We do too much "heroification" in America, according to James W. Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (a book that ought to be on everybody's shelf).  Like me, he thinks the word hero has been cheapened, ending up more often a description for football quarterbacks who throw perfect last-minute passes than for, say, the passerby who risks her own life to pull a child from a flooding river.

Heroification describes what textbooks, too many teachers,  and the likes of Lynne Cheney have done to historical figures such as the deeply racist Woodrow Wilson and a multitude of other notable Americans. The process of heroification not only turns the notorious into role models but many people who actually deserve the praise pressed upon them into one-dimensional stereotypes without flaws. As if we couldn't stand to see our heroes as human beings who don't always get things right, who, in fact, sometimes behave deplorably and hypocritically.

Despite his flaws, my number one personal hero is - and has been since I was 14 - Frederick Douglass, the runaway slave whose persistent eloquence was one of the leading factors persuading Abraham Lincoln to bring black soldiers into the Union Army. Without them, it is uncertain that the Union would have survived. As historian Eric Foner wrote a few years back:

At an Independence Day meeting sponsored by the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society in 1852, the former slave Frederick Douglass delivered one of the nineteenth century's greatest orations. His theme was the contradiction between American slavery and American freedom.

Douglass did not mince words. He spoke of a government that mouthed the language of liberty yet committed "crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages"; of patriotism reduced to "swelling vanity"; of hypocrisy destroying the country's "moral power abroad." Although slavery is gone, Douglass's critique remains as relevant as in 1852. But so too does his optimism that the days of empire are over, and that in the modern world abuses cannot permanently be hidden from the light of day. Douglass, not the leaders of a slave-holding republic, was the genuine patriot, who called on his listeners to reclaim the "great principles" of the Declaration from those who had defiled and betrayed them. That is a truly patriotic goal for our own Fourth of July.

Here is what Douglass said 156 years ago, with obvious resonance for our own time.

Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold that a nation's sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that the dumb might eloquently speak and the "lame man leap as an hart."

But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn that it is dangerous to copy the example of nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can today take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people.

"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! We wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth."

Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorry this day, "may my right hand cleave to the roof of my mouth"! To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine. I do not hesitate to declare with all my soul that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate, I will not excuse"; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, shall not confess to be right and just....

For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not as astonishing that, while we are plowing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, and secretaries, having among us lawyers doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators, and teachers; and that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hillside, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives, and children, and above all, confessing and worshiping the Christian's God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!...

What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply....

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms- of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

From PR Newswire:

^{President Bush Boosts Porn Industry With Economic Stimulus Plan, According to AIMRCo}

An unforeseen and surprising beneficiary of the Economic Stimulus Plan, a plan that George Bush contends will "boost our economy and encourage job creation," has surfaced this week. An independent market-research firm, AIMRCo (Adult Internet Market Research Company), has discovered that many websites focused on adult or erotic material have experienced an upswing in sales in the recent weeks since checks have appeared in millions of Americans' mailboxes across the country.

According to Kirk Mishkin, Head Research Consultant for AIMRCo, "Many of the sites we surveyed have reported 20-30% growth in membership rates since mid-May when the checks were first sent out, and typically the summer is a slow period for this market."

Jillian Fox, spokeswoman for LSGmodels.com, one of the sites reporting figures to AIMRCo, added, "In a June 15, 2008 survey to our members, thirty two percent of respondents referenced the recent stimulus package as part of their decision to either become a new member, or renew an existing membership."

(h/t to Pam Spaulding at Pam's House Blend)

The following appeared on the Front Page of Daily Kos on July 2, 2003. (There was only a Front Page in those days - no right-margin Diaries yet).

Bush is a badass

You know, it's really easy to play cowboy from the safety of a Secret Service protective ring in the United States.

Our soldiers in Iraq don't have that luxury.

"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."

Our Cowboy in Chief is now daring Iraqi irregulars to attack our men and women on the ground?

Is he literally out of his fucking mind?

^{(Part II will appear next Friday.)}

Rabbit-Proof Fence is my favorite big-screen movie of American Indians.

But that’s an Australian movie, you say? Yep. The best film of American Indians is a Down Under 2002 movie about aboriginals without a loin-cloth, smear of war paint or drop of firewater in sight. It’s the story of three young mixed-race girls who find their way home after being ripped away from their parents in 1931 by the government and trained to focus on their "white side" so they can become somebody’s servants. A few critics have complained that this based-on-a-true-story movie goes overboard in demonizing the main white character (Kenneth Branagh) and depicting most other whites of the era as deeply bigoted, morally uncourageous paternalists. What could the director have been thinking?

The American version of Rabbit-Proof Fence has been out there for the telling ever since Thomas Edison showed his "movie" Hopi Snake Dance at the Columbian World Exposition in Chicago in 1893 on the brand-new kinetoscope his staff had developed. It’s the story of how American Indian children were torn from their customs, religions, languages, tribes and parents by demons and paternalists who saw cultural genocide as the proper modern alternative to the centuries-old physical genocide that had become no longer an acceptable course of action. But of all the hundreds of movie Westerns depicting Indians, this story has failed to generate excitement among four or five generations of movie-makers. Instead, the Hollywood Indian has prevailed.  

As Ted Jojola, an Isleta Pueblo Indian and associate professor at the University of New Mexico, wrote in his 1998 essay, "Absurd Reality II: Hollywood Goes to the Indians," Edison’s choice presented a stereotypical view of American Indians that would ...

"...persist into contemporary times. Its longevity though, is explained by the persistence of myth and symbol. The Indian became a genuine American symbol whose distorted origins are attributed to the folklore of Christopher Columbus when he ‘discovered’ the ‘New World.’ Since then the film industry, or Hollywood, has never allowed Native America to forget it. The Hollywood Indian is a mythological being who exists nowhere but within the fertile imaginations of its movie actors, producers and directors. The preponderance of such movie images have reduced native people to ignoble stereotypes."

Thank you, House Democrats.

That is, thank you to the 151 House Democrats (and, oh yeah, four Republicans) who voted Thursday against continuing to fund the occupation of Iraq. As opposed to the 80 who voted for it. In other words, thanks to the majority.

I know that a handful of you don't really deserve thanks. You voted "nay" with the full knowledge that this funding was going to pass anyway. If you had seen that the vote was going to be a little closer, had there actually been the possibility that the nays would have constituted the House majority, you would have voted "aye" for fear of being labeled, come November - or on the upcoming Fourth of July - as an unpatriotic terrorist-sympathizer who doesn't "support the troops." So maybe that thanks is really only due to 147 of you. Or 143. Who knows? No way to parse out all the ulterior motive possibilities.

Nearly six years ago, 126 House Democrats voted against the Iraq War Resolution, officially known as the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002. You weren't properly thanked for that. Eighty-one Democrats voted for the AUMF.

If you happen to be one of those who voted against the funding today and also voted against the AUMF in 2002, a double huzzah.

And if you're a visitor to this site whose Representative is one of the folks listed below, drop her or him a thank-you by e-mail or a phone call.

Neil Abercrombie, Gary Ackerman, Thomas H. Allen, Jason Andrews, Michael Arcuri, Joe Baca, Tammy Baldwin, Xavier Becerra, Sanford Bishop, Timothy Bishop, Earl Blumenauer, Leonard Boswell, Robert Brady, Bruce Braley, G.K. Butterfield, Lois Capps, Michael E. Capuano, Dennis A. Cardoza, Russ Carnahan, Christopher P. Carson, Andre Castor, Yvette E. Clarke, Wm. Lacy Clay, Emanuel Cleaver, Steve Cohen, John Conyers Jr., Jerry F. Costello, Joe Courtney, Joseph Crowley, Elijah E. Cummings.

Danny K. Davis, Peter A. DeFazio, Diana DeGette, William D. Delahunt, Rosa L. DeLauro, John D. Dingell, Lloyd Doggett, Michael F. Doyle, Donna F. Edwards, Keith Ellison, Eliot Engel, Anna G. Eshoo, Chaka Fattah, Bob Filner, Barney Frank, Al Green, Raul M. Grijalva, Luis V. Gutierrez, John J. Hall, Phil Hare, Jane Harman, Alcee L. Hastings, Brian Higgins, Maurice D. Hinchey, Mazie K. Hirono, Paul Hodes, Rush Holt, Michael M. Honda, Darlene Hooley

Jay Inslee, Steve Israel, Jesse L Jackson Jr., Sheila Jackson-Lee, William J. Jefferson, Henry C. Johnson, E.B. Johnson, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, Steve Kagen, Marcy Kaptur, Patrick J. Kennedy, Carolyn C. Kilpatrick, Ron Klein, Dennis Kucinich, James R. Langevin, John B. Larson, Barbara Lee, John Lewis, David Loebsack, Zoe Lofgren, Nita M. Lowey, Stephen Lynch

Carolyn Maloney, Edward J. Markey, Doris O. Matsui, Carolyn McCarthy, Betty McCollum, Jim McDermott, James P. McGovern, Jerry McNerney, Michael R. McNulty, Kendrick B. Meek, Gregory W. Meeks, Michael H. Michaud, Brad Miller, George Miller, Gwen Moore, James P. Moran, Christopher S. Murphy, Patrick Murphy, Jerrold Nadler, Grace F. Napolitano, Richard E. Neal, James L. Oberstar, David R. Obey, John W. Olver, Frank Pallone Jr., Bill Pascrell Jr., Ed Pastor, Donald M. Payne, Nancy Pelosi, David E. Price

Nick J. Rahall II, Charles B. Rangel, Laura Richardson, Steve R. Rothman, Lucille Roybal-Allard, Linda T. Sánchez, Loretta Sanchez, John P. Sarbanes, Janice D. Schakowsky, Adam B. Schiff, Robert C. Scott, Jose E. Serrano, Carol Shea-Porter, Brad Sherman, Albio Sires, Louise Slaughter, Adam Smith, Hilda Solis, Jackie Speier, Bart Stupak, Betty Sutton, Ellen Tauscher, Mike Thompson, Bennie G. Thompson, John F. Tierney, Edolphus Towns, Nicki Tsongas

Tom Udall, Chris Van Hollen, Nydia Velázquez, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Maxine Waters, Diane Watson, Melvin L. Watt, Henry Waxman, Anthony D. Weiner, Peter Welch, Robert Wexler, Lynn Woolsey, David Wu, John A. Yarmuth.

Total fatalities of American military in Iraq since March 2003: 4101

Total fatalities of coalition military: 4414

Total Iraqi fatalities as a result of the invasion and occupation: Unknown, but as many as 1.4 million

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

Andrew Kramer at The New York Times writes:

^{Deals With Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back}

Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat. ...

The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts, which would run for one to two years and are relatively small by industry standards, would nonetheless give the companies an advantage in bidding on future contracts in a country that many experts consider to be the best hope for a large-scale increase in oil production.

There was suspicion among many in the Arab world and among parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to extract. The Bush administration has said that the war was necessary to combat terrorism. It is not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts; there are still American advisers to Iraq’s Oil Ministry.

The United States government played no role whatsoever in this matter. Having oil men in the Presidency and Vice Presidency at the time of these no-bid contracts is just a cowinkydance.

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

You may wish to check out Troutfishing's Diary, Bush Slanders Troops, Blaming Them For His Own Torture Policy.

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

   ^{Maj. General Antonio Taguba (Ret.), who led the Army’s 2004 investigation into the prison abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib. (From the foreword of Broken Laws, Broken Lives).}

It is impossible to escape a mixture of sadness and fury while reading the 149 horrific pages of the just-released report published by Physicians for Human Rights and called Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by the US. Sadness for the victims. Fury for the fact that American citizens have paid for the ghastly criminal acts of guards and interrogators at U.S.-run prisons in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and Afghanistan. Sadness that Americans are now seen as torturers worldwide. Fury that high officials who ordered these acts are not digging holes and filling them up every day on some penal atoll.

The torture those officials authorized has been revealed over the years in bits and pieces. We’ve seen the photographs. Newspaper stories, magazine articles and a dozen books have been written. There have been previous scathing reports, including two by PHR. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights have delved into the matter. There was, of course, the Army’s 2004 investigation into what happened at Abu Ghraib. And, better late than never, Senator Carl Levin began presiding Tuesday over three days of hearings on the subject, Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody.

For the first time, however, Broken Laws, Broken Lives has added grim evidence gleaned from medical tests, both physical and psychological, of 11 former detainees. Unique stories, but with a theme that cannot - and must not - be ignored. The evidence was gathered and evaluated under strict internationally recognized standards and procedures for determining whether someone has been tortured or ill-treated and for documenting the consequences in a manner so that the results can be used in court. These standards are part of the Istanbul Protocol, Manual on the Effective Investigation and Documentation of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, adopted by the United Nations in 1999.

We'll take a look at one of those 11 cases in a minute.

PHR is a 20-year-old human rights organization that shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 with five other non-governmental organizations making up the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. According to PHR, Broken Laws, Broken Lives ...

... demonstrates that the permissive environment created by implicit and explicit authorizations by senior US officials to "take the gloves off" encouraged forms of torture even beyond the draconian methods approved at various times between 2002 and 2004. In an environment of moral disengagement that countenances authorized techniques designed to humiliate and dehumanize detainees, it is not surprising that other forms of human cruelty such as physical and sexual assault were practiced. The fact that these unauthorized torture practices happened over extended periods of time at multiple US detention facilities suggests that a permissive command environment existed across theatres and at several levels in the chain-of-command. This climate allowed both authorized and unauthorized techniques to be practiced, apparently without consequence.

Given the limited number of detainees evaluated, the findings of this assessment cannot be generalized to the treatment of all detainees in US custody. The patterns of abuse documented in this report, however, are consistent with numerous governmental and independent investigations into allegations of detainee mistreatment making it reasonable to conclude that these detainees were not the only ones abused, but are representative of a much larger number of detainees subjected to torture and ill-treatment while in US custody.

As a consequence of this report and its previous work, PHR recommends: 1) establishing an independent commission with subpoena power and full access to classified documents to investigate and publicly report on detention and interrogation in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantánamo Bay, and other locations; 2) holding to account all individuals "who played any role in the torture or ill-treatment of detainees, including those who authorized the use of methods amounting to torture or exercised command authority over them"; 3) issuing of a formal government apology to detainees subjected to torture; 4) setting up a system for compensating and assisting victims of torture experienced while in U.S. custody; 5) international monitoring of all U.S.-operated places of detention; 6) releasing by the U.S. Department of Justice of all legal opinions and other memoranda concerning standards regarding interrogation and detention policy and practices; and 7) repudiating in writing all forms of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment by government or contract personnel.

It was not easy to find individuals who would undergo a medical examination, talk openly about degrading and painful experiences that have left them with physical and emotional scars, post-traumatic stress disorder and utterly changed lives. Each was accorded anonymity and is referred to in the report by pseudonym. Each of the 11 former detainees was evaluated over two days by a medical doctor and a psychiatrist or psychologist well-experienced in effects of torture. "In each case," PHR wrote, "the clinicians provided opinions on possible torture and ill-treatment based on correlations between individual allegations of torture and specific physical and psychological evidence. They found no evidence of deliberate exaggeration in any case." [Emphasis mine -MB]

Let’s meet one of them, as described by PHR, an Iraqi they call Amir, which means "prince" in Arabic.

In his interview, Amir said:  "No sorrow can be compared to my torture experience in jail. That is the top reason for my sadness. I cannot forget it."

Arrested in August 2003 in Baghdad, he was held by U.S. authorities for 17 months. Brutally beaten, sodomized, placed in stress positions, forced to go naked for long periods, humiliated sexually, bombarded with noise, and tortured in other ways, Amir has since continued to suffer "from physical and psychological symptoms since his release. He reported several marked impairments in his social, sexual, and emotional functioning subsequent to his detention."

In his twenties when he was arrested, Amir earned his living as a salesman, the sole provider for his mother, his younger brother, his younger brother’s wife, and their three children. Arrested at a Baghdad hotel while he was sleeping, he was blindfolded and shackled and taken away in a truck to one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces, which had been converted to U.S. military use. He was soon removed by truck to another prison, made to undress, photographed naked, forced to stand for five or six hours, and remained blindfolded. Over the next three days, he and other prisoners were forced to run around a narrow room, denied rest and forced to eat standing. During this time, he injured his foot and, despite profuse bleeding, was forced to continue running. When he tried to tell a soldier about the injury, he was thrown against a wall and he passed out. Later an interpreter hit him in the nose with a plastic water bottle.

He was at that prison for 10 days, then transferred to another where he spent 27 days in a "small dark room" and was repeatedly interrogated and mistreated, including being pushed against a wall.

In September 2003, Amir was taken to Abu Ghraib prison.

During the course of detention, Amir recalled experiencing several other abuses. On one occasion, Amir was playing with a broken toothbrush while sitting in front of his cell. When the soldiers saw this, they confiscated the broken tooth brush and accused him of manufacturing a dangerous weapon. They told him to take off his clothes. Amir recalled that he pleaded that his religion forbids nakedness. He was nevertheless restrained naked to the bars of his cell’s door for two to three hours. He was then returned to his cell naked and without a blanket. He noted that the soldiers would come to his cell and humiliate him because of his nakedness.

Amir recounted remaining naked and being forced to pray in that condition. During that time, he recalled that a soldier came to his cell and started shouting. Amir was praying, so he did not answer. The soldier entered the cell, and pushed Amir’s head to the floor. He was then suspended with his arms up and behind his back for several hours, with only his toes touching the ground. During this time, Amir also heard increasingly high-pitched screaming from, in his words, "others who were tortured. The screaming was getting higher and higher."

Subsequently, Amir was taken to a small foul-smelling room and was forced to lay face down in urine and feces. He noted, "You can’t even breathe because of that smell... [The soldier] pushed me to lie down. I tried to move my shoulder so my face would not go to the ground. They brought a loudspeaker and started shouting in my ear. I thought my head would explode." Amir reported that a broomstick was forcibly inserted into his anus. He was hit and kicked on his back and on his side. At this point, he was bleeding from his feet and shoulders, and the urine exacerbated the pain from these wounds. He was pulled by a leather dog leash and was ordered to "howl like dogs do." When he refused to do so he was repeatedly kicked. Amir felt a hot liquid on his back and guessed that someone was urinating on him. He received more kicks on his left side and in the groin, and one of the men stepped on his genitals, causing him to faint.

Amir subsequently woke up to cold water being poured on his head. He recalled hurting all over his body, particularly on the left lateral side of his chest, his right middle finger, and his groin and genitals. He noticed that his genitals were swollen and had wounds.

When asked about his internal responses to this episode of abuse, Amir described, "My soul was flying away. Like my body was not there. I started to think about my family ...When I woke up [from the beating], I felt like I was not of this life. But my body was there, the pains in my body were there."

Following this episode, Amir was kept naked in his cell for about four days. During that period, representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) visited him and he told them about his mistreatment. The ICRC personnel provided him with clothing and blankets, which were confiscated after they left. When the Red Cross returned the following day, these provisions were given back to him – only to be taken away again when the visitors left. ...

When asked "Did any doctor help you with your injuries?," Amir uncharacteristically interrupted the interviewer and cried out, "Did I need to ask for help? I was there naked and bleeding. They were supposed to help...These were not real doctors. They had no compassion. They were not there to practice medicine but to make war."

Among his post-detention symptoms, Amir said, are severe headaches, discomfort in his left testicle, including during intercourse, pain in his back and knees, other musculo-skeletal pain, persistent significant left lateral-side chest pain," and dizziness. He described irregular heartbeats several times a day. These he said come from his memories of abuse. "These are the memories I can never forget ...I want to forget, but it is impossible." He also described a constant nervousness, flashbacks, disturbed sleep, moodiness, outbursts of anger, sexual dysfunction, depression, thoughts of suicide and low tolerance. "I constantly feel disturbed. I would break everything in the house. When I disagree with my wife, I would smash things." Classic symptoms of PTSD.

Medical tests run by the PHR team, including a bone scan and a psychological evaluation, were consistent with Amir’s claims of mistreatment.

One of the most disturbing aspects of Amir’s treatment and that reported by several of the other former detainees is that of the medical personnel, a problem described well in Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror, a harrowing book by medical ethicist Dr. Steven H. Miles, who pried 35,000 pages of information out of the government with Freedom of Information Act applications. One thing he discovered: Early on in the abandonment of the Geneva Conventions, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld instructed that military doctors monitor torture.

PHR notes:

Some of the detainees reported that they received good and appropriate medical care during their detention. However, both the experiences recounted by the detainees and the medical records available in one of the cases show how physicians and other health workers became, at best, ethically compromised in these detention settings. At worst, health professionals at these sites became enablers of torture by providing medical care in an environment where torture was taking place. In fact, in some cases health professionals may have given interrogators the "green light" to continue with abusive techniques and, in other cases, the health professionals effectively patched the detainees up so that they could be abused further.

At Guantánamo, two detainees said that a person who seemed to be a doctor was present during beatings in Guantánamo Bay. Detainees also suspected that medical and psychological information gained from the detainees for treatment was shared with and used by interrogators. Three of the former Guantánamo detainees said that they spoke with psychologists. Although the men initially thought the meetings were confidential, they later had reason to believe that the psychologists shared information with interrogators.

The detainees from Guantánamo reported that they were given injections or medication without their consent. For example, one man recalled receiving an estimated ten to fifteen injections that often caused rashes. He also indicated that sometimes the injections were administered by "civilians...coming to take lessons – it was like internships."

The medical records do not indicate that the health professionals inquired into or documented any form of ill-treatment perpetrated by US soldiers. Instead, their interventions and documentation obfuscate the relationship between the detainee’s abuse and ill-treatment in confinement and his deteriorating mental and physical condition.

Broken Laws, Broken Lives makes for nightmare reading. But it is imperative that it be read. And acted upon.

As Maj. General Taguba says in the foreword:

In order for these individuals to suffer the wanton cruelty to which they were subjected, a government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded. The UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored.  And the healing professions, including physicians and psychologists, became complicit in the willful infliction of harm against those the Hippocratic Oath demands they protect. ...

The former detainees in this report, each of whom is fighting a lonely and difficult battle to rebuild his life, require reparations for what they endured, comprehensive psycho-social and medical assistance, and even an official apology from our government.

But most of all, these men deserve justice as required under the tenets of international law and the United States Constitution.  

And so do the American people.

Indeed. No doubt many in the Cheney-Bush administration expect to run out the clock over the next 215 days and ride off into the sunset to pen their memoirs. Nobody who has observed this crew for the past seven and a half years thinks justice will be done in this matter before January 2009.  Is it too much to hope that there will be some afterward? Or are we destined to see these torturers and torture enablers and torture-abettors get away without paying even the mildest penalty?

+ +

(If you are pressed for time, the link for Broken Laws, Broken Lives (http://brokenlives.info) includes a 12-page summary in addition to the 149-page full report.)

See jhutson's Video: One Detainee's Heartbreaking Story of US Torture.

In an internal study obtained by the Associated Press last week, the Veterans Administration found that female veterans aren’t being as well taken care of as male veterans. The same study found the general quality of health care at the VA to be good when measured against standard benchmarks. Place that grade B overall assessment against the many complaints raised against the VA and one can only imagine how much worse the situation really is for women veterans than the study shows.

In 2007, the VA treated 255,000 women, some 5 percent of them veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. That percentage is expected to double soon. Some 180,000 women have served in those two wars. While VA officials say they’re doing a better job, Washington Sen. Patty Murray sees it otherwise: "They aren't ready. Absent a proactive, concerted effort and knowing their limited resources, they are struggling with so much this might get lost."

[According to the AP, the] review  of the quality of care at VA facilities, which was mandated by Congress, found that at about one-third of its facilities, the quality of outpatient care given to women wasn't as good as what was offered to men.

It said that the VA has made strides in improving care for women veterans, such as creating onsite mammography services and establishing women's clinics at most of its medical centers. It also said the VA is attempting to recruit clinicians with training in women's care and broadening its approach to better address diseases prevalent among women such as lung cancer.

However, it said that there were barriers that remained, such as the need to train more physicians in women's care and for more equipment to meet women's health needs.

The VA has begun a long-term study of 12,000 female veterans to see how serving in Iraq and Afghanistan has affected their physical, mental and reproductive health and how well the VA is dealing with their problems. But what happens right now, today and tomorrow, as more women enter a system unprepared both financially and in so many other ways to receive them? The VA is, after all, practically notorious for the number of studies it completes and shelves.

What's worse than this failure to meet women's veterans needs is a deeply rotten attitude in the highest reaches of the VA. For instance, as McClatchy's Les Blumenthal wrote on May 22 of hearings by the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee:

The Department of Veterans Affairs said Wednesday that it opposes much of Sen. Patty Murray’s bill to improve care for female veterans, even as the number of women seeking VA medical services is expected to double within the next five years.

A top VA official admitted during a Senate Veterans Affairs Committee hearing that the agency might not be prepared for the anticipated influx of female veterans.

"We recognize there may well be gaps in services for women veterans, especially given the VA designed its clinics and services based on data when women comprised a much smaller percentage of those serving in the armed forces," said Gerald Cross, the VA’s principal deputy undersecretary for health. ...

The agency’s concerns cover new studies of the physical and mental health problems female veterans faced and how the department was dealing with them. Cross said that would overlap with existing studies under way and would cost millions of dollars that could better be spent on health care services.

The VA also opposed sections that would require mental health workers to get special training on how to care for female victims of military sexual trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, to require additional staff to deal with female veterans and to provide child care for veterans seeking VA care.

The committee is scheduled to vote on Murray’s bill June 26.

Senator Murray, whose father was a disabled World War II veteran and who worked as a physical rehabilitation intern in a Seattle veterans hospital near the end of the Vietnam War, has become a key advocate for health care for veterans from her perch on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. She’s the first woman ever to serve on the committee, where she has been assigned since 1995. It’s a job she takes seriously, as VA secretaries have discovered when they try to cut clinics or low-ball budgets, and Idaho Senator Larry Craig learned a year ago when they butted heads last June over her effort to increase veterans eligible for care by 200,000.

As reported in an April story in which Murray's anger was undisguised, she accused the VA of lying about the number of attempted suicides by veterans. Until internal e-mails were publicly exposed by CBS News on April 21 as a consequence of a class action suit, the VA put the number of attempted suicides at 790. The e-mails, which were part of an internal VA debate over whether the number should be downplayed, said the total was around 12,000, 15 times what the VA was claiming publicly. Six months previously, CBS had learned that the suicide rate for veterans was more than twice the national average of 8.9 per 100,000 population.

"The suicide rate is a red-alarm bell to all of us," said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. Murray also said that the VA's mental health programs are being overwhelmed by Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, even as the department tries to downplay the situation.

"We are not your enemy, we are your support team, and unless we get accurate information we can't be there to do our jobs," Murray told Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs Gordon Mansfield during the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee hearing.

Mansfield told Murray and the other senators that he didn't think the VA had deliberately tried to mislead Congress or the public.

Murray remained skeptical, however, saying that the VA has demonstrated a pattern of misleading Congress about the increasing number of soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and are now seeking help and straining Defense Department and VA facilities and programs. ...

"I used to teach preschool, and when you bring up a 3-year-old and tell them they have to stop lying, they understand the consequences," Murray said. "The VA doesn't.
They need to stop hiding the fact this war is costing us in so many ways."

Other costs, as detailed in the Rand Corporation’s Invisible Wounds of War are the large number of veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury.

Visiting Alaska in late May at the behest of Ted Stevens – whose Senate seat is vulnerable to a takeover by the Democrats this year – VA Secretary Peake, who replaced the previous Secretary in part because of Senator Murray’s pressure, belittled some of these psychological and health injuries as overblown and akin to football injuries. As Brandon Friedman noted at VetVoice at the time:

Frankly, Peake's casually dismissive attitude sucks.  Being hunted by other humans every day for 15 months, watching your friend bleed to death, and having your brain flattened like a pancake from a thousand-pound detonation are not comparable to football injuries.  

It's also quite clear that this was neither a mis-speak nor a quote taken out of context, as this was the second day in a row that Peake has belittled the combat injuries sustained by those fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.  On Saturday, Peake suggested that PTSD was being "overdiagnosed."  He then continued:

"Just because someone might need a little counseling when they get back, doesn't mean they need the PTSD label their whole lives."

Might need a little counseling?  This fundamental lack of understanding of both combat injuries and their treatment is inexcusable coming from the individual charged with leading the VA.  

In this context, however, it's no wonder that the VA is under Congressional scrutiny for downplaying the extraordinarily high number of suicides among veterans.  Likewise, it comes as no surprise that VA officials have recently been caught instructing caregivers to diagnose returning troops with "Adjustment Disorder" instead of PTSD in order to save money.  

This is clearly a pattern that reflects an overarching strategy on the part of the VA to disregard the injuries of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

Low-balling budgets? Running operations like the Walter Reed annex? Downplaying PTSD and traumatic brain injuries? Is it any shock that the VA falls short when treating female veterans?

As Blumenthal wrote in May:

Two nightmares haunt Robin Milonas.
While serving in Afghanistan in 2004 as an Army Reserve civil affairs officer, the former lieutenant colonel got lost in a minefield while leading a small convoy delivering school supplies to civilians.

Even more troubling is the memory of a man who arrived at the main gate of Bagram Air Base carrying a young boy whose leg had been blown off by a land mine.

"I was an outgoing, energetic, determined good soldier who wanted to make the Army a career," said Milonas, of Puyallup, Wash., who just turned 50.

"Now I am broken."

Milonas has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and receives therapy at the veterans center in Tacoma, Wash. But three times she's been denied a disability rating from the VA, which says Milonas hasn't proved her problems are related to service in Afghanistan.

Milonas believes that the VA has yet to recognize that even though women are barred from combat, it's hard for them to avoid the trauma associated with serving in a war zone like Afghanistan.

"The battle is everywhere," she said. She thinks the government's attitude is that "because women aren't allowed in combat, they can't have PTSD. It must be depression or women's issues like PMS."

VA officials say there's no double standard when it comes to disability ratings for PTSD.

"This is the first group of women's vets we have seen with this intensity of experience," said [Patricia] Hayes [the VA's national director of women's health care issues]. "We are not sure what the long-term effects will be."

Certainly women veterans in this war, who perform a much greater range of jobs, will are facing a different set of circumstances than the women of the Vietnam era. But we do have some idea of what the long-term effects will be. The National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study, which looked at 432 women who served in Vietnam from 1964-1975 – mostly as nurses, found that 27% suffered from PTSD sometime during their postwar lives.

As in so many other areas, the VA needs to get up to speed, with all due speed. However, as the Cheney-Bush Administration has repeatedly shown, it is incapable of providing the leadership to get us there. As with so much else, new marching orders will have to wait until January 2009.

On February 12, 2004, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, two activists who had been together for 51 years, married each other after San Franciso declared same-sex marriages legal. The California Supreme Court subsequently nullified their marriage and some 4000 others in a ruling saying the city had no authority to approve the marriages in defiance of state law. Last month, the same court ended the state's ban on gay marriage. So, Monday night, Martin, 87, and Lyon, 83, got married again. Once again, as in 2004, they were the first couple to take advantage of the legal change.

^{Same-sex weddings start with union of elderly San Francisco couple}

Mayor Gavin Newsom, who officiated the ceremony in the reception area of his office, said it was a fitting way to memorialize last month's state Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage in California, which took effect at 5:01 p.m. ...

The couple made their way out of the office and onto the balcony area where a cake - and large crowd- was waiting. Rose petals fluttered down from the ceiling as the crowd cheered and cameras flashed.

"This is an extraordinary moment in history and extraordinary moment in time" Newsom said to the crowd. "They are extraordinary people who have lived extraordinary lives and spent half a century fighting for justice and equality."

Lyon drew laughter with her comments.

"When we first got together, we were not really thinking about getting married, we were thinking about getting together," she said. "I think it's a wonderful day."

"Ditto," Martin said.

Martin and Lyon have lived in the same house in San Francisco since 1955. That same year, at a time of flourishing McCarthyism, which hunted not only communists, but also gays, the pair helped found, with six other women, the Daughters of Bilitis, the nation's first lesbian rights organization. They risked everything. Martin was elected president and Lyon secretary. "DOB went on to define its purpose as bringing lesbians into the public discourse through education, encouraging responsible research studies, and advocating for changes in the penal code."

The organization held its first national convention in 1960, in downtown San Francisco.

Highlights included discussions on psychosexual behavior, status of gay bars, religious attitudes, legal problems of lesbian couples and entertainment. Phyllis and Del hosted a pre-convention reception at their home. Their address and phone number were printed in the program. From that point on there was no turning back for DOB or the couple who brought it out of the closet.

Unfortunately, in 1969 the National Organization for Women (NOW) President Betty Friedan labeled lesbians "The Lavender Menace." Again entering unfriendly territory, Del and Phyllis were two of the first out lesbians to join NOW, insisting on the couple's membership rate. At the 1971 and 1973 NOW conventions, the oppression of lesbians as a feminist issue was acknowledged in resolutions that Del and Phyllis were instrumental in getting adopted.

In 1972, they were also instrumental in setting up the Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club. That year their book Lesbian/Woman, depicting lesbian lives in a positive way, was published. The book was chosen in the 1990s by Publishers Weekly as one of the 20 most  influential women's books of the '70s and '80s).

In 1976, Martin wrote Battered Wives, a catalyst for establishing a network of battered women's shelters. Lyon became co-director of the National Sex Forum, which initiated the use of explicitly sexual films as a teaching tool, and subsequently became a member of The Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, which grants doctoral and other degrees in sexology.

Activists for life. Spouses forever. Congratulations!

+ + +

Tuesday is the 1875th day since Mission Accomplished.

There are 216 days left of the Cheney-Bush regime.

The Overnight News Digest is posted and includes the story, U.S. abuse of detainees was routine at Afghanistan bases.

Tom Teicholz at the Los Angeles Times writes:

The pariah loophole
^{Former Nazis remain free because no country will accept them.}

John Demjanjuk's last appeal to avoid deportation was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court on May 19. The 88-year-old accused Nazi concentration camp guard was stripped of his citizenship and ordered sent to Ukraine, his birthplace; Poland, the locus of the crimes; or Germany, the heir to the Nazi regime under which he served.

Yet, as it now stands, he is still in the United States. Why? He can't be exiled unless another country agrees to accept him. For the time being, he remains free.

In this, Demjanjuk is not alone. There are five other former Nazi criminals against whom the U.S. Justice Department successfully completed deportation proceedings but whom no country has been willing to accept. Romanian-born Johann Leprich, a guard at Mauthausen camp in Austria, is one; his deportation was finalized in 2006. Another is Jakiw Palij, born in a region of Poland that is now in Ukraine. He was a guard at Poland's Trawniki labor camp (where in a single day in 1943, 6,000 prisoners were murdered), and his deportation was finalized in January 2006. Mykola Wasylyk, another Trawniki guard also found to be at the Budzyn camp, had his final appeal denied in 2004.

Theodor Szehinskyj, also born in a part of Ukraine that used to be Poland, was in the SS unit called the Death's Head Brigade and was a guard at the Gross-Rosen, Sachsenhausen and the Warsaw concentration camps. His deportation litigation was completed in March 2006.

Finally, there is Anton Tittjung. Tittjung was born in what was then Yugoslavia and is now Croatia. He was a Waffen SS member and a guard at Mauthausen.

Should any of these criminals worry that deportation is imminent, they might take comfort from the fact that the Supreme Court declined to hear Tittjung's final appeal way back in 2000. He still remains free in the United States. In addition, in recent years, four of their denaturalized Nazi peers died before they were ever deported.

Demanjuk was first charged in 1977 at age 57 for falsifying his 1952 applications to enter the U.S. and to get his citizenship in 1958. His citizenship was revoked in 1981, and he was extradited to Israel in 1986. Convicted and sentenced to death in Israel, Demjanjuk later had his sentence overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court on the grounds of reasonable doubt. In 1993, when he was 73, a U.S. Appeals Court overturned the 1981 ruling. In 1998, Demjanjuk regained his U.S. citizenship. But it was revoked again in 2002, when Demjanjuk was 82, after a new trial. An appeals court upheld the revocation in 2004. Late in 2005, an immigration judge ordered him deported. In 2006, the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld the deportation order. In January, the Sixth Circuit Court refused to review the order. Last month, the Supreme Court did the same.

Now 88, Demjanjuk, like the other war criminals still alive, has two goals in mind: stay free and run out the clock.  

Demjanjuk is one of the Nazis the anti-Semite Pat Buchanan chose to defend in the 1980s. For instance, in a 1982 interview with Allan Ryan Jr., then head of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigation, Buchanan said: "You've got a great atrocity that occurred 35-45 years ago, okay? Why continue to invest...put millions of dollars into investigating that. I mean, why keep a special office to investigate Nazi war crimes. ...why not abolish your office?"

One of the camps where Demjanjuk has been accused of being a guard was the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland. Some 800,000 people were murdered in the camp's gas chambers. Today on the site, 17,000 stones stand in a symbolic cemetery. It is said that 17,000 is the largest number of Jews gassed in a single day at the camp. More than 130 of the stones are inscribed with the names of the cities from where victims were deported to Treblinka.

Should aged Nazi war criminals, those who helped put the 800,000 into mass graves at Treblinka and the ashes of millions of others into the ground at other camps be left in peace to live out their dotage? What should be the statute of limitations on war crimes?

The Overnight News Digest is posted,  and includes a story that puts the lie to Senator Lindsey Graham's comment Thursday: "They said an al Qaeda member has a constitutional right to go to a federal court of their choosing and say, 'Judge, let me go,' The Nazis never had that right."

John Demjanjuk would beg to differ, Senator.

Margaret Talev at McClatchy Newspapers writes about Boumediene v. Bush [Caution: 70-page pdf].

^{McCain rebuffed, Obama vindicated by court's Guantanamo ruling}

Obama applauded the ruling, saying it was a repudiation of "yet another failed policy supported by John McCain."

Although both senators have opposed the use of torture in military interrogations of detainees and advocated closing the Guantanamo Bay facility, they've taken different stances when it comes to detainees' legal rights.

McCain, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam who survived torture, helped shape the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It established a military-commission trial system as an alternative to civilian courts and said that federal courts couldn't consider habeas corpus petitions of detainees at Guantanamo; that is, detainees couldn't challenge in U.S. civilian courts the grounds on which they were being held.

McCain voted for it and Obama voted against it. ...

One of Obama's campaign-speech lines has been that if he's elected president, "I will restore habeas corpus" to detainees.

Obama, who has a law degree and taught constitutional law, said Thursday's opinion undercut President Bush's views on executive power, raised questions about McCain's judgment and was "an important step toward re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law, and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus."

"Our courts have employed habeas corpus with rigor and fairness for more than two centuries, and we must continue to do so as we defend the freedom that violent extremists seek to destroy," he said. ...

McCain noted at a press conference in Boston that he had not yet read the decision but that Chief Justice John G. Roberts' dissent was worthy of attention. Having not read the decision, he knew this how?

Three times in four years, the Supreme Court has ruled against the Cheney-Bush administration's shameless detention of terrorist suspects at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, the 45-square-mile area wrenched from Spain in 1898 and effectively stolen from Cuba in 1903 with a coerced treaty. From the White House's point of view, Guantánamo was perfect, neither Cuba nor the United States, a jurisdictionless no-man's-land where the rule of law could be ignored and the precepts of civilized behavior violated on a daily basis without the prying eyes of bleeding-heart terror-symps or the other two branches of government that the Founders chose to provide as limiters of executive power.

This third decision, like the previous ones - Rasul v. Bush and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld - doesn't mean Gitmo will be shut down or the prisoners there (who haven't been already released or transferred to places like Bagram in Afghanistan) will go free any time soon. But the ruling is another major smackdown for the royalist approach Mister Bush and his legal theorists have tried to impose on the nation at the point of a bayonet labeled "9/11."

As Human Rights Watch's Legal and Policy Director James Ross writes in Salon:

^{Supreme Court to Bush: You're not above the law}

In the end, Boumediene says that the U.S. president cannot be a law unto himself. It says that anyone held in what is de facto U.S. territory -- no matter what crimes he may have committed or where he is from -- is entitled to challenge his detention. And that's something really worth celebrating.

From Italy, President Bush said Thursday that he disagreed with the ruling but "we will abide by the court's decision" -- as if he believes the administration has a choice in the matter. In the past, the administration has shown an incredible tenacity for seeking to undermine the rule of law. But then again, maybe President Bush will come to realize that his Guantánamo approach hasn't worked. That detaining hundreds of people who were later released without charge causes more harm than good. That trying people before ad hoc military commissions is a doomed process -- and that the federal courts can competently prosecute people for acts of terrorism, as they already do regularly. And that making the U.S. safe against acts of terrorism can be achieved with the help of the law, rather than by riding roughshod over it.

Don't hold your breath.

Indeed. Don't hold your breath. There are still 220 days until January 20.

Tonight, a tidbit from the early days of Daily Kos, June 11, 2002, to be precise. More proof that some things never change, even if the press secretary does.

It wasn't "The Little Caterpillar"

Last week, Bush surprised people by rejecting a report issued by the EPA admitting global warming was a scientific certainty. When asked about the report, Bush dismissively said "I read the report put out by the bureaucracy." I was shocked. What, Bush read a 268-page report? That would require some sort of adult attention span!

Well, Ari Fleischer finally admitted that Dubya lied: "Whenever presidents say they read it, you can read that to be he was briefed." That may be the case with Shrub and Reagan, but competent presidents do their own reading.

Of course had President Gore made this lie, it would be all over Fox news for weeks ...

The Overnight News Digest is posted and informs us that Norway legalizes gay marriage.

A month ago, Kathy G., who ought to be on everybody's daily must-read list, wrote a fine piece at her blog, The G Spot, called The Hillary-ization of Michelle Obama, in which she pounded on Christopher Hitchens's May 5 screed in Slate. But she dug a good deal deeper, and I am going to quote her at considerable length.

The Hitchens piece, contemptible piece o' shite though it is, a surefire sign that, now that it's clear Hillary's presidential campaign is all but over, the right is proceeding apace with its attempt to Hillary-ize Michelle Obama. We have, of course, all heard about how "unpatriotic" she is. Maureen Dowd has already cattily attacked her for not being sufficiently deferential to her husband. And now we're being treated to Hitchens' exegesis of how her college term papers prove she's really Stokely Carmichael in drag. Delightful! But hey . . . radical, unfeminine, unpatriotic -- remind you of any other right-wing caricatures of a certain prominent Democratic woman with a famous husband?    

It's not surprising that they're doing this to Michelle, because it's one of the most basic moves in the wingnut playbook. All Democrats are radicals who hate America, of course; in addition, all female Democrats are ballbusting beeyotches (just as all male Democrats are girly-men). The gender crap, sadly, is probably still going to be an issue for any Democratic first lady. The only first ladies who seem to  be noncontroversial and enjoy wide popularity are the ones who, like Pickles, resemble Stepford wives. But overwhelmingly, it seems to be Republicans, not Democrats, who marry that sort of woman.

The role of first lady tends to be a poor fit for today's Democratic wives, many of whom have been outspoken women with significant careers of their own. Though, of course, virtually any modern woman would chafe against the ridiculous 19th century-style confines of the role. Even the title itself -- "first lady" -- has the musty odor of an antique about it. It's a term that sounds like it's straight out of the 19th cult of true womanhood.

And speaking of the cult of true womanhood -- here is the classic article on the subject, by the historian Barbara Welter (I took her undergrad course in the history of American women, more years ago than I'd care to remember). This is the opening paragraph of that article:

   

The nineteenth-century American man was a busy builder of bridges and railroads, at work long hours in a materialistic society. The religious values of his forbears were neglected in practice if not in intent, and he occasionally felt some guilt that he had turned this new land, this temple of the chosen people, into one vast countinghouse. But he could salve his conscience by reflecting that he had left behind a hostage, not only to fortune, but to all the values which he held so dear and treated so lightly. Woman, in the cult of True Womanhood presented by the women's magazines, gift annuals, and religious literature of the nineteenth century, was the hostage in the home. In a society where values changed frequently, where fortunes rose and fell with frightening rapidity, where social and economic mobility provided instability as well as hope, one thing at least remained the same - a true woman was a true woman, wherever she was found. If anyone, male or female, dared to tamper with the complex of virtues that made up True Womanhood, he was damned immediately as the enemy of God, of civilization, and of the Republic. It was the fearful obligation, a solemn responsibility, which the nineteenth-century American woman had - to uphold the pillars of the temple with her frail white hand.

I always did love that phrase about the true woman holding up "the pillars of the temple with her frail white hand." "First lady" is a term which originated in the 19th century, and the role of first lady was very much part and parcel of the cult of true womanhood. But, as we see, the cult of true womanhood was very much a racial construct -- that was (a lot of) the point. So if Michelle Obama ascends to the role which is the apotheosis of the cult of true womanhood -- the role of First Lady of the United States -- I predict that wingnut heads will explode throughout the land. And there will be a whole other layer of bullshit Michelle will have to deal with. In addition to the anti-Democrat bullshit, and the sexist bullshit, there will be, of course, the racist bullshit.

My heart goes out to her. The road she will be traveling on will be a difficult one, in particular because there is no one in the history of America who has trod that particular path before. She is an exceedingly courageous person to have chosen such a public role. Just by sheer virtue of being black and female, and daring to live a public life, she will be highly controversial. She will attract a hell of a lot of ugly hatred. Even for a person as strong as I am sure she is, there are sure to be times when that will be very, very hard to take.  

What I'm wondering right now is, what can we - as Democrats, as feminists, as people who are deeply committed to racial equality -- do to help and support her?

This isn't the last time Kathy G has focused on the intersection of racism and sexism as regards Michelle Obama and this campaign, and you can count on her to do it again as the inevitable slurs and smears emerge. Some folks here and elsewhere in wwwLand have repeatedly argued that we should get past racism and sexism and move on. I couldn't agree more. But anybody who thinks we as a nation can move on without talking about it, and talking about it again, and again, and actually doing something about it, are confused over how change actually occurs.

Total U.S. military fatalities in Iraq since March 2003: 4094

Total coalition fatalities in the same period: 4407

Total number of U.S. military suicides as a result of the Iraq invasion and occupation: Unknown, hundreds at least

Total number of Iraqi deaths because of the invasion and occupation: Unknown. As many as 1.4 million, possibly more

The Overnight News Digest has been posted.

Glenn Hurowitz over at Grist, the on-line environmental magazine, interviews Scott Kleeb, the 32-year-old, highly photogenic, Yale Ph.D who is the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Nebraska.

The hot rancher speaks

^{U.S. Senate candidate Scott Kleeb and the clean energy roundup}

Question: Where do you see Nebraska's economic future, and what role do you think clean energy will play in it?

Answer: We've got to transform the way we produce and consume energy. There's a failure of leadership we've seen at all levels of government. We've got to figure out how to do more with less. That's true of our elected officials and true of ourselves as individuals. This is a generations-long process. We are on the cusp of it right now. Biofuels and wind energy and solar energy and algae-based energy is just the tip of the iceberg.

Nebraska's economy is going to be transformed by that revolution. Farmers will find new ways of feeding or, once we get to cellulosic ethanol, fueling the world.

Question: Recent studies have suggested that devoting American land to growing biofuels instead of food is causing massive deforestation in carbon-rich tropical forests. How can switchgrass and cellulosic ethanol be viable if it's just causing food to be grown in these highly sensitive ecosystems thousands of miles away?

Answer: The rainforests are the world's largest carbon sink. The impact [of deforestation] there is much more important than what we're talking about in this country. You saw it in the farm debate on what we do about Conservation Reserve Program land [agricultural land that's set aside for conservation purposes]. You're even seeing an internal battle. Many farmers are members of the Farm Bureau or the Farmers Union, but are also members of Ducks Unlimited or Pheasants Forever. On one side, they're being lobbied by their farm organizations who talk about $5 [a bushel] corn or $6 corn and talk about how great it is and how we should produce more of it. On the other side, they're being lobbied by the organizations they're members of like Ducks Unlimited talking about increasing the CRP acreage. Farmers are personally conflicted about it. That's only going to get bigger. These are not easy questions that we're trying to deal with.

The advantage of switching to switchgrass is that you can do it because you don't harvest it the same way you harvest soybeans or corn or other row crops. You don't have to plough up the ground or disrupt the soil. With switchgrass, it's a little bit like mowing your yard. You never actually dig the roots out of the system. You never actually turn over the soil in any way, you just sort of mow off the top part of it. You don't actually disrupt the soil underneath it. You can raise switchgrass in areas we now consider marginal lands, low water lands so that it would not be competing with the river systems like the Mississippi or the Platte or some of the Corn Belt states where they do have a lot of rain or wherever it might be. You're competing on a different set of areas than you would be for food production.

Click on. There's lots more.

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

Normally, I'd rather eat Friskies than excerpt William Kristol and Bob Novak in the same week, much less in the same post. But for once the pair provide a good way to start Monday.

William Kristol writes:

In any case, with the battle against Hillary Clinton behind him, everything seems to be going swimmingly for Obama. Meanwhile, the McCain campaign dog-paddles along. And almost every Republican I’ve talked to is alarmed that the McCain campaign doesn’t seem up to the task of electing John McCain.

Robert Novak writes:

Shortcomings by John McCain's campaign in the art of politics are alienating two organizations of Christian conservatives. James Dobson's Focus on the Family is estranged following the failure of Dobson and McCain to talk out their differences. Evangelicals who follow the Rev. John Hagee resent McCain's disavowal of him.

The evangelicals are not an isolated problem for the Arizona senator. Enthusiasm for McCain inside the Republican coalition is in short supply. During the four months since McCain clinched the nomination, he has not satisfied conservatives opposed to his positions on global warming, campaign finance reform, immigration, domestic oil drilling and how to ban same-sex marriages.

It's not all doom and gloom for McCain from these two, but you don't have to peer between the lines to perceive their wrinkled brows.

And then there's staff writer Peter Wallsten's piece in the Los Angeles Times, John McCain's Ohio disconnect:

CINCINNATI -- As the architect of Ohio's ballot measure against gay marriage, Phil Burress helped draw thousands of conservative voters to the polls in 2004, most of whom also cast ballots to reelect President Bush. So Burress was not surprised when two high-level staffers from John McCain's campaign dropped by his office, asking for his help this fall.

What surprised Burress was how badly the meeting went. He says he tried but failed to make the McCain team understand how much work remained to overcome the skepticism of social conservatives. Burress ended up cutting off the campaign officials as they spoke. "He doesn't want to associate with us," Burress now says of McCain, "and we don't want to associate with him."

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

Ronald Reagan came into office with three major ideas in mind. Vastly expand defense spending, cut taxes on the wealthy, and do something about the annual budget deficit, then hovering around $80 billion a year. He did increase defense spending, something rightwingers still like to falsely claim sent the Soviet Union into bankruptcy. And he did cut the top tax rate from 70% to 50% to 38% to 28%, giving already wealthy Americans gigantic increases in income while starting us down the road toward a Third World skewing of the ratio between rich and poor. He achieved this with the assistance of more borrowing than all the Presidents who had preceded him. Compared with the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania, however, Reagan was a piker.

The Great Communicator had image-conscious speechwriters. When Reagan first addressed Congress in February 1981, he said:

I’ve been trying ... to think of a way to illustrate how big a trillion is.  The best that I could come up with is that if you had a stack of $1000 bills in your hand only four inches high you would be a millionaire. A trillion dollars would be a stack of $1000-dollar bills 67 miles high.

I've just watched for the second time the good parts of the exquisite video put up in Alyosha Popovich's Diary, Don't mess with Bill Moyers (vs. O'Reilly Factor). You shouldn't miss it.

But now I'm torn between wanting so very much for Bill-O to accept Moyers's invitation to spend an entire hour on his show and not wanting Moyers to waste even 60 seconds on the loofah-man. Fortunately, it doesn't matter. Because there is no way that Mr. Bill fuck-it-let's-do-it-live O'Reilly is going to let somebody else be in charge of interruptions. No way will he accept his inability to slip away to a commercial, to get in the last word, to place himself in a position where being a bully will do him not one ounce of good, to sit down in a chair where he'll get no slack for throwing another of his high-decibel tantrums.

Bill-O just isn't that kind of guy. He's a fool and a tool and a coward and a liar, but he's shrewd enough not to let Moyers dissect his whole bile-shrouded schtick with a few well-placed questions.

So I can rest easy about my guilty desire to see him, as one commenter on Popovich's Diary puts it, pwned, schooled and pwned and schooled again for a delicious hour. Ain't gonna happen. Moyers will have to cover something substantive instead.

Update: Here's a 39-minute video of Moyers at the National Conference for Media Reform Saturday before he spoke to the guy from Fox. Thanks to SarahLee.

 

In 1966 and early 1967, I served under the tutelage of Tom Hayden (and others) as a third-tier "outside agitator," helping to set up and give advice to campus chapters of Students for a Democratic Society in the days when community organizing was one of the group's key efforts. Hayden went on to become famous, or infamous in the view of some people, but he never lost his love for up-from-the-bottom politics.

On the anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy's murder, Hayden wrote at Huffington Post:

Bobby and Barack:

[In the early morning hours of June 5, 1968], I watched from a New York townhouse the murder of a second Kennedy in five years. Martin Luther King already was gone, Vietnam and our cities were burning. I was in the midst of chaotic planning for anti-war demonstrations at the Democratic Convention coming in August.

I drifted off with friends to St. Patrick's Cathedral where Kennedy staffers let us through the doors late at night. After sitting a while in silence, I found myself as a member of a makeshift honor guard standing next to his simple coffin. I was wearing a green Cuban hat and weeping. The last political hope of the Sixties vision -- a movement-driven progressive government -- was finished, whether by chance or plot, it mattered little. The violence I had resisted under white racism in the South was seeping into my veins. Like many who took their rage even farther, I was hardening, and never dared again to recover my young idealism.

"Dad, don't you recognize anything of yourself in this movement?", asked an angry email from my son Troy, nearly forty years later. He was working 24/7 with his [now] wife Simone, for Barack Obama, spreading the boundless energy of the young and an artist's flair for silk-screens. How could I share your giddy utopianism, I wanted to respond, after the murders of the Sixties icons -- John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, all of whom I had known as a young man? If those killings were not enough, we suffered the Nixon and Reagan eras of counter-revolution aimed at what our generation had achieved. Then the war and sanctions and war again for control of the Persian Gulf. During the coming decades, I was limited every day by the sordid realities, as well as the occasional modest achievements, of electoral politics.

I didn't see him coming. When I heard of the young state senator with a background in community organizing who wanted to be president, I was at least sentient enough to be interested. When I read Dreams of My Father, I was taken aback by its depth. This young man apparently gave his first public speech, against South African apartheid, at an Occidental College rally organized by Students for Economic Democracy, the student branch of the Campaign for Economic Democracy [CED] which I chaired in 1979-82. The buds of curiosity quickened. Soon I was receiving emails from David Peck, an organizer of the Occidental rally, who now is coordinating Americans in Spain for Barack Obama.

One of Bobby Kennedy's qualities, or perhaps it was a quality of the times, was an easy and growing familiarity with the New Left. He evolved from 1961 to 1963 from viewing the Freedom Riders as a dangerous nuisance to a prophetic minority. By 1967, he even wanted to copy SDS community organizing projects -- a forerunner of Barack Obama's path -- as a template for a national war on poverty.

The Overnight News Digest has been posted.