That's how my physical therapist referred to the current policy of issuing marriage licenses to gay couples in San Francisco. It felt so good to hear someone from another country say something so very positive about the place where I come from. Yea!
I think it's absurd that there are people who think that the Earth was created in 4004 BCE and that the Lord created it in six days. I think it's more absurd that the United States has politicians that are too cowardly or craven to confront such absurdity. I think it is despicable that the Bush administration and many Republicans ignore science and contradict research when it runs contrary to their desires. And I am not alone.
Juan Cole is the man. In this, he explains in some detail what an Arab is. If you are going to use a word, it stands to reason that you should know what it means. The New York Times (which virtually never corrects its substantial errors) does not follow this rule, but you should.
I offer this as a gift for those ignorant souls who believe that the criminal justice system in the United States has no problems whatsoever. Kudos to TalkLeft for the heads up. May I be angry now? Thank you. I'm angry now. I find myself questioning the entire "criminal justice" system (a justice system that in this case was criminal). Does that mean that I hate America?
The American Prospect is offering five suggestions for the press to improve itself. Thanks go to TalkLeft for the heads up.
Richard Cohen of the Washington Post describes Bush's thinking, as portrayed in Tim Russert's Meet the Press interview as childlike.
The New York Times has a story about how the press in Russia behaves like Putin's lapdog. Maybe when the American press is done congratulating itself on how "free" it is, it will recognize how bought it has become.
Maybe you think I'm exaggerating. Here's a short story to perhaps dispel your doubts.
I know a woman who grew up in the DDR (East Germany). She experienced lots of unpleasantness that soured her about that government. Things like being arrested and questioned, the government preventing her from getting a high school diploma because she protested against medium-range nuclear weapons (something that I did in the US as well, with equally unsatisfactory results, although without the Draconian penalty that she suffered), and of course being spied upon by many of her neighbors. She knows about the spying because she has seen and read her government files. At the risk of making a dramatic understatement, she is no fan of dictatorship.
Two years ago, she went to New York for the first time. She was there for two weeks and this was and is her only direct exposure to the United States. We met not long thereafter and one evening she asked me one of the most striking questions I've ever been asked. "How do you get news in the US?" She went on to tell me how she had developed a variety of methods to discern what was happening in the world when she lived under a command dictatorship, but that when faced with the almost total lack of substantial information that is released in the American press, particularly television, she was at a loss. She describes it as "worse than a dictatorship, because in a dictatorship, you know they are controlling the information."
This, an expression of a long oppressed community joyously celebrating their freedom, reminds me of this. And I have great hopes because of it.
"Water is not just a purity game; it's a cost game,'' says Dr. Philip M. Rolchigo of General Electric (taken out of context). I suppose this is as fair a point as any to go off on the difference between the first world and the third. In the the first world, the New York Times discusses the financial opportunities offered by the water purification industry for multi-national corporations like General Electric in the business section.
In the third world, a child dies every fifteen seconds because of a lack of fresh water. Quite a contrast.
Soldiers have made the decision to refuse to serve in the occupied territories in Israel before. But never before have Israeli special forces soldiers refused to serve.
At night, in the quiet of their rented farmhouse, Robert Shrode lets Debra pick the shrapnel out of his body. Another generation of soldiers and their families have to come to terms with the reality that war is a very messy business.
This is an interview with two US soldiers who have been in Afghanistan and Iraq. You should find yourself angrier after you read it. I have no desire to be in the military, but that does not mean that I think that the people who are in it should have to suffer needlessly. The Bush administration wants to fund a strategic missile defense system, but does not supply adequate protective equipment to its soldiers, sailors and Marines.
David Hackworth, whose website is focussed primarily on military issues, has written a brief homage about Major Scott Ritter, the former US arms inspector. Ritter is the former Marine who was ridiculed for saying that Iraq had no WMDs.
Long before blogging was popular, there was Harper's Weekly Review. It still rules.
Calpundit has the latest on Bush's military duty. It is not yet a "smoking gun," but there is the smell of something burnt in the air. Full marks to Kevin Drum for ferreting out the "torn document" piece of the puzzle. I wonder how Karl Rove is going to react; and Poppy.
The Economist has a brief opinion piece about the American dollar's exchange rate and why it must fall even further.
A Baptist minister who is also a professor of theology at Harvard has written a brilliant Op-Ed piece in the Boston Globe about the recent Massachusetts Supreme Court decision on gay marriage.
This interview with General Wesley Clark is worth reading. Thanks to The American Street for the heads up.
"I have never met an African-American who was surprised by the attack on the World Trade Center. Blacks do not see America as the great liberator of the world. Blacks understand how the rest of the world sees us, because we have also been the victims of American imperialism."
- Walter Mosley
Apparently the US government is considering attacking Hizbullah in Somalia and Lebanon. I spoke with a rather patriotic Iranian man once, who felt that Hizbullah was the "most respected flag" in Palestine. The Bush administration seems to disagree.
The Los Angeles Times has an article about why the Bush administration's immigration initiative offers very little to the illegal immigrant community.
P.S. I suppose that I'm going to accept at face value the notion that the Bush administration actually intended their initiative to be a positive step. Please ignore my head shaking from side to side.
The BBC has a posted a relatively innocuous article about the forced expulsion of the German population of Czechoslovakia at the end of the Second World War. Forced deportation of Germans throughout Eastern Europe at the end of the war numbered more than nine million people.
I live in a city where many of the buildings uncomplainingly wear bullet wounds that serve as a reminder of past traumas. Humans tend to be vocal about their own wounds and are often unable to understand the pain of others'. Forced emigration may seem insignificant when compared to the more graphic horrors of the the Second World War, but the wounds are no less real. And the desire for recognition and compensation for past suffering are as well.
Reparations are a delicate issue for the survivors and their assignees as well as for the Czech people and their government. It seems to me that Americans regularly express their inability to comprehend European sentiments about the horrors of war. It is not simply the injuries caused by war that many Europeans have come to abhor; it is also the way the wounds heal afterwards that give so many here pause.
Juan Cole seems to have the latest lowdown(no pun intended) on the Valerie Plame affair. Lots of good background on the accused.
Scott Turow, former US District Attorney and author, has written a book, Ultimate Punishment, about the implementation of the death penalty. There's an interview with him in the Atlantic Monthly where he discusses the issues a bit.
Nuclear non-proliferation is one of those issues that very few people are against. Nuclear weapons for everyone appears on neither the Republican nor the Libertarian platforms. The US government has made many deals with questionable regimes in order to pursue its goals. Sometimes these deals go awry.
Addendum: The Economist paints an even bleaker picture, suggesting that this could make things quite difficult for the Pakistani President, General Pervez Musharraf, who has survived two assasination attempts in the last year. Yes, things can get even worse than being repeatedly shot at. I suspect that the founding of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan would probably be awkward for the United States of America.
Ariel Sharon is apparently floating a trial balloon about perhaps redrawing the borders between the occupied territories and Israel proper. I suppose that it is most likely that this will be shot down rapidly as totally unacceptable by the conservatives in Israel, to say nothing of their supporters in the US. But if it's not, and that is a huge if, and if everyone on the Palestinian side can go along with this, a gigantic if, and if it is not just some rhetorical ploy on Sharon's part, then this could be very interesting indeed.
Addendum: Or it could be an attempt to distract the Israeli voters from corruption charges against Sharon and the rest of the world, including me, from recognizing that Ariel Sharon is welded to the status quo. Shame on me for thinking otherwise.
I remember as a child begging my father to tell me about the war, which in his case meant the Second World War. He told me something that I have never entirely understood: that to be killed was something that did not frighten him, but to be wounded, terrified him. I'm reminded of this because of an article I just read from a reporter who was embedded during this latest war against Iraq. He had been a Marine in the first Gulf War and that experience pushed him in the direction of becoming a reporter.
What is interesting about his story, is not just how involved he was in a particular battle where American troops ending up attacking other American troops as well as Iraqis, but that after coming home and beginning the process of readjusting to being home again, he failed, and took his own life yesterday. I have included two reports of his death because the obituary in the newspaper he wrote for does not mention the cause of death.
Thanks to Romenesko for the heads up.
Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, writes the following paragraph which may be one of the more eloquent answers to all the people who feel that Bush is being "unfairly" blamed for the Central Intelligence Agency's problems.
By all means, proceed with the independent commission. A huge mistake has been made, and we need to know why. But if for a moment we think that it was the CIA alone that took us to war, then we will have learned nothing from what happened. That would be the gravest intelligence failure of them all.
In his column today, Cohen alludes to his complicity in the march to war. It's a bit understated in my opinion, but a mea culpa from him is still honorable.
It appears that the "knocker" who killed the cow that was later found to have Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy(BSE, or mad cow disease), has decided to turn whistleblower and the Department of Agriculture, to say nothing of the beef industry, are none too pleased about it. He talks about lies in the Agriculture Department's official report, intimidation from the same and the inadequacy of the testing regime in slaughterhouses.