Why, some of my best friends are

According to the most recent poll I've seen, a clear majority of Americans - 55% - believe that "if gays are allowed to marry, the institution of marriage will be degraded." And about half favor a constitutional amendment defining marriage as one man and one woman.

At the same time, however, most Americans "consider themselves tolerant of gays," says the Los Angeles Times poll.

That's a pattern that seems reflected in the debates about the issue that have occurred around the country. In Georgia, for example, a bill to have an amendment to the state constitution barring gay marriage put on the state ballot was adopted on March 31 by just two votes over the 2/3 required, and that only after three days of intense lobbying by both proponents and opponents after an earlier attempt failed.

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, it took three constitutional conventions to produce a "compromise" proposal that bans same-sex marriages but specifically allows for same-sex "civil unions," which for all practical purposes would, within the state, be identical except for the name. The Christian Science Monitor notes that by the proposal,

this legislature showed that, even among one of the most liberal collection of lawmakers in the country, gay marriage is politically infeasible.

Yet in legalizing civil unions, an institution virtually identical with marriage except in name, the legislature here has gone further in securing rights for gay couples than could have been imagined six months ago, when the state had not adopted even rudimentary spousal legal rights.

This, the article suggests, "shows a state, if not a nation, locked in ambivalence."

It would seem that way at first glance, certainly. For example, while that LA Times poll says 55% think same-sex marriage degrades the institution, 41% insist it doesn't. And while half in the LA Times poll support an amendment to the US constitution banning same-sex marriages, a CBS-New York Times poll from last month said that only 38% think the issue is important enough to merit such an amendment. The two results together would seem to say that while many would support an amendment if it passed, only a minority think it matters enough to do anything about it.

The real question is, however, are we seeing ambivalence or the throes of change, change that many see coming (roughly 60% in the LA Times poll felt that eventual legal recognition of same-sex marriage was "inevitable") and some are trying to inhibit by the harsh, not-easily-changed means of writing discrimination into state and federal constitutions, aided and abetted by political mushiness and subtle bigotry.

The mushiness was clearly seen in Massachusetts. Firm opponents of any amendment banning same-sex marriages numbered about 75, with probably about the same number, maybe somewhat fewer, proponents of an absolute, no recourse ban. That looks like a stalemate, but in fact the opponents should have had the upper hand, since a genuine standoff means no amendment, which is what opponents wanted.

That's where the mushy "moderates," the muddled "middle," came in. Whining that they had to pass something because it would "look bad" if they didn't, grousing that they couldn't face accusations of "wasting time," and apparently having no moral convictions against discrimination, they left partisans on both sides concerned that if they didn't "compromise" that the no-moral-compass-and-proud-of-it caucus would go with the other side. The result was the please-none legislation that emerged.

The proposal does provide for, if you will, a "separate but equal" legalized union for gays and lesbians. However, despite some claims, it is not the "same except for the name." For one thing, while it provides the same rights and guarantees under state law, it does not apply to federal law. There, same-sex couples still have neither rights nor privileges not protections. Then there is the matter of reciprocity, the general principle that privileges granted in one state will be respected by another. (That's the reason, for example, why you don't have to have a separate license for every state you drive through.) No legal principle requires one state to respect the marriage laws of another, but generally, they do. For example, my wife and I were married in Indiana. We now live in Massachusetts. We did not have to get remarried on arriving here; our marriage in Indiana was accepted automatically by our new home state. But if the reverse happened to a same-sex couple who formed a "civil union" here, upon arriving in Indiana their union would vanish in a puff of legal smoke.

As is most often the case and as noted by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in the decision that started all this renewed debate, separate but equal may be the former but it is not the latter. And those who prefer enshrining bigotry to "looking bad" are perhaps more guilty than the outright bigots who at least can claim to taking a stand, grossly wrong though it may be.

And bigotry does indeed figure in this. The overt bigots are the driving force behind the effort to actively, legally, and overtly discriminate in law, but it is the subtle bigotry, the unconsidered bigotry of those who would call - and even think - themselves tolerant but say otherwise with their actions, that gives them the numbers to move their primitiveness into action.

After all, what does it mean when about 60% of poll respondents say that "homosexual relationships are 'against God's will,'" while at the same time, by the same percentage, insist that they are "sympathetic to the gay community?" What does it mean when this can be taken seriously:

Representative Randal Mangham, a Decatur [GA] Democrat who had previously abstained from voting, said he changed his mind because he felt uncomfortable explaining the issue to his children. "I don't appreciate having to explain to my 9-year-old why two big husky guys are kissing," Mr. Mangham said.

And just why in hell would he have to "explain" it? Did the boy ask? Why? Did he ask about a man and a woman kissing? If not, doesn't that say something about the attitudes the boy has already been taught? And if yes, why couldn't Mangham give the same answer regarding the men? Why couldn't he just shrug and say "I guess they like each other?" What does his admitted "discomfort" tell us about his own attitudes?

(This is without even touching the question of what this has to do with an amendment banning same-sex marriages. Or is Mangham thinking that banning marriage is the same as banning gays and lesbians, period? Perhaps he should move to Tennessee.)

Why did Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney use the occasion of the passage of the quantitatively proposal to say he wanted the Supreme Judicial Court to stay its order allowing for same-sex marriages, even though this was just the first step of a process that won't be completed before November 2006 at the earliest, while insisting he was against discrimination? (State Attorney General Tom Reilly has declined to ask for the stay, which the Court was unlikely to issue in any event. The fact that Romney undoubtedly knew that says volumes about whether he was acting on principle or politics.)

This is perhaps the bottom line, from the Georgia legislature's debate:

During two hours of impassioned speeches, Karla Drenner, an Avondale Estates Democrat and the Legislature's only openly gay member, provided one of the session's more dramatic moments when she stood up and scolded those who said they planned to support the resolution but asked her not to be offended by their votes. "For those of you who say it is not about me," she said, "it is about me and thousands of others just like me and about my family and their families."

Exactly. Of course it's about her. In some sense, it's about all of us because it's about discrimination. But particularly, it's about her. It's about an old college friend. A couple of old political colleagues. My sister-in-law. It's about seeing people as "them."

Those who talk about second-class "civil unions," who insist they are "tolerant" of people whose relationships are "against God's will," who support writing discrimination into our most basic laws while telling colleagues "it's not about you," are people who are willing to tolerate - and I mean that in the limited sense - gays and lesbians so long as they can continue to define them as "other." As "alien." As "not us."

We seem to be at a point where grudgingly, hesitatingly, with unsure step and fearful glances in every direction, we are moving toward acceptance of gays and lesbians as people, that is, as defined by their individuality rather than their category. It will be a long time coming - we have been dealing with similar questions about race and gender for decades longer (I mean in an open social-debate way) and still neither non-whites nor women are fully accepted. But at least in those cases it's no longer acceptable - I guess I should say as acceptable as it once was - to be openly hostile, openly bigoted, and those that are often try to pass it off as "jokes" to conceal - or in some cases, to refuse to admit to themselves - their real meaning. So yes, it will be a long time coming.

But I swear it will come.

Footnote for what it's worth: Recently at a school program I was doing for a group of first- and second-graders, before I began one of the older boys ran up to me with a big grin and said "Guess what? There's a boy in my class and he loves another boy!" A little girl classmate of his was trying to push him away from me, telling him "That's not true!" and "That's not fair!"

I stopped her, looked directly at him, and said "So what?"

His grin faded to a forced smile, he shrugged, and turned away without a word.

I'm not sure what reaction he desired or expected, but it's clear that what he was not prepared for was indifference. One thing we should remember is that our usual reaction of trying to defend the accused - because that's what they appear to be - by labeling the accusation as untrue or unfair actually endorses the underlying claim that it's something shameful. We need to be aware of our own subtle bigotries - or at least the lazy bigotries of accepting, even tacitly, the bigots' terms of argument.

Jeopardy! for Friday, April 9

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is Annie?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Theater for $1200

When a revival of this musical toured the United States in 1992, Irene Cara played Mary Magdalene.

Everything is connected to everything else

Brazil, like many nations, needs foreign capital in order to develop.

Connection: So it gets funding from the World Bank.

Connection: The World Bank is more interested in satisfying the desires of its investors than in actually aiding the countries that are its clients, so...

Connection: ...it presses Brazil, as it has pressed many other nations, to adopt economic policies that promote agriculture for export rather than for local consumption, the better to service it's foreign debt.

Connection: This results in rising exports of beef and soya...

Connection: ...which require increasing amounts of cleared land...

Connection: ...which leads to massive deforestation on a scale that not only threatens thousands of plant and animal species unique to the Amazon rainforest but...

Connection: ...could, scientists fear, affect global climate. Thus, the BBC for April 8 says that

[e]nvironmental groups are calling for urgent action to slow deforestation in Brazil's Amazon jungle.

About 9,170 square miles (23,750 sq km) of forest were lost in 2003, just up from 8,983 square miles (23,266 sq km) in 2002, the Brazilian government says.

The scale is not as high as in the mid-1990s, but it confirms the world's largest forest is disappearing rapidly.

Brazil's environment minister, Marina da Silva, said that the growth rate of deforestation had been halted but that "23,000 (square kilometers of forest lost last year) is still a very worrying number." Especially when we remember that stopping the growth rate of deforestation is hardly the same as stopping deforestation. If from now on 23,000 sq km were lost each year, the growth rate of deforestation would be zero. But the forest would keep right on disappearing.

Like all good physicists, I think of processes as being reversible. The process we have seen here is that economic troubles for Brazil lead to deforestation and possible effects on climate to the detriment of all. Reversing that says the key to preventing deforestation and its possible climatic impact is economic justice for the people of Brazil.

It took environmentalists a long time to figure it out, but now they are probably more aware of it than others: Economic justice and environmental quality are soulmates.

Just in case you missed it

Inglewood, California, is a working-class community of 112,000, with blacks and Latinos in about equal numbers.

Lat year, Wal-Mart, the biggest retail outfit in the country (and possibly the scummiest), set it's corporate eyes on a 60-acre parcel of concrete-covered land there with the intention to build a "superstore" plus a collection of chain shops and restaurants. But the Inglewood City Council blocked the proposal, citing environmental, traffic, labor, public safety and economic concerns.

But Wally World was not going to give up. It hired people to gather signatures on a petition (paying them more than it pays its average clerk) in order to put the question directly to voters as a ballot initiative then, hired a PR firm and ponied up over $1 million to push for it.

The initiative route was unusual enough, but the initiative itself was just nuts.

The proposal would essentially exempt Wal-Mart from all of Inglewood's planning, zoning and environmental regulations, creating a city-within-a-city subject only to its own rules.

It also would require a 2/3 vote to alter any of the terms even though the initiative itself could pass by a simple majority.

Despite the support of the mayor and despite outspending opponents by more than 5-1, when election day came this past Tuesday, Wal-Mart lost. Lost convincingly: better then 60-40. Apparently not everyone - or even a majority of a working class city - is willing to undermine their town's long-term economic base in order to save a buck on a pack of underwear.

Unintentional Humor Dept.: Peter Kanelos, the Southern California coordinator for Wal-Mart's community affairs division, at one point claimed that opponents of the measure, including organized labor, church groups, community organizations, the City Council, and the town's representatives in state government, "are not representative of the community" and accused labor of "attempting to bully Wal-Mart and its customers."

Falling back

Several commentators, in analyzing Can'tbe Right's performance (the word is chosen deliberately) before the 9/11 Commission, made note of the fact that she "stuck to the script" of an engaged, concerned Bush. But actually she did more than that, and in that extra can be seen the outline version of the Bush team's latest fallback line of defense.

A new line was obviously necessary. The trashing of Richard Clarke had gained no traction: The media weren't playing along like they had in the past, as recently as with Paul O'Neill, in good part because the experienced in-fighter Clarke was adept at self-defense and counter-punch. Blaming the Clinton administration, a standard riff, was also out of tune because its defenders could point to specifics, including military retaliations, preventing an attack on Los Angeles International Airport in 1999, and - perhaps most importantly - specific warnings to the incoming Bush team of their concerns about al-Qaeda. (Note that this has nothing to do with approving or disapproving anything the Clinton people did or didn't do. This is about the political position the Bushites were in.) And there was too much information out there about pre-9/11 concerns expressed by a variety of sources to continue to go with the "nobody had any idea" defense.

So instead, Condi stuck to the script about Bush and insisted anew that nothing had been done prior to the WTC attacks because, well, no one told them about any domestic threats. All the info the FBI had about suspected terrorists in the US, the flying lessons some of them were taking (which did not involve learning how to take off or land), all the rest of the bits and pieces, somehow none of that made its way up the ladder to the exalted beings such as herself dwelling at the top of the heap.

Leave aside the fact that this is an outrageous lie that in a just world would have her in the dock for perjury and consider instead its overarching theme. It's a classic defense: Blame "the structure."

In this view, "everyone must share the blame" - in fact, blame is spread so widely that it can't actually be placed anywhere at all. Now Richard Clarke is no longer a money-grubbing, partisan, disgruntled ex-employee but a devoted civil servant and blame-sharer. Even the Clinton administration isn't really to blame, oh no, well, yes it is but not really more than anyone else because well, it's not really anyone's fault, you know. If only we had known.

In fact, this old-time defense was clearly developing before Condi took the stand. Bush himself had done it clumsily more than once.

Washington (AP, April 5) - President Bush said Monday he will tell the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks that his administration lacked the information needed to prevent the terrorists from striking. ...

"Let me just be very clear about this," he said. "Had we had the information that was necessary to stop an attack, I'd have stopped the attack. ... If we'd have known that the enemy was going to fly airplanes into our buildings, we would have done everything in our power to stop it."

(There is actually a subtle aspect to this in that it serves to defend his administration against its failures by focusing on a very narrow point, that of not knowing the exact date and method of attack, but overall it serves the "we didn't know, we couldn't have known" meme.) But the point was also made more subtly by others. For example, on March 30, the Christian Science Monitor reported that

the issue may not be so much one of the people involved as the structure in place to deal with national security and specifically the terrorism threat, some experts say. ...

"If Henry Kissinger had been the national security adviser in July of 2001, he would have been in the same position as Rice," says [Raymond] Tanter[, a former NSC official in the Reagan administration]. "The problem was and in some ways continues to be international and domestic coordination. Even Kissinger, as strong as he was, had no authority to knock around somebody like [Attorney General] John Mitchell."

Tanter says the Clinton administration was successful in creating the foreign-domestic coordination "ad hoc," as seen in the successful derailing of a planned terrorist attack on Los Angeles International Airport in late 1999.

But he says the noninstitutionalized way in which that coordination was organized meant it was not automatically carried over into the new administration.

So even though it was done, it wasn't done. So nothing to do with Rice you see, or Bush for that matter. They were right there on terrorism. The problem is "the structure," aka the "culture of the bureaucracy."

This is, again, a classic defense. It has appeared in various guises at various times but the general thrust remains the same. In fact, Rice's testimony reminded me enough of something else that I dug through some old writings and found something I had written back on January 5, 1987 about Contragate.

And after a few committee hearings, some dust-gathering reports, several promises to "consult more closely with Congress," and a very intense, serious, and scholarly discussion of the organizational structure (but not the policies) of the NSC, we can smugly pat ourselves on the back in that way only Americans can, declare confidently "the system works!" and pretty much (and very gratefully) drop the whole unpleasant business. No structural changes get made, no basic foreign or military policy assumptions get challenged, and, most importantly, no status gets un-quoed.

Just like Reagan and Daddy did then, Junior is now setting up the "structure," in this case that of the intelligence services, to take the fall, diverting the flow of questions to something so amorphous as to be vaporous, avoiding dealing not only with the whats of what they did, but the whys, whys that should start by asking why they were so obsessed with Iraq that immediately in the wake of 9/11 that was their first thought.
(And no, asking if Iraq was involved was not "a reasonable question." There'd been no hint of Iraqi operations aimed at the US since at least 1993 but a string of al-Qaeda incidents. And if the question was "reasonable" because of our "hostile relations" with Iraq, what about Libya? Or Iran? Why weren't they also targets of inquiry? Why only Iraq?)

And then those whys should go beyond to questions about the whys of our policies, our relations with the rest of the world, particularly in this case the Muslim world. The 9/11 Commission's charge is to see if anything could have been done to prevent 9/11 and to recommend steps to prevent a recurrence. The Commission, however, is going to be looking at intelligence-gathering, "bureaucratic impediments to interagency information-sharing," "structures for rapid-response decision-making," and other such delights of the DC crowd. It will not be looking at the policies we as a nation have pursued, the governments we have supported, the actions we have taken ourselves or supported in others, that have helped to develop the climate and conditions in which such as al-Qaeda can flourish.

Which makes it all the more important that we do.

Footnote: From the Center for American Progress we learn that the media were not overly impressed with Rice.

Knight-Ridder ... headlined, "President Learned of a Plot, Aide Says".... [T]he Chicago Sun-Times headline says, "Rice's Answers Don't Resolve Questions," while the Dallas Morning News notes the puzzling testimony in its headline, "Rice: Terrorism Neither Ignored Nor At Top of Agenda." And while the policy debate continues, few can argue with the LA Times headline: "Rice Leaves Image of Detached Leaders."

It seems the Bush-Rove magic really is gone. Even pack journalism can have its good points.

Update April 10: Apparently I'm not the only one who feels this way. This is from an AP news analysis, April 8:

Washington - Condoleezza Rice offered little new information about the days leading up to Sept. 11, and instead determinedly shifted blame from the White House to a two-decade failure in the way U.S. intelligence fought terrorism.

From her opening statement to the occasional clashes with members during three hours of testimony Thursday, President Bush's national security adviser stuck closely to her message that blame for America's worst terror attack rested with administrations dating to Ronald Reagan.

GMTA.

So much for a "new beginning"

The BBC for April 6 tells us that

Haitian police have arrested the former interior minister of exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. ...

Mr Privert is accused of helping coordinate the killing of political opponents in Saint Marc - around 96km (60 miles) north of the capital Port-au-Prince - as violence raged in the run-up to Mr Aristide's fall. ...

Mr Privet's arrest comes days after Haiti's new government announced it would block dozens of former Aristide officials from leaving the country - including former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune.

The accusation, that is, relates to a crime supposedly committed during the slow-motion coup that overthrew Aristide. If the accusation is true, Privert clearly deserves punishment.

But it will be interesting to see if any of Gerard Latortue's "freedom fighters" are similarly charged for their atrocities.

Update: On Tuesday, I mentioned Colin Powell's one-day trip to Haiti, where he called for the "new beginning" of the title. However, I missed this, as reported in that day's New York Times:

Port-au-Prince, Haiti, April 5 - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said during a visit here on Monday that American judicial authorities were looking into prosecuting the former Haitian president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, on corruption charges.

"There are inquiries being made by our judicial authorities in the U.S. to see if there is any evidence of wrongdoing on his part," Mr. Powell said....

This "new beginning" is sounding more and more like the old imperialism.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is wept?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Theater for $400

"Little Girls" and "You Won't Be an Orphan for Long" are songs from this ever-popular musical.

Sometimes an item is "just because"

Like this one.

Marseille, France (Reuters, April 8) - A plane raised from the Mediterranean 60 years after it crashed, killing author Antoine de Saint-Exupery, has been identified and will be put on display in southern France, officials said on Wednesday.

Saint-Exupery, whose fable "The Little Prince" is considered a classic of flight, love and loneliness, disappeared on July 31, 1944, during a wartime aerial reconnaissance mission.

"The wreck of the plane that was raised last autumn near the Riou island has been identified as the (Lockheed Lightning) P-38 on which Saint-Exupery made his last voyage," said Jean-Claude Gaudin, mayor of southern Marseille. ...

A French diver discovered the remains of the airplane off the coast of Marseille four years ago, after a fisherman hauled up a bracelet belonging to the author and aviator in 1998.

It was raised from 260 feet last October and, though analysis showed the plane was Saint-Exupery's, it remains unclear why it crashed. The author's body has never been recovered.

Saint-Exupery, born in 1900 to an aristocratic French family, tried several times to study liberal arts before deciding to become a pilot.

As an adult, his passion for flying inspired "Vol de Nuit" ("Night Flight") and in 1943 "The Little Prince," an all-time bestseller about a pilot downed in the Sahara who meets a mysterious prince with whom he makes an interplanetary journey.

Makes me want to re-read it.

Footnote to the footnote to the footnote

New Zealand has said it will withdraw the country's small contingent of 60 military engineers from Iraq in September, while leaving open the possibility of finding other ways "of helping Iraq to return to full sovereignty."

Meanwhile, the leader of the Labor Party in Australia, Mark Latham, who hopes his party will replace the conservative coalition of John Howard in elections late this year, has pledged in that event to end Australia's involvement in Iraq by Christmas.

"If Labor had been in government in Australia we wouldn't have had troops in Iraq in the first place," he said.

Thanks to Counterspin for the link.

Footnote to the footnote

Something that should make those numbers drop still more. From the Observer (UK) for April 4:

President George Bush first asked Tony Blair to support the removal of Saddam Hussein from power at a private White House dinner nine days after the terror attacks of 11 September, 2001.

According to Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to Washington, who was at the dinner when Blair became the first foreign leader to visit America after 11 September, Blair told Bush he should not get distracted from the war on terror's initial goal - dealing with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Bush, claims Meyer, replied by saying: 'I agree with you, Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.' Regime change was already US policy.

It was clear, Meyer says, 'that when we did come back to Iraq it wouldn't be to discuss smarter sanctions'.

The charge is from a lengthy article in the May issue of Vanity Fair, which, the paper says, does much to corroborate Richard Clarke's testimony that Bush was "obsessed" with Iraq.

In late July, 2002, Blair's foreign policy adviser was in Washington meeting with Shrub and national security adviser Can'tbe Right.

Vanity Fair quotes a senior American official from Vice-President Dick Cheney's office who says he read the transcript of a telephone call between Blair and Bush a few days later.

'The way it read was that, come what may, Saddam was going to go; they said they were going forward, they were going to take out the regime, and they were doing the right thing. Blair did not need any convincing. There was no, "Come on, Tony, we've got to get you on board". I remember reading it and then thinking, "OK, now I know what we're going to be doing for the next year".'

Before the call, this official says, he had the impression that the probability of invasion was high, but still below 100 per cent. Afterwards, he says, 'it was a done deal'.

All the stuff about "no decision," "getting the inspectors in," "we gave him every chance," and all the rest of it - just lies. All of it.

I mean, we already knew that - but it's always nice to have corroboration.

Sidebar: The Vanity Fair article also makes use of the contemporaneous diaries of Blair's former international development secretary, Clare Short, which make it clear that while Bush and company were lying to us about the intent to attack Iraq, Blair was lying to his own cabinet.

They do say you can judge someone by the company they keep.

Footnote to the preceding

A new poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press indicates that the public's opinion of Bush's handling of Iraq has slipped to a new low - and so has his overall job rating. Just 40% approve of how the Bush team is dealing in Iraq, down from 60% in mid-January. Moreover, by a sizable margin, the public

believes the administration does not have a plan to bring the conflict to a successful conclusion. The number of Americans calling for the troops to come home is rising, with just a bare majority now favoring keeping US troops in the region

until there is a stable government. That figure is down from 63% three months ago.

Meanwhile, Shrub's overall positive-negative approval rating is 43%-47%, the lowest of his presidency. He got the approval of 56% in the mid-January poll.

Thoughts on recent developments

It's said that the actual level of support for Moqtada Sadr, who's described as "radical cleric Moqtada Sadr" so often that there must be people think the adjectives are actually part of his name, is small, perhaps just 600 hardcore followers out of the tens of millions of Iraqis. It's also been noted that his religious status is low, giving him accordingly less influence than more senior - and moderate - Shiite leaders. Both are very likely true.

And both are entirely irrelevant.

The first thing that is relevant and important about Sadr is that his supporters are ready and willing to take up arms against targets that he indicates. It's his al-Mahdi ("the Messenger") Army, a militia that numbers from perhaps 3,000 to as many as 10,000 that's responsible for the intensified violence directed against occupation forces (and not just American ones) in central and southern Iraq.

Sadr's followers are disaffected, angry, driven, and they seem eager to feel the sense of power and control that violence can bring. They respond readily to his declarations that "America has shown its evil intentions and the proud Iraqi people cannot accept it." He tells them they "must defend their rights by any means they see fit" and they reply by circulating calls to "terrorize the enemy."

Sheik Abu Mahdi al-Rubaie, a 35-year-old al-Sadr follower at the mosque, warned that any U.S. move against al-Sadr would be "a very dangerous thing."

"They will pay a heavy price. ... We are ready to lay down our lives for al-Sayed," he said, using the Arabic word for "master" to refer to al-Sadr.

What I'm saying, in short, is that they are burning with frustration-driven fury, unafraid, and feel they have nothing to lose.

The other thing relevant and important about Sadr is that he is a Shiite.

Until now, armed resistance has at least pretty much all come from Sunnis, whose hatred for the US and its allies after a year of humilating occupation is intense. It's clearly visible in the aftermath of attacks, that is, in the celebrations, celebrations that are not even those of satisfaction in winning but go well beyond into what can only be called gloating: pleasure taken not so much in victory for your side as in humiliation for the other.

I recall reading a while ago that the existence of funerary practices was one of the things that marked the emergence of a culture, that is, one of the things that defined culture was a means of dealing with death. Most cultures - perhaps all, maybe some anthropoligist can confirm that for me - have some tradition of respect for the dead, some rite associated with death. To violate those rites, to violate the dead, then becomes an attack not on the individual person (who is certainly beyond pain and unaware of the event) but on the entire culture of which they were part, branding it as something unworthy of notice or the most basic respect. It's an attack on the very core conceptions on which people's views of themselves and the world around them are built. No wonder, then, that desecration of corpses has been used to taunt enemies throughout history and no greater wonder at the visceral reaction such treament produces.

What that means is that such things as dragging bodies of the dead through the streets or the meant-to-be-horrifying hanging of charred corpses from a bridge are expressions of power, their intent purely psychological. They can be used by the powerful to demonstrate that power or by the powerless in an attempt to assert power (or at least to feel powerful), but the root impulse is the same.

That emotional intensification of the resistance has accompanied a similar military intensification, of which the attacks in Fallujah and Ramadi are a part. Even middle-class Sunnis who might have thought their professional or entrepreneurial skills could give them a place of influence in the "new" Iraq are becoming disillusioned and radicalized.

But on the other hand, Shiite Muslims in Iraq for the most part have avoided direct confrontations with US and other troops.

Until now, that is. Sadr's militia has initiated "the most serious insurrection of the postinvasion period," as the Times put it. The immediate spark for the violence was the closing of Sadr's newspaper and the arrest of a chief aide on a charge of being involved with the murder of another Shiite cleric last year - a charge on which Sadr was also threatened with arrest. Protests quickly built to combat in an eruption of anger months in coming and all the stronger for that reason. Fighting has gone on in a half-dozen or more places and in four towns - Kut, Kufa, Karbala, and Najaf - the al-Mahdi army seemed to be in control, from where they made demands for the Coalition forces to withdraw from populated areas and for the release of all persons recently seized.

The initial success of Sadr's forces coupled with his harsh anti-occupation message - one which often moves past that to an anti-American one (he recently called 9/11 "a miracle from God") - has generated signs of Paul Bremer's worst nightmare: a combined Sunni-Shiite resistance.

Baghdad, April 6 - On the streets of Baghdad neighborhoods long defined by differences of faith and politics, signs are emerging that resistance to the U.S. occupation may be growing from a sporadic, underground effort to a broader insurrection by militiamen who claim to be fighting in the name of their common faith, Islam.

On Monday, residents of Adhamiya, a largely Sunni section of northern Baghdad, marched with followers of Moqtada Sadr, the militant Shiite cleric whose call for armed resistance was answered by local Sunnis the same afternoon, residents said. ...

"It's all so we will have a resistance, Adhamiya and Moqtada combined," [bakery owner Abu] Hassan said.

"What Moqtada Sadr did simply woke up the people," said Sarmad Akram, 36, who owns the small food shop next door. "Now the people have the guts to resist."

That same Washington Post article goes on to report that the reaching out from one to the other was not just a matter of bakery-shop chatter, either:

"We send you this letter from your brothers in al Anbar governate and the city of Fallujah, to say that we are with you under the banner of 'God is Greatest' and the mantle of Islam." So began a letter read over loudspeakers Monday outside Sadr's headquarters in the Shiite slum named for his late father and uncle....

"We are all behind Sayyid Moqtada Sadr, may God give him victory ... on the subject of liberation," the letter read. Several hundred members of Sadr's irregular militia ... cheered and waved pistols and swords at the words.

Portraits of al-Sadr and graffiti praising his "heroic deeds" and "valiant uprising against the occupier" have appeared in Ramadi.

This makes for an uprising significant not only in its geographical breadth but in its social depth. Sadr has exposed a deep and harsh reality that US administrators have struggled to keep under wraps: No one but no one is happy with events or how they are turning out. Even the Shiites, long an oppressed majority under Saddam Hussein and thought to be generally sympathetic to American goals (or at least what they thought were American goals) are turning against the occupation. And for the moment they and the Sunnis have decided they have a common enemy - the occupation and its representatives.

Now, Sadr is no fool. He's openly aligned himself with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, declaring his "solidarity" and saying Sistani "should know that I am his military wing in Iraq." Sistani, however, does not seem to want a military wing.

Senior scholar Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani issued a statement calling for calm to allow the problem to be resolved through negotiation.

Sistani also urged the "demonstrators not to retaliate against the occupation forces in the event of an aggression".

However, Sistani's statement declares that the "demonstrators' demands were legitimate" and "condemns acts waged by the occupation forces and pledges his support to the families of the victims".

Negotiation doesn’t seem to be in the plans of the Coalition forces, however, as US military leaders say they will "destroy the Mahdi army," pursuing a course even Shiite members of the Governing Council reject.

Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI, "condemned the policy of shooting innocent demonstrators, closing papers, and arresting clerics", according to the party organ al-Adala.

Governing Councillor Abd al-Karim Al-Mohammedawi, an anti-Saddam guerrilla commander and wartime ally of the Americans in the southern province of Amara, said he might resign if the Sadrists' demands were not met, the Coalition-funded al-Sabah newspaper reported.

At the same time, however, and despite all that, the fact is this is not a general insurrection, nor do I think it will become one. While there have been clashes in several places, the numbers involved have been relatively small and, more significantly, do not seem to be swelling dramatically. I expect that the fighting will die down, perhaps with some face-saving agreement about releasing people seized "now that the situation is stabilized" and a vaguely-worded guarantee to Sadr about there being "no plans to take him into custody at the present time." For his part, I think that Sadr is going to realize that in the absence of that non-occurring general uprising, his people are going to be ground down - slowly, perhaps, but still ground down - by the sheer mass of the overwhelming numbers and firepower they face. I see him announcing an end to the fighting in a way that doesn't constitute any sort of surrender, perhaps something along the lines of "we have bloodied the enemy's nose, let us give him a chance to consider his error," at which point his militia melts back into the general population.

It's the longer-term meaning that matters, that ripping back of the curtain that Bremer and the rest have pulled across the deep divisions and frustrations, the deep rage, the profound sense of failure and betrayal, that exists in Iraq. It's important to remember that, again, that pent-up fury has a common target: the occupiers. What happens when that's no longer true? Consider this quote:

"We lost faith in the Americans," said Asaam Al Jarah, principal of a Kadhimiya high school. "Everybody was waiting for the transition, waiting and waiting. Then we saw the law was rubbish.

"Now everything is different."

Kadhimiya is a mostly Shiite area of Baghdad across the Tigris from Adhamiya. I believe it's revealing that Shiite resentment has grown so strong in the wake of the interim constitution and Sistani's objections to it. As I've noted previously, I suspect that the Shiites viewed the overthrow of Saddam as meaning "democracy," as meaning majority rule, as meaning they would finally be in charge, and as not meaning minority rights. When things didn't go that way, they felt betrayed, that the whole thing was "rubbish" - and that maybe they'd have to think about taking care of themselves, themselves.

So long as they're thinking about that common enemy, they will not be thinking about their relative position viz-a-viz Sunnis. When that common enemy is no longer there - and "no longer there" doesn't have to mean physically, it could mean politically or psychologically, such as after the "transfer of authority" - let's call them "other considerations" will come to the fore. That's the time to fear. And whether it comes tomorrow, or July, or September, or in 2005, or whenever, it will come.

Update: Edited to insert a link

Deja vu - or deja read, anyway

From the Beeb for April 5:

The Bush administration has received a warning from two senior senators that Iraq faces the possibility of civil war.

Richard Lugar and Joe Biden, the Republic and Democratic Party leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the US should consider postponing the handing over of sovereignty which at the moment is set for 30 June. ...

Democrat Senator Joe Biden talked over the weekend of the real prospect of civil war in Iraq if the White House sticks to the 30 June deadline for handing over sovereignty. ...

Mr Biden's Republican colleague, Richard Lugar, also talked of the possibility of civil war.

Seems to me I already said that.

Putting a different face on things

When I first came across this AP story on April 5, I thought the 9/11 Commission was looking to give the White House a graceful way out of its embarrassing flipflop about national security advisor Can'tbe Right testifying under oath.

Commission spokesman Al Felzenberg said Monday the decision to let Rice testify might have been influenced by a 1945 photo the panel sent to the White House showing a top presidential aide appearing before a congressional panel to discuss policy advice.

The Nov. 22, 1945, New York Times photograph shows Adm. William D. Leahy, chief of staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, appearing before the special congressional panel investigating the Pearl Harbor attacks.

Felzenberg said the commission's executive director, Philip Zelikow, faxed the photo the day before the White House reversed its position, showing the administration there was historical support for allowing a top presidential aide to testify under oath before a congressional panel.

But thanks to Josh Marshall, I learn that Newsweek has one additional detail:

Last Monday morning 9/11 commission executive director Philip Zelikow faxed a photograph to the White House counsel's office with a note saying that if the White House didn't allow national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice to testify in public before the commission, the photograph would "...be all over Washington in 24 hours," Newsweek has learned.

Well, that does kinda put it in a different light, doesn't it, now?

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is Exodus?

JEOPARDY!
The Bible for $1000

The shortest verse in the King James Bible says "Jesus" did this.

My being wrong doesn't mean you are right

The government of Israel has become increasingly aggressive in trying to manipulate news coverage by labeling critical reports - or the failure to report stories the government wants circulated - as evidence of "anti-Semitism."

For example, it has

written to the BBC accusing its Middle East correspondent, Orla Guerin, of anti-semitism and "total identification with the goals and methods of the Palestinian terror groups"

because in her report on Hussam Abdu, the 16-year-old would-be suicide bomber, she noted Israel's obvious interest in the incident's PR potential and that journalists were not allowed to ask the boy questions beyond his name and age, leaving the army's version of the story the only one available. That was enough, in Jerusalem's view, to demonstrate "a deep-seated bias against Israel."

This was despite the fact that Israeli embassies around the world urged media to carry the story as part of a campaign to link Palestinian violence to Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, which would seem to show that its PR value was very much on their minds. Earlier, those embassies had called newspapers to tell them that failure to run the story about the 12-year old boy who supposedly was unwittingly carrying explosives would be regarded as showing an anti-Israel bias. When Sky News, the Times of London, and several French papers didn't follow orders, an Israeli newspaper called for their correspondents to be expelled from the country.

Israeli officials have also compiled dossiers on individual reporters in an attempt to influence their editors. Does all this work?

CNN sources say the network has bowed to considerable pressure on its editors. Israeli officials boast that they now have only to call a number at the network's headquarters in Atlanta to pull any story they do not like.

So does all this work? You tell me.

But let's be complete here. Just because the government of Israel wields the charge of "anti-Semitism" like a club in an attempt to control press coverage does not mean that anti-Semitism doesn't exist.

Burlington, Ont. (Toronto Globe & Mail, April 6) - All Canadians must fight against hatred and intolerance of the sort that spawned the firebombing of a Jewish school in Montreal Monday, Prime Minister Paul Martin said. ...

The attack destroyed the library of the United Talmud Torah elementary school, the oldest Jewish day school in the country. A message taped to the front of the building indicated the bombing was prompted by the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East and that further similar crimes were being planned.

The Prime Minister, who labelled the bombing a strike against freedom, said "the attack against a place of learning, where young children gather, is an offence against all that Canadians cherish."

But he quickly went on to decry other recent incidents that police are investigating as hate crimes, including the desecration of a Jewish cemetery in Toronto, the vandalizing of a synagogue and the attempted arson at a mosque.

The note, in French and supposedly from an outfit calling itself "the brigades of Sheik Ahmed Yassin," said the attack was in retaliation for Yassin's murder by Israeli forces.

Police, however, said they'd never heard of any such group and personally I wonder if the name wasn't made up pretty much on the spot to justify the expression of hatred.

The school's library was a total loss.

Oh my....

Some things just make you blink and shake your head in wonder.

This is from Atrios, quoting the Charlotte Observer.

It was a mouthwatering menu. Not that you'd expect less for $2,000 a plate.

Seered [sic] beef tenderloins with golden tomatoes on an herb-encrusted baguette. Grilled garlic chicken with smoked gouda on a honey wheat wrap. Fruits and gourmet olives and crudite. A gourmet luncheon with only one thing missing: something to eat it with.

The explanation was at the bottom of the menus distributed at President Bush's $1.5 million Charlotte fund-raiser Monday.

"At the request of the White House, silverware will not accompany the table settings," it said in discreetly fine print.

No silver. No plastic.

The lack of utensils might have been why many plates went virtually untouched.

The reason: So the tinkle of silver wouldn't disrupt the president's speech.

And this is from Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo.

Washington (MSNBC, April 6) - The White House has refused to provide the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks with a speech that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was to have delivered on the night of the attacks touting missile defense as a priority rather than al-Qaida, sources close to the commission said Tuesday. ...

[T]he commission submitted a last-minute request for Rice's aborted Sept. 11 address, the sources told Reuters on condition of anonymity. But the White House has so far refused on the grounds that draft documents are confidential, the sources said.

Now, the reason isn't hard to fathom.

The Washington Post, citing former U.S. officials who have seen the Rice speech, reported last week that the speech was designed to promote missile defense as the cornerstone of a new national security strategy. It said the speech included no mention of al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden or Islamic extremist groups.

But, uh, it was a speech. Just what the hell sort of confidentiality applies to a speech? Doesn't a speech that no one is allowed to hear or read kinda lose its point?

What a bunch of lying maroons.

Getting jobbed on jobs

To hear some tell it, one month of happy job news is the end of all economic woes. I even heard one pundit say it was something approaching the end of John Kerry's ability to use the economy as an issue.

Well, to be sure, there was some good news.

The economy added 308,000 jobs in March, the Labor Department estimated, pulling out of a pattern of tepid employment growth to clock the largest number of new jobs in a single month since April 2000. ...

"There is only a silver lining," said Mickey Levy, chief economist at Banc of America Securities. "There are very few gray clouds."

In addition, the Department of Labor revised its estimate of job creation in January and February to a combined 205,000. The average monthly job growth in the first quarter of the year worked out to about 171,000, the best in nearly four years.

However, when you look a little deeper, it becomes clear that Levy's enthusiasm should not be so unbridled.

First, unemployment, measured by a different survey, also rose slightly, from 5.6% to 5.7%. (Not surprisingly, that was dismissed as irrelevant by the same sorts of voices that in previous months were telling us that slow job growth was not a problem because after all, unemployment was not rising.)

Second, even with the upswing, job creation remains extremely slow by historical standards. After the last serious recession in the early 1990s, it took 14 months for job numbers to return to their pre-recession levels. It's now 28 months since the official end of the last recession in November 2001 and we're still nowhere near back where we were.

And despite those recent increases, we're still 1.8 million jobs short of where we were when Bush took office. It would take six more months of unbroken growth at the same rate as March just to get back to where we'd been nearly three years before. And even that wouldn't really be a recovery, since roughly 140,000-150,000 new jobs are needed per month to accommodate population (and thus labor force) growth. That is, we'd have the same number of jobs available as in November 2001 - but with three years' growth in the labor force.

There were other "grey clouds" as well.

According to the household survey, almost 24 percent of all the people listed as jobless have been unemployed for at least half a year, a full percentage point above the level in February and the highest level since July 1983, when unemployment soared to 9.3 percent.

At the same time, the average workweek of nonsupervisory workers slipped by 0.1 hour, to 33.7 hours. And average weekly earnings fell by 0.2 percent over the month to $523.70 — barely 1.8 percent higher than it was a year ago. [Which was about the same as the inflation rate; that is, real wages basically went nowhere.]

Indeed, despite the employment increase, the index of aggregate weekly hours of production or nonsupervisory workers — which measures the aggregate amount of work outside of farms in the private sector — fell by 0.1 percentage point in March to 99 percent.

Now, if jobs are up but if the average workweek, average weekly earnings, and the aggregate amount of weekly work are all down, doesn't that indicate either that a lot of these new jobs are part-time or that a lot of existing full-time jobs have been turned into part-time ones? Does the payroll survey distinguish full-time from part-time jobs?

The jobs report, I expect, is giving accurate numbers based on its survey, but it seems to me that the reportage includes a hell of a lot of inc-spin that makes things sound much better than they are. ("Inc-spin" is a term I just made up. It's short for "incompetence spin" and it refers to that sort of unintentional spin that arises when members of the media simply act as stenographers to official reports instead of analyzing what they get and putting it into a larger context. That is, they're not consciously spinning, but the result of their incompetence and/or laziness is to produce spin anyway.)

Of course, beyond the inc-spin there was real spin. For example, N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the President's Council,

argued that President Bush's tax cuts had been vital to stabilizing the economy in recent years, suggesting that raising taxes, as Senator Kerry has proposed to do for people on the highest incomes, could derail the employment recovery. "The key is not to reverse course," Mr. Mankiw said. "We should not reverse the tax cuts but make them permanent."

Reading that reminded me of the early years of the Reagan administration, when after initially promising Reaganomics would produce an "immediate" improvement in the economy they kept pushing the "start date" back further and further as things went from bad to worse. At one point, I noted that they were creating a built-in excuse: So long as the economy remained in the dumps, they would say the effect hasn't set in yet. "The economy improves at any point in the future," I wrote, "and they say 'see, it worked.'" So it is, it seems, with Bush's welfare for the rich tax schemes.

On the other hand, the DNC claim that if we just elect John Kerry everything will be fine and 10 million jobs will appear by virtue of the sheer dynamism of his administration is an equally empty claim.

The lack of jobs - and more, the lack of good jobs - is neither because of nor in spite of Bush's tax plans and the same would be true of a Kerry White House. The lack of jobs is because corporations don't want to pay people. They want profits, not expenses, and as long as they can increase revenue without increasing payroll that's exactly what they'll do.

Washington, March 30 (Reuters) - U.S. corporate profits are on the upswing but firms have squeezed wages like never before, and some economists fear excluding workers from the recovery could undermine economic growth.

Wage growth normally slows during, and in the wake of, a recession as high unemployment gives companies more bargaining strength and enables them to raise productivity.

But the pull-back is bigger this time, in part because U.S. workers' ability to negotiate has been sapped by foreign competition and the outsourcing of U.S. jobs. And in the long run, this could undermine consumer spending. ...

The culprit is soaring productivity, as new technology enables firms to boost output without adding workers. Hourly worker output grew 9.5 percent in the third quarter last year and a still-strong 2.6 percent in the fourth.

Of course, back in the 80s and 90s we were being told that the lack of wage increases was because of slow productivity growth; now we're being told that the lack of jobs is because of high productivity growth. In short, in previous years we were being told to do what would wind up cutting our own throats later on. Right now, after-tax corporate profits are at 14.8% of Gross Domestic Product, the highest ever. But the jobs still aren't there.

Is anyone surprised by this?

The fact is, the only way this cycle of ratcheting up the pressure on our living standards with every flicker of the economy is going to be broken is to take on the corporations directly. No tinkering with the tax code, no "incentive package to keep jobs at home," no promise to "enforce the rules" is going to make more than the smallest difference as long as the rules we're going to "toughly enforce" are written by the corporations themselves.

The major parties are both in hock to corporate America - or, more accurately in these days of "integrated global economy" buzzphrases, corporate Transnational - to a degree that renders them incapable of more than slowing the decline of our living standards, even assuming the best of intentions. Which I don't.

I refuse to get into one of those time-wasting, idiotic, self-defeating debates about who's "worse." I'm not saying that there is no difference at all between the proposals of George Bush and John Kerry. In fact, I'll even say that given the narrow confines within which they think, Kerry's are clearly better: Bush's will accelerate the long-term decline, Kerry's will slow it. But neither will stop it. So no, I'm not saying there is no difference, but I am saying that Kerry no more than Bush solves the basic problem of shrinking presents and shriveling futures and that while Bush wants to hand the government over to corporate America outright, Kerry relies on using what amount to public subsidies to encourage Big Business to "do the right thing." And in the longer run, that's still playing the game by the corporations' rules, making it a game we can't win.

You want me to get excited about a candidate with a long-term view of our economic future? Show me one who for a start

- supports universal, single-payer health care and endorses adequate housing and productive work as human rights.
- supports some form of guaranteed national income (That's a .pdf file; you can view it as .html here.) - sometimes known as a "social wage."
- opposes globalization, and I don't mean just wants to add a few codicils making nice about labor rights and the environment but I do mean including shutting down the FTAA talks and withdrawing from NAFTA and the WTO.
- supports economic development in poor nations by supporting domestic (that is, domestic to those nations) economic and technological development with a focus on "appropriate-level technology."
- supports a "corporate responsibility law" that would, as I put it when I proposed such a law back in 1980, state that "corporations are civilly, and their officers civilly and criminally, liable for actions they knowingly take and policies they knowingly pursue," and openly advocates a "corporate death penalty" for sufficiently criminal behavior, that is, revoking its charter, firing its officers and Board of Directors, and placing it into receivership.

That would get me interested. Utopian, you say? Too radical, you say? Never get adopted, you say? That just shows how far in the hole we are and who is actually in charge of our economic futures.

Spinning the Spin Dept.: Randall Kroszner, a former member of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, says it's true that the share of income going to labor has dropped compared to that going to capital - that is, more of the value produced by the economy is going to investors and bankers and less to workers.

But he said corporate bias toward profits was necessary because companies would not invest without being confident of making profits.

"You can't be certain of the recovery until you see robust business investment ... Ultimately, this will be good for labor because as you get more investment, labor works with the new capital and wages go up in the long-term," he said.

William Poole, President of the St. Louis Fed, took a similar line, telling reporters last Thursday a profit surge boosts investment and beefs up corporate cash flow.

"Good corporate cash-flows means corporates are not raising large amounts in financial markets and that of course is part of the reason that interest rates remain relatively low which feeds back ... to help support the household sector," he said.

In other words, having no jobs and no wage growth is actually a good thing for us.

That makes it all clear. Thank you, gentlemen.

Addendum One: From Daily News Online, quoting an AP story for April 5:

The share of the U.S. population working or actively seeking a job has fallen to 65.9 percent, the lowest level in 16 years. ...

If those people who want jobs but aren't looking were counted, the unemployment rate would be more than 7 percent, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com. "To me, that is much more representative of the state of the job market," he said. "It doesn't feel like a 5.6 percent job market. It feels like more of a 7 or a 7 and a half percent job market."

Addendum Two: Again from DNO, this time quoting a story from CNNMoney, again from Monday:

More than 60% of U.S. corporations didn't pay any federal taxes for 1996 through 2000, years when the economy boomed and corporate profits soared, Tuesday's Wall Street Journal reported, citing the investigative arm of Congress.

The disclosures from the General Accounting Office are certain to fuel the debate over corporate tax payments in the presidential campaign. Corporate tax receipts have shrunk markedly as a share of overall federal revenue in recent years, and were particularly depressed when the economy soured. By 2003, they had fallen to just 7.4% of overall federal receipts, the lowest rate since 1983, and the second-lowest rate since 1934, federal budget officials say.

But remember, it's all for your own good.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
Who is Samson?

JEOPARDY!
The Bible for $600

The feast of unleavened bread is combined with Passover in this Old Testament book.

What's old is new again

So Colin Powell thinks it's time for a "new beginning" in Haiti, does he? He wants "the proud people of Haiti to ... seize this new chance to put your country firmly on the path to democracy," does he? Yes, indeed he does - and what's more, he says that Washington will help!

Wow. Gee. I'm impressed.

Except where was Powell, where was Washington, where was their commitment to democracy when the existing democracy of Haiti under President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was being overrun by the thugs, goons, gangs, and former death squad leaders our now-favored prime minister Gerard Latortue calls "freedom fighters?" Where was the support when Haiti was being starved by aid freezes engineered from the White House? Where was the touching concern for the condition of the people of Haiti when the Bush crew was pressuring Aristide to not raise the minimum wage to a still-pitiful $3.00 a day because that's the way transnational corporations wanted it?

Oh, but all that's past! It's time for new beginnings! Fresh start! Clean slate! No, let's forget all that. So of course, let's also not make any investigation into how and why Aristide left Haiti. I mean, he says he was forced to leave, kidnapped by US forces, in fact - but let's not find out, no. Any such investigation would serve "no purpose," Mr. Unsolid Intelligence said. (Sidebar: When Aristide first raised the claim he was kidnapped, I was ready to chalk it up to hyperbole, as meaning something more along the lines of "once I agreed to leave, they rushed me out before I could make the emotional adjustment." But the more the US insists that we should not find out what actually happened, the more suspicious I become.)

Some stubborn fools, however, have failed to get with the program. Caricom, the Caribbean Community, has refused to recognize the new government in Haiti and what's more, for some reason no rational person can fathom, has demanded a UN inquiry into the circumstances of Aristide's departure. That's put a bit of a hitch into Mr. People Used to Think I Had Integrity's plans, which looked to those nations to take over the "peacekeeping" operations in June.

But no problem. After all, everything is new again. It's morning again in Haiti. Isn't it?

Footnote: Latortue had his hand out for international aid, saying Haiti is virtually bankrupt. True enough, but he slipped up a bit in laying blame. "Those who were here before left the country with absolutely nothing," he said.

Mr. Latortue, you're right that those who are to blame were there before. But you're wrong in your implication that they no longer are. They were there before and they're still there, all around you. No, not those glowering in shanty towns, but those sitting around you, smiling in their suits. They indeed left Haiti with nothing. And they will continue to do so as long as they can. And frankly, I don't think you give a damn.

A reminder of what "arrogance" means

From BBC News for April 5:

At least 50 people, mostly civilians, have been injured in a grenade attack at a market in Indian-administered Kashmir, police say.

The incident happened in the town of Pulwama, south of the state's summer capital, Srinagar.

Police say suspected militants threw the grenade at an army convoy but it missed its target and exploded on a busy road.

More than 35,000 people have died in over a decade of violence in Kashmir.

September 11 did not "change everything" and the only people who thought it did are those so wrapped up in an egotistical, Ameri-centric view of world events that they imagine that what happens to us is the sole criterion of importance for all people everywhere.

...but not for you

- When the Shrubberies announced the plan to photograph and fingerprint travelers arriving in the US, some critics noted that the plan exempted nations that operate under a visa waiver program. No problem for an administration always ready to expand its reach.

Washington, April 2 - The Department of Homeland Security announced on Friday that it planned to require travelers from 27 industrialized nations, including longtime allies like Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Japan and Australia, to be photographed and electronically fingerprinted when they arrive in the United States. ...

Under an existing program, airport inspectors began photographing and fingerprinting travelers who need visas to visit the United States in January. ...

[Asa Hutchinson, an undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security,] said he did not believe the move would deter tourists from visiting the United States, but acknowledged that some countries might retaliate by instituting tough new requirements for Americans traveling abroad. He went on to say the Bush administration would applaud such decisions from foreign leaders.

That's not what they were saying in January.

It will be interesting to see reaction to this and its effect on tourism, especially when the lines start backing up. Of the 19 million foreign visitors to the US in 2002, almost 13 million came from the 27 newly-affected countries. That means the workload of fingerprinting and photographing will triple.

Sidebar: Administration officials downplayed any effect on travel to the US.

They argue that tourists will be willing to undergo the screening once they learn that the digital fingerprinting and photographing typically takes 15 seconds and does not leave visitors with ink-stained fingers.

Oh, yeah, that's the real issue here. Not presumption of guilt, not invasions of privacy, not Big Brother, but ink-stained fingers. Right.

- Inch by inch, rights under the Fourth Amendment are being stripped away. It's long been established that if you're arrested, police can search "the immediate area" of the arrest; I even recall a case where the search turned up some drugs and even though the arrest was found to be improper the drugs were still declared admissible as evidence under a separate charge of possession! Recently, it was ruled that if police upon entering your home feel unsafe, they can search the house (provided only that the search is "brief," whatever that may mean).

I remember a while ago a court decision finding that it was legal for police to search the passengers of a car because since it wasn't their "possession," they had no "reasonable expectation of privacy" there. And even if it is your car, well, forget it. From the Christian Science Monitor for March 31:

"When you are in a car, you are fair game," says Tracey Maclin, a law professor and Fourth Amendment scholar at Boston University School of Law.

The limited privacy protections that do exist for cars may shrink even more as a result of a case set for oral argument Wednesday at the US Supreme Court. At issue in Thornton v. US is whether police may conduct a search of a passenger compartment without a warrant even if they arrest the driver or a recent occupant outside the car.

If a majority of justices permit the practice, it would expand an existing rule from a 1981 Supreme Court decision [that] allowed police to search a car's interior, without first obtaining a warrant, whenever a suspect is arrested while inside the car.

The Readers Digest version of the case is that in July 2001, a police officer in Norfolk, VA, became suspicious of one Marcus Thornton after noticing that the license plate on his car did not match the registration.

(Question: Why was the check being made at all? Just random "see what I can find" fishing? I thought "random checks" were illegal.)

Thornton went to a shopping-center parking lot and got out of his car. The officer confronted him about his car registration. He consented to a frisk, which revealed marijuana and crack cocaine in his pocket.

(Question: How could a frisk, supposedly intended to reveal hard objects that could be weapons, reveal that?)

Thornton was arrested, his car was searched, a loaded gun was found, and he was convicted of drug and weapons charges. On appeal, his lawyer contended the gun should not have been admitted because the warrantless search was illegal. A federal appeals court panel in Richmond ruled against him and the case has gone to the Supreme Court.

What's idiotic about this having gotten this far is that it runs directly contrary to the original justifications for such searches from the 1981 case: that it was to protect police by allowing them to search for weapons that might be within reach and to prevent the destruction of evidence. Now, never mind that I find those to be excuses, not reasons (the difference being that excuses come after the fact, reasons come before it), and just consider the present case: Neither of those conditions applies if the suspect is approached outside the car! They just don't.

US Solicitor General Ted Olson argued against limitations on such searches.

"Such a limitation would create an incentive for suspects to jump out of cars before police initiate contact with them and, at the same time, encourage police to rush contact with suspects before they can exit a car, creating a potentially explosive dynamic," he says in his brief.

The fact that that argument is transparently stupid (in the real world, there would be little difficulty in obtaining a warrant to search the car of someone arrested just after emerging from it) shows that the real issue here for the Ashcroft thugs and the 21 states that agree with him is not protecting police but expanding government power.

It's coming to the point where the only way the Fourth Amendment applies to you is if you never leave your house and never let anyone else in, either.

Privacy for us...

- Sibel Edmonds is a former translator for the FBI with a top-secret security clearance. According to an interview with the newspaper The Independent (UK), on February 11 she gave the 9/11 Commission detailed information showing senior Bush administration officials knew of plans to use aircrafts in attacks on US cities well before they happened.

Hired as a translator right after 9/11, by the end of the following winter she was complaining to her superiors about severe problems in the translation department. In March 2002 she was fired as a result.

When Mrs Edmonds sued the FBI over her dismissal, the Attorney General, John Ashcroft, at the request of the FBI director, Robert Mueller, invoked the rarely used "state secrets privilege" procedure to petition the court to dismiss the case. A statement issued by the Department of Justice said this had been "to prevent the disclosure of certain classified and sensitive national security information".

- The Bushites continue their struggle to avoid admitting that corporate executives and their PR flacks were the driving force behind the "new" energy policy created by Dick "The Big Dick" Cheney's "energy task force."

Cheney's energy plan was published three years ago and the administration has been fighting lawsuits since, arguing that it would violate the Constitution's separation of powers doctrine to have a judge force the president or vice president to reveal who they met with in private,

says Daily News Online, quoting the Los Angeles Times for April 2.

However, they are, perhaps, just perhaps, slowly being brought to heel. On Wednesday, in a suit brought by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the US District Court in DC ruled that the records in question are "agency records" that lie outside any shield protecting the president and vice-president and ordered the release of thousands of pages of documents. Meanwhile, a suit brought by the Sierra Club and the conservative legal foundation Judicial Watch contending that the secret meetings violated an open-government law, earlier resulted in a similar ruling. The White House refused to comply, lost in Appeals Court, and has appealed to the Supreme Court.

- Attempts by the House Ways and Means Committee to investigate charges by chief Medicare actuary Richard Foster that he had been threatened with being fired if he told Congress the truth about projected costs of the prescription drug part of last fall's Medicare deform bill have been scuttled by the White House and committee chair Bill Thomas (R-CA). Again from Daily News Online, again quoting the LA Times for April 2:

A senior White House official and the former Medicare administrator, central figures in a controversy over the cost of the new Medicare prescription drug law, declined to appear before a House committee Thursday, defying Democrats who had sought their testimony.

Citing executive privilege, the White House refused to send Doug Badger, the special assistant to the president for health policy, to testify before the House Ways and Means Committee. The former Medicare administrator, Thomas Scully, who no longer works for the government, wrote the committee a letter saying he had been busy traveling and would be unable to appear.

Democrats then tried to persuade the committee to subpoena them, but those motions failed along party lines, by a vote of 23 to 16.

Thomas then blocked a proposal to have Scully come on another date, effectively putting and end to the investigation.

A bizarre sidebar to this is that in refusing - more accurate than "declining" - to appear, Scully wrote the committee that

when he was administrator, Foster was not free to communicate directly with lawmakers.

"There is no question whatsoever," he wrote, "that I made it very clear to Foster, both directly and indirectly, that I, as his supervisor, would decide when he would communicate with Congress."

That is, he as much as confessed! He was responsible for Foster's contacts with Congress and thus he himself was guilty of willfully hiding that fact that the pill plan would cost $140 million more than the Bushites claimed - that is, that he actively concealed relevant and accurate information about a major piece of legislation.

How big do you think his bonus will be?

- In response to a request from the 9/11 Commission, the Clinton Library released thousands of pages of documents relating to his administration's dealings about terrorism. However, continuing it's steadfast policy of stall, delay, and foot-drag, the White House withheld most of them until they were caught out. On Friday, the White House agreed to allow the commission to review the papers. Official White House scumbag Scott McClellan insisted it was "simply ridiculous" to suggest they'd been anything less than totally, fawningly cooperative with the commission, claiming they'd provided "everything they [i.e., the commission] need."

In addition to wondering how even this crew has the gall to assert that the target of an inquiry gets to decide what information that inquiry "needs," note carefully that the agreement is to let the commissioners "review" the documents - but they have to go over to the National Archives to do so. The White House has given no assurances that any of the papers will actually be released.

Who'da thunk?

Bush: Rice to Lay Out Facts in Testimony - headline on AP wire story, April 5

That would be a refreshing change.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
Who is Thomas Jefferson?

JEOPARDY!
The Bible for $200

The Philistines made sport of this strongman "and they set him between the pillars."

...because in other places it's slipping away

The high hopes that greeted the renewed negotiations on the future of Cyprus have faded. Attempts to reach a settlement have failed even though people thought early on that the pressure of an agreed timetable would produce some sort of compromise.

No deal. Instead, we have the final step of the procedure: UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has put forth his own proposed settlement, supposedly one that "fills in the blanks" between the two sides' positions. It will be put to a referendum to both Greek and Turkish communities on Cyprus on April 24. Rejection by either side will kill the deal, which was intended to establish a unified Cyprus before it joins the EU on May 1.

Prospects are not good. Greece officials say an agreement is not possible and Greek Cypriots are seen as unenthusiastic about the plan.

It's not hard to see why. Annan's plan, while imposing conditions that some individual Turks on Cyprus would find burdensome (specifically, some might wind up having to leave in order to allow some Greek Cypriots to return to homes from which they were driven during the Turkish invasion in 1974), has as its core making the island into "a loose federation of two equal political parts" while allowing Turkish troops to remain in the north. In other words, the essence of the plan is to legitimize Turkey's invasion and its establishment of a breakaway state that has never been recognized by a single nation other than Turkey itself.

No wonder Turkey, which entered the process only reluctantly, is now all smiles and talking about "walking on the path of peace." It could hardly have asked for more.

According to the Times,

Mr. Annan seemed to suggest that failure this time would be permanent.

"The choice is not between this settlement plan and some other magical or mythical solution," he said. "The choice is between this settlement or no settlement."

I must confess that based on what I know, and if I were a Greek Cypriot, even if I believed that to be true I would still vote no. Sometimes half a loaf is not better than none.

And Kofi Annan needs to be reminded of "the inadmissibility of territory seized by war."

Finding hope where you can...

According to an April 12 emailing from Global Exchange, the Free Trade Area of the Americas is in deep trouble. And it couldn't happen to a more deserving target.

The meeting in Miami last November - the one where the "Miami model" as a means of crushing public dissent entered the political lexicon - set up a "blueprint" for making all of the Americas one giant, free-trade, corporate playground. But since then, there has been no progress toward that end. ("Progress" is not a word that fits easily in the mouth in a case like this.)

Meetings in February and March only managed to agree on dates for more meetings. Now, even the date for the next meeting is up in the air.

Brazil in particular has been doing the heavy lifting here, resisting pressure from the US to give transnational corporations freer reign and to "open its borders to imports" - otherwise known as turning its customs offices into help files for corporate profit. What makes Brazil's position a little easier is that the US is refusing to consider ending its agricultural price supports.

Apparently the US feels that free trade, like taxes, are for "the little people."

A little email sent to CNN

I can't understand how you could possibly justify your coverage of Colin Powell's statement that intelligence on which he based his UN claims about Iraq having mobile bioweapons labs was "not solid."

According to my word processor, you used 102 words noting Powell's statement. You then used 794 words, over seven times more, rehashing Powell's arguments - including those about mobile facilities, without mentioning that these are the very claims Powell now admits are not "solid!"

Please don't tell me it was necessary in order to "provide context." The context was the nature of the speech, not the details of the individual claims.

That's especially true since even if the argument of "context" were to be granted, a simple ticking off of the points would have been more than adequate. More importantly, if context is what's required, it should also have been necessary on that same basis to note not only Powell's own doubts about mobile facilities - which you did not do - but also that questions have been raised about almost every other aspect of his UN speech - which you also did not do.

The net effect is to reinforce the very claims that have been cast into doubt by subsequent experience - indeed, to reinforce claims that were known to be doubtful at best at the time they were made.

Truly, a bad performance.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is eight?

FINAL JEOPARDY!
Historic Americans

In 1976, a National Gallery of Art show honored the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the death of this statesman.

On the other hand, this could be fun

This is also from the Iraqi Press Monitor, this time for March 31 and the newspaper quoted is the daily Al-Mashriq, published by Al-Mashriq Institution for Media and Cultural Investments.

Iraqi journalists have made a legal claim against top civil administrator L. Paul Bremer for dissolving the former Ministry of Information (MI) after the fall of the old regime. The legal case, which has been delivered to the Administrative Judiciary Court in the Ministry of Justice (MJ), claimed Bremer had dissolved the MI without any legal basis, and must therefore present himself to the Court on April 21 either to cancel that order or to stop applying it. Al-Mashriq was informed that some lawyers have been following up on the case with the concerned bodies. The Court informed Bremer of the content of the case and the date of the trial. It is worth mentioning that Bremer dissolved the MI shortly after the fall of the regime, leaving more than 6,000 Iraqi families without a decent livelihood.

Sidebar: In a March 27 article on the struggles of members of the newly "free" Iraqi media to understand and meet their responsibilities as journalists, Aljazeera quoted Hamid Abid Sarhan, a journalist at al-Mashriq, as saying

the new Iraqi media is far from the success story the Americans claim.

Al-Mashriq, which enjoys a readership of 25,000, was set up three months ago and claims to be "independent". However, Sarhan says it is also fiercely anti-occupation.

He told Aljazeera.net: "All the new Iraqi newspapers should show the world what the Iraqis are suffering under American occupation. There is no democracy and freedom here."

And he said the press is not as free as most people think.

"It is dangerous if you write something bad about the Americans. They don't allow you to criticise them too harshly. So there is still censorship but of a different kind."

He added: "Many of the papers are owned by political parties and the viewpoint found in them is the viewpoint of the political parties. So Iraqis don't trust what they are reading."

And that's different from here exactly how?

Another sign of the progress we're making

From the Iraqi Press Monitor for April 1, quoting Al-Mutamar, which is issued daily by the Iraqi National Congress:

The families of Kurdish victims of the notorious Anfal operations have rejected the idea of national reconciliation with Baathists called for in the recent Arbil conference. The General Council of Faili Kurds said a mass grave had been found in Rashidiya in Baghdad, which held the remains of 400 Faili Kurds. Meanwhile, the Kurdish Center of Halabja Against Anfal and Massacres also has rejected the call for reconciliation with the Baathists launched by the Arbil conference. The Centre called for making April 14 a day of mourning in Kurdistan to commemorate massacres that the Kurds have suffered.

Al-Anfal - "the spoils" - was the name given by the Iraqi military to a series of bloody attacks on Kurds which lasted from February 23 until September 6, 1988. Human Rights Watch called it "a campaign of extermination."

Faili Kurds are a minority of a minority: Shiite Kurds. (Most Kurds are Sunni Muslims.) They were targets of special suffering under Saddam as they mostly lived along the Iran-Iraq border, making them also suspected of being "Iranians." The Arbil Conference in effect urged everyone to forgive and forget - or, as others would have it, "get over it." Apparently some people are not willing to do that.

International law is for wusses

On Wednesday, the United States was found by the International Court of Justice at The Hague to have violated the human rights of 51 Mexican men now on death row in US prisons by failing to provide them with a fair trial.

Under the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, of which both the US and Mexico are signatories, the US was required to tell the men of their right to receive legal assistance from their consulates. Because they were never informed of that right, they may not have received the level of help to which they were entitled and therefore may have been convicted unfairly. The court said the convictions should be reviewed.

The court's decisions are legally binding.

But in a similar case, the court ordered the US to stay the execution of a German national in 1999 - he was put to death nevertheless.

Ignoring international law and treaty obligations whenever they prove inconvenient being something else that did not suddenly appear under the Bush regime.

Meanwhile, the Kansas City Star reported on April 2 that

Mexican President Vicente Fox said Friday the International Court of Justice and the United Nations will have to take action if the United States doesn't comply with a ruling that it review the cases of 51 Mexicans on death row.

In an interview with the board of directors for The Associated Press Managing Editors, Fox declined to say, however, whether Mexico would take additional measures if the U.S. government does not follow the order.

Fox hinted he might try to get the Security Council to pass a resolution, but of course that won't happen and he knows it. If the effort is made at all, it will be to try to shame the US by bringing world attention to the matter.

But seeing as how we're shameless, I don't expect it to amount to anything.

Footnote: As usual, I try to imagine what would happen if the situation was reversed, if there were 51 Americans on death row in Mexico who hadn't been told of their right to consular assistance and Washington thought they hadn't gotten a fair trial. Why, we'd be making all kinds of diplomatic prot -

Oh wait, I'm sorry, that couldn't happen. Mexico's death penalty is only for the most extraordinary circumstances and no one has been executed by a civilian court since 1937.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is the House of Lords?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Britannica for $2000

Number of Henrys who ruled England between AD 1000 and 1600.

Badgering Iraq

There is reason enough to believe that the Bush administration was looking to find a way to invade Iraq from day one, as the saying goes. (This is without considering the role of the old cold warriors whose desire to impose US will on the region long predated Shrub and his Shrubberies.)

Recently, however, something new has been added: a plan to provoke Iraq into an action that would be used to justify "going in," a plan known as Desert Badger.

After the first Gulf War, the US and the UK imposed on Iraq so-called "no-fly zones." Those zones were actually illegal as they were created and enforced without UN authorization. Over time, the "no-fly" zones became what could be called "no defend" zones: If Iraqi antiaircraft fired at American planes, "self-defense" was used as an excuse to bomb the site. Indeed, if Iraqi radar even locked onto a plane - necessary even just to follow where the plane was going - it brought the same reaction. (Pre-emptive strikes did not originate with Bush.) The military was known to try to provoke Iraq into taking potshots in order to justify more bombing. It got to the point where one Pentagon representative referred to a bombing raid in northern Iraq as "routine."

However, Bush ordered a plan that went well beyond that. US pilots would continue their provocative "patrols" of the illegal no-fly zone. If by chance the Iraqis shot one down, it would trigger a massive retaliation within four to eight hours. According to a CNN-TV news account from March 31,

Pentagon sources say a long list of targets across the country would be hit, crippling Iraqi air defenses and command and control. The plan went far beyond the Clinton administration's 1998 Operation Desert Fox, which hit 100 targets in four days. ...

One defense official familiar with the plan says if a plane got shot down, that was the trigger. We were going in. Over time, the source said, Operation Desert Badger evolved into a more robust plan for attacking the regime.

The president would have quickly decided whether to take the next step, approving sending a small number of ground troops to secure key areas.

Because of the small numbers of US forces in the region at the time, the plan apparently was not one to overthrow Saddam Hussein. However, it was intended to be an attack on a scale not seen since the first Gulf War and the reference to "securing key areas" raises some interesting questions since the US forces on the ground at the time were in Kuwait.

Now let's see, just what areas in Iraq that we might have wanted to "secure" are within easy reach of Kuwait? Hmm....

Footnote: The same broadcast quoted Donald Rumsfeld as saying the plans were "packaged, pre-cleared with the president. And we were cocked and ready...." I'll ignore the obvious lines about the Bush crew being concerned if they were cocked or not in favor of noting that if the plans were fully cocked, that about double the cocking of the thought processes behind them.

Jeopardy! for April 2

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is the BBC? (Acceptable: British Broadcasting Corporation)

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Britannica for $1200

This parliamentary body is the final court of appeals in England.

Where have you been?

Okay, you don't want to know my trials and tribulations, but you do deserve an explanation of where I disappeared to yesterday.

I mentioned that I got a new computer and have gone back to work so I'd probably be posting lightly for a week while I juggled schedules and transferred files. The latter got a little more complicated than I expected.

I have someone I intend to give my "old, slow it was a blazing speed demon three or four years ago" computer to. (So no, it's not being thrown out.) But in the course of trying to clean up the disk, uninstall crap, etc., I had a total system meltdown that eventually required reinstalling Windows98.

The reinstall program deletes the existing version of '98 before installing the new one. Fine. Except that the new install wouldn't work; it just kept dropping to a c:\ prompt. So at that point I had no Windows at all. I kept re-booting, trying to figure out what was going wrong - and discovering that the computer was recognizing the presence of the d: drive (where the install CD was) only about half the time.

I finally got the computer to fess up that the problem was that the Windows setup program exceeded the "largest executable program size" for the free memory I had available.

Happily, I had already set up the new computer for online access, because I then had to use it to go online to look up DOS commands, which I had long since forgotten. After a good deal of frustration, I figured out that I had to edit my autoexec.bat file to remove an installed memory manager to reboot to free up space to run the install to get Win98 back for the house that Jack built.

Of course, this also meant I had to reinstall drivers for video, sound, and modem. (I didn't bother with the printer; I figured I could live without it until the new computer is set up.)

So, okay, that seemed done.

Now, the old computer had a CD drive but no CD-RW drive; the old one crapped out on me a while back and although I had bought a new on a few months ago I'd never gotten around to actually installing it. When I got the new computer I figured "why bother" - I actually thought of selling it to recoup part of the cost of the new machine.

I have a Zipdrive and I was using that to load up disks to transfer the various files I wanted to the new computers. Yesterday it was all ready to go. I brought the Zipdrive to the new machine. It installed in a flash. I put in the disk - it didn't work.

Huh?

It turned out that the disk compression scheme I'd used on the Zip disks only works on Win98 - and the new machine, of course, is XP.

So the disks were unreadable. What I said is unprintable.

SO...

I installed the damn CD-RW drive in the old machine. Copied about 400mb worth or files to a new CD. Brought the CD to the new machine - it said the CD is blank.

AAAAA!!!!!

This time, however, it turned out to be a simple matter of having misread the instructions: I'd only done a dummy burn of the new CD. I went back, did it right, and it works.

YES! IT WORKS! IT WORKS!

There were, however, some losses: References and links to articles that were stored on the desktop for easy access when writing things for here are, of course, gone. A couple that I really want I knew where to go back for, but the others, well, ::shrug::. But things do seem to be back on track, at least for the moment.

So still expect light blogging for a few more days but I will try to make the wait worthwhile.

Jeopardy! for April 1

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is a guerrilla?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Britannica for $400

On April 1, 1980, this British TV network, tongue in cheek, announced that the Big Ben clock was going digital.