Obama's new U.S. order

Just in time for the inauguration, I can't resist one more political campaign note. Take a look at the graphic above. It's conventional wisdom that people's life-long political leanings become fixed in their first few votes. Unless something changes, an overwhelming cohort of Democrats are coming along.

What the graphic obscures is that an ever-enlarging fraction of the "youth vote" is made up of people who would be expected to lean toward the Democrats because they are people of color: Black, Latino or of an Asian-origin.

In 2020, the census projects that whites will be only 60 percent of the population, as opposed to about 66 percent today. In 2040, whites will be only a 51 percent share.

Those "youth voters" are the leading edge of a momentous demographic shift in what the people of the United States look like and where our ancestors came from.

And that demographic change may be the real import of the Obama presidency. Maybe the skinny guy with the African name brings not so much novel policy prescriptions (existing realities can be awfully confining, often in sad ways) as a new imaginative universe which we are all going have to learn to live in.

He saw it all ...

A former guard at Guantanamo has given a television interview about the brutality to inmates that he witnessed. He has no doubt that what was done there is torture.

The BBC has the video.

H/t Andrew Sullivan.

Yes -- we do need full disclosure and prosecutions of the intellectual authors of torture.

Unsure about Afghanistan

The other day a front page writer at DailyKos, the largest Democratic/progressive blog around, ran a poll of its members about when the U.S. should get out of Afghanistan. The results are captured above (there may in the end have been slightly more participants. I took the screen shot after about 24 hours when the post had long scrolled away into web oblivion.)

I think it's fair to say, the activists of DailyKos are unsure about Afghanistan. Immediate withdrawal got the (marginally) largest vote. Options that contemplate (maybe) a fairly quick U.S. departure (either bin Laden neutralized or less than 24 months) also showed substantial support. It seems fair to conclude that somewhere between one third and one half of these Democratic progressives want out fairly urgently.

But more than a quarter also indicate they just don't know what to do about Afghanistan. That's a lot in a place where many contributors like to demonstrate how cocksure they are.

According to an article in today's Washington Post, the Obama administration doesn't know what to do either. The troop increase they contemplate is intended simply to give them time to figure out.

They do know the U.S. is failing to meet any rational objective in Afghanistan as surely as it has in Iraq. In fact, they are casting around to figure out what the objective of the war there might be.

"We have no strategic plan. We never had one," a senior U.S. military commander said of the Bush years. Obama's first order of business, he said, will be to "explain to the American people what the mission is" in Afghanistan. ...

Obama has offered few public comments on Afghanistan since the election. "We haven't seen the kinds of infrastructure improvements; we haven't seen the security improvements; we haven't seen the reduction in narco-trafficking; we haven't seen a reliance on rule of law in Afghanistan that would make people feel confident that the central government can, in fact, deliver on its promises," he said last month on NBC's "Meet the Press." "We've got to ramp up our development approach," he said, without providing details.

The president-elect set out a "very limited" objective of ensuring that Afghanistan "cannot be used as a base to launch attacks against the United States." He cited the need for "more effective military action" -- even as he warned of fierce Afghan resistance to the presence of foreign troops -- and said the "number one goal" is to stop al-Qaeda.

I take from this that we've finally got a President who knows 1) the U.S. is not all powerful and 2) who knows when no policy prescription looks like a good choice.

All of this should imply an opportunity for the peace movement, if we can rise to it. Since Afghanistan has proved a long, costly, and mostly meaningless war with no "victory" in sight, most people (even this President) will support ending it so long as they don't think pulling out will empower al-Qaeda to kill us.

We need to do the education to get as many as possible of the wavering progressive activists on board with rapid departure. That should be possible -- Obama is not going to fix the Afghan quagmire.

The peace movement has to promote the rather simple notion that ceasing to bomb Afghan communities will actually hurt al-Qaeda recruiting.

Neither the U.S. nor some partnership with the European Union is going to change Afghan society. So far we've only empowered the more venal war lords and opium traders -- Afghans are going to have to fix their battered country themselves, though material recovery aid intelligently and respectfully offered might help. Personally, I'd like to see aid to women's groups, if possible. But aid doesn’t mean more weapons, for anyone.

Of course the most important way Obama can reduce al-Qaeda's attractiveness is by showing that strength means knocking Israeli heads in the interests of peace instead of enabling the killing of Palestinians. That would really take balls, but it is the only road to peace across the region. Not perhaps likely, but the sole road to a wider peace, nonetheless.

UPDATE: Naturally there's a blogosphere campaign about this. See Get Afghanistan Right.

Good for Bishop Robinson; good for PE Obama

Imagine my delight this morning when I saw the news (above) on the front page of Talking Points Memo. The Obama juggernaut is including the good bishop of New Hampshire in the inaugural festivities.

It is hard to find a more controversial gay clergyperson. While there are lots of gay clergy (yes, that's true as anti-gay persons are always astonished to learn when these folks come out of the closet), there aren't many who manage to exemplify the consistent equanimity and sensitivity toward those who would exclude him that Bishop Robinson shows.

Not surprisingly, his home town paper has the most interesting story on the bishop's invitation:

"It's important for any minority to see themselves represented in some way," Robinson said. "Whether it be a racial minority, an ethnic minority or, in our case, a sexual minority. Just seeing someone like you up front matters."

... Robinson doesn't yet know what he'll say, but he knows he won't use a Bible. "While that is a holy and sacred text to me, it is not for many Americans," Robinson said. "I will be careful not to be especially Christian in my prayer. This is a prayer for the whole nation."

Concord [NH] Monitor

That's inclusion. I've been wondering what our new President was doing to include the non-Christian portion of the nation, not to mention the many atheists. Guess Robinson has been thinking about them too.

But the sheer fact of Bishop Robinson's inclusion wasn't the only reason for my delight. See that picture TPM used to illustrate the news? That's one I took during Bishop Gene's visit to my home parish, St. John the Evangelist in San Francisco. It sits on Flickr waiting to be used -- it's nice to see it again. I suspect the Bishop probably prefers some of the many happier images of him, but he does look very dignified here.

UPDATE, 1/19/09: Because the prayer was not included in the HBO telecast (and the sound was iffy in parts of the crowd) some people did not get to hear Bishop Robinson's invocation. Here's a YouTube [4:14]:

A slightly disjointed meditation on the baptism of Jesus

In some Christian calendars, today is the celebration of the baptism of Jesus by the his prophetic predecessor, John. For those who've missed the story, John is often pictured as a sort of a wild nutcase who wandered around in the wilderness with sticks in his hair, exhorting people to turn back to the god of their tribe and offering to dunk people in the Jordan River to mark a new beginning. When Jesus came to John to be baptized, the older prophet recognized him as someone greater than he was and a voice from heaven named Jesus as "the Son of God, the Beloved."

Not surprisingly, in contemporary Jordan there's an actual location along the Jordan River which tradition names as the location of this event. And it's a tourist attraction which we visited a few years ago.


A path leads through "wilderness" which turns out to a thicket of low bushes.


There's not much river. Syria, Jordan, and Israel all draw water from it.


Multiple layers of tourist amenities, from ancient stone steps to contemporary National Park-style shelters, line the banks -- or where the banks have at times been.


Finally the river, supposedly the site of the awesome event. Tourists edge down cautiously to touch the waters.


Across the river in what the U.N. calls the Occupied Palestinian Territories and what our media calls the West Bank [of the Jordan], sits an Israeli fortification. ***
Jordan is at "peace" with the state cross the river. Unlike Syria or Lebanon, it has an internationally recognized, agreed border with Israel.

The conquered Palestinian people living under Israeli occupation have no such status. Nor does the occupying power want them -- their number already more or less equals the Jewish residents of Israel and is increasing rapidly.

So what is Israel to do with this living, breathing, population of unwanted people?

• Israel could opt to become a modern democratic state in which political and human rights are not determined by religious or ethnic identity. That would be the end of Israel as a Jewish state. Not likely.

• Israel could remove its fortified settlements (think pioneer stockades in the American West, only filled with Brooklyn accents), pull back to its 1967 borders, and co-exist with a Palestinian state, at peace with its Arab neighbors. Since 2002, some version of this has been, and still is, on the table. This is apparently politically impossible for Israeli governments, especially so long as they are propped up by U.S. support.
  

• The Palestinians currently within Israeli borders could be ethnically cleansed, murdered or expelled somewhere (there are no apparent takers). Successive Israeli governments periodically go some ways along this path, as they are presently doing in Gaza. It is not clear how much of a massacre might lead the rest of the world to intervene -- it is possible that no atrocity would be too great, though one hopes not.

That banner is what brave antiwar Israelis said should be done about Israel's existential dilemma at a demonstration in Tel-Aviv yesterday. They know they don't have the option of looking away.

What, if anything, can we, who are far away onlookers, do about any of this?

In the United States, we have a direct, particular responsibility to get our government out of the business of enabling Israeli atrocities. At present our Congress is cheering and we're delivering the bombs to pound Gaza.

The thoughtful Professor Juan Cole says that street protests don't do much.

A protest culture around Gaza is growing up in the West of some sophistication ...

A wave of street protests swept Europe and the Middle East on Saturday. Personally, I don't think these events are very effective, though they can help with networking and social solidarity. They won't cause significant changes in Israeli policy. Setting up an effective counter to the Israel and military-industrial lobbies on Capitol Hill, now that would make a big difference.

Still, the scale of the protests is breathtaking.

He's right ... and I also think he's wrong. A culture of protest that assumes that Israel is the bully on the block is a prerequisite for any more effective political action. It can't keep Gazans alive today -- they'll die horribly until Israel chooses to stop -- but an end to giving Israel a pass on the basics of civilized behavior is a start. The shift that is happening is a lot like the generational attitudinal shift on gay rights: we are coming into a generation which is not confused either by the notion that gays are "unnatural" or by the myth that Israel with its army and nukes is a victim-state. As with gay rights, most of the "western" world is leagues ahead of the United States on all this. As the culture of protest takes hold, then an effective inside strategy can be created. J Street makes a start in Washington, even though for many protesters it will seem too little, too timid.

Is there anything that the Palestinians now being slaughtered can do? Probably not, but a commenter at Al Jazeera in English offered a vision [I have not corrected the English]:

I know by sitting safely in my house its very easy for me to suggest the below, but i think its the only safe place to Go & defy the israelis. People should create a mob all of them women children elderly youth and along with thier lifestock, start moving towards the state of israel as refugees runing away from war ravaged Gaza to the safe custody of thier enemy, then only this israeli propoganda will fail, yes definately they will start to kill but if gazans stand firm they will have to stop.

Bilal
United Arab Emirates

***
Jesus was, of course, a Jew. And a very low status resident of what was Palestine and is now Israel. And, so we're told, he was loved by God, got dunked, and thereafter went about doing God's business.

The powers of his day found Jesus so threatening they tortured him to death. But it turns out that wasn't enough to make an end of him. In fact, it just started something.

Is there any way that contemporary unmerited suffering can start something? Perhaps. ***See also Naomi Klein's argument for a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement in response to Israel's criminal behavior. That too could be something.

More on Anaheim air

A couple of days ago I complained about the all-too-visible air here in Anaheim. As it happens, now I can show, not just tell.


On Friday, a bridge over the Santa Ana Freeway looked like this.


Over night the wind came up and the same view looked like this.


Nearby, this was Disneyland's Magic Mountain on Friday.


Not perfect, but much better on Saturday.


In fact, once the winds blew, this view of a snow-capped peak looming over Orange County reminded me of why all these people might have wanted to come here in the first place.


Certainly the mountain in the distance (when visible) is a lot more attractive than Tinkerbelle's butt on a decorative sign, even on a nice clear day.

A slaveringly pro-Israeli resolution

An angry Quaker is a beautiful thing. When that quiet rationality is overcome by moral outrage, something awesome is launched into the world.

Here's Helena Cobban writing about the United States Senate's enthusiastic endorsement of Israel's assault on the people of Gaza.

The U.S. Senate is not made up of people who are monsters or idiots. But it is made up of people whose first inclination is to look out for their chances of re-election in a political system that is drenched in, and corrupted by, the influence of raw money.

The new US Senate was voted in Tuesday. Today, as Israel's assault on Gaza continues, the Senate made one of its first items of business the adoption of a strongly pro-Israeli resolution-- crafted in AIPAC's policy shop-- that expressed strong support for Israel's viewpoint on all aspects of the current war.

This, even as the UN's Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs was issuing the latest in its series of updates on the humanitarian crisis that Israel's latest war of choice has inflicted on Gaza's 1.5 million people. ...

Information about the ever-worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza has been available for a number of days now, and has been reported on the US media....

Do the Senators have any idea how heartless and brutal they look to just about everybody else in the rest of the world when they pass such a slaveringly pro-Israeli resolution?

Just World News,
January 8, 2009

The behavior of the US Congress (now US representatives have since jumped on board) is the proper target for the protests of the very substantial portion of the US public that is appalled by the atrocities inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza. We provide and fund the weapons; we underwrite the ongoing theft of Palestinian land that Israel calls "settlements"; and our Congresscritters believe with some experiential evidence that they have to tow the line of the Israel Lobby to stay in office. If we don't like what is happening in Gaza, we have to change the behavior of our own rulers. That's the job of those of us here.

*** Reuters Alernet which aggregates news from international NGOs has a very good, comprehensive set of links to blogs from within Gaza.

Challenge Obama to end torture

We do have to get on board with this and several other campaigns.

In particular all who can should vote for "get FISA Right, repeal the PATRIOT Act, and restore our civil liberties" at Change.org to keep those issues out front.

Does this internet stuff do anything? I don't know. It's no substitute for direct contact with politicians, sometimes rather demanding contact. But it is one more avenue for the necessary "redress of grievances".

Rules are for somebody else

They keep wanting to change the rules to fit their own needs.

Not content with working to un-marry the 18000 LGBT people who got married in California, supporters of Prop. 8 now want to get rid of campaign finance disclosure laws that make public the names of donors to campaigns.

Proponents of a ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage filed a lawsuit in federal court in Sacramento this week seeking to overturn state campaign finance laws that require that names and personal information of donors to California political campaigns be made public.

They claimed that donors to Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California after one of the most heated campaigns in recent memory, have been the victims of threats and harassment because their support for the ban was made public.

“This harassment is made possible because of California’s unconstitutional campaign finance disclosure rules as applied to ballot measure committees where even donors of as little as $100 must have their names, home addresses and employers listed on public documents,” Ron Prentice, head of the Protect Marriage Coalition, said in a statement.

L.A. Times, January 8 2009

Yes, the law does require that when people engage in the very public speech that is an election campaign, they have to come clean publicly about who they are. If folks want to go off by themselves and talk about their opinions, fine -- they can be private about who is involved. But when they want to impose their opinions on their fellow citizens, they have to come out into view. Those are the rules.

And yes, that means they will be publicly criticized.

The Prop. 8 folks don't like the rules -- they guess they'll try to change them to suit themselves. Isn't that what they did in November?

On the road again: Anaheim

I'm staying for several days in this slightly absurd example of the Stockbrokers' Tudor architectural style.


If I wanted to and had the time (I don't; this is work), I could board the shuttle to Disneyland.


These pictures don't do justice to the air which is all too visible. Perhaps not quite up the standard set by James Fallows' photos of Beijing, but far too close. On the shuttle here, another passenger insisted, "this area will be really pretty when all the cars are electric." The driver countered, "That will be when all the people are gone."

We seem to be in an unsettled frame of mind.

UPDATE: Yes, I did feel the 4.5 earthquake here around 7:45 pm. It was very mild.

Labor in Obama-land

The other day I spent a couple of hours at a meeting of union activists at which a pretty good crowd listened to speakers about the Employee Free Choice Act. Unhappily, I came away worried that this proposed law, organized labor's primary Congressional agenda item, is not going to see smooth sailing.

What's the Employee Free Choice Act about? Easy, it's about making it more difficult and more expensive for employers to bully, harass and intimidate workers who want to form a union. The law would

• increase penalties for violations of labor law. At present anti-union employers consider the minimal penalties a cost of doing business.

• Allow employees to win union representation by majority sign up (so-called card check) instead of forcing them into a months long election process during which the people who control their pay checks can use any combination of threats and lies to try to break the organizing drive.

• Require that, if employees do join a union, the company must either agree to a contract in three months or submit the labor dispute to neutral arbitration.

That is, the Employee Free Choice Act is about leveling a playing field that is currently tilted heavily against some of the hardest working, lowest paid, least listened to workers in the country. How's some car washer or hotel maid going to get a fair shake without a union? Not likely.

So why do I fear this reasonable measure is in trouble? Partly because the sort of meeting I was in, full of the best and most active unionists, was just getting up to speed on what it is about -- and that's people inside the labor movement. Speakers agreed that if it doesn't get done fast, business will be able to bottle it up. In areas where Congresscritters and Senators can be swayed, millions of dollars are already committed to TV ads against passage.

But I'm also worried when I survey the terrain on which labor is trying to win relief. I read things like this from a writer I often find perceptive.

To us (or to me anyway), the old class wars seemed quaint -- if not inaccessible. Unions were fine, I guess, but they seemed relics of a bygone era -- unnecessary in the new dynamic global economy ... Unlike those silly union organizers in the 30s, big modern me had the good fortune of living in an era enlightened by the Chicago School about both the virtues of wealth concentration and the vices of regulation.

Being sympathetic to the old Left ...was something that respectable knowledge workers like myself didn't do. ... I was something different -- I was a Silicon Valley liberal. And so I felt the temptation to ostentatiously distance myself from the ancien regime by, say, criticizing the UAW or pooh-poohing the Great Society...

He's got it that with the economic downturn, he might have to examine his preconceptions, but with this as a starting point, he's going to have a ways to go before he considers passing labor law reform an important priority.

And he's not uncommon. I saw the same detachment from labor's agenda at the Obama 2.0 meeting I attended awhile back.

I think it is accurate to describe the Obama coalition as having been composed of four major groups. (This typology owes a lot to Carl Davidson's observations.) Many campaign offices were organized and run by "Obama youth" -- very young, mostly white but accustomed to somewhat multi-racial environments, true believers in "change" and "yes, we can!". In addition, there was the Black community, energized and involved as never before, performing miracles of activism and turnout. Then there were the Democratic regulars, what passes for the party apparatus where such a thing exists, eager for a bigger slice of the governmental pie. Finally there was the huge labor field operation that turned out its own base and increased Obama's (minority) share of the white working class vote.

Only the last of these segments considers the Employee Free Choice Act important. The others will be supportive with a nod from the President-elect. But they won't go to war for it and anti-union employers will. That prospect is not encouraging.

Tim Costello at Global Labor Strategies has written an interesting piece about how he sees labor missing the boat despite being a necessary part of electing a "change" President. [My emphasis.]

In the run-up to this year's election organized labor made a plan to pour its resources into electing a Democratic President and Congress and then to push for the enactment of the Employee Free Choice Act ... . They did a terrific job during the election; in some key areas labor was the difference between victory and defeat for the Democrats.

Then with unexpected abruptness September's financial collapse provided the accelerant for a general economic crisis that had been smoldering for more than a year. Since then, labor has been unable to adapt to the changed circumstances. ... With the exception of a few public pronouncements on the crisis, labor leaders have retained an almost single minded focus on passage of EFCA. Meanwhile people are losing their jobs and getting kicked out of their homes in record numbers, while others -- from the high skilled to the low skilled, white collar and blue collar -- walk a financial tightrope, in high anxiety, without a net.

And no matter what one thinks of EFCA or the possibility of its passage in a meaningful form, it is not an adequate response to the current crisis. In the most wildly optimistic scenario, any benefits from EFCA -- and we think they will be modest, but important -- are a year or two down the road. ...

The labor movement historically has two functions: to represent workers in the workplace through collective bargaining, and, to be the socially sanctioned representatives of the general economic interests of workers in public discourse. It is this second role -- as a representative of all workers -- that labor now needs to assume. What is needed at this moment of crisis is a new spirit in the labor movement and a new kind of unionism that addresses the needs of all workers and combines the mass mobilizing and protest techniques of modern social movements with an alternative vision of economic reconstruction from the bottom up. ...

Costello is almost certainly right. The labor movement is full of people who know that -- as well as others who can't imagine mustering that much sheer energy and enthusiasm for a desperate fight. In part they are hampered in taking up the role of the voice of the working people at large by the natural legacy of decades of bad labor law: they've had to be so good at manipulating the minutia of legalisms that they have forgotten how to look around at the forest.

We can count on labor to try -- but labor also needs the rest of us in the Employee Free Choice Act fight and to insist on wider perspectives. It's one of those situations where, if the people move, our leaders may follow ...

Protesting too much?

There are reports that my Senator, the icy Diane Feinstein, is pissed that the President-elect has named Leon Panetta as C.I.A. director. Panetta is an outsider to the C.I.A., however much of a Washington insider he is. He has been critical of the Bush torture regime.

DiFi's pique matters in this because she's the incoming chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia is not pleased either. He was the previous chair. He had this exchange with reporter Elana Schor:

when asked if Panetta joining the CIA would make the nation less secure, the senator said: "That's a provocative way to put it."

These two seem to have a bee in their bonnets. Other members of the Intelligence Committees seem fine with the nomination.

I write my Senator all the time, so I wasn't surprised to get an email from DiFi today.

But I sure was surprised that it was about her effort last August to limit U.S. interrogation tactics to what's in the Army Field Manual -- that is, to get the U.S. out of the torture business and into compliance with international law.

I wonder: why does she want to burnish her anti-torture credentials at the moment? Is Panetta, as is rumored, going to learn that the two dyspeptic Senators signed off on past C.I.A. torture which he seems charged to clean up?

Will we ever know?

Reporting from Gaza is necessarily personal

Robert Fisk in the London Independent has pointed out something notable about the current situation in Gaza. Since Alan Johnston of the BBC was kidnapped by Palestinian jihadis several years ago, no "western" journalists have lived permanently there. Israel is keeping out any reporters trying to get in now, which Fisk finds reminiscent of the Russian conquest of Afghanistan in 1980. But as a consequence, any voices the world is hearing now from Gaza belong to Palestinians.

That the Israelis should use an old Soviet tactic to blind the world's vision of war may not be surprising. But the result is that Palestinian voices – as opposed to those of Western reporters – are now dominating the airwaves. The men and women who are under air and artillery attack by the Israelis are now telling their own story on television and radio and in the papers as they have never been able to tell it before, without the artificial "balance", which so much television journalism imposes on live reporting.

One of the Palestinian reporters for Fisk's own paper has told his own story: how he learned his father had been killed. Akrem al-Ghoul had the misfortune to be in the way of the Israeli ground offensive. They hit his house from an F-16 jet (U.S.-supplied).

The phone call came at around 4.20pm on Saturday. A bomb had been dropped on the house at our small farm in northern Gaza. My father was walking from the gate to the farmhouse at the time. ...

It was the closest farm to the northern border with Israel. Ironically, we always thought the biggest danger there was not from Israeli troops, who usually went straight past if they were mounting an incursion, but from stray Hamas rockets aimed at the Israeli towns north of us.

But shortly before sunset on Saturday, as Israeli ground troops and tanks invaded Gaza in the name of shutting down Hamas rocket sites, the peace of that place was shattered and my father's life extinguished at the age of 48. Warplanes and helicopters had swept in, bombing and firing to open up the space for the tanks and ground forces that would follow in the darkness. It was one of those F16 airstrikes that killed my father.

The house was reduced to little more than powder, and of Dad there was nothing much left either. "Just a pile of flesh," my uncle, who found him in the rubble, said later with brutal honesty.

Al-Ghoul was a lawyer and jurist who hated it that Hamas was imposing its version of Islamic law on the Palestinian legal system. His son writes:

My grief carries no desire for revenge, which I know to be always in vain. But, in truth, as a grieving son, I am finding it hard to distinguish between what the Israelis call terrorists and the Israeli pilots and tank crews who are invading Gaza. What is the difference between the pilot who blew my father to pieces and the militant who fires a small rocket? I have no answers but, just as I am to become a father, I have lost my father.

Let's hope the author, Fares Akram, survives the Israeli assault. He is still reporting from Gaza City -- and hoping his nine months pregnant wife doesn't go into labor just now.

For reports from Gaza bloggers, when they have any electricity, try Moments of Gaza and Global Voices.

Rockets

This is what the Israeli strike on the Islamic university in Gaza looked like, as distributed by AP.


This is one of those Qassam rockets Palestinians are firing into southern Israel. Certainly nothing anyone would like to have incoming ... but not quite in the same league, either.

The international press is being kept out of Gaza as the Israeli assault goes on, so Dion Nissenbaum, who covers the Middle East as Jerusalem bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers, writes from Israel.

The Lawnchair War in Israel

They gather every morning on the southern Israeli hilltop as the pairs of Apache helicopters on attack runs swoop over the Mediterranean coast and air strikes send charcoal clouds curling over the Gaza Strip skyline.

They don't seem to be bothered by the occasional Qassam rockets and mortar rounds that explode in the surrounding fields.

They have come to watch the war.

Read all about it.

Reality breaks through "news"

Every morning the San Francisco Chronicle seems to get thinner. I'll miss it if (when?) the collapse of daily print newspaper business model brings it down.

What other regional US newspaper would run this frontpage headline on a Sunday morning?

Israel Fighting Ghost Of Lebanon
Analysis: Victory over Hamas in Gaza could restore fear it once inspired in regional enemies.

The article by Michael Kalman filing from Jerusalem isn't bad either.

"Gaza will be your cemetery, and you have no choice but to end the aggression and lift the blockade," added Hamas spokesman Ismail Radwan.

The derision contained in those taunts may reflect false bravado. But it also underscores a central issue underlying the Gaza conflict and Israel's position: The Jewish state has lost a large measure of its capacity to intimidate and control its regional enemies, a new vulnerability that dates back to the stalemate with Lebanon's Hezbollah militia in 2006.

... Israel has yet to clearly express what it expects to achieve by sending in thousands of ground troops backed by tanks and helicopter gunships.

The rest of the article quotes various Israeli politicians, academics, and military men trying to figure out what an end game might look like.

It doesn't mention the possibility that the Gaza assault is a product of Israeli politicians jockeying for advantage in the elections called for February 10.

Nor does it mention the central fact of an offensive on one of the most urbanized, crowded places on earth: huge numbers of non-belligerent people are going to lose their homes, their communities and their lives as Israel blows up parts of its open air prison for uppity Palestinians.

Elsewhere, the paper does report via AP

The United States has blocked approval of a U.N. Security Council statement calling for an immediate cease-fire between Israel and Gaza's Hamas rulers, diplomats said.

That is, our rulers are supporting and protecting the slaughter.

The Chronicle is not perfect, but it is to some extent breaking the rules that make the US mainstream media mindless mouthpieces for our government and its Israeli buddies. They sometimes did the same in reference to Afghanistan and Iraq, sending their own reporters to the war zones who didn't just repeat the platitudes that too often came from embedded reporters.

I suspect this relatively high quality journalism is in part a response to the relatively well-informed Northern California public who have moved beyond the official story of poor threatened Israel up against those nasty brown Ayrabs.

As I said, I'll miss the Chron if/when it goes down. ***For a really useful history and overview of Israel's wars on their neighbors, read Professor Juan Cole from today. Cole puts Kalman's insights in a far longer historical frame.

Buffalo Bulls: then and fifty years later

A reunion of some of the 1958 UB athletes from a great ESPN article.

I'm watching the University of Connecticut make mincemeat of the University of Buffalo's offense in one of the most improbable of the post-season college football games, the International Bowl, played in Toronto. What kind of US college football game gets played after New Years in Canada?

The game itself should be even more of a blowout for UConn than it is, as the Bulls seem completely hapless -- except that Connecticut has fumbled the ball five times.

But that's not what this post is about. The game has brought to the fore the story of the last time that Buffalo earned a bowl berth -- 50 years ago. That year, when UB was still a small private school that played the likes of Harvard, the team won eight games. They were invited to the Tangerine Bowl to be played in Orlando, Florida. Then it came out that Black and white players were not allowed to appear together on the field that had been chosen for the bowl.

Buffalo had two Black athletes. The 1958 team unanimously voted not to go the Florida game to reject this discrimination. The 2008 team dedicated its bowl to these forebears.

Willie Evans, one of those Black players, explained the context to a UB magazine last year.

"It was a big deal for Buffalo at the time ... Blacks weren't included in the paper at all for any reason, yet we were on the front page. When we were coming back from Harvard, the pilot told us that there were a couple thousand students waiting for us at the airport. It was great support."

... Evans had never visited any of the southern states.

"I had a chip on my shoulder from the experience. It was a matter of letting it beat you down or not. I saw it as an opportunity to show my athleticism." ...

Since his playing days, Evans has remained active in the University community...

"One reason why I'm still with the university is the way things have come," Evans said. "Diversity is something that has caught on with the campus. We're not there yet, but it has improved significantly since I was here. There are expectations that exist now that were not around when I was a student."

Today, UB has the most highly praised Black coach in the college game, Turner Gill. He's an amazing coach, but the competition to be a leading Black coach isn't as stiff as it might be; though 50 percent of the athletes in the 117 big time schools are Black, only three of their coaches are Black. There may be a few more next season, but something is wrong here.

As an eleven year-old football fan growing up in Buffalo in 1958, I should remember this history, but I don't. The University of Buffalo was off my radar; I remember watching the traditional conferences, the PAC-8 and the Big-8, in their post season appearances.

But back then, I did acquire a bowl watching habit that I keep to this day. Given a choice of unknown competitors to root for (that's bowl season for you), I'll always gravitate to the least Southern team.

These targets had names

As Israel continues its bombardment of Gaza, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) public relations office is providing what for the last decade has become standard war pornography: video feeds from precision guided rockets destroying their targets. The IDF has its own YouTube channel where you can watch these explosive snuff videos at your leisure. Wow -- there goes a mosque! Yikes -- that was the Hamas Government compound! Wonder how many people were inside?

I poked around in this channel the other day, mostly just appalled. All that destruction can't possibly lead to anything but further hatred.

But one video was actually interesting. It was called "Israeli Air Force Strikes Rockets in Transit" and seemed to show what appeared to half a dozen human figures on the ground moving cylindrical objects into an open pickup truck. The black and white film is jerky -- the indistinct men seem to swarm rather than walk, slightly insect-like. On the other hand, their movements don't seem furtive, as if they were hiding something. Can Gazan rocketeers really act so casual? Then comes the blast and they disappear in a fire ball.

You can see this one for yourself if you want [2:42]:


The Israeli journalist Amira Haas has since reported in Haaretz newspaper what seems to have been the story that underlies this gritty video.

According to B'tselem and the Mezan center for human rights, the truck belongs to Ahmed Samur, 55, and is still standing, burnt, beside his workshop in the Jabaliya refugee camp. Next to it hang scorched oxygen balloons, a blade and cables. Nobody dares move the truck or the accompanying accoutrements for fear that the UAVs filming every detail from above will bomb whoever approaches.

"Everything is still there on the ground," said Samur on Thursday. "We only moved the dead."

Just three hours before the attack, Samur's daughter told him that she had heard on the local radio that a house next to his workshop had been bombed.

He immediately got into his Mercedes truck, along with his son and a few neighbors and relatives, and went to the workshop to see the damage.

They were shocked to discover that the neighboring house had collapsed onto his workshop and decided to pack up the expensive tools and take them home before they could be looted.

On the first round, they brought home a drill, a welding torch, a scale, other tools and a gas balloon for cooking. Then they went back to the workshop to pack up the rest: three of six oxygen balloons used for welding, two jerrycans filled with benzene and two filled with diesel.

As Samir's son Imad organized the tools in the truck, his brother-in-law packed his own smaller car with 50 packages of welding electrodes, 4 kilograms each, and drove off.

Samur himself stood on the other side of the street to keep the dust particles from the burning nearby house from flying into his lungs. He looked at the youths packing the truck and was reminded of working bees in a honeycomb - this was just before 5 P.M., he estimates.

"Suddenly I saw a flash of light next to my truck and then it caught fire and I heard the sound of an explosion. I started to run toward the blast, and when I got close and the smoke cleared, I saw bodies, one of them belonging to my son Imad. I fainted. When I woke up they told me that Imad and the seven other young people who were helping him had been killed," he recounted.

Speaking to Haaretz by phone, Samur said: "These were not Hamas, they were our children, and I will tell you their names. Imad Samur, 32; Ashraf al-Dabar, 30; Mahmoud Rabayan, 15; Rami Rabayan, 23; Ahmed Hila, 19; Mohammed Mahdi, 17; Wissam Eid, 14; Mohammed Haber, 20. Four others were hurt, two of them seriously: Bilal Rabayan, 19 and his brother Baha, 16."

Knowing their names doesn't make them any less dead.

Iraq New Year

1st Lt. Matt Vigeant, far right, and his Iraqi translator check the documents of an Iraqi driver pulled over near Sadr City, last May. Tina Susman / Los Angeles Times.

Anthony Shadid, a Washington Post reporter, wrote one of the first and most accessible accounts of the early phases of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Blog post about it here.

Today he offers a description of contemporary Baghdad, as the Status of Forces Agreement nominally ends the occupation and returns the country to Iraqi sovereignty. (Does anyone remember that the US nominally transferred sovereignty back to the Iraqis once before, on June 28, 2004, as Coalition Provisional Authority proconsul Paul Bremmer scurried out the door?)

Shadid describes the mood among residents -- both hopeful and wary.

This war's end feels more truce than treaty, more respite than reconciliation. There is no revival or renaissance, no celebration. It manifests itself most in the simple lifting of a siege.

In a roundabout once known as Ali Baba Square, water occasionally flows from a bronze fountain portraying Kahramana, the slave girl who outwitted the 40 thieves of "A Thousand and One Nights." Boys play pool on tables lining the lazy Tigris River. Trucks along Abu Nawas Street bring flopping fish destined for plates of masgoof, an Iraqi specialty.

In Firdaus Square, where Hussein's statue once gave way to American tanks whose barrels read "Beastly Boy" and "Bloodlust" and U.S. soldiers blared Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" over Humvee speakers, two students, Hussein al-Abbas and Amjad Abdel Hamza, took pictures of each other near the swings and park benches.

"For the memories," Abbas said.

Behind them, a poster reads: "Law builds the nation."

Fragile is the term American officials rely on to describe this Iraq, and indeed, it is that. At this moment, the country feels as though it could recover, economically if not physically, blessed by oil reserves that are potentially the largest in the world. Crumbling, it feels as though it could just as well remain a powerless, pliant country buckling under its own weight, dependent on a United States that seems determined to dictate its future.

Go read it all.

For McClatchy reporter Dulamy, Baghdad is a broken, fearful city and also home, where daily life somehow goes on.

Yesterday, a taxi driver agreed to take me to a west Baghdad neighborhood, as we arrived he stopped his car not far away from the main street of the block and told me: "I can't, forgive me."

He explained that he has a family and don’t want to take any risk. I told him I am coming to this neighborhood on daily bases [sic] with many drivers but he said he can not trust the situation.

The neighborhood was, and still for many, a fearful place after all fighting against the American troops, Iraqi troops, sectarian killings, crimes and displacement. I had to step down and to take another taxi.

...

It made me think again and again why people don’t trust the new situation but how can people trust the situation enough when blast walls are still surrounding neighborhoods? When there are more than 260 checkpoints inside Baghdad? How can people trust the new situation when dozens of main roads, tunnels and bridges are still closed? When military convoys still filling the streets and not allowing tens of cars to approach them or pass them? ...

It will be a better situation when officials (all officials) start touring Baghdad with less than 20 soldiers and bodyguards and less than five military vehicles guarding them by blocking all the roads as they pass by. Imagine, we have a parliament of 275 members, and a cabinet of more than 30 ministers, three members in the presidential council, advisors, provincial councils, governors, heads of municipality, judges, deputy ministers (each ministry has several)…etc, you can do the math.

I will say Baghdad is a better place when it will be better than it was prior to 2003 in terms of security, municipality, electricity, transportation and other fields.

Again, read the whole thing.

Friday cat blogging: Mission District windowsill dwellers

I have no idea why this "cat" has taken up residence nearby. Cheerful, isn't.


This one is admittedly probably not a cat. Perhaps a small dragon? A guardian creature of some sort?

We are neither homogenous or boring around here.

Most offensive bowl game ad of the year

The football bowl season isn't over yet -- but I've decided after far too many hours in front of sometimes exciting and often boring spectacles, this Taco Bell ad ranks as one of the worst of the season.

Beating up on the barista is no way to sell your crappy burritos.

Please leave your nominations in comments.