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August 31, 2005
Pamela Hess - Pentagon Correspondent for UPI
I was listening to NPR on the way home this evening and listened to an interview with Pamela Hess from UPI. Hess is currently in Iraq traveling through all 18 provinces in order to assess if the U.S. is winning the war in Iraq and if and when the U.S. could pull out. She is focused on trying to bring a different perspective than what is seen daily in the news of more insurgent activity, suicide bombs, and general disorder.
I thought it strange that the NPR interviewer introduced Hess as the Pentagon Correspondent - UPI. It made it sound to me like Hess worked for the Pentagon and not UPI. As Hess recounted her experiences in visiting 8 of the 18 provinces and in talking with the U.S. troops I realized it was like listening to expertly crafted propaganda. Hess did not have one negative thing to say about the war, the troops morale, the effect of swaying public support for the war, or the treatment of troops by the government. She made it sound like each soldier was excited to be in Iraq doing their part for protecting the U.S. way of life.
Unfortunately, the cynic in me just thinks that Hess was granted access to be embeded with the troops only if she spun a positive story out of Iraq.
Posted by kermisch at 11:42 PM
August 26, 2005
Great article on Lance Armstrong's latest controversy
Earlier this week the L'Equipe newspaper in France accused Lance Armstrong of a positive EPO test from samples taken back in 1999. The process of testing these samples broke many of the protocols set forth by WADA - the world anti doping agency. Here is a transcript from Larry King with Lance discussing this issue.
Posted by kermisch at 8:21 AM
August 24, 2005
My Private Idaho -- Reprinted from NYT
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 24, 2005
W. vacationed so hard in Texas he got bushed. He needed a vacation from his vacation.
The most rested president in American history headed West yesterday to get away from his Western getaway - and the mushrooming Crawford Woodstock - and spend a couple of days at the Tamarack Resort in the rural Idaho mountains.
"I'm kind of hangin' loose, as they say," he told reporters.
As The Financial Times noted, Mr. Bush is acting positively French in his love of le loafing, with 339 days at his ranch since he took office - nearly a year out of his five. Most Americans, on the other hand, take fewer vacations than anyone else in the developed world (even the Japanese), averaging only 13 to 16 days off a year.
W. didn't go alone, of course. Just as he took his beloved feather pillow on the road during his 2000 campaign, now he takes his beloved bike. An Air Force One steward tenderly unloaded W.'s $3,000 Trek Fuel mountain bike when they landed in Boise.
Gas is guzzling toward $3 a gallon. U.S. troop casualties in Iraq are at their highest levels since the invasion. As Donald Rumsfeld conceded yesterday, "The lethality, however, is up." Afghanistan's getting more dangerous, too. The defense secretary says he's raising troop levels in both places for coming elections.
So our overextended troops must prepare for more forced rotations, while the president hangs loose.
I mean, I like to exercise, but W. is psychopathic about it. He interviewed one potential Supreme Court nominee, Harvie Wilkinson III, by asking him how much he exercised. Last winter, Mr. Bush was obsessed with his love handles, telling people he was determined to get rid of seven pounds.
Shouldn't the president worry more about body armor than body fat?
Instead of calling in Karl Rove to ask him if he'd leaked, W. probably called him in to order him to the gym.
The rest of us may be fixated on the depressing tableau in Iraq, where the U.S. seems to be delivering a fundamentalist Islamic state into the dirty hands of men like Ahmad Chalabi, who conned the neocons into pushing for war, and his ally Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who started two armed uprisings against U.S. troops. It was his militiamen who ambushed Casey Sheehan's convoy in Sadr City.
America has caved on Iraqi women's rights. In fact, the women's rights activists supported by George and Laura Bush may have to leave Iraq.
But, as a former C.I.A. Middle East specialist, Reuel Marc Gerecht, said on "Meet the Press," U.S. democracy in 1900 didn't let women vote. If Iraqi democracy resembled that, "we'd all be thrilled," he said. "I mean, women's social rights are not critical to the evolution of democracy."
Yesterday, the president hailed the constitution establishing an Islamic republic as "an amazing process," and said it "honors women's rights, the rights of minorities." Could he really think that? Or is he following the Vietnam model - declaring victory so we can leave?
The main point of writing a constitution was to move Sunnis into the mainstream and make them invested in the process, thereby removing the basis of the insurgency. But the Shiites and Kurds have frozen out the Sunnis, enhancing their resentment. So the insurgency is more likely to be inflamed than extinguished.
For political reasons, the president has a history of silence on America's war dead. But he finally mentioned them on Monday because it became politically useful to use them as a rationale for war - now that all the other rationales have gone up in smoke.
"We owe them something," he told veterans in Salt Lake City (even though his administration tried to shortchange the veterans agency by $1.5 billion). "We will finish the task that they gave their lives for."
What twisted logic: with no W.M.D., no link to 9/11 and no democracy, now we have to keep killing people and have our kids killed because so many of our kids have been killed already? Talk about a vicious circle: the killing keeps justifying itself.
Just because the final reason the president came up with for invading Iraq - to create a democracy with freedom of religion and minority rights - has been dashed, why stop relaxing? W. is determined to stay the course on bike trails all over the West.
This president has never had to pull all-nighters or work very hard, because Daddy's friends always gave him a boost when he flamed out. When was the last time Mr. Bush saw the clock strike midnight? At these prices, though, I guess he can't afford to burn the midnight oil.
Posted by kermisch at 12:37 PM
August 23, 2005
Elie Wiesel: It would have been a nice gesture by the Palestinian leadership to hold the applause.
[Reprinted from the Star Tribune]
In 1991, when Saddam Hussein's Scud missiles fell in a deafening din on Tel Aviv, some Palestinians danced in the streets and on the roofs of their houses.
I saw them. I was in Jerusalem, and I could see what was happening in the Arab quarter of the Old City. It happened again later, each time a suicide terrorist set off a bomb on a bus or in a restaurant. I evoke these scenes with sadness, and for a reason: We have just seen them repeated in Gaza.
The images of the evacuation itself are heart-rending. Some of them are unbearable. Angry men, crying women. Children, led away on foot or in the arms of soldiers who are sobbing themselves.
Let's not forget: These men and women lived in Gaza for 38 years. Successive governments, from the left and the right, encouraged them to settle there. In the eyes of their families, they were pioneers, whose idealism was to be celebrated.
And here they are, obliged to uproot themselves, to take their holy and precious belongings, their memories and their prayers, their dreams and their dead, to go off in search of a bed to sleep in, a table to eat on, a new home, a future among strangers.
From far away, we watch them on television screens and in the pages of newspapers. Some have behaved in an offensive and undignified manner. They insulted and wounded soldiers; they spat on officers -- including some who are decorated heroes, all of them ready to give their lives for their country. But the majority have responded in a dignified way: with tears. As though united in the same despair, soldiers and evacuees cried together, even to such an extent that certain commentators have reproached them, saying: Our warriors of yesterday and tomorrow shouldn't give way to easy emotion.
On a strictly military level, the operation is a success. For that, and for his brave decision to pursue future peace even at present political cost, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon deserves praise. But starting now, Israelis and Palestinians must face the question: What next?
And here I am obliged to take a step back. In the tradition I claim, the Jew is ordered by King Solomon "not to rejoice when the enemy falls." I don't know whether the Qur'an suggests the same.
I know only that in my opinion, what is missing from the chapter now closing is a collective gesture that ought to be made, but that hasn't been made, by the Palestinians.
Let's imagine it, if you will. Let's imagine that, faced with the tears and suffering of the evacuees, the Palestinians had chosen to silence their joy and their pride, rather than to organize military parades with masked fighters, machine guns in hand, shooting in the air as though celebrating a great battlefield victory. Yes, imagine that President Mahmoud Abbas and his colleagues, in advising their followers, extolled moderation, restraint, respect and a little understanding for the Jews who felt themselves struck by an unhappy fate. They would have won general admiration.
I will perhaps be told that when the Palestinians cried at the loss of their homes, few Israelis were moved. That's possible. But how many Israelis rejoiced?
And now, where are we? A lull is imperative. The tears must be allowed to dry and the wounds to heal. Haste, in this delicate moment, is dangerous. Any pressure from outside risks being counterproductive.
Why these words of warning? Because last May, at an official dinner offered by King Abdullah II of Jordan, I spoke with the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qureia. When I asked him what he thought of Sharon's courageous decision regarding Gaza, it was with a wave of the hand that he objected, adding with disdain: "All that is worth nothing, means nothing. If Sharon doesn't begin right away to negotiate definitive borders, a great catastrophe will be the result." He repeated those words: "right away" and "a great catastrophe."
The optimist in me wants very much to believe that those were just words. Gaza, after all, is but one chapter in a book that must ultimately be about peace.
Elie Wiesel, a professor of humanities at Boston University, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. This article was translated from the French by the New York Times.
Posted by kermisch at 8:10 AM
August 14, 2005
This F*&king Scares Me
- End Abortion
- Ban Same Sex Marriages
- Fewer restrictions on religious (read: Christian) expression in public places
Posted by kermisch at 10:48 PM