http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article3266598.ece
10 humanitarian crises forgotten (but not gone)
If doctors edited newspapers... The frontline physicians at Médecins Sans Frontières have chosen the 10 humanitarian crises that should have been given more coverage in 2007. By Claire Soares and Daniel Howden
Published: 20 December 2007
Colombia
While the cocaine trade regularly features in the headlines, little attention is devoted to the scale of the internal refugee crisis. After four decades of civil conflict that has evolved from a war of political ideologies to a struggle for territory and control over the narcotics trade, large numbers of Colombians live in areas controlled by militia or guerrillas. With basic human rights under threat and unpredictable violence endemic in many rural areas, millions have fled to the shantytowns – or barrios – that ring every major town. Nearly four million people live in these insecure settlements cut off from basic state services such as mains electricity, water and health care. In the endless slums that now choke the capital, Bogota, areas are divided up and fought over by the same paramilitaries and left-wing rebels that blight and dominate the countryside.
Sri Lanka
After a quarter of a century of fighting, this year will be remembered among the bloodiest in Sri Lankan history. The civil war between the government forces and the separatist Tamil Tigers flared back into life last year and has kept worsening. International efforts to resolve the conflict have made no headway as key figures on both sides appear to have decided that a military solution is possible. Targeted bombings, mine attacks, suicide bombings, abductions, recruitment of child soldiers have all followed. The civilian toll in a country already flattened by the 2004 tsunami has been horrendous. Hundreds of thousands of people in need of humanitarian aid have been forced to flee to makeshift camps and the situation has been compounded by a climate of hostility and suspicion towards aid agencies. MSF is among the few agencies still operating in frontline areas, such as Point Pedro and Vavuniya, where doctors are desperately needed.
Somalia
Violence in Somalia hit some of the worst levels in more than 15 years in 2007, prompting UN officials to declare it the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa, surpassing even Darfur in its horror and hopelessness. Ethiopia invaded Somalia on Christmas Day last year and easily overpowered the Union of Islamic Courts, but ever since insurgents have been staging increasingly ferocious guerrilla style attacks, particularly in the capital, Mogadishu. Aid workers say one million people have fled their homes, including 60 per cent of Mogadishu's population. This week mortar shells slammed into a crowded market in the capital, killing a dozen people including a mother and her three children, and a foreign journalist was kidnapped. This precarious security situation means reaching those in need is increasingly difficult. Just yesterday, the UN called for the creation of "safe zones" so that aid could get through to the most vulnerable, particularly children.
Burma
The extraordinary democracy protests by the Buddhist monks in one of the most repressive countries on earth put Burma back atop the news agenda this year. But the nature of ordinary life under the military junta has remained a dim part of the picture. High levels of malaria and HIV are made unimaginably worse by the negligence of a regime that spent only 1.4 per cent of its budget on health care. Despite the overwhelming need, there are few humanitarian groups able to work within the country and those that do so have to operate under severe restrictions. Comparatively few donors are willing to fund operations in the country for fear of indirectly supporting the regime. Further complicating the situation is the absence of any clear statistics on the health situation. The UN says that as many as 360,000 Burmese, out of 50 million, are living with HIV.
Malnutrition
There may not have been a headline-catching food crisis in 2007 on a similar scale as the one that beset Niger last year, but malnutrition is still a disturbing way of life for many in west and east Africa and south Asia, and is associated with the deaths of five million children under the age of five. MSF is campaigning for international donors to scale up their funding for ready-to-use foods, milk and peanut-based pastes that do not need to be kept in a refrigerator, so can be sent out into the rural mud-hut villages where mothers can feed them to their babies at home, rather than being forced to trek miles to the nearest clinic. In Maradi, Niger aid workers are using these pastes to boost the diets of 62,000 children during the seasonal lean period and stop them becoming malnourished in the first place.
Chechnya
Ninety-nine per cent of the electorate here turned out to vote for Vladimir Putin in the recent Russian presidential election. Such a result defies belief in the breakaway Muslim republic crushed by Mr Putin's forces in the second Chechen war. The Putin-installed strongman who rules the republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, made sure that his boss would not be disappointed. Under his authoritarian rule, Mr Kadyrov has cowed the separatists and terrified their families through torture and abduction. The capital, Grozny, flattened by Russian bombs, has been rebuilt, and the airport reopened. But two wars have left psychological and physical scars on the civilian population with large numbers of people suffering from high levels of anxiety, insomnia and depression. As the military conflict with Russia fades into the background with only sporadic clashes now reported, and western leaders no longer openly challenge Russia on its human rights abuses in the republic, humanitarian needs remain critical.
Zimbabwe
With each new headline warning of economic meltdown in Zimbabwe the litany of impossible statistics has grown this year: inflation at 12,000 per cent, three million fleeing the country, 85 per cent unemployment. Under this extraordinary strain, what had been among the best healthcare systems in Africa has collapsed. As many as 3,000 people are dying every week from HIV/Aids and the chronic absence of life-extending antiretroviral drugs is accelerating this death march.
As many as four million people are in danger of starvation according the World Food Programme and the fuel crisis means that rural clinics are treating patients who have sometimes walked for days in search of medical treatment. The fate of the 83-year-old President, Robert Mugabe, continues to dominate coverage of the country that was once seen as the poster boy of post-colonialism, but it is the impoverished people of this beautiful southern African country paying the price of a man-made crisis.
Central African Republic
While neighbouring Chad and the western Sudan region of Darfur have made their way into global media coverage, the tiny landlocked Central African Republic finds itself starved of attention. This "phantom state" in the middle of Africa has no government institutions functioning outside the capital, in the north bandits and warring factions constitute the law of the land. Rights groups say hundreds of civilians have been executed and at least 100,000 people caught in the crossfire of rival armed groups have fled their villages and are hiding in forests and bush. Complicating a perilous internal situation are the CAR's unpredictable neighbours. The potential for the whole region to tip over into chaos is immense. A small contingent of EU peacekeepers is due to be deployed in the New Year.
Democratic Republic of Congo
With the country's first democratic elections in decades successfully completed in 2006, the Congolese might have been forgiven for expecting an easier time in 2007. But those out in the east, in the North Kivu region, have seen little sign of the stability that re-elected President Joseph Kabila promised. Instead, fighting between armed groups has raged for much of the year and the government is in open combat with rebel leader Laurent Nkunda. Hundreds of thousands of homeless people are hiding in the forest because their villages are no longer safe. They are scavenging food to stay alive and trying to dodge the cholera that is rampant throughout much of the region. And for the women living in this area, there is another nightmare to face: sexual violence is alarmingly high. A peace conference has been scheduled for next week to try to calm the troubled region, but few are optimistic of a rapid solution.
Tuberculosis
Kairat, from Uzbekistan, on the right, was among the 500,000 people to be diagnosed with multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis this year. But he was one of the lucky ones, moving to one of the few hospitals in the region to get specialist care. But even those who do get treatment have to rely on a highly toxic and expensive cocktail of drugs that often trigger violent side-effects and has to be taken for two years. Amazingly, there have been no major advances in treatment of the disease since the 1960s, and the most commonly used test to diagnose TB was developed at the end of the 19th century and detects only half the cases. An estimated $900m is needed every year for research and development but only $206m has been made available.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Book argues that Bell stole phone idea
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071226/ap_on_hi_te/techbit_bell_book
Book argues that Bell stole phone idea
By BRIAN BERGSTEIN, AP Technology Writer
12-26-7
A new book claims to have definitive evidence of a long-suspected technological crime — that Alexander Graham Bell stole ideas for the telephone from a rival, Elisha Gray.
In "The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret," journalist Seth Shulman argues that Bell — aided by aggressive lawyers and a corrupt patent examiner — got an improper peek at patent documents Gray had filed, and that Bell was erroneously credited with filing first.
Shulman believes the smoking gun is Bell's lab notebook, which was restricted by Bell's family until 1976, then digitized and made widely available in 1999.
The notebook details the false starts Bell encountered as he and assistant Thomas Watson tried transmitting sound electromagnetically over a wire. Then, after a 12-day gap in 1876 — when Bell went to Washington to sort out patent questions about his work — he suddenly began trying another kind of voice transmitter. That method was the one that proved successful.
As Bell described that new approach, he sketched a diagram of a person speaking into a device. Gray's patent documents, which describe a similar technique, also feature a very similar diagram.
Shulman's book, due out Jan. 7, recounts other elements that have piqued researchers' suspicions. For instance, Bell's transmitter design appears hastily written in the margin of his patent; Bell was nervous about demonstrating his device with Gray present; Bell resisted testifying in an 1878 lawsuit probing this question; and Bell, as if ashamed, quickly distanced himself from the telephone monopoly bearing his name.
Perhaps the most instructive lesson comes when Shulman explores why historical memory has favored Bell and not Gray — nor German inventor Philipp Reis, who beat them both with 1860s telephones that employed a different principle.
One reason is simply that Bell, not Gray, actually demonstrated a phone that transmitted speech. Gray was focused instead on his era's pressing communications challenge: how to send multiple messages simultaneously over the same telegraph wire. As Gray huffed to his attorney, "I should like to see Bell do that with his apparatus."
Book argues that Bell stole phone idea
By BRIAN BERGSTEIN, AP Technology Writer
12-26-7
A new book claims to have definitive evidence of a long-suspected technological crime — that Alexander Graham Bell stole ideas for the telephone from a rival, Elisha Gray.
In "The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret," journalist Seth Shulman argues that Bell — aided by aggressive lawyers and a corrupt patent examiner — got an improper peek at patent documents Gray had filed, and that Bell was erroneously credited with filing first.
Shulman believes the smoking gun is Bell's lab notebook, which was restricted by Bell's family until 1976, then digitized and made widely available in 1999.
The notebook details the false starts Bell encountered as he and assistant Thomas Watson tried transmitting sound electromagnetically over a wire. Then, after a 12-day gap in 1876 — when Bell went to Washington to sort out patent questions about his work — he suddenly began trying another kind of voice transmitter. That method was the one that proved successful.
As Bell described that new approach, he sketched a diagram of a person speaking into a device. Gray's patent documents, which describe a similar technique, also feature a very similar diagram.
Shulman's book, due out Jan. 7, recounts other elements that have piqued researchers' suspicions. For instance, Bell's transmitter design appears hastily written in the margin of his patent; Bell was nervous about demonstrating his device with Gray present; Bell resisted testifying in an 1878 lawsuit probing this question; and Bell, as if ashamed, quickly distanced himself from the telephone monopoly bearing his name.
Perhaps the most instructive lesson comes when Shulman explores why historical memory has favored Bell and not Gray — nor German inventor Philipp Reis, who beat them both with 1860s telephones that employed a different principle.
One reason is simply that Bell, not Gray, actually demonstrated a phone that transmitted speech. Gray was focused instead on his era's pressing communications challenge: how to send multiple messages simultaneously over the same telegraph wire. As Gray huffed to his attorney, "I should like to see Bell do that with his apparatus."
State of the Unions
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/opinion/24krugman.html
December 24, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
State of the Unions
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Once upon a time, back when America had a strong middle class, it also had a strong union movement.
These two facts were connected. Unions negotiated good wages and benefits for their workers, gains that often ended up being matched even by nonunion employers. They also provided an important counterbalance to the political influence of corporations and the economic elite.
Today, however, the American union movement is a shadow of its former self, except among government workers. In 1973, almost a quarter of private-sector employees were union members, but last year the figure was down to a mere 7.4 percent.
Yet unions still matter politically. And right now they’re at the heart of a nasty political scuffle among Democrats. Before I get to that, however, let’s talk about what happened to American labor over the last 35 years.
It’s often assumed that the U.S. labor movement died a natural death, that it was made obsolete by globalization and technological change. But what really happened is that beginning in the 1970s, corporate America, which had previously had a largely cooperative relationship with unions, in effect declared war on organized labor.
Don’t take my word for it; read Business Week, which published an article in 2002 titled “How Wal-Mart Keeps Unions at Bay.” The article explained that “over the past two decades, Corporate America has perfected its ability to fend off labor groups.” It then described the tactics — some legal, some illegal, all involving a healthy dose of intimidation — that Wal-Mart and other giant firms use to block organizing drives.
These hardball tactics have been enabled by a political environment that has been deeply hostile to organized labor, both because politicians favored employers’ interests and because conservatives sought to weaken the Democratic Party. “We’re going to crush labor as a political entity,” Grover Norquist, the anti-tax activist, once declared.
But the times may be changing. A newly energized progressive movement seems to be on the ascendant, and unions are a key part of that movement. Most notably, the Service Employees International Union has played a key role in pushing for health care reform. And unions will be an important force in the Democrats’ favor in next year’s election.
Or maybe not — which brings us to the latest from Iowa.
Whoever receives the Democratic presidential nomination will receive labor’s support in the general election. Meanwhile, however, unions are supporting favored candidates. Hillary Clinton — who for a time seemed the clear front-runner — has received the most union support. John Edwards, whose populist message resonates with labor, has also received considerable labor support.
But Barack Obama, though he has a solid pro-labor voting record, has not — in part, perhaps, because his message of “a new kind of politics” that will transcend bitter partisanship doesn’t make much sense to union leaders who know, from the experience of confronting corporations and their political allies head on, that partisanship isn’t going away anytime soon.
O.K., that’s politics. But now Mr. Obama has lashed out at Mr. Edwards because two 527s — independent groups that are allowed to support candidates, but are legally forbidden from coordinating directly with their campaigns — are running ads on his rival’s behalf. They are, Mr. Obama says, representative of the kind of “special interests” that “have too much influence in Washington.”
The thing, though, is that both of these 527s represent union groups — in the case of the larger group, local branches of the S.E.I.U. who consider Mr. Edwards the strongest candidate on health reform. So Mr. Obama’s attack raises a couple of questions.
First, does it make sense, in the current political and economic environment, for Democrats to lump unions in with corporate groups as examples of the special interests we need to stand up to?
Second, is Mr. Obama saying that if nominated, he’d be willing to run without support from labor 527s, which might be crucial to the Democrats? If not, how does he avoid having his own current words used against him by the Republican nominee?
Part of what happened here, I think, is that Mr. Obama, looking for a stick with which to beat an opponent who has lately acquired some momentum, either carelessly or cynically failed to think about how his rhetoric would affect the eventual ability of the Democratic nominee, whoever he or she is, to campaign effectively. In this sense, his latest gambit resembles his previous echoing of G.O.P. talking points on Social Security.
Beyond that, the episode illustrates what’s wrong with campaigning on generalities about political transformation and trying to avoid sounding partisan.
It may be partisan to say that a 527 run by labor unions supporting health care reform isn’t the same thing as a 527 run by insurance companies opposing it. But it’s also the simple truth.
December 24, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
State of the Unions
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Once upon a time, back when America had a strong middle class, it also had a strong union movement.
These two facts were connected. Unions negotiated good wages and benefits for their workers, gains that often ended up being matched even by nonunion employers. They also provided an important counterbalance to the political influence of corporations and the economic elite.
Today, however, the American union movement is a shadow of its former self, except among government workers. In 1973, almost a quarter of private-sector employees were union members, but last year the figure was down to a mere 7.4 percent.
Yet unions still matter politically. And right now they’re at the heart of a nasty political scuffle among Democrats. Before I get to that, however, let’s talk about what happened to American labor over the last 35 years.
It’s often assumed that the U.S. labor movement died a natural death, that it was made obsolete by globalization and technological change. But what really happened is that beginning in the 1970s, corporate America, which had previously had a largely cooperative relationship with unions, in effect declared war on organized labor.
Don’t take my word for it; read Business Week, which published an article in 2002 titled “How Wal-Mart Keeps Unions at Bay.” The article explained that “over the past two decades, Corporate America has perfected its ability to fend off labor groups.” It then described the tactics — some legal, some illegal, all involving a healthy dose of intimidation — that Wal-Mart and other giant firms use to block organizing drives.
These hardball tactics have been enabled by a political environment that has been deeply hostile to organized labor, both because politicians favored employers’ interests and because conservatives sought to weaken the Democratic Party. “We’re going to crush labor as a political entity,” Grover Norquist, the anti-tax activist, once declared.
But the times may be changing. A newly energized progressive movement seems to be on the ascendant, and unions are a key part of that movement. Most notably, the Service Employees International Union has played a key role in pushing for health care reform. And unions will be an important force in the Democrats’ favor in next year’s election.
Or maybe not — which brings us to the latest from Iowa.
Whoever receives the Democratic presidential nomination will receive labor’s support in the general election. Meanwhile, however, unions are supporting favored candidates. Hillary Clinton — who for a time seemed the clear front-runner — has received the most union support. John Edwards, whose populist message resonates with labor, has also received considerable labor support.
But Barack Obama, though he has a solid pro-labor voting record, has not — in part, perhaps, because his message of “a new kind of politics” that will transcend bitter partisanship doesn’t make much sense to union leaders who know, from the experience of confronting corporations and their political allies head on, that partisanship isn’t going away anytime soon.
O.K., that’s politics. But now Mr. Obama has lashed out at Mr. Edwards because two 527s — independent groups that are allowed to support candidates, but are legally forbidden from coordinating directly with their campaigns — are running ads on his rival’s behalf. They are, Mr. Obama says, representative of the kind of “special interests” that “have too much influence in Washington.”
The thing, though, is that both of these 527s represent union groups — in the case of the larger group, local branches of the S.E.I.U. who consider Mr. Edwards the strongest candidate on health reform. So Mr. Obama’s attack raises a couple of questions.
First, does it make sense, in the current political and economic environment, for Democrats to lump unions in with corporate groups as examples of the special interests we need to stand up to?
Second, is Mr. Obama saying that if nominated, he’d be willing to run without support from labor 527s, which might be crucial to the Democrats? If not, how does he avoid having his own current words used against him by the Republican nominee?
Part of what happened here, I think, is that Mr. Obama, looking for a stick with which to beat an opponent who has lately acquired some momentum, either carelessly or cynically failed to think about how his rhetoric would affect the eventual ability of the Democratic nominee, whoever he or she is, to campaign effectively. In this sense, his latest gambit resembles his previous echoing of G.O.P. talking points on Social Security.
Beyond that, the episode illustrates what’s wrong with campaigning on generalities about political transformation and trying to avoid sounding partisan.
It may be partisan to say that a 527 run by labor unions supporting health care reform isn’t the same thing as a 527 run by insurance companies opposing it. But it’s also the simple truth.
Your Nominees for the Golden Duke Awards!
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dukesnominees.php
Your Nominees for the Golden Duke Awards!
TPM is pleased to announce that we will be giving away our First Annual Golden Dukes to recognize great accomplishments in muckiness including acts of venal corruption, outstanding self-inflicted losses of dignity, crimes against the republic, bribery, exposed hypocrisy and generally malevolent governance.
The awards are named in honor of Congressman-turned-inmate Randy "Duke" Cunningham. It's been a heady few years for Muckraking, what with the meta-Abramoff scandal and so much more. But here at TPM we still believe that Duke is the iconic modern scandal. Few so well combine outlandish corruption, national security, sex, and sheer cartoonish ridiculousness.
The Nominees
We'll be giving away awards in six categories:
Best Testimonial Trainwreck
John Tanner for his unfortunate performance in front of the House Judiciary Committee
Sara Taylor for her muddled, bumbling, and oh-so-evasive testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee
Kyle Sampson for his own sorry showing in the Senate during the DOJ politicization hearings
Lurita Doan for her unprecedentedly incoherent testimony to Rep. Henry Waxman and his House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
Alberto Gonzales for his spectacular series of self-contradictions in regard to the NSA warrentless wiretapping program
Outstanding Achievement in Improbable Forgetfulness
Alberto Gonzales for spouting more I-don't-recalls than we care to count
Sara Taylor for forgetting what she had for breakfast last week
Bradley Schlozman for generalized phony forgetfulness
Lurita Doan also for generalized phony forgetfulness
Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) for not recalling what he did that fateful day in the Minneapolis airport
Outstanding Achievement in Corruption-based Chutzpah
Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) for his phony resignation and brazenly inventive interpretation of the American legal code
Scott Bloch for commissioning private company Geeks on Call to purge his government-issued laptop of possibly incriminating documents
Rudy Giuliani for his astoundingly audacious use of public dollars in the now infamous Shag Fund scandal
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) for her undisclosed purchase of some prime real estate at half the market price from friend and campaign contributor Bob Penney
Ginger Cruz for her generally outlandish behavior, including but not limited to making "inappropriate sexual remarks" and threatening employees with supernatural retribution
Best Scandal -- Local Venue
Vincent J. Fumo for his impressive 139 counts of fraud and obstruction of justice in addition to the bamboozling of two state-funded charities for the purpose of personal purchases
Michael Corona for using his position as Sheriff of Orange County to enrich himself, his wife, and his mistress
Rachel Paulose for her bigoted and hostile management style following the publicly funded coronation extravaganza that she held for herself
Richard Roberts for his use of funds from Oral Roberts University, over which he presides, to support his own lavish spending habits as well as the campaign of a local official for the Tulsa mayoral office
State Rep. Bob Allen (R-Merrit Island) for soliciting sex from and undercover officer, then attributing his decision to a fear of black men in public places
Best Scandal -- Sex and Generalized Carnality
Glenn Murphy for sexually assaulting an unconscious man at a Young Republicans get-together
State Rep. Richard Curtis (R-Vancouver) for soliciting a gay prostitute and then starting an argument over the fee
Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) for generalized whore-mongering in multiple jurisdictions
Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) for poorly executed bathroom sex
State Rep. Bob Allen (R-Merrit Island) also for poorly executed bathroom sex
Best Scandal -- General Interest
Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) for multiple counts of backroom wheeling and dealing for personal gain
Rep. Don Young (R-AK) for using the US Treasury to pay off a campaign contributor
Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) for poorly executed bathroom sex followed, of course, by some ballsy legal acrobatics
Alberto Gonzales for the politicization of the DOJ, boldfaced lying, and refusal to resign
President George W. Bush for the general politicization of the US government
It's in the judges' hands now. The winners in all six categories will be announced on December 31, 2007.
The Judges
We're happy to have a very distinguished panel of expert judges to sort through your nominations and choose the ultimate winners. They are:
Susie Bright, author, sexologist, analyst of erotic endeavors
John Dean, former Nixon White House Counsel, author, critic, columnist, muckster-turned-muckraker
Hendrik Hertzberg, essayist, political reporter, general TPM hero
Matthew Yglesias, blogger, representative of the rising generation, advocate of the typo-challenged
Dahlia Lithwick, law and legal affairs writer
Your Nominees for the Golden Duke Awards!
TPM is pleased to announce that we will be giving away our First Annual Golden Dukes to recognize great accomplishments in muckiness including acts of venal corruption, outstanding self-inflicted losses of dignity, crimes against the republic, bribery, exposed hypocrisy and generally malevolent governance.
The awards are named in honor of Congressman-turned-inmate Randy "Duke" Cunningham. It's been a heady few years for Muckraking, what with the meta-Abramoff scandal and so much more. But here at TPM we still believe that Duke is the iconic modern scandal. Few so well combine outlandish corruption, national security, sex, and sheer cartoonish ridiculousness.
The Nominees
We'll be giving away awards in six categories:
Best Testimonial Trainwreck
John Tanner for his unfortunate performance in front of the House Judiciary Committee
Sara Taylor for her muddled, bumbling, and oh-so-evasive testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee
Kyle Sampson for his own sorry showing in the Senate during the DOJ politicization hearings
Lurita Doan for her unprecedentedly incoherent testimony to Rep. Henry Waxman and his House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
Alberto Gonzales for his spectacular series of self-contradictions in regard to the NSA warrentless wiretapping program
Outstanding Achievement in Improbable Forgetfulness
Alberto Gonzales for spouting more I-don't-recalls than we care to count
Sara Taylor for forgetting what she had for breakfast last week
Bradley Schlozman for generalized phony forgetfulness
Lurita Doan also for generalized phony forgetfulness
Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) for not recalling what he did that fateful day in the Minneapolis airport
Outstanding Achievement in Corruption-based Chutzpah
Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) for his phony resignation and brazenly inventive interpretation of the American legal code
Scott Bloch for commissioning private company Geeks on Call to purge his government-issued laptop of possibly incriminating documents
Rudy Giuliani for his astoundingly audacious use of public dollars in the now infamous Shag Fund scandal
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) for her undisclosed purchase of some prime real estate at half the market price from friend and campaign contributor Bob Penney
Ginger Cruz for her generally outlandish behavior, including but not limited to making "inappropriate sexual remarks" and threatening employees with supernatural retribution
Best Scandal -- Local Venue
Vincent J. Fumo for his impressive 139 counts of fraud and obstruction of justice in addition to the bamboozling of two state-funded charities for the purpose of personal purchases
Michael Corona for using his position as Sheriff of Orange County to enrich himself, his wife, and his mistress
Rachel Paulose for her bigoted and hostile management style following the publicly funded coronation extravaganza that she held for herself
Richard Roberts for his use of funds from Oral Roberts University, over which he presides, to support his own lavish spending habits as well as the campaign of a local official for the Tulsa mayoral office
State Rep. Bob Allen (R-Merrit Island) for soliciting sex from and undercover officer, then attributing his decision to a fear of black men in public places
Best Scandal -- Sex and Generalized Carnality
Glenn Murphy for sexually assaulting an unconscious man at a Young Republicans get-together
State Rep. Richard Curtis (R-Vancouver) for soliciting a gay prostitute and then starting an argument over the fee
Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) for generalized whore-mongering in multiple jurisdictions
Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) for poorly executed bathroom sex
State Rep. Bob Allen (R-Merrit Island) also for poorly executed bathroom sex
Best Scandal -- General Interest
Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) for multiple counts of backroom wheeling and dealing for personal gain
Rep. Don Young (R-AK) for using the US Treasury to pay off a campaign contributor
Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) for poorly executed bathroom sex followed, of course, by some ballsy legal acrobatics
Alberto Gonzales for the politicization of the DOJ, boldfaced lying, and refusal to resign
President George W. Bush for the general politicization of the US government
It's in the judges' hands now. The winners in all six categories will be announced on December 31, 2007.
The Judges
We're happy to have a very distinguished panel of expert judges to sort through your nominations and choose the ultimate winners. They are:
Susie Bright, author, sexologist, analyst of erotic endeavors
John Dean, former Nixon White House Counsel, author, critic, columnist, muckster-turned-muckraker
Hendrik Hertzberg, essayist, political reporter, general TPM hero
Matthew Yglesias, blogger, representative of the rising generation, advocate of the typo-challenged
Dahlia Lithwick, law and legal affairs writer
GQ MEN OF THE YEAR 2007
http://men.style.com/gq/features/landing?id=content_6227
MEN OF THE YEAR 2007
From Bill Clinton to Kanye West, meet all of our Men of the Year
GQ MEN OF THE YEAR 2007: The Honorees
Bill Clinton – Public Citizen
Daniel Craig – Leading Man
Kanye West – Graduate
Casey Affleck – Breakout of the Year
Judd Apatow, Michael Cera, Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen, and Paul Rudd – Comedy Mafia
Javier Bardem – Villain
Brad Bird, director of ‘Ratatouille’ – Innovator
Cate Blanchett, in ‘I’m Not There’ – Performance of the Year
Mike Bloomberg, Mayor of the City of New York – Maverick
Boise State vs. Oklahoma at the Fiesta Bowl – Game of the Year
Josh Brolin – Tough Guy
Cast of ‘Mad Men’ – Instant Classic
David Chang of New York’s Momofuku – Chef
David Chase, creator of ‘The Sopranos’ – Final Act
Simon Cowell – Mastermind
John Cusack – Comeback
Daft Punk – Trailblazers
Daria – Supermodel of the Year
Sgt. Joshua Delgado and the new breed of Army medics in Iraq – Unsung Heroes
Roger Federer – Court King
Tom Hanks – Icon
Emile Hirsch – Wild Man
Ryan Howard, first baseman, Philadelphia Phillies – Slugger
Lil Wayne – Workaholic
Josh Marshall, founder, Talking Points Memo – Muckraker
James McAvoy – British Import
Derek O’Dell, student, Virginia Tech – Lifesaver
Hayden Panettiere – Obsession of the Year
Ron Paul, presidential candidate – Dark Horse of the Year
Alex Rodriguez – Hit Man
Seth Rogen – Father of the Year
Mark Ruffalo – Secret Weapon
Julian Schnabel – Visionary
Jason Schwartzman – Cool Kid
John Smeaton, baggage handler, Glasgow International Airport – Employee of the Year
Channing Tatum – Man of Next Year
Robin Thicke and Rihanna – Smooth Operators
John Varvatos – Designer of the Year
Shaun White – Reinvention
MEN OF THE YEAR 2007
From Bill Clinton to Kanye West, meet all of our Men of the Year
GQ MEN OF THE YEAR 2007: The Honorees
Bill Clinton – Public Citizen
Daniel Craig – Leading Man
Kanye West – Graduate
Casey Affleck – Breakout of the Year
Judd Apatow, Michael Cera, Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen, and Paul Rudd – Comedy Mafia
Javier Bardem – Villain
Brad Bird, director of ‘Ratatouille’ – Innovator
Cate Blanchett, in ‘I’m Not There’ – Performance of the Year
Mike Bloomberg, Mayor of the City of New York – Maverick
Boise State vs. Oklahoma at the Fiesta Bowl – Game of the Year
Josh Brolin – Tough Guy
Cast of ‘Mad Men’ – Instant Classic
David Chang of New York’s Momofuku – Chef
David Chase, creator of ‘The Sopranos’ – Final Act
Simon Cowell – Mastermind
John Cusack – Comeback
Daft Punk – Trailblazers
Daria – Supermodel of the Year
Sgt. Joshua Delgado and the new breed of Army medics in Iraq – Unsung Heroes
Roger Federer – Court King
Tom Hanks – Icon
Emile Hirsch – Wild Man
Ryan Howard, first baseman, Philadelphia Phillies – Slugger
Lil Wayne – Workaholic
Josh Marshall, founder, Talking Points Memo – Muckraker
James McAvoy – British Import
Derek O’Dell, student, Virginia Tech – Lifesaver
Hayden Panettiere – Obsession of the Year
Ron Paul, presidential candidate – Dark Horse of the Year
Alex Rodriguez – Hit Man
Seth Rogen – Father of the Year
Mark Ruffalo – Secret Weapon
Julian Schnabel – Visionary
Jason Schwartzman – Cool Kid
John Smeaton, baggage handler, Glasgow International Airport – Employee of the Year
Channing Tatum – Man of Next Year
Robin Thicke and Rihanna – Smooth Operators
John Varvatos – Designer of the Year
Shaun White – Reinvention
Bhutto target of many militant groups
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071228/ap_on_re_as/bhutto_whodunit
Bhutto target of many militant groups
By KATHY GANNON, Associated Press Writer
12-28-7
Benazir Bhutto was the target of threats from virtually all of the militant groups who make Pakistan their home — from al-Qaida to homegrown terrorists to tribal insurgents on the Afghan border.
Her assassination after a rally in the garrison city of Rawalpindi — where the country's military and intelligence services are based — also focused anger and suspicion on the government of President Pervez Musharraf.
The former prime minister blamed al-Qaida, the Taliban and homegrown militants for an Oct. 18 suicide bombing that tore through a procession welcoming her back from exile to lead her opposition party in parliamentary elections. But she accused militant "sympathizers" in Musharraf's administration of backing the attempt on her life. Bhutto's supporters chanted "Killer, Killer, Musharraf!" outside the hospital where she was pronounced dead Thursday.
Musharraf blamed Islamic terrorists, pledging that "we will not rest until we eliminate these terrorists and root them out."
Al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri decried Bhutto's return in a video message this month and called for attacks on all the candidates in the Jan. 8 elections. And according to Bhutto, several Pakistanis arrested in an assassination attempt during her second term in the mid-1990s said they were following Osama bin Laden's orders.
The U.S.-backed, British-educated leader who pledged to redouble Pakistan's fight against Islamic militancy was also despised by Taliban-style radicals backed by tribes along the border with Afghanistan, where American forces are battling rising militant violence.
Baitullah Mehsud, a tribal warlord in the Waziristan region, was quoted in a Pakistani newspaper as saying that he would welcome Bhutto's return with suicide bombers. He later denied that in statements to local television and newspaper reporters.
Khalid Khwaja, a former Pakistani intelligence officer and self-declared friend of bin Laden, said Bhutto "was very openly threatening these tribal people."
"Naturally some of them could have done it," he said. "She was certainly hated to that degree by those elements who are victims of the American terror."
Bhutto also was labeled an infidel by groups such as Jaish-ul Mohammed, Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Hezb-ul Mujahedeen, which were spawned by Pakistan's military and intelligence services to take on neighboring India in the disputed Kashmir region.
The groups later aligned themselves with al-Qaida and have vowed to battle foreign troops in Afghanistan, and wage war against the Pakistani military for its support of the U.S.-led anti-terror campaign. Some of their leaders said Bhutto deserved to die for her threats to crush militants.
"I think by far the most likely (suspect) is the al-Qaida organization, which has been trying to kill Bhutto for the better part of the decade," said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former senior director for South Asia on the National Security Council.
"If it's not them, it's certainly one of the groups that are sympathetic with them," Riedel said. "They all work together and share a common antipathy to Bhutto because she's a woman, an advocate of secularism, a supporter of democracy and everything they stand against."
Retired army Gen. Hamid Gul, a former head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence secret service agency, questioned the security arrangements made for Bhutto's rally.
A cordon of police surrounded the park where Bhutto spoke, yet her attacker was able to get to the rear gate, where he shot her as she was leaving and then detonated himself, according to witnesses.
"How could they enter with so much of a police cordon. I am surprised," Gul said in an interview with The Associated Press.
A Washington-based friend of Bhutto's, Mark Siegel, told CNN that the former prime minister had been "very concerned that she was not getting the security that she had asked for," including devices used to jam cell phone signals.
"She had asked for special tinted cars, she had asked for four vehicles to surround her at all times," Siegel said. "All of that was denied to her.
Gul asserted that a suicide bomber couldn't have carried out the attack without being forewarned of Bhutto's movements with a cell phone or other device.
Bhutto had complained after the October assassination attempt in the city of Karachi that jamming devices had not been working, Gul said.
"Why were the jammers not working? She had been begging the government after the attack in Karachi saying the jammers were faulty then," he said. "I know that these things could not occur if the jammers are working."
"I think it is convenient to put the blame on al-Qaida. But there are other possibilities and they have to be examined," Gul said, without offering specifics. Gul strongly opposes the U.S.-backed campaign against Islamic militants, and has labeled himself the jihadists' only public supporter.
In an interview with the AP in November, a former district leader of Hezb-ul Mujahedeen said some members of Pakistan's intelligence establishment resented the idea of a woman leading a Muslim nation, as well as Bhutto's denunciation of militant Muslims. Hezb-ul Mujahedeen is believed to be heavily funded by Pakistani intelligence to fight in Indian-controlled Kashmir.
"In the Pakistani (secret) agencies and in the army there are so many people who are not secular, who are fundamentalists and will help a suicide bomber to carry out his job," said the former district leader, Saifullah, who uses just one name.
A former Taliban intelligence official, Mullah Ehsanullah, told The Associated Press this year that there were more than 500 men training as suicide bombers in 50 sites across the region in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
These camps he said, are run by al-Qaida and include Pakistani jihadists and Arab militants.
U.S. officials in Washington said they were trying to determine who might have carried out the attack.
FBI spokesman Richard Kolko said "the FBI continues to work with our U.S. intelligence community partners reviewing the al-Qaida claims for responsibility for any intelligence value. The validity of those claims are undetermined."
The statement came after a law enforcement official told the AP that a national FBI and Homeland Security bulletin to law enforcement agencies cited Islamist Web sites as saying al-Qaida had claimed responsibility. The official asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak publicly about it.
Director of National Intelligence spokesman Ross Feinstein said his agency was "in no position right now to confirm who may have been responsible."
___
Associated Press writers Carley Petesch in New York and Matt Apuzzo in Washington contributed to this report.
Bhutto target of many militant groups
By KATHY GANNON, Associated Press Writer
12-28-7
Benazir Bhutto was the target of threats from virtually all of the militant groups who make Pakistan their home — from al-Qaida to homegrown terrorists to tribal insurgents on the Afghan border.
Her assassination after a rally in the garrison city of Rawalpindi — where the country's military and intelligence services are based — also focused anger and suspicion on the government of President Pervez Musharraf.
The former prime minister blamed al-Qaida, the Taliban and homegrown militants for an Oct. 18 suicide bombing that tore through a procession welcoming her back from exile to lead her opposition party in parliamentary elections. But she accused militant "sympathizers" in Musharraf's administration of backing the attempt on her life. Bhutto's supporters chanted "Killer, Killer, Musharraf!" outside the hospital where she was pronounced dead Thursday.
Musharraf blamed Islamic terrorists, pledging that "we will not rest until we eliminate these terrorists and root them out."
Al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri decried Bhutto's return in a video message this month and called for attacks on all the candidates in the Jan. 8 elections. And according to Bhutto, several Pakistanis arrested in an assassination attempt during her second term in the mid-1990s said they were following Osama bin Laden's orders.
The U.S.-backed, British-educated leader who pledged to redouble Pakistan's fight against Islamic militancy was also despised by Taliban-style radicals backed by tribes along the border with Afghanistan, where American forces are battling rising militant violence.
Baitullah Mehsud, a tribal warlord in the Waziristan region, was quoted in a Pakistani newspaper as saying that he would welcome Bhutto's return with suicide bombers. He later denied that in statements to local television and newspaper reporters.
Khalid Khwaja, a former Pakistani intelligence officer and self-declared friend of bin Laden, said Bhutto "was very openly threatening these tribal people."
"Naturally some of them could have done it," he said. "She was certainly hated to that degree by those elements who are victims of the American terror."
Bhutto also was labeled an infidel by groups such as Jaish-ul Mohammed, Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Hezb-ul Mujahedeen, which were spawned by Pakistan's military and intelligence services to take on neighboring India in the disputed Kashmir region.
The groups later aligned themselves with al-Qaida and have vowed to battle foreign troops in Afghanistan, and wage war against the Pakistani military for its support of the U.S.-led anti-terror campaign. Some of their leaders said Bhutto deserved to die for her threats to crush militants.
"I think by far the most likely (suspect) is the al-Qaida organization, which has been trying to kill Bhutto for the better part of the decade," said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former senior director for South Asia on the National Security Council.
"If it's not them, it's certainly one of the groups that are sympathetic with them," Riedel said. "They all work together and share a common antipathy to Bhutto because she's a woman, an advocate of secularism, a supporter of democracy and everything they stand against."
Retired army Gen. Hamid Gul, a former head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence secret service agency, questioned the security arrangements made for Bhutto's rally.
A cordon of police surrounded the park where Bhutto spoke, yet her attacker was able to get to the rear gate, where he shot her as she was leaving and then detonated himself, according to witnesses.
"How could they enter with so much of a police cordon. I am surprised," Gul said in an interview with The Associated Press.
A Washington-based friend of Bhutto's, Mark Siegel, told CNN that the former prime minister had been "very concerned that she was not getting the security that she had asked for," including devices used to jam cell phone signals.
"She had asked for special tinted cars, she had asked for four vehicles to surround her at all times," Siegel said. "All of that was denied to her.
Gul asserted that a suicide bomber couldn't have carried out the attack without being forewarned of Bhutto's movements with a cell phone or other device.
Bhutto had complained after the October assassination attempt in the city of Karachi that jamming devices had not been working, Gul said.
"Why were the jammers not working? She had been begging the government after the attack in Karachi saying the jammers were faulty then," he said. "I know that these things could not occur if the jammers are working."
"I think it is convenient to put the blame on al-Qaida. But there are other possibilities and they have to be examined," Gul said, without offering specifics. Gul strongly opposes the U.S.-backed campaign against Islamic militants, and has labeled himself the jihadists' only public supporter.
In an interview with the AP in November, a former district leader of Hezb-ul Mujahedeen said some members of Pakistan's intelligence establishment resented the idea of a woman leading a Muslim nation, as well as Bhutto's denunciation of militant Muslims. Hezb-ul Mujahedeen is believed to be heavily funded by Pakistani intelligence to fight in Indian-controlled Kashmir.
"In the Pakistani (secret) agencies and in the army there are so many people who are not secular, who are fundamentalists and will help a suicide bomber to carry out his job," said the former district leader, Saifullah, who uses just one name.
A former Taliban intelligence official, Mullah Ehsanullah, told The Associated Press this year that there were more than 500 men training as suicide bombers in 50 sites across the region in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
These camps he said, are run by al-Qaida and include Pakistani jihadists and Arab militants.
U.S. officials in Washington said they were trying to determine who might have carried out the attack.
FBI spokesman Richard Kolko said "the FBI continues to work with our U.S. intelligence community partners reviewing the al-Qaida claims for responsibility for any intelligence value. The validity of those claims are undetermined."
The statement came after a law enforcement official told the AP that a national FBI and Homeland Security bulletin to law enforcement agencies cited Islamist Web sites as saying al-Qaida had claimed responsibility. The official asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak publicly about it.
Director of National Intelligence spokesman Ross Feinstein said his agency was "in no position right now to confirm who may have been responsible."
___
Associated Press writers Carley Petesch in New York and Matt Apuzzo in Washington contributed to this report.
Beast of the Month - November 2007
Beast of the Month - November 2007
Nancy Pelosi, House Speaker
"I yam an anti-Christ... "
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"
"This is a song called Livin' In the Future. But it's really about what's happening now. Right now... Over the past six years we've had to add to the American picture: rendition, illegal wiretapping, voter suppression, no habeus corpus, the neglect of that great city New Orleans and its people, an attack on the Constitution. And the loss of our best men and women in a tragic war. This is a song about things that shouldn't happen here happening here."
Bruce "The Boss" Springstreen, introducing a song to Today Show viewers in September.
In September, college student Andrew Meyer was tasered and arrested at the University of Florida by a gang of jack-booted campus police. His crime? Asking 2004 Democratic Party candidate John Kerry two questions at a forum created precisely for that purpose. His two questions, incidentally, were about evidence that the 2004 election was stolen and if Kerry was a member of the Skull & Bones. Oddly, though Meyer clearly was being overwhelmed by police force, Kerry droned an unconvincing reply while Meyer screamed "Don't tase me, bro!" The big loser in the media frenzy afterwards was John Kerry, and though it's impolite to kick a man while he's down politically - especially when that man should legitimately be sitting in the White House - frankly Kerry deserves it. But beyond Mr. Kerry, what happened perfectly symbolizes everything that's gone on over the past seven years: leaders of the Democratic Party sitting back passively, pretending nothing is wrong, while basic American liberties are trampled upon.
Apparently, a lot of people agree with The Konformist at this point. Opinion polls show George W. Bush widely detested, as his popularity has sunk to a Watergate-era Tricky Dick: an October Zogby poll gave him a 24% approval rating. And yet, the same polls indicate that the Democrat-controlled Congress is even MORE detested. Indeed, the same Zogby poll indicates Congress has a paltry 11 percent approval rating, and polls consistently show the legislature exceeding the record low of 1992 when the era of Bush I and check-bouncing Congressmen inspired a "throw the bums out!" mentality in the masses (which sadly later fueled the rise of the Newtoids.)
Mainstream pundits try to spin this in arguing the problem is a lack of Beltway bipartisanship, but the numbers prove this to be a lie. The smoking gun is revealed by looking at popularity among party affiliation of the voters: while Bush has a decided ideological split (as Salon's Glenn Greenwald noted, he still had a 64-29 approval-disapproval rating among GOP voters in an August Gallup poll, vs. an 8-90 rate among Democrats) there is no real rift about Congress (a 24-66 among Republicans and 28-59 among Democrats.) Indeed, another Gallup poll in September indicated Congress was more popular among Republicans than Democrats. That would indicate the problem is not a lack of bipartisanship, but rather a lack of Congress rightfully taking on Bush and his right-wing minions (hence why party voters are even more disgusted with the performance than Republicans.)
None of this should be a surprise. The stage was set in May 2006, when current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (The Konformist Beast of the Month) declared: "Impeachment is off the table." In retrospect, these words have shaped the current political climate more than "Macaca" ever could (or, as sayings go, "Don't tase me, bro!") By publicly declaring the Democrats would remain toothless in any defiance of the law by the Bush Team, it has only encouraged Shrub and his minions to escalate their arrogance in massive criminality. Even after further revelations of fraudulent lies leading to the Iraq War, widespread illegal wire-tapping by the DOJ, torture of POWs in defiance of the Geneva Convention and even the Nixonian pardon of White House perjurer Scooter Libby, the Democrats have remained faithful to Pelosi's pledge. This is even after a July poll by the American Research Group showed 45 percent of the public favors impeachment of Bush (and an even higher 54 percent of Donkey Dick Cheney.)
Some would argue the Pelosi pledge was a pragmatically wise move: Pelosi was attempting to counter right-wing ravings that a Democratic-controlled would be so left-wing it would resemble a gang of Stalinists (or, worse, a Hillary clone army.) By denying the demands of the most radical members of the Democratic Party, the theory goes, it enabled the Democrats to appeal to moderates and ensure their 2006 Election victory. But as far as lies go, backing off on the no-impeachment promise appears to be one that can be without little fallout, especially since, as opinion polls now show, impeachment is no longer a fringe movement but a mainstream one with strong support from moderates.
The official position of why the "no impeachment" mantra is still being followed: that the American public wants results, not highly politicized hearings that would be divisive. So, what results have come from the Democratic-controlled Congress so far? Let's see: continued funding for the Iraq War even with no timetables put into place, passage of a FISA bill which gave Bush a virtual blank check to spy on Americans without a court order, and continued torture of POWs which has given America a black eye on the world stage. Meanwhile, a bill to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) to cover more low-income children failed to override a Bush veto by 13 votes in the House. Apparently, Ms. Pelosi was unable to arm-twist thirteen GOP members to side with sick children over a widely unpopular Bush. Indeed, during a July breakfast with progressives, Pelosi itemized a list of the Democratic Party's alleged agenda: ending the war in Iraq, expanding health care, creating jobs and preserving the environment. So far, they have far more success implementing the GOP "to do" list (hence their unpopularity among Democrat voters.)
The real reasons why impeachment isn't being pursued? To begin with, there is again pure pragmatism: so long as Bush and Cheney occupy the White House, they (and the Iraq War) remain an albatross hung around the neck of any Republican seeking the presidency in 2008. Even someone as unlikable as Hillary can win in such a contest, or so the theory goes. Another reason the "I" word is being avoided is that it opens a can of worms, where the Democratic Party's complicity over the last seven years will become quickly apparent.
But perhaps the biggest reason: the Democratic Party is led by those who, almost universally, believe in the American establishment, even more so than the GOP. And admitting that the US government has been a criminal enterprise the past seven years hardly brings out mass faith in this establishment. While a portion of the Democrat leadership have noble sentiments, when push comes to shove, they will side with the establishment anytime it conflicts with the desires of the working class and progressives, and thus betray the foot-soldiers of the party.
A telling quote comes from Barack Obama, a fellow The Konformist concedes is certainly one of the more decent men in D.C. Yet on the impeachment issue, he shows establishment fawning and cluelessness. He opposes it, declaring: "I think you reserve impeachment for grave, grave breaches, and intentional breaches of the president's authority." Hmmm. And by grave breaches of the president's authority, do you exclude little things like illegal spying on American citizens, violating the Geneva Convention and using fraud to push the US into a costly and destructive war?
The bad news is, politically speaking, the Democratic Party leaders appear to be the winners despite all this. At this point, a majority of Americans will back a party of sniveling, unprincipled cowards over what the GOP has turned into during the Bush years. The Democrat establishment also believes, rightfully, that no matter how much they betray the progressive movement, they will come crawling back to them at election time over shards of glass rather than be stuck with Republicans controlling Congress or the Presidency. That means in 2008, the two most powerful politicians in America likely will be Hillary and Pelosi.
The good news: don't pen in Pelosi as a 2008 winner just yet. She may have an even tougher battle than Hillary does against Obama and John Edwards. Peace activist Cindy Sheehan, the mother of an American soldier who died in Iraq, and who during the summer of 2005 shamed the korporate media to finally cover tragedy in Iraq as much as they follow the lives of Britney, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and Brangelina, has announced a run for Congress as an independent against Ms. Pelosi. On why she is running against the top Dem in the House, Sheehan has explained that Republicans "are literally like rats jumping off the sinking ship of state and they are distancing themselves from George and Dick faster than the Democrats. With the mood of the country, we know this is not a moral position but a politically expedient one. Why can't we urge the Democrats to a moral position? Because they have been elected with a (D) they become one of the Untouchables?"
Whether Sheehan can win is still to be seen: Pelosi, after all is an incumbent, and a powerful one at that. On the other hand, Ms. Sheehan has overcome bigger odds politically in the past, and if ever the Speaker of the House could lose an election in a "secure" seat, it would be Pelosi against Cindy in a race decided by extremely progressive Bay Area voters. Because of this, The Konformist gives an early endorsement of Ms. Sheehan without reservations, both because of admiration of Sheehan and loathing of Pelosi. Frankly, somebody needs to be held accountable for the last seven years, and if the Democrats won't put that on Bush and Cheney, then they need to be punished for their own culpability. Go to it, Cindy!!!
In any case, we salute Nancy Pelosi as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, Nancy!!!
Beastly Update: Showing the continued sniveling servitude by the Democratic Party, Michael Mukasey was confirmed as Attorney General 53-40 on November 8 by the US Senate, despite his refusal to espouse his views on the legality of torture by the US government.
Sources:
For more on the Cindy Sheehan 2008 campaign:
http://www.cindyforcongress.org/
Antosca, Nick. "Kerry Should be Ashamed, and the Cop Who Tased Andrew Meyer Should be Jailed." The Huffington Post 18 September 2007 <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-antosca/kerry-should-be-ashamed-_b_64873.html>.
Berman, Ari. "Why Pelosi Opposes Impeachment." The Nation 31 July 2007 <http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?bid=15&pid=218930>.
Conover, Bev. "The Media and John Kerry's Disgusting Display." Online Journal 20 September 2007 <http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2440.shtml>.
Greenwald, Glenn. "Why is the Democratic Congress so unpopular?" Salon 21 August 2007 <http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/08/21/congress/index.html?source=search&aim=/opinion/greenwald>.
Kleefeld, Eric. "Poll: More Republicans Than Democrats Approve Of Congress." Talking Points Memo 20 September 2007 <http://tpmelectioncentral.com/2007/09/poll_more_republicans_than_democrats_approve_of_congress.php>.
Parry, Robert. "Bush Gets a Spying Blank Check." ConsortiumNews.com 5 August 2007 <http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/080507.html>.
"Peace Activist Sheehan to Challenge Top Democrat Pelosi." Monsters and Critics 10 Aug 2007 <http://news.monstersandcritics.com/usa/news/article_1341231.php/Peace_activist_Sheehan_to_challenge_top_Democrat_Pelosi>.
Rjmac. "Springsteen Gets Political on Today Show." Daily Kos 28 September 2007 <http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/9/28/101850/975>.
Sheehan, Cindy. "Strange Bedfellows..." MichaelMoore.com 12 July 2007 <http://www.michaelmoore.com/mustread/index.php?id=886>.
Nancy Pelosi, House Speaker
"I yam an anti-Christ... "
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"
"This is a song called Livin' In the Future. But it's really about what's happening now. Right now... Over the past six years we've had to add to the American picture: rendition, illegal wiretapping, voter suppression, no habeus corpus, the neglect of that great city New Orleans and its people, an attack on the Constitution. And the loss of our best men and women in a tragic war. This is a song about things that shouldn't happen here happening here."
Bruce "The Boss" Springstreen, introducing a song to Today Show viewers in September.
In September, college student Andrew Meyer was tasered and arrested at the University of Florida by a gang of jack-booted campus police. His crime? Asking 2004 Democratic Party candidate John Kerry two questions at a forum created precisely for that purpose. His two questions, incidentally, were about evidence that the 2004 election was stolen and if Kerry was a member of the Skull & Bones. Oddly, though Meyer clearly was being overwhelmed by police force, Kerry droned an unconvincing reply while Meyer screamed "Don't tase me, bro!" The big loser in the media frenzy afterwards was John Kerry, and though it's impolite to kick a man while he's down politically - especially when that man should legitimately be sitting in the White House - frankly Kerry deserves it. But beyond Mr. Kerry, what happened perfectly symbolizes everything that's gone on over the past seven years: leaders of the Democratic Party sitting back passively, pretending nothing is wrong, while basic American liberties are trampled upon.
Apparently, a lot of people agree with The Konformist at this point. Opinion polls show George W. Bush widely detested, as his popularity has sunk to a Watergate-era Tricky Dick: an October Zogby poll gave him a 24% approval rating. And yet, the same polls indicate that the Democrat-controlled Congress is even MORE detested. Indeed, the same Zogby poll indicates Congress has a paltry 11 percent approval rating, and polls consistently show the legislature exceeding the record low of 1992 when the era of Bush I and check-bouncing Congressmen inspired a "throw the bums out!" mentality in the masses (which sadly later fueled the rise of the Newtoids.)
Mainstream pundits try to spin this in arguing the problem is a lack of Beltway bipartisanship, but the numbers prove this to be a lie. The smoking gun is revealed by looking at popularity among party affiliation of the voters: while Bush has a decided ideological split (as Salon's Glenn Greenwald noted, he still had a 64-29 approval-disapproval rating among GOP voters in an August Gallup poll, vs. an 8-90 rate among Democrats) there is no real rift about Congress (a 24-66 among Republicans and 28-59 among Democrats.) Indeed, another Gallup poll in September indicated Congress was more popular among Republicans than Democrats. That would indicate the problem is not a lack of bipartisanship, but rather a lack of Congress rightfully taking on Bush and his right-wing minions (hence why party voters are even more disgusted with the performance than Republicans.)
None of this should be a surprise. The stage was set in May 2006, when current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (The Konformist Beast of the Month) declared: "Impeachment is off the table." In retrospect, these words have shaped the current political climate more than "Macaca" ever could (or, as sayings go, "Don't tase me, bro!") By publicly declaring the Democrats would remain toothless in any defiance of the law by the Bush Team, it has only encouraged Shrub and his minions to escalate their arrogance in massive criminality. Even after further revelations of fraudulent lies leading to the Iraq War, widespread illegal wire-tapping by the DOJ, torture of POWs in defiance of the Geneva Convention and even the Nixonian pardon of White House perjurer Scooter Libby, the Democrats have remained faithful to Pelosi's pledge. This is even after a July poll by the American Research Group showed 45 percent of the public favors impeachment of Bush (and an even higher 54 percent of Donkey Dick Cheney.)
Some would argue the Pelosi pledge was a pragmatically wise move: Pelosi was attempting to counter right-wing ravings that a Democratic-controlled would be so left-wing it would resemble a gang of Stalinists (or, worse, a Hillary clone army.) By denying the demands of the most radical members of the Democratic Party, the theory goes, it enabled the Democrats to appeal to moderates and ensure their 2006 Election victory. But as far as lies go, backing off on the no-impeachment promise appears to be one that can be without little fallout, especially since, as opinion polls now show, impeachment is no longer a fringe movement but a mainstream one with strong support from moderates.
The official position of why the "no impeachment" mantra is still being followed: that the American public wants results, not highly politicized hearings that would be divisive. So, what results have come from the Democratic-controlled Congress so far? Let's see: continued funding for the Iraq War even with no timetables put into place, passage of a FISA bill which gave Bush a virtual blank check to spy on Americans without a court order, and continued torture of POWs which has given America a black eye on the world stage. Meanwhile, a bill to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) to cover more low-income children failed to override a Bush veto by 13 votes in the House. Apparently, Ms. Pelosi was unable to arm-twist thirteen GOP members to side with sick children over a widely unpopular Bush. Indeed, during a July breakfast with progressives, Pelosi itemized a list of the Democratic Party's alleged agenda: ending the war in Iraq, expanding health care, creating jobs and preserving the environment. So far, they have far more success implementing the GOP "to do" list (hence their unpopularity among Democrat voters.)
The real reasons why impeachment isn't being pursued? To begin with, there is again pure pragmatism: so long as Bush and Cheney occupy the White House, they (and the Iraq War) remain an albatross hung around the neck of any Republican seeking the presidency in 2008. Even someone as unlikable as Hillary can win in such a contest, or so the theory goes. Another reason the "I" word is being avoided is that it opens a can of worms, where the Democratic Party's complicity over the last seven years will become quickly apparent.
But perhaps the biggest reason: the Democratic Party is led by those who, almost universally, believe in the American establishment, even more so than the GOP. And admitting that the US government has been a criminal enterprise the past seven years hardly brings out mass faith in this establishment. While a portion of the Democrat leadership have noble sentiments, when push comes to shove, they will side with the establishment anytime it conflicts with the desires of the working class and progressives, and thus betray the foot-soldiers of the party.
A telling quote comes from Barack Obama, a fellow The Konformist concedes is certainly one of the more decent men in D.C. Yet on the impeachment issue, he shows establishment fawning and cluelessness. He opposes it, declaring: "I think you reserve impeachment for grave, grave breaches, and intentional breaches of the president's authority." Hmmm. And by grave breaches of the president's authority, do you exclude little things like illegal spying on American citizens, violating the Geneva Convention and using fraud to push the US into a costly and destructive war?
The bad news is, politically speaking, the Democratic Party leaders appear to be the winners despite all this. At this point, a majority of Americans will back a party of sniveling, unprincipled cowards over what the GOP has turned into during the Bush years. The Democrat establishment also believes, rightfully, that no matter how much they betray the progressive movement, they will come crawling back to them at election time over shards of glass rather than be stuck with Republicans controlling Congress or the Presidency. That means in 2008, the two most powerful politicians in America likely will be Hillary and Pelosi.
The good news: don't pen in Pelosi as a 2008 winner just yet. She may have an even tougher battle than Hillary does against Obama and John Edwards. Peace activist Cindy Sheehan, the mother of an American soldier who died in Iraq, and who during the summer of 2005 shamed the korporate media to finally cover tragedy in Iraq as much as they follow the lives of Britney, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and Brangelina, has announced a run for Congress as an independent against Ms. Pelosi. On why she is running against the top Dem in the House, Sheehan has explained that Republicans "are literally like rats jumping off the sinking ship of state and they are distancing themselves from George and Dick faster than the Democrats. With the mood of the country, we know this is not a moral position but a politically expedient one. Why can't we urge the Democrats to a moral position? Because they have been elected with a (D) they become one of the Untouchables?"
Whether Sheehan can win is still to be seen: Pelosi, after all is an incumbent, and a powerful one at that. On the other hand, Ms. Sheehan has overcome bigger odds politically in the past, and if ever the Speaker of the House could lose an election in a "secure" seat, it would be Pelosi against Cindy in a race decided by extremely progressive Bay Area voters. Because of this, The Konformist gives an early endorsement of Ms. Sheehan without reservations, both because of admiration of Sheehan and loathing of Pelosi. Frankly, somebody needs to be held accountable for the last seven years, and if the Democrats won't put that on Bush and Cheney, then they need to be punished for their own culpability. Go to it, Cindy!!!
In any case, we salute Nancy Pelosi as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, Nancy!!!
Beastly Update: Showing the continued sniveling servitude by the Democratic Party, Michael Mukasey was confirmed as Attorney General 53-40 on November 8 by the US Senate, despite his refusal to espouse his views on the legality of torture by the US government.
Sources:
For more on the Cindy Sheehan 2008 campaign:
http://www.cindyforcongress.org/
Antosca, Nick. "Kerry Should be Ashamed, and the Cop Who Tased Andrew Meyer Should be Jailed." The Huffington Post 18 September 2007 <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-antosca/kerry-should-be-ashamed-_b_64873.html>.
Berman, Ari. "Why Pelosi Opposes Impeachment." The Nation 31 July 2007 <http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?bid=15&pid=218930>.
Conover, Bev. "The Media and John Kerry's Disgusting Display." Online Journal 20 September 2007 <http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2440.shtml>.
Greenwald, Glenn. "Why is the Democratic Congress so unpopular?" Salon 21 August 2007 <http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/08/21/congress/index.html?source=search&aim=/opinion/greenwald>.
Kleefeld, Eric. "Poll: More Republicans Than Democrats Approve Of Congress." Talking Points Memo 20 September 2007 <http://tpmelectioncentral.com/2007/09/poll_more_republicans_than_democrats_approve_of_congress.php>.
Parry, Robert. "Bush Gets a Spying Blank Check." ConsortiumNews.com 5 August 2007 <http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/080507.html>.
"Peace Activist Sheehan to Challenge Top Democrat Pelosi." Monsters and Critics 10 Aug 2007 <http://news.monstersandcritics.com/usa/news/article_1341231.php/Peace_activist_Sheehan_to_challenge_top_Democrat_Pelosi>.
Rjmac. "Springsteen Gets Political on Today Show." Daily Kos 28 September 2007 <http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/9/28/101850/975>.
Sheehan, Cindy. "Strange Bedfellows..." MichaelMoore.com 12 July 2007 <http://www.michaelmoore.com/mustread/index.php?id=886>.
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Steve Martin's Orange County
http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/homepage/abox/article_1942721.php
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Take a tour of comedian Steve Martin's Orange County
The comedian and writer grew up in Garden Grove, worked at Disneyland as a kid and cut his teeth as a performer at Knott's.
By PETER LARSEN
The Orange County Register
If we are shaped by the places we go and people we know in our childhoods, then Steve Martin is an absolute product of Orange County in the '50s and '60s.
From the well-known outlines of the actor-comedian-writer's life we already knew that Martin grew up in Garden Grove, worked at Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm as a teen, and launched his career as a comic in the long-gone folk clubs here some 40 years ago.
But with the recent arrival of "Born Standing Up" (Scribner, $25), Martin's memoir of the first half of his life, the details of his years here – the significant places on the map of his life – are revealed in the star's own words and memories.
So with a stack of Post-its and a close eye for local color, we embarked on a journey through Martin's back pages, looking to piece together this travel guide to the star's life in the O.C.
GARDEN GROVE BOUND
Born in Waco, Texas, Martin moved to Los Angeles when he was 5, partly because his father, Glenn, wanted to get into show business. When that plan quickly fizzled, Glenn Martin moved into real estate, and when Martin was 10, the family bought a brand-new house for $16,000 in Garden Grove.
"This area of Orange County gleamed with newness, and the move enabled me to place my small hand on Opportunity's doorknob."
DISNEYLAND DEBUTS
Not long after Martin moved to Garden Grove, Disneyland opened its doors. A friend told him they were hiring kids to sell guidebooks, and Martin sped to the theme park on his bicycle and got the job.
"Disneyland, and the idea of it, seemed so glorious that I believed it should be in some faraway, impossible-to-visit Shangri-la, not two miles from the house where I was about to grow up."
THE GOLDEN HORSESHOE REVUE
After selling his guidebooks, Martin would roam Disneyland, hanging out in the magic shop, with the trick roper and especially at the Golden Horseshoe in Frontierland– which remains today. He memorized all of comic Wally Boag's routines, and at least subconsciously noticed his knack for making balloon animals while telling jokes.
"My fantasy was that one day Wally would be sick with the flu, and a desperate stage manager would come out and ask the audience if there was an adolescent boy who could possibly fill in."
MERLIN'S MAGIC SHOP
At Merlin's Magic Shop in Fantasyland– now the Castle Heraldry Shoppe – Martin likewise studied magician Jim Barlow's routine, and when he was 15 was hired to work there with Barlow. The shop sold gags like the arrow-through-head and nose glasses – both of which Martin incorporated years later in his stand-up act. Standing behind the counter, Martin did tricks and learned to work a crowd.
"I tried my first jokes – all lifted from Jim's patter – and had my first audience that wasn't friends or family."
HIGH SCHOOL DAYS
Martin attended Rancho Alamitos High School until 1962, when changes in school district boundaries transferred him to Garden Grove High School, a change he decided to use to make over his image – at least his image of himself.
"I was happy to discard my old personality and adopt a new one defined by the word of the day, 'nonconformist.' Of course, the difference between my old personality and my new personality was probably imperceptible, so I was lucky to have all-new classmates who would not remember my old conformist ways."
ON TO COLLEGE
After graduating from Garden Grove High School, Martin enrolled at Santa Ana Junior College, taking classes in theater and English poetry. Soon after he heard that Knott's Berry Farm was looking for entertainers and decided to take a shot.
"One afternoon I successfully auditioned with my thin magic act at a small theater on the grounds, making this the second happiest day of my life so far."
THE BIRD CAGE THEATRE
The Bird Cage Theatre, in the Ghost Town at Knott's Berry Farm, presented old-fashioned melodramas (it's still in use, too, though only on Christmas and Halloween). And it was there that Martin performed between the ages of 18 and 22. But mostly he was starting to learn his craft – even if he wasn't getting rich doing so.
"I was being paid two dollars a show, twenty-five shows a week. Even in 1963, the rate was considered low."
THE GOLDEN BEAR
With Kathy Westmoreland, a high school friend and fellow Bird Cage performer, Martin developed a hillbilly comedy routine, which they worked on at Knott's before taking it down to the Golden Bear folk club in Huntington Beach, where once and future stars such as Jackson Browne (another O.C. boy) and John Mayall would play. It was, Martin writes, a much tougher audience.
"My belief in the inevitability of our success charged me up before, during, and after the show, and it was not until days later when I acknowledged to myself that our debut in the tougher world of real show business had been met with only a polite response."
MAKING THE ROUNDS
After transferring to Long Beach State College– now Cal State Long Beach – and while still working at the Bird Cage, Martin slowly morphed his magic act into a comedy routine he took out to perform in the folk clubs of Orange County. His regular stops included the Prison of Socrates on Balboa Island (now a B.J.'s pizzeria), the Mecca in Buena Park (now Aloha Family Billiards), the Paradox in Tustin (part of the Jamestown Village shopping center), and Rouge et Noir in Seal Beach,
"I now had my first job outside Knott's Berry Farm (after being hired at the Prison of Socrates), which presented a particular difficulty. It was one thing to do five minutes at the Bird Cage … but it was another thing to do twenty minutes for paying customers."
GARDEN GROVE IN L.A.
As his comedy career slowly developed throughout the '60s, Martin eventually landed a job writing for "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" and moved to Laurel Canyon in Hollywood. Even there, though, he benefited from old ties to Garden Grove, reconnecting with Bill McEuen– the older brother of high school friend and Nitty Gritty Dirt Band member John McEuen– who became Martin's manager for most of his stand-up career.
"He had banged his way out nowhere, too, living just a few miles from me in Garden Grove and growing up under the thumb of a critical father. He had long hair before it was fashionable and kept it not only after it was unfashionable but forever."
FAME BACK AT HOME
Martin worked the comedy circuit in small clubs around the nation and eventually on TV talk shows, finally working his way up to "The Tonight Show" and Johnny Carson in the early '70s. By the mid-'70s, his career was ready to explode, thanks to exposure on the then-new "Saturday Night Live" and hit comedy albums "Let's Get Small" and "A Wild and Crazy Guy." Back in Orange County – where his parents lived in Laguna Beach for the last three decades of their lives – Glenn and Mary Martin reacted differently to their son's new fame: his mother delighted by; his father, with whom the book details his difficult relationship, less.
"After my first appearance on 'Saturday Night Live,' (my father) wrote a bad review of me in his newsletter for the Newport Beach Association of Realtors, of which he was president: 'His performance did nothing to further his career.' Later, shamefaced, my father told me that his best friend had come into his office holding the newsletter, placed it on his desk, and shaken his head sternly, indicating a wordless 'This is wrong.'"
SAYING GOODBYES
Martin quit his stand-up career for the movies in the early '80s – partly from the isolation of the huge fame he'd found, partly because he felt he'd reached the end of what he could do in comedy. And while his father didn't care much for his debut movie, "The Jerk" – "He's no Charlie Chaplin," was all Glenn said after seeing it – they did eventually reconcile and finally express their love for each other by his death in 1997.
By 2002, Mary Martin was in failing health at her home in Laguna Beach, and after saying goodbye to his dying mother, he left the house, driving home to Los Angeles but then finding himself drawn back to Knott's and the Bird Cage. Slipping into the park through a back gate, he made his way to the now-little-used theater, remembering the secret way to enter without a key. And standing there on the darkened stage, Martin says, he thought back over the previous four decades, reflecting on a life shaped mostly by his earlier experiences in Orange County.
"Driving home along the Santa Ana Freeway … I asked myself what it was that had made this place capable of inducing in me such a powerful nostalgic shock. The answer floated clearly into my consciousness as though I had asked the question of a Magic 8-Ball: I wanted to be there again, if only for a day, indulging in high spirits and high jinks, before I turned professional, before comedy became serious."
Contact the writer: 714-796-7787 or plarsen@ocregister.com
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Take a tour of comedian Steve Martin's Orange County
The comedian and writer grew up in Garden Grove, worked at Disneyland as a kid and cut his teeth as a performer at Knott's.
By PETER LARSEN
The Orange County Register
If we are shaped by the places we go and people we know in our childhoods, then Steve Martin is an absolute product of Orange County in the '50s and '60s.
From the well-known outlines of the actor-comedian-writer's life we already knew that Martin grew up in Garden Grove, worked at Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm as a teen, and launched his career as a comic in the long-gone folk clubs here some 40 years ago.
But with the recent arrival of "Born Standing Up" (Scribner, $25), Martin's memoir of the first half of his life, the details of his years here – the significant places on the map of his life – are revealed in the star's own words and memories.
So with a stack of Post-its and a close eye for local color, we embarked on a journey through Martin's back pages, looking to piece together this travel guide to the star's life in the O.C.
GARDEN GROVE BOUND
Born in Waco, Texas, Martin moved to Los Angeles when he was 5, partly because his father, Glenn, wanted to get into show business. When that plan quickly fizzled, Glenn Martin moved into real estate, and when Martin was 10, the family bought a brand-new house for $16,000 in Garden Grove.
"This area of Orange County gleamed with newness, and the move enabled me to place my small hand on Opportunity's doorknob."
DISNEYLAND DEBUTS
Not long after Martin moved to Garden Grove, Disneyland opened its doors. A friend told him they were hiring kids to sell guidebooks, and Martin sped to the theme park on his bicycle and got the job.
"Disneyland, and the idea of it, seemed so glorious that I believed it should be in some faraway, impossible-to-visit Shangri-la, not two miles from the house where I was about to grow up."
THE GOLDEN HORSESHOE REVUE
After selling his guidebooks, Martin would roam Disneyland, hanging out in the magic shop, with the trick roper and especially at the Golden Horseshoe in Frontierland– which remains today. He memorized all of comic Wally Boag's routines, and at least subconsciously noticed his knack for making balloon animals while telling jokes.
"My fantasy was that one day Wally would be sick with the flu, and a desperate stage manager would come out and ask the audience if there was an adolescent boy who could possibly fill in."
MERLIN'S MAGIC SHOP
At Merlin's Magic Shop in Fantasyland– now the Castle Heraldry Shoppe – Martin likewise studied magician Jim Barlow's routine, and when he was 15 was hired to work there with Barlow. The shop sold gags like the arrow-through-head and nose glasses – both of which Martin incorporated years later in his stand-up act. Standing behind the counter, Martin did tricks and learned to work a crowd.
"I tried my first jokes – all lifted from Jim's patter – and had my first audience that wasn't friends or family."
HIGH SCHOOL DAYS
Martin attended Rancho Alamitos High School until 1962, when changes in school district boundaries transferred him to Garden Grove High School, a change he decided to use to make over his image – at least his image of himself.
"I was happy to discard my old personality and adopt a new one defined by the word of the day, 'nonconformist.' Of course, the difference between my old personality and my new personality was probably imperceptible, so I was lucky to have all-new classmates who would not remember my old conformist ways."
ON TO COLLEGE
After graduating from Garden Grove High School, Martin enrolled at Santa Ana Junior College, taking classes in theater and English poetry. Soon after he heard that Knott's Berry Farm was looking for entertainers and decided to take a shot.
"One afternoon I successfully auditioned with my thin magic act at a small theater on the grounds, making this the second happiest day of my life so far."
THE BIRD CAGE THEATRE
The Bird Cage Theatre, in the Ghost Town at Knott's Berry Farm, presented old-fashioned melodramas (it's still in use, too, though only on Christmas and Halloween). And it was there that Martin performed between the ages of 18 and 22. But mostly he was starting to learn his craft – even if he wasn't getting rich doing so.
"I was being paid two dollars a show, twenty-five shows a week. Even in 1963, the rate was considered low."
THE GOLDEN BEAR
With Kathy Westmoreland, a high school friend and fellow Bird Cage performer, Martin developed a hillbilly comedy routine, which they worked on at Knott's before taking it down to the Golden Bear folk club in Huntington Beach, where once and future stars such as Jackson Browne (another O.C. boy) and John Mayall would play. It was, Martin writes, a much tougher audience.
"My belief in the inevitability of our success charged me up before, during, and after the show, and it was not until days later when I acknowledged to myself that our debut in the tougher world of real show business had been met with only a polite response."
MAKING THE ROUNDS
After transferring to Long Beach State College– now Cal State Long Beach – and while still working at the Bird Cage, Martin slowly morphed his magic act into a comedy routine he took out to perform in the folk clubs of Orange County. His regular stops included the Prison of Socrates on Balboa Island (now a B.J.'s pizzeria), the Mecca in Buena Park (now Aloha Family Billiards), the Paradox in Tustin (part of the Jamestown Village shopping center), and Rouge et Noir in Seal Beach,
"I now had my first job outside Knott's Berry Farm (after being hired at the Prison of Socrates), which presented a particular difficulty. It was one thing to do five minutes at the Bird Cage … but it was another thing to do twenty minutes for paying customers."
GARDEN GROVE IN L.A.
As his comedy career slowly developed throughout the '60s, Martin eventually landed a job writing for "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" and moved to Laurel Canyon in Hollywood. Even there, though, he benefited from old ties to Garden Grove, reconnecting with Bill McEuen– the older brother of high school friend and Nitty Gritty Dirt Band member John McEuen– who became Martin's manager for most of his stand-up career.
"He had banged his way out nowhere, too, living just a few miles from me in Garden Grove and growing up under the thumb of a critical father. He had long hair before it was fashionable and kept it not only after it was unfashionable but forever."
FAME BACK AT HOME
Martin worked the comedy circuit in small clubs around the nation and eventually on TV talk shows, finally working his way up to "The Tonight Show" and Johnny Carson in the early '70s. By the mid-'70s, his career was ready to explode, thanks to exposure on the then-new "Saturday Night Live" and hit comedy albums "Let's Get Small" and "A Wild and Crazy Guy." Back in Orange County – where his parents lived in Laguna Beach for the last three decades of their lives – Glenn and Mary Martin reacted differently to their son's new fame: his mother delighted by; his father, with whom the book details his difficult relationship, less.
"After my first appearance on 'Saturday Night Live,' (my father) wrote a bad review of me in his newsletter for the Newport Beach Association of Realtors, of which he was president: 'His performance did nothing to further his career.' Later, shamefaced, my father told me that his best friend had come into his office holding the newsletter, placed it on his desk, and shaken his head sternly, indicating a wordless 'This is wrong.'"
SAYING GOODBYES
Martin quit his stand-up career for the movies in the early '80s – partly from the isolation of the huge fame he'd found, partly because he felt he'd reached the end of what he could do in comedy. And while his father didn't care much for his debut movie, "The Jerk" – "He's no Charlie Chaplin," was all Glenn said after seeing it – they did eventually reconcile and finally express their love for each other by his death in 1997.
By 2002, Mary Martin was in failing health at her home in Laguna Beach, and after saying goodbye to his dying mother, he left the house, driving home to Los Angeles but then finding himself drawn back to Knott's and the Bird Cage. Slipping into the park through a back gate, he made his way to the now-little-used theater, remembering the secret way to enter without a key. And standing there on the darkened stage, Martin says, he thought back over the previous four decades, reflecting on a life shaped mostly by his earlier experiences in Orange County.
"Driving home along the Santa Ana Freeway … I asked myself what it was that had made this place capable of inducing in me such a powerful nostalgic shock. The answer floated clearly into my consciousness as though I had asked the question of a Magic 8-Ball: I wanted to be there again, if only for a day, indulging in high spirits and high jinks, before I turned professional, before comedy became serious."
Contact the writer: 714-796-7787 or plarsen@ocregister.com
Kitchen gadgets: The "Egg McMuffin" machine
http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2007/12/18/egg_muffin_maker/index.html
Kitchen gadgets: The "Egg McMuffin" machine
In five minutes, a delicious cheese and egg sandwich that's better than drive-through.
By Farhad Manjoo
Dec. 18, 2007
In Christmas of 1972, when Ray Kroc, the head of McDonald's, was visiting Santa Barbara, Calif., one of his local employees, Herb Peterson, showed him something crazy: a breakfast sandwich.
"It consisted of an egg that had been formed in a Teflon circle, with the yolk broken, and was dressed with a slice of cheese and a slice of grilled Canadian bacon," Kroc recounted in "Grinding It Out," his 1987 memoir. The prototype sandwich was served "open-face on a toasted and buttered English muffin," a look that didn't sit well with Kroc. "But then I tasted it, and I was sold. Wow! I wanted to put this item into all of our stores immediately."
Three years of research and development followed, with the company's advertising, operations and supply experts preparing the sandwich for McDonald's foray into what Kroc called "the breakfast trade." The eventual mass-market sandwich would be just slightly different from the prototype, served closed rather than open, and blessed, now, with a perfect name. Patty Turner, the wife of longtime McDonald's CEO Fred Turner, had suggested it: the Egg McMuffin.
There's something romantic to this story, something you've got to admire about the ingenuity and entrepreneurial gumption attendant to successful inventions -- a sentiment completely out of whack with the $3 sickly, chewy, rubbery perfect circle of egg, bread and meat that is the post-millennial drive-through Egg McMuffin (at 300 calories, one of the healthiest items you can find at McD's).
The McMuffin in my vegetarian experience -- i.e., sans bacon -- has always been better in theory than in fact. Like all fast food, it looks delectable in promotional photos, photos that fool you because, you reason, how could this collection of ingredients not be straightforwardly delicious? Egg, butter, cheese, bread and meat are all you could want in a breakfast. Yet McDonald's always manages to turn the concoction into something you feel a fool for eating.
I've stepped into this analysis of America's most famous breakfast sandwich as part of kitchen gadgets week at Machinist, for which I've been reviewing the oddest food-related products pushed in this season's catalogs. Today's unit is the Back to Basics Egg & Muffin toaster, which promises to deliver "the drive-thru breakfast without the drive!"
A product that actually fulfilled such a promise would be a sorry thing indeed. Add to that that the E&M looks disconcertingly gimmicky. A two-slice toaster affixed with a circular egg-cooking pod, it suggests a marketing trick devised by Ron Popeil (hey, it does everything at once!). You don't expect it to work.
But the machine doesn't simply re-create fast food. In the time it takes to trudge to the drive-up window, the E&M gins up something surprisingly good. No, I'm being reticent: These sandwiches are delicious.
The toaster part is your standard timer-based kitchen toaster, so let's not dwell on it. The clever portion is the egg cooker, which the marketing copy calls a "poacher" but which really is a steamer. To make your sandwich, spray the E&M's egg-cooking tray with cooking oil, then crack an egg into it. This tray sits perched above a heating element. Pour two to two and a half tablespoons of water onto that element. The water boils, steaming the egg -- the more water you add, the firmer your egg becomes. (There's a handy measuring cup to help; the machine can also warm precooked slices of bacon, but I didn't try that.)
The toast gets done at the same time as the egg, an achievement about which the E&M's product manual is quite dramatic: "Your Egg & Muffin Toaster has been ingeniously designed to optimize your cooking abilities by timing the simultaneous completion of the toast and the egg. This technology ensures that all the ingredients for the perfect sandwich will be warm and fresh."
But when, in about five minutes, the toast pops up and your egg is perfectly cooked, the drama seems justified. To the toasted muffin I added some butter, a slice of good sharp cheddar, and salt and pepper, and then I popped on the egg -- which comes out round, exactly the size of a regulation-size English muffin.
I used better eggs and cheese than McDonald's does and more salt and butter, too, but I still can't get over how good these sandwiches are. Each looks as delicious as an advertising shot of a McD's Egg McMuffin, and tastes like the sandwich in those pictures ought to.
Prepared to medium, the egg whites are firm but not rubbery, and the yellow is just slightly liquid. In three days' time I made six sandwiches and not one was other than perfect.
The egg-making portion uses several plastic parts, all of which clean up easily in the dishwasher or with a soapy sponge. Nothing else requires much cleaning. The E&M sells for $30. Get one.
Kitchen gadgets: The "Egg McMuffin" machine
In five minutes, a delicious cheese and egg sandwich that's better than drive-through.
By Farhad Manjoo
Dec. 18, 2007
In Christmas of 1972, when Ray Kroc, the head of McDonald's, was visiting Santa Barbara, Calif., one of his local employees, Herb Peterson, showed him something crazy: a breakfast sandwich.
"It consisted of an egg that had been formed in a Teflon circle, with the yolk broken, and was dressed with a slice of cheese and a slice of grilled Canadian bacon," Kroc recounted in "Grinding It Out," his 1987 memoir. The prototype sandwich was served "open-face on a toasted and buttered English muffin," a look that didn't sit well with Kroc. "But then I tasted it, and I was sold. Wow! I wanted to put this item into all of our stores immediately."
Three years of research and development followed, with the company's advertising, operations and supply experts preparing the sandwich for McDonald's foray into what Kroc called "the breakfast trade." The eventual mass-market sandwich would be just slightly different from the prototype, served closed rather than open, and blessed, now, with a perfect name. Patty Turner, the wife of longtime McDonald's CEO Fred Turner, had suggested it: the Egg McMuffin.
There's something romantic to this story, something you've got to admire about the ingenuity and entrepreneurial gumption attendant to successful inventions -- a sentiment completely out of whack with the $3 sickly, chewy, rubbery perfect circle of egg, bread and meat that is the post-millennial drive-through Egg McMuffin (at 300 calories, one of the healthiest items you can find at McD's).
The McMuffin in my vegetarian experience -- i.e., sans bacon -- has always been better in theory than in fact. Like all fast food, it looks delectable in promotional photos, photos that fool you because, you reason, how could this collection of ingredients not be straightforwardly delicious? Egg, butter, cheese, bread and meat are all you could want in a breakfast. Yet McDonald's always manages to turn the concoction into something you feel a fool for eating.
I've stepped into this analysis of America's most famous breakfast sandwich as part of kitchen gadgets week at Machinist, for which I've been reviewing the oddest food-related products pushed in this season's catalogs. Today's unit is the Back to Basics Egg & Muffin toaster, which promises to deliver "the drive-thru breakfast without the drive!"
A product that actually fulfilled such a promise would be a sorry thing indeed. Add to that that the E&M looks disconcertingly gimmicky. A two-slice toaster affixed with a circular egg-cooking pod, it suggests a marketing trick devised by Ron Popeil (hey, it does everything at once!). You don't expect it to work.
But the machine doesn't simply re-create fast food. In the time it takes to trudge to the drive-up window, the E&M gins up something surprisingly good. No, I'm being reticent: These sandwiches are delicious.
The toaster part is your standard timer-based kitchen toaster, so let's not dwell on it. The clever portion is the egg cooker, which the marketing copy calls a "poacher" but which really is a steamer. To make your sandwich, spray the E&M's egg-cooking tray with cooking oil, then crack an egg into it. This tray sits perched above a heating element. Pour two to two and a half tablespoons of water onto that element. The water boils, steaming the egg -- the more water you add, the firmer your egg becomes. (There's a handy measuring cup to help; the machine can also warm precooked slices of bacon, but I didn't try that.)
The toast gets done at the same time as the egg, an achievement about which the E&M's product manual is quite dramatic: "Your Egg & Muffin Toaster has been ingeniously designed to optimize your cooking abilities by timing the simultaneous completion of the toast and the egg. This technology ensures that all the ingredients for the perfect sandwich will be warm and fresh."
But when, in about five minutes, the toast pops up and your egg is perfectly cooked, the drama seems justified. To the toasted muffin I added some butter, a slice of good sharp cheddar, and salt and pepper, and then I popped on the egg -- which comes out round, exactly the size of a regulation-size English muffin.
I used better eggs and cheese than McDonald's does and more salt and butter, too, but I still can't get over how good these sandwiches are. Each looks as delicious as an advertising shot of a McD's Egg McMuffin, and tastes like the sandwich in those pictures ought to.
Prepared to medium, the egg whites are firm but not rubbery, and the yellow is just slightly liquid. In three days' time I made six sandwiches and not one was other than perfect.
The egg-making portion uses several plastic parts, all of which clean up easily in the dishwasher or with a soapy sponge. Nothing else requires much cleaning. The E&M sells for $30. Get one.
Think censor: Apple's lawyers shut down rumor site
http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2007/12/20/apple_censor/index.html
Think censor: Apple's lawyers shut down rumor site
A new Apple innovation: Sue your journalistic hounds into silence.
By Farhad Manjoo
Dec. 20, 2007 In December, 2005, Nicholas Ciarelli, a well-connected young tech journalist who went by the pen name Nick de Plume, published a juicy bit of dish on his Web site. According to "highly reliable sources," Apple would soon be releasing "a bare bones, G4-based iMac without a display," he wrote.
Ciarelli's site, Think Secret, was known as among the more reliable in the vibrant online community of Apple rumor pages, which seek to feed an ardent community's hunger for inside information from a company legendary for keeping its lips sealed. This latest piece was big news, and it got even bigger when Apple went on the offensive -- the company filed suit against Think Secret and "unnamed individuals" who'd given the site its secrets.
The action, of course, confirmed the accuracy of Ciarelli's story. A few days after filing the suit, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the Mac Mini, exactly the kind of computer Ciarelli had fingered.
Apple's case briefly made Ciarelli an online cause célèbre. Digital rights activists argued that he, like established journalists, was entitled to coverage under California's reporter's shield law, which protects journalists from giving up information on their sources. Apple disagreed, saying he had broken trade secrets laws -- and a judge sided with the company.
Today brings news that Apple prevailed completely. According to a "settlement" the company entered into with Ciarelli, Ciarelli will close Think Secret. Writing in the strained voice of a Soviet prisoner, he reported the news in a press release on his site:
Apple and Think Secret have settled their lawsuit, reaching an agreement that results in a positive solution for both sides. As part of the confidential settlement, no sources were revealed and Think Secret will no longer be published. Nick Ciarelli, Think Secret's publisher, said "I'm pleased to have reached this amicable settlement, and will now be able to move forward with my college studies and broader journalistic pursuits."
A positive solution for both sides? Sure, Ciarelli gets to keep his sources -- a good thing -- but the settlement is a win for him only in the way that a person who gets mugged can be thankful he wasn't knifed, too.
Apple wins everything here, closing down a journalist who did exactly what reporters are supposed to do -- establishing contacts with insiders to shed light on a secret much in public demand.
Imagine if Dick Cheney were able to do the same thing to the New York Times, to shut down the paper for reporting on the "trade secret" of NSA surveillance, say?
Or do you think it's too much to equate a company protecting its innovation with a government protecting illegal activity?
Granted the stakes are vastly different. But what's the functional difference here, the difference as it regards our notions of journalism and a free press? What are reporters looking into corporate trade secrets -- about environmental pollution or fraud or other chicanery -- supposed to take from this settlement? Shut up or else, that's what.
Am I mistaken, or was Apple the firm that once plumbed George Orwell for a famous TV ad? Probably I'm mistaken.
Think censor: Apple's lawyers shut down rumor site
A new Apple innovation: Sue your journalistic hounds into silence.
By Farhad Manjoo
Dec. 20, 2007 In December, 2005, Nicholas Ciarelli, a well-connected young tech journalist who went by the pen name Nick de Plume, published a juicy bit of dish on his Web site. According to "highly reliable sources," Apple would soon be releasing "a bare bones, G4-based iMac without a display," he wrote.
Ciarelli's site, Think Secret, was known as among the more reliable in the vibrant online community of Apple rumor pages, which seek to feed an ardent community's hunger for inside information from a company legendary for keeping its lips sealed. This latest piece was big news, and it got even bigger when Apple went on the offensive -- the company filed suit against Think Secret and "unnamed individuals" who'd given the site its secrets.
The action, of course, confirmed the accuracy of Ciarelli's story. A few days after filing the suit, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the Mac Mini, exactly the kind of computer Ciarelli had fingered.
Apple's case briefly made Ciarelli an online cause célèbre. Digital rights activists argued that he, like established journalists, was entitled to coverage under California's reporter's shield law, which protects journalists from giving up information on their sources. Apple disagreed, saying he had broken trade secrets laws -- and a judge sided with the company.
Today brings news that Apple prevailed completely. According to a "settlement" the company entered into with Ciarelli, Ciarelli will close Think Secret. Writing in the strained voice of a Soviet prisoner, he reported the news in a press release on his site:
Apple and Think Secret have settled their lawsuit, reaching an agreement that results in a positive solution for both sides. As part of the confidential settlement, no sources were revealed and Think Secret will no longer be published. Nick Ciarelli, Think Secret's publisher, said "I'm pleased to have reached this amicable settlement, and will now be able to move forward with my college studies and broader journalistic pursuits."
A positive solution for both sides? Sure, Ciarelli gets to keep his sources -- a good thing -- but the settlement is a win for him only in the way that a person who gets mugged can be thankful he wasn't knifed, too.
Apple wins everything here, closing down a journalist who did exactly what reporters are supposed to do -- establishing contacts with insiders to shed light on a secret much in public demand.
Imagine if Dick Cheney were able to do the same thing to the New York Times, to shut down the paper for reporting on the "trade secret" of NSA surveillance, say?
Or do you think it's too much to equate a company protecting its innovation with a government protecting illegal activity?
Granted the stakes are vastly different. But what's the functional difference here, the difference as it regards our notions of journalism and a free press? What are reporters looking into corporate trade secrets -- about environmental pollution or fraud or other chicanery -- supposed to take from this settlement? Shut up or else, that's what.
Am I mistaken, or was Apple the firm that once plumbed George Orwell for a famous TV ad? Probably I'm mistaken.
The year in technology
http://machinist.salon.com/feature/2007/12/24/year_end_review/
The year in technology
The iPhone was great, except for its restrictions. And guess who's dialing up a better mobile Web now?
By Farhad Manjoo
Dec. 24, 2007
You'll balk if I label 2007 "The Year of the iPhone." True, news of Apple's new device hit the world within two weeks of New Year's 2007 and dominated tech coverage pretty much incessantly afterward. But as several cynical Salon letter writers pointed out at its launch in late June, the iPhone, cool as it was, failed to revolutionize human relations. "Hey, did your iPhone end the war? No, it didn't, so shut up!"
But tech doesn't work that way. Only a handful of Macheads seriously expected the iPhone to deliver an exit strategy in Iraq, cure AIDS and forestall foreclosure on millions of subprime mortgages. Most techies had lower expectations, and it's true that for some of us, the iPhone didn't meet even those. As a phone, the thing didn't stand out. It lacked, moreover, several necessary features, and more than a few people still can't get the hang of its damned keyboard.
Still, every conversation about tech in 2007 spirals into a conversation about the iPhone; the device, as I wrote after two weeks using it, marks a new way of living. For some people constant access to the Internet is a pleasant dream, while for others it's a dreaded nightmare. This year, for all of us, it became a reality, the unavoidable future.
Apple skeptics point out that cellphones have offered on-the-go access to the Web for years, long before the iPhone came along. But that's a bit like deriding the utility of the internal combustion engine on the basis that horses did basically the same thing. The iPhone's mobile Web is fundamentally different from anything that has come before -- hassle-free, easy to use and functionally the same as the browser on your desktop.
And this suggests the iPhone's true impact -- it forced us, for the first time, to confront the thorny public policy issues that the mobile Web will raise, issues sure to consume Silicon Valley, Hollywood and regulators in Washington for the foreseeable future.
Take telecom policy. Until recently, "network neutrality" -- the proposal to prohibit Internet service providers from imposing discriminatory rules on the network lines coming into our homes -- was an issue most experts associated with the wired Internet, not wireless networks.
We get mad when Comcast or AT&T monkeys with what we can do on the Web at home, but few took notice that cellular carriers have always restricted our behavior on wireless networks -- they dictate what phones we can use, which programs we can run on those phones, and what we can do with those programs. For a long while, the prohibitions raised few objections because the mobile Internet was too useless to get very worked up about.
The iPhone altered our calculus of concern. By illustrating the possibilities of the mobile Web, the phone cast wireless networks as ground zero in the battle for computing freedom.
Ironically, Apple itself wound up on the wrong side of the fight. Among my chief complaints about the iPhone was Apple's policy prohibiting third-party developers from creating programs for it. The restriction undoubtedly came about as a consequence of Apple's exclusive deal with AT&T, which, like other wireless companies, is afraid of wayward applications hurting its bottom line. If you were free to use the Internet phone service Skype on your iPhone, you might make very cheap calls overseas -- and why would AT&T want to let you do that?
The restrictions showed up Apple CEO Steve Jobs' idea that his phone was a full-fledged mobile computer. The iPhone did seem to have the potential to act as a true minicomputer -- but if it remained closed, it could never match the wizardry we're used to on the desktop.
In late September, Apple moved to shut down hackers who had rigged the phone to run in unapproved ways. Many customers were apoplectic. Apple subsequently promised that it would offer a way for programmers to create their own iPhone apps -- a recognition that the iPhone's true utility lies in the innovation that developers across the world will bring to it.
If Apple's innovation pointed to the possibilities of a wireless Web, another company moved aggressively to realize those possibilities. Right, Google.
During the summer, the search firm pushed the Federal Communications Commission to adopt a set of "openness principles" on the 700 MHz band of radio space, a wireless bounty that the government will offer to high rollers at a grand auction early in 2008.
Google did not persuade regulators to make the spectrum fully open, but it did win some benefits for consumers. Specifically, the FCC set aside a block of radio space on which wireless firms will not be allowed to prohibit customers from running devices and applications of their choice. Google also announced it would bid for wireless space, and it unveiled Android, an open-source operating system for mobile phones that will allow developers to create applications that run on a wide range of phones.
Google's not doing these things altruistically, of course. The company sees billions in the wireless Web: More people using the Internet means more people using Google's services.
Fans of the search firm see its moves as a rare instance when private ambition aligns with the public good. After all, Google's gambit has already produced gains for customers. Phone companies wary of a direct fight with Google are now tripping over themselves to bring a measure of openness to their networks.
But how long can we trust Google -- a firm that now dominates every aspect of our digital lives -- to protect our interests? The year ends with that cliffhanger.
When, a decade from now, you think back on these times, you may well remember the iPhone's launch as a mere footnote to a more momentous story: 2007, the year the mobile Internet got its start -- or, you know, the year Google finalized plans to take over the world.
The year in technology
The iPhone was great, except for its restrictions. And guess who's dialing up a better mobile Web now?
By Farhad Manjoo
Dec. 24, 2007
You'll balk if I label 2007 "The Year of the iPhone." True, news of Apple's new device hit the world within two weeks of New Year's 2007 and dominated tech coverage pretty much incessantly afterward. But as several cynical Salon letter writers pointed out at its launch in late June, the iPhone, cool as it was, failed to revolutionize human relations. "Hey, did your iPhone end the war? No, it didn't, so shut up!"
But tech doesn't work that way. Only a handful of Macheads seriously expected the iPhone to deliver an exit strategy in Iraq, cure AIDS and forestall foreclosure on millions of subprime mortgages. Most techies had lower expectations, and it's true that for some of us, the iPhone didn't meet even those. As a phone, the thing didn't stand out. It lacked, moreover, several necessary features, and more than a few people still can't get the hang of its damned keyboard.
Still, every conversation about tech in 2007 spirals into a conversation about the iPhone; the device, as I wrote after two weeks using it, marks a new way of living. For some people constant access to the Internet is a pleasant dream, while for others it's a dreaded nightmare. This year, for all of us, it became a reality, the unavoidable future.
Apple skeptics point out that cellphones have offered on-the-go access to the Web for years, long before the iPhone came along. But that's a bit like deriding the utility of the internal combustion engine on the basis that horses did basically the same thing. The iPhone's mobile Web is fundamentally different from anything that has come before -- hassle-free, easy to use and functionally the same as the browser on your desktop.
And this suggests the iPhone's true impact -- it forced us, for the first time, to confront the thorny public policy issues that the mobile Web will raise, issues sure to consume Silicon Valley, Hollywood and regulators in Washington for the foreseeable future.
Take telecom policy. Until recently, "network neutrality" -- the proposal to prohibit Internet service providers from imposing discriminatory rules on the network lines coming into our homes -- was an issue most experts associated with the wired Internet, not wireless networks.
We get mad when Comcast or AT&T monkeys with what we can do on the Web at home, but few took notice that cellular carriers have always restricted our behavior on wireless networks -- they dictate what phones we can use, which programs we can run on those phones, and what we can do with those programs. For a long while, the prohibitions raised few objections because the mobile Internet was too useless to get very worked up about.
The iPhone altered our calculus of concern. By illustrating the possibilities of the mobile Web, the phone cast wireless networks as ground zero in the battle for computing freedom.
Ironically, Apple itself wound up on the wrong side of the fight. Among my chief complaints about the iPhone was Apple's policy prohibiting third-party developers from creating programs for it. The restriction undoubtedly came about as a consequence of Apple's exclusive deal with AT&T, which, like other wireless companies, is afraid of wayward applications hurting its bottom line. If you were free to use the Internet phone service Skype on your iPhone, you might make very cheap calls overseas -- and why would AT&T want to let you do that?
The restrictions showed up Apple CEO Steve Jobs' idea that his phone was a full-fledged mobile computer. The iPhone did seem to have the potential to act as a true minicomputer -- but if it remained closed, it could never match the wizardry we're used to on the desktop.
In late September, Apple moved to shut down hackers who had rigged the phone to run in unapproved ways. Many customers were apoplectic. Apple subsequently promised that it would offer a way for programmers to create their own iPhone apps -- a recognition that the iPhone's true utility lies in the innovation that developers across the world will bring to it.
If Apple's innovation pointed to the possibilities of a wireless Web, another company moved aggressively to realize those possibilities. Right, Google.
During the summer, the search firm pushed the Federal Communications Commission to adopt a set of "openness principles" on the 700 MHz band of radio space, a wireless bounty that the government will offer to high rollers at a grand auction early in 2008.
Google did not persuade regulators to make the spectrum fully open, but it did win some benefits for consumers. Specifically, the FCC set aside a block of radio space on which wireless firms will not be allowed to prohibit customers from running devices and applications of their choice. Google also announced it would bid for wireless space, and it unveiled Android, an open-source operating system for mobile phones that will allow developers to create applications that run on a wide range of phones.
Google's not doing these things altruistically, of course. The company sees billions in the wireless Web: More people using the Internet means more people using Google's services.
Fans of the search firm see its moves as a rare instance when private ambition aligns with the public good. After all, Google's gambit has already produced gains for customers. Phone companies wary of a direct fight with Google are now tripping over themselves to bring a measure of openness to their networks.
But how long can we trust Google -- a firm that now dominates every aspect of our digital lives -- to protect our interests? The year ends with that cliffhanger.
When, a decade from now, you think back on these times, you may well remember the iPhone's launch as a mere footnote to a more momentous story: 2007, the year the mobile Internet got its start -- or, you know, the year Google finalized plans to take over the world.
Mitt Romney's pursuit of tyrannical power, literally
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/?last_story=/opinion/greenwald/2007/12/23/romney/
Mitt Romney's pursuit of tyrannical power, literally
The candidate's answers to key questions of executive power are beyond disturbing.
Glenn Greenwald
Dec. 23, 2007 In yet another superb piece of journalism, the peerless Charlie Savage of The Boston Globe submitted to the leading presidential candidates a questionnaire asking their views on 12 key questions regarding executive power. Savage's article accompanying the candidates' responses makes clear why these matters are so critical:
In 2000, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were not asked about presidential power, and they volunteered nothing about their attitude toward the issue to voters. Yet once in office, they immediately began seeking out ways to concentrate more unchecked power in the White House -- not just for themselves, but also for their successors. . . .
Legal specialists say decisions by the next president -- either to keep using the expanded powers Bush and Cheney developed, or to abandon their legal and political precedents -- will help determine whether a stronger presidency becomes permanent.
"The sleeper issue in this campaign involves the proper scope of executive power," said Richard Epstein, a University of Chicago law professor.
All of the leading Democrats -- Edwards, Dodd, Biden, Clinton, Richardson and Obama -- submitted responses, as did Mitt Romney, John McCain and Ron Paul. Refusing to respond to the questions were -- revealingly -- Giuliani, Thompson and Huckabee. Significantly, if not surprisingly, all of the candidates who did respond, with the exception of Romney, repudiated most of the key doctrines of the Bush/Cheney/Addington/Yoo theories of executive omnipotence, at least for purposes of this questionnaire. I'll undoubtedly write more about those responses shortly.
But by far the most extraordinary answers come from Mitt Romney. Romney's responses -- not to some of the questions but to every single one of them -- are beyond disturbing. The powers he claims the President possesses are definitively -- literally -- tyrannical, unrecognizable in the pre-2001 American system of government and, in some meaningful ways, even beyond what the Bush/Cheney cadre of authoritarian legal theorists have claimed.
After reviewing those responses, Marty Lederman concluded: "Romney? Let's put it this way: If you've liked Dick Cheney and David Addington, you're gonna love Mitt Romney." Anonymous Liberal similarly observed that his responses reveal that "Romney doesn't believe the president's power to be subject to any serious constraints." To say that the President's powers are not "subject to any serious constraints" -- which is exactly what Romney says -- is, of course, to posit the President as tyrant, not metaphorically or with hyperbole, but by definition.
Each of the questions posed by Savage is devoted to determining the extent of presidential power the candidate believes exists and where the limits are situated. On every issue, Romney either (a) explicitly says that the President has the right to act without limits of any kind or (b) provides blatantly nonresponsive answers strongly insinuating the same thing.
Just go and read what he wrote. It's extraordinary. Other than his cursory and quite creepy concession that U.S. citizens detained by the President are entitled to "at least some type of habeas corpus relief" -- whatever "some type" might mean (Question 5) -- Romney does not recognize a single limit on presidential power. Not one.
And even with regard to his grudging allowance that American citizens should have "some type of habeas relief," Romney -- and only he -- implicitly endorses Alberto Gonzales' bizarre claim that -- despite the clear language of Article I, Section 9 -- "nothing in the Constitution confers an affirmative right to habeas corpus" (Question 9). Under this twisted Romney/Gonzales view, the right of habeas corpus -- which Thomas Jefferson described as "one of the essential principles of our government" and "the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution" -- is not constitutionally guaranteed to Americans but can be revoked at any time, for any reason.
In every area, Romney explicitly says that neither laws nor treaties can limit the President's conduct. Instead, displaying the fear-mongering cowardice that lies at the heart of Bush/Cheney Republican power, Romney described the root of his view of the world this way: "Our most basic civil liberty is the right to be kept alive."
Romney recited that cowardly platitude -- what has now become the shameful flagship of the Republican Party -- in response to being asked whether the President has the power to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants even in the face of a law that makes it a crime to do so. At its core, the defining principle of the Republican Party continues to be a fear-driven repudiation of the American ethos as most famously expressed by Patrick Henry, all in service of keeping the citizenry in fear so the President can rule without limits.
These are just some of the powers which Romney -- and, among the respondents, Romney alone -- claimed the President possesses, either by explicitly claiming them or refusing to repudiate them when asked directly:
* to eavesdrop on Americans with no warrants, even if doing so is in violation of Congressional law (Question 1);
* to attack Iran without Congressional authorization, even in the absence of an imminent threat (Question 2);
* to disregard a congressional statute limiting the deployment of troops (Question 3);
* to issue a signing statement reserving a constitutional right to bypass laws enacted by Congress (Question 4);
* to disregard international human rights treaties that the US Senate has ratified where said treaties, in his view, "impinge upon the President's constitutional authority" (Question 8)
Even more disturbing were the specific questions Romney refused to answer. When asked if the President has the right to use "interrogation techniques" that Congress, by law, has prohibited in all circumstances, here is what Romney said (Question 7):
A President should decline to reveal the method and duration of interrogation techniques to be used against high value terrorists who are likely to have counter-interrogation training. This discretion should extend to declining to provide an opinion as to whether Congress may validly limit his power as to the use of a particular technique, especially given Congress's current plans to try to do exactly that.
Mitt Romney is running for President and proudly refuses to say if he would obey the law regarding torture. Worse, he's citing national security as an excuse for refusing to answer the question. He's not even President yet, and he's already insisting that it's too Top Secret for him even to participate in the debate over the President's duties to abide by the law. Even considering where our country has been taken with these matters, that's an astonishing assertion -- that the Terrorists will win if Mitt Romney expresses his views on whether the President must obey the law.
Underscoring his authoritarian mentality, Romney refused to say that there was even a single "executive power the Bush administration has claimed or exercised that [he] think[s] is unconstitutional" or even that there were any which were "simply a bad idea" (Question 10). In Romney's view, the Leader has not erred at all. Rather, this is the caricature of a response he gave to that question:
The Bush Administration has kept the American people safe since 9/11. The Administration's strong view on executive power may well have contributed to that fact.
Romney perfectly expresses the driving view of our GOP-dominated political culture over the last seven years, as profoundly un-American as it is Orwellian: You are in grave danger of being slaughtered by Terrorists. The only thing that matters is that your Leader protect you. In order to be safe, you must place your blind faith and trust in the Leader. There can be no limits on the Leader's power -- not even ones you try to place on him through your representatives in Congress -- otherwise you will be in severe danger and might even lose your freedoms.
In a Washington Post Op-Ed this morning, historian and George Washington biographer Joseph Ellis labels Dick Cheney's quest for limitless presidential power "historically myopic" and writes:
Your opinion on the current debate about how much power the executive branch should have will be significantly influenced if you read the debates about the subject in the Constitutional Convention and the states' ratifying conventions. For it will soon become clear that the most palpable fear that haunted all these debates was the specter of monarchy.
Although one would not have thought it possible, a Mitt Romney presidency, by his own description, would remove us still further from those core principles. Romney isn't running to be President, but to be King. Anyone who wants to dispute that ought to try to distinguish the fantasies of power Romney is envisioning from those the British King possessed in the mid-to-late 18th Century.
Mitt Romney's pursuit of tyrannical power, literally
The candidate's answers to key questions of executive power are beyond disturbing.
Glenn Greenwald
Dec. 23, 2007 In yet another superb piece of journalism, the peerless Charlie Savage of The Boston Globe submitted to the leading presidential candidates a questionnaire asking their views on 12 key questions regarding executive power. Savage's article accompanying the candidates' responses makes clear why these matters are so critical:
In 2000, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were not asked about presidential power, and they volunteered nothing about their attitude toward the issue to voters. Yet once in office, they immediately began seeking out ways to concentrate more unchecked power in the White House -- not just for themselves, but also for their successors. . . .
Legal specialists say decisions by the next president -- either to keep using the expanded powers Bush and Cheney developed, or to abandon their legal and political precedents -- will help determine whether a stronger presidency becomes permanent.
"The sleeper issue in this campaign involves the proper scope of executive power," said Richard Epstein, a University of Chicago law professor.
All of the leading Democrats -- Edwards, Dodd, Biden, Clinton, Richardson and Obama -- submitted responses, as did Mitt Romney, John McCain and Ron Paul. Refusing to respond to the questions were -- revealingly -- Giuliani, Thompson and Huckabee. Significantly, if not surprisingly, all of the candidates who did respond, with the exception of Romney, repudiated most of the key doctrines of the Bush/Cheney/Addington/Yoo theories of executive omnipotence, at least for purposes of this questionnaire. I'll undoubtedly write more about those responses shortly.
But by far the most extraordinary answers come from Mitt Romney. Romney's responses -- not to some of the questions but to every single one of them -- are beyond disturbing. The powers he claims the President possesses are definitively -- literally -- tyrannical, unrecognizable in the pre-2001 American system of government and, in some meaningful ways, even beyond what the Bush/Cheney cadre of authoritarian legal theorists have claimed.
After reviewing those responses, Marty Lederman concluded: "Romney? Let's put it this way: If you've liked Dick Cheney and David Addington, you're gonna love Mitt Romney." Anonymous Liberal similarly observed that his responses reveal that "Romney doesn't believe the president's power to be subject to any serious constraints." To say that the President's powers are not "subject to any serious constraints" -- which is exactly what Romney says -- is, of course, to posit the President as tyrant, not metaphorically or with hyperbole, but by definition.
Each of the questions posed by Savage is devoted to determining the extent of presidential power the candidate believes exists and where the limits are situated. On every issue, Romney either (a) explicitly says that the President has the right to act without limits of any kind or (b) provides blatantly nonresponsive answers strongly insinuating the same thing.
Just go and read what he wrote. It's extraordinary. Other than his cursory and quite creepy concession that U.S. citizens detained by the President are entitled to "at least some type of habeas corpus relief" -- whatever "some type" might mean (Question 5) -- Romney does not recognize a single limit on presidential power. Not one.
And even with regard to his grudging allowance that American citizens should have "some type of habeas relief," Romney -- and only he -- implicitly endorses Alberto Gonzales' bizarre claim that -- despite the clear language of Article I, Section 9 -- "nothing in the Constitution confers an affirmative right to habeas corpus" (Question 9). Under this twisted Romney/Gonzales view, the right of habeas corpus -- which Thomas Jefferson described as "one of the essential principles of our government" and "the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution" -- is not constitutionally guaranteed to Americans but can be revoked at any time, for any reason.
In every area, Romney explicitly says that neither laws nor treaties can limit the President's conduct. Instead, displaying the fear-mongering cowardice that lies at the heart of Bush/Cheney Republican power, Romney described the root of his view of the world this way: "Our most basic civil liberty is the right to be kept alive."
Romney recited that cowardly platitude -- what has now become the shameful flagship of the Republican Party -- in response to being asked whether the President has the power to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants even in the face of a law that makes it a crime to do so. At its core, the defining principle of the Republican Party continues to be a fear-driven repudiation of the American ethos as most famously expressed by Patrick Henry, all in service of keeping the citizenry in fear so the President can rule without limits.
These are just some of the powers which Romney -- and, among the respondents, Romney alone -- claimed the President possesses, either by explicitly claiming them or refusing to repudiate them when asked directly:
* to eavesdrop on Americans with no warrants, even if doing so is in violation of Congressional law (Question 1);
* to attack Iran without Congressional authorization, even in the absence of an imminent threat (Question 2);
* to disregard a congressional statute limiting the deployment of troops (Question 3);
* to issue a signing statement reserving a constitutional right to bypass laws enacted by Congress (Question 4);
* to disregard international human rights treaties that the US Senate has ratified where said treaties, in his view, "impinge upon the President's constitutional authority" (Question 8)
Even more disturbing were the specific questions Romney refused to answer. When asked if the President has the right to use "interrogation techniques" that Congress, by law, has prohibited in all circumstances, here is what Romney said (Question 7):
A President should decline to reveal the method and duration of interrogation techniques to be used against high value terrorists who are likely to have counter-interrogation training. This discretion should extend to declining to provide an opinion as to whether Congress may validly limit his power as to the use of a particular technique, especially given Congress's current plans to try to do exactly that.
Mitt Romney is running for President and proudly refuses to say if he would obey the law regarding torture. Worse, he's citing national security as an excuse for refusing to answer the question. He's not even President yet, and he's already insisting that it's too Top Secret for him even to participate in the debate over the President's duties to abide by the law. Even considering where our country has been taken with these matters, that's an astonishing assertion -- that the Terrorists will win if Mitt Romney expresses his views on whether the President must obey the law.
Underscoring his authoritarian mentality, Romney refused to say that there was even a single "executive power the Bush administration has claimed or exercised that [he] think[s] is unconstitutional" or even that there were any which were "simply a bad idea" (Question 10). In Romney's view, the Leader has not erred at all. Rather, this is the caricature of a response he gave to that question:
The Bush Administration has kept the American people safe since 9/11. The Administration's strong view on executive power may well have contributed to that fact.
Romney perfectly expresses the driving view of our GOP-dominated political culture over the last seven years, as profoundly un-American as it is Orwellian: You are in grave danger of being slaughtered by Terrorists. The only thing that matters is that your Leader protect you. In order to be safe, you must place your blind faith and trust in the Leader. There can be no limits on the Leader's power -- not even ones you try to place on him through your representatives in Congress -- otherwise you will be in severe danger and might even lose your freedoms.
In a Washington Post Op-Ed this morning, historian and George Washington biographer Joseph Ellis labels Dick Cheney's quest for limitless presidential power "historically myopic" and writes:
Your opinion on the current debate about how much power the executive branch should have will be significantly influenced if you read the debates about the subject in the Constitutional Convention and the states' ratifying conventions. For it will soon become clear that the most palpable fear that haunted all these debates was the specter of monarchy.
Although one would not have thought it possible, a Mitt Romney presidency, by his own description, would remove us still further from those core principles. Romney isn't running to be President, but to be King. Anyone who wants to dispute that ought to try to distinguish the fantasies of power Romney is envisioning from those the British King possessed in the mid-to-late 18th Century.
A Quechua Christmas Carol
http://www.gregpalast.com/a-quechua-christmas-carol/
Good and Evil at the Center of the Earth:
A Quechua Christmas Carol
by Greg Palast
December 24th, 2007
[Quito] I don’t know what the hell seized me. In the middle of an hour-long interview with the President of Ecuador, I asked him about his father.
I’m not Barbara Walters. It’s not the kind of question I ask.
He hesitated. Then said, “My father was unemployed.”
He paused. Then added, “He took a little drugs to the States… This is called in Spanish a mula [mule]. He passed four years in the states- in a jail.”
He continued. “I’d never talked about my father before.”
Apparently he hadn’t. His staff stood stone silent, eyes widened.
Correa’s dad took that frightening chance in the 1960s, a time when his family, like almost all families in Ecuador, was destitute. Ecuador was the original “banana republic” - and the price of bananas had hit the floor. A million desperate Ecuadorans, probably a tenth of the entire adult population, fled to the USA anyway they could.
“My mother told us he was working in the States.”
His father, released from prison, was deported back to Ecuador. Humiliated, poor, broken, his father, I learned later, committed suicide.
At the end of our formal interview, through a doorway surrounded by paintings of the pale plutocrats who once ruled this difficult land, he took me into his own Oval Office. I asked him about an odd-looking framed note he had on the wall. It was, he said, from his daughter and her grade school class at Christmas time. He translated for me.
“We are writing to remind you that in Ecuador there are a lot of very poor children in the streets and we ask you please to help these children who are cold almost every night.”
It was kind of corny. And kind of sweet. A smart display for a politician.
Or maybe there was something else to it.
Correa is one of the first dark-skinned men to win election to this Quechua and mixed-race nation. Certainly, one of the first from the streets. He’d won a surprise victory over the richest man in Ecuador, the owner of the biggest banana plantation.
Doctor Correa, I should say, with a Ph.D in economics earned in Europe. Professor Correa as he is officially called - who, until not long ago, taught at the University of Illinois.
And Professor Doctor Correa is one tough character. He told George Bush to take the US military base and stick it where the equatorial sun don’t shine. He told the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which held Ecuador’s finances by the throat, to go to hell. He ripped up the “agreements” which his predecessors had signed at financial gun point. He told the Miami bond vultures that were charging Ecuador usurious interest, to eat their bonds. He said ‘We are not going to pay off this debt with the hunger of our people. ” Food first, interest later. Much later. And he meant it.
It was a stunning performance. I’d met two years ago with his predecessor, President Alfredo Palacio, a man of good heart, who told me, looking at the secret IMF agreements I showed him, “We cannot pay this level of debt. If we do, we are DEAD. And if we are dead, how can we pay?” Palacio told me that he would explain this to George Bush and Condoleezza Rice and the World Bank, then headed by Paul Wolfowitz. He was sure they would understand. They didn’t. They cut off Ecuador at the knees.
But Ecuador didn’t fall to the floor. Correa, then Economics Minister, secretly went to Hugo Chavez Venezuela’s president and obtained emergency financing. Ecuador survived.
And thrived. But Correa was not done.
Elected President, one of his first acts was to establish a fund for the Ecuadoran refugees in America - to give them loans to return to Ecuador with a little cash and lot of dignity. And there were other dragons to slay. He and Palacio kicked US oil giant Occidental Petroleum out of the country.
Correa STILL wasn’t done.
I’d returned from a very wet visit to the rainforest - by canoe to a Cofan Indian village in the Amazon where there was an epidemic of childhood cancers. The indigenous folk related this to the hundreds of open pits of oil sludge left to them by Texaco Oil, now part of Chevron, and its partners. I met the Cofan’s chief. His three year old son swam in what appeared to be contaminated water then came out vomiting blood and died.
Correa had gone there too, to the rainforest, though probably in something sturdier than a canoe. And President Correa announced that the company that left these filthy pits would pay to clean them up.
But it’s not just any company he was challenging. Chevron’s largest oil tanker was named after a long-serving member of its Board of Directors, the Condoleezza. Our Secretary of State.
The Cofan have sued Condi’s corporation, demanding the oil company clean up the crap it left in the jungle. The cost would be roughly $12 billion. Correa won’t comment on the suit itself, a private legal action. But if there’s a verdict in favor of Ecuador’s citizens, Correa told me, he will make sure Chevron pays up.
Is he kidding? No one has ever made an oil company pay for their slop. Even in the USA, the Exxon Valdez case drags on to its 18th year. Correa is not deterred.
He told me he would create an international tribunal to collect, if necessary. In retaliation, he could hold up payments to US companies who sue Ecuador in US courts.
This is hard core. No one - NO ONE - has made such a threat to Bush and Big Oil and lived to carry it out.
And, in an office tower looking down on Quito, the lawyers for Chevron were not amused. I met with them.
“And it’s the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States?” Rodrigo Perez, Texaco’s top lawyer in Ecuador was chuckling over the legal difficulties the Indians would have in proving their case that Chevron-Texaco caused their kids’ deaths. “If there is somebody with cancer there, [the Cofan parents] must prove [the deaths were] caused by crude or by petroleum industry. And, second, they have to prove that it is OUR crude – which is absolutely impossible.” He laughed again. You have to see this on film to believe it.
The oil company lawyer added, “No one has ever proved scientifically the connection between cancer and crude oil.” Really? You could swim in the stuff and you’d be just fine.
The Cofan had heard this before. When Chevron’s Texaco unit came to their land the the oil men said they could rub the crude oil on their arms and it would cure their ailments. Now Condi’s men had told me that crude oil doesn’t cause cancer. But maybe they are right. I’m no expert. So I called one. Robert F Kennedy Jr., professor of Environmental Law at Pace University, told me that elements of crude oil production - benzene, toluene, and xylene, “are well-known carcinogens.” Kennedy told me he’s seen Chevron-Texaco’s ugly open pits in the Amazon and said that this toxic dumping would mean jail time in the USA.
But it wasn’t as much what the Chevron-Texaco lawyers said that shook me. It was the way they said it. Childhood cancer answered with a chuckle. The Chevron lawyer, a wealthy guy, Jaime Varela, with a blond bouffant hairdo, in the kind of yellow chinos you’d see on country club links, was beside himself with delight at the impossibility of the legal hurdles the Cofan would face. Especially this one: Chevron had pulled all its assets out of Ecuador. The Indians could win, but they wouldn’t get a dime. “What about the chairs in this office?” I asked. Couldn’t the Cofan at least get those? “No,” they laughed, the chairs were held in the name of the law firm.
Well, now they might not be laughing. Correa’s threat to use the power of his Presidency to protect the Indians, should they win, is a shocker. No one could have expected that. And Correa, no fool, knows that confronting Chevron means confronting the full power of the Bush Administration. But to this President, it’s all about justice, fairness. “You [Americans] wouldn’t do this to your own people,” he told me. Oh yes we would, I was thinking to myself, remembering Alaska’s Natives.
Correa’s not unique. He’s the latest of a new breed in Latin America. Lula, President of Brazil, Evo Morales, the first Indian ever elected President of Bolivia, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. All “Leftists,” as the press tells us. But all have something else in common: they are dark-skinned working-class or poor kids who found themselves leaders of nations of dark-skinned people who had forever been ruled by an elite of bouffant blonds.
When I was in Venezuela, the leaders of the old order liked to refer to Chavez as, “the monkey.” Chavez told me proudly, “I am negro e indio” - Black and Indian, like most Venezuelans. Chavez, as a kid rising in the ranks of the blond-controlled armed forces, undoubtedly had to endure many jeers of “monkey.” Now, all over Latin America, the “monkeys” are in charge.
And they are unlocking the economic cages.
Maybe the mood will drift north. Far above the equator, a nation is ruled by a blond oil company executive. He never made much in oil - but every time he lost his money or his investors’ money, his daddy, another oil man, would give him another oil well. And when, as a rich young man out of Philips Andover Academy, the wayward youth tooted a little blow off the bar, daddy took care of that too. Maybe young George got his powder from some guy up from Ecuador.
I know this is an incredibly simple story. Indians in white hats with their dead kids and oil millionaires in black hats laughing at kiddy cancer and playing musical chairs with oil assets.
But maybe it’s just that simple. Maybe in this world there really is Good and Evil.
Maybe Santa will sort it out for us, tell us who’s been good and who’s been bad. Maybe Lawyer Yellow Pants will wake up on Christmas Eve staring at the ghost of Christmas Future and promise to get the oil sludge out of the Cofan’s drinking water.
Or maybe we’ll have to figure it out ourselves. When I met Chief Emergildo, I was reminded of an evening years back, when I was way the hell in the middle of nowhere in the Prince William Sound, Alaska, in the Chugach Native village of Chenega. I was investigating the damage done by Exxon’s oil. There was oil sludge all over Chenega’s beaches. It was March 1991, and I was in the home of village elder Paul Kompkoff on the island’s shore, watching CNN. We stared in silence as “smart” bombs exploded in Baghdad and Basra.
Then Paul said to me, in that slow, quiet way he had, “Well, I guess we’re all Natives now.”
Well, maybe we are. But we don’t have to be, do we?
Maybe we can take some guidance from this tiny nation at the center of the earth. I listened back through my talk with President Correa. And I can assure his daughter that she didn’t have to worry that her dad would forget about “the poor children who are cold” on the streets of Quito.
Because the Professor Doctor is still one of them.
*****
Watch the Palast investigation, Rumble in the Jungle: Big Oil and Little Indians, on [1] BBC Television Newsnight, now on-line via [2] http://www.gregpalast.com/ - and Thursday’s US broadcast of [3] Democracy Now.
For a copy of Palast’s prior reports from Venezuela for BBC and Democracy Now, get “[4] The Assassination of Hugo Chavez,” on DVD, filmed by award-winning videographer Richard Rowley.
URLs in this post:
[1] BBC Television Newsnight: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/7113903.stm
[2] http://www.gregpalast.com/: http://www.gregpalast.com/
[3] Democracy Now: http://www.democracynow.org/
[4] The Assassination of Hugo Chavez: http://www.palastinvestigativefund.org/
Share This: http://www.gregpalast.com/?p=1935&akst_action=share-this
Good and Evil at the Center of the Earth:
A Quechua Christmas Carol
by Greg Palast
December 24th, 2007
[Quito] I don’t know what the hell seized me. In the middle of an hour-long interview with the President of Ecuador, I asked him about his father.
I’m not Barbara Walters. It’s not the kind of question I ask.
He hesitated. Then said, “My father was unemployed.”
He paused. Then added, “He took a little drugs to the States… This is called in Spanish a mula [mule]. He passed four years in the states- in a jail.”
He continued. “I’d never talked about my father before.”
Apparently he hadn’t. His staff stood stone silent, eyes widened.
Correa’s dad took that frightening chance in the 1960s, a time when his family, like almost all families in Ecuador, was destitute. Ecuador was the original “banana republic” - and the price of bananas had hit the floor. A million desperate Ecuadorans, probably a tenth of the entire adult population, fled to the USA anyway they could.
“My mother told us he was working in the States.”
His father, released from prison, was deported back to Ecuador. Humiliated, poor, broken, his father, I learned later, committed suicide.
At the end of our formal interview, through a doorway surrounded by paintings of the pale plutocrats who once ruled this difficult land, he took me into his own Oval Office. I asked him about an odd-looking framed note he had on the wall. It was, he said, from his daughter and her grade school class at Christmas time. He translated for me.
“We are writing to remind you that in Ecuador there are a lot of very poor children in the streets and we ask you please to help these children who are cold almost every night.”
It was kind of corny. And kind of sweet. A smart display for a politician.
Or maybe there was something else to it.
Correa is one of the first dark-skinned men to win election to this Quechua and mixed-race nation. Certainly, one of the first from the streets. He’d won a surprise victory over the richest man in Ecuador, the owner of the biggest banana plantation.
Doctor Correa, I should say, with a Ph.D in economics earned in Europe. Professor Correa as he is officially called - who, until not long ago, taught at the University of Illinois.
And Professor Doctor Correa is one tough character. He told George Bush to take the US military base and stick it where the equatorial sun don’t shine. He told the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which held Ecuador’s finances by the throat, to go to hell. He ripped up the “agreements” which his predecessors had signed at financial gun point. He told the Miami bond vultures that were charging Ecuador usurious interest, to eat their bonds. He said ‘We are not going to pay off this debt with the hunger of our people. ” Food first, interest later. Much later. And he meant it.
It was a stunning performance. I’d met two years ago with his predecessor, President Alfredo Palacio, a man of good heart, who told me, looking at the secret IMF agreements I showed him, “We cannot pay this level of debt. If we do, we are DEAD. And if we are dead, how can we pay?” Palacio told me that he would explain this to George Bush and Condoleezza Rice and the World Bank, then headed by Paul Wolfowitz. He was sure they would understand. They didn’t. They cut off Ecuador at the knees.
But Ecuador didn’t fall to the floor. Correa, then Economics Minister, secretly went to Hugo Chavez Venezuela’s president and obtained emergency financing. Ecuador survived.
And thrived. But Correa was not done.
Elected President, one of his first acts was to establish a fund for the Ecuadoran refugees in America - to give them loans to return to Ecuador with a little cash and lot of dignity. And there were other dragons to slay. He and Palacio kicked US oil giant Occidental Petroleum out of the country.
Correa STILL wasn’t done.
I’d returned from a very wet visit to the rainforest - by canoe to a Cofan Indian village in the Amazon where there was an epidemic of childhood cancers. The indigenous folk related this to the hundreds of open pits of oil sludge left to them by Texaco Oil, now part of Chevron, and its partners. I met the Cofan’s chief. His three year old son swam in what appeared to be contaminated water then came out vomiting blood and died.
Correa had gone there too, to the rainforest, though probably in something sturdier than a canoe. And President Correa announced that the company that left these filthy pits would pay to clean them up.
But it’s not just any company he was challenging. Chevron’s largest oil tanker was named after a long-serving member of its Board of Directors, the Condoleezza. Our Secretary of State.
The Cofan have sued Condi’s corporation, demanding the oil company clean up the crap it left in the jungle. The cost would be roughly $12 billion. Correa won’t comment on the suit itself, a private legal action. But if there’s a verdict in favor of Ecuador’s citizens, Correa told me, he will make sure Chevron pays up.
Is he kidding? No one has ever made an oil company pay for their slop. Even in the USA, the Exxon Valdez case drags on to its 18th year. Correa is not deterred.
He told me he would create an international tribunal to collect, if necessary. In retaliation, he could hold up payments to US companies who sue Ecuador in US courts.
This is hard core. No one - NO ONE - has made such a threat to Bush and Big Oil and lived to carry it out.
And, in an office tower looking down on Quito, the lawyers for Chevron were not amused. I met with them.
“And it’s the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States?” Rodrigo Perez, Texaco’s top lawyer in Ecuador was chuckling over the legal difficulties the Indians would have in proving their case that Chevron-Texaco caused their kids’ deaths. “If there is somebody with cancer there, [the Cofan parents] must prove [the deaths were] caused by crude or by petroleum industry. And, second, they have to prove that it is OUR crude – which is absolutely impossible.” He laughed again. You have to see this on film to believe it.
The oil company lawyer added, “No one has ever proved scientifically the connection between cancer and crude oil.” Really? You could swim in the stuff and you’d be just fine.
The Cofan had heard this before. When Chevron’s Texaco unit came to their land the the oil men said they could rub the crude oil on their arms and it would cure their ailments. Now Condi’s men had told me that crude oil doesn’t cause cancer. But maybe they are right. I’m no expert. So I called one. Robert F Kennedy Jr., professor of Environmental Law at Pace University, told me that elements of crude oil production - benzene, toluene, and xylene, “are well-known carcinogens.” Kennedy told me he’s seen Chevron-Texaco’s ugly open pits in the Amazon and said that this toxic dumping would mean jail time in the USA.
But it wasn’t as much what the Chevron-Texaco lawyers said that shook me. It was the way they said it. Childhood cancer answered with a chuckle. The Chevron lawyer, a wealthy guy, Jaime Varela, with a blond bouffant hairdo, in the kind of yellow chinos you’d see on country club links, was beside himself with delight at the impossibility of the legal hurdles the Cofan would face. Especially this one: Chevron had pulled all its assets out of Ecuador. The Indians could win, but they wouldn’t get a dime. “What about the chairs in this office?” I asked. Couldn’t the Cofan at least get those? “No,” they laughed, the chairs were held in the name of the law firm.
Well, now they might not be laughing. Correa’s threat to use the power of his Presidency to protect the Indians, should they win, is a shocker. No one could have expected that. And Correa, no fool, knows that confronting Chevron means confronting the full power of the Bush Administration. But to this President, it’s all about justice, fairness. “You [Americans] wouldn’t do this to your own people,” he told me. Oh yes we would, I was thinking to myself, remembering Alaska’s Natives.
Correa’s not unique. He’s the latest of a new breed in Latin America. Lula, President of Brazil, Evo Morales, the first Indian ever elected President of Bolivia, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. All “Leftists,” as the press tells us. But all have something else in common: they are dark-skinned working-class or poor kids who found themselves leaders of nations of dark-skinned people who had forever been ruled by an elite of bouffant blonds.
When I was in Venezuela, the leaders of the old order liked to refer to Chavez as, “the monkey.” Chavez told me proudly, “I am negro e indio” - Black and Indian, like most Venezuelans. Chavez, as a kid rising in the ranks of the blond-controlled armed forces, undoubtedly had to endure many jeers of “monkey.” Now, all over Latin America, the “monkeys” are in charge.
And they are unlocking the economic cages.
Maybe the mood will drift north. Far above the equator, a nation is ruled by a blond oil company executive. He never made much in oil - but every time he lost his money or his investors’ money, his daddy, another oil man, would give him another oil well. And when, as a rich young man out of Philips Andover Academy, the wayward youth tooted a little blow off the bar, daddy took care of that too. Maybe young George got his powder from some guy up from Ecuador.
I know this is an incredibly simple story. Indians in white hats with their dead kids and oil millionaires in black hats laughing at kiddy cancer and playing musical chairs with oil assets.
But maybe it’s just that simple. Maybe in this world there really is Good and Evil.
Maybe Santa will sort it out for us, tell us who’s been good and who’s been bad. Maybe Lawyer Yellow Pants will wake up on Christmas Eve staring at the ghost of Christmas Future and promise to get the oil sludge out of the Cofan’s drinking water.
Or maybe we’ll have to figure it out ourselves. When I met Chief Emergildo, I was reminded of an evening years back, when I was way the hell in the middle of nowhere in the Prince William Sound, Alaska, in the Chugach Native village of Chenega. I was investigating the damage done by Exxon’s oil. There was oil sludge all over Chenega’s beaches. It was March 1991, and I was in the home of village elder Paul Kompkoff on the island’s shore, watching CNN. We stared in silence as “smart” bombs exploded in Baghdad and Basra.
Then Paul said to me, in that slow, quiet way he had, “Well, I guess we’re all Natives now.”
Well, maybe we are. But we don’t have to be, do we?
Maybe we can take some guidance from this tiny nation at the center of the earth. I listened back through my talk with President Correa. And I can assure his daughter that she didn’t have to worry that her dad would forget about “the poor children who are cold” on the streets of Quito.
Because the Professor Doctor is still one of them.
*****
Watch the Palast investigation, Rumble in the Jungle: Big Oil and Little Indians, on [1] BBC Television Newsnight, now on-line via [2] http://www.gregpalast.com/ - and Thursday’s US broadcast of [3] Democracy Now.
For a copy of Palast’s prior reports from Venezuela for BBC and Democracy Now, get “[4] The Assassination of Hugo Chavez,” on DVD, filmed by award-winning videographer Richard Rowley.
URLs in this post:
[1] BBC Television Newsnight: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/7113903.stm
[2] http://www.gregpalast.com/: http://www.gregpalast.com/
[3] Democracy Now: http://www.democracynow.org/
[4] The Assassination of Hugo Chavez: http://www.palastinvestigativefund.org/
Share This: http://www.gregpalast.com/?p=1935&akst_action=share-this
'The Water Horse'
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-et-water25dec25,0,7893362.story REVIEW: 'The Water Horse'
'The Water Horse' offers a coming-of-age story about a mythical sea creature and changing relationships.
By Kevin Crust
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
December 25, 2007
An enchanting tale of friendship and evolving relationships, "The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep" engagingly grafts coming-of-age movie chestnuts onto Scottish folklore. Though most of the narrative won't surprise anyone who has seen "E.T. The Extraterrestrial" or numerous similar stories, director Jay Russell and screenwriter Robert Nelson Jacobs create a realistic world in which the fantastical is credible.
In a present-day Scottish pub, a young American couple looking at the infamous photo of the Loch Ness monster is offered the true story behind the legend by a charming old man (Brian Cox). They bite and the man quickly whisks them back to World War II with the tale of a young boy named Angus MacMorrow struggling with his sailor-father's absence.
Simultaneously scared and fascinated by the water, Angus (Alex Etel) discovers a large, barnacle-covered egg in a tide pool at the seashore. He smuggles the egg back to the stately manor where he lives with his sister, Kirstie (Priyanka Xi), and mother, Anne (Emily Watson), the head housekeeper. Perched on a large loch, the home is empty save for a small domestic staff.
That changes when an army regiment, led by Capt. Hamilton (David Morrissey), arrives to use it as its billeting quarters, and Anne hires a secretive handyman named Lewis Mowbray (Ben Chaplin). The suddenly bustling grounds make it a challenge for Angus to hide his discovery, especially once the egg hatches, releasing an adorably strange sea creature with four flippers and a tail.
Angus bonds with the tiny beast and dubs his new friend Crusoe after being unable to identify its genus or species. Kirstie and Mowbray are unavoidably recruited to help in hiding Crusoe after discovering him in an upstairs tub, and the latter tells the children the myth of the water horse, a mysterious creature of which legend dictates only one exists at a time.
Though the duo of Angus and Crusoe initially conjures images of "Beany and Cecil" ("Help, Cecil! Help!" "I'm comin', Beany-boy!"), the relationship deepens as the boy attempts to fill the void left by his father. Etel is excellent as Angus, helping to ground the film in the uncertainty of wartime. Watson also shines as the protective mother unable to salve her son's emotional wounds. Morrissey and Chaplin give depth to their roles as men from opposite ends of the British social spectrum innately pitted against each other.
Best known for family-friendly fare such as "My Dog Skip" and "Tuck Everlasting," Russell, along with director of photography Oliver Stapleton, shot the film primarily in New Zealand but manages to beautifully evoke the Scottish coast and the 1940s. The visuals comfortably balance warmly nostalgic hues with the harsher shades of the film's more serious themes and action sequences.
Adapted by Jacobs from the Dick King-Smith ("Babe: The Gallant Pig") book, "The Water Horse" treads carefully on issues of loss and at times may be too intense for small children. Crusoe morphs rather quickly from cuddly urchin to fierce sea monster, and likewise, some of the film's shifts in tone are equally jarring, moving from kitchen-sink realism to slapstick, high adventure and back again.
Still, given the lack of intelligent, nonpandering family films, "The Water Horse" provides substantive entertainment. What it lacks in originality, it makes up for in execution.
kevin.crust@latimes.com
"The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep." MPAA rating: PG for some action/peril, mild language and brief smoking. Running time: 1 hour, 51 minutes. In general release.
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