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Power Politics
(Arundhati Roy)

Arianna Huffington

Page Contents

11/30/05: The Huffington Post      11/30/05: Headlines      11/29/05: The Huffington Post      11/29/05: Headlines      11/28/05: San Francisco Chronicle      11/28/05: Headlines      11/27/05: The Huffington Post      11/26/05: The Huffington Post      11/26/05: Headlines      11/25/05: The Huffington Post      11/24/05: The Huffington Post      11/24/05: Headlines      11/22/05: The Huffington Post      11/22/05: Headlines      11/21/05: The Huffington Post      11/21/05: Headlines      11/20/05: The Huffington Post      11/19/05: The Huffington Post      11/19/05: Headlines      11/18/05: The Huffington Post      11/18/05: Headlines      11/17/05: The Huffington Post      11/17/05: Headlines      11/16/05: Headlines      11/15/05: The Huffington Post      11/14/05: The Huffington Post      11/13/05: Headlines      11/12/05: San Francisco Chronicle      11/12/05: Headlines      11/10/05: The Huffington Post      11/09/05: The Huffington Post      11/09/05: Headlines      11/08/05: Headlines      11/07/05: The Huffington Post      11/05/05: Headlines      11/04/05: The Huffington Post      11/03/05: San Francisco Chronicle      11/03/05: Headlines      11/02/05: The Huffington Post      11/02/05: Headlines      11/01/05: The Huffington Post      11/01/05: Headlines

11/30/05: The Huffington Post

It's Powerball, only Shirley Jackson style. You don't get the millions. No steak knives or press-on nails. You just endure three different chemicals being pumped into your bloodstream -- paralyzing your muscles, putting you to sleep, and stopping your heart -- and you're dead. | But yesterday, Governor Mark Warner of Virginia granted clemency to Robin Lovitt -- denying Lovitt the dubious distinction of becoming the 1,000th person executed in America since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976. | Rest assured, there will be a thousandth person executed. Fact is, it seemed unfair there, didn't it, that the 1,000th wasn't going to be executed in Texas? Texas, after all, has executed 353 people since 1976. This year alone, the state had executed 17 as of mid-November. That's right. Spread out evenly across a year, executions occur more frequently in Texas than the...

I realize there is some unwritten law that says no woman newscaster is allowed to appear on any of the NBC channels and question the network's hypocrisy relative to the Valerie Plame affair, but Andrea Mitchell's continued presence thereon is particularly grating. I for one live for those special moments when she, Tim Russert and Chris Matthews get together and "question" each other like they're all not up to their eyeballs in it. The stuff of Murrow, that. | Tom Maguire points out this little gem from the Tim Russert show on October 29, 2005:MITCHELL: You know, I should have spoke--'cause there's been a lot blogged about all of this--I was called by the CIA because it was erroneously reported in The Washington Post that I was the recipient of the leak before Novak's column came out, and I had not been. So I was never...

In a major surprise, Governor-elect Jon Corzine of New Jersey announced today his choice to replace him in the United States Senate: Edie Falco, better known to New Jersey voters as Carmelo Soprano, the estranged wife of reputed mobster Tony Soprano. Corzine had been expected to choose one of the members of New Jersey's congressional delegation; every one of the Democrats in the delegation had sought the prized Senate seat, with some, like Bob Menendez and Frank Pallone, aggressively campaigning for the appointment. | Faced with the prospect of alienating all those he bypassed to choose a rival colleague, he surprised them all by going in a different and unconventional direction, while countering the expected criticism for bypassing a Hispanic candidate, Menendez, by choosing a woman. Falco, a gifted actress, has for several years portrayed Carmelo Soprano to stunning effect, becoming synonymous with the character. "Carmelo Soprano epitomizes mainstream New Jersey family life,"...

Right around the time Patrick Fitzgerald indicted Scooter Libby-Bob Woodward, Andrea Mitchell and Tucker Carlson have all been saying that the CIA made an investigation to see if the Valerie Plame leak caused any damage. | Andrea Mitchell: | "I happen to have been told that the actual damage assessment as to whether people were put in jeopardy on this case did not indicate that there was real damage in this specific instance." | Bob Woodward: | "They did a damage assessment within the CIA, looking at what this did that [former ambassador] Joe Wilson's wife [Plame] was outed. And turned out it was quite minimal damage." | Tucker Carlson: | " And if you're going to make all this noise about the Valerie Plame leak being damaging to national security and, incidentally, there is evidence that it wasn't-the CIA in fact did an internal assessment of the damage done and found not very much at all." | WTF? I mean really, what the hell are these people talking about? Didn't they read in the Washington Post that the CIA never did an investigation? I understand that you guys are carrying so much water for the administration that you need an oxygen tank to breath, but give me a break. Is Karl Rove still sending you messages through the fillings in your teeth? | There's a saying that goes something like this: " Your bottom ends when you stop digging." Each time Mitchell talks...

Only the left respects George Bush. The right insists he is an idiot. | There was never and is to this day not an iota of evidence of any Iraqi threat yet Bush supporters swear "The President was really scared of Saddam." The left respects Bush's intellect. We know he did not think a small, middle eastern country with a ruined economy and a crushed military was primed to attack the wealthiest, most powerful nation on earth with the deadliest war machine in history." | From November 27 2002 until March of 2003, teams of physicists, geologists, munitions experts, biochemists and the like examined the US intelligence that claimed Iraqi WMD. The scientists, after investigating the CIA's "sites of concern," after using ground penetrating radar to search for buried weapons and interrogating administration claims declared them, in the words of one inspector "Bullshit after bullshit after bullshit." The left thinks the president understands what the phrase...

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11/30/05: Headlines

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11/29/05: The Huffington Post

From the moment Wal-Mart saw the trailer they went into full attack mode complete with a war room, political operatives and spin doctors. They may have an unlimited bank account (well, actually they OWN the bank), but this film will not be swift-boated. | The Wal-Mart war room is run by Edelman PR, the famed DC PR firm known for its 50-year defense of the tobacco industry, and is staffed with people adept at feeding this echo chamber. From Mike Deaver, Ronald Reagan's chief of staff and image guru to Mike Krempasky, a right-wing political blogger/operative with ties to key Republican dirty-tricksters such as Morton Blackwell, Roger Stone, and Richard Viguerie. | Before the film was even released, they came up with 10 pages and a video power point presentation attacking not only the trailer, but also every other film Robert Greenwald has ever...

The apparent suicide of Col. Ted Westhusing, as reported in the Los Angeles Times, resonates with loss, tragedy, and meaning. He was a professional ethicist, specializing in the concept of a soldier's honor, who was assigned to supervise a civilian military contractor in Iraq. Col. Westhusing saw everything he believed in trashed by civilian leadership that understood neither ethics nor honor, under a Republican government that disrespects and mistreats its military. Sound like a facile interpretation? Then listen to the facts. | Westhusing, reports the Times, "was one of the Army's leading scholars of military ethics ... His dissertation (for a Ph.D. in philosophy) was an extended meditation on the meaning of honor." Once in Iraq, Westhusing received an anonymous complaint that the contractor he oversaw, USIS, had been cheating the government - and that it concealed gross human rights violations to protect its contracts. | Writes the Times: | "In e-mails to his family, Westhusing seemed especially upset by one conclusion he had reached: that traditional military values such as duty, honor and country had been replaced by profit motives in Iraq, where the U.S. had come to rely heavily on contractors for jobs once done by the military." | But then, it comes from the...

Iran, a country that the U.S. accuses of supporting the Iraqi insurgency (as well as sponsoring terrorism elsewhere), is now a country that we want to talk to. About Iraq. Not anything else, mind you, just Iraq. I suppose it's pointless to talk to them about the nuclear issue, since they seem to have the upper hand on that. But Iraq, well, that's another matter. The Bush administration must be desperate indeed if it feels the need to engage Iran, charter member of the 'axis of evil', on the Iraq quagmire. (It also must be a nightmare for the neo-cons, who once dreamed of being showered with roses on the streets of Baghdad before moving on to the streets of Tehran, to have to now watch a helpless and hapless Bush administration sit down and talk to the Iranians.) | Although the State Department insists that...

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11/29/05: Headlines

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11/28/05: San Francisco Chronicle

After I read Jane's wonderful piece entitled "Let's Tell Mikey; He'll print anything," on Oct. 30th, I had to ask myself what kind of journalist would print a story so full of spoonfed propaganda that I instantly got a bad case of acid reflux. Here's a key passage that caught my eye: | | "Rove remains in some jeopardy, but the consensus view of lawyers close to the case is that he has probably dodged the bullet." | Jane Hamsher wonders: "Consensus view of who? Luskin and his team of lawyers?" | Yes, Jane, that's the view Mikey is most comfortable with. Just ask yourself this question. Since most of the newspapers were printing stories based on "lawyers close to the case" before Fitzgerald's press conference, why was Newsweek the only publication to print the dribble contained in Isikoff's article? The word on K Street is that the Washington Post and the NY Times wouldn't have anything to do with these obvious, self-serving talking points that Rove's attorney was peddling. One can surmise that if a certain someone is looking...

Sen. Joe Biden has stopped being an apologist for the war, which is more than can be said for certain other Democratic candidates for President. He says he would have voted against the war if he had known what he knows now, particularly that George W. Bush would use war as a first resort. | But whether or not Biden's initial support for the war is disqualifying, his appearance on Meet the Press confirmed today that Biden has a far worse Kerryesque flaw: he cannot stop being Senator Foghorn. The Democrats cannot again have their candidate strangled in his own syntax. | Like Kerry, instead of answering a question with a clear statement, Biden takes the great circle route, including liberally quoting himself. Take this answer on today's program, where he is so intent on referencing his own statements that he launches into an...

I'm not going to argue with the Vice President; Representative John Murtha is a patriot and granite on the side of the US soldier. But there are these other nattering nabobs of negativity. They always blame America first. When some Islamist excuse maker claims that 'The perception of occupation in Iraq is a major driving force behind the insurgency.' We can't let--well actually that was George Casey, Commanding General of the Multinational Task Force in Iraq. | OK, but the bad guys want us to think regular Iraqis want us to just leave. The enemies of Iraqi democracy claim, 'The great desire of the Iraqi people is to see the coalition forces on their way out.' Alright... that was the elected Prime Minister of Iraq Ibrahim Jaffari. | But whatever Iraqi leaders may think, the important thing is that our American leaders remain resolute...

Dear Mr. Ford: You are spending an enormous amount of money on an ad campaign touting your company's commitment to 'innovation' and 'fuel economy' -- but no one is taking you seriously. Let me explain why: as long as you continue to sue state governments -- 11 and counting -- for their heroic attempts at reducing global warming emissions, you will be viewed as the bad guy. You can call yourself 'innovators' but the truth is that you are aggressively suing to stop real innovation. | Your investment of millions on high priced law firms whose assignment is to slam the brakes on the long overdue first step this country has made towards slowing global warming is ill conceived and dangerous. Every second now counts in dealing with climate chaos -- and bogging solutions down in the courts is downright criminal. | You built...

As promised, I am in the Crescent City for Thanksgiving week and a little lagniappe (New Orleanian for extra), and, while so much press and blogging attention has been focused on all levels of government, what I've gleaned is a story of two very different corporations and their behavior in the post-disaster world. | One, let's call it Company B, owns a broadcast media property in New Orleans. In the wake of Katrina, the enterprise relocated twice, finally ending up in Baton Rouge, where it continued to put out what, to my observation, was a consistently fine product during the days and weeks of chaos and worse. A source within the company who's not prone to Pollyannaish views of the business world, says the company continued all employees on the payroll, while telling those with particularly difficult situations not to bother coming in to work until...

It's been more than four years since terrorists crashed Flight 93 in rural Pennsylvania as part of the Sept. 11 attacks, killing 40 crew members and passengers. And some movie producers are hoping that audiences are now ready to watch what happened on that plane. | Outside London this month, British writer-director Paul Greengrass began shooting a Flight 93 movie, produced by Universal Pictures and London-based Working Title Films. In Los Angeles, American filmmaker Peter Markle is finishing up his movie, produced by Fox Television Studios for the A&E cable network.

Like a Broadway show in rehearsals too long, the post-Ted Koppel "Nightline" finally has its opening night. | "There are many people out there who are looking to prejudge us one way or another," said James Goldston, the show's new executive producer. "There's a great feeling of 'will this remain true to the original 'Nightline' and all that. All I would say is that I'd like the show to be judged on what we do, rather than a theoretical version of what we might do."

Bryan Lentz, toting an Army-issue duffel bag, slips into the booth. | Over the din of a bustling downtown coffee shop, the 41-year-old infantry officer and lawyer leans across the table, and outlines his latest mission.

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11/28/05: Headlines

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11/27/05: The Huffington Post

It's hard to know which was the bigger fiasco, the M&M balloon in the Macy's parade or the GOP's attempt to Swift Boat Rep. John Murtha (but there's no doubt that Rep. Jean Schmidt was the week's biggest turkey). Meanwhile, as the annual holiday shopping orgy kicks off, what better time to take a closer look at retailing giant Wal-Mart? Inspired by Robert Greenwald's "The High Cost of Low Price", our HuffPost bloggers did just that. And, for those who missed it, there's a final helping of Thanksgiving leftovers. All that, Harry Shearer, and much more below in our Sunday Roundup.

Human rights abuses in Iraq are now as bad as they were under Saddam Hussein and are even in danger of eclipsing his record, according to the country's first Prime Minister after the fall of Saddam's regime. | 'People are doing the same as [in] Saddam's time and worse,' Ayad Allawi told The Observer. 'It is an appropriate comparison. People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same things.'

The Defense Department has expanded its programs aimed at gathering and analyzing intelligence within the United States, creating new agencies, adding personnel and seeking additional legal authority for domestic security activities in the post-9/11 world. | The moves have taken place on several fronts. The White House is considering expanding the power of a little-known Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, which was created three years ago. The proposal, made by a presidential commission, would transform CIFA from an office that coordinates Pentagon security efforts -- including protecting military facilities from attack -- to one that also has authority to investigate crimes within the United States such as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage or even economic espionage.

ADELAIDE, Australia - The 16-year-old star of the "Harry Potter" movies said Saturday the latest film in the series should not be toned down to get a rating suitable for young children. | Daniel Radcliffe, who has the title role in the films based on J.K. Rowling's novels, said "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" is at times intense.

GEORGE CLOONEY has declared the past 12 months to be the worst year of his life, after dealing with death, depression and health problems. | Among his long list of woes, the 44-year-old actor had to deal with painful spinal damage after gaining a huge amount of weight for his role in his latest movie SYRIANA.

GODE, Ethiopia - Two endangered cheetah cubs held captive and abused at a remote village restaurant are to be rescued by an Ethiopian veterinarian and U.S. soldiers, an environmental official said. | Befekadu Refera, an official of the national Environmental Protection Agency, said the veterinarian would take the cheetahs away from Gode on Saturday and hand them to U.S. troops for safekeeping until the animals are flown to the capital, Addis Ababa.

BEIJING - An earthquake with a magnitude of at least 5.5 shook part of central China on Saturday, killing at least 14 people and injuring nearly 400. | The official Xinhua News Agency said the quake happened at about 9 a.m., with the epicenter in Ruichang, a city of 420,000 in Jiangxi province.

TOKYO - A Japanese spacecraft showed signs of trouble Saturday after apparently landing on an asteroid and collecting surface samples in an unprecedented mission to bring the extraterrestrial material back to Earth, officials said. | The Hayabusa probe, hovering about three miles from the asteroid, appeared to be shaking due to a possible gas leak from a thruster, said Atsushi Akoh, a spokesman for Japan's space agency, JAXA.

WASHINGTON - In Alabama, a man with a history of mental illness killed two police officers with a rifle he bought on Christmas Eve. In suburban New York, a schizophrenic walked into a church during Mass and shot to death a priest and a parishioner. In Texas, a woman taking anti-psychotic medication used a shotgun to kill herself. | Not one of their names was in a database that licensed gun dealers must check before making sales -- even though federal law prohibits the mentally ill from purchasing guns.

They're the scourge of hobo encampments and hot-sheet motels. To impressionable children everywhere, they're a snippet of nursery rhyme, an abstract foe lurking beneath the covers that emerges when mommy shuts the door at night. | But bedbugs on Park Avenue? Ask the horrified matron who recently found her duplex teeming with the blood-sucking beasts. Or the tenants of a co-op on Riverside Drive who spent $200,000 earlier this month to purge their building of the pesky little thugs. The Helmsley Park Lane was sued two years ago by a welt-covered guest who blamed the hotel for harboring the critters. The suit was quietly settled last year.

MOSTAR, Bosnia (Reuters) - Bosnia's southern town of Mostar unveiled the world's first statue of kung fu legend Bruce Lee on Saturday, paying homage to a childhood hero of all its divided ethnic groups. | The life-size 1.68 meter (5ft 7in) bronze statue is situated in Mostar's central park, close to the former front line of Bosnia's 1992-95 civil war. A decade after the conflict, Mostar's Muslim and Croat inhabitants remain deeply split.

I know the title of the piece doesn't make much sense, but neither does Coulter's latest diatribe. Ann Coulter says that Rep. John Murtha is emboldening the enemy and encouraging them to fight on. Her thesis is that he will cause more American lives to be lost and is a traitor as are all democrats who speak out. If Murtha is a gutless traitor (who actually served in the military) because he values the safety of our troops lives than what does that make Donald Rumsfeld? The Secretary of Defense sent our soldiers off to war without the proper protection which forced Army Spc. Thomas Wilson to ask: | | "Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?" | Rumsfeld's response was to say: | "You go to war with the Army you have not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time" | How many soldiers were killed and wounded because of this? Is Rumsfeld a traitor too? | We went...

At The Huffington Post, Rep. Dennis Kucinich publishes a letter he and 23 more members of Congress sent to the publisher of the LA Times objecting to the dismissal of columnist Robert Sheer. If they were just readers writing to a paper complaining about something the paper had done, fine. Wonderful, in fact. The more feedback, the better. | But they don't write as readers. Their letter begins: "We, as Members of Congress, object to the dismissal..." | What does being a Member of Congress (capitalized) have to do with this? Is this an effort to intimidate the press from an official position? Remember, people, we don't do that here. In fact, you are sworn to protect against just that. | In this time when FCC commissioners act as eager accomplices to the so-called Parents Television Council in putting a chill on free speech on our airwaves and kneecapping our...

Jeffrey M. Johnson | Publisher | Los Angeles Times | 202 West First Street | Los Angeles, CA 90012 | Dear Mr. Johnson: | We, as Members of Congress, object to the dismissal of Robert Scheer, a 32-year veteran of the LA Times with a long history of excellence in reporting and op ed pieces. For example, over the last 10 years: | Scheer, in 1995, was a leading critic of the Gingrich plan to cut social spending to record low levels and he wrote adamantly about the need to save affirmative action. | In 1996, Scheer criticized welfare reform for its effect on the poor as soon as the economy turns south. | Scheer wrote in 1999 in defense of Wen Ho Lee, the nuclear weapons scientist accused by many of selling...

I'm always amused at how cable news, in attempting to simulate political discourse, holds debates on issues by airing non-budging, diametrically opposed viewpoints rather than two reasonable folks who actually hear one another. Fox News' John Kasich, for example, brought an atheist in to argue in favor of removing 'God' from our currency and from the Pledge Of Allegiance. My question is, why choose an atheist? Can't they find a churchgoer who feels the same way? Or do they assume that those with spiritual beliefs shouldn't object to any theocratic measures taken by our government? | The argument is always the same: Right believes the phrases 'In God We Trust' and 'One Nation Under God' are healthy and American because they declare to the nation and the world that we are a citizenry that acknowledges a higher power. Left believes the two expressions are unhealthy and...

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11/26/05: The Huffington Post

Tuesday's story in the Daily Mirror that detailed what was allegedly in a Top Secret British security memo got me thinking: Is this the first time someone suggested bombing al Jazeera out of existence? I had a hunch that it had been talked about, on some level, and made its way up to the President, who was probably keen on the idea, personally. | Coworkers told me I was on another planet -- there is absolutely no way that the President would ever consider bombing within a friendly country. This just made me even more determined to check out my gut feeling. So I did what determined-but-lazy people do. I did a Google search. | Sure enough, a search for 'bomb al Jazeera' led me to this article , written in September 2003 by Frank Gaffney, in which he recommends 'taking out'...

Pollster Mark Blumenthal Joins the Crowd of Folks Who Simply Don't Get It or Just Don't Care | Pollster Mark Blumenthal follows up his recent post on the matter of the extraordinarily questionable results of Ohio's November 8th, '05 Elections. All four of the Election Reform initiatives on the ballot that day mysteriously and spectacularly failed to win approval in stark opposition to the pre-election polling by the historically accurate Columbus Dispatch which had predicted most of them would win by large margins. | That they lost by large margins instead, has been the subject of some controversy. We've blogged about it (here and here) and responded (here) to Blumenthal's analysis of tweaks in the Dispatch polls methodology that he feels 'might' have skewed their findings this time around. Despite the major changes in the 'methodology' used to gather the actual Election Results in...

Poor Scott McClellan. | He must be feeling left out. While members of both parties keep popping up and calling for Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, and even Vice President Cheney to resign, no one has mentioned Scottie. | So, in the gentle spirit of this Thanksgiving weekend, let me step in: Scottie McClellan should step down. But not for the same reasons as Rove, Rummy and Cheney. I think Scottie should resign for Scottie's sake. | I mean, just look at him. Day in and day out, being sent out with such ludicrous talking points, contradictory evasions, half-truths, non-sequitors, and outright lies -- it's hard to even watch him. | Sometimes, his talking points are so mutually contradictory you get the feeling that his hard drive is about to crash, and Helen Thomas will have to step up and...

Camp Casey Thanksgiving, Crawford, Texas | I was feeling very down when I was flying to Waco yesterday. I did a lot of crying and missing Casey on the way out from Sacramento. I am not at the place in my grieving yet where I can look at all of our good times and feel grateful for them. Remembering many, many happy Thanksgivings past only made me feel worse, not better. | So, I called my sister (one of the Crawford 12 jailbirds) when I was on a short layover in Dallas to ask her who was picking me up. She wouldn't give me a straight answer saying that "don't worry, someone will be there." So I told her not to worry about it, I would take a taxi to the Peace House or rent a car. I was DEFINITELY feeling sorry for my poor little self. |...

Friday's Wall Street Journal follows up on the breaches in the New Orleans levee-and-floodwall system with a long piece that concentrates on the fractured responsibility of the levee boards, sewerage and water board, and Port, as well as the Army Corps, for inspection and maintenance of the system. It also points out, appropriately, the failure of the Louisiana Legislature to unify those responsibilities in the recent special session. | What the Journal misses, however, is what the local paper, The Times Picayune, uncovers in Friday's edition, unaccountably not available online (late Thanksgiving?). The highlights: scheduled inspections of the system, conducted by levee board members and officials from the Army Corps of Engineers, were "cursory affairs" that "skipped the floodwalls...exposed by Katrina as the system's Achilles' heel." Beyond these scheduled visits, the agencies relied on grasscutting crews who "know what a good levee looks like". | Says Jerry Colletti, the Army Corps' operations manager for completed works of the...

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11/26/05: Headlines

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11/25/05: The Huffington Post

Somewhere, maybe in your town, there was a house with an empty seat at the Thanksgiving dinner table. | You probably don't know the people who live in this house, but you may have seen this house. | It's the house with several large American flags, "W" and Bush/Cheney" bumper stickers on the window of the SUV parked out front. Maybe a "Freedom Is Not Free" on the rear window. Perhaps even a fish on the rear bumper as well. | Who lives in this house? | This is a family who from their boy's early childhood, told him to stand up and fight. To not back down. | This is a family who did not say "no" when their son was four, and he asked for a toy gun for Christmas. | This is a family who taught...

HARBIN, China - China's government defended its handling of a chemical plant explosion that sent a 50-mile-long toxic slick of river water coursing through a major city Thursday and blamed the disaster on a subsidiary of a state-owned oil company. | The benzene slick on the Songhua River in northeast China flowed into Harbin days after the city of 3.8 million people shut down its water system, setting off panicked buying that cleared supermarket shelves of bottled water, milk and soft drinks. The government said it would take about 40 hours for the chemical to pass the city.

nOf course I have a cell. I even blog about the stuff. | I take it with me, but only turn it on when I need to. Why? | I like to hear myself thik. | When I am on the bus, or the train, or in the mall, or walking downtown, and I see and hear everyone on their cell, I overhear much of the banter. | 95% is not necessary: | "I'm here now," "we're gonna meet at Kirsten's house," "you won't believe what happened in math class, " "did you hear who she's seeing," "did I wake you up, sweetie," "chanterelles or portabellos, hun?" | BFD. It ain't important. | Kid scrapes a knee, "my car broke down and here's my AAA number," "biopsy is back and its only an ovarian cyst.." "the Realtor called and we might have a bid," now that's important. | Face it. Most cell conversations are unnecessary. I wonder, with all of us yacking on the cell all the time, what happens to those quiet moments? Have we forgotten how to think? In solitude? |...

Sea levels are rising twice as fast as they were 150 years ago and man-made greenhouse emissions are the prime cause, a study by scientists in America has found. | Tide lines worldwide are rising by about 2 millimetres a year, compared to 1 millimetre a year in 1850, said Kenneth Miller, professor of geology at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

DENVER - Former FEMA Director Michael Brown, heavily criticized for his agency's slow response to Hurricane Katrina, is starting a disaster preparedness consulting firm to help clients avoid the sort of errors that cost him his job. | "If I can help people focus on preparedness, how to be better prepared in their homes and better prepared in their businesses -- because that goes straight to the bottom line -- then I hope I can help the country in some way," Brown told the Rocky Mountain News for its Thursday editions.

VIENNA (Reuters) - Iran attempted to play down the importance of information it received from the black market on making the core of a nuclear weapon and said on Thursday the material was freely available on the Internet. | Last week the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in a report that Iran had handed over several pages related to the production of key components of a nuclear weapon.

It's being called the worst computer worm of the year -- a fast-spreading Internet threat that looks like an official e-mail from the CIA or FBI but can leave your computer wide open to intruders. | The bogus e-mail claims the government has discovered you visiting "illegal" Web sites and asks you to open an attachment to answer some official questions. If you do, your computer gets infected with malware that can disable security and firewall programs and blast out similar e-mails to contacts in your address book. It can also keep you from getting to computer security Web sites that might help fix the problem, and it may open your Windows computer to intruders who can steal your personal data.

WASHINGTON - There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today than at any point during the last 650,000 years, says a major new study that let scientists peer back in time at "greenhouse gases" that can help fuel global warming. | By analyzing tiny air bubbles preserved in Antarctic ice for millennia, a team of European researchers highlights how people are dramatically influencing the buildup of these gases.

SANTIAGO, Chile (Reuters) - One day before his 90th birthday, former Chilean dictator | Augusto Pinochet was under house arrest on Thursday and facing tax fraud and human rights charges in his toughest legal situation yet. | On Wednesday, Pinochet was placed under house arrest and charged with tax fraud, forging passports and documents, and incomplete reporting of his assets in a case involving an estimated $27 million hid in foreign bank accounts

Given the popularity of Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, I figured it was a time to update a story I wrote last year that featured a local group fighting a planned supercenter in their Ohio Valley communities. I was actually writing about a 2003 report by the Brookings Institution, "Back to Prosperity: A Competitive Agenda for Renewing Pennsylvania," on coordinating existing policies to promote real economic development overall growth, rather than the piecemeal approach that our 2,584 municipalities (yes, we do have a lot), 67 counties and state government tend to use. | Then representing nine of those municipalities (since grown to 14), the 400-member group Communities First had seized on the report to make its case that a 204,000-square-foot Wal-Mart and a 102,000-square-foot strip mall atop a cliff above a congested state road would not only create traffic and environmental problems, but also be bad for local economic development. But the...

The spacecraft is on a mission to collect samples from the surface of the asteroid Itokawa and return them to Earth in the summer of 2007. | Officials have said that the probe successfully touched down on Itokawa on Sunday 20 November despite an initial announcement of failure.

Two extremes of Thanksgiving memories bookend my childhood, and in an odd way, life in America. | There was the one Thanksgiving weekend that I spent the day with my first-grade friend Vicky, whose brother was studying Latin and whose farm was better than ours because it had horses. After lunch one day, her father bundled us into an honest-to-goodness open sleigh, and the horse pulled us over the Currier and Ives landscape. I'm sure we must have sung and talked and laughed, but the loudest sound I remember now was the hiss of the runners on the snow. | There was the other November weekend -- the first time I ever saw my parents cry. I knew it had something to do with all the stuff going on on the television -- the man waving from a convertible on a Texas street, the...

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11/24/05: The Huffington Post

Holidays exist for a variety of reasons. Religious traditions. Marking the occasion of a battle won. Even commemorating an event of historic and/or mythic proportion. However, in my experience, the reasons for the holidays are not usually reflected in the ceremonies themselves. The resurrection of Christ? Let's dye eggs and hide them all over the yard. All the snakes being driven from Ireland? Let's get fall down sloppy drunk. The 4th of July does have fireworks, ostensibly to remind us of 'the rocket's red glare'... but the greater tradition seems to have become the first big barbecue of summer. Similarly... and frankly to a much more disgusting extent... Thanksgiving is the one holiday that, more than any other, represents the grand American custom of over-consumption. | Whatever your political or historical understanding of the origins of the holiday, chances are that your celebration this weekend will...

It's Thanksgiving and I am indeed thankful for many things. I am first and foremost thankful for whoever locked that door the President tried to open while escaping his press conference in Beijing the other day. It provided us with an "uber-metaphoric" moment for this White House and the bad decisions they have made and then run away from. If the President had tripped and fallen face first into a giant Iraq-shaped cake it would not have been more on the money than the locked door moment. So thank you random Chinese building attendant or janitor for doing your job and locking the door on the left. | I am also thankful for the crazy rise of blogs and news web sites that have at least semi-made up for the complete collapse of our mainstream media. Anderson Cooper aside, the dance between our corrupt government and...

Thanksgiving, 1974. I'm twelve-years-old and my parents are screaming at each other, something that has been happening more and more often these days. The stress of the holiday, cooking so many dishes and trying to time them to arrive at the table simultaneously has pushed my mom over the brink. Also to be factored in, she is thirty-five-years old and her Yale Law School midterms are kicking her butt. This is her first year back in academia, returning to grad school since my sister and I seem to be up and running. I don't remember what the fight is about but I do remember that she smacks my dad in the stomach with the flat of a plate and then -- infinitely worse -- she snatches his prized quart of Pepsi off the set table and dumps it right down the sink. | Thanksgiving, 1977. Our...

ALTHOUGH I AM IN JOLLY OLD ENGLAND, where, sadly, there is no Thanksgiving, I can still be thankful! | THANK YOU, ANIMALS | When you see pictures of animals, they are ALWAYS SMILING - proof of the JOY AND PRIDE only they can feel when providing food and clothing for humanity. Hooray for animals! | THANK YOU, SUVs | According to a book called "SUV," the "sport" in sport utility refers to outdoor activities. These outdoor activities allow us to attack nature, RATHER THAN EACH OTHER. For that reason, SUVs are instruments for peace, as they allow us to kayak instead of kill. Against SUVS? You have blood on your hands. (If an SUV was a musical instrument, it would be a sitar. In contrast, a Prius would be a kazoo.) | THANK YOU, MCDONALDS. | No company has...

Last week the supposedly family-friendly U.S. House of Representatives passed a budget that doubles the weekly work required of people who get welfare (read: mothers), from 20 hours to 40. Meanwhile, the budget includes no increase in already meager federally funded child-care subsidies. | The disastrous math is simple enough. With more welfare moms looking for child care, and no more child care to be had than exists now, one side effect of the stringent House budget will be to take subsidized day care away from working poor people who currently get it. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 330,000 children now in subsidized day care will lose it under this budget. These are the children of people who exist nobly - and thanklessly - just above the welfare line, working for minimum wage at Dunkin' Donuts or Walmart, and whose lives are already held together...

I like Thanksgiving. Always have. Of course the turkey is usually dry, but everyone loves stuffing. Bringing up the whole thing about the Pilgrims wiping out the Indians always seemed a bit excessively guilt-trippy and overly specific to me. I never really related to the whole Pilgrim Fathers aspect to Thanksgiving in the first place. Awfully goyishe, for one thing. Why should I feel guilty for what they did? Thanksgiving isn't about that for me. It only seems natural, healthy, a part of basic human culture to celebrate harvest, to be thankful, to overeat, and watch college football games you don't care about. | But lately, when I think about what I'm thankful for, the question of guilt does seems a bit irrepressible. The current consensus seems to be that guilt is a pathetic, useless emotion, felt only by self-loathing wankers (otherwise known as liberals). Sure,...

Yesterday was a beautiful day. And as I sat outside in the cool, crisp autumn air, watching the magnificent play of sunlight through the leaves, and enjoying the book I was reading, I thought: "These are not to be taken for granted." So I said - not out loud, but just to myself - I said, "I am thankful for magical days, for the wonders of the changing seasons, and I'm thankful for Al Franken." | Not to put any extra pressure on Al. I mean that's a tough spot in the line-up for any comic; "It's the Power of the Almighty, the Splendor of Nature, and then you." | But reading his new book, I was so aware of feeling gratitude. No irony here, just good-old "appreciative" for his work. He does his homework. He elucidates. He pushes back. For all of us who read the paper every morning and feel like our only two choices are to, (a) End it all and run naked, screaming off a cliff, or (b) Stop reading the news and just put up another...

As a service to those who want to save time so they can watch more football this Thanksgiving, I have already included readers' comments to this post: | While flying to Florida for the Miami Book Fair last week, I came down with a bad cold. | HateLibsHarry: There's a war on you narcissist! Haven't you heard? Stay the course! | My cold got worse... | Doughboy22: Boo-hoo, crybaby! Liberals are such wimps. | ...in Miami, and by the time I flew home it had morphed into a sinus infection. | SoaringEagle: I guess it didn't stop you from writing, if you call what you do 'writing'. Who are you, anyway? | I am aware the world has far worse problems and I will get to that in a moment. I called my...

Out on the Dakota prairie back in 1981, the snow was blowing across the windshield too thickly for us to be driving. Fortunately, we found the farm house we had been looking for down a dirt road partially covered in heaving white drifts. An unassuming man in jeans and a work shirt let us into the warmth and introduced us to his family. His shoulders sloped from work and the weather had left its marks on his face. Through the window of the kitchen, as the storm began to ease and show the sun, America appeared to roll endlessly westward. | Marlon Clendenning was a farmer, living a life of hard work and fulfillment with his wife and children. They were as independent as we all want to be; paid taxes, planted cash crops, obeyed the law and worshipped their god. Everything was just fine until...

Ah yes, it's that time of year again. Thanksgiving. A time for each and every American to consider how truly fortunate we are to live in this great country of ours, a time to give thanks for the gracious and bountiful gifts we all enjoy, a time to share our joy, our love and our appreciation with our far-flung families... | | | | | ... and a time for dogs to wonder just what the hell they did wrong that could possibly explain why they're getting stuffed in a crate and shoved into the cargo hold of a plane for five-and-a-half hours.

African Americans and observant Jews may be the happiest people in America. When you ask my pal, Rabbi Scheiman 'How ya doin'?' He replies 'It's the best day of my life!' Jews are required by law to feel and express gratitude one hundred times a day. The affect is not so pronounced in all of us as in Rabbi Scheiman but his attitude is the goal. When I ask the same question of black people, 'How ya doin'?' I estimate that about one in four respond, 'I'm blessed.' | My gratitude as an African American derives from my age. I was born in 1956 In the age of full-frontal discrimination. When I was born, restaurant owners legally threw Negroes out of the joints for trying to sit and eat in the same room with white people. Now, a few decades later I wish somebody would...

This Thanksgiving I give thanks to the 30 million turkeys with pop-up thermometers in their breasts who will make 30 million families happy, assuming they can afford the cranberry sauce and other trimmings. | This Thanksgiving I give thanks to Mark Copsy of Chicago, Illinois, and his 30 pound, frozen Norbest turkey. (It is not known if the bird was a pop-up or a non-pop-up.) Returning from the store with said fowl, Mr. Copsy saw a car on fire with an elderly gentleman at the wheel and a woman next to him, both for some reason unable to open the doors and escape. He tried to smash the window by using hands and then feet to rescue the couple, but, failing in the attempt, he said, 'Hell, I'll just use the damn turkey. And that's what I did.' Warning the car's occupants to protect their faces...

Thanksgiving is an invitation to celebrate plenty. I have a problem with mass suggestions, so ever since our daughter was old enough to laugh at clowns, the three of us --- along with much of the Hasidic community from Brooklyn --- spend Thanksgiving afternoon at the Big Apple Circus. Afterward, if we have successfully ducked all invitations, we head off to a coffee shop and a satisfying stroll home through a deserted Central Park. | Until recently, walks in the park featured actual conversations. But ever since the junior member developed -- in quick succession -- the power of speech, a sense of empowerment and a point of view, our chats have a random, schizy quality. One of the grownups might mention a weird news factoid. Then the kid has an observation about Polly Pockets -- and all hope of a serious exchange is extinguished. |...

An American fell asleep while watching cable news on the night before Thanksgiving. In a troubled sleep he began to dream ... | It was Thanksgiving 2105 A.D. or, in the abbreviated hyperspeak of the future, it was THNKSGV. Robot newscopters crisscrossed the skies over America, bypassing scenes of devastation, poverty, and war in search of missing young white women. It was the holiday weekend and Americans would be home from work -- that is to say, the 37% percent of them who had full-time jobs would be home. | And they would be expecting their news programs - that is to say, they would be expecting entertainment. Those other Americans -- the ones who didn't work, or only worked occasionally, or worked for sub-minimum wages in those no-protection-union-banned-OSHA-free places called the 'Wild Zones' -- well, they would be too busy just surviving. |...

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11/24/05: Headlines

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11/22/05: The Huffington Post

A healthy debate about how and when America should get out of Iraq is now underway in America. Better late than never. The catalyst for this new dialogue is the courageous Congressman John Murtha. | It is perfectly reasonable (and extremely vital) that America discuss and debate the merits of Murtha's proposed plan for withdrawl. However, some critics have attacked Murtha on the validity of his statements about what is really happening inside Iraq. Statements like, "We cannot win this militarily. Our tactics themselves keep us from winning." | Do you think Murtha is wrong about how things are going in Iraq? Do you feel he is exaggerating what our military is really up against in Iraq? Well, let me give you something to think about. | Recently, I got an email from a very close buddy of mine currently serving as an officer in Ramadi, Iraq. He speaks with a candor and...

The whereabouts of 6,644 people reported missing after Hurricane Katrina have not been determined, raising the prospect that the death toll could be higher than the 1,306 recorded so far in Louisiana and Mississippi, according to two groups working with the federal government to account for victims. | Most of those who remain listed as unaccounted-for 12 weeks after the storm probably are alive and well, says Kym Pasqualini, chief executive officer of the National Center for Missing Adults. She says they are listed as missing because government record-keeping efforts haven't caught up with them in their new locations.

The US has been declared the top gaming nation at the World Cyber Games. | America's 16 players won two gold medals and one silver to top the national rankings at the gaming event.

I'm sure I was one of tens of thousands of people who read Nicholas Kristof's article 'Never Again, Again?' in yesterday's New York Times. I'm sure all of us who read it shuddered at the gruesome recounting of the murder of a 2-year-old girl, Zahra, at the hands of the janjaweed militia in Darfur. | Kristof was in Chad a year ago and has opened many people's eyes to the genocide in Darfur since that time, unfortunately to little avail. Now, he is frustrated and disturbed because the genocide continues. | I have been to Sudan and Chad twice this year to bear witness to this genocide and I have written about it at the Huffington Post and elsewhere. Reading Kristof, I shuddered more than most, because I have seen and heard what he so movingly describes. Today, Kristof articulates many levels...

Representative John P. Murtha, the hawkish Democrat who spent his political career as a staunch Pentagon supporter, came home Monday as something entirely different: an antiwar symbol. | His call last week for an American troop withdrawal from Iraq within the next six months took aback many of his own constituents and made the plainspoken former Marine colonel's homecoming on Monday a moment for re-evaluation - of the congressman, as well as of the Bush administration's strategy for Iraq.

Anyone remember those scenes on MTV's 'Beavis and Butthead' show, where Beavis would either see--or be playing with--some form of fire and he'd inevitably erupt into orgasmic ecstasy, screaming wildly, 'Heh, heh, heh, Fire! Fire! Fire!' | Am I dating myself? (Or just revealing that I watched too much MTV as a teenager...) | Well, I couldn't get Beavis' fire fetish out of my mind as I watched the reaction by many Republicans to the recent (and now dissipating, if not entirely dissipated) riots in France. | As I read coverage and analysis, I couldn't escape this very real, palpable sense that many on the right were downright giddy to see France in flames. You could almost hear them screaming, 'Fire! Fire! Fire!' | Consider: | Bill O'Reilly said that the riots were proof of 'karma,' thanks to...

Back in the year 2000, I believed almost without thinking about it that the US was a "superpower", the only "superpower" in the world. Maybe it was true and maybe it wasn't, but there was a lot of money around, Americans were pretty prosperous, and most people around the world had a benign view of the US. Maybe the clearest sign of our "superpower" status was that the right wing and the press could beat up on Bill Clinton with absolutely no effect on US power or the perception of US power. Beating up on Bill Clinton was a kind of parlor game that the participants cared about, but was in the end of no international import. The most surprising thing, then, about the last five years is how quickly and absolutely the US has ceased to be a superpower. | We are a country...

Representative Richard Pombo may have shot himself in the foot. Two weeks ago, when the Republican leadership had to strip Arctic and coastal drilling out of the House version of the budget reconciliation bill in order to attract enough moderate Republican votes to pass it, Pombo and fellow leadership favorite Joe Barton, the Chair of the Commerce Committee, staged a fake leadership schism and kept the bill from being reported out at all. The purpose of the playacting was to help the leadership put more pressure on House moderates. Although the media reported it as a serious split, it didn't work. | So last Friday morning, at about 1 AM, Joe Barton finally stopped playacting and provided the critical vote that enabled the Budget Reconciliation bill to pass 217-215. But, meanwhile, the House had rejected the Health and Human Service funding bill when 22 Republicans members...

Wal-Mart and its founding family have given $460,000 in campaign cash to recently reduced California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Like Arnold, Wal-Mart could be in for a fall due to its arrogance and lack of proportion. | For his half mill, Arnold vetoed legislation that would have prevented Wal-Mart from locking its workers in at night, would have raised the minimum wage and would have required Wal-Mart to disclose how many of its workers were on the taxpayer- funded Medicaid program because it refused to provide them with health care benefits. Schwarzenegger was the Waltons' bag man, but the Goliath company might learn a lesson or two from the deflated Mr. Universe. | #1 Don't fuck with Robert Greenwald. | #2 Arrogance and indifference breeds contempt | #3 Sometimes, even in America, it's about more than money.

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11/22/05: Headlines

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11/21/05: The Huffington Post

On Friday, freshman Republican Rep. "Mean Jean" Schmidt mounted one of the fiercest, most personal assaults Congress has witnessed since Preston Brooks caned Charles Sumner to a bloody pulp in 1856. The target of Schmidt's attack was Rep. John Murtha, a Vietnam vet who had just introduced a resolution calling for a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq within 6 months (which included several measures designed to ensure regional stability upon pullout). | "A few minutes ago I received a call from Colonel Danny Bubp, Ohio Representative from the 88th district in the House of Representatives. He asked me to send Congress a message: Stay the course," Schmidt declared from her lectern. "He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message, that cowards cut and run, Marines never do." | By employing Bubp, a Marine reservist, as her surrogate attack dog, Schmidt sought to give the impression that the military rank-and-file overwhelmingly deplored Murtha's resolution. Murtha may have been a Marine a long, long time ago, but he doesn't understand the harsh realities of the post-9/11 world. But that tough-talking paragon of the modern warrior, Colonel Danny Bubp, whoever he is, sure as hell...

Wal-Mart is not a friend to undocumented workers in this country, particularly those who scrub its floors. | Last week, 125 undocumented workers were arrested and deported following a raid on the construction site of a new Wal-Mart distribution center in Scranton, PA. Wal-Mart is claiming it didn't know the workers were here without proper papers and is blaming the violations on a sub-contractor that has worked on several of its sites across the country. | In 2003, Wal-Mart was issued a "target letter" informing it that a grand jury was investigating the company for violation of immigration laws. The New York Times reported: | "...two federal law enforcement officials said in interviews that Wal-Mart executives must have known about the immigration violations because federal agents rounded up 102 illegal immigrant janitors at Wal-Marts in 1998 and 2001. In the October raid, federal agents searched the office of an executive at Wal-Mart's headquarters, carting away boxes of papers. Federal officials said prosecutors had wiretaps and recordings of conversations between Wal-Mart officials and subcontractors. | The use of illegal workers...

I've known Robert Greenwald for many, many years. In his "past life," he was an important Hollywood director who was involved in a number of major films. (In fact, one of his films, Sweet Heart's Dance, was filmed in Vermont and if you look closely at the DVD, which you should immediately rent from your local video store, you'll see me in it.) | In recent years, Robert has played an extraordinary role in producing films on some of the most important issues facing our country. Whether it was taking a hard look at Fox television, or the war in Iraq, or the attack on civil liberties in America, or the huge impact that Wal-Mart is having on American society, Robert is addressing issues in a way that is rarely seen in commercial or public media. | As important as the content of Robert's work...

Against all norms of social convention, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. yelled 'fire' in a crowded theater this past week, after viewing the Robert Greenwald film, The High Cost of Low Prices. | As soon as the lights went up, the giant retailer was passing out its 28-page critique of the film, raising as many new issues as the movie itself. Rather than assail the message, Wal-Mart's PR team went after the messengers, attempting to discredit almost everyone in the movie--especially the people who worked inside the corporation for years. | Wal-Mart assails its own former managers who appear in the film. No corporation likes a whistle-blower, but these former Wal-Mart associates ar