Meanwhile, back on the East Coast...

While the L.A. Times finally put some focus on the massive Iraqi death toll, the N.Y. Times keeps looking at the country it helped destroy (remember Judy "boo" Miller) through rose-colored glasses:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 25 — Enrollment in Iraqi schools has risen every year since the American invasion, according to Iraqi government figures, reversing more than a decade of declines and offering evidence of increased prosperity for some Iraqis.

Despite the violence that has plagued Iraq since the American occupation began three years ago, its schools have been quietly filling. The number of children enrolled in schools nationwide rose by 7.4 percent from 2002 to 2005, and in middle schools and high schools by 27 percent in that time, according to figures from the Ministry of Education.

The increase, which has greatly outpaced modest population growth during the same period, is a bright spot in an otherwise gloomy landscape of bombs and killings that have shattered community life in many areas in western and central Iraq. And it is seen as an important indicator here in a country that used to pride itself on its education system, then saw enrollment and literacy fall during the later years of Saddam Hussein's rule.

The rest of the article is packed with statistics and personal anecdotes about kids going back to school. Isn't that sweet? Hey, maybe that's the solution to truancy in our own public schools: Bomb the inner cities! Let's see... on a per-capita basis, about 20,000 Chicagoans will have to be sacrificed on behalf of this "Reading is Fundamental - Seriously" campaign.

The report uses a framework which absolves the U.S. of responsibility for the sanctions which killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children (which was just fine by Clinton's Secretary of State):

In many ways, the increase is a measure of how far Iraq had fallen. Iraq was one of the most educated countries in the Middle East in the 1970's. *** But enrollment began to fall significantly in the 1980's, toward the end of the Iran-Iraq war, and only worsened during the period of international economic penalties that were imposed after Mr. Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. ***
Much of the decline in the education system that happened in the last years of Mr. Hussein's government came as a result of an economic downturn during the era of international penalties on Iraq. As the country grew poorer in the 1990's, the numbers of working children went up.
[emphasis added]

The penalties were "international," and the country just "grew poorer." Apparently the U.S. didn't have any policies towards Iraq until the 2003 invasion, when things got better:

Teachers and administrators interviewed in four Iraqi cities said their classrooms were more full than they had ever been — a continuation of a pattern they began to see just months after the American invasion in 2003, when class sizes began swelling again. [emphasis added]

Again and again, bad things just "happen" or are attributed to "international" forces, while readers are reminded about the evilness of the former Iraqi leader:

The increase has pointed out many of the infrastructure problems that plague the country. Hussein al-Rifaii, a former high school teacher and political prisoner under Mr. Hussein who is now the general director of schools in eastern Baghdad, said the country needed approximately 5,000 new schools, an increase of almost 50 percent.

Infrastructure problems "plague the country" - you know, like a natural case of locusts. And it has to be noted that al-Rifaii was a political prisoner, lest we forget the "liberating" effect of the invasion.

So the kids who have survived the U.S. assault on Iraq are going back to school - while job opportunities are being created daily:

The official who helped prepare the statistics for this article was assassinated this month.

(NOTE: The LA Times and NY Times do not have common ownership.)

It's about time

Kudos to the Los Angeles Times for putting Iraqi casualties front and center:

BAGHDAD — At least 50,000 Iraqis have died violently since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, according to statistics from the Baghdad morgue, the Iraqi Health Ministry and other agencies — a toll 20,000 higher than previously acknowledged by the Bush administration.
Many more Iraqis are believed to have been killed but not counted because of serious lapses in recording deaths in the chaotic first year after the invasion, when there was no functioning Iraqi government, and continued spotty reporting nationwide since.
The toll, which is mostly of civilians but probably also includes some security forces and insurgents, is daunting: Proportionately, it is equivalent to 570,000 Americans being killed nationwide in the last three years.

Not a perfect article -- it should have mentioned the Lancet study (pdf) and Les Robert's estimate of 100,000-300,000 deaths -- but it's a good start.

Send a letter to their editor, as I did:

Thank you for the article by Louise Roug and Doug Smith on the Iraqi death toll. For over three years the media has been virtually silent about the primary victims of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. These casualties cannot be diminished as "collateral damage," since there are no valid targets in an illegal war. I hope you will follow up with stories about these victims and how their communities have been impacted, in the same way such stories are told regarding much smaller-scale tragedies involving U.S. citizens (e.g., Sept. 11, 2001).

UPDATE: The LA Times published my letter.

Two Funny

The Daily Show on "dickishness" & the Colbert Report on snake marriage

I knew UofC students were special, but...

it's cruel to make them ride the short bus.

Over 100,000 dead Iraqis can't be wronged

Norman Solomon takes on the "liberal" media:

"The story really takes us back into the 8th century, a truly barbaric world," John Burns said. He was speaking Tuesday night on the PBS "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," describing what happened to two U.S. soldiers whose bodies had just been found. Evidently they were victims of atrocities, and no one should doubt in the slightest that the words of horror used by Burns to describe the "barbaric murders" were totally appropriate.
The problem is that Burns and his mass-media colleagues don't talk that way when the cruelties are inflicted by the U.S. military -- as if dropping bombs on civilians from thousands of feet in the air is a civilized way to terrorize and kill.

Better killing through technology!
It also avoids those high laundry bills when mass homicide is done by less "civilized" means.

We hear that of course the U.S. tries to avoid killing civilians -- as if that makes killing them okay. But the slaughter from the air and from other U.S. military actions is a certain result of the occupiers' war. (What would we say if, in our own community, the police force killed shoppers every day by spraying blocks of stores with machine-gun fire -- while explaining that the action was justifiable because no innocents were targeted and their deaths were an unfortunate necessity in the war on crime?)

As Pierre Tristam notes, the lack of feature-film-friendly images and stories covers up the extent of U.S. terrorism:

Dramatic stories of American losses or suspended tragedies spring up as out of nowhere—Jessica Lynch, the four American mercenaries killed and strung up on that Fallujah bridge, the two missing soldiers. The story plays out in the media in that Black-Hawk-Down language of inspiring honor against overwhelming odds no matter the outcome. The Iraqi background, where everything is more collectively violent, more tragic, more abject than anything the Americans are suffering collectively (remember: civilians have no armor, and civilians are bearing the brunt of the butchery), is nothing more elaborate in the storyline than those painted backdrops the old Hollywood studios used interchangeably movie after movie. Iraqis extras aren’t even in the picture, begging the indelicate cliché: when an Iraqi dies out of America ’s line of sight, has he even existed?

This is the traditional framework:

"It's only terrorism if they do it to us. When we do much worse to them, it's not terrorism."
-- Noam Chomsky

Bacharachablog

Burt gets radical:

I've been writing love songs all my life, never rocking the boat. There were years that I paid no attention to the political process, times I never voted. *** But starting with the 2000 election, things for me began to change. I watched as Bush basically stole the election, and other terrible situations occurred; and by the time 9/11 hit, I didn't feel like writing love songs.

***

On "Who Are These People," it was very important for me to make a statement about what I was feeling at the time.

"Who are these people that keep telling us lies
and how did these people get control of our lives
and who'll stop the violence 'cause it's out of control?
make 'em stop."

And then when Elvis [Costello] came in on the middle verse he sang,

"This stupid mess we're in just keeps getting worse,
so many people dying needlessly
looks like these liars may inherit the earth
even pretending to pray and getting away with it."

Elvis sang my last two lines with the very strong intensity I felt:

"Things really have to change,
Or we're all fucked!"

Nobody has ever sung fucked like Elvis Costello.

Go Burt! Go Burt!

He's obviously not going for radio airplay with that one - especially with the new obscenity laws.

So this is what our broadcast media has come to: a Burt Bacharach song can't be heard, while we get endless doses of the psychopath known as Ann Coulter (who has yet to respond to a very generous offer from Henry Rollins).

When you can't say 'fuck,' you can't say 'fuck the government.'
-- Lenny Bruce

(thanks to A House Is Not A Homepage for the pointer)

ps - Coincidentally, I've been spinning those classic Bacharach/Warwick collaborations lately - amazing stuff.

Reflections on Experience

I really dug this Nation piece by Jackson Lears, ostensibly a review of Martin Jay's Songs of Experience, tracing the concept of "authentic experience" through the history of modern philosophy.

Cruel & Unusual, but Hilarious

The Stern Fan Network has one of the most diabolical and creative - and ultimately hilarious - pranks on its discussion board. I fell for it when I first came across this thread in the main discussion forum, a thread originating in the "Pranks" forum, which I had never checked out. But a couple of minutes (and several extra heartbeats) later, after reading similar threads, I finally figured it out - and realized this gag has been going for at least 3 years. Once you know how it works (via the [you] code) and go back to re-read the threads, you realize it's some Siriusly clever and funny stuff. Revenge of the web geeks?!

"Believe It or Not, I'm Walking on Air..."

Stephen Colbert once opened "The Colbert Report" with: "I swallowed 20 condoms full of Truth and I’m about to smuggle them across the border." Well, Colbert delivered the goods in Bush's lap at Saturday's White House Correspondents' Dinner - watch all three parts.

Trapped in the Closet

Morgan Meis has a great piece on R. Kelly's extraordinary R&B opera:

[It] broke me down and rearranged me as a man. *** You can’t believe you’re watching it, and you can’t stop. You have no idea exactly what it is, even, that you’re watching or how such a thing could possibly have been created . . . and you want more.

You can watch the episodes at YouTube, but apparently you need to hear Kelly's commentary on the DVD as well.

UPDATE: the commentary is also on the Tube - and it's even better than the "Trapped" serial!

Taibbi Knows Jack's Shit

Another instant classic by Matt Taibbi.

All Together Now...

If you're happy and you know it clap your hands.
(clap clap)
If you're happy and you know it clap your hands.
(clap clap)
If you're happy and you know it then your face will surely show it.
If you're happy and you know it clap your hands (clap clap)

or maybe a little Sam & Dave:

Don't you ever feel sad,
Lean on me when times are bad.
When the day comes and you're down,
In a river of trouble and about to drown

Just hold on, I'm comin',
Hold on, I'm comin'

UPDATE: The homicidal scumbag still doesn't think anything went wrong.

Treated Like Animals? If Only

From a Katrina survivor:

"I would rather have been in jail," Janice Jones said in obvious relief at being out of the [Superdome]. "I've been in there seven days and I haven't had a bath. They treated us like animals."

Not quite, Ms. Jones:

Thousands of people are feared dead in the rubble of storm-shattered New Orleans, but at the New Orleans zoo only three of its 1,400 animals died in the wrath of Hurricane Katrina. The famous Audubon Zoo has the good fortune of being located on some of the city's highest ground, but it also had a disaster plan for the animals that worked better than the city's plan for humans.

So there we have it: in planning for a catastrophic disaster, our society chooses to save zoo animals and to kill human beings. Make no mistake, this is not a disaster but a crime.

Perhaps that zoo director would have done a better job as head of FEMA than that horse show commissioner. But in Bushland, no one can ever screw up, so it doesn't really matter who's in charge.

Reality and Its Discontents

We know about politically-motivated photo-ops, but this is unconscionable. Kos sums it up: "This is absolutely the most fucked up thing ever done by this president, in a long list of fucked up things."

Marjorie Cohn reminds us:

Last September, a Category 5 hurricane battered the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds. More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of the storm. Although the hurricane destroyed 20,000 houses, no one died.

Eli at leftiblog notes that even the Wall Street Journal suggested Cuba as a model for disaster preparedness.

If only Fidel had been in charge instead of FEMA.

Castro conquered Ivan.
Bush was bitch-slapped by Katrina.
No wonder he refuses to face Cindy.

For Bob Denver - RIP, little buddy

The "us" in the U.S.

BushCo's response to Katrina speaks for itself. The question of whether the type of racism on display is deliberate or not is irrelevant. What's worse: treating certain people as inferior or as invisible? In any case, it could not be any clearer that Americans who live in poverty and have dark skin are not considered truly American.

On September 2, Bush stated that "now we're going to go try to comfort people in that part of the world." That part of the world? I didn't know that BushCo's efforts to turn the clock back to the 19th century involved reversing the Louisiana Purchase.

In April 2004, Bush, while justifying his democracy-at-the-point-of-a-gun policy, said:

There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily -- are a different color than white can self-govern.

As Robert Jensen notes:

It appears the president intended the phrase "people whose skin color may not be the same as ours" to mean people who are not from the United States. That skin color he refers to that is "ours," he makes it clear, is white. Those people not from the United States are "a different color than white." So, white is the skin color of the United States. That means those whose skin is not white but are citizens of the United States are ...? What are they? Are they members in good standing in the nation, even if "their skin color may not be the same as ours"?

This is not simply making fun of a president who sometimes mangles the English language. This time he didn't misspeak, and there's nothing funny about it. He did seem to get confused when he moved from talking about skin color to religion (does he think there are no white Muslims?), but it seems clear that he intended to say that brown people -- Iraqis, Arabs, Muslims, people from the Middle East, whatever the category in his mind -- can govern themselves, even though they don't look like us. And "us" is clearly white. In making this magnanimous proclamation of faith in the capacities of people in other parts of the world, in proclaiming his belief in their ability to govern themselves, he made one thing clear: The United States is white. Or, more specifically, being a real "American" is being white. So, what do we do with citizens of the United States who aren't white?

What do we do with them?
We let them drown.

These are the Bush Family Values.

Happy National Preparedness Month

There's irony and then there's irony:

National Preparedness Month is a nationwide effort held each September to encourage Americans to take simple steps to prepare for emergencies in their homes, businesses and schools. National Preparedness Month 2005 is being co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the American Red Cross. Throughout September, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the American Red Cross will work with a wide variety of organizations, including local, state and federal government agencies and the private sector, to highlight the importance of emergency preparedness and promote individual involvement through events and activities across the nation.

Look here -- and note the blonde-haired white girl, looking all safe & comfortable. Hmm... I didn't see many blonde-haired white girls in the Superdome, so... Hey, job well done, Homeland Security!
This call, however, puzzled me:

The state Homeland Security Department had requested--and continues to request--that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.

Oh, wait, I get it: no Red Cross = more dead people = fewer living people, making the evacuation, when they finally got around to it, that much easier! Brilliant!
Yes, die Heimat is in the good hands of Michael Chertoff, who, days after Katrina hit, had no idea that thousands of people were in the New Orleans convention center -- and has the balls to blame the media [UPDATE], the local government, and the impoverished residents who could not evacuate. Un-fucking-believable. I guess he now qualifies for a promotion in this Bush administration.
BTW, if you were wondering, VP Dick Cheney has been hard at work -- making sure the cleanup and rebuilding contracts go to Halliburton. Sound familiar?
Krugman, once again, nails it:

Ideological cynicism about government easily morphs into a readiness to treat government spending as a way to reward your friends. After all, if you don't believe government can do any good, why not?
***
[The Bush administration's contempt for FEMA] reflects a general hostility to the role of government as a force for good. And Americans living along the Gulf Coast have now reaped the consequences of that hostility

Put another way, under BushCo, government is indeed a force for good, but "good" is defined in terms of the wealthy white Christian male in the mirror.
As Mike Whitney writes, the poor & black

were left to face the rising waters and the government neglect without any prospect of real assistance. When you can't buy your way out, you're left to rot; that's how the "invisible hand" of the free market operates. The message is clear: if you have nothing, you are nothing.

New slogan for the GOP: "If You're Brown, It's Trickle Down or Drown"

Good Fucking Question

Atrios on BushCo's handling of the Gulf Coast disaster:

The emergency preparedness for a medium scale biological or chemical attack, or the "dirty bomb" scenario, would be exactly identical to the kind of preparedness you'd have for a natural disaster of this type. Sure, some of the complications would be different in the various situations, but the basic needs - mass evacuation, temporary shelter, the provision of safe food and water, medical care - would be the same.

Haven't they done fucking anything in 4 years?

This is what you get when an administration is filled with incompetents.
It could not be more obvious that those in power don't really give a damn about the fate of poor black folk -- they're too busy destroying the lives of other darker-skinned people.
More here and here.

Liberal Blogosphere for Hurricane Relief



Please donate now.

The Greatest Act of Terrorism

Sixty years ago, the U.S. dropped two WMDs over Japan, killing a quarter of a million human beings (mostly civilians). Another quarter million continue to suffer the physical consequences today.
Read:

• Frank Brodhead
  
• Norm Dixon
• Kai Bird & Martin Sherwin
• Gary Kohls
• Anthony Gregory
• Richard Drayton
• James Carroll
• Mickey Z
• and the cover-up
  

Melted Idol

DRog brings the funny:

...the audience grew even larger and more enthusiastic when platinum-blonde '80s pop prince Billy Idol delivered a set of oldies such as "Dancing With Myself" and "White Wedding."

At age 50, Idol looked as if he'd stepped out of Madame Tussaud's wax museum, and the heat and his ridiculous leather pants threatened to make him melt onstage, which would have been the most entertaining part of his show.

Taking Over the Controls

Gotta have some laughs as the neo-fascists take another step forward...

"Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue."
--Lloyd Bridges as Steven McCrosky