fostering goodwill

The current administration has decided to use Iraq as a laboratory for tort reform--when the government screws up and shoots your innocent relatives, take what you are offered and pretend to be grateful:

In February 2006, nervous American soldiers in Tikrit killed an Iraqi fisherman on the Tigris River after he leaned over to switch off his engine. A year earlier, a civilian filling his car and an Iraqi Army officer directing traffic were shot by American soldiers in a passing convoy in Balad, for no apparent reason.

The incidents are among many thousands of claims submitted to the Army by Iraqi and Afghan civilians seeking payment for noncombat killings, injuries or property damage American forces inflicted on them or their relatives.

The claims provide a rare window into the daily chaos and violence faced by civilians and troops in the two war zones. Recently, the Army disclosed roughly 500 claims to the American Civil Liberties Union in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. They are the first to be made public.

They represent only a small fraction of the claims filed. In all, the military has paid more than $32 million to Iraqi and Afghan civilians for noncombat-related killings, injuries and property damage, an Army spokeswoman said. That figure does not include condolence payments made at a unit commander’s discretion.

. . .

In the case of the fisherman in Tikrit, he and his companion desperately tried to appear unthreatening to an American helicopter overhead.

“They held up the fish in the air and shouted ‘Fish! Fish!’ to show they meant no harm,” said the Army report attached to the claim filed by the fisherman’s family. The Army refused to compensate for the killing, ruling that it was “combat activity,” but approved $3,500 for his boat, net and cellphone, which drifted away and were stolen.

Thankfully our armed forces have not let their guard down against Iraqi fishermen engaging in “combat activity” with, well, presumably their daily catch. I can imagine the conversation in the helicopter:

Pilot: There he is!
Co-pilot: Where?
Pilot: There!
Co-pilot: What? Behind the fish?
Pilot: It *is* the fish!
Co-pilot: You silly sod!
Pilot: What?
Co-pilot: You got us all worked up!
Pilot: Well, that's no ordinary fish.
Co-pilot: Ohh. That's the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered aquatic vertebrate you ever set eyes on!
Gunner 1: You tit! I soiled my armor I was so scared!
Pilot: Look, that fish's got a vicious streak a mile wide! It's a killer!
Medic: Get stuffed!
Pilot: He'll do you up a treat, mate.
Medic: Oh, yeah?
Gunner 1: You manky Scots git!
Pilot: I'm warning you!
Gunner 1: What's he do? Nibble your bum?
Pilot: He's got huge, sharp... er... He can leap about. Look at the bones!
Co-pilot: Go on, fill him full of lead!
Gunner 2: Right! Silly little bleeder. One fish stew comin' right up!

The fishermen evidently were doing everything in their power to indicate that they meant no harm to the soldiers hovering overhead. But even if you speak the language of your benevolent overlords, how do you communicate with a fucking helicopter?

Apparently you don’t. (That’s the point of having a helicopter, really.)

In another incident, in 2005, an American soldier in a dangerous Sunni Arab area south of Baghdad killed a boy after mistaking his book bag for a bomb satchel. The Army paid the boy’s uncle $500.

. . .

Soldiers hand out instruction cards after mistakes are made, so Iraqis know where to file claims.

The give-away here: “mistakes are made.”

“The Army does not target civilians,” said Maj. Anne D. Edgecomb, an Army spokeswoman.

The Army does not target civilians, it just shoots them. It’s like a video game, but more exciting cause you've got more skin in the game.

[Major Edgecomb continues:] “Sadly, however, the enemy’s tactics in Iraq and Afghanistan unnecessarily endanger innocent civilians.”

Sadly, Iraqi civilians have unnecessarily endangered themselves by carelessly inviting U.S. forces to destroy their country and gun them down for fishing and transporting books in public places. It’s not our fault that unforeseen political opportunities quickly seized the war on terra necessitated the mobilization of 130,000 soldiers to a remote land in order to subjugate the local population.

In late 2003, as more Iraqis were accidentally injured or killed, the Army began offering condolence payments. It has not always worked as planned, said Sarah Holewinski, the executive director of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, a nonprofit group in Washington.

“Sometimes families would get paid and sometimes their neighbors wouldn’t,” she said. “It caused a lot of resentments among the Iraqis, which is ironic because it was a program specifically meant to foster good will.”

Fascinating—to think that a policy of this administration had the exact opposite of its intended effect. That’s got to be a first.

Once again, I'm unhappy that our government is off killing beleaguered, impoverished people who never posed a threat to us and telling us to be proud of it.

vote and die

The Times has the rundown on persistent politically-motivated efforts by DOJ appointees to crack down on a voter fraud crisis that barely exists. One felon voted while on probation and served a year in jail for her attempt at civic engagement. The article profiles several permanent residents who registered to vote not knowing they were ineligible, never actually voted, but were deported anyway for their efforts. Many permanent residents mistakenly register to vote by filling out registration cards attached to driver’s license registration cards. All they hear is “Register to vote! Get involved in your community!” but the DMV doesn’t care if the occasional permanent resident gets deported—not their problem. Immigration even encourages permanent residents to register to vote at the swearing in appointment (the last step in obtaining citizenship) before they are sworn in, which can cause serious problems if the ceremony is postponed for some reason. Again, not the government’s problem if its negligence fucks up someone’s life.

“Rock the vote,” “vote or die,” whatever the latest bullshit line is, the clear message from our government is you’d better think twice about voting for the wrong side or they will come after you.

Update: Publius has lots more here about government innovation to stop "improper" votes before they are cast.

molestame ... molestame mucho

Sanjaya Malakar
Originally uploaded by Jackie Sometimes Art.

Sanjaya!

the "c" word

Here we go again:

The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse.

Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape online discussion and debate.

Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.

. . .

Mr. Wales and Mr. O’Reilly were inspired to act after a firestorm erupted late last month in the insular community of dedicated technology bloggers. In an online shouting match that was widely reported, Kathy Sierra, a high-tech book author from Boulder County, Colo., and a friend of Mr. O’Reilly, reported getting death threats that stemmed in part from a dispute over whether it was acceptable to delete the impolitic comments left by visitors to someone’s personal Web site.

Distraught over the threats and manipulated photos of her that were posted on other critical sites — including one that depicted her head next to a noose — Ms. Sierra canceled a speaking appearance at a trade show and asked the local police for help in finding the source of the threats. She also said that she was considering giving up blogging altogether.

. . .

Menacing behavior is certainly not unique to the Internet. But since the Web offers the option of anonymity with no accountability, online conversations are often more prone to decay into ugliness than those in other media.

I hesitate to delve into this, since I’m starting to get the impression that newspapers and magazines are learning they can get traction online and stir up a fuss simply by putting out a story about blogs in which one or more sources says something someone in the blogosphere will strongly disagree with, which is to say they open their mouths and emit sounds commonly known as words. It’s the journalistic equivalent of poking an anthill with a stick because it’s easier and produces more interesting results than doing your chores.

I don’t read tech blogs, and I wonder how much of this article is relevant to political blogging. In the political blogosphere, I’ve certainly seen vitriolic ad hominem attacks from the left, the right, and all places in between. However, lefty bloggers (and libertarians not named Glenn) generally place less value than right-wing bloggers in “civility” as it’s generally understood offline, meaning the use of curse words. I feel as though the word “civility” has been reduced in this debate to one meaning—presence or absence of profanity—much as in some religious contexts “morality” has become code for “sex” for people who feel uncomfortable using the ‘s’ word. Insofar as “civility” in this context is used to mean snark or general rudeness or exasperation with one’s political opponents, these are lesser components of the concept and seem to cause less alarm among the non-blogging public.

As a general principle, I value civility as an extension of the golden rule: treat others as you’d like to be treated, that is, respectfully. But civility in some contexts is overrated. For instance, in a quality gangster flick, you don’t want Al Pacino yelling “fetch” or “flip” a couple hundred times in the course of arranging drug deals and gunning people down, or Jack Nicholson politely refraining from breaking a flunky’s hand for no apparent reason, thereby failing to demonstrate to the viewer his expansive ruthlessness.

As far as civility in the context of online political blogging, at the risk of making the obvious and possibly infuriating argument, I’m going to go right where my hippie brain takes me and say that this, this, or this [warning: graphic photos of the effects of war] strike me as rather more obscene than George Carlin’s seven naughty words. One might, if one were so inclined, wonder where the civility is in Guantanamo Bay, in half the world’s population living on less than $2 a day, or in the federal prosecution of a dying woman whose self-medication with a mildly psychoactive plant allows her not to starve to death?

In the hierarchy of incivility, killing someone because you don’t understand how the world works or how you fit into it, killing someone “accidentally” as you see it because that person is essentially invisible to you, must surely rank somewhere above an “aitch-ee-double hockey stick” or an “ask me no more questions, I’ll tell you no more lies”, if somewhere below the dread F-bomb.

Turning to comment threads--death threats or extremely abusive or harassing comments would probably be deleted from a thread and the commenter banned at most of the blogs I frequent. Death threats are sometimes delivered by phone or the blessed post, but we don’t talk about “codes of conduct” for how telephone conversations or personal correspondence should be carried out. Blogging is a medium of communication between human beings—while it’s seen by some as an innovative medium at the moment, it’s not the first and won’t be the last.

In my view, if someone leaves an anonymous comment, it might mean they are new to the site or the blogosphere or just don’t have the stones to stand behind what they say (see, e.g., V-Dare trolls currently plaguing pro-immigrant blogs). However, anonymity should be distinguished from pseudonymity. If a blogger has a pseudonymous online persona (as certain well-regarded bloggers currently suffering from Traffic Deficiency Syndrome have been known to do), it may mean that their job requires discretion or they want some level of separation between their online and offline lives, for whatever reason. A blog, whether pseudonymous or not, is an intensely personal investment of time and energy. A blogger has the right to manage his comments however he wishes. Deleting or banning crackpot trolls to maintain the integrity of a thread or one’s personal sanity is fully acceptable behavior. Anonymous commenters shouldn’t feel too bad about having their comments deleted since they didn’t value them enough to attach their names in the first place. I think most bloggers have figured out how to manage comments to their personal satisfaction without signing on to any code or set of principled guidelines.

So that’s enough words spilled about this silliness.

disobeying orders

Hilzoy passes on the story of a modern-day saint.

the unfashionable argument

IOZ and Kevin Drum find something to agree on in the form of a recent Kathleen Parker column, even down to the mode of mocking it, the long-suffering Dinesh D'Souza. As IOZ’s response is more interesting, I’ll quote it at length:

With that long introduction, I can only say that in tone if not topic, you could easily imagine this scolding editorial by notable Orlando uterus Kathleen Parker to be a harangue about the folly and sin of women's suffrage, say, or legalizing miscegination. Here is the heart of it:

We can debate whether they're right until all our boys wear aprons, but it won't change the way we're perceived. The propaganda value Iran gained from its lone female hostage, the mother of a 3-year-old, was incalculable.

It is not fashionable these days to suggest that women don't belong in or near combat -- or that children need their mothers. Yes, they need their fathers, too, but children in their tender years are dependent on their mothers in unique ways.

There's not enough space here to go into all the ways that this is true, but children (and good parents) know the difference even if some adults are too dim, brainwashed or ideologically driven to see what's obvious.

Why the West has seen it necessary to diminish motherhood so that women can pretend to be men remains a mystery to sane adult.

In the annals of bad writing, there's probably not a greater transgression than the habit of making a broad, potentially counterfactual assertion, and then following it with the familiar, "There's not enough space here to go into all the ways that this is true, but it is true, by god, and everyone knows it." That, of course, is the priciple tactic of the gender traditionalist, who feels that with thousands of years of the ol' patriarchy on his side, women bearing the brood and men tilling the field, women baking the bread and men hunting the boar, women weeping and men warring, why, how otherwise could it be? These are people who embrace an essentially static model of human knowledge and understanding. That virtually every other thing our species believed about itself and the universe around it throughout almost the whole of our history on this planet has proven to be not merely wrong, but spectacularly wrong, fundamentally wrong, wrong to the point that wrongness loses its categorical meaning and slips off toward infinity, is irrelevant where boys and girls are concerned. Boys like trucks; girls like dolls. That's the way it's always been, and by my four humors and all the ether between here and canal-crossed Mars, by the wheel of Apollo's chariot and the angry spirits of the harvest, I swears to ya that's the way it shall always be, amen.

What our authoress is saying in the pages of the Post is that we must keep our womenfolk-wombearers cossetted and coddled, baking bread as they themselves ferment and rise, in order to avoid the possibility that the weak leader of an impoverished theocracy might one day use some British ladycakes as an example of the fact that We, the West, are Wimps. "You gonna let yer lady do it for you?" Oh-ho-ho, it's like when Marissa Tomei knew cars and Joe Pesci didn't. The message: Mothers, stay home. Don't go off to war. Don't get raped--it is, like, totally worse for women.

I suppose it's what you'd call the Dinesh D'Souza school of thought: treat your women as would your enemies, in order that your enemies not treat your women as your enemies otherwise would.

Guantánamo

The NY Times reports on the latest conditions at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility:

A new, long-term hunger strike has broken out at the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, with more than a dozen detainees subjecting themselves to daily force-feeding to protest their treatment, military officials and lawyers for the detainees said.

Lawyers for several hunger strikers said their clients’ action were driven by harsh conditions in a new maximum security complex to which about 160 prisoners have been moved since December.

. . .

Lawyers for several detainees being held in the new maximum security complex, called Camp 6, compared it to “super-max” prisons in the United States. The major differences, they said, are that the detainees have limited reading material and no television, and that only 10 of the roughly 385 men at Guantánamo have been charged.

The Camp 6 inmates are generally locked in their 8-by-10-foot cells for at least 22 hours a day, emerging only to exercise in small wire cages and shower. Besides those exercise periods, they can talk with other prisoners only by shouting through food slots in the steel doors of their cells.

“My wish is to die,” one reported hunger striker in the camp, Adnan Farhan Abdullatif, a 27-year old Yemeni, told his lawyer on Feb. 27, according to recently declassified notes of the meeting. “We are living in a dying situation.”

Commander Durand, the Guantánamo spokesman, dismissed such accounts as part of an effort by the prisoners and their lawyers to discredit the detention mission. He described new unit as much more comfortable than the detainees’ previous quarters, and he denied that they suffer any greater sense of isolation in the new cellblocks.

The “detention mission” has become something untethered from any previous notions of desert and punishment. For hundreds already, the link between alleged illegal action and the ongoing pre-judgment penalty was too tenuous to withstand even the watered down, due process-less military tribunals, and they were released without charge after years of captivity. From Wikipedia:

Most of the detainees still at Guantanamo are not scheduled for trial. As of November 2006, according to MSNBC.com, out of 775 detainees who have been brought to Guantanamo, approximately 340 have been released, leaving 435 detainees. Of those 435, 110 have been labeled as ready for release. Of the other 325, only "more than 70" will face trial, the Pentagon says. That leaves about 250 who may be held indefinitely.

Now, frankly, we have the rest and don’t know what to do with them. They have the upper hand, their status as enemies of the U.S. cemented, perhaps for many after being manufactured out of nothing more than the government’s electorally-driven need for enemies.

The NY Times article continues:

“Anytime something changes, people will seize on that as an opportunity to say that things are getting worse,” [Durand] said. “This was designed to improve living conditions, and we think it has.”

Commander Durand obviously is unfamiliar with basic concepts of justice most people learn in elementary school. Maybe he had them driven out of his head at West Point. The problem is not that “things are getting worse,” it’s that they have not yet changed. No government official can adequately explain why we are holding these people after 5 years and have only informed a small fraction of them why they are being held.

The situation is utterly disgusting and shameful. The government would be hard pressed to find a way to more thoroughly discredit itself internationally. It has morally soiled itself. That the camp has not been shut down already due to domestic pressure shows once again how little regard most Americans have for the lives of non-Americans.

Dick! . . . or, the further dissociation of language and meaning in American political discourse

[Bush Administration officials] can and should speak in the tongue of [English], but without coming to prefer it and without losing the mother tongue of faith. – Elder Neil A. Maxwell (edited slightly for clarity).

Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker:

Yesterday, Cheney, in an interview with Rush Limbaugh, again touted a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, saying:

...remember Abu Musab al Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist, al Qaeda affiliate; ran a training camp in Afghanistan for al Qaeda, then migrated -- after we went into Afghanistan and shut him down there, he went to Baghdad, took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq; organized the al Qaeda operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene, and then, of course, led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June.... This is al Qaeda operating in Iraq. And as I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq.

Now, as with nearly every Cheney statement, this is about three distortions rolled into one big lie. The three distortions: Zarqawi did not organize operations for Al Qaeda prior to the invasion, in fact, he did not affiliate himself with al Qaeda until 2004; prior to the 2003 invasion, he was in the northern Kurdish portion of Iraq, outside of Saddam Hussein's control, not Baghdad; and there's no evidence of collusion between Zarqawi and Hussein. (A bonus fourth distortion might be the fact that the U.S. reportedly had a prime chance to kill Zarqawi before the invasion, but chose not to -- some say because his presence in Iraq provided justification for the war.) But the big lie is that Iraq and Al Qaeda were allies and co-conspirators.

Kiel points out that not only were Cheney’s assertions known before the war to be false by the parallel intelligence group Cheney had set up outside of normal channels, but their falsity was confirmed by the Defense Department Inspector General's subsequent investigation into the matter.

This leads me to three possibilities regarding Cheney’s statement:

(1) The Reagan interpretation: Cheney doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but his authority has gone unchallenged for so long that he doesn’t think it matters.

(2) The Nixon interpretation: He knows that what he’s saying is false, but also that this is inconsequential, since his assertions support a narrative that is “truthful” if not factually accurate because it tells the greater story of American goodness and Islamist badness. This big picture “truth” is more important than small bore facts, which can be massaged or ignored as necessary. In short, meaning is no longer conveyed in the traditional way by words, but by intentions and actions. Or, when Dick Cheney says something, the specific combinations of letters into words and words into phrases are essentially irrelevant and should not be invested with too much importance by the listener; the salient point is that he speaks. (This particular conjecture has over the past few years found expression in a thousand and one bloggy formulations rooted in the “reality-based community” meme of late 2004.)

(3) The Clinton interpretation: This is more or less the same as (2), except that Cheney is so caught up in the “truthful” narrative that he actually “believes” what he is saying, in the same way that one believes in life after death or in a divine, omnipotent Creator. That is to say that the accuracy of particular factual assertions is not only irrelevant, but the semblance of fact, the process of determining truth or falsehood through factual inquiry, can be marshaled to serve a useful purpose. Once a given belief is established, all that is then required to inject it into the national bloodstream is a facially plausible interpretation of some supporting set of facts; see, e.g. “intelligent design” or FARMS or global warming denialists. It doesn’t matter much what those facts are or how their interpretation stands up to established methods of testing. What matters is that there are “facts” and an “interpretation”; this alone is enough for the official narrative to gain entrance into the marketplace of ideas and be repeated ad nauseam by Chris Matthews and Tom Friedman.

Perhaps it’s some combination of the three, or maybe there’s a simpler explanation, like Dick Cheney is actually a robot constructed and programmed by scientists of the troika of terror, the Axis of Evil, long before the phantom grouping had even been dreamed up by Michael Gerson, and inserted into the very seat of American power to subvert the imperial project from within.

Orrin!

Josh Marshall:

Now, just before starting this post I was chatting with one of my colleagues here at TPM, trying to figure out what the hell Hatch's whopper was all about. My take was that the pattern of facts is simply too ridiculous to be a lie in the narrow and specific sense of a knowing falsehood. I think it's far more likely that this was something some talk radio hound or blogger either intentionally or inadvertantly mixed up. Hatch heard it and since he just ad libs through this scandal without having any idea what he's talking about he just decided to repeat it even though it's transparently ridiculous on its face.

. . .

The whole episode is just another example of Hatch's complete indifference to acquainting himself with even the most basic facts of the US Attorney Purge story. On the whole saga, he doesn't even rise to the level of being a hack. He's simply a joke.

H-1B visas exhausted in a single day

Immigration lawyers were predicting this, but I’m still surprised it actually happened:

Illustrating the inadequacy of the quota for specialized H-1B workers, USCIS announced today that it received more applications than the 65,000 limit on April 2. April 2 was the first day on which an employer could request a first-time visa for an H-1B worker for the period that begins on October 1, 2007. Agency rules state that if the limit is reached on the first day of filing, all applications received on the first two days are put into a lottery to determine who gets the relatively few visas that are available.

In the fiscal year now in effect, the supply of such visas lasted less than eight weeks after the filing period opened. For the fiscal year that starts October 1, 2007, the supply did not last through even the first day. "Every year, the application window becomes shorter and shorter, to the point that it is now practically non-existent," said Carlina Tapia-Ruano, President of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. "These high-skilled workers help to keep our system dynamic, and many sectors of the economy will suffer from this shortage."

The H-1B is a visa for skilled occupations, and is only available to workers who have at least a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent. I’m aware of very few Americans of any political stripe who argue that fewer skilled workers should be allowed into the country. But apparently, nothing of substance can be done until Congress hashes out an immigration bill. I’m not holding my breath.

older and wiser?

In which Alanis tries to make up for a decade of getting shit for her song "Ironic":

the myth of the rational actor

Just as American foreign policy stumbles and lurches forward in pursuit of the elusive national interest—like Frankenstein, destroying most thoroughly that which it most ardently desires—so the business community systematically and unintentionally continues to undermine its own interests.

Exhibit A: The American automakers’ decision to scale back fuel-efficient projects like the electric car and gear the bulk of their operations towards selling large, fuel inefficient vehicles just before the fuel market enters the longest period of sustained high prices since the 1970s.

Exhibit B: The business community’s concerted, shadowy efforts to program political actors to obstruct progress on combating global warming, combined with a misinformation campaign to distort public perception of the established scientific consensus. This has a very large potential downside for global companies a few decades down the road.

Exhibit C: The campaign of the early airlines to consolidate market power and destroy rivals through political means (this based on my careful viewing of The Aviator), thereby stifling innovation, thwarting efficiency, and ultimately sending company after company into bankruptcy. Microsoft and the telecoms eagerly pursue this business model with little thought of the consequences.

Exhibit D: The business community’s instinctive, reactive, decades-long fight against universal health care, which every single other advanced economy has adopted, even as health care costs eat away at profits year after year.

Executives are so entrenched in the mentality that every government initiative reduces profitability, that what benefits workers necessarily costs management, and that the political machine that maintains the status quo must constantly be fed, that they fail to see obvious solutions to long-standing problems. Too often in their eyes, the most serious problems are consumer preferences that don’t align with existing products, too much competition in the marketplace, and workers who are seen as a net drag on productivity rather than the essential element of production. The business class does not understand some important ways in which the public and private spheres interact, otherwise, it would not consistently obstruct efforts to combat global climate change when it has the potential to destroy the foundations of the legal, political, and economic systems which underpin global companies.

On an individual level, it’s the woman on the subway begging for change to go shoot up again, a momentary release from the misery of existence. The corporate attorney slogging through another 80 hour week just to get to Saturday night so he can get trashed and forget about the broken family he’s left behind. The politician whose ambition and desire for approbation hollows out his soul until all he sees in the eyes of his peers and constituents is scorn.

Or, less dramatically, it’s simply the business class cutting off the nose to spite the face.

sweet land of liberty

A granddaughter remembers:

“In the case of my grandfather, the tragedy was multiplied by the fact that he was a hero in the eyes of his children, a leader in the Japanese-American community of Hood River, and had always counseled his compatriots to be ‘200 percent American,’ ” Ms. Yasui said. “And look what it got him: arrested and dragged out of his house a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, transferred from one military prison to another for years, and not released until several months after the war was over.”

If only Mr. Yasui had been slightly more patriotic, perhaps his fellow citizens wouldn’t have locked him up for no reason at all . . .

I’m glad to see the patriotic traditions of racial profiling and arbitrary detention pioneered by the Greatest Generation are alive and well today.

brooklyn, cont.

More pictures:

On the waterfront.

A sign in the window said this was an old taxi cab.

brooklyn

I took some pictures on a walk around the borough yesterday. Here are a few of them:

A new enormous condo is going up in downtown Brooklyn.

If you want to be a prophetic physician, call this number.

Brooklyn Bridge from DUMBO.

Manhattan Bridge.

in the shadows

Kevin Johnson at ImmigrationProf Blog gives us a peek at the police state in which out-of-status immigrants live:

Lilia Velasquez, a San Diego immigration attorney and immigration professor at California Western, says in the last 10 days, she's received twice as many calls as normal. She says many Latino residents in North County are terrified because Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have detained their relatives and neighbors. According to the radio interview (here) by KPBS Reporter Amy Isackson, Lilia Velazquez says the stories callers are telling her are nearly identical. Velazquez:

The immigration officer had gone to their homes looking for someone else. They didn't find that someone else. So they arrested the husband or the relative instead. And they were very worried as to whether there was a special operation taking place or why was ICE staking out those places.

Velazquez says callers tell her agents often detain everyone at the house who can't show immigration papers.

And from the LA Times (via Johnson again) we learn that there are shanty towns in Southern California:

Jose and his family live in a world few ever see, a vast poverty born in hundreds of trailer parks strung like a shabby necklace across the eastern Coachella Valley.

Out here — just a few miles from world-class golf resorts, private hunting clubs and polo fields — half-naked children toddle barefoot through mud and filth while packs of feral dogs prowl piles of garbage nearby.

Thick smoke from mountains of burning trash drifts through broken windows. People — sometimes 30 or more — are crammed into trailers with no heat, no air-conditioning, undrinkable water, flickering power and plumbing that breaks down for weeks or months at a time. "I was speechless," said Haider Quintero, a Colombian training for the priesthood who recently visited the parks as part of his studies. "I never expected to see this in America."

. . .

Some of the largest and poorest parks are on the Torres Martinez Indian Reservation where they are not subject to local zoning laws and the county can't monitor safety, hygiene and building standards. The reservation is also home to the worst illegal dumps of any tribe in California, Arizona or Nevada, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The federal agency has closed 10 of the 20 most toxic dumps and cited four of the largest trailer parks for health violations.

. . .

The presence of the parks on the reservation has frustrated Torres Martinez Tribal Chairman Raymond Torres.

"The owners started off with good intentions, then I think it overwhelmed them," he said. "I have a real problem with it. Someone is going to get hurt. I'd like to see the parks gone and the owners start over again."

But in the complex world of tribal sovereignty, Torres cannot close the parks; only the Bureau of Indian Affairs can. The bureau said last week that parks on the reservation are illegal because they do not issue bureau-approved leases to tenants. They are now threatening legal action against [trailer park] Duroville and said other parks could be next.

Trailer parks began springing up on Indian land largely because of a county crackdown. In 1998, after several fatal accidents caused by faulty wiring, Riverside County began closing parks that did not have permits and threatening to sue others not up to code. Faced with outrage from farmworker advocates and the Roman Catholic Church, who feared thousands could be rendered homeless, officials backed off, but not before many panicked park dwellers had moved onto the reservation.

Bad things happen when an entire community lives outside of the law.

On the other side of the park, Cesar Rafael, 17, a Purepechan, lives in his parents' trailer. He and several other students at Desert Mirage High School in Thermal made a short video about their world, "The Contaminated Valley," which was shown at school.

"I wanted people to see another side of life," he said. "Everything is poisonous here, even the water is poisonous. And nobody really cares about it. We are invisible.

As is often the case on the immigration blogs I read, a lone VDare troll is the only person motivated to comment on the situation. His love for humanity is palpable.

what country are you?

Holy crap, it worked!

You're Costa Rica!

You're about as peaceful as anyone on the planet, a real dyed-in-the-wool
pacifist. And why not? No one really poses much of a threat to you and
everything seems to work out, no matter how much violence and insanity rages all around
you. So you relax and appreciate nature and culture while the rest of the world
carries on their petty disagreements. If only everyone could follow your
example...


Take the Country Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid

I love Costa Rica! How did they know?

(Via IOZ.)

rage

May the major cell phone companies burn jointly and severally in eternal hellfire. I’ve not come across a single one that wouldn’t mug its own grandmother in a dark alley and blame it on the new neighbors with the funny accent down the street. My fervent hope is that the crafty intertubes find a way to snake their customers and utterly destroy their revenue base.

God I hate them.

reporting on reporting

I found this from Atrios to be insightful:

Adding to the post below about reporting/talking, campaign journalism is an area which is just filled with hackery. There's really no way to do interesting "straight reporting" about campaigns, aside from polls and hirings/firings. It's almost intrinsically "talking about the news" instead of reporting on it. So campaign journalism is part highly subjective narrative, part gossip, part anonymous backbiting, part reporter projection, part quoting sources with major conflicts of interest, part unrepresentative "man on the street interviews," etc. If I ran a newspaper, campaign reporting is the area where I'd begin chucking out the entire model of "balanced journalism" and recognize it for what it ineivtably is, a highly subjective description of what's going on. Reporters hide behind all the various devices given to them to try to take themselves out of the narrative, but ultimately they really are just creating the very subjective narrative they wish to create. So, drop the pretense and bring the reporter's voice forward.

Campaign reporting of the sort you might read in the Times is typically a glorified version of the type of “reporting on reporting” that you get when a celebrity story has burned through the tabloids for a week or so and the Times decides it wants a piece of the grubby action without getting its wingtips dirty. A few days into the Anna Nicolle story or Britney’s latest shenanigans or whatever latest hot news that isn’t “real news”, the Times will do a story on how other outlets are covering this bit of non-news and how excited people who don’t know any better seem to be about it. These attempts to hover above the fray while transparently cashing in on the salacity of the story are quite silly. Likewise, political reporters aspiring to be bloodless, opinionless automatons of objectivity only manage to deceive both the reading public and themselves that they are not part of the story, too.

repudiation

Any way you spin it, Iraq is the war of Bush and his supporters. But this may be the key to ending the war:

In 2002, and in 2004, and at all points in between and since, the war in Iraq has been Bush’s War; and, as he was their man, it has been the Republicans’ War. The war and Bush were inseparable - he was The War President, the war was his thing, and if he stopped being President the war was lost. In 2002, this was good; in 2004, kind of a wash; now, it’s no good at all. Now, whether Republicans really thought supporting the war was good policy, or just good politics, isn’t that important, as they (almost) all have impressively long track records of equating leaving Iraq with letting Osama crash on your couch. This makes it hard to change course, even with most of the country supporting a pull-out. But as the investigation of OverblownPersonnelMatterGate drags on, and Bush gets even more toxic, policy is going to be less important than politics, and the political imperative is going to be to repudiate Bush. And the way you repudiate Bush is by repudiating his policy, and ending the war.

However, if the Republicans don’t understand the new dynamic and fail to repudiate Bush and end the war, the party will be decimated in the 2008 elections and then the Democrats will do it on their own and get the political credit. I hope that isn’t the way this plays out.

Also, very bad things are likely to happen when we leave (see, e.g., Cambodia circa 1977). At some point before the U.S. is forced by domestic politics to pull out of the country, it should ask the Security Council to sanction a multilateral peacekeeping force to intervene to stop the country from imploding. Unfortunately, I can’t picture the rubes willing to step into that pile of shpoop, nor can I imagine Bush agreeing to UN intervention or anything like it. Hopefully his successor will be more flexible.

And hopefully his successor will not be Clinton. Here is a convincing version of the liberaltarian argument against her. Come to think of it, I don’t know of any bloggers who are revved up about Clinton, whatever their politics. Are there any out there?