We have a Constitutional right to be vicious and foolish ...

... all the more reason not to exercise it.

Most of us don't have to see this kind of crap day in and day out -- or perhaps worse, hear about it continually from families and far-flung communities.

U.S. Muslims do. There's nothing extraordinary about this newscast, except that the presenter acts as if it's substance is all in a day's work. [2:13]



Many communities would not leave their Muslim members to face this desecration without protest. I don't know if that will be true in the Florida town. Certainly there are Christians and people of no faith in the Florida Panhandle who know better.

It is past time to make September 11, not a mournful observance of the failures of our government to see looming dangers, but a celebration of the civil liberties and religious toleration that make this country so different from the world's theocracies. A terrible trauma happened. But it is time to stop wallowing in it, to stop celebrating victimization, and look to what sometimes makes this country great.

Arizona anti-immigrant law blocked ... but

In any case, the Obama administration is swooping down on immigrant workers and tearing apart families at a far greater rate than the Bush guys ever achieved.

The Prez talks a smart immigration reform game, but accelerated deportations are the reality. And nothing is going to end the reality of undocumented immigration so long as employers in this country want cheap, powerless workers from across the border where Mexico remains an economic basket case for the starving unskilled.

So racism is gets reinforced today and nothing is solved but the brown people feel the hurt. Not a proud day.

Afghanistan: civilian casualties

The United States will eventually leave Afghanistan. We will decide we can't afford it, just as we realized we couldn't afford a meaningless, corrosive war in Iraq either.

This video tells us something else: why we should leave Afghanistan if we have a smidgen of human sympathy.

On the road today ...

When mired in airport waiting areas, little things divert. Good news: both Long Beach and Logan (Boston) have free wifi. Yeah for them.

The item above was a feature of the women's bathroom at SFO. You just stick your hands in and it blows hot air. True, this doesn't get them dry, but usually neither do empty paper towel dispensers ...

More money for war; who loses?

Before this drops down the memory hole, here are a couple of the last paragraphs from the Associated Press story on yesterday's approval of funds for Obama's Afghanistan adventure.

The bill includes more than $33.5 billion for the additional 30,000 troops in Afghanistan and to pay for other Pentagon operational expenses, $5.1 billion to replenish the Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief fund, $6.2 billion for State Department aid programs in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Haiti, and $13.4 billion in benefits for Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange.

In addition to stripping out money for teachers and student aid, the final bill does not provide more than $4 billion requested by the administration to finance settlements of long-standing lawsuits against the government, including $1.2 billion to remedy discrimination by the Agriculture Department against black farmers and $3.4 billion for mismanaging Indian trust funds.

My emphasis.

So in order shake loose funds to ship servicepeople to get killed in Afghanistan, we are screwing students and teachers -- and U.S. citizens who have a legal claim on the government for grotesque misconduct.

The black farmers' lawsuit involved the Pigford settlement that the recently unexpectedly prominent Shirley Sherrod was a part of; the native peoples' trust fund embezzlement by the Feds was where Republican wheeler-dealer and bribester Jack Abramoff made his ill-gotten gains (for which he went to prison). I guess we shouldn't be surprised that Senate Republicans balked at paying up what these people were owed.

Watch unemployment grow

... and weep.

"The Decline: The Geography of a Recession," was created by labor writer LaToya Egwuekwe. It shows the growth of unemployment county by county from January 2007 until July 2010.

Greg Sargent has the skinny on why Republicans think this picture is just fine.

The larger Republican strategy -- explained to me privately by Republican aides -- is rooted in the fact that they believe dragging out any discussion of unemployment helps the GOP in the long run. ... But their larger strategy is all about casting doubt on the efficacy of the stimulus in particular and on the failure of the Dems' big-spending ways in general.

Republicans think that it feeds their larger argument, particularly among independents, if Dems continue to ask for more money to help the jobless (drawing attention to the fact that Dem spending policies have yet to fix the economy) while Republicans continue to insist that government find the money to pay for it.

This isn't about Republicans banking on mass economic suffering to help them at the polls. Rather, they're dragging out the discussion of unemployment in the belief that the public will conclude that Dem policies have failed -- and that Dems have their heads in the sand about how much money they wasted on their pie-in-the-sky liberal dream schemes.

One of our two major political parties doesn't care who it puts the screws to in other to regain power. This should be considered sociopathic.

At least the other party thinks that it has to throw a few bones to the majority of the citizens if it wants to keep its jobs.

H/t to Time Goes By for the clip.

***And here's another map detailing what will happen to job training programs funded by the stimulus if Republicans don't relent.

Marauding mosquitoes munch on mountaineers

Has anyone reading this ever been chased off a peak at over 10000 feet by mosquitoes? This happened to us last week in Yosemite National Park -- twice! I know this was a fairly wet winter and some patches of snow remained, but this was like trying to camp by a lake in Minnesota in June. We were swarmed by biting bugs. Climbing meant swallowing one occasionally while panting. Yuck! The Sierra Nevada mountains were glorious as always, but usually when you get up that high, the wildlife is restricted to a few marmots.

I turned to the internet to see whether we were seeing the leading edge of global warming.

Apparently I'm not the only one who had that thought. The Florida resort of Key West is being plagued by alarmist reports that mosquitoes arriving from Central America are spreading dengue fever. Just what that city of the hotels and bars needed in a recession. Some scientists expect the mosquito-borne disease to spread on the Gulf Coast, but perhaps most alarmingly the Centers for Disease Control is being forced by budget troubles to cut the division that tracks such invasive, insect carried diseases. According to the New York Times,

The disease centers confirmed that the 2011 budget does eliminate financing for the “vector-borne” disease branch, which tracks dengue, West Nile virus, plague, encephalitis and other illnesses carried by insects.

Dr. Ali S. Khan, deputy director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, said that the disease centers had to make budget cuts, and that the vector-borne disease branch was one. But he said other money could be used to pay for some of the work it used to do.

More than a dozen medical organizations have signed a letter to Congress, asking that the money be reinstated.

The report does not attribute the dengue threat to global warming; good scientists are careful not to generalize from anecdotal samples. But it sure would be reassuring to know the government had the resources to watch developments.***
On the other hand, after all the alarms of past years, mosquito-borne West Nile virus does not seem to be marching triumphantly through California as some feared a few years ago. The state monitoring center reported only one human case last year and four this year.***One of the most fascinating tidbits of mosquito lore I found on the web was a recent article in Nature that explored what harm might follow if we succeeded in eliminating these biting pests. Scientists aren't usually fans of doing away with species, but in this case

... there seem to be few things that mosquitoes do that other organisms can't do just as well -- except perhaps for one. They are lethally efficient at sucking blood from one individual and mainlining it into another, providing an ideal route for the spread of pathogenic microbes.

"The ecological effect of eliminating harmful mosquitoes is that you have more people. That's the consequence," says Strickman. Many lives would be saved; many more would no longer be sapped by disease. Countries freed of their high malaria burden, for example in sub-Saharan Africa, might recover the 1.3 percent of growth in gross domestic product that the World Health Organization estimates they are cost by the disease each year, potentially accelerating their development. There would be "less burden on the health system and hospitals, redirection of public-health expenditure for vector-borne diseases control to other priority health issues, less absenteeism from schools", says Jeffrey Hii, malaria scientist for the World Health Organization in Manila.

Thousands of public health workers are working on this.***Meanwhile, the little buggers keep biting. There's lot of lore, almost all of it spurious, about why the bugs choose particular individuals for their blood-sucking assaults. I enjoyed this imaginative sample:

It seems that mosquitoes have discriminating pallets. Did you know...that mosquitoes prefer children to adults; women to men; blondes to brunettes; people who have smelly feet and women who are ovulating? They also bite 500 more times often during a full moon.

Bring on the DEET!

Blogging may be light for the next few days, though I've pre-posted some material. I'll be on the road driving around the Northeast and will update on how the mosquitoes are faring in places where the heat is soaring. Did the larvae boil?

Those Wikileaks documents

As someone who writes a lot about Afghanistan, I probably should have something to say about the 90000 pages of previously secret military documents let loose on the world today.

I can't get properly excited about them. If you were paying attention, you knew the Pakistani spooks were helping the bad guys, you knew NATO and US forces were killing more civilians than they admitted and naturally pissing off the Afghans, you knew that "Classified" often means simply embarrassing to a military, and you knew the Karzai "government" was a kleptocratic farce.

And you felt bad for the Afghans and the foreign troops who are getting maimed and dying in this mess.

But here's hoping the big leak adds to the growing skepticism of Congresspeople when they are asked to vote more money for the war this week.

"Excluded" workers band together

Last week I listened to women from the National Domestic Workers Alliance and its local affiliate Mujeres Unidas y Activas report about their trip to the US Social Forum. That gathering drew some 15000 grassroots activists to Detroit in June to exchange experiences, share tactics and strategies, and envision a better future for people at the margins of U.S. life.

The women reporting back obviously had developed a great camaraderie, much reinforced on their long cross country bus trip; they repeatedly broke out in chants and collapsed in peels of laughter.

But what they wanted to tell the crowd at the Sunrise Cafe in San Francisco was what they had learned. And what they had learned employed a category that was new to me, though instantly recognizable once I'd heard it articulated.

"We learned about all the excluded workers: the taxi drivers, the day laborers, housekeepers and nannies, the farmworkers, guest workers brought into the country on contract to labor at hog farms and slaughter houses, the dishwashers in the back of the restaurant...."

What all these people have in common, beside low wages and frequently immigrant status, is that they usually work in the informal economy and are seldom covered by even the weak wage and hours standards that protect most employed people. The historical reason for their omission from the laws is pretty simple: this is work usually done by people of color. When labor laws were won during the the 1930s New Deal, excluding Blacks was a condition of white support.

Now the organized labor movement, pushed by the workers themselves, says it is time to fix the labor laws to include everyone. John Sweeney, head of the AFL-CIO, recently spoke up for a domestic workers' bill of rights reminding people that his own mother had been a domestic worker for 40 years.

And in New York State, such a bill of rights passed the State Senate last month.

Two different versions have been passed by the two houses of the New York state government. The Senate version is more expansive and would grant guarantees such as paid holidays, sick days, overtime pay, and the right to collective bargaining. Right now, domestic workers are not even entitled to minimum wage.

"What the average worker takes for granted, that’s what we’ve been denied," says Patricia Francois, who worked as a nanny in New York for twelve years before losing her job a year and a half ago.

Yes Magazine

California workers pushed a similar measure through the legislature in 2006 but Governor Schwarzenegger vetoed the protections. These women will be back.

What was overwhelming in the women's report was the broader view of solidarity they had taken on. Sometimes what it takes to make progress is adopting new language that illuminates what we've been looking at all our lives. Excluded workers, used to highlight this whole class of people on whose labor our society depends but whom the more fortunate seldom consider, provides a frame that might reorganize the labor movement "from the bottom up."

All workers need to band together, but none more than those who have been historically excluded.

Yet another war we need to end ...

From the 18th International AIDS Conference last week comes the Vienna Declaration.

The criminalization of illicit drug users is fueling the HIV epidemic and has resulted in overwhelmingly negative health and social consequences. A full policy reorientation is needed.

... There is no evidence that increasing the ferocity of law enforcement meaningfully reduces the prevalence of drug use.

This is a big step. Public health workers from all over the world are denouncing the "War on Drugs" as part of the problem, not at all a solution.

Unfortunately, hardly anyone in authority is listening. In a candid New York Times commentary on the declaration, Donald G. McNeil Jr. lamented:

No one heard. ... organizers' efforts to get publicity for the Vienna Declaration, which calls for drug users to be spared arrest and offered clean needles, methadone and treatment if they have AIDS, have come to naught. Almost no one here talks about the war on drugs.

Outside of Africa, one third of AIDS infections are thought to come from injection drug use. Though the U.S. contributes the bulk of world AIDS funds, our public health people would rather talk about most anything in preference to drug war abatement. McNeil points out one honorable exception:

... Dr. Nora D. Volkow, the normally low-profile director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, ... said she personally agreed with the declaration's premise.

"Addiction is a brain disease," she said. "I'm a scientist. The evidence unequivocally shows that criminalizing the drug abuser does not solve the problem. I’m very much against legalization of drugs or drug dealing. But I would not arrest a person addicted to drugs. I'd send them to treatment, not prison."

Asked if she feared being attacked by Congressional conservatives, she said: "I took this job because I want drug users to be recognized as people with a disease. If I don’t speak about it, why even bother to gather the data?"

These are pretty moderate sentiments about the "War on Drugs," but I suspect the reality-based community better get prepared to rally to Dr. Volkow's back.***

While on the topic of the Drug War, I want to point out Michelle Alexander's new book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The core of Alexander's argument is that, in the wake of the last century's civil rights overthrow of obvious legal discrimination, the "War on Drugs" has become the bulwark of an enduring white supremacy that grinds down most African Americans. Most white people and those people of color who manage to move into the middle class don't have to see this if we don't chose to look. But the drug war -- mass imprisonment, stigmatization of minor offenders, often brutal police enforcement and a facade of legal process that penalizes poor people -- have created a durable and largely unchallenged structure of oppression.

A bit of common sense is overdue in public discussions about racial bias the criminal justice system. The great debate over whether black men have been targeted by the criminal justice system or unfairly treated in the War on Drugs often overlooks the obvious. What is painfully obvious when one steps back from individual cases and specific policies is that the system of mass incarceration operates with stunning efficiency to sweep people of color off the streets, lock them in cages, and then release them into an inferior second-class status.

... how exactly does a formally colorblind criminal justice system achieve such racially discriminatory results? Rather easily, it turns out. The process occurs in two stages. The first step is to grant law enforcement officials extraordinary discretion regarding whom to stop, search, arrest, and charge for drug offenses, thus ensuring that conscious and unconscious racial beliefs and stereotypes will be given free reign. Unbridled discretion inevitably creates huge racial disparities.

Then, the damning step: Close the courthouse doors to all claims by defendants and private litigants that the criminal justice system operates in racially discriminatory fashion. Demand that anyone who wants to challenge racial bias in the system offer, in advance, clear proof that the racial disparities are the product of intentional racial discrimination -- i..e., the work of a bigot. This evidence will almost never be available in the era of colorblindness, because everyone knows -- but does not say -- that the enemy in the War on Drugs can be identified by race. This simple design has helped to produce one of the most extraordinary systems of racialized social control the world has ever seen.

Any doubters should take a look at a recent New York Times article about the Brownsville neighborhood where 14000 residents get stopped and frisked by rookie white cops making quota over and over again usually without any arrests -- and where residents express frustration in equal measure about violent thugs and the police.

Alexander writes that civil rights advocates (her own background) may someday "be embarrassed" about their failure to leap into the fight against the way the Drug War enforces white supremacy. It would be great to see an alliance of the public health scientists and the civil rights community. They are naming the same harm.

Thanks to Daniel De Groot at Open Left for pointing to the Vienna Declaration.

Saturday scenes and scenery: Mission street food -- on the walls!

Last week I posted photos of some of the neighborhood food vendors. Here's how they appear when rendered as art by Francisco Aquino (aka Twick) in a new mural at 23rd Street and Capp.


The strawberry seller looks wary, just as his counterpart usually does in real life.




That apron looks like this hot dog vendor might go for having a union.


Aquino's Mission Street not only boasts a flower seller -- there's also a "Hope Cafe."

The soft gauzy style in which the vendors are rendered makes a nice change from some of the Mission's trite political murals.


Around the corner, the artist indulged his own more baroque, Mayan-influenced imagination.

The whole project is an effort at graffiti prevention according to the property management, much encouraged by the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Torture apologist in town

These good folks were outside the Irish Cultural Center in the San Francisco's Sunset District Thursday to greet John Yoo, the featured speaker at an Association of Former Intelligence Officers luncheon.

The pickets' message was simple:

Crimes are crimes no matter who does them. Crimes under Bush are crimes under Obama and must be resisted by anyone who claims a shred of conscience.

***John Yoo's memos gave "legal cover" for Bush regime crimes.

Fire John Yoo

There's not much doubt about their case: Yoo's legal arguments for torture were called "shoddy" and "biased" by government investigators. He wrote what his bosses wanted and excused patently vicious treatment of prisoners.

In the interests of absurdity, I should probably add that Yoo denies that banging helpless prisoners into walls and half drowning them is "torture." He should get a taste of such treatment if he wants any credibility for that statement.

I'm glad to see that Yoo is dogged by protesters, however feeble such efforts seem. After all, the guy is still ostensibly fat and happy, a law prof and a mini-celebrity within the torture wing of Republican Party. But it must be wearing to be labeled and denounced as a criminal everywhere he goes.

His accomplice in legal chicanery, the lawyer Jay Bybee who Prez George W. made a federal judge, whines because his name will forever be sullied by his advocacy for torture. According to the New York Times, he thinks he's the victim.

"I have regrets because of the notoriety that this has brought me," he said. "It has imposed enormous pressures on me both professionally and personally. It has had an impact on my family. And I regret that, as a result of my government service, that that kind of attention has been visited on me and on my family."

Poor thing -- his dirty work violently broke hundreds of mens' minds and spirits and he has to put up with being thought a monster.

The responsible adults here are pretty clearly the apparently weak pickets. They tell the truth, again and again; they stand on solid ground while the torture apologists flail. Their witness recalls us all to our humanity.

Boys will be boys ...

The Democratic Governors' Association seems to think they can rally activists to "fight the right" by putting this out. It's a hoot.

Obviously they haven't noticed that women are more likely than men to be Democrats, regardless of age or other variables.

In case we'd forgotten, there's a war on ...

While politicians play the blame game, some people are taking matters into their own hands.

Waffaa Bilal, an Iraqi-American artist whose brother died in Iraq, has repeatedly tattooed himself to draw attention to the casualties of war. On his body are marks for each dead Western soldier, and 100,000 dots representing Iraqi casualties. [3:30] RT

Masters of the universe ...

in the Junior High School bathroom line.

I don't know what they are really doing, but it isn't their jobs. As the new Economic Security Index reveals, one in five of us is screwed. Where's the urgency, guys? Get to work!

Pic via Ezra Klein.

How to respond to a PR crisis

The Obama administration has been enduring public humiliation, having rushed to force the resignation a black USDA employee falsely charged with racial bias against white dirt farmers, only to have been shown to have swallowed a rightwing hoax and had the charges refuted by both the evidence and the dirt farmers. Pretty bad. Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack has now offered the wronged employee a public apology and a job. He sounded quite contrite.

"I asked for Shirley [Sherrod's] forgiveness, and she was gracious enough to extend it to me," Vilsack said, accepting "full responsibility" for forcing her to step down.

"This is a good woman," he said. "She has been put through hell. I could have done and should have done a better job." ...

"I did not think before I acted and for that reason this poor woman has gone through a very difficult time," he said. "This was my decision, and I made it in haste."

In this last bit, he's defending the White House from charges that it pressed him to deep-six Sherrod in order to quiet the furor rightwing media were ginning up. The denial isn't likely to be believed, but otherwise, Vilsack seems convincing.

The other day I ran across a succinct description of how an institution should handle a public relations crisis. I saved it, not knowing when I might find it interesting. Now I know. Here's the prescription. (I've cut the specifics of the incident described to extract the general principles).

Acknowledge the mistake, apologize for it, and explain how you won't let it happen again. ... Do this emphatically and repeatedly for a while. Avoid the passive voice, or qualifiers to your apology or explanation. Embrace the bottom line -- you screwed up, you're sorry, you won't do it again, and you're implementing substantive changes. Let the aggrieved parties know that you really care about them. Then shut up and listen for a while. Make at least some of the changes those aggrieved parties recommend.

Having gone through this process with clients a few times, I know it's a lot harder than it looks. People have pride. They may feel that not all the facts are getting out there. They may be worried about liability, and they retreat to a bunker, thinking they should remain silent until the whole thing blows over. Sometimes they feel they really haven't done anything wrong, even if the wrongdoing is obvious to everyone else. When it's your company, or your organization, or your reputation, these are all understandable reactions. The actions these reactions prompt, however, typically make matters much worse.

My emphasis. If that's the standard, and I think it is, it looks like the Obama folks were able to sink their pride and fairly quickly take a better course. Any other action would not only have been wrong -- it also would have been a terribly damaging admission of inability to respond to a minor but telling crisis.

Much of my criticism of the Obama administration has arisen from shock that the crisis management apparatus that so deftly managed the 2008 campaign (any campaign is a minefield of unexpected eruptions) had apparently dissolved once the Prez took office. Let's hope this little episode presages a revival of past sure-footedness.

Budget short takes: Recognizing limits

It's nice to see Congressman Barney Frank, a guy who actually has influence in Congress, telling some home truths about where the federal government can save money if it wants to.

"We need a thoughtful, non-rancorous discussion about the appropriate mission," said Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.).

Frank has been actively promoting ideas to cut the defense budget. In April, he put together a group of scholars to look specifically for defense cuts, unlike President Obama's deficit-reduction commission, which appears to be focusing elsewhere. The group issued its report last month, outlining nearly $1 trillion in defense budget cuts over the next 10 years.

"What should we be doing? What policy should we be setting? We have not had that conversation," Frank said Tuesday.

He's got the point: if, after more people get back to work, you want to reduce what the government spends, take a knife to the bloated military establishment. The thing grows in all directions, seemingly immune from concerns about why and for what purpose.

A machete is called for, not a scalpel.

What I was looking at last week this time ...

Slow blogging today ... I'm busy regrouping after a mini-vacation.