Candidacies

Yesterday I met with a prospective local candidate. He's a good guy and would be wonderful to have in government. I was encouraging and even donated to his campaign. And I said to him what I say to all of them: to win office, you have to run with all your being -- and you have to understand that the qualities that make a good candidate are completely different than the qualities that make for a good officeholder.

I've previously described the quality candidates need as benign megalomania.

This morning I see that Mark Halperin. a senior political analyst for Time magazine and former ABC News Political Director, is saying something similar about our aspiring presidents:

Our two most recent presidents, both of whom I covered while they were governors seeking the White House. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are wildly talented politicians. Both claimed two presidential victories, in all four cases arguably as underdogs. Both could skillfully serve as the chief strategist for a presidential campaign.

But their success came not because they convinced the news media (and much of the public) that they would be the best president, but because they dominated the campaign narrative that portrayed them as the best candidate in a world-class political competition. In the end, both men were better presidential candidates than they were presidents.

Halperin is criticizing the news media, his own profession, himself, for practicing the horserace journalism that values political dexterity over policy substance. He might as well criticize our capitalist culture that has assured most of us that candidates are just marketable commodities and that holds campaigns to no higher ethical standards than it holds prescription drug commercials.

...These side effects may kill you, but isn't the background scenery lovely ... soft music fades...

Time to unsubscribe

Warning: This film shows a performance artist undergoing, for real, interrogation techniques permitted in the CIA handbook.

You won't like it.

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Unite against terrorism. Unite against human rights abuses in the 'war on terror'.

Go ahead; do it. It is not a lot, but it is something.

Horror and hope

My friend Jane at Acts of Hope pointed me to Bill Moyers talking with theologian James Cone about the nooses coming out of our racist closets these days -- and the power of love and resistance. Here's a sample:

BILL MOYERS: I would have a hard time believing God is love if I were a black man. I mean, those bodies swinging on the tree. What was God? Where was God during the 400 years of slavery?

JAMES CONE: See, you are looking at it from the perspective of those who win. You have to see it from the - perspective of those who have no power. In fact, God is love because it's that power in your life that lets you know you can resist the definitions that other people are being-- placing on you. And you sort of say, sure, nobody knows the trouble I've seen. Nobody knows my sorrow. Sure, there is slavery. Sure, there is lynching, segregation.

But, glory, hallelujah. Now, that glory hallelujah is the fact that there is a humanity and a spirit that nobody can kill. And as long as you know that, you will resist.

I'm pretty much video proof, but this is a frank, truthful, joyful conversation not to be missed. Video and transcript here. Take the time to watch; you won't regret it.

Flying while Muslim

Too dangerous to fly?

What it boils down to, says Dr. Waleed Meneese, the Imam of Daralfarooq mosque in Southeast Minneapolis, “is that the faith of 1.5 billion people is becoming a suspicious practice in America.”

Twin Cities Daily Planet,
November 22, 2006

The cancerously expanding Terrorist Security Center watch lists that underlie everyday U.S. airport security theater generate thousands of false stops and create inconvenience of hundreds of thousands of prospective passengers. But those experiences are innocuous compared with the harassment and humiliation that U.S. Muslims and others with Arabic names experience when crossing the border and boarding airplanes.

Southern California InFocus recently catalogued numerous incidents:

• "I was returning from a trip to Dubai and Saudi Arabia," recalls [Dr. Monzer] Kahf, [a well-known Syrian-born consultant, trainer and lecturer in Islamic banking, finance and economics] who has been living in the United States for 37 years and became a U.S. citizen in 1980. "The customs officer told me I had too many stamps in Arabic on my passport." Kahf said he was detained for an hour and a half, questioned and eventually let go. Kahf also added that since then he has traveled overseas 24 times and on each and every trip he was stopped, detained and interrogated.

• "Any time I leave the country, I'm usually stopped for at least an hour or two - the most was four hours," said [Shaikh Yassir Fazaga] an Eritrea-born soft-spoken imam. "I've gotten so used to it, that I actually prepare myself." When returning to the United States from Canada in July 2006, Fazaga, who is a U.S. citizen, arrived two hours before his flight and was given clearance to board the plane only to be pulled off later. He was then detained and questioned for close to three hours. Fazaga was not given a reason for his detention but was cleared and let go. "I missed my flight and had to wait an extra day to catch the next flight out of Calgary," Fazaga added.

• On Dec. 16, 2004, Anaheim resident Bilal Dalati, 42, was coming back from a business trip with a 15-person delegation that included Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez and several elected officials. ... Then, something unexpected happened. "The minute I stepped off the plane, there were two officers waiting for me," Dalati said. "They took my passport, walked me to my luggage and then went through it piece by piece." Dalati, a U.S. citizen of 20 years, said he was pat-searched, had the contents of his pockets and wallet emptied and then asked odd questions. Dalati added that the officers subsequently photocopied all paperwork in his possession, and then he was let go.

Given the frequency of these incidents, it is good news that the six Muslim religious leaders who were yanked off a US Airways flight last year will be getting their day in court.

A federal judge on Tuesday rejected most defense arguments to dismiss a lawsuit filed by six Muslim imams who were arrested last November on a U.S. Airways jet in Minneapolis after passengers reported they were acting suspiciously.

The imams have said that three of the men in their party said their evening prayers in the airport terminal before boarding the plane, then entered the aircraft individually, except for one member who is blind and needed a guide. Once on the plane, the men did not sit together.

A passenger raised concerns about the imams through a note passed to a flight attendant. Also, witnesses reported that the imams made anti-American comments about the war in Iraq and that some asked for seat belt extensions even though a flight attendant thought they didn't need them.

U.S. District Judge Ann Montgomery, in a 41-page opinion and order, said it is "dubious" that a reasonable person would conclude from those facts that the imams were about to interfere with the crew or aircraft. She said the plaintiffs had stated a plausible claim that Metropolitan Airports Commission officers violated their constitutional rights.

Associated Press,
November 21, 2007

How very conventional these citizens, these imams, are! They think they should have a constitutional right to pray, travel and hold opinions. Perhaps courts will agree. We can hope so.

Watch out: the watch list is growing

Today the New York Times reports that air travel has gone smoothly for most Thanksgiving travelers. The weather was good -- and prospective airline customers are getting well trained: many began the holiday a day early to avoid the crush.

So how's our "no fly list," our security theater system, doing? According to slew of recent reports on the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and its parent Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), the system is still limping -- and regularly infringes on our expectation that we're innocent until we commit a crime and should expect to be allowed due process to clear our names. Nor does it make us safer.

For starters, the watch list continues to snare absurd victims. In addition to Congressmen and small children, even an airline pilot has a problem:

Captain Robert Campbell was a pilot for the US Navy in Vietnam. He recently retired from a 22-year career as an airline pilot.

And, yep, he's on the list...

"The fact is, I'm authorized by the TSA to fly the airplane and ride the jump seat on air carriers," he said. "But if I want to ride in the back, I'm on the No-Fly List."

Aero News Network,
November 6, 2007

The TSA says this sort of thing happens because people have names very like or identical to people who should be stopped from flying. At the present rate of growth, roughly 200,000 new names a year, pretty soon one million names will trigger special scrutiny. Not surprisingly,

..."It undermines the authority of the list," says Lisa Graves of the Center for National Security Studies. "There's just no rational, reasonable estimate that there's anywhere close to that many suspected terrorists."

Though the government wins breathless hype from student reporters for its Terrorist Screening Center which selects these names, the office of the Inspector General was less impressed when it examined a sample portion of the list:

Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said its management by the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) "continues to have significant weaknesses," producing a high error rate and a slow response to complaints from citizens.

In an examination of 105 records, for example, the auditors found that 38 percent of the records contained errors or inconsistencies that the TSC's own quality-assurance efforts had not found. They also discovered that the TSC is operating two versions of the database in tandem without ensuring that their contents are identical, which they said could result in missed opportunities to identify terrorists. ...

The review found that nearly half the initial name matches against the watch list proved worthless, suggesting that the government should consider misidentifications a priority and develop policies to address them, Fine said.

Washington Post,
September 6, 2007

Security expert Bruce Scheier got a chance to explain the results of bad matches to TSA head Kip Hawley:

The main problem with the list is that it's secret. Who is on the list is secret. Why someone's on is secret. How someone can get off is secret. There's no accountability and there's no transparency. Of course this kind of thing induces paranoia. It's the sort of thing you read about in history books about East Germany and other police states.

Not everyone gives the government the benefit of the doubt about its list collecting. As reported in Travel Management,

First Amendment rights activist Edward Hasbrouck, working for The Identity Project, during the TSA meeting said that the "core of the proposed rule" is a requirement for "would-be air travelers to obtain permission from the government before they can travel." That, he said, infringes on freedoms of assembly of movement.

And all this mass of names and data the government is collecting isn't just used to hassle people who want to fly. The government uses it in multiple other contexts.

The State Department queries the list before issuing visas, customs and border agents use it to vet incoming travelers and a subset of the list is exported to airlines for their passenger rating systems. More than 800,000 local and state police can also query the database when they pull over a speeding car or run a detained person's name through their computer system.

Wired Security News

The ACLU warns that the TSC envisions additional uses:

There was considerable discussion in today's [Congressional] hearings on whether the watch list should be checked for anyone trying to purchase a firearm. One can imagine the watch list, once thought of as merely a "No-Fly List," being used increasingly as a screening method to determine eligibility for a wide array of privileges and rights. A move in this direction would make it a true blacklist, with hundreds of thousands of Americans wrongly denied full participation in society because of erroneous placement on the list.

This certainly seems possible if the powers-that-be feel the need for more coercive controls over some of their opponents. For the moment, most of us are not threatening enough to invoke such a response. And for the moment, we can and must still defend whatever political space we can make. But something cancerous and evil is growing among us, exemplified in those airport security checks.

Thanksgiving for hills and their critters

I don't celebrate often enough the wonderful land in which I live, the hilly trails where I run when my tired feet let me.


On the coast in the Marin Headlands (part of the Golden National Recreation Area) rocky coves hide where the mountains plunge into the sea.


Hawks -- many turkey vultures actually, but there are redtails too -- soar on the thermals looking for dinner.


This guy tries to blend in with an old asphalt road and almost succeeds.


A doe checks out the slow moving intruder.


While the gentleman of the family decides the runner can't possibly disturb their grazing.

Who gets to vote?

New black voters, 1966.

Here's yet another case of politicians picking their voters rather than voters picking their politicians. This one is from Florida. Like every state under the federal H[elp] A[merica]V[ote]A[ct] (passed after the 2000 election debacle), Florida has had to clean up its voter rolls and create a statewide database of registrants.

Now a Florida newspaper's analysis shows that when new registration applications go through thestatewide level, somehow ten percent of potential voters get dropped. And there is a pattern to who gets filtered out:

More than 14,000 initially rejected — three-quarters of them minorities — didn't make it through that last set of [state] hoops.

Blacks were 6 1/2 times more likely than whites to be rejected at that step.

Hispanics were more than 7 times more likely to be failed.

Unaccepted but also not denied, they remain in limbo as "incomplete" or, often, sitting in Florida's new statewide voter registration system with no designation at all.

State law requires those "lost" voters to be notified; most contacted said they were unaware of the problem.

If Republican authorities have their way, a lot of jurisdictions are going to need a new civil rights movement.

In the early 90s I was part of a group of North Americans who shared their electoral experience with left parties in El Salvador. Our hosts shared a perfect description of this sort of barrier to public participation. They called it "strategic incompetence."

H/t TPM.

Depressing thought for a Monday morning.

A corner of an evaporating glacier, Kilimanjaro, 2002.

A Democrat on the Democrats:

The message from the world's science community is that humanity has seven years in which to abate the growth of carbon emissions. That is less than a two-term President's opportunity to lead. The next American President effectively will decide mankind's future relationship with the planet.

As of now, no Democratic candidate is making this necessary crusade the centerpiece of their campaign, and every Republican candidate in effect sub silentio supports the melting of the ice caps, drowning of Florida, flourishing of plague and pestilence, and sparking of global war over energy resources. In this latter respect if anything I underestimate the terrible policies advocated by the Republicans. They make the America Firsters of the years before Pearl Harbor look like globalists. The Democrats, however, have within their group no one who as yet is the fervent champion of what Al Gore has won the Peace Prize for.

Reed Hundt, TPM

Happy Birthday St. John's: We're 150 today!

Marshal Cousins photo.

The Bay Area Reporter, a publication that can be described as San Francisco's gay newspaper of record, shares the news:

Gay-friendly church celebrates 150 years

A San Francisco church that's been welcoming the LGBT community for more than three decades will celebrate its 150th anniversary this weekend.

The Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist has survived low membership, the 1906 earthquake, an arson fire in the 1970s, and an ever-evolving neighborhood. The church, which occupies a quiet, leafy corner of the Mission District, will host a special Eucharist, reception, and dinner Sunday, November 18.

You don't have to be Episcopalian to attend.

The church offers a "very loving, supportive community," said Kathy Veit, one of the church's lay leaders. The church provides "something people are looking for that can be elusive in a place like the San Francisco Bay Area, where people are too busy to work on relationships," she said.

Veit, who identifies as lesbian and was raised Roman Catholic, said before she became a member three years ago, it had been 25 years since she'd been to church. She said the Bay Area's transitory nature makes it hard for people to get to know each other, but church members do things for each other like taking meals to new parents, and helping elderly church members get to medical appointments.

According to the Reverend John Kirkley, the church's openly gay rector – the pastor of the parish – as many as 80 percent of the church's approximately 90 members are LGBT. Veit said about 60 percent of the church's members live within walking distance, which is close to the Castro District, Noe Valley, and the South of Market neighborhoods.

[There's much more ...]

The party is this evening. I intend to enjoy.

Terrors of the night Chinese to show the way?

Glacier edge on Kilimanjaro in 2002; certainly long melted today.

When I was a child in the 50s, we sweated at night in fear of the Bomb. In the United Kingdom today

Half of children between the ages of seven and 11 are anxious about the effects of global warming and often lose sleep over it...

A survey of 1,150 youngsters found that one in four blamed politicians for the problems of climate change, while one in seven said their own parents were not doing enough to improve the environment.

The Scotsman

Now there is a cohort asking itself at a very young age, "Can it happen here?" They are not crazy; in fact they have a sensible, and aptly targeted, apprehension of risk:

From the high asthma rates in Massachusetts to malaria scaling Mount Kenya, sick children have become the first victims of rising temperatures and extreme weather.

Boston Globe

International polling reveals that the adults also get it. Interestingly Chinese citizens are among the most willing to pay for needed costs and lifestyle changes.

In all countries majorities agree that in order to address the problem of climate change it will be necessary for individuals in their country "to make changes in their life style and behavior in order to reduce the amount of climate changing gases they produce."

Urban Chinese have the largest majority--85 percent--who would support raising taxes on the fuels that contribute most to climate change. ...

... China stands out as exceptionally willing to consider higher taxes as a means of combating climate change. When those against or uncertain about higher taxes are asked whether they would support them to increase efficiency or develop new sources, the total in favor of tax increases becomes a nearly unanimous 97 percent.

Apparently there's something about living in a country on the economic rise that gives people at large a can-do attitude, something our current rulers in this country neither practice nor encourage.

Thoughtful people wonder whether the challenge of climate change actually presents even more threat to our historic social arrangements than is posed by climate crisis itself. The author and social observer Anatol Lieven has mused:

The question now facing us is whether global capitalism and Western democracy ... can make the limited economic adjustments necessary to keep global warming within bounds that will allow us to preserve our system in a recognizable form; or whether our system is so dependent on unlimited consumption that it is by its nature incapable of demanding even small sacrifices from its present elites and populations.

If the latter proves the case, and the world suffers radically destructive climate change, then we must recognize that everything that the West now stands for will be rejected by future generations. The entire democratic capitalist system will be seen to have failed utterly as a model for humanity and as a custodian of essential human interests.

International Herald Tribune

Now there's a vision worthy of nightmares.

Iraq Moratorium day

Step by step the longest march can be won, can be won
Many stones can form an arch, singly none, singly none
And by union what we will can be accomplished still
Drops of water turn a mill, singly none, singly none.

From the preamble to the constitution of the United Mineworkers of America

Buhdydharma has up a great post for this Iraq Moratorium Friday. The little essay explores the metaphor of the water of resistance -- the demand to stop U.S. war(s) -- spreading out through the U.S. population, seeping into unexpected cracks, leaking out where least expected.

Take a look at Bruce Lee on the power of water:


As an alternative to big peace marches and the tiresome, though necessary, work of pressuring complacent politicians of both parties, the Iraq Moratorium aims to get as many possible of us moving on a local level on the 3rd Friday of every month. The Iraq Moratorium project undoubtedly needs any spare change we have available.

Dissent around the table, around the world

When you visit other people's countries, have you ever wished you could reassure your hosts that you aren't on board with contemporary US foreign adventures? Very possibly, if you are part of the 20 percent of U.S. residents who even have a passport. Apparently that's how the women pictured above felt. The sign scrawled on a menu reads, "we did not vote for Bush."

They had just won an international bridge tournament in Shanghai; they were proud and happy; they wanted to share their moment with their international friends.

“What we were trying to say, not to Americans but to our friends from other countries, was that we understand that they are questioning and critical of what our country is doing these days, and we want you to know that we, too, are critical,” Ms. Greenberg said, stressing that she was speaking for herself and not her six teammates.

The controversy has gone global, with the French team offering support for its American counterparts.

“By trying to address these issues in a nonviolent, nonthreatening and lighthearted manner... “you were doing only what women of the world have always tried to do when opposing the folly of men who have lost their perspective of reality.”

New York Times
November 14, 2007

The U.S. Bridge Foundation was not amused. Sponsors, including the Chinese government, might withhold contributions. The offending sign makers are threatened with suspension from federation events, including the World Bridge Olympiad next year in Beijing. The federation demands an apology and more.

The federation has proposed a settlement to Ms. Greenberg and the three other players, Jill Levin, Irina Levitina and Ms. Rosenberg, who have not made any mollifying statements.

It calls for a one-year suspension from federation events, including the World Bridge Olympiad next year in Beijing; a one-year probation after that suspension; 200 hours of community service “that furthers the interests of organized bridge”; and an apology drafted by the federation’s lawyer.

What's a bridge player to do when her federation wants to police her political views?

What's an empire to do when women just want to be friendly?

Fixing the vote by race, age and class

No color-no ID required. Light blue-some ID required. Blue-photo ID required. Dark blue-proof of citizenship required. January 2007

When you can't win an election on your own merits, wouldn't it be great to pick own your electorate who you can trust will vote for you? That's why politicians like to draw district boundaries to ensure one-party dominance. A new study [pdf] from the University of Washington's Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race and Sexuality shows pretty conclusively that by demanding voters show photo IDs, Republicans ensure that more voters are white, older, and affluent. Others, likely Democrats, get pushed off the rolls.

Indiana's photo ID law is being challenged as discriminatory in court. Researchers set out to find what it really would do voter eligibility. They polled carefully randomized samples of voters and non-voters about their IDs. The results show clearly that the ID requirement is designed to build a Republican bias into the universe of voters and potential voters.

• 21.8 percent of black Indiana voters do not have access to a valid photo ID (compared to 15.8 percent of white Indiana voters -- a 6 point gap).

• When non-registered eligible voter responses are included -- the gap widens. 28.3 percent of eligible black voters in the State of Indiana to not have valid photo ID (compared to 16.8 percent of eligible voting age white Indiana residents - a gap of 11.5 percent).

• The study found what it termed "a curvilinear pattern (similar to an upside down U-curve)" in the relationship between age and access to valid ID -- younger voters and older voters were both less likely to have valid ID compared to voters in the middle categories. 22 percent of voters 18-34 did not have ID, nor did 19.4 percent over the age of 70. (compared to 16.2 percent of Indiana voters age 35-54 without valid ID and 14.1 percent for 55-69 year olds).

• 21 percent of Indiana registered voters with only a high school diploma did not have valid ID (compared to 11.5 percent of Indiana voters who have completed college -- a gap of 9.5 percent).

• Those with valid ID are much more likely to be Republicans than those who do not have valid ID. Among registered voters with proper ID, 41.6 percent are registered Republicans, 32.5 percent are Democrats.

Brennan Center fror Justice

It's pretty clear who the authors of this law think should be allowed to elect their government officials.

Diplomacy in the time of empire

Maziar Bahari of Newsweek interviewed Sadegh Kharazi, Iran's former ambassador to France, about his country's tortured relations with the North American giant.

... whenever we wanted to have a rapprochement with the United States they demanded more.

H/t to Informed Comment: Global Affairs.

Iraq war has set a human tide in motion

A woman with a supply of rations from the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization. Marko Georgiev for The New York Times.

According to Juan Cole, an Iraqi newspaper reports that

1,500 Iraqis are being forced to leave Syria every day as a result of strict new visa requirements. Still, about 500 new Iraqi refugees are able to come into Syria every day, since they managed to get visas. There are an estimated 1.4 million Iraqi refugees in Syria. There is now a net reduction of 1,000 per day, so that if it continues, in about 4 or 5 years all the Iraqis will be out of Syria. Which is probably what the Syrian government intends. Note, however, that this influx of 7,000 Iraqis a week from Syria is not spurred by better security in Iraq (otherwise, why are 500 a day or 3500 a week still leaving Iraq for Damascus?) The exodus is being dictated by new Syrian strictness about visas and residency permits.

Meanwhile, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs talked with people forced to return to a still desperately dangerous Baghdad.

Broke and desperate, Ziad Qahtan Naeem and his family have returned to their house in war-battered Baghdad, a move they likened to a "death sentence".

The six-member Shia family fled the Sunni-dominated Mansour neighbourhood of western Baghdad nearly two years ago and took refuge in Syria, joining more than one million Iraqis there.

But they have become part of a growing wave of Iraqis leaving Syria -- not because they are confident of Iraq’s future but because they have run out of money. ...

"At any moment you or any member of your family could be a statistic in a police file," added 46-year-old Naeem, who spent US$30,000 in Syria.

Things have deteriorated to the point that some parts of Iraq are turning away Iraqis fleeing more violent parts of the country. Basra has begun keeping out arriving refugees.

“We cannot cope with any more families seeking refuge in our province, whatever their reasons. The governorate is seriously affected by the high number of displaced families,” a senior official in Basra Governing Council, Hassan Abdul-Kareem, told IRIN on 11 November. ...

“The number of Iraqi families fleeing their homes for safer areas has increased, despite reports that levels of violence have diminished,” said Abdul-Kareem. ...

Dozens of families who arrived in the province on 9 and 10 November were forced to turn back or head to other southern provinces as Basra security stopped them at check points and prevented them from entering Basra city.

“When they saw our bags, a police officer stopped us and told me and my seven family members that we had to head back to where we came from because the local council had prohibited the entrance of new arrivals,” Raghib Muhammad, a 43-year-old Baghdad resident seeking refuge in Basra, said.

Relief agencies estimate that there are now roughly 2.5 million Iraqis forced into short term exile in Jordon or Syria by the violence unleashed by the U.S. war -- and an equal or greater number displaced within Iraq.

If you click on the picture of Faiza on the sidebar to the right, you'll reach the Collateral Repair Project, an Iraqi grassroots initiative through which people in the United States can help some of the displaced in Jordan and within Iraq help themselves. Take a look.

Veterans Day: The woman general who took the fall

One Woman's Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story by General Janis Karpinski with Steven Strasser.

A friend pulled this title out of a remainder bin, skimmed it, and passed it on: "You should read this." She was right.

As the title makes clear, this is Karpinski's side of the story of the torture scandal, for which she was the highest ranking officer to be rebuked. As far as her apologia is concerned, on some subjects, like the complete muddle Donald Rumsfeld's Department of Defense had made of Army Reserve, she is very persuasive.

At the mobilization station you end up with battalion commanders who don't know their brigade commanders, company commanders who don't know their battalion commanders, and soldiers who don't know each other or their leaders at any level. A soldier who grew up in Montana finds herself deploying with a bunch of guys from Brooklyn. A soldier who speaks no Spanish finds himself assigned to a company from Puerto Rico. If the system looks chaotic, it is. ... Most of the Reserve and National Guard units we sent to the Middle East starting in late 2002 had nothing like [the desirable] level of cohesion.

She is less able to document her central contention about the torture scandal -- though subsequent revelations about the sadistic inclinations of our rulers seem to bear her out:

For the rest of my days I will believe that, at Abu Ghraib , these soldiers were following orders when they humiliated and abused detainees.

But this material is not what I found so interesting about this book. What drew me in, as a Vietnam-era feminist whose life experience made the attractions of the military opaque, is Karpinski's tale of what attracted her to the Army and how she persevered despite discouragement and actual abuse from its male hierarchy.

[By 1977 when] the Army restructured itself into a volunteer force after Vietnam, it was attracting plenty of male recruits who wanted education and training that would carry over into civilian life. But the Army also needed warriors, and there were not so many volunteers for that assignment. That's where the women came in. Our policymakers' plan over the next decade was to steadily expand the ranks of women holding jobs in combat support and combat-service support. As more women were given roles as truck drivers, supply officers, intelligence analysts, and the like, more men would find those jobs closed and be forced to join the warriors. And once you became a professional infantryman, you were much more likely to make the Army your career. There were lots of civilian jobs for truck drivers and electronics technicians trained by the Army -- but not so many for combat fighters.

Karpinski didn't understand how women soldiers were being used to track men into less desirable jobs when she enlisted -- nor does it seem that she would have objected if she had known it. This is a woman who consistently identifies with management, a useful state of mind in a rigid hierarchy. But she's also no dope. Her struggle with her status as a woman in a man's world is interesting.

I was determined to become a soldier's soldier ...But I had to acknowledge something else about myself: I also wanted to remain a woman. ...Some women -- even straight women -- tried to neutralize the men by joining them, cutting their hair and playing down their female characteristics. For my part, I tried to be both an office and a gentlewoman. ... The way to be taken seriously in a man's world is force them to engage your intelligence, not to try to change what you are.

Well maybe. It worked for a long time for Karpinski. She aced paratrooper training. She fought off superior officers with wandering hands. She worked for male officers who respected her -- and male officers who were terribly threatened by her competence. She rose up the ranks -- and ended up learning Arabic and training women in the United Arab Emirates for military service. She was eventually promoted to brigadier general of MPs in the Reserves.

And then, as Bush's Iraq invasion went sour, after all the contortions she put herself through to rise in the institution she loved, she was made the Pentagon's scapegoat for Abu Ghraib. She still believes in the hierarchy she both submitted to and climbed but insists:

you have to look up the chain of command as well as down.

The book is a fascinating cultural period piece and an angle on the war worth more attention from those of us trying to end it.

A religious enemy

Where would we be without an enemy? Certainly not willing to throw away our wealth, creative energy, and historic appreciation of the rule of law for a mess of "homeland security" and military boondoggles.

U.S. Republicans are working hard to create a properly dangerous foe out of the 1.5 billion adherents of Islam. Obviously there are terrorists in the world who trumpet that they are Muslims -- just as there are terrorists who claim to be Christians and terrorists who claim to be patriots. (Remember Eric Rudolph and Timothy McVeigh?)

Interestingly, people in the United States have proved somewhat resistant to taking up a crusade against the people of one of the world's largest religions. We require manipulation.

Pollsters and communications advisers to congressional Republicans are urging lawmakers not to follow President Bush's lead when it comes to talking about terrorists and the threat they pose to the nation.

While Bush has lightened up on using the word "Islamic" in front of terrorists, the advisers said on background that the word should always be used because Americans believe that "Islamics" are those who act on terrorist threats. Words to avoid are "Muslim," "extremist," and "radicals."

One adviser, who was part of two closed-door briefings by the consultants to GOP congressional members and aides over the past two weeks, said most Americans polled are not threatened by "Muslims" and that the words "extremist" and "radical" conjure up an image of people who make threats but don't follow through with them. "People believe terrorists act, so we should be using that instead of extremist or radicals. Calling the threat 'an Islamic terrorist' or 'al Qaeda' works better than 'Muslim radical,' " said the consultant.

Looks like this effort is making headway in some pretty scary places.

Jamil Dakwar of the ACLU has been observing the recent proceedings in Guantanamo at which one of the administration's newfangled "military commissions" found that Omar Ahmed Khadr is indeed an "unlawful military combatant." Despite numerous obstacles thrown up by the government, defense lawyers did have a chance to question the military judge, Army Col. Peter Brownback, about his impartiality.

Col. Brownback also gave an unusual answer when he was asked what he knows about al-Qaeda. He said: "al-Qaeda is an organization or a group dedicated to the spread of Islam."

Sure sounds like Col. Brownback has been slugging the koolaid -- apparently al-Qaeda = Islam; Islam = terrorism. I sure wouldn't want someone so confused and credulous as my judge. But our rulers think a guy this ignorant is highly qualified.

Long live the Doggies

The dogs were out for a ride on Valencia Street the other day. I have no idea why.

These three 7 foot high dog heads are relics of the Doggie Diner fast food restaurants that thrived back when we hadn't yet figured out that our car culture and cheap fatty meals were sure to kill us. The local chain was founded in 1949. One of these dog heads on a pole looked out from each location. When the chain failed in the 1980s, most of the heads were either destroyed or snapped up by collectors -- these must be some of those.


After dedicated struggle by preservationists, the last dog head was planted out by Ocean Beach on the median strip of Sloat Blvd. at 45th Avenue. I imagine that tourists take it for something to do with the Zoo across the street.


If those tourists care to look closely, they'll find this plaque at the base of the dog's pole. From the plaque, I learned the Doggie Diners were union shops. All the more reason to mourn that innocent era.

I've always liked the dog heads so I'm glad that Ocean Beach neighbors managed to preserve this monument to another time.

Republican election gimmick

Darrell Issa thinks I'm an idiot. He sent me a letter. He wants my support for an idea...

Issa is the Southern California Republican Congressman who made a fortune selling car alarms after beating charges of car theft. As a politician, his claim to fame is that he bankrolled the petitions that led to the recall of Democratic Governor Gray Davis. He thought he might have a shot at being Governor himself, but was upstaged by the Terminator.

Now he is fronting for round two of the Republican party's effort to dredge some electoral votes out of the true blue state of California. That strange anachronism, the Electoral College mandated by the Constitution (remember that document?), consists of electors pledged to support the candidate who gets a majority of the state's votes. That's going to be pretty much any Democrat here, and the catch is large -- 55 electoral votes out of 538. Now the Constitution doesn't say that those votes have to be allocated on a winner take-all basis -- the state could change how they get elected. We could decide by an initiative that electors should be allocated on the basis of which candidate won in each Congressional district.

Republicans would love that. You see, California's Democratic legislators and governor began this decade by passing a redistricting that amounted to an incumbent protection plan. We get turnover in our Congressional delegation when incumbents die, or retire, or go to prison -- but not because the voters replace them (Richard Pombo in 2006, excepted) All our districts were drawn to be one-party fiefdoms and there is no reason to think they'd perform differently in the 2008 Presidential vote. So if we passed an initiative to choose electors by Congressional District, we'd be handing the Republicans 20 electors.

Not my idea of a good thing. Issa's envelope gives the game away -- an unattractive picture of Hillary Clinton was supposed to entice me to open it.

Democrats call this election gimmick the "Dirty Tricks" initiative. Some out of state Giuliani backers were pushing it several months ago, but that effort tanked. Now Issa has taken it up -- with this direct mail component that I just received. Other Democrats have also marveled at receiving this solicitation. Issa's outfit must have used a list of frequent voters for the mailing.

Polls report the "Dirty Tricks" plan is already under 50 percent. Democrats will hammer it into the ground if it makes the June ballot, though having to do that will be costly and wasteful.

Progressive attempts to rig the system to get results we like better with less effort strike me as mostly naïve, set-ups for unintended consequences. This Republican plan is just sleazy.

Wonder if Issa thinks fronting for it will boost his candidacy for Governor, after Arnold is finally out of the way?

What did we know? When did we know it?

Recently Sahar, an Iraqi who writes from Baghdad for McClatchy News Service reflected on a trip to the U.S.

...I came home with a better understanding of what areas need to be covered for the regular American to better understand the situation in Iraq.

I was greatly surprised that most people didn't have an inkling of what Iraq is - was. I would have thought that as the U.S was at war in Iraq, the regular American would have some idea of what Iraq had, and thus would be better equipped to assess the loss that resulted from this war - but I found that not very many people - amongst those that I met, at least, had any clear idea of the Iraqi society, and what the war has cost the country, in terms of how it affected our education system, our healthcare, services and infrastructure. And although they were aware of the statistics of the casualties lost as a result of the collapse in the security system, the figures were so high as to become surreal - they acknowledged them in their minds but couldn't actually feel them in their hearts.

Each and every person I met was compassionate and supportive - so much so that I am at a loss - if people felt like that, why isn't there an outcry so loud that policy makers have no choice but to stop and listen??

Why indeed? That is the question peace movement activists chew over endlessly. After all, at this point 60 to 70 percent of U.S. citizens want us out of Iraq -- why aren't we able to demand an end to our war more effectively?

In a commentary on books by Iraq vets, Michael Massing has some interesting suggestions about how the U.S. public filters information about Iraq that help explain the paradoxes Sahar encountered.

...the public remains ill-informed about many key aspects of the war. This is due less to any restrictions imposed by the government, or to any official management of language or image, than to controls imposed by the public itself. Americans -- reluctant to confront certain raw realities of the war -- have placed strong filters and screens on the facts and images they receive. This is particularly true regarding the conduct of U.S. troops in the field. The U.S. military in Iraq is an occupation army, and like most such forces, it has engaged in many troubling acts. With American men and women putting their lives at risk in a very hostile environment, however, the American public has little appetite for news about such acts, and so it sets limits on what it is willing to hear about them. The Press -- ever attuned to public sensitivities -- will, on occasion, test those limits, but generally respects them. The result is an unstated, unconscious, but nonetheless potent co-conspiracy between the public and the press to muffle some important truths about the war. In a disturbing twist on the Orwellian nightmare, the American people have become their own thought police, purging the news of unwanted and unwelcome features with an efficiency that government censors and military flacks can only envy. ...

... the Iraq war, like most wars, is a savage, pitiless affair in which American soldiers have been forced to do many un-American things. Most Americans prefer not to confront this. They want to be able to maintain their belief that Americans are an exceptionally virtuous, freedom-loving people and that their soldiers are a uniquely compassionate, well-meaning force. Any assertions to the contrary can rouse the beast, and the press, well aware of this, tends to tread warily around it. ...

... The books by Iraqi vets are filled with expressions of disbelief and rage at the lack of interest ordinary Americans show for what they've had to endure on the battlefield. ...

... In his reflections on politics and language, Orwell operated on the assumption that people want to know the truth. Often, though, they don't. ... The public has become its own collective Ministry of Truth -- a reality that, in many ways, is even more chilling than the one Orwell envisioned.

Strange times we live in, when we can both know and not know so completely. Filters cannot however, in the end, shield us from the karmic consequences of responsibility sloughed off.

Election day, 2007: a moment for ranked choice voting

Today's San Francisco election is such a bore that I never got around to marking my "vote by mail" ballot. I'll have to drop it at a polling place.

We face the usual array of propositions. I wrote about the most important -- "Yes on A; No on H" -- previously.

But this election is notable for me mostly because, for the first time, I'll actually be using the "ranked choice voting" system we adopted in 2002 and implemented in 2004. Instead of simply electing the candidate who gets the most votes (even if their total is under 50 percent) or going on to a run off between the top two candidates, we get to list our first, second and third choices. Here's a pretty good description of how it works:

... ranked-choice voting is a series of mini-elections based on voters' one-time marking of their first, second and third choices. Should no candidate get more than 50 percent of the vote after the first-choice selections are tallied, the lowest vote-getter is eliminated. (In the past, there would have been a runoff election weeks later between the two top vote-getters.)

Now, a software program will review the second-choice picks of voters whose first preference was eliminated. Those votes are added to the tallies of the remaining candidates. The computer does another count and the process repeats itself until a candidate passes the 50 percent mark and is the winner.

Why haven't I used my ranking option before? Because I think it as a voting system designed for elections that don't matter. We have no real contest today about who is going to be elected -- no serous candidate was willing to take on our incumbent mayor. Gavin (the empty pretty boy) Newsom is never getting my vote, so I can play on this ballot by marking three of his 12 challengers. But it is all a bit of a farce, just the right time for an insubstantial gimmick like "ranked choice voting."

Let me be a little more serious here. Proponents of ranked choice or "instant runoff" voting seem to say three things about the merits of the system, only one of which makes the slightest sense to me.

• Instant run offs save the city bundles of money we used to spend during the era when we treated November elections as a primary and required someone to get over 50 percent in a two person contest a month later. This claim is absolutely true. And as someone who worked in some of those run offs, I can testify that it is miserably difficult to keep a campaign going through Thanksgiving and almost into the Christmas season as we used to have to do. So I don't miss that long slog.

• Some argue that ranked choice voting ensures that the winner gets elected with 50 percent of the vote. I say, so what? If this only happens because the winner picked up a lot of second and/or third choice votes, it doesn't mean that the majority of voters got the candidate they wanted. Such a victory seems no more legitimate to me than a victory with 42 percent when a majority of voters spread their votes among three or four other candidates. There's a species of innumeracy at work here that attributes magic efficacy to a formula that renders a 50 percent plus one victory, but doesn't force a candidate to win a true majority vote.

• Finally, I've heard ranked choice voting enthusiasts, including candidates, say that the system reduces negative campaigning -- candidates have to hope to pick up some second and third choices from their opponents, so they can't risk alienating those voters by drawing a strong contrast between themselves and others in the race. Gimme a break -- democratic elections are not popularity contests for president of the Eighth Grade. They are the arena in which citizens of a democracy fight out, through proxies, the issues that determine the shape of our lives. We often disagree and have different interests. Making nice is not nearly so important as really debating those conflicts.

Ranked choice voting has appealed to progressives as somehow "cleaner" or "nicer" than good old, ordinary, messy ugly politics. But it is just a gimmick -- we'll get from democracy exactly what we put into the fight for the sort of city and society we believe in. No voting gimmick is going to bring out more poor and working people to demand their officials represent their interests -- that takes laborious, frustrating, base-building organizing, not a bright shiny voting system.

In particular, I fear this election is going to show us just how valuable those mayoral run offs in 1999 (Ammiano challenging Brown) and 2003 (Gonzales almost knocking off Newsom) were to San Francisco progressives. In 2000 and 2004, progressive candidates captured most of the Board of Supervisor seats we could ever hope to win. The experience gained and the coalitions assembled in the mayoral run offs the year before set the stage for those victories, even though our candidates lost. We'll be entering 2008 without that experience -- and with Newsom's handlers sitting on a huge war chest to aim at Board seats opened by term limits.

The progressive dream of a magic bullet to make winning elections easier attracted many to ranked choice voting. Magical thinking has been a contributing factor (among many, most more directly about money and power) in a weakening of progressive San Francisco politics.

What's the deal?

Detail from a mural in Mexico City.

Editor - Theodore Roosevelt gave us the Square Deal, Franklin Roosevelt the New Deal, and Harry Truman the Fair Deal. George W. Bush's presidency should be remembered in history as the Ordeal.
BOB SILLS, Castro Valley

San Francisco Chronicle
November 5, 2007

So long as Bush is not remembered as imitating this guy...


Update: November 6, 2007
Seems Juan Cole has been thinking along these lines as well.

If Bush and Cheney are ever tempted into extreme measures in the United States, Musharraf has provided a template for how it would unfold. Maintain you are moving against terrorists and extremists, but actually move against the rule of law. [Barnett] Rubin has accepted the suggested term of "lawfare" to describe this kind of warfare by executive order.

Call me crazy, but I wonder about our future.