The Green[e]house Effect: a Weblog

Bollywood & Vine

The latest issue of The Village Voice has a story about the ongoing lovefest between Hindi music and hip-hop — and about how Indian music’s Western fans get some things wrong:

“Some hip-hop artists don’t give a shit about Indian people,” says Vidya Murthy, a 23-year-old in marketing at an entertainment magazine, reacting to the belly dancing and harems in videos for songs like Truth Hurts’ “Addictive” and Erick Sermon’s “React” that clearly sample Indian music. Sunaina Maira, author of Desis in the House, a study of second-generation Indian Americans growing up in New York, says that for young Indians these images bring back memories of growing up unrecognized and of confronting racism.

And promo visuals aren’t the only way entertainers are carelessly profiting from Indian culture. Sermon baffled those who understood the Hindi hook in “React.” The translation goes, “If someone wants to commit suicide, so what can you do?” To which he responds, “Whatever she said, then I’m that.” “It doesn’t flow,” says Samir Bali, a restaurant consultant from Queens. “If you’re not Indian it sounds fine but I understand, and everyone I know thinks it sounds stupid.”

“When I see a video or hear a song that’s completely getting it wrong, it raises the hair on the back of my neck,” says Nandini D’Souza, an editor at W. “But if they invest in a little fact-checking and ultimately can shed some light on the difference between turbans, then rock on.”

I hadn’t thought that deeply about it before; I just thought it was really goofy — in an exhilarating way — to hear Dr. Dre making beats out of bhangra, or to see Missy Elliot take a sitar hook out of nowhere and make “Get Ur Freak On.” Which makes my reaction more in line with this:

It’s gratifying to hear ‘your music’ at the gym,” says Sejal Shah, a writer in Park Slope. “It was as if the Bend It Like Beckham soundtrack I’d been listening to on my Walkman had suddenly been picked up by the speakers and was being broadcast.” For many young South Asians, the first time they heard “Beware” on the radio is already an indelible, pivotal moment—ask them, and you’ll hear a lot of “I thought a CD was playing” or “I was so excited I called a bunch of people, and was like, ‘Holy shit, turn it on.’ “

Amen. And do you know what’s great about that? Somehow, without really trying, we’ve managed to break down the walls around “her” music and make it everyone’s.

If that’s not worth cracking a smile about, I don’t know what is.

Professor Pot Kettle Black

The Instapundit rides again:

Whether or not the Pentagon’s idea [for a futures market in terrorism] is a good one depends on details I don’t know about. But the lame criticism makes clear that the critics are — as usual — clueless on the subject.

I may not have gone to Yale Law School, but even I can see a contradiction here. I mean, if you’re going to rail on people as clueless, it stands to reason that you wouldn’t do it right after admitting that you’re clueless yourself.

But then, this whole episode has an “and in other news, the sun sets in the west” flavor to it, doesn’t it? Since when has Glenn Reynolds not spouted off before a second thought can make it to his fingers from his brain? And for how long have people been calling him on it?

Long on Bluster, Short on Self-Awareness

Salon magazine’s Michelle Goldberg observes as College Republicans at a convention put on a clinic in self-parody:

Erickson was followed by Jack Abramoff, a powerful right-wing lobbyist and former College Republican chairman, who exhorted the next generation to fight hard, lest “the ascension of evil, the bad guys, the Bolsheviks, the Democrats return.”

That equation — evil = communist = Democrats — was nearly axiomatic at the convention. Ann Coulter’s latest book, “Treason,” which tarred virtually all Democrats as traitors, may have been denounced by conservative intellectuals, but its message has pervaded the party. Gene McDonald, who sold “No Muslims = No Terrorists” bumper stickers at the Conservative Political Action Conference in January, was doing a brisk trade in “Bring Back the Blacklist” T-shirts, mugs and mouse pads. Coulter herself remains wildly popular — Parker Stephenson, chairman of Ohio College Republicans, calls her “one of my favorite conservative thinkers.”

[ … ]

“I’m a Republican because liberals make me sick,” said [Chris] Sibeni, spitting out the words. “I don’t like whiny people and tree-huggers.”

“You’re a tree-hugger, but the tree you’re hugging is the money tree,” joked Chen, a jocular 22-year-old who plans to attend law school next year at either Boston University or Tulane.

After a cocktail, the foursome retired to Sibeni and Chen’s disheveled room, where the hosts made the girls fuzzy navels with orange juice and peach schnapps. At which point all let loose their political ids.

Sibeni, who had spiky hair, glasses and a long face, is high-strung and given to rash pronouncements. He denounced assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. for “dividing the country” and trying to help African-Americans “advance over the white society,” and defended American support of the brutal Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile. Chen, who went to high school with Sibeni in Great Neck, Long Island, is easy-going and quick to concede Republican mistakes, mocking his friend’s more outré arguments.

While Sibeni declared that Bill Clinton had been more dangerous to America than Osama bin Laden, Chen defended the ex-president’s economic program. “Without him,” Chen argued, “we would not have had globalization. He took a Republican idea, used it as a Democratic idea, and used it to become the most popular president of all time.”

Chen seemed so mild and centrist that at one point I called him a closet Democrat. Taken aback, he replied: “How am I a closet Democrat? I’m racist, I love guns and I hate welfare.”

He wasn’t kidding. “I’m racist against anybody who doesn’t work for a living,” said Chen, whose family comes from Taiwan. “We’re in Washington D.C. You can guess who that is.” He’s no fan of religion, but says he’s less bothered about paying tax dollars to faith-based programs than to “crack whores who have eight kids because it’s easier than working.”

“I wish there could be racial equality,” said Sibeni, who, while in high school, refused to attend Martin Luther King Day celebrations. “The number one reason there’s racial inequality is because of hip-hop.”

“For young black men, it glorifies something they try to live up to, and they end up dead or in jail,” says [Rosanne] Ferruggia, sipping her drink.

Ferruggia, the daughter of a pharmaceutical salesman, was valedictorian of her Southwest Florida high school. “I had the highest SAT scores in between five and 10 years” at her school, she says, and feels affirmative action cheated her out of scholarships. “I watched minority after minority after minority accept these awards … I’m tired of people whining that I’m taking away from them.”

“A lot of poor white people in the trenches of Appalachia, they don’t complain, they go out and work,” said Ferruggia’s blond friend, who sat quietly next to her for most of the evening. “Black people have been given a lot of chances …”

“And they always screw it up,” said Sibeni.

And people say the Democrats are in serious trouble?

Wishful Thinking

Never let it be said that I don’t listen to feedback. After Tim Jarrett chided me on his site for letting my Amazon wish list get dusty, I took a moment out from candle-and-cake time tonight to bring it up to date. You don’t have to thank me right away — just make sure to send some presents.

More Gephardt Bashing

I offered a little charity to Missouri’s finest eyebrowless congressman a few posts ago, but Joe Rospars has gotten me sour on him all over again:

This AP story makes a pretty damaging claim against Dick Gephardt’s ambition:

Democratic presidential hopeful Dick Gephardt missed a House vote Friday on a Republican-backed bill that would overhaul the landmark Head Start education program, a measure that survived in the House by a hairbreadth margin.

The 217-216 Republican victory came after midnight Thursday and was so tenuous that Rep. John Sullivan, R-Okla., recovering from a car accident, was brought in by wheelchair. But Gephardt, the former House Minority leader, had left Thursday evening for a two-day campaign swing through South Carolina, and the Head Start vote became one of hundreds he has missed this year.

The only other lawmaker who failed to make the vote was Democratic Rep. Ed Pastor, who was on a late flight returning from Arizona after attending to his ill father.

This wasn’t the first time:

Gephardt, who led the House Democrats before relinquishing his leadership post to run for president, has missed more than 350 votes this year, roughly 90 percent of those taken in the House, according to a Republican count.

The only other House member seeking the presidency, Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, has not missed any votes. Four senators also are running for president, and all have skipped votes for campaign events, but none to the degree of Gephardt. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., has not been present for roughly half the votes in the Senate, giving him the second-highest missed-vote record among the presidential contenders, according to the Republican count.

It seems pretty clear that Dick Gephardt ought to resign his Congressional seat. Representation in Congress doesn’t only mean voting — it means participating in debates on and off the floor and, especially in Gephardt’s case, being one of the leaders of your party. Opportunism is the only thing keeping Dick Gephardt in Congress.

Yep.

Yabba Dabba Doo!

’Scuse me while I pat myself on the back for a second — I turn 31 today. Since the thirties are the new twenties and all, I figure I ought to go celebrate by going out tonight and having a rockin’ good time. So if you’re looking for me, Doc Searls, or Wil Wheaton, you know what to do: you can find us in the club, bottle full o’ bub.

Incidentally, I spent this day five years ago taking the second day of the Illinois bar exam. I can think of better ways to spend a birthday than squinting at paper and cramping your hand writing essays — but on the bright side, I passed, and I garnered enough sympathy out of all my friends there that I got free drinks ’til about 3 a.m. So for those of you about to rock, I salute you. And feel your pain.

Lone Star Dems, On the Lam and Off the Heezy

Texans and political junkies, fasten your seat belts; Democrats in the legislature have broken quorum by hightailing it out of the state again. Put some popcorn in the microwave, because watching this should be great fun. [No word yet on when the Department of Homeland Security plans to get involved, though.]

Thoughts of Travel …

Spending all afternoon and evening cranking out thoughts on the state of the technology industry can leave you pooped, so you can understand why my mind wandered to thoughts about fun I could be having elsewhere. So you tell me, which sounds more fun: walking across America, or traveling around the world?

First, let’s check with someone doing the walk:

So I called Romey on Erik’s phone to let her know I wasn’t ignoring her e-mail, I just didn’t have the ability to respond. It was kind of funny, because Erik’s phone was in analog roam, so I was wandering around the area saying “can you hear me now”, like those lame-ass commercials. This was the first time I’d talked to Romey since the 4th of July. It seems so long ago, but at the same time, so recent that I met her. It’s hard to explain, time just moves different when you’re not doing the same thing everyday, other than walking that is. It’s just that everyday is so full of new things and new people, all the days both run together while remaining individual. Wow, bet that sure cleared things up for ya… too bad I’m more confused than now then when I started trying to explain things. D’oh.

Ummm, okay. Next up, a circumnavigator:

I’ve got kind of an intense situation going on right now. I’m up in my treehouse in Kibale National Park, it’s perfectly dark outside, and I’m hearing things –- big, mammoth things -– moving around outside. Something is crashing through the bushes and trees just 30ft away from my perch.

I started hearing the noises as I was walking back from dinner, a ten minute hike through utterly dark forest with just an old paraffin lantern to guide the way. As I neared the treehouse I heard some giant animal smashing through the trees, heavy footfalls thudding on the damp ground. (In fairness, those heavy footfalls may have been mine –- I was sprinting to the treehouse. The lantern swung wildly at my side, casting freaky, choppy light through the bush. What a relief when the giant ladder came into view!)

The crashing in the bush is coming closer, trees bending, snapping. Now a pause. I get the feeling that there’s a great beast who’s thinking out there, just a few feet away.

A loud snort! Maybe it’s a water buffalo? That’s more likely than …

More crashing!

I just held the lantern out the main window to get a look. Succeeded in blinding myself. Silence. Then the crashing continued, more agitated than before. I get the feeling that, whatever it is, it’s getting annoyed.

I took a closer look at the treehouse supports. This place is up on a bunch of stilts and it’s also anchored to a fat center tree. Solid. An elephant couldn’t… No. Why would they want to? And if a berserk elephant decided to push this house down, what are the odds of her doing so tonight? …

You’ve got to be kidding me –- a shot just rang out.

Poachers?

Wait – that was a tree being cracked over!

The elephants are breaking trees! Damn big ones too! And here I am sitting in a …

— okay, then, I think I’ve made up my mind — my air-conditioned house is starting to sound pretty comfortable, thanks. Does anyone want me to send a post card?

Silly Cyclists — Bikes Are for Kids

That seems like the attitude of congressional Republicans:

Fresh out of subcommittee, a new congressional transportation appropriations bill will entirely eliminate some $600 million worth of annual federal funding for bike paths, walkways and other such transportation niceties in fiscal year 2004.

What a joke. We’re talking about $600 million for the whole country. Georgia wanted four times that much for a 59-mile tollway to nowhere in particular.

Defenders of the bill argue that, in light of huge federal deficits, something has to go … [but] under the new bill, which the full Committee on Appropriations is likely to consider this week, before it goes to the House floor for a vote, highways would receive $34.1 billion in fiscal year 2004, which is $2.5 billion more than this year, while the Transportation Enhancements program that funds bike paths and walkways would get nothing. The bill would also significantly reduce funding for everything from Amtrak to reverse-commute transportation programs that connect low-income urban workers to jobs in the suburbs.

Right — because something has to go. It’s just a coincidence that the “something” getting chucked happens to include just about every type of program perceived to typically appeal to Democratic voters.

[T]he bill puts $4.8 billion more into highway projects than President Bush asked for in his 2004 budget.

Oh. What was that about something having to go?

Micah Swafford, press secretary for Rep. Ernest J. Istook, R.-Okla., who chairs the subcommittee that wrote the bill, argues that, with the prospect of a $455 billion federal budget deficit and anticipating declining revenues in the highway taxes that fund transportation programs, the committee had to cut something.

“It’s more important to provide the basic funding for roads, before you provide money for enhancements whenever you’re facing a shortfall,” Swafford says, citing Department of Transportation statistics that there are 6,476 structurally deficient bridges on the national highway system as one of the reasons that highways were the subcommittee’s priority.

He’s calling a sidewalk an “enhancement”? Or a subway? Or a bike path? When I lived in Chicago, those were the best ways to get around! Another thing to point out is how little water the “structurally deficient bridges” argument holds — I can point to places around here in Atlanta, and in suburbs all over the country, with structurally deficient sidewalks — structurally deficient because the sidewalk doesn’t exist. Instead of a safe path, you see a well-worn dirt trail where people stay just a whisker away from traffic while they walk home from the bus stop. That might be the reason why Atlanta has one of the worst pedestrian death rates in the nation.

But something had to go. Sorry, pedestrians!

Bill Kristol, Waterboy

The man that people used to call “Dan Quayle’s brain” goes to the mat for President Bush in today’s Washington Post:

“George Bush has left us less safe and less secure than we were four years ago.”
— Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), July 22

President Bush’s 16 words on uranium and Africa in his January State of the Union address — “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa” — have become famous, or infamous. But Dick Gephardt’s 16 words, spoken in the course of a major foreign policy speech this past Tuesday, are the ones that matter.

Right — because Dick Gephardt sent people to war on the basis of a lie.

Dick Gephardt’s 16 words … change everything. They reflect the considered judgment of a centrist Democratic presidential candidate, one who voted to authorize the war, that his party must stand in fundamental opposition to the Bush foreign policy. They indicate the capture of the Democratic Party by the pace-setter in the presidential race, former Vermont governor Howard Dean.

Dick Gephardt speaks for the party?! That’s funny — I didn’t realize he was still the House minority leader. I also don’t know how you can call an anti-free trade congressman who supported the Equal Rights Amendment [PDF] a “centrist Democrat.” Maybe he can fill me in on that.

Actually, Gephardt went further than Dean. I suppose it’s technically possible that things could turn out worse for the Iraqi people, or for us, post-Hussein (though I’d be happy to take that bet, and I’m sure the Bush campaign would too). But Gephardt has laid down an extraordinarily clear marker for judging the Bush administration: He claims we’re less safe and less secure than we were four years ago.

Who brought the Iraqi people into this? Did Gephardt say anything about the Iraqi people? Is Kristol hearing things?

If Kristol wants to talk about our security, we can run down a checklist:

• Taliban insurgency still going strong, and getting people killed? Check.
• Homeland security still a bad joke? Check.
• North Korea processing nuclear fuel? Check.
• Iran developing nuclear weapons? Check.
• Osama bin Laden still on the loose? Check.
• Alliances with key European allies in tatters? Check.
• Army overstretched, with no relief in sight? Check.
• Still turning a blind eye to Saudi misbehavior? Check.

Bill Kristol full of s#@*? Check.

I don’t even like Dick Gephardt. But for someone to claim that his 16 words turned the words upside down, while a president’s lies to Congress don’t mean anything … well, it’s actually pretty typical of the Republican Party these days.

Why the U.N. Won’t Come to the Rescue in Iraq

Mickey Kaus spells it out:

If it was ever controversial to suggest that Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense department would shave the number of troops comnitted to Iraq for grand neoconservative geopolitical reasons—i.e., so the U.S. could credibly threaten to fight several other similar wars—it shouldn’t be controversial now that Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith has more or less admitted it to Barbara Slavin and Dave Moniz of USA Today, The key USAT graf:

Feith confirmed that the decision to limit the number of troops sent in was ”strategic and goes far beyond Iraq. This is part of his (Rumsfeld’s) thinking about defense transformation. It’s an old way of thinking to say that the United States should not do anything without hundreds of thousands of troops. That makes our military less usable.” [Emphasis added.]

[…] P.P.S.: The UN Saves the Neocons? Note that if other member countries of the United Nations supply the peacekeeping troops that are now missing in Rumsfeld’s plan, the U.N. may perversely be saving the grand neocon military strategy from failure more than it’s saving the Iraq invasion from collapse. The U.S. might be perfectly able to stabilize Iraq by sending in a lot more American troops, after all—but that would save Iraq at the expense of the neocon’s “usability.” We couldn’t fight many other wars if we had to commit a huge portion of our army to peacekeeping after each one. But if we can fight the war with a small U.S. combat force (as in Iraq) and then send in U.N. troops to do the cleanup and policing—even if that means giving the U.N. more control over reconstruction—we can repeat the process again and again without tying up all our divisions of fighters. … Who knew the don’t-tie-us-down neocons would wind up relying on the United Nations they scorn?

P.P.P.S.: This logic is surely not lost on the other nations in the U.N.. If they send troops they’re not just legitimating a bold recent use of U.S. military power. They are, in a very practical, non-precedential sense, enabling future bold, semi-unilateral uses of U.S. military power. …

Does anyone seriously think our usual allies — Germany, France, Canada, South Korea — feel like bailing us out so we can start the whole tocsin-shaking, gun-waving routine all over again? I didn’t think so. The guys in the 3d Infantry Division could be stuck in the desert for a long time.

Attorney General Edwards?

John Edwards hasn’t caught fire yet in any of the key primary states, and it’s still up in the air whether he’ll make it to the convention — or whether he’ll even hang in there rather than ditching the presidential race to run for re-election to the Senate. But if by chance he doesn’t win the nomination, he ought to be in any winning Democrat’s cabinet — and he’d make a top-notch replacement for John Ashcroft.

Think about it. He had a great career as a general practice lawyer in North Carolina, and one look at the kinds of cases he handled — workmen’s compensation, and torts such as corporate negligence — tells you that he knows that there’s more to law enforcement than indefinite detentions and credit-hogging press conferences. Moreover, since he’s still young, taking a high-profile cabinet post would keep him in contention for a presidential run sometime down the road, and give him time to gain some of the seasoning that he hasn’t managed to learn over a mere four years in the Senate.

I’m not saying that the Democrats don’t have other options. A smart candidate looking ahead to next November, though, might see the upside potential in lining up his White House team now to give the voters a credible alternative to the current crowd. Just envision it: say, Dean at the top of the ticket, then Clark as veep, Edwards at Justice, Gary Hart at Homeland Security, George Mitchell at State, Sam Nunn at Defense — who wouldn’t at least have a little respect for that lineup? Who wouldn’t see them as plausible operators in the hallways of power?

Okay, so maybe that’s a pipe dream. But does anyone have a better idea?

C’est Incroyable!

I can’t believe it.

Tyler Freaking Hamilton of Team CSC staged an epic 80+ mile breakaway to win his 1st Tour [de France] stage win (he was second to Jan Ullrich in a time trial in 1998). Hamilton picked up 2 minutes on everyone, which will move him up into 6th, with 4th and 5th possibly within striking distance during the Saturday time trial.

Hamilton became the 6th American to win a Tour stage (from memory: LeMond, Andy Hampsten, Jeff Pierce, Lance Armstrong, Tyler Hamilton, and who’s number 6?).

You may not get what makes this so special, or why anyone should care about any other american than Lance Armstrong — but if you don’t, get a load of the condition Tyler Hamilton has been racing in:

That’s right — he’s wearing a sling. He broke his collarbone on the second day of the race, but checked out of the hospital and went right back to racing.

And that’s what makes him Tyler Freaking Hamilton. God bless him.

Quit Yer Bellyaching, Already

Ever heard the phrase, “and don’t let the door hit you on the a%# on the way out?” I had half a mind to say it after reading this:

Suicide Watch

Warning to the Democratic Party.

You have a serious problem.

Gerard Van Der Leun:

[W]ith the single exception of Rudolph Giuliani , I have never voted for a Republican in my life. …

And yet … I am unwilling to consign thousands of my countrymen to death in order to bring the current crop of Democrats back into power. Call me cynical and unsupportive of a Democrat’s right to hold any sort of power at this time, but that’s just the way I feel.

Linden in the Comments section at Winds of Change:

I realized the other day that I didn’t want the Democrats to win, especially with the path they are pursuing. I don’t trust them on national security matters. In fact, I think they need to be taught a lesson. I’m a liberal and I’m beginning to hate the other “liberals”.

Howard Veit over at Roger L. Simons’s place:

I have made the horrible observation that if you are a classic liberal you are now a Republican. The intolerance, the anti-Semitism, the fascist shutdown of all debate (the current Cal Poly fiasco) make it impossible to be a Democrat.

What happend to the “I’ll defend to the death the right to….”? The Left is a horror show.

[…] Huh? Wha? says the Democratic Party as it’s found by its friend sprawled on the men’s room floor with a hypodermic needle sticking out of its arm. I don’t have a problem. Whatcha talkin’ about?

Get a grip, Dems. Leftists and liberals are leaving.

I may have gone to law school, but it doesn’t take an attorney to know that a patchwork of anecdotes from fellow travelers does not an open-and-shut argument make. You would think that with the president’s poll numbers heading south and combative candidate Howard Dean riding high, leftists and liberals are coming back into the party, not leaving it. And please, don’t take my word for that:

About 400,000 people from every state have contacted members of Congress in the past three weeks as part of a MoveOn.org petition that asks Congress to investigate the controversial claims that led to the war on Iraq, with more than 50,000 people signing on to the liberal activist Web site in the past five days alone.

“It seems more and more people who supported the war are signing on,” said Eli Pariser, MoveOn.org’s campaigns director. “They’re angry. People who in the past couple of weeks before the war decided to support it are swinging back.”

For organizations that opposed the war, these are busy days. Not since hundreds of thousands of people across the country marched in antiwar rallies in the weeks before the U.S.-led invasion has the rationale for the preemptive war come under such fire.

So people feel angry and fired up — rightly, in my opinion, and I speak as an Alabama-born American who gives no quarter when it comes to national security — and somehow that’s bad? Our outrage makes us like smack junkies with a “needle sticking out of [our] arm”?

I don’t even know where to start addressing that. No, wait, I do: with that self-righteous statement about electing a Democrat being tantamount to “consign[ing] thousands of my countrymen to death.” In case you haven’t heard, this country has a newspaper called the Washington Post, and it ran a story this Monday — in English, and not in invisible ink — that pointed out that the Central Intelligence Agency warned the White House that a situation in which Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was cornered and verging on losing power was precisely the circumstance that posed the greatest threat to American security, thanks to the risk that he might give away his chemical or biological weapons. That’s precisely the situation we just forced, you might recall — and assuming for the sake of argument that Hussein did have those weapons, it could well be a GOP president who “consign[ed] thousands of my countrymen to death.”

That’s an unpleasant risk. If you can’t accept that possibility, though — if you can’t consider the chance that the Iraq war might have harmed our security — you have zero standing to preach about moral superiority.

Totten trots out out a reference to the party’s supposed disadvantage on foreign affairs, but that gap is disappearing. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released yesterday showed that only 46 percent of Americans trust congressional Republicans to handle foreign affairs, while 41 percent trust Democrats. As for the charge about a “fascist shutdown of all debate” — gee, you would think that the Post hadn’t run a story the same day about a threat letter from the GOP against a Democratic television ad, sent in a hamfisted effort to … well, shut down debate.

If you want to ignore the evidence and walk out of the Democratic Party because of some distorted belief about where most of us stand — or out of a head-in-the-sand ignorance of the flaws of the other party — I won’t stop you. But don’t let the door hit you on the a$# on the way out.

The ‘Healthy Forests’ Initiative: Still Nothing of the Sort

I hate to do this to a friend, but I need to chide my old college roommate Tim Jarrett for swallowing one of the usual GOP talking points on the so-called Healthy Forests Initiative. [You know the one — it’s it basically proposes to mow down national forests in the name of saving them.] He writes:

It looks like I was wrong to allege that the Bush policy on logging national forests to save trees was cynical and a sell out of government resources to support industry. This article in the New York Times reports on an accidental experiment that showed that thinned forest patches that had been subjected to prescribed burns—controlled forest fires—stopped a rampaging non-prescribed burn dead in its tracks. Note that Charlie called this one in the comments to my original post.

Controlled burns can lessen the impact of fires, but to tout that as reason to support the Healthy Forests Initiative is a classic case of Bush-era misdirection.

If the president wants the benefits of more controlled burns, it stands to reason that he would ask for a law that enables more controlled burns. But the Healthy Forests Initiative does all that and then some — for instance, instead of advancing a policy to build a cordon sanitaire around populated areas, the Bush plan uses loose language sneaked into a key definition to pave the way for pell-mell logging in places well out of range of the nearest cul-de-sac. The Bush bill would also clamp down on judicial review and public input across the board — even in fabulously lucrative redwood forests in rude health, just as much as in places where thick growth creates a fire hazard.

Put plainly, the Healthy Forests Initiative is just another Bush trojan horse — a policy that uses a convenient excuse to get the President’s way on a priority he would have pursued by whatever means presented themselves. It has a pretty name and a tenuous relationship to a sound scientific argument — but beyond that, it’s worth little more than the paper that the Bushies would have us chop down trees in perfectly healthy forests to write on.

The Web Gets a Little Grosser

Joe Gross is a great music critic, and I read him every chance I get. That probably has a little to do with the fact that I used to edit him in my days of putting a weekly alternative paper out at the University of Virginia, but hey — what’s the matter with a little pride?

As of this week he and his colleagues at the Austin American-Statesman have a group blog, and I have to say it looks good. Culture mavens should give it a read. Today’s entry definitely merits a chuckle — it includes, among other topics, his reminiscences about seeing “Constitution Hall turned into one big conga line.”

The Return of the King

Business on the environmental front kept me tied up and away from a keyboard today, but never mind that — guess who’s back?

Back again?

Matthew’s back.

Tell a friend.

For What It’s Worth

Another day, another story like this:

Tracey Crockett got a dozen red roses from her husband on Monday. A soldier serving in Iraq, he liked to surprise her with flowers, for no reason.

A few hours later, there was another knock at her door. Army officials told her Sgt. Michael Tyrone Crockett, 27, had been killed in an ambush that day near the Baghdad airport.

“He always sent me red roses,” she said by telephone Tuesday from her parents’ home in Tomball, Texas, near Houston. “He loved to spoil me, and after his son was born, he spoiled him, too.”

On Tuesday, she and the 3 1/2-year-old boy who is named for his father each received letters he had written days before.

She hasn’t told her son of his father’s death, “but he knows it, anyway,” she said.

“He’s helping comfort me more than I’m helping him,” she said. “He tells me, ‘Mommy, don’t cry.’ ”

Michael Crockett was the 36th soldier with the 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized) to be killed in Iraq.

“Stop, children — what’s that sound; everybody look what’s going down …”

Sully Has an Epiphany

Now he tells us.

THE FISCAL WRECKAGE: The debt that we will hand over to the next generation is now growing at a fantastic rate. Even the Bush administration’s own rosy estimates predict that this president will have landed the country with almost $2 trillion of accumulated new debt in the next five years … [T]he sheer scale of damage the administration is doing to our future economic and military strength is still deeply worrying … [N]o conservative can be happy to observe the phenomenal growth of government under this president. The sheer fact of moving from long-term surplus to fast-mounting debt and structural deficits in a mere two years will be a damning election argument. Right now, the president doesn’t seem even to acknowledge that there’s a problem … He needs to figure out how to reverse this trend and address it in the looming campaign.

Andrew, let me tell you exactly how to reverse this trend and address it in the looming campaign: by voting out President Bush.

There Are Four Lights

Cheers, Hans Blix — you don’t exist.

Is George Bush going mad? Losing his grip on reality?

In a photo op in the Oval Office with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan yesterday, Bush made a comment at the very end of the event that didn’t quite jibe with the collectively agreed upon reality:

The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power, along with other nations, so as to make sure he was not a threat to the United States and our friends and allies in the region. I firmly believe the decisions we made will make America more secure and the world more peaceful. (Emphasis added.)

Now, I don’t know about you, but I distinctly remember Hans Blix et al. running around Iraq while Saddam was in power, often accompanied by Iraqi minders who were there, one would suspect, on the orders of Saddam Hussein.

Coming up next, Bush tells the story of the discovery of America. “And George Washington built three cruise ships, and sailed here under a flag that was made for him by Betsy Ross … ”

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

The Associated Press reports that Bush administration insiders plan to hold next year’s Group of Eight (G-8) economic summit right here in the Peach State, down in the sprawling, tweedy beachside resort of Sea Island. Word of the decision leaked today, after a round of speculation that focused on possible locales such as Hilton Head Island, S.C., an unnamed Florida location, and the historically significant town of Bretton Woods, N.H.

The chief advantage Sea Island boasts over those possibilities is its tightly limited access — its sole connection to the mainland United States is a two-lane causeway that links the resort and St. Simons Island, which is itself bridged to the rest of Georgia by another two-lane causeway. Those quirks of geography should make it child’s play for security planners to bottleneck protestors across the shore, keeping them out of sight [and mind] of assembled world leaders and press.

Even so, that won’t stop determined demonstrators from taking advantage of the next best locations: the city of Brunswick, located at the landward end of the St. Simons Causeway; the nearby Kings Bay Naval Base, home to the Atlantic nuclear missile submarine fleet; and the newly opened suspension bridge running from Brunswick to the south. And don’t forget always offbeat Savannah — just an hour north along Interstate 95 — where progressive activists might feel right at home.

I can’t wait to see who decides to show up for the President’s welcome party. This should be loads of fun.

Ben Affleck, Prophet

PG, who blogs at All the Sins of the World, has somehow managed to remember a scene from Good Will Hunting that — when read today — seems eerily prescient. High-step over there and read the whole thing.

Things I Learned Today

“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
– President Bush, Jan. 28, 2003

Today, I learned that I was brought to my parents by a great big stork.
Today, I learned that one can drive from Utah to Hawai’i.
Today, I learned that the moon is made out of cheese and pastrami.
Today, I learned that pi stops at the 439th digit.
Today, I learned that the national language of China is French.
Today, I learned that Tony Blair was recently elected prime minister of Canada.
Today, I learned that a sonnet has 15 lines.
Today, I learned that Hebrew is read from left to right.
Today, I learned that mo shu pork contains peanut butter.
Today, I learned that the Chicago Cubs won the ’98 World Series.
Today, I learned that Dustin Hoffman won an Oscar for his role in Ishtar.
Today, I learned that 23 ounces makes a pound.
Today, I learned that Snoop Dogg wrote “Yesterday.”
Today, I learned that Vanuatu won World War II.
Today, I learned that Microsoft is a wholly owned subdivision of John Deere.
Today, I learned that the lighthouse at Alexandria was built in Rome.
Today, I learned that the pope is Buddhist.
Today, I learned that the sun rises in the west.
Today, I learned that arugula is a key ingredient in German chocolate cake.
Today, I learned that four is the magic number.
Today, I learned that basketball is played with seven-man teams and a puck.
Today, I learned that the macarena is the Burmese national dish.
Today, I learned that “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” is 17 words.
Today, I learned that cows sing.
Today, I learned that frogs dance.
Today, I learned that rain hums.
Today, I learned that snakes jump.
Today, I learned that the earth’s orbit is shaped like a square.
Today, I learned that pigs fly.
Today, I learned that mice read.
Today, I learned that President Bush tells the truth.

Welcome to the Occupation

President Bush:

I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the President — maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.

---

William Butler Yeats :: “The Second Coming”:

The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

White House press secretary Ari Fleischer:

The president said that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa. That still may be absolute fact. This revisionist notion that somehow this is now the core of why we went to war or a fundamental underpinning of the president’s decisions is a bunch of bull.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice:

We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

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The New York Times // Michael Gordon :: “A Perfect War?”

The Defense Department has come up with a novel explanation for the looting, robberies and shootings that have afflicted Iraq since Saddam Hussein was overthrown: They are the unavoidable consequence of a triumphant war plan. …

“We are facing some of the problems brought on by our very success in the war, in particular, our ability to use speed to pre-empt many of the actions that we were afraid Saddam might take,” [undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas] Feith said in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “War, like life in general, always involves trade-offs. It is not right to assume that any current problems in Iraq can be attributed to poor planning.”

In short, the Pentagon seems to be asserting that there was nothing it should have done differently. The disorder that afflicted Iraq in recent months was a necessary and acceptable consequence of a broader strategy for quickly winning the war. It was not preventable, and the strategy accepted this risk.

The assertion that Pentagon planning for the occupation of Iraq was flawless is quite a claim, given the mounting allied casualty toll, the difficulty the United States has had in restoring basic services and the continued threat of economic sabotage.

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The New York Times // Steven Lee Myers :: “Anxious and Weary U.S. Soldiers Face New Mission in Iraq”:

Sergeant Jaime Betancourt was there in March when a taxi loaded with explosives killed four of his company’s soldiers at a checkpoint.

He was there in April when his battalion seized the road out of the international airport and Saddam Hussein’s army made its last desperate defense.

He was there later that month when his company, part of the 1st Brigade of the Army’s 3d Infantry Division, crossed the Tigris River and began to restore order in Baghdad’s eastern half as chaos threatened to unravel the victory the brigade had helped win.

Betancourt is still here today, enduring infernal heat and fetid quarters in the ransacked headquarters of Iraq’s Interior Ministry, as much of the 3d Infantry Division remains in the city.

“I think that was the most scary thing — trusting civilians, especially after the car bomb,” Betancourt said, referring to the taxi bombing, the worst single attack against the brigade’s troops, on March 29, near Najaf, about 85 miles south of Baghdad. “We didn’t want nothing to do with these people anymore.”

As he stood guard at a hospital, as he enforced curfew at checkpoints, as he patrolled streets once again bustling with Iraqis, even the children terrified him, said Betancourt, who, at 21, appears barely older than a boy.

“At the end,” he said, “it was like, ‘Get that kid away from me.’”

It was not supposed to end this way for the brigade’s 5,000 soldiers and officers, who were accompanied by a reporter during the war and again this month in Baghdad. After fighting their way from the Kuwaiti border to the international airport outside Baghdad in three fierce weeks, they believed that the war — or at least their part of it — was over.

Six months after arriving in Kuwait and almost three months after entering Iraq, they were ready to go home. Then they discovered that, at least from a soldier’s-eye view on the ground, there seemed to be no American plan for a postwar Iraq.

The mayhem that followed the collapse of Saddam’s government on April 9 has thrust them into a new mission: keeping peace, even as their weary minds and bodies may still feel at war.

“You call Donald Rumsfeld and tell him our sorry asses are ready to go home,” said Private First Class Matthew O’Dell, an infantryman in Betancourt’s platoon, as he stood guard Tuesday. “Tell him to come spend a night in our building.”

Two months after surging into Baghdad, the 1st Brigade’s soldiers and officers have found themselves enmeshed in yet another campaign — less intense, perhaps, but still exhausting, still perilous and, at times, still psychologically taxing.

Some said they were haunted by the deaths they caused — and suffered — and have sought counseling. All seemed tired and hot and increasingly bitter. Morale seems to have plummeted as sharply as the temperature has risen.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution // Ron Martz and Jingle Davis :: “Fort Stewart Troops Kept on Duty in Iraq”:

In Fallujah, about 40 miles west of Baghdad, Army Lt. Col. Eric Schwartz, commander of Georgia-based Task Force 1-64, made an announcement Monday afternoon to hushed staff members.

“We were extended in theater. Units will now stay one year,” he said.

Schwartz said later, “They know it ripped my heart out to stand up there and tell them we weren’t going home.”

The news hit especially hard because soldiers with the 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized) from Fort Stewart were told July 9 that they could start packing this week to come home to Hinesville.

About 10,000 soldiers, including troops in Task Force 1-64, learned Monday their homecoming will be delayed indefinitely. The same day, a 3rd Infantry Division soldier was killed in an ambush near Baghdad and 10 others were wounded, three seriously. …

Schwartz told company commanders and staff officers Monday not to set their sights on any specific date for going home. The extension order, expected to be announced by the Pentagon today, will specify that units sent to Iraq or Kuwait will spend “a minimum” of one year, Schwartz said.

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International Herald-Tribune // Brian Knowlton :: “Rumsfeld Says More GIs May Be Needed”:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld predicted Sunday that attacks on coalition troops in Iraq could grow “more vicious” this summer, and said for the first time that an increase in U.S. force levels was at least a possibility.

“We’re still in a war,” he said on one of two television appearances. Since May 1, when President George W. Bush declared that major hostilities had ended in Iraq, 31 U.S. soldiers have died in the hostilities there.

President Bush:

I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the President — maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.

A Problematic Privatization

The Journal-Constitution today features an article on the woes of Herschend Family Entertainment, the company that Georgia selected in the late 1990s to take over the management of Stone Mountain Park. Herschend spent generously in recent years to add attractions to the property — including a new ‘antebellum’ mill village and a water slide — but with ticket sales stagnant, the company wants $3 million cut from its annual rent.

The fad for privatization, when taken too far, leads governments to make mistakes — like, for instance, putting public functions out for bid for which there could be no discernible gain from going private. Not to put too fine a point on it, there’s only one Stone Mountain. It has no competing massive granite domes that feature gigantic sculpture carvings in the immediate vicinity. Without competition, a private company faces no external pressure to make its operations more efficient, or to justify expenses by their value to the business, or to innovate in ways that improve the business model. [Not that there’s much room for improvement on the business model of a giant-sized rock.]

What we have here, in short, is a case of government swapping out public management for a private manager who wants to suckle on the government teat. Can someone tell me how that improves matters?

Any Georgian with taste, by the way, could have seen this coming to no good end; Herschend is the same company that brings us Dollywood and Branson, Mo. Picking a puffed-up carny operator to run a 3,000 acre public park made about as much sense as picking Disney to run the Louvre.

Allons Enfants de la Patrie …

… le jour de gloire est arrivé!

Pour a cold glass of Pernod with me, and raise a toast to the land that gave us Montesquieu, Lafayette, New Orleans, and … er, Courvoisier. Vive la France — et merci beaucoup.

Quick Hits

Some offhand thoughts before the weekend:

• If Bush remains bogged down in controversy in January about the truth of his claims that Iraq possessed banned weapons, yet manages to keep a united GOP front against a congressional investigation, I wonder: should Democrats register their opposition to the stonewalling by boycotting the State of the Union address? Half of me believes the Dems would take a hit in public opinion for looking petulant — but the other half sees it as a potentially vivid, emphatic protest.

  Most congressional Dems seem to operate with a well-ingrained resistance to public displays of irritation, but hey — if something like that happens in spite of the long odds, remember that you saw the idea here first.

• From the ‘no lie left behind’ dept.:

  A recent state audit in Houston, which examined records from 16 middle and high schools, found that more than half of the 5,500 students who left in the 2000-01 school year should have been declared dropouts but were not. That year, Houston schools reported that only 1.5 percent of its students had dropped out.

  The audit — which recommended lowering the ranking of 14 of the 16 schools from the best to the worst, has been a stunning blow to the Houston school system, the largest and most celebrated district in Texas. Last year, the city won a $1 million prize as best urban district in the country, from the Broad Foundation, which is based in Los Angeles.

  The city has also been a pillar of the so-called Texas miracle in education, whose emphasis on grading school performance became the model for the rest of the country under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. It was largely on the strength of his success here that Rod Paige, Houston’s former superintendent, followed George W. Bush east to become secretary of education.

  Now, some here are questioning whether the miracle may have been smoke and mirrors, at least on the high school level. And they are suggesting that perhaps Houston is a model of how the focus on school accountability can sometimes go wrong, driving administrators to alter data or push students likely to mar a school’s profile — through poor attendance or low test scores — out the back door.

  As the story goes on, the writer explains how administrators often pressed students with academic or disciplinary problems to quit, in the name of boosting overall student performance on standardized tests. That the troubled students lost to the system as a result might have been the ones who most needed help appears to never have crossed some staffers’ minds.

  And this is the model Washington decided to apply to the rest of the country?

That’s it from here. Have a great weekend — I’ll see y’all Monday.

Sticker Shock

What a surprise — it looks as though the cost of running Iraq just doubled:

WASHINGTON, July 10 — The Pentagon’s new estimate that military costs for Iraq would average $3.9 billion monthly for the first nine months of this year produced surprise and anger today among Congressional Democrats, who said the amount was not only more than they had been told, but far too large given the budget deficit.

“It is a lot more than I expected,” said Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, the ranking Democrat on the Budget Committee. “Obviously the Iraqi occupation is bogging down, and the cost is substantially higher than we were earlier advised. So the problems are mounting, and I got a real earful from parents of soldiers when I got home about the lack of a plan for the postwar.”

The Pentagon comptroller today stood by the concepts that produced the initial estimate in April that military costs would average just over $2 billion monthly …

Administration officials disclosed, meanwhile, that the cost of running the civilian parts of the stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq also are increasing, and that the roughly $7 billion available to pay for much of these costs is expected to run out near the end of the year …

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said the American people would support continued troop assignments in Iraq if they were given all the facts. But he expressed annoyance that it had taken so long to learn the true costs of the postwar period.

“I think the American people need to be told, ‘Look, we’re going to be there for quite a while, and it’s going to cost us quite a bit of money,’ ” said Mr. McCain, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “People should be given some estimate of what we can expect. Americans will support the president, in my view, if he just talks straight to them and tells them what the challenges are we face. We got some of that, albeit reluctantly, yesterday from Rumsfeld.”

Let’s take stock: the administration misrepresented the evidence about weapons of mass destruction, apparently misrepresented the level of the threat, seems to have misrepresented the number of troops needed to keep the calm in Iraq after the war, and held tightly to the cost estimate for military operations until the last minute. Now it’s making a sudden upward revision in that figure, too, when it’s long past too late for anyone to cite high costs as a reason not to get involved.

If you ask me, the president doesn’t seem to trust us with the facts. Why should we trust him?

The Well-Heeled Larcenists Protection Act of 2003

Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times writes today of the House Republicans’ latest venture in corporate crime coddling. This time, they want state regulators to quit pursuing investment bankers and analysts who try to fleece shareholders.

She puts it less colorfully:

The bill, the Securities Fraud Deterrence and Investor Restitution Act of 2003, was introduced in May by Richard H. Baker, Republican of Louisiana. It bars state securities regulators from creating rules for brokerage firms that differ from those established by the Securities and Exchange Commission or self-regulatory organizations like the New York Stock Exchange. If the bill had been law in 2002, for example, it would have prevented Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general, from pursuing the changes on Wall Street that resulted from his investigation into analyst conflicts.

If passed, the bill would prevent states from imposing rules on the disclosures that brokerage firms make about the investments they sell. The measure would also prohibit state regulators from instituting conflict of interest requirements on brokerage firms, like those relating to stock analysts that 10 large securities firms agreed to last December when they settled with regulators and paid $1.4 billion in penalties and fines.

The bill, which passed the subcommittee mainly along party lines, appears to be in direct response to Mr. Spitzer’s aggressive Wall Street inquiry.

From a party that so often stakes itself on the notion of empowering states to act independently of Washington, this seems, to put it mildly, like a break from character. But who aside from a true masochist expects today’s Republicans to demonstrate fidelity to principle?

I Read the News Today, O Boy …

Forget Looney Tunes — today’s news is starting to put me in a mood more akin to that of Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes. First up, this story, related without comment:

The military also reported that a soldier died Wednesday in what it described as a non-hostile gunshot incident. The military gave no more details. The names of the dead and wounded were withheld pending notification of next of kin.

An American soldier attached to the 101st Airborne Division died Monday in another non-hostile gunshot incident near Balad, 55 miles north of the capital. Soldiers at an air base near Balad said on condition of anonymity that the soldier had taken his own life.

Then this — also related without comment, except to say that I hope this is just so much advance spin, instead of corroborated fact:

A long-awaited final report on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks will be released in the next two weeks, containing new information about U.S. government mistakes and Saudi financing of terrorists.

Former Rep. Tim Roemer, who served on the House Intelligence Committee and who has read the report, said it will be ”highly explosive” when it becomes public …

Roemer, who is also a member of the independent commission on Sept. 11, would not discuss details of the report. He said he expects the public report to be a compromise between intelligence officials who wanted to hold back data and congressional leaders and staffers who pressed for more disclosure.

A source familiar with the investigation, speaking on condition of anonymity, cited two ”sensitive areas” of the report that will command public attention:

• More information on ties between the Saudi royal family, government officials and terrorists. The FBI may have mishandled an investigation into how two of the Sept. 11 hijackers received aid from Saudi groups and individuals.

  John Lehman, a member of the independent commission, said at a hearing Wednesday: “There’s little doubt that much of the funding of terrorist groups — whether intentional or unintentional — is coming from Saudi sources.”

• A coherent narrative of intelligence warnings, some of them ignored or not shared with other agencies, before the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
  

  The report will show that top Bush administration officials were warned in the summer of 2001 that the al Qaeda terrorist network had plans to hijack aircraft and launch a “spectacular attack.” …

The final report was completed in December. Since then a working group of Bush administration intelligence officials has ”scrubbed” the report, objecting to additional public disclosures.

Wait, I do have a comment. George? Dick? Don? John Lennon has a question for you. And so do I.

Huh?!

Insert the sound of Elmer Fudd shaking his head and doing a double take here [emphasis added]:

“I think the American people continue to express their support for ridding the world of Saddam Hussein based on just cause, knowing that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons that were unaccounted for that we’re still confident we’ll find,” [White House spokesman Ari] Fleischer said. “I think the burden is on those people who think he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are.”

Oh, man, I get a headache every time I try to wrap my brain around that. You win, Ari — just don’t think you won’t get caught someday …

Sneak Previews

TypePad — the Movable Type-powered hosting service slated to arrive soon at a web near you — appears to have a slew of alpha [and beta] test blogs up, running, and open for viewing. [Six Apart business development veep Anil Dash referred to the unveiling as “opening the kimono.” Dude, that was not an image I needed.]

With that demonstration underway, the moves by AOL to enter the blogspace, and the ongoing strangeness over at Userland, it looks as though this sleepy corner of the world is getting a heck of a lot more interesting.

Brainstorming

I’ve had a few ideas locked away in my own personal skunk works for a while, but now that half of the year is on the low end of the hourglass, I think it’s time that I let you sneak a peek.

As the ever-perceptive Esta put it to me in an e-mail a few weeks back, I’ve lately been “craving community.” These proposals — that’s a grandiose term, because they’re only at the “what-if” stage — harness that impulse to two trends that seem to be gathering steam: consolidation of independent sites into group blogs, and setting up sites that focus on specific cities.

With that in mind, here’s a glimpse at what I have in mind, including working titles:

1. The Peach Tea project had its genesis back in May while I wrote a post about the Chicago-based Gapers’ Block. That site — basically a metablog about the arts, culture and quirks of the city by the lake — struck me as a great model of how a city-based site should look: participatory, variegated in its subject matter, and chock-a-block with fresh content. [To give you a sense of how on the ball the Gapers’ Block people are, they even gave the site its own daily updated photoblog.]

   What with Atlanta brimming with great blogging talent — I can only point to a few with this post, but the list goes on and on and on — a group blog about life in the 404 could generate some serious energy, and maybe even provide a little competition for the city’s fusty and occasionally uneven alternative papers. D. Clay of ShiftyEye apparently has the same view, and he’s come as far along as setting up a working site that’s currently in its test phase.

   I’m inclined to pool my efforts with his — that strikes me as the speediest way to get this project off the ground. If you’re game for contributing design wizardry and/or content, use the comments to give me a show of hands.

2. The next site is a more specialized play, and has a great deal to do with my taste for Southern politics. I’ve nicknamed it Red Dirt & Yellow Dogs.

   I see a niche for a local site that provides dish and off-kilter commentary from a lefty perspective. Georgia has a few political blogs — well, ‘ersatz blogs’ would be more like it — already, but none of them have enough distinctiveness of voice, immediacy, or interactivity of content to do the concept justice. This would take less work to launch than Peach Tea [I don’t hear much clamoring for politicians to have their own dedicated photoblog], but would still include a running calendar of events, Daily Kos-style open threads, and liberal doses of scuttlebutt, analysis and opinion.

   I have a list of writers in my head that I’d like to recruit. Some of you know who you are already; the rest, I plan to get in touch with over the next few days. I welcome all comers, though, so if you want to help get this show on the road, give me a holler.

I yield the floor. What questions do you have?

Justice, Ashcroft Style

John Ashcroft and his Justice Department sure know how to take the war on terrorism to the evildoers:

Sitting i