Life as a Spectator Sport

A long long day on the road, fourteen hours of driving. About five hours ago, as I was starting back home, the title and first sentence of yesterday's blog came into focus in my mind for no particular reason, and I realized that I had associated Agent Orange with the first Gulf War. I was obviously not firing on all thrusters when I did that, as I really do know better. I think I was in that mode of I-really-want-to-finish-this-up-and-post-it-so-I-can-go-to-bed. That's what you get for blogging when you're half asleep. Anyway, it's corrected now. Somehow I doubt that there was much to defoliate in the deserts of Kuwait.

Friday, February 27, 2004

PTSD, Gulf War Syndrome, Suicide

War can be hell even if you're the alleged "winner." Is suicide going to be the sad legacy of George W's war, as Gulf War Syndrome was of his father's, and PTSD of Lyndon Johnson's? Following is an excerpt from an article by Wayne Smith in today's Editor & Publisher online.

The army reports that 21 soldiers in Iraq and Kuwait have killed themselves since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom but this number will increase as suspicious non-combat deaths that have already occurred and might be suicides await classification by the army's Criminal Investigation Division (CID). We have learned from a Pentagon source that the CID may not rule on these deaths until after the operation is over. Even the number of 21 is well above the average Army rate.

The army's peculiar calculus also excludes suicides that occur outside the "theater," that is, soldiers who served in Iraq or Kuwait but kill themselves once they get home. The media is toting these up ad hoc. United Press International discovered two at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and The Sun of Baltimore recently reported on one that occurred in a Shoney's Inn. But most of these tragedies will unfold anonymously since family members are often reluctant to speak publicly about a subject they consider taboo.

Smith, a Vietnam vet and former post traumatic stress disorder counselor, says that research at the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation brought back feelings of "deja vu," as he contemplated a country ill-prepared to deal with post-Iraq psychiatric disorders.

Reading the article brought back memories for me too, of a co-worker who spent several years with the Montagnard tribes in the central highlands of Vietnam. He came back with a Vietnamese wife, a scar that stretched from the middle of his scalp down to his chin and a very shaky hold on reality. Several people whose desks had been near his had already complained that he "mumbled all the time" and had asked to be moved to another part of the large open office to get away from him. For whatever reason, he and I hit it off immediately, and although our good relationship didn't stop the muttering from the other side of the cubicle wall, he seemed to calm down somewhat. One day, though, he didn't show up for work. When there was no word from him by the middle of the afternoon, I called his house. The man who answered the phone said Laurie had tried to kill himself. No one knew why. He had gotten up in the morning as though it was any other day, taken out a handgun that he kept in a drawer and put it to his head. Only his wife's screaming bodily intervention had stopped him. By the time he was able to return to the workforce, we had moved hundreds of miles away. I saw him only a couple of times after his suicide attempt—sad, awkward visits in which neither of us knew what to say to the other, while his wife hovered anxiously in the background to make sure I wouldn't upset him. I don't know whether he is alive today or not.

Smith goes on to say:

Now, over the next few weeks, as more troops rotate home, and the anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq approaches, the Pentagon faces the prospect of a potentially unwieldy public becoming more "casualty sensitive," something war planners have been conscious of since Vietnam brought the human or "blood" cost of conflict into America's living rooms.

This looming milestone may explain a bizarre episode a few weeks ago when various Pentagon spokespeople began driving the suicide number down, to 18 or even 17, only to officially re-affirm a higher number later.

I have to say that the Bush administration is at least being consistent. After all, a lot of their other numbers are going up and down like a yo-yo too (see Brad DeLong's January and February blog entries on payroll figures for some interesting examples).

Smith mentions that the anti-malarial drug Lariam is suspected of possibly playing a role in the suicides, but suggests that the "sheer bloodiness of this deployment" is a factor as well.

Experts both on suicide and epidemiology, including the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, tell us that a cluster of suicides in a specific population, in this case the army, represents the thin edge of a numeric wedge. A report by UPI on Feb. 19 from the army's hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, offers a chilling glimpse at the size of the trouble heading for the military's already over-taxed and unprepared medical system. It said that about 1,000 soldiers have already been evacuated to Landstuhl for psychiatric reasons.

The UPI story by award-winner Mark Benjamin also exposed what may be the Pentagon's internal mantra on an issue so explosive it could seriously downgrade the American public's support for this war. When asked how many soldiers the hospital has treated following actual suicide attempts, Col. Rhonda Cornum, commander of the hospital, wouldn't give a number, saying only, "This is a sensitive thing that some people might not want you to know, I guess."

My internal mantra, expressed already in this blog, is "Didn't we learn anything from Vietnam?" I guess not.

Thursday, February 26, 2004

Comments, please?

If anyone has commented here and was wondering why their deathless prose didn't show up afterward, it's because the old YACCS commenting system wasn't working with the changes Blogger made to their code, and I wasn't aware of it. Thanks, the several of you who have written to me to point this out. YACCS made new code available some time back, and I have now added it to my template.

George W. Bush, Will You Please Go Now?!

Shoulda done this before now. I added George W. Bush, Will You Please Go Now?! to the blogroll. Doug has done the world a great service—he found someone who can explain why gay marriage is so bad for society:

Yesterday I chided all those right-wingers who fatuously claim that gay marriage would tear the very fabric of our American society, challenging them to explain exactly how this was going to happen. Well, a letter writer in today's edition of the Birmingham News surprised me by stepping up to the plate. The Rev. Christopher Crain declares that gay marriage will destroy American society because it will...irrevocably alter the wedding industry!:

If same-sex marriages were mainstreamed, everything from the content of sociology classes in our public high schools to the covers of family and parenting magazines would reflect this radical change. Residential phone listings in the telephone book would look different. Jewelry stores would market a new genre of wedding rings. Wedding caterers would offer cake toppers that would initially turn heads.

Yes, wedding caterers would have to introduce entire new lines of cake decorations. Clearly, this is an issue requiring action at the Constitutional level.

Rev. Cain must not live in a culturally diverse area (I don't know exactly where he lives, so I'm not throwing stones at Birmingham!) or he would know that the current phone book arrangement already doesn't work well for a large number of Americans (including those women who choose not to take their husband's name upon marriage). I'm not going to take individual pot shots at the rest of his lame objections—just want to say, "Thanks, Doug!" for bringing them to my attention.

"A deeply immoral work of art"

Speaking of Andrew Sullivan, his critique of The Passion is a searing indictment that makes Maureen Dowd read like a polite commentary. I hesitated before printing this in its entirety, but it's so powerful that I think it deserves to be repeated fully, not just linked to.

THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST: Well, I went last night to see the movie everyone is talking about. I'm writing this not long after leaving the theater so these are my raw and immediate impressions - not a fully considered review. I was of course deeply moved in parts. If you are a person of the Christian faith, it is impossible not to be moved by a rendition of the passion of the Savior that is not a travesty. The very story itself, embedded in the soul and the memory, stirs the emotions and prayers and meditations of a lifetime. To see it rendered in a believable setting in languages that, however inaccurate, give you an impression of being there, is arresting. It brings this simple but awe-inspiring story to life in a way very difficult to approximate in the written or spoken word. You can see why Passion plays were once performed. The Gospels do end in extraordinary drama, pathos, plot, agony. Portraying them vividly may, we can hope, bring some people to read the Gospels and even to explore further what the redemptive message of Jesus really is.

PURE PORNOGRAPHY: At the same time, the movie was to me deeply disturbing. In a word, it is pornography. By pornography, I mean the reduction of all human thought and feeling and personhood to mere flesh. The center-piece of the movie is an absolutely disgusting and despicable piece of sadism that has no real basis in any of the Gospels. It shows a man being flayed alive - slowly, methodically and with increasing savagery. We first of all witness the use of sticks, then whips, then multiple whips with barbed glass or metal. We see flesh being torn out of a man's body. Just so that we can appreciate the pain, we see the whip first tear chunks out of a wooden table. Then we see pieces of human skin flying through the air. We see Jesus come back for more. We see blood spattering on the torturers' faces. We see muscled thugs exhausted from shredding every inch of this man's body. And then they turn him over and do it all again. It goes on for ever. And then we see his mother wiping up masses and masses of blood. It is an absolutely unforgivable, vile, disgusting scene. No human being could sruvive it. Yet for Gibson, it is the h'ors d'oeuvre for his porn movie. The whole movie is some kind of sick combination of the theology of Opus Dei and the film-making of Quentin Tarantino. There is nothing in the Gospels that indicates this level of extreme, endless savagery and there is no theological reason for it. It doesn't even evoke emotion in the audience. It is designed to prompt the crudest human pity and emotional blackmail - which it obviously does. But then it seems to me designed to evoke a sick kind of fascination. Of over two hours, about half the movie is simple wordless sadism on a level and with a relentlessness that I have never witnessed in a movie before. And you have to ask yourself: why? The suffering of Christ is bad and gruesome enough without exaggerating it to this insane degree. Theologically, the point is not that Jesus suffered more than any human being ever has on a physical level. It is that his suffering was profound and voluntary and the culmination of a life and a teaching that Gibson essentially omits. One more example. Toward the end, unsatisfied with showing a man flayed alive, nailed gruesomely to a cross, one eye shut from being smashed in, blood covering his entire body, Gibson has a large crow perch on the neighboring cross and peck another man's eyes out. Why? Because the porn needed yet another money shot.

GUTTING THE MESSAGE: Moreover, the suffering is rendered almost hollow by a dramatic void. Gibson has provided no context so that we can understand better who Jesus is - just a series of cartoon flashbacks. We cannot empathize with Mary fully or with Peter or John - because they too are mere props for the violence. The central message of Jesus - of love and compassion and forgiveness - is reduced to sound-bites. Occasionally, such as when the message of the sermon on the mount is juxtaposed with the crucifixion, the effect is almost profound - because there has been an actual connection between who Jesus was and what happened to him. But this is the exception to the rule. Watching the movie, you can see how a truly powerful rendition could have been made - by tripling the flashbacks and context, by providing a biography of Jesus, by showing us why he endured what he endured. Instead, all that context, all that meaning, has been removed for endless sickening gratuitous violence.

PILATE, THE SAINT: Is it anti-Semitic? The question has to be placed in the context of the Gospels and it is hard to reproduce the story without risking such inferences. But in my view, Gibson goes much further than what might be forgivable. The first scene in which Caiphas appears has him relaying to Judas how much money he has agreed to hand over in return for Jesus. The Jew - fussing over money again! There are a few actors in those scenes who look like classic hook-nosed Jews of Nazi imagery, hissing and plotting and fulminating against the Christ. For good measure, Gibson has the Jewish priestly elite beat Jesus up as well, before they hand him over to the Romans; and he has Jesus telling Pilate that he is not responsible - the Jewish elite is. Pilate and his wife are portrayed as saints forced by politics and the Jewish elders to kill a man they know is innocent. Again, this reflects part of the Gospels, but Gibson goes further. He presents Pilate's wife as actually finding Mary, providing towels to wipe up Jesus' blood, arguing for Jesus' release. Yes, the Roman torturers are obviously evil; yes, a few Jews dissent; and, of course, all the disciples are Jewish. I wouldn't say that this movie is motivated by anti-Semitism. It's motivated by psychotic sadism. But Gibson does nothing to mitigate the dangerous anti-Semitic elements of the story and goes some way toward exaggerating and highlighting them. To my mind, that is categorically unforgivable. Anti-Semitism is the original sin of Christianity. Far from expiating it, this movie clearly enjoys taunting those Catholics as well as Jews who are determined to confront that legacy. In that sense alone, it is a deeply immoral work of art.

I have not seen the movie and was not aware to what extent Gibson had "fleshed out" the scriptural bones. This subtle shift of emphasis to make the Jews more culpable and Pilate less so is inexcusable. I think Andrew Sullivan was being generous when he called it a "work of art."

Again I ask, if this film had been made about any other historical personage besides Jesus Christ, would we tolerate the images it shows and the message it suggests? Then we ought not to do so with The Passion either.

Andrew Sullivan bails

Andrew Sullivan has left the nest! Welcome to the real world, Mr. Sullivan. His "Email of the Day" reads:

"I voted for President Bush in 2000 and planned to do so again in November. My reason: national security and the man's seeming personal integrity. As a Jew, I had a gut-level fear of the Christian Right but (1) did not believe Bush shared its worldview and (2) saw fundamentalist Christian support for Israel as indicative that the Christian Right was not anti-Semitic.

Then, in one ten day period, I saw the Christian Right go into rapture over a film that is blatantly anti-Semitic (I saw it today), saw Laura Bush both indicate approval of this film and empathy for those disgusted at the idea of gay marriage and then the President made his speech supporting the amendment.

I'm straight and also a Jew and, to me, the Bushes - sensing defeat in November - are going to tap into homophobia, anti-Semitism and whatever else it takes to secure their base.

I was never part of that base. Jews, gay Republicans, African-American Bush voters, Hispanics are not part of the base but, add our votes to that of the base, and the GOP wins.

But now it loses. Jews used to be the canary people. Jews still play that role but today, even more so, that role is played by gays. You can judge a party or a leader by how he treats this group, the one group it is still safe to hate in America.

Well, Bush has failed the test. I will not be part of the gay-bashing, Mel Gibson adoring, xenophobic America that the Bushes consider their base.

This canary has no intention of dying from the poisonous gas of hatred. I'm 58. I have voted for every Republican nominee since Nixon and without regrets. Until now. I wish I could take back my 2000 vote. But, in any case, I will work to get out the vote for Kerry or Edwards. I will not vote for a President who secures the basest elements of his base by dividing Americans.

And you know what: he is going to lose. That gay marriage announcement was the desperate act of a desperate man."

I love that phrase, "canary people." I think we should make that the new slogan for the gay community and its friends, for this political year, at least. How about a nice white t-shirt with a yellow canary on the front, and on the back, "I'm one of the Canary People." Someone should take this on and put up a CafePress page for it. I haven't got time to do it, but I'll buy one if someone else does!

The fallout from Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ is already beginning (yeah, I said I didn't want to write anything more about it, but I can't overlook this—and thanks to Mustang Bobby for providing the link).

The Lovingway United Pentecostal Church in Denver, Colorado, put up a sign yesterday. In huge letters, it reads, "Jews Killed the Lord Jesus." Across the bottom of the sign was the word "Settled." When Maurice Gordon, pastor of the church, was contacted by a representative of the Anti-Defamation League, the church removed "Settled," and added the scriptural attribution (I Thess. 14-15) but refused to change or remove any other wording.

The Colorado Council of Churches also tried to get Pastor Gordon to change the sign, but he refused to answer the phone, or even the door. Rev. Jim Ryan, a spokesman for the council, said:

"It is ironic that a church named 'Lovingway' would advance such an attitude of hurtfulness," Ryan said. "Christ gave his life for all people. To blame a particular group of people, then or now, is a misuse of the Gospel of love and grace. The Colorado Council of Churches wishes to make it clear that this one congregation does not speak for the vast majority of the Christian community. In fact, we stand in direct opposition to the message on this sign and its implications."

Maureen Dowd expressed her feelings in a recent column (sorry, it came to me through multiple forwards and I don't know where it was originally published). Here is the first part of the column::

Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Mel Gibson and George W. Bush are courting bigotry in the name of sanctity.

The moviemaker wants to promote "The Passion of the Christ" and the president wants to prevent the passion of the gays.

Opening on two screens: W.'s stigmatizing as political strategy and Mel's stigmata as marketing strategy.

Mr. Gibson, who told Diane Sawyer that he was inspired to make the movie after suffering through addictions, found the ultimate 12-step program: the Stations of the Cross.

I went to the first show of "The Passion" at the Loews on 84th Street and Broadway; it was about a quarter filled. This is not, as you may have read, a popcorn movie. In Latin and Aramaic with English subtitles, it's two gory hours of Jesus getting flayed by brutish Romans at the behest of heartless Jews.

Perhaps fittingly for a production that licensed a jeweler to sell $12.99 nail necklaces (what's next? crown-of-thorns prom tiaras?), "The Passion" has the cartoonish violence of a Sergio Leone Western. You might even call it a spaghetti crucifixion, "A Fistful of Nails."

Writing in The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor, scorns it as "a repulsive, masochistic fantasy, a sacred snuff film" that uses "classically anti-Semitic images."

I went with a Jewish pal, who tried to stay sanguine. "The Jews may have killed Jesus," he said. "But they also gave us `Easter Parade.' "

The movie's message, as Jesus says, is that you must love not only those who love you, but more importantly those who hate you.

So presumably you should come out of the theater suffused with charity toward your fellow man.

But this is a Mel Gibson film, so you come out wanting to kick somebody's teeth in.

In "Braveheart" and "The Patriot," his other emotionally manipulative historical epics, you came out wanting to swing an ax into the skull of the nearest Englishman. Here, you want to kick in some Jewish and Roman teeth. And since the Romans have melted into history . . .

I was interested to read that her response to the violence in the film was, "you come out wanting to kick somebody's teeth in." That is precisely the reaction I was expecting. The sign on the Lovingway United Pentecostal Church of Denver, Colorado, is just a pseudo-Biblical way of expressing similar feelings.

Wednesday, February 25, 2004

It's interesting what you find in the comments to other people's blogs. In this case, I found Matt Zemek's Wellstone Cornerstone. Matt's blog is subtitled "Paul Wellstone progressivism for conservatives and people of faith (and for dispirited liberals, too!)." That struck a chord with me to begin with (as Mike from Pray Naked says, "too conservative for my liberal friends and too liberal for my conservative friends"), but Matt went on to say about Gavin Newsom what I wish I had been able to find the words for. Go read.

Ah, it was Brad DeLong who used the term "grownup Republicans." I just came across it again on his blog, and remembered.

Brad quotes another of my favorite people, Teresa Nielsen Hayden at Making Light. Left-of-radical-right folk are not that thick on the ground right now, so it's not surprising that the same people keep turning up on other people's blogs. But I always get a little charge out of seeing a familiar name anyway, and feeling a sense of community with people whose only real connection to me is that we know some of the same people. Ain't the internet wonderful.

Teresa links to an online transcript of a Vanity Fair article about Attorney General John Ashcroft. I can't believe that Vanity Fair doesn't mind the open copyright violation here, so just in case they issue a cease and desist order, which they would certainly be within their rights to do, I am going to go buy this issue of the magazine forthwith. But as long as it is online, you might as well enlighten yourselves. John Ashcroft is a scary fellow. Here is one brief excerpt, a description of a dinner party at the governor's mansion while Ashcroft was governer of Missouri.

Visitors to the governor's mansion often found themselves expected to join in prayer, and on one such occasion—it was a dinner gathering of lawyers, waited on (as is customary in the Missouri governor's mansion) by local prisoners who had earned the privilege—Ashcroft gave a family values speech. "In the course of this he said, 'Women in the workforce have become so prevalent that a man's role has been reduced to a sperm donor,'" reports one of the guests.

No one could believe it, says this lawyer. Everyone knew Janet Ashcroft had written a textbook on business law with her husband; indeed, she would later teach law at Washington, D.C.'s traditionally black Howard University. Even their daughter, Martha, was attending law school. And yet, says the dinner guest, "he was serious. He didn't mean to be amusing."

Only the governor's wife appeared unfazed. Perhaps she was used to such opinions. (Last year, she declared in Missouri, "I have to behave myself, and I have to spoil him rotten, and that makes my life unbelievably stressful.") The night of the dinner, she was dressed girlishly, in a floral summer dress, with matching flowery sandals. Her earrings were roses modeled out of pink clay. The young lawyer complimented her on a particularly decorative artifact. "It's bolted down," Janet Ashcroft said meaningfully.

"Bolted down—I'm sure you know who the waiters are," echoed the governor, giving a swift glance at the prisoners, all within earshot, who served them. "You know how they are."

And the waiters? I wonder. What was their reaction?

"Stone-blank," replies the lawyer. "Stone, stone, stone. The waiters, who were all African-American, had to have heard. I love to pray, but what business did we have praying in the governor's mansion? That night I thought, We started this out with a prayer to God, and this is the way you end the evening? It makes me sick to think I prayed with him."

The article goes on to describe what Ashcroft has in mind for the people he serves.

Last February, a proposal known as the Domestic Security Enhancement Act (nicknamed Patriot II) leaked from the Justice Department, causing instant consternation—at which point Ashcroft assured everyone that it was simply a draft, that's all. It gave a fair idea, however, of options being considered. "I don't think it's dead by any stretch of the imagination," says Barr. The ACLU's executive director, Anthony Romero, observes, "It was clear Ashcroft was caught with his hand in the cookie jar. But what you're finding now is that they're taking pieces of Patriot II and sprinkling it across pieces of legislation."

Among its provisions: the creation of a DNA database of terrorism suspects and their associates. The power to wiretap Americans for 15 days without a court order after terrorist attacks. The ability to block bail for terrorism suspects, make secret arrests, and expand the federal death penalty to convicted terrorists. In addition, as Patriot II revealed, the government would like to revoke the American citizenship of anyone who helps an organization the attorney general deems terrorist.

Kudos to Vanity Fair for printing this article. Let them know you approve by buying a copy of it. In fact, let them know with an email that you bought this issue particularly because of the article. They just might be tempted to commission more of the same.

I couldn't let the day pass without a comment on Bush's support of the Federal Defense of Marriage amendment. I was on the road all day yesterday in my radio-less Jeep, and staggered in at nearly midnight in no condition to post blog entries. But thanks to a mid-morning call from Kate, I knew about the radical right's latest assault on society (hey, they've been using that terminology against us for years--why can't we take it back?) and had all day to think about it.

My reaction is that Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, may be more of a hero than he could ever have imagined. This attempt to change the Constitution of the United States to restrict the civil rights of a statistically significant portion of its citizens would have been put forward anyway. Bush would have supported it anyway, without the marriages in San Francisco. But it would still, today, have been a potential weapon: a threat held over the head of the Massachusetts representatives, all the Democratic candidates for anything, and anyone who dared to speak in favor of equal civil rights for all citizens. In order to be perceived as acting against gay marriages, the radical right has had to come out for this amendment far in advance of when it would have been most advantageous to do so. In other words, this time, we called the tune, and Bush's friends are having to dance to it. A "pre-emptive strike," Kate said, with heavy irony.

The presidential election is still most of eight months away. Eight months in which the anti-states-rights nature of this amendment can be analyzed on the evening news. Eight months in which the doubtful constitutionality of the amendment itself can be discussed. Eight months for legal scholars to weigh in at length. Eight months of opportunities for George W to put his foot in his mouth in response to questions about it. This is not a pretty picture for the conservatives. It would have been far better for them to have held off until after November, regardless of which way the election went. If the Democratic candidate won, they could have counted on at least some right-wing backlash support. If the Republican won, they could have claimed they had a "mandate" for passing some kind of anti-gay-marriage amendment. Now they are going to have to deal with the, at best, mixed reactions to a poorly framed and legally dubious document.

Even waiting until after Massachusetts votes on its proposed gay-marriage law would have been an improvement. "See?" they could have said, if Massachusetts passes the measure. "We knew everyone was against gay marriage!" And if Massachusetts does not pass the bill, they could have proclaimed that only a constitutional amendment would stop the evil march toward civil rights for everyone.

But Gavin Newsom and the courageous officials of the city of San Francisco forced them to play a hand that they would surely rather have saved for much later. Like I said, heroes, all of them.

I hope this will be my first and last comment on The Passion of the Christ.

I'm not likely to ever be a convert to one of the Christian Orthodox denominations. I don't think I could stand up for an entire service, if nothing else, and I'd be embarrassed to have to sit down. But one aspect of the Orthodox churches (besides their divine music) strongly resonates with me—their insistence on the ineffability, the transcendence, the mystery of God's relationship with His people. Many people will not have encountered the word "mystery" in this context. It simply means that we can't quantify, or describe accurately, or know (in the same way that we can know physical worldly facts) what God is like, or how Christ's sacrifice could have atoned for the eons of human wickedness. The Orthodox churches (rightly, in my opinion) reject Western theologians' attempts to explain these and other difficult doctrines of Christian belief in human terminology.

They also vehemently reject the idea that their iconography is in any way representational. The portraits of the Holy Family, the angels and the saints of the church are meant to lead the mind of the worshipper into that indescribable place of communion with God that can only be experienced, never completely articulated.

Protestants have never quite accepted the notion that the statues and pictures in Roman Catholic and Christian Orthodox churches were anything more than thinly disguised idols. So the enthusiastic reaction of the evangelical churches to Mel Gibson's outpouring of graphic violence truly bewilders me. Just as the evangelicals insist that one doesn't need statues of Jesus in order to know God, I would have expected to hear them say, "You don't need to see two hours of a young man slowly being tortured to death in order to accept that Jesus Christ died for your sins." [Note: slightly edited here, as I realized I hadn't done a good job of making my point in the original text.]

With their ability to draw the viewer into almost a participatory experience, movies can imprint on even the non-impressionable person a lasting, intense and first-hand sensation of having been present at the events of the story. Ask anyone who went to see Saving Private Ryan how that film changed their understanding of the horror of battle. The problem with presenting an event of religious significance in such a realistic form, however, is that the over-powering intensity will forever take the place of whatever understanding an individual previously had of the event. Put in blunt terms, you will no longer have your understanding of the atonement of Christ after seeing this film. You will have Mel Gibson's instead. Unless you're a whole lot more tough-minded than most people, your private, sacred, communication with God on the subject of Christ's death, and what it means to you, will forever be drowned out by the grisly violence of this film.

Franklin Graham himself confirmed this position. On NBC's Today Show this morning, he said that after seeing the movie, "every time you think of Christ, you will have images of this film in your mind."

Even more troubling, we hear of pastors urging parents to take their children to see this R-rated film. On the Today Show, Katie Couric asked Franklin Graham whether it was something children should see. At first, he answered the question honestly, and I believe, from the heart. "This was an execution—would you take your children to see a criminal being executed?" And then he backpedaled and said he thought teens could "handle it." The issue is not whether teenagers may be capable of viewing something like this without having nightmares afterward, but whether they should be forced by their parents and religious leaders to have to cope with it. Did anyone recommend taking children and teens to Saving Private Ryan in order to convince them of the awful nature of war? And to echo Franklin Graham, would we take our children to watch a criminal being put to death?

Advance viewers described the film as "life-changing." In a much-forwarded email I received from someone who had seen an early advance screening, the writer said she started crying at the beginning of the film and didn't stop until after it was over. She attributed this to the compelling power of the film, and I would certainly not argue with her. The reactions are eerily reminiscent of those of a generation ago when The Exorcist was first aired. That film also presented an emotionally charged subject in far more realism than film-goers of the time were accustomed to, and if you're old enough, you'll remember the accounts of people screaming, or passing out, or claiming that demons had been cast out of them as well. Human beings have strong emotional reactions to frightening events, and being human, have a tendency to ascribe those emotions to something more than the interaction of neurotransmitters in their circulatory system. Ask anyone who has been sexually or physically abused, or who has experienced some dreadful traumatic event, what long-lasting physical effects they experience. The name for it is "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder."

I have to ask whether parents want their children's understanding of God's love, and His resulting sacrifice for us, to be imprinted in their minds in such horrific images that the child will never be able to escape from them. Let's try an analogy here: if the father of your children died while saving them from a house fire, would you want the children to watch a film that showed him running into the flames to rescue them, knowing that they were watching the imminent death of their beloved parent? Then how, in God's name, can you subject them to this film that revels in the physical torture of God's beloved Son?

Let's not forget that Mel Gibson's previous filmography has such notable entries as the Road Warrior (Mad Max) films, strongly criticized by many religious leaders for their celebration of violence. If this film portrayed any other event than the death of Christ, he'd be drawn and quartered by the very people who are flocking to praise him now. Is it possible that he has simply found a socially acceptable outlet for an outpouring of violence that he couldn't present in any other form?

Another disturbing outcome of this film is going to be the anger that people will inevitably feel. How could anyone watch another person being put to death before their eyes without a welling-up of rage against the perpetrators? Franklin Graham made it clear that "all of us" are the perpetrators, and I'm sure that message is going to be widely pronounced from America's Christian pulpits this coming Sunday. But not everyone will be able to internalize that guilt without acting it out. Whether the acting-out is directed specifically toward Jews, as many Jewish leaders fear, or just results in an overall increase in violent crimes in general is anybody's guess right now, but the point is that you can't put images like this in people's minds without something inimicable to society coming back out.

I'll toss out one final personal objection of my own, and that's all. One young woman interviewed on television said, "You will never want to sin again after seeing this movie." In her words, I could plainly hear the old threat that has thundered from pulpits (and their equivalents) since the beginning of time: "Offend ME and you'll be sorry." In this case, we're supposed to understand that Christ was made to "be sorry" for our transgressions. Jesus made it explicitly clear, however, that his death and resurrection ushered in a new order, a new relationship between God and His people. We are now to love each other, as God loved us. In the words of the old hymn, "They Will Know That We Are Christians by Our Love."

Unfortunately, the reputation of American Christians around the world owes much more to the images shown in this film than it does to loving our neighbors.

Monday, February 23, 2004

Non-political entry today. My brain is hurting and I need to think about other things for a while.

I seem to be back to having "theme days." For anyone who's new to reading here, many of my trips around the state of Virginia have been marked by multiple instances of some oddity or event. I'd have one store after another in a different location than where my paperwork said it was supposed to be. Or there would be a whole day's worth of people who freaked out over having to sign the consent form giving me permission to walk around with clipboard and camera. There was more than one "car trouble" day, and at least a few times when I'd repeatedly get lost, though I've driven around Virginia so much now that that particular problem doesn't happen often any more.

Today was "skunk day." With two days of brilliantly beautiful weather, there was bound to be a lot of wildlife roaming around (and therefore more road kill). For whatever reason, every other dead body on the road today was a skunk. Nick spent half the day with his fingers squeezed over his nose moaning, "Arrrrrggghhhh, that stinks!"

Today we went to Staunton, tomorrow we go to Richmond. Nick doesn't want to go with me, but video games have too strong a pull on him if I leave him home. I come home to find the pile of practice problems or the chapters of review reading still untouched, and I know he's been in front of the Play Station all day long.

On the other hand, I suppose I should be grateful that he hasn't become addicted to EverQuest. I pay for a monthly subscription for him, since he enjoys the game and the cost is minimal, but I keep hearing about people who throw themselves into the EverQuest universe and never come out. Nick and I were talking today about video game design, and he dismissed EverQuest in these words: "It's just a bunch of chat rooms with some monsters thrown in for you to shoot at." I started laughing so hard I almost ran off the road. The wisdom of babes, indeed. I rewarded him with a book on introductory video game programming, since he's been asking me to teach him to program.

Sunday, February 22, 2004

All you Star Trek fans go right this minute to Bark Bark Woof Woof and read Bobby's Bush-in-the-holodeck scenario. Bobby nails our fearless leader right on his . . . er—phaser, but reminds us that this world isn't Star Trek:

Unfortunately, we can't just say, "Computer, end program." Like any good drama, it has to run its course. And we can't end the program by running our own holodeck programs here in the blogosphere, either; some could say that the Dean candidacy was a holodeck campaign that crashed when it touched the reality of the voting booth. We need to get out and get going in the real world - and convert our energy into matter - because every vote matters (pun intended). The longer we allow this holodeck game to go on, the more dangerous our world becomes.

I've seen the Bush White House compared to a lot of things but seldom with such apt and humorous accuracy. This should resonate with every Star Trek fan (and there are a lot of us). Thanks, Bobby, for the laugh and for the warning.

Ralph Nader is going to run for president, he confirmed in his interview on Meet the Press. It was probably inevitable that he would. But he appears to be distancing himself from the Green Party, probably perceiving, along with a lot of other people, that the Greens are seen as a bunch of wackos. Whether or not that is correct, it is certainly how the Bush campaign would position them. As an independent, Nader has the opportuntiy to hammer Bush without having to defend the Greens. In fact, running as an independent allows himself to put his agenda forward without having to defend anyone else's, a far more attractive position than he has ever held before.

You have to give the guy credit for speaking his mind even if you're not going to vote for him. I am not going to vote for him, partly because I don't think he has a snowball's chance in hell of winning, and partly because I do not believe he could govern effectively after what he is saying about some of the people he'd have to govern with. But by golly, he said some things that badly needed to be said, in the same unambiguous language Howard Dean used.

My favorite quote is this: "George Bush is a giant corporation masquerading as a human being." That explains the bumbling, fumbling delivery (the usual corporate delay between being notified of anything and taking action on it), the repeated mis-statements and odd word choices (his database obviously needs to be re-indexed), and his outright lies and subterfuges (no explanation should be necessary for that analogy).

Another quotable moment: "If Bush doesn't trust the American people with the truth [Nader was speaking specifically about the war here, but the comment applies to other areas as well], why should the American people trust Bush with the presidency?"

He did mis-state one issue, saying that Bush should be impeached for lying about the reasons for war, that Clinton had been impeached for a far more trivila reason. No, Mr. Nader, Clinton wasn't impeached for messing around with Monica; he was impeached for lying about it—the same reason that Bush ought to be impeached.

I particularly liked his outspokenness about our current relationship with Iraq. Tim Russert asked, "What would President Ralph Nader do today about Iraq? Would you pull all our troops out immediately?"

Nader responded:

We owe a responsibility to the people of Iraq. We entrenched Saddam Hussein in 1979 along with the British. We armed them, we gave them credits, we sold them onto U.S. export license by corporations--sold materials for chemical and biological warfare in the 1980s under Reagan and the first Bush administration. Can you imagine that? And, of course, then he invaded Iraq and he was no longer our boy, he was our adversary, and one day President Bush number one could have overthrown-- with all the international support that he had, he could have overthrown Saddam Hussein. Instead he told the Kurds and the Shiites "rise up and overthrow the tyrants." They got about 75 percent of the country under their control, and President Bush number one held back our military forces while Saddam Hussein slaughtered these people.

Amen, brother!

What needs to happen now, I believe, is for John Edwards to start listening to Ralph Nader, and to echo every damn thing Nader says. In fact, it wouldn't hurt for him even to credit Nader with saying it. He just needs to use his own superb public speaking abilities to then say, "But I'm a better choice for president because I can work with the people who run Washington DC, not antagonize them." That won't endear him to Nader, whose primary message is about opposing the people who run Washington. But a combination of his own skills and Nader's blunt honesty might just do the trick.

I'm not one of the "Anyone But Bush" adherents, though I'd rather see Ralph Nader running the country than George Bush, any day. But I don't believe he can be effective, precisely because of his "take no prisoners" confrontational style, and I would hate to see his candidacy result in another four years of Bush.

Nader did at least leave the door open for a possible withdrawal, if he saw that his presence might result in a victory for Bush. And perhaps his campaign might actually be an advantage in some ways for the Democratic nominee and a negative for Bush. If Nader were not running himself, his support for the Democratic candidate would allow the Republicans to tar that person with everything Nader was criticized for in the 2000 election. If Nader's presence diffuses the anti-Bush vote, it will also diffuse the Republicans' target-shooting. And it can't hurt for one more person to be loudly proclaiming the facts.

Kevin at Calpundit also picked up the report from the Union of Concerned Scientists about the Bush administration's disregard (perhaps manipulation would be a more accurate term) of scientific research, and quotes it at greater length than the article I found. He also has a link back to the full UCS report.

Saturday, February 21, 2004

It's good to know there really are what someone referred to as "grown up Republicans" out there (sorry, I can't remember who it was who said this—if you see this, please let me know so I can credit you!) It was especially good to find one so close to home: Lex Alexander, of the Greensboro News-Record, writes Blog on the Run. I found him via a typical circuitous route: a link on Beast of Sound took me to Terry Mattingly's Get Religion, whence I linked to Steve Outing writing about journalists who blog, in Editor and Publisher.

Lex, I note with approval, links to some of the same people as I (or at least some whom I read regularly). Lex is, in his own words, a conservative Republican, but one who obviously has not allowed political opinion to clog his thinking processes, and I don't say that just because he supports gay marriages.

Lex writes passionately about the "bastardization of science," (see his February 19, 2004 post titled Blinded by science, or blind faith? and Part Deux on February 20, 2004), something that infuriates me almost as much as the idea of sending troops to San Francisco (and makes about as much sense).

In my blindingly naive way, I assumed that the appropriation of science in the interest of politics/religion/war/etc had gone by the way, left behind in the wake of the Vatican's three-century-overdue exoneration of Galileo. I'd like to think that the government's attitude toward science in the last four years has been, if not unique, at least unprecedented, but that's probably naive too. At any rate, here's my contribution to the disquieting prospect of four more years of science-by-permission, a Reuters Foundation report that the Bush administration "distorts science":

Top scientists and environmentalists on Wednesday accused the Bush administration of suppressing and distorting scientific findings that run counter to its own policies.

They backed a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists that said the administration had suppressed research on global warming, air quality, sexual health, cancer and other issues.

The report said there had been a systematic effort to manipulate the government's supposedly independent scientific advisory system "to prevent the appearance of advice that might run counter to the administration's political agenda."

"We are not ... taking issue with the administration's policies. We are taking issue with the administration's distortion of the process with which science enters into its decisions," Dr. Kurt Gottfried, a professor of physics at Cornell University and chairman of the UCS, told reporters.

Russell Train, head of the Environmental Protection Agency under former Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, said that during his tenure "I do not recall ever receiving a suggestion, let alone an order, from the White House as to how I should make a regulatory decision."

"How times have changed," Train added.

If our government's tactics—the suppression and distortion of free speech, the multiple voting irregularities, the encroachment of a state-supported religion, and the manipulation of the economy for the benefit of a small minority—were taking place anywhere else in the world, we'd call that country a dictatorship. It's past time for the American public to wake up and realize that the pot is boiling, and we're about to be cooked.

All right, the pity party is officially over. About once a year all the pent-up baffled indignation comes pouring out, and then I go back to being sensible and concentrating on more important things.

Here's another first-person report from "lawless" San Francisco:

After nine days, 3,034 weddings, exhausted staff and two sit-ins by the Bible "repent now"-ers, it was decided that the Clerk's office would return to normal hours which means they are closed on weekends. I heard over one newscast that they are going to require appointments for ceremonies next week. That is the way they do it for hetero ceremonies. Before this on a busy day they did 25-30 ceremonies. Now they are doing over a hundred and still turning away more than they are able to do. However now that it is clear that the court isn't in any hurry to prevent them from happening ( that is the beauty of the legal strategy—the opponents have to prove they are harmed by the weddings and they should be stopped; the city doesn't have to show why they should continue until the actual hearing which is scheduled at the end of March) there is no reason to keep the hectic pace. That is the long winded explanation. If you are simply asking, "Can I come and get married next week?" the answer is "Yes, we would love to have you!" The unknown at the moment: "What is Arnold going to do to terminate the marriages?"

Anyone who talks about chaos and lawlessness just doesn't know what they are talking about. We just happened to see part of the White House press briefing on CSPAN. There was one "reporter" who wanted to know when Bush was going to send the troops to SF. Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock Article 2 gives the President the power ....

When he was basically not responded to by the Press Secretary, "I've already gone over the President position on that." another reporter stared screaming, "We want to know when he is going to take action. He needs to take action we want to know what action he is going to take to stop this lawlessness."

I love being Pat Robertson's worse nightmare—loving couples. As for Bush being troubled by my actions. Thank you, I've been troubled by his actions for the past four years, I'm glad he is "troubled " by mine.!!

Doesn't it just give you goosebumps of joy to know someone wants to send troops to San Francisco to stop those evil folk from getting married! Or goosebumps of some variety anyway.

Hmm, this is interesting. I followed back the link on Bark Bark Woof Woof to the Washington Post article about William H. Pryor's appointment to a federal appeals court. Way down there at the bottom, the article says that in a brief before the Supreme Court, Pryor argued that "if a law in Texas outlawing sex between homosexuals was overturned, it would open the way for legalized prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography and even incest and pedophilia."

I guess we know where he stands on same-sex marriage.

People toss around the term "homophobia" as though it just meant a strong objection to homosexual behavior. We need to remember what the "phobia" part of the word means. Merriam-Webster says that a phobia is "an exaggerated, usually inexplicable, and illogical fear of a particular object, class of objects, or situation." Using that definition, I would argue that William H. Pryor is suffering from a phobia that makes him unable to render a fair decision in any case where homosexuality is involved. If his phobia was one of religious belief, or race, or ethnic origin, no one would appoint him to the bench. Why is his fear of homosexuals not sufficient reason to bar him from a federal judicial position?

Because a lot of other people are scared silly too?

Come on, folk, just what is it about ME that has you in such a state of abject terror? This is getting personal. I want to know how I threaten the stability of society, the future of our families, the integrity of our nation, the very fabric of space and time?

Yes, some homosexuals engage in behaviors that no one could condone. So do some heterosexuals. They're all wrong, regardless of their sexual orientation. The rest of us just go along trying to do our jobs, keeping a roof over our heads and food on the table, raising our children if we have them, and remembering to take the garbage out. We're so damned ordinary that you don't even know who most of us are, and if you did know, that wouldn't change the dynamic between you and us unless you wanted it to.

This rant is totally useless, I realize. It's just a way to unload feelings I've had for a very long time. It isn't going to change anyone's mind. I'll get over the shouting and go back to being reasonable soon. When I don't have to stay in the closet to keep my business in business. When I don't have to refer to Kate as "my friend." When I can use my own name here without worrying about my safety. When hell freezes over, I guess.

Friday, February 20, 2004

I mentioned yesterday that conservatives were accusing gay-marriage supporters of advocating polygamy, but failed to provide any links. Here are some:

• Beyond Gay Marriage, an article from the Aug. 4 -- Aug. 11, 2003 issue of the Weekly Standard. Oddly, this article contains one of the best defenses of gay marriage I've seen recently. In his explanation of why polygamy would not be good for America, Stanley Kurtz writes:

  In most non-Western cultures, marriage is not a union of freely choosing individuals, but an alliance of family groups. The emotional relationship between husband and wife is attenuated and subordinated to the economic and political interests of extended kin. But in our world of freely choosing individuals, extended families fall away, and love and companionship are the only surviving principles on which families can be built [emphasis mine]. From Thomas Aquinas through Richard Posner, almost every serious observer has granted the incompatibility between polygamy and Western companionate marriage.

• Schwarzeneggar: Gay Marriages Illegal. No, Arnold isn't pontificating on polygamy, but the article does quote a certain Genevieve Wood:

  Genevieve Wood, vice president of the Communications Family Research Council, said that redefining marriage might be a slippery slope.
  
  "There are people out there ... who want to engage in polygamy, they think that's a good family structure. There are others who think that group marriages are a family structure," Wood added.

  I couldn't find an internet reference to anything called the Communications Family Research Council. I believe CNN goofed here and that the sentence should read "Genevieve Wood, vice president of Communications for the Family Research Council . . . " Nor I did find a quote to this effect on the Family Research Council site itself, though there certainly is plenty of other anti-gay sentiment. Genevieve Wood's online CV lists her as vice president of media for the FRC, a member of the Heritage Foundation's Media Advisory Board, and a "frequent political commentator" for MSNBC, Fox News and CNN.
  
  
• An op-ed piece in the Philadelphia Enquirer links same-sex marriage with incest and polygamy. This author is at least opposed to other kinds of discrimination against homosexuals. He says "The sexual orientation of my gay friends and acquaintances, among whom have been a district justice and a musician/actor, is completely irrelevant to how I regard them as persons. I believe that employment, housing, legal and social discrimination based on sexual orientation is abhorrent and support all laws designed to prevent it." But he still fears that same-sex marriages are a slippery slope toward polygamy, if not incest. He fails to see that laws against same-sex marriage fall into the category of the social discrimination he claims to oppose. This is how knee-jerk emotional reactions make people blind to reason and logic.
  
  
• Chuck Colson, in an article in CBN News quotes Princeton Professor Robert George on the Supreme Court's ruling against the Texas sodomy law:

  If the Supreme Court dismantles prevailing law, George writes, it will likely replace marriage with consent as the principle by which courts distinguish constitutionally protected sex from unprotected sexual conduct. But if consent becomes a new standard for defining sexual privacy, he warns, then not only sodomy, but also fornication, adultery, polygamy, prostitution, adult incest, and even bestiality would become protected rights.

  Colson also suggests where we might try looking for weapons of mass destruction. "I realized the other day that our inspectors are looking in the wrong place for weapons of mass destruction," he says. "These weapons are not in Baghdad; they're in Washington, in the hands of the sexual liberationist lobby."
  
  Who knew we were so powerful! I thought we were only a threat to the sanctity of marriage! (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

This is a very small sampling of the vicious rhetoric already making the rounds. Look for it to get worse.

To my shame, I sat out the conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment. I was married to an abusive man, who opposed the ERA, of course, and through him, was involved with a fundamentalist church. In an attempt to protect myself and my children, I kept my mouth shut. No more.

Thanks to Beast of Sound for alerting me to The Bemusement Park, who will now join one of his pastoral brethren, and the rest of the strange and wonderful people on the blogroll.

And thanks, Kate, for the news that Sandoval, New Mexico, may begin issuing marriage licenses for same-sex couples. More on that as I get wind of it.

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

I've held off commenting about same-sex marriages, since I can't claim to be exactly unbiased on the subject, but perhaps it's time to do some thinking out loud.

What I think is that all this rhetoric about who can and cannot get married, or whether one set of people can get married and another set can have only a "civil union" is a smokescreen. The fact is that everyone who gets married legally in the United States gets a civil union. When marriages are performed by a member of the clergy they are invested with all the rights, obligations and benefits of the civil union as defined in each state.

In Virginia, any person who can talk a judge into authorizing it can perform marriages, upon posting a $500 bond. You don't need any kind of religious credentials at all.

§§ 20-25. Persons other than ministers who may perform rites.
Any circuit court judge may issue an order authorizing one or more persons, resident in the jurisdiction in which the judge sits, to celebrate the rites of marriage in such jurisdiction. Any person so authorized shall, before acting, enter into bond in the penalty of $500, with or without surety, as the court may direct. Any order made under this section may be rescinded at any time. Any judge or justice of a court of record, any judge of a district court or any retired judge or justice of the Commonwealth or any active, senior or retired federal judge or justice who is a resident of the Commonwealth may celebrate the rites of marriage anywhere in the Commonwealth without the necessity of bond or order of authorization.
(Code 1919, §§ 5080; 1938, c. 152; 1981, c. 295; 1981, Sp. Sess., c. 15; 1983, c. 64; 1985, c. 195; 1987, c. 149; 2003, c. 228.)

In fact, in Virginia two people may marry each other without the benefit of any marriage celebrant at all, as long as someone posts the $500 bond and accepts the responsibility for completing and filing the marriage certificate.

§§ 20-26. Marriage between members of religious society having no minister.
Marriages between persons belonging to any religious society which has no ordained minister, may be solemnized by the persons and in the manner prescribed by and practiced in any such society. One person chosen by the society shall be responsible for completing the certification of marriage in the same manner as a minister or other person authorized to perform marriages; such person chosen by the society for this purpose shall be required to execute a bond in the penalty of
$500, with surety.
(Code 1919, §§ 5081; 1968, c. 318; 1981, c. 295.)

Virginia's marriage statute completes the definition of marriage as a civil union by making it illegal to perform the ceremony of marriage unless you are authorized by civil law to do so.

§§20-28. Penalty for celebrating marriage without license.
If any person knowingly perform the ceremony of marriage without lawful license, or officiate in celebrating the rites of marriage without being authorized by law to do so, he shall be confined in jail not exceeding one year, and fined not exceeding $500.
(Code 1919, §§ 4542.)

It's clear that in Virginia, at least, marriage IS a civil union first. It is a religious celebration only to the extent that any given couple wants it to be. And if the insititution of marriage is a primarily civil one, then it was my impression that no state could constitutionally restrict it to only one privileged set of people.

For those who would allow "civil unions" but restrict "marriage", the question becomes whether there can be one kind of civil union for heterosexuals and a different one for homosexuals. The philosophy of "separate but equal" was demolished long ago as unconstitutional, but that isn't really the issue. The bottom line is that the people who are opposed to gay marriages do not want our relationships to be legitimized in any way, and the name-calling is getting ugly. You'd think we were back in the old Equal Rights Amendment days, when any women who favored passage was labelled a lesbian. Now that "lesbian" is no longer the ultimate epithet, knee-jerk conservatives have had to come up with a whole new list of accusations, and they're getting creative.

If all you wanted was to marry the person you've chosen to spend the rest of your life with, you might be a bit surprised to learn how many other things you're pushing as well. Visit some of the anti-gay-marriage websites and you'll learn that we favor polygamy, that we're out to replace the traditional family as the cornerstone of social order, and that allowing gays to marry would be as wrong as letting a man marry his mother, daughter or sister.

Andrew Sullivan, not usually a bastion of leftist thought, puts it pretty well:

What exactly is the post-Lawrence conservative social policy toward homosexuals? Amazingly, the current answer is entirely a negative one. The majority of social conservatives oppose gay marriage; they oppose gay citizens serving their country in the military; they oppose gay citizens raising children; they oppose protecting gay citizens from workplace discrimination; they oppose including gays in hate-crime legislation, while including every other victimized group; they oppose civil unions; they oppose domestic partnerships; they oppose . . . well, they oppose, for the most part, every single practical measure that brings gay citizens into the mainstream of American life.

We're going to see George Bush and the Republicans use the issue of homosexuality itself, not just gay marriage, as a way to divert attention from the sick economy, the increasing number of deaths in Iraq, the lies that got us into Iraq to begin with, and every other facet of his dysfunctional presidency. I've been wondering what he would come up with to scare the voters into keeping him in Washington. Now I know. Among other things, it's me, of all people (sorry, I know that's not grammatical, but it has more gut-level tension than 'Tis I').

I didn't realize I was that scary. I feel like stopping people on the street and asking, "Do I frighten you? If my partner and I got married, would that destroy your marriage? Would the fact that we could never have had children together make your relationship with your children any less significant?"

And I want to ask, "Will being afraid of me somehow create more jobs? Will it bring back the child or the spouse or the friend who died in Iraq? Will it balance the budget? What does it get you to be afraid of ME?"

We need to keep asking these questions in the days ahead.

"Will passing a constitutional marriage amendment get back the job you lost when your company moved its headquarters to Bermuda and its jobs to India?"

"Will denouncing me restore the Pell grant your college-aged child lost due to budget cuts?"

"Will calling me names bring back the money your school district no longer has?"

George, I'll still try to keep my discourse civil, but you just made the fight a personal one. You made me into some kind of monster, into a shibboleth to scare other people with. You made me, a pudgy middle-aged grandmother going gray at the temples and wobbly in the knees, into a weapon for you, and I won't have it.

Monday, February 16, 2004

Via Hesiod at Counterspin Central, this little gem: a company called "Outspoken Clothing," which sells apparel, buttons, mugs and mousepads with a decidedly non-Bush bias, has had frequent visits lately from the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. No, not in person, via the Internet. Their server logs show entries such as this one:

wdcsun18.usdoj.gov - - [26/Jan/2004:03:06:19 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 807 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02 (CK-DNJ702R1)"

wdcsun18.usdoj.gov - - [26/Jan/2004:03:06:19 -0500] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 1609 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02 (CK-DNJ702R1)"

wdcsun18.usdoj.gov - - [26/Jan/2004:03:06:20 -0500] "GET /catalog.php HTTP/1.1" 200 16061 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02 (CK-DNJ702R1)"

wdcsun18.usdoj.gov - - [26/Jan/2004:03:06:20 -0500] "GET /cafepress/art/anyonebutbush.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 8859 "http://www.outspokenclothing.com/catalog.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02 (CK-DNJ702R1)"

wdcsun18.usdoj.gov - - [26/Jan/2004:03:06:20 -0500] "GET /images/impeachbushn.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 3897 "http://www.outspokenclothing.com/catalog.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02 (CK-DNJ702R1)"

wdcsun18.usdoj.gov - - [26/Jan/2004:03:06:20 -0500] "GET /outspeak-new.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 22365 "http://www.outspokenclothing.com/catalog.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02 (CK-DNJ702R1)"

If you're not familiar with server log formatr, each "GET" statement is followed by the name of the file that was retrieved. For example, "GET /cafepress/art/anyonebutbush.jpg" returned an image with Bush's face in the center, surrounded by the words "Anyone but Bush 2004" and "GET /images/impeachbushn.gif" returned a button with the wording "Impeach Bush." These represent a vist to their home page, where each of the images is displayed. This particular list of entries, and the ones accompanying it, represent a single visit to the site by the Department of Justice. Server access logs record an individual entry for each image that was "served."

The one I like the best is "My government gave the rich a $330 billion tax cut and all I got was this lousy t-shirt." I may go buy one of those.

More disturbing are the later searches, originating from Lycos and Altavista, for sites with the keywords "progressive clothing." I'd like to think that someone at the Department of Homeland Security is just looking for new clothes, but considering the earlier hit from DOJ, that seems unlikely.

One of the things I gave up when I moved the blog back to Blogspot from my own personal site was the ability to look at server logs. But my site counter, Free-Stats, does show referrals to my site and also shows the search phrase used when someone found the site via a search engine. I can't tell whether DOJ or DHS is trolling my site, but you know what? They're welcome if they do. And because all the archived files, up to January of this year, are still in the search engines' indices, I CAN see who is looking at them and then being re-directed to the Blogspot archives. So, in the words of our fearless (NOT!) leader, "Bring It On!"

We've been Mark Martin fans here for a long time, and now there's another reason—this February 14 excerpt from the Washington Times:

"Having Democrats trolling for votes among NASCAR dads," scoffed Republican pollster Whit Ayers, "is like Republicans trolling for votes at a NOW convention," referring to the liberal National Organization for Women.

Certainly, the Democrats hope for a better reception than Mr. Clinton got in 1992, when he showed up for a race in Darlington, S.C., during his first run for the presidency.

Many of the drivers were conspicuously absent when Mr. Clinton worked his way through the garage. The crowd booed lustily when the soon-to-be president was introduced.

"That was kind of embarrassing," Labonte said, managing a weak smile. "Just because you're not going to vote for the man, you don't have to boo him. I'll never forget that."

Driver Mark Martin got the seemingly thankless task of escorting Mr. Clinton around the paddock. Both were from Arkansas, so NASCAR asked Martin to handle the duty.

Looking back, Martin said he didn't mind being seen with a man who was obviously viewed with scorn and skepticism by most of the other drivers.

"My dad told me he did a lot of great things for our state," Martin said. "I probably wouldn't have escorted him around if I thought he was a heel."

While professing that he's not into politics, Martin did speak some brave words as he walked toward his motor home after Wednesday's practice — he actually believes Mr. Clinton was a pretty good president.

"I'm not into whether you're a Republican or a Democrat — I care about the individual," Martin said, not even bothering to lower his voice to a whisper. "I will tell you this: I don't believe the Republicans when they say everything good that Clinton did was just luck, and all the bad stuff that's happened since Bush has been in office is just bad luck.

"Hey, at least the budget got balanced when Clinton was in there."

NASCAR fans, depicted in the article as next-thing-to-fanatic Bush supporters, aren't stupid. They read, they think, they talk to each other about current issues, and they're as capable as anyone else of coming to honest conclusions. As a NASCAR fan myself, who provided computer support for several years for one of the most venerable of the NASCAR teams, and a resident of the most densely NASCAR-fan-populated part of the country, I'm not worried.

Saturday, February 14, 2004

Update to one of this morning's earlier posts (sorry, my permalink tag doesn't seem to be working properly--you'll have to scroll down if you want to read it). I included a quote from CNN.com's article on the attack in Fallujah, Iraq. Here is the quote again (you'll see why in a moment):

Friday, Abizaid told The Associated Press that Iraqis must depend less on the U.S. military, even if that means a bigger risk of violence in coming months.

"We have to take risk to a certain extent, by taking our hands off the controls," he said. "It's their country, it's their future. Our job is to help them help themselves."

I clicked back to the CNN site after hearing on television that the number of dead was greater than had been reported earlier, just wondering whether CNN had updated their story to reflect the revised casualties. To my surprise, the two paragraphs from which the quote above was taken had disappeared from the article. I have no problem with CNN revising a story to include new information, but removing something that might reflect badly on the United States smacks of another kind of revisionism. I've written to CNN to ask where the original story can be found. And I learned a lesson: save anything you might want to go back to later, in case it isn't there any more. I'm still such a political innocent.

More on this later.

Rambling around the blog-o-sphere this morning (when I should be doing laundry) brought me to The Right Christians, a blog subtitled "It is time for the Christian Right to meet the right Christians." The phrase turns out to be a quote from, of all people, Rev. Al Sharpton. The blog's author explains his choice of subtitle:

We thank the Rev. Al Sharpton for our name. Confronted by an anti-abortion protester at NARAL's January rally to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Roe V. Wade, Rev. Sharpton responded, "Young lady, it is time for the Christian right to meet the right Christians." Our site is not otherwise connected with the Sharpton campaign and he is not responsible for its content nor we for his campaign. We do appreciate his stating so succinctly what we have been feeling for some time and wish him well.

I've been sick and tired for a long time of the claim that "If you're a Christian, you have to support George Bush, because he stands for Christian values," and the other odious variants of that point of view. I know many perfectly nice people who say it with undeniable sincerity; all I can hope is that their eyes are being opened. But until now I hadn't found a blog which was both publicly anti-Bush and publicly Christian.

I want to add this blog to my sidebar of good places to visit, but I don't know whether to put it under political blogs or Christian blogs. Does it say something that I think I have to make that distinction? I'm going to just remove the sub-categories and list them all alphabetically. We're in this mess together, after all.

Welcome, Rev. Allen Brill.

I listened in disbelief early this morning to the CNN account of a "skirmish" in Fallujah. 20 Iraqi's, mostly policemen, were killed, while US troops did nothing to help. CNN.com printed this quote from Gen. John Abizaid, US commander in the Middle East:

Friday, Abizaid told The Associated Press that Iraqis must depend less on the U.S. military, even if that means a bigger risk of violence in coming months.

"We have to take risk to a certain extent, by taking our hands off the controls," he said. "It's their country, it's their future. Our job is to help them help themselves."

Helping them "help themselves" sounds an awful lot to me like throwing them off the deep end of the pier and watching the trail of bubbles as they sink.

[EDIT] Well, well, well. The article has been changed since I did a cut 'n' paste about 9:00 this morning, and no longer includes this quote. Darn--I really wish I had saved the earlier version of it.

This attitude made absolutely no sense to me (well—it still makes no sense) until I ran across Iraq'd, a new blog by Spencer Ackerman in The New Republic Online. TNR has taken a beating recently from folk who are just a leetle bit suspicious of its true loyalties. This column may go a long way toward redeeming its reputation. Ackerman was writing in the wake of Bush's Meet the Press inteview, specifically in response to Bush's statements about Iraqi democracy.

"These people are committed to a pluralistic society," Bush told Russert, and there are indeed Iraqis committed to pluralism. The problem is that Bush's policies are marginalizing them.

Or worse. Not only have moderates been weakened politically by the November 15 Agreement; the inability of the U.S. to provide security has led to the assassinations in Baghdad of hundreds of Iraqi intellectuals and civil servants--the backbone of Iraqi civil society, which itself would be the backbone of a potential democracy. "This works against everything we're trying to do here," Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt told The New York Times on Saturday. But rather than demonstrate that we're serious about the future of Iraq by renewing our offensive against the assassins, U.S. military commanders are intending to rapidly turn over security responsibilities in the city to the inadequately trained and relatively ill-equipped Iraqi police--a force of 8,000 for a city of over 5 million, which security experts consider vastly insufficient.

Bush's rhetoric about terror is beginning to sound a little more valid. The tragic irony, though, is that the terror is being inflicted most intensely on the very nation that his actions were supposed to save.

If I were an Iraqi policeman this morning, I might be having serious thoughts about a career change.

Friday, February 13, 2004

Oh well, just couldn't resist. Hop over to Conceptual Gorilla's Talking Points and learn how to Defeat the Right in Three Minutes. Strident, but right on target. Cheap-labor conservative, cheap-labor conservative, cheap-labor conservative . . . can anyone say Google bomb?

I have to take a break from this political stuff once in a while. It's depressing. So today I got in one of my now infrequent computer service calls. Same old story--someone I did some work for about three years ago asked around and got passed from one person to another until he came up with someone who knew my current phone number. He called me the other day to say his computer was taking ten minutes to boot up and was throwing up one error message after another.

Good gracious, what a mess it turned out to be. At some point, someone had downloaded the Genome@Home project software from Stanford University, a cooperative endeavor that allows volunteers to utilize spare cpu cycles in their computer to design new proteins not been found in nature. "By comparing these 'virtual genomes' to those found in nature," says the Stanford site, "we can gain a much better understanding of how natural genomes have evolved and how natural genes and proteins work." Whoever had downloaded the software onto Joe's computer had already removed it, but some fragment was still trying to call home to Stanford every time the computer started up. It took some considerable time to track this down, because the only place where this little snippet was referenced was in the registry, but I eventually found its name and located its source by the simple method of Googling the file name.

Then there was BonziBuddy, along with several partners of the Gator Corporation and various other pieces of spyware, all also reporting back to their makers. Joe had already installed a spyware detection product but it had missed one of the Gator variants, which was happily reloading all the others every time he went online.

I've forgotten most of the others, but there must have been six different pieces of junk trying to install or execute themselves on startup, including a call to scanreg, a utility that backs up the Windows registry. That one thing alone accounted for most of the ten minute startup time.

I downloaded the free version of the ZoneAlarm firewall and showed him how to use that, and strongly suggested he also download AVG for virus protection, and left with the promise to find out what memory his older Compaq uses and how much it will cost to double it.

I hate those calls where I have to tell my customer that I really can't do anything to help them. It does happen now and then to any computer technician, and I feel horrible for accepting money for the work, even though they had just as much benefit from my knowledge as someone whose computer I could fix. This was one of those happy days when I left my customer beaming at his now cooperative computer, and felt as though I had done a "good thing."

Whoee! Just got a forward from Kate of the message from her friends in SF. It's even better than I thought. I'm supposed to be on the way to work on someone's computer right now, but couldn't resist taking a moment to post this:

February 12, 2004. The day that turned out to be our wedding day. We went to the County Clerk’s office around 11 and asked for a marriage license. The person at the information desk didn’t know when they would be available. We went back outside because we thought that the Mayor was going to be holding a press conference. A reporter and crew from NBC asked us about getting married. They did an interview with the both of us. They told us that the press conference was cancelled. I happened to notice that Roberta Achtenberg (President Clinton’s HUD Undersecretary) was standing on the sidewalk. I asked her if she was waiting for the rally that was supposed to begin at noon. She became rather flustered. I was really confused as to why until she said, “The first same sex wedding already has taken place. That’s all I can say.” I went back to the Clerk’s office and asked again for a marriage license. The lady who was behind the information counter said that if they were ready they would start handing them out at noon. (It was about 11:20.) We waited. There were all sorts of reporters and photographers. At noon we got our application and filled it out. We came back and paid a fee. Then we got back a license, which we had to take to the Recorder’s Office. At the point we got to the Recorder’s office there were three couples ahead of us waiting in line. As we got in line a clerk came out and said, “There is a problem with the licenses and we are asking you to go back to the Clerk’s office.” When we got there it was pointed out that they hadn’t changed the license so it still read Bride’s Name and Groom’s Name instead of Applicant One and Applicant Two like the application. By then the office was pandemonium. There were camera crews, people waiting to get married, the excitement of same sex couples realizing it really might happen, a County Clerk’s office facing an onslaught of people. When we finally got our corrected license we went back to the Recorder’s office. The NBC crew was still waiting for us. People from the Recorder’s office had already talked with us while we were waiting to get our licenses corrected. They told us they would be able to do our ceremonies as soon as we got our licenses. They put the three couples that had had trouble with their licenses in this waiting room. They wanted us to line up in order so they could do our ceremonies. One clerk took the first couple outside. When they second couple went outside a lady came in and said, “Actually we don’t have to go anywhere, we can just shut the door and use this room for your ceremony. (There was a large window on one side so that we were visible, but there was less noise with the door shut.) The NBC reporter agreed to be our witness and the cameraman filmed the whole ceremony. The reporter also acted as our wedding photographer. The first thing the clerk says to us is “Do you have rings?” We didn’t. She said, “No problem instead of rings how about exchanging kisses?” There was only one part when she inadvertently used “her” but she quickly caught herself. In the end she pronounced us “spouses for life.” It was just a fantastic event.

And there you have it, folk! A firsthand account of one of the very first gay marriages in the US. Congratulations again, B and F!

Kate called to tell me that two long-time male friends of hers, who live now in San Francisco, were married yesterday. Congratulations! I'll bet they weren't much more than second in line after Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin. Here's an excerpt from an AP story:

In a political and legal challenge to California law, city authorities officiated at the marriage of a lesbian couple Thursday and said they will issue more gay marriage licenses.

The act of civil disobedience was coordinated by Mayor Gavin Newsom and top city officials and was intended to beat a conservative group to the punch.

The group, Campaign for California Families, had planned to go to court on Friday to get an injunction preventing the city from issuing marriage licenses to gay couples.

Longtime lesbian activists Phyllis Lyon, 79, and Del Martin, 83, were married just before noon by City Assessor Mabel Teng in a closed-door civil ceremony at City Hall, mayor's spokesman Peter Ragone said. The two have been a couple for 51 years.

Ragone said that beginning at noon, officials would begin issuing marriage licenses to any gay couples applying for one.

How fitting that Phyllis and Del should have been the first. Their book, Lesbian Women, published in 1972, was a groundbreaking account of what it meant to realize you were lesbian, and how that knowledge affected your life. I found the book about five years later, at a point when I had to come to terms with my own orientation, and it was invaluable to me. For some odd reason, it meant something to me that they weren't just two refugees from the hippie decade--they were nearly my own mother's age. When I read the book, they were already celebrating their 25th anniversary together. I was brought up to respect my elders, and here were two women I could both identify with and respect, and hold up as an ideal. Nothing could be more appropriate than for the first same-sex marriage in the US to celebrate the love of Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin. Congratulations to them, and to Kate's friends, to everyone else who gets in there before an injunction is issued (if it is), and well-earned congratulations to the city of San Francisco for having the courage to do this.

An AP story in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune (thanks to Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo for the link to this) seems to confirm that George W. did indeed pull some kind of duty in an Alabama guard unit when he says he did. Wouldn't it be ironic if Bush is actually telling the truth here? His continuing refusal to make his military records completely public has resulted in such unprecedented digging that far more damaging information may come out as a result. Or possibly not. What could be in those records that he is more afraid of us finding out?

Thursday, February 12, 2004

Perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic to say that the best we can hope for is to kick Bush out (see previous entry). Doc Searls' post from Saturday, February 7, 2004 suggests a more long-term view. "Dean's is a wave on a rising tide," he says. "That tide will continue to rise, whether or not Dean's wave reaches shore. "

The rising tide to which he refers is the growing number of people who are using blogs to change society, whether it's publishing political opinion, actually doing original research on any number of political and/or social issues and making the results available via their blogs, or just reading, thinking about and acting upon the news and commentary they receive via blogs. We've gotten over the rather naive notion that blogs would become the news sources of the future, taking over from traditional media outlets, but blogs are doing something even more important than expanding on the typical 45-second media newsbyte.

Except for the occasional "Breaking News!" traditional broadcast media airs what its executives think we want to hear. We already knew that, of course, but the recent coverage of Bush's military service is a good example of how this works. Faint hints of a story in 2000, but not enough people were interested in hearing about it for the national media to give it any time. Since then, however, bloggers and the sites they publicize have kept the story alive and growing. Even with the sensationalist nature of some of those sites, and the fact that their information wasn't always entirely accurate, Bush's advisors and spokespeople haven't been able to put a lid on it. Terry McAuliffe's mention of it was more than just a shot in the dark--I don't believe he would have taken a chance on embarrassing himself if he hadn't know the public was ready to hear it. Why? Because some threshold number of people had begun to mutter about it in blogs, and in letters to the editor, and over the back fence with their neighbors. People had shown that they wanted to hear about the story (thanks largely to bloggers, I believe). Once McAuliffe opened his mouth and Kerry joined in, the snowball effect took over, and now you can hardly pick up a newspaper or turn on the nightly news without hearing something about the story. I won't discount David Kay's inadvertent role in this. In my opinion, media executives felt that not finding WMD's had "softened up" the public to hear additional negative information about Bush. But I was surprised at the number of Bush supporters I personally know who admitted to having read something about Bush's military service already. Where did they read it?

On the net.

This is why I voted for Howard Dean in the Virginia primary on Tuesday (from a speech given in Madison, Wisconsin, on February 9):

We need to pull back the curtain and let the American people know what is happening in Washington's corridors of power. We need strong reforms:

Disclosure should be more frequent. Under current law lobbyists register every six months. I think they should register on-line in real time, and there should be a lobbying database on the Internet so ordinary citizens can keep an eye on their democracy.

Disclosure should be more specific. Right now, lobbyists only have to report which chamber of Congress or government agency they lobbied. I think lobbyists should be required to report who they met with, when they met, and what issue they discussed.

Disclosure should be more comprehensive. Lobbyists should report how much they spend on advertisements, national organizing, and of course fundraising activities. Registered lobbyists should not make political contributions at all, but beyond that they should be required to report when they facilitate contributions from others.

We will change the way Washington works. We will take our country back.

Let me tell you about the America I want back. I want an America where mothers can take their children to a family doctor, instead of going to the emergency room every time because there's no health insurance.

I want an America where hard-working Americans don't live in fear of losing their jobs because that means losing their health care too.

Where corporations care as much about the communities that make their products and buy their goods as they do about their profit sheets.

Where CEO's don't make 531 times what workers earn, even as they ship their headquarters to Bermuda and their jobs to China.

I want an America where men and women have the chance to go to college, get good jobs, maybe even start their own businesses -- regardless of their background. Where the kitchen table is a place to share dreams -- not to worry and struggle over paying the credit card bills, the mortgage, the tuition payments.

I want an America where no child left behind is something we pay for and guarantee, not an empty promise sold by Washington politicians to the rest of us. I want a fair America that doesn't let soldiers risk their lives for us and then get told they can't get overtime pay for jobs that use the skills they learned in the military.

I want an America where we are more than cogs in a machine, where there is nourishment for our human souls. Where there is true community, and we recognize and affirm that we are all in this together.

That's the type of America I want us to take back

I can't imagine any true American, regardless of political leanings, who would disagree with this. Unfortunately, it looks as though the best we can hope for is to show Bush the door.

Wednesday, February 11, 2004

Added Old-fashioned Patriot, just because I like his subtitle: For folks who believe that patriotism doesn't include racist, jingoist, murderous lies. Well--the rest of his writing is pretty good too.

Blogging after midnight again, darn it. We took Clarence to see his doctor today, because of the infection on his legs that continues to get worse. The doctor slapped him into the hospital on the spot, not an entirely unexpected result. Unfortunately, the hospital is almost three hours from home, and I didn't get back until almost 11:00. If not for the snow tomorrow, I would have come straight home and crashed, but I thought I'd better stop at the grocery store and stock up on a few things, and now I'm awake.

Because the hopsital is so far away, Clarence assumed immediately that I had just dumped him there and wouldn't be back until he is released. Don't tempt me, I felt like saying, but didn't. He looked so lost and depressed, sitting there in a hospital gown with all the acoutrements of hospital life arranged on his bed table, that I almost felt sorry for him. But then a young attractive aide came in and he was immediately the most charming person in the world, and my sympathy for him changed back to a far more sensible cynicism. He'll be the perfect patient for a day or so, and then his real nature will start to show through, and they'll be glad when the doctor sends him home.

Wonder if a good slug of single malt would make me sleepy . . .

Thanks to the beast (Beast of Sound) for linking to me. I enjoyed reading his blog, the same sort of blend of personal homily and political observation that I'd like to think mine is, and he appears to be a fellow computer person too.

Here's something kind of off the wall. This morning the History Channel aired a program on Theodore Roosevelt, and though I watch little television, I happened to be within hearing distance when several interesting comments were made. T.R. was an advocate of war: War, he said, was cleansing to a nation's spirit. Righteous war was honorable. I'm paraphrasing, because I didn't realize the significance of these remarks until after most of them had been made and it was too late to grab something and write them down. So I've been scouring the net this morning looking for sources and wondering to what extent Teddy was a hero of the young GW. Roosevelt seems to have been mildly obsessed with the manliness of war, but to give him credit, he flung himself personally into it when the opportunity arrived, forming the Rough Riders regiment that fought in Cuba during the Spanish-American war.

I haven't wanted a TiVo before--seemed like an unreasonably expensive luxury--but if I'd had one today, I could have hit the button and recorded the program (is that all it takes? You see the level of my ignorance). Anyhow, I'm still looking for the speeches and/or publications where the statements were made that the History Channel quoted, and if anyone has suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them.

Whass going on here? 7 referrals from Bark Bark Woof Woof? Mustang Bobby has added me to his blogroll, thank you, sir!

Just in from Calpundit: more on the Bush Air National Guard pay records. The White House announced today (um, that was actually yesterday, I guess, since it's after midnight here now) that DoD had requested the pay records from the archive in Colorado (and does that strike anyone as kind of strange? Why would the Department of Defense be requesting the records?) I had planned on commenting on this myself, but Kevin has upstaged me. Here is a summary, anyway.

The records which were released are for the period from October 28, 1972 to July 30, 1973. They are not for service in the Texas Air National Guard, but for hours earned with the Air Reserve Force (which has resulted--inevitably, I suppose--in a veritable explosion of acronyms related to and rhyming with ARF). Many of the former National Guard and Reservist personnel who commented on Cal's Feb. 8 post say that being transferred to ARF was not necessarily a disciplinary measure, as a lot of people have assumed. Okay, I'll buy that. For whatever reason, Bush was redirected to a unit with no airplanes. Might be because he failed to show up for his flight physical, and thus was grounded, but . . . whatever.

I should point out, because this has been widely circulated, that the so-called "disciplinary note" which he signed, the infamous "Document 23," is actually the second page of the standard enlistment contract that everyone had to sign. If we're going to criticize him, we'd at least better get the facts straight.

Many of the same people who commented on Cal's Feb. 8 post also said that record-keeping screwups were common, that officers routinely had to be hunted down to take their flight physicals, that it wasn't even that unusual for people never to show up and for nothing to be done about it. I'll buy all that too. I worked for the Navy for a couple of years and I can tell you some horror stories myself about messed up records. It does seem a bit strange that John McCain, John Kerry and Wesley Clark voluntarily made their entire military record public, and that we've had to pry what little we've gotten so far out of Bush, but maybe he's just modest about the details.

The bottom line is that there is still no evidence that he performed his National Guard duty anywhere during the time he was in Alabama, in spite of his claims to the contrary, and no good reason why he should have been allowed a temporary transfer to an Alabama unit that had no airplanes in which he could practice his $200,000 price-tag flying skills. His unit commander in Texas turned down his first request for a transfer, noting in more military language that the request was inappropriate. Strangely, his second request was granted, and he certainly did go to Alabama to work for the senate campaign of William Blount [EDIT: note to self--pay attention, doofus, it's Winton Blount]. There seems to be no dispute about that. But no one has any record, memory, vague recollection, or other hint of knowledge that he put in his time in the Alabama unit. Yet he continues to insist that he did.

What it comes down to for me is that while Bush was hiding out in the Air National Guard, one sister and both of my brothers were on active duty service overseas, my first high school boy friend was being buried after dying in Vietnam, and one of my co-workers, who had seen early service with the Special Forces in Vietnam, was having a nervous breakdown. Yet he cites his "military service" as evidence of his qualification for the job of our country's Commander-in-Chief. I just want to grab him and yell, "How DARE you put yourself in the same category as the people who risked their lives in active military service!"

Wow, that felt better!

Tuesday, February 10, 2004

Additional short post: added DaveNet, always worth reading. Can't think why I haven't added him before.

Just got off the phone with Shelley, and I guess I don't need to worry any more about her being taken advantage of by other drivers because she's a woman. She told me that she had been backing up to a loading dock at some Coca-Cola warehouse, pulled forward enough to correct her angle, and watched in disbelief in her side mirror as a much smaller Coke truck slid into her spot. She jumped out and confronted the driver, who just smirked and shrugged at her. "Too bad, tough luck, I'm here, you can just wait."

Shelley said she might have backed down, except that she had exactly fifteen minutes to get unloaded before she would be out of hours, and in violation of the law. So she went in search of the employee who had told her to use that dock. He sympathized, he said, but the driver was a company employee and there wasn't anything he could do. Shelley said she went back and told the driver exactly what she thought of him, in terms any truck driver would understand (in which, I gather, various portions of his anatomy, and what he probably did with them, figured prominently). And then she backed up her truck so close that he couldn't get back out, turned it off, locked the door and went to the bathroom. She was talking on the phone to me during part of the resulting confrontation with the yard supervisor and various other people, and I could hear her smiling as they screeched at her. No, she said calmly, she wasn't going to move her truck. Not unless the driver apologized to her. He was an employee of the company where she was delivering and they had an obligation to tell him to apologize. She said the supervisor flatly refused even to tell the driver that she wanted an apology, just kept shouting at her to move her rig, or they were going to call a tow truck. "Go ahead," she said. They would call her fleet manager, they said. "Here's the phone number," she said. "Want to use my phone?"

She did eventually move when they opened up another loading dock for her. As a result of the confrontation, she has been permanently banned from that receiver, which is apparently not a big deal. She said she talked to her fleet manager and he scolded her for her language, but didn't sound too distressed otherwise. And I'll bet that Coke employee never cuts off another woman truck driver again. Let's just hope he didn't go home and take it out on his wife.

One brief entry before I go off to vote--added Brad Delong to the list of political/economic sites in the sidebar. Wish I had the knowledge and the time to be as prolific as he is. The man posts whole paragraphs just about every day, and he's fast too. His comments on Bush's Meet the Press interview were online by the time I had done no more than find the transcript and begin to formulate how I wanted to respond.

But I have other responsibilities too. I'm hoping to get us moved back to Stuart by the middle of the summer. We have to do a lot of work to make the trailer habitable again--the heating system doesn't even work at the moment, the refrigerator must be replaced, and I'm sure the place is over-run with mice. The driveway is going to have to be fixed so Shelley can get in and out with her truck, and the front bedroom, which I had been using, must be cleared out for Nick. Shelley and I worked out a schedule when she was home this week of what could and must be finished by a given time--driveway work done as soon as possible, one of the storage units down in Mt. Airy cleaned out enough to make room for Shelley's furniture, etc. I have about 2000 books in storage from when I had the bookstore in Stuart, many of which are not really worth keeping. But without someone's help, I never had time to go through them and dump the unsaleable ones.

I also must find someone who can come in every day and check on Clarence during the times I can't be at home. He is going downhill fast, I'm afraid. I started taking him to a nephrologist a couple of years ago when he began having kidney problems, but this doctor has moved now to Christiansburg. Unfortunately, Clarence strongly resisted the idea of starting over with a new doctor. so we're driving to Christiansburg every time he needs to be seen. I don't mind doing that--it's nothing compared to the distances I drive all the rest of the time--but I think the drive itself is becoming very hard on Clarence. And while this doctor is very respected as a nephrologist, I wonder whether he is competent to treat some of the other complications of diabetes. Clarence is developing skin ulcers and the doctor's only response so far has been to prescribe an antibiotic. While that may prevent an infection from spreading, I don't think it's doing anything for the sores themselves, and I think I need to find something like an ET nurse or a wound clinic closer to home. Yet one more stress, sigh.

Monday, February 09, 2004

A few comments on George Bush's appearance on Meet the Press Sunday morning (the full transcript is at MSNBC's Meet the Press site).

I had wondered whether Tim Russert would pull his punches. He did ask a series of good, pointed questions, but he dropped the ball every time when Bush answered. Brad Delong has done an excellent job of both dissecting Bush's answers and suggesting additional questions Russert might have asked.

Bush has an odd habit of answering a different question than the one he was asked, of revealing information the questioner wasn't trying to elicit. I like to think that his conscience is hiding inside there somewhere and poking him. You just told a real whopper there, Dubya, but you can make it right—tell the nice man what you really plan for the intel commission. Whatever the reason for this strange phenomenon, Russert missed the boat on every one of those instances as well. For example:

Russert: On Friday, you announced a committee, commission to look into intelligence failures regarding the Iraq war and our entire intelligence community. You have been reluctant to do that for some time. Why?

President Bush: Well, first let me kind of step back and talk about intelligence in general, if I might. Intelligence is a vital part of fighting and winning the war against the terrorists. It is because the war against terrorists is a war against individuals who hide in caves in remote parts of the world, individuals who have these kind of shadowy networks, individuals who deal with rogue nations. So, we need a good intelligence system. We need really good intelligence.

So, the commission I set up is to obviously analyze what went right or what went wrong with the Iraqi intelligence. It was kind of lessons learned. But it's really set up to make sure the intelligence services provide as good a product as possible for future presidents as well [italics mine]. This is just a part of analyzing where we are on the war against terror.

I'm sure Tim Russert assumed, like the rest of us, that the commission was set up to find out why our intelligence was allegedly so flawed. It probably never occurred to him to ask exactly what the commission would be charged with doing. But now we know.

Next excerpt:

Russert: There is another commission right now looking into September 11th . . . Will you testify before that commission?

President Bush: We have given extraordinary cooperation with Chairmen Kean and Hamilton. As you know, we made an agreement on what's called "Presidential Daily Briefs," and they could see the information the CIA provided me--that is unique, by the way, to have provided what's called the PDB, because--

Russert: Presidential Daily Brief?

President Bush: Right.

And see, the danger of allowing for information that I get briefed on out in the public arena is that it could mean that the product I receive or future presidents receive is somewhat guarded for fear of--for fear of it being revealed, and for fear of people saying, Well, you know, we?re going to second guess that which you told the President.

What George Bush knew in advance of the September 11 attacks is important enough that he shouldn't be trying to make brownie points with the American public by touting his generosity in revealing it. But again, he mentioned something that Tim Russert would probably never have asked about, his concern that the general public might find out what he knew, and that someone might 'second guess' the significance of the information.

Russert did comment on the fact that the intelligence commission has been given until April 2005, well after the election, to complete their work and present a report, but failed to add that the 9/11 commission has been told to have its findings completed within three months, a clear impossibility. Kind of makes you think Bush wants to rush one and dawdle on the other.

On the economy:

Russert: How, why, as a fiscal conservative as you like to call yourself, would you allow a $500 billion deficit and this kind of deficit disaster?

President Bush: Sure. The budget I just proposed to the Congress cuts the deficit in half in five years.

Now, I don't know what the assumptions are in the GAO report, but I do know that if Congress is wise with the people's money, we can cut the deficit in half. And at that point in time, as a percentage of GDP, the deficit will be relatively low.

I agree with the assessment that we've got some long term financial issues we must look at, and that's one reason I asked Congress to deal with Medicare. I strongly felt that if we didn't have an element of competition, that if we weren't modern with the Medicare program, if we didn't incorporate what's called "health savings accounts" to encourage Americans to take more control over their healthcare decisions, we would have even a worse financial picture in the long run. I believe Medicare is going to not only make the system work better for seniors but is going to help the fiscal situation of our long term projection.

At first I thought bringing up Medicare was just another little indiscretion. Russert didn't ask about specific cuts. But during the break after this group of questions, NBC ran a lovely little public service announcement in which vibrantly healthy-looking seniors enthused over the fact that 'Medicare wasn't changing, just getting better.' It became obvious that Bush's mention of Medicare was orchestrated to tie in with the PSA.

Tim Russert failed to ask why the true anticipated cost of Medicare was kept from our legislators until after the bill was passed, something which has Bush's most conservative supporters up in arms against him. He also apparently didn't hear that last little remark Bush dropped in: "I believe Medicare is going to not only make the system work better for seniors but is going to help the fiscal situation of our long term projection."

Er—excuse me? How exactly is the Medicare program going to "help the fiscal situation"? By completely privatizing it? That's the only reason I can think of for Bush's failure to own up to its true projected cost, to be able to say, "Gee, it was nice of you guys to pass this bill, but we just can't afford it after all, and if we get rid of it, look how much better the figures will be!"

Bush's response to the question about his military service was one of the most revealing (and perhaps the one he'll most regret providing):

Russert: When allegations were made about John McCain or Wesley Clark on their military records, they opened up their entire files. Would you agree to do that?

President Bush: Yeah. Listen, these files--I mean, people have been looking for these files for a long period of time, trust me, and starting in the 1994 campaign for governor. And I can assure you in the year 2000 people were looking for those files as well. Probably you were. And--absolutely. I mean, I--

Russert: But you would allow pay stubs, tax records, anything to show that you were serving during that period?

President Bush: Yeah. If we still have them, but I--you know, the records are kept in Colorado, as I understand, and they scoured the records.

And I'm just telling you, I did my duty, and it's politics, you know, to kind of ascribe all kinds of motives to me. But I have been through it before. I'm used to it. What I don't like is when people say serving in the Guard is ? is ? may not be a true service.

Russert: But you authorize the release of everything to settle this?

President Bush: Yes, absolutely.

We did so in 2000, by the way.

Hmm. One promise he may come to regret, and one outright lie. And a couple of possible mis-statements that may also come back to haunt him. " . . . people have been looking for these files for a long period of time, trust me." Did he mean "looking AT these files?" Because the files have been secured in Colorado, as he said, and have most definitely NOT all been released, neither during the Texas governor's campaign nor during the 2000 presidential campaign. So that was, at best, another instance of verbal stumbling, and at worst, an inadvertent admission of the truth.

Then he said, " . . . and they SCOURED the records." Did he mean that someone looked at them closely? Or did he mean they were 'cleaned up'? The problem with George W. Bush, the President of the United States, is that you frequently can't tell exactly what he meant when he says almost anything.

Finally, if I were Colin Powell, I'd be just a little pissed right now at Bush's not-too-subtle dig about "denigrating the Guard." In Powell's autobiography, he said he was angry that sons of wealthy and powerful families "managed to wangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units" in order to avoid going to Vietnam. Maybe Bush should have read "My American Journey" before choosing Colin Powell as a running mate. My opinion is that Powell has boot-licked himself into a position from which only a full-scale offense can save face. I'll be surprised if he lasts much longer, but I'll bet he goes down swinging.

I've only touched the high spots here (or were they low spots?). The general consensus amongst the far more knowledgeable people who are commenting on Sunday's interview is that Bush came off very badly with everyone, even his supporters, and that the only kind thing anyone could say about Tim Russert is that he was trying to be respectful to the office of president, if not to the current occupant of the office

Friday, February 06, 2004

Oops, looks like I opened my mouth and stuck my foot in it. Kate says she certainly IS willing to bum around the country with me, though compromises will still have to be made—I don't think we can fit two adults, a cat and a large wooly dog into the cab of a pickup truck, and I suspect the cat is non-negotiable. A van, perhaps. But that's still all in the dim nebulous future when neither of us has other obligations.

Nick is glowing—Shelley wanted him to be tested at Sylvan to see whether he was making adequate progress with homeschooling. I think both Nick and I worried that she thought I wasn't doing an adequate job. She protested that she simply didn't have any way to measure his progress herself, but it's hard not to be a bit defensive. In any case, everyone is relieved and satisfied. He tested off the scale in reading and writing, and above grade level in math. We knew he would do well with reading, but he was convinced he couldn't do math, and I worried that he would forget everything I had taught him. The only area of math in which he didn't work at least at grade level was basic geometry, and we haven't yet gotten to that this year. The summary at the end of his test was "Very exceptional," and he's been going around with a smirk declaring "Very exception! Very exceptional!" ever since. Today we go back to biology and history and math and his little vacation is over.

Wednesday, February 04, 2004

From Mustang Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof, this cool link to a map of states I've visited, most of them courtesy of our family's peregrinations during my childhood. I've added Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Nevada, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island as an adult. Mom, you'll have to help me here—did we make it to Michigan when we were traveling? I can't remember. Someday I'll get to the rest of them.

What I had always thought I would do when I was free to move independently again was to buy an old pickup truck, put a small camper top on the back, and hit the road, accompanied perhaps with a large wooly dog of some variety. Sleep in campgrounds, or wherever I find myself, pick up work where it comes along, take pictures, write. Stay in touch with cell phone, ham radio and laptop when I feel like it. Live a vagabond existence again, or as close to that as you can get these days. I'll have at least a minimal pension, certainly enough to keep a pickup truck on the road, and except for admittedly being addicted to my computer and the net, I have few other needs.

Kate, however, has let me know that this is not what she had in mind for her retirement, so I guess there are going to be some compromises, but I'm still gazing wistfully at the states in green [EDIT--for whatever reason they seem to no longer be green, but gray] that I haven't seen, and the ones in red that I'd like to revisit.


create your own visited states map
or write about it on the open travel guide

Tuesday, February 03, 2004

More economics, for anyone willing to wade through a few figures (despite my bookkeeping skills, I was never particularly interested in national economics before, but that's changing). Teddy, at It's Still the Economy, Stupid, has some pithy remarks at the end of a dense couple of pages of figures:

. . . as with most of the Bush Administration policies, particularly regarding Iraq and the economy, "laughably unrealistic assumptions" are par for the course. This administration is the most fiscally irresponsible this country has ever had (and probably ever will), and with several bubbles in the balance and $33 trillion in total debt, this is certainly not the time to be unrealistic with so much at stake. The flat truth is that Bush and the GOP have crippled the federal budget for DECADES in just three years. Add to this that the crippling private pension funds, federal pension protection, state unemployment insurance funds, social security, medicare, health insurance in general, the entire social safety net is in tatters, facing enormous future obligations that have no hope of being funded under realistic projections. At this point, replacing this administration is only going to be a first step in fixing a legacy of economic troubles.

Why isn't the other side refuting these claims with hard numbers? Because they can't?

Thanks to Graham, at Blogger tech support, my pictures are back, much appreciated.

Two new blogs under the political heading: the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Wampum. Good stuff about Bush's interesting budget arithmetic at both sites.

The NY Times published an article yesterday by William Safire (free registration required to view) that describes an alleged intelligence coup against the Soviet Union in 1982. Sounds good, until you dig a bit into the facts, and if you recognize a possible motive behind this sudden revelation.

Safire's article refers to a book about to be published by Thomas C. Reed, a former Air Force secretary. According to Safire, Reed states, "The pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves [for the Trans-Siberia pipeline] was programmed to go haywire, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds. The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space."

Safire says that the explosion occurred in 1982 in the Siberian wilderness, with no loss of life, and that the Soviets' discovery of the flawed software "made all the software it had stolen for years . . . suddenly suspect, which stopped or delayed the work of thousands of worried Russian technicians and scientists."

Just a couple of little problems here. First, the explosion he refers to (unless someone snuck one in that nobody else knows anything about) took place in 1989 and was set off by sparks from a couple of passenger trains passing through valleys where leaking gas had settled. Over 500 people were killed.

Second, the NSC staffer with whom Reed was working, Gus Weiss, wrote about the sale of flawed technology to the Soviet Union in a 1996 article now posted on the CIA website. His article states that "Contrived computer chips found their way into Soviet military equipment, flawed turbines were installed on a gas pipeline, and defective plans disrupted the output of chemical plants and a tractor factory." Granted, Reed might simply be providing more information in his book than Weiss did in this article, but if Weiss bothered to note that defective plans "disrupted the output" of chemical plants, it seems odd that he would have skipped any mention of what Reed describes as the "most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space."

There is also the little matter of "computer chips" versus "software." Leaving out for the moment the fact that Weiss specifically says they ended up in Soviet military equipment, 1982-vintage "chips" were not what they are today. You didn't incorporate whole pipeline control software packages into a bunch of chips. Yes, individual controller chips certainly could have been designed to spit out incorrect valve settings. But such chips were used for highly specialized functions and were normally programmed either by the manufacturer of the device they were going to be controlling, or by programmers working at the facility where they were going to be placed into use.

That's not to say pre-programmed chips couldn't have been sabotaged, and the Soviets' definition of military equipment might well have included a natural gas pipeline. Reed's statement may simply reflect a lack of understanding of the difference between individual electronic controllers and "pipeline software." And Gus Weiss's article is non-specific enough to leave plenty of room for things he didn't happen to mention. But the number of apparently conflicting statements, the number of "mays" and "mights" that are required to make it plausible at all, and the outright error in the date of the explosion should have been enough to trigger any editor's bullshit monitor. The fact that Safire's article appeared on the Times op-ed page, rather than being presented as "news," suggests that perhaps it did.

If this article was intended to buoy up the reputation of the intelligence community, all I can say is that it suffers from the same lack of careful research that our intelligence experts have been accused of, and should be viewed with the same skeptical mindset.

Monday, February 02, 2004

Two quick notes for today:

First, thanks to Blogwise for including me in their blog list. I'll post a banner link to them as soon as I get the image-uploading problem straightened out with Blogger.

Second: If one thing is going to save this country in the near future, it may be that there are some things both conservatives and liberals hold sacred. One of them is a strong feeling about privacy. We don't like the idea of some company we never heard of using 'data mining' techniques to build dossiers on us from the information in state, federal, medical and commercial records.

That is just what's happening, however. According to the Utah Deseret News, via Slashdot, "the information is collected by states and forwarded to a database in Florida, where a private company, Seisint Inc., builds and manages the database." It has come to light that Utah's former governer, Mike Leavitt, signed Utah up to participate in a pilot program for this database without telling anyone, and that has gotten Democrats and Republicans alike up in arms. Read the whole article here.

Afterthought: might be interesting to know who the principles of Seisint, Inc. are.

Sunday, February 01, 2004

Regular readers know by now that I don't trash George W. Bush. I voice my opinion, but I try to keep things polite. But, oh dear! I've said he's his own worst enemy, and he just proved me right once again. I've been watching the Super Bowl preliminaries, one of which was a live interview with GW in the Rose Garden. His final comment was, "I don't think there's going to be a big point spread, but what do I know? I'm just the president."

Amen.

For anyone who noticed that my pictures suddenly disappeared, it obviously has to do with the switch back to Blogspot, and I'm trying to work that out with Blogger right now.

I've just watched an hour (minus commercials) of Howard Dean, on Meet the Press, and I got up from my seat with a smile on my face. No one else in this campaign gives me hope that things can be turned around. It's obvious why he attracted such enormous and enthusiastic numbers at the beginning. More than that, though, he gives you himself. He said at the end that perhaps he needed to do a better job of of letting people know him personally, that like any doctor, he tended to get to know other people better than they knew him. Perhaps he doesn't realize just how much the ordinary person sees of himself, or herself, in him. When was the last time you heard a presidential candidate use the word "crap" in a public appearance, or say that the current regime was "screwing around" with the country? That's not political language—that's what people say over the copier in the office, and over the back fence in the suburbs, and on the steps of the post office in little rural towns. If ordinary Americans want to be represented again in the government, they could do worse than elect someone who sounds like them, and isn't embarrassed about it.

Is that an emotional reaction, rather than a detached, intellectual one? You're damn right it is.

The template is set to display 10 posts. To see all the posts for this month, click on the month name in the Archive section

This site is a member of WebRing. To browse visit here.

RSS Feed PERSONAL Send email to liz at life-as-a-spectator-sport.com Home I'm a mother, grandmother, a computer professional, Democrat, Christian. I welcome politely worded comments and email, my spam filter throws the rest away, so don't bother to flame me WHY 'LIFE AS A SPECTATOR SPORT' "If you're lucky not to live in the gutters of a slum, but still can't afford to take vacations in the Alps, you're part of that enormous middle class who lives life through the medium of the television, further separated from "real" life by air conditioner, by automobile, by dishwasher, microwave and ice-in-the-door refrigerator, by automatic washer and dryer, and all the other appliances and conveniences that make it possible for America to live life at second hand. I'm not sure why Americans decided that televised drama was better than the real thing, that cardboard microwave food containers were an adequate substitute for real dishes, and their contents for real food, or that cooking, dishwashing and face-to-face conversation wasn't worth the effort and time it required. Someone fed this nation a plastic crate of out-of-season tomatoes and told us it was life and we took them at their word, and we're so much the poorer for it that it's hard to know where to start to list the shortcomings." I wrote this a couple of years ago, but I have to admit it's much less amusing than I thought it would be to see the artifical construct falling apart. THE NON-ELECTRIC HOME Cleaning, 1 Cleaning, 2 Cleaning, 3 KNITTING BLOGS Extravayarnza Knitting Heretic Mind of Winter Pie Knits Persistent Illusion See Eunny Knit The Keyboard Biologist Taleweaver's Ramblings TECHnitting Wendy Knits FINISHED PROJECTS -------FINISHED IN 2006------- Peruvian Cap Tutti-Frutti Socks Shelley's Socks Carol's Socks -------FINISHED IN 2007------- Chain Link Socks Baby Surprise Jacket Valerie & Friend Baby Bonnet Rainbow Baby Socks Girls Pixie Hood Mitred Square Heart Red & White Socks Coffee Cup Pot Holder Nubbins Dishcloth Garterlac Dishcloth Suede Booties Kate's Socks Norwegian Sweet Baby Cap Half Thumbless Mittens Red Mittens for Akkol -------FINISHED IN 2008------- SELF-RELIANCE AND THE FUTURE -- Blogs and websites -- Causubon's Book Club Orlov Food Storage Made Easy From the Wilderness In the Wake Listening to Katrina Survival Topics The Modern Homestead The Oil Drum Notes from a Hillside Farm -- Mailing Lists -- 12vdc Power Living on the Land Rainwater Refrigeration Alternatives Old Ways of Living POLITICAL BLOGS and SITES The political sites have moved BOOKS I'M READING How to Grow More Vegetables, etc. Small Scale Grain Raising ARCHIVES February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 August 2008 July 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003 August 2003 July 2003 June 2003 May 2003 April 2003 March 2003 February 2003 January 2003 December 2002 November 2002 October 2002 September 2002 August 2002 July 2002 June 2002 May 2002 April 2002 March 2002 February 2002