Politics Attitude

cedric and i both got e-mails on our reposts yesterday to our mirror sites. we were asked to do it again sometime and since sherry e-mailed me saying that her favorite review by kat was ___, we're doing it today. this is kat's review of rickie lee jones and norah jones' cds from 2007.

Kat's Korner: Those Jones girls

"Those Jones girls."

Kat: That was always accompanied with a heavy sigh and said by my grandmother.

I'm not really sure what year it started but the illegal war in Vietnam was going on and my grandfather was "resting."

He'd had a heart attack and retired or been retired, they never tell kids anything, and my grandparents had moved in with us.

The Jones family lived on our street, four houses down. They were a mother, a father, a son in Vietnam and two daughters.

The blonde daughter was the older of the two and the first hippie on our street. This was apparently a big deal to my grandparents. My grandfather appeared to miss the sight of her long legs in a miniskirt while my grandmother fretted over why "that Jones girl" didn't do anything with her hair.

The other sister was two years younger, dark haired and always reminded me of Marlo Thomas but everyone else always said Mary Tyler Moore. Actually, when I was a kid, they said "Laura Petrie." It was only when I was a teenager, and MTM had her own show, that they said Mary Tyler Moore.

Among the neighborhood kids, there was huge split about who you liked. The fault line usually left those trying to figure out life on one side and those who still believed their parents were infallible and All Mighty on the other.

One day, the big news was that the Jones boy had been injured in Vietnam and would be coming home. As wounds went, it either wasn't very bad or they were sugar coating it for the kids.

Concern replaced curiosity when my mother and grandmother were trying to round up a kid or two to drag along as they took food over to the Joneses. My sisters weren't home and my brothers weren't interested. You better believe I grabbed the dangling invite.

We were all in the Jones kitchen, with the mother. The adults were drinking coffee. My mother was listening to what little was known at this point. But my grandmother had a look in her eye I knew well.

Suddenly she was standing and announcing that I needed to go to the bathroom, but keep talking, she'd take me. I don't remember how old I was at the time, 9? 13?, but I was too old to need someone "taking" me to the bathroom. But that's not what this was about. This was about snooping and you couldn't know my grandmother without knowing that hours spent watching the neighborhood from the front window was just a warm up.

The first thing my grandmother did on any visit to fresh territory was start opening cabinets. She didn't hide this. She'd be in the middle of talking and just get up, go to someone's kitchen cabinets and start looking through. She must have been restraining herself on this visit out of 'respect' for the wounded Jones boy.

The Jones house was interesting to the whole neighborhood for a number of reasons. Primarily because the family really didn't 'mix.' The two oldest kids did, the Jones boy and the Jones girl. Before he was sent to Vietnam, he'd hang out with the other guys, fixing cars in the drive way. Or trying to fix cars in the drive way. They spent hours on those cars. He'd smile at the kids younger than 16, maybe give a wave. His sister also stuck to the older kids and I must have spent at least one entire summer hearing my oldest sister discuss how she was "mature" but because she was one grade behind, she might as well not exist. Once a year, the entire family would turn out, at 4th of July, for the big backyard b-b-q. That was at our house and adult women were always pestering my mother with questions about what was the Jones mother like and how did she get her to come to the b-b-q when she wouldn't do anything else with the neighborhood? Another point of interest was their house which, unlike the rest, was set back from the street and had these huge bushes. Added to the mystery of the family.

For me, personally, there was also the fact that I was one of eight children, living in cramped quarters with two parents and a set of a grandparents.

We were the largest family on the block but there were others with six and five children. The smallest family on our block, outside of the occasional set of newlyweds just moving in, was the Jones family with just three kids.

What must that be like?

The daughters had their own bedrooms and, as my grandmother and I found out, the youngest had a white canopy bed (sheets and canopy were pink) that matched a tidy as a pin desk and bureau. The curtains were also pink. There was nothing on the white walls but this really bad framed pastel of a line of ballerinas. Pinned inside the closet, we found a magazine poster of someone and I'll say now it was Tony DiFranco just to keep the story moving. It may have been someone like him, but I really don't remember now. I remember thinking, whatever age I was, how uncool the guy was. I also remember my grandmother whispering "little rebel" and realizing how truly out of it my grandmother was.

The two shared a bathroom and I was especially knocked out or jealous over this. It was between their bedrooms and they could enter it from the door in the hall, if they wanted, or from either of their bedrooms.

It was more than the vast array of makeup, pimple cream, nail polish bottles, et al that stood out. Oh to be able to stumble out of bed -- in a room I shared with no sister -- walk straight to a door, open it and have a bathroom. Instead, in my family, the kids were always lined down the hall waiting our turn in the designated children's bathroom.

My oldest sister had ruined it for all of us when she left the iron on in my parent's bathroom, face down on the vanity, when she stopped in the midst of straightening her long hair, to take a phone call. In those pre-cordless phone days, "lucky" was having a phone with a really long cord.

The Jones girls' bathroom was just a little too fussed over. Like a mother had picked out everything, the way the youngest daughter's bedroom looked. We were at the door leading into the other daughter's room and we opened it and oh my God.

Now the way my grandmother was carrying on, you would have thought we found a room full of teens fixing on heroin in one corner, having an orgy in the center of the room and off in another corner putting together a bomb they were planning to use on the Statue of Liberty or at least the local Carl Jr.'s.

I didn't go for the drama but, no argument, it was impressive. The ceiling had a painting of Jimi Hendrix. It wasn't 'artistically pure,' but there was no mistaking the man was Hendrix. (For any wondering, my grandmother's shock had nothing to do with Hendrix' skin color. She could surprise you for an old woman. On the issue of civil rights, she was 100% for it and was fond of saying "we Irish" knew all about discrimination and had an obligation to fight it everywhere.)
My own thoughts were, and I'd already started drawing and painting at this point, "Eh, a little too Sunday comics." But I could tell it was Hendrix and mainly concerned with how she was physically able to paint the entire ceiling. The curtains were heavy and we just had the light from the bathroom so my grandmother flipped the switch, a red glow bathed the room, and then I was knocked out. The Hendrix ceiling was like one of those blue light posters. Very creative.

On the desk next to the bed, my grandmother had lost interest in the ceiling, were a couple of lava lamps, a clock radio and a square device that my grandmother couldn't figure out. I was about to tell her it was a strobe light but she'd already turned it on and spent a few second blinking before declaring "Drugs" and switching it off.

If tomorrow I was put under oath, I couldn't tell you what color the walls were. I could guess that they were white since that was the color of all the walls in the house. But you couldn't see any wall. Everything was covered with clippings and photos torn out of magazines. These weren't the glossies from 16. When there was a break from this, it was only to make room for something drawn or painted on a piece of paper. Sometimes it was just a slogan on a piece of a paper like: "LET'S TRY LIVING TOGETHER." I was looking at as much as I could, a compiled rock history that was actually then current, but my grandmother was fretting about all the holes in the wall from so many thumb tacks. She was at the closet door now but hesitating as if she was too afraid of what she would find. This from the woman who, again, eagerly rifled through your cabinets while she was standing before you.

So I did the mature thing and stepped around her. I opened the closet and there were a ton of groovy clothes, not all hanging. There were also a ton of maps and travel books. (My grandmother's comment was "I bet her mother has no idea.") I think it was all too much for my grandmother but she covered that by saying we'd been gone too long and we headed back to the kitchen.

The Jones boy came home and nothing much happened for awhile. My grandfather would tell us kids, when our parents weren't around, that the Jones boy was mainly shell shocked and my grandmother would tell him to stop, that kids didn't need to hear about this. But one night he was out in the Jones family Buick, apparently drunk, and creamed Ray's Barracuda.

That was a car put out by Plymouth and I know that only because I was starting to get heavily interested in guys. Guys like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and Jim Morrison. None of whom lived in my neighborhood. So I'd try to find something in common those guys had with the older teenagers that were on my block. Ray and his father had gotten the Barracuda at a public auction. It had been pulled out of the Bay, or that's what everyone said. When it first got hauled back to their drive, not only could you not drive it, but it was an eyesore. And don't think my grandmother didn't note that fact every day. But Ray and the other boys worked on it and worked on it. I'd watch from my upstairs window sometimes -- like when they covered the windows with newspapers and spray painted it blue. And through weeks and weeks of work, they got that car running and it looked brand new. It was Ray's car but every guy on the block took pride in it.

Then came the Jones boy creaming it and I swear there would have been a next day ass kicking if everyone wasn't saying, "Well, he just got back from the war." I should probably note that Ray's car wasn't parked on the street. The Jones boy had jumped a curve, driven across the family's front yard and hit the Barracuda full on in the passenger side.

All any of us neighborhood kids cared about was the car but I know some of the parents were talking about how the yard was torn up as well.

The Jones parents had offered to pay to have it fixed but Ray's dad was all about how he'd been to Korea and he understood as he refused the money. The boys were back, pulling out whatever you call the inside of car doors and using rubber hammers (which I'm sure have another name) to try to bang out the dents. They did that over and over for a week before they finally hit the wrecking yards and found a score.

But that was really the beginning of the end of the mystery. The blonde Jones girl was making it very clear she wasn't part of the family anymore or even part of the neighborhood. It might have been as much as six months later that she split for good or it might have only been two weeks. Her exit was big drama as she stood in their drive way screaming at her parents, who were trying to get her back in the house, that they weren't helping her brother "and he needs help!" That was it and she was out of there.

Maybe out of embarrassment over that or Ray's car, they made an attempt to interact with the neighbors more. They'd walk over in the evenings with their youngest daughter who looked put out and talk to a neighbor, then talk to another. I remember once coming home from school to find the Jones mother crying to my mother in our kitchen and knowing to back my butt right back out before my mother told me.

Then came the big moment. The moment everyone in the neighborhood talked about. It was a summer day and after dinner, but the sun was still out. The Jones boy was out on their front yard screaming. We were hurried into the house and I ran straight to my bedroom window because I had never seen a man nude except in statues and paintings. He was hollering about the war being a crime, something the older teenagers might whisper but most wouldn't say anything, it was my age group that would say that full out, even in front of our parents.

Whatever he was saying, I remember thinking, "You tell 'em!"

But I was more interested in his body. He had a nasty wound on his chest, left side, but other than that, forget the David, this was the body to check out. Even though my other sisters were trying to nudge me out of the way to get a better look, you know I wasn't giving up my perch. So that's what one of those looked like on an adult male. Lot of hair around the thing but interesting. His parents were trying to talk to him and the father kept trying to put a blanket over him. He kept tossing it to the ground. After about ten minutes, he finally stormed off, down the street, still naked.

No one ever stopped talking about that. Even two years later, we'd still mention it. The grown ups tried to pretend like they didn't talk about it. But we'd catch the silences when we entered a room. Sometimes, we'd catch a word or two before they saw us.

The Jones boy was gone. He never came back. The family put a "FOR SALE" sign up in the front yard. They stopped trying to mingle and I remember when the father would get out of his car at the end of the day, he'd make a point to look down at the ground and avoid catching the eye of anyone out in their own yards. At least one more time, the mother visited mine. The youngest Jones girl went around looking sad and angry. I've actually got a picture, one of the first ones I ever took, with her in it. I had my friends lined up in the front yard to take a picture and she's walking past in the background. She's glaring out of the corner of her eye.

Now you're probably either saying "Go on" right now or asking what this has to do with music?

Two Jones women, different Jones women, have CDs out now. Rickie Lee Jones put out The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard and Norah Jones put out Not Too Late. When I listen, they remind me of those Jones girls.

Rickie Lee Jones has a stripped down sound on this album. There's an electric piano on one track and a keyboard on the other, but no "We Belong." It's a guitar driven CD and she's exploring issues of spirituality/state of the world throughout. It's a new tactic for her but it works, it satisfies and reminds you of just how much RLJ has always refused to sit still. It's really meaningless to say "Check out track ___ and track ___" because she's offering a full album, an artistic journey. I'm certain that "Lamp Of the Body," "It Hurts," "Circle In The Sand" or "Elvis Cadillac" will end up on a RLJ collection at some point in the future, maybe more than one. But this really works best as a full listen and you don't want to use "shuffle," you want to listen straight through and it's easy to do so when it kicks off with something as strong as "Nobody Knows My Name."

Then we've got Norah Jones known to too many as "Snorah Jones." See RLJ reminds me of the blonde daughter from my street. She's always exploring and on a journey. She's life itself. Norah Jones is the other sister. She's the one everybody's parents like. And I wasn't thinking I'd even enjoy this CD. But there's something about Not Too Late that reminds me of the photo I took that I was telling you about. I don't know what's happened in Norah Jones' life, from press accounts, not much and all is happy. But don't ever swear on press accounts.

Maybe though Norah Jones hasn't suffered some tremendous loss, maybe she's just realized that being beloved by parents everywhere isn't quite where she wants to be? Maybe she doesn't see the height of art as appearing in Two Weeks Notice? She's actually worked her butt off her to stretch. It's not the stretch RLJ regularly makes, but it's a huge improvement over her past work.

Not Too Late works as an album not because of art. There's no cohesive statement here. Tracks seven, eight and nine demonstrate that might be a possibility in the future. I don't know that Norah Jones' inner world has fallen apart, maybe she didn't need it to move beyond the cloying "Come Away With Me" or the did not come song that led to many jokes about her. She was supposed to be stretching on the last album and that was nothing but standing still. Here, she's going for something and sometimes reaching it and sometimes failing. So you still get the standard issue "Be My Somebody," for instance. A song no one needed because there are about sixty similar ones being piped in at Starbucks across the country as I type.

But there's enough here to demonstrate that she realizes she needs to stretch and enough to indicate that she's actually capable of art and not just pleasing sounds. I'd say she's got half of an interesting album here. After track nine, she's back to doing what she's always done. It plays like somebody got scared. Like, in the middle of playing Red Light Green Light on the school yard, she froze and you're waiting for the kid on the swing to knock into her and send her sprawling to the ground. (The whistle on "Little Room" may lead you to cheer that knocking down.) I think the front and back cover of the standard CD (there's a deluxe edition) capture the two sides of this album. On the front cover, she's sitting with her dress spread out looking too dainty for this world, like a doll a child's left behind (and outgrown). The back cover isn't a photo, it's a painting. She doesn't look pretty with a pointy face and too large eyes. Her knees are nobby, her elbows are pointy. She's at a piano playing. That's the Norah coming through on the best tracks. Miss Pretty comes through on the worst.

If she can lose the need to be pretty, she might actually someday have a shot at something like The Sermon On Exposition Boulevard. That'll require being freer with her emotions and her art and it will mean more songs that aren't pretty. For now, she's put out a better CD than most of us would have expected with moments of real art.

rickie lee jones

Posted at 07:11 am by politicsscree
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gas bag gwen

"I've got a pretty long track record covering politics and news," she said. "so I'm not particularly worried that one-day blog chatter is going to destroy my reputation. The proof is in the pudding. They can watch the debate tomorrow night and make their own decisions about whether or not I've done my job."
Others in the McCain-Palin nexus sowed seeds of doubt about Ifill.
Asked by Sean Hannity if she was worried about Ifill, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said, "I am not going to let it be a concern," adding "that just makes us work harder. It makes us want to communicate even clearer and more profoundly with the electorate, letting them know what the contrasts are between these two tickets."
In addition, on a conference call set up by the McCain-Palin campaign, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani -- while calling Ifill a "very honest, decent journalist" and saying there is "no question that she will be perfectly fair in the way she asks the questions" -- also raised that very question.
"If the moderator of this debate were someone who was writing a book that basically was 'The Age of McCain,' I have a feeling that a lot more of these publications would be saying that the person should not be doing it," said Giuliani. "Now it might be totally unfair to do that. Just as I think it's totally unfair to do this. But it's just one more indication of how there is a double-standard in the way this campaign is treated."

that's from jake tapper's 'McCain Campaign Insinuates Bias by Moderator of VP Debate' (abc news) and gwen ifill's a joke. for laughs, let's all look back at one passage:

"I've got a pretty long track record covering politics and news," she said. "so I'm not particularly worried that one-day blog chatter is going to destroy my reputation. The proof is in the pudding. They can watch the debate tomorrow night and make their own decisions about whether or not I've done my job."

long before the primaries ended, gwen ifill was asking why hillary wouldn't drop out (on washington week) and was referring to her as 'that woman' and so much more. gwen ifill has always been in the tank for barack obama.

her track record, such as it is, is for being a fluffy piece of nonsense who, like the other beltway gas bags, sucks up and runs with the pack.

and she's the last to critizie palin - though she has. as ava and c.i. have repeatedly documented, gwen is the 'journalist' who brought up the 1st amendment on air and didn't know what it said. growing flustered, she finally said 'whatever it says' and tried to move on. a journalist knows the 1st amendment. a 'journalist' does not.

gwen's track record also includes defending blackwater on washington week and this was when 'covering' the september 2007 shooting.

so gwen has no track record except as a useless gas bag.

when even juan williams is calling for her to step down, you know it's bigger than gwen lets on.

oh, by the way, remember when scooter libby was indicted? and remember when he was found guilty?

long before that happened, gwen had assured viewers it was just 'a summer scandal' which would quickly fade away. it didn't though, did it?

gwen's record is 1 of incompetence.

by the way, last time i highlighted jake tapper, sherry e-mailed to ask, 'why doesn't he give up news and pose for playgirl?' he is a very attractive man - especially for a journalist.

on gwen, i hope she goes through with the debate. i like to think it could be the career destroyer for her and 1 less gas bag on the airwaves is always a good thing.

her 'fairness' record also includes shutting out ralph nader, cynthia mckinney and all others from the presidential race. but no 1 is supposed to notice that either.

or that she vouched for jeremiah wright on washington week or any of her other efforts promoting barack obama.

meanwhile, ralph is shut out of the debates. because people are scared he might hurt barack. apparently barack can only win on an uneven playing field. let ralph in the debate and, oops, barack's chances might fall. so screw democracy and the american people's right to see the candidates running for president. better to turn the whole year (and election) over to barack, right?

a lot of us disagree. this is joe thomas' 'Letters: Real candidates would not run from Ralph Nader' (the daily triplicate):

Gas prices are still through the roof. The price for a barrel of oil has gone down 33 percent, but gas prices have only gone down 7 percent. Our troops are still in Iraq even though the government there wants us to leave.
Our borders are still broken seven years after the terrorists attacks on our country and we still have not found and killed Osama Bin Laden.
Our food supply has been seriously compromised and the FDA does not do a thing about it. Everyone knows how crooked and incompetent the Bush administration is, but nothing has changed since Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats took over both houses of Congress.
There are two over-hyped politicians by the names of Obama and McCain running for president this year. John McCain will do nothing for the economy or the home mortgage crisis. McCain and his Bush-league pals support the trade policies and the deregulation that got us into this mess in the first place.
What about Obama and his Democratic buddies? Are you kidding me?
A lot of this deregulation nonsense took place during the Clinton administration and Obama has corporate thugs from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac advising him and funding his campaign.
There is one candidate and one candidate only who truly represents change and hope.
That man is Ralph Nader! Call the commission on presidential debates at 202-872-1020 so Ralph Nader can get into the debates. What are McCain, the maverick, and Obama, the agent for change, afraid of? If Obama is the real deal, he should be more than happy to debate Nader instead of running away like he has so far.
Joe Thomas
Brookings, Ore.

now here's some events ralph has coming up:

Oct. 4th, Noon
Nader/Gonzalez 2008 Rally
Waterbury, CT
195 Grand St. Waterbury, CT 06702
More info: Mike at (203) 573-9524 or events@votenader.org
Map it
Oct. 4th, 4pm
Private Gathering with Ralph Nader
Hartford, CT
RSVP: Rob (202) 471-5833 or events@votenader.org
Minimum Contribution: $100
Map it
Oct. 4th, 7pm
Nader/Gonzalez 2008 Rally
Storrs, CT
Edwin O. Smith High School
1235 Storrs Rd. Storrs, CT 06268
Suggested Contribution: $10/$5 students
(203) 468-1268 or events@votenader.org
Map it
Oct. 5th, 11am
Nader/Gonzalez Rally
Amherst, Massachusetts
U-Mass. Amherst, Bowker Auditorium in Stockbridge Hall
80 Campus Center Way, Amherst, MA 01003
Suggested Contribution: $10/$5 students
(504) 319-9312 or events@votenader.org
Map it
Oct. 5th, 4pm
Intimate Gathering with Ralph Nader
Waitsfield, VT
Contribution: $30 to $100
RSVP: (202) 471-5833 or rob@votenader.org
Map it
Oct. 5th, 7:30pm
Nader/Gonzalez Rally
Burlington, VT
Ira Allen Chapel
26 University Place Burlington, VT 05405
Suggested Contribution: $10/ $5 students
(504) 319-9312or events@votenader.org
Map it
Oct. 6th, 12pm
Nader/Gonzalez Rally
Hanover, NH
Alumni Hall, Hopkins Center for the Arts
Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755
Suggested Contribution: $10/$5 students
(202)471-5833 or events@votenader.org
Map it
Oct. 6th, 7:30pm
Nader/Gonzalez Rally
Portland, ME
First Parish in Portland Maine, Unitarian Universalist
425 Congress St. Portland, ME 04101
Suggested Contribution: $10/$5 students
(202)471-5833 or events@votenader.org
Map it

and i'm going to note those again tomorrow night. i just had the best idea for a post about nader (or i think it's the best) and if i write anything else tonight, i'll use it. instead i want to open with it tomorrow (and i'm wrote a note to myself to remember because otherwise i would forget). let's close with c.i.'s 'Iraq snapshot:'

Wednesday, October 1, 2008. Chaos and violence continue, Iraq falls off the news radar, the big 'handover' takes place, and more.

Today was 'handover' for the "Awakeing" Council (also known as Sawha and "Sons of Iraq"). The Sunni 'movement' began in Al Anbar Province in 2005 when the US military put Sunni thugs on the US tax dollar payroll. Puppet of the occupation Nouri al-Maliki, who staffed his ministries with Shi'ite thugs, has long seen the "Awakening" Councils as a threat to his supremacy in the puppet government. The late Lt Gen William E. Odom testifed before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee April 2nd and noted of the "Awakening" Council members:

Let me emphasize that our new Sunni friends insist on being paid for their loyalty. I have heard, for example, a rough estimate that the cost in one area of about 100 square kilometers is $250,000 per day. And periodically they threaten to defect unless their fees are increased. You might want to find out the total costs for these deals forecasted for the next several years, because they are not small and they do not promise to end. Remember, we do not own these people. We merely rent them. And they can break their lease at any moment.

The US has armed, trained and paid both sides in the conflict. Some might point out that to be 'needed' in the region, it helps to play both sides. During the same hearing, War Hawk Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations got the attention of Senator Barbara Boxer:

Barbara Boxer: Did you just say that Maliki uses the Iraqi security forces as his militia? Did you say that?Biddle: Yes.Barbara Boxer: If that's true and Maliki uses his military as a force to bring about peace -- that's scandalous and that we would have paid $20 million to train [it] and someone that we consider an expert says it's a militia, that's shocking.

Now the two extremist groups (neither of whom represent the bulk of Sunni and Shia Iraqis) are being 'partnered' and at a time when distrust runs high. Last month Charles Levinson (USA Today) reported on some of the suspicions of "Awakening" Council members and quoted Mullah Shihab al-Safi stating of the al-Maliki government sudden rush to arrest "Awakening" Council members, "Our government is after us. We sacrificed hundreds of our sons to drive al-Qaeda out. Now the government says we are no different than terrorists." And this tension was well known long before today. Dropping back to the September 11 snapshot:

Meanwhile the "Awakening" Council is back in the news. These are the Sunni thugs on the US payroll ($300 a month for males, $280 for females) because, as US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker told Congress repeatedly in April, paying them off means they don't attack US equipment or soldiers. That's a lot of lunch money to fork over each money to be safe on the 'playground.' Puppet of the occupation, Nouri al-Maliki, has long been vocally opposed to the "Awakening" Councils. That's because he staffed with Shi'ite thugs. The two most extreme segments of Iraq are at war with one another. al-Maliki has made it very clear he has little use for the "Awakening" Councils and his staff has echoed that repeatedly. With US Senators and House Reps loudly objecting to the tax payer monies being spent on this program (one Petraeus hails) last April, there's been a push to have the puppet government (sitting on billions) pay the "Awakening" Council itself. (Senator Barbara Boxer was especially vocal in April asking why the puppet government wasn't paying them.) The new talk is that al-Maliki will begin paying them but distrust remains on both sides.

Nicholas Spangler and Mohammed al-Dulaimy (McClatchy Newspapers) report that despite for-show motions in public on the part of the puppet government, "Awakening" Council leaders remain skepitcal (with one saying after the latest press conference, "I don't trust a word they say") that the puppet government will take charge and pay the 99,000 "Awakening" members or that 20,000 will be absorbed "into the police and army" starting October 1st. Thursday's press conference found Gen Abud Ganbar declaring, "The government has ordered that monthly salaries be paid until we can put (Awakening members) into security forces or ministires. Payments will continue until they find jobs." That leaves "Awakening" leaders skeptical and the reporters quote various voices explaining why including the claim that the puppet government has hired al Qaeda members. Khalid al-Ansary and Waleed Ibrahim (Reuters) report on the puppet government side where grave doubts are repeatedly raised ("But he also expressed distaste for some members of the predominantly Sunni Arab Awakening movement, an aversion shared by some other officials.") as is the argument that there is need "to weed out" certain members. In other words, Thursday's press conference reassured no one and the tensions remain.

September 23rd, Erica Goode (New York Times) reported on the tensions in Baghdad as the transfer of "Awakening" to the puppet government approaches and notes that "Awakening" Councils in Adhamiya "have posed increasing problems. . . . Some residents complain that the men, not a few of them swaggering street toughs, use their power to intimidate people. Sometimes violence erupts." At the start of last month, Rania Abouzeid (Time magazine) was quoting the "Awakening" Council spokesperson Mohammed Mahmood al Natah on his dismay over the 'handover', "We wanted it to be postponed but the decision had already been made by the government and we cannot change it." Despite the very public nature of the tensions and the fears on both sides, things appear to have been rushed through with very little planning.

Near the end of September, Lt Gen Lloyd Austin gave a briefing where he praised the "Awakening" Council and declared, "One of our primary focus areas as we move foward is transitioning the Sons of Iraq program to the Iraqi government. The volunteer movement that started in Anbar and spread across the rest of the country significantly contributed to the security successes that we are now taking advantage of. The Sons of Iraq have paid a heavy price fight al Qaeda and other insurgent groups, and it's important that the government of Iraq responsibly transition them into meaningful employment. Prime Minister Maliki has assured me that the government will help those who help the people of Iraq. And so next week in Baghdad the government will accept responsibility for approximately 54,000 Sons of Iraq, and we will be there to assist in the transfer." And yet for all the words expressed, no planning appeared to have gone into what happened next, a point NPR's JJ Sutherland repeatedly attempted to explore. The exchange ended with this:

JJ Sutherland: Sir, I understand that but I'[m saying, "What happens in October? I understand eventually you want to have them be plumbers or electricians. But in October, there are a lot of checkpoints that have been manned by the Sons of Iraq. Are those checkpoints all going to go away? Are they only going to be staffed by Iraqi police now? That's my question. It's not eventually, it's next month.

Lt Gen Lloyd Austin: Yeah. Next month the Iraqi government will begin to work their way through this. And there's no question that some of them, some of the checkpoints, many of the checkpoints, will be -- will be manned by Iraqi security forces. In some cases, there may be Sons of Iraq that will be taksed to help with that work. But in most cases, I think the Iraqi government will be looking to transition people into different types of jobs.

That was September 22nd and the US military was apparently operating under the notion that things could be figured ("begin to work their way through this") at some point in October. Ann Scott Tyson (Washington Post) reported this morning on the new Pentagon report to Congress which cited the Pentagon's belief in the importance of the "Awakening" Councils and also noted the "[t]ension between the government and Sunni volunteers . . . in Diyala Province, where the Sunni population is fearful that the government is using military opeations ostensibly aimed at al-Qaeda in Iraq as a pretext to 'arrest, intimidate, or kill moderate Sunnis and SOI groups who are otherwise interested in participating the political process'." The Pentagon's report to Congress is [PDF format warning] "Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq" and it hails the "Awakening" Councils:

The emergence of the SoI remains one of the major developments of the past 18 months; however, the integration and employment of SoI remain a significant challenge. The SoI provide significant security benefits to their local communities by protecting neighborhoods, securing key infrastructure and roads, and identifying malign activity. What began primarily as a Sunni effort has now taken hold in many Shi'a and mixed Sunni-Shi'a communities as well. Today there are over 98,000 SoI contributing to local security.

If the Pentagon believes that one has to wonder how they missed the various "Awakening" Council members speaking to the press repeatedly about either being on strike (while at a checkpoint) because there was an arrest warrant out for an "Awakening" member or telling the press that they'd learned their checkpoint would be shut down after the 'handover'?

Leila Fadel (McClatchy Newspapers) sketched out the basics, "Unemployment in Sunni areas remains high, basic services are still poor, distrust of the United States and the Shiite-led Iraqi government is widespread and fears of Shiite militias persist. On Wednesday, al Qaisi and 54,419 other men in Baghdad province will transition to Iraqi government control. That's more than half of the Sons of Iraq (SOI) who're now being paid by the U.S. military to protect neighborhoods -- and in some cases not to shoot at American troops." John Hendren (ABC News) reports: "Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told ABC News Iraq plans to give 20 percent of the nation's 100,000 Sons of Iraq jobs to the police force and army. 'I don't think that the Iraqi government neither the Multi National Forces could achieve such success and security without their participation,' al-Dabbagh told ABC News. But here in the small village of Jambariyah, an al Qaeda stronghold north of Baghdad until early this year, just one of 70 Sons of Iraq has been hired to date, and of the 1,200 in the city of Dujail, none." Despite those (and other) realities, the 'handover' took place today. Mary Beth Sheridan (Washington Post) reports, "The handover of the armed groups was a low-key affair in Baghdad, where government offices are closed for a six-day holiday marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The transition was largely symbolic, since the U.S. military plans to stay involved with the groups for several months as the Iraqi government begins paying their salaries and decides how to employ them." Last month, Erica Goode and Muhafer al-Husaini (New York Times) noted that Brig Gen Tarek Abdul Hameed declare that the puppet government in Baghdad would indeed pick up their payrolls for the "Awakening" Councils -- as did many outlets. However, Tim Albone (Times of London) explains, "Senior US military sources said that America would pay the salaries of any members of the force who did not find alternative employment." UPI cites KUNA to inform that, according to Maj Gen Jeffery Hammond, though the 'handover' took place today al-Maliki's government will not begin paying until November 10th. Meanwhile Nizar Latif (UAE's The National) offers this evaluation, "However, the US military and the Sahwa themselves are concerned that the Iraqi government may simply disband the councils and push the former insurgents back into the role of active insurgents. In essence it would be a repeat of a former devastating mistake, when America disbanded the Iraqi army in 2003, leaving thousands of trained soldiers without jobs and a score to settle against the US military."

Turning to some of today's reported violence . . .

Bombings?

Hussein Kadhim (McClatchy Newspapers) reports a Baghdad roadside bombing that wounded four people .

Shootings?

Hussein Kadhim (McClatchy Newspapers) reports an armed clash in Diyala Province that claimed 2 lives and four police officers wounded.

Moving over to the US presidential race. David Hoff (Education Week) explores what the presidential choices mean in terms of the No Child Left Behind Act (also known as "No Learning, Just Crib Notes") since both GOP presidential nominee John McCain and Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama support it. Hoff notes three who are for quality education (first step, end NCLB):

Ralph Nader, who is running as an independent, says "federal policy needs to be transformed from one that uses punishments to control schools, to one that supports teachers and students; from one that relies primarily on standardized tests, to one that encourages high-quality assessments. Broader measures of student learning are needed that include reliance of classroom-based assessments along with testing."

Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party candidate, writes: "Turning education over to the federal government, as through such legislation as the No Child Left Behind Act has not worked. Trying to fix failing schools with more money and regulations also has failed to do anything other than waste taxpayer money without results." He proposes ending the federal government's role in education and turning decisions back to state and local governments.

The Green Party, which has nominated Cynthia McKinney to be its candidate, writes in its draft platform that "the federal Act titled No Child Left Behind punishes where it should assist and hinders its own declared purpose. It should be repealed or greatly redesigned." The federal government's roles should be limited to ensuring students across states have a "level playing field," the platform says.

Hoff notes that Barr and McKinney did vote for NCLB in 2001 while both were members of the US House of Representatives. Anita Zimmerman (The Chetek Alert) covers many presidential candidates and we'll note this section:

The state's Green party has many of the same challenges. They don't get much media coverage, their candidates are rarely invited to debates, and their resources are too limited for national advertisement. Like the Constitution party, there are "scattered individuals" but no cohesive Barron County organization, says Jeff Peterson, co-founder of the Wisconsin Green Party. Peterson, a 20-year veteran of the party and a Luck resident, believes presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney appeals to urban voters and young people. Peterson's been "politicking from his computer," he adds. On the national level, the Green party's base is split between 20-somethings and 50-somethings, Peterson explains. While the party enjoys support on college campuses, it has never succeeded in garnering the 5-percent vote necessary to "unlock all sorts of resources," especially the monetary kind. Peterson's goal for the election is to "maintain a presence." Voters need third-party options, he believes, and candidates like McKinney, a former congresswoman from Georgia, take stances on issues Republicans and Democrats may not address.

Ralph Nader is the independent presidential candidate and Team Nader's Ashley Sanders explains:

Many people tend to see the economic crisis as a problem from nowhere, divorcing it from the deliberate and systematic dismantling of regulation and oversight waged by the corporate sector in its fight for ever-greater profits. Many of these same people view Barack Obama's candidacy in similar but opposite terms, seeing him as the change candidate from nowhere who will save our economic and political our economic and political system--divorcing his hope message from his actual platforms and legislative history. In part two of her February analysis of Obama's campaign, Pam Martens makes the connection between our rootless critiques of the economy and our rootless support of Obama. When the same people causing a crisis are funding the man claiming to solve a crisis, we can expect more of the same.

Governor Sarah Palin is the GOP nominee for vice president and yesterday Katie Couric interviewed the McCain-Palin ticket for The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric (link has text and video and click here for transcript):

"I do," Palin said. "I'm a feminist who, uh, believes in equal rights and I believe that women certainly today have every opportunity that a man has to succeed, and to try to do it all, anyway. And I'm very, very thankful that I've been brought up in a family where gender hasn't been an issue. You know, I've been expected to do everything growing up that the boys were doing. We were out chopping wood and you're out hunting and fishing and filling our freezer with good wild Alaskan game to feed our family. So it kinda started with that."

Today the McCain-Palin campaign released the following:

Today, Chief Warrant Officer 4 Michael J. Durant (Ret.) issued the following statement on Joe Biden's apparently false accounts of near-misses on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq:
"Senator Biden claimed at a debate last year that he'd been 'shot at' while visiting Iraq. And he has claimed repeatedly, most recently last week, that his helicopter was 'forced down' in Afghanistan -- leaving his audience with the impression that it was fire from the Taliban which had grounded the aircraft. Neither of these stories appears to be true, and Senator Biden has never accounted for the discrepancies.
"I've been on a helicopter that was 'forced down' by enemy fire, and I've been 'shot at.' Neither is easily confused with being caught in a snow storm or awakened by a loud bang in the night. Senator Biden has a responsibility to come clean on what actually happened, and explain why he would ever say such things to the American people. And with the Vice Presidential Debate coming up on Thursday, it is incumbent on the news media to ask Senator Biden the tough questions -- as they have so far failed to do -- and examine his responses closely for inconsistencies of the kind we've witnessed in recent months.
"The American people expect and deserve leaders who tell the truth about their record and their experiences, and a news media that holds all candidates -- no matter their party -- to the same standard."

When it was Hillary, it was BIG NEWS. Was it just because she's a woman? Was it just because the press wants to elect Barack? Tomorrow night Joe Biden and Sarah Palin are scheduled to debate. Prior to the start of the vice presidential debate, (3:45 p.m. local time), Senator McCain will be participating in the Women's Town Hall Meeting in Denver.

iraq
mcclatchy newspapers nicholas spangler mohammed al dulaimy
leila fadel
the new york times erica goode
mudhafer al-husaini the washington post ann scott tyson tim albone

Posted at 07:09 am by politicsscree
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and here's c.i.'s review of last year.

2007: The Year of Living Useless (Year in Review)

"For his good and the good of The Morning Star, I intend to remove him from the land of the living!" hollers Walter Connolly's Oliver Stone in the 1937 screwball comedy Nothing Sacred about star reporter Wally Cook (Fredric March) being moved over to the obituaries after his big scoop explodes in his and the paper's face. Shortly after, Cook convinces Stone there's a story in Hazel Flagg (played by Carole Lombard) and vows, "If I don't come back with the biggest story you've ever seen, you can put me back in short pants and make me marble editor!" Could we get an order of short pants for independent media?

If 2006 was The Year of Living Dumbly, 2007 was The Year of Living Useless. And was anyone more useless than independent media?

Take FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, because we have to start somewhere. Sending out an action alert about an article the New York Times printed when, in fact, the offending paragraph only made it into online versions was a simple mistake. It's not one that Cedric and Wally made (see "New York Times lies again!" and "THIS JUST IN! NEW YORK TIMES LIES ABOUT PEACE MOVEMENT!") but then, they were on it in real time and not days later. It provided laughter at the paper as FAIR supporters stormed the e-mail accounts with angry missives about that offending article the paper 'printed' but it didn't do any real damage and could be chalked up to a simple mistake.

No such leeway can be given when FAIR rushed in to prop up a bad article by lying about it, "The Nation's investigation into the U.S. occupation's impact on Iraqi civilians (7/30/07) . . . " They began breathlessly having forgotten the basics: A people's story is never told by outsiders. Xenophobia on parade in their rush to promote the magazine's worst article (a hard call to make granted).

The publicity hack for the magazine felt the need to mail the public account of this site on July 2nd about the article but problems with the article were already known. A large number of veterans were already offended that they'd been pushed aside and those who had spoken with the magazine's two reporters had questions about the realities that would make it into print. For those involved in the peace movement in any manner, this was the big talk as spring drew to a close and summer began. Either FAIR didn't give a damn or they're not part of the peace movement.

If it's the latter (that would explain their refusal to cover it), they didn't need that background to be appalled by the article when it finally was published.

It didn't take a determined sleuth to notice that the term "war resisters" continues to be banned at the alleged leading magazine of the allegedly left. Camilo Mejia couldn't be called a "war resister" but he could be called a "deserter" demonstrating that, if this is the left's idea of understanding, there are serious comprehension issues. Mejia, a non-US citizen, should have been discharged while he was in Iraq since his service contract was up and he couldn't legally be 'stop lossed'. A Florida Senator, a centrist Democrat, grasped what the allegedly left magazine couldn't. Mejia self-checked out only when the military refused to honor their own policy (after acknowledging it) and he also applied for CO status and was denied. It's rather cute that none of that gets noted when he's reduced to "deserter" (a term that is inaccurate and bothers him but no one at The Nation gave a damn). At the very least, a left magazine could have used the term "war resister," but The Nation, in 2007, demonstrated they were far from left and far from journalism.

The article opened with an overly long introduction ("A Note on Methodology") and maybe all the excess wordage caused FAIR and others to miss it but the article bragged of "dozens" of photos of abuse. That wasn't an empty boast. They were provided with many photographs. They made the 'journalistic' choice not to run them.

Shielding the public from realities is the sort of action that regularly (and rightly) leads to charges of censorship and calling out by left organizations. But FAIR, despite the organization's name, wasn't interested in applying journalistic principles fairly, just in schilling for a really bad article.

The article provided three groups of veterans: Iraq Veterans Against the War (wrongly identified as left, IVAW is against the war and its membership is diverse), a centrist group whose goal is to elect veterans (they'd argue they have other goals but their actions in 2007 cast that in doubt) and a right-wing, publicity front group identified as such by PR Watch. Somehow none of that was a concern to the journalistic critics at FAIR. Had Meet the Press provided the same 'balance,' the same 'mix,' they'd be up in arms.

A sign of how bad the article was came after it was published when those veterans against the war already voicing their concerns were joined by centrists and the front group in decrying the lousy article.

It tried to be everything and in the end was nothing other than insulting. Apparently Nation readers are not known to be against the illegal war (who knew?) and are very, very young children who must be sheltered from the truth, hence the need for a left or 'left' magazine to 'balance' with not only a center group but a right-wing front group and the need not to publish photographic evidence of abuse. (In December, 60 Minutes would do something similar. Possibly the watchdog FAIR ignored that because they realized how hypocritical they'd look for calling it out having remained silent on The Nation's own censorship?)

FAIR was far from alone in schilling for this bad article co-written by the man who rushed the false link between Iraq and 9-11 onto the front pages of the New York Times in October 2001; however, that's another thing we're not supposed to notice. The only ones who stood apart from the journalistic embarrassment were Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez (Democracy Now!) who wisely saw what was missing in the article -- war resistance -- and rounded out their discussion of the story by providing clips of war resisters the program had interviewed in the past.* Maybe they had heard the long criticism leading up to the publication or maybe the two journalists just read the article and saw what was obviously missing from it? Regardless what a media watchdog couldn't notice, Goodman and Gonzalez did. As the article continued to be schilled (and turned into mill for op-eds) months after it was published, it became obvious that journalistic standards were in short supply on the left.

The world is beautiful today
More beautiful by far
Than any other day
I only know
That I'm in love with such green earth . . .

Nothing's Sacred was turned into a Broadway musical entitled Hazel Flagg and, if lacking any other realities she should have grown up with, Nation editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel appears familiar with the score and damn determined to regularly sing it (the score Time magazine called in real time overly loud -- a bit like those annoying "Sweet Victories" posts). But we'll get back to that.

2007 was the year independent media should have been sent to their rooms -- with no TV or computer privileges.

For those who missed it, 2007 was not an election year, though you'd never know it to sample independent media. Much has been made of the public exhaustion with what passes for coverage of candidates (you always know it's a trend -- real or media created -- when the Times rushes to weigh in), but never forget that independent media was first out of the gate in the horse race coverage.

The non-stop horse race coverage had to push aside a lot of topics and one was the Iraq War.
August 20th, Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) noted the Project for Excellence in Journalism "study shows corporate news coverage of the Iraq war has dropped sharply in the last four months. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the Iraq war accounted for just fifteen percent of news coverage, down from twenty-two percent earlier this year. Network evening news coverage of the war went from forty-percent to nineteen percent. The Democratic and Republican presidential campaign emerged as the most-covered issue over the same period." "Campaign For President Takes Center Stage In Coverage" only tracked mainstream media. If independent media were tracked, it would be even worse. But there appears to be some pact that no one in independent media will ever call out independent media -- thereby explaining how it continues to get worse each year.

A serious issue in independent media we'll get too shortly but tracking it resulted in the July 2nd e-mail from The Nation. Third Estate Sunday Review reader Calvin then asked that The Nation's Iraq coverage be covered for the first six months of 2007. The results? 13 pieces were published on Iraq, 14 pieces on the 2008 elections. A real and ongoing war takes a backseat to a future election. That's the print magazine, not their online 'writing' which is even less concerned with Iraq. In fact, 2007 was the year that "Iraq War" would disappear as a folder on their website's home page. Did the illegal war end? No, just their interest in it.

From The Third Estate Sunday Review's "Horse racing or Iraq? Which wins out at The Nation:"

In The Elector, Ava came up with the idea for the tag by the illustration (and notes it was reworked by others "credit where it's due"), "Our special issue that continues our non-stop 2006 election coverage that we'll only drop in a few weeks when we gear up for the 2008 elections." If you're missing the truth in that joke, you need only grab the November 20, 2006 issue of The Nation, flip to page five where "The 'Off-Year Primary'" begins (it ends on page six). If you're blanking, in 2006 the general election took place across the country on November 7th. And lest you think The Nation was sleeping on the horse race, the article was available online November 3rd. Yes, before the 2006 election had taken place it was already time to announce "If there's a winner in the 2006 version of that contest, it's Senator Barack Obama" (!), to offer up Hillary Clinton's negatives (Lakshme, take note, this piece was written by a male -- we look forward to your piece on why left and 'left' men, who may or may not have supported Hillary as First Lady, have trouble with her as a presidential candidate all this time later), tell you George Allen was out of the 2008 presidential race (when was he in?) and include some "good news for McCain". All before the 2006 election had taken place, this piece on the 2008 election was written and run online.

The author of the piece was John Nichols, first out of the gate, and they were off!

The Progressive, to turn to another independent media outlet, had their own problems: Ruth Conniff. Damn proud of her lukewarm scribbles and awfully lucky Katha Pollitt left her off the list of "I like Mike" supporters, Conniff appears to exist these days to remind people how Judith Miller could have ever been associated with the magazine. Lacking any interest in a topic that wouldn't make the Sunday chat & chews and lacking the depth to 'explore' any further than Tim Russert would, Conniff repeatedly embarrassed herself in 2007 with her 'election' coverage. John Nichols should have found another topic but his posts and articles were heart felt, Conniff showed all the 'talent' of a draq queen impersonating Donna Summer or maybe she was attempting to impersonate Gail Collins?

Sometimes a subject could cause her to dig a little deeper but even then it was about as deep as a coat of nail polish. While John Nichols seemed sincerely concerned about what citizens were getting from the candidates, Conniff thought a bemused attitude was the way to go. Erma Bombeck never covered politics and that was a good thing. A functioning independent media would have tossed Conniff and all the others turning in their second-rate, imitation MSM writing.

Six days before Pollitt called out the male "I Like Huckabee" supporters (plus Gail Collins), Rebecca had called out Conniff's crap. Reality check for anyone at an alleged left magazine, no one needs your gushing. Conniff appears to think she's still on the cable and chat & chew guest list. She's not. She's writing for an alternative magazine and that requires something a little deeper than the superficial 'banter' exchanged with Chris Matthews. If she's incapable of offering it, she needs to be kicked to the curb. It should be a basic that "I like" pieces aren't required from journalists. For those foolish enough to offer them, they should be required to do some research. Not knowing a candidate's history embarrasses not only yourself but the magazine you represent.

It's not easy to advocate the ditching of Conniff because there are so damn few women being published. But women like Conniff serve the purpose, intentionally or not, of saying 'left' women can't keep up with their male peers. And maybe The Nation magazine could offer that as their excuse for their lousy record in publishing women?

In 2007, we tracked who the 'leading magazine of the left' published and who they didn't. July 4th, the result of the first six months were published at all community sites:

"Are You A Writer For The Nation? If so, chances are you must have a penis," "Are You A Writer For The Nation? If so, chances are you have a penis," "Are You A Writer For The Nation? If so, chances are you have a penis," "Are You A Writer For The Nation? If so, chances are you have a penis," "Are You A Writer For The Nation? If so, chances are you have a penis," "Are You A Writer For The Nation? If so, chances are you have a penis," "Are You A Writer For The Nation? If so, chances are you have a penis," "Are You A Writer For The Nation? If so, chances are you have a penis," "Are You A Writer For The Nation? If so, chances are you have a penis," and "Are You A Writer For The Nation? If so, chances are you have a penis."

December 23rd, the tracking completed with "The Nation featured 491 male bylines in 2007 -- how many female ones?" (The Third Estate Sunday Review). Before we get to the results for the full year, let's note that the first six months saw 255 men received bylines while only 74 women did. That announced (and 'announced' by a backstabber) feature went up two days after The Nation's Ben Wyskida rushed in via e-mail to maintain, "On the subject of women and the magazine; you should also know that the magazine is more than aware of the imbalance, and has taken steps in the last several months to recruit and bring in more women writers."

Well hallelujah! The problem's being addressed. But is addressing the problem publishing 75 women to 236 men?

The magazine apparently thought it was. The first six months saw 255 men and 74 women, the second half saw 236 men and 75 women. That's working on the problem? Only in independent media could this be considered working on the problem and 'taking steps' to address a recognized 'imbalance.' So for the year, The Nation published 491 men and only 149 women.

In a world where women mattered and people were smart enough to grasp that they have the same rights to make demands of independent media as they do of mainstream media, The Nation would be called out loudly. Didn't happen and remember that the next time FAIR publishes another study of the gender ratio in the mainstream media. Remember that when we don't hold little media accountable we're in no position to hold big media accountable.

And always remember and never forget that any woman in a role of power isn't "the answer." Some women are Queen Bees and not interested in helping other women. Which is how a weekly magazine where one woman holds the title of editor and publisher could publish only 149 women but 491 men. Only a Queen Bee would write the following, "A disturbing story in The Washington Post yesterday suggested that Congress is losing its co**nes when it comes to closing some of the most obscene tax loopholes benefiting the richest of the rich--hedge funders and private equity managers." That's from her September 5th "A Democratic Litmus Test" (Editor's Cut, The Nation) and if you don't know the word I've censored, you can google the post. Unlike Katrina, I don't confuse strength with male genitalia and I'll be damned if I take part in furthering that lie. The fact that vanden Heuvel will further it means, as noted in "Does Katrina vanden Heuvel thinks she has testicles?," she either assumes she has mixed genitalia or is confessing to her own weakness.

Regardless, it was ugly and women, already under attack, didn't need it.

It bears noting that Katrina vanden Heuvel's ascent to publisher coincides with The Nation's sudden refusal to use the term "war resister" and with their refusal to cover war resisters. Prior to that, readers of the magazine could learn of modern day war resisters. The Peace Resister Katrina vanden Heuvel takes over and she's so determined to run from the topic
she pens the laughable "The Peace Primary" (google it, no link to trash). As noted in " The Peace Resister pretends to be about peace" (The Third Estate Sunday Review):

She opens with American Friends Service Committee and writes (this is in full) of them " The twelve finalists include: * American Friends Service Committee with Iraqis, military families, veterans, and peace supporters in the US to highlight the human and economic costs of war." We'll assume the verb in that sentence is missing due to computer problems (we often lose words here as well -- spell check on another feature resulted in "amp" being inserted for full sentences) so we'll ignore the fact that it's missing. But what we can't ignore is her continued silence on war resisters which, for the record, is not a silence that the Quakers practice. American Friends Service Committee started because? Of conscientious objectors. They continue that work today. It takes a real Peace Resister to write about American Friends Service Committee and not note that reality.

But she did that. For more on her tenure as publisher, you can see:

"The Nation ignores war resisters even as it publishes the child of one," "the nation magazine ignores war resisters while publishing the child of one," "The Nation refuses to cover war resisters while publishing the child of one," "The Nation ignores war resisters even while publishing the child of one," "The Nation ignores war resisters while publishing the child of one,""The Nation refuses to cover war resisters while publishing the child of one," "The Nation refuses to cover war resisters while publishing the child of one," "The Nation ignores war resisters while publishing the child of one," and "The Nation ignores war resisters even while publishing the child of one."

In fairness to Katrina, she's always been opposed to war resisters. In 2007, what's the excuse from others?

Doesn't independent media exist to tell the stories of resistance? And isn't their claim to increased fame and larger audiences the illegal war in Iraq? Didn't they tell us the truth in real time? Didn't they tell us that they loved peace, baby? They said they'd keep coming back to this topic, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, oh, baby . . .

Like a Carpenters song, the illegal war apparently dated quickly. (Maybe Sonic Youth could try to revive independent media?)

How is it that independent media could offer so many year end reviews and not note Ehren Watada? The reality is even he, the most covered war resister, fell off little media's radar in 2007 (there were exceptions) so by year's end, our White 'leaders' appeared to feel it was only the role of the Asian-geared press to cover Watada and they could easily rush off to other topics. (Rebecca called out one leader here.) What about Adam Kokesh who fought the military when they attempted to alter his discharge? Matthew Rothschild (The Progressive) would call it out in real time. A few covered it after the hearing. AP, by contrast, covered it throughout, and, no surprise for MSM, they regularly ignored a 1970 Supreme Court verdict that has already addressed this issue and stated that the US military has no say in theater (street theater or big productions). For independent media to have filled in the blanks, they'd have to be aware of the Court's ruling but apparently that was more work than they were capable of.

So was interviewing war resisters emerging in 2008. Think back to it and do so in shock as you rake your brain to find one US independent outlet (broadcast or print) that made time to note even one war resister to emerge in 2008. Joel Bleifuss (In These Times) stood alone in noting the Kamunen brothers, Luke, Leif and Leo, who all self-checked out and said "no more"-- stood alone in independent media, print or broadcast.

When people take a stand, when they demonstrate the Courage to Resist*, if their stories aren't told, we need to be asking why that is? (*Courage to Resist is a wonderful organization and offers real coverage of war resisters but we don't consider them "media," they're an organization.) And we need to ask who's being served by the silence? And who's being harmed?

A clear answer comes with Josh White and Ann Scott Tyson's "Charges Against Snipers Stir Debate on 'Baiting'" piece for the Washington Post about the "kill teams" operating in Iraq -- US service members under orders to leave out items and then to shoot-to-kill any Iraqi who comes across their trap. An explosive story to be sure and one independent media (briefly) rushed to play catch up with. Catch up? Had they covered war resisters, independent media could have broadcast or printed the story on "kill teams" months prior -- the Canadian media had. How? US war resister James Burmeister, Iraq veteran, went to Canada and in the early summer months was giving as many interviews as he could line up to get the word out on the "kill teams." As always independent media had something else to do. When they tried to play catch up to the Post in September, they either still weren't aware that Burmeister had served on a "kill team" or else they were so shamed from their earlier silence that they didn't want their consumers to know about it. Not only did Canadian media cover it, regional US big media did as well. As noted here on September 26th:

In a July snapshot, this appeared: "Mark Larabee (The Oregonian) reports on Burmeister and notes the 'traps' were an issue -- setting out the fake carmera or other equipment so that someone would go for it and then shooting them for touching US property -- with James Burmeister declaring, 'As soon as anyone would mess with it, you were supposed to lay waste to them. I completely disagreed with that tactic. I can't see how that's helping anyone whatsoever'; and on Iraq, 'I though people needed to be free there. But when I went there it was all about captures and kills and it felt like we messed things up over there'." Credit to Larabee for covering it. You've got the CBC interview.

You had a lot, you just didn't have independent media. And it's way past time independent media news consumers started asking why that is -- in fact, they should be demanding answers at this point.

If independent media went out of their way to avoid Iraq and all Iraq related stories, what did they cover? 2007 was when the bulk of little media enlisted in the Barack Obama presidential campaign -- a Katrina coffee fetcher even went to work for it. Bambi would walk on his own and go to potty all by himself in 2008, indy media insisted, but right now he needed coaxing. And what better way to guarantee that than by lavishing him with non-stop praise.

As they crowded around the potty chair, they produced many embarrassing moments. To note only two of the really bad moments . . .

Out lesbian Laura Flanders took to The Nation's website to plead with Barack days after his South Carolina event that provided homophobes stage space to express their homophobia. Flanders chose to plead with Barack. To stop putting known homophobes on stage? No, to plead with him to dump Democratic king-maker Richard Daley over Daley's stance on torture. Forget themselves, Sisters Are Doing It For Barack.

Reality check would require noting that when you're personally insulted there's often a response of, "Am I making too much of this? Is it just me?" Point, Flanders isn't the only one who could have or should have called it out. In fact, as 'liberals,' progressives or whatever, it was incumbent upon all of us to stand up. Heterosexuals registering their offense would have sent a strong message that this wasn't acceptable. Instead all but the Black Agenda Report appeared to suffer from laryngitis. (And though we're not here to hand out lolly pops, it bears noting that Glen Ford, Bruce Dixon and Margaret Kimberley packed more life, more independence and more thought into any one week of 2007 than most 'independent media' could manage the whole year.)

The other embarrassing moment, and one that tickeled Big Media, came when Katrina vanden Heuvel's lust for President Obama outweighed her duties and obligations as editor and publisher of The Nation. Ari Berman had written praising Bambi for a performance. DC correspondent David Corn had called Hillary Clinton the winner. Demonstrating that she will allow no diversity of opinion and that she has no grasp on her professional roles, Katrina, grabbing the vapors, rushed to her blog to issue that her "colleague" Corn was wrong and Berman was right.

In a year that gave Big Media much to laugh at, no other gift from Little Media provided as many chuckles or as much outrage from their corporate counter-point. vanden Heuvel wasn't either Corn or Berman's colleague, she was their "boss" and, by publicly choosing sides, she angered and amused Big Media who couldn't believe any publisher at "a real magazine" (to quote one) "would be so stupid?" You can check Big Media's archives to see who got cited for their opinion of that Obama v. Clinton mix-up: Corn, Berman or vanden Heuvel? (For those lacking the time, it was David Corn.) To no one's surprise (but a loud chorus of "Good for him!"s), Corn left his home home of twenty years and moved over to become the DC bureau chief at Mother Jones.

As if to underscore the huge gap between journalism and DNC party organ, Mother Jones would offer Stephanie Mencimer's "Cheney: No Justice for Jaime Jones" while the self-billed 'leading magazine of the left' remained silent on the issue of what happened to Jamie Leigh Jones in Iraq -- even after she publicly testified before a Congressional committee. But The Nation's silence was perfectly in keeping with an independent media that completely ignored Abeer and largely ignored Suzanne Swift.

2007 would stand out as the year independent media attacked Cindy Sheehan for daring to note the reality: Democrats in Congress were not ending the illegal war despite being handed control of both houses in the November 2006 elections to do so. The Peace Mom could be kicked to the curb because the 'left' was really just schilling for the Democratic Party in most cases. Shameless "Don't Run, Cindy!" campaigns sprung up -- as ignorant and appalling as "Ralph, Don't Run!" earlier but, note, now these undemocratic 'leaders' weren't rushing to eliminate presidential contenders, they were attempting to eliminate House candidates. In 20010, look for The Nation and others to stick their big noses into municipal elections. Not surprisingly, none of the ones launching a "Don't Run, Cindy!" campaign lived in the Bay Area. If they had, they might have grasped the current House rep does not represent the eighth district of California and citizens are majorly displeased with Nancy Pelosi. (As polling of the Bay Area would later demonstrate.) But somehow the race was something for residents of Los Angeles and NYC to weigh in on -- even though they didn't know the area, didn't live in the area and wouldn't be voting in it. Instead of using their voices to support the candidates in races they COULD VOTE IN, they thought the thing to do was gang up on a woman who'd already given so much. It was disgraceful.

But not surprising. Independent media isn't "independent" and at some point may face serious probes of their tax-free status. It's one thing to be of the left, it's another to be in bed with the Democratic Party and the latter actually violates the tax-free status so many hold. Fortunately for them, Democrats currently control Congress so there will be no probe in the immediate future. (If they had any brains, they'd throw a bone or two to the Green Party and independent candidates just to give the appearance that they're not an arm of the Democratic Party.)

In addition to that reality, the attacks on Cindy shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone paying attention in March of 2007. That's when it was obvious that the Congressional Democratic leadership was selling out the voters. And that's when Pelosi's enforcer David Obey threw an abusive and public tantrum captured on video. Instead of calling out Obey, many (such as David Sirota) rushed in to defend Obey. The woman he attacked was Tina Richards and wasn't it cute the way she was either left undefended or attacked by our so-called 'left' media? It's really hard for people to even pretend you're 'independent' media when you rush to defend Obey and his tantrum while piling on the mother of wounded Iraq veteran Cloy Richards whose 'crime' was trying to get the medical attention her son was owed. It was a disgraceful moment for independent media and a lot of people would like to pretend it didn't happen.

The embarrassment might have continued for the full year had Howard Zinn's "Are We Politicians or Citizens?" (The Progressive) not made the point so many in independent media wanted to forget. That's how bad 2007 was, 'independent' media could and did go after two women working to end the illegal war, one the mother of son who died in the Iraq War, the other the mother of a son who was wounded in it. And what did independent media, so quick to slam these women, have to show for itself on Iraq? Not too damn much.

Among the big embarrasments would be Pacifica Radio's special broadcast in November to raise money for the Pacifica Radio Archives. Announced weeks in advance, it would offer two hours on war resisters. The day before the broadcast aired, Pacifica announced they had eliminated the two hours and were instead offering old speeches. Why? There are many questions to be answered including why Gregory Levey (Salon) was the only one at a US outlet to write about war resister Kyle Snyder being arrested by Canadian police (on the eve of his wedding) on the orders of the US military (Snyder was released) or that the US military crossed into Canada to search for war resister Joshua Key? Or how about why Nation correspondent Ian Williams took his "Hell No, They Won't Go!" on war resisters to another outlet?

The writers' strike has meant that Ava and I have been covering Big Media each week in our TV pieces. Make no mistake that we think Big Media has done a wonderful job in 2007. But Big Media signed up to re-sell the illegal war big time in 2007. It was very obvious as they repeatedly put out the lie that, though the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, they didn't have the power to end the illegal war. And that's just citing one example. What's Little Media's excuse? What's the excuse of 'brave' voices for their silence? Or, as Ruth put it, "If I was going to summarize public radio in 2007 in a single sentence, it would be: '2007, the year NPR won by default'."

2007 played out like Katrina vanden Heuvel had cloned herself and taken over all indy outlets. The bulk of independent media journalists couldn't make time for Iraq and appeared put out when events forced them to briefly note it. They could (and did) make 2007 all about the 2008 presidential elections. (The year really needed a column from Zinn asking "Are we merely voters or are we citizens?" Only he could have possibly ended this nonsense that repeatedly rendered citizens powerless with no means of change other than voting.) They could and did latch onto any Big Media craze. They could WASTE everyone's time for another year with the Iran War which, for the record, never started. By year's end, they were rushing to claim credit for preventing that war -- that war the establishment was blocking Bully Boy from starting. But having wasted so much time on a war that hadn't started while ignoring a real, ongoing war, it was probably necessary for them to lie to themselves and others that they stopped it.

This piece was written on the road on scraps of paper and largely revolves around what college students were expressing disgust with or what community members had e-mailed about on any given day of the year. So it's a little more representative of the American people than the bulk of so-called independent media. Piecing it together from various scraps is a pain in the ass. And while it's true that's one reason we're not rushing to note most of the exceptions in the landscape of bad Little Media, there's another reason as well: State Propaganda.

Many of the outlets that could have gotten a mention of praise for one or two programs or pieces that mentioned Iraq in some manner lost that mention when they elected to turn their programs and space over to the Cult of Bhutto in the last days of 2007. Christian Parenti and Ken Silverstein stood more or less alone in independent media by demonstrating that they were actual independent voices. And it needs to be noted that while rushing to weigh in on 'Saint' Bhutto, the same useless 'independent' voices couldn't (and didn't) say one damn word about the fact that the 3,900 mark passed (US service members killed in the Iraq War, official DoD count) last week.

It sent a message as "Editorial: Screw You" (The Third Estate Sunday Review) noted. And it was a lousy way for independent media to end 2007 but, by December, not at all surprising. In the film Nothing Sacred, The Morning Sun manages to cover up their journalistic embarrassments by staging the death of Hazel Flagg. For independent media to cover up their 2007 coverage or 'coverage' would require that they stage a mass slaughter. Instead, the only things that got slaughtered in 2007 were reality and perspective.

[Note: Martha and Shirley looked at 2007 in books, Kat addressed the year in music. The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com. Eddie e-mailed and asked that this DN! link be included also. It's Goodman and Gonzalez speaking with veterans about what they saw in Iraq.]

iraq
camilo mejia
joshua key
kyle snyder
adam kokesh
iraq veterans against the war
democracy now
amy goodman
juan gonzalez
james burmeister
josh white
the washington post
matthew rothschild
stephanie mencimer
howard zinn
gregory levey
ian williams
joel bleifuss
cindy sheehan
tina richards
laura flanders
katha pollitt
christian parenti
ken silverstein
black agenda report
peace resister
Katrina vanden Heuvel
like maria said paz
kats korner
sex and politics and screeds and attitude
trinas kitchen
the daily jot
cedrics big mix
mikey likes it
thomas friedman is a great man
the third estate sunday review

Posted at 08:32 am by politicsscree
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and since i don't have to space to post to the mirror site, i'll post c.i.'s year-in-reviews for 2006 and 2007. (i'm not going back to 2005 and 2004.)

2006: The Year of Living Dumbly (Year in Review)

Coming off the first Camp Casey and the spark Cindy Sheehan brought back to the peace movement, 2006 should have been the year the media truly led -- instead they didn't even reflect.

All Things Media Big and Small travelogued through 2006 looking for a topic that interested them and never finding one. It was a college travel study: 40 topics in 40 days. Nothing was followed up on, just topics ticked off. Then, summer 2006, they apparently thought they'd taxed themselves so that Iraq fell off the radar for six to eight weeks. Jimmy Breslin, among others, sounded an alarm, but there was no indication that anyone in media was listening.

In one of the most surreal moments of 2006, the media watchdog FAIR issued a report card for PBS' NewsHour. Among the findings was the deplorable fact that, in the six months studied, the NewsHour had not featured one peace activist as a guest. The fact found FAIR in glass houses territory because, during the same period, their weekly half-hour program CounterSpin had also not featured one peace activist as a guest -- a fact they seemed to be unaware of.

That study, more than anything else, crystalized the problems of independent media in 2006. They wanted the mainstream media to be more diverse, to report with follow ups, go down the list, but there was no desire to use their own outlets to change anything.

If you agreed with FAIR that the NewsHour should, for instance, feature more female guests, you might wonder why CounterSpin's ratio of male to female guests was even worse than the NewsHour's? Noting the problems with big media is important but doesn't it come off as more than a bit meaningless when, in your own forums, you don't use the power you have?

A peace activist invited on the NewsHour would have been wonderful -- but it didn't happen. The fact that independent media also took a pass more often than not was an abdication of both power and responsibility.

Here's how bookings largely work -- people see something. They see something covered somewhere and they think, "Hey, maybe we should cover that?" Bravery in bookings rarely exist. So possibly NewsHour bookers read The Nation?

If so, they'd have no reason to book a peace activist because The Nation wasn't interested in Iraq in 2006. You could flip through issue after issue and never find a single story on a rally, an event, an organizer . . . You got a lot of coverage of the same topics big media covered, from a different perspective.

That's called responding, it's not called leading. And The Nation, a weekly, led the way for the worst trend in independent print media for the year: Democratic Party organ.

The parody The Elector pretty much summed up the best known left magazines in 2006. Having editorialized in 2005 that they would not support the campaigns of any candidates who did not call for an end to the illegal war, in 2006, The Nation (and others) couldn't tear themselves from those same candidates. You could find a Hillary Clinton cover, but a candidate for ending the war (Democratic or any other party), who could have actually benefitted from coverage (cover or otherwise), didn't get the build up. By the time they were profiling Harold Ford Jr. in their issue that hit the stores right before the election, they were no longer scraping the bottom of the barrell, they were outside the barrell, face down in the gutter.

A number of visitors have e-mailed an intended highlight, an article in an issue that will arrive to subscribers this week. It will appear in the January 8, 2007 issue. The topic is the Appeal for Redress petition. The article is in a 2007 issue (that most subscribers still haven't received and isn't in the stores yet) and supposedly, to the visitors, that makes up for the fact that in 2006, the magazine could do an entire issue on food but couldn't write one word about the biggest story to emerge in 2006 related to Iraq: resistance within the military.

The petition is a story and it's one worth covering. It's also true that signing a petition is a bit easier than saying "no" to the illegal war. It's a MoveOn type of activism, the same sort of behavior that the "Oy vey, kids today" critics slam in column after column. In media big and small, the usual desk jockey grumps dusted off those old columns (which predate the sixties) and gas bagged about how kids today just aren't active. So while the petition is a story, is newsworthy, that The Nation chooses to make this the first story they do on war resistance in print is rather sad.

The story of 2006?

War resisters. Ehren Watada, Ricky Clousing, Kyle Snyder, Darrell Anderson, Mark Wilkerson, Agustin Aguayo, and Katherine Jashinski should have been covered in 2006 but most of the time, they weren't. They joined Joshua Key, Camilo Meija, Pablo Paredes, Carl Webb, Stephen Funk, David Sanders, Dan Felushko, Brandon Hughey, Jeremy Hinzman, Corey Glass, Patrick Hart, Clifford Cornell, Joshua Despain, and Kevin Benderman as members of the military who have said no. From June through September, Watada, Clousing, Snyder, Anderson, Wilkerson and Aguayo all went public and the independent media response was (at best) underwhelming.

Take Ivan Brobeck who returned from Canada and turned himself in on election day. Who noted that? It's called The Full Brobeck. November 6th, on KPFA's Flashpoints, Nora Barrows-Friedman interviewed him and . . . no one else did or bothered to report on him. The web site Common Dreams did run a press release put out by Courage to Resist which was apparently supposed to pass for coverage that Brobeck was returning from his self-check out and returning with an open letter to the Bully Boy.

Rolling Stone and Left Turn managed to run print articles on Watada. Left Turn is a monthly, Rolling Stone is a weekly that focuses more on entertainment. How they managed to cover it when the weekly, political magazine The Nation couldn't is a question people should be asking?

Sign a petition, vote, and call it a "Sweet Victory," apparently.

The Nation, in 2006, was about as political as the Big Brothers and Big Sisters programs across the country. In print, week after week, it seemed to revel in just how useless it could be -- such as the 'philosophical' rant of AlterPunk about how the New York Times shouldn't run unsigned editorials -- which, as dubious a basis for a column at it was, might have carried some (mild) weight were it not for the fact that The Nation runs . . . unsigned editorials.

Among the many useless articles was one by Ruth Conniff in the June 26, 2006 issue of The Nation which was entitled "How to Build a Farm Team" ("Identify candidates. Add money. Watch the numbers grow."). This was one of the many articles that demonstrated The Nation was more concerned with being a party organ for the Democratic Party than in covering the issues that mattered. Or possibly you'd prefer the April 24, 2006 issue which covered the 'issue' of injecting religion into politics to win seats (for Democrats) with Dan Wakefield ("religious progressives are making a comeback"), Frances Kissling (who actually raised issues), and Michael Lerner ("The left's most powerful weapon could be a spiritual vision of the world.").

There was time to chase celebrity ambulances ("Can Schwarzenenegger Be Defeated?" asked on the cover of the June 5, 2006 issue -- all politics are local -- when a celeb's involved, apparently). There was time to visit the world of What If? (the February 6, 2006 issue featured not one but twenty pretend State of the Union addresses). And always, there was time to send how-to lists to the Democratic Party (one example: March 20, 2006 issue contained Fred Block's "A Moral Economy" -- "To seize the political moment, Democrats need a better narrative.")

In what might have been an attempt not to "forget the ladies" (Abigail Adams would be so pleased), the May 22, 2006 cover proclaimed "It's Mother's Day." Now someone at the magazine missed the point that Mother's Day was created for peace so instead you got the classicist "The Motherhood Manifesto" by Joan Blades and Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner. (Women without children got no shout outs in 2006, for those wondering.) The insulting article was an adaptation of an insulting book published by . . . Nation's Books.

Well if Simon & Schuster can use 60 Minutes to promote their wares, why not The Nation? The most 'radical' suggestion in the article? Start "a whole new conversation about motherhood". Redbook couldn't have put it better. That article, more than any other, may capture The Nation in 2006 -- three-plus-pages leading up to the start a conversation "answer." (As Trina noted: "It read like a make-work project that was done between luncheons.")

Start a conversation, sign a petition, VOTE, VOTE, VOTE! If it gets any worse in 2007, look for the cover story: "The Revolution Starts With You: Brush After Each Meal!"

When this community (at all the sites) began noting the silence on the peace movement and on war resisters by The Nation, e-mails occassionally came in to correct us.

Let's deal with Christian Parenti first. He did write an article about the peace movement that was available online only. The May 8, 2006 issue did contain a different article by him, "When GI Joe Says No." If you can find one war resister named in the three page article, please e-mail. Find one person who said no to the Iraq war -- one "GI Joe" saying "no" to the current war -- in the article. You can find history about Vietnam soldiers who said no, but there's no war resister in the article. The article Parenti wrote featuring Camilo Mejia, among others, was an online article only.

The other thing that gets pointed out in e-mails is that there were two stories on Ehren Watada. In fact, an e-mail on that came in this weekend. Quote: "You are forgetting the two articles on Ehren Watada." No, I am not. I am talking about the magazine that I pay for and no article on Ehren Watada appeared in print in 2006. The articles visitors (who all claim to read the magazine but apparently just visit the website) refer to were "online exclusives." In fact, the authors of that piece have a new "online exclusive" that went up December 19th and the question that should be asked of the most recent article is why, since they obviously participated in the tele-conference Ehren Watada held in November (when the US military announced their intent to court-martial him -- scheduled for Feb. 5th), they're only now writing about it (and in passing)?

While both Off Our Backs and Ms. devoted whole issues in 2006 to address war and peace , The Nation was more interested in providing their food issue, their green (environmental -- don't think for a moment the Green Party got coverage in The Nation) issue and the non-stop, never ending Hurricane Katrina issues. But the war itself? Four years in and The Nation rarely gave a damn unless it could be worked into a "Vote!" article.

The official slogan was "Nobody owns The Nation" but 2006 played out like the slogan was: "The Nation, tip-sheet for the Democratic Party!" And we can't leave this topic without noting the shameful attempt to draw a line between the magazine and Harry Belafonte. While that piece was written for the Washington Post (and published there) an extended version went up at the website. As shameful in its own way as uninviting Belafonte from speaking at Coretta Scott King's funeral (addressed on Democracy Now!), The Nation really hit a low with that column -- a low in a year of lows.

Another low happened when The Nation, Democracy Now! and about every left and 'left' outlet decided to continue to give a platform to the man they portray as a Cassandra but whom the mainstream media has noted was twice arrested in stings to capture sexual predators. As Chrissie Hynde once sang in "How Much Did You Get For Your Soul," "How much did you, How much did you, How much did you get?" He went around the country with Seymour Hersh slamming the peace movement (and wanting to turn it into the military -- presumably with himself as commander), he ridiculed and mocked Cindy Sheehan in an independent weekly, and despite that, despite the mainstream media's reports of two busts for seeking out sex with underage girls online, he was given a platform repeatedly.

Let's move over to radio. Air America Radio became more of a joke than ever as it lost both Janeane Garofalo and Mike Malloy -- two who could and did pull in audiences -- and replaced them with the second string. In fact, AAR's business model appears to be that of a new-age coach, "Everyone gets to go on the field . . . whether they're qualified or not!" (Randi Rhodes and Laura Flanders remain the strongest reasons to listen to the ever failing and flailing network.) Air America Radio is both commercial radio and listener supported radio -- and it couldn't stay out of the red despite running dual models. In terms of the 'master plan,' it appears to have become "Let's stomp out community radio and shove our national programming off on local areas." Getting into bed with Clear Channel only made that model all the more obvious.

Then there's Pacifica Radio, the nation's oldest public radio network. People like Margaret Prescod, Deepa Fernandez, Dennis Bernstein, Nora Barrows-Friedman, Sonali Kolhatkur, Aaron Glantz and more did actually cover the war and they deserve credit for that but, as Micah pointed out, it's also true that Pacifica offered at least two election programs this year (one national -- weekly program, one on KPFA -- daily program) yet still no program dedicated to covering the Iraq war. The illegal war hits the four year mark in March and there is no program devoted to the topic of it. Flashpoints began as an outlet to cover the first Gulf War. Since Pacifica has cancelled their peace program (Peacewatch, in 2003), the omission becomes more glaring each day.

The response to this year's fundraiser for the Pacifica Archives should have been a wakeup call. In a year when the economy meant many fundraising targets were not met, the Pacifica Archives fundraiser exceeded their target goal. The fact that the theme was "Voices for Peace and Non-Violence" should have been an indication that audiences would welcome this sort of coverage.

Instead, it fell to individual shows and, since none has Iraq as it's focus, the results were frequently disappointing. Flashpoints deserves special credit for their outstanding coverage. Iraq is not their focus but they picked up the slack and then some by interviewing more war resisters than anyone else, by regularly airing reports from Dahr Jamail and others and by, honestly, paying attention to what was going on. In doing that, they didn't lose focus on the occupied territories.

What other Pacifica programs too often featured was tired guests talking about tired topics. Want to buy some New Kids On The Block CDs? No? Didn't think so. But the tired topic of Judith Miller continued to pass for 'media criticism.' That was truly embarrassing, hearing guests drag out Miller over and over in 2006 when she penned not one word for the New York Times in 2006. But they kept heading to the well on that even though the well was dry and then some.

Now Miller wasn't the only one at the Times who sold the war before it started and in its early days, nor was the Times the only mainstream outlet that sold the war. But it's just so much fun to play Bash the Bitch one more time apparently. It's allowed a great many to keep their heads down and not get called out for their own actions. More importantly, in 2006, the war was still being sold and focusing on the departed Miller provided a lot of cover to the Dexter Filkins, Michael Gordons, et al.

What Miller (and others -- including Gordo) did in the run up to the war is important, is historical. But in 2006, if you're going on a radio show to talk about the war and the press or doing so in print, you need to be able to cite something a bit more contemporary than articles that ran in 2002 and 2003. As we've long noted here, if (IF) Judith Miller and her crowd got us over there, it was the Dexter Filkins that kept us there. But, outside of Danny Schechter, name a media critic that addressed Filkins.

The Washington Post outed Dexy as the go-to-guy for the US military when they wanted to plant a story. The reaction to that article? CounterSpin addressed it in headlines for a few seconds before rushing on to the very hot topic of Bill O'Reilly. Bill O'Reilly, a national joke, and Dexter Filkins. CounterSpin was apparently comfortable addressing O'Reilly and apparently scared to address Dexter Filkins. Not scared to address the Times, mind you, because they and their guests were fond of bringing up Judith Miller. They just lacked the spine and the bravery to address Dexter Filkins.

For those who don't know, the slaughter of Falluja was covered by the 'award-winning' Dexy. The lies go straight to the embedded, ditch digging Filkins who had no wall between himself and the military and who reportedly allowed them to vet his 'award-winning' copy before he turned it into the Times (which would explain why his report took DAYS to make it into print).

Though CounterSpin didn't applaud his disclosures in speeches, other outlets did. Those disclosures aren't brave, they're the sort of things you say when you're speaking to an audience made up of people who no longer buy the lies of war. But along with his reporting not being questioned, many rushed to applaud him as brave for noting that the war was lost. Noting that in a speech to a small audience, never in print. By not telling readers the truth, year after year, the likes of Dexy have kept the US military in Iraq as much as any Judith Miller got them over there to begin with. A real independent media, a brave one, would have addressed that a long time ago. Instead it was play dumb . . . all year long.

Which brings us back to the summer of 2006 when the Israeli government went into wack-job mode (or further in) and independent media dropped Iraq (as though it were Afghanistan?) to jump on the non-stop bandwagon, the 24-7 wall-to-wall coverage.

There was no time to cover Ehren Watada's Article 32 hearing in August (when Democracy Now! tried to sneak it into their headlines weeks later they confused at least one indy media writer who wrote that a decision had been reached -- when it hadn't and wouldn't until November -- and he cited DN!'s coverage as the proof). They were all obsessed with this one story (Israel) and no programmer appeared to think, "You know, practically every show is covering this topic, we should cover some of the events related to Iraq or anything else because I honestly doubt anyone wants to hear 24-7, day after day, week after week about one topic." But independent media seemed to have a really hard time supporting war resisters -- as though they were all suffering from Revisionist Rambo damage. (That might also explain the inability to review the brilliant documentary Sir! No Sir!)

Along with Watada's Article 32 hearing, this included the revelations during the August military inquiry into the rape and murder of fourteen-year-old Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, the murder of her parents and the murder of her five-year-old sister. They were murdered by, and Abeer was raped by? The US military. When James P. Barker confessed in court in November "alleged" was no longer an adjective that was needed. But even Barker's confession didn't prompt independent media to cover Abeer. Democracy Now!, The Nation, no one rushed in to cover the war crime. They still haven't. They couldn't cover it in August and they didn't cover it in November when one of the accused confessed and gave his account of what the others (allegedly) involved did. Now nickled and dimed conventional wisdom could gas bag on Hurricane Katrina -- in an attempt at gas bag cute -- and any number of topics. But could she write about Abeer? No, which, if you ask me, qualifies as "a real stab."

Robin Morgan's "Their Bodies as Weapons: Rapes in conflict zones result from the idea that violence is erotic, and it pervades the US military" (The Guardian of London via Common Dreams) is a strong article but it's also true it has had little competition. Other than Off Our Backs, no one else has seen Abeer as a story worth telling in independent media. Maybe it's too embarrassing to admit that while the wall-to-wall was being provided, Abeer was being ignored? Maybe Abeer wasn't seen as 'economic' and, goodness knows, our independent media was all about 'economcis' (so much so, James Carville could have been the editor of many publications). The reality is that "property" was once defined to include women and children as well as slaves and serfs of all ethnicities and races and 'living wages' do not combat and end racism, sexism, homophobia or any other issue. Robin Morgan perfectly captured the various elements at work when adults think they have a 'right' to rape a 14-year-old girl.

Also ignored during that period was CODEPINK's Troops Home Fast, the fast that led to a meeting between activists and Iraqi parliamentarians in Jordan to discuss peace. If you're asking, "What meeting?" -- well, take that up with indepdendent media. (And before a visitor writes, "The Nation had a piece in an issue this summer . . ." No, they didn't. They had an "online exclusive" by Tom Hayden about the trip to Jordan -- a piece that someone decided was worth posting online but not printing.) Or how about the fact that the US military was keeping a body count on Iraqi deaths? Nancy A. Youssef broke that story, that the US military had been doing that for almost a year, in June. That news lost out to elections . . . in Mexico -- what independent media was all geared up to make the summer story until they dropped everything to head off to the Middle East.

How bad was the summer when independent media forgot Iraq? Cindy Sheehan had Camp Casey III in Crawford and where was independent media? Democracy Now! broadcast Mark Wilkerson's announcement that he was turning himself in and that was it -- for them and for all of independent media. When even Camp Casey can't register, you better believe independent media forgot Iraq. Ironically, while Camp Casey III couldn't register, various independent media voices were giving interviews citing their 2005 work on Camp Casey as evidence as the kind of power independent media can have -- while ignoring Camp Casey III.

Sadly though, we're not done. There was also Camp Democracy in D.C. which did take place, day after day, workshop after workshop, it just took place with little to no independent media coverage. John Nichols (who did write about it online), Elizabeth Holtzman, Ann Wright, Antonia Juhasz, Ricky Clousing, and more. What was it? Camp Casey moved to DC to be part of Camp Democracy on Constitution Ave, right there on the Washington Mall. Impeachment, the war, immigration rights, and much more were addressed each day. It began on the fifth of September and was due to close on the 21st but had to be extended because it proved so popular. Along with those already named, others participating included Danny Schechter, Diane Wilson, Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters, Ray McGovern, Dave Lindorff, Kevin Zeese, Jennifer van Bergen, Howard Zinn, Kim Gandy, Elizabeth de la Vega, Mark Karlin, Raed Jarrar, Robert Greenwald, Jim McGovern . . . The list goes on. Enough people to launch the mastheads of several independent magazines and then some. But you didn't get much coverage of it.

If you're interested in coverage of it, David Swanson's website offers this:

For the holidays this year, give your loved ones some TRUTH:Camp Democracy lasted for 18 days this past fall; 18 days of workshops, press conferences, education, and actions. Some of the highlights have been captured in a 45-minute documentary. You and your friends and family can listen to the wisdom of Howard Zinn, Jeff Cohen, Elizabeth Holtzman, Col. Ann Wright, Ray McGovern, Iraq War vets, Iraq War resisters, Hurricane Katrina survivors, and many more. Watch the Bush Crimes Commission verdict being delivered to the White House and hear a panel of experts lay out the case for impeachment. See Helga Aguayo tell the story of her husband's refusal to serve in Iraq. Camp Democracy can continue to educate and engage those newly awakened to the issues before us; those who were there can remember the lessons learned. Read more about the DVD.
Purchase the DVD. They're $17 each. The cost of shipping and handling is included.

Now they couldn't cover Camp Democracy but, after the election, the same independent media wanted to tell you it was all about Iraq. I personally believe that Iraq did influence the election and think the polling bears that out, but if independent media thinks so, shouldn't the polling have been their wake up call? Shouldn't they have stopped offering their laughable excuses for not covering Iraq ("The public doesn't care . . ." -- or as 'Truth' Conniff 'bragged' on KPFA, no one in her community has been effected by the illegal war), rolled up their sleeves and started addressing Iraq?

Didn't happen. Instead it was time to gasbag about who deserved credit for the 'wins.' And amazingly, though it was the one demographic that could be most easily verified, they managed, in all their hours of gas baggery, to avoid mentioning women were the deciding factor. Reality check for all the bean counters who ignored or forgot the gender gap, in the US women are in the majority. So the next time you schedule your gas baggery, you should do a check to see who you have on, or give print space to, to discuss the way women voted -- in 2006, women's votes weren't discussed which might be expected from the mainstream media, but which is appalling from independent media.

Along with Iraq, Iraq related stories such as war resisters and women, race and youth also lost out. You really wouldn't know it to read the gas baggery (The Progressive was the worst here but no one's hands were clean) on the immigrant rights wave but young people led that. They led it, they fueled it and they moved the nation. The gas bags and the desk jockeys could bemoan the so-called apathy of youth today (in fact, The Nation awarded a prize to the student who wrote about how apthetic her peers were -- in those contests, it always helps to repeat false stereotypes) but to do so, they had to ignore reality. That meant ignoring who led on the immigrant rights demonstrations, that meant ignoring the students across the country who are actively protesting the war and, most of all, that meant ignoring Gallaudet. Months and months of campus protests by students (who won a victory) and they got ignored. It's hard to repeat the (false) line on apathy and cover Gallaudet so maybe that's why our independent media ignored the story? Or maybe it was because hearing impaired and deaf students were just 'too different' from those making decisions in our independent media? Regardless, the students of Galladuet, the students leading the immigration rights movement, the students standing up against the war, deserved credit they never got.

Race? If you missed it, independent media remains largely White. The Ego Of Us All dies and it was time for a non-stop outpouring. Coretta Scott King dies and she's either included as an after thought or ignored. Don't kid that it wasn't about race. Coretta Scott King was more than "the wife of." She was politically active until the end. She spoke out against the illegal war, she spoke out against homophobia. From the moment that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. died, she was thrust into the lead role and took it because Dr. King's mission was not to be a footnote in history. Both for his legacy and for the struggle that still needed to be fought, she took on the leadership role and her thanks from (White) independent media was to be ignored or relegated to an aside for 2006. It was racism. And it was sexism. And it was disgusting.

All of the above added up to make 2006, for independent media, The Year of Living Dumbly. I would say that there's no way 2007 could be worse but I'm afraid some would eagerly accept that as a challenge.

The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.

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sir! no sir!
danny schechter
trinas kitchen
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kpfa
flashpoints
nora barrows friedman
dahr jamail
ali al-fadhily
the third estate sunday review
kyle snyder
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darrell anderson
ivan brobeck
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Posted at 08:31 am by politicsscree
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and this was my favorite kat review because i love this cd.

Kat's Korner: Hold Me Down

Kat: In a really bad summer of music, there were a few bright spots. Take Augustana. Everything's that missing in Coldplay's Viva La Vida can be found on Agustana's Can't Love, Can't Hurt. Is it art?

It's not anything you'd want to hang on a wall but do most things on your wall get your heart pumping and your ass shaking?

Augustana's "Boston" (heavily featured in Scrubs) put them on the radar but it's the live shows that are putting them on the map.

Can't Love, Can't Hurt is so far beyond 2005's All the Stars and Boulevards that it frequently doesn't even sound like the same group. Seeing them live will only confuse you further. I caught the band live this spring when they were early into their tour and again later this summer when they were a support act. If there's a better arena and shed band to emerge this year, I've missed out. Live the new songs are a little rougher and a lot more thumpin'. So much so that I'm expecting the next album to be another huge leap for the band.

This growth may make listening to the latest CD a disappointment if you catch them live first; however, Can't Love, Can't Hurt provides you with "Hey Now" and "Sweet and Low." The first is a rocker (or sounds like it until you hear them perform it live -- again, they're reworking the album on the road). It's also a song lyrically that clues you in: "Chris Martin has entered his Rod Stewart phase but we're making music."

They certainly are. "Sweet and Low" is probably the best written, best performed and best produced track on the CD. "Sweet and Low" is the song that everyone's going to be cited as their favorite song when the next CD carries Augustana to the top ranks. It's got everything a classic rock song needs, the vocal aching with lust, the chords that fire up just when they're needed. Look for millions of women (and probably a a number of men) to claim two or so years from now, "Oh, yeah, Augustana? Back in 2008, I was like 'hold me down'? Oh, yeah, Dan Layus, I'll hold you down all right!"

Anywhere you go, anyone you meet
Remember that your eyes, can be your enemies
I said, hell is so Close, and heaven's out of reach
But i ain't givin' up quite yet
I've got too much to lose
Hold me down, sweet and low, little girl
Hold me down, sweet and low, and I'll carry you home
Hold me down, sweet and low, little girl
Hold me down and I'll carry you home

The rain is gonna fall
The sun is gonna shine
The wind is gonna blow
The water's gonna rise
She said, when that day comes,
Look into my eyes, no one's givin' up quite yet, we've go too much to lose
Hold me down, sweet and low, little girl
Hold me down, sweet and low, and I'll carry you home
Hold me down, sweet and low, little girl
Hold me down and I'll carry you
All the way

"Carry me all the way," Layus sings in that song and the energy completely carries it and the CD. On the slow-tempo "Fire," energy is really all that the band has going for it and they put it across.

If you haven't caught the band live, you'll love Can't Love, Can't Hurt. If you've caught them live, you know they've already moved beyond it. In which case, I suggest you skip the regular version of Can't Love, Can't Hurt and instead purchase the deluxe version which includes four additional tracks -- two are videos. "Hey Now" and "Sweet and Low" acoustic are more than enough, even after sweating through one of their high intensity performances, to get you excited all over again.

Artist Site

Kat's Korner: Chris Martin's cold play

Kat: I really fear for Gwenth Paltrow. I don't know her, I'm not a fan. Take out The Royal Tennenbaums and you're left with a slew of movies I'd never see. But there's one role she's likely to be cast in that I wouldn't wish on anyone: modern day Yoko.

Listening to Coldplay's hugely disappointing Viva La Vida, it was obvious that someone was going to have to take the fall and that the day of reckoning loomed. The summer release was tightly embraced and heavily praised by music critics and dee jays desperate for actual music -- that would require playing an instrument. Because the band can actually play instruments, Viva La Vida was said to be the thing we all have a stake in.

A stake in? Like the current economic meltdown, it appears a lot of musical experts were in willful denial. The disappointing Viva La Vida follows up the disappointing X & Y. The only improvement is that the latest album seems to grasp that dynamics are really what put Coldplay over. It wasn't the lyrics. It was the landscape of sound, the peaks and valleys, the hush and roar of various songs. X & Y would have been good album for a band like Bon Jovi that long ago lost its currency. But as the follow up to A Rush of Blood to the Head, X & Y served notice that Coldplay had been hugely overpraised and that the band didn't even grasp what had made it famous.

Viva La Vida can be seen as band members thinking, "If Chris Martin wants to embarrass himself, he's on his own." Martin is singer. Sometimes he plays an instrument and, too often, he's responsible for writing the songs. The last strong song Coldplay recorded was the title track to A Rush of Blood to the Head. "I'm going to buy a gun and start a war . . . if you can tell me something worth fighting for . . ." Chris Martin is one of those artists who, after being primped by various stylists for the photo shoot, really tries hard to show some sort of enlightened pose in the accompanying text. But as various interviews have demonstrated (I'm especially thinking of an embarrassment in Mother Jones that ran several years ago), he can name check but does nothing to indicate depth.

That's the reality of his lyric writing as well. The song I quoted was on an album released in August of 2002 -- before the start of the illegal war. Because many in the US didn't discover Coldplay until after the start of the Iraq War, a few wrongly thought Coldplay was making some form of contemporary comment. All this time later, Martin still hasn't. But look for him to name check sweat shop labor and assorted other issues in the never-ending attempts to prove himself deep.

While no advocate of sweat shop labor, I think you can grasp on one listen to the latest product that Coldplay might benefit musically from a little sweat. On the plus, the band does sound like it's trying and that it's grasped the musical landscape they created on "A Rush of Blood to the Head" was as responsible for that song's lasting impact as were Martin's words. So it's a real shame that the producers (including the increasingly snooze-fest Brian Eno) have worked so hard to destroy any excitement. Viva La Vida not only sports no sweat, it's sterile and heartless. I believe Martin's vocals about as much as I believed Petula Clark really wanted to go to downtown. Like Clark, Martin chirps away in a confectionery manner.

Usually when I think of how sorry the bulk of today's 'popular' music is, I think of the Disney Kids and the damage they've done. But it's equally true that a group like Coldplay creates their own musical landfill. They may, in fact, be more damaging because they're held up as examples and the real question there is: An example of what?

The Rolling Stones, a British band that came along years earlier, could rock out. Even when addressing the world around them in a song like "Street Fighting Man," the Stones could rock out. Coldplay always seems on the verge of about to rock but stalling so Martin's lyric can make some deep point but, like the rocking out, no deep point ever comes. As the dismal recordings pile up, it's hard not to wish that Martin tried less for lofty and was more willing to come up with his own 'stupid girl' songs ("Under My Thumb," et al) because at least that might have some life in it. Somewhere around the half-way mark in the hideous "Lovers in Japan/Reign of Love," I realized Coldplay was all about indications. They lack the ability to actually feel or convey feeling so they indicate. It's like listening to the rock equivalent of America's Next Top Model as the boys try so desperately to be winners but have no grasp of what the prize actually is.

If the whole point of Coldplay was to make Chris Martin a cover boy, consider the band a success. If the point was ever to make music that got you rocking on your feet or on the mattress, they're a failure. Thus far in the 21st century, it appears the marketing of the product is as close to art as music's going to get. The thing about hype is that it always comes back to bite you in the ass and, if Chris Martin doubts that, he should talk to the Knack. At some point in the near future, Coldplay's going to have to face the real critical judgment. When that day comes and a fall guy's needed, the easy target will probably be the actress Gwyneth Paltrow. However, assuming Gwyneth corrupted Chris requires that you first buy into the belief that he had originally had something worth offering. For the second album in a row, Viva La Vida argues that was never the case.

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Posted at 08:27 am by politicsscree
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cedric and i are noting the common ills cartoonist isaiah today at our mirror sites.

Isaiah's The World Today Just Nuts "Barack Running Scared"

Isaiah's latest The World Today Just Nuts "Barack Running Scared." Barack crawls away nervously from Sarah Palin as he insists, "Lipstick or not, she scares me."

the world today just nuts
comic
barack obama
sarah palin
the common ills

and this is a piece third did with him back in may of 2005:

Talking With Isaiah, The Common Ills cartoonist

"There's no policy I'm aware of," Common Ills community member Isaiah explains. "I don't have any desire to do a violent comic so that didn't come up. But there really wasn't any guidelines put on me. I did wonder if it was okay to spoof John Bolton's alleged swinging ways but C.I. said go for it."

For those readers who may have missed it (stranger things have happened), Isaiah is now the illustrator for The Common Ills. With his first comic, he addressed how Condi Rice gets a pass as the media focuses on what she's wearing. (In that comic, she was grinning for the camera as she held the torn remains of Latin America.) In the two weeks since he began contributing, he's done an illustration of Jane Fonda as well as more in his series The World Today Just Nuts.
Besides the Bolton comic, there's also been a Love Is . . . spoof: Bully Is . . . plotting destruction together.

"The Common Ills is just such a great site and I'm always visiting it and noticing what C.I. are some member has contributed," Isaiah explains. "Then, like Ruth, I started thinking about it and wondering what I could contribute. For about a couple of weeks before the first thing went up, I was sketching things and thinking about what sort of thing I wanted to do. I hadn't drawn or doodled, depending on your view, in years. But I felt like I could add a visual element for the community that wasn't there."

How far are they planned ahead?

"If I have an idea during the week, as soon as I can grab time, I'll sketch it and try to get it to C.I. ahead of Sunday now. With John Bolton, I was listening to The Majority Report that night and thinking, 'This is a cartoon.' I e-mailed C.I. and asked if it was okay because at the time only Larry Flynt was making the charges that Bolton's sexual background including some 'swinging times.' I wanted to be sure there wasn't a problem with the topic or with the charges coming from Flynt. C.I. noted that Flynt was on Democracy Now! and that my spot is editorial because that's what the comics are so do whatever I want. After I read that, I thought, 'The vote's going down tomorrow from the panel, I don't want to wait until Sunday to weigh in on this.' So I sketched it out quickly and sent it to C.I. asking if it was okay. The response I got back was that every line was visible so it would go up tomorrow morning. Which was pretty cool because I meant is the cartoon itself okay? I had Bolton with one arm wrapped around the United Nations building and with the other hand, he's got a finger playing with the building while he's talking about a three way with the European Union and stuff."

One thing that's changed is that Isaiah submits them in jpeg now.

"I didn't even think about that. I use my scanner for photos and things like that to send to friends and just use the automatic setting. One reason the first comic was so much work to go up was that it wasn't in JPEG format. So C.I. had to convert it and enhance it to make the first one work."

The plan is for each Sunday to feature an illustration, "like how you have the Sunday comics in your newspapers." Other than that there will be an illustration when something pops up.

"But that doesn't mean suggest something," Isaiah clarifies. "I was really glad C.I. noted this was my space and that I'd think up what to do because I'm not talented enough to do something on demand. I'd almost said that to C.I., that I didn't want any of that kind of suggestion feedback but then thought that might come off rude since it's a community based site. Then I read what C.I. posted and was glad that went up. If someone has a great idea, they should sketch it out and get it posted on their own. I'm not someone who can draw something, even as badly as I draw, under request. It has to strike me as strange or weird that something's happening and then from there I toss it around to see if it's a comic."

A number of rejected illustrations have made it into the gina & krista round-robin. Why were those rejected?

"I didn't want them posted. I was tossing those out to C.I. to show what I had in mind. The first thing I sent it was the pencil drawing of Laura Bush making those comments about Desperate Housewives. C.I. was willing to post that and the next few but I kept saying no because I didn't think I'd really accomplished what I wanted to. I was happy to share them in the private newsletter but I wasn't wanting them up at a site."

Besides being interviewed by Gina and Krista for their round-robin, Isaiah also spoke with Rebecca for a post at Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude.

"That was a lot of fun and Rebecca and Gina & Krista were trying to give heads up to what was coming. C.I. doesn't do heads up unless you ask for them because a lot of members will change their mind or try to do something and it won't turn out. I know I wad up more than makes it to the site. So I understood that but I was serious about doing this and I'd gone out and looked at what art supplies I wanted to do it with. Had to turn around and leave to think about it some more. I knew I wanted colors because the whole point of being visual is to take it beyond black type on a white background. At first I thought about markers but didn't have the control with them that I wanted. I wasn't going to attempt to do paintings. So I thought about map colors and the like before finding a set of pencils that I really liked. I don't think the Bolton comic would have come off as well as it did without some color."

As he told Rebecca:

so isaiah told me that first off, he's working in ergo soft staedtler water color pencils for his editorial cartoon. it will be called 'the world today: just nuts.'

He also spoke of influences.

"I did take a few art classes but you're not going to notice that because that's not really what I was interested in. I can remember that, growing up, there were these things called ColorForms or something. They were like magnets and you'd put them on this board. There was this really cool one that a neighbor had of a haunted house with Scooby Doo and my sister had some Raggedy Ann thing which wasn't so cool. I really wanted this Batman & Robin one. But for whatever reason, probably money, it was always 'next time.' One day, my great grandfather was over at my grandparents and he had a nurse because he was in a wheel chair. He wasn't feeling well and we were supposed to be very quiet. So I was sitting at the kitchen table waiting my turn for one of the coloring books and getting tired of waiting. His nurse took pity on me and gave me some blank paper. I just started drawing my own coloring book pages to color in. I had Batman, Robin, Batgirl and things like that. I was about to turn four. And for three, they were pretty good. Sadly, they're about the same level now. So pretend they were drawn by a three year old and you'll be really impressed. In art classes, I always enjoyed doing etchings best. I did one of my dog Brandy that impresses me to this day. It's too good for what I should be capable of. But I'm limited and I know that. Anyone looking at something I did at The Common Ills should know I suffer no delusions of artistry."

Isaiah told Rebecca that comic books and Mad Magazine were big influences.

"Right. I liked Mad a lot. They were black and white drawings. I really liked it when they'd spoof a movie or TV show because I could look at the drawings and know what the people really looked like. So I was able to learn a lot from Mad after I started drawing, I mean right after. I had an uncle who looked at those first coloring book drawings and went out and bought me a Mad Magazine and a Mad Magazine book. He always wanted me to draw him a Spy vs. Spy thing. I finally did a drawing of it, and he put it up on his wall even though it wasn't that good, but I really don't like requests. The other thing, and this might be interesting, is that by the time I got to first grade, most of the my 'style' was set and I got in trouble for always drawing women with big breasts. One day we had to draw our family and my mother did have big breasts but I'd also drawn Wonder Woman on another piece of paper and the combination led to my teacher having a talk with my mother when she picked me up. That may be from Mad or from comic books. Or it may be something Freudian. But the teacher felt the drawings were 'indecent.'"

What happened?

"With the teacher? My mother didn't care. She told the teacher to look at how everyone was drawing these circles for faces and doing two dots for eyes and then to look at mine. She would say for years after that she wasn't sure who was focused on breasts, me or the teacher, because there was so much else in each drawing to notice."

So what does Isaiah think of the illustrations?

"I think they're half-assed on my part and just there to contribute to the community. I don't mistake them for art or think they're on the level of some cartoonist."

They are what they are?

"Kat's motto!" Isaiah laughs. "Yep, that pretty much sums it up. They are what they are. Take from them what you can. I don't mistake myself for an artist or an illustrator. I don't have this compulsion to draw. Before starting this up, the only time I'd draw was for my nephews when they'd ask for a Bart Simpson or something. Kids like my drawings, that's about the level I'm on."

When we ran the drawing of Jane Fonda last week, we got a great deal of positive response.

"That's nice, but it's probably got more to do with the subject than with my limited abilities. But it's just there to give something back to the community. I've got no desire to write up an essay or a few paragraphs. But, given the time, I can do a doodle or two a week. Ruth's doing these examinations of NPR's Morning Edition and Kat does those incredible reviews where she just captures the mood of a CD. I'm not someone who's going to read an article in a paper or online and e-mail The Common Ills to highlight it. I'm either too lazy or assuming that if I've seen it, everyone's seen it. So this is my way of tossing in a contribution. If people like it, that's cool but I'm not going to lose any sleep over it if they don't. I'm not pouring my heart and soul into this."

Speaking of Ruth, we were supposed to interview Isaiah last week but he begged off asking us to focus instead on Ruth.

"I just felt it was her moment and she should get the spotlight. BuzzFlash linked to her and from what she'd written in her posted e-mail as well as in her entries, I knew that would be really important to her, as it should be, so I didn't see the point in you guys doing something on me. It was her moment and she should have the attention. It wasn't some big gesture on my part. It was nice of you guys to think that it was, but, to me, it was just common sense and common decency to say, 'I think you should focus on Ruth.'"

We think Isaiah's too modest. About everything. About how nice it was for him to direct us over to Ruth last week. About his contributions to The Common Ills community. Check out his illustrations and we think you'll be impressed too.

Posted at 08:13 am by politicsscree
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cedric and i decided we'd use our mirror sites today to note isaiah.

Isaiah's The World Today Just Nuts "Boys Do Cry"

Isaiah's latest The World Today Just Nuts "Boys Do Cry." Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden declares, tear streaming, "Remember weeping on the campaign trail is okay if you have a penis." [If you're late to the party on the tears, see "TV: Do Not Disturb The Propaganda."]

the world today just nuts
comic
joe biden
boys do cry
the common ills

now this is a thing i wrote on isaiah back in 2005:

isaiah the common ills new cartoonist

as readers of the gina & krista round robin already knew, the common ills was getting it's own cartoonist. community member isaiah will be contributing editorial cartoons from time to time.

when i spoke with isaiah, i asked him to tell me something he hadn't told gina and krista because i didn't want to blow their round-robin.

so isaiah told me that first off, he's working in ergo soft staedtler water color pencils for his editorial cartoon. it will be called 'the world today: just nuts.'

he said he's nervous about whether or not the community will enjoy it. i assured him that all contributions are appreciated and since no one's doing anything visual at the common ills currently, he'll be setting the pace for members. (any of the member who does a visual there after will judged based on what isaiah's contributed.)

isaiah said that no 1 had asked him what he felt his strengths were. so i asked, 'what are you strengths' because i can take a hint!

isaiah said foregrounds will always be stronger than backgrounds.

the 1st cartoon is based on condi rice's statements and attitude towards latin america which made her a 'bully to do the bully boy proud' isaiah notes. the cartoon was done on friday and sent in on saturday but delayed as c.i. attempted to figure out which program would work with blogger (not a lot will). the hope was to have it up on sunday but there wasn't time to do some training (i was c.i.'s teacher so blame me for any errors or mistakes).

i asked isaiah if he'd ever be willing to do anything for me (like ... a really hot drawing of christian parenti or dahr jamail!) and he said to give him some time and he would try it but his cartoons are 'cartoony' and probably wouldn't be what i was looking for.

i think they're great. (i've seen two others that may go up at the common ills. may because isaiah just sent those in to share with c.i. and hadn't intended that they be posted.)

i asked isaiah what his inspiration was and he said the news for the subject and in terms of arts 'tons of comic books and mad magazines when i was a kid.'

i hope every 1 will make a point to check out what isaiah will be doing over at the common ills. gina & krista's round-robin will contain the first cartoon as an attachment you can download so look for that in your inboxes friday.

posted by Sex And Politics and Screeds and Attitude @ 5/03/2005 12:15:00 AM

Posted at 08:10 am by politicsscree
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couric interviews palin

Then it's off to the McCain campaign plane, where CBS News was invited up front to ask a handful of questions.
Couric asked Palin whether she considers herself a feminist. "I do," Palin said. "I'm a feminist who, uh, believes in equal rights and I believe that women certainly today have every opportunity that a man has to succeed, and to try to do it all, anyway. And I'm very, very thankful that I've been brought up in a family where gender hasn't been an issue. You know, I've been expected to do everything growing up that the boys were doing. We were out chopping wood and you're out hunting and fishing and filling our freezer with good wild Alaskan game to feed our family. So it kinda started with that."

the above is from cbs evening news with katie couric's 'Palin Opens Up On Controversial Issues' and you can also watch the video of it there. on governor palin, yesterday's post resulted in several e-mails and i've been too busy to read them. though i'm no longer nursing the baby, when you have a baby who's not even 2, it is work. (as i'm sure it will be at 5, 8, 12, 15 ...)

but flyboy read e-mails while i was giving the baby a bath. i actually shouldn't have bothered. a lot of people were going into the pool. i didn't realize that. we get done with the bath and she's all eyes when she sees people outside at the pool. c.i., of course, has floaties. (of course because c.i.'s prepared for everything.) flyboy said, 'let's put them on her.' i was all for putting them on her but didn't think she'd go into the pool. she wanted in and i was honestly too nervous to do it so flyboy took her into the pool. i was saying, 'if she cries, she comes right out then.' because it's not the bathtub and it could scare her. we live right on the beach back home but she hasn't even been in the ocean (which would frighten me even more than her going into a pool, to be honest). so they go into the pool and she's got her little fist on her daddy. (she's gripping his chest by the hairs and so tight she probably pulled some off.) but after a few minutes she wants to move around and she did. i was just amazed. she put her head into the water and i thought, 'okay, she's going to be scared, get her out.' but she made this really sour face when she pulled her head back up and then just went back to playing. she loved it in there. so much so that flyboy's saying we need to think about a pool (and my attitude is, we've got the ocean, we don't need a pool).

didn't you love that tangent. but the point was, if i'd known she was going in the pool, i wouldn't have done the bath. it's kind of like washing your car and then it rains.

but anyway, there were a lot of e-mails on that and 1 woman has a special-needs child and asked if i would note something from factcheck.org's debunking rumors on palin:

No Cut for "Special Needs" Kids
It's not true, as widely reported in mass e-mails, Web postings and at least one mainstream news source, that Palin slashed the special education budget in Alaska by 62 percent. CNN's Soledad O'Brien made the claim on Sept. 4 in an interview with Nicolle Wallace, a senior adviser to the McCain campaign:
O'Brien, Sept. 4: One are that has gotten certainly people sending to me a lot of e-mails is the question about as governor what she did with the special needs budget, which I'm sure you're aware, she cut significantly, 62 percent I think is the number from when she came into office. As a woman who is now a mother to a special needs child, and I think she actually has a nephew which is autistic as well. How much of a problem is this going to be as she tries to navigate both sides of that issue?Such a move might have made Palin look heartless or hypocritical in view of her convention-speech pledge to be an advocate for special needs children and their families. But in fact, she increased special needs funding so dramatically that a representative of local school boards described the jump as "historic."
According to an April 2008 article in Education Week, Palin signed legislation in March 2008 that would increase public school funding considerably, including special needs funding. In particular, it would increase spending for certain special needs students that Alaska calls "intensive needs" (students with high-cost special requirements) from $26,900 per student in 2008 to $73,840 per student in 2011. That almost triples the per-student spending in three fiscal years. Palin's original proposal, according to the Anchorage Daily News, would have increased funds slightly more, giving intensive needs students a $77,740 allotment by 2011.
Education Week: A second part of the measure raises spending for students with special needs [the intensive needs group] to $73,840 in fiscal 2011, from the current $26,900 per student in fiscal 2008, according to the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development.Unlike many other states, Alaska has relatively flush budget coffers, thanks to a rise in oil and gas revenues. Funding for schools will remain fairly level next year, however. Overall per-pupil funding across the state will rise by $100, to $5,480, in fiscal 2009. ...Carl Rose, the executive director of the Association of Alaska School Boards, praised the changes in funding for rural schools and students with special needs as a "historic event," and said the finance overhaul would bring more stability to district budgets.
According to Eddy Jeans at the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development, funding for special needs and intensive needs students has increased every year since Palin entered office, from a total of $203 million in 2006 to a projected $276 million in 2009.
Those who claim that Palin cut special needs funding by 62 percent are looking in the wrong place and misinterpreting what they find there. They point to an apparent drop in the Department of Education and Early Development budget for special schools. But the special schools budget, despite the similar name, isn't the special needs budget. "I don’t even consider the special schools component [part of] our special needs funding," Jeans told FactCheck.org. "The special needs funding is provided through our public school funding formula. The special schools is simply a budget component where we have funding set aside for special projects," such as the Alaska School for the Deaf and the Alaska Military Youth Academy. A different budget component, the Foundation Program, governs special needs programs in the public school system.
And in any case, the decrease in funding for special schools is illusory. Palin moved the Alaska Military Youth Academy's ChalleNGe program, a residential military school program that teaches job and life skills to students under 20, out of the budget line for "special schools" and into its own line. This resulted in an apparent drop of more than $5 million in the special schools budget with no actual decrease in funding for the programs.

that is how the cult of obama works - they find something that people admire about you and lie about it to try to hurt you. that's what they do.

i'm glad that so many of you enjoyed the post last night. i don't know how well written it was, but it was honest.

flyboy also told me that ____ (longterm reader here) wrote that she was voting for mccain - palin. and had worried that i would be upset.

look, i wouldn't be upset if you were voting for barack. i will not vote for him, but it's your vote. like c.i. always says, 'if your vote feels right to you, that's the way you should vote.' (and that includes if your vote is not voting.) i'm not going to hate any 1 for how they vote.

so don't worry about it. it's not really an issue to me. i'm not going to the polls with you and into the voting booth. i'm also not going to show up at your front door screaming, 'you must vote __!' i'm voting for ralph nader and i'm proud of my vote. whomever you're voting for (regardless of who it is), i hope you're happy about your vote.

i'd hate to spend 4 years thinking, 'i should have listened to myself.' i'd rather vote for who i believe in and i'd rather you vote for who you believe in - whomever that is.

and if your decision is not to vote and that feels right, then you made the right decision there.

i'm not bill moyers issuing scare threats to try to force you to do what i want you to do. i assume you're a smart person who knows your own likes and dislikes better than i do.

'cult of barack' refers to the liars in the media. it does not refer to individuals. c.i.'s always very clear about that and i may not have been here so let me put that in since we're talking about your vote - 'your' vote. own it and vote (or don't vote) as it feels right to you.

speaking of c.i., i need to note '2007: The Year of Living Useless (Year in Review)' because community member lloyd wanted it noted and this is my favorite part from the essay:

"For his good and the good of The Morning Star, I intend to remove him from the land of the living!" hollers Walter Connolly's Oliver Stone in the 1937 screwball comedy Nothing Sacred about star reporter Wally Cook (Fredric March) being moved over to the obituaries after his big scoop explodes in his and the paper's face. Shortly after, Cook convinces Stone there's a story in Hazel Flagg (played by Carole Lombard) and vows, "If I don't come back with the biggest story you've ever seen, you can put me back in short pants and make me marble editor!" Could we get an order of short pants for independent media?
If 2006 was The Year of Living Dumbly, 2007 was The Year of Living Useless. And was anyone more useless than independent media?

let's close with c.i.'s 'Iraq snapshot:'

Tuesday, September 30, 2008. Chaos and violence continue, the US military announces another death, Iraqi refugees forced out of Jordan, a 'turnover' takes place tomorrow, and more.

On the medical front, Jormana Karadsheh (CNN) reports that along with allowing Iraqi doctors to carry guns, Nouri al-Maliki's council also decreed that they cannot be "detained by police without Ministry of Health approval" and notes the International Committee of the Red Cross' March report (PDF format warning, click here) which stated over " 2,200 doctors and nurses have been killed and more than 250 kidnapped since 2003" and that there were "34,000 register doctors in 1990" but "at least 20,000 have left the country." Karadsheh goes on to site the Iraqi government's figure of 8,000 having "left their jobs" (and "some fleeing the country") but "about 800 doctors have returned to their jobs". The Iraqi government figures are bunk. (Credit to Karadsheh for crediting the source on those figures -- other outlets present them as facts with no sourcing.) As noted in the August 4th snapshot, Dr. Essan Namiq (Deputy Minister of Health for Grants and Loans) and Dr. Kahmees al-Sa'ad (Administrative deputy Minister of Health) held a press conference in the Green Zone August 3rd in which many fanciful claims were floated in which Dr. Essan Namiq declared that "more than 80% of the Iraqi doctors" had returned. They just make up the numbers with whatever they think make looks them good and never worry about their own figures matching up at a later date with . . . their own figures. 80% of 8,000 is not 800.

That's really what told on them immediately in the Myth of the Great Return -- they released a figure over the weekend and, by Monday, you had to add more zeros to the abusrd claim. The myth started in the fall of 2007. Fall is here again and it's time to make it appear the Iraqi refugee situation isn't all that bad . . . really. The country's oil wealth allows them to call in favors. Hani Hazaimeh (Jordan Times) reports that 74,000 barrels of oil were shipped to Jordan from Iraq "in the past 10 days" and quotes Jordan's Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources Khaldou Qteishat declaring, "The ministry is cooperating with its Iraqi counterpart to overcome several challenges in order to meet the daily target of 10,000 barrels as stipulated in the agreement, to be increased gradually to 30,000 barrels." The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates there are at least 4.7 million Iraqi refugees -- internal and external. Of the over 2 million external refugees many are in Jordan or Syria (with some estimates of 700,000 in each country; others of 750,000 in Jordan and as many as 1.5 million in Syria). But when Iraq buys you off on oil, you're happy to eject refugees. IRIN reports, "The Iraqi embassy in Amman is organising the repatriation by planes of dozens of Iraqi families who wish to return home, despite warnings from UN agencies about the security situation. Iraqi diplomats in Amman said they had charted a plane to repatriate the Iraqis later this week, during the Muslim holiday of Eid al Fitr. Disabled people and the elderly will be among the Iraqis leaving in what, according to the Iraqi ambassador, will be the first official return by air to the homeland since the US-led invasion in 2003." The disabled and the elderly. The most vulnerable. Sent back to the violence in Iraq. China's Xinhua reports that 2 "busloads of Iraqis" have already been shipped out and that some on the buses "said they were forced to return due to difficult economic conditions in Jordan." To be clear, Jordan turned a penny on the refugees long before the oil infusion. Nicholas Seeley (Christian Science Monitor) reported at the start of July that while Jordan refused to allow the refugees to work and while they were dependent upon assistance, Jordan was spending aid money for the refugees: "In 2007, 61 percent of UNHCR's operational budget was given directly to Jordan, along with millions of bilateral aid from the European Community and the United States" "a large portion of the aid . . . has gone to address Jordan's own urgent national priorities." Turning a profit from human misery, that's all it was. Meanwhile the UNHCR set up tents for Ramadan in Amman, "For the second straight year, the UN refugee agency has provided iftar to needy Iraqis and Jordanians during the month of Ramadan, which ends on Tuesday. Muslims believe that feeding someone iftar (the evening meal during Ramadan) as a form of charity is very rewarding." It's apparently a thought passed over the Jordanian government -- which represent a citizenry that is 94% Muslim.

External refugees that return frequently become internal refugees. That's due to the fact that (a) they left the region due to violence and threats and (b) their former homes are often occupied. The Institute for War and Peace Reporting's Zaineb Naji (via Kansas City Star) states that Iraq's internatl refugees are not registering (72,000 have registerd to vote in what may (or may not) be upcoming provincial elections, "just 2.6 per cent of the total figure for those uprooted by the conflict") and reminds, "According to a report in July by the International Organisation for Migration, IOM, IDPs do not have adequate shelter or access to drinking water, food, health care, education and electricity. Many are squatting in public buildings, mud huts, or in houses abandoned by other families. The latter is a widespread problem preventing many IDPs from returning home. Surveys have shown that more than 60 per cent of the displaced want to go back to their towns and villages."

Meanwhile, the New York Times' Erica Goode (at the paper's blog, Baghdad Bureau Blog) writes of spending the night at the home of an Iraqi friend which required her to wear a a black abaya and hijab and climb a darkened staircase to ensure that no neighbors grasped an American visiting. In the apartment with her friend, her friend's husband and the couple's three-year-old daughter on a 114 degree day, they saw frequent 15 minute burst of electricity (apparently making up -- when combined -- the few hours of electricity outside the Green Zone Baghdad sees each day): "The electricity shortage, they said, is a problem not just for comfort but for the refrigerator in the bedroom, which goes off and on all day, making it difficult to store food. The water in the sink and shower, too, is unpredicatble, sometimes working, sometimes not. . . . We drank fruit juice and bottled war -- even when there is tap water, it is not potable." And that's Baghdad (outside the Green Zone), not a distant province in the country. Five years after the start of the illegal war, that's life in Baghdad. An Iraqi correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers reports (at Inside Iraq) on taking a taxi through the Dora neighborhood of Baghdad: "Meanwhile, we saw graffiti on the walls. 'There is no place for betrayers in the Islamic State of Iraq,' someone had spray painted on one wall. The saying refers to the Islamic state, a front for a Qaida in Iraq."

Moving to the the oil-rich northern region, Anna Fifield (Financial Times of London) reports that Ibril is the 'hot spot' in the Kurdistan region of Iraq where "prices have almost doubled in the past two years and are still climbing" in the "English village -- complete with cul-de-sacs lined with identical two-storey houses, garden gnomes on front lawns and Range Rovers in driveways". A British investor, Russell Jones, raves, "There is an enormous amount of free money here being kept under people's mattresses." It helps to have name oil and, of course, name lobbyists to advocate for you. But in Baghdad? Corinne Reilly (McClatchy Newspapers) notes, "Dumped bodies are once again appearing along Baghdad's streets. Two years ago, Iraqi police recovered an average of 50 bodies a day across the capital, most of them shot in the head with their hands tied behind their backs. By this summer, the bodies had all but disappeared, but this month, they began to show up again, usually one or two a day." The corpse count climbs as a 'handover' approaches. The US military is due to hand the "Awakening" Council members over to the puppet government in Baghdad. Pakistan's Daily Times reports: "The US military will this week begin handing over control of 100,000 Sunni anti-Qaeda fighters to Iraq's Shiite-led government, a move that risks undermining hard-earned security gains. The Iraqi government and the US military have agreed in principle to the transfer of responsibility of all 'Sons of Iraq' from October 1, beginning with 54,000 men in the province of Baghdad. . . . Iraq will start paying the salaries of Sahwa men in Baghdad -- a monthly bill of around 15 million dollars -- from November 10, Major General Jeffery Hammond, commander of US forces in the Iraqi capital, told reporters." This transfer will come at a time when unemployment is already a big issue around the country. Corrine Reilly (McClatchy) notes
"most approximations put unemployment across Iraq at between 30 percent and 60 percent. . . Iraqi and American officials agree, the country's soaring unemployment rate must come down. They say that if more Iraqis don't find work soon, people here will pay the cost in blood. . . . The link between unemployment and bloodshed is in especially sharp focus right now, as the U.S. military prepares to hand authority over the Sons of Iraq to the Iraqi government. . . . If the government fails to pay the Sons of Iraq and they don't find other employment, many fear the former insurgents will turn back to violence."

Returning to the issue of provincial elections, eNews 2.0 offers "Iraq's unity threatened by lack of minority quota" which explains that the bill that passed the Iraqi Parliament on provincial elections last week continues to be a source of scorn -- specifically for failing to provide "a clause that defines the quota of minorities in provincial councils" and Ageel Abdel-Hussein of Moqtada al-Sadr's movement states, "Minorities should be given their rights in the provincial councils to contribute to the building of the Iraqi state." The write-up also informs that in Nineveh Province, Iraqi Christians protested Sunday in numbers exceeding 5,000.The bill will be nixed or approved by the Iraqi presidency council made up of the president and Iraq's two vice presidents. Iraq's president is Jalal Talabani and The Jordan Times reports that he returned to Iraq Monday after spending "nearly two months in the United Sates for medical treatment" (not noted in the article was his wife, Hero Ibrahim Ahmed, visiting Los Angeles in attempt to find a distributor for her film Saturday) and that he is stating the treaty between the US and the puppet government (wrongly called a SOFA) must go through.

In some of today's reported violence . . .

Bomings?

Laith Hammoudi (McClatchy Newspapers) reports a Baghdad car bombing that claimed 4 lives (with nine people wounded) and a Diyala Province roadside bombing that targeted the Kudristan Democratic Party's Jamal al Sayd Khalili who was wounded in the bombing.
Shootings?

Laith Hammoudi (McClatchy Newspapers) reports two police officers wounded in a Mosul shooting.

Corpses?

Laith Hammoudi (McClatchy Newspapers) reports 2 corpses discovered in Baghdad. Reuters notes 1 corpse discovered in Mosul yesterday.

Today the US military announces: "A Multi-National Division - Baghdad Soldier died of wounds at approximately 12:45 p.m. at a Coalition force's Combat Support Hospital Sept. 30. The Soldier was wounded when his patrol came under small-arms fire in northern Baghdad at approximately 12:15. The Soldier was medically evacuated by air to the medical facility, however, the Soldier later succumbed to the wounds. The Soldier's name is being withheld pending notification of next of kin and official release by the Department of Defense." The announcement brings to 4176 the number of US service members killed in Iraq since the start of the illegal war with 25 announced for the month thus far. That is one shy of the July figure (13) which was trumpeted as 'big news' and yet another 'turned corner.' It is two more than the number of deaths for August (23).

Meanwhile, Reuters notes, "Defense Secretary Robert Gates predicted on Monday that growth in U.S. military spending would level off in the coming years but not face severe cutbacks, despite the current economic crisis." No surprise there. Chalmers Johnson (at The Asia Times) explains, "On Wednesday, September 24, right in the middle of the fight over billions of taxpayer dollars slated to bail out Wall Street, the House of Representatives passed a $612 billion defense authorization bill for 2009 without a murmur of public protest or any meaningful press comment at all. (The New York Times gave the matter only three short paragraphs buried in a story about another appropriations measure.) The defense bill includes $68.6 billion to pursue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is only a down payment on the full yearly cost of these wars. (The rest will be raised through future supplementary bills.) It also included a 3.9% pay raise for military personnel, and $5 billion in pork-barrel projects not even requested by the administration or Secretary of Defense Robert Gates." Meanwhile Joseph Gerth (Kentucky Courier-Journal) reports on a state poll which found "54 percent of Kentuckians support the U.S. presence in Iraq, and 62 percent favor the U.S. presence in Afghanistan."

Turning to the US presidential race. Sunday on CBS' 60 Minutes (link has text and video), the US top commander in Iraq, Gen Ray Odierno, explained to Lesley Stahl that he doesn't vote and why: "I will say this. I made a decision when I got promoted to colonel that I would not longer vote in national elections because I feel it's my job to serve the commander-in-chief. So I have not voted. Probably a bad American for not voting, but I made that decision because of the position that I have." Voting or not voting is a personal decision. So is taking accountability which the Democratic presidential nominee cannot apparently do still. CBS News' Maria Gavrilovic reports that Barack Obama thinks the meltdown is just groovy because it allows talking about issues: "I mean, there was a time pretty recently when we were talking about lipstick and pigs." We? We? Barack plagiarized a Washington Post comic and made insulting remarks but it's "we". He can always grab credit for what he hasn't done, he just never takes accountability for what he did do. Where it gets really funny is if you compare Maria Gavrilovic's reports today. In one, Barack is saying that the economic meltdown is "not a time for politics" and, less than an hour later, Barack's stating the economic meltdown allows for a good test of the candidates. But who will he cheat off of?

Cynthia McKinney is the Green Party presidential nominee and here's an important statement regarding her campaign:Green Party National Women's Caucus challenges NOW to support the historic McKinney/Clemente presidential campaignMonday, 29 September 2008 19:38Distributed by the Green Party of the United States National Women's Caucus of the Green Party of the United States For Immediate Release Monday, September 29, 2008 Contact:Morgen D'Arc, Spokesperson, 207-761-7797, morgenizer@yahoo.com Linda Manning Myatt, Spokesperson, 248-548-6175, lmmyatt@wowway.com Green Party National Women's Caucus challenges NOW to support the historic McKinney/Clemente presidential campaign WASHINGTON, DC -- The National Women's Caucus of the Green Party of the United States has sent an open letter to the National Organization for Women (http://www.now.org) urging support for the Green Party's presidential ticket. The text of the letter is appended below. The letter cites Green nominee Cynthia McKinney's six terms in Congress and her unmatched dedication to the principles of equality and human rights championed by NOW. The National Women's Caucus emphasizes the historical role that alternative parties have played in the struggle for women's suffrage and rights, and notes that NOW has failed even to recognize the significance of America's first national campaign by two women of African descent: Ms. McKinney is African American and running mate Rosa Clemente is Black Puerto Rican. OPEN LETTER TO NOW, THE NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMENNational Women's Caucus of the Green Party of the United StatesSunday, September 28, 2008Dear National Organization for Women leadership and members: The National Women's Caucus of the Green Party of the United States is dismayed that your recent endorsement of Senator Barack Obama for President of the United States did not acknowledge the first all-female ticket in recent U.S. history. Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente are running for President and Vice President, respectively, on the Green Party ballot line. Cynthia McKinney served six terms in the U.S. Congress and two terms in the Georgia General Assembly. She is a global human rights and peace activist with a substantial voting record supporting women. Rosa Clemente is a community organizer and journalist who was one of the founders and primary organizers of the first national Hip Hop political convention. Their "Power to the People" campaign goal is to ensure that public policy reflects the Green Party values of ecological wisdom, social justice, grassroots democracy, and nonviolence. Cynthia McKinney has been a steadfast supporter of full reproductive rights for women throughout her legislative career, including funding for contraception and UN family planning, and opposition to "abstinence only" sex education. Rosa Clemente has been an outspoken advocate on issues affecting people of color, particularly women, and has directed her campaign toward the 48% of young people who don't vote, to encourage participation in the electoral process. Additional positions of the McKinney/Clemente campaign that will benefit women include: - Equal Rights - End to forced sterilization and coerced or uninformed consent procedures, - Immediate end to the War in Iraq and reinvestment of the money into our communities - Single-payer, universal "Medicare for All" - Election integrity where every vote is counted - Right to same-sex marriage - Free higher education - End to the drug war - Right of return of survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita - Withdrawal from corporate trade agreements such as NAFTA that are devastating economies worldwide - Promotion of renewable energy (no coal or nuclear) to create hundreds of thousands of new manufacturing, construction and service jobs Neither Obama nor his Republican opponent John McCain support these positions. The National Organization for Women PAC repeatedly praised Congresswoman McKinney during her six terms in U.S. Congress; and her record, on every relevant issue, surpasses those of the male endorsees. But now, these two women of color -- powerful and power-challenging, real choices, and nominated by a political party that proudly boasts Feminism & Gender Equity among our Ten Key Values -- don't even receive acknowledgment. The National Organization for Women, at all levels, has long struggled over diverging feminist paths -- choosing either to press for change within the existing power structure, and its institutions, or to step outside of the expected and challenge the institutions themselves. In the view of the National Women's Caucus of the Green Party of the United States, NOW has best served women when NOW has recognized, in the words of Audre Lord, that "when you look back on the road you've come, and see pain, and look forward to the road you're on, and see pain, then, step off the road, and make a new path." We recall when NOW distributed buttons proclaiming that "Women were not born Democrats, Republicans, or YESTERDAY." We recall when the heroines of our heritage were Belva Lockwood, Alice Paul and Sonia Johnson, each willing to form her own political party, or run for president independently, or both. They were willing because that path provided fewer barriers to telling the plain truth, the truth that needed to be heard, than did service to the establishment parties. We even recall when NOW announced the formation of its own, alternative, political party, the "Party for the 21st Century," with Dolores Huerta at its head. We rejoiced when NOW sought to make a new path, because the old political road was simply too filled with the pain of condescension and compromise, deferment and settling for what was offered. Even when NOW, through its political action committee, decided in the last two decades to bestow its endorsement on candidates from the over-represented political parties, it was to reward them for actually moving closer to the day when a woman might be president, with a Geraldine Ferraro and a Hillary Clinton sitting in the candidate car, and not just trudging behind it, pushing. But this past week, that endorsement reward was offered without even that, out of the same "fear of the alternative" that has driven women to set our own hopes, dreams and destinations aside, time and again, to let the men drive the car. Belva, Alice and Sonia did not become president of the United States, but, with the support of the feminists of their time, speaking truth, each re-formed the vision that America had about women. While men can be feminists too, their institutions can only be deemed feminist if they produce equality. The dearth of elected women, at every level, is its own condemnation of the party structures that are the paved road of American democracy. It disappoints us greatly, that earlier this month, NOW has not made a new path. By failing to commend, or even comment on, the presidential candidacy of Cynthia McKinney and her Green Party running mate, Rosa Clemente, NOW is driving on the wrong side of history. We invite the National Organization for Women, and feminists everywhere, to support the Green Party and the McKinney/Clemente campaign. Come walk the walk with us, and make a new path. Sincerely, National Women's Caucus, Green Party of the United States Nan Garrett, Co-Chair Ginny Marie Case, Co-Chair National Women's Caucus Member Claudia Ellquist, National NOW Board member, 1990-94, participated in the drafting of this letter National Women's Caucus Green Party of the United States 1711 18th Street NW Washington, DC 20009 202-319-7191 202-319-7192 MORE INFORMATION Abortion and contraception: McKinney is a firm supporter of abortion rights, appearing on EMILY's List of pro-choice women. She has also supported federal funding for contraception and U.N. family planning programs. Quite a long statement on Women, Families and Children [. . .] * Voted YES on reducing Marriage Tax by $399B over 10 years. (Mar 2001)* Supported funding child care, child health, & child housing. (Jul 1999) McKinney immediately challenged Georgia House rules requiring women to wear dresses by wearing slacks Green Party of the United States 202-319-7191, 866-41GREEN Fax 202-319-7193 Cynthia McKinney/Rosa Clemente 'Power to the People' Campaign for the White House http://votetruth08.com http://www.runcynthiarun.org Cynthia McKinney on video http://www.youtube.com/user/RunCynthiaRun http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=RunCynthiaRun • Press conference, September 10 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_5ivgS4asc • Speech in Denver, August 24: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPxgcjOjUEc • Music video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gx1NPlQjkqo

For more on the embarrassment that was the NOW PAC endorsement, see the Sept. 16th snapshot. Ralph Nader is the independent presidential candidate, Matt Gonzalez is his running mate. Team Nader notes:

Got $3?
Donate it now to Nader/Gonzalez.
Why?
We're just $25,000 from reaching the $3 million mark.
Three million dollars for the year!
That might be peanuts to McCain and Obama.
But it's real nutrition for Nader/Gonzalez.
And it's literally three times what any other third party or independent campaign has raised so far this year.
October promises to be a month of surprises -- for both Obama and McCain -- but also for Nader/Gonzalez.
But before we deal with October, we have to finish off September.
And we need to reach our $3 million goal by midnight tonight.
So, we need 8,400 of you, our loyal supporters, to donate $3 now.
Why?
Because we've always liked Ralph. (pictured here in his hometown of Winsted, Connecticut at age 11.)
And because at midnight tonight we close our books for the month of September. And report to the FEC.
All the national pundits will ask -- hey Nader/Gonzalez.
How much money have you raised with one month left until the election?
And we can say -- $3 million.
Donate $3 dollars now -- or whatever you can afford.
If 8,400 of you do it, we'll meet our goal of $3 million by the end of tonight.
And we'll also meet our most recent Three Way Race fundraising goal of $150,000 by midnight tonight.
So, let's crank 'er up.
And get it done.

iraqhani hazaimehthe jordan timesjoseph gerthanna fifieldjomana karadshehcnn
mcclatchy newspaperscorinne reillylaith hammoudithe daily times
the new york timeserica goode

Posted at 09:10 pm by politicsscree
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katha pollitt and other bitches

the above is Isaiah's The World Today Just Nuts "Boys Do Cry" and it's hilarious and pointed. it underscores how biden cried last week and the press didn't treat it as a major event. contrast that with hillary in new hampshire. or contrast any of biden's misspeaking with how it's treated: no big deal. sarah palin misspeaks (or is said to) and it's proof that she's an idiot.

the real idiots are the bitches.

yeah, the b-word. i'm not c.i. i've never had a problem calling a woman (or a man) a bitch.

katha pollitt and other bitches is the title of this post.

today, after c.i. was done at the doctors, we went to a high school to speak (i'm at c.i.'s for the week) and the election was brought up (we were talking about iraq). a young man (he'll be voting for the first time, he turns 18 next month) was very upset. he explained he thought he'd vote democrat but he had decided to vote for john mccain and sarah palin.

he was obviously very upset and c.i. handled it fine, stressing that every 1's vote was their vote and they didn't owe any 1 an explanation. c.i. said, 'if the vote is what's right for you then it is the right decision for you. you don't have to feel bad.'

and the guy nodded but he's got a piece of a paper in his hand.

he asks if he can read something and c.i. says sure.

it's that bitch katha pollitt's column on sarah palin.

he gets to her line about palin's special-needs child and i look over at c.i. and can tell c.i.'s pissed. the guy stops there and he was really upset. so there's a silence and c.i. leaps in and says that this is a high school and in another setting, 'i would say exactly what i think of that garbage. if that upset you, i'm not surprised because it has enraged me. it takes a very pathetic and sick person to write that sort of crap. and i'll have to leave it there because i will get us all in trouble with my language.'

so the guy speaks and explains his brother has down syndrome. and that he found that palin's bitchy (my word) one-line offensive and he's found other similar comments by other people offensive. he said he's voting for mccain-palin because of his brother and because 'the democrats have revealed just what they really think in their writing about palin's child.'

i jumped in because i didn't want c.i. to have to handle the whole thing. (ava had a thing with her family today and she wasn't there. the rest of us were silent for the bulk of this exchange because the guy was obviously so upset and we were probably thinking we would upset him by speaking.)

i said 1st off, i don't consider katha a democrat. i do consider her a barack supporter and that the perfect response to her bitchy bulls**t is to vote for palin. i explained i was voting for nader myself but if i was weak on nader (i'm strong on nader), katha's bulls**t would have had me running to mccain-palin.

it is disgusting.

katha pollitt does not cover special-needs children. there was no reason for her to suddenly mention trig palin being special-needs except for the fact that she's a bitch (an ugly bitch) who is as hateful as she is ugly.

i'm sick of it. i'm sick of all of it.

i'm sick of gloria steinem going on kpfk and claiming that she has never heard any 1 suggest that sarah palin should stay home with her kids, certainly no 1 on the left and certainly no feminist. bullf**kings**t, gloria.

i'm sick of a feminist community that refuses to call out the bashing of sarah palin. i'm sick of a feminist community that thinks they can get by without calling out the bitches like katha pollitt.

on trig palin, let me be really clear. i probably would have made a joke. years and years ago. when i was young. (and when we weren't as smart as we are today.) i remember c.i. tearing apart this jock on campus who used the r-word. (made popular again thanks to normal lear's favorite show south park.) i had never thought about it as being offensive. i was really glad i hadn't used it around c.i. and i remember meeting jackie susan (which i've written about here before). she really was my favorite writer. and i had all of her books that were then out. and c.i. knew i loved her and arranged for me to have lunch with her and c.i. she'd just gotten some bad news about her son (who had autism - i think his name is guy, but it was so long ago, i may have that wrong). she started to lose it at the table and c.i. took her to the ladies' room and i followed. that's when i found out that she had a son who was challenged. i found out the whole story in the ladies' room. and i just remember not knowing what to say or do and just being amazed by how well c.i. handled that. back then, it was an issue that c.i. took very seriously and it's still 1 of the biggest issues with c.i. (and 1 that c.i. donates a ton of money too).

but guy was institutionalized and many were back then. (again, it was a long time ago and i may be remembering susan's son's name wrong.) i never met any 1 who was challenged or disabled. i had a great grandfather who had a stroke and was in a wheel chair but he died before i was 5 and i really remember his nurse better than i remember him.

my point here is that all those years ago, the kind of b.s. that katha and others are pulling was 'accepted.' it was the 'norm'. and, as a society, we just didn't know any better. we do now.

and c.i. did back then. c.i. just didn't up with any crap on that issue.

so here is our enlightened katha and the other bitches thinking they can toss out special-needs and hide behind they weren't doing anything wrong. but they never write about special-needs children, now do they? and they never advocate for them. the whole point was to mock palin and if it took hitting her child with the mocking, so be it.

she's a bitch. katha pollitt is f**king bitch.

she is so grossed out by trig palin (because she's immature, there's nothing wrong with trig palin) that she takes offense to his being at the rnc convention with his brother and sisters. she's not bothered by the brother and sisters - they aren't special-needs children. but it was just a hardship for katha that a special-needs child was shown, along with plain's other children, at the rnc.

what that really says is: hide them away.

i've written about my abortion here before. my child would have been special-needs. unlike trig palin, he would have needed repeated surgeries and, even with those, he wouldn't have had a life. i don't mean a 'normal' life, i mean he wouldn't have lived. the surgeries would have been prolonging life but he never would have seen adulthood (the child might have been a she). that was the hardest decision i ever had to make.

when i 1st learned there was a problem, the 1st person i told was c.i. i wasn't sure how flyboy (the father) would take the news. c.i. was on the phone with me for 3 hours while i cried. and i was having the baby at that point. when the next round of tests came back, i'd have to make a different decision. (my decision was that to give birth would have been selfish because the child would have had no life, would be in and out of the hospital with 1 operation after another and they'd just prolong life for a brief time.)

before that round of tests, i just knew there was a problem. and i was okay with that. i knew it would be more work than i was probably up to and worried that flyboy would have a different opinion (he didn't, he agreed with me).

so although i do not know sarah palin's situation, i've been a lot closer to it than katha pollitt. and i would never make fun of sarah palin or trig palin.

and i think it takes a real bitch to be offended that trig palin is included in the family just like every other member of the family.

katha is now the 5th woman i've read with a little comment that argues, in effect, that special-needs children should be hidden away. a real feminist movement would be calling it out and asking who the hell are you to say that trig palin didn't have as much of a right to be present as every other member of the palin family.

i'm pretty damn sick of the women representing themselves as 'feminists' today.

if this didn't make sense, blame it on my mascara which has run the whole time i've been typing. i keep having to wipe it away. i'm done with the bitches by the way, all the rest is not referred to in the title (nor is isaiah referred to in the title).

moving to team nader:

The Mob Hands Us an October Surprise

Posted by The Nader Team on Monday, September 29, 2008 at 12:51:00 PM

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Opposed to the bailout of Wall Street crooks?

Donate $10 now to Nader/Gonzalez.

Why?

We're in the tenth month of our campaign.

And we're in the final two day stretch of our $150,000 Three Way Race Fundraising Drive.

Thanks to you, we're in striking distance.

We're at $110,000 with two days to go.

We need 4,000 of you, our loyal supporters, to donate $10 each.

Let's crank it up.

And get it done.

Our strategy all year long -- put Nader/Gonzalez in a position to break through.

And together, we did it.

We put Nader/Gonzalez on 45 state ballots -- and the District of Columbia.

Then, all of a sudden, here comes the MOB.

With an October surprise.

The MOB?

That would be McCain/Obama/Bush.

With the Mother Of all Bailouts.

McCain/Obama/Bush are pushing hard for the bailout of Wall Street crooks.

While Nader/Gonzalez stand with the American people in opposition.

Why are we in this mess?

As Richard Fischer, the president of the Federal Reserve in Dallas put it yesterday, we're in this mess because of "a sustained orgy of excess and reckless behavior."

Why then should we bail out those who engaged in the orgy?

We shouldn't.

And it's time to stand up and speak in one loud and clear voice.

No to the bailout.

Vote Ralph Nader.

The man who for his entire career has pushed for tough law and order regulation of Wall Street.

Regulation that would have prohibited the orgy of excess and reckless behavior.

The bailout of Wall Street crooks will be the number one issue throughout October.

And we need your help now to gear up to drive home the message.

Throughout this campaign, you have never let us down.

We have met every fundraising goal we have set for ourselves.

Right now, we're at $110,000 in our Three Way Race Fund.

And we have to hit $150,000 by tomorrow midnight.

We have climbed this hill before.

Right now, we need 4,000 of you, our loyal supporters, to donate $10 each.

This week, Ralph Nader and Matt Gonzalez are traveling up the California coast.

Pounding home the message -- no bailout for Wall Street crooks.

There is crisis.

There is movement.

Which way will it turn?

It's up to you.

Our loyal supporters.

So, let's crank it up.

And get it done.

Onward to November

The Nader Team

PS: And remember, if you donate $100 now, we'll ship to you a copy of The Ralph Nader Reader, a 441-page collection of Ralph's writings on Wall Street vs. Main Street, democracy, the corporate state, and our hyper-commercialized culture. If you donate $100 now, we will send you this diverse collection -- and Ralph will autograph it. (This book offer ends at 11:59 p.m. September 30, 2008.)

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kat did 2 reviews this week: 'Kat's Korner: Hold Me Down' and 'Kat's Korner: Chris Martin's cold play.'

i've noted norman finkelstein here from time to time and this is m. junaid levesque-alam's 'An Interview With Norman Finkelstein' (dissident voice):

Levesque-Alam: I wanted to start off talking about developments in the Gaza Strip. Taking a cursory glance at [Egyptian weekly] al-Ahram last week, it was clear that the subject on everyone’s mind, aside from the humanitarian cost being paid by residents in Gaza, is whether there is any real overarching Israeli policy or plan here. What do you think Israel is really hoping to achieve with its siege of Gaza?

Norman Finkelstein: After Salvador Allende was elected, the US said it was going to make the Chilean economy scream. The U.S tormented Nicaragua to unseat the Sandinistas. You tell the people that if you keep reelecting this government we're going to keep strangling you, while if you elect our government we will allow you a marginal existence but still better than before.

Levesque-Alam: In that vein, there appear to be two related observations. Once, again turning to Al-Ahram, there was an analysis by Khalid Amayreh, saying that, "the very legitimacy of the PA now depends on the continuation of the talks, regardless of whether progress is made or not. Needless to say, this posture is more than good news for Israel since it allows the Jewish state to keep on building settlements in the West Bank and create more irreversible facts in East Jerusalem, all under the rubric of the peace process."

My question is, number one, do you see Fatah as fulfilling any role other than peace talks for the sake of peace talks, and two, do you think facts are being created on the ground in such a way that the two-state solution is not even a viable option anymore?

Finkelstein: I don't get involved in internal Palestinian politics. Those are choices Palestinians have to make. This much however can be said. You cannot win from diplomacy what you haven't won on the battlefield. I don't necessarily mean an exchange of lethal weapons; mobilizing public opinion is also a potent force. A good versus a bad diplomat will make some difference. Abba Eban made some difference; I don't want to discount it. But negotiations are the most trivial aspect of politics. What counts in politics is your ability to organize, mobilize, and bring to bear superior force -- and again force doesn’t necessarily mean lethal force; there is also the force of public opinion. The so-called Palestinian leadership has not invested anytime in trying to organize its constituency either in the Occupied Territories or abroad. Nothing is going to change without such organization -- it's just silliness; for the Palestinian leadership, lucrative silliness.

that's just an excerpt. use the link for the full thing. i think norman is a very smart person and i think he demonstrates it yet again above when he refuses to pass judgment on the choices of palestinians. a) choices aren't all that easy when you're occupied. b) only gas bags (hello, katha pollitt!) assume they're an expert on everything and have an opinion worth sharing on every topic in the world.

let's close with c.i.'s 'Iraq snapshot:'

Monday, September 29, 2008. Chaos and violence continue, the US military announces another death, the US Secretary of Defense declares no withdrawal happening if Obama or McCain become president, Friday's non-debate and more.

Today Basil Adas (Gulf News) covers the continued efforts to of the White House and the puppet government in Baghdad to push through a treaty (circumventing the US Senate and the US Consitution, though the Iraqi Parliament will supposedly be able to give a thumbs up or thumbs down)masquerading as a SOFA. Adas reports that the issue of the immunity of US troops is something the US now signals they're willing to discuss according to the Kurdistan Alliance's Feriad Rawanduz who is hopeful that a treaty can be pushed through before the end of the year. Abdul Aziz al Hakim tells Adas that possibly their could be a judicial body comprised of both Iraqis and Americans who would rule on the actions of individual US service members. Ryan Crocker, US Ambassador to Iraq, is optimistic and claims the 'movement' is some sort of rebuke to Iran (from Iraq). Adas says the path after a treaty is drawn up is the Executive Board, then the National Security Council and the Iraqi Parliament. Finally, Adas notes: "Meanwhile, Defence Minister Abdul Qader Jasem Mohammad confirmed yesterday that Washington had offered a number of Beechcraft spy planes to bolster the Iraqi security forces." Iran's Press TV reports that rumors state the White House and the puppet have "settled their main differences over a controversial security agreement." Nothing was said about the treaty in Robert Wood's press briefing at the US State Dept today nor did Tony Fratto mention it in his White House press briefing today. US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker has repeatedly blamed the Iranian government for the US failure to control the puppet and did so again in an interview with AP's John Daniszewski where he stated, "The evidence is pretty clear. It is the stream of public statements coming out of Tehran, political and clerical figures, all criticizing the agreement. So they are being very open about their interference."

From the treaty to provincial elections. Last week a bill passed the Parliament that is now awaits a thumbs up or down from the presidency council. On Sunday, Iraqi Christians took to the streets to protest the bill. AP noted that "hundreds of Christians staged protests" today in Iraq and those protests were probably most effective on the world stage. al-Maliki's shown no concern for the rights of any of the religious minorities in Iraq; however, the puppet knows that persecution of Christians won't play well with the Americans still supporting the Iraq War so he moved quickly to insist that he supports seats in Parliament being reserved for religious minorities. Sadly, some will play that development out as if it matters. It doesn't matter at all. Parliament voted on the bill, it is sent to the presidency council who will either sign off on it (making it law) or reject it. al-Maliki's way too late to impact anything unless the bill is rejected and the Parliament takes another shot at it. Reuters notes that al-Maliki's claiming Parliament can add things to the bill. Well that would actually make it a new bill and not what the full Parliament voted on. Reuters quotes Iraq's Chaladean Catholic leader, Cardinal Emmanuel III Delly, stating, "I call on the presidency council not to approve the cancellation of article 50 of the provincial law which is an oppression against our presence and representation in Iraqi society." Shamiram Daniali (Assyria Times) declares, "Just when we thought things cannot possibly go any worse for the most persecuted population of Iraq, its indigenous people who are Assyrian Christians, we witnessed the biggest injustice yet by the Iraqi Parliament."

Staying with the weekend, Saturday AFP reported a Jalawla raid by the Iraqi police on the Kuridsh pesh merga and, citing Salah Koikha ("spokesman for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan"), 1 pesh merga member was killed during the raid. Reuters adds that 1 Iraqi police office officer died. The raid took place in Diyala Province where the pesh merga has prevented Iraqi forces from enterting certain areas such as Khanaquin (see last Monday's snapshot). India's Economic Times observes, "In a mirror image of Kirkuk, the Kurdish town of Khanaqin near the border with Iran that holds sizeable oil reserves is being exposed to ethnic tensions and rival territorial claims. The local Kurdish political leadership warns that the area could see an ethnic explosion, as they call for Khanaqin to join the adjoining autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) of northern Iraq."

This morning Basil Adas (Gulf News) reported, "Meanwhile, Defence Minister Abdul Qader Jasem Mohammad confirmed yesterday that Washington had offered a number of Beechcraft spy planes to bolster the Iraqi security forces." Vanessa Gera (AP) reports that it was 12 planes and that Mohammed al-Askari, Defense Minister, has confirmed that "six King Air planes had been delivered and the other six were expected soon." In a possible related item, Aseel Kami (Reuters) reports Iraqi doctors can now pack heat thanks to a new decree from al-Maliki's cabinet.

Violence continued over the weekend and Sundays bombings gathered attention. Reporting on that (and the Iraqi Christians), Tina Susman (Los Angeles Times) observed, "The violence and the protests showed the tensions that still exist in Iraq despite progress on security and political reconciliation. The blasts were particularly jarring because they came around sunset, when the markets are filled with people buying food for the evening meal that breaks their daylong fast during the holy month of Ramadan." Susman quoted bombing victim Hidar Abdulhussein stating, "We are innocent and peaceful people. Why are they targeting markets and shoppers? How were they able to get in? There are so many army and police checkpoints." Sam Dagher and Muhammed al-Obaidi (New York Times) cite Mizher Abed Hanoush who "echoed concerns voiced by many Iraqis in recent weeks about the fragility of the security situation in Baghdad. 'The situation is turning to the worse again, I do not know why,' he said." AP notes that the death toll from yesterday's bombings have climbed to at least 35. Turning to some of today's violence . . .

Bombings?

Hussein Kadhim (McClatchy Newspapers) reports a Baghdad mortar attack which wounded five people, another which wounded three people and a third which wounded one person while a Mosul car bombing left nine people wounded "including 5 Peshmerga members of the PDK." Reuters notes 1 "Sunni Arab tribal leader died on Monday of wounds inflicted by a bomb attached to his car that exploded on Sunday in Mosul," an Iskandariya roadside bombing that claimed 1 life (three people wounded) and a Samarra roadside bombing that left Samarra Mayor Mahmoud Khalif (and four of his guards) wounded.

Shootings?

Reuters reports 2 brothers were shot dead in Mosul. Vanessa Gera (AP) reports Sheik Ahmed Salim was wounded in a Diyala Province shooting which also claimed the lives of his 2 sons.

Corpses?

Hussein Kadhim (McClatchy Newspapers) reports 1 corpse discovered in Baghdad. Reuters notes 1 corpse discovered in Mosul.

Reuters notes, "A U.S. soldier was killed by small arms fire when his patrol was attacked in eastern Baghdad, the U.S. military said."

Meanwhile, speaking in DC at the National Defense University today, US Secretary Robert Gates joked about the run away defense budget, "Resources are scarce -- and yes, it is a sign I've already been at the Pentagon for too long to say that with a straight face when talking about a half trillion dollar base budget. Nonetheless, we still must set priorities and consider inescapable tradeoffs and opportunity costs." He further made clear that McCain or Obama, there's no withdrawal from Iraq happening: "In Iraq, the number of U.S. combat units in country will decline over time. About the only argument you hear now is about the pacing of the drawdown. Still, no matter who is elected president in November, there will continue to be some kind of American advisory and counter-terrorism effort in Iraq for years to come."

Moving into the US presidential race. Lynette Long is supporting the McCain - Palin ticket and Long is a feminist. Bill Clinton cited her last week on ABC's The View and yesterday on NBC's Meet The Press. At her site, Long compiles a list of reasons as to why Governor Palin is "Good For Women" which includes "keeping the issue of sexism in the United States of America front and center" and expanding "the definition of feminism." She also writes that following speaking at a McCain - Palin rally, "An executive member of the National Organization for Women contacted me the very next day. It was a friendly conversation tinted with sarcasm. 'How do you feel about your speech?' she asked me. 'Great.' I responded. 'Why shouldn't I feel great. I gave a speech about women's rights in front of a large audience. I highlighted the under-representation of women in every branch of government, the sexism in the media, and the unfair treatment of Hillary Clinton by the Democratic Party.' 'Where did you give your speech?' A rhetorical question deserved a quip answer, 'Before thirty-thousand Americans.' Republicans are Americans, aren't they. 'By speaking at a McCain-Palin event people will think you are endorsing McCain.' That's the point, I am endorsing McCain-Palin." We're starting with this because a number of members of the Cult of Obama are repeating the lie that many 'feminists' have. (And it will be 'feminists' until they correct that and other lies they've spread.) 'Sarah Palin wants rape victims to pay for their own rape kits!' Prove it. September 24th, FactCheck.org published their item on it and they found nothing to prove that rumor. No proof. That's how the Cult took down Hillary, they repeated lies and piled on more lies. Usually, the most effective lie was the one that turned a Hillary strength into a liability -- a strength Barack didn't posses. So when 'feminists' rush to tell you Sarah Palin hunted wolves from a helicopter, the appropriate response is, "You, ma'am, are a damn liar." And when they insist that Palin forced rape victims to pay for rape kits, the same reply should be followed by pointing to Barack's "Faith, Family, Values Tour" with headliner Doug Kmiec who is both a homophobe (and actively fighting to overturn marriage equality in California) and an anti-choice advocate who admitted to the New York Times last month that he wanted Roe v. Wade overturned. If 'feminists' think that's feminism, they have more problems than lying.
As the press continues digging around Palin's past can someone help me out here? I thought during the Democratic Party primaries, when Barack kept suggesting that there was something evil in Hillary and Bill Clinton's tax returns, that Barack himself made a promise. There was nothing evil in their tax returns as was demonstrated when the Clintons released them. But didn't Barack promise to release his papers from when he was in the Illinois legislature. It was hard, he whined, because he didn't have that much money. Well he's sitting on a large wad of Wall St. money and surely, all these months later, the papers must have been compiled. Exactly when will he be making them public?
Violet Socks (Reclusive Leftist) explains, "Whenever women in a patriarchal society buck male opinion, there's hell to pay and they know it. Women in America really went out on a limb this year by backing Hillary in the face of withering derision from men (and from young women attempting to curry favor with men, consciously or not). Now they're making amends by piling on Palin. Ridiculing Sarah Palin as a moron -- which she clearly is not -- is de rigueur for everybody now in the Obama camp. It's their preferred sport. It's true that Palin is verbally awkward in interviews, but then, Obama himself is a man whose unscripted remarks are so ignorant and confused they defy belief. A teleprompter-deprived Obama thinks there are 57 states in the Union, believes Oregon is in the Great Lakes region, doesn't know which states border his own state of Illinois, and has no idea which Senate committees he's on." And, yes, in response to some e-mails today, the ridicule Palin faces is sexism and just because some self-proclaimed 'feminist' online wants to pretend Tina Fey's sexist (and, yes, bitchy) portrayal of Palin is nothing to fret over doesn't make it so. Staying with stupidity, the I-stalk-my-ex-and-trash-his-younger (and prettier)-new-partner 'feminist' Katha Pollitt who offered up that Palin was an "affirmative action babe." First, there's nothing wrong with affirmative action when someone is qualified. Second, when Katha's sold out feminism (as she freely admitted doing in April) for her hero Barack, maybe calling a candidate an "affirmative action" hire isn't the way to go because Barack's qualifications are non-existant. Katha wipes the sweat from underneath her many chins, hunkers down at the keyboard and comes up with one falsehood after another. At one point, she has to drag Carly Fiorina into it because Katha longs for a girlfight (longs for anything that will get her fat ass some attention but it's not 1996 and most stopped reading Katha long ago) so she rushes to type that Carly Fiornia was "ushered off the stage after she pointed out that Sarah Plin couldn't run a major corporation". Just as Katha has to insist that she was dumped by the one who got away because of his own problems (not the story everyone else heard), Katha has to omit a lot of reality when pretending to talk politics. CNN quoting Fiorina, "Well I don't think John McCain could run a major corporation, I don't think Barack Obama could run a major corporation, I don't think Joe Biden could run a major corporation." It must be very sad to be Katha Pollitt. It's even sadder to have to read her (no link to trash so no link to Katha). Long after the election's over, feminists will be addressing what went down and Liars for Barack like Katha will be the new Susan Brownmillers (and that's not anything to wish for, read Susan Faludi's Backlash). And since Katha crossed my line-you-do-not-cross (special needs children), let me toss out that each passing day finds Katha looking more and more like Bill Clinton's ugly brother. And for Katha's friend who sometimes e-mails, ask Katha to watch her words about special needs children before you beg me not to comment on Katha's Butt Ugly-ness. Meanwhile Mollie (Get Religion) explains how the press regularly distorts Palin's religion and, no surprise there, she just had to look to the Los Angeles Times.

Barack participated in a two-party presidential 'debate on Friday. Susan (Random Thoughts) offers this evaluation, "Thank God it's over. I call it a draw; both were equally boring, equally deceptive, equally unfit for the job of president." Klownhaus notes the Cult reaction and attempts to break it down for TalkLeft's Jeralyn: "Do you want to know what the difference between spinning and outright lying is? There isn't one." Patrick Martin (WSWS) found the debate underscored "that there is no choice in the 2008 presidential election within the confines of the official two-party system. Two candidates stood facing each other, espousing nearly identical positions in defense of Wall Street and American militarism which would, in any other country in the world, immediately identify them as representatives of the ultra-right. . . . Obama said that the lesson of Iraq was 'we should never hesitate to use military force, and I will not, as president, in order to keep the American people safe, never hesitate to use military force'." Asked by moderator Jim Lehrer ("how do you see the lessons of Iraq, Senator Obama?"), Barack responded, "So I think the lesson to be drawn is that we should never hesitate to use military force, and I will not, as president, in order to keep the American people safe. But we have to use our military wisely. And we did not use our military wisely in Iraq." That was a good catch by Martin and one I honestly missed. After the question is asked by Lehrer, Barack takes six paragraphs to get that point (six paragraphs according to CNN transcript). Speaking to PBS' Ray Suarez following the debate (transcript and audio), presidential historian Michael Beschloss noted that "John McCain was repeatedly on the offensive and, to some extent, Obama was on the defensive. I was surprised by that. In terms of strategy, we'll see what works. But oftentimes in debates, if a candidate does go on the offensive, it does tend to work. That's what Kennedy did in 1960. It's what Ronald Reagan did in 1980. And it is what Bill Clinton did in 1992." PBS' Washington Week did two broadcast on Friday instead of their usual one. The first was pre-debate (standout there was the Washington Post's Dan Balz reporting from the debate location) and the second was a post-debate discussion. From the second broadcast:

Gwen Ifill: I was struck Michele that Barack Obama didn't seem to have much of an answer to that experience question.

Michelle Norris (NPR): I was surprised because it was basically John McCain's closing statement. He said that he had been involved in virtually every major national security crisis over the last 25 years and he said directly --

Gwen Ifill: He named half the leaders he'd met with.

Michele Norris: Yes. And he said I don't think Barack Obama has the experience or the judgment to be president and Jim Lehrer didn't say anything and basically let Barack Obama respond and the first thing he said was my father came from Kenya It was not directly dealing with that and I was very surprised by that.

Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader offers his thoughts regarding the 'debate':

It isn't who won. It's what won.
Always ask after you watch a debate, not who won, but what lost and what won.
Militarism won.
Boondoggle star wars won.
Corruption won.
Corporate crime won.
Bailouts for Wall Street won.
Nuclear power won.
Aggressive NATO won.

What Lost?
Peace advocates lost.
Consumers lost.
Workers lost.
Solar energy really lost.
You ought to ask what they don't talk about, what they ignore, what they avoid. Both of these candidates are vying to get into the White House so they can take orders from their corporate paymasters.
That's what it's all about. Corporate government or the people's government? That's why we're running: to make a people's government.
When you ask what won you get a clear view that these two candidates are really afraid of challenging corporate power. It's our job to make them more afraid of the people than big business.

Video of Ralph's critique can be viewed here. KPFK broadcast the debates (click here for KPFK archives -- it's Friday under "Special Programming" at 5:03 p.m.) with commentary provided by, among others, Sonali Kolhatkar (host of Uprising) who stated, "I think Obama lost a lot of opportunities to strike back at McCain. Obama was on the defensive, as you said, Obama sounded like he was on the defensive and overall, I think, the debate was quite a bit more boring than I think most people thought." The only worthwhile guest not running for office was Chris Hedges who noted of the debate, "A lot of empty talk. It's pretty clear nothing's going to change in Iraq. Both candidates are going to ramp up the war in Afghanistan. Neither of them would address the real issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because their hands are tied by the Israeli lobby and the Israeli government." You can also laugh at many crackpots if you listen (Dr. Drew -- and add counting to the many skills Dr. Drew lacks). You can hear Sonali's co-host Ian Masters -- aka Babbling Brook or maybe just "Trainwreck" -- utilize non-stop sexism in his 'commentary' on this week's debate (the one that hasn't taken place). It wasn't just enough that he deploy SEXISM against Palin, after Cynthia McKinney was off the air he mocked her and called her "loopy" for her Florida analysis which, for the record, was correct. Ian Masters is a sexist idiot. It's pathetic that KPFK aired that embarrassment. It's linked for three reasons. 1) Audio for those who want to listen to the debate. 2) Cynthia McKinney. 3) Ralph Nader. Sonali asked Cynthia whether she supported the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan and Iraq?

Cynthia McKinney: Absolutely, there's no way that -- I think the Democrats and the Republicans are on the wrong track when they say that we need to have more troops in Afghanistan. No. the people of Afghanistan don't want more missiles, more deaths, more bombs, more violence. They want peace. They want justice. They want self-determination. And that is what the United States ought to be offering the people of Afghanistan. And they want legitimate government which Ha mad Karzi does not represent.

Asked of differences between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, Cynthia replied:

Well of course I understand the Democratic Party very well after having served four years in the Georgia legislature as a Democrat and after having served twelve years in the United States Congress as a Democrat. What I can say is that voters never lose when they vote their values and that is really the message that we should be sending. And for voters who might be torn because of what the corporate press has told them to support -- the corporate political parties about the election of 2000, basically what has been told to voters has been told to them in an effort to prevent them from voting their values because if they voted their values and their values included peace then they would not vote Democrat or Republican, they would vote Green. . . . If their values were social justice, they would not vote Democrat or Republican, they would vote Green. And what the corporate press has failed to tell us is that the corporate political parties were engaged in the rankest form of disenfranchisement to the tune of one million Black people all over the United States being disenfranchised, being denied the right to have their votes counted in 2000. 78,000 of them were right there in the state of Florida and the Democratic Party did nothing to protect the right of their own voters, which the Black community represents, to have their votes counted. And then in 2004, the further insult was made by John Kerry who made a commitment, a recorded commitment, that we weren't going to see a repeat of 2000 where one million Black people had their votes not counted and then despite the fact that reports were coming in from Ohio of tremendous disenfranchisement in the Black community, John Kerry conceded the very next day.

Following McKinney, Aura Bogada (Free Speech Radio News) spoke to Ralph Nader.

Ralph Nader: I think something needs to be done for the millions of home owners who are going to be foreclosed. There are a lot of good ways to save them from losing their homes. The progressive economist Dean Baker in Washington suggests that they be allowed to rent their homes until the situation is stabilized -- rather than be evicted from their homes, they become tenants so that's one approach. But by and large the White House has not made the case that there needs to be a gigantic bailout and Congress is not investigating having a series hearing of deliberative hearings the way they did for a tiny bail out of Chrysler in 1979. So they haven't made the case and if there is to be a bailout they haven't shown what kind of bailout, how much is needed, should it be injection of capital, how do they evaluate the distressed assets, how are they going to pay for it, when are they going to pay for it. It's nothing but a blank check. $700 billion. George Bush wants. King George the IV, and that's it. This is dictatorial rule-making and unfortunately the Democrats with a few tweaks here and there are going to roll over.

The measure Ralph spoke of died in the House today. Offering a Green perspective, Kimberly Wilder (On the Wilder Side) writes about the topic (one attempt by the House to kill the bill doesn't mean it's over) and her suggestions include:

-Demand the absolute moratorium on foreclosures that some people have already envisioned might be needed.
-Demand a moratorium on apartment evictions.
-Encourage our friends and neighbors to truly evaluate their resources now, a few days or weeks before something happens: Make a network with 3 or 4 family members. Where would everyone go, who would they live with, if one by one they got kicked out of their homes?
-Start thinking of laws to propose, or amendments to this bailout bill, that either punish landlords with residential property not rented out, or make squatting rules so simple that there will not be empty apartments rotting around the country, while some people are homeless and looking for a place to lie their head.
-Start thinking about a way to put a moratorium on the enforcement of "keeping my neighborhood affluent laws" such as in the town I live in, where it is illegal to have a home with two front doors. Or, rules that only one family can live in a home. (Which should be well thought out, I realize. Because, they could be misapplied by bad landlords to overcrowd, or create burdens that make impossible parking/traffic situations if there is not an emergency.)

We're working that topic back to the presidential election via US House Rep Dennis Kucinich. On Democracy Now! today, he revealed that Barack Obama was said, by House Democrats not to want bankruptcy protection for the home owners:

Amy Goodman: Congressman Kucinich, can you explain how it is that the Democrats are in charge, yet the Democrats back down on their demand to give bankruptcy judges authority to alter the terms of mortgages for homeowners facing foreclosure, that Democrats also failed in their attempt to steer a portion of any government profits from the package to affordable housing programs?

Dennis Kucinich: Well, I mean, those are two of the most glaring deficiencies in this bill. And I would maintain there was never any intention to -- you know, well, many members of Congress had the intention of helping people who were in foreclosure. You know, this -- Wall Street doesn't want to do that. Wall Street wants to grab whatever change they can and equity that's left in these properties. So --

Amy Goodman: Right, but the Democrats are in charge of this.

Dennis Kucinich: Right. You know, I'll tell you something that we were told in our caucus. We were told that our presidential candidate, when the negotiations started at the White House, said that he didn't want this in this bill. Now, that's what we were told.

Amy Goodman: You were told that Barack Obama did not want this in the bill?

Dennis Kucinich: That he didn't want the bankruptcy provisions in the bill. Now, you know, that's what we were told. And I don't understand why he would say that, if he did say that. And I think that there is a--the fact that we didn't put bankruptcy provisions in, that actually we removed any hope for judges to do any loan modifications or any forbearance. There's no moratorium on mortgage foreclosures in here. So, who's getting --who's really getting helped by this bill? This is a bailout, pure and simple, of Wall Street interests who have been involved in speculation.

Hardly surprising considering where Barack's campaign money comes from. But see if that gets any more news traction than Biden's speaking error did last week. Barack and John got to stand on stage in a so-called presidential debate. Shut out were presidential candidates Cynthia McKinney, Ralph Nader, Bob Barr and Chuck Baldwin. Team Nader reports that Trevor Lyman is attempting to organize a debate in NYC for McKinney, Nader, Barr and Baldwin as well as (invited even if they don't show) Barack and McCain. Lyman explains: "Please join us for a third party candidate debate and money bomb (date to be announced as we approach 10,000 pledges mark, location in New York City). All of the major candidates will be invited to participate. The event will be broadcast via BreakTheMatrix.com and many others (details to come). Remember, all of America is on the Internet. Together we can break the media blackout on third party candidates. Be sure to tell your friends and family to tune in." And before any e-mails come in, no, all of America is not online.