Immigration poll

It turns out that most people in the United States don't want to jump on the "hate the immigrant" bandwagon. Perhaps the most interesting findings were that, surprise, African Americans were more welcoming to undocumented people than whites.

A new poll from CNN found that:

Most Americans would like there to be fewer illegal immigrants in the country, but only three in 10 say all of them should be deported ...

Blacks and whites differed over whether the number of illegal immigrants should be increased, with 14 percent of African-Americans saying it should, versus 3 percent of whites.

Nineteen percent of blacks said they thought all illegal immigrants should be removed from the country; 35 percent of whites said that. ...

The races differed more on whether state and local police should turn over illegal immigrants they encounter, even if the immigrants have broken no state or local laws. In such cases, 45 percent of blacks and 61 percent of whites said they believe police should turn over illegal immigrants.

Asked whether people who cannot read or write English should be allowed to vote, 54 percent of blacks said they should, versus 43 percent of whites.

These findings remind me of discussions during the campaign against California Proposition 187 in 1994 -- Prop. 187 was the right's prototype for subsequent anti-immigrant legislation. We, opponents, got hammered as 59 percent of the state's voters passed the measure. But as civil rights advocate Van Jones reminded us over and over: "If only Blacks had been voting, this would not have passed." Yes, the Black community was deeply split, but exit polls showed something like 51 percent against, 49 in favor. Meanwhile nearly 80 percent of anxious California whites approved Prop. 187.

With the browning of the electorate nationally, stirring up anti-immigrant sentiment is going to become less and less useful to the right. More and more citizens look at immigrant low wage workers and think "oh, these people are like us; these people are us." Some kind of regularization of status is needed, but most of us are not seeking mass deportations.

Not all news is bad ... really

The Survey and Policy Research Institute (SPRI) at San Jose State University asked Californians what should be done about unauthorized immigrants.

A substantial majority of Californians continues to support a path to legal residency for undocumented and illegal immigrants. In October, 59% of California adults (53% of voters) said that undocumented or illegal immigrants living or working here should be allowed to become legal residents of the state, while 30% (36% of voters) disagreed.

SPRI has asked the same question about immigration in quarterly surveys since March 2006, and support for residency has remained steady at between 50-63% over that time period. Support for legal residency is strongest among Latinos (78%), liberals (69%), and Democrats (67%), while the idea is less popular among Republicans (44%) and conservatives (48%).

What jumps out at me is that this majority who just want our neighbors legalized is not being heard in the immigration debate. How to do we make the majority audible and effectual?

Thanks to California Progress Report for pointing to the SPRI poll.

Losing is not just thinkable -- it is a fact

REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic photo

It's hard for most people in the United States, even dedicated peace activists, to comprehend the one simple truth: the US is currently losing -- actually has lost -- two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We just can't take it in. We've got all the high tech weapons; we're the biggest and meanest giant on the planet; we're the richest society around spending enormous sums on a war-fighting apparatus full of smart, dedicated people -- how can we be losing militarily? It must be a mistake; maybe George W. and Rummy were just incompetent.

In fact, the U.S. is repeating a pattern here, one that has existed since the U.S. emerged as top empire after World War II. One of the best historical dissections of the U.S.'s Vietnam debacle is James William Gibson's The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. Gibson made a nuanced argument that capitalist development in the U.S. ensured that our leaders and military were mesmerized by their technological capacity into believing that they could override any political obstacle to their plans for Southeast Asia by applying sophisticated technology. A few choice quotes give the flavor of Gibson's analysis:

Bicycles cannot "beat" cars and trucks and planes and railroads. But in 1954, the Vietnamese beat the French in the battle of Dien Bien Phu. Thousands of peasants cut trails through jungles and across mountains; thousands more dug tunnels close to French fortifications; thousands more walked alongside bicycles loaded with supplies for the Vietminh army. ...At the time, the French were amazed at their loss. The Americans were similarly amazed years later. They did not learn from the French because they thought the French simply did not have enough tools of war. ...

Gibson quotes Henry Kissinger writing in the Vietnam era:

'A scientific revolution has, for all practical purposes removed technical limits from the exercise of power in foreign policy.' ...

And he describes a study by a U.S. military analyst, Stephen D. Westbrook, who was trying to fathom how the United States could have been tossed out by the technologically inferior Vietnamese forces:

Major Westbrook compared 'unit readiness' in the United States Army to the readiness of the People's Army of Vietnam. He found that in heavy equipment the American military totally dominated the NVA. The NVA's victory then was the result of categories not conceptualized by the American military ...

Gibson goes on to point out that because losing the war to technological inferiors seemed impossible, aside from a few serious military historians, both military and politicians sought to blame civilian authorities for "exercising self-imposed restraint" in killing enough Vietnamese. The Vietnamese might beg to differ.

These days, an historians of Vietnam, Gabriel Kolko, is trying once again to explain how the U.S. could be losing wars to technologically inferior enemies in interviews in Der Spiegel here and here.

The US is losing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the very same reasons it lost all of its earlier conflicts. It has the manpower and firepower advantage, as always, but these are ultimately irrelevant in the medium- and long-run. ...

Wars are more determined by socio-economic and political factors than any other, and this was true long before the US attempted to regulate the world's affairs. Political conflicts are not solved by military interventions, and that they are often incapable of being resolved by political or peaceful means does not alter the fact that force is dysfunctional. This is truer today than ever with the spread of weapons technology.

Against a determined enemy, technology doesn't necessarily prevail even at the operational level:

Many in the American military have learned the fundamental dilemma of modern warfare: More money and better weapons don't mean that you win. IEDs, which cost so little to make, are defeating a military which spends billions of dollars per month. IEDS are so adaptable that each new strategy developed by the United States to counter them is answered by the Iraqi insurgents.

The Israelis were also never quite able to counter IEDs. One report quotes an Israeli military engineer who said the Israeli answer to IEDs was frequently the use of armored bulldozers to effectively rip away the top 18 inches of pavement and earth where explosive devices might be hidden. This is fantastic, as the cost of winning means destroying roads, which form the basis of a modern economy.

He concludes:

Washington refuses to heed this lesson of modern history.

Even though our rulers don't get it, it is important that the peace movement understand and proclaim loudly that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are well and truly "lost." We owe it to the suffering people of those countries who bear the vast preponderance of the pain. We owe it to U.S. grunts who are getting killed to disguise the loss so that politicians (and generals) now in power can push blame off onto future rulers. We owe it to ourselves, because unless we can ensure a true history of these debacles, we'll just live them again.

Knowing that these are lost wars -- wars that no new tactics, or "surges", or even redesigned new armored personnel carriers, are going to "win" -- clarifies that all the arguments about "responsible phased withdrawal" are just hot air. U.S. military forces aren't doing anything in Iraq or Afghanistan but killing and dying -- the meaning of those conflicts is already set. The U.S. launched aggressive wars and lost. Extending the killing and dying won't change a thing, but will increase human misery and U.S. guilt.

Blog toy: right brain or left brain?

No picture with this one because the picture is the content. The simple exercise at this link claims to show you whether you are right brained (use feeling, "big picture" oriented, imaginative, etc.) or left brained (use logic, detail oriented, facts rule, etc.). I was strongly "right brained" -- until I looked at it for awhile and figured out how to make it give the contrary action. How left brained is that?

Try it and share perceptions in comments if so moved.

Thanks to Seeing the Forest for this one.

An oped to make you puke

The measure of a civilization is the degree of its obedience to the unenforceable.

Lord Moulton
Via Discourse.net

Some twit of a Georgetown University and Brookings Institution foreign policy wonk is so scared of terrorists that he wants to toss away one of the real accomplishments of "western civilization," its condemnation of torture. Or perhaps it is not terrorists that have him shitting in his pants, but rather the upcoming movie "Rendition" which apparently exposes the brutality and folly of the U.S. practice of abducting people someone decides are "terrorism suspects" and shipping them off to be tortured by cooperative regimes. Why the movie might just shock the consciences of the sheep -- oops, people.

Writing in the Boston Globe, Daniel Byman fears this portrayal of "renditions" may lead to restrictions on US intelligence operatives:

Renditions, of course, violate the laws of the country in which they occur, going against US traditions of supporting the rule of law. However, the most controversial aspect of renditions is sending suspects to third countries where human rights abuses are common. ...

Abuses are even more worrisome than usual because - as "Rendition" illustrates - at times we will apprehend an innocent person. ... Mistakes like this are not just a result of government officials being sloppy or too aggressive, but rather inherent to the lower evidentiary standard that makes renditions attractive in the first place. However, when the United States gets the wrong man, it paints an image of America as supportive of brutality, making allies less willing to cooperate openly with Washington. ...

...dangerous terrorists would go free if the program were abandoned.

Indeed, the peoples of the world might think that their countries ought to have some say about what happens to their citizens (whatever their local spooks may think), but Byman knows better. The U.S. is the world's imperial hegemon after all. The U.S. gets to make its own rules and call them law. Mr. Byman can't quite bring himself to say bluntly that the U.S. sends people it considers terrorists off to be tortured, but he doesn't bother to try to refute the testimony of people like Maher Arar, the Canadian tortured at U.S. behest in Syria who was eventually paid $12 million by his government as compensation. (Wonder if Canada sent the CIA the bill?)

Basically Byman takes it as a given that the United States should be able to torture at will, but should hedge its actions around with "legal" trappings.

Essential for the legitimacy of this process is legal review. At the very least, a senior official in the Department of Justice who has some degree of separation from the executive branch officials involved in the program should be consulted to ensure that the intelligence used to finger the suspected terrorist is carefully vetted. ...

To be clear, the criteria would not be equivalent to that used in finding a guilty verdict for US courts, as intelligence is often limited and fragmentary. However, the legal review would ensure that at least some standards are maintained.

To return to Lord Moulton quoted at the outset -- the world cannot, at present, enforce civilized standards on the United States. Our practice of torture places us outside "civilization." It is up to the people of the United States to enforce civilized behavior on our rulers. Or would we rather run hither and thither like scared rabbits?

An organizer as candidate

Two friends from different sides of the country, both with deep experience of working in elections, pointed me to this item which partially contradicts what I said about Barack Obama in this post. Am I wrong that Obama doesn't have the megalomanial need to win that a candidate needs?

DES MOINES, Iowa — Barack Obama began his speech in an odd and important way, a way that did not make a single news story.

Obama was delivering a major address, reminding voters of his early opposition to the Iraq war. It was big deal speech. There were prepared texts handed out to the press and everything.

But Obama's first words were not in his text, even though they may have been the most important words he spoke all day.

"If you have not yet signed up as a Barack Obama supporter, hopefully after the speech you will," he told the crowd at the Polk County Convention Complex. "Fill out one of those cards. We’ll have volunteers all across the doors. You won’t be able to get out without seeing one of these cards."

Pretty mundane stuff, right? Which is why most candidates don’t bother with it. Especially not in a speech being covered by the national press, with six TV cameras grinding away. ...

"If you are already a supporter, then I would love for you to fill out another card indicating you want to be a precinct captain," Obama went on. "Because we need precinct captains in every precinct all across Iowa. And if you are not going to be a precinct captain, then we want you to find four more supporters to caucus for us. That’s a pretty simple assignment." ...

After Obama’s speech, he worked the rope line, which just about every candidate does. But on the rope line, there was a staff person behind him, with sign-up cards in her hand.

And if you shook the candidate’s hand, or got an autograph from him or got him to pose for a picture with you, she handed you a card and asked you to sign up, to volunteer, to bring four friends with you next time.

Politico

This is an amazing account of a candidate who understands organizing. Maybe the guy does have the burning desire that makes a candidate -- or maybe he is simply the extremely rare candidate who actually understands how elections get won at the base level.

For another perspective on Obama as organizer, see this admiring article by Ryan Lizza.

Misstep

This guy was mesmerized by his own publicity too.

Looks like the noxious Ann Coulter may have talked herself into an "Army versus McCarthy" moment. Back in 1954, the Republican Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, had had a good run, stirring up hysteria about phantom communists undermining the country and getting teachers, actors and writers fired for leftist sympathies, real and imagined. But then he claimed the U.S. Army was a hot bed of communism and allowed his aide Roy Cohn to demand preferential treatment for a drafted friend/former lover? Hearings pitting the Army against McCarthy were broadcast on TV and the weight of public and establishment opinion moved to repudiate the drunken inquisitor.

Coulter's been making a good living selling hatred against easy targets like "fags" and Muslims -- but last week, she stepped over a line and woke up a much more dangerous foe. According to the Los Angeles Times' TV critic Tim Rutten:

Earlier this week, Coulter went on "The Big Idea," a talk show aired on CNBC, the cable channel devoted to business news. Its host, Donny Deutsch, is a preternaturally affable businessman who invites successful people on to talk about how they turn their ideas into money. Coulter was there to describe how she had -- in our vulgar commercial argot --"branded" herself. At one point, Deutsch asked her what an ideal country would be like, and she replied that it would be one in which everyone was "a Christian." Deutsch, who happens to be Jewish, protested that Coulter was advocating his people's elimination. She responded that she simply hoped to see Jews "perfected" through conversion to Christianity. ...

Perhaps the best response came from the Anti-Defamation League, which called Coulter's comments "outrageous, offensive and a throwback to the centuries-old teaching of contempt for Jews and Judaism. The notion that Jews are religiously inferior or imperfect because they do not accept Christian beliefs was the basis for 2,000 years of church-based anti-Semitism. While she is entitled to her beliefs, using mainstream media to espouse the idea that Judaism needs to be replaced with Christianity and that each individual Jew is somehow deficient and needs to be "perfected" is rank Christian supersessionism and has been rejected by the Catholic Church and the vast majority of mainstream Christian denominations. Clearly, Ann Coulter needs a wake-up call about the power of words to injure others and fuel hatred. She needs an education, too, about the roots of anti-Semitism."

That she does. As the league points out, "supersessionism," the theological notion that Christianity "completes" or "perfects" Judaism is, along with the deicide libel, anti-Semitism's major theological underpinning.

For once these folks are confronting real anti-Semitism, not the phony stuff that amounts to questioning the behavior of the state of Israel. Christians do need to be reminded often about the terrible consequences of bad theology.

Coulter needs to shut up.

UPDATE: Coulter has her rightwing Jewish defenders. In the Jewish Daily Forward, Yaakov Ariel, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, discounts her remarks.

“A conservative, Jesus-oriented faith doesn’t mean, in and of itself, that people are anti-Jewish,” said Ariel, a specialist in Jewish-Evangelical ties. “Some of the more favorable attitudes toward Jews have developed in Evangelical circles, though perhaps in a way that makes some Jews uncomfortable.”

... “People who don’t care about Jews don’t care about their conversion,” he said. “Enemies of the Jews in the late-19th and early-20th centuries certainly did not try to convert them. The more you know about the Other, the better the ties. Relations between Jews and Evangelicals are better today than ever before.”

May I say, oy vey?

Friday Dog Blogging Pooches on the picket line

Nurses affiliated with the California Nurses Association (CNA) just completed a two day strike at 15 hospitals affiliated with Sutter Health, the monster "nonprofit" that is gobbling up local medical facilities. They are demanding adequate staffing for quality patient care, better pensions, and health care coverage for retiring nurses.

Yesterday the nurses held a rally the California "campus" (what kind of bull is that name?) of California Pacific Medical Center. I was surprised by how many of the nurses brought their dogs.



Hospital security looked on warily. Do these women look scary to you? Well, maybe they should.


Eventually the nurses crowded together to listen to speeches from clergy, labor and political leaders.


Dogs had to be held up to see the action.

Gender onslaught

Okay, this is from a soap company and the women in it are mostly stereotypically white and well off -- but it nails a great deal about how gender conformity is enforced.


We're all supposed to get "fixed" for somebody's profit. And we'll only put ourselves through this mutilation if we're taught to hate the selves we feel ourselves to be.

And that leads right into the subject that is roiling gay community waters at the moment: the willingness of "our leaders" (Congressman Barney Frank) and "our friends" (Speaker Nancy Pelosi) to drop protections for transsexuals from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA, the bill which would outlaw employment discrimination against us. They say they can't pass it with transsexuals in. Much of the community knows that if they cut out the transsexuals, the bill (which Bush would veto anyway) would lose most of its value. Why? Because effectively it would only apply to gay people who play by conventional gender rules.

The Bay Guardian summarizes what's wrong with the watered down ENDA:

... as the American Civil Liberties Union points out in a legal analysis of the changes, the gay and lesbian people most likely to face discrimination in the workplace are those who don't hew to traditional male and female roles. Effeminate men and butch women are far more at risk than, say, a gay man who can easily pass as straight. "The more masculine a gay man is or the more feminine a lesbian is, the less the likelihood of discrimination," the ACLU notes.

As the Lambda Legal Defense Fund writes, "This new bill also leaves out a key element to protect any employee, including lesbians, gay men and bisexuals who may not conform to their employer's idea of how a man or woman should look and act. This is a huge loophole through which employers sued for sexual orientation discrimination can claim that their conduct was actually based on gender expression, a type of discrimination that the new bill does not prohibit."

That is, a stripped down ENDA would only serve gay people who could pass as conventionally heterosexual. These are the gays who least need protection. Without language outlawing discrimination based on gender presentation, what's to keep an employer from deciding that dyke salesperson scares the customers and should be canned?

Sure, lots of discrimination is motivated by various forms of "ick" reaction to our sexuality -- but even more happens when our very being seems to pose a challenge to the norms of male and female gender identity. Queens, dykes and trannies suggest that not only sexual attraction, but also gender itself, are not immutable, fixed. Gender can change; people can express their gender identities in individual ways. Lots of our gender norms are just convenient ways of reinforcing male dominance. Gender deviance terrifies those who cling to patriarchal norms. And imposed gender conformity starts with learning to hate our unmutilated selves.

It has been very heartening to see how many LGBT leaders and institutions have protested the gutting of ENDA. Good for us. We're learning.

Hat tip to The Agitator for the soap company video.

Friends

You never know who you'll come upon in a San Francisco park.





Sighted today near Pine Lake at the west end of Stern Grove. I will not attempt an explanation. I don't have one.

One angry journalist

I didn't think she had it in her. Actually, I'd never much thought about her, not being a consumer of local TV news. The former news anchor at Fox's Channel 2 in the San Francisco Bay Area has come out swinging against her former employers.

The erosion was slow and many of us barely noticed the small chiseling away of who and what we once were. Anchors and reporters depend on high ratings. If ratings fall in television, people get fired. In the months following 9/11, the president's approval rating was 86 percent, and that's when many in commercial journalism lost their way. To disagree or even ask a disagreeable question regarding the president and his decisions was interpreted as disloyal by many media corporations. ...

In January 2003, President Bush delivered his State of the Union address. Osama bin Laden turned into Saddam Hussein, and Afghanistan turned into Iraq. The press knew this was a bait and switch, but fearing that reporters and anchors might appear unpatriotic, the corporate media made it clear that even if George W. Bush played twister in the nude while a few sheets to the wind instead of going to constitutional law classes at Yale, we were not allowed to talk about it. ...

... Not wanting to appear unpatriotic, the town criers did not cry out. Many corporate media reporters became stenographers, not reporters, on that day. Those in television journalism, particularly those working for a Fox affiliate, were not allowed to ask questions that could be perceived as unpatriotic, and every question was seen as unpatriotic. Monarchs and dictators don't allow questions. They also destroy those who speak ill of them. "Scooter - Valerie." "Rove - Anyone." ...

... local reporters looked at their retirement plans and their kids in college and promptly puckered their lips on the behinds of corporate media and smooched. If my kids were still in college, I would not have the courage to write this now. ...

Anchors and reporters stopped asking why. The corporate media demanded nationalism without skepticism, believing ratings would fall further if reporters did their jobs. ...

Anchors and reporters began allowing precious hours meant for journalism to be filled with helicopter shots of the latest grassfire, traffic jam or car chase, a la O.J.

Anchors and reporters allowed news directors and sales people to dictate their "look." Good journalism does not have a "look." ...

Anchors and reporters started wearing American flags on their lapels. Some of them never voted in any election. ...

Anchors and reporters started referring to the United States government as "We."

And that's not the half of what she wants us to know. Read it all here.

Candidates need some benign megalomania

Barack Obama at a rally in Waterloo, Iowa. (Photo: Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press)

Today Josh Marshall, as he often does, caught the essence of something I've often wanted to write about. He's talking about Barack Obama but the deficiency he describes is common among candidates for office, especially ones who lose.

He's trying to show us how marvelous he is (and this isn't snark, he's really pretty marvelous) so that Democratic voters will recognize it and give him the nomination.

But that's not how it works in this country. I don't know if it really works otherwise anywhere else. But you have to really want it, come out and say it, take it. I thought about qualities that describe what is at issue. 'Toughness' seems to bound up in meta-national security mumbojumbo. 'Ruthlessness' sounds too, well, ruthless. You have to want it enough that you reach out and take it. Which isn't always pretty and admirable. But that's what it takes.

I've worked for a number of these candidates. They think that if the electorate only would understand how good and qualified they are, they would be elected. And they might very well make great office holders. But they make lousy politicians.

Good candidates need an almost megalomaniacal certainty that they deserve the job and the willingness to do what it takes to get it. Since these are profoundly anti-democratic characteristics, how do we ever get good governance? That's what the Constitutional system of checks and balances is supposed to deliver by moderating and buffering the drives of individuals. When, as at present, it is not operative, we get lousy governance.

Unfortunately I think Marshall is right about Obama. I think new net activist opportunities that helped him last winter set him up for the position he is now trapped in. He benefited enormously because his supporters revealed a new arena for organizing Presidential buzz at social networking sites like Facebook. Obama made a huge splash in a place others hadn't really known existed (or if they knew, that it mattered.) It all came easy. Bad luck for Obama, as this novel buzz fed his belief that his own virtues would carry him to the nomination.

Successful candidates identify, target and corral their potential supporters in disciplined pursuit of office; they employ whatever technical means they can find and afford. They know the question is not how, but how many? They know they are cobbling together a majority, not demonstrating their superior virtue. This is not an attractive picture when stated baldly that way, but it is how elections work.

Remembering Che

This young man wore his Che T-shirt in Damascus, Syria last year.

Forty years ago today in the Bolivian highlands, a Cuban-born CIA agent, gave the order to a Bolivian soldier to shoot their captive, Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Yet somehow the guerilla leader, the Argentine doctor who sought to lead an uprising of the poor, lives on as an international icon. Of what he is an icon is not so clear, but that that somehow he lives in popular imagination is undeniable.

The villagers in the town where he died venerate him as a saint to be invoked in time of trouble.

The winding road that connects Vallegrande to La Higuera leads to a cluster of humble houses, walls plastered with Che's images and graffiti. In the middle of the village is a cobbled star-shaped square with a small bust of Che; next to it is a large altar with a cross and a big grey sculpture of Guevara.

Melanio Moscoso, 37, sits against a wall next to a Guevara poster. 'We pray to him, we are so proud he had died here, in La Higuera, fighting for us. We feel him so close,' he says.

His neighbour, Primitiva Rojas, professes devotion: 'I have lots of faith in him. Because he stopped existing does not mean he is not here with us.' A few days ago, when feeling sick, she prayed to him and soon felt better. 'That same night I dreamt of a man with a black beard and tender eyes, who was telling me: "I was the one who cured you".'

Certainly much of Che's enduring magic arises from responses to Alberto Korda's iconic photo of the bearded, long-haired revolutionary in the beret. It is a source for all those T-shirts and posters. Wikipedia reports: "the Maryland Institute College of Art called Korda's picture, 'the most famous photograph in the world and a symbol of the 20th century.'"

Somehow the image and the man's history have merged in imagination to call up a deep archetype of the heroic leader who brings justice to the poor.

I only know that when I was around the Catholic Worker movement in the 1970s -- that is, in the heart of in what was Roman Catholicism's U.S. alternative to godless communism -- Che's famous dicta from a letter on Socialism and the new man [sic] hung in the crowded office:

Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality...

The dream endures.

Archbishop Tutu: hope-filled truth teller

Lately I've been dipping into The Rainbow People of God, a collection of (now retired) South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu's speeches, letters, sermons, and interview extracts that I picked up in a used bookstore.

Much of this material dates from an excruciating time in South Africa, after the white racist apartheid regime accepted in 1990 that it would have to come to terms with the Black majority, but before the landmark non-racial election in 1994 that brought the African National Congress (ANC) and Nelson Mandela to power. During that time, right wing white groups did all they could to encourage violence between various Black groups, instigating terrible massacres in Black townships, especially in Natal Province. Witnesses often reported that police from the white government had a role in the clashes.

Tutu had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his courageous, non-violent struggle against apartheid; later under the ANC government, he would head the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that tried to find ways for South Africa's people to go forward together, leaving the violence of apartheid behind. But in the interlude, Tutu strove courageously to comfort and restrain the victims of the inter-communal violence. Something of the anguish of that time comes across in this sermon from 1992, in the wake of an atrocity in which "200 or 300 men armed with axes, knives, spears and automatic weapons moved through an informal settlement at Boipatong, ... south of Johannesburg, slaughtering forty-six people. ... Boipatong residents alleged that some policemen had acted in collusion with the attackers. ..." Tutu preached:

Our country is on the brink of disaster. Many of us have had to anesthetize ourselves to the agony and suffering of our fellow South Africans. Many of us have had to invoke the kind of defense mechanism that had to see us, we hoped, through this horrendous period of carnage and bloodletting. We had reached dangerous levels when many of us would sigh with relief and say 'Oh, it's only five,' or 'It's only six or seven people who have been killed. Thank goodness.' Only! That is so utterly unacceptable ... Those five or six or seven or eight or ten, hey, that was someone's husband, father, son. That was somebody's brother, somebody's sister, mother. ...

I hope somewhere, somehow it will sink into the consciousness of most our white fellow South Africans that we are human beings. Just a simple thing: we are human beings. We are not animals. ... Our cry is for you to recognize that God has created us as God has created you. Our cry is that God has given us a land that is large enough for all of us. And we want to share it with you. ...

Whether you do or don't stand up, let us tell you again what we have said so many times: We are going to be free, we are going to be free. We are going to be free despite all of this that they are doing. We are going to be free. We want you to be with us when we are free. ...

A combination of realism, of unvarnished recognition of how we accustom ourselves to the unbearable, coupled with an inclusive demand for simple justice, carried Tutu through those awful times. I recognize the anesthetizing going on in me as I contemplate what my government is doing to people across the world. Baghdad is showing progress; only ten tortured corpses today ... I strive for something like Tutu's confidence that yes, one day, we'll make this rich, beautiful country a force for justice for our own people and the peoples of the world. The Archbishop has always projected that hope; can we, the comfortable, settle for any less? ***
Coincidentally, the good Archbishop is in the current news. The University of St. Thomas in Minnesota invited him to be part of a program it had hosted for several years that brought Nobel laureates to campus to speak with young people; then it got cold feet and disinvited him. According to the local paper City Pages:

"We had heard some things he said that some people judged to be anti-Semitic and against Israeli policy," says Doug Hennes, St. Thomas's vice president for university and government relations. "We're not saying he's anti-Semitic. But he's compared the state of Israel to Hitler and our feeling was that making moral equivalencies like that are hurtful to some members of the Jewish community."

St. Thomas officials made this inference after Hennes talked to Julie Swiler, a spokeswoman for the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas.

"I told him that I'd run across some statements that were of concern to me," says Swiler. "In a 2002 speech in Boston, he made some comments that were especially hurtful."

Tutu's offending speech is here. After seeing Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands and communities, Tutu saw injustice -- and many similarities to the apartheid system. This, apparently, is the offending paragraph from his speech:

People are scared in this country [the U.S.] to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful -- very powerful. Well, so what? This is God's world. For goodness sake, this is Go'’s world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosovic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.

Again -- Tutu spoke unvarnished truths that many cannot bear to hear and concurrently held up the hope that injustice will not triumph forever. For this, he is again condemned by some who do not recognize their common humanity with people who are repressed and exploited.

A few comments:

• The phrase "the Jewish lobby" raises hackles and is inaccurate. But if a state proclaims its reason for being is to provide a homeland for Jewish people, it is not surprising that most folks tend to assume its advocates are Jewish. It takes a more subtle understanding of U.S. right wing lunacy to appreciate that much of the Israel Lobby consists of non-Jewish racist imperialists who want to use Israel as "our cop on the ground" against "the Islamics" and of Christian fundamentalists who believe Israel fulfills prophecies of their own triumphal future. Many U.S. Jews are appalled by the behavior of the state of Israel -- and very conflicted about the position its allies place them in.

• Though probably little known outside its locality, the University of St. Thomas is a respected academic institution that should know better than to dump Tutu. It is the largest private college or university in Minnesota. Many regional leaders are among its graduates including Mike Ciresi who is running in the Democratic primary to take on Republican Senator Norm Coleman in 2008.

• The organization Jewish Voice for Peace has collected the relevant links about the Tutu disinvitation at its blog, Muzzlewatch. They've set up an easy email page through with to send letters of protest to the University.

UPDATE, October 12, 2007: the University of St. Thomas has backed off its dis-invitation of Bishop Tutu. Full letter here.

What animates Dianne Feinstein...

Would that California's senior Senator got this excited about protecting the Constitution and ending the war:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., watched from a Marina Green reviewing stand as the [Fleet Week] parade of ships passed by. Asked about the Blue Angels' flights, she said the team should be appreciated for what it is - an amazing display of superb technical proficiency.

"When I was mayor, I went up with the Blue Angels, and we did a loop," she said. "It was the most exciting day of my life."

San Francisco Chronicle,
October 7, 2007

When Feinstein was mayor here, she was known for tuning in to police radio transmissions and rushing to the scene of fires.

Such boring business as oversight of warrantless wiretapping or Bush's appointment of their man on the election rigging beat [Hans von Spakovsky] to the Federal Election Commission can't seem to get the same quality of attention, though these things are her job.

Ken Burns' war and our real ones

Publius at Obsidian Wings:

Modern remembrances too often make the act of war seem more romantic than it is. If WWII taught us anything, it’s that we should try our best to avoid war. Its horrors and devastation were simply beyond words. But instead of seeing those horrors and resolving to stop war, many Americans today see WWII as a vindication of war itself. Because war was necessary in that instance, it becomes necessary in all instances. ...

Mass acceptance of war as a foreign policy tactic was one reason the administration could sell Iraq so easily. The American people didn’t put up much of a fight. ...

And we don't pay a price for this war that we have to feel daily. In WWII, my parents learned to do without driving to save gas for the war effort and learned to love beef tongue because it was a meat that wasn't rationed. Today only the families of the soldiers have to live with a gnawing anxiety brought by our wars. We'll all pay over time, in crumbling infrastructure and worldwide collapse of any benefit of the doubt for the United States good intentions.

Perhaps we are becoming a "normal country." I think many will be surprised by what they have lost.

Friday critter blogging The blessing of the beasts

On the feast of St. Francis (October 4), in the city of St. Francis, about 40 pets and some 75 people were well and truly blessed last night at the Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist in the Mission district.




Dogs and their friends waited for the service to begin.








By the opening hymn, the aisle was a tangle of leashed pets.






Who's this?


Even rats can be loved.


There was even a gecko -- "Scout" -- who was molting.


People and pets seemed to have a great time.

Day of international blogging for Burma

According to the Associated Press,

YANGON, Myanmar [Burma] – After crushing the democracy uprising with guns, Myanmar’s junta switched tactics Wednesday, sending troops to drag people from their homes in the middle of the night and letting others know they were marked for arrest.

People living near the Shwedagon Pagoda, Myanmar’s most revered shrine and a flash point of unrest during the protests, reported that police swept through several dozen homes about 3 a.m., dragging away many men for questioning. ...

Dozens of Buddhist monks jammed Yangon’s main train station after being ordered to vacate their monasteries – centers of the anti-government demonstrations – and told to go back to their hometowns and villages. ...

After the night of widespread detentions, military vehicles patrolled the streets in Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city, with loudspeakers blaring a warning: “We have photographs. We are going to make arrests!” ...

Will the photos that alerted the world to the democracy protests serve as death warrants?

Sign a truly international pro-democracy petition here.

This bomb still threatens

Last night I spent a hour or so reading a small pamphlet, Defusing the Ticking Time Bomb Scenario: why we must say No to torture, always. [PDF] Quite obviously this little book from a venerable European human rights outfit, the Association for the Prevention of Torture, is designed to teach any sane remnant in the United States how to argue against the pernicious influence of "24," Dick Cheney and George W. Bush on our moral character. We scare the heck out of its authors.

Some excerpts:

Once the assumptions hidden in the Ticking Bomb scenario have been exposed and challenged, several things should be clear. The scenario’s popularity of late is part of a concerted effort to create a legal exception to the prohibition against torture. The lack of precision in defining the scope of the scenario means that any such exception will necessarily be much broader than the “pure” ticking bomb scenario initially suggests.

... anyone who attempts to justify torture in the name of saving lives is assaulting the common humanity of us all. We must treat them with shame and revulsion as we would any proponent of genocide or slavery.

... arguments about the ticking bomb hypothetical are not truly about what we would do in some imagined future, it is about the kind of society we want to live in today and every day.

... we must recognize that being prepared to use torture, even in exceptional circumstances, implies certain institutional arrangements that seem fundamentally inconsistent with the kind of society most people desire. We can anticipate clandestine interrogation centres staffed with interrogators trained in torture techniques (presumably in some sort of torture academy). On our streets we would walk amongst men and women who have been encouraged to override their natural revulsion at causing pain and suffering to another human being helpless to defend himself. Researchers and entrepreneurs would work to discover and produce ever more horrific torture equipment and techniques. In the past these types of institutional arrangements have been associated with the Nazis, with other fascist states and totalitarian societies and dictatorships. What would it say about our society if we were to adopt the same techniques that were central to theirs? What kind of company do we wish to keep?

Sounds about right to me, but these sorts of arguments don't speak to the passionate need to hurt someone, most anyone, that gripped too many in the United States after 9/11. And 9/11 taught far too many of us to fear for the first time that the United States could be vulnerable to determined enemies. At the behest of lying leaders all too eager to legalize torture, the United States waltzed off down the "slippery slope."

Scott Shane, David Johnston and James Risen tell the story very clearly in the October 4 New York Times. In 2001, C.I.A. teams were under tremendous pressure to find any terrorists and terror plots that might exist. Their boss declared "9/11 changed everything." And it did.

From the secret sites in Afghanistan, Thailand and Eastern Europe where C.I.A. teams held Qaeda terrorists, questions for the lawyers at C.I.A. headquarters arrived daily. Nervous interrogators wanted to know: Are we breaking the laws against torture?

The Bush administration had entered uncharted legal territory beginning in 2002, holding prisoners outside the scrutiny of the International Red Cross and subjecting them to harrowing pressure tactics. They included slaps to the head; hours held naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the ultimate, waterboarding.

Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics. ... "We were getting asked about combinations -- 'Can we do this and this at the same time?'" recalled Paul C. Kelbaugh, a veteran intelligence lawyer who was deputy legal counsel at the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorist Center from 2001 to 2003. ...

The questions came more frequently, Mr. Kelbaugh said, as word spread about a C.I.A. inspector general inquiry unrelated to the war on terrorism. Some veteran C.I.A. officers came under scrutiny because they were advisers to Peruvian officers who in early 2001 shot down a missionary flight they had mistaken for a drug-running aircraft. The Americans were not charged with crimes, but they endured three years of investigation, saw their careers derailed and ran up big legal bills.

That experience shook the Qaeda interrogation team, Mr. Kelbaugh said. "You think you're making a difference and maybe saving 3,000 American lives from the next attack. And someone tells you, 'Well, that guidance was a little vague, and the inspector general wants to talk to you,'" he recalled.

They thought they were on the trail of the ticking time bomb -- but concurrently they feared too that they were stepping over a precipice.

To reassure the anxious torturers, John Yoo wrote "the torture memo" -- a facile legal opinion asserting to C.I.A. operatives that they were acting within the law. When word of this leaked out, the Department of Justice in the person of James Comey questioned the legal arguments. He wanted to make a stand.

[In 2005] Mr. Comey spoke of the "agonizing collisions" of the law and the desire to protect Americans. "We are likely to hear the words: 'If we don't do this, people will die,'" Mr. Comey said. But he argued that government lawyers must uphold the principles of their great institutions.

"It takes far more than a sharp legal mind to say 'no' when it matters most," he said. "It takes moral character. It takes an understanding that in the long run, intelligence under law is the only sustainable intelligence in this country."

Comey knew he was up against "a concerted effort to create a legal exception to the prohibition against torture" through a "ticking time bomb" scenario.

Shane, Johnston and Risen give a former naval lawyer the last word in their article:

"I know from the military that if you tell someone they can do a little of this for the country's good, some people will do a lot of it for the country's better," [John D.] Hutson [the Navy's top lawyer from 1997 to 2000] said.

By the way, despite Comey and Congress, the Bush Administration still keeps its "exception" open by executive order.

When you want to know...

Want to know what percentage of your neighbors never married? Ever wondered what the median income in your area is? Is it true the folks in the area you are canvassing seem to move a lot? Just plug a zip code into Zipskinny and find out.

This web tool quickly gives you a selection of basic census data by zip codes -- and shows you how nearby zip codes compare. It's fun and interesting.

It's a good tool for anyone planning a campaign in a limited geographic area, for statistics junkies, and for the simply curious. Enjoy.

Iraq is over. Not the war, the country

Not all Iraqi refugees get to cities. These are picking up water aid in desert camps. Photo: Marko Georgiev for The New York Times

When I was part of a delegation to the region in the summer of 2006, the obvious reality, visible on the streets of Amman in Jordan and Damascus in Syria, was a massive presence of Iraqis, refugees from a country falling apart in the wake of the U.S. invasion. In those days, it was hard to get anyone to think about the regional effects of the enormous refugee flow (roughly 2 million out of Iraq and 2 million displaced within.) Now every day there is a new article about their plight -- though not nearly enough action on their behalf from the instigators of their misery.

Nir Rosen, probably the U.S. journalist who has gotten most deeply inside the Iraqi situation, has new, long article in the Boston Review that reports on refugee lives in Egypt, Syria and Jordan, as well as his attempts revisit long time acquaintances inside Iraq. He opines dismally on the likely future:

What will happen to Iraq? Think Mogadishu, small warlords controlling various neighborhoods, militias preying on those left behind, more powerful warlords controlling areas with resources, such as oil fields, ports, and lucrative pilgrimage routes and shrines. Irredentist Sunni militias will attempt to retake their lost land, but they will be pushed into the Anbar Province, Jordan, and Syria, where they may link up with local Islamist militants to destabilize Amman and Damascus. ...

There is no “surge.” At best it can be called an ooze, a slow increase of American occupying forces by a mere 15 percent, consisting of few new soldiers and many whose terms of service have been merely extended. Yet the U.S. has doubled the size of its mission, announcing it will also take on the Shia militias as well as the Sunni ones. On the ground, that means American soldiers secure areas and then hand them over to Iraqi security forces who impose a reign of terror on the inhabitants. In the Iraqi civil war the army and police are not the solution; they are combatants, fighting on behalf of Shia-sectarian Islamist parties. The vaunted efforts to train Iraqi security forces have merely trained better death squads. ...

The American occupation has been more disastrous than the Mongols’ sack of Baghdad in the 13th century. Iraq’s human capital has fled, its intellectuals and professionals, the educated, the moneyed classes, the political elite. They will not return. And the government is nonexistent at best. After finally succumbing to Iraqi pressure, the Americans submitted to elections but deliberately emasculated the central government and the office of the prime minister. ... Maliki will be the last prime minister of Iraq. When he is run out there will be no new elections, since they can’t be run safely and fairly anymore, and the pretense of an Iraqi state will be over. [My emphasis]

Do read it all.

Then, if you are not depressed enough, go read Barbara F. Walter's oped about the history of the trajectories of civil wars in the last 60 years. The money quotes:

Civil wars don't end quickly. The average length of all civil wars since 1945 is 10 years. ... This suggests that, historically speaking, Iraq's current civil war could be in its early stages, with nothing to suggest that it will be a short, easy war.

True, many Iraqi factions -- including Shiite and Sunni groups -- would prefer negotiation to protracted conflict. After all, political power and oil revenues can be divided. The crux of the problem is that there is no way to enforce any agreement that is reached. ... The push for a constitutional compromise is naive and without any basis in history or realpolitik. [My emphasis]

Get the U.S. forces out of there now. The Iraqis are going to have find their own equilibrium. We broke it and we are not fixing it -- and can't. Hard for the U.S. to admit, but simply true.

Urban life: why I still drive a car

SF Mike has a great post concluding:

It's hard to change people's behavior, but living without cars as much as possible creates communities, improves everyone's health, and is a blueprint for some kind of future without oil wars.

I couldn't agree more. In the last few years, I've begun to use the car much less. But I still do drive fairly often. Let's unpack this, recognizing that my behavior is individual and a little quirky. Isn't everyone's?

Many days, I never move the car (it's usually parked on the block) except perhaps to avoid street sweeping tickets. Currently I'm working at home. I walk to buy fresh food. I've gotten a gym membership a convenient distance away on foot. I can and usually do walk to church.

I'll take BART, the San Francisco Bay Area's '70s vintage subway system that stops a block from my home, whenever it goes within about a mile of where I want to go. That covers a fair amount of ground, including San Francisco Airport, downtown San Francisco, and much of Oakland and Berkeley. I can even get to Oakland Airport on BART, using the connector bus.

Somewhat to my shame, I don't use Muni, the San Francisco bus system. Because both Muni and BART are fundamentally spoke systems, designed above all to get workers in and out of downtown, the same places I could reach on one bus are mostly the same as the downtown areas I reach on BART -- and BART is faster and more reliable. Sometime back I simply stopped taking Muni if the ride required a transfer, because the system felt rickety, unpredictable.

Although San Francisco is a small city, I don't cycle for transportation. The traffic and the hostility of drivers scare me. I envy the brave souls I see on bikes, but I think I'd get killed. And I don't trust that I could lock a bike outside and not find it vandalized or stolen when I returned. Apparently, despite all the good work of bicycle advocates, these fears commonly limit city cycling.

So what gets me into the car? Visits to friends who live far from BART. Errands that require visiting multiple destinations on a tight schedule. Shopping for staples in quantity. Transporting disabled friends. Leaving the city. And most frequently, at least three trips a week to the margins of the city -- the beach, Golden Gate Park, the bay or further -- so that I can run without traffic!

When I go out to exercise, I need the car to serve as a portable locker room. I can't imagine a viable substitute for having this place to park clothes, fluids, etc. while I go tromping around. This was also true in the past when I worked in offices away from home; I would drive to work in order to have the portable locker room available before or after. So long as I run, I'll frequently drive. That seems madly contradictory, but it has been true for a long time.

Thoughts? I'd love to hear from other city people why they drive, so that together we can practice envisioning what it would take to get us out of cars. Cities that provide more solutions for the times we need cars have to be part of our future.

Creeping censorship

U.K. bloggers v. the Uzbek billionaire
Alisher Usmanov bought part of a popular football [soccer] team, thereby drawing public scrutiny. The former U.K. ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, who has denounced the Uzbek dictatorship's violent repression much to the horror of his former employer, Tony Blair, had published a blog article that characterized Usmanov as one the gangsters who have gobbled up the wealth of the former Soviet Union by force and trickery.

Usmanov didn't like that, so he got high class London lawyers on the case. The United Kingdom has ferocious libel laws that enable people who claim defamation to pretty much put the publishers out of business -- these laws create a guilty until proved innocent situation, unlike US libel law where truth is a pretty complete defense. So Murray's ISP and an intermediary ISP wholesaler, took down Murray's blog when they got a lawyer letter threatening, not proving, a libel claim. (In the US, ISP's have been held not responsible for what we say using them; we're responsible.)

Murray's ISP blog wholesaler happened also to be serving a couple of members of Parliament -- and Bloggerheads, a sort of crossroads of the Brit political blogosphere. Fearing a libel charge, they took those sites down as well as Murray's. And the UK blogosphere mobilized -- hundreds of blogs took up the hue and cry about Usmanov. It is really not smart to make broad libel suit threats if you were aiming for a low profile about your possibly criminal misdeeds.

As of today, good news. After a couple of weeks, Bloggerheads is up again. More here at Bloggerheads proprietor Tim Ireland's temp site devoted to this imbroglio.

Nell at A Lovely Promise pointed out that U.S. bloggers also have an interest when Usmanov attacks our U.K. counterparts.

And in the U.S.A. ...
Another reason we need some good law making it clear that internet discourse occures in a new form of public space. Boing-Boing reports on AT&T's new terms of service:

From now on, AT&T can terminate your connection for conduct that "tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries." So AT&T customers aren't allowed to write/podcast/vlog critical things about AT&T, its billing-practices, or its cooperation with illegal NSA wiretapping, on pain of having their connections disconnected.

Stuff like this needs more speech. Let people know what our corporate masters would like to do to the pipes or there'll be blockages ahead.