Category: Politics

Reza at rest in the back of the motor home in Oklahoma
Reza [new site!] is in Forrest City, Arkansas right now. Dave Hyslop, who’s travelling with him by car, says they should reach Memphis by tomorrow evening. He asks if anyone has an Elvis costume for Reza.
From a June 23rd report, now on the website, made while Reza and Dave were still in Oklahoma:

Meet Eddie and his wife, owners of the Elk Run RV Park in Elk City, OK. We spent the night here (41 mile marker) after Reza’s first day of running in Oklahoma. I’d gone here to check their rates and scope out the accommodations in advance.
We’ve found that $25 a night for two people has tended to be on the high side of what we’ve encountered along the way and $15 a night has been the low end.
As you can see, Reza and I have added a little signage to the side of the motor home…some handy work he and I created at Kinko’s and then applied in the parking lot of Home Depot–both in Amarillo, TX.

The poster is always a good ice breaker in conversation. I tell Eddie what it’s all about and he says, “Ahh, I’ll let you stay for $!2.” Very kind of him but his generosity was only getting started! I say, “Thanks.” and said I’ll return after I pick up Reza.
When I return he fills out a receipt for me and asks if he can get Reza’s autograph? “Eddie,” I say, “I’ll do you one better than that–come on out to the mobile mansion and I’ll introduce you.”
Reza’s got both his knees iced and a third ice pack resting on the right side of his groin area but still makes the effort to stand up and greet the man. “Oh don’t get up for me,” Eddie said, “you’re the one that’s been work’n all day.”
“Thank you so much.” Reza said.
Seeing all this, Eddie says, “Tell you what–I’m gonna let you stay for free. I want to help you guys out.”
By this time, Kamran, the 18-wheel over-the-road driver has just arrived to drop us off a load of provisions from the Food Bazaar Market in Los Angeles. This is the third time Kamran has stopped to check up on us. He’s drives a route between Wisconsin and Los Angeles so it’s enabled him to rendezvous with us at various points along the way. From this point on we won’t be seeing him as he always turns north at Oklahoma City. Can’t tell you what a friend he’s been to Reza and I along the way. He’s always stopped for at least 2–3 hours to visit with us. The man’s pure heart.
We spot the motor home (hook up the electrical, water, sewer and when available, cable line) and here comes Eddie. “How are you doing for money?” he asks.
“Well…” I say, “we’ve always been looked after.”
“Are you taking donations? he asks.”Well, yeah but you’ve already donated, Eddie!” I said.
“He’s from Iran, right?” he asks.
“Yes.” I said.
“Well my wife of 35 years died of cancer a year and a half ago and her doctor was from Pakistan. He took care of her for three and half months–sometimes he’d come out twice a day–it didn’t matter. You know how much his bill was?” he asks.
I shook my head.
He held his right hand up and formed a circle with the index finger and what remained of an amputated thumb, “Zero.” he said.
The hospital, however, wasn’t so kind. “I didn’t have no insurance; ” he said “they took pretty much everything I had. The bill was $100,000. They took my farm, two rental units I had in town, a building I had and gesturing around the RV park he said, “This is all I’ve got left.”
He pulls a ten-spot out of his wallet and goes to hand it to me and Reza says, “No, you can no give, you no business tonight.” and sweeps his arm around toward all the empty spots in the RV park. Kindness killing kindness.
So that’s the way it’s been this whole trip. People like Eddie who don’t have it to give–going ahead and giving anyway.
“I came into this world with nothing but skin so if I go out that way I guess that’s alright.” Eddie said. “I hope you guys make it good.”

A couple of fans in Oklahoma City go through the scrapbook begun in central Asia

When Barry told me about this story he had found in the foreign press (Reuters Asia), I really thought it was manufactured.
Bush’s handlers arranged a photo-op this week on the island of Goree, where Americans and others once confined Africans who were to be transported around the world as slaves. The objective this time was to demonstrate that our president is definitely against slavery, but in order to stage the theatrical scene, every resident of the island was rounded up at dawn and confined to a stadium for the duration of the great man’s visit.

N’diaye and other residents of Goree, site of a famous slave trading station, said they had been taken to a football ground on the other side of the quaint island at 6 a.m. and told to wait there until Bush had departed, around midday.
Bush came to Goree to tour the red-brick Slave House, where Africans were kept in shackles before being shipped across a perilous sea to a lifetime of servitude.
He then gave an eloquent speech about the horrors of slavery, standing at a podium under a sizzling sun near a red-stone museum, topped by cannon pointing out to the sea.

Incredible. absolutely incredible, but, as Bloggy himself writes, Americans aren’t being told about this – as usual – even though it would be front-page news in any society with a real press.

Can we stop and think about this lead NYTimes story for a minute?

Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor making his first bid for national office, raised substantially more money this quarter than all his more established opponents in the Democratic presidential contest, according to figures released today.
The result forced Dr. Dean’s rivals to reconsider how to deal with an opponent they had until now viewed as little more than an irritant.
At the same time, Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, who had initially been seen as a formidable fund-raiser with strong ties to labor, has apparently come in fifth among Democrats in fund-raising in the second quarter, which ended Monday. It would be the second weak showing in fund-raising by Mr. Gephardt. His aides cautioned today that they were still counting checks.
Dean is now a real candidate because he has money, and the corollary of that is that he will cease to be a real candidate if he should eventually fall behind others in the accumulation of more money.

Is the headline, “Dean’s Surge in Fund-Raising Forces Rivals to Reassess Him,” and the story itself for that matter, even conceivable in any other mature republic? Elsewhere citizens, even professional politicians, don’t appear and disappear as legitimate candidates for office only on the basis of whether or not they are cash cows.
Our government is available to the highest bidder, and nothing else is ever really discussed, except the candidates’ numbers in the polls.

Our daring commander-in-chief, who will always be the most protected individual on the planet, courageously flipped the bird at Iraqi militants who might be thinking of threatening our already-beleagured troops in the Middle East.

“There are some who feel like that conditions are such that they can attack us there,” Bush told reporters at the White House. “My answer is: Bring them on. We have the force necessary to deal with the situation.”

He’s daring a people already on the brink of major insurgency to just try to kill and maim Americans. Do “our boys and girls” need this kind of support from an idiot who has already said he placed them in great peril in the first place because his friend god told him to?
Even in the initial story about Bush’s remarks, Reuters has to report that they have outraged Washington – well, at least the Democrats.

“I am shaking my head in disbelief. When I served in the army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander — let alone the commander in chief — invite enemies to attack U.S. troops,” said New Jersey Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg.
Rep. Richard Gephardt of Missouri, a Democratic presidential candidate, said: “I have a message for the president: ‘Enough of the phony, macho rhetoric. We should be focused on a long-term security plan that reduces the danger to our military personnel.'”

The real reason the nation is going to hell in a hand basket was revealed by Ha’aretz recently but it has never appeared in the mainstream U.S. media, “save a tiny mention in the Post,” Eric Alterman wrote yesterday.

Anyway, according to “selected minutes acquired… from one of last week’s cease-fire negotiations between Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and faction leaders from the Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular and Democratic Fronts… Abbas said that at Aqaba, Bush promised to speak with Sharon about the siege on Arafat. He said nobody can speak to or pressure Sharon except the Americans. According to Abbas, immediately thereafter Bush said: ‘God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East.'”

In the words of that great American pundit and sage, Lily Tomlin, “If you speak to God, it’s a prayer, if God speaks to you it’s schizophrenia.”
[thanks to Jamie and Barry]

Or is it a question of digging our own grave? In any event, this is just not worthy of a great nation, or of a people who think they are a part of a great nation.
French wine didn’t make us stupid. French wine didn’t make us do wretched things to people we know nothing about. French wine didn’t make us greedy and provincial and it did not endow us with a dangerous sense of moral superiority over the entire world. French wine didn’t make us cowards. French wine did not turn the world against us.
French wine will not end the “American century.”
We’re going to do it on our own.
We’ve been told all year that Americans want to punish France for showing good sense lately in its foreign policy, but I wasn’t ready to take the story seriously – until now.

The usual contingent of American wine merchants were mostly absent [from France’s largest wine fair this week in Bordeaux], confirming to many at the fair that American ill will over France’s opposition to the war in Iraq bruised more than egos.
French wine sales to the United States, once French winemakers’ most promising market and now one of their greatest competitors, are going down the drain.

Up to now I had actually thought this nonsense would blow away quickly and that we would soon be directing our anger to the right target: the entire American media and political establishment. In fact it’s clear we haven’t learned a thing, and the result will not be disaster just for certain French industries.
French wine, and perhaps the French aeronautical industry and many others as well, may never recover from American fear and stupidity, but in the end the real victim will be America and everything that a wise and generous America could have been for itself and for the world.
In the meantime, chez nous, we enjoyed a magnificent bottle of French wine last night. The entree was a plate of sauteed sea scallops on a bed of wilted frisee tossed with sauteed shallots, chanterelle and balsamic vinegar. The wine was a Muscat 1992 Grand Cru Goldert Domaine Zind Humbrecht, and the recipe was that of Mario Batalli. An odd combination, but I think “surf and turf” always requires imagination when matching wine and food. Besides, the Zind was getting antsy sitting in the rack here.
Vive la France!

All this is coming from the second most powerful person in the country (third, if we have to count Bush in addition to Cheney):

[Senate Majority Leader Bill] Frist said he feared that the ruling on the Texas sodomy law could lead to a situation “where criminal activity within the home would in some way be condoned.”
“And I’m thinking of, whether it’s prostitution or illegal commercial drug activity in the home, and to have the courts come in, in this zone of privacy, and begin to define it gives me some concern,” Frist said.

No, the problem is as usual that he’s not thinking. The ideologue was speaking in the context of his announcement today of support for a constitutional amendment which would ban gay marriage, because

“I very much feel that marriage is a sacrament, and that sacrament should extend and can extend to that legal entity of a union between, what is traditionally in our Western values has been defined, as between a man and a woman.”

So, now the Radical Right, which has always said it is opposed to any extension of federal power, thinks the federal government should be given final authority over religious rites.
On some level I cannot get too enthused about the latest sodomy decision of the Supreme Court. I did not receive a gift last week. The justices did not give me the right to be me or the right to fuck. The rights were always mine, whether those people recognized them or not.
What has changed is the official opinion of 5 or 6 judges, and with much work that change will come to mean much more. [And we must not forget that the strategic appoinment by this administration of just 2 replacements could reverse the decision.] But Frist reminds us that the country itself hasn’t been changed overnight by Lawrence and Garner vs. the State of Texas. Opinion and behavior is not the direct product of the judicial system. The opposite may be closer to real experience, but there too it’s the lags and the snags which are always so painful.
I’m really an optimist, in spite of these musings. I just hate to see decent people take these things for granted. The malevolent ones never do. Also, like so much that has advanced humanity in the past, whether material or ethical and cultural, we must not think that there was anything inevitable about progress, or that only ordinary, individual mortals were responsible for it, or that we could start from scratch tomorrow and do it over. There are giants and saints, and they’ve been working at these things for a very long time. Sometimes they get a lot of help.
Thanks LAMBDA and so many other wonderworkers.

The AP reports,

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist says Thurmond showed what one person can do by living life to the fullest.

Sometimes even an atheist likes to think about an afterlife. I would really like to think that Strom Thurmond could look at the NYTimes front page this morning. At the top is a banner headline reporting the Court’s legalization of gay sex, and it rests above a large photo of the two defendents embracing yesterday. For those who notice these things, the couple is mixed-race. Near the bottom of the page is a small-ish headline, “Strom Thurmond, Foe of Integration, Dies at 100.” The photo is also rather small. Justice, but with more than a touch of wit.

Strom’s gone. Good.

Maureen Dowd’s just about had it with affirmative action!

Justice Thomas’s dissent in the 5-4 decision preserving affirmative action in university admissions has persuaded me that affirmative action is not the way to go.
The dissent is a clinical study of a man who has been driven barking mad by the beneficial treatment he has received.
It’s poignant, really. It makes him crazy that people think he is where he is because of his race, but he is where he is because of his race.

She reminds herself that

. . . he got into Yale Law School and got picked for the Supreme Court thanks to his race.
. . . .
He is at the pinnacle, an African-American who succeeded in getting past the Anita Hill sexual harassment scandal by playing the race card, calling the hearing “a high-tech lynching,” and who got a $1.5 million advance to write his African-American Horatio Alger story, “From Pin Point to Points After.”

Dowd is further disgusted by the affirmative action program which brought us George Bush,

the Yale legacy who also disdains affirmative action, is playing affirmative action politics in the preliminary vetting of a prospective Supreme Court nominee, Alberto Gonzales. No doubt Bush 43 will call Mr. Gonzales the best qualified man for the job, rather than the one best qualified to help harvest the 2004 Hispanic vote. [Bush 41 nominated Thomas with the preposterous claim that he was “the best qualified” man for the job.]
President Bush and Justice Thomas have brought me around. I don’t want affirmative action. I want whatever they got.