@Dismal Science
Amazing list. Dear American friends – there goes YOUR money. And it buys this: Country Reports on Human Rights Practices – Iraq courtesy US State Department.
The 2004 report covers the human rights record of the Interim Government from June 28 to December 31, 2004 (guess why). It does not mention occupation forces and their deads. From what we know by other reports, there is no big difference.
assorted quotes:

According to UNICEF, nearly 1 in 4 children (31.2 percent of girls and 17.5 percent of boys) between the ages of 6 and 12 did not attend school. According to authorities, literacy dropped from 80 percent in the late 1980s to approximately 50 percent during the year. Although 75 percent of teachers are women, women and girls represented approximately 70 percent of the increase in illiteracy.
…
According to the Ministry of Higher Education, approximately 3,000 women indicated that they wanted to postpone their university studies because of the current security situation.
…
The Government’s Christian Endowment Office reported that there were between 750,000 and 1 million Christians in the country, mostly in the North and Baghdad; there were 1.4 million in 1987. The majority of the country’s Christians were Chaldeans. Christian religious leaders estimated that approximately 700,000 Christian citizens lived abroad.
…
According to the Ministry of Human Rights, at least 80 professors and 50 physicians were assassinated during the year. Reporters Without Borders noted that 31 journalists and media assistants were killed during the year (see Section 2.a.). Universities also suffered from a wave of kidnappings. Researchers, professors, administrators, and students were all victims, including some who disappeared without a trace.
…
There was a widespread perception that police made false arrests to extort money. Some police officers did not present defendants to magistrates and held them in detention cells until their families paid bribes for their release. In the Central Criminal Court in Baghdad, the time between arrest and arraignment was often in excess of 30 days, despite the 24-hour requirement.
…
Reportedly, coerced confessions and interrogation continued to be the favored method of investigation by police.
…
during this reporting period, torture and ill treatment of detainees by police was commonplace. In interviews with 90 prisoners conducted from August to October, 72 claimed that they had been tortured or mistreated. The reported abuses included some instances of beatings with cables and hosepipes, electric shocks to their earlobes and genitals, food and water deprivation, and overcrowding in standing room only cells.

Posted by: b | Mar 1 2005 16:55 utc | 3

they’re shooting unarmed protesters in Haiti and a friend of mine is over there… [worried]… anyone got a good source of recent news?

Posted by: DeAnander | Mar 1 2005 18:03 utc | 5

@ DeAnander: This was on Common Dreams this morning.

Posted by: beq | Mar 1 2005 18:17 utc | 7

Link above, from carpetbagger via Empire Notes
Johnson said he told the president that night, “Syria is the problem. Syria is where those weapons of mass destruction are, in my view. You know, I can fly an F-15, put two nukes on ’em and I’ll make one pass. We won’t have to worry about Syria anymore.”
The crowd roared with applause.
This is so twisted, it’s hard to know where to start. Which of these is the most outrageous part of this story?
* That a sitting member of Congress is bragging about his desire to drop nuclear weapons?
* That Johnson has shared this idea with the president?
* That Johnson’s favored approach to non-proliferation is an unprovoked nuclear attack?
* That this speech was delivered in a church?
* That Johnson’s audience “roared with applause”?
Carpetbagger reports, you decide.
…………………………
And Ward Churchill says outrageous things?

Posted by: anna missed | Mar 1 2005 19:15 utc | 9

Counterpunch has an article by Paul Craig Roberts that predicts the end of the US as we know it. He is very serious about the US in a complete economic meltdown.

Posted by: jdp | Mar 1 2005 20:09 utc | 11

From the scandal that keeps giving: Guckert’s military escort domain names up for sale.

Posted by: beq | Mar 1 2005 20:48 utc | 13

@ jdp and b: I second that and suggest that anyone who is “sleeping with the enemy” make a copy and leave it out in the open somewhere. I am going to send it home and suggest that my Mom leave it where my Dad will trip over it since he leaves stuff from the WSJ in her stack all the time. Thanks jdp.

Posted by: beq | Mar 2 2005 0:08 utc | 15

Not only that Roberts wrote it, but that he wrote it for Counterpunch – a former ed. of WSJ!! The reach & power of Economic Orthodoxy surely must be equal to that of the religious orthodoxy of the Catholic Church @the apex of it’s power. Also, this is just a slight recasting of an art. he posted on same site that we also linked here w/in last week or two.
My only quibble w/the article is that he like most everyone else uses the passive voice – as in xUS losing it’s ability to create middle class jobs. No, asshole, that’s called deliberate active policy – it’s not losing it, it’s being deliberately Destroyed.
For the regular WSJ readers among Barflies, didn’t he support those policies? God knows the WSJ has been primary cheerleader for the Pirates.

Posted by: jj | Mar 2 2005 4:16 utc | 17

Interestingly, I just checked the Paul Craig Roberts archive on his usual site – lewrockwell.com – & his counterpunch articles aren’t there – neither this one or the last ~The Great Job Sellout!! I guess they’re only devoted to freedom w/in the confines of their ideology – when it turns out that ideology is destroying America, it’s time to ignore it & blather on mindlessly….

Posted by: jj | Mar 2 2005 4:48 utc | 19

ZNet | U.S.
Contours of Conservative Hypocrisy
by M. Junaid Alam
February 27, 2005
It is not controversial to assert that the values, ideals,
and opinions held by people on social and political matters
vary in accordance with their place on the political
spectrum. What if, however, it was posited that on one end
of this spectrum, politics consists not only of pursuing
stated aims, but also of crafting codewords and rhetoric
designed to lure in others who would not otherwise be
interested in those aims? Judging from the output of its
vast array of columnists, pundits, and intellectuals, the
modern American Right perfectly fits this description. For
it is the rare conservative who will openly declare from the
outset that he is in favor of waging war on weaker nations,
cutting down safeguards for disadvantaged citizens, heaping
aid upon the wealthy, plundering the environment, and so on.
Far more common is the conservative who, in pursuing these
very same aims, will invoke with much sincerity the
cherished terms of security, responsibility, freedom, and
optimism. It would be helpful, I think, if we took a look at
a few of the very carefully constructed frameworks,
codewords, and values invoked by the Right and see how they
match up against actual reality.
Terrorism:
This seems straightforward enough: terrorism is the act of
terrorizing someone. In a political context, you could
terrorize a whole population in myriad ways: kill citizens
at random, kill them systematically, steal their land,
plunder their resources, imprison them through physical
confinement, starve them economically with embargoes or
blockades, sabotage their society by installing puppet
leaders, and so on.
But when the Right uses the word “terrorism,” they are never
referring to anything but the first listed form of terrorism
— that is, the form employed some extreme Islamist groups.
Needless to say this is a very convenient misappropriation,
since all the other forms of terrorism have been and
continue to be widely employed by the United States and
Israel, with much more destructive results than anything
Islamists have been able to inflict.
So for instance, if around 100,000 Iraqis have been killed
mostly by US air bombing, that’s not terrorism. If 1,000,000
Iraqis died from US-led economic sanctions, that’s not
terrorism. If thousands of Afghans and Palestinians have
been killed by US-made military hardware, like tanks and
fighter jets and sniper guns, that’s not terrorism.
In the Right’s universe, terrorism only happens when a
Muslim commits violence. The violence inflicted upon the
Muslim, neatly excised from the definition of terrorism, is
not reclassified under any other category — except perhaps
benevolence. Usually it simply slips down the memory hole.
Moral equivalency:
This is a term the Right uses to clean up the contradictions
left behind by their distortion of the word “terrorism.” For
instance, if you talk about foreign civilians killed in the
wars we’ve started to illustrate that we too have committed
terrorism, that’s called “moral equivalency” — the equating
of non-American lives with American ones, an apparent crime
under the moral rubric of conservatism. Likewise, pointing
out that many more Palestinians than Israelis have been
killed (not to mention occupied, tortured, expropriated,
etc.) in that conflict is also “moral equivalency” —
committing the sin of assigning non-white, non-Western life
the same worth as that accorded to Israeli life.
The exchange rate for American-Israeli life vis-à-vis
Arab-Muslim life varies depending on the conflict and time
period. Looking at 9-11 casualties (3,000) versus Iraqi
casualties for this war (100,000) the going rate is around
33:1 — every 33 of their innocents killed matters as much
as every one of ours. Of course, that would assume someone
saying Americans and Muslims have both attacked each other
“equally” — an already racist position but once which the
ultra-racist American Right considers anathema.
Usually the bare logic of this expression is concealed with
concocted moral outrage over the specific method used by the
enemy — suicide attacks, beheadings, and guerrilla war. So
supposedly killing a civilian from the safety of your tank
or airplane is more morally sound than blowing yourself up
to achieve the same end, and being caught by a reporter on
camera shooting a wounded person lying on the ground — or
taking photos of torture yourself for amusement — is better
than videotaping killing a person. Exacting standards, no doubt.
Freedom:
No word has fallen prey to political evisceration more than
this one. Certainly it has inspiring connotations, but in
reality you can have the “freedom” to live without fear as
well as the “freedom” to impose fear on somebody else. You
can be free from killing, or free to kill. The dual capacity
of this word is very useful for the Right.
For instance, it can justify breaking unions by giving
workers the “freedom” to not join unions, even though unions
are historically a major gain for the working class in the
struggle against employers’ greed, and all the figures
clearly show unionized workers fare much better than their
non-unionized counterparts in terms of pay, benefits, and
job security. But who can question the power of the freedom
to suffer?
Heralded with similar misty-eyed melodramatics is the
“freedom” afforded by “free” market solutions to economic
issues. After all, what better prescription for a problem
than to grant “freedom”? Of course here we mean freedom for
businessmen to decide the fate of everyone working under
them and the environment they inhabit without bearing
consequences themselves. This very approach is being
heralded in the effort to eviscerate social security: take
away the money from “evil government bureaucrats” and hand
it over to less accountable — but somehow less evil —
stock-brokerage firms.
Personal responsibility:
A key component of the Right’s supposed notion of “rugged
individualism” is the insistence that the plight of any
individual in society is mainly, if not solely, the result
of some flaw in that individual’s personality or behavior.
Sniggering contempt is displayed for anyone who tries to
highlight the flaws of the actual social system in which the
individual lives. Anyone who can’t find employment or fails
to advance in some field need only hang his head at his own
stupidity, weakness, or whatever other personal shortcoming;
all other actors and agents on the social scene are absolved
of responsibility.
But this ethic is applied with extreme selectiveness: poor
people, minorities, oppressed groups, and the working-class
are sternly instructed to adhere to this protocol, but the
business elite and their government friends are neatly exempted.
Hence, businesses are allowed to “externalize costs” — let
owners reap maximum short-term profits by offloading
longer-term consequences of production on the health of
employees and the environment. Wealthy corporations also
hold out their hands so they can stuff into their bulging
pockets public money — generously thrown to them by the
government — as “corporate subsidies,” thus avoiding the
perilous fate meted out to less fortunate souls in the
glorious free-market system. Failing businesses run by
grossly overpaid managers are also free to slash wages,
benefits, and jobs of those underneath them to cut down
costs which ballooned only because of their own
incompetence, forcing employees to cope with unpredictable
and sometimes dire consequences for their bosses’ mistakes.
Precisely the same sorry, irresponsible, trend can be
observed in government behavior in foreign policy. The vast
reservoir of growing hatred and resentment felt by hundreds
of millions of people around the world for America is the
direct result of this government’s underwriting of major
atrocities across the globe — a fact openly recognized this
year in the form of two major reports, one by the Defense
Science Board and the other by the National Intelligence
Council.
And because we live in the ugly untidy world of reality and
not on an ideal fantasy island, people victimized by US
aggression abroad (be it torture, mass bombardment, or
supporting puppet dictators) do not necessarily make neat
and clean distinctions between government agents and
civilians. Therefore, America saw September 11th, a day on
which thousands of innocents were murdered because the US
government betrayed them, by (a) funding the very same cast
of characters who struck the towers back when they were
deemed “freedom fighters” for combating Soviet Marxism, and
(b) leaving American civilians to deal with the fatal
consequences of the elite’s power and profit-driven meddling
in the Middle East. Just another case of externalized costs.
Reverse discrimination:
This remarkable codeword is ensconced within the general
framework of the earlier-dissected term moral equivalency,
but deserves individual treatment because of its popularity
among rightists, who reach to it almost intuitively. The
basic premise is that affirmative action — for blacks in
college considerations for instance — is merely racism in
reverse, and therefore inherently unfair against whites. The
very basis of the complaint operates on one of three
assumptions at any given time: it denies the history of
blacks being on the receiving end of an inherently unfair
system of discrimination in the first place; assumes somehow
that an equalization of opportunity has magically taken
place very recently; or posits that since blacks are of less
value than whites, their history of oppression is irrelevant
and need not be compensated for.
The point was starkly illustrated when rightists on some
college campuses set up politicized bakery sales in which
whites had to pay a higher price for baked goods than
blacks. Using the same setup, however, the point can also be
utterly demolished. The bake sale demonstration completely
covers up the historical reality preceding affirmative
action — that is, it does not take into account the
centuries of affirmative action enjoyed by whites. After
all, if the bake sale demonstration was historically
representative, for nine-tenths of the time the sale was
going on it would have to be blacks who pay a higher price,
since for centuries whites have, still speaking
figuratively, been buying up the baked goods at far less
cost than blacks. More bluntly, blacks were either slaving
away under the white whip to produce the “goods” or
producing them at such a menial wage to make them affordable
to white consumers.
To paraphrase Cornel West, the choice is between letting
blacks face a job environment in which they will be
discriminated against, or letting blacks face a job
environment in which they will be discriminated against,
with institutionalized mechanisms to grant them some
protections. At its heart, the argument against affirmative
action simply reflects the fact that we still live in a
racist society. The uproar over affirmative action-type
programs, then, only validates the need to have them there
in the first place.
Liberal elite:
An all-encompassing mythical boogeyman held responsible for
every problem in America, the “liberal elite” is ultimately
a projection of cultural-conservative angst. Cultural
conservatives consider themselves as victims, people
seriously persecuted by a contemptuous, snobbish cabal of
better-educated, better-paid people ensconced mainly in
Hollywood, academia, and gay clubs nationwide, who indulge
in fancy, foreign-oriented brands and are disconnected from
practical reality.
The power of this concept lies in the fact that, at its
root, it is a class-based complaint. Because the left has
been in a state of paralysis, the concept of class
antagonism locating the capitalists as the bad guys keeping
down working people has been pilfered and re-engineered by
the right. The liberals are now painted as the parasites,
who are responsible for the (very real) hardships endured by
the working-class. Capitalism is not even mentioned in this
new model, so millionaires like Bush preserve an aura of
being an “everyman’s man” even though their income, assets,
and power place them far above any such standing, and the
reality of capitalism’s role in social decay is substituted
for the myth of the liberal cabal.
More disturbingly, other ill effects of capitalism’s divide
and conquer effect on working people — aggravation of
racism, sexism, and nationalism — has produced in part a
white working class that exhibits all these features in an
extreme form. They tend to blame blacks, gays, women, and
immigrants for their plight. This is all infused with class
anger aimed at wealthier professional workers — who are in
fact usually more progressive in their outlook — creating a
very noxious and bitter form of right-wing populism.
The mobilization of this populist sentiment has been a very
effective tool in bludgeoning even mildly progressive ideas,
vis-à-vis the demonization of those celebrities who hold
some moderately progressive views. Derided as “limousine
liberals,” their great crime, apparently, is to have some
concern for those less fortunate than themselves, while not
themselves being less fortunate. So what we end up with is a
bizarre process whereby rich people who are reactionaries
use the class resentment of the white working-class to
attack rich people who are semi-progressive, thus
discrediting the very notion of progressive ideas among a
large portion of these white workers.
M. Junaid Alam, 22, studies at Northeastern University, is
co-editor of the radical youth journal Left Hook
(http://www.lefthook.org ) and can be reached at
mailto:a…@lefthook.org

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Mar 2 2005 7:07 utc | 21

Some People in Washington Actually Work for a Living
Interesting Story in the Halls of Power.

Posted by: Groucho | Mar 2 2005 7:37 utc | 23

And the mods such as “b” censors comments for being to long and turns right around and posts long if not longer comments? – I don´t get that, but a link plus some excerpt would have been enough for that Znet piece.
That said: In rebuff to Canada, Rice puts off visit

LONDON – US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has put off a visit to Canada next month, the State Department said on Tuesday in what was seen as a rebuff to Ottawa for pulling out of US plans to deploy a missile defense shield over North America.
Rice was scheduled to visit Canada in the second week of April, but her spokesman Richard Boucher said, “the schedules didn’t work out”.
“We are looking for a date when we can make that happen,” he said, without confirming or denying reports that the cancellation was due to problems over missile defense.
But, speaking on condition of anonymity, a US official travelling with Rice to a London meeting on the Palestinian problem said the trip’s cancellation was “in part” due to Canada’s refusal to cooperate on missile defense.
Canada said last week it would not participate in US missile defense shield plans after mulling its stand on the issue for more than a year.

I guess she will not be missed.

Posted by: b | Mar 2 2005 12:22 utc | 25

Jim Kunstler is bloggin under the title Clusterfuck Nation. Nice rants and you will love this one:
Power = power

America is, after all, the world’s most powerful nation.
This sentiment has been boinging around the major media lately, especially in stories and columns about the health of the dollar. But what does it really mean?
We have the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal for sure. We could vaporize every world city if it came to that.
…
What America definitely doesn’t have is enough oil and natural gas to run the nation’s economy as it currently exists — as a chain of realtors driving SUVs to tanning booths to impress house-buyers borrowing money from lenders who flip the mortgages to government sponsored entities who can’t add up a column of figures, even with the help of computers.

chain of realtors…

Posted by: b | Mar 2 2005 16:36 utc | 27

JMF, I followed your link about Hunter Thompson working on the World Trade collapse story … source is a Paul William Roberts eulogy in the Globe and Mail …

He’d been working on a story about the World Trade Center attacks and had stumbled across what he felt was hard evidence showing the towers had been brought down not by the airplanes that flew into them but by explosive charges set off in their foundations. Now he thought someone was out to stop him publishing it: “They’re gonna make it look like suicide,” he said. “I know how these bastards think . . .”
That’s how I imagine a tribute to Hunter S. Thompson should begin. He was indeed working on such a story, but it wasn’t what killed him. He exercised his own option to do that. As he said to more than one person, “I would feel real trapped in this life if I didn’t know I could commit suicide at any time.”

That’s all I could find, no other reference to WTC. Roberts was recently an Iraq war correspondent who praises HST, “born a gentleman,” in the article.

Posted by: jonku | Mar 2 2005 18:51 utc | 29

When a Special Forces platoon leader just back from Iraq matter-of-factly tells a close friend of mine, as happened last week, that he and his unit are now training their sights (literally) on Iran, we need to take that seriously. It provides us with a glimpse of reality as seen at ground level. For me, it brought to mind an unsolicited email I received from the father of a young soldier training at Fort Benning in the spring of 2002, soon after I wrote an op-ed discussing the timing of Bush’s decision to make war on Iraq. The father informed me that, during the spring of 2002, his son kept writing home saying his unit was training to go into Iraq. No, said the father; you mean Afghanistan … that’s where the war is, not Iraq. In his next email, the son said, “No, Dad, they keep saying Iraq. I asked them and that’s what they mean.”
Read the rest of the article here

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Mar 2 2005 22:21 utc | 31

the line between law and lawlessness gets thinner…
the dark side of online/radio networking: it’s easy for the Hutu (so to speak) to reach out and whip up support and rage among people unbalanced enough to start killing Tutsi. ever wondered what would happen if Rush Limbo ever really, seriously called for killing Libruls on his popular radio show? my bet is he would find some volunteers…
scary stuff.

Posted by: DeAnander | Mar 3 2005 3:32 utc | 33

“The President has given the Selective Service System a set of readiness goals to be implemented by March 31, 2005. As part of these performance goals, the System must be ready to be fully operational within 75 days. This means the Draft could be in operation as early as June 15, 2005.” from A Site Worth Bookmarking

Posted by: jj | Mar 3 2005 4:15 utc | 35

Posted by: Another milestone | Mar 3 2005 5:42 utc | 37

Europe risks US sanctions over China arms sales

America and Europe were yesterday being drawn ever closer into a trade war after senior US congressman issued a blunt warning to the EU over its plans to lift a 15-year-old arms embargo on China.
Talking explicitly about how it would retaliate for the first time, Richard Lugar, the powerful republican head of the Senate foreign relations committee, warned that the US would stop sales of military technology to Europe.
His Democratic counterpart, Senator Joseph Biden, warned that the lifting of the ban would be “a non-starter with Congress”. Their tough words came after a meeting with President George Bush in the White House.

I am against selling weapons, well in a ideal world at least. But it seems not only Bush and Republicans, but also democratic politicians have not realised that the US has lost any moral footing to tell others what to do. Seems they realy have slow curve of learning.

Posted by: Fran | Mar 3 2005 5:49 utc | 39

Two different yet equally disturbing “postcards from America” type essays.
Postcards from Post-Election America:

Gioia outlined the findings of a survey on reading trends conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau and involving more than 17,000 people. The study showed that for the first time since such surveys have been taken, fewer than 50 per cent of Americans had read anything of a literary nature in the past year (including a poem on a fridge magnet). Most perturbing was the precipitous decline in literary reading among those aged 30 and under. While noting a 400 per cent increase in electronics purchases, the study suggested that within 30 to 40 years, if present trends continue, there will be no reading of literature, outside of school assignments, anywhere in U.S.

The Ghosts of Karl Marx and Edward Abbey:

The evidence of environmental destruction is as easy to come by as is that for inequality. Consider just a few facts. More than 100 million persons in the United States live in urban areas where the air is officially classified by the Environmental Protection Agency as unsafe to breathe. In a world awash in toxic substances, the United States, with just 5 percent of the world’s population, produces over 70 percent of the world’s hazardous waste. Over a million children in the United States suffer from lead poisoning. […]
I am an economist, so I am used to seeing the world in terms of data. But data alone do not satisfy most people. It is one thing to make the arguments I have just made, but it is another to have them resonate enough in people’s minds to make them come to realize that the facts are part of their lives. To give the facts real bite, it is necessary to connect them to the lives of ordinary people. Perhaps I can do this by describing a few of the things we observed on our cross-country journey.
Signs of growing inequality are everywhere in the United States. I have written a detailed travelogue for the Monthly Review website (www.monthlyreview.org), and I have noted many of these there. But here I note two especially stark indicators. First, there is an incredible and growing distance between the housing of the rich and the poor. […]No matter where you go, the well-to-do have isolated their living spaces from everyone else’s. Either they are living in gated or otherwise guarded communities or they are buying enormous tracts of land and building bigger and bigger mansions on them, sometimes complete with private roads and security guards.[…]
The racial and ethnic divide becomes a chasm when it comes to the work people do. It is a safe bet that if there is a low-wage, low-status job, a person of color will be working at it. Throughout the West, we saw prisoners doing various types of road work, under the supervision of armed guards. A white worker here was as rare as rain in Death Valley. [lots more]

Looks like Empire, smells like Empire… ah, the illiterate Mob of Rome, kept docile and entertained by endless military spectacle… if I were a drinking person I think I’d go and get quietly drunk.

Posted by: DeAnander | Mar 3 2005 7:32 utc | 41

Lloyd Axworthy is president of the University of Winnipeg and a former Canadian foreign minister.
Missile Counter-Attack – Axworthy fires back at U.S. — and Canadian — critics of our BMD decision in An Open Letter to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice

Dear Condi, I’m glad you’ve decided to get over your fit of pique and venture north to visit your closest neighbour. It’s a chance to learn a thing or two. Maybe more.
I know it seems improbable to your divinely guided master in the White House that mere mortals might disagree with participating in a missile-defence system that has failed in its last three tests, even though the tests themselves were carefully rigged to show results.
But, gosh, we folks above the 49th parallel are somewhat cautious types who can’t quite see laying down billions of dollars in a three-dud poker game.
…
If you want to have us consider your proposals and positions, present them in a proper way, through serious discussion across the table in our cabinet room, as your previous president did when he visited Ottawa. And don’t embarrass our prime minister by lobbing a verbal missile at him while he sits on a public stage, with no chance to respond.
Now, I understand that there may have been some miscalculations in Washington based on faulty advice from your resident governor of the “northern territories,” Ambassador Cellucci. But you should know by now that he hasn’t really won the hearts and minds of most Canadians through his attempts to browbeat and command our allegiance to U.S. policies. Sadly, Mr. Cellucci has been far too closeted with exclusive groups of ‘experts’ from Calgary think-tanks and neo-con lobbyists at cross-border conferences to remotely grasp a cross-section of Canadian attitudes (nor American ones, for that matter).
…

Posted by: Fran | Mar 3 2005 15:16 utc | 43

From the above Scharper piece above (“postcards”):

“Many of us at the conference had the gnawing, visceral sense that literature was the canary in the mine of the U.S social fabric, and it was beginning to choke.”

I went looking for this. Not much but if you wanted to be proactive on a certain level…

Posted by: beq | Mar 3 2005 20:34 utc | 45

The police in Winchester, Kentucky has stopped the beginning of a new terrorist threat: Zombies!

Posted by: A swedish kind of death | Mar 3 2005 23:10 utc | 47

beq, thank you for the BookCrossing-link – what a lovely project. It’s the finishing highlight of my day (it’s 1am over here). So good night, and may we all find the right books at the right time.

Posted by: teuton | Mar 4 2005 0:01 utc | 49

that zombie article must have been pretty graphic. amazing that a police department would classify a kid’s creative writing as a felony. but then, who knows what’s going on in kentucky. george rogers clark high school? give me a break. clark was a dimwitted testosterone & whiskey-fueled indian hating land speculator in kentucky who made a name for himself by brutally slaughtering indians, burning villages, and mutilating non-warriors, including children and their mothers, occassionally ripping out their wombs. the much-heralded victory at vincennes largely fell into his lap after the local french & indian militia deserted the british governor of detroit, henry hamilton (but not without clark’s personal hand in scalping & tomahawking sixteen captives, both indian & white, as a sign of who was in charge). seven years later clark was to suffer the same humiliation as hamilton, again at vincennes, when his own men deserted him in his assault upon the indian villages on the upper wabash river. not content to be seen as a fool, clark started seizing the property of french traders and made himself a enemy of french, spanish & american officials. congress chastised him, the secretary of state henry knox ordered the dispersal of his remaining troops, the state of virginia revoked the authorities it had earlier established him with, and clark wound up desolate, drunk, and at the receiving end of numerous civil suits and threated criminal suits for the rest of his life, until he drunkenly stumbled into the fire in his little shack one winter night and later died from his burns. kinda sad that a state would name an educational institution after such a character. probably not a felony against that though…

Posted by: b real | Mar 4 2005 2:49 utc | 51

What’s even sadder is that this kid is apparently passing high school, but he sounds like an illiterate thug from a bad movie from the 1940s. Leave the kid alone, and go arrest his teachers for fraud!

Posted by: Blind Misery | Mar 4 2005 3:44 utc | 53

Oh Gawd… Soros starts advocating dumping US dollars

If you are parking life savings or investments in US dollars it is time to worry, says American billionaire George Soros, granddaddy of currency trading.
The mighty American dollar has lost 40 percent of its value in the past two years against other currencies and is expected to lose 20 percent more, Soros declared last week[…]
Money is the most cowardly of commodities. In panic, it stampedes sometimes toward the abyss.

Guys like Soros make public statements like this for a reason… think he’s trying to instigate a run on the dollar? has he been quietly buying Euros for the last couple of years?

Posted by: DeAnander | Mar 4 2005 5:13 utc | 55

This is about Israel, not anti-semitism

Racism is a uniquely reactionary ideology, used to justify the greatest crimes in history – the slave trade, the extermination of all original inhabitants of the Caribbean, the elimination of every native inhabitant of Tasmania, apartheid. The Holocaust was the ultimate, “industrialised” expression of racist barbarity.
…
Israel’s expansion has included ethnic cleansing. Palestinians who had lived in that land for centuries were driven out by systematic violence and terror aimed at ethnically cleansing what became a large part of the Israeli state. The methods of groups like the Irgun and the Stern gang were the same as those of the Bosnian Serb leader Karadzic: to drive out people by terror.
Today the Israeli government continues seizures of Palestinian land for settlements, military incursions into surrounding countries and denial of the right of Palestinians expelled by terror to return. Ariel Sharon, Israel’s prime minister, is a war criminal who should be in prison, not in office. Israel’s own Kahan commission found that Sharon shared responsibility for the Sabra and Shatila massacres.
Sharon continues to organise terror. More than three times as many Palestinians as Israelis have been killed in the present conflict. There are more than 7,000 Palestinians in Israel’s jails.
To obscure these truths, those around Israel’s present government have resorted to demonisation. Initial targets were Palestinians, and have now become Muslims. Take the Middle East Media Research Institute, run by a former colonel in Israeli military intelligence, which poses as a source of objective information but in reality selectively translates material from Arabic and presents Muslims and Arabs in the worst possible light.
Today the Israeli government is helping to promote a wholly distorted picture of racism and religious discrimination in Europe, implying that the most serious upsurge of hatred and discrimination is against Jews.

Ken Livingstone, the London mayor, writing in the Guardian

Posted by: b | Mar 4 2005 8:37 utc | 57

Very interesting diary on dKos: America is Number One.

Posted by: Fran | Mar 4 2005 14:08 utc | 59

@Clueless
Did you know this?
The number of jews emigrating from former sovjet states to Germany has been bigger (some 180,000 in total) than the number emigrating to Israel. Germany had given a special refugee status to these, when they could prove some German anchestor.
Israel did protest massivly, saying this would endanger the existance of the state of Israel.
See, being helpful and freindly to jews is not Israels rulingclass desire. Their desire is zionism in the sense of a greater Israel.

Posted by: b | Mar 4 2005 16:44 utc | 61