Yesterday Kevin Drum took a stab at defending David Brooks' jes' folks elitism (Summary of Brooks: In America, everyone who isn't rich wants to be, so no one will mind if the rich take it all.). I don't think the defense quite works. Brooks' piece was stupid, and a relatively sensible line here or there can't change that.

But Kevin's overall point is a good one. Resentment of the rich and squabbling over who gets what doesn't sell. It isn't the fact that some people have more money that bothers most of us, it's how -- in all too many cases -- they got it. It's not the money, it's the unfairness, the insiders' games, the undeserved advantages, that make people angry. And fortunately for any Democrat trying to sell that message, George Bush is the poster boy for unfair advantages. To everything you already know about Bush's legacy admissions to Andover and Yale, and his Harken dealings, add Kevin Phillips' analysis of the move to end taxation of dividends as one more example of the Bush family motto: "Public service means private opportunity." The Bush family has been in the investment business for four generations. As Phillips says, "When the Bushes start talking about investment, ordinary folks should start circling their Chevrolets." Sort of like when you see "Cheney" and "oil" in the same paragraph. It's "not only unfair, but the policy equivalent of self-dealing." Pretty blatant self-dealing: Bush's tax plan would save him $44,500. To most of us, that looks a whole lot like an annual income. Those figures have an uncanny resemblance to the amount of money we expect to have to work for. It's not fair.

I'd take the argument a little farther. In fact, I don't have to, because someone already did. John Balzar had a great piece in Sunday's LA Times arguing that the biggest problem with the tax-cutting fever is not who gets what, but that it destroys the whole idea of "neighborhood values," and the "understanding that individuals do not prosper apart from the fortune of the nation." Most Americans are genuinely patriotic. They want what's best for their neighborhoods, their cities, their states, and their country. And taxes are our contribution toward making it work. At one time we believed that the more you received from the country (and rich people obviously get enormous benefits from living in this country; if they didn't they wouldn't be here), the more you owed it -- and as a result we had a genuinely progressive income tax. Balzar remembers that time, when tax rates at the highest earning levels were above 90%:

Let's pause and remember that Americans were far less greedy and stressed as a consequence. Our overall standard of living progressed by the years. Along the way we built an interstate highway system. Our public schools were first-rate. Our industries led the world. There was no shortage of innovation or ambition. And we surrounded ourselves with personal comforts. We congratulated ourselves that we were the richest and freest nation on Earth.

Gated communities were not the rage. You never saw lawn signs warning of immediate response by private armed security. And we didn't have to face the unsettling news that two decades of growth in personal income had come to an end.

So what happens to the dwindling middle class in 10 more years? You can guess the answer.

We are fundamentally a middle class society that works together to solve problems. We're not an I-got-mine-and-the-hell-with-the-rest-of-you society.

Don't get me wrong. The Republicans are putting out massive amounts of deliberately misleading "facts" about the "stimulus." That needs to be countered. Lies shouldn't stand. But there's more wrong with their plan than just the fact that it's a "preferential option for the rich." It's also a plan that encourages us all to ask not what we can do for our country, but what it can do for us. It says the hell with what my neighbors and my country need, I want more. And that makes downright unpatriotic.

The comment section is causing too many computer problems -- for me and apparently for other people. And I'd rather spend my time writing than trying to figure out code. So, for now, comments are gone. Sorry.

Hesiod has pulled together a lot of important information about the unfinished war in Afghanistan, which has pretty much disappeared from the American media.

The Guardian notes not only the disappearance of the "liberal" American press, but the complete befuddlement of "ordinary reporters who believe their sole job is to get at the truth." The final paragraph looks to blogs as the last refuge for skeptics.

But Dwight Meredith has noticed that (to quote a different Dylan song) things have changed.

You've got to love a guy who asks questions like these:

Ari, other than Elliot Abrams, how many convicted criminals are on the White House staff?

Ari, what was the President thinking when he appointed an alleged war criminal to investigate a war crime?

Ari, you have said the President wants regime change in Iraq, by which I take it to mean the President wants to overthrow the government in Iraq. Why don't you just say the President wants to overthrow the government in Iraq?

Ari, you said earlier that "Democracy is God-given." Didn't Thomas Jefferson have something to do with it?

and my favorite --

Ari, Ari, wait a second. [The president]'s in favor of the death penalty for individuals generally. Is he in favor of the death penalty for corporations convicted of crimes that result in death?

Since 1980, the Emma Goldman Project, which houses Goldman's papers at UC Berkeley, has sent out annual fund-raising mailers with Goldman quotes, usually related to contemporary issues. This year the university insisted that two of the quotes -- dealing with free speech and opposition to war -- be removed because they were "too political."

Once you get past alternately laughing at and being chilled by the irony of censoring a statement promoting free speech, look at the quote the university found acceptable because it wasn't unduly political:

"The most violent element in society is ignorance"

Not political? That's the best explanation of Bush administration policies I've heard. Come back, Emma Goldman.

Aziz Poonawalla has an interesting suggestion for organizing opposition to Bush.

Natasha has put links to her numerous, and well-researched posts on Venezuela on a single page, and Sean-Paul has done the same with his very insightful posts on Korea.

Another interesting poll on Iraq, this time from the Christian Science Monitor, suggests that Bush is losing the p.r. war. Both the percentage of people who see Saddam Hussein as a threat to the United States and the percentage of people who think it is "very important" for the U.S. to take military action in the near future have declined.

The latest episode of The Story Point and fictional trolls have invaded the comment section!

(Via Rittenhouse Review)

Bill Frist has done important and laudable work in Africa as a doctor, and understands and appears to be genuinely concerned about the health crisis the continent is facing. But according to an aritcle in The New Republic, as a senator, Frist had to choose between his conscience and his political allegiance. Politics won.

I recently linked to a thought-provoking article in The Village Voice on why Africa may soon become as much a magnet for terrorists as much of the Middle East already is. Corruption, poverty, exploitation by Western companies, and Western apathy about African problems, make anti-American arguments resonate with many people. And countries with failed governments, where chaos and violence are endemic, provide perfect nests for terrorists.

I swear, sometimes it looks like Bush and Company are trying to speed up the process.

Yesterday, The Los Angeles Times ran a heart-breaking story on AIDS in Africa. In South Africa, the AIDS crisis is so bad, people are having to make a choice between buying food for themselves or funerals for their children, and cemeteries are running out of space. Undertakers, however, are having a very profitable year. Stephen Lewis, the U.N. envoy for AIDS in Africa, insists that the world has never witnessed anything as horrible as the AIDS plague: "There are no precedents for what is happening in Africa right now. Not the 'Black Death' of the Middle Ages, not the wars of the 20th century -- nothing has prepared us for the catastrophic mixture of AIDS and famine." Lewis recently warned that if U.S. and other leading industrial counties don't immediately increase their contributions to The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, they will be committing "mass murder by complacency." But not only is the United States not increasing its contribution to the Global Fund, it continues to undermine efforts to make antiretroviral medicines cheaper and more widely available in poor countries in order to protect the patent rights of large pharmaceutical companies. That's what you get when apathy meets up with a need to provide goodies for your campaign contributors.

Money for African projects is available -- as long as they're not humanitarian projects. According to a recent story in Mother Jones, Bush, Inc. (relying on a plan developed by -- surprise! -- Dick Cheney) is financing numerous overseas projects for private oil companies. Some of the largest and most politically well-connected oil and gas companies have received millions in government financing in the past year to help develop oil fields and build pipelines. One of the beneficiaries is -- one more big surprise -- a subsidiary of Dick Cheney's old company, Halliburton -- which received $135 million dollar loan guarantee last October to expand a natural-gas production facility in Nigeria. The U.S. will spend $500 million this year to help finance a single project -- a pipeline that a consortium of 10 oil companies headed by British petroleum will profit from. By coincidence, $500 million happens to be the total amount the U.S. has pledged to the Global Fund to Fight Aids. To pay its fair share, to equal the European contribution in terms of the size of the economy, the U.S. would need to give $2.5 billion. That's a lot of money. Not as much, however, as the $100 billion in debt that President Bush has authorized the Export-Import Bank to assume in its effort to help the oil companies.

Now keep all that in mind while you read this morning's LA Times article on the Bush administration's increasing interest in African oil, and see if this sentence doesn't make you a little nervous:

The national energy plan drafted by Vice President Dick Cheney's task force spotlighted West Africa as "the fastest-growing source of oil and gas for the American market," and the administration has promised industry officials to do what it can to promote development.

Honestly, that Dick Cheney is one busy and industrious little fellow, isn't he?

Needless to say, in order to get at all that oil we're going to have to do a lot more than hand out massive amounts of money to Dick Cheney's friends. We're going to have to overlook minor matters like the fact many African leaders are using oil money to buy weapons, repress dissent, and live in luxury, without making a dent in the region's poverty. Democracy and human rights are not exactly high on the agenda in many of those countries either.

You could try to make a case, of course, that by "investing" in Africa, the U.S. will be in a better position to encourage accountability and respect for human rights. But as Stanford University political scientist Terry Lynn Karl pointed out, "We don't have a single example of oil leading to long-term positive outcomes in developing countries." And it's not like anybody's making an effort to change that history. The oil companies make deals with corrupt African regimes, but since no one knows exactly what the deals are, it's impossible for citizens to hold their governments accountable. Activists have pressed for measures to force companies to reveal the deals. But the Republican way is to hand out favors to big companies, not ask to behave responsibly.

And by the way -- the LA Times mentions that $135 million dollar loan guarantee for the petroleum plant in Nigeria. They didn't mention that it was the vice-president's old company that got the money. I guess they didn't think it was relevant.

This is my new motto: Mojo is a renewable resource.

Liberal Oasis links to another poll showing support for Bush dropping into the 50s. And while other polls still have him in the low 60s, the trend is definitely downward.

Meanwhile, a Knight-Ridder poll has 83 percent of Americans supporting war with Iraq. That's assuming U.N. approval, support of allies, and unambiguous evidence that Iraq has nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. Without those things, support drops to one-third.

In other words, in the real world, support for war is one-third.

The percentage of people who think Bush has explained the reasons for the war is also dropping.

You have to read pretty far to find the most interesting part of the poll, though:

* Two-thirds of the respondents said they thought they had a good grasp of the issues surrounding the Iraqi crisis.

* Seventeen percent knew that none of the September 11 hiackers were from Iraq. They were outnumbered by the 21 percent who thought the majority of them were Iraqis.

* Respondents who actually did know the facts about Iraq were considerably less hawkish than those who thought they knew, but were wrong.

That pretty much sums up the whole issue, doesn't it? Most of the people who know what they're talking about are against the war. The majority of those who support it don't know what they're talking about. That's been obvious for a long time, but it's nice to have statistics to back it up .

Sean-Paul Kelley and I disagree about Iraq (although he's very smart and honest, and I take his arguments seriously), but his response to a recent Newsday article suggesting that Bush and Company are considering appropriating Iraqi oil to pay for the war and occupation is identical to mine. I don't give the Bush administration credit for much anymore. I'm a fairly trusting soul, but not a complete fool. Still, even I was shocked by that level of cynicism, and I still hope the story is wrong (or, as Kevin Drum suggests, since it seems to have hatched in the incompetent Dick Cheney's office, maybe it will eventually wander away.)

One thing especially struck me about Sean-Paul's post: the grace with which he responded to a reader (Kevin, as a matter of fact) who disagreed with him. It's a perfect model of how an intelligent person deals with criticism. You really should read it, because you won't see that kind of class and thoughtfulness displayed very often in the blogosphere.

I didn't see or hear Governor Ryan's speech yesterday, but reading the transcript, I'm sorry I missed it. It's an extraordinary speech, demonstrating that when you're doing the right thing, the simplest and most straightforward language carries enormous weight.

Reading through, I wondered, how many politicians ever ask themselves Ryan's simple questions -- Is that fair? Is that right? Those questions would make a better plaque than "The buck stops here" to put on the desk in the Oval Office.

And the moral struggle implicit in this passage -- I spent a good deal of time reviewing these death row cases. My staff, many of whom are lawyers, spent busy days and many sleepless nights answering my questions. -- brought to mind George Bush's contrasting refusal to engage in thought, let alone an honest moral reckoning, when he responded to an AP reporter who asked about the possibility of innocent people being executed in Texas: "If you’re asking me whether or not as to the innocence or guilt or if people have had adequate access to the courts in Texas, I believe they have." A report had indicated that the death penalty in Texas was a knot of racial bias and incompetent defense, but Bush didn't even think it was worth looking into the issue. The refusal to bother asking yourself ethical questions must be the worst form of laziness. As Governor Ryan put it, "Many people express the desire to have capital punishment. Few, however, seem prepared to address the tough questions that arise when the system fails. It is easier and more comfortable for politicians to be tough on crime and support the death penalty. It wins votes. But when it comes to admitting that we have a problem, most run for cover." Cowardice, as well as moral sloth.

What struck me most about Ryan's speech, however, was that he dealt with more than just the unfair application of the death penalty. He moved on to question whether the death penalty could ever be just, and even to ask a profoundly difficult question: Does the death penalty really help ease the pain of victims' families? Is the "hope of revenge" the best thing we can offer them? What more could we do for those families if we didn't have the enormous cost -- financial and emotional -- of the death penalty?

But it is cruel and unusual punishment for family members to go through this pain, this legal limbo for 20 years. Perhaps it would be less cruel if we sentenced the killers to TAMS to life, and used our resources to better serve victims.

My heart ached when I heard one grandmother who lost children in an arson fire. She said she could not afford proper grave markers for her grandchildren who died. Why can't the state help families provide a proper burial?

Another crime victim came to our family meetings. He believes an inmate sent to death row for another crime also shot and paralyzed him. The inmate he says gets free health care while the victim is struggling to pay his substantial medical bills and, as a result, he has forgone getting proper medical care to alleviate the physical pain he endures.

What kind of victims services are we providing? Are all of our resources geared toward providing this notion of closure by execution instead of tending to the physical and social service needs of victim families? And what kind of values are we instilling in these wounded families and in the young people? As Gandhi said, an eye for an eye only leaves the whole world blind.

And as if those were not difficult enough questions to ask, Ryan had the audacity to take seriously "the family members of the inmates" -- a group of innocent people whose suffering I can't remember ever hearing a politician mention.

Ryan's speech demonstrates something amazing and wonderful about human beings: Once we start asking simple moral questions -- Is that right? Is that fair? -- it's very hard to stop. We start by trying to deal with one injustice, and the struggle spirals out and we begin to see other injustices growing out of the first. In the end, it's not about victims vs. criminals, but a search for true justice that heals all.

I'm attempting to add a comments board at the moment, but I'm just tinkering and may drop the whole idea if it turns out to be more trouble than its worth. Drop me a line and say hello, if you like. It will help me figure out whether or not the thing is functioning. Don't be offended if I delete your message though. I'm new at this.

The ever-expanding left-wing cocoon

I like Living Small because it's a quiet, well-written blog that deals more with literature and faith than politics. It also has some nice recipes.

Jenn Manley Lee has, without a doubt, the best designed blog I've ever seen. It would be worth adding to the blogroll just for the way it looks -- as inspiration for the rest of us who settle for bland, slightly tweaked Blogger templates. But on top of that it has a lot of good writing, often personal, or exploring where the personal and political come together. As an example, check out Spent all my money on booze and strippers.

The Nitpicker won't be in the running for next year's Koufax Awards for design (why do so many good blogs use the ugliest Blogger template?), but Terry discovers fascinating stuff and has a great bullshit detector.

Late Night Thoughts makes me think. Emma can rant with the best of them, but she's especially good when digging below the surface, and exploring the connections between personal life and political beliefs. I also appreciate a writer who shares my definition of sin.

And then there are the blogs that I've been reading forever through someone else's link and for some reason (laziness wouldn't have anything to do with it, would it?) never got around to adding to my list. Until now.

Roger Ailes

D-Squared Digest

Mark Kleiman

Oliver Willis

I also finally got around to fixing my link to The Poor Man (I could still get there through the old link, it just took an extra step.) He's been especially good lately, but I don't know how he's going to beat this.

After yesterday's important and heartening news that Illinois Governor George Ryan pardoned four men on death row who may have been tortured into confessing, the first site I went to this morning was, of course, Talk Left, where Jeralyn has a succinct explanation of the decision, along with a good round up of articles on the news.

Reading the Los Angeles Times article about the pardons this morning, what struck me most was the victims' families' anger at Ryan's decision, their tenacity in believing the convicted men are guilty, despite the evidence. That feeling is understandable. If you think you've found justice, you'll hold on to it like a child clinging to a blanket, no matter how dirty and ragged it gets. But reading that, I remembered how often I have heard people say that the main reason they support the death penalty is the "comfort" it gives victims families. And I can't help but notice that often victims are so understandably desperate for the pain to be eased that they can take comfort in enormous injustice -- but as a decent society we can't afford to do so.

Which brought to mind Scott Turlow's recent essay in The New Yorker on how he moved from a "death-penalty agnostic" to a still hesitant and unsure opponent of the death penalty. For me, one of Turlow's most compelling arguments against the death penalty was that it is most likely to be imposed in response to the most ghastly and incomprehensible crimes. That sounds right of course, the way it should be. And yet, as Turlow points out, those cases are the ones in which justice is least likely to be found, because the emotions they arouse make all of us -- the public, police, prosecutors, judges, and juries -- feel like victims, who so desperately need "justice" that we're far more willing than we ordinarily would be to settle for a dirty, ragged substitute.

The New York Times has a good article this morning on the decline in the number of death sentences and how, to some extent, it reflects changing public attitudes toward the death penalty. Scott Turlow, in his New Yorker piece notes that most Americans have always had mixed feelings about the death penalty that aren't easily measured by for and against polls. The NYT quotes two poll numbers that suggest that for a significant number of people those "mixed feelings" have reached a strange level. In the past decade, support for the death penalty has dropped from 80 to 70 percent -- still a high percentage of supporters. But between 40 and 50 percent of Americans think the death penalty is unfairly administered. Even if you assume that most people who oppose the death penalty believe it is unfairly administered, that still leaves many people believing that it's unfair, but they support it anyway. A crisis of conscience in the making.

UPDATE: Kevin writes: I think you might be a bit too harsh on the victims' families. In investigations like this, the police and the prosecutors are often in very close contact with the families of the victims. The victims often receive only the prosecution's point of view, since the prosecution and the police can become their main source of information. The first people to provide comfort for the victims are often the police officers delivering the horrible news. Very often, the only people who can give the victims a conduit for escaping their feelings of powerlessness are the police and prosecutors. In many cases, the police and the prosecutors have become as close, or closer, than family in the minds of the victims. I don't think that the victims are taking comfort in an injustice as that they do not understand that an injustice has been done. To believe that, they must believe that people who they have relied upon to get them trough the worse times of their lives betrayed them. And they are often asked to believe that they were betrayed in the face of adamant denials by the police and prosecutors.

That is one of the most disgusting aspects of police and prosecutors who abuse the system or refuse to admit they made mistakes. They leave the victim's with a lifetime of feeling that justice had been ripped from them.

I didn't mean to suggest that victims' families were clinging to an injustice that they recognize as injustice, but only that pain makes it virtually impossible for anyone to see and think clearly. Given similar circumstances, I'm positive I wouldn't be one bit more objective. I also think what you say about police and prosecutors adds a whole other layer to the issue. When I think about police and prosecutors hanging on to what it has become clear is a phony story, my immediate concern is obviously with the person unjustly convicted. I never thought about the effect on the families. Or, if I did, I thought it best to allow them to take comfort in whatever myth eased the pain. But you're right, of course -- encouraging them to believe a lie, in the long run, only increases the pain.

Long story; short pier has a must-read post on the perception and reality of poverty.

U.S. considers seizing revenues to pay for occupation
Bush administration officials are seriously considering proposals that the United States tap Iraq's oil to help pay the cost of a military occupation, a move that likely would prove highly inflammatory in an Arab world already suspicious of U.S. motives in Iraq.

Officially, the White House agrees that oil revenue would play an important role during an occupation period, but only for the benefit of Iraqis, according to a National Security Council spokesman.

Yet there are strong advocates inside the administration, including the White House, for appropriating the oil funds as "spoils of war," according to a source who has been briefed by participants in the dialogue.

"There are people in the White House who take the position that it's all the spoils of war," said the source, who asked not to be further identified. "We [the United States] take all the oil money until there is a new democratic government [in Iraq]."

The source said the Justice Department has urged caution. "The Justice Department has doubts," he said. He said department lawyers are unsure "whether any of it [Iraqi oil funds] can be used or has to all be held in trust for the people of Iraq."

Another source who has worked closely with the office of Vice President Dick Cheney said that a number of officials there too are urging that Iraq's oil funds be used to defray the cost of occupation...

Couldn't you have predicted, as soon as you saw the headline, that if you read far enough into the story, Dick Cheney's name was going to turn up?

Ampersand argues that Josh Marshall's recent piece on Dick Cheney's incompetence was, if anything, too kind. Marshall gives Cheney credit for having been a good Secretary of Defense, but Ampersand finds evidence that even as Secretary of Defense Cheney was "competence-challenged."

Marshall makes a good case (as does Ampersand), but I'm having a hard time shifting mental gears to see Cheney as more incompetent than Machiavellian.

Somewhat (although not entirely) irrelevantly, I have to mention something that recently came to my attention about Cheney. I linked a couple of days ago to a Washington Post article from 1991 in which Pentagon officials admitted that the US deliberately bombed civilian targets, including electrical plants that powered hospitals and water treatment plants, in order to give itself post-war leverage in Iraq, including possibly encouraging the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The article quotes then-Defense Secretary Cheney on this immoral policy: "If I had to do it over again, I would do exactly the same thing."

I've been reading a number of reports recently, particularly from Oxfam about the humanitarian crisis that threatens Iraq. Iraq’s water treatment system has never recovered from the Gulf War bombings that crippled the electrical supply it depends on. More than a decade later, one-third of the national power supply is still down. The water and sanitation system is on the verge of collapse. The past two days, as I've been reading these articles, Cheney's remark -- "If I had to do it over again, I would do exactly the same thing" -- has been haunting me. I don't mean that they will deliberately go after civilian targets again. I can't see that they have anything to gain from doing so this time. But Cheney made it very clear in 1991 that the lives of Iraqi civilians were not a concern. There's every indication that they're considered just as irrelevant this time.

Is there such a thing as an incompetent Machiavellian?

UPDATE: I knew that phrase was ringing a bell. As reader Sylvia Li points out, there's a reason why they're called Mayberry Machiavellis.

The Pope has apparently been reading a few of the nastier warbloggers.

I'm probably revealing my ignorance here (not that anyone who reads this site regularly is under any illusions on that score), but what's going on with Tony Blair? The American press portrays him as American staunchest ally, the British press paints him as Bush's lapdog, and yet his relationship to Bush and his attitude toward war with Iraq seem a lot more complex than what either press suggests. On the one hand, he's obviously gearing up for war. On the other hand, there are rumors that he is pressuring Bush to delay the war until Autumn to give weapons inspectors more time. Blair denied the rumor, through a spokesman, but even while denying it argued that the January 27 deadline for the weapons report isn't that important, and that " the weapons inspectors in Iraq must be given the time and space they need to do their job."

Is this just an attempt to calm anti-war British voters, or does it reflect a real discomfort with Bush's determination to have a war no matter what? The BBC suggests both:

What is clear is the British Government is responding both to the criticism of its own policy and to a more generalised dislike of the Bush administration.

And several other British newspapers see efforts to delay if not stop the war. The Financial Times suggests that Blair's statement was a deliberate effort to "quash expectations" of American hawks.

What I don't know is whether or not this makes any difference whatsoever. Even if Blair is backing off from support for Bush, does it matter? Do doubts expressed by our "staunchest ally" have any effect?

Is there a hope any reasonable person can hang on to that this war won't take place?

UPDATE: The Los Angeles Times takes note of the fact that there are realities even the most arrogant and war-hungry administration has to deal with -- including skittish allies other than Britain -- but quotes a State Department official who says, "Whatever the talk and whatever the timing, it still feels as if the train has left the station."

My daughter has a birthday coming up, so yesterday I went to a party supply store looking for a piñata. While browsing, I noticed a gag gift -- a single condom with a picture of an old man on the front and the words Over the Hill Condoms -- Full Year's Supply." Dumb joke

In Botswana, the average man receives less than one condom per year from international donors. Botswana has the highest rate of HIV infection in the world -- 39 percent of adults. Deadly joke.

When George Bush I was president, the U.S. donated 800 million condoms per year around the world. The number's now down to 300 million.

Part of the problem is that President Bush Jr. owes a few favors to right-wing religious groups who are bizarrely anti-condom -- unlike the many religious groups that do important work combatting AIDS in poor countries. As one conservative Catholic website noted, "The only absolutely guaranteed, permanent contraception is castration." So far there haven't been many takers for that form of birth control and disease prevention. Maybe the president would like to volunteer, just to set a good example.

Bush hasn't completely signed on to the anti-condom cause, but he's made previous unholy alliances with the Christian right over health issues and that makes small moves his administration has made -- demanding that a reference to "consistent condom use" to fights AIDS be removed from an international agreement, removing a fact sheet about condoms from the CDC website -- extremely worrisome.

There is an AIDS epidemic in Africa, which this administration has been extremely cavalier about. Seventy million Africans may die from the disease in the next twenty years. The UN recently warned that the international response to the crisis has been miserly, and as American money and attention flow toward Iraq, little improvement in that situation can be expected. And on top of that, Bush seems ready to endanger more lives as a sop to a few of his crazier religious supporters -- the ones who believe Jesus hated sex and thought death was an appropriate punishment for it.

The third is installment of The Story Point is up.

Yesterday, in the LA Times, I noticed this small article about Republicans, now that they have complete control of the government, undoing their own ethics rules, and it seemed to me a pretty significant story to stick at the bottom of page 10, without any details. But as Sean-Paul, over at The Agonist points out, the LAT wasn't the only memerber of the "liberal media" to miss the point of the story.

I've written many times about religion as a catalyst for change. The Goblin Queen (hearby added to the blogroll) has an interesting exploration of religion as a source of stability.

Now if we could just get George Bush to this church.

In this week's Village Voice, Ta-Nehisi Coates suggests that sub-Saharan Africa may be the next center of terrorism. It has all the requirements -- economic instability, political unrest, corruption, failed governance, and a combination of exploitation by Western corporations, and apathy on the part of American policy makers (following decades of support for corruption and thuggery) that feed anti-Americanism. It also has a long history of religious conflict which most Americans only became aware of during the Miss World riots in Nigeria (and even then understood in very simplistic and ahistorical terms.)

But -- warbloggers beware, cliche-breaker approaching -- Islamic fundamentalism doesn't seem to be a necessity. As the Washington Post reported last month, al Qaeda found lucrative refuge in Liberia -- an authoritarian, but secular country.

What Africa needs is not an attack on religion, it's an attack on the conditions that breed terrorism. And it needs that attention now.

I can never keep up with how many good things Dwight Meredith posts, but do not miss his recent post on how the president has changed his tune on government's role in the economy, nor his post on the heroism of the freedom riders. I would only add, that in addition to the Taylor Branch book that Dwight cites, the autobiography of John Lewis (one of the original freedom riders, and now a Congressman from Georgia), Walking With the Wind is not only a good source of information about that period in our history, but also one of the most inspiring books on the value of religious faith that I've ever read.

It takes a conservative to insult a conservative.

If no one knows, it didn't happen...
In 1991, a Census Bureau demographer estimated that 158,000 Iraqis died during the Persian Gulf War -- three-fourths of them civilians. She was reprimanded, her report was rewritten, and she threatened with losing her job. She challenged the dismissal, but she subsequently received no assignments and was forbidden to speak about Iraq. Despite her treatment, she says, "Nobody has ever said the numbers were wrong."

She has no intention of trying to estimate Iraqi deaths in the approaching war.

U.N. emergency planners estimate that in the early stages of war in Iraq:

* Half a million Iraqis could require medical treatment as a result of serious injuries.

* 4.5 million to 9.5 million Iraqis could quickly need outside food to survive.

* 900,000 Iraqi refugee requiring immediate assistance could be driven into neighboring countries.

* 2 million refugees could be driven from their homes but remain inside Iraq, where access by relief agencies would be problem because of the fighting.

Little has been done to prepare for the looming emergency, and the U.N. fears that if the United States bombs or blockades key roads, rails, bridges and ports, delivering relief to Iraqis may be impossible. War could also lead to the outbreak of diseases, including cholera and dysentery, in "epidemic if not pandemic proportions."

Ari Fleischer is comfortable with that. I mean, it's not like they're Americans or anything:

Q: Would the President attack innocent Iraqi lives?

MR. FLEISCHER: The President wants to make certain that he can defend our country, defend our interests, defend the region, and make certain that American lives are not lost.

For sci-fi fans: Kevin has posted the second installment of The Story Point.

From the e-mail box:

On the Iraqi sanctionsGlad to see your post on the sanctions, but one point you didn't mention -- if you read a report by Barton Gellman in the Washington Post, it turns out the US deliberately destroyed the Iraqi water treatment system, knowing it couldn't be repaired under sanctions. The Pentagon officials told Gellman that the idea behind this was that by making the civilian population suffer, Saddam would be pressured to cave in to UN disarmament demands, or better yet, his regime might be overthrown.

The NYT ran a story (October 6, 2002) about possible modifications to the Geneva convention. One area of interest is whether facilities such as water treatment plants should be explicitly declared off limits for military attacks. The NYT didn't mention in this story that the US had done this during the Gulf War.

I think the Washington Post article from 1991 shows beyond doubt that the US was deliberately targeting civilians back then. I don't think the case is quite so clearcut later in the decade, mainly because it is extremely rare to find American government officials naive enough to openly tell reporters that they were trying to make civilians suffer. But all this pretense in the mainstream press that civilian suffering from the sanctions is unintentional on our part and that the suffering is 100 percent the fault of Saddam is a deliberate lie. They know better.

Incidentally, the NYT reporting of John Burns has been disgraceful on this issue -- he has gone out of his way to put all the blame on Saddam. I haven't checked your LA Times weblink, but it is probably very similar to what Burns has been writing. -- Donald Johnson

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On Mother Teresa
"Mother Teresa's view of charity. It's a view with a strong appeal for powerful people who want to feel good, but don't want to see any real change. The canonization of Mother Teresa contains a political message as well as a spiritual one ..."

This struck me as analogous to the pedophilia scandal ... on the one hand you have the institutional church, "powerful people who want to feel good, but don't want to see any real change" struggling to deny the existence very real spiritual and physical crimes in order to maintain the hierarchy and difference by which they have accumulated power. It's the ugly underside of the Church that some of us struggle with endlessly .... how to ignore the Powerful Institution, with which we disagree so wholeheartedly, an Institution willing to chuck it's own rules to rush the canonization of Mother Teresa (while simultaneously telling us all to obey the rules or we'll be exiled). That the Church is willing to overlook/deny M.T's close relationship with really evil dictators seems to me connected to the same Church being willing to overlook/deny the deep-seated sexual dysfunction that has corrupted the clergy (or by which the Church, in its insistence on celibacy and on the inherent evil of all sexual pleasure has corrupted its own clergy). If sex itself is always evil, then the difference between abusing a child and healthy marital relations is only one of degree, right?

All I can do is pray that the receding tide of post-Vatican II Catholicism, the Catholicism of social conscience will somehow rise again ... but it looks for now like it's going to be a long wait. In the meantime, what's one to do? Take refuge in a local parish? Try to find local means to practice the radical Catholicism of those like Romero? Or just take refuge in the Mass itself? I don't know ... I've been unable even to go to Mass for months, because if it is the sacrament I believe it to be, how can I take it from the hands of a priesthood that as a corporate body is so soiled with sins against children? So it's just been me at home with my little altar and my beloved Virgin of Guadalupe ... -- Charlotte
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It would be fine for people to be inspired by Mother Teresa's reputation for holiness if she had settled for leading by example (hell, it would have been holy of her to do it that way).

Unfortunately, she leveraged her image into the support of a great many ugly things that served whatever she imagined her larger purpose was (campaigning against first-world support for family planning in the third world springs to mind - should babies have to starve to death, or die of AIDS, on behalf of religion, let alone someone else's? - and playing pattycake with some really noisome people, as long as they would give her large money in return for a few minutes toasting in the penumbra of her "holiness").

The difference between her use of religion and Pat Robertson's escapes me. -- Julia

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On Independent vs. Corporate Bookstores
This is more than a matter of large corporate bookstores driving out small local bookstores. It is also a matter of what books get published, and, indirectly, what books get written in the first place. Publishers, especially smaller ones, but even large ones to some extent, must publish works they can sell through Barnes and Noble, Borders, etc. If a book, however well-written and attractive to readers, has no chance of being sold to a large outlet, it may well not be published at all. Authors who make their living writing books are aware of this, and tailor their books accordingly. Of course there are myriad exceptions to this simplification, but in principle, the hegemony of large corporate bookstores actually reduces the range of content available to the reader through any bookstore whatsoever, no matter how physically large a store's shelf stock may be.

Yes, to my dismay, I do shop at Barnes and Noble, though I buy from the few remaining local independents whenever I can.

I draw the line at Amazon, not because of their practices as booksellers but because they have allegedly in the past shown a very cavalier attitude toward privacy issues involving the information you give them when you purchase books. But then again, I may be more sensitive than most to such issues: these days, I purchase stridently liberal or antiwar political books with cash rather than a card, and I no longer check such things out of the public library at all. -- Steve Bates

In defense of Mother Teresa.

And another from the e-mail box:

The "role-model" value of Mother Teresa doesn't depend on what she actually did; what matters is what people think she did. That, in my opinion, is what is being canonized in her case: her public image.

This isn't entirely a bad thing; if people are awed by the thought of someone sacrificing everything to care for the utterly wretched, some of them may behave more charitably than they otherwise would have, which is a good thing. The principal drawback to canonizing the public image of a modern-day figure is that such an image can be debunked, and then everyone is worse off than before, and there goes another chunk of the Church's credibility. -- Sylvia Li

Today's gems:
Hesiod on Cheney (and I've got to read that Josh Marshall article)

Kevin on affirmative action.

Seeing The Forest on taxes (okay, it's Sunday's gem -- I'm a little behind.)

Natasha on the slippery meaning of patriotism.

I live in a fairly small college town that, a decade ago, had three bookstores (not counting the two used bookstores and the campus store). There was a little, undistinguished independent; a big independent with great selection in every area I was interested in (good literary fiction, poetry, history, and politics), besides being a cozy, inviting place to browse; and the best children's bookstore I've ever been in (and I never going anywhere without visiting the local children's bookstore.)

Then Barnes and Noble opened up downtown. The big independent, which unfortunately had just moved to a larger store across the street, putting it in a precarious financial position, was out of business within a year. So was the children's bookstore. The little independent, with not much going for it other than a pretty store front on a pretty main street that draws a lot of tourists, is still around. The owners have been trying to play on local guilt since Barnes and Noble opened (If you don't shop here, the big nasty corporations win!) but while liberal guilt trips and anti-corporate sentiment usually work very well on me, it's no sale here. I can go to Barnes and Noble, which has a wide selection, and feel guilty about feeding the corporate beast, or I can go to a little card and gift shop with a few shelves of novels, and nothing else I'm interested in (I have enough cookbooks, thanks.) The book lover in me beats the liberal every time.

Or it used to. When Barnes and Noble opened, I hated it because it was big chain, and a year later I hated it because it because it put two good stores out of business. The children's bookstore was truly irreplaceable. Barnes and Noble has a decent selection of children's books, although not nearly as good as the specialized store it drove out. But it doesn't have an owner who knows and loves children's books and is always ready to make suggestions for customers she gets to know. More importantly, what Barnes and Noble does have is a way of displaying the junkiest books (and the toys that go with them), so that my daughter and I have to plow through aisles of garbage that screams Buy me! to a seven-year-old in order to get to the real books. And every time I shop, there are more Captain Underpants and fewer real books.

And the same thing has happened with adult books. At first, to be honest, as frustrated as I was about losing my favorite bookstore, I had to admit that Barnes and Noble's selection of literary fiction was, if anything, better than the local independent's. And the books were displayed at the front of the store, so I could always see what new novels (and, amazingly, even books of short fiction) had just come out. Little by little, those books have moved to the back of the store, replaced by computer books and right-wing screeds, and they must be ordering fewer because more often than not I end up at Amazon now. Did people really suddenly stop reading real books and start reading Ann Coulter, or is something else going on?

That's one of those questions I don't have an answer to.

What brought all this to mind was a fascinating post on bookstores over at Electrolite, followed by a fuller exploration of the topic by readers (this is what comments boards were made for!)

There has always seemed to me to be something deeply dishonest about conservatives citing Dr. King's dream of color-blind society in their attacks on affirmative action, but I could never explain why. Ampersand explains why.

News from abroad that it would be nice to see in this country

Lula to use defence funds in famine fight
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who took office as Brazil's president this week, on Friday postponed a US$750m defence programme by a year to finance emergency social spending. José Viegas, the new defence minister, said the purchase of 12 fighter aircraft would be delayed and funds used in hunger eradication projects...

According to a new book, "High and Mighty," SUV drivers "don't care about anyone else's kids but their own, are very concerned with how other people see them rather than with what's practical, and they tend to want to control or have control over the people around them." They are also "willing to endanger other motorists so as to achieve small improvements in their personal safety," and are too dumb to notice that those safety gains are illusory. They don't like minivans because they're driven by "nice" people who volunteer for their churches and carpool other people's kids, and they don't want anyone to think they are "nice."

I know...duh!

But while reading this, it occurred to me that SUVs are not only the symbolic vehicle of the coming war because of the enormous amounts of gas they consume, but because of the personality traits they legitimize and encourage. Once you've bought an unsafe car because it makes you feel big, important and a little dangerous (and if you're big, you must be safe, right?) and have convinced yourself that it doesn't matter that you're endangering other people's lives because you feel safer, and that's all that really counts, it's not a big deal to go to war because you might be in danger, even though a glance at the facts would tell you that going to war won't make you one bit safer. After all, other people's kids don't matter, do they?

An example: To illustrate the kind of selfishness that marks some SUV drivers, Bradsher finds people who rave about how they've survived accidents with barely a scratch, yet neglected to mention that the people in the other car were all killed. (One such woman confesses rather chillingly to Bradsher that her first response after killing another driver was to go out and get an even bigger SUV.)

It must have been a very traumatic experience. I'm sure she'll feel better after invading Iraq.

When was the last time you heard a rational person on talk radio? Go visit skippy and he'll tell you what to do about it.

The poor give us so much more than we give them." -- Mother Teresa

"When the church hears the cry of the oppressed it cannot but denounce the social structures that give rise to and perpetuate the misery from which the cry arises." -- Archbishop Oscar Romero

Surprisingly, I didn't get a single angry letter about my agreeing with Christopher Hitchen's attack on Mother Teresa. (Tentatively agreeing -- I'm still open to anyone really defending Mother Teresa, something beyond how "everyone knows" what good work she did.) My three conservative Catholic readers must have taken the weekend off. I did, however, get several letters from people who agreed, and said they'd been frustrated for a long time with the difference between popular image and reality in Mother Teresa's case.

Matthew Yglesias wonders if "some little thing like so-and-so should be a saint" really matters. Obviously it matters to millions of Catholics, and to millions more non-Catholic Christians who look up to her as a model of a life of faith. But I think it should matter even to an atheist like Matt.

A saint's life offers an example of how to live, and defines holiness for Catholics. But some saints have cross-over appeal, and Mother Teresa, with her long and deep hold on the popular imagination clearly falls into that category. Ask most Americans, of any religion, to name an irreproachable person, someone who embodied goodness, and I suspect the first name that will come to the vast majority of minds is Mother Teresa's.

But Teresa represented a particular -- and political -- notion of faith and holiness. Although she was associated with the poor of Calcutta, Teresa's deepest alliance was with the rich and powerful -- sometimes the relatively benign rich like Princess Diana, and sometimes thugs like the Duvaliers. Her ministry was primarily to them -- she offered them a way to save their souls, by giving money to ameliorate the lives of the poor without questioning why the poor were poor. And, as Hitchens documented in Missionary Position, his book on Mother Teresa, that amelioration was far less than most people believe. For Mother Teresa, poverty was necessary, for if it didn't exist, how could the rich demonstrate their goodness?

Think of President Bush, whose policies have done so much to harm the poor, doing a photo op at a food bank and encouraging Americans (presumably the poor don't count as Americans) to give more to their suffering fellow citizens, and you have a red, white and blue version of Mother Teresa's view of charity. It's a view with a strong appeal for powerful people who want to feel good, but don't want to see any real change. The canonization of Mother Teresa contains a political message as well as a spiritual one. As Hitchens notes, the speeded up canonization process for Mother Teresa is odd, and suggests that the Vatican is anxious to send that particular political and spiritual message.

Another Catholic associated with the poorest of the poor is on a slower track to sainthood. Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador who was murdered in 1980 while celebrating Mass, could not have been more different from Mother Teresa. His real allegiance was with the poor. At the time he became Archbishop in 1977, small groups of poor Catholics were banding together to worship and study the gospels and their implications for society. Uneducated peasants organizing, choosing leaders and speaking of social justice in the name of Christianity made landowners uneasy. Death squads roamed the country, killing the leaders and the priests and nuns who worked with them. Archbishop Romero, who before he became Archbishop was considered a moderate conservative, cast his lot with the poor and with the fight for social justice. He didn't tell the powerful that they could go on oppressing the poor as long as they threw them a few crumbs from time to time. He told them that the Church "says to the rich: do not sin by misusing your money. It says to the powerful: do not misuse your political influence. Do not misuse your weaponry. Do not misuse your power. It says to the sinful torturers: do not torture. You are sinning. You are doing wrong. You are establishing the reign of hell on earth."

It remains to be seen whether the Church really does say those things to the powerful. The canonization of Mother Teresa would say exactly the opposite.

Mother Teresa and Archbishop Romero represent two very different views of what it means to care for the poor. The offer polar opposite models to follow. Mother Teresa was honored by the powerful, Oscar Romero was killed by them. And that's one of the reasons it matters which one first becomes a saint.

A survey done at St. Louis University, paid for in part by several orders of Catholic nuns, found that about 40% of nuns in the United States have been victims of some form of sexual abuse or harassment, in a significant number of cases by priests. The researchers believe that the numbers probably underestimate the prevalence of sexual abuse because many nuns feel shame and guilt, and fear speaking out.

What's especially disturbing about the story is that the study was done in 1996, and published in two small circulation religious research journals in 1998, but the findings were never reported in the mainstream press -- not even in a year in which sexual scandals in the Catholic Church received wide coverage.

Many people in and out of the Church have felt that over time the pedophilia scandal developed into a witch hunt directed at gay priests. Sexually abused nuns didn't fit the storyline. Does that have anything to do with why we haven't heard about them until now? And will we stop hearing suggestions that if the Church just eliminated gay priests, the problem would go away?

I suppose I should be grateful to the Los Angeles Times for at least mentioning the fact that the sanctions imposed on Iraq do more harm to ordinary Iraqis than to Saddam Hussein, even if the mention comes in an article this stupid. But honestly, this is just plain offensive. It's never been possible for the media to mention sanctions without rushing to add that there would be no sanctions if Saddam would just behave, which, while undeniably true, is also beside the point. Saddam was just as greedy, just as monstrous a dozen years ago, when there were no sanctions and Iraq was a relatively wealthy country. It gives no credit to Saddam to admit the sanctions are not doing what they were designed to do. They aren't touching Saddam; they are killing ordinary Iraqis.

This LA Times piece, though, carries the argument to the highest levels of nonsense. They start by affirming that the sanctions keep Iraqis from getting needed medicines, and move on to point out that obviously it's all Saddam's fault, because he has plenty of money and material to build mosques.

Run that one by me again? If someone needs antibiotics, bricks and mortar don't make ideal substitutes. I'm sure Saddam, the old secularist, is laying down mosques at record rates to try to paint himself as a good Muslim and distract people from their misery. Of course it's an enormous con job. But that doesn't mean that if he stopped pulling that con he could use the money to buy medicine for Iraqis. Under the sanctions, Iraq can't spend its oil revenues on domestically produced medicines. And Iraq is not allowed to buy certain medicines from other countries. Just last week the UN Security Council placed tighter limits on doses of antibiotics that can be sent to Iraq. It doesn't make any difference how much money you have if you're forbidden to buy what you need.

In 1999, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer did a series on the effect of the sanctions called Life and Death in Iraq. They updated it late last year. Read it. We're on the verge of war with a country where the population has been devastated by sanctions, and for a number of reasons there has been virtually no preparation for what almost everyone recognizes is an approaching humanitarian disaster. The LA Times ends their article with a little sanctions humor. But if you read the whole story, it's pretty hard to find anything to laugh at.

"The more you examine the religion [Islam], the more militaristic it seems. After all, its founder, Mohammed, was a warrior, not a peace advocate like Jesus." -- Kenneth Adelmen

I've read dozens of variations on that statement, and every time the logic, or lack of it, drives me mad. Never mind mentioning that Christianity has its own militaristic streak, does it make any sense whatsoever to argue that Islam is violent because Mohammed was a warrior, and Christianity is peaceful because Jesus was a peace advocate, and therefore, as followers of Jesus we must attack?

I know I'm setting myself up for angry mail here, but I think Christopher Hitchens makes a good case against sainthood for Mother Teresa.

Can you do fiction on a blog? I'm primarily a fiction writer -- or I used to be, before this blog started consuming my writing time -- and I've often wondered about that, and considered trying it. Kevin Raybould, who's already proven his ability to write clear and well-reasoned political commentary at Lean Left, has taken up the challenge with a science fiction novel he has begun serializing at The Story Point. If you're interested in fiction, especially sci-fi, you might want to go over, take a look, offer some encouragement, or even make suggestions. Or just read and enjoy.

Gene Healy has pulled together the strongest case I've seen against the national security argument for invading Iraq. (You might also be interested in reader comments on the essay posted at STAND DOWN). My only quibble with the piece is that Gene early on dismisses both the humanitarian argument for war and the notion that "venal or frivolous motives lie behind the administration's push for war." I think focusing primarily on the national security argument is the right approach, both because that is the argument the administration has emphasized, and because it is the one with the most resonance for ordinary Americans. If Americans support war with Iraq, it will not be because they are concerned with the human rights of Iraqis, but because they fear the possibility of a nuclear attack on the United States, and believe that is a genuine threat.

Nevertheless, I don't think it's fair or wise to completely dismiss the humanitarian argument. A concern for human rights may not move the majority of Americans, but many liberals take it seriously. I take it seriously. And it is the crowd-pleaser Bush is using to rally the troops, telling them that we will be "liberating" the Iraqi people. And while it's possible to make a case against humanitarian intervention without mentioning the administration's venal motives, its history of hypocrisy, corporate bootlicking, lack of concern for human rights, failure to follow through on reconstruction in Afghanistan, and just plain, old-fashioned lying, drive a stake through the heart of the most compelling human rights argument for invasion.

Eve Tushnet has just completed a long and interesting series of posts on race. It begins here and ends here, and in between, you're on your own, but it's worth tracking down the pieces. There's much I agree with, and a few things I disagree with, but they're thought-provoking posts, and well worth your time.

By now you've read skippy's talk radio rant, I'm sure, but don't miss the follow-up, not to mention, in a related vein Digby on Michael Jackson (the other Michael Jackson).

And by the way, Sisyphus says that The Washington Post would like to know what you think of Little Green Footballs?

Oink.

The most interesting takes I've read on the proposal to bring back the draft have come from Kevin Drum and Jeralyn Merritt -- and Jeralyn's also includes interesting comments from readers.

I don't think the draft is likely to return, and I think there are more good arguments against it than for it -- from both a moral and a practical standpoint. But I agree with Kevin that far too many Americans have a great sense of entitlement, and I would add a lack of interest in anything that doesn't effect them personally. Jeralyn mentions being in college in the late sixties and seeing young men's lives ruined by the draft. She's certainly right. But I remember being in college a few years later, trying to help organize opposition to the resumed bombing of North Vietnam and the mining of Haiphong Harbor in 1972 (in supposedly radical Berkeley) and being met with a who cares, let's party response from the majority of students I talked to. There were large demonstrations in Berkeley that spring. But activists who had been there a few years told me that the response was not what they expected, and they chalked it up to the fact that because of the change to a lottery system, more students felt comfortable that the draft wouldn't touch them. It only got worse when the draft was eliminated in 1973.

A draft, whether for military or other national service, makes me very uncomfortable for a lot of reasons. But I'd love to hear some better alternatives for making Americans pay attention to the rest of the world and realize that there are human costs to pay for our government's actions.

UPDATE: Max has more on the topic. But, hey, I liked Country Joe.

Yesterday I mentioned that the Department of Labor had decided to stop publishing information about factory closings . Today Sam Heldman and Nathan Newman explain why it is important, and how the decision demonstrates not only the administration's love of secrecy, but its profoundly anti-labor agenda.

George Bush's addiction to secrecy -- and his ability to get others to feed his addiction -- stuns even those of us old enough to remember Richard Nixon. Adam Clymer has a noteworthy article in today's New York Times about that addiction, which is so extreme even Republicans are objecting.

Clymer seemed to miss one important issue, though. He recalls the administration's fight to keep records from Ronald Reagan's presidency from being made public:

On March 23, 2001, Mr. Gonzales, the White House counsel, ordered the National Archives not to release to the public 68,000 pages of records from Ronald Reagan's presidency that scholars had requested and archivists had determined posed no threat to national security or personal privacy. Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the documents were to become available after Jan. 20, 2001, twelve years after Mr. Reagan left office. Mr. Reagan's administration was the first covered by the 1978 law.

The directive, which also covered the papers of Mr. Reagan's vice president and the president's father, George Bush, was to last 90 days. When Mr. Gonzales extended the sealing period for an additional 90 days, historians like Hugh Davis Graham of Vanderbilt University attacked the delays, saying they were designed to prevent embarrassment and would nullify the records law's presumption of public access to those documents.

On Nov. 1, 2001, President Bush issued an even more sweeping order under which former presidents and vice presidents like his father, or representatives designated by them or by their surviving families, could bar release of documents by claiming one of a variety of privileges: "military, diplomatic, or national security secrets, presidential communications, legal advice, legal work or the deliberative processes of the president and the president's advisers," according to the order.

Before the order, the Archivist of the United States could reject a former president's claim of privilege. Now he cannot.

The order was promptly attacked in court and on Capitol Hill. Scott L. Nelson of the Public Interest Litigation Group sued on behalf of historians and reporters, maintaining that the new order allowed unlimited delays in releasing documents and created new privileges to bar release.

House Republicans were among the order's sharpest critics. Representative Steve Horn of California called a hearing within a few days, and Representative Doug Ose, another Californian, said the order "undercuts the public's right to be fully informed about how its government operated in the past." The order, Mr. Horn said, improperly "gives the former and incumbent presidents veto power over the release of the records."

On Dec. 20, the White House sought to silence the complaints by announcing that nearly all the 68,000 pages of the Reagan records were being released. Legislation introduced to undo the order never made it to the House floor, where leaders had no interest in embarrassing the president. And a lawsuit challenging the order languishes in Federal District Court before Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.

In other words, the administration played a little game with the records: By releasing most of the papers, they took off the pressure to release all of them -- still managing to keep control of what would and would not be released.

Clymer notes that the administration's control of information could effect how history is written. He might have added that it effects how journalism is written as well. The Washington Post recently published a stunning article on US complicity in Saddam Hussein's war crimes, focusing especially on Donald Rumsfeld's role. The Post's information came from Reagan-era declassified documents. But at least one significant piece of the puzzle is missing:

The U.S. tilt toward Iraq was enshrined in National Security Decision Directive 114 of Nov. 26, 1983, one of the few important Reagan era foreign policy decisions that still remains classified. According to former U.S. officials, the directive stated that the United States would do "whatever was necessary and legal" to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran... Secret talking points prepared for the first Rumsfeld visit to Baghdad enshrined some of the language from NSDD 114, including the statement that the United States would regard "any major reversal of Iraq's fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West."

In essence, the Washington Post can't tell the whole story because Bush has managed to keep the document describing Reagan's policy toward Iraq classified. That's convenient for Bush, but it's an outrage for the rest of us.

Hey thanks, guys and gals -- although, personally, I'd vote for Jim. And I hope everyone goes over to thank Dwight for coming up with the idea and putting in a lot of work. Next year we have to come up with a way to do this so that PLA gets included in the nominations.

 I had one of the first Barbies, back in the early '6Os. The one with the narrow, evil eyes. (Think George Bush with a lot of mascara.) The one in the knitted zebra-striped bathing suit. Unfortunately my Barbie never had a wardrobe beyond that impractical bathing suit, because poor girls get poor Barbies, and Goodwill didn't yet have a Barbie collection.

And in many ways, that was an advantage. I never got Malibu Barbie or Dr. Barbie, but I had fabric scraps Barbie, toilet paper Barbie, and -- best of all -- aluminum foil Barbie. The fabric scraps came from a brown dress my mother tried to sew for me when I was in second grade. My mother could not sew if her life depended on it. Believe me, Goodwill was an improvement. Thank God I wore a Catholic school uniform five days a week and only had to put up with that ugly brown dress on Sundays. But the scraps that were left over, draped over my angry-eyed Barbie, had a fringed-leather look, which I decided made my Barbie an Indian. I also had a cowboy doll, which Barbie regularly beat up. Her stilettos were lethal. In my world, Barbie the Indian princess defeated all the cowboys.

Wrapped in toilet paper, Barbie was an Egyptian queen. She had absolute power. No one would dare defy her or she would send them away to build pyramids. She also defeated the cowboys.

And if your imagination was stifled by a Barbie with all the accoutrements, you may not realize that aluminum foil makes perfectly believable armor. Think of the pen name I use to write this blog, and you can probably guess who aluminum foil-clad Barbie was. She defeated the cowboys as well.

All of this came flooding back to mind when I read Max's Barbie post, particularly about his concern with finding "professional" looking dolls. Doctor Barbie rather than cheerleader Barbie. I admit, I do the same thing when I choose dolls for my daughter. The last one I bought was Pilot Barbie (she came with a suitcase and a passport, but no gun). But when I think about it, I realize Max and I can probably both relax. As long as there have been Barbies, those dolls have led more interesting, heroic lives, and shaped girls' values in more eccentric ways, than most people realize. Forty years later, I'm still determined to defeat the cowboys.

Gimme shelter
Reconstruction of Afghanistan apparently doesn't include homes. Half a million refugees in Afghan cities are homeless, and will spend the Afghan winter in tents, ruins, and half-built structures.

For women, the problem of homelessness is compounded by misogyny. RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) operates shelters for women in Afghanistan and for Afghan refugees in Pakistan, not just for those fleeing abuse, but for unmarried and abandoned women, and former prostitutes, who desperately need the literacy training and work skills RAWA offers. But the shelters have to operate secretly, out of fear of resurgent fundamentalists. RAWA is not even allowed to run overnight shelters. If women need a place to stay, they're taken over the border to Pakistan. Last June, the first Afghan minister for women's affairs, Sima Simar, a powerful advocate for women's rights, was driven out of her job, in part by death threats from fundamentalists who view any protection for women as a threat to their power. The current women's affairs minister insists that Afghanistan has no need for women's shelters, since any problems women can be dealt with by the women's families.

This article cuts to the heart of the Bush administration's approach to bad news: Factories are closing, what should we do? Let's keep it a secret.

Devra has some interesting thoughts on the continuing appeal of Bill Clinton

I'm sure you already know this, but the most eagerly awaited blog arrived yesterday and it's already so good I feel like I can just stop writing now (you notice I didn't post anything yesterday -- you think that was a coincidence?). Drop by and visit Hullabaloo. The name, unfortunately, brings to mind a really dumb music tv show from my childhood back in the Middle Ages (otherwise known as the '60s). Now Shindig would have been a good name...

Devra has a must-read post on Jim Crow laws outside the South.

I agree with Elayne: There is something fundamentally wrong about turning the ashes of murdered people into a warship. Making the building of that warship an $800 million dollar pork project for Trent Lott's home town just compounds the indecency.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden demonstrates that you're not required to buy into your "heritage."

I think I have a similar ancestry on my father's side, although I'm not sure. My family's always been too poor, shiftless, and embarrassed to be aware of what came before. I don't know anything about my relatives -- not even names -- before my grandparents. But my father's from Tennessee, the family's been there since well before the Civil War, and there were a lot of photographs of people in uniform floating around my grandfather's house, so I've always assumed there was a hidden Confederate back there somewhere.

But I don't have to go back that far to find race hatred. That's my "heritage" as much as the spectral Confederate. As a child, I heard my father make statements that Archie Bunker would have considered going too far. And not just racist ones. Like Archie, my father was an equally opportunity bigot. I heard every anti-Papist slur in the air. And of course my father was married to a Catholic from Ireland -- which is probably one of the reasons I consider the psychology of bigotry infinitely complex.

Colleen Rowley may be one of Time magazine's Persons of the Year, but Ted Barlow discovered that the F.B.I. reserved its honors (and cash) for the man who blocked her.

Matt Yglesias looks at (and tentatively supports) Charles Rangels' proposal to reinstitute the draft, and his readers offer several objections well worth considering.

I have to admit that as the terrified mother of an 18-year-old boy, my first thought is, "Don't even think about it." And I'm not sure I buy in to Rangel's exhortation to "shared sacrifice." Society needs people to do many dangerous jobs, but that doesn't mean we expect every able-bodied person to put in time as a police officer or fire fighter. The important issue there (as should also be the case with the military) is that we should make sure people in those jobs have the tools and training to make the job as safe as we can make it, and should pay them adequately for their work.

But I think Matt is right in suggesting that there's a connection between the draft and the seriousness with which people take foreign policy. It is simply harder to convince people to go along with reckless wars if their own lives, or the lives of their children will be put on the line.

Julia's hate mail is worse than my hate mail. But I'm glad she mentioned it because it's a reminder of what uppity women deal with.

So how long do you think it will be before John Ashcroft looks into the connection between right-wing Christians and al-Qaeda?

I'm a word person. Numbers usually whiz right past my brain. But these numbers break down even my resistance:

Three million people died of AIDS this year, 80 percent of them in Africa.

One out of every five people in southern Africa is HIV-positive. In Zimbabwe and Swaziland, more than one-third of adults live with HIV.

In less than twenty years, 70 million Africans will die of AIDS.

That number -- 70 million people -- ought to trigger the same kind of response a looming genocide invokes: the knowledge that we won't be able to live with ourselves in the future if we don't do something to stop it now, that in a few years we'll be asking ourselves the same question we ask now about Rwanda -- how in God's name did we manage to sit by and watch that happen?

Fifty-eight percent of AIDS victims in Africa are women. That isn't significant because women's lives are in any way more valuable than men's lives, but because it extends the reach of the disease far beyond the victim. Seventy to eighty percent of food in Africa is produced by women. In times of famine, women have traditionally been the ones to set up networks to distribute food. But sick and weakened women inevitably devote less time to planting and harvesting crops, and to helping with food distribution. When the people who produce the food die, the entire community suffers. And of course it's a vicious cycle: malnutrition takes a toll on the immune system and speeds up the development of AIDS in people who are HIV-positive.

In Africa, you can't separate the AIDS issue from the hunger issue. People are starving because of AIDS; HIV-positive people develop AIDS because they're starving.

Yesterday's New York Times had an important piece by Kofi Annan on why current efforts to fight the famine in southern Africa depend as much on HIV and AIDS prevention as on traditional food assistance. It's a good piece, as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough. There are some important pieces of information that the secretary-general of the U.N. is too diplomatic to mention:

The president is too busy to care about Africa. Bush had scheduled his first trip to Africa as president for early next month. The Congressional Black Caucus urged the president to use the trip to promote awareness of AIDS in Africa, and to begin a US initiative to fight AIDS, but recently the president cancelled the trip. His focus is on Iraq. Africa has lost even the minimal amount of attention it ever had.

"Compassionate conservatism" is as much a scam abroad as it is at home. While sending Colin Powell out to lecture the world about fighting AIDS, the administration pledged only $500 million dollars to The Global Fund to Fight AIDS (the U.S. would need to give $2.5 billion to make its contribution equal that of Europe in terms of the size of the economy.) Bush fought a proposal by Jesse Helms, of all people (together with Bill Frist), for another $500 million for a program for HIV-positive African children, and when it passed anyway, he signed it only after convincing Frist to chop $300 million out of it.

Condescending, even racist, assumptions are built into the Bush administration's response to AIDS in Africa. Andrew Natsios, the head of America's foreign aid program, has argued against giving antiretroviral drug treatment to African AIDS patients because, Africans supposedly "don't know what Western time is" and are incapable of taking medicines on schedule. Antiretroviral treatment has been successful in Cote d'Ivoire, Senegal and Uganda, proving this racist assumption utterly absurd.

Corporate contributors come first. Rich countries, especially the US, continue to block efforts to loosen WTO patent rules so that poor countries can afford generic drugs, including AIDS medicines. Research by Oxfam shows that the availability of generics cuts costs dramatically. The pharmaceutical companies, despite promises, never lower their prices until faced with competition from generics. But the US has threatened sanctions against several countries with severe AIDS problems that have tried to obtain medicines, and has joined with other countries that are home to major pharmaceutical companies in opposing a pledge not to enforce the WTO agreement dealing with patents in cases of health emergencies like the African AIDS crisis. (American Prospect has a good article on the administration's choice of drug company profits over the lives of people in developing countries.)

Corporate contributors come first. (I know, I'm repeating myself. But that single sentence covers a lot of ground when you're talking about the policies of Bush, Inc.) The U.S. and Europe provide enormous subsidies for agribusiness which make it more difficult for farmers in poor countries to compete. We protect our own businesses, while insisting poor countries cut subsidies to their farmers.

You can hardly pick up a newspaper without reading a story about how hard it is to solve health problems and food shortages in Africa because of African governments' corruption and misplaced priorities. But let's be honest: Corruption and misplaced priorities are hardly unique to Africa.

Save the Children/ Oxfam Report on HIV/AIDS and Food Insecurity in Southern Africa (pdf)

Doctors Without Borders Background Information on HIV/AIDS Treatment in Developing Countries (pdf)

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, and who is willing to destroy his own heart? -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

First, read this. Scroll down to the December 18th post if the links are being fussy, but read it before you read anything I have to say.

And now I have one quick comment to add. I will gladly join the battle against the hard core racists and the (to me far worse) people who exploit racism to foster their ambition. But there's a danger in doing that, and it isn't overreaction (you can not overreact to racism). The danger is that we all start to believe that racism is something over there, in some other part of the country, or in the heart of some other guy, and if we just get rid of those people, all the problems will go away. I want to get rid of Lott and Ashcroft and that creep who won a presidential primary in South Carolina by waving the Confederate flag, stroking BoJo University, and running with a rumor about his opponent's dark-skinned daughter as much as anybody else. But when they're gone, the problem won't disappear. You don't grow up in America without racism, and the legacies of slavery and segregation, effecting the way you view the world. Racism shapes the world all of us live in.

I'm sure I'll have more to say about this when I think about it some more. But the basic idea has been in the back of my head since the Trent Lott story broke, and Dominion's post made me want to at least bring it to the surface today.

Michael Kinsley on Bill Frist: He won his seat from an incumbent Democrat by using television commercials full of racial innuendo. Frist is undoubtedly a better person than his use of those commercials would suggest. Does that make them better or worse?

Worse. And are those commercials still kicking around?

A coalition of civil rights, religious and labor groups plan to deliver a message to Bill Frist: You say the Republican Party has changed, prove it by opposing judges with "records of deep hostility to core civil rights principles," supporting hate crimes legislation, and making a real commitment -- backed up with cash -- to election reform that insures that every vote actually gets counted.

UPDATE/ COMMENTS: I didn't comment on this item immediately, because my first thought was simply "Bravo," and that seemed pretty tepid and pointless. An hour or so later, the only way I can see a down side to this kind of pressure is if the Democratic Party lives up (down?) to our worst expectations. Either we keep out hateful judges, get hate crimes legislation passed, and make sure every voter has an equal chance to register and vote, and all the votes are equally likely to be counted (which is one of those wonderful issues where the morally right and the politically advantageous come together), or it is made clear not just to black voters (whose voting record suggests they don't really have any difficulty with the concept to begin with), but to white soccer moms and dads who get queasy around hardcore racists, that the Republican party's outreach to minorities is as phony as it gets. That's assuming the Democratic Party and the beltway liberals don't let the Republicans get away with calling opposition to civil rights "conservatism," (an insult to principled conservatives if ever I heard one) and pretending that problems with voting procedures (not to mention deliberate attempts to hold down minority voting) aren't forms of discrimination. But that's not going to happen, right?

Three blogs I'm adding to the blogroll (and a sample of terrific work)

Antidotal on the difference between fantasy and reality.

Long story; short pier did a post on the INS arrests that combines passion with a good deal of research on the history of INS abuses.

Burningbird explores an issue that intrigues me: What constitutes good weblog writing, and are the standards different from what makes print writing good?

No one is sure exactly how many Iraqi Americans there are (somewhere between 200 and 400 thousand), and their discomfort about expressing opinions makes measuring their political leanings virtually impossible, and yet the Bush administration "operates under the delusion that the majority of Iraqi Americans favor a war," as the vice president of the Arab-American Discrimination Committee puts it.

I'm not so sure "delusion" is the right word. This administration tends to believe -- or at least pretends to believe -- whatever is most convenient. And certainly the belief that a huge majority of Iraqi nationals support an invasion is convenient. If true, it would suggest that even people whose friends and families would be endangered by a war realize that there is no other way to get rid of Saddam.

But according to The Times, while there is certainly a base of support for invasion among Iraqi intellectuals, most Iraqis are more conflicted. They felt, even before the war talk began, that they were being asked to choose between two horrors: Saddam and the sanctions that have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and they fear now that a war will make the lives of their friends and families even worse. They're not buying the argument that things will suddenly be better when Saddam is gone and not to worry about what it will cost to eliminate him.

In other words, they're in the same position as many other Americans who want to do the right thing and see nothing in front of them but horrible choices. The only difference is that, for the Iraqis, the choice is frighteningly personal.

Some Iraqi Americans are speaking out against the war, and the sanctions, but many are too afraid to do so, afraid that they are "poised to become the face of the new enemy," and that if they question American policy, their loyalty will be questioned. I suspect the fear is justified. The administration has an interest in selling the story that, as some State Department officials claimed, 80 to 90 percent of Iraqi Americans supported invasion. Given recent INS arrests over mangled paperwork, I'd be nervous about messing up Bush's storyline, too. Their fearful silence is very convenient.

I recently wrote a bit of memoir to explain why, emotionally, I don't think that charity is a substitute for a social safety net (which, in turn, is only a shabby substitute for genuine social justice). Molly Ivins lays out the facts of the issue. Because of Bush's policies:

* 36,000 senior citizens were eliminated from meal programs.

* 532,000 families lost their heating assistance.

* 50,000 children will be forced out of after-school programs.

And there's more. Dented cans (or even perfect ones), a few frozen turkeys, and a toy for the tot can't make up the difference. That doesn't mean you shouldn't donate to charity, but it's a band-aid, not a real solution. And making the poor poorer and then posing for pictures while you toss them a few crumbs is just plain mean.

The evolution of a southern strategy
"When you're from Mississippi and you're a conservative and you're a Christian, there are a lot of people that don't like that." -- Trent Lott

"I know that Republicans around the state are hurt and angry about the way Senator Lott has been treated. I encouraged them to take out their frustrations next year at the ballot box by electing Republicans from top to bottom, from governor to coroner." -- Jim Herring, Mississippi State Republican chairman.

Sam Heldman offers evidence from personal experience that Bill Frist's invocation of Marion Barry was an appeal to racism. Sam's post stirred up an odd thought: I'll start to believe the coded racial appeals have disappeared when I realize that it's been a long time since I've heard California politicians outside of San Francisco running against Willie Brown, or Republican pundits giggling about Al Sharpton as a serious candidate for the Democratic nomination.

Believe it or not, some people were blogging yesterday. Fortunately, you can still catch up on it today.

Alas, a blog starts with a simple summary of the discussion going on at Eschaton over whether, now that Trent Lott has accidentally dragged the Southern Strategy into the light, it is better to focus on exposing blatant Republican racism like voter intimidation and neo-Confederate ties, or on Republican policies that harm minorities. The first are easier to make people see, the latter are more important. You can always count on Barry to go deeper than the obvious, of course, and he does, making an good case that the fundamental issue is whether it is more important to help the Democratic Party, or raise issues of racial injustice.

Following up a wonderful Christmas Eve post on Republican tolerance of racial bigotry, PLA continues with an analysis of the Southern Strategy has played in presidential elections since 1968.

The Watch honors the spirit of Christmas with a post on the power of non-violence.

An introduction to modern corporate ethics
When 40 tons of toxic gas leaked from the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India,in 1984, it killed 8,000 people in three days -- 20,000 in all so far. 120,000 people were left chronically ill. Eighteen years later, stockpiled chemicals are still leaking poison into the ground water.

In 1984, most Americans couldn't really comprehend the horror of thousands of people dying in one harrowing event. Unfortunately, now most of us can.

Bhopal was an accident, but a preventable one. Union Carbide had tried to cut costs at the factory by reducing safety measures. The safety siren, meant to alert the community, had been turned off. The company immediately evacuated their employees, but took three hours to inform the police about the leak, and did nothing to warn local people or give any advice on measures they could have taken to protect themselves from the gas.

Union Carbide paid an average compensation of $500 to each of the living victims of the disaster. That will cover their medical costs for five years. After that Union Carbide walked away, merging with Dow Chemical, which refuses to accept responsiblity for Bhopal.

Earlier this month, on the 18th anniversary of the leak, Bhopal survivors and international supporters brought "contaminated soil, water and brooms," and a demand for remediation measures, to Dow India in Bombay.

Dow's response? It's suing the survivors for ten thousand dollars.

"And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn. And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men."

Merry Christmas

A lump of coal in his stocking just isn't enough
The daughter of Sisyphus has a Christmas wish for the president.

Would you like to hear my Ebeneezer Scrooge impression?
Thank you, Devra. You've beautifully and righteously vented on something that's bothered me most of my life -- the distinct lack of charity in a lot of "charity." I've never sorted toy donations, but I've done canned food drives, and clothing donations, and at some point I always end up mumbling to myself, "Exactly when did you people come to the conclusion that the poor aren't human?" The one donation to clothing drives that sends me round the bend is torn underwear. What kind of people think the poor are so desperate they'd wear someone else's old underwear? And are they sitting at home basking in the warm glow of their generosity?

Sorry -- charity drives bring out my most uncharitable side. And bad memories as well.

I have to admit, this is partly a personal issue. I went through a period as kid when Christmas was ruined every year by the guy from the church (not our church, some other damn church) pulling up in a station wagon loaded with food boxes. My mother was too polite to turn him away.

It started when I was eleven -- just old enough to begin reading adult body language. A man with a crew cut, wearing a bright red cardigan, carried a cardboard box into the apartment and set it on the kitchen table. My mother was in her robe, her hair in curlers, getting ready for work. She worked night shift. I could tell that she was in hurry and embarrassed to be seen like that, and that she wanted the man out of the apartment fast. But he hung around, asking stupid questions and glancing at everything out of the corner of his eye. I remember realizing that my mother was trying to maneuver to get him with his back to the couch, because the couch had a spring sticking out. She had covered it with a towel, but you could still see the outline of the spring, and the towel looked ratty anyway. Every poor person fixates on one thing that makes them feel especially poor, an objective correlative of poverty, and for my mother it was that sofa. She could buy her clothes at Goodwill and go without food at least once a week, she could handle being awakened by phone calls about my father's gambling debts, but somehow she felt less poor if she thought no one saw the sofa.

My mother was from Ireland. I once read that during the potato famine, Irish peasants who realized they were about to die would find a corner of the houses that couldn't be seen from the window, and huddle there to wait for the end, humiliated by their starvation. And, strangely, I smiled when I read that sad detail, because it reminded me of my mother. You're all right as long as no one sees.

The man in the red cardigan just didn't get it. He hung around chatting, as if he were waiting for something. And eventually my mother figured out what he wanted and gave it to him. She asked if he had a lot more deliveries to make. I think she was just trying to remind him to get going, but that question turned out to be exactly what he wanted. He started rambling on and on about how many people his church helped at this time of year and how proud he was of all those fine people, and how good it made him feel to help. My mother kept looking at the door. And then he said that what he had in the car was for the people in our building, and he looked at a piece of paper and told my mother which other apartments he was spreading his Christmas cheer to.

Kids who grow up in violent homes learn to pick up the exact moment an adult becomes angry -- before they do anything. When the man named the other charity cases in the building, I could see a change in my mother's expression that I'm sure the man couldn't see. She kept smiling, but anger was building under the surface, made worse by the fact that she had to keep smiling and playing the part of the grateful poor lady.

The anger came out after the man left. My mother screamed and cried that he was going to tell half the people in the building that she couldn't even feed her kid. And all the time she was jerking the curlers out of her hair, because priorities are priorities, and she was late for work. And anyway, she screamed, headed for the kitchen, that was a lie. A no-good lie. We always have food, except the day before payday, and we don't need their garbage. She took cans out of the box -- some dented, some labelless, others just useless. Beets, lard, hollandaise sauce. I remember looking at that little yellow can and wondering what it was. Did it come from Holland, and was it made of daisies? My mother picked up the small frozen turkey. "I don't want this garbage," she screamed -- and she threw the turkey to the floor, and stormed out of the kitchen. She'd thrown it so hard, it dented the linoleum.

She left for work, and I put the canned charity away. There was one large box of kiddie cereal. The bottom of the box had gotten damp, and when I picked it up, it split open, and all the cereal scattered across the floor.

Whenever I hear about welfare taking away people's dignity, I always remember crawling around on the kitchen floor, trying to pick up the sugary colored rings of private charity.

I thought of the man who sucked the air out of Christmas a few days ago, as I was reading an article about President Bush urging Americans to give more to the needy. I'd second the idea, of course. It certainly wasn't his plea for time and money that bothered me. It was a president being photographed putting canned peaches and spinach in a bag, without thinking about the fact that there are more important and effective things he could do to help the needy. But of course that assumes that the point is to help those in need, and not to provide photo-ops for presidents, and chances for the middle class to feel good about themselves while getting rid of their garbage.

Thank you to everyone who sent me ideas for fixing my archives yesterday, including Dwight Meredith, who suggested burning candles and chanting nursery rhymes in Arabic (don't know any Arabic, so I went with Gaelic prayers and Italian lullabies). After trying a dozen different suggestions, I finally followed the advice of my favorite conservative, Eve Tushnet -- I ripped out my archives link and made new links myself. And now, thanks to Eve, I have archives!

This entry has also been posted at Stand Down -- the anti-war blog that explores reasons for opposing war with Iraq from multiple politcal perspectives. If you'd like to comment, you can do so here.

The Liberal Media in Action
Thank you to Donald Johnson for pointing out to me that the New York Times got around to publishing something this morning on a topic Kerim Friedman wrote about a few days ago and I picked up on yesterday: the outing of companies that did business with Iraq, providing support for Saddam's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. Oddly, the Times quotes "American officials and private weapons specialists" who say Iraq's weapons declaration includes the names of 31 foreign suppliers, including two small American companies, both of which are now out of business, and one of which was owned by an Iraqi immigrant.

The Times' numbers are decidedly out of synch with those published a few days ago in the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung (and picked up by The Independent), which include 24 US companies -- Honeywell, Unisys, Sperry, Rockwell, Hewlett Packard, Eastman Kodak, and Bechtel among them -- and 150 foreign companies in all. In all honesty, I have no way of knowing whose numbers are more accurate, but it seems dishonest to me to cite one set of figures, and one list of companies, without at least noting that others have been named. The oddity is compounded by the fact that at the end of the article, the Times quotes Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project On Nuclear Arms Control, who argues that any company that did business with Iraq deserves to have its identity revealed: "If you look at the scale and frequency of the exports of some of these companies, it's clear that they were deeply involved in Iraq's chemical weapons program. They must have known what was going on."

That's a bold statement. So, New York Times, where's the rest of the list?

Can somebody on Blogspot with functioning archives help me? For some reason, my archives expired in September. That's a bit of a problem because I occasionally get e-mails from people saying, "Remember that thing you wrote a few weeks ago on [fill in the blank, but it's usually Nigeria]? How do I get that?" And unfortunately my answer is always "Your guess is as good as mine." I can find everything I've written on my editing page, and I've even e-mailed old posts to people who've asked, but I have no idea how to get them to show up on the site. Ampersand even blogged about my late lamented archives (okay, that wasn't the most important part of his post, but the topic did arise.)

I just looked around and realized this is not just one of the things you have to live with if you're stuck on Blogspot. CalPundit has archives. Ignatz has archives. PLA, Rittenhouse, and Two Tears all have living, breathing, up to the minute archives (and good ones at that). Am I doing something wrong? My settings are on weekly archives (I'd change it to monthly, but since it's not working anyway, there doesn't seem to be any point.) I've tried republishing the archives so many times over the past few months it's ridiculous. Does anyone have any suggestions for bringing my archives back from the grave?

More awards! Jesse Taylor has opened nominations for The Year's Most Annoying Conservatives. I think his readers pretty much have it covered already, but go over and see if you can think of anybody who's been getting to you all year to add to the list. Personally, I'm with the reader who said Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Osama bin Laden should tie for first place -- people who sell the idea that God is full of hate should be lumped together, even if they call their hatred by different names, and they certainly top my list of people I wish would just go away.

CHAPTER 3
Everything you always wanted to know about John Ashcroft*

John Ashcroft's opposition to school integration in Missouri may have been politically motivated, but it sometimes had a gratuitously mean edge. In 1984, when he was in his final year as Attorney General of Missouri, and was running for Governor of the state, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals voted to uphold most of the school desegregation plan that Ashcroft had vigorously fought during his tenure as AG, including a voluntary transfer program which permitted students from predominantly black suburbs to attend schools in predominantly white suburbs. The court did agree with Ashcroft that the state should not pay for the that part of the program, since it didn't have anything to do with integrating schools in the city. Ashcroft immediately moved to cut off payments for the 311 African American students in the program -- a move that, if implemented, would have forced them to return to their former schools with only three months left in the school year. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch called Ashcroft's action a "cruel way to deal with students who had placed their educational hopes in their new schools." Fortunately for the students, the court ordered the state to continue the payments until an agreement could be worked out between the state and the suburbs. Ashcroft called the decision allowing the black students to stay at the same school through the end of the year "a gross miscarriage of justice."

...........................

*but were afraid to ask.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

That Western companies helped Saddam Hussein build weapons isn't news. But some bits and pieces of information about that assistance that have filtered out over the past few days disturb me, even though I haven't figured out how much weight to give them, and how to string them together yet:

* According to Die Tageszeitung, Iraq's report to the UN Security Council lists 150 foreign companies -- including American, British, German, and French -- who provided Saddam Hussein with equipment and expertise for his weapons program from 1975 on, including support for building nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

* Some of the companies were providing support as recently as last year.

* The dossier documents methods the companies used to cover up their activities.

* Information about foreign companies' involvement with Saddam Hussein was collected by UN weapons inspectors between 1991 and 1998. However, the five permanent members of the Security Council -- the United States, Britain, Russia, France and China -- have blocked release of the relevant information.

* The non-permanent members of the Security Council received an expurgated version of Iraq's weapons declaration report, with the names of foreign companies blacked out, although the censors did an incomplete job and left the names of some German and Swiss companies in the report.

* Die Tageszeitung quoted sources close to Dick Cheney as saying the Bush administration was hoping to prove a German company was continuing to co-operate with the Iraqi regime over the supply of equipment allegedly useful in the construction of weapons of mass destruction.

* Relations between Germany and Washington are strained because of Germany's outspoken criticism of a possible military strike against Iraq.

* Among the American companies listed are Honeywell, Unisys, Sperry, Rockwell, Hewlett Packard, Eastman Kodak, and Bechtel.

* British officials said the list of companies appeared to be accurate.

* Most of the sales were legal and often made with the knowledge of governments. In 1985-90, the U.S. Commerce Department licensed $1.5 billion in sales to Iraq of American technology with potential military uses.

* I can't find any articles on the subject in either The New York Times or The Washington Post -- and I'm hoping that has something to do with my lousy research skills.

.................

More information and comments at Stand Down

........................

Sources:
Leaked report says German and US firms supplied arms to Saddam

Parts of declaration cut from Iraq weapons report

Arms report names Western suppliers

U.S., others aided Iraqi nuke program

Die Tageszeitung's List of Companies
.

Obviously the Republicans want Trent Lott out because he hurts their carefully crafted image. But there's another reason percolating under the surface. I've been thinking about it for a few days, because hints of this other motive peeked out in a couple of conversations I had with Republicans, and now the Christian Science Monitor has picked up the thread: They're afraid that with Lott around, the party (and, indeed, Lott himself) will have to be so sensitive that they're forced to move left on racial issues. The administration's backing off on support for the Supreme Court case challenging racial preferences at the University of Michigan, and Trent Lott's statement on BET in favor of affirmative action make conservatives nervous. What are they going to have to do to avoid the appearance of racism? Are there right-wing judicial nominees who might have squeaked through before Thurmond's Centennial who won't past the smell test now? And will that reduce the party to hunting for moderates? Will cutting millionaires' taxes while education, welfare, and health care wither suddenly be seen in a different light -- and force Bush to do the unthinkable: put the needs of the most vulnerable citizens (of all races) ahead of the wish lists of his corporate friends?

Relax, Republicans. It's not going to happen. I wish it would, but it won't.

The party is going to have to be a little more careful about race than it has previously been, whether Trent Lott goes or stays (but having him around scratches the wound and complicates matters). In many ways, that's a good thing for the country. Assuming we still have a remotely functioning press -- a big assumption, I admit -- the Southern Strategy just got harder to play. Bob Jones University may find few politically powerful speakers. Interviews with Southern Partisan magazine are probably not going to pass unnoticed by the mainstream press. It will get a lot more difficult to play footsie under the table with bigots. Your South Carolina strategy will be noticed in Southern California. And that's a good thing -- a small rip in the fabric of hypocrisy.

But when it comes to policies, nothing will really change. Genuine change requires understanding that the effects of slavery and segregation continue to gnaw holes in the promise of America, in psychological as well as economic ways, and that we have a continuing moral obligation to look for ways to undo the damage. The modern Republican Party, even at it's best, has never believed in that obligation. It's been about tokens, and twisting the language of justice to unjust purposes. In the CSM story, there's a revealing remark. An affirmative action opponent who believes the Bush administration will eventually file a brief opposing the Michigan program, offers a way of selling that opposition: "I think the way this drama has played out actually puts the president in a very good position.... He can say, 'I think racial discrimination is wrong..., and for exactly that reason, my administration is filing a brief telling the Supreme Court that they should rule against racial discrimination in college admissions.' "

Yes, we think discrimination is bad, and therefore we're going to put all our effort behind ending the massive discrimination against white people. Republicans think that will sell, and they're probably right. But the fact that they're thinking of that even now, while the fruit of that thinking is on the front page of the paper every day, says a lot about how deep their understanding of the problem goes.

I'm an odd sort of political junkie in that I tend not to pay much attention to electoral politics until I absolutely have to. I suppose when it comes right down to it, I'm too much of a moralist to feel comfortable with all the compromises involved, and so firmly on the left that I don't expect to have a real choice. I can count on the fact that my favorite candidate is not going to win. I haven't voted for a presidential candidate I actually liked since George McGovern (and I thought he was a bit too conservative.) Most of the time, I'd prefer to vote Green, but I understand that the Republicans also prefer I vote Green. You never saw a grin as smug and satisfied as the one that appeared on the face of one of my husband's Republican friends when my husband said he was considering voting for Nader. (The grin changed my husband's mind -- you've got to watch your body language, Republicans, you're giving the game away). Basically my attitude is, I despise Bush and therefore I'll hold my nose and vote for any Democrat you put in front of me.

I am capable of being embarrassed by my ignorance, though. Recently someone asked me what I thought of Howard Dean, and my answer ("Uh, the guy from Vermont, right?") was rather humiliatingly stupid. I would have been better prepared if I'd read this London Times article, which seems to me a good, fair, and simple (I need that) introduction. Count on the Brits to explain American politics in a way that even a politically clueless American like me can understand.

And the next time someone asks me about Howard Dean, I'll be able to say, "That's the best we can do, huh? Well, at least he's not Bush." (Once the campaign really gets going, rather than put on a bumpersticker for my favorite candidate, I may just have one made up that says, "Not Bush." That pretty much covers the possibilities I can live with.)

Score one -- maybe -- for the expression of outrage.

The people who own Nestle have an interesting sense of timing. Ethiopia is in the middle of a drought which has left millions in danger of starvation. The number of people requiring emergency food aid could reach 15 million over the next few months. Nestle decided this was a great time to demand $6 million from the Ethiopian government as payment for a company nationalized in 1975, which Nestle didn't even own at the time.

I hate to cut into VH1's monopoly on the eighties, but do they know it's Christmas?

That was yesterday's news. Today's news is that public outrage over Nestle's greed forced the company to promise to pour the money back into Ethiopia. Of course, it would be better if they didn't take the money out of the country in the first place. And it would be better if the promise to put the money "in a long-term viable investment in Ethiopia which will contribute to the economic development of the country" didn't arouse suspicions that they're talking about something that is more in the long-term interest of Nestle than of Ethiopia. (This is, after all, the same company that made a fortune on pushing powdered milk over breastfeeding in countries where, because of unsafe water, bottle-fed babies were 25 times more likely to die than breastfed babies.) Business may be business, but when people are starving, contracts and long-term investments are way down on the priority list. But at least Nestle got nudged in a decent direction, and I guess that's cause for a small Christmas celebration. Without chocolate.

CHAPTER 2
Everything you always wanted to know about John Ashcroft*

As governor of Missouri, John Ashcroft twice vetoed measures passed by the Missouri legislature which would have made it possible for volunteers from nonpartisan organizations like the League of Women Voters to register new voters in St. Louis, a Democratic-leaning city, which was about 50 percent black. The measure would have made it as easy to register in the city of St. Louis as it was in St. Louis County -- which was mostly white and Republican, and where volunteer deputy registrars could be, and were, commissioned. By making it more difficult for voters to register in St. Louis than in the suburbs, Ashcroft managed to surpress the African American vote, which aided him in his 1988 re-election bid.

...........................

*but were afraid to ask.

Chapter 1

Jeb Bush stepped up boldly yesterday to criticize Trent Lott. Not for rhapsodizing on segregation, mind you, but for doing something really unforgivable -- hurting Republicans.

"It doesn't help to have this swirling controversy that Senator Lott, in spite of his enormous political skills, doesn't seem to be able to handle well," Governor Bush told The Miami Herald in an interview published today. "Something's going to have to change. This can't be the topic of conversation over the next week."

I knew we could count on the president's brother to recognize the important ethical issues at stake here.

And also demonstrating his sense of priorities, Bush restored the civil rights -- including the right to vote -- of an FBI agent who was convicted of obstruction of justice for destroying a report criticizing the bureau's handling of the Ruby Ridge shootout. Bush obviously learned from his past mistakes and is making amends. And certainly this should more than make up for the thousands of legal Florida voters who were knocked off the voter rolls when they were classified as felons.

I'd really like to believe in the basic goodness and sanity of my fellow Americans. But sometimes they make it so damn hard.


(Via reading & writing)

I'm sure you've already heard that Bill Clinton told the truth. The man might lie about small things, but he told the truth when it counted: "They try to suppress black voting, they ran on the Confederate flag in Georgia and South Carolina, and from top to bottom the Republicans supported it."

Republicans have won elections by making it harder for African Americans to vote and by luring racists to the polls. That isn't a shocking statement to anyone who pays attention to politics, but it is stunning -- gloriously so -- when a politician says it. Even one who's not running any more.

I suspect Sam Heldman has it right. It won't be long before Clinton is accused of exploiting race in order to stick it to the Republicans and maybe benefit the Democrats. But so what? If Democrats hem and haw and try to play nice, Republicans will seize on insignificantly small disagreements to accuse them of playing politics. If Democrats stand up and boldly tell the truth, Republicans will accuse them of playing politics. Given the circumstances, they might as well tell the truth. The truth is always easier to remember anyway.

I don't pretend to understand the political machinations of the fight over Trent Lott. Who will benefit from this, Democrats or Republicans? Is this the first crack in revealing the strategy that has animated the Republican party for the past generation (in which case, Ashcroft goes next), or can the Republicans send Trent Lott into the wilderness and make everyone believe that their "seg"-tolerating days are over?

I honestly don't know, maybe because I just haven't thought about it much. I've gotten quite a bit of mail on the subject, so I know other people are thinking about it, but I just don't seem to be able to wrap my mind around the subject. To me, this is more an ethical than a political question. Trent Lott needs to go because if there's no cost to expressing support for segregation almost forty years after the Civil Rights Act, something is so rotten at the core of the American system that you might as well just give up on it. And I don't believe that's the case. If that benefits Republicans, I'll live with that, because the alternative is worse. But it's equally important not to let up on the Republican Party -- not for political reasons, but because the big lie that Republicans have worked hard to attract minorities shouldn't stand. They've worked hard to change their image; they've done little or nothing to change their ways. (I think Matt Yglesias is one of the smartest bloggers around, but I have to disagree with him on this issue: Bush has played racial politics with the best of them. Bob Jones, the Confederate flag, rumor-mongering about John McCain's adopted daughter. And let's not forget that he "won" an election by having his little brother surpress the black vote in Florida. What's new about Bush is that he's far better than Lott at talking out of both sides of his mouth.)

But even though I can't quite get a grasp on the politics of this issue, I have to admit, Clinton's statement cheers me. Clinton and I have probably been on opposite sides of issues almost as often as we've been on the same side, but there's two things I know you can count on Clinton for -- a good speech and an astute reading of how an issue plays out politically. Maybe now that he's not running for anything, he figures he can tell the truth and shame the devil, but deep down I suspect he's still reading whether or not it's a good time, politically, to tell the truth. The man's only been out of office two years, and I don't think politicians can turn honest that fast. But since his political instincts are obviously infinitely superior to mine, I'm encouraged by his honesty. I think it's at least possible he knows what he's doing.

It's always a good time to tell the truth. Maybe it's a smart time as well.

Yesterday I posted lyrics for Nina Simone's 1963 classic Mississippi Goddam. Two readers wrote to remind me that Phil Ochs had a pretty good understanding of Mississippi politics as well. Phil updated this song a few years later under the title "Here's to the State of Richard Nixon." ("where the wars are fought in secret, Pearl Harbor every day") I wish he was still around to update the song one more time.

Here's To The State of Mississippi
by Phil Ochs (1964)

Here's to the state of Mississippi --
For underneath her borders the devil draws no line;
If you drag her muddy rivers, nameless bodies you will find.
Oh, the fat trees of the forest have hid a thousand crimes;
The calendar is lying when it reads the present time.
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of.
Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of!

And here's to the people of Mississippi --
Who say the folks up north, they just don't understand;
And they tremble in the shadows at the thunder of the Klan;
Oh, the sweating of their souls can't wash the blood from off their hands;
Where they smile and shrug their shoulders at the murder of a man.
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of --
Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of!

And here's to the schools of Mississippi --
Where they're teaching all the children that they don't have to care,
All the rudiments of hatred are present everywhere,
And every single classroom is a factory of despair,
And there's nobody learning such a foreign word as "fair."
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of --
Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of!

And here's to the cops of Mississippi --
They're chewing their tobacco as they lock the prison door,
And their bellies bounce inside them when they knock you to the floor;
No, they don't like takin' prisoners in their private little wars,
And behind their broken badges, there are murderers and more.
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of --
Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of!

And here's to the judges of Mississippi --
Who wear the robe of honor as they crawl into the court,
They're guardin' all the bastions of their phony legal fort;
Oh, justice is a stranger when the prisoners report,
When the black man stands accused, the trial is always short.
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of --
Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of!

And here's to the government of Mississippi --
In the swamp of their bureaucracy, they're always bogging down,
And criminals are posing as the mayors of the towns;
And they hope that no one sees the sights and no one hears the sounds,
And the speeches of the governor are the ravings of a clown.
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of --
Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of!

And here's to the laws of Mississippi --
Congressmen will gather in a circus of delay,
While the Constitution's drowning in an ocean of decay;
"Unwed mothers should be sterilized," I've even heard them say;
Yes, corruption can be classic in the Mississippi way.
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of --
Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of!

And here's to the churches of Mississippi --
Where the cross, once made of silver, now is caked with rust,
And the Sunday morning sermons pander to their lust;
Oh, the fallen face of Jesus is choking in the dust,
And Heaven only knows in which God they can trust.
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of --
Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of!

CHAPTER 1
Everything you always wanted to know about John Ashcroft*

When John Ashcroft ran for Governor of Missouri in 1984, one of the centerpieces of his campaign was bragging about the fine work he had done as the state's Attorney General in opposing desegregation of St. Louis public schools. He called the desegregation plan "an outrage against humanity."

...........................

*but were afraid to ask.

I've discovered so many interesting blogs since I started reading them that sometimes it's hard to keep up. I just don't have time to read everything I want to. But one thing I've learned: Whenever Avedon Carol writes a long piece, read it. Today she has an essential essay on the politics of race -- in both parties. I'll come back to this topic, but right now, just go read Avedon.

My car radio is pretty limited. The public radio station fades in and out and the really good locally programmed station that I listen to at home doesn't come in at all most of the time. That leaves me with one talk radio station, one "classic rock" station, and one oldies station that are occasionally worth listening to. So today, as I was driving around doing my Christmas shopping, I had a choice between Jimi Hendrix (I love Hendrix -- but not on a car radio, thanks), Rod Stewart singing "Hot Legs" or Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh won. I figured there could at least be some comic relief there.

I quickly decided to go back to fuzzy Jimi Hendrix, but not before hearing about some poll that showed that two-thirds of all Republicans think that what Trent Lott said was no big deal. Rush Limbaugh seemed to think that meant the press was blowing it out of proportion. I had two reactions. If the poll is real, it ought to cue the one-third of Republicans who still have something vaguely resembling a conscience that they're in the wrong party. If it isn't true, it should cue all conservatives who still have something vaguely resembling a brain to turn off Rush.

Even if they have to listen to fuzzy Foxy Lady.

I just can't get this song out of my head for some reason:

Mississippi Goddam
(1963) Nina Simone

(The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam
And I mean every word of it)

Alabama's got me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam!

Can't you see it
Can't you feel it
It's all in the air
I can't stand the pressure much longer
Somebody say a prayer

Alabama's got me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam!

(This is a show tune, but the show hasn't been written for it, yet)

Hound dogs on my trail
School children sitting in jail
Black cat cross my path
I think every day's gonna be my last

Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I don't belong here
I don't belong there
I've even stopped believing in prayer

Don't tell me
I'll tell you
Me and my people just about due
I've been there so I know
They keep on saying "Go slow!"

But that's just the trouble
Too slow
Washing the windows
Too slow
Picking the cotton
Too slow
You're just plain rotten
Too slow
You're too damn lazy
Too slow
The thinking's crazy
Too slow
Where am I going
What am I doing
I don't know
I don't know

Just try to do your very best
Stand up be counted with all the rest
For everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam!

(I bet you thought I was kiddin' didn't you?)

Picket lines
School boycotts
They try to say it's a communist plot
All I want is equality
for my sister my brother my people and me

Yes, you lied to me all these years
You told me to wash and clean my ears
And talk real fine just like a lady
And you'd stop calling me Sister Sadie

Oh but this whole country is full of lies
You're all gonna die and die like flies
I don't trust you any more
You keep on saying "Go slow!"
Go slow!

But that's just the trouble
Too slow
Desegregation
Too slow
Mass participation
Too slow
Reunification
Too slow
Do things gradually
Too slow
Would bring more tragedy
Too slow
Why don't you see it
Why don't you feel it
I don't know
I don't know

You don't have to live next to me
Just give me my equality
Everybody knows about Mississippi
Everybody knows about Alabama
Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam!

The front page of yesterday's LA Times featured a poll showing that Americans are more doubtful about the need for war with Iraq than has been suggested, and that support for a ground attack on Iraq is decreasing. But it was a poll result buried at the end of the article that caught my attention: Seventy percent of Americans believe that if there is a war, we have an obligation to stay after the war is over and help rebuild. Unfortunately, that's an easy sentiment to exploit (The oil companies are laying pipelines all over the place. You don't call that rebuilding?) But at its heart it speaks to the decency of the vast majority of Americans. We expect to be held accountable for the consequences of our actions.

But rebuilding Iraq is off somewhere in the future. I wish someone would take a poll right now asking Americans if we have a moral obligation to help rebuild Afghanistan. I suspect (or at least hope) you'd find roughly that same seventy percent who say we do.

So how come we're abandoning that task and taking on a new one?

Human Rights Watch has issued a report on conditions in Afghanistan -- in Herat province in particular -- which documents that for women living under warlord rule (in this case, the rule of Ismail Khan, the governor of Herat) things haven't changed nearly enough since the Taliban were driven out. Many girls have been allowed to return to school, and women to some jobs. However, they can still be arrested for failing to veil themselves, driving, or speaking to a man on the street. Troops continue to enforce Taliban-era restrictions on music and dress, targeting women and girls for abuse. In addition, Khan has censored women's groups, intimidated women leaders, and even recruited boys to spy on girls and report "un-Islamic" behavior.

Ismail Khan and his warrior bands have received substantial military and financial support from the United States.

Hamid Karzai has made a bold move in the direction of breaking the warlords' control -- which is probably the most important task in improving the human rights situation, and protecting the rights of women in particular, in Afghanistan. On Tuesday he issued a decree banning senior politicians from military activity (in other words, no warlords allowed in the government) and announced that he will attempt to disarm the private armies that rule most of Afghanistan within the next six months. Heavy weapons handed over would be given to the still-forming Afghan national army. The private armies' weapons include tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery pieces, field guns, multiple-rocket launchers, and antiaircraft guns. Among the warlords most reluctant to give up weapons and hand control of their armies over to the national government is Ismail Khan, who so far has not responded to Karzai's decree.

Karzai doesn't have the power to control the warlords without help from the international security force. He's not getting it.

The Turks, currently in command of the ISAF, are going home ( according to the BBC, to prepare for war with Iraq). A combined corp from Netherlands and Germany will soon take their place. But discussions about getting the peacekeepers outside of Kabul have been abandoned. The UN Security Council resolution that created ISAF prohibits the troops from taking part in operations outside the capital. The US has suggested that coalition forces in several provincial capitals could work on both military and civilian projects, but humanitarian workers have already been targeted in many parts of Afghanistan, and are worried about any further blurring of the line between soldiers and aid workers.

HRW insists that all countries involved in Afghanistan -- including the US -- need to stop funding the private armies (the US is still using them to go after Taliban and al-Qaeda stragglers), and give all aid directly to the central government. We need to support Afghan women's groups and protect women leaders from threats and intimidation. And the ISAF needs to be expanded and sent out into the provinces. Women's lives are in danger.

But just in case Bush and Company don't really care about women's lives anymore, there is one other thing they should know. The chaos created by the warlords is threatening the trans-Afghan pipeline project as well.

Maybe that will get Bush's attention.

The good old liberal New York Times ran a strange article this morning keeping alive the well-debunked myth that conservatives were the ones who tore into Trent Lott, and -- grab your hat, we're headed into the Twilight Zone here -- asserting that this "fact" disproves Al Gore's statement that that "the nation's conservative news media acts as a monolithic Republican support system." The Times gives a prominent place to Rich Lowry's laughable comment that conservatives have worked so hard, and with such great idealism, in overcoming their racist image, and they couldn't stand to see that image torn down by someone like Lott. Not the racism, mind you, just the image.

Howell Raines, let me introduce you to the man Trent Lott is least likely to send a Christmas card to this season.

The Los Angeles Times at least touched on the obvious fact that the main reason Lott is in trouble with conservatives is that they've never liked him personally and don't think he's done enough to promote the right-wing agenda. According to the Times many Republicans question whether Lott is even conservative enough. (Most of the Republicans I know are fairly moderate. I don't know any truly insane, to the right of Trent Lott Republicans, so I won't even take a guess on how true that is.)

But you'll have to go a little beyond the major newspapers before you get to the really important point: Republicans want Lott out fast not just because he tars their name, but because the longer the story plays out, the more likely it is that people will notice other Republicans who've played similar games.

Joe Conason did a great piece yesterday on John Ashcroft's ties to segregationists. Josh Marshall went after Ashcroft as well. Timothy Noah pointed out that Strom Thurmond is not quite as reconstructed as the press (and, in particular, the New York Times) would have us believe. Hesiod is piling on George Bush I's warm and fuzzy feelings for the 1948 Dixiecrat presidential candidate. Paul Krugman is going after the Republicans' "soft spot for theocracy" (which he seems to have discovered via Atrios .) And in a weird piece defending Lott (I think, it's hard to tell), William Saletan argues that a lot of the Republicans now going after Lott have plenty of "politeness to bigots" and "amnesia about struggles for civil rights" to answer for as well. (Saletan seems to suggest that his makes Lott somewhat less condemnable; I'd suggest it means the condemnation so far has been much too narrowly focused.)

It can't be repeated too often: It isn't just Lott.

Lady Sings The Dixiecrat Double Entendre Blues

In honor (or perhaps I should say dishonor) of Trent Lott's nostalgia for the good old days of segregation, Devra recently posted lyrics (and a link, if you'd like to listen) to Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit," a song about lynching. Keeping in mind Pat Buchanan's breathtakingly stupid choice of words in defense of Lott* it was a well-chosen musical accompaniment to the news.

Devra's post started me thinking about something I read a long time ago about Billie Holiday, "Strange Fruit," racism, and the interpretation of words.

Try to imagine Lady Day in an evening gown, a white gardenia tucked in her hair, on stage in a nightclub, singing a graphic song about lynching, while her audience sipped champagne. It's impossible, grotesque. And in fact, Billie was generally reluctant to sing the song, partly because, as you can imagine, it took a lot out of her. In her autobiography she  says she threw up every time she had to sing it. But she also had mixed feelings about the song because her audiences so often missed the point. She'd sometimes get bizarre requests to sing the "sexy" song about "black bodies," which unnerved her to say the least. Proof, if you need any, that as often as not, even the most eloquent voice is not heard.

When she did perform the song, it was usually at the end of a show. Two different kinds of audiences heard "Strange Fruit." One was a group Billie trusted. If she sensed that an audience was with her -- not just that they liked her act, but that they understood and appreciated the artistry of a woman who was changing the shape and structure of popular song -- she would sometimes sing "Strange Fruit" as a gift, the way you might share a painful secret with a friend who could understand that sharing was an act of trust and honor.

But she also used the song as a weapon. In Lady Sings The Blues she describes a scene that was all too common:

This white boy stayed around just to bug me. When I started singing...he'd start kicking up a storm of noise, rattling glasses, calling me nigger, and cursing nigger singers.

When she had that kind of audience, she would pull out "Strange Fruit," spitting out the words, as if to say, I know who you are, and I understand everything I need to know about why you're treating me this way.

One song, with many meanings -- most of them within the artist's control.

Southern trees bear a strange fruit

You don't have to start with a work of art to sing one song in different ways. You can start with words like "states' rights" and "traditional values." There's nothing wrong with the words themselves. Here in the central California suburbs, when Republicans I know hear politicians talk about things like "states' rights," what they hear is a message of smaller government and more local control. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to be in favor of. In some instances, I'd even agree with them.

But that arguable, respectable message is not what people in many parts of the country heard when Ronald  Reagan, for instance, proclaimed his belief in "states' rights" in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers -- James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman -- had been murdered in the early sixties, and where there were still many people who deeply resented their state's loss of its "right" to segregation and intimidation of black voters. It does not make the tiniest bit of difference whether Ronald Reagan was a racist. Signaling that hard-core racism was acceptable was despicable. For many people who regard themselves as liberals, it remains, more than twenty years later, unforgivable. Maybe it gnaws at moderate Republicans, and even many conservatives, as well, but I haven't heard any complain about it.

What Reagan did was a mirror image of what Billie Holiday did. When she wanted, as she put it, to "bounce something off that cracker," she used a song to send a message of defiance (real defiance -- as she well understood -- would have landed her in jail, or worse). Reagan, facing the descendents of Lady Day's nasty hecklers (and quite a few even more dangerous sorts) sang a cozy little lullaby of acceptance. Compare Billie's unspoken, but nonetheless clear I can't hit you the way I'd like to, but here's what I think of you, cracker to Reagan's equally clear I can't come straight out and agree with you, but you boys know I'm on your side. It's the same technique, with vastly different results.

It's amazing -- sometimes appalling -- what an artist can accomplish with a few words.

And Reagan is far from the only one to use the device.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south

John Ashcroft, who made his name as a politician opposing school desegregation in St. Louis, gave an interview to Southern Partisan magazine in 1998, which the editors introduced by  noting that he was a "champion of states' rights and traditional Southern values." Sounds fairly innocuous, but one of the traditional Southern values Southern Partisan promotes is the notion that the Declaration of Independence contains "deliberate lies" like the idea that all men are created equal.

According to Richard M. Quinn, the magazine's former editor, in the South the magazine "is considered mainstream conservative." If you read "conservative" as a longing to return to the "values" of the past, I suppose there's some truth in that. Here's the formula for a "mainstream conservative" magazine: recipes for sweet potato casserole, articles on country music and NASCAR, suspicion of central government and disdain for taxes -- I'm okay with this so far, but then there are:

* revisionist articles on why slavery wasn't as bad as it's detractors suggest (apparently slave owners were strong supporters of "family values"),

* paeans to former Klan leader David Dukes as "a Populist spokesperson for a recapturing of the American ideal,"

* praise for "the effectiveness of the original Ku Klux Klan,"

* political commentary on the fact that "Negroes, Asians, and Orientals... have no temperament for democracy" (the author goes on to pat himself on the back, of course, for being bravely "unpolitic" in asserting this),

* and a denigration of Martin Luther King as "a man whose role in history was to lead his people into a perpetual dependence on the welfare state."

Makes you wonder about a politician in the South who describes himself as a "mainstream conservative," doesn't it?

I don't know whether John Ashcroft subscribes to Richard Quinn's definitions of "state's rights" and "Southern values," but most of the readers of his magazine do, and you don't have to be an expert code-reader to recognize the I-am-one-of-you message Ashcroft was sending to those readers. There's just no other, more innocent explanation of Ashcroft's praise for the magazine as a source that "helps set the record straight." Or his to-the-barricades call for "traditionalists" to "stand up and speak in this respect, or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda." These people are Confederate leaders and Ashcroft didn't want anyone to be taught that there was anything perverted about their agenda. As in the case of Trent Lott's statement, I can't come up with a reading of that sentence that any decent person would subscribe to.

Here's a fruit for the crows to pluck.

Trent Lott, Thad Cochrane, Phil Gramm, Jesse Helms, and Dick Armey have all been interviewed by Southern Partisan.

Mark Potok, editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center's "Intelligence Report," describes an interview with the magazine as a way of pandering to an audience with racist leanings. It's a way of doing so without offending voters who would take less kindly to overt racist statements.

This wink and nod strategy isn't just a matter of nasty and unfair politics. The truly objectionable part of the whole thing is that when prominent politicians play this game, they leave hard-core, blatant racists with the impression that their beliefs are still respectable. They give people a license to be racist.

Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Why are liberals harping on this so much now, and disdaining Republican "apologies?" Because it's a ugly game that has driven most of us crazy for as long as we've been aware of politics. You'd have to have been old enough to vote before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to remember a time when Republicans weren't playing this loathsome game. (And by sheer coincidence, 1964 happens to be the year Strom Thurmond became a Republican, as well as the first presidential election year in which Trent Lott was eligible to vote.) The rest of us have wondered all our political lives why most people weren't as outraged by it as we are. Finally, they are. Trent Lott's statement helps expose the game even to people who normally don't pay much attention to politics.

In the end, this isn't about politics, it's about moral accountability. It's about standing up in front of your audience and singing the song straight. And it's about time.

--------------------------------------

*Pat Buchanan: "What we are witnessing is the lynching of a good man who made a bad choice of words in a birthday tribute to an old man whose sins are no more scarlet than those of the rest of us."

The New York Times has started what looks like a very interesting series of articles on the Ten Commandments. Over the next ten days, they'll be taking one commandment each day and exploring how people reckon with it in their lives. How does a soldier, for instance, interpret the fifth commandment (the sixth if you're Jewish or Protestant) -- Thou shalt not kill?

The first article in the series is about a couple whose daughter died, and who found nothing but pain in the way they had always interpreted the first commandment -- as an assertion that everything that happens in the universe reflects the will of God. They were fortunate to connect with a rabbi who told them they didn't have to simply accept that commandment, but could challenge it.

So far, it looks like one of those rare occasions when the press takes seriously the moral struggles of people of faith, rather than defining religion as a set of simplistic rules.

A few days ago, I mentioned a moving essay Jeralyn Merritt wrote about passing on her sense of justice and compassion to her son. From today's New York Times comes a reminder that some people define "family values" in a somewhat less inspiring way:

Mr. Lott was staunchly opposed to [James] Meredith's integration of Ole Miss. "Yes, you could say that I favored segregation then," he told Time magazine in 1997. "I don't now." He added, "The main thing was, I felt the federal government had no business sending in troops to tell the state what to do."

Back at home, the turmoil at Ole Miss was roiling Pascagoula and even Mr. Lott's family. Ira Harkey Jr., editor of The Pascagoula Chronicle, was writing editorials denouncing racial violence and criticizing Barnett for fighting the integration of Ole Miss. In response, a group of local people — many of them shipyard workers, Mr. Harkey says — harassed him for months, threatening violence and even shooting out his office windows.

Some time later, Mr. Harkey said, he received a letter from a woman who told him that if he did not publish her letter it would prove "you are truly an integrationist and I hope you not only get a hole through your office door but through your stupid head." It was signed Iona W. Lott — Mr. Lott's mother.

"I called her, asked if she'd sent it to me, and she said she certainly had sent it to me and she meant every word," said Mr. Harkey, now 84.