The New Evangelicals

This article in the new edition of U.S. News is political tea leaf reading which bears out the point that Amy Sullivan made in her article on religion and politics, and the important intersection of the two for Democrats, in the Washington Monthly earlier this year. Here's the nut of the U.S. News article:

The chosen. As a major promoter of the First Great Awakening, the religious revival that swept through the Colonies in the 1740s, Edwards modified his own highly orthodox Puritan-Calvinist heritage and unintentionally launched a new and distinctively American strain of Protestantism. That tradition became the dominant religious force in American culture and politics in the 19th century and up through the early 20th. Along the way, it touched just about every major social movement, from abolitionism to Prohibition. "It is the glory of American Christianity," says Nathan Hatch, provost of the University of Notre Dame and author of The Democratization of American Christianity, "and it is also the shame."

Starting in the late 19th century, however, waves of new immigrants and an assortment of intellectual challenges from Darwinism to "modernist" theology began edging evangelicals from their place at the center of American life. In reaction, a core of the faithful adopted a hypermoralistic, biblically literalist, and anti-intellectual stance that came to be known as fundamentalism. In the 1940s, more open-minded carriers of the torch, including Billy Graham and Carl F. H. Henry (founding editor of Christianity Today), broke with the bunker mentality and attempted to reconnect with the larger culture. Abandoning the apocalyptic scenarios of the fundamentalists and much of their anti-intellectual baggage, they broadened their appeal, often reaching out to Christians in mainline Protestant churches and even to Catholics.
Fundamentalism didn't just disappear; many highly visible leaders and televangelists remain of that tendency. But it is now only one current within a larger movement. "We are back to a situation in which evangelicalism dominates our culture," says Wolfe. "But that doesn't mean `fundamentalist.' It means revivalist, personalist, therapeutic, entrepreneurial--the megachurch."

Consider the political arena. In addition to George W. Bush, whose conversion experience is arguably what set him on the road to politics in the first place, evangelicals in prominent places include the attorney general, the speaker of the House, and the House majority leader. Evangelical language and concerns, from faith-based social initiatives to attitudes toward abortion, same-sex unions, and America's relations with Israel, shape both the rhetoric and many of the policies of the current administration. And particularly since 9/11, evangelical notions about God's special covenant with the American people have contributed to a quasi-religious nationalism that casts America as the chosen nation engaged in a righteous struggle with evil.

The bottom line. Throughout most of American history, the evangelical constituency has tended to be, as Wheaton College historian Mark Noll points out, "more Democratic than Republican and relatively passive." But Supreme Court decisions on school prayer and abortion began to change that. Today, thanks to three decades of organizing efforts by the Christian right, most white evangelicals have come to be aligned with the Republican Party. In the last presidential election, 40 percent of Bush's votes came from religious conservatives. But not all evangelicals have ended up at the conservative end of the political spectrum. Theologically conservative African-American evangelicals and a minority of white evangelicals combine to make the evangelical perspective a force to be reckoned with inside the Democratic Party. Martin Luther King Jr. continues to be a beacon of evangelically inspired liberal activism, and President Jimmy Carter was every bit as open about his personal relationship with Jesus as George Bush is.

The last line of the second graf says a great deal about all religion in American, be it Evangelical, "Cafeteria Catholic" or the denominational divisions in American Jewry: "revivalist, personalist, therapeutic, entrepreneurial." The Christian Evangelicals have been so successful at selling this approach that it has affected nearly every other tradition. Americans are religious shoppers, and this is what they are buying.

Gen. Wesley Clark is the poster boy (or icon) for this approach: the child of a Jew and a Methodist, raised a Baptist by his own choice, he converted to Roman Catholicism while soldiering in Viet Namh and now attends a Presbyterian Church. Beliefnet.com did an interview with him earlier this month, the first in a series of profiles in faith they will be conducting with all of the candidates.

Wesley Clark is quintessentially American in his faith because he defines himself by what he says he is, rather than by the definition of the religion he claims, a tradition which goes back to Jonathan Edwards. I know a lot of people who do that, and it is probably quite confusing for those who claim no faith or are hostile to faith: it is very difficult for any tradition or denomination to be coherent to outsiders when the self-identified adherents make claims which appear to be in contradiction with each other.

UPDATE: Via Philocrites, an interesting follow-on story in the BoGlo Magazine, God on the Quad, on the growth of Evangelicalism in such unlikely places as MIT and Harvard.

Patriot Act Redux

Via Talk Left, comes an interesting tale from today's LATimes:

Patriot Act Author Has Concerns
Detaining citizens as 'enemy combatants' -- a policy not spelled out in the act -- is flawed, the legal scholar says.

By Richard B. Schmitt, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department's war on terrorism has drawn intense scrutiny from the left and the right. Now, a chief architect of the USA Patriot Act and a former top assistant to Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft are joining the fray, voicing concern about aspects of the administration's anti-terrorism policy.

At issue is the government's power to designate and detain "enemy combatants," in particular in the case of "dirty bomb" plot suspect Jose Padilla, the Brooklyn-born former gang member who was picked up at a Chicago airport 18 months ago by the FBI and locked in a military brig without access to a lawyer.

Civil liberties groups and others contend that Padilla — as an American citizen arrested in the U.S. — is being denied due process of law under the Constitution.

Viet Dinh, who until May headed the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, said in a series of recent speeches and in an interview with The Times that he thought the government's detention of Padilla was flawed and unlikely to survive court review.

The principal intellectual force behind the Patriot Act, the terror-fighting law enacted by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Dinh has steadfastly defended the Justice Department's anti-terrorism efforts against charges that they have led to civil-rights abuses of immigrants and others. While the Patriot Act does not speak to the issue of enemy combatants, his remarks still caught some observers by surprise.

Dinh and former Ashcroft assistant Michael Chertoff have been among the most agressive defenders of the Patriot Act, which was Dinh's creation. They've been all over the chat shows, from CNN to NPR, boasting the "reasonableness" of the Patriot Act in the face of our post-9/11 world and the war on terrorism. This about face comes as a surprise. There has to be some backstory here: it is interesting that this story is an LAT feature and doesn't show up in any of the East Coast national papers. Anybody have a clue?

Letter from Baghdad

It's the Sunday morning after Thanksgiving here in the States. That means that most of us are going to be hauling in a heavy Sunday newspaper made heavier with holiday ads, trying to sort through the news, think about a shopping strategy for Christmas and try to enjoy the last day off before the harried holiday season begins.

With all that to do, you hardly need more work, but I'm going to give you another link to George Packer's large and taxing essay in last week's The New Yorker because it is some of the most important war reporting to come out of Iraq to date. Here are some questions to think about while you are reading it. Count the number of unattributed sources. By way of Calpundit, ask yourself whose ax is being ground by each of those who speak without a name. Play the Washington guessing game: what's the difference between an "Administration official" and a "Senior Administration official?" How high up the food chain does Packer get with his unattributed sources? The Washingtonian offers some helpful hints.

My take on Packer's Letter from Baghdad: a careful journalist, Packer spent a lot of time in Iraq trying to suss out the real "fair and balanced" story, one that tells us about real successes, as well as the stuff that makes it onto CNN (and I get letters from all over the world telling me how lousy our television coverage is.) The story he comes away with is, I think, a lot darker than the one he planned to tell when he went into Iraq this fall.

In particular, follow the thread he uses to organize his rather sprawling tale, the fortunes of Drew Erdmann, a historian of post-war reconstructions who fled academia to apply his knowledge to the hands-on work of reconstruction in Iraq, first with ORHA, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Aid, under Jay Garner, now J. Paul Bremer's CPA, the Coalition Provisional Authority. Note that Erdmann is stateside now, working for the National Security Council. I'd swap Baghdad for Bethesda, too. Note all of the post-war plans that simply got thrown out the window, and note how the crafty Iraqi insurgents have taken to attacking what few allies we have in-country. All of the post-war plans generated by the State Department called for internationalization of the "liberation" as swiftly as possible. The insurgents quickly calculated that isolating the US was a strategy for success.

George Packer is a superior story teller: he shows, rather than tells, what is going on. An idealist (rather than idealogue) like Drew Erdmann gave up in under 6 months.

It is often said that a month is an eon in politics. A year, then, must be an eternity. There is more than enough time for conditions to slide in all directions in Iraq, in the economy and in things unforseen today (including "pushbacks" by the CIA over the Plame affair and the investigations into intelligence pre-9/11 and pre-war) but George Packer's essay is dispositive about conditions on the ground as we head into winter.

Open Thread

I'm giving it back to you.

Carrot? Stick?

The Governator has decided that he will go out among his subjects to drum up support for his tax/bond referendum, which needs support by this coming Friday, Dec. 5, to be placed on the March referendum. How is the Governator going to garner this support? He is holding campaign-style rallies in the districts of Dems who are vulnerable in the next election. When I was in the negotiation biz, you usually tried to make the deal with honey before you brought out the threats.

Governor turns up pressure
Targeting legislators, he'll take finance plan to their constituents.
By Gary Delsohn -- Bee Capitol Bureau
Published 2:15 a.m. PST Saturday, November 29, 2003

Determined to get his "fiscal recovery" plan through the Legislature by Friday's deadline, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will spend next week barnstorming the state and applying pressure to targeted lawmakers he thinks may be persuaded to come to his aid.

Using talk radio and campaign-style public events, the governor and his aides have carefully selected venues where they believe he can sway potentially sympathetic legislators by appealing directly to their constituents.

"The governor will not be shy about rallying the public to his cause," Rob Stutzman, Schwarzenegger's communications director, said Friday.

"He believes his political power comes from them and he needs the public to partner with him to push the Legislature to act by next Friday."

Karl Rove and Tom DeLay are sitting and watching and wiping their eyes as they laugh hysterically and wonder how they can use this tactic to best advantage when they try to push through the energy plan in January.

"MILITARY INTELLIGENCE?"

U.S. Says Iraqi Police May Have Coordinated Attacks on G.I.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Attackers ambushed a team of Spanish intelligence officers on a highway south of Baghdad on Saturday, killing seven agents and wounding one, Spanish Defense Minister Federico Trillo said.

Television footage showed a small group of youths gathered after the attack, chanting slogans in support of Saddam Hussein and kicking the bodies.

The team was attacked with rocket-propelled grenades and rifles in Mahmudiyah, 18 miles south of Baghdad, Trillo said in televised comments. He said he would fly to Iraq to repatriate the bodies.

The two civilian four-wheel-drive vehicles were traveling south from Baghdad to the city of Hillah, according to Capt. Ivan Morgan, a spokesman for a multinational division in southern Iraq. He described the men as Spanish soldiers attached to an intelligence unit.

Then, a couple of grafs later, Sanchez manages to contradict himself within three sentences:

The United States suspects al-Qaida operatives have taken part in many of the attacks on coalition and civilian targets in Iraq, but still has no conclusive evidence of its involvement, the top U.S. military official in Iraq said Saturday.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez also said some U.S.-trained Iraqi police and civilian informants appear to have conducted some of the attacks.

``Clearly those are concerns we have. We try to do the vetting (of Iraqi employees) as close as we can,'' he said. ``There have been instances when police were conducting attacks against the coalition and against the people.''

They are still trying to tie Iraq to 9/11, but they are starting to admit what the blogosphere has been buzzing about for months: Iraqi "collaborators" are sharing intelligence with or even leading the cells that are carrying out attacks against coalition forces. Steve Gilliard wonders today if, perhaps, the Iraqis say one thing among themselves and tell us something else?

From George Packer's mammoth essay in The New Yorker, finally available online (and causing comment all over said blogosphere):

Prior marvelled over how many flatly contradictory stories he had heard from the same people during his two visits to the neighborhood. He admitted that he would never get to the bottom of them all. “I’m not freaking Sherlock Holmes,” he said. Then he deadpanned, “I’m just an average guy, trying to get by.”

Intelligence? Give me a break. Iraqis have figured out how to game the system and draw the troops on patrol into their fabricated stories, using soldiers for personal retribution. We don't know the language or the culture and have no way of understanding when we are being led down the primrose path.

Reconstructing Iraqi Oil

Seems like just t'other day we were told that the cost of reconstruction would be borne by Iraq's vast oil wealth. Now we learn that we've ruined a country with a badly depleated ability to gain any kind of economic independence.

Oil Experts See Long-Term Risks to Iraq Reserves

By JEFF GERTH
Published: November 30, 2003

As the Bush administration spends hundreds of millions of dollars to repair the pipes and pumps above ground that carry Iraq's oil, it has not addressed serious problems with Iraq's underground oil reservoirs, which American and Iraqi experts say could severely limit the amount of oil those fields produce.

In northern Iraq, the large but aging Kirkuk field suffers from too much water seeping into its oil deposits, the experts say, and similar problems are evident in the sprawling oil fields in southern Iraq.

Experts familiar with Iraqi's oil industry have said that years of poor management have damaged the fields, and some warn that the current drive to rapidly return the fields to prewar capacity runs the risk of reducing their productivity in the long run.

"We are losing a lot of oil," said Issam al-Chalabi, Iraq's former oil minister. He said it "is the consensus of all the petroleum engineers" involved in the Iraqi industry that maximizing oil production may be detrimental to the reservoirs.

A 2000 United Nations report on the Kirkuk field said "the possibility of irreversible damage to the reservoir of this supergiant field is now imminent."

***SNIP***

There is not yet a firm price tag of modernizing Iraq's oil industry, but it is clear it will be enormous.

Edward C. Chow, a former Chevron executive who is now a visiting scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, estimates it will cost $20 billion to restore Iraqi production to prewar levels, an amount that is more than double the administration's plan for oil reconstruction needs over the next four years.

Mr. McKee said he believed that Iraq could get back to the prewar production capacity of three million barrels a day under current budgets. But even he is cautious.

"How sustainable that would be is a question," he said. "I think it would depend a lot on how long they could nurse their old infrastructure along without it cratering."

Since we still don't have electricity back up to anything near pre-war levels, somehow I think the expensive computer simulations it will take to get the oilfields running again are a ways off.

Second Helpings

The pull of family and that sleepy-after-turkey-L-Tryptophan phenomenon kept me with the Brother and S-I-L an extra night. The Brother outdid himself: in the ten years I've taken Thanksgiving at his table, the man is pro who enjoys, finally, having time to play at the family table. The food was so good that it constituted his finest revenge on us: death by cuisine was a real possibility. He sent me home with enough leftovers for a week, clearly feeling the need to keep up the strength of his older and much littler sister. And he baked me a pumpkin pie, perhaps the best I've ever eaten. He's been reading the blog....

Time with the B and S-I-L also includes room where no conversation is necessary. They and I are all lovers of animals, and there have been some painful losses and difficult new welcomes in their house this year: a much loved and loving dog and the sweetest cuddling cat are gone, for animal lovers these are family losses. We are learning the habits and needs of the new puppy and kit. When those moments of discovery and rapprochment happen within your view, when the tiny kitten and the giant puppy look at each other with curiosity and you are present for it, it is a gift to be present, and we had one of those days and could only watch with wonder as the newest family members began to learn their paths within the tribe. We stayed up too late watching, knowing that a new path was being found which was going to take us some new places, too, even as we mourned the loss of the old and familiar avenues which have been our neighborhood for so long. Laughs were laughed, tears were shed.

It was everything that a holiday should be. Laughter and tears are sacred stuff. As are second helpings.

The Emerging Backstory

Myths About Intelligence

By Stuart A. Cohen
Friday, November 28, 2003; Page A41

The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 2002 concerning Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has been dissected like no other product in the history of the U.S. intelligence community. We have reexamined every phrase, line, sentence, judgment and alternative view in this 90-page document and have traced their genesis completely. I believed at the time the estimate was approved for publication and still believe now that we were on solid ground in reaching the judgments we did.

The NIE judged with high confidence that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and missiles with ranges in excess of the 150-kilometer limit imposed by the U.N. Security Council. It judged with moderate confidence that Iraq did not have nuclear weapons. These were essentially the same conclusions reached by the United Nations and by a wide array of intelligence services -- friendly and unfriendly alike. Moreover, when U.S. intelligence agencies disagreed, particularly regarding whether Iraq was reconstituting a uranium enrichment effort for its nuclear weapons program, alternative views were spelled out in detail. Despite all of this, a number of myths have been created that seem to have gained traction with the public. A hard look at the facts of the NIE should dispel these popular myths:

Cohen goes on to list eight myths that this op-ed is designed to shoot down, including that the CIA buried contradictory assessments, "shaped" intelligence, set policy (to go to war,) used single sources and so forth. All of these are straw man arguments. Why? Read the last couple of grafs of the piece:

***SNIP***

Confronting allegations about the quality of the U.S. intelligence performance have forced senior intelligence officials to spend much of their time looking backward. I worry about the opportunities lost because of this preoccupation, but also that analysts laboring under a barrage of allegations will become more and more disinclined to make judgments that go beyond ironclad evidence -- a scarce commodity in our business. If this is allowed to happen, the nation will be poorly served and ultimately much less secure. Fundamentally, the intelligence community increasingly will be in danger of not connecting the dots until the dots have become a straight line.

The search for WMD cannot and should not be about the reputation of U.S. intelligence. Men and women from across the intelligence community continue to focus on this issue because finding and securing weapons and the know-how that supported Iraq's WMD programs before they fall into the wrong hands is vital to our national security. If we eventually are proved wrong -- that is, that there were no weapons of mass destruction and the WMD programs were dormant or abandoned -- the American people will be told the truth; we would have it no other way.

The writer, who has been with the CIA for 30 years, was acting chairman of the National Intelligence Council when the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was published.

What is going on here? Both more than less that meets the eye. The Republicans on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence are preparing to make a broadside attack against the NIE and the establishment intel services, principally the DIA and CIA, in order to block investigation of Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon. It was the OSP which was shaping and cherry-picking intel which was subsequently "stove-piped" directly into VP Richard Cheney's office. Cohen's article tells us nothing we didn't already know, all of it has been leaked to the press in the last five months, he simply re-assembles it into a coherent argument. Why this, why now? Those are the important questions.

Clearly, Cohen was deep inside the intel establishment. Said establishment is fronting its most senior people as a shot across the bow to the SSCI that they are quietly going to let the Committee politicize the investigation into prewar intel, as they have been attempting to do by shutting down the questions and even participation of the Democrats on the committee. The CIA must have decided that the Republicans in Congress are politically tone deaf, as this is the third or fourth gauntlet that they have felt the need to throw down. Life is not going to be gentle for the Congressional Repubs this spring.

Posted by Melanie at 01:32 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Open Thread

Bump is headed out for the holiday. We'll be back tomorrow night. Open thread for you....

We are Watching

Government by Juggernaut

Hardball isn't new to politics; Democrats happily employed the rules to their advantage when they held power, and, in the Senate, where the minority has greater protections, they still do. Republicans once clamored for fair treatment and railed against their subjugation at Democratic hands. But their use of the rules to impose their will is making the Democrats look benevolent by comparison. "The Republicans had better hope that the Democrats never regain the majority," Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said the day after the House Medicare vote.

In the session now limping to its conclusion, Democrats have been excluded from conference committees, where the majority seems to view them as a pesky irrelevance. On the energy bill, they were shut out entirely. On prescription drugs, a favored few Democratic senators inclined to support the bill were allowed into the room. But Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.), who had voted for the Senate measure and been appointed to the conference by his party, was barred; so were all House Democrats. And while conferences are supposed to resolve differences between the two houses, these days legislation often emerges with provisions previously unseen -- and undebated -- in either house. Other provisions approved by both chambers disappear in conference. Lawmakers are then confronted with an unappetizing up-or-down vote on the entire package.

Rank-and-file lawmakers of both parties are often unable to see legislation until the vote is upon them -- not just because details are still being hammered out, but because exposing the document to public scrutiny would hurt the cause of those who seek to have it passed by any means. Both houses have rules designed to prevent this sort of governing by ambush. But these are routinely swept aside in the interest of swift passage, however uninformed. Contempt for the minority extends to the White House, which sought recently to require that Democrats obtain the approval of Republican committee chairs before submitting questions to the administration.

In the House, where the majority has the parliamentary power, the ability to offer amendments is constricted, and often curtailed entirely, with Democrats stopped from even offering their alternative for a vote. Debate is abridged to the point of parody. On prescription drugs, each side had an hour to present its views on one of the biggest changes in Medicare since its enactment. But when the time came to vote and Republicans lacked a majority, the haste evaporated. The customary 15-minute limit for voting was stretched to close to three hours, as GOP leaders confronting a loss bludgeoned members to switch their votes. While this was the longest such stretch, it wasn't an aberration: The majority has kept the vote open about a dozen times in recent years. Adding time to a vote may not seem like a big deal, but when it's done in contravention of the usual practice and solely for the purpose of achieving the desired outcome, it leaves lasting bitterness.

This WaPo editorial is a natural follow-on to the post below. Think about the implications: if you live in a state or congressional district represented by a Democrat, for all intents and purposes you are unrepresented in Congress. Your guy or gal is effectively gagged by procedural manipulations on a gross scale that was maligned by Republicans when they were in the minority, and the Dems used in a relatively mild way. I'm listening to Diane Rehm on NPR right now, and Charlie Cook just called these tactics "unprecedented."

Add to this the lack of discipline and leadership on the part of Congressional Dems, and you can see we have a problem which needs to be addressed during the next congressional election. We also need to be in regular communication with our reps to let them know what our wishes are and to remind them that they are accountable at election time.

The Real Culture War

Begin your holiday weekend with the utter good sense of David Neiwert's Orcinus on the topics of polarization and civil discourse.

Dave's essay is both well-reasoned and discouraging. Civil discourse has become nearly impossible when "movement" conservative idealogues like Ann Coulter and the President of the country can call all dissenting opinion "treason." The moment we are living in right now is as poisonous as the McCarthyite 1950's, the Bush administration is using IRS audits punatively, the way Nixon did. Next stop, blacklists.

The next national election is going to be about the "culture wars," but not in the way that the right has taught us to frame the issue. The culture in question is going to be about the right of free speech, not gay marriage, the dissolution of the traditional family or "Sex and the City." The RNC ad released last week was the shot over the bow: it wasn't about ideas, it was about vilifying the other side.

The winner of this fight is going to be the possessor of the biggest megaphone, trying to reach an American electorate which is increasingly disengaged and uninterested, but which will provide the swing votes for one side or another if it can be awakened from its entertainment-induced torpor. Admire the job Terry Macauliffe has done to put the DNC on a firm financial footing and then give them some money over at Kicking Ass. I'll have an ePatriots link up before the end of the long weekend.

What Dave Neiwert is pointing to is a showdown. As Steve Gilliard likes to remind us, you don't bring a knife to a gun fight. George Bush is going to raise in excess of $200 million dollars directly for his campaign. The PAC and 527 dollars available to the Republicans will be more than twice that. Against the corporate interests, we have numbers, and if all of us can give a little, we can even the fight. Whomever you support in the Democratic primary, remind your candidate to avoid the circular firing squad which was so much in evidence in Monday night's debate in Iowa. This primary must be about our ideas vs. Bush rather than a bloodbath on each other.

It's Time for Good Food

Gilliard got me thinking about food, celebrations, remembrance and family with his long a wonderful post about his family's Thanksgiving dinner menu. Steve's right, we don't vary these menus because they are liturgies, "the work of the people" from the Greek, and "religion" from the Anglo-saxon, "that which ties us together." They are our contact with the past, our past, they create our present and they are the hope of our future, one we hope will be very much like the parts of the past which are most sacred to us.

My menu has mutated as I've moved. In the upper plains, it was the plain white food of the Scandinavian Lutheran culture I grew up in. Turkey, mashed potatoes, white rolls, the most colorful thing was the dressing and the lime jello with marshmallows. Even the gravy was beige.

As a young wife, I added fresh vegetables, carrots and broccolli, my family learned to come along with that. I was in that Mother Earth News phase, learned to can and baked all the breads and bagels in my kitchen. Those of you who live outside New York City as ex-pats and complain about not being able to find real NY bagels, get a clue. You'll have to make them yourself. E-mail me for the recipe.

In grad school in Boston, Thanksgiving added New England clam chowder and baked beans at Thanksgiving. Hunh. Baked beans were for cookouts where I grew up, and clam chowder was from Mars.

Single again, I moved to North Carolina and discovered that the Thanksgiving food culture was very different. Ham and collards, and this was white people food. Some people ate ham for every holiday, and I learned about sweet potatoes, the bad ones, the ones with marshmallows. But I did learn to appreciate blackstrap molasses.

Now I'm in Virginia, within a couple of hours drive of at least five different food cultures for the holiday, there are people here who eat stuffed hams, pork stuffed with pork, it must be a republican thing. My drive will be one hour away, and my brother will blend the foods of our Minnesota upbringing with some of the tastes of Baltimore. My bro is also a professional chef, so the holiday meals are worth looking forward to. Leigh's learned to cook sweet potatoes, but I haven't learned to like them. He does a traditional northern sage bread dressing, a gravy that I would kill to learn to make (yes, he uses canned stock, so do I), he'll make the cranberries and couple of breads from scratch, along with the pies, but there won't be any pumpkin because he and Anne prefer cherry. This is a sorrow for me. For the last 30 years, part of the liturgy for me has been a piece of pumpkin pie for breakfast on the morning after Thanksgiving to fortify myself before I got about the serious business of disposing of the leftovers: trimming the carcass for sandwiches, preparing the leftovers for soup and getting the left-over gravy, dressing and bird ready for "hot brown" open faced sandwiches for lunch. And dozing in front of the football games. Now, I stop on the way home from my bro's, with a pack of left overs, and pick up a pumpkin pie at the grocery to fortify me for the exercise of the day after.

We'll get to Turkey and Wild Rice Soup before this game is over.

The real debate in the family is about what constitutes the proper cold turkey sandwich on the weekend after. Mom contends that it's turkey with cranberry sauce and a dab of mayo. I favor turkey with swiss and French's mustard, sprouts are good, but the bread has to be San Francisco sourbread. Leigh thinks the whole cold sandwich project is illegitimate and saves up for the hot brown.

But the thing none of us disagrees about is Aunt Marj's Baked Mashed Potatoes.

These are so simple, and so remarkable.

Prepare your tools. Two potatoes per person, these should be ordinary Idahoes. Beaters, big sauce pan. Lots of butter, lots of salt and pepper, and a little container of half and half wouldn't be a bad thing.

Peal and cut the potatoes into quarters and then into eighths. Place in the sauce pan, cover them with a couple of inches of water. Boil until a fork causes them to fall apart. Drain and reserve the liquid.

Return the potato pieces to the sauce pan (off the heat) add a couple of table spoons of butter and a quarter cup of milk (half and half is better) and apply elbow grease if you are using a hand beater, or judgement if you are using a power mixer, which will turn your potatoes into library paste if you over use it. Those of you who are ricing are outside of my experience. If the mixture is too thick, thin it with the reserved potato water.

When you get your potato-cream-butter concoction to the point when you think it is just short of the point where you think it is ready to be served, stop. Butter a baking/serving dish. I mean butter it. Don't skimp here. Turn your potato concoction into said bowl. Cover the potatoes with a lot of butter, don't skimp. Put the dish into a 350 oven with a lot of salt and pepper. In 30 minutes, you will be delightfully pleased. The crust will be what everybody fights over. Which is a whole lot better than all the things they could be fighting over.

May your thanksgiving leave you with some amazing leftovers, and a reminder that we have a lot to be grateful for. Thank you, reader.

A Global Battle

U.N.: Global AIDS Epidemic Rampant

By JANE WARDELL
The Associated Press
Tuesday, November 25, 2003; 11:43 AM

LONDON - International efforts to control the spread of HIV/AIDS are failing, with more people dying from the disease this year than ever before and as many as 46 million people around the world living with the virus, said a U.N. report released Tuesday.

The worldwide epidemic killed more than 3 million people this year and infected another 5 million with human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, said UNAIDS, the U.N. agency responsible for coordinating global efforts to fight AIDS.

The report said the epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa remains rampant while more recent epidemics in China, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam and several central Asian republics are growing.

"This year, more people became infected with HIV than any previous year before and more people then ever died from AIDS," said UNAIDS executive director Dr. Peter Piot.

The global response to the crisis has expanded significantly in recent years through more spending on anti-retroviral medication and education, UNAIDS said.

"However, it is quite clear that our current global efforts remain entirely inadequate for an epidemic that is continuing to spiral out of control," Piot said. "AIDS is tightening its grip on southern Africa and threatening other regions of the world."

In sub-Saharan Africa, and increasingly in Central Asia and Southeast Asia, this disease may wipe out most of a generation. The economic dislocation and political instability which will come with such a massive die-off may ruin what little steps have been made in these poor countries to create some economic development. The scale of the human tragedy is unimaginable. The costs of political and economic collapses will dwarf what little we are currently spending to fight this scourge.

Buuilding Bridges

The Perils of Partisanship
by John Podesta
November 24, 2003

Conservatives have also been a polarizing force in the political process. White House Political Director Karl Rove and Majority Leader Delay have aggressively pursued a national strategy to use control over state legislatures to consolidate congressional power through the redistricting process. In Texas, conservative state senators were encouraged to ram through a redistricting plan which, even proponents admit, was drawn for purely partisan purposes. When some state senators fled Texas in order to prevent the plan - which would dramatically dilute the voting strength of minority voters - from becoming law, Majority Leader Delay launched a frantic effort to enlist the Justice Department to track the fleeing senators down and arrest them. When the Justice Department refused, Delay enlisted the Department of Homeland Security, which should be spending time tracking down terrorists, to track down the absent state senators.

A recent poll by the Pew Research Center shows that independent voters are growing tired of the policy consequences of conservatives’ my-way-or-the-highway approach - on issues such as national security, finance, Medicare and corporate malfeasance. This represents an opportunity for progressives, no matter what their party affiliation, to form a new working majority and get our country back on the right path. To do so will require progressives to reverse the current trend of polarization, reach out to broad range of the political spectrum and present a forward-looking, inclusive agenda to the American people.

John Podesta's insight in that final graf is key: progressives are going to have to form coalitions with moderates and even center-righties offended by Bush's hubris. Tests of ideological purity are the stuff of the neo-cons and cheap labor conservatives who are bundling up this country and selling it off to their corporate friends. It would be an error for us to try to enforce that kind of purity. We need to learn to hear the language, the concerns and the needs of those who don't track with our complete agenda, but with whom we have enough in common to agree on a candidate, to turn out the vote and take this government back to serving the needs of the voters.

Solidarity Forever

Teamsters Halt Food Deliveries to Markets

By Nancy Cleeland, Times Staff Writer

Giving a boost to striking supermarket clerks, the Teamsters union Monday ordered its drivers and warehouse workers to honor picket lines at grocery distribution centers in Southern California, disrupting food deliveries during one of the busiest shopping weeks of the year.

More than 8,000 members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters will be sidelined at 10 distribution centers in Southern and Central California for the duration of the strike, said Jim Santangelo, president of Teamsters Joint Council 42.

"We either end this thing together or we die together," Santangelo said.

This is a good-news/bad-news development. When a powerful union like the Teamsters decides to support your picket line, of course it turns up the economic pressure on the employers. But, as you expand the universe of workers who are feeling the pain of lost income, pressure is also applied to the union to settle. The stakes are raised for both sides. In this particular case, the Teamsters know that they are looking at their own future negotiations with the grocery chains, not just in California, but all over the country. As a result, they will be less likely to pressure the UFCW into a premature settlement.

Open Thread

Comment away. I don't know enough to have a point of view on the revolution in the former Soviet Georgia. If you can school us, please do.

Open thread.

Second Class Soldiers

Reservists petition Congress for better equipment in Iraq

BY PHILIP DINE
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - Angry military reservists and their relatives across the country are flooding Congress with complaints about the adequacy of the equipment given to members of the reserves and National Guard in Iraq.

From the San Francisco Bay to Missouri to Cape Cod, lawmakers in both parties are getting an earful from Guard and Reserve members who say they are not properly outfitted for dangerous missions. Outdated or inadequate supplies run the gamut from rifles to Humvees, body armor to night-vision goggles, working radios to Chinook helicopter countermeasures against missiles.

The concerns are resonating on Capitol Hill.

It's just unthinkable we would send any units into a war zone not fully equipped," said Rep. Edward Schrock, R-Va., a member of the House Armed Services Committee and a 24-year Navy veteran who served in Vietnam.

"It's incumbent on this government to provide the reserve units with 100 percent of the same equipment before we send them over there - and obviously they have not done that," Schrock said.

He said that a Chinook unit from Virginia lacked upgraded night vision goggles and radios that could communicate with advanced air warning systems.
"Somebody dropped the ball," Schrock said.

This should enrage every American, regardless if you were for or against the war. This is all part of the "planning" for the war after the war, the planning that never occurred. The Guard and Reserve units routinely live with hand-me-down equipment for training at home, now they've been sent into battle with it.

Read the Letters to the Editor in Stars and Stripes. There are "issues" between the Regular Army and the Guard and Reserve troops, the part-time soldiers resent all the deployments they've had over the last 8 years, active duty soldiers resent the bitching; the Guard and Reserve have inferior equipment, but they are getting shot at and dying just like Regular Army.

Further, recruitment and retention, among both Regular Army and Guard and Reserve, is now becoming an issue (this was all predictable):

Army Reserve battling an exodus

By Robert Schlesinger, Globe Staff, 11/23/2003

WASHINGTON -- The US Army Reserve fell short of its reenlistment goals this fiscal year, underscoring Pentagon fears that the protracted conflict in Iraq could cause a crippling exodus from the armed services.

The Army Reserve has missed its retention goal by 6.7 percent, the second shortfall since fiscal 1997. It was largely the result of a larger than expected exodus of career reservists, a loss of valuable skills because such staff members are responsible for training junior officers and operating complex weapons systems.

"The Army has invested an enormous amount of money in training these people, and they're very hard to replace," said John Pike of globalsecurity.org, an independent research group in Washington.

With extended deployments and increasingly deadly attacks by Iraqi guerrillas, Defense Department officials are scrambling to combat a broader downturn in retention and recruitment that they fear is on the horizon.

Enormous damage has been done to national security by this pre-emptive and unnecessary war: the Army, for all intents and purposes is broken and will take years to repair, like after Viet Nam. We've sent our troops into a meat grinder poorly equipped, with out basics, like ammunition and bullet proof vests, with radios that don't work, bad night vision goggles, insufficiently armored transport. The poor support planned for the Army and Marines on the ground is both a travesty and a tragedy, and an indictment of the Bush administration. These people are too incompetant to put people in harms' way. If Rumsfeld had any integrity or sense of the value of the lives he places in danger, he should have resigned months ago. That he still has a job tells you how little regard George W. Bush has for our troops.

Getting Its Act Together

Clark Hires New Campaign Manager

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: November 24, 2003

Filed at 12:02 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Paul Johnson, campaign manager of Bob Graham's unsuccessful presidential bid, was hired Monday for the same position in Democrat Wesley Clark's campaign.

Clark spokesman Matt Bennett said Johnson was hired by campaign chairman Eli Segal and will start next Monday.

Johnson is a Minnesota native and a veteran of several Democratic campaigns for the Senate. He also worked on the presidential campaigns of former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey in 1992 and Walter Mondale in 1984.

Graham, a Florida senator, exited the presidential race last month, saying he couldn't raise enough money to be competitive. Some Graham staffers went to work for Clark, the retired Army general who had entered the race shortly before Graham got out. Those staffers include spokesman Jamal Simmons and New Hampshire director Steve Bouchard.

Clark has been without a campaign manager since early October, when Donnie Fowler quit the job.

Clark rival Howard Dean also got a boost Monday from a former Graham staffer. Graham's eldest daughter, Gwen Graham Logan, is joining Dean's campaign as a southern regional advisor and national surrogate speaker.

The Clark campaign has been slow to get its act together, but Clark put in a pretty impressive appearance with Russert last Sunday. I saw his foreign policy speech at the Council on Foreign Relations on C-Span over the weekend and was favorably impressed. He is well spoken, but does not light up a room the way that Dean does.

Courting Contention

Lawmakers fear another senior citizens' revolt against Medicare bill

By James Kuhnhenn
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - As they weigh their votes on a massive Medicare prescription drug bill, a lot of nervous lawmakers keep seeing the ghosts of a senior citizens' revolt 14 years ago.

Then as now, Congress was on the verge of expanding Medicare coverage. Critics were warning seniors they were getting a raw deal. And lawmakers back in 1989 were equally eager to convince Americans that their new Medicare benefits were a wonderful idea.

For Dan Rostenkowski, D-Ill., then powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, it all boiled over on a hot day in August when he failed to sell the new coverage to elderly activists at a seniors' center on Chicago's North Side. Brandishing canes, some waving signs saying "Rottenkowski," they chased the sweating, panicked lawmaker to his car. When they surrounded his car, he got out and ran down the street.
Within months, Congress had repealed the law.

"The backlash will be bigger," this time, Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California, a consumer health advocacy group, predicted last week. For one thing, the current Medicare changes are bigger than 1989's. They're also hard to explain, passed by a partisan vote, and will adversely affect some seniors.

I'm listening to the Senate debate now. This turkey is going to pass, probably later today, but there will be fallout: seniors tend to be more politically active than any other demographic.

Open Thread

Rant. Organize. It's up to you.

President's Cup

I got home in time to catch the end of the play-off, including Tiger Woods awesome 15 foot putt. These guys are good. I know it doesn't say "golf" up there on the masthead, but I'm a golf nut (watching, not playing, it's a sport for rich people and I'm not there yet) so file this under "culture." I think the result the team captains ironed out is terrific.

After Playoff Between Woods and Els, Presidents Cup Declared a Tie
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: November 23, 2003

Filed at 3:20 p.m. ET

GEORGE, South Africa (AP) -- After 34 matches between the best two teams in the world, and three exhilarating playoff holes between the best two players in the world, the Presidents Cup was declared a tie Sunday.

Tiger Woods and Ernie Els, playing against each other with 11 guys counting on them, parred all three playoff holes before darkness fell on the Links Course at Fancourse.

After much debate, captains Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player agreed to share the cup.

The United States is the defending champion, but that doesn't mean they retain the cup, which happens in all other international cup competitions.

``We'll have to make another one,'' PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem said.

It took a little negotiation as night fell, the players could not read the greens and nobody thought it was a good idea to extend a two-man playoff into the next day. This is a team event, and having an extra-day play off in a singles round just felt wrong. I applaud the captains and the teams.

Beyond the Patriot Act

Gen. Franks Doubts Constitution Will Survive WMD Attack

John O. Edwards, NewsMax.com
Friday, Nov. 21, 2003

Gen. Tommy Franks says that if the United States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government.

I read this Newsmax reprint of a Cigar Afficianado article yesterday, but didn't think anything of it at the time. My daily Juan Cole forced me to reappraise.

Here's a retired member of the officer corps who thinks the officer corps should be put in charge of the country if we have a WMD attack. Jeebus, we got through the Civil War without suspending the Constitution, and this guy thinks that document won't hold up? The same one he swore to uphold when he joined the Army? That is freakin' frightening.

By the Century

This story made my blood run cold. The last sentence is arresting for our microwave culture.
Moving Targets

Terror wave: New bombings, and worries about a ‘spectacular.’ Al Qaeda is badly wounded, but far from defeated
.

U.S. officials can’t seem to decide whether the war in Iraq is helping or hurting the overall war on terror. It has long been a dream of many in the Bush administration, especially the neoconservatives in the Pentagon centered on Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, that a democratized Iraq will be both a beacon and a base in the fight against radical Islam. But some senior of-ficials worry, though usually not out loud, that the war could backfire. A leaked memo from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pointedly asked whether Islamic religious schools, fueled by anti-Western rage, are creating terrorists faster than American soldiers can kill or capture them.

Although the administration likes to say that the war in Iraq and the war on terror are inseparable, the former has almost certainly diverted resources from the latter. Arabic translators, always in short supply, are in demand to interrogate Iraqi prisoners and help American soldiers talk to the locals. Meanwhile, in Washington, transcripts of electronic intercepts of possible terrorist conversations pile up, unread and untranslated for weeks. Similarly, many Special Operations soldiers who had been chasing through the mountains of Afghanistan looking for bin Laden and his followers were shifted over to Iraq to spend months fruitlessly searching for weapons of mass destruction.

Administration officials insist that they have not been robbing Peter to pay Paul in the war on terror. Much of what the CIA knows about Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists comes from other intelligence services. The Egyptians or Jordanians are much more likely to get inside an Islamic terror network than the Americans. Countries that don’t always observe democratic niceties sometimes have more effective interrogation methods (the Egyptians have been known to closely question a suspect’s family members). The CIA has a pipeline, lubricated by large amounts of cash, to the secret police in various Middle Eastern countries.

Still, the war in Iraq has not helped foster these special relationships. The security services of Middle Eastern despots are not enthusiastic about promises of democratic change coming from Bush, who made clear in his speech last week in England that America would push even its allies to become more democratic. After 9/11, Syrian intelligence began working with the CIA against a common enemy, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, which wanted to both overthrow the Assad regime and help Al Qaeda attack the United States. But, intelligence sources tell NEWSWEEK, the neocons in the Pentagon have been undermining that relationship by accusing (without much proof) the Syrians of encouraging jihadists to cross into Iraq and of hiding Saddam’s WMD inside Syria.

So far, Turkey has been America’s most constant public ally among Muslim nations in the Middle East. Turkey is a bridge to the West, with strong economic and military ties to Europe and the United States. It has long been the most secular of Islamic countries and the friendliest toward Israel. All of which marks Turkey as a target for extremists. Last week a Qaeda Web site challenged Turkey to leave behind the “Crusaders” and rejoin Islam.

The responsibility for the suicide bombings was claimed by a Turkish radical fringe group called the Islamic Eastern Raiders’ Front (IBDA-C). Driven underground by Turkey’s violent repression of Islamic fanaticism in the ’90s, some Turkish extremists showed up in Qaeda terrorist-training camps in Afghanistan or joined the jihad in Chechnya or Bosnia. Just before they self-immolated, two of the Istanbul bombers had flown to Dubai, a crossroads in the Gulf sometimes used by terrorist planners, including the ones who staged 9/11. Did the Turks receive money, weapons and instruction from some higher authority? Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s brainy number two, has written that jihadists should go after softer, smaller targets if the big ones are too hard to hit. Al-Zawahiri has also counseled patience. True holy warriors measure time by the century.

Lessons Learned & Open Thread

Lots of other boomer bloggers have spent some time today with the "we will always remember exactly where we were when we learned....", a 40 year old reminiscence.

I don't want to make a big project out of this; boomers are 'way too self-absorbed, anyway. Just let me add my little bit of context.

I was in the fourth grade. My grandfather died earlier that November after a long, painful and incapacitating bout of cancer. Over the space of a couple of years, he went from being one of the most physically imposing and vigorous men I knew to a bedridden fragment of his former self, and in mind-altering pain. My childish grief at his loss will always be tied up in the assassination of President Kennedy.

Kennedy was hated in my household, the parental politics were somewhat to the right of Attila the Hun. I don't want to put words in the mouth of my late father, but I seem to recall that the reaction at my house was very different from that in the homes of my friends, and that was confusing. My irreligious parents didn't care about the Catholicism, Kennedy was a hated liberal.

That whole fall was very confusing. My family moved the previous month, from a small town on the border of Minnesota and Canada to a suburb St. Paul, I went to my first funeral, and the president of the United States was assassinated in the space of a month.

I was nine, old enough to begin to form a (small) worldview, and I learned in short order that people you love will leave you through death, that all places are different and that something which seems to a nine-year-old as the solidest thing in the world, the United States government, can be shaken to its foundations and survive. Forty years later, inside the beltway, I'm still betting on love, in spite of death, have come to adore the wonderful particularity of the places I visit (and the place in which I live) and have discovered how truly fragile our Constitution and the institutions which support it can be.

You can reflect on your own Kennedy experience or anything else that strikes your fancy on this thread.

Support the Workers

Churches Back Boycotts Over Migrant Workers

Labor Unions Decry Treatment by Taco Bell, Mt. Olive Suppliers
By Bill Broadway
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 22, 2003; Page B09

The National Council of Churches has endorsed consumer boycotts of Taco Bell and the Mt. Olive Pickle Co., putting the weight of one of the country's largest religious organizations behind labor unions' efforts to improve wages and living conditions for thousands of migrant workers in Florida and North Carolina.

Council officials called the endorsements "especially significant" because of the organization's insistence that boycotts are a "measure of last resort" in pressing for improved worker rights and other social justice issues. The council represents 36 denominations and 50 million Christians. It last endorsed a boycott 15 years ago against Royal Dutch/Shell Oil because of the company's connections to the apartheid system in South Africa.

President-elect Thomas Hoyt, bishop of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in Louisiana and Mississippi, said the boycotts are part of a nationwide effort to call attention to the poverty of millions of Americans, especially the "slave labor" that he said has been imposed on migrant workers who harvest tomatoes used in Taco Bell tacos and burritos and the cucumbers Mt. Olive transforms into pickles and relish.

Steve Gilliard has a long disquisition on "church food" today, which is undoubtably one of the good things that churches do, church suppers, breakfasts, spaghetti dinners and that home-made soul food that Steve made me salivate for. But here is another good thing that churches do: apply pressure for social justice. I don't know how successful this particular boycott will be, however, as the migrant workers are hired directly by the farmers (or agribusinesses) who supply Taco Bell and Mt. Olive. The grape boycott that was part of the creation of the United Farm Workers was directed at the growers themselves.

Urge to Merge

Marriage's Stormy Future

In different realms — and different political circles — there is now talk of creating new forms of semi-marriages, about blurring the lines between marriage and cohabitation, about common-law marriage and even about "delegalizing" marriage by taking the state out of the whole business of recognizing private relationships, and leaving people to solemnify their unions in religious ceremonies or private contracts.

Since the 1960's, marriage rates have declined, while unmarried births, cohabitation and divorce all increased, along with criticism of marriage as a flawed institution. Cohabitation and out-of-wedlock births are not going away.

In fact, there is evidence that the United States is becoming a post-marital society. Americans living alone made up 26 percent of all households in the 2000 census, the first in which single-member households outnumbered married-couple households with children.

But these days, in part because of the debate over same-sex marriage, the institution of marriage is getting a rosy rethinking, one that stresses both the profound human yearning for lasting love and the practical benefits that marriage brings to both children and the marital partners. .........

"I don't think there's a pre-Christian version of monogamous marriage," Professor Cott said. "I think that was the breakthrough. Look at the Jews in the Old Testament. They're polygamous. Look at Roman and Greek marriage, where men could have other wives or concubines, or young men."

In recent surveys, most Americans say they disagree with the statement that having children is the main purpose of marriage. At the same time, polls find, most Americans oppose gay marriage.

"We have largely collapsed one model of marriage, where gendered identities were relatively clear, and we don't know where we are going with whatever the next one is going to be," said Hendrik Hartog, a history professor at Princeton. "We may end up with differing worlds of marriage in differing parts of the country, just as, up to the 1940's, we had differing worlds of divorce in different states. It's not the most healthy situation, but I can't imagine that Utah's going to recognize gay marriages any time soon, whatever happens in Massachusetts."

I dunno. Among my GLBT friends, the suburban push to marry is as strong as it is among my straight friends, and I've been to a number of commitment ceremonies (or whatever you want to call them.) Those folks are as married as anybody else. This is a fairly conservative part of the world, but everybody knows which clergy will perform same-sex weddings. The Unitarian Universalists have been doing it for decades, but I also know plenty of mainline Protestant ministers and a few Rabbis who are willing to do the deed.

Boots on the Ground

Army Is Planning for 100,000 G.I.'s in Iraq Till 2006

By ERIC SCHMITT

Published: November 22, 2003

WASHINGTON, Nov. 21 — Army planning for Iraq currently assumes keeping about 100,000 United States troops there through early 2006, a senior Army officer said Friday. The plans reflect the concerns of some Army officials that stabilizing Iraq could be more difficult than originally planned.

The officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, warned that maintaining a force of that size in Iraq beyond then would cause the Army to "really start to feel the pain" from stresses on overtaxed active-duty, Reserve and National Guard troops.

The officer was offering a senior-level Army view on the issue, but the size of any future American force in Iraq will ultimately be decided by President Bush and a new provisional Iraqi government that is expected to assume control from an American administrator by June. The Army plans nevertheless give a view of top-level Pentagon thinking about the size of the American force that may be needed in Iraq well beyond the time next year when Washington expects to turn political control of Iraq back to Iraqi leaders.

Mr. Bush has said he will be guided by the military's judgment in deciding troop levels. Military officials have said they will base their recommendations largely on security conditions in Iraq and the extent Iraqis are trained to fill missions now carried out by American troops.

Mr. Bush will be guided by the political judgement of Karl Rove. This news is an early heads-up that American soldiers fighting and dying will be a feature of the campaign next year. A feature, not a bug.

Open Thread

Tell us what you really think.

Week the First

The Sacramento Bee is going to be required reading for at least a while. The California state capitol's daily will be covering the Governator on a daily basis, and I already sense that these professionals at the business of state government are taking it up with some glee.

This isn't government, it's theater. We could have predicted this, of course. My blogcolleague, Steve Gilliard gives the Gropenator 90 days. Judging from the first week, he isn't going to get that long.

Reminding lawmakers that he "won in almost every county," Schwarzenegger vowed to campaign "up and down the state."

In Sacramento, Senate President Pro Tem John Burton snapped at Schwarzenegger's threats, saying the governor "hasn't got a plan."

The San Francisco Democrat joined others in complaining about the lack of details in the governor's proposals, saying Schwarzenegger has yet to explain the $2 billion in spending cuts he wishes to make.

Sen. Joe Dunn, D-Santa Ana, said Schwarzenegger's remarks signaled a return to "politics as usual."

Dunn said Schwarzenegger's threats "won't bother us one iota. ... We have serious problems. We will not react to partisan politics that do not help solve our huge problem."
Senate Majority Leader Don Perata, D-Alameda, said Schwarzenegger needs to recognize that the Legislature's job is to "provide the check and the balance" by questioning his plans.

"We are not stupid," Perata said. "We know we lost that election, but we are going to do our job."

But he pointed out that lawmakers were also elected.
"He may have gotten more votes," Perata said. "But I got here the same way that he did, and so did everybody else."

For a second day, lawmakers complained that they didn't have enough information about Schwarzenegger's proposals, especially with a Dec. 5 deadline for approving measures for the March ballot.

Schwarzenegger's budget director (who defected from Jeb Bush in Florida to work for a movie star) walked out of her first meeting with lege leaders after 25 minutes, pleading "a meeting with the governor, and you don't keep him waiting." Well, Ka-lee-for-nee-ah, you elected him. Live with it. He's proposed a bond which is probably unconstitutional and thinks he can barrow his way out of deficits. Gee, that works so well here at Harmony Hall.

It's a Good Thing!

On a day featuring a filibuster of the Waste, Fraud and Abuse Energy Bill, and debate in the Senate on the Waste, Fraud and Abuse Medicare Bill, it's nice to discover that the congresscritters do something that actually, you know, serves the people

Congress Poised for Vote on Anti-Spam Bill
By DAVID STOUT

Published: November 21, 2003

WASHINGTON, Nov. 21 — House and Senate negotiators reached agreement today on a law to crack down on the floods of unsolicited e-mail messages that clog the nation's cybermail boxes.
The House of Representatives seemed ready this afternoon to pass the bill quickly, perhaps before nightfall. Similar legislation passed the Senate, 97-0, four weeks ago, and so it appears likely that the full Congress will approve a measure very soon.

"For the first time during the Internet era, American consumers will have the ability to say `no' to spam," Representative Billy Tauzin, the Louisiana Republican who heads the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in a statement. "What's more, parents will be able to breath easier knowing that they have the ability to prevent pornographic spam from reaching defenseless, unsuspecting children."

As a practical matter, what politician in their right mind isn't going to love running on this one?

My ISP provides subscribers with Postini, which is a terrific spam and virus filter. If yours doesn't offer it or something similar, it couldn't hurt to ask.

Yellowcake and Terror Franchises

Smart Op-Ed in the IHT.

Don't force Africa to bargain with its uranium

Niger, Chad, Mali and Burkina Faso, at the southern edge of the Sahara, are among the world's poorest nations. Hunger, disease and chronic illiteracy are a way of life in this part of the world, where a dollar a day would be a privilege. .These nations are laden with foreign debts in the billions of dollars, while their peoples battle with perennial drought. But these countries are endowed with large deposits of uranium. And since they cannot export cars, like Japan, or computer chips, like the United States, or electronics, like South Korea, or missile technology, like North Korea, uranium becomes simply a market commodity. .

Saddam Hussein may not have sought to buy uranium from Niger, but if he had wanted to, he could have obtained it from any one of several nations. Life is so unbearably harsh for the people here that exporting any commodity that would provide hard cash - for health care, education, decent roads and shelter - would be difficult to resist. .If the Bush administration and other Western governments want to prevent Iran or North Korea from getting their hands on Africa's uranium, then they should make a serious commitment to help these poor nations. .

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States committed billions of dollars to help Russia secure its nuclear weapons to prevent them from falling into the hands of hostile states or individuals. If the West judged it strategically important to help Russia in this way, why not help African countries out of poverty to prevent them from resorting to selling their uranium?

Given that we are now dealing with non-state bad actors with limitless resources and extremely de-centralized structure, this becomes a rather pressing piece of business. From today's WaPo.

A senior FBI official said the main link among the groups appears to be their shared experiences in the al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. Approximately 20,000 people from 47 countries passed through the camps from the mid-1990s until the U.S-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, officials estimate. The camps served as sites to train and indoctrinate fighters, keys to building the future network as they returned to their homelands.

Gunaratna described the al Qaeda camps as "a terrorist Disneyland, where you could meet anyone from any Islamist group."

U.S. and European intelligence officials said the creation of terror franchises was in part the result of successes in capturing or killing al Qaeda's senior leadership and pressuring individuals and institutions that funded the movement.

PLaying Fair

How US kept Australians in the dark

By Marian Wilkinson, Herald Correspondent in Washington November 21, 2003

Australian air force officers stationed at US command centres during the Iraq war were denied access to critical US intelligence they needed for their duties and were forced to leave classified briefings because of a policy described by a senior US Air Force intelligence officer as silly.

Major-General Tommy Crawford told a conference of Australian, British and US military experts he strongly opposed the policy that blocked Australian officers from getting intelligence on Iraq even when some of it originated from Australian intelligence sources.

"Now that's a silly damn policy," said Major-General Crawford after an RAAF officer with the Australian embassy, Wing Commander Alex Gibbs, asked why Australian and British officers at US command centres were denied vital material during the war.
The intelligence could have been helpful in protecting Australian Special Forces in Iraq, according to US security analysts.

General Crawford said the opposition to giving coalition officers access to the intelligence network came from US intelligence agencies outside the military.

A Post-Modern moment: a reader in New Zealand sends this article from the Australian press to a chick in the Washington suburbs. Hunh.

We ask our allies to put their troops in harms way and then refuse to share with them intelligence, some of which originated with them, in order to protect their own forces? This doesn't seem like a policy which is helpful in encouraging cooperation.

Open Thread

Some heavy stuff is likely to come down this weekend and my real life is colliding with the blog. I'll keep you informed around the edges. The local Dean headquarters opens on Saturday. I'm going. If Clark were opening a local headquarters, I'd be going to that, too. He isn't, and that's an issue

On Sunday, my faith community has a committee meeting that I have to attend. My group meets here. It's an hour each way and the meeting will take several hours. I'll return as soon as I can.

Leaking Leaks and the Leaking Leakers who Leak Them

There is a developing story about the Feith memo leaked to The Weekly Standard and the CIA response leaked to the Post. This is going to take more than a day to chase down. Meanwhile, read Josh Marshall's story on Cheney's history of rogue operations in intel at Talking Points Memo. Cheney's got a track record. Josh links to a weighty story at The New Republic.

Exit Strategery

Time Europe:

On Iraq, the bottom line for attracting serious European support, both in money and more troops, is a switch to U.N. administration. Bremer has announced a new timetable and procedure for transferring power to Iraqis by next summer, but there's no sign of a bigger U.N. role in that process. Blair himself has been beseeching Bush all year to be more forthcoming on Guantánamo, where nine British citizens are among the prisoners detained as "unlawful combatants" without access to lawyers, facing trial in military tribunals almost universally denounced in Britain as lacking due-process protections. Blair has said that unless their trials can meet minimum standards, he'll insist on their return to Britain — though it's hard to see how the U.S. could permit this without prompting similar demands from other countries. It will dog Blair throughout the summit if this problem isn't solved, but all Bush could reveal to British TV journalist David Frost for an interview shown Sunday was murk: "They will go through a military tribunal at some point in time, which is ... an international court — or in line with international courts." Huh?

What Bush really wants to do this week is make Europe take another look at him. "Very few Europeans have listened to extensive comments from this President," says his communications director Dan Bartlett. "It's usually chopped up into the stereotypical narrative. They are going to see a side of this President they don't know." He'll attend a round table with aids victims, delighted to show off his "compassion" and his government's $15 billion pledge to aids programs in poor countries. He'll meet with the families of British victims of Sept. 11 and of soldiers killed in Iraq. In Blair's northeast constituency of Sedgefield, Bush will chat with the locals at a school and over lunch in a picture-perfect olde English inn.

It will be a intriguing double act, the Tony and George show. "Blair's attitude is, 'Bring it on,'" says an aide. "If you're confident in your argument, you can win, and he always is confident." What Bush lacks in eloquence he will try to make up in projection. The political risk for them both is a bunch of ugly TV pictures of protesters wrecking their party. The risk for Europe and the world is that, however convinced and eloquent they may be, their determination to stick in Iraq does not equate to knowing how to fix it.

The solution to the security problem is more boots on the ground now. The subject came up during the joint press conference this morning, but I don't think anybody seriously thinks the neo-cons have woken up to the reality that all the rest of us have been aware of for quite some time.

Speaking at a news conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush pledged to ''finish the job we have begun'' in Iraq and both men said they would not be deterred by twin blasts that killed at least 27 people in Istanbul on Thursday.

''We could have less troops in Iraq. We could have the same number of troops in Iraq. We could have more troops in Iraq -- (whatever is) necessary to secure Iraq,'' Bush said.

A senior Bush administration official later said there were no signs U.S. troop levels would go up, stressing that Bush would be guided by his commanders on the ground and ''if anything, the discussions are in the other direction.''

"Whatever is necessary..."

The Pelosi Primary

New York filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi - who became a political celebrity during the 2000 campaign with her HBO documentary, "Journeys With George" - is again on a mission to find the next President.

"I'm looking to be with the winner," the 33-year-old Pelosi told me yesterday during a rare stopover at her Greenwich Village apartment between trips to Iowa and New Hampshire.

I can't travel with two different candidates at once," said the daughter of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). "It's not like I have minions to send out on the trail. It's just me and my digital camera. So I have to choose carefully."

Pelosi is smack-dab in the middle of a lucrative, two-year deal to make a second campaign documentary for HBO - so I suppose she's as qualified as anybody to handicap the Democratic primary race:

Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean: "He's definitely hot right now. It's like his supporters are a cult. At the Jefferson and Jackson dinner in Des Moines last weekend, it was tons of screaming kids, but they weren't from Iowa. They'd been bused in from across the Midwest, and they didn't clap for anyone else - only Dean. Afterward, there was a party at the Fort Des Moines and they acted out Dean's stump speech, waving their arms and mouthing the words, like it was 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show.' Dean was there, and at first he was smiling, but after a while he looked pretty freaked out. You have to remember that the 70-something Iowa voter is not into the screaming kids."

Retired Gen. Wesley Clark: "He seems overhandled and overmanaged."

Mass. Sen. John Kerry: "For the first time in my life, I'm feeling sorry for John Kerry."

Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt: "I would say that Gephardt is the sleeper candidate, because people underestimate the power of experience. People who live in New York are typically after what's cool, what's hot, what's next. But in Iowa, they respect experience. The people who get out in below-zero weather to vote on Caucus night are not into hipsters."

As for Pelosi's old pal President Bush, with whom she clearly hit it off during the last campaign, the filmmaker hopes he's not the winner. "If I ever had a soft spot in my heart for him, I can promise you it has grown very hard."

She's not the only one who things this primary is going to boil down to a Dean-Gehardt race.

Attention Getting

Turkey was hardly of a mind to come on board, so I'm wondering, why this, why here?

HSBC Headquarters and British Embassy Damaged
By REUTERS

ISTANBUL, Nov 20 (Reuters) - Two blasts rocked Istanbul on Thursday, killing at least five people and devastating both the HSBC Bank headquarters and British consulate in an apparent suicide attack Britain linked to Islamist militants.

More than 100 people were injured, Turkish television said.

The blasts, coinciding with a British visit by President George W. Bush, were the second such strike in Muslim Turkey in five days. Turkey's interior minister said he saw a connection with weekend attacks on two Istanbul synagogues that killed 25.

Men and women wept, nursing their wounds, and bodies lay amid a chaos of wreckage outside the towering Istanbul headquarters of HSBC, the London-based global bank. Witness accounts suggested the blasts could be suicide bombings.

Firefighters were working to put out a fire inside the 12-storey building, which was charred and black from the explosion. Twisted pieces of cars and broken glass lay across the street outside the building.

"The windows just exploded, everything exploded. I think there must be dead but I don't know the number," said one banker who worked in the HSBC building.

Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said Turkey would not bow to terror. "Everyone must know that we will not give up to terror," he said in Stockholm.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the strikes bore "all the hallmarks of the international terrorism operations practised by al Qaeda and associated organisations."

NPR supplies the answer: HSBC (my mortgage company) is a British bank out of Hong Kong. OBL never works without sending a message. This one is to the Bush/Blair talks. It says, "We haven't forgotten about you, cousins, and we can hit you anywhere."

OPEN THREAD

Rant, mourn, celebrate. It's up to you

What do they talk about?

Polly Toynbee in The Guardian:

So what do Bush and Blair talk about over their fireside bottle of mineral water? Where is this fabled meeting of minds? Once they have done whatever is to be done - or not done - on Iraq, Guantanamo and trade tariffs, once they have small-talked wives and children, what then? Here is the leader with the greatest wealth and power on Earth at his command, squandering it, abusing it, misusing it with every step he takes. The two men can hardly compare notes on pet projects and policies. It is astonishingly difficult to talk for long or with any closeness to someone whose politics are obnoxious.

In truth, whatever appearances suggest over the next two days, there is precious little shared between them beyond political destinies so fatefully linked in Iraq.

Polly nails the part of this visit that I just don't get.

The Daily Mirror today:

A secret record of the last NEC [Labour's National Executive Council] meeting showed Mr Blair saying: "Michael Howard's soft centrist language was an illusion, like the US Republicans' compassionate conservatism."

At the meeting Mr Blair faced criticism from within Labour ranks about the visit and was accused of "endorsing" Mr Bush's re-election.

One NEC member said: "Blair is privately attacking Bush for being a nasty right-winger. But in public he's his best mate. He can't have it both ways and it is creating real divisions in the party."

Tony Blair is not without challengers within the ranks of Labour, and this state visit gives aid and comfort to his competitors, chiefly Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. The two have made private deals through the years to keep Brown from challenging Blair directly, but the hugely unpopular Iraq war and Blair's relationship with the hugely unpopular Bush may be the wedge which allows Brown to gather a power center (er, centre) within Labour. I've been predicting since early summer that Blair is going to face a no-confidence vote within his own party by the end of the year. I think we'll see a Brown government by early next year.

Hypocrites

I stayed up later than I have in years last week to watch that 39-hour rant on the floor of the Senate as the Republicans threw their little tantrum about the Democrats fillibusteringg 4 of Bush's judicial nominees. The R's, of course, have never blocked a D nominee, oh, no.....

In twist, GOP blocks Bush nominee

By Geoff Earle

The Senate is blocking another of President Bush’s judicial nominees — but this time it’s Republicans and not Democrats playing the role of obstructionists. Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) last week sought unanimous consent to take up the nomination of Leon Holmes to a seat on the U.S. District Court in Arkansas. Pryor made the request after the Judiciary Committee reported Holmes’s nomination without recommendation on a party-line vote, meaning the panel took no position on whether he should be confirmed by the full Senate.

But at least four centrist Republicans expressed doubts about Holmes, based on statements culled from some of his writings. The four are Arlen Specter (Pa.), Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins (Maine), and Kay Bailey Hutchison (Texas).

Among Holmes’s judicial writings that have provoked controversy was one comment relating to a rape exception for a constitutional amendment banning abortion. He called the issue a “red herring” because “conceptions from rape occur with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in Miami.”

Specter, who sits in on the meetings in which GOP leaders plot strategies to move judicial nominations, generally opposes restrictions on abortion rights and often parts with party leaders on social issues. He is being challenged in a primary election by conservative Rep. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.).

Hutchison, noting that Senate Republicans just finished a futile marathon anti-filibuster effort to overcome Democratic opposition to six Bush nominees to federal appellate courts, said, “I will not ever stop a vote from coming to the floor. That’s what we talked about for 36 hours last week.”

Pryor, who once practiced law with Holmes, a Republican, in Little Rock, noted that he has been “languishing” on the Senate’s calendar for more than six months. Pryor said he is “perplexed” as to why Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) hasn’t scheduled a floor vote on the nomination.

Pryor's statement is vanishly ill-informed, but it's a jump to read anything ideological into it. Actually, if you are a consistent seamless garment pro-lifer, prohibitting abortion in the case of rape would be the party-line position.

Theater of the Absurd

A RIGHT ROYAL FIASCO

Nov 19 2003

By Ryan Parry

FOR the past eight weeks, I have enjoyed unfettered access throughout Buckingham Palace as one of the Royal Family’s key aides. Had I been a terrorist intent on assassinating the Queen or President George Bush, I could have done so with absolute ease. Indeed, this morning I would have been serving breakfast to key members of his government, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and US Secretary of State Colin Powell.

The Guardian corroborates:

A Buckingham Palace spokeswoman today announced a full investigation into the hiring of Parry, as urgent talks were held involving palace officials and Scotland Yard. Metropolitan police said they were "vigorously" investigating the security breach.

Scotland Yard deputy assistant commissioner Andy Trotter said: "All the agencies involved are vigorously looking at the issues ... We have been in discussion this morning about it with those involved in recruiting and vetting procedures."

What a story! Until he quit last night, he was in charge of delivering the Queen's meal trays, and laid out the chocolates and fruit baskets in the bedroom being used by the Bushes. Heads will roll over this. Funny, I haven't seen anything on CNN....

Ah. CNN International has the story.

140th Anniversary

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

Our Sources Suggest...

Josh Marshall suspects that something big is coming down today. Given that the "Bush Doctrine" in PR is "the pushback" and the stories out of London are going to be the protests, this is both predictable and understandable. The "Rove Doctrine" is "have a different story to tell." That's worked so well in Afghanistan and Iraq. Click the heels of your ruby slippers together three times and repeat after me....And pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

Put Your Clothes On

Here is the deal on "gay marriages."

Marriage, as defined in law, has never been about religious rites or sacraments. Sure, there have always been rites and sacraments, but they've always stood to legitimate what is basically a contractual relationship. We don't go to church when we close on a house, but maybe we should, and that's a separate argument. As a spiritual director, I'm sometimes asked to do "house blessings" for people, and that's a good thing. When we marry, we are telling another party from whom we want something, and they have something to trade, "here is what I'm going to be obligated to, here is what you are going to be obligated to, here is where we are going to find mutual benefit and here is how we are going to get out of this agreement if it doesn't work out." In a nutshell, that's marital law in most of the states.

Until the end of chattel slavery as marriage, a recent innovation, women were property to be traded for advantages like having heirs. If you live in a society where having property and the distribution of it after your death is important, you'll love the debate on the Massachussetts gay marriage law. This is a proxy fight about who is in charge. It's not about morality, it is about power. And the other side doesn't want to have this conversation because it is all about white, straight men in power and it is not politically correct. Get a clue, left, white straight men are going to be in power forever until we change the paradigm.

The gay model of marriage, a partnership of two equally responsible, equally obligated adults scares the crap out of conservatives who still see marriage as a one-up/one-down relationship, the one they grew up with, with mommies and daddies who look just their own.

My gay and lesbian friends have long-term partnerships which form and break up at about the same rate as my straight friends. Mommies stopped wearing shirtwaists and having the martini waiting when daddy came home about 40 years ago. Daddy stopped being a remote figure who "went to work and came home to relieve the pressures of his day" a little more recently, but all of us stopped being this cartoon as recently as our latest trip to the grocery. Daddy was trying to deal with his cell phone in Bengali while his utterly adorable 8 year old was giving him the grocery list, in English. I stood still to listen for a moment. Her English was impeccable, his heavily accented, and I thought, Melanie, you've just been handed the "immigrant moment", the one where things change and no one knows it.

Christ, people, we've bought into a commercial culture which is so empty that we have to walk around the grocery talking on the phone in order to find any meaning. The customer in the soda aisle was talking about the next Jets game. What there was about this conversation that couldn't wait for some private space baffles me.

But that's where we are in the culture: no bar between public space and private space.

It's sort of like the low rise jeans phenomenon: too much information. Really, I don't need to see that much of you, your pubic bones are lovely, but you are shouting and I wish you'd shut the hell up.

OPEN THREAD

Bloggy goodness.

Of Drugs and Aardvarks

Medicare Monstrosity

E.J. Dionne gets off the line of the week:

They went in to design a prescription drug benefit for seniors and came out with an aardvark.

Then E.J. goes off on a little excursis about how he can't understand why anybody thinks this patched together bill is a good idea, but if you read the final grafs, we see that E.J. does, after all, understand what this is all about:

The virtue of Medicare is that it creates a large risk pool. The wealthy and the healthy are in the same boat as the poorer and the sicker. Busting up Medicare's risk pool would almost certainly raise costs to poorer and sicker seniors, as insurance companies make more money insuring healthy people than sick ones. It would take an enormous amount of regulation to prevent this sort of "cherry-picking."

Now, what does any of this have to do with a prescription drug benefit? Good question. If this were only about providing a limited prescription drug benefit, Congress could have debated the best ways to cut up the $400 billion it has allocated for this purpose. The amount covers a little more than a fifth of seniors' drug costs. Logically, this limited sum would have been best used to help the poorest seniors who are not now covered by Medicaid, and the sickest -- those whose drug costs are especially high.

Instead, Republican negotiators, joined by Democratic Sens. John Breaux and Max Baucus, went behind closed doors and decided to use the public's demand for drug coverage as an opening wedge to change Medicare. The shame of it is that Republicans and Democrats in the Senate had already reached a real compromise. The bipartisan proposal, crafted in cooperation with Sen. Ted Kennedy, was inadequate. Yet it was better than this bill. It passed the Senate overwhelmingly because it left the larger Medicare issues open for real debate later.

But House conservatives weren't willing to go that far. They want medical savings accounts, a tax cut for the wealthy in disguise, and they insisted on experiments with privatization

But if privatization is such a good idea, why do the private insurance companies need such big subsidies to enter the Medicare market? The bill includes $12 billion for what Kennedy calls a "slush fund" to subsidize the private insurers. That's not capitalism or competition. It's corporate welfare.

This perversion of one of the most basic threads of our social safety net must be stopped. The pundits have been all over the place with this issue today, some calling for the passage of the bill on the "don't sacrifice the good on the altar of the perfect" meme. This bill is nothing more than using prescription drugs as a wedge issue to feed greater disparity in the care of the younger and weller against the older and sicker. I went to the AARP message boards today - they've endorsed the bill - and the membership is calling for the mass resignation of the entire board of trustees. What the AARP and some of the pundits don't understand is that this bill doesn't represent an incremental improvement in benefits, but rather a gutting of the basic provisions of Medicare in exchange for a small improvement in benefits for the rich.

The Gift of Blog

Melanie Goux's weblog is updated on Mondays. Go over (the link is over on the right) and read this week's entry, which is about how this Bump in the Beltway came into being.

I participated in the WaPo's online discussion of blogging yesterday. One of the gripes of the Post's Book World writer, Jennifer Howard, is that bloggers are too self-referential, so you won't find me doing this very often because I agree with her. But, just this once, I think you should get to know the benefactress of this blog and understand exactly what a big deal it is. And if you read around her archives, you'll know her as well as I do: up until last Thursday, when she offered me this blog, our relationship had consisted of exchanging perhaps 2 emails when I was still blogging at DailyKos. Maybe I'll make it a rule that I get to be a little in-bred once every other Tuesday.

More Bad Bugs

I heard a story on Morning Edition this morning about a big outbreak of hepatitis A in Pennsylvania over the last few weeks. Here's the story from the NYT this morning:

Liver failure brought on by hepatitis A, a usually nonfatal viral infection, killed Mr. Cook on Nov. 7. He became the first person to die in what federal health officials say is the biggest food-borne outbreak of hepatitis A in the United States.

Two others have died since then and more than 500 people have become infected. Health officials are looking at similar but smaller outbreaks in Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina and Ohio to see if they are related.

State officials in Pennsylvania and federal officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration are trying to pin down the source of the infection that has struck Beaver County, which includes a string of working-class towns along the Ohio River 20 miles northwest of Pittsburgh.

"We have not identified any specific food source," Dr. Calvin B. Johnson, secretary of the Pennsylvania Health Department, said at a news conference here on Monday. "We hope to get lab results soon that will identify whether it came from a food source" rather than being passed from a person infected with the virus, which is the most common method of transmission.

The NPR story reported that the usual death rate for HepA is three per thousand, so three per 500 sounded a little alarming. Bump reader TAK is an epidemiologist, so I wrote and asked for an opinion about this outbreak:

I only know what I read about this outbreak in
the NY Times. (Infectious disease is not my area - guns and car crashes
are) I think the whole outbreak is troubling - we have increased our
risk of infectious diseases by astronomical numbers with many cultural
practices - including transporting agricultural products far beyond
their communities of origin, increased exposure to food prepared by
many, many different people, underfunding basic public health practices
like restaurant inspections, food inspections, etc. (See - this is what
epidemiologists do....they say they don't know too much and then proceed
to be opinionated anyway).

So I started out thinking this was a science/health story, but it turns out that it's a political story. This has some pretty serious implications: both our food supply safety and our public health infrastructure are in sad shape due to underfunding over decades. In a world where scary bugs (like Mad Cow) and the food supply overlap, where we worry about the danger of Chem/Bio weapons, where we are facing a particularly scary flu season (and the flu vaccine this year doesn't include protection against the severe strain that surfaced this fall,) and epidemiologists are waiting around for the next SARS outbreak, starving the government so Grover Norquist can drown it in a bathtub doesn't seem like such a great idea.

Here's a link to the Center for Disease Control's Advisory on the HepA outbreak.

(Enjoy the opera, TAK!)

UPDATE: I "got the clue" on this topic a few years back when I read NYT science reporter Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague. It arrived from Amazon on one of the hottest July weekends during a classically miserable Washington summer. I had the airconditioning set to about 80 degrees to save money. I couldn't put the book down, and spent the entire weekend chilled. WMDs are the least of our worries, super bugs are more likely to get us first.

Union Made

Transport strike ends after 35 days

LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- The union representing striking transit workers called an end to their 35-day walkout on Monday after the two sides in the labor dispute agreed to submit their disagreement over health benefits to arbitration.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who also heads the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board, said the 2,000 striking mechanics, as well as bus drivers and other transit workers who had refused to cross picket lines, would begin returning to work on Tuesday.

He said the arbitration agreement, reached Sunday night and approved by the full County Board of Supervisors on Monday, would restore full bus and train service to the second-largest U.S. city by the end of the week.

The strike, which began Oct. 14, has stranded more than 400,000 riders who relied on the county's network of buses, subways and trains to get to work, school and elsewhere, snarling the area's already congested roads and freeways.

Neil Silver, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1277, called the strike "a very sad thing that had to happen."

"As I have said on strikes, there are no winners and no losers. Everybody loses," Silver told reporters.

Pardon my french but Horsesh**. News coverage of labor issues in this country stinks, and this CNN story is no exception. You have to read Nathan Newman to find out what is really going on. When a union decides to take a strike, it is for strategic reasons that typically have to do not with the current negotiation but for the next one and the one after that. I led four of these things in the '90's, we took weeks and weeks of lost wages in order to set up the conditions under which we'd be negotiating in 8 or 10 years' time. For the most part, while painful, the strikes and lockouts did the job.

This also means that our blogcolleague Art Silber can get to work.

Stormy Weather

I start the morning with NPR on the radio after a period of silence and
this. (Link fixed.) Anyway, I just got the weather report for today and we are told to expect thunderstorms tonight and tomorrow.

I bring this up because in this part of the world we've got a Third World electrical system. If there are two clouds in the sky, there's a good chance the power will go out for anywhere between 2 hours and 2 days. If the Bump falls silent, it won't be because of lack of interest, it'll mean the power is out.

Silence=Respect

Thousands of Italians in Tribute to the 19 Lost
By Frank Bruni

Published: November 18, 2003
ROME, Nov. 17 — The sight was extraordinary, but less so than the sound, or rather the lack of it. Although thousands upon thousands of people filled one of this city's most chaotic squares during the evening rush hour on Monday, the decibel level seldom rose above a whisper's.

Silence was just one way in which those people sought to show their respect for 19 Italians killed in a suicide bombing in Iraq last week. Another was to wait two to three hours, in the drizzle and dark, for a chance to walk past the victims' coffins, arrayed inside a palace that towers over the square, Piazza Venezia.

The line went on and on, just like Italy's mourning.

We've lost over 400 dead and thousands wounded. We never see the coffins.

Where are our silent mobs?

hat tip Atrios

OPEN THREAD

Use the F word sparingly, please. Learn a wider vocubulary. Please.

Holy Cow!!

This is nothing short of amazing.

The EU is threatening a politically crafty trade war over Bushco's steel tarriffs, which are already the single worst political decision Karl Rove has committed so far. The EU war strategy is to place prohibitive tarriffs on American products produced in states which barely went Bush in the last election, which you have to admit is pretty clever.

But now I have to wonder if the Rove machine has suffered a complete political breakdown. This is incredible:

US firms told 'take UK jobs home'
Robert Lea, Evening Standard
17 November 2003

GEORGE Bush's administration has called on US companies in Britain to relocate jobs to America in an astonishing move that could trigger a major trade war.

US-based multinationals have been told they will receive compensation from American trade authorities if they cancel contracts in Britain and take jobs home, according to CBI director-general Digby Jones.

The allegations come only a day before Bush arrives in London for his controversial State visit and escalate the storm of protest he has already caused by slapping big protectionist tariffs on European steel imports.

Speaking at the CBI's annual conference in Birmingham, Jones said: 'Three chief executives of American companies investing in Britain have told me to my face that they have been told to close down, bring their stuff home and make it in the US.'

It's safe to say that the Bush-Blair meeting is going to be the news this week. The protests have already started.

Terrorism and Your 401(k)

AlQaeda Threats Unnerve World Markets
Mon November 17, 2003 11:32 AM ET

By Miral Fahmy

DUBAI (Reuters) - Al Qaeda struck fear into the world's biggest financial markets on Monday after a purported statement from the militant group vowed more suicide bombings against the United States and its European and Asian allies.

European shares were mired in the red on Monday afternoon, after Tokyo stocks fell to their lowest level since August -- partially due to weekend bombings in Turkey and clashes in Iraq.

In New York, shares sagged in early morning trade, with Nasdaq falling more than one percent as concerns over more deadly attacks rippled across the globe.
Gold was approaching levels not seen since 1996 on a weakening dollar and security fears.

at this hour: Dow off 120, Nasdaq down 30, S&P; sinks 11

Economic terrorism?

Bring 'em On

BUSH PULLS OUT OF SPEECH TO PARLIAMENT
Nov 17 2003
By Bob Roberts, Political Correspondent

GEORGE Bush was last night branded chicken for scrapping his speech to Parliament because he feared being heckled by anti-war MPs. The US president planned to give a joint address to the Commons and Lords during his state visit to Britain. But senior White House adviser Dr Harlan Ullman said: "They would have loved to do it because it would have been a great photo-opportunity. "But they were fearful it would to turn into a spectacle with Labour backbenchers walking out."

***snip***

The only speech Mr Bush, who will stay with the Queen at Buckingham Palace, is now due to give will be to an "invited audience" at the Banqueting House in Whitehall.
Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn said: "This is yet another slight on this country by the president of the USA.

"The least he could do is subject himself to questions from MPs."

Right. The President who gives press conferences only in months with two full moons is going to subject himself to the kind of mauling Tony Blair receives at Prime Minister's Question Time every week? Please. Don't make me laugh.

Between the extraordinary security demands the White House has placed on the Brits, the insulation Bush will receive from the British public (and Parliament) and now this, I think we can safely say that President Bring 'em On is a coward.

And if you think the British tab press is going to ignore that, you'd be wrong. Bush is going to be savaged in the British press and I imagine that'll play well on this side of the pond.

Our Long National Nightmare

I'm not an historian, but I've been a pretty careful student of the political and religious movements that have been a part of my lifetime. The liberalism of the hopeful and angry 1960s was spent by the time of the Carter administration. The United States has never been a "liberal democracy" in the sense that the United Kingdom and its Commonwealth or most of post-war Western Europe is. Liberalism (in both its classical and Modern senses) in the US has awakened for brief and quite contained epochs, usually in response to some sort of historical emergency, like the Civil War or the Great Depression.

We are living in such an emergency now and liberalism is showing signs of awakening from its slumber.

Clergy Group to Counter Conservatives
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON

Published: November 17, 2003

WASHINGTON, Nov. 14 — In an effort to counter the influence of conservative Christian organizations, a coalition of moderate and liberal religious leaders is starting a political advocacy organization to mobilize voters in opposition to Bush administration policies.

The nonprofit organization, the Clergy Leadership Network, plans to formally announce its formation on Friday and will operate from an expressly religious, expressly partisan point of view. The group cannot, under Internal Revenue Service guidelines, endorse political candidates, and it will have no official ties to the Democratic Party.

***snip***

Jenny Backus, a Democratic consultant working with the new group, said: "There's been a concerted effort by Christian conservatives to question the faith of people who disagree with their positions in the same way that they question their patriotism. The Clergy Leadership Network will now be the amen corner for people of faith who express disagreement with the administration and the Christian Right."

***snip***

John Green, a political scientist and director of the Bliss Institute, a research center for the study of grass-roots politics based at the University of Akron, said there were more practical reasons for an organization like the Clergy Leadership Network to avoid divisive issues.

"In many people's minds the words `conservative' and `liberal' are firmly linked with positions on lifestyle issues," Mr. Green said. "Within such a diverse coalition, these clergy undoubtedly have congregations with different views on gay rights and abortion. But they may be able to find common ground on issues like war and peace, social welfare and the need for jobs."

The language of liberalism has grown lazy and imprecise through decades of inattention. "Lifestyle issues" are code words for race, class and sexual orientation. A "lifestyle choice" is deciding to put a pool in the backyard and deal with all of the associated costs, and it isn't a choice most of us ever get to make. A "lifestyle choice" is a weekend house in the mountains/at the beach/in the city. Hey, nice to know you. Can I spend Labor Day Weekend with you? I'm straight, white, single, female and poor. Somebody tell me which of these are "lifestyle choices."

Decades of class warfare have forced the language of liberalism into such a defensive posture that it is left with such imprecise and deceptive constructions as "lifestyle issues" with which to describe itself. The fact of the matter is that most working stiffs, no more than a paycheck or two away from the street, don't have choices. We don't have "lifestyles." We have lives.

OPEN THREAD

As a general rule, there will be an open thread every night. This is the place for you to talk about whatever you want. I say "general rule" because my brief exposure to the blogworld means that life intrudes, no matter what your intentions are.

That said, while Mel and I are fine-tuning this site, I'm probably going to have some questions for you. You have to educate us about how you want this site to work. You don't have to answer the question, you can move on to whatever you want to say.

The posts I put up today each took a lot of time to research, which means that I didn't have as much time to work on the blogroll as I would have liked, but it got me thinking.

The blogroll will be my daily reads. The list is long (no, I don't have a life and thank you for asking) and coding this in HTML is mind-numbingly boring, so let's just say that I wasn't highly motivated, particularly when I started to alphabetize. Yawn. And I'm fighting the cold from hell. Today was day 3, which is usually the worst for me, and I'm beginning to think that death by sneezing IS possible. Even the cats were looking at me funny. My death is a threat to the can opener.

Ennaway, fiddling with the blogroll got me thinking about you. What are some of the sites you can't do without on a daily basis? I'll add some of the consensus picks to the list. If you have a site to add to the list and can code the HTML with the name, you get extra points. Expand my vision. I want to know what you are reading.

And thanks for a great opening weekend. The community is beginning to form.

Politics and Religion

Amy Sullivan has a feature article today in the Inky.

Too many Democrats mistakenly argue that the only way to attract religious voters is to "pander" - and they refuse to change their platform simply to win a few votes. What they don't realize is that they already support policies that draw on the values shared by many religious communities. They just have yet to make the connection. Churches - including many evangelical denominations - led the effort to oppose war last spring. The Evangelical Environmental Movement launched the "What Would Jesus Drive?" campaign to promote fuel-efficient cars and reduce pollution. There are any number of other issues, from fighting offensive spam e-mail to expanding national service, that have a moral component, are important to voters, and are already championed by Democrats....

Silent Democrats also unwittingly enable the Bush administration's strategy of using religious rhetoric to distract attention from policies that do not at all match the concerns of the faithful. The President's catchphrase for the war on terrorism - "If you're not with us, you're against us" - is very similar to a verse from the Gospel of Mark, with one important distinction. Jesus says, "Those who are not against you are with you." That's an entirely different perspective - and it's one that could be marshaled in defense of multilateralism by Democrats who know their Scripture.

But Democrats don't need to start memorizing Bible verses. They don't need to season their speeches with lines from gospel hymns. Disaffected religious moderates who share the values of social justice, concern for the earth, and economic equality aren't looking for a tent revival at the next Democratic convention or potlucks at campaign rallies. They're just looking for a little respect.

I got into more than one argument about this over at That Other Place. The paragraphs I selected from Amy's article hit the nails exactly on the head. It's not "pandering" to go to any group, explain your positions and ask for their votes. Moderate to liberal Christians don't appreciate being lumped into the same group as Falwell fanatics. Moderate to liberal Christians, Jews, Muslims, Bahais or whatever place a very high value on the social justice precepts of the Democratic party platform. Amy gets it exactly right in the last line: we don't expect or need our candidates to hold our theology, just to respect that we have a theology and it is the underpinning of our political positions.

Amy is also a new neighbor of mine. Welcome to Washington, Amy!

The Special Relationship II

Terrific (and scathing) opinion piece in the Observer today previewing W's state visit to London next week.

With more than 60,000 protesters expected, Thursday's protest will be led by Americans opposed to both the war and the US president, march under the banner 'Proud of My Country, Shamed By My President'. The Americans will march alongside Vietnam veteran and peace activist Ron Kovic, whose life became the subject of the Oliver Stone film Born on the Fourth of July.

Kovic, who was paralysed in Vietnam in 1968 while serving as a US Marine, said he was proud to return as a guest of the peace movement 30 years later.

'I see myself as an ambassador of the American peace movement to share my heartfelt thanks with the courageous British citizens who have rightly opposed this war. Nothing is more tyrannical than fighting a pre-emptive war that should never have been fought in the first place.'

Bush may not see any of them. He will climb aboard Air Force One after being seen off by the Queen. The airborne White House will climb into the skies above London, flanked by US jets. The visit will be over. Only history can judge whether the talks between President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair have made the world a safer place.

The article goes into great detail about the imperial security demands made on the Brits by the White House, including diplomatic immunity for snipers if they shoot and kill a protester and the deployment of a tank mounted weapon called a "mini-gun" which sounds like a truly frightening weapon capable of slicing through buildings. The Brits resisted the most outrageous demands. Bushco wanted to shut down the city, close the tube and create a cordon sanitaire around the president's traveling party. It's going to be a mess. Contrast the imperial Bush approach to state visits with Bill Clinton's last visit to the UK:

He dropped into the Malt House pub for a pint of Greenalls, not out of any sense of nostalgia for the English beer of his student days, but because it promoted an image of him back home as an 'ordinary Joe'. Bush is unlikely to have any such opportunity. Protesters are pledging to dog his every carefully orchestrated step

The British people are going to resent being treated like the enemy, and Londoners are going to hate having their city invaded by an occupying power. The protests are going to be huge. The overweening arrogance demonstrated by the White House in the planning for this trip has the potential to blow up in Bush's face. It's always the arrogance that comes back to bite him.

UPDATE: I've decided that the "value added" that bloggers provide is in playing up significant detail that might otherwise get lost in the torrent of information that passes in front of our eyes each day. Here's another detail from the a story in the Independent on Sunday:

My husband died in vain
What one British widow will tell Mr Bush this week
By Severin Carrell in London and Andrew Buncombe in Washington

16 November 2003
President George Bush will be accused this week of lying about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in a face-to-face meeting with the families of British soldiers killed in the war, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

Unmentioned in the Independent story is the fact that Bush has barely met with any of the families of the American dead. The Independent is, however, pointing out the fact that this has the potential to be a PR disaster for Bush. This is a much less optimistic article than the one in the Observer, and captures the mood of the ordinary Londoner better.

Electoral Strategy

A Route for 2004 That Doesn't Go Through Dixie

A decade ago, Democratic strategist Paul Tully wondered if his party should abandon the South and build a national majority elsewhere. No less than Tully's sudden and tragic death during the 1992 campaign, Clinton's victory that year muted this sentiment.

Maybe Tully's ghost is channeling to Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager. Trippi likes to remind reporters that winning all the Gore states plus New Hampshire would put Dean in the White House. Because the Bush states gained seven electoral votes as a result of the 2000 Census, Trippi's math is a bit off -- in 2004, that combination only yields 264 electors, six shy of the magical 270 threshold.

But Trippi has the right idea. If the Democrats can hold the Gore states -- a big "if," but they have to start somewhere -- plus capture newly competitive Arizona's 10 electors, that's exactly 270. A non-Southern strategy isn't the only path back to the Oval Office. But it may be the shortest.

The point that Prof. Thomas Schaller is making here applies equally well to all of the Democratic campaigns, Dean/Trippi is a placeholder. The shifting demographics of the "New Southwest" puts those states into play for the Democrats next year, particularly if they can get out the Hispanic vote. Schaller is making the case for simply ignoring the South and using scarce resources in other states which are more "gettable."

Dean and Edwards have both raised the issue that poor Southern whites are voting against their own economic self-interest when they vote Republican. Fine. There are complex cultural reasons which have been incubated by the Republican "Southern Strategy" which will take a generation of re-education to change, and while I think our candidates should do some of that re-education, making it into the centerpiece of a campaign strategy is unnecessary. Attitudes get changed at the local level and the local party in much of the South is simply listless. Here in Virginia we had a lege election earlier this month and many seats ran uncontested. We need a top of the ticket which gets people enthused about party politics at the local level. We need to nurture potential candidates for local and state elections. The Republican right wing has been packing local parties and fronting candidates for 20 years, that's how they took over the party. We need do something similar from the center-left.

Some Good News for Ds

Kathleen Blanco Wins Louisiana Gov. Race

White Male Monopoly on Governor's Office Will End
By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Staff Writer
NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 15 -- Lt. Gov. Kathleen Blanco, a Cajun grandmother and veteran Democrat, won a tightly contested election for Louisiana's governor Saturday, breaking a 130-year lock by white males on the job and snapping a string of Republican gubernatorial victories this fall.

She defeated Republican Bobby Jindal, a brown-skinned 32-year-old son of immigrants from India whose energetic campaign and credentials as a wunderkind technocrat and committed conservative lifted him from obscurity to the cusp of victory in his first race for public office.

This one came down to the wire and Blanco's victory was a come from behind, last minute effort. As the story makes clear, one of the things about this race which makes it newsworthy is that that it was clean. That's not always the case in Louisiana. It's also significant that a woman won in the Deep South. Any Louisiana readers who can comment on the election? Louisiana politics are a thing unto themselves.

What's Shabbat?

I'll be doing politics and religion every so often at this site, some of you have asked for it.

Today is the Christian Sabbath, yesterday was the Jewish one, on Friday, the Muslims had their weekly day of prayer. On the Sabbath, I conduct no commerce, it's my no-shopping day, and I have to put a little thought into preparing for it by stocking up.

For me, as for the Jews and Muslims I know, it is a day to get out of the commercial culture and spend time with my God and the people I love. I'll be here at the Bump, but a little less active as I check in with family and friends and make a meal that's a little nicer than what I make on weekdays. On Sundays, you will find me less aggressively partisan, more reflective and willing to share my recipes. There will be no Friday Cat Blogging at the Bump, Rosie and Eddie won't sit still for that, but on Sundays the tone will change.

I'm going to send you to a colleague in Minnesota. Post-Modern Pilgrim, a Moravian minister in Minnesota (what? I thought that the Moravians were in Pennsylvania and North Carolina? The Lutherans run things in Minnesota) is wondering about fasting and invites your comments on the subject. Sundays are not a fast day for me, rather a feast day. Teresa of Avila, the Spanish Carmelite mystic, reflected late in her life on her own years of extreme self-denial with the pithy phrase, "There is a time for penance, and there is a time for pheasant."

Since I don't shoot the birds anymore, tonight we're featuring roast chicken stuffed with rosemary, garlic and lemons, an herby risotta, and a salad of wild field greens. This day, I wish for you the love of family and friends and a chance to break bread with them. May peace be with you.

OPEN THREAD

For you......

And I'd like some feedback. MT is a very flexible format for a blog. Mel tells me that the template, the design, of the site we chose is easy to read on older monitors (like mine) but the white-on-black is harder to read on newer monitors. It's easy to change the design. Anybody got strong feelings one way or the other?

Post script: my gratitude to Mel Goux knows no bounds, of course. If you are pleased with what she's done for us, scroll down to the very first post and tell her in comments.

Mirror Wars

Attacks in Afghanistan Are on the Rise

Gen. Abizaid Calls Combat Situation 'Every Bit as Difficult' as in Iraq
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 15, 2003; Page A16
.......
With most public attention focused on the growing insurgence in Iraq, Afghanistan is also heating up. In contrast to President Bush's Veterans Day declaration that "in Afghanistan we're helping to build a free and stable democracy as we continue to track down and destroy Taliban and al Qaeda forces," the U.S. intelligence community recently reported stepped-up activities by those forces.

In response, the Americans have mounted a six-day operation aimed at al Qaeda in the mountains along the Pakistani border. "We've taken casualties there," Abizaid said, adding: "We will continue to take casualties there, yet we take the fight to the enemy day after day." Since the United States first began operations in Afghanistan in October 2001, 35 Americans have died from hostile fire, 11 since August, according to the Associated Press.

With most public attention focused on the growing insurgence in Iraq, Afghanistan is also heating up. In contrast to President Bush's Veterans Day declaration that "in Afghanistan we're helping to build a free and stable democracy as we continue to track down and destroy Taliban and al Qaeda forces," the U.S. intelligence community recently reported stepped-up activities by those forces.

In response, the Americans have mounted a six-day operation aimed at al Qaeda in the mountains along the Pakistani border. "We've taken casualties there," Abizaid said, adding: "We will continue to take casualties there, yet we take the fight to the enemy day after day." Since the United States first began operations in Afghanistan in October 2001, 35 Americans have died from hostile fire, 11 since August, according to the Associated Press.

Milt Bearden was the CIA agent who ran the Afghan insurgents during the Soviet war and has some perspective on what is happening right now in both Afghanistan and Iraq:

My own experience in war has largely been on the side of insurgents. I served as the Central Intelligence Agency's quartermaster and political agent to the Afghan resistance against the Soviet occupation from 1986 until the Soviets left in 1989.

From my perspective, the Iraqi resistance has taken a page from a sophisticated insurgency playbook in their confrontations with the American-led coalition.

The insurgents' strategy could have been crafted by Sun Tzu, the Chinese military tactician, who more than 2,500 years ago wrote, in "The Art of War," that the highest realization of warfare is to attack the enemy's strategy.

What this tells me is that we are facing identical wars in very different terrains and we have in neither place sufficient force to be able to contain it. The Afghans succeeded in tossing the Soviets out with these tactics, and the Soviets were using a whole lot bigger force than the combined US/NATO coalition in Afghanistan. I'll try to do a piece on "Fourth Generation" or "Assymetrical Warfare" tomorrow. It is a complicated topic.

The irony, of course, is that the Iraqis are emulating the Afghans who are doing what we taught them to do.

Good Writing

One of the things I hope to do with this blog is to promote some of the genuinely superior writing and thinking which is available for the cost of a dial-up here in the blogosphere. My blogroll (yeah, yeah, maybe by tomorrow) will give you links to some of my favorite places, but when I find something that particularly moves or surpises me, it'll get a feature here on the front page.

As I look around me this afternoon, it's clear that my "office" looks a lot like The World According to Chuck's.

Tuesday, November 11, 2003

The Leader Of The Band

I knew there was a metaphor around here somewhere.

I've been looking for it lately, sensing it skulking around. I even spent three hours cleaning the garage on Sunday, finding two screwdrivers and six pairs of work gloves, but no answers.

It was in my office, as it turns out, but then everything is. My office is a metaphor all by itself, an abstract schematic of the inside of my head, which is a good way to scare people.

Quick, tell me some other good ways. In my peripheral vision, I can see two cookbooks, a phone book, "Dakota" by Kathleen Norris and "The Language of Life" by Bill Moyers, none of which I've picked up in a long time. There are dirty dishes and two years' worth of newspapers that I have to file, six shirts, three NetFlix mailers, 18 empty cans of Diet Rite, and a bottle of transmission fluid. All of this has meaning.

But I was looking for something specific. Something that would explain what's going on, why and what I feel and how it all fits and makes sense....

Click on the link to read the rest, then come back here and tell us about some of your favorite writers that you've met here in the blogspace.

The "Special Relationship"

UK on second highest terror alert
Previous alerts have led to roadside checks by police

Britain's security services have been put on their second highest state of alert amid intelligence of a possible al-Qaeda attack, the BBC has learned.

The internal "severe general" alert is said to be unconnected to US President Bush's forthcoming UK visit.
It follows warnings about plans by al-Qaeda supporters from North Africa.

The alert means security will be extra tight around potential targets. Sources say no attack is imminent, and there is no intelligence of a specific target.

'Rare'

The warning comes as police plan an "unprecedented" security operation for US President Bush's state visit to the UK next week.

The internal alerts are for the security services only, including the police, the army, MI6 and MI5, and not usually made public.

Right. This has nothing to do with Bush's triumphal entry into London.

One of the many reasons that I'm grateful to Mel Goux for giving me this site at this particular moment in time is that my gut tells me that this trip to England is going to be the beginning of a set of disasters for W. With or without help from Al Qaeda, London is going to explode next week. Bush hatred is not limited to Americans. In fact, it is more common abroad than it is at home. If Bush were really a "friend" of Tony Blair's, he'd cancel this trip, which will serve to focus the British public's anger at Blair. Tony is already within a breath of losing his grip on 10 Downing Street, this visit is not going to be helpful for him.

Inside Baseball

I just heard Scott Simon on NPR's Weekend Edition do a fairly dismissive story about blogs, and then I open the WaPo website and find this story, which will be in my dead tree edition tomorrow.

Outlook: The Thing About Blogs
Jennifer Howard

Washington Post Book World Contributing Editor
Monday, November 17, 2003; 2:00 p.m ET

They were supposed to be the ultimate outsider activity, a way for smart kids armed with a computer and an opinion to make their voices heard on matters of the day, even if they didn't have a job at the New York Times or CBS. Instead, blogs have become just another insider's game, writes The Post's Jennifer Howard in her Sunday Outlook piece. Bloggers constantly pat each other on the back while routinely pasting their chosen whipping boys and girls -- usually establishment-media types (whose jobs the bloggers perhaps secretly covet?). Bloggers' idiosyncratic, brash, take-no-prisoners approach to commentary can be refreshing and insightful, but all the cronyism and negativity is burning this reader out.

Howard will be online Monday, Nov. 17 at 2 p.m. ET to discuss her article and the blogging phenomenon.

Submit your questions and comments before or during the discussion.

Howard is a contributing editor to The Washington Post Book World.

Editor's Note: washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online

I'll probably show up for this. Anybody care to join me?

Clearly, I'm not burned out on blogs. I can't believe how much I've learned since I discovered the blogosphere 18 months ago or so. I gratefully sit at the feet of Juan Cole every morning. I've learned about the law, economics and a host of other disciplines about which I never knew much before.

Sure, there is a ton of personal opinion and commentary kicking around the blogosphere, but this is not news. What there also is: a wealth of information freely offered by experts in every possible discipline. I'm a smarter consumer and a better educated voter because of the blogosphere, and I'm damn grateful for those who take the time to put their expertise on their blogs.

Equal Opportunity Terror

At Least 16 Killed in Blasts Near Istanbul Synagogues

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: November 15, 2003

Associated Press
Associated Press/CHA via APT
Filed at 7:04 a.m. ET

ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP) -- Car bombs exploded outside two synagogues in Istanbul at almost the same time during Sabbath prayers on Saturday, killing at least 16 people and wounding more than 140, the interior minister said.

One car bomb detonated near the Neve Shalom synagogue, the city's largest. The other severely damaged the Beth Israel Synagogue in the affluent district of Sisli, three miles away.

Interior Minister Abdulkadir Aksu said 16 people were killed and 146 were wounded. Aksu had earlier said 23 people were killed. He did not explain the discrepancy.

Aksu said the police were investigating whether the attacks were a suicide bombing, or if the bombs were on timers or detonated by a remote control.

The explosions happened during morning Sabbath prayers.

Television footage showed medical teams carrying away several people, some with bloodied or charred faces. Private NTV television showed the twisted wreckage of a car and a huge crater in front of the Neve Shalom.

I guess this is part of Bush's plan to bring democracy to the ME: equal opportunity suicide bombers. Sounds like a quota system to me.

Put Your Outrage Meter Back on Your Toolbar

This from the Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau home page:

House, Senate Republicans agree on energy bill
By Seth Borenstein and Sumana Chatterjee
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Congressional leaders on Friday forged a national energy bill that contains tens of billions of dollars worth of tax breaks and subsidies to oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries while emphasizing production over conservation.

A cornerstone of President Bush's energy policy - the controversial drilling for oil in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - was eliminated because of a lack of support in the Senate. Also missing is the oil industry's desire to test for oil and natural gas along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

Details of the legislation remain under wraps to all but a handful of Republican lawmakers and their aides, who promised to make it public Saturday afternoon. Those who wrote the bill, however, acknowledge that the details may not look good.

"We know that as soon as you start reading the language, we're duck soup," said Senate Energy Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., one of the two major authors.

A note to our New Mexico readers: maybe you'll want to ditch this guy? Work with the DNC to find a worthy candidate in the next senatorial election.

Welcome to the Bump

Gentle Readers,

It's been a pretty hectic 48 hours. Melanie Goux offered me this space on Thursday morning, configured it last night, and here we are. There is still quite a bit of housekeeping to do (the blogroll will come later this weekend) but the day's news pages beckon, there is so much to do to take down the empire of W before it is too late.

This will be an interactive site. I value community, my email and comments boards will always be open to you. I have strong opinions about things, but like a good argument. Mel Goux gave me this site so that we could talk about what animates us, what gives us life and breath, right here. I'm learning Movable Type as we speak, and it will probably be a day or two before I get the details down. Please be patient as I learn my way around.

We'll get to today's news directly, but before we do, let's talk about this:

When we invaded Iraq last spring, Karl Rove gave a vote in the next election to the Sunnis, the Kurds and the Shi'a. It appears that he thought this would be a "cakewalk," an electoral tool for the president. The shallow thinkers at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the neo-cons at the Pentagon hadn't thought about dead, wounded and angry soldiers. From today's Stars and Stripes:

GAO report: Some Army troops unpaid for weeks, denied medical care

Army National Guard soldiers activated to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan are plagued with pay-and-benefits problems and even denial of medical care to those wounded, auditors reported. Investigators from the General Accounting Office, Congress’ investigative arm, tracked Guardsmen who weren’t paid in months, were told to repay debts they hadn’t incurred or told they didn’t qualify for medical care, according to a report released Thursday titled “Military Pay: Army National Guard Personnel Mobilized to Active Duty Experienced Significant Pay Problems.”

Is it my imagination, or are the military just the Hired Help?

The Dems have never had a constituency in the Armed Services, but for the next election, they are going to have to learn to speak to the soldiers, sailors, airmen and women and Coast Guarders who have put their butts on the line for the Constitution and have found themselves marginalized by the W administration. That's just one of the new populations the Dems will have to learn to address in order to win.

Just a Bump

Hello and welcome back.

This is Just a Bump in the Beltway, and a gift from Melanie Goux.

We've got a year to beat George Bush, and this is one of the places where we are going to learn how to do it.

Mel Goux set this up for me and it will take us another couple of days to finish the blogroll and so forth. Please be patient for the moment. Your ideas will always be a part of this page, however. This is a community.

The coffee pot is always on at this Bump in the Beltway.

The gift, take two

The first incarnation of this site was as a 15th anniversary gift to my dear husband (the airline brat), in an attempt to share an experience I’ve very much enjoyed over the past three years or so. But try as I might, I could never convince him of the fun and pleasure to be found in a simple blog. And try as he might, he never felt the need to share his thoughts online. So after five months with only one post, he generously consented to allow me to put this site to better use by once again making it a gift. This time, to a woman loaded with ideas and the desire to tell them. This time, I’ve no doubt it will stick. Today, the blog formerly know as node707 officially re-launches as Just a Bump in the Beltway. And I can’t wait to read what will fill these pages.