Association of American Editorial Cartoonists.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:09 AM | Get permalink

Here's a no-brainer.

Unless, of course, you're a Dubya administration bureaucrat making the decision.

If you'd just lost your home in a disaster, which one of the following would you rather live in?

Choice A: A FEMA trailer, costing the feds between US $60,000 and $70,000. You can't add on to it, and it'll blow away in a hurricane.

The classic FEMA trailer, if you can get one.

Choice B: A 'Katrina Cottage', costing about US $35,000 to build. You can add to it, and it'll most likely ride out a hurricane.

The Katrina Cottage. Don't expect one from the feds.

The Katrina Cottage is reminiscent of the 'temporary' cottages built in San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. Many of those cottages were lived in for decades, and there are still a few standing today. If this magpie had to choose between the cottage and the trailer, we'd take the cottage in a hot second.

Can you guess how many Katrina Cottages the feds are buying? [Hint: It's in the very low one figures.]

You can read more about Katrina Cottages in this article at the New Orleans Times-Picayune and this one at the St Petersburg Times.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:36 AM | Get permalink

Sunday, March 19

Slow blogging again.

This magpie is heading off to demonstrate against the Iraq war, and won't be back until this afternoon, West Coast US time. Blogging is important, but ending the war trumps the internet every single time.

FBI agents reading this blog can look for me here:

Out now!

The rest of you should go to your own local demonstration. If we're lucky, Dubya will hear about the demos when his minions read him the newspaper in the morning.

See you in the streets!

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:14 AM | Get permalink