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Archives
rovegate
The Plame Floodgates Open
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It's only been a few days since the Supreme Court nominee was hurriedly announced in an attempt to get Karl Rove off the front pages. Since then, all hell has broken loose.
Bloomberg is reporting that Rove and Libby both gave testimony to the grand jury that flatly conflicts with the testimony given by those they said they talked to.
We now know that the Top Secret memo most consistent with the talking points that Rove and Libby told reporters was seen in the hands of Press Secretary Ari Fleischer in the days before the leak occurred. And that Fleischer told the grand jury he never saw it.
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What poses perhaps the greatest threat of all for the Bush administration is that, as each news agency puts the story in the hands of some of the best investigative reporters, the various threads of the story are being woven into a compelling -- and disastrous -- storyline. A Bush administration crime, carried out by Watergate-era and Iran-Contra figures that this administration has embraced wholeheartedly, done in the service of shoring up "fixed" evidence used to justify a preemptive war. And news services are tying the Plame outing to the "fixed" nuclear intelligence cited by Bush in his pre-war declarations to the nation. Those links are, finally, being made, and it's beginning to make the Nixon White House look like a Norman Rockwell painting in comparison.
There is very little time left for the White House to come up with some path -- any path -- by which to distance themselves from the wider allegations against not just Rove, but against the president and vice president themselves. Instead, they are stonewalling reporters asking them to clarify their involvement. In fact, both Bush and Press Secretary Scott McClellan haven't even backed off their previous public statements that Rove, by name, wasn't involved -- they've just refused to discuss it.
That's not going to cut it. The President needs to answer for his subordinates, who at this point are looking like they have given up any credible pretenses of innocence, and are now simply shopping for the weakest possible charges against them.
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Follow the Uranium
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This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.
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The Rove Affair, a Non-Beltway Perspective
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It has become increasingly clear that there’s no way the press in general, and the Washington press corps in particular, can come out of this fiasco looking good. What is the average news consumer supposed to make of a case that remains so thoroughly murky even though two major news organizations are at the center of it, and presumably privy to a lot more than they’ve reported (and I don’t mean the names of their confidential sources, if any are still confidential)? What is the average ordinary (non-journalist) individual to make of pitiful displays like the July 11 gaggle, which we’re supposed to think showed a suddenly-energized White House press corps making Scott McClellan pay for his months of subterfuge and persiflage but featured such fatuous questions as: “Scott, can I ask you this: Did Karl Rove commit a crime?”
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Republicans Must Choose: Bush Or America?
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"Karl Rove is loyal to President Bush," a correspondent wrote as Treasongate broke. "Isn't that a form of patriotism?" Not in a representative democracy, I replied. Only in a dictatorship is fealty to the Leader equal to loyalty to the nation. We're Bush's boss. He works for us. Unless that changed on 9/11 (or 12/20/00). Rove had no right to give away state secrets, even to protect Bush.
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genetic engineering
Patricia Piccinini
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thanks to Conscientious
torture r us
Bush Threatens to Veto Attempts to Regulate, Investigate Abu Ghraib Torture
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So on one hand, the Bush administration is frantically blocking the release of the photographic proof of the most horrific war crimes committed in U.S. military-run prisons.
On the other hand, the Bush administration is simultaneously threatening to veto any attempts by McCain, Graham or others to establish even rudimentary rules banning such torture -- or even investigating the torture already documented.
I think it's time to invent some new swearing, because there isn't anything currently in the language that fully encompasses the White House's unapologetic attempts to ensure the Bush administration's own crafted and approved "interrogation" policies be allowed to continue unhindered. Yes, according to the Bush administration, any attempts by Republican senators to legislate against, say, the sodomizing of detained children are unduly infringing on the president's fight against terrorists.
Truly, there is no sunken depth to which this White House does not feel comfortable indulging itself in.
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photography
Important Things
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"When I was a child I occasionally found mermaid’s purses - egg cases for sharks and skates which had washed up on the beach. I wanted to open the purses, to find out if the leathery sacks actually contained a baby shark or not, but spent long minutes filled with anxiety about what I would see if I did. Would the fish still be alive? Would it squirm or move? Having destroyed its haven, could I really just stand there and watch the fetus die? Eventually such thoughts eclipsed all curiosity, and so I always put the purse back down on the sand and left it undisturbed.
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thanks to A Botzilla Journal
china
Pay close attention to this.
Breaking the Peg
by Billmon
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I got so caught up in other matters yesterday that I completely ignored the big financial news: the Chinese government finally bowed to reality and adjusted the rigid peg that fixed the value of its currency, the yuan, against the U.S. dollar.font>
This is, at least potentially a very big deal -- for reasons which I've been talking about, off and on, almost since I first opened Whiskey Bar. While the financial market reaction to yesterday's move was, all things considered, relatively mild, there's no guarantee that will remain true going forward.
It's possible, in fact, that we have just passed a major milestone in economic history -- and in the much briefer history of America's reign as the world's only superpower. But this may not be recognized for many years to come.
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YUAN SEEN NOTHING YET
by Elaine Meinel Supkis
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All sorts of funny stuff about the sudden switch of direction from the Chinese. I am suspecting the Chinese are going to encourage the Bush/Greenspan Skull and Bonesmen to believe that China jumped the dollar shark because they were terrified of all the bellowing from America. That they are a'fearful of that ol' briar patch! Yass.
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KRUGMAN GETS SOME THINGS WRONG
By Elaine Meinel Supkis
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Often I admire Mr. Krugman. I read him avidly and learn a lot from him. But sometimes he misses what is going on. I assume this is because he reads the New York Times when it comes to stuff about China. He obviously doesn't read Japanese or Chinese newspapers.
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photography
People I Don't Know
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I have been fascinated with found photographs for a long time. For 25 years, I have collected photographs found on the ground. Recently I have been drawn to more formal portraits culled from dusty cardboard boxes in thrift stores or ratty suitcases at flea markets.
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thanks to A Botzilla Journal
economy
America's Truth Deficit
By William Greider
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DURING the cold war, as the Soviet economic system slowly unraveled, internal reform was impossible because highly placed officials who recognized the systemic disorders could not talk about them honestly. The United States is now in an equivalent predicament. Its weakening position in the global trading system is obvious and ominous, yet leaders in politics, business, finance and the news media are not willing to discuss candidly what is happening and why. Instead, they recycle the usual bromides about the benefits of free trade and assurances that everything will work out for the best.font>
Much like Soviet leaders, the American establishment is enthralled by utopian convictions - the market orthodoxy of free trade globalization. The United States is heading for yet another record trade deficit in 2005, possibly 25 percent larger than last year's. Our economy's international debt position - accumulated from many years of tolerating larger and larger trade deficits - began compounding ferociously in the last five years. Our net foreign indebtedness is now more than 25 percent of gross domestic product and at the current pace will reach 50 percent in four or five years .
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thanks to Bad Attitudes
photography
Amassing a Treasury of Photography
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More specifically, officials at the Eastman House - the world's oldest photography museum, with more than 400,000 photos and negatives, dating back to the invention of the medium - felt that they needed a New York City presence. And the International Center, a younger institution with a smaller collection, wanted access to Eastman's vast holdings, which include work by Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy.
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But now both institutions are at work on an ambitious project to create one of the largest freely accessible databases of masterwork photography anywhere on the Web, a venture that will bring their collections to much greater public notice and provide an immense resource for photography aficionados, both scholars and amateurs.
The Web site - Photomuse.org, now active only as a test site, with a smattering of images - is expected to include almost 200,000 photographs when it is completed in the fall of 2006, and as both institutions work out agreements with estates and living photographers, the intention is to add tens of thousands more pictures.
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Be sure to check out the test site. This is going to be incredible!
PhotoMuse.org
Eugene Atget
Avenue des Gobelins, 1925
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iraq
The Iraq war is over, and the winner is... Iran
Hamstrung by the Iraq debacle, all Bush can do is gnash his teeth as the hated mullahs in Iran cozy up to their co-religionists in Iraq.
by Juan Cole
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Iraq's new government has been trumpeted by the Bush administration as a close friend and a model for democracy in the region. In contrast, Bush calls Iran part of an axis of evil and dismisses its elections and government as illegitimate. So the Bush administration cannot have been filled with joy when Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and eight high-powered cabinet ministers paid an extremely friendly visit to Tehran this week.font>
The two governments went into a tizzy of wheeling and dealing of a sort not seen since Texas oil millionaires found out about Saudi Arabia. Oil pipelines, port access, pilgrimage, trade, security, military assistance, were all on the table in Tehran. All the sorts of contracts and deals that U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney had imagined for Halliburton, and that the Pentagon neoconservatives had hoped for Israel, were heading instead due east.
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Iraq: The War We Are Not Being Shown
By Arianna Huffington
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My vacation has been remarkably eye-opening. Now, when travelers say things like that, they usually are talking about being introduced to new cultures, different foods, singular settings… but in my case, I’m talking about war. Specifically, how shockingly different the coverage of the war in Iraq is here in Europe compared to what we get back home.font>
It’s like a pair of blinders has been removed and I’m suddenly seeing for myself what I’ve long known to be the case: just how sanitized a version of the war the American mainstream media are delivering, and how little of even this cleaned-up coverage we get.
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A war without enough equipment, under commanders who consider civilians the enemy, an Iraq War veteran sounds like a Vietnam War veteran.
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Talk about deja vu all over again: Here was a fed-up veteran recalling being sent into war without enough military equipment, under troop commanders who considered civilians the enemy. But 26-year-old Patrick Resta wasn’t talking about Vietnam. He was relating his experiences with an Army National Guard unit in Iraq.
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thanks to Antiwar.com
IVAW
Iraq Veterans Against the War
photography
Brooks Jensen is one of the editors of the excellent LensWork. He now has a personal website:
Brook Jensen Arts
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In addition to making photographs, Brooks has some very interesting thoughts on some different aspects of making photographs. Check out his links in the Catalog section about why he is doing what he is doing. And don't miss the Library section where you can download PDF files of some of his projects. A lot to think about. And he has an audio blog, too.
Disgrace
The Seeds of Fascism
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Disgrace: this is one of my first emotions when I watch the settlers' uprising against the eviction of the settlements of Gaza and a couple in the West Bank. Take a look at these guys: adults and youth, men and women, with no fear, no hesitations, no need to apologize when they struggle against their own state. All over the country they block roads. They put chains on school gates at night, they pour glue into the door locks in state offices. They obtain the schedule of the prime minister and boo him wherever he goes. They threaten to kill the chief-of-staff, they harass individual officers at home. They pour oil and scatter nails on the highways. They sabotage army and police vehicles; they pour sugar into bulldozers' oil tanks. They resist and hit soldiers and police; their favorite curse for the Israeli forces is "Nazi." They incite soldiers to disobey orders, and they actually disobey them. An inner uprising like Israel has never seen.
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Jerusalem and Terrorism
by Juan Cole
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The Ariel Sharon government in Israel has announced that it will build a huge wall on someone else's land through Jerusalem, cutting off 55,000 Arabs from the city (they'll have to go through nasty Israeli checkpoints every day to get into their own city!)
This is land theft on a massive scale. Worse, it is theft on a stage of sacred space that affects the sentiments of over a billion people. Whether Westerners like it or not, Jerusalem is considered by Muslims their third holiest city, and Israeli theft of the whole thing drives a lot of them up the wall. A partitioned Jerusalem where the Arab east is connected to the West Bank is the only route to peace. Sharon in his usual aggressive, grabby way, is trying to make that forever an impossibility.
And, folks, this sort of thing, which the Washington Post didn't even notice, may very well get you and me killed. I think what Sharon is doing is morally and politically wrong to begin with. But I sure as hell resent the possibility that I or my family is going to get blown up because of it.
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`It is all Israel'
By Amira Hass
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Listen to the soldier in the field. He says what his commanders were trained to cover up and embellish. Listen to the red-headed soldier, who prevented residents of Qafin from passing through the gate in the separation fence last month to get to their lands. These are 5,000 out of 8,200 dunams of agricultural land in a village in the northwestern West Bank. These are lands belonging to the families of these residents for several generations, and for so-called security reasons they were separated from the village - as has happened, and will happen, with hundreds of other Palestinian villages.font>
Several residents have Civil Administration permits allowing them to pass through the closed gate. Signed permits serve as written proof - intended for the High Court of Justice, and indirectly for the world court at The Hague - that the security establishment and the state are keeping their promises, whereby the security fence does not keep farmers away from their land, that it is "measured." This could be used as evidence in a future international court that will clean out the entire system: the commanders, the politicians, the judges. A written document is better evidence than the undocumented long hours during which people waited for nothing outside the gate, under the beating sun.
But the soldier knows better, because he's in the field, and he doesn't lie: These permits don't obligate the army, he said (and the Civil Administration confirmed this, when asked), because this gate is only for the olive harvest season. That is, the autumn - but now it's summer. Since the gate near their land is closed, there's no chance that the Qafin farmers can pass through to plant 7,500 olive saplings received as a donation, to replace the 12,000 trees destroyed by the fence. Since the gate near their land is closed, when fires break out they can't get there quickly and save the groves their grandfathers planted. And since the gate is closed, they are unable to plant wheat, okra or corn between the groves to slightly improve the nutrition of their families, which are trapped in a cycle of poverty and unemployment.
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A Quarter of a Million Dollars Per Settler
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The state of Israel – which, the last time I checked, was both a foreign and a sovereign nation – wants the American taxpayers to cough up $2.2 billion in addition to our regular $3 billion-or-so annual subsidy to pay for the withdrawal from Gaza.
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Gaza and the Orange Shirt Protests
Or the Middle East Made Simple
by Juan Cole
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Even in ordinary circumstances, Gaza is a mess-- a crowded slum with nearly a million and a half people crammed into a tiny portion of the strip, living in grinding poverty. Children's health statistics have been plummeting. Gaza used to be much nicer, but the Arab-Israeli conflict cut it off from its natural markets and recreated it as a vast bidonville. In recent years the Israelis have turned it into a sort of jail and have razed Palestinian dwellings at a time when there is not enough housing for them. A lot of Gaza residents are refugees from the 1948 war when Zionist forces kicked them out of their homes and exiled them from Palestine.
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pixels
Gigapxl Project
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Indirectly, it also teaches you about the number of pixels for standard film formats. The other day, I scribbled down a similar calculation, and it seems my calculation appears to be correct. If you assume 100 pixels per mm (which is their number) you arrive at 8.64 Megapixels (MP), 36 MP, 129 MP, and 516 MP for 35mm, 120, 4x5, and 8x10, respectively (if I haven't just mistyped the number in my pocket calculator). Thus, it's easy to see why even fairly cheap digital cameras can achieve 35mm quality easily, whereas 120 is still a bit of a stretch. The resolution achieved with large-format photography is still another league.
To make it really geeky, you'd have to factor in that many good films can resolve more than 100 pixels (or lines) per millimeter, which gives you another factor with which you have to multiply the sizes given above. Using some numbers I found online gives these as 1.0, 1.0, 1.44, 1.56, 2.56, 10.24, and a whooping 81.0 for Kodak's Tri-X 400, Kodachrome 64, Agfa Scala (200), Kodak's E100SW (E100G might have an even higher number - I couldn't find it), Fuji Velvia (50; 100 might be more), Kodak's (sadly discontinued) Technical Pan, and Gigabitfilm (25), respectively. Needless to say, you also have to have an excellent lens for this.
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globalism
Pandemic of Brainlessness
by Jim Kunstler
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The public discussion over the global economy is symptomatic of America's new pandemic of brainlessness, the mainstream media especially. The head cheerleader, of course, has been Tom Friedman of the New York Times, author of The World Is Flat. Friedman and the rest of the cheerleading squad believe that that the global economy is a permanent institution. Now that it is established, we can only expect more of it. More and better. Forever.
What all these cretins seem to miss is the cold hard fact that today's transient global economic relations are a product of very special transient circumstances, namely, relative world peace and absolutely reliable supplies of cheap energy. Subtract either of these elements from the equation and you will see globalism evaporate so quickly it will suck the air out of your lungs.
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poetry
Walt Whitman's world
America still needs his poetry
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This month marks the 150th anniversary of a landmark event in literary history: the publication of the first edition of Walt Whitman's ''Leaves of Grass."
When this thin volume, with its ornate green jacket, crude title page, and frontispiece showing the casually dressed Whitman, was advertised for sale on July 5, 1855, few could anticipate its tremendous impact on literature. The book met with sharp criticism. One reviewer, shocked by its sensual images, called it ''a mass of stupid filth." Another, puzzled by its emotional intensity, said its author ''must be some escaped lunatic, raving in pitiable delirium."
In the face of such attacks, Whitman promoted himself actively. An ex-newspaperman with contacts in the press, he published anonymously three long, glowing reviews of his own book in periodicals friendly to him. Referring to himself in the third person, he exclaimed, ''An American bard at last!" He asked," Was he not needed?" He provided the answer: ''You have come in good time, Walt Whitman!"
Whitman also publicized praise he received from his most ardent supporter, the Concord sage Ralph Waldo Emerson. The poet sent his volume to Emerson, who responded with an enthusiastic letter calling it ''the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed." ''I have great joy in it," Emerson wrote, ''I find incomparable things said incomparably well." In a soon-to-be-famous declaration, Emerson added, ''I greet you at the beginning of a great career." Without Emerson's permission, Whitman had Emerson's letter printed in the New York Tribune and again in the appendix to the second edition of ''Leaves of Grass," published the next year.
Whitman's self-promotion, though at times tactless, was for a good cause. He was right when he insisted that America needed his poetry.
America still needs his poetry.
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thanks to PureLandMountain.com
prisons are us
A Reagan legacy - the world's leading jailer
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Michael Niman refers to our "Prison Industrial Complex", which he ascribes to Reagan: the "war on drugs" and "three strikes you're out".
When historians look back at the end of the 20th century they'll write about "the era of incarceration." Prisons, like consumerism and suburban sprawl, have emerged as defining features of the American cultural landscape. Building and running prisons is one of the fastest growing industries in America, supported by a subservient judiciary eager to keep them filled….
In 1998 the US surpassed the former Soviet Union and won the crown as the globe's foremost jailer with an incarceration rate of approximately 690 prisoners per 100,000 citizens [his numbers differ just slightly from the ones I used]. By comparison, that is almost 6 times Canada's incarceration rate (115), over 12 times Greece's rate (55), 19 times Japan's rate (37) and 29 times India's rate of 24 prisoners per 100,000 citizens.
Niman points out that all this growth involves enormous cost to the taxpayers. It's estimated that maintaining a prisoner costs anywhere from $20,000 to $60,000 a year. Though it's hard to see what we get for all that, it's easy to see that the billions "come at the cost of cuts to education, the arts, parks, environmental programs and social programs". The prison system is also, notoriously, a "war on African Americans". After presenting more statistics, Niman concludes: "Put simply, this means that if a white man in Amherst and a Black man in Buffalo both personally consume illicit drugs, the Black man is over 20 times more likley to wind up in jail." To meet rising prison costs, state and local governments turn increasingly to prison labor which they "lease" to private corporations.
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maybe the light at the end of the tunnel isn't an oncoming freight
Things are starting to lighten up a bit. Three of the four sites that I have been working on are done and the fourth will be done this weekend. It's been a real grind doing three weeks of work in a week and a half. Other work has been put off and I will be able to catch up with that soon. William arrived from Iraq this afternoon. They will be leaving for California and Colorado Monday. It's a weight removed knowing he is home safe. Today was spent running errands and doing physical non-computer stuff which also refreshes the mind. One good thing over the recent work is that my bank account is filling up and there is some large format gear in the pipeline as well as some film developing equipment. Ken Smith has encouraged me to develop my own and I think I've figured out how to do it without built in running water. More later. Now back to regular programming.
If it isn't one thing it's another
Another 2 to 3 days and I should be caught up on work and start getting back to normal. William, my son-in-law, was to leave Iraq in 8 days. Last night Jenny got a call at 2 in the morning that William's dad had died. William is on his way back now. William was to have gone to his new post in Colorado at the first of August for deprogamming classes and then spend a week on the Island before driving down to Barstow to see his parents and then on to Colorado. Now they will head out to California as soon as he gets here and then they will go to Colorado after the funeral. William is his dad's only next of kin so he and Jenny will have to arrange everything for the funeral. This sucks.
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