Friday critter blogging Meet Beanie

She doesn't look mean, does she? But Beanie is a working dog, the terror of stable rats. She catches them and shakes til their eyes pop out.

Then she goes and looks for a lap to sit on.

Mournful thoughts for 9/11, seven years on

I'm writing in an airport waiting to rush off on yet another trip halfway across the country. Busy, busy, busy.

I've negotiated "security," that silly ritual of pulling off shoes, pulling out laptop -- as I write this I realize, it being 4:45 am, I forgot to pull out my quart size bag of toothpaste and hair gel. Not a peep from the screeners as my bag passed through the scanner with the forbidden items in the pocket. So much for this theatrical ritual.

Within days of 9/11, a wise friend wrote an open letter with some advice for his stunned community of progressive friends. I paraphrase from memory: Do not, whatever you do, start talking about chickens coming home to roost ... in this national atmosphere of shock, anger and grief, people won't want to hear.

Seven years on, I will say aloud that those chickens are still coming home. The terrible attacks stunned a nation drifting in blissful but culpable ignorance. Too many of us thought we could ignore the ambitions of billions of other human beings who yearn for lives of some security, for respect for their histories and unique cultures, for a decent share of global wellbeing. Their pain was not our concern as we, five percent of the world's population, grabbed 25 percent of the world's energy resources, to take one example of our disproportionate consumption.

A kindergartener would know that such a division of the toys couldn't last -- but we are mightily armed kindergarteners crashing around in the world as if the planet were our playpen.

Our rulers used our naïve anger and ignorance to lead us into one completely unjustified war based on lies. In that war, we've torn apart a country, covered ourselves in shame as torturers and murderers -- and, despite all our power, are in the process of being thrown out, though we don't acknowledge this. Meanwhile, we're mired in another failing and spreading war in the wilds of Central Asia where we can rain death from the skies, but cannot bring peace and stability on the ground and see no disengagement in prospect.

And at home, fear and vengeance have trumped attachment to Constitution and the tradition of the rule of law, not men. These emotions have assaulted the virtue that accompanies our innocence, our generous hopeful spirit. We have become hooked on adrenaline and anxiety. We accept the theater of security and allow massive spying on individuals and raids that sweep up and disappear the Muslim, brown, foreign others who we are encouraged to fear.

We are locked in a Presidential campaign in which fear and greed are using every racist, sexist tactic in the book to try to drown hope and change. ***Later. Yet another airport. My flight is delayed. What else is new?

And yet, and yet...none of this post-9/11 horror show is over yet. Terrible possibilities that have not yet happened cannot be allowed to kill good possibilities that might yet triumph. Every day we live, we have the chance to make our impasse worse -- or make some tiny bit of this sad country a little better.

We can create friction that grinds away at the wall of fear and ignorance. We can try to choose for life and hope. There aren't really any other options. That can happen here.

Less worrying -- more working

Feeling down about the apparent stall of Barack Obama's campaign since the conventions? There's a remedy. DO SOMETHING!

Today MoveOn.org offered me a chance to act; I did as instructed and I feel better already. This project is over -- but you can achieve the same moderate relief from campaign anxiety. Stop fretting; start working.

Here's the poop on my little effort this afternoon, worthy of reporting, I think, because it was a smart project and a smart use of contemporary technological possibilities.

The email explained:

Starting tomorrow, thousands of your fellow MoveOn members in battleground states will be volunteering at hundreds of local Obama campaign office -- knocking on doors, making phone calls, registering new voters, and more.

They're going to make a big difference -- which is why we want to make doubly sure that we're giving them the right addresses and phone numbers.

That's where we need your help. Can you spend a few minutes calling at least ten Obama offices to make sure the info we have for them is correct?

I didn't have time, but it seemed a good idea and I did it anyway.

The online tools were good. Here's the script:

Here's what the call screen looked like after I'd finished a call:

Here's what popped up after 6 calls:

This was worth doing. If your campaign is going to use volunteers, you have to make them confident you are not wasting their time. That includes sending them to the right address at a time when the campaign office will be open. Don't laugh. On a project this large, it would be easy to screw up and burn off some willing enthusiasts.

The folks getting the calls at Obama offices were nice, full of energy. The offices I called had just opened. They liked the idea of MoveOn sending in the troops. They'll welcome you and put you to work if you go join them.

As a multi-national corporation once urged: "Just do it."

The Otherness of Barack Obama: "It's the names"

This McCain ad aims to make sure you remember the Democratic candidate is a "skinny Black guy with a funny name."

The other day a friend of mine admitted something she found very upsetting, something she was sure she'd be condemned for. She finds the idea of Barack Obama in the White House frightening.

She's a hard working, accomplished, late middle-aged, working class white woman. Deeply ensconced in the liberal ambiance of Northern California, she will vote for Obama in November; about that there is no question. But she finds the idea of him as president scary.

Friends, a little shocked but supportive, pressed her -- "Why? What is it that gives you that feeling?"

She suggested, "It's my racism..." But we knew that, though true as it is for all of us who are white, was too vague to be meaningful. She thought some more and explained, "It's the names. I felt it when I watched Michelle's speech and his daughters came on stage. They were called something I can't pronounce."

Obama's daughters are named Malia Ann and Sasha (short for Natasha, actually).

Neither of these is an uncommon name in the present United States. According to the name frequency tool described here, Malia ranked 403rd in popularity for girls in 2007. The name did not appear with any frequency before the mid-1970s. Sasha, as a girl's name (I think of it as something men are called in Russian fiction) ranked 350th in 2007. It was 256th in the mid-1980s and largely unused before the 1960s.

My friend's name, which I am not going to share out of respect for the quality of confidence she gave us in discussing something that troubled her, hit 259th in the mid-1930s and just about disappeared from common usage shortly after she was born.

And "no names starting with Barack were in the top 1000 names in any decade" according to the same tool. That may change.

So what is with white perceptions that African Americans have "strange" names, besides a stratagem to deflect awareness of our own racism?

I did a little light-weight research on the history of African American naming customs here and here. Both authors suggest that laying great stress on the empowerment of naming may have roots in the African customs brought by the slaves. But since losing the power to choose one's own name was of the essence of slavery, selecting one's name became identified with freedom.

The slaves brought to the U.S. from Africa had to endure a number of brutal crimes against them, not the least of which was being stripped of the names they were given in their native countries. These names held great importance, as they were often bestowed during special ceremonies held to celebrate the giving of a new name. This forced abandonment of something so precious destroyed a vital link to their countries of origin and took away a heritage that dated back much further than that of their enslavers. ... Slave owners thought nothing of replacing what they considered to be strange-sounding, exotic names with ones they could more easily pronounce. ...

After the conclusion of the Civil War, one of the first things that many freed slaves did was cast aside the names that had been forced upon them by their former masters and adopt new names that reflected their freedom.

In my own lifetime, I've seen another flowering of African American naming choices. When I was younger, I thought, from experience, of Black people as having names like "Eddie Washington" and "Eva Jefferson." But since the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, African Americans have exercised joyous creativity in naming their children, adopting names that people thought of, rightly or wrongly, as authentically African, or Muslim, or simply beautiful.

This freedom in naming has a cost in discrimination from white society. The National Bureau of Economic Research reports a complex 2001 study in which resumes from fictitious persons whose race might be signaled by their names were sent out in response to Chicago "help wanted" ads.

Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback.

Names matter.

During the Democratic National Convention, I remember reading somewhere a complaint that every speaker kept saying over and over "Barack Obama..." this and "Barack Obama..." that. Maybe that was far more intentional than I realized. Maybe the speechwriters and speech vetters over-repeated the candidate's name in order to help inoculate white America against our instinctive racist recoil from an unfamiliar moniker.

On some level this works. Note that my friend described her discomfort with "the names" as stemming from the family, not the guy himself. We're getting used to "Barack Obama." We're getting used to thinking of "the skinny Black guy with the funny name" as our next President. We have a ways to go, but together we can get there.

Fun with taxes?

I must be kidding. But folks might like this. Follow the link to ObamaTaxCut.com, answer some simple questions (no hunting for all those papers) and find out how you'd fare under Senator Obama's tax proposals.

Bonus: you also get your tax fate under McCain's regime.

Putting us to the test: Are the American people stupid?

You decide. [3:58]

What is the Iraq war costing?

The total cost of the Iraq War will be over $3 trillion, according to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard public finance professor Linda Bilmes. That's enough to buy a new Toyota Prius for every household in America.

For a new example every day, just visit War? Or Car?

Recent ones I liked included: Buy Ohio State - Michigan tickets until the sun becomes a red giant and Buy a platinum vibrator studded with diamonds for each woman in Europe and the Americas.

Visit frequently, then do something about this criminal waste -- including electing Obama.

Back to the real world: Descent into Chaos

The debased politics of the United States certainly can make one question whether the rule of law or democracy can be sustained in a commercial communications environment. But until recently, the world did have a good-sized supply of true believers in these accomplishments of European civilization: the insurgent "western-leaning," educated classes of exploited and misruled former European colonies were some of the most ardent believers anywhere. For example, Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh is reported to have admired the U.S. Constitution -- until the United States committed itself to preventing the Vietnamese from choosing their own path.

Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid was another such believer whose trust has soured. His new book, Descent into Chaos, is both the record of his personal disillusionment and a meticulous, invaluable, chronicle of how the United States has destroyed hope for democracy and development in Afghanistan, the other Central Asian "Stans," and Pakistan in the years since 9/11.

Rashid, and many like him, thought the United States would have to side with freedom in his native part of the world.

Initially, it seemed that 9/11 assured that the world would address the social stagnation and state failure in South and Central Asia. ...Afghanistan had to be rescued from itself. Autocratic regimes in Pakistan and Central Asia had to change their repressive ways and listen to their alienated and poverty stricken citizens. Iran had to be made part of the international community. The West had to wake up to the realities and responsibilities of injustice, poverty, lack of education and unresolved conflicts such as those in Kashmir and Afghanistan which it had ignored for too long and which could not longer be allowed to fester. The West and democratic-minded Muslims had to help each other counter this new and deadly form of Islamic extremism.

The attacks of 9/11 created enormous trepidation in the region as America unsheathed its sword for a land invasion of Afghanistan, but they also created enormous expectations for change and hope for a sustained western commitment to the region that would lift it out of poverty and underdevelopment. Surely the 3000 American dead lying in the rubble n the Hudson as well as the others in Pennsylvania and Washington had not died in vain. Surely we would remember them not for the revenge that the United States was about to take on Al Qaeda, but for the hope that their deaths had brought to a neglected corner of the globe. Instead, seven years on, the US led "war on terrorism" has left in its wake a far more unstable world than existed on that momentous day in 2001.

The book is an exhaustive, pained narrative of the abysmal U.S. failure in Central Asia.

As the U.S. gets slowly booted from Iraq, this region is going to become the main zone of imperial conflict. Past performance ensures that the result will be bloody for the local population and probably fruitless for the NATO nations now embroiled there.

Ominously, today Juan Cole points out that with regard to the war in Pakistan/Afghanistan (yes, the U.S. is engaged in military action in both countries), "Obama looks closer to the thinking of the US officer corps in Afghanistan than does McCain."

If you want to know where your military is at 3 am, I cannot recommend Rashid's current book too highly.

P.A.N.T.H.E.R: "Sexism exsts"

[3:22] Watch when you need a laugh.

We have a "special responsibility" to disabled people

Long before Sarah Palin and her child (the one born last April with Down Syndrome) were even a gleam in John McCain's ambitious eye, I ran across this video in which Barack Obama describes what he would do about federal policies that assist physically and otherwise challenged people.

I have to say that I was surprised by the quality of it. The man knows the subject; he actually knows what is he talking about. And he has a concrete command of what government can and should do to assist disabled folks taking their rightful place in society. It is absolutely worth watching. [3:40]

Some of the assumptions that underlie his policy proposals:

• "We must build a world free of unnecessary barriers, stereotypes and discrimination."

• "Every nation has a special responsibility to look after those who can't live on their own."

• "We must support independent community-based living for anyone who chooses it."

Take the time to watch this. You'll be impressed. For Barack Obama, disabled people are not some "special interest" or suitable object of charity; disabled people are part of the national "we."

Friday critter blogging The dogs of Dolores Park

A week ago we caught one of the last performances of the San Francisco Mime Troupe's Red State. (Not to my taste, but other views were mixed.)


Over a small ridge, a middling size crowd listened to speeches and music commemorating the Chicano moratorium.


Renee Saucedo urged the crowd to attend a Town Hall meeting on the ICE raids on migrant families.


But for sheer enjoyment of the park, the winners were the many dogs.






San Francisco is having an extended summer this year. Dolores Park was at its best.

Oddest moment in McCain speech at RNC

We have bit of a competition for this prize. Fairly early on, Mr. Seven-or-So houses bemoaned the fate of a couple who

"lost their real estate investments in the bad housing market."

Gee, what about the 343,000 who lost their homes in the first half of this year? Most people live in their homes, John. Homes are kind of important to them. Sorry about the folks with the investments -- but how about the folks who need somewhere to live?

This oddity was rivaled by another:

"We believe everyone has something to contribute and deserves the opportunity to reach their God-given potential from the boy whose descendents arrived on the Mayflower to ..."

I keep reading that and wondering, what is he talking about? Some of my ancestors arrived on the Mayflower. They've been dead for a long time. Nobody is arriving now to have descendants. To be honest, I expected find this was a delivery gaffe -- but I found it in the text of the prepared remarks. I have no idea what McCain was talking about.

But that's over. Even the TV news babblers seemed relieved as they chatted about the failure of the balloon drop to emerge properly. On to November...

UPDATE on the foreclosures that John McCain seems not to understand: According to the Associated Press

A record 9 percent of American homeowners with a mortgage were either behind on their payments or in foreclosure at the end of June, as damage from the housing crisis continues to mount, the Mortgage Bankers Association said Friday.

But the source of trouble in the mortgage market has shifted from subprime loans made to borrowers with poor credit to homeowners who had solid credit but took out exotic loans with ballooning monthly payments. ...

More than one out of 10 borrowers with a prime adjustable-rate loan is now delinquent or in foreclosure. That portion, 11.3 percent, was up from 9.7 percent in the first quarter and is expected to continue to rise as more homeowners see their monthly payments spike.

This isn't about investments -- this is a prelude to homelessness for people who were encouraged to overextend themselves when banks and mortgage brokers saw an opportunity for a quick profit. The borrowers may have been foolish, but the people who set them up for this fall were crooks. And McCain doesn't get any of this. He has lots of houses.

The ThreeSame monster

Smug, ignorant and a little mean -- John McCain seems to have done the near impossible: found yet another Republican governor of small accomplishments to inflict upon a country that needs competence and a smidgen of sense.

McCain has apparently become a reckless man lost without any political compass except his own ambition.

Oddest line from Sarah Palin's speech at the RNC

My fellow citizens, the American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of "personal discovery."

This seems a little incongruous coming from a person whose complete lack of qualifications for the office ensures that running for it can only be a journey of personal discovery.

Unremitting heat in a trashed city

While Republicans party and politicians pander in St. Paul, life goes on in the strange, harsh Baghdad that the U.S. invasion and occupation have made. Here's a bit of a word picture from Laith at Iraq Today.

It is summer in Iraq as it is in the northern half of earth but summer in Iraq is something different. ... let me say it is like hell. Yes, we practice hell every minute during summer in Iraq with a temperature of 107 degrees. Furthermore, Ramadan started. Today is the second day of Ramadan. ... That means to control myself from dawn until sunset. I must not eat or drink and I have also to control my nerves because fast means more than feeling hungry or thirsty. It means to feel the suffering of poor people and to behave like real good people.

When I come to office, I pass through the city center....Most of the convoys of the officials pass through this area also. ...A convoy of one of our (sacred officials) was waiting to pass. Six pick- up trucks of the Iraqi national police and the car of (his majesty the sacred official) is in the middle of them. I was walking in this hot day while his majesty was in his bullet proof air conditioned vehicle.

I was about to cross the street when one [of] the policemen ... shouted "Stop. Wait. Don't pass." I was like "what you want me to wait in this sunny place for the sake of a man?" I lifted my shirt mocking "see there is not explosive vest." ...A young soldier from the checkpoint on the side of the street came towards me smiling. He took my hand and he helped me to cross the street as if he was telling the policeman to be a human being. The policeman kept watching without saying a word. I felt I'm a child who can't do anything without the help of an adult....

With such officials who moves only with protection and air conditioned vehicles and who know nothing about their duty in Iraq and with such a stupid policeman (we have a lot of policemen who are the same as the one who stopped me); with such arrogan[ce] Iraq has no chance to walk one step forward.

Laith wants her country back -- and more and more sees no hope for ordinary Iraqis while politicians dither.

What was Coleman thinking?

"John McCain has a face that says 'YES.'" Norm Coleman (Senator, R-MN, a former mayor of St. Paul) just said that in a speech at the Republican Convention. I was driving, so I didn't catch the context -- I doubt that I wanted to.

Journalist Amy Goodman speaks in St. Paul

"Reporters are the eyes and eyes. They are what protects democracy. When those eyes are shut, when the ears are closed, democracy is threatened, and that's what they do when they arrest journalists." -- Pacifica Radio report.

Goodman's show tells the story.

ST. PAUL--Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and producers Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar have all been released from police custody in St. Paul following their illegal arrest by Minneapolis Police on Monday afternoon.

All three were violently manhandled by law enforcement officers. Abdel Kouddous was slammed against a wall and the ground, leaving his arms scraped and bloodied. He sustained other injuries to his chest and back. Salazar’s violent arrest by baton-wielding officers, during which she was slammed to the ground while yelling, “I’m Press! Press!,” resulted in her nose bleeding, as well as causing facial pain. Goodman’s arm was violently yanked by police as she was arrested. ...

Goodman was arrested while questioning police about the unlawful detention of Kouddous and Salazar who were arrested while they carried out their journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the Republican National Convention. Goodman’s crime appears to have been defending her colleagues and the freedom of the press.

She was not supposed to do that, not supposed to let us know what goes on in the streets while the oligarchs party.

I'm frequently critical of street demonstrations as unimaginative and unfocused. But we should all be far more critical of "policing" that amounts to violent repression of unpopular opinions.

Labor Day

It's a little hard to tell whether these workers rendered in a heroic mural on the rectory of St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church in the San Francisco Mission District have put their shoulders to the wheel or are about to be rolled over.

Whatever else we get out of this election, let's hope the resulting Congress and President will approve the Employee Free Choice Act which would make it much harder for employers to keep their workers from forming unions if they wish.

Maybe Palin is just ordinary?

One of the odder things about John McCain's latest present to the electorate is that she apparently had no particular views on the Iraq war until pulled out of obscurity. From Salon's War Room:

In an interview with Alaska Business Monthly shortly after she took office in 2007, Palin was asked about the upcoming [Iraq] surge. She said she hadn't thought about it. "I've been so focused on state government, I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq," she said. "I heard on the news about the new deployments, and while I support our president, Condoleezza Rice and the administration, I want to know that we have an exit plan in place; I want assurances that we are doing all we can to keep our troops safe."

Seven months into the surge, she still either had not formed any opinion on the surge or the war or just wasn't sharing. "I'm not here to judge the idea of withdrawing, or the timeline," she said in a teleconference interview with reporters during a July 2007 visit with Alaska National Guard troops stationed in Kuwait. "I'm not going to judge even the surge. I'm here to find out what Alaskans need of me as their governor."

That's a little weird, since Fort Richardson, near Anchorage, has dispatched countless soldiers to Iraq, including many who did not make it back. And Palin's own son, Track, is an infantry soldier who could go there any time.

Perhaps this lack of opinion is not really so odd -- except in a candidate who might suddenly find herself the President of the United States. Apparently her lack of views was really the default position for many people until U.S. soldiers started coming back from Iraq in body bags or maimed in body and mind.

David Moore, while working for the Gallup poll, designed an experiment in the run up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Conventional polling found substantial majorities of people in the U.S. in favor of the war -- something around 59 percent in favor, 38 percent against, and only 3 percent undecided. As a test, the pollster then asked each set a contrary question: for those in favor of an invasion, would you be upset if it didn't happen? For those against, would you be upset it the U.S. does attack Iraq?


The graphic shows the somewhat surprising result.

Only 29 percent of Americans supported the war and said they would be upset if it didn't come about, while 30 percent were opposed to the war and said they would be upset if it did occur. Another 38 percent, who had just expressed an opinion either for or against the proposed invasion, said they would not be upset if the government did the opposite of what they had just opined. Add to this number the 3 percent who initially expressed no opinion, and that makes 41 percent who didn't care one way or the other.

What this experiment revealed was that instead of a war-hungry public, Americans were evenly divided over whether to go to war — three in ten in favor, three in ten opposed, with a plurality willing to do whatever the political leaders thought best.

Moore concludes that the result shows the "the absurdity of much public opinion polling." And it does. In the interests of accommodating an interviewer, people express off-the-top-of-the-head opinions they have not seriously considered and which they only hold loosely.

I see a lot of lessons. This finding certainly reminds me that, because polls are taken seriously by the media and others who pay for them, I shouldn't horse around in answering them. (For unknown reasons, I get polled fairly frequently.) Even if I think the question is stupid, I should try to find a way to answer it so my response leans toward my actual opinion.

For the peace movement, we need to remember that when we're told public opinion is against us, we may really be seeing that people just hope that their leaders know what they are doing. Until they learned better from bitter experience, the public trusted the rulers enough to go to war. That trust having eroded, it will not be rebuilt easily. The peace movement didn't create the erosion, but we can built upon, encouraging skepticism about additional wars.

And for the pollsters, I throw back a question: if you knew that public support for the Iraq war was that soft -- why didn't you tell the world that most people really didn't have an opinion on going to war? War is irrevocable. When we figure out later that it was wrong, the dead are still dead. Pollsters' failure to put out their very lukewarm finding seems to verge on criminal when we contemplate the horrors this ill-considered war has unleashed.

Window shopping

I've known enough homeless women who carried their possessions around with them to be offended by the window display of this hip boutique. It's true, they didn't usually own such brightly colored bags.

Click on the picture to see a larger image.