The Distant Ocean

Hillarack Oblinton or Barillary Clintama?

You have to love stories like this one ("Similarities to Clinton land Obama in a tough spot"):

Part of Obama's problem, analysts say, is that despite how hard his campaign is working to highlight its differences - he is vowing again this week to take her on more directly - he and Clinton are simply not far apart on major issues.

"It's Wal-Mart and Kmart - they're occupying the same space," said Benjamin Ginsberg, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

That, analysts say, puts Obama in something of a box: If he and Clinton are too alike on substance and policy, Clinton's character should be his prime target - but to attack that would undermine the unifying, positive message of his candidacy.

Ok, you don't have to, but I do.  The illusion of choice within the Democratic Party is the lesser version of the illusion of choice between the Democrats and Republicans, and it's part of the reason that I find it so amusing to watch liberals agonizing over which of these pro-corporate, pro-war candidates to support.  But it's rare to see it called out so explicitly in the national press.

UPDATE: I'm shocked to discover that both of my title monikers had already been used elsewhere (damn your oily hide, Google!).  But it looks like "Barillary Oblinton" would have been completely original and daring.

I rant about more trivial crap

This is almost as minutiaesque as typos at CNN, but it's one of my pet peeves.  I'm sure we've all suffered through the tendency of news outlets to use excruciatingly bad humor to frame stories.  As a regular reader of the San Francisco Chronicle web site, I know this pain all too well; it's practically guaranteed that'll you'll find at least one atrocious pun or crippled, groan-inducing joke on their site every day, whether in the headlines, the stories, or both.  Today's bumper crop includes "Big Drag, Arnold was Joking" (about the Governator's recent claim that marijuana isn't a drug--at least when he's smoking it), "Foreign Concepts in Investing" (about international investing), and "Hoping to Spook Revelers" (about efforts to keep people from coming to the now-canceled Castro Halloween celebration).  Longer on quantity than quality, I'll grant you, but they illustrate the point.

Today I happened across an example from Forbes that was so bad that my brain actually tried to retract my eyeballs back through my skull as I read it.  It was a story titled "Goodyear Races Ahead", which opened thusly:

Consumers are speeding toward Goodyear.

On Tuesday, Goodyear Tire & Rubber reported hot-rodded third-quarter earnings, despite a 6% decrease in American tire sales.

Have they no shame?  Have they no decency?  But the suffering didn't even end there.  The story linked to yet another masterpiece of subtle wit from Forbes, "Goodyear Bounces Higher":

Maybe it won't be a great year, but 2007 is starting out as a good year for Goodyear Tire and Rubber, which is recovering more quickly than it thought it woudl [sic] from last year's labor strife.

Are you noticing a pattern here?  A pattern of evil so immense, so dark, so encompassing, that merely to name it is to risk your sanity?  You aren't?  Are you sure?  Because I am.

I have a suggestion for Forbes: don't try to rip off The Naked Gun--it just makes you look bad.

FRANK: It's the same old story. Boy finds girl, boy loses girl, girl finds boy, boy forgets girl, boy remembers girl, girl dies in a tragic blimp accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day.

JANE: Goodyear?

FRANK: No, the worst.

To redeem this post somewhat, here's an excerpt from that investment article that explains (in part) how Goodyear can have improved earnings despite a reduction in American tire sales:

U.S. multinationals are benefiting not just from faster growth overseas, but also from the falling dollar, which can make American-made goods more competitive in foreign markets and produce currency gains when companies repatriate their foreign profits.

Take McDonald's, which gets almost two-thirds of its revenue from overseas. For the quarter that ended Sept. 30, it reported that sales at restaurants open at least 13 months grew 5.1 percent in the United States, 6.5 percent in Europe and 11.4 percent in Asia/Pacific, the Middle East and Africa. Currency gains added $41.4 million or 3 cents per share to the fast-food chain's bottom line.

So although we actual human beings may not like watching our money shrivel away against other currencies, it's not a problem for multinational corporations.

Sue, Ralph, sue!

Ralph Nader is going after the Democratic Party for the bouquet of dirty tricks they deployed to prevent him from getting on state ballots in 2004:

The lawsuit also alleges that the Democratic National Committee conspired to force Nader off the ballot in several states.

"The Democratic Party is going after anyone who presents a credible challenge to their monopoly over their perceived voters," Nader said in a statement. "This lawsuit was filed to help advance a free and open electoral process for all candidates and voters. Candidate rights and voter rights nourish each other for more voices, choices, and a more open and competitive democracy."

Among other things, the lawsuit alleges that the DNC tried to bankrupt Nader's campaign by suing to keep him off the ballot in 18 states. It also suggests the DNC sent Kerry supporters to crash a Nader petition drive in Portland, Ore., in June 2004, preventing him from collecting enough signatures to get on the ballot.

The best part of this story for me is that it would seem to suggest that Nader plans to run again in 2008.  Do it, Ralph!  I can hardly wait to hear the peevish whining!

There are far more details of the Democrats' 2004 tactics here.  If you want to have some fun, describe them to your Democrat-voting, Nader-hating acquaintances and see what kinds of rationalizations they come up with.  My own experience broke roughly even between rationalizers and those who (to their credit) were unsettled by it, even if only briefly.

Hopefully the actual filing will be available at some point; I'm sure it would make interesting reading.  If I do find it I'll let you know (and if you know where to find it, please let me know).

UPDATE: Democracy Now! did an interview with Carl Mayer, a member of the legal team that filed the lawsuit (video here).  He only had time to sketch the tip of the iceberg, but even that is enough to show just how low the DNC and its cohorts were willing to go to block people like me from having the choice of voting for Nader:

We have emails from Democratic Party operatives stating, we want our people to go to this convention and then refuse to sign the petition at the convention so Nader will not get enough signatures at the convention to get on the ballot. ...

The complaint -- and this is all documented. It’s a seventy-three-page complaint, over 250 paragraphs, chapter and verse, about how, for example, the SEIU came up with the strategy of getting its members to go and write signatures in the wrong place on a petition, on Nader’s petitions, which would then invalidate the entire petition.

If there's any meaningful difference between these tactics and the Republicans' tactics, I certainly can't find it.

Their after him again

Apparently George Bush is such a nincompoop that even his homophones are wrong:

"Congress is not getting it's work done," Bush said, flanked by members of the Republican House leadership. "The House of Representatives has wasted valuable time on a constant stream of investigations, and the Senate has wasted valuable time on an endless series of failed votes to pull our troops out of Iraq."

You wonder how the CNN reporter could hear the apostrophe--but considering the speaker, maybe he just assumed it must be there.  I certainly wouldn't argue it with him.

Going past the schadenfreude of typos, though, the more obvious error is Bush's worldview.  There are always fantasies being spun about the Democrats (both by supporters and detractors), but Bush's version--in which the Democrats are diligently investigating the endless crimes of his administration and voting over and over again to pull the military out of Iraq, as opposed to spending their time rubber-stamping his agenda--is particularly amusing.  If only it were true.

UPDATE: CNN has removed the offending apostrophe from they're article, even though it was obviously interpolatable based on Bush's pea-sized brain.  I was hopeful that they'd stick to there guns, but apparently their cowards.

We can't help you if you won't help yourselves

From the Associated Press:

Evangelical Christians in the U.S. have helped convince dozens of Iranian Jews to move to Israel in recent months, offering cash incentives and claiming that Iran's tiny Jewish community is in grave danger.

The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, a charity that funnels millions of dollars in evangelical donations to Israel every year, is promising $10,000 to every Iranian Jew who comes to Israel, said the group's director, Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein. ...

Eckstein argued that calls by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for Israel's elimination, coupled with Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program, represent danger.  "Is this not similar to the situation in Nazi Germany in the late '30s, where they (Jews) also felt they could weather the storm?"

No, it's not, Iran's Jewish community replied--also evidenced by the fact that "the IFCJ initially offered $5,000 per immigrant, but doubled the amount when response was lower than expected."  Apparently Iranian Jews think that actually living in Iran gives them some kind of special insight into their own circumstances.

The Israeli Wehrmacht

Essential reading:

Nufar Yishai-Karin, a clinical psychologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, interviewed 21 Israeli soldiers and heard confessions of frequent brutal assaults against Palestinians...

The soldiers described dozens of incidents of extreme violence. One recalled an incident when a Palestinian was shot for no reason and left on the street. 'We were in a weapons carrier when this guy, around 25, passed by in the street and, just like that, for no reason - he didn't throw a stone, did nothing - bang, a bullet in the stomach, he shot him in the stomach and the guy is dying on the pavement and we keep going, apathetic. No one gave him a second look,' he said.

The soldiers developed a mentality in which they would use physical violence to deter Palestinians from abusing them. One described beating women. 'With women I have no problem. With women, one threw a clog at me and I kicked her here [pointing to the crotch], I broke everything there. She can't have children. Next time she won't throw clogs at me. When one of them [a woman] spat at me, I gave her the rifle butt in the face. She doesn't have what to spit with any more.'

I've often heard people argue that it's obscene to compare Israel to Nazi Germany.  What's obscene to me isn't the comparison itself, but the fact that it's so apt.

On the road

I'm out of town, so posting will be light for a few days.

The Golden Arches Gate Bridge

I imagine some of you are familiar with this little bridge in San Francisco:

But unless you live here you may not be aware that the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District (aka "the District") has proposed a plan to solicit corporate sponsorship for the bridge.  The original plan was to allow "discrete logos on interpretive signage and fixed equipment" (e.g. kiosks, benches, and viewing areas), but it was scaled back in response to public criticism.  The new plan cuts out the allowance for logos/signage on fixed equipment--for now.  But there will still be corporate logos on interpretive signs around the viewing areas.

The District is saying that this is just a limited project, and they're playing up how unobtrusive the corporate branding will be, but we all know how this story goes--this is only the thin end of the wedge.  I wouldn't doubt that if this plan goes through there will be advertisements on the toll booths or even the bridge itself (at least on the pedestrian areas) within ten years.  The small advertisements on San Francisco buses have grown into full bus-wrapping monstrosities that obscure the few rays of sunlight you used to see on there; these days you run the risk of getting SAD just from taking a bus downtown at high noon.  The bridge isn't likely to get that bad, but once the corporations establish a toehold it's only a matter of time before the ads start growing and spreading.

The District is taking public comments on their proposal right now.  Since the Golden Gate Bridge is an international icon, I imagine that comments from people who have visited (or may visit) San Francisco would carry as much weight as the views of locals--especially since tourism is a major component of the local economy.  So if you'd like to let them know what you think of this plan, you can send email to bridgecomments@goldengate.org.

(Title joke stolen shamelessly from a commenter on the San Francisco Chronicle web site who wrote, "Welcome to the United States of American Airlines. And over here in New York Harbor, we have the Statue of Liberty Mutual.")

A brief musical interlude

Justin Sullivan of New Model Army is one of the most talented lyricists I've heard, and also one of the most politically aware.  NMA is an English group, and they were banned from performing here for years because of their politics; apparently the US didn't appreciate it when they filmed the video for their song "51st State" in front of the American embassy in London.

I happened across a YouTube video of "You Weren't There," easily one of my favorite NMA songs, about the false sense of understanding you can get from experiencing the world only through a video screen.  This part in particular made me think of what it was like for many Americans trying to understand why 9/11 happened:

All this information swims round and round
Like a shoal of fish in a tank going nowhere
Up and down between the glass walls
You're so safe in the knowledge they're impenetrable
And you look out at the world and see nothing at all
So go back to sleep and you'll be woken
When the time comes
And you'll never know just what hit you
Or where it came from

Full lyrics here.  And here's the video; hopefully you can get a sense of the brilliance of the song, since the video really doesn't do it justice (and it becomes a group effort thanks to the crowd signing along)*.  If you like it, you might want to take a look at "Here Comes the War" or "Spirit of the Falklands" (an older song, but still very good).  NMA album suggestions available upon request for those of you who (like me) still buy CDs.

* (UPDATE: I've found a better version, so this comment no longer applies.)

Everything old is new again

October of 2000:

The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday canceled a vote on a controversial resolution that would have recognized as genocide the mass killings of Armenians in what is now Turkey approximately 80 years ago.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Illinois, said the resolution had been pulled after President Bill Clinton said he was "deeply concerned" about the language in the document. Clinton and Hastert talked by telephone on Wednesday night about the legislation.

Hastert said Clinton had warned of "possible far-reaching negative consequences for the United States" if the House voted on the legislation.

October of 2007:

"[Bush] called the speaker today and requested that the resolution not be brought to the House floor. The president and the speaker exchanged candid views on the subject, and the speaker explained the strong bipartisan support in the House for the resolution," said Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly.

You know, no matter how you try to plan for it, it seems like there's just never a good time to recognize genocide.  Consider Hastert's statement that it was necessary to cancel the vote because "we all know that the situation in the Middle East is unusually tense."

It's worth reading the first article to see just how much of what's happening now is a carbon copy of what happened in 2000.  We'll see if Pelosi ends up following the script; I can't imagine why she wouldn't at this point, since the political upside (what there was of it to begin with) is rapidly vanishing.

UPDATE: That sure didn't take long:

"Whether it will come up or not, what the action will be, remains to be seen," Pelosi, a California Democrat, told reporters on Wednesday. She previously had vowed it would get a vote of the full chamber sometime this year.

And yet another bright side

It seems like you can't go a week without the US doing something bafflingly ethical these days; first it's Congress considering the Armenian genocide resolution, and now Bush is meeting with the Dalai Lama.  If it weren't for the fact that the White House has done everything it can to scuttle the Armenian genocide resolution, you'd be tempted to think the meeting with the Dalai Lama was part of some kind of coordinated charm offensive.  Apparently it's just one uncoordinated charm offensive, though:

At a time when the administration has been widely criticized for its war policy in Iraq, publicly praising the Dalai Lama also "offers an enormously powerful statement of commitment to faith-based politics that's not militaristic or intrusive," Barnett says. "Bush needs to be seen as a man of peace."

Somehow I think the massive pile of dead bodies that Bush is standing on will prevent most of the world from reaching that conclusion.  But whatever the purpose behind it, there've been yet more beneficial side effects:

China, which called on Washington to cancel the events and the "so-called medal," responded Monday by pulling out of a meeting in Berlin this week at which its representatives were to have met with those from the USA, Great Britain, France, Russia and Germany to discuss U.N. sanctions against Iran over that nation's nuclear efforts.

So thanks to Bush's calculated photo op, the ongoing efforts by the US to isolate and demonize Iran (in order to continue laying the groundwork for an eventual attack) have been dealt a temporary setback.

This is actually pretty extraordinary: every time the US does the right thing these days, no matter what the motivations might be, something good happens.  If we can just convince politicians to keep up the cynical posturing, who knows?  Maybe world peace will spontaneously break out.

Or maybe not.  But look at it this way: every minute Bush spends trying to act like a man of peace is a minute when he can't be issuing signing statements.

Look at the bright side

Here's what Turkey's top general had to say about the Armenian genocide resolution that's making its way through Congress:

"If this resolution passed in the committee passes the House as well, our military ties with the U.S. will never be the same again," Gen. Yasar Buyukanit told the daily Milliyet newspaper.

Yes, and just imagine how much harder it would have been without Turkey's assistance for the United States to bomb Iraq for more than a decade (in the name of maintaining the no-fly zones), to attack Yugoslavia, to invade Afghanistan, and to carry out its ongoing siege of Iraq.  What an awful tragedy that would have been.

So there are two good reasons to support this resolution: because it's the right thing to do, and also for the eminently practical reason that it may damage military ties between the US and Turkey and therefore make US aggression against other nations that much more difficult to carry out.

Go, little resolution, go!

BONUS: Let's take a moment to remember those heady days of hypocrisy when at any moment you might have American-made F-16s taking off from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey on their way to protect Kurds in Iraq, or you might have American-made F-16s taking off from Incirlik on their way to kill those same Kurds--and the only difference was the nationality of the pilots:

[Former US Air Force pilot] Horn said that on more than one occasion he and his comrades received a radio message that "there was a TSM inbound"--that is, a "Turkish Special Mission" heading into Iraq. Following standard orders, the Americans turned their planes around and flew back to Turkey.

"You'd see Turkish F-14s and F-16s inbound, loaded to the gills with munitions," he said. "Then they'd come out half an hour later with their munitions expended."

When the Americans flew back into Iraqi airspace, he recalled, they would see "burning villages, lots of smoke and fire."

For outright moral turpitude it's hard to beat the Bush administration, but for really top-notch hypocrisy like this the Clinton administration was second to none.

IRONY BONUS: Look who wrote the article I quoted above.  And then look in the damn mirror!

The bang-up journalistic rigor of Thomas Ricks (or: Look in the damn mirror!)

Here's Thomas Ricks (a Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post and the author of "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq") at the World Affairs Council in August 2007, responding to a question about the media's failures in the run-up to the Iraq war (at about 51:30 in the program):

You know, I had an argument about this with Noam Chomsky, the leftist at MIT.  He and I were on a radio show together and he kept on going on about the MSM, the mainstream media, this and that.  And it suddenly dawned on me, I said, "Professor Chomsky, when you say the mainstream media, what you're really talking about is one thing: the New York Times."  And he said, "Yeah."  And I said, "I don't work for the New York Times."

(The bare words on the page don't begin to do justice to the smirking condescension of Ricks' delivery, by the way; for that you'll have to listen to the audio.)

Now, anyone who's read or listened to Chomsky at any length knows that this is a complete crock--Chomsky doesn't use the phrase "MSM", and he certainly doesn't restrict his reading to the New York Times.  So I decided to find out whether Ricks was making this up, or just mangling the facts beyond all recognition.

The radio show Ricks was referring to was "Open Source," hosted by Christopher Lydon.  Lydon conducted an hour-long interview of Noam Chomsky and to a lesser extent Ricks in August 2006.  The specific exchange Ricks is referring to goes like so (at about 30:00 in the program):

LYDON: The media didn't ask many questions either [before the Iraq war], and it's given--the last month--a pretty blind eye.

RICKS: I think that's one of the great myths of our modern times, that the media didn't ask questions.  We asked questions, we didn't get answers.  We wrote stories.  I wrote a story a month before the invasion, I asked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, "You don't know where the WMD is, do you?", and he said, "No, but I'm confident that once we cross the border the Iraqis will show us."  I wrote these stories, Walter Pincus wrote these stories.  Now, yeah, the New York Times screwed things up to a fare-thee-well, but you're painting with a pretty broad brush if you say "the media".

LYDON: Fair enough, Tom, I stand corrected, but I do--I am a New York Times refugee, and reader.  But--

RICKS: Well you should expand your reading base.

LYDON: I stand corrected.

So Ricks' version of what "Chomsky" said is not only miles off the mark, it didn't even involve Chomsky; rather, these were Christopher Lydon's views that Ricks was mischaracterizing.  Ricks had already asked Chomsky several direct questions and had had lengthy exchanges with him (and Lydon sounds nothing like Chomsky), so Ricks certainly would have known who he was talking to at any given time.

And it's not that these were the only views about the media expressed during the radio show, and so Ricks might understandably have made a simple mistake about the source.  In fact Chomsky explained in detail his own views on the media's performance before the Iraq war, in direct discussion with Ricks.  Here's a small excerpt of what Chomsky actually did say (starting at around 35:00):

CHOMSKY: I agree with Tom Ricks that the media, in a professional sense, did their job.  I suspect the Russian media did too [regarding Afghanistan in the 1980's].  They described the catastrophes, they asked who was responsible, etcetera. ...

[To Ricks] While I agree with you about the reporting--you know, there are brave, serious, honorable reporters there, and people ask questions like "Where are the WMD?", but they didn't ask the question, "Do we have the right to commit the supreme international crime?"  If anyone were to compare the treatment of the Afghan war in Pravda with the treatment of this war in the United States, I think it would be very similar.

Or in other words, not only did Chomsky not "go on about the MSM, the mainstream media, this and that," but he actually agreed with Ricks, twice--albeit with the kind of deeply illuminating analogy that is his hallmark.  And Ricks was responding to (or arguing with) Chomsky throughout this discussion, as you'll see if you listen to it for yourself.  So Ricks got a crystal clear summary of Chomsky's views of the media--yet he somehow managed to quote, attribute, and summarize them completely incorrectly.

I spared you the tail end of Ricks' quote from the World Affairs Council (at the top) for as long as I could, but now I'm afraid you must suffer as I have.  Here's what followed Ricks' reality-free swipe at Chomsky:

I stand by my coverage.  Are there stories I wish I'd written differently?  Yeah.  Are there stories I wish I'd written more than once?  Yeah.  But if you go back and read the Washington Post, we did a pretty bang-up job during the run-up to the war.  And my answer to the American people is, don't blame the media--look in the damn mirror.  The information was available.  Don't blame it on the media.

Yes, given the above demonstration of his journalistic rigor, I'm sure that Ricks did (and continues to do) a bang-up job of giving the public all the accurate and complete reporting they need to make informed decisions, and so we should all stop blaming Thomas Ricks.  The American people thought there were WMDs Iraq?  LOOK IN THE DAMN MIRROR.  The American people thought Iraq was in cahoots with al Qaeda?  LOOK IN THE DAMN MIRROR.  The American people expected to be crushed under the anvil of Iraq's awesome power unless Bush attacked Iraq first?  LOOK IN THE DAMN MIRROR!  It's not Thomas Ricks' fault that the American people can't keep the facts straight!  Thomas Ricks reported it all and then let the American people decide!  The American people got it wrong?  STOP BLAMING THOMAS RICKS!  MIRROR!  MIRROR!  LOOK IN THE DAMN MIRROR!  GEHAAFAFERRRRRAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!

Whoa, sorry.  Got carried away there for a second.

(For some examples of Thomas Ricks' bang-up job of giving the American people all the information on Iraq, see this Nexis-flexing article by Jonathan Schwarz.)

I'd highly recommend that you take an hour to listen to the entire Open Source radio interview with Chomsky (and Ricks).  Not only is it filled with useful information, it's also worth hearing for yourself the contrast between the shallow, mainstream pomposity of Ricks' views and the humility and depth of knowledge that Chomsky displays in dismantling them.  Ricks is badly outclassed, and he comes out of it looking like a second-rate Thomas Friedman--which is, I suspect, a large part of the reason that his mind decided to rearrange this embarrassing bit of history to make "the leftist at MIT" look worse and him look better.

Inside the mind of Alexander Cockburn

I've written before about Alexander Cockburn's feverish hooting and hollering at anything connected to global warming.  Given that background, it was an absolute certainty that the recent awarding of the Nobel peace prize to the IPCC and Al Gore would be irresistible to him--and sure enough, he pounced like a dog on a ham bone.  I found this paragraph particularly interesting:

Anyone who has studied the antics of [Gore's] co-winner of the peace prize, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will know that the IPCC's prime role every three years has been to ignore the work--some of it respectable scientific research--of its expert panels and issue entirely mendacious and to issue alarmist [sic] press releases designed to win headlines in the New York Times.

If you've read CounterPunch for as long as I have, you know that they're not too careful about editing their articles; there's a continual stream of typos, botched formatting, and superfluous words or phrases.  In this case we've got the latter: note the "issue entirely mendacious [press releases]" followed immediately by "issue alarmist press releases".  Oops!  So Cockburn apparently wrote one phrase and then changed it, but forgot to delete the other one.  But which one did he actually want to leave in the final article?  This is a deeply perplexing question which requires our careful consideration.  Here are the possible scenarios:

1) Cockburn might have written "entirely mendacious" and then thought, "No, that's going way too far--I need to be more judicious in my phrasing and fair in my characterizations."  And now he's filled with embarrassment and horror to see his original draft in published form on the web site.  Or,

2) Maybe he wrote "alarmist" and then thought, "No, no, no, that will never do--it's so pedestrian, and it's not nearly as snide and overstated as it needs to be."  So he puffed it up with a 25-cent insult phrase (which may or may not have started out as the bare word "mendacious" and then metastasized into "entirely mendacious" just moments later).

So which one is it?  Let's see if the phrases he chose elsewhere in the article give us any subtle clues to help us penetrate this conundrum: "hucksters and falsifiers", agitprop", "bogus science", "toxic alarmism", "cooked statistics", "demagoguery"...yes, I'm getting the distinct feeling that he really did mean to write "entirely mendacious".  In fact I'd say the only question is what would have possessed him to type something as mild as "alarmist" in the first place--even if it only survived for a few seconds before being replaced by a suitably hyperbolic phrase.

In any case, if you set aside the standard issue global warming tantrum, Cockburn's reminders of Gore's history are well worth reading--especially as liberal veneration for Gore is reaching such a breathless crescendo.

Putting stories to the words

All this week the "Armenian genocide" has been in the news--but only as a phrase, with no substance or meaningful explanation.  Robert Fisk remedies that; see also this article of his, and this one.

One of the most galling parts of the drama this week has been sensible liberals saying, sure, we should probably recognize the Armenian genocide sometime--but must it be right now, when we're relying so much on Turkey's assistance?  I wish they would read these articles, and I only hope that if they did they'd have the humanity to set aside their faux-sophisticate realist posing and agree that yes, it must be right now.

And the 2007 Nobel peace prize goes to...

...the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change!  Yeehah!  Let's all give them a big hand!  Way to go, Rajendra Pachauri!

If you hadn't heard that yet, it's because the US media is practically ignoring the fact that the 2007 peace prize was awarded jointly to the IPCC and Al Gore.  I'm happy to see that the Nobel Foundation included the IPCC, since it means that this year's award won't be a complete debacle a la 1973.  If that seems harsh, please see what I've written (and what George Monbiot has said) regarding Gore's shameful record on global warming back when he was actually in a position of power and could have done something concrete about it.

UPDATE: In an interview in June 2006 with Charlie Rose, Gore himself said that what the Bush administration is doing about global warming is "worse than nothing" because "they are actively throwing monkey wrenches in every international negotiation" (at about 19:30 in the video).  So he apparently accepts the same logic that George Monbiot and I are using in calling out his sorry record with the Clinton administration.

CommonDreams: spammers as well as censors

If you've been reading here for a while you know that CommonDreams engages in some of the most ferocious censorship I've ever encountered, deleting comments (and commenters) with wild abandon.  I and others have found ourselves disappeared from their site without warning or explanation.

Now it turns out that they're spammers as well.  And not only that, but they have the audacity to spam the same people they've removed from their site.  And in the spam in question, they're actually putting out the begging bowl to ask for donations--I suppose they're expecting those of us they've nuked to send them a check to help defray the costs of excommunicating us?

Here are some of the more boggleworthy highlights:

• "For 10 years, CommonDreams.org has been committed to this simple goal: To help build community among the millions of progressive Americans by providing a space to share news and ideas."
• "Technology now makes it much easier to stand up to the right-wing corporate interests that are so intent on controlling everything from what we read to what we say."
• "We don't want to have to answer to anyone except you."

Seriously, I'm starting to think that CommonDreams is actually run by a Dadaist performance art troupe whose onoing magnum opus is an attempt to push the bounds of arrogance and hypocrisy beyond all previously-known limits.  With evident success.  I can't imagine what they could do for an encore at this point, but I know better than to doubt them.

Another victim sent me his response to their spam, which he began by recounting his own experience with them:

You have blocked my email address, my log-in codes, and even my IP address from being able to create new log-in codes. Not only that, you have purged all messages I posted to message boards dating back to when I first joined, and even gone so far as to purge nearly all of the messages from other posters that referred to mine, like your own Memory Hole. When I requested information on why my posts were being removed, I was ignored. When other posters wrote in requesting information on why my posts were being removed, they, too, were ignored. When somebody completely unknown to me later reproduced portions of one of my deleted posts, his post was removed within two hours, as were a few others that commented upon it, and I later determined his log-in codes were blocked. My own wife can no longer post for no reason than having asked, in the only post she ever made to Common Dreams, if anyone knew what happened to the thread or had saved a copy of the original post.

Yes, thank goodness there's a progressive organization out there that's so selflessly committed to building community, that stands up to those who are intent on controlling everything from what we read to what we say, and which doesn't answer to anyone except us.

Bush-Turkey relationship, explained

As many of us may have noticed, there is much talk of the Bush-Turkey relationship over the past few days, because of the Armenian genocide resolution which is now going in Congress.  If you have been reading about this topic of knowledge you may have seen many complicated terms such as Ottoman, PKK, bilateral, Incirlik, Kurd, and Gul.  These unusual terms are only parts of many bigger ideas involved which are confusing to us.  I will try to explain with simpler words so that this problem may be understood better.

First, we must look at history.  For much time, the relationship of Bush and Turkey has been very good:

There was only happiness, reflected in goofy open-mouthed grins and congenial hand of Bush on back of Turkey.  This indicates good bilateral relations.

But now, possible recognition of the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians makes Turkey mad.  Turkey is embarrassed and ashamed and he does not want this bad part of his past mentioned for all to hear.  CNN explains very well the anger of Turkey in this article they have published about this new problem in the relationship of Bush and Turkey.  Here are parts of the article which I have clarified to make many facts easier to understand:

[Turkey] warned Thursday that consequences "won't be pleasant" if the U.S. House of Representatives approves calling the killings of Armenians in Turkey during World War I "genocide." ...

[Turkey] also said the resolution's passage would be a "very injurious move to the psyche of [Turkey]." ...

"Yesterday some in Congress wanted to play hardball," said [Turkey]. "I can assure you Turkey knows how to play hardball."

These stern words show the deep unhappiness of Turkey.  Turkey is afraid his "psyche" or "mind" will be hurt by the bad words of Congress against him.  This fear has made him very mad at his old friend Bush, and so he will "play hardball" on him.  Pictures are worth many more words than just words on their own, so here is what Turkey plans now for Bush:

This indicates bad bilateral relations.

The remarkably elastic concept of genocide

George Bush, explaining why the Armenian genocide--the event that actually led to the coining of the term "genocide" by Raphael Lemkin--should not be designated as such by Congress:

On another issue before Congress, I urge members to oppose the Armenian genocide resolution now being considered by the House Foreign Affairs Committee. We all deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people that began in 1915. This resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings, and its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in NATO and in the global war on terror.

George Bush, explaining why what's happening in Darfur must be termed genocide:

[M]y nation has labeled what's taking place in Darfur as genocide, and when we find genocide it's time to do something about it. ...

7,000 troops is not enough, if you believe what's taking place on the ground is genocide. Maybe some don't think it's genocide, but if you've been raped, you think it's -- your human rights have been violated. If you're mercilessly killed by roaming bands, you know it's genocide.

Bush then added, "Genocide genocide genocide genocide.  Oh, and by the way, genocide."

You know, it'd be more direct if he'd just wear a T-shirt that said "I AM A CYNICAL, POSTURING, HYPOCRITICAL BASTARD."  At least then the press might report on it (or they'd have a hard time cropping it out of their photos, anyway).

The only real question is why the Bush administration has chosen to ramp up the rhetoric on Darfur now, and the only certainty is that it has absolutely nothing to do with "human rights."  There's a likely explanation which I'm sure will leave you reeling with disbelief.

(More on the elastic concept of genocide here, featuring cynical posturing hypocritical bastarditude by Bill Clinton that makes Bush's look like a pale imitation.)

UPDATE: Via Democracy Now!, here's an excerpt of a letter Bush wrote in February of 2000 to the Armenian National Committee:

The Armenians were subjected to a genocidal campaign that defies comprehension and commands all decent people to remember and acknowledge the facts and lessons of an awful crime in a century of bloody crimes against humanity. If elected President, I would ensure that our nation properly recognizes the tragic suffering of the Armenian people.

It's tempting to conclude that he's broken this promise, but give him credit for misleading the ANC with Clintonian deftness: "the tragic suffering of the Armenian people" is exactly the phrase he used yesterday.  If they thought he was going to use the phrase "genocidal campaign" again after he was elected, that's their own misunderstanding.

Iranians up to their old tricks again

Undeterred by the ease with which sophisticated Western audiences have seen through their previous efforts, Iranian intelligence continues to try to bolster the credibility of their "spy squirrels" story by planting similar items in the US media.  The latest example:

No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying. Some federally funded teams are even growing live insects with computer chips in them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their bodies and controlling their flight muscles remotely.

The robobugs could follow suspects, guide missiles to targets or navigate the crannies of collapsed buildings to find survivors. ...

The Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems project aims to create literal shutterbugs -- camera-toting insects whose nerves have grown into their internal silicon chip so that wranglers can control their activities. DARPA researchers are also raising cyborg beetles with power for various instruments to be generated by their muscles.

"Mounting spyware on their bodies"?  Yeah, we get it--just like the squirrels.  Look, Iran, just give it up; here in the civilized Western world we stop believing in fairy tales once we reach adulthood.