Amygdala

2013-01-01T14:38:00.000-08:00

STILL ALIVE. Still struggling with life, trying to carry on. Still problematic. Having lots of therapy.

I hate to ask, but if you have a subscription, I still very much need your help and support as much as ever. Donations hugely appreciated.

Content is something we hope to return to sooner or later.

TENTH BLOGIVERSARY

2011-12-31T17:18:00.000-08:00

TENTH BLOGIVERSARY

December 30th, 2010, was the 10th blogiversary of this blog. I began it on December 30th, 2001

8973 posts.

I'd like to chat more about this, and much else, but I'm preoccupied with a dreadful cold.

I'm too sick to go out to tonight's New Year's party I was greatly greatly looking forward to, but may all unable to celebrate with others tonight have as much good cheer as possible.

It's always possible the next day may bring a wonder to any of us.

It's always possible the next year may bring many wonders to any of us. You never know where you may find an unexpected joy, whether for a moment, or a lifetime.

Another phrasing I like is: remember that everyone has their own struggles, no matter how invisible to you or me.

Try to remember to be kind. (I'm so good at that in some ways, and I realize I'm so crap in others, and must work so much harder on those!)

Meanwhile, an important piece you should read on Tech’s Relationship With Depression, Suicide and Asperger’s:

[...] Too many suffer Stanford Duck Syndrome, berating themselves for being "failures," causing depression and suicide.

Failure, failing, and being “a failure” is such a part of tech culture that it is a cultural locus for entire posts, blogs, pep talks and conventions.

Failure is universally feared and derided, yet framed and re-framed again and again as a means of staying positive, of learning from mistakes, of using failure as a measure of working hard for success.

The ideal of success in tech is married to the terror of failure.

What undoubtedly makes it worse is the public nature of tech culture, populated with gossip bloggers happy to run any item for page views, the better if it humiliates their competitors. Add to this that the very nature of tech work itself is inherently isolating."

As is writing, and much other intellectual/artistic labor.

The best preventive for suicide, aside from individuals finding professional help, is for all of us to do our best to help pick up others who seem to have fallen, or are in trouble.

I spend far too much time feeling the results of the brain weasels that insist the irrational emotional crazy pain/depression/anxiety is so strong that the least painful option is to just quit.

I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

Then I read this: http://suicidescale.com/

And this longer summary:

Being Suicidal: What it feels like to want to kill yourself

I have to say that I find it a bit distressing to note that I've spent many years spending much time having gone through all five of the first six stages, stopping only part way through six:

[...]

Disinhibition

Disinhibition happens when you cognitively deconstruct everything. Nothing remains. Your standard defenses are gone. You forget about purpose, suffering, others, and ramifications in favor of a self-focused task to end it all."

When I'm feeling bad, I definitely feel like stage 5: "Suicidal people have an aversive or anxious awareness of the recent past (and possibly the future too), from which they seek to escape into a narrow, unemotional focus on the present moment."

Suicidal people resemble acutely bored people: The present seems endless and vaguely unpleasant, and whenever one checks the clock, one is surprised at how little time has actually elapsed.

That is, I desperately desire to feel at all normal, let alone happy, but instead it's, during the worse times, all unbearable sadness, or terror, or fear, or disappointment, or just irrational crying, confusion, and inability to think about anything but the irrational pain one is feeling.

Just feeling non-anhedonia for a while, and feeling able to take even small pleasure in some things, is a feeling of relative joy and wonder, too much of the time.

But another thing about the sort of emotional lability I suffer as a clinical depressive/bipolar/anxiety-panic-disorder/etc is that statements about how I "generally" feel or have felt or done tend to strongly depend on how I'm feeling at the time. Not totally, by any means, since I'm not particularly delusional, but it's very easy to feel as if the way one feels at any given moment is the way one most commonly feels, and it's very difficult to emotionally, as opposed to intellectually, remember feeling mid-term differently in the past.

I think aspects of that are common to most everyone; it's the exaggeration and extremeness on the spectrum that takes it into the realm of mental/emotional illness.

Please, note to any readers: I'm not making plans to kill myself. I'm not making plans to make such plans.

I've just spent too much time in too many years perfectly understanding the feeling that it could be a relief, wanting that relief, feeling that feeling, and walking up to and past the border of, when it's bad, just feeling indifferent about the effort necessary to take steps to actively kill myself.

Why bother when I feel like I'm trapped into doing it in slow-motion?

I wish I meant that in an "we're all dying" way, but the truth is that at various times, I've meant it somewhere beyond a metaphor, but not quite literally.

And at my worst, I feel far too dysfunctional to plan or take action on anything, let alone anything as involved as suicide.

That's what's kept me alive.

Mostly it's the hope that the brain biology will get better, that treatment will eventually help, and I'll be less subject to irrational emotional pain, etc.

Hope is the one necessary thing.

And for that, you've perhaps already read and heard Mr. Gaiman:

"May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art – write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. May your coming year be a wonderful thing in which you dream both dangerously and outrageously.

I hope you will make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and you will be liked and you will have people to love and to like in return. And most importantly, because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now – I hope that you will, when you need to, be wise and that you will always be kind. And I hope that somewhere in the next year you surprise yourself."

One lifts an eyebrow at whomever titled the YouTube upload, and their grasp of the apostrophe, but that's YT for you.

And for those who may be involved with a woman, you might learn something new -- you can't have seen these diagrams before! -- about The Internal Clitoris.

Happy New Year, and may 2012 bring you all joys and wonders you've never foreseen.

Maybe I'll even switch to a new blog template, and start blogging, instead of posting to Google +, Facebook, and Twitter, again. That would be spiffy.

Yes, right now the formatting on this post is fucked. It's a reason I've been posting so little.

Sorry.

SAID THE RED QUEEN

2011-10-04T15:00:00.001-07:00

SAID THE RED QUEEN.

First, we don't kill all the lawyers.

Let's continue the examination of the lawfulness of the killings of American citizens Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan I began in my post, Off With Their Heads! (Many comments there; Amygdala version here.

(That various other non-citizens, including Muhammad Salme al-Naaj and Abdul-Rahman bin Arfaj, and another several Yemenis, were killed is another debate, but they should not be forgotten, either.)

Consider the justifications presented for these killings:

#1: Did they commit "treason"? Possibly so!

Sticking point: the U.S. Constitution says very clearly:

Section 3 - Treason
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

It's almost as if the drafters of the Constitution considered this!

Our Constitution specifically defines "treason" and the only way someone can be convicted of it. As You Know, Bob (everyone), the U.S. Constitution is superior to U.S. laws, which can't violate the Constitution. So al-Awlaki and Khan can't have been put to death because they committed "treason."

The President has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution.

#2: It was justified to kill them because of their propaganda and speech.

Unfortunately for this argument, the Constitution also rules it out with the little-known, obscure, First Amendment freedom of speech.

Let's move on to more serious arguments.

But first let's jump to the White House presenting its official response as press secretary Jay Carney explains, and is questioned by Jake Tapper (!) of ABC News:

video platform video management video solutions video player

Some quotes:

TAPPER: You said that al-Awlaki was “demonstrably and provably involved” in operations. Do you plan on demonstrating or proving –

CARNEY: I — Jake, you know, I should step back. I — he is clearly — I mean, “provably” may be a legal term. I think it has been well established, and it has certainly been the position of this administration and the previous administration, that he is a leader in — was a leader in AQAP; that AQAP was a definite threat, was operational, planned and carried out terrorist attacks that, fortunately, did not succeed but were extremely serious, including the ones specifically that I mentioned in terms of the would-be Christmas Day bombing in 2009 and the attempt to bomb numerous cargo planes headed for the United States; and that he was obviously also an active recruiter of al-Qaida terrorists. So I don’t think anybody in the field would dispute any of those assertions.

TAPPER: You don’t think anybody else in the government would dispute them.

CARNEY: I think any — well, I wouldn’t know of any credible terrorist expert who dispute the fact that he was a leader in al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and that he was operationally involved in terrorist attacks against American interests and citizens.

In fact, all sorts of experts question whether he was "operationally involved" and so did the U.S. government. January 13, 2010:

[...] In fact, until last fall, most Yemenis had never heard of the American-born cleric living in their midst. Those most familiar with him were a small group of Western counterterrorism officials and experts — and even they thought al-Awlaki was of relatively little consequence. [...] The Administration is trying to be careful in its assessment of al-Awlaki. Officials recognize that in demonizing a jihadist, they may create a monster they cannot control as the U.S. seemingly did in 2003 when it identified Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi as the top al-Qaeda leader in Iraq at a time when he was little more than a relatively obscure Jordanian terrorist operating north of Baghdad. The notoriety was a bonanza for al-Zarqawi, as mujahedin streamed to join his group. As for al-Awlaki, "the best way to describe him is inspirational rather than operational," says a senior U.S. official. But, as this official points out, "the inspirational element is motivating people to take action. Where do you draw the line?"

[...] What distinguishes al-Awlaki is not his record; other preachers have had demonstrably closer links to al-Qaeda and jihad. It is his target audience. Al-Awlaki aims his sermons at young Muslims mostly living in the U.S. and Britain. [...] Jarret Brachman, author of Global Jihadism: Theory and Practice and former director of research at West Point's Combating Terror Center [...] who monitors jihadist websites, reckons that al-Awlaki's sermons are "totally harmless nine times out of 10 ... but in the 10th, he starts to breathe a little fire." Much of the brimstone can be found in his blog posts, in which al-Awlaki states baldly that Islam and the West are in conflict and argues that all Muslims should join the holy war. [...] The exact nature of al-Awlaki's operational role remains in dispute. "There's nothing to suggest that he's sitting down and planning attacks," says Ben Venzke of IntelCenter, a private intelligence contractor.

I can go on with endless cites casting doubt on his involvement in operations.

But back at the White House:

TAPPER: Do you plan on bringing before the public any proof of these charges?

CARNEY: Again, this is — the question is — makes us – you know, has embedded within it assumptions about the circumstances of his death that I’m just not going to address.

TAPPER: How on earth is it — what is — I really don’t understand. How — he’s dead.

CARNEY: You –

TAPPER: You are asserting that he had operational control of the cargo plot and the Abdulmutallab plot. He’s now dead.

CARNEY: Mm-hmm.

TAPPER: Can you tell us or the American people — or has a judge been shown — ?

CARNEY: Well, again, Jake, I’m just –

TAPPER: How did –

CARNEY: I’m not going to go any further than what I’ve said about the circumstances of his death and the case against them, which, again, you’re linking. And I think that –

TAPPER: No, you said that he’s responsible for these things. I’m –

CARNEY: Jake — yes. But again –

TAPPER: Is there going to be any evidence presented?

CARNEY: You know, I don’t have anything for you on that.

TAPPER: Do you not see at all — does the administration not see at all how a president asserting that he has the right to kill an American citizen without due process and that he’s not going to even explain why he thinks he has that right is troublesome to some people?

CARNEY: I wasn’t aware of any of those things that you said actually happening. And again, I’m not going to address the circumstances of al-Awlaki’s death. I think it’s — again, it is an important fact that this terrorist, who was actively plotting – had plotted in the past and was actively plotting to attack Americans and American interests is dead. But I’m not going to, from any angle, discuss the circumstances of his death.

Trust the King!

So does the President have this power under the AUMF?

Constitutional law professor Marty Lederman has the most authoritative analysis, starting by responding to the official explanations by Deputy National Security Advisor Jack Brennan:

[...] It’s evident that a principal purpose of this section of the speech concerning the use of force, especially outside the “hot battlefield” of the Af/Pak theater, is to further distance the Administration from the “Global War on Terror” framework that infected U.S. characterizations of our counterterrorism strategy shortly after September 11th. ”[W]e are at war with al-Qa’ida,” emphasizes Brennan – not with all terrorists the world over. (Brennan explains that our “ongoing armed conflict with al-Qa’ida stems from our right—recognized under international law—to self defense.

This is not news, or controversial. See, e.g., U.N. Resolution 1373 (Sept. 28, 2001). There is no such self-defense rationale available as a matter of the jus ad bellum with respect to all international terrorist groups.)

But what about Brennan’s references, early in his speech, to al-Qaida “adherents” and “affiliates”? Although Brennan explains that “adherents” of al-Qaida–including “individuals . . . with little or no contact with the group itself” – have become a serious national security challenge because they can and do conduct attacks in the United States, the U.S. is not at war with each of them. That is to say, the U.S. is not resorting to the use of military force against them. Brennan also points to the danger of al-Qaida “affiliates”; but he does not suggest that the U.S. practice is to use military force against all al-Qaida “affiliates,” either. As the Administration’s recent National Strategy for Counterterrorism explained, “‘Affiliates’ is not a legal term of art. Although it includes Associated Forces [i.e., cobelligerents of al-Qaida and the Taliban engaged in the conflict against the U.S., against whom force may be used], it additionally includes groups and individuals against whom the United States is not authorized to use force based on the authorities granted by the Authorization for the Use of Military Force. . . . The use of ‘Affiliates’ . . . is intended to reflect a broader category of entities against whom the United States must bring various elements of national power, as appropriate and consistent with the law, to counter the threat they pose.” In other words, military force is authorized against al-Qaida, the Taliban and their cobelligerents. But the increasing threats from groups and individuals who are more loosely inspired by or affiliated with al-Qaida will appropriately be countered using other tools of counterterrorism strategies, apart from the use of force.

This couldn't be more important. The official U.S. position is that we are not at war with "al-Qaida 'adherents' and 'affiliates' simply because of that status.

So that claim flies out the window.

So how about that "worldwide battlefied" some assert? What's the actual legal scope?
Lederman:

[...] Brennan then moves on to a matter about which “there is some disagreement”–namely, “the geographic scope of the [armed] conflict.” [...] Brennan acknowledges that there are some in the international community—”including some of our closest allies and partners”–who take the view that the armed conflict with al Qaeda and its associated forces is limited “only to the ‘hot’ battlefields.” [...] Brennan does not say that the armed conflict with al-Qaida is “global”–that it extends the world over. But he does strongly imply what has been evident for some time, namely, that the U.S. believes the conflict extends at a minimum to locations (such as Yemen and Pakistan) from which enemy forces regularly plot and launch attacks against the U.S.

Brennan’s primary point of emphasis, however, is that even in those locations, where the U.S. is of the view that the restrictions and immunities of “armed conflict” are in effect, it is not the Administration’s view that it can or should use lethal force without limitation: ”That does not mean,” Brennan said, that “we can use military force whenever we want, wherever we want.”

For one thing, “international legal principles, including respect for a state’s sovereignty and the laws of war, impose important constraints on our ability to act unilaterally—and on the way in which we can use force—in foreign territories.” This is of a piece with the views repeatedly expressed by Harold Koh and others, as I explained here, that the Administration is committed to conducting the armed conflict in compliance with the laws of armed conflict, including Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, fundamental customary law norms (e.g., the principles of distinction, proportionality, humanity and necessity), and, as Brennan stressed, norms of state sovereignty (including those in article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter), which generally prohibit the use of force in another sovereign state unless either that state consents, or the state’s government is “unwilling or unable to take the necessary actions” that are permitted to the U.S. under the doctrine of self-defense.

The official U.S. position naturally acknowledges there are strong legal limits to U.S. application of military force. We can't "use military force whenever we want, wherever we want.”

What is a key limitation? The threat must be imminent.

Claims that al-Awlaki and Khan presented an imminent threat of other than posting to YouTube, blogging, speaking, and writing, seem extremely shaky, at best.

[...] Well, as Brennan elaborates, even those allies who would deny the expanded scope of the armed conflict beyond “hot battlefields” agree with the U.S. that a nation may use force in self-defense against an entity or state that is “planning, engaging in, or threatening an armed attack against U.S. interests,” even outside of the “hot battlefield,” if the threat of such action is “imminent.”

If.

[...] And Brennan explains that outside the “hot battlefields” the U.S. is not using force against enemy forces without discrimination among them, as it would be entitled to do in an armed conflict, but is instead hewing to what would be permissible if the U.S. were only acting on a self-defense theory, i.e., what would be permissible even in the absence of an armed conflict [...]

The U.S. government does not claim the whole world is a battlefield. They carefully distinguish between the "hot battlefield" of Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
Moreover:

[...] First, Brennan’s speech intriguingly suggests that, at least in practice, U.S. use of force outside the “hot battlefield” may be even more restrictive than a traditional self-defense model would indicate. He states that U.S. efforts in such locations “are focused on those individuals who are a threat to the United States, whose removal would cause a significant – even if only temporary – disruption of the plans and capabilities of al-Qa’ida and its associated forces.”

Deputy National Security Advisor Brennan also carefully stated:

[S]ome have suggested that we do not have a detention policy; that we prefer to kill suspected terrorists, rather than capture them. This is absurd, and I want to take this opportunity to set the record straight. . . . I want to be very clear—whenever it is possible to capture a suspected terrorist, it is the unqualified preference of the Administration to take custody of that individual so we can obtain information that is vital to the safety and security of the American people. This is how our soldiers and counterterrorism professionals have been trained. It is reflected in our rules of engagement. And it is the clear and unambiguous policy of this Administration.

If it's possible to capture, policy is to do that: not kill.

Another argument favoring acting against al-Awaki and Khan was that the harboring nation was/is "unwilling or unable" to act.

The question of our relations with Yemen, President Saleh, and the mess that is Yemen would require at least another post, if not a series, and is gets into the practical question of just how badly the U.S. may be hurt by our military and political support for Saleh, in the wake of his massacres, and double-playing the U.S. arguably even more, or as much, as Pakistan, so I'll let that lie for now, but whether Yemen was "unwilling or unable" is both a very real legal question to argue, as well as whether we were wise to take this act.

Here's a little-spoken-of point:

Mostly lost in the debate over the legality of killing cleric Anwar al-Awlaki is a strange twist in U.S. law: While the Obama administration contends al-Awlaki's U.S. citizenship didn't prevent the CIA from targeting the alleged terror leader with a drone, the government didn't have the right to take away that citizenship.

"It's interesting," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said at Friday's daily briefing amid a barrage of questions on the airstrike that killed al-Awlaki in Yemen. Nuland said she asked State Department lawyers whether the government can revoke a person's citizenship based on their affiliation with a foreign terrorist group, and it turned out there's no law on the books authorizing officials to do so. "An American can be stripped of citizenship for committing an act of high treason and being convicted in a court for that. But that was obviously not the case in this case," she said. "Under U.S. law, there are seven criteria under which you can strip somebody of citizenship, and none of those applied in this case."

But it's okay to kill citizens without judge, jury, trial, or even making public the legal memos asserting it's okay.

There seem to be strong reasons to consider that capturing al-Awlaki was possible:

[...] First, counterterrorism cooperation “with Yemeni security agencies improved significantly in recent months,” despite the deepening political crisis and spreading instability, according to U.S. and Yemeni officials.

One report noted that Yemen had been allowing more drone flights, increasing the amount of information it provided the United States, and even allowed Americans to participate in interrogations of detained militants.

Reportedly, it was information that Yemeni intelligence 00 obtained by interrogation - shared with the United States three weeks ago that led to Awlaki, who was reportedly given the code name Objective Troy. After two weeks of surveillance, Awlaki was killed by several Hellfire missiles while travelling in a Toyota pickup truck along with between three and six others, including American-born Samir Khan, and Muhammad Salme al-Naaj and Abdul-Rahman bin Arfaj, members of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). That the United States actually improved counterterrorism cooperation with Yemen during President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s exile further undermines his long-standing claim that his rule is essential to fighting al Qaeda in his country.

[...]

While a CIA drone reportedly killed Awlaki, a number of other military assets were also involved in the operation. The Washington Post reported that Joint Special Operations Command drones “came across the Gulf of Aden from Djibouti.” In addition, according to a CBS Evening News report, if the CIA drone missed Awlaki, “carrier jets flying from an amphibious carrier off the coast were ready,” and “there was even an option for sending in Marine Ospreys with special operations forces to collect any intelligence left after the strike. But that was never used.”

Third, U.S. officials claimed that Awlaki had a much more “operational” role in AQAP after his death, than they had before. In the past two years, Awlaki had been described as “inspirational,” “charismatic,” an “effective communicator” who’s “internet presence magnifies the threat.” In May, FBI Direct Robert Mueller warned that Awlaki “has taken on a significance that he certainly did not have way back when.” Yet, most officials described him as not being intimately involved in operations, such as Leon Panetta, who testified to the Senate in June that “because he’s very computer oriented and as a result of that, really does represent the potential to try to urge others, particularly in this country, to conduct attacks here.”

Dropping USSOCOM troops, with air support, as we did with bin Laden, in a capture attempt, would seem to have been an option. Perhaps al-Awlaki would have been killed in the attempt, but it's unclear why an attempt wasn't made.

In the end, what will be the results?

The killing of Al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki is unlikely to weaken the terror group’s determination to attack the United States, a new study released Monday said.

While the death of Awlaki was a “tactical victory for the U.S. counterterrorism efforts,” the report by the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center says it is “unlikely to impact AQAP’s [Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s] operations in Yemen or its desire to attack the interests of the United States.”

Instead, the real key to eliminating Al Qaeda’s viability in Yemen and crushing its ability to attack the U.S. lies in removing its Yemeni leaders, including Nasir al-Wahayshi, who are responsible for the group’s operational coherence.

The study warned that by ignoring the local dynamics in Yemen when calculating AQAP’s capabilities, the U.S. risks miscalculating the effectiveness of military action and inflaming anti-American sentiment.

The report also said America’s counterterrorism policy must include a complete assessment of the challenges and limitations AQAP faces in Yemen.

And while a more representative Yemeni government or the fall of President Ali Abdullah Saleh is unlikely to have a significant short-term impact on AQAP’s ability to attack the U.S., “a more accountable and transparent Yemeni government presents a serious strategic challenge to the group’s long-term survival,” the report said.

The center’s study was based a year of fieldwork completed from 2008 to 2009 by the author, whose name was withheld from the report, and written before the killing of Awlaki.

And Ali Abdullah Saleh continues on, despite his endless manipulations of the U.S., claiming to be the only defense against al Qaeda In The Arab Peninsula until he inevitably falls.

And after all his U.S. ties and support, most Yemenis will hate the United States even more.

Won't that help?

Cross-posted at Obsidian Wings.

PAPERS, PLEASE

2011-09-30T20:17:00.005-07:00

PAPERS, PLEASE

Children.

Who we hates, we do, because their parents are illegal immigrants.

And in Alabama, this is now happening:

FOLEY, Alabama -- Many of the 223 Hispanic students at Foley Elementary came to school Thursday crying and afraid, said Principal Bill Lawrence.

Nineteen of them withdrew, and another 39 were absent, Lawrence said, the day after a federal judge upheld much of Alabama’s strict new immigration law, which authorizes law enforcement to detain people suspected of not being U.S. citizens and requires schools to ask new enrollees for a copy of their birth certificate.

Even more of the students -- who are U.S. citizens by birth, but their parents may not be -- were expected to leave the state over the weekend, Lawrence said.

"It’s been a challenging day, an emotional day. My children have been in tears today. They’re afraid," he said. "We have been in crisis-management mode, trying to help our children get over this."

Foley Elementary has the area’s largest percentage of Hispanic students, about 20 percent of its student body.

Under the new immigration law, schools must check the citizenship status of any student who enrolls after Sept. 1.

The students must present a birth certificate. Those who cannot do so have 30 days to submit documentation or an affidavit signed by a parent or guardian saying that they are here legally.

Why? Federal Judge Sharon Lovelace Blackwell.

[...] The decision, by Judge Sharon Lovelace Blackburn of Federal District Court in Birmingham, makes it much more likely that the fate of the recent flurry of state laws against illegal immigration will eventually be decided by the Supreme Court. It also means that Alabama now has by far the strictest such law of any state. [...]

The judge upheld a section that requires state and local law enforcement officials to try to verify a person’s immigration status during routine traffic stops or arrests, if “a reasonable suspicion” exists that the person is in the country illegally. And she ruled that a section that criminalized the “willful failure” of a person in the country illegally to carry federal immigration papers did not pre-empt federal law.

In both cases, she rejected the reasoning of district and appeals courts that had blocked similar portions of Arizona’s law. Legal experts expected the Justice Department to appeal. [...]

All summer, rallies for and against the law have been taking place throughout the state. Farmers and even the state agriculture commissioner have raised concerns about the law’s effect on farms, sheriffs have condemned it as too onerous for financially hurting counties and others have worried that it could seriously hinder the state’s efforts to rebuild after last April’s devastating tornadoes. [...]

How onerous are we talking?

Among the other sections Judge Blackburn upheld: one that nullifies any contracts entered into by an illegal immigrant; another that forbids any transaction between an illegal immigrant and any division of the state, a proscription that has already led to the denial of a Montgomery man’s application for water and sewage service; and, most controversially, a section that requires elementary and secondary schools to determine the immigration status of incoming students.

The civil rights groups challenged this last section on the ground that it would unlawfully deter students from enrolling in school, even if it did not explicitly allow schools to turn students away. The judge dismissed their challenge for lack of standing, though she did not rule on the argument’s merits.

I kinda thought conservatives favored private contracts, but clearly there are cases where only Big Government can save the day by nullifying all contracts with someone.

Dismal, indeed:

[...] The consequences for Alabamans will be serious — not just for the undocumented, but for their blameless citizen children, for those who are mistaken for unauthorized immigrants and for farmers and other business owners ensnared in the law. [...]

Judge Blackburn upheld the “papers, please” section, an echo of Arizona’s notorious attempt to require state and local law enforcement officials to check a person’s immigration status during traffic stops if they have “a reasonable suspicion” that someone is here illegally.

She upheld a section that criminalized the “willful failure” of an illegal immigrant to carry federal immigration papers. And she left untouched a section that requires elementary and secondary schools to collect data on the immigration status of incoming students and their parents, a clearly unlawful attempt to frighten families into keeping their children out of school.

You can't deny the law is having a huge effect already:

[...] Hispanic students are vanishing from public schools in the wake of a court ruling on Wednesday that upheld the state’s tough new law cracking down on illegal immigration. Education officials say scores of immigrant families have withdrawn their children or kept them home this week, afraid that sending them to school would draw attention from the authorities. There are no precise statewide numbers. But several districts with large immigrant enrollments reported a sudden exodus of children of Hispanic parents, some of whom told officials that they would leave the state to avoid trouble with the law, which requires schools to check students’ immigration status.

SCOTUS will have to take Pyler v. Doe into account:

[...] One grounds for challenging Section 28 will be the 1982 Supreme Court case, Plyler v. Doe. After Texas schools tried to block enrollment of illegal immigrants, or charge them tuition, the high court ruled that children residing in the US, whether legally or not, have a right to a free public elementary and secondary education.

While this is going on, SCOTUS today:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to decide whether the length of immigrants’ lawful residence in the United States should be considered in determining whether their children may be deported.

But why does this hurt us all? They're just criminals, illegals, after all.

One could run through a list of these provisions, explaining. But let's start by explaining how we're helped by denying any child an education.

What happens to these kids of illegal immigrants?

Children whose parents are illegal immigrants or who lack legal status themselves face “uniformly negative” effects on their social development from early childhood until they become adults, according to a study by four researchers published Wednesday in the Harvard Educational Review.

The study concluded that more than five million children in the United States are “at risk of lower educational performance, economic stagnation, blocked mobility and ambiguous belonging” because they are growing up in immigrant families affected by illegal status.

The study is the first to pull together field research by social scientists nationwide to track the effects of a family’s illegal immigration status on children from birth until they graduate from college and start to navigate the job market. It covers immigrants from a variety of origins, including Latinos and Asians.

About 5.5 million children in this country have at least one parent who is an illegal immigrant, according to an estimate by the Pew Hispanic Center. Among them, about one million children were brought here illegally by their parents, while about 4.5 million are United States citizens because they were born here.

In all, about 9.5 million people live in “mixed status” families that include American citizen children and unauthorized immigrants, Jeffrey S. Passel, senior demographer at the Pew center, said on Tuesday.

“Unauthorized status casts a big shadow that really extends to citizen as well as undocumented children,” Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, a professor of education at New York University who is an author of the study, said on Tuesday. “It affects their cognitive development, engagement in school and their ability to be emerging citizens.”

The Harvard study reports that “fear and vigilance” guide the home lives of young children whose parents are illegal immigrants, making the parents significantly less likely to engage with teachers or be active in schools.

Parents’ fears of deportation led to lower levels of enrollment of their American children in public programs for which the children were legally eligible, including child care subsidies, public preschool and food stamps, the study found. [...]

Many illegal immigrant parents work long hours in low-wage jobs, sometimes more than one job. New research on very young children cited in the Harvard study showed that the undocumented parents’ difficult work conditions “contribute substantially to the lower cognitive skills of children in their families.” This was true even though the children were more likely to be in two-parent families than American children as a whole.

As teenagers, children without legal status face a hard awakening when they apply for jobs, driver’s licenses or financial aid for college and discover they are not legally qualified for any of them. Their paths diverge from siblings who are American citizens by birthright.

“In late adolescence, they start to realize their legal limitations, and their worlds turn completely upside down,” said Roberto G. Gonzales, a sociologist at the University of Chicago whose research on college-age illegal immigrants is cited in the Harvard study.

Academic achievement does little to lift the prospects of illegal immigrants who have grown up here. Out of 150 immigrants Professor Gonzales studied in depth, 31 had completed college or advanced degrees, but none were in a career that matched their educational training. Many were working low-wage jobs like their parents.

The Harvard study found that many illegal immigrant youths, facing the “reduced promise of mobility,” had dropped out of school and begun the search for work they could do without legal papers, “forced deeper and deeper into an underground work force.”

The researchers said that a generation of young illegal immigrants raised in this country was moving toward “perpetual outsider-hood.”

But, hey, not my problem. Their parents shouldn't have come here, in search of jobs.

They're completely different from your or my American immigrant forbears.

Who should we deport? The Obama Administration is doing it:

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency announced on Wednesday that it had arrested 2,901 immigrants who have criminal records, highlighting the Obama administration’s policy of focusing on such people while putting less emphasis on deporting illegal immigrants who pose no demonstrated threat to public safety.
Officials from the agency portrayed the seven-day sweep, called Operation Cross Check, as the largest enforcement and removal operation in its history. It involved arrests in all 50 states of criminal offenders of 115 nationalities, including people convicted of manslaughter, armed robbery, aggravated assault and sex crimes.

That's legitimate. But only if done carefully.

The rest? We'll all pay the price, one way or another.

OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!

2011-09-30T11:06:00.005-07:00

OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!

I say we just kill all accused murderers from now on.

Think of the money saved, the deficit, and, of course, the children.

Now that we've established that the courts and Constitution don't matter, let's just jail all the accused criminals, too. Why lose sleep? They're murderers and criminals!

The state says so.

All Presidents need the power to assassinate people simply because they say so. What could go wrong?

This matters not.

Amendment 5 - Trial and Punishment, Compensation for Takings.
Ratified 12/15/1791.
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Amendment 6 - Right to Speedy Trial, Confrontation of Witnesses.
Ratified 12/15/1791.
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Why believe Anwar al-Awlaki was a major figure, btw? Irrelevant to the crucial question, but it again goes to the question of simply having a prosecution, without courts or trial or defence, simply because... the state says that's what should be done.

Imagine the worst President you can think of. Should that President have the power to unilaterally execute people not in the heat of battle? Are we truly "at war"? If so, when does it end?

I'm with Glenn Greenwald here.

Cross-posted at Obsidian Wings.

ADDENDUM, 12:52 p.m., PST: presenting Professor Jonathan Turley on Obama and civil liberties.

ADDENDUM, October 4th, 3:45 p.m., PST: see quite long follow-up here: The Red Queen.

YOU'RE ONLY AS SMALL AS YOUR DREAMS

2011-09-27T21:14:00.000-07:00

YOU'RE ONLY AS SMALL AS YOUR DREAMS. Dream large.

ORBIT WITH ME

2011-09-24T15:41:00.001-07:00

ORBIT WITH ME. Ever dream of doing this?

Dream a little dream.

Dream a big dream.

THE TERRORISTS WON

2011-09-11T20:19:00.001-07:00

THE TERRORISTS WON.

This is the price we paid.

Read The Rest Scale: 5 out of 5.

BARELY ALIVE

2011-09-04T10:13:00.001-07:00

BARELY ALIVE
I'm officially back in major depression at the moment. Severe clinical depression. Yes, a flare-up of my lifelong problem, and part of being bipolar, combined with severe panic disorders, anxiety disorders, and a mild degree of agoraphobia.

We'll hope the current bout of overwhelming pain, triggered by certain events, is a passing trend.

But right now I'm highly dysfunctional. Apologies for attached lack of blogging.

Yes, I'm trying to seek more professional help. I could use any help from local friends with that, frankly.

Friends are encouraged to write, but on the other hand, I'm apt to be too paralytically depressed to respond. :-(

STAYING ALIVE

2011-08-15T18:50:00.001-07:00

STAYING ALIVE

Social media is very distracting from blogging. So is real life social activity. So is severe clinical recurring depression, panic and anxiety disorders.

My apologies.

I'm still here. I'm still intending to get back to blogging Real Soon Now. Trying to work on the depression and forming new habits to get back in the blogging groove.

Miss y'all!

A GOOD COPYEDITING JOB, AND A BIG FAVOR TO ME

2011-06-21T15:41:00.006-07:00

A GOOD COPYEDITING JOB, AND A BIG FAVOR TO ME

A very important to me friend of mine -- not me -- with solid copyediting experience is looking for immediate freelance or permanent or temporary copyediting or proofreading work of any sort, either by mail/shipping, or locally in the Bay Area. CV upon request.

She's also available at present for any sort of office work in the Bay Area, or other work suitable to someone with some mobility disabilities and chronic pain issues.

Please write me at gary underscore farber at yahoo dot com with any questions if you have any leads. Thanks immensely for your help.

Yes, I hope to be back to blogging regularly, or even semi-regularly, in the near future.

ADDENDUM: I've understandably lost a lot of subscribers in the last year and particularly the last six months, and money is pretty tight again. If anyone optimistically would feel like subscribing, or donating, now would be a good time again. I do hope to start repaying with more writing again soon.

Additionally, I'll give half or more of any donations in the next month to a friend who right now has a major crisis paying rent for the month; that's as much a huge motivation in my asking.

Thanks for any consideration.

UPDATE, July 19th, 2011: my friend is still looking for any work, including any Bay Area general office/admin, or retail work; write me at gary underscore farber at yahoo dot com with any info re possible work locally or freelance by mail. And, yes, new or renewed subscriptions, and donations, would be wonderful: thanks to any who can help!

UPDATE, August 4th, 2011. Yes, I intend to get back to posting; I'm momentarily focusing on working on some life-problems, and I appreciate your patience and faith that I'm not disappearing.

YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO FREEZE AND BE UTTERLY SILENT

2011-05-17T18:22:00.004-07:00

YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO FREEZE AND BE UTTERLY SILENT

The Fourth Amendment continues to be onion-peeled into nothingness. KENTUCKY v. KING puts another nail in the coffin as police gain the right to kick in your door simply because they hear movement within your dwelling.

Obviously that's probable cause, because noise indicates a crime.

Does that make sense to you? It does to 8 out of 9 members of the Supreme Court.

ALITO, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and SCALIA, KENNEDY, THOMAS, BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., joined. GINSBURG, J., filed a dissenting opinion.

Here's the gist:

[...]
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the majority, said police officers do not violate the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches by kicking down a door after the occupants of an apartment react to hearing that officers are there by seeming to destroy evidence.

In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that the majority had handed the police an important new tool.

“The court today arms the police with a way routinely to dishonor the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement in drug cases,” Justice Ginsburg wrote. “In lieu of presenting their evidence to a neutral magistrate, police officers may now knock, listen, then break the door down, never mind that they had ample time to obtain a warrant.”

The case, Kentucky v. King, No. 09-1272, arose from a mistake. After seeing a drug deal in a parking lot, police officers in Lexington, Ky., rushed into an apartment complex looking for a suspect who had sold cocaine to an informant.

But the smell of burning marijuana led them to the wrong apartment. After knocking and announcing themselves, they heard sounds from inside the apartment that they said made them fear that evidence was being destroyed. They kicked the door in and found marijuana and cocaine but not the original suspect, who was in a different apartment.

The Kentucky Supreme Court suppressed the evidence, saying that any risk of drugs being destroyed was the result of the decision by the police to knock and announce themselves rather than obtain a warrant.

The United States Supreme Court reversed that decision on Monday, saying the police had acted lawfully and that was all that mattered. The defendant, Hollis D. King, had choices other than destroying evidence, Justice Alito wrote.

He could have chosen not to respond to the knocking in any fashion, Justice Alito wrote. Or he could have come to the door and declined to let the officers enter without a warrant.

“Occupants who choose not to stand on their constitutional rights but instead elect to attempt to destroy evidence have only themselves to blame,” Justice Alito wrote.

Right. Let's get more detail.

[...] In response to the radio alert, the uniformed officers drove into the nearby parking lot, left their vehicles, and ran to the breezeway. Just as they entered the breezeway, they heard a door shut and detected a very strong odor of burnt marijuana. At the end of the breezeway, the officers saw two apartments, one on the left and one on the right, and they did not know which apartment the suspect had entered. Gibbons had radioed that the suspect was running into the apartment on the right, but the officers did not hear this statement because they had already left their vehicles. Because they smelled marijuana smoke emanating from the apartment on the left, they approached the door of that apartment. Officer Steven Cobb, one of the uniformed officers who approached the door, testified that the officers banged on the left apartment door “as loud as [they] could” and announced, “ ‘This is the police’ ” or “ ‘Police, police, police.’ ” Id., at 22–23. Cobb said that “[a]s soon as [the officers]started banging on the door,” they “could hear people inside moving,” and “[i]t sounded as [though] things were being moved inside the apartment.” Id., at 24. These noises, Cobb testified, led the officers to believe that drug related evidence was about to be destroyed.

At that point, the officers announced that they “were going to make entry inside the apartment.” Ibid. Cobb then kicked in the door, the officers entered the apartment, and they found three people in the front room: respondent Hollis King, respondent’s girlfriend, and a guest who was smoking marijuana. The officers performed a protective sweep of the apartment during which they saw marijuana and powder cocaine in plain view. In a subsequent search, they also discovered crack cocaine, cash, and drug paraphernalia. Police eventually entered the apartment on the right. Inside, they found the suspected drug dealer who was the initial target of their investigation.

So, to recapitulate: the cops simply followed a suspect, lost track of him, had a 50-50 chance of guessing whether he was in the left or right apartment, smelled burning marijuana, yelled "police," then because they ZOMG, heard noise, that was sufficient reason to bust down the door of someone with no connection to the suspect, arrest them, and subsequently convict them, and that's sufficient cause for a search.

So: all the police have to do is be near enough your dwelling to think they hear inside it, decide they hear movement, and voila: goodbye, requirement for a warrant.

The court sentenced respondent to 11 years’ imprisonment.

So if anyone knocks loudly at your door, and you can't make out what they say: you damn well better freeze. It might be the police, and if you move, that might be grounds for your door being broken down and your home searched.

But, hey, if you're not a criminal, what do you have to hide? Isn't that what constitutional rights are all about?

No?

So what's the right approach? How about the one the Kentucky Supreme Court gave, which SCOTUS reversed?

[...] To determine whether police impermissibly created the exigency, the Supreme Court of Kentucky announced a two-part test. First, the court held, police cannot “deliberately creat[e] the exigent circumstances with the bad faith intent to avoid the warrant requirement.” [...] Second, even absent bad faith, the court concluded, police may not rely on exigent circumstances if “it was reasonably foreseeable that the investigative tactics employed by the police would create the exigent circumstances.” Ibid. (internal quotation marks omitted). Although the court found no evidence of bad faith, it held that exigent circumstances could not justify the search because it was reasonably foreseeable that the occupants would destroy evidence when the police knocked on the door and announced their presence.

Crazy, eh? But, no, Samuel Alito says it's all your fault if you move.

What's wrong here? It's not complicated:

JUSTICE GINSBURG, dissenting. The Court today arms the police with a way routinely to dishonor the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement in drug cases. In lieu of presenting their evidence to a neutral magistrate, police officers may now knock, listen, then break the door down, nevermind that they had ample time to obtain a warrant.

[...] Circumstances qualify as “exigent” when there is animminent risk of death or serious injury, or danger that evidence will be immediately destroyed, or that a suspect will escape.

[...]

The question presented: May police, who couldpause to gain the approval of a neutral magistrate, dispense with the need to get a warrant by themselves creating exigent circumstances? I would answer no, as did the Kentucky Supreme Court. The urgency must exist, I would rule, when the police come on the scene, not subsequent to their arrival, prompted by their own conduct.

[...] “[T]he police bear a heavy burden,” the Court has cautioned, “when attempting to demonstrate anurgent need that might justify warrantless searches.” [...] That heavy burden has not been carried here. There was little risk that drug-related evidence would have been destroyed had the police delayed the search pendinga magistrate’s authorization. As the Court recognizes, In no quarter does the Fourth Amendment apply with greater force than in our homes, our most private space which, for centuries, has been regarded as “ ‘entitled to special protection.’ ” [...] Home intrusions, the Court has said, are indeed “the chief evil against which . . .the Fourth Amendment is directed.” [...] (“At [the Fourth Amendment’s] very core stands the right of a man to retreat to his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.”). “ ‘[S]earches and seizures inside a home without a warrant are [therefore] presumptively unreasonable.’ ” [...]

How “secure” do our homes remain if police, armed with no warrant, can pound on doors at will and, on hearing sounds indicative of things moving, forcibly enter and search for evidence of unlawful activity?

The answer is simple: not at all.

Welcome to the land of the free and the home of the brave.

An entirely separately notable act by SCOTUS today was this:

[...] Among the cases denied review on Monday, perhaps the highest visibility one was Mohamed, et al., v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., et al. (10-778) — the latest appeal seeking to challenge the closing down of a lawsuit, because the government claims a “state secrets” privilege, seeking to hold someone liable for the Central Intelligence Agency’s once-secret program of “extraordinary rendition.” That phrase is the technical description of an official practice, used fairly often during the “war on terrorism,” in which an individual is captured in a foreign country, and transferred secretly to another country, for interrogation and, allegedly in some cases, for torture.

In this case, the four foreign nationals targeted by the “rendition” program did not sue the CIA directly, but rather sued a private firm, an affiliate of the Boeing Corp. that was claimed to have provided flight plans and logistics support for CIA-operated planes used to transport the captured individuals to foreign sites. The four individuals argued that the government had improperly claimed a “state secrets” privilege to shut down the lawsuit entirely, instead of using that privilege only to challenge evidence, piece by piece, as involving national security interests. The Ninth Circuit, however, ruled that the privilege may indeed be invoked to end a lawsuit entirely, on the theory that it simply cannot be tried in any way without risking exposure of national secrets.

The Supreme Court has refused repeatedly in recent years to hear appeals challenging the use of the “state secrets” doctrine in cases testing secret intelligence or military operations. It thus appears that some of the most controversial anti-war programs initiated during the George W. Bush Administration may never be tested in federal court.

The entire legal "state secrets" doctrine remains appalling. Just take the executive's word! Who doesn't love a doctrine (U.S. vs. Reynolds) based on a lie?

Cross-posted at Obsidian Wings.

BLOGGING IS LIKE A SIMILE

2011-04-12T08:11:00.014-07:00

BLOGGING IS LIKE A SIMILE. Let's try some news and article dumping throughout the day here, eh?

The Amygdala staff has been slack, scattered, and unfocused on posting to this blog; the staffers responsible have been sacked; once again, new staffers for new brain connections!

So: 2 US servicemen mistakenly killed by drone attack in Afghanistan.

[...] The Marines under fire were watching streaming video of the battlefield being fed to them by an armed Predator overhead. They saw a number of "hot spots," or infrared images, moving in their direction. Apparently believing that those "hot spots" were the enemy, they called in a Hellfire missile strike from the Predator.

Technology will triumph.

It worked in Vietnam! We're winning.

After all, unlike Vietnam, there are no safe havens across borders: Pakistan Tells U.S. It Must Sharply Cut C.I.A. Activities:

Pakistan has demanded that the United States steeply reduce the number of Central Intelligence Agency operatives and Special Operations forces working in Pakistan, and that it halt C.I.A. drone strikes aimed at militants in northwest Pakistan. The request was a sign of the near collapse of cooperation between the two testy allies.

Pakistani and American officials said in interviews that the demand that the United States scale back its presence was the immediate fallout from the arrest in Pakistan of Raymond A. Davis, a C.I.A. security officer who killed two men in January during what he said was an attempt to rob him.

In all, about 335 American personnel — C.I.A. officers and contractors and Special Operations forces — were being asked to leave the country, said a Pakistani official closely involved in the decision.

It was not clear how many C.I.A. personnel that would leave behind; the total number in Pakistan has not been disclosed. But the cuts demanded by the Pakistanis amounted to 25 to 40 percent of United States Special Operations forces in the country, the officials said. The number also included the removal of all the American contractors used by the C.I.A. in Pakistan.

This is what we call "big news."

It's also, when you read between the lines, leverage, and there will be a trade-off, and you'll have to read between the lines, at best, and look carefully at the right sources, to find information about it when it happens, should said information be findable -- but traces always surface on the internet:

[...] In addition to the withdrawal of all C.I.A. contractors, Pakistan is demanding the removal of C.I.A. operatives involved in “unilateral” assignments like Mr. Davis’s that the Pakistani intelligence agency did not know about, the Pakistani official said.

An American official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said without elaborating that the Pakistanis had asked “for more visibility into some things” — presumably the nature of C.I.A. covert operations in the country — “and that request is being talked about.”

Translation: the ISI just pulled the lever to try to get CIA to be as transparent as is possible with ISI in the hall of mirrors.

Expulsions are part of the game.

All intelligence analysis is about decluttering.

[...] Clutter exists only when those things exert a mental drag, or get in the way of living, in line with the old Afrikaans proverb, 'Alles wat jy besit vat van jou tyd' — 'Everything you own snatches at your time.'

My information sucking is a tad cluttering, but I declutter for you, my guests.

[...] "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call 'life' that is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run," is how Henry David Thoreau, everyone's favourite 19th-century hut-dwelling minimalist, expressed the sense that owning things constitutes a spiritual burden. He advocated not decluttering, though, so much as simplicity; not throwing things out so much as not acquiring them in the first place. Decluttering can be a step towards greater simplicity. But only if, having thrown off the ballast, you resist accumulating more. Otherwise, you're not really decluttering. You're just keeping the decluttering industry in business.

Your Amygdala declutters information. (Link via Stef.)

I could check the quote, but there would be a cost. Without going to the source, I note that Wikiquotes has it as:

And the cost of a thing it will be remembered is the amount of life it requires to be exchanged for it.

-- Journals (1838-1859) (After December 6, 1845.)

Yet more succinctly, I note that:

* It is a great art to saunter.
o April 26, 1841

I must return to more saunter in my blogging.

* For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms, and did my duty faithfully, though I never received one cent for it.
o After February 22, 1846

Thoreau was, as we know, an early blogger. He merely lacked Hellfire missiles.

He also notes in Life Without Principle (1863):

We do not live for idle amusement. I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up.

I would at least saunter. I'm easily amused.

More information clutter to come.

ADDENDUM, 9:36 a.m.: Good to be back on Memeorandum.

ADDENDUM, 10:17 a.m.: Longer and considerably more serious and detailed variant about AfPak posted at Obsidian Wings. Links to, and quotes from, Spencer Ackerman, David Ignatius, and Bruce Rolston, as well as myself.

ADDENDUM, 12:06 p.m.: George Carlin on Stuff:

POTTERY BARN LIBYA, PT 2: ANTHONY CORDESMAN, ONE MAN ARMY, OR GIVE PEACE A CHANCE?

2011-04-10T18:02:00.007-07:00

POTTERY BARN LIBYA, PT 2: ANTHONY CORDESMAN, ONE MAN ARMY, OR GIVE PEACE A CHANCE?

Part 1 on Amygdala!

In Pottery Barn Libya, Part 1 (or do you prefer ObWi?), I began explaining the situation in Libya. Now, more, and what America and NATO should do.

The tactical day to day sway of battle does not matter, save to those brutally slaughtered in it, and suffering from it. Suffering greatly.

What matters are the choices America and Europe make.

Naturally, Joe Lieberman and John McCain want bombs away, all-out regime change.

Nothing makes John McCain happier: Back on the Battlefield: How the Libya debate snapped John McCain out of his 2008 funk—and into a fresh fight with Obama.

John McCain has never met a country he wouldn't like to bomb:

[...]

McCain, who insists on visiting Iraq and Afghanistan twice a year, often favors a muscular approach to projecting U.S. military power but is wary of entanglements with no exit strategy. The old aviator, who had both arms repeatedly broken in a Hanoi prison camp, says that experience has “also given me a sense of caution in light of our failure in Vietnam.” While McCain opposed the U.S. military actions in Lebanon and Somalia, he is sympathetic to humanitarian missions—and would even consider sending troops to the war-torn Ivory Coast if someone could “tell me how we stop what’s going on.”

Pressed on when the United States should intervene in other countries, McCain sketches an expansive doctrine that turns on practicality: American forces must be able to “beneficially affect the situation” and avoid “an outcome which would be offensive to our fundamental -principles—whether it’s 1,000 people slaughtered or 8,000…If there’s a massacre or ethnic cleansing and we are able to prevent it, I think the United States should act.”

McCain: bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran.

Bombs away.

"There will be other wars."

McCain: "We are all Georgians now."

Tough guy Anthony Cordesman naturally wants to fight. Unsurprisingly, he used to be national security assistant to Senator John McCain.

Cordesman, who has, see previous links, always been deeply wired into the militarist networks of the Washington, D.C. village of talking heads and millionaire journalism, has a (surprise!) widely-quoted piece advocating we (surprise!) go all in.

Let's not.

Where is Cordesman cited authoritatively? The Los Angeles Times.

[...]
"The truth is, time isn't on anybody's side yet," said Anthony H. Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "If Kadafi can prevent the east from getting oil, he can consolidate power and outwait the rebels."

Over time, the world might lose its enthusiasm for challenging Kadafi. "Interest flags, support flags and you don't get the military backing," Cordesman said.

ABC News.

Senator Lindsay Graham also wants to attack, of course:

[...] "The idea that the AC-130s and the A-10s and American air power is grounded unless the place goes to hell is just so unnerving that I can't express it adequately," said Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C. "The only thing I would ask is, please reconsider that."

Cordesman is in the Christian Science Monitor:

[...]
“From a Libyan viewpoint, dragging the country into a long political and economic crisis, and an extended low-level conflict that devastates populated areas, the net humanitarian cost will be higher than fully backing the rebels, with air power and covert arms and training,” writes Anthony Cordesman, national security expert at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, in a commentary Wednesday on the CSIS website.

A middle path between regime change and the status quo?

Mr. Cordesman says that the international political environment precludes the US, as it does NATO, from openly adopting “regime change” as its Libya policy. But he says that, given the alternative of an “unstable stalemate” in which civilians could suffer “for months or years,” something he calls a “quietly escalating regime kill” is the best option.

Among the essential elements of such a policy would be stepped-up airstrikes on Qaddafi forces and weapons, arming the rebels, sending in teams of Special Forces to guide coalition airstrikes (at Qaddafi assets and away from civilian populations), and fully enforcing United Nations sanctions to deny Qaddafi funds and supplies.

Cordesman acknowledges that Obama may have already approved some steps covertly. Indeed, administration officials quietly confirmed last week that the president OK’d dispatching CIA operatives to Libya to provide intelligence on the rebels and to help guide airstrikes.

The intel on the rebels – who they are and to what degree, if any, they are infiltrated by elements of Al Qaeda – will form the basis for Obama’s next important decision concerning Libya: whether or not to arm the rebels, either directly or through third parties.

Time's Swampland:

[...] Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, said Wednesday that "essentially, the no-fly zone is not going to succeed." [lots more]

Associated Press:

[...]

"The fact is, day by day, we're going to confront the reality that a no-fly zone is probably a misnomer," said Anthony Cordesman, a national security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "If this structure can't stop Gadhafi's ground forces, then it fails."

"If we want to basically get rid of the regime, then we have to go much further and attack Gadhafi's centers of power and land targets," Cordesman said.

USA Today. Bloomberg News. MS-NBC.

You name a mainstream media outlet, and they've all gotten Tony Cordesman's memo:
Libya: “No Fly” to “Unstable Stalemate” or “Regime Kill?”

That's right, you have three guesses which he's for. Who wants to be a winner?

And Tony is ready with some good quotes, and is in everyone's rolodex.

Cordesman is the One Man Army Corps.

Not particularly re-imagined.

Let's go back to Jason Pack, from Pottery Barn Libya, Part 1, and look further at who these rebels are.

The next most organized units are those composed of bearded men with Islamist leanings. These fighters are likely to be from certain cities -- most famously Darnah -- and of certain backgrounds, such as unemployed men with university degrees. Some have attended Salafi seminaries; a smaller proportion have trained together secretly in Libya. A minuscule inner core fought in Afghanistan alongside Osama bin Laden in the 1980s and created the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) upon their return to Libya in the early 1990s. That group's raison d'être was to violently overthrow Qaddafi. After failed putsch attempts at the end of the 1990s, the Libyan state effectively crushed and co-opted the LIFG during the 2000s. Over the last five years, prominent former LIFG leaders have renounced their previous ties to al Qaeda and articulated an innovative anti-extremist Islamic theology. As the Wall Street Journal's Charles Levinson, who has met with prominent former LIFG elites in Darnah, has reported, "Islamist leaders and their contingent of followers represent a relatively small minority within the rebel cause. They have served the rebels' secular leadership with little friction. Their discipline and fighting experience is badly needed by the rebels' ragtag army."

Although hard-core Islamists are likely to remain bit players politically in the rebel movement, it would be unrealistic to expect Islam not to play a significant role in post-Qaddafi Libya. Much of eastern Libya remains traditional and religiously conservative. Adherence to the Senussi Sufi order served as the defining social, religious, and political lodestar of the Cyrenaicans from the mid-19th century until 1969, after which point Qaddafi suppressed them. Indeed, because Qaddafi excluded all conservative Muslim sensibilities from having a say in politics after 1969, Muslim groups must be granted their rightful seat at the table from now on.

Islam has always served to unite disparate tribal, social, and regional groupings in Libya. In Qaddafi's wake, assuming he falls, we can expect moderate Islam to be a key rhetorical factor in both popular discourse and politics. This should not frighten Western observers, as the use of Islam as a uniting, stabilizing factor will be a bane to jihadi recruitment efforts.

Should we worry about those "al Qaeda flickers"? Ever-alarmist Con Coughlin inevitably thinks so! (Coughlin has always been a mouthpiece for rightwing elements of MI6.)

Certainly Qadaffi keeps claiming we should but there's little evidence, as David Zucchino reports: Rebels in Libya insist they're no fans of Al Qaeda.

Col. Moammar Kadafi has depicted this coastal city of squat concrete homes and graceful blue harbor as the staging ground for an Al Qaeda takeover of Libya.

A radical Islamic caliphate, Kadafi claims, is based in Derna, inside rebel-held eastern Libya, and is directing the uprising against him.

That characterization draws a belly laugh from Mabrouk Salama, an Irish-educated chemistry professor who serves on the rebel leadership council in Derna.

"Al Qaeda? Here? Ha!" Salama said, shaking his head. "It's just Kadafi's way of trying to scare America."

[...]

It is impossible for an outsider to discern the motives, intrigues or heartfelt beliefs of Libyans in cities like Derna, which was sealed off from the outside world for four decades under Kadafi. But appearances, at least, do not suggest a deep Al Qaeda presence here.

Zahi Mogherbi, a retired political science professor in Benghazi who wrote a research paper on radical Islamic influences in Libya, said 63 men from Derna and 23 from Benghazi were among 120 Libyans who went to Iraq in 2006 and '07. Calling those numbers "fairly insignificant" in a nation of 6.5 million, Mogherbi said radical Islam had not taken root in Derna or anywhere else in eastern Libya.

[...]

"I have not seen any doctrinal movement to espouse any radical brand of Islam," he said, describing Derna as moderate and progressive by Arab standards.

"It would not be tolerated," Mogherbi said. "The people are rebelling against a dictatorship. They will not substitute this dictatorship for a radical Islamic dictatorship."

Leaders of the 15-member opposition council here say that only about half the local men who went to Iraq even survived the war, and that the rest now support the rebellion against Kadafi. Few actually had contact with Al Qaeda or returned bent on radicalizing Libya, they say.

"They're the same as us: revolutionaries who want to get rid of Kadafi and bring democracy and freedom to Libya," said Moftah Mahkrez, a member of the Derna opposition council. "This is Libya, not Afghanistan."

Anis Mahkrez, the friend and follower of Hasadi, said Al Qaeda's philosophy was alien to Libya and had little appeal here. He said Hasadi had joined the fight to depose Kadafi and that he reported to the rebel council.

[...]

Rebel leaders here hardly look or sound like Al Qaeda operatives.

Salama, who was jailed under Kadafi and said he holds a doctorate from the University of Dublin, was dressed in a pinstriped business suit. Except for a neatly clipped mustache, he was clean-shaven.

Moftah Mahkrez, 44, a businessman, wore a blue blazer and designer jeans. Brother Anis, 48, who was jailed for five years by the Kadafi regime, wore a stylish black tracksuit.

Anis was once a well-known soccer player. Photos of the brothers in soccer uniforms adorn the home they share in downtown Derna.

Anis nodded vigorously when his brother said he and fellow council members controlled the Hasadi militia that includes Anis.

"My brother is loyal to football, not Al Qaeda," Moftah said.

Moftah described extremists who went to Iraq as poorly educated young men weary of living in Kadafi's police state. "Now they need pencils and paper, not Kalashnikovs" rifles, he said.

Mogherbi, the Benghazi professor who advises the rebel national council, said radical Islam provided a natural outlet for young men living under Kadafi's dictatorship.

"Their radicalization was a reflection of their antagonism toward the Kadafi regime and his neglect of the east," Mogherbi said. "Now that Kadafi no longer controls the east, there is no appeal in this radical form of Islam."

In Senate testimony last week, Navy Adm. James Stavridis, commander of NATO forces, described "flickers in the intelligence of potential Al Qaeda, Hezbollah" influence in Libya. But he said there was no evidence of "significant Al Qaeda presence or any other terrorist presence."

In Benghazi, the rebels' political leadership is dominated by Western-educated lawyers, doctors, businessmen and academics, along with several former Kadafi ministers or diplomats.

Mustafa Gheriani, a rebel spokesman who earned a master's degree from Western Michigan University, says Al Qaeda will try to take advantage of the chaos in Libya. Western-led airstrikes and missile attacks against Kadafi's forces are a bulwark against extremist overtures to young Libyan men, he said recently.

But that could change if U.S. and Western support fades, Gheriani warned. Rebel fighters might be persuaded that radical Islam is the best way to overthrow Kadafi, he said.

"They would align with the devil to get rid of this guy," Gheriani said.

Reasons for concern? Of course. Alarm? Not for now.

Jason Pack:

In any case, the Islamists, like the army defectors, don't comprise the bulk of rebel fighters. The most prevalent form of unit organization is ad hoc: a few brothers or friends sharing gas money, a few rifles, a rebel flag, and a pickup truck. Occasionally, whole villages or subsections of tribes have joined the rebels as a semicoherent unit. Yet even then, village headmen or tribal sheikhs do not appear to be leading or orchestrating the fighting. In fact, military leadership at the front, inasmuch as it exists, is entirely spontaneous. In late March, for example, the top military brass in Benghazi strongly advised the fighters not to push past Ajdabiya when it was retaken due to coalition airstrikes. The fighters did not obey orders and were quickly routed by Qaddafi's counterattacks.

Indeed, it is nearly impossible to imagine that the revolutionaries can defeat Qaddafi by military force alone. Lacking an effective chain of command or training, they have not yet learned to employ guerrilla tactics, siege tactics, or any formal coordinated military maneuvers. Arming the rebels with more sophisticated munitions will not help them congeal into a coherent fighting force. Training them might help, but it would take too much time.

The best hope for the rebels is that the Qaddafi regime crumbles from within -- a distinct possibility as key defections, daily hardships in Tripoli under international siege, and Qaddafi's diplomatic blunders all progressively demoralize his supporters. So far, coalition air power has been crucial in keeping the rebels alive long enough that Qaddafi's forces may self-destruct. But merely preventing slaughter and a rebel defeat is not enough. Now that the no-fly zone has fulfilled its key humanitarian and strategic mission, it is time for the coalition to shift gears. As Oliver Miles, former British ambassador to Libya, puts it, "Precisely because it is unlikely that the rebels will be able to militarily defeat Qaddafi even with increased coalition air support or more arms, Western and Arab countries can best help the rebels through politics, diplomacy, and propaganda -- all of which, if employed with savoir-faire, may tip the scales away from Qaddafi."

Helping the rebel political leaders effectively requires understanding who they are and how the Libyan uprising began. [...]

Exactly.

[...]

Youth activists were quickly joined by lawyers, judges, local administrators, and technocrats who opposed Qaddafi's repressive response to the protests. Many of these individuals were previously government officials or consultants who had become increasingly disillusioned by the failure of Libyan détente with the West to produce genuine political reform at home.

On Feb. 27, the most prominent among them banded together in Benghazi to form the Transitional National Council (TNC). The TNC has gained legitimacy as grassroots committees have sprung up across eastern Libya to select local town notables, who have in turn endorsed the TNC.

(Ironically, this practice is akin to Qaddafi's ideology of "direct democracy" with its imperative for the creation of local Basic People's Congresses.) Thus, what began as a youth revolt has been taken over by reformist regime technocrats and defected diplomats, who are the only groups capable of representing the rebels to the outside world.

The TNC top leadership has extensive experience interfacing with Western governments and the international business community. The rest of its members were deliberately chosen to represent the various major factions of the opposition.

It includes relatives of the former Libyan king, human rights lawyers, former Qaddafi intimates upset with the slow pace of reforms, conservative Muslims who are against al Qaeda, pro-Western businessmen, technocrats with American Ph.D.s, and representatives for women and youth.[...]

Revolutions eat their young. Ask Alexander Kerensky, say. Look to the French Reign of Terror.

Potential problems? Various:

One potential shortcoming of the rebels' current political structure is its heavily Cyrenaican, Arab, and elite makeup. If the rebels succeed in overthrowing Qaddafi, they will face enormous pressure to rapidly incorporate new players from western Libya, the Libyan diaspora, and the Berber, Tuareg, and Tabu ethnic groups. Simultaneously, they would have to focus on the social and economic issues that concern the youth and the unemployed, not merely those of reformist technocrats. Most crucially, after a hypothetical rebel victory the predominantly Cyrenaican fighters will no doubt clamor for their place in the sun as the saviors of Libya. It would be highly inappropriate for outside powers to attempt to micromanage or pre-empt the delicate evolution of the representative structure for the new Libya.

Exactly. We don't want to own the Pottery Barn of Libya. We can't try another Paul Bremer. The last one didn't work out too well.

We're still in Afghanistan, still mired, and things are getting worse.

Two hours ago in Iraq: "Iraqi officials: 6 killed in bombings, assassinations in Baghdad."

Today: Hardline Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr rallied thousands of followers Saturday.

Their message: United States civilians as well as troops must leave by the end of the year.

Hardline Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr mobilized tens of thousands of followers Saturday, using the anniversary of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime to issue a warning to American civilians as well as soldiers that it was time to go.

[...]

Far from Baghdad's Firdous Square, where US Marines helped Iraqis bring down Saddam Hussein’s statue in 2003, the cleric’s supporters marched from Sadr City to Mustansiriya Square, near a major university in northeast Baghdad.

Black smoke rose from the square from the burning American flags, and protesters set up a grisly display of Americans in business suits being burned in cages.

“We are time bombs,” the protesters chanted between a choreographed wave of young men dressed in the satin colors of Iraq's flag.

[...]

Asked whether that meant that the Sadrists were opposed to even a US diplomatic mission here if US forces were gone, several officials said the Sadr movement opposed any expansion of the US civilian presence here and considered the embassy the headquarters for the occupation.

US Ambassador James Jeffrey told reporters April 1 that the embassy, already the biggest in the world, planned to double in size next year to 18,000 personnel. That would include security, support staff, and diplomatic offices outside of Baghdad.

Sadr ended his message by calling on all his followers who could to register at the political party’s offices to engage in an open-ended protest until the Americans left.

Most Iraqis are deeply cynical about US intentions here.

“Iraq is a very rich country,” said Sabah al-Amiri, a government employee who came out to the protest. “Logically, I can’t believe the Americans will leave and ignore these interests easily.”

In the complex political climate here, the countdown for US forces to exit Iraq has placed the United States in a bind.

How many more countries can we afford to occupy? How many more Muslim lands do we want to invade?

Libya? Pack:

Amid reports that personality clashes may be enveloping the top TNC leadership, I remain reasonably hopeful that the TNC will be able to successfully incorporate most elements of Libyan society and that political infighting and factionalism can be kept to normal levels. Libya is an artificial colonial creation. But unlike other colonial entities, it lacks the social fissures and historical grievances that have led to sectarian or ethnic violence in places like Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The idea that a civil war might ensue between east and west after Qaddafi's departure is overly pessimistic.

Paradoxically, as Qaddafi repressed so many of Libya's social groups other than the Qadhadhfa and Magarha tribes, it is foreseeable that all the former out-groups will be able to strike a rough consensus about building a post-Qaddafi Libya.

The rebels appear to be hard at work in paving the way for this new Libya.

They insist that they have organized secret cells in the country's west, a plausible claim given Qaddafi's evident unpopularity in towns like Misrata, Zintan, and Zawiyah. And even though tribesmen of the Magarha and Qadhadhfa will probably stick by Qaddafi and fight on until the end, other more urban and technocratic pillars of the regime are likely to wither if the major Arab and Western players give the TNC more effective support.
But that support should primarily be political, not military in nature. The Western and Arab allies are beginning to recognize this, yet more sophisticated and high-level efforts are urgently needed. Prominent defectors like Moussa Koussa should be harnessed for all their propaganda value and asked to speak out against Qaddafi on Arabic satellite TV. Additionally, the coalition could help rebel leaders voice their cause to their potential comrades in Qaddafi-controlled western Libya. Qatar has already set up a satellite channel for the rebels; more countries should give them airtime, funding, and more diplomatic support. French President Nicolas Sarkozy -- who has recognized the TNC as the legitimate government of all of Libya and seems the most politically committed of Western leaders -- could extend another invitation to Mahmoud Jibril, the rebels' de facto foreign minister, this time to the Élysée Palace, granting him international prestige and a platform to ask for more specific assistance.

Moral power, not firepower, is what will ultimately defeat Qaddafi. The fighters are the heart and soul of the Libyan revolt, but they will never be able to lead it. Savvy diplomatic support and a little bit of good fortune could very well produce a tipping point over the next weeks or months. Until then, the international community must not take its eye off the ball as other crises emerge in the Arab world or the situation on the ground appears to become stalemated. Libya's future depends on it.

If we "Regime Kill," we're in the same damn place we are in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And Obama has a mini-AUMF of his own from his Office Of Legal Counsel. Obama has accomplished little in dismantling the legal regime of George W. Bush, even if John Yoo isn't around to advocate some nice boy's testicle-crushing.

Moreover, Libya is awash in arms. Peter Bouckaert warns:

[...]
Libyans are extraordinarily welcoming people, and they don't seem to mind when I poke my nose into the backs of the battle-ready pickups at the front line and snap some pictures of the weapons and munitions the rebels are carrying. Even at the military bases and weapon depots under rebel control, a few words of introduction normally led to a warm welcome and a tour of the facilities. That is, if there is anyone guarding the facilities in the first place. When I went to the main military weapons depot in the contested town of Ajdabiya on March 27, just after Qaddafi's forces had fled the city and rebels were still busy celebrating their victory, I had the entire base and its 35 munitions bunkers, stacked to the rafters with weapons, all to myself for several hours.

What we found was shocking. Qaddafi's weapon stocks far exceeded what we saw in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein; some of the weapons, such as the surface-to-air missiles capable of downing a civilian aircraft, now floating around freely in eastern Libya are giving security officials around the world sleepless nights. After I began circulating some of the pictures I had taken, I began getting anxious calls from arms-control officials, asking for more details about what I had seen. There is good cause for U.S. and European officials to worry -- there are rocket-propelled grenades, surface-to-air missiles, and artillery shells full of explosives that can easily be refashioned into car bombs.

[...]

Among the weapons of greatest concern to Western security officials is the SA-7 "Grail" surface-to-air missile, a Soviet-designed, heat-seeking, shoulder-launched missile designed specifically to shoot down low-flying planes. The SA-7 -- basically a long green tube with the missile inside -- belongs to a family of weapons known as man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADS. Although these weapons date back to the 1960s, they remain extremely deadly, especially against civilian planes without defense systems. Two SA-7 missiles were fired by al Qaeda operatives at an Israeli chartered Boeing 757 during a November 2002 attack in Mombasa, Kenya, narrowly missing the plane. During the past month and a half, we have seen literally hundreds of SA-7s floating around freely in eastern Libya. The SA-7s require assembly with a trigger mechanism and a battery cooling pack attached to the launch tube, and many of the launch tubes we saw were unassembled. However, some of the SA-7s had been fully assembled.

While the SA-7s have caused the greatest alarm among Western security experts, the rest of Qaddafi's extensive arsenal is nothing to laugh at. We found many varieties of guided anti-tank missiles, including the advanced laser-guided AT-14 "Spriggan" (known in Russia as the Kornet), which was reportedly used by Gaza-based militants one day ago in an attack on a school bus in southern Israel that critically injured a teenager. The Spriggan also served as one of Hezbollah's most effective weapons against Israeli tanks in the 2006 Lebanon war. And there are tens of thousands of some of the nastiest anti-tank mines in the world in Qaddafi's warehouses -- nasty because they are made mostly out of hard-to-detect plastic and can be armed with an anti-lifting device that causes the mine to explode when attempts are made to remove it from the ground.
We also found thousands of 122-mm "Grad" rockets, which are used in a launcher that fires salvos of 40 rockets at one go and are capable of sowing destruction up to 40 miles away. The Grads were the Afghan mujahideen's weapon of choice during their deadly civil war in the early 1990s following the Soviet withdrawal -- they used these rockets to reduce Kabul to rubble. Eastern Libya is also home to tens of thousands of rocket-propelled grenade launchers, which are powerful enough to blow up a tank or punch a hole in a concrete building. We found tens of thousands of artillery, tank, and howitzer shells of various calibers, all loaded with high explosives easily convertible into car or roadside bombs. We even found HESH (high-explosive squash-head) shells, which are filled with plastic explosives -- a dangerous tool in the hands of terrorist groups.

The dangers we saw were not limited to the unguarded stockpiles of weapons. There are vast amounts of abandoned munitions and unexploded ordnance everywhere on the constantly shifting front lines along the coastal highway in eastern Libya. The recent airstrikes by international coalition forces on Libyan government military targets have added to the battlefield debris, leaving behind destroyed ammunition, vehicles, tanks, Grad launchers, and artillery pieces, often still loaded with munitions. Families, often with their children, have been visiting some of these strike sites, taking away potentially deadly mementos. Qaddafi's forces have added to the dangers by laying new minefields -- we discovered two such fields, containing dozens of anti-tank and anti-personnel mines, in Ajdabiya after pro-regime forces withdrew. Who knows how many more such minefields have been laid, only to be discovered when someone steps or drives over these concealed hazards?

Libya is a minefield.

If America haplessly wanders into it, we'll have more d ead friends, brothers, sisters, parents, children.

None of us, Libyans, Americans, Europeans, Africans, anyone, should have to face that.

Funerals are not fun.

Let's not have more than we need to, and let's not say we did.

The White House is reportedly struggling to form policy.

We have Marines Gearing Up For Deployment Off Libyan Coast.

There was no likely bloodbath prevented in Benghazi.

Alan J. Kuperman proposes Five Principles:

•Do not intervene on humanitarian grounds in ways that benefit rebels unless the state's retaliation is grossly disproportionate. This policy discourages both rebel provocation and state reprisals against civilians. In Libya, we should intervene no further unless Gadhafi's forces massacre civilians.

•Deliver purely humanitarian aid — food, water, sanitation, shelter, medical care — in ways that minimize the benefit to rebels. The United States admirably is delivering supplies to Libyan refugees across the border in Tunisia and Egypt. But we should ensure that relief sites do not become rear bases for Libya's rebels. If local governments are unwilling to patrol the refugee encampments, we should organize multilateral policing.

•Expend substantial resources to persuade states to address the legitimate grievances of non-violent domestic groups. Ironically, Obama has applied little pressure on Yemen and Bahrain, which slaughtered peaceful protesters, but he bombed Libya for responding to armed rebels. This sends precisely the wrong message to the Arab street: If you want U.S. support, resort to violence.

•Do not coerce regime change or surrender of sovereignty unless also taking precautions against violent backlash — such as golden parachutes, power-sharing, or preventive military intervention. If the White House insists on Gadhafi's departure, it should guarantee asylum for him and a continuing share of power for his senior officials and allied tribes. Simply demanding regime change could drive him to genocidal violence as a last resort, while the international community lacks the will for a preventive deployment of ground troops.

•Do not falsely claim "humanitarian" grounds for intervention driven by other objectives. If Obama is intervening because of Gadhafi's past misdeeds, rather than recent humanitarian offenses, he should say so publicly. Otherwise, the White House encourages further rebellions that aim to lure U.S. intervention by provoking retaliation.

Let's follow those. America needs to break its addiction to war. There is little enthusiasm in America for another war. The rebels are confused at best.

Jacob Zuma says that Gaddafi has accepted the African Union cease-fire proposal. Zuma claims optimism.

[...]

Zuma, who led a five-strong African Union (AU) delegation to the Libyan capital, said he was optimistic that a settlement would be reached. The delegation, minus Zuma, who was leaving Libya on Sunday night, will travel to Benghazi today to present the plan to the rebel opposition leadership.
Referring to officials of the regime, Zuma told reporters inside Gaddafi's compound at Bab al-Azizia that "the brother leader delegation has accepted the roadmap as presented by us". He also called on Nato to stop airstrikes on Libyan military targets "to give a ceasefire a chance".

Asked about the prospects of a deal, Zuma said: "I am optimistic."

The AU proposal is thought to centre on a negotiated political settlement between the Libyan regime and the rebel opposition, but no details have been disclosed.

However, opposition forces insist they will not consider any political deal that involves Gaddafi or members of his family retaining power.

Proposals put forward by the regime so far have included Gaddafi or one of his sons overseeing political change in Libya. It is far from clear how this gap could be bridged.

"The delegation ... will be proceeding to meet the other party, to talk to everybody and present a political solution to the problem in Libya," Zuma said.

"We also ... are making a call on Nato to cease the bombings to allow and to give a ceasefire a chance."

The AU delegation, consisting of the presidents of South Africa, Congo-Brazzaville, Mali, and Mauritania, plus Uganda's foreign minister, landed at Tripoli's Mitiga airport after Nato gave permission for their aircraft to enter Libyan airspace. The planes were the first to land in Tripoli since the international coalition imposed a no-fly zone over the country more than two weeks ago.

Should the U.S. refuse all military options? No. Should we remove all air assets and send them home? No. We need leverage. There's no place for romanticization in peace and war. We need to be hard-headed, and sometimes people need to be killed so that others may live. Sometimes the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

There may be a role for military aid, overt or covert. There are, as President Obama has stated, many who can do that. There may be a role for future military involvement by American air power in Libya.

There are many possibilities. I am not a seer. I don't know what will happen. I don't know for sure what's best. The way to fewer deaths and less suffering is often unclear.

But, first: do no harm. Should the argument by OMAC Cordesman for striking hard to kill the head of the snake be listened to? Yes. Arguments should always be weighed and considered.

All I am saying, for now, is simply: let's give peace a chance.

Just give it a chance.

We can say:

[War] is instinctive. But the instinct can be fought. We're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands! But we can stop it. We can admit that we're killers ... but we're not going to kill today. That's all it takes! Knowing that we're not going to kill - today!

We can always bomb the crap out of Libyans next week. They'll still be there. Tomorrow we may be "needing" to bomb rebels.

Our policy has been proclaimed to be:

[...] that Muammar Qaddafi is no longer fit to lead and should leave power. And we are obviously pursuing a number of different means, non-lethal means, non-military means, to help bring that about, to pressure Qaddafi, to isolate him, and to create an environment where the Libyan people hopefully will be able to create their own future with the leaders that they deserve and that they pick. And that's the endgame that we envision.

Let's try not killing today, and giving peace a chance.

Cross-posted at Obsidian Wings.

UPDATE, April 11th, 2011, 1:08 p.m. PST: Just lost another $50 subscriber moments ago, and keep losing subscribers as I'm on fewer and fewer blogrolls, get fewer and fewer links, and I'm rather hoping not to have to do another fund-raising post again, but... links appreciated, blogrolling appreciated, subscriptions unbelievably appreciated -- see left sidebar for how to subscribe or donate. Thanks!

Also, C. J. Chivers gives a terrific example of how Libya being awash in weapons results in absurd adaptions with danger to all -- in this case, the mutating by rebels of air-to-ground rocket pods onto pickup trucks.

Imagine this war lasting a couple of years, or even six months, and more and more of Qaddafi's weapons stores being grabbed up, a la Iraq, and used by both sides (which may yet splinter into further factions, keep in mind! And then who are we fighting for, exactly?)! Libyan Road Warrior, Redux. And More Photographs From Eastern Libya.

POTTERY BARN LIBYA, PART 1

2011-04-10T17:32:00.010-07:00

POTTERY BARN LIBYA, PART 1

What is to be done?

Colin Powell famously said of Iraq, quoting Tom Friedman (who got it wrong)

'You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people,' he told the president. 'You will own all their hopes, aspirations, and problems. You'll own it all.' Privately, Powell and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage called this the Pottery Barn rule: You break it, you own it.

Does anyone want to buy Libya, and own it for the next decade?

That's what's on order.

That, or negotiating a way out of this thing.

The Libyan rebels are a mess. April 3rd:

[...] The rebel army’s nominal leader, Abdul Fattah Younes, a former interior minister and friend of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi whom many rebel leaders distrusted, could offer little explanation for the recent military stumbles, two people with knowledge of the meetings said.

Making matters worse, the men could hardly stand one another. They included Khalifa Heftar, a former general who returned recently from exile in the United States and appointed himself as the rebel field commander, the movement’s leaders said, and Omar el-Hariri, a former political prisoner who occupied the largely ceremonial role of defense minister.

“They behaved like children,” said Fathi Baja, a political science professor who heads the rebel political committee.

Little was accomplished in the meetings, the participants said. When they concluded late last week, Mr. Younes was still the head of the army and Mr. Hariri remained as the defense minister. Only Mr. Heftar, who reportedly refused to work with Mr. Younes, was forced out. On Sunday, though, in a sign that divisions persisted, Mr. Heftar’s son said his father was still an army leader. [....]

On March 29th, Obama's press secretary, Jay Carney told the press gaggle on AF1 that, in essence, he didn't know who the hell these people are, but let's hope for the best:

[...] Q One of NATO’s military leaders testified on the Hill today that there had been signs of al Qaeda seen amongst Libyan rebels. How does that affect the White House thinking on engaging with them?

MR. CARNEY: Well, what I would say is that, as you know, we spend a lot of time looking at the opposition and now meeting with opposition leaders. And the folks who are in London, the people that -- and the leader that Secretary Clinton met in Paris, have made clear what their principles are and we believe that they’re meritorious -- their principles. I think they had a statement today that had some very good language in it that we support.

But that doesn’t mean, obviously, that everyone who opposes Moammar Qaddafi I Libya is someone whose ideals we can support. But beyond that, I don't have any detail about individual members of the opposition.

Q Does it concern you about how much you don't know about the opposition?

MR. CARNEY: Well, what I would say is that we have met with opposition leaders and we're working with them, but as the President said, and as the opposition leaders who put out a statement today said, it’s up to them to decide who their leaders are going to be.

But we do know something of who they are right now, as Jason Packer explains:

If you let strangers know that you research Libya for a living, there seems to be only one question on their minds: "Who are the Libyan rebels?" I've been asked it at cocktail parties, on ski lifts, at academic seminars, and even by Western journalists in Benghazi who have developed the flattering habit of Skype-ing me at odd hours. Americans seem captivated by this question, perhaps because they have heard senior U.S. officials from Defense Secretary Robert Gates to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to various Republican congressmen proclaim that they do not yet know enough about who the rebels are. I do not take such statements at face value. U.S. statesmen know quite well who the rebels are -- but pretend otherwise to obscure the fact that the United States has yet to formulate a comprehensive policy toward them.

The rebels consist of two distinct groups: the fighters and the political leadership.

Thus it always is. In Libya:

First, the fighters. [...] These fighters are a ragtag bunch of men of all ages and degrees of military training riding pickup trucks around the eastern coastal desert. You have probably seen pictures of them triumphantly showing the "V"-for-victory hand signal as they move westward and fleeing in unorganized columns when they retreat eastward. What you may not have realized (unless you too get woken up by those random Skype calls from Ajdabiya) is that the vast majority of these fighters have never actually arrived at the front and are not contributing to the rebels' effective fighting strength. Such organization as there is tends to be on the unit level only, and this does not facilitate the formation of an effective line of battle.

The units with the highest degree of organization are former Libyan army battalions that were stationed in eastern Libya, also known as Cyrenaica. These units, including those led by former Interior Minister Abdul Fattah Younis al-Abidi, defected en masse in mid-February, retaining their organizational structure. Bizarrely, these units are largely absent from the current fighting. It is unclear why.

I don't think so. It's likely because they don't want to be slaughtered. Which tends to happen if you join "units" like these: C. J. "Chris" Chivers, April 6th, Libyan Rebels Don’t Really Add Up to an Army :

BENGHAZI, Libya — Late Monday afternoon, as Libyan rebels prepared another desperate attack on the eastern oil town of Brega, a young rebel raised his rocket-propelled grenade as if to fire. The town’s university, shimmering in the distance, was far beyond his weapon’s maximum range. An older rebel urged him to hold fire, telling him the weapon’s back-blast could do little more than reveal their position and draw a mortar attack.

The younger rebel almost spat with disgust. “I have been fighting for 37 days!” he shouted. “Nobody can tell me what to do!”

The outburst midfight — and the ensuing argument between a determined young man who seemed to have almost no understanding of modern war and an older man who wisely counseled caution — underscored a fact that is self-evident almost everywhere on Libya’s eastern front. The rebel military, as it sometimes called, is not really a military at all.

What is visible in battle here is less an organized force than the martial manifestation of a popular uprising.

With throaty cries and weapons they have looted and scrounged, the rebels gather along Libya’s main coastal highway each day, ready to fight. Many of them are brave, even extraordinarily so. Some of them are selfless, swept along by a sense of common purpose and brotherhood that accompanies their revolution.

“Freedom!” they shout, as they pair a yearning to unseat Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi with appeals for divine help. “God is great!”

But by almost all measures by which a military might be assessed, they are a hapless bunch. They have almost no communication equipment. There is no visible officer or noncommissioned officer corps. Their weapons are a mishmash of hastily acquired arms, which few of them know how to use.

With only weeks of fighting experience, they lack an understanding of the fundamentals of offensive and defensive combat, or how to organize fire support. They fire recklessly and sometimes accidentally. Most of them have yet to learn how to hold seized ground, or to protect themselves from their battlefield’s persistent rocket and mortar fire, which might be done by simply digging in.

Prone to panic, they often answer to little more than their mood, which changes in a flash. When their morale spikes upward, their attacks tend to be painfully and bloodily frontal — little more than racing columns down the highway, through a gantlet of the Qaddafi forces’ rocket and mortar fire, face forward into the loyalists’ machine guns.

And their numbers are small. Officials in the rebels’ transitional government have provided many different figures, sometimes saying 10,000 or men are under arms in their ranks.

But a small fraction actually appear at the front each day — often only a few hundred. And some of the men appear without guns, or with aged guns that have no magazines or ammunition.

Join these brave but untrained souls, see Benghazi, and die.

Instead, Libya’s rebels have entered the grim work of waging war almost spontaneously, and would need time, training, equipment and leadership to develop into even a reasonably competent force.

For now, their ranks have three elements: a so-called “special forces” detachment of former soldiers and police officers; a main column organized into self-led cells of fighters built around a few weapons and pickup trucks; and a sort of home guard that is undergoing quick training to man checkpoints and serve as a civil defense force.

There is also the “shabab,” milling groups of youngsters who arrive at the front each day hoping to pitch in, but with scant idea of how. Officially, the shabab are not part of the fight.

The rebels insist the size of the special forces detachment is large, but on the battlefield it feels anything but. Colonel Ahmed Bani, the military’s top spokesman, suggested that some of these soldiers are being held back for now.

“Our army, the professionals, are still waiting for armaments,” he said. “Only some of them are at the front lines supporting the young men.”

The largest visible body of rebels each day consists of groups of self-led fighters in cars and pickup trucks, who move up and down the highway to Brega, where the Qaddafi forces have plugged the road to Tripoli and taken custody of essential oil infrastructure — a key to the economic fortune of any Libyan government.

These men are a Libyan melting pot, a cross-section of professions and backgrounds. Businessmen and engineers fight beside students and laborers.

A few are Libyans from abroad who hurried home in February or March, answering an urge to topple Qaddafi and remake Libya on less autocratic lines.

They lack structure and they know it. Each contingent fights largely according to its own whim. Sometimes no one knows who is in charge.

“We are without command,” said Ibrahim Mohammed, 32, who said he had served as a sergeant in the Libyan army. “Too many without command. And this is the problem.”

His fighting cell consisted of six men, two pickup trucks, a rebel flag, a heavy machine gun, a few Kalashnikov rifles, a Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifle and a surface-to-air missile. The six men — excepting two who are related — had not known each other before the uprising began.

Now they lived in the desert, roaming a single road, dodging mortar and rocket fire. Their truck beds contained blankets, a tarp, ammunition, bottled water and ammunition crates packed with fresh vegetables and canned food.

The third group is made up of more recent volunteers, who turn up each morning for training at a military base at the edge of Benghazi.

Mindful that the rebels lack weapons and trainers, and that sending them into battle against Colonel Qaddafi’s conventional military will get too many of them killed, the rebels’ military leadership is training them for the more limited duties of civil defense.

They are brave. They are men who give their lives like Mahdi Ziu, a "paunchy man, sedentary and diabetic, with thinning hair and glasses and a resigned expression" who "worked as a middle manager at the Arabian Gulf Oil Company," who blew himself up to breach the Katibah (read the whole thing):

[...]

On Sunday morning, with the sound of gunfire in the background, Ziu slipped a last will and testament under the door of a friend. He then returned to his apartment and asked the neighbors to help him load a number of full gas canisters into his black Kia sedan, parked just outside the house. They asked why, and he told them the canisters were leaking; he needed to get them fixed. His brother, Salem Ziu, told me that he thinks Mahdi used a small patch of TNT, the kind Libyans use to kill fish, as a detonator. No one really knows.

What is certain is that about 1:30 p.m., Ziu drove his car until it was facing the Katiba’s main gate, near the police station where the first protests began five days earlier. The area in front of him was clear, a killing zone abandoned by all but the most reckless. Rebels fired from the shelter of rooftops and doorways, and snipers at the Katiba fired occasional shots down on the figures darting in the streets. Ziu put his foot down on the accelerator. The guards opened fire, but too late. The speeding car struck the gate and exploded, sending up a fireball that was captured on a cellphone video by a protester a few hundred yards away. The blast blew a hole in the wall, killing a number of guards and sending the rest retreating into the Katiba. Within hours, it would fall to the protesters.

The remains of Ziu’s charred and crumpled car now lie by the open gate of the Katiba. Above and around it are tributes to him in looping spray-painted letters: “Mahdi the Hero.” “Mahdi, who liberated the Katiba.”

The Katiba fell, and defeated the Khamis Brigade, led by the seventh and youngest son of Muammar al-Gaddafi, Khamis.

Stronghold fall, weapons, APCs, tanks and arms are captured, men die, women are raped.

This is war.

Reports Emerging Of Rape By Libyan Soldiers.

Women, children, the elderly, fell and are killed.

The rebels are in disarray at best. Chris Chivers:

If ever there was an indicator of a rebel force in disarray, it was this: a lone Libyan rebel in uniform on the highway leading away from the battlefield, unarmed, almost dazed, separated from his unit, trying to hitch a ride.

His name was Abdullah Insaiti, and until Feb. 17, when the uprising in Libya began, he had been a sergeant in the Libyan Army. A career soldier, now 33, he had served almost 13 years as an infantryman, specializing in antitank rockets and heavy machine guns. In February, he and the rest of his unit defected from their base in Benghazi and joined the rebels.

The campaign had its dizzying highs and terrifying lows. And now, this afternoon, he appeared on the highway, staggering home.

His unit, he said, had been scattered under fire in the fighting in recent weeks. He said he believed that eight of his friends had died, but offered that the number was probably much higher than that. Some, he said, had been blown apart in the shelling they had been subjected to out in the desert, where the forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi have been pounding the rebels with all manner of fire.

Asked if he knew where his unit was now, Mr. Insaiti gave a perplexed shrug. From inside his olive-drab coat he produced the two-way, hand-held radio he had once used to communicate with his fellow fighters. Its battery was long dead.

“I don’t know anything more about them,” he said of his friends. [....]

Meanwhile NATO is accidentally bombing the rebels. Sh*t happens.

NATO acknowledged on Friday that its warplanes hit a rebel convoy the day before, killing at least four people, and after some confusion eventually expressed regret over the accident.

Oops.

[...] On Thursday, General Younes said he could not understand how NATO could continue to confuse the rebels and the loyalist forces, particularly in this latest mix-up. “It is not possible to make a mistake with 20 tanks advancing on a large patch of desert land,” he said. “We hope that such a mistake will not be repeated.”

[...]

On Thursday, General Younes said he had repeatedly warned NATO about the deployment of tanks to the front lines. “We informed them at the time the tanks were leaving Benghazi, and when they arrived at Ajdabiya,” he said. “We informed them that in the early morning they would be advancing on Brega. We gave them all the information concerning their number, and that they would be carried on tank transports, and their direction.”

How is this working out for the rebels? Not so well.

[...]

Despite General Younes’s contention that his fighters had recovered from the NATO attack and regained ground, a rebel-held checkpoint on the western edge of Ajdabiya was shelled by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces around 2:45 p.m. on Friday, suggesting they were still within striking distance of the city.

A small contingent of rebels gathered at a checkpoint there on Friday, passing the hours peering nervously westward in anticipation of another advance by pro-Qaddafi forces. The rebels were an ill-disciplined sight, sometimes firing long bursts of machine-gun fire high in the air, and at one point devolving into a long rebel-on-rebel shoving-and-shouting match.

The immediate question was no longer whether the Forces of Free Libya, as they are called, would be able to retake the oil town of Brega, from which they were ousted this week. It was whether they could hold on to Ajdabiya, which is the next city to the northeast and sits at the strategic junction of the major roads to the north, to Benghazi, and the east, to Tobruk and the Egyptian border.
By morning, pro-Qaddafi forces had moved close enough to Ajdabiya to ambush vehicles on the road less than five miles from the western checkpoint. And by midafternoon, the checkpoint was subjected to enemy fire, either artillery or rockets.

The contingent of rebels and milling civilians there, perhaps 200 people in all, fled en masse when a barrage of at least six high-explosive rounds burst beside them. As the smoke and dust rose, the rebels ran, many climbing into other people’s cars and trucks as they sped past.

Within minutes, the checkpoint was abandoned. The entrance to the city was unguarded.

Since the Qaddafi forces withdrew from the city last month under NATO air pressure, the rebels have controlled the city’s entrance. But they have yet to fortify the position in any way, or to move communications equipment to it, or to dig trenches for their ever accumulating waste, or to provide it and its environs with any sense of order.

And by late Friday afternoon, at least for a short time, they had abandoned it outright.

Whether the loyalists want to recapture Ajdabiya or have been creating a buffer between rebel-held territory and the oil infrastructure at Brega and Ras Lanuf was not known. But there seemed to be no armed rebel presence between the pro-Qaddafi vanguard and Ajdabiya, a city largely deserted by its population and available for the taking from the jittery rebels. [....]

Not so well at all.

What's the latest genius idea of the rebels? Earlier from that story of the 8th, and many other reports:

[...] Rebels in the hotly contested area between Brega and Ajdabiya in eastern Libya said that henceforth they would paint the tops of their vehicles pink to help avoid future friendly fire accidents.

Because, you know, in Libya, the government can't get pink paint.

As the conflict has evolved, however, Colonel Qaddafi’s forces have proved adept at mixing in with civilian populations and mimicking the rebels’ vehicles, to sow confusion and deter allied airstrikes.

No sh*t. They're professionals. Crappy, but professionals.

They adapt: Changing Libyan Tactics Pose Problems for NATO.

[...] But American intelligence reports from Libya say that the Qaddafi forces are now hiding their troops and weaponry among urban populations and traveling in pickup trucks and S.U.V.’s rather than military vehicles, making them extremely difficult targets.

Hello, Mogidishu. Quaddafi fought against pick-up trucks in Chad, remember, and he knows how to fight with them and that you can lose to Toyotas.

Back to Steven Erlanger at the Times:

“The military capabilities available to Qaddafi remain quite substantial,” said a senior Pentagon official who watches Libya. “What this shows is that you cannot guarantee tipping the balance of ground operations only with bombs and missiles from the air.”

[...]

NATO officials, who just took over responsibility for the air campaign from the United States, deny that their bureaucracy is somehow limiting the campaign. “No country is vetoing this target or that one; it’s not like Kosovo,” where in 1999 some countries objected to certain bombing targets, said a senior NATO official, asking anonymity in accordance with diplomatic practice.
“The military command is doing what it wants to do,” he said.

[...]

“NATO is not the problem,” the senior NATO official said. “The Qaddafi forces have learned and have adapted. They’re using human shields, so it’s difficult to attack them from the air.” While many Western officials have accused the Qaddafi forces of using human shields, they have yet to produce explicit evidence. But they generally mean that the troops take shelter, with their armor, in civilian areas.

The harder question is how NATO will respond to the changed tactics of the Qaddafi forces, which now seem to have achieved a stalemate against the combination of Western air power and the ragtag opposition army.

What is to be done?

[...]

The United States has had C.I.A. agents on the ground with the rebels in eastern Libya for some time, and there are unconfirmed reports that they may be helping to train the rebel army’s raw recruits. Even so, forming a real army that can oust Colonel Qaddafi may take many months, and the coalition is unlikely to be that patient.

That is one reason that allied governments, including the United States and Britain, are urging defections from the Qaddafi circle and hoping that he will be removed from inside. No official, of course, is willing to talk about any covert mission to remove the colonel, except to say that “regime change” is not authorized by the United Nations.

And that is why Britain, Turkey and the United States are all exploring the possibilities of a negotiated solution to the conflict, provided Colonel Qaddafi and his sons relinquish power.

François Heisbourg, a military policy expert at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris, said, “Given where we are, any deal that removes Colonel Qaddafi from the scene is a deal we should take.”

As for the current air war, NATO is especially sensitive to the criticism that came most scathingly from the leader of the Libyan opposition forces, Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes. He said in Benghazi late Tuesday that “NATO blesses us every now and then with a bombardment here and there, and is letting the people of Misurata die every day.”

We need to stop the blessings.

This is a civil war. It is, for now, a stalemate.

What are the options? I'll explain in my next post: POTTERY BARN LIBYA, PT 2: ANTHONY CORDESMAN, ONE MAN ARMY, OR GIVE PEACE A CHANCE?.

Cross-posted on Obsidian Wings.

ADDENDUM, 4.11.11, 1:27 p.m.: Thanks hugely, Susie Madrak!

4:14 p.m: Thanks, Aziz Poonwalla at Talk Islam!

HELLO, GOODBYE: YOU SAY GOODBYE, I SAY GO TO HELL, GLENN BECK

2011-04-06T12:03:00.007-07:00

HELLO, GOODBYE: YOU SAY GOODBYE, I SAY GO TO HELL, GLENN BECK

Glenn Beck is leaving Fox News, but not, I'm afraid, leaving us alone.

FOX NEWS AND MERCURY RADIO ARTS ANNOUNCE NEW AGREEMENT

(New York, NY) Fox News and Mercury Radio Arts, Glenn Beck’s production company, are proud to announce that they will work together to develop and produce a variety of television projects for air on the Fox News Channel as well as content for other platforms including Fox News’ digital properties. Glenn intends to transition off of his daily program, the third highest rated in all of cable news, later this year.

Speculation is, of course, rampant.

[...] Two of the options Mr. Beck has contemplated, according to people who have spoken about it with him, are a partial or wholesale takeover of a cable channel, or an expansion of his subscription video service on the Web.

Reports this week that Joel Cheatwood, a senior Fox News executive, would soon join Mr. Beck’s growing media company, Mercury Radio Arts, were the latest indication that Mr. Beck intended to leave Fox, a unit of the News Corporation, when his contract expired at the end of this year.

Notably, Mr. Beck’s company has been staffing up — making Web shows, some of which have little or nothing to do with Mr. Beck, and charging a monthly subscription for access to the shows.

He's not going away. Frankly, this is part of the not-that-slow collapse of the whole "tv network" paradigm that the internet is forcing. "TV' isn't going away as fast as traditional publishing, which is going away much faster than the traditional music distribution business, but it's circling the drain rapidly with streaming and direct deals for iPads and tablets and phones and all sorts of streaming.

Below, the worst of Glenn Beck, but why he's not stupid about media. Laugh and weep.

By the end of this year, an estimated 2 million households in the U.S. will have abandoned TV for the Web,cutting the cord with their cable companies. This estimate comes from Convergence Consulting Group, a Toronto-based research firm with a new report on The Battle for the American Couch Potato. That 2 million is up from the 1.6 million it was estimating a year ago, but it is still rather small and the number of cord cutters may very well have peaked last year as cable companies begin to fight back with TV Everywhere offerings.
Nevertheless, the big beneficiaries of cord cutting are Netflix, Hulu, and Apple TV.

They benefit even if people keep their cable but add Internet TV streaming or downloads to their viewing repertoire, as is much more common. According to Convergence , 18 percent of viewers in the U.S. watched free, full episodes of TV on the Web last year, and that is growing by a percentage point every year:

Estimated Percentage of Average Weekly US Viewers That Watch Free Broadcast and Cable Network Online Full Episodes, 2009-2012
2009—16%
2010—18%
2011—19%
2012—20%
Streaming has helped Netflix in particular in terms of driving new subscriber growth, and it is also arguably a gateway drug to cord cutting. Convergence estimates that Netflix revenues from online-only subscribers in the U.S. will grow from $172 million this year to $578 million in 2013. And if you add in Hulu Plus, the combined streaming revenues from both companies will reach an estimated $800 million in two years.

Beck is just part of this, and he's ahead of the curve.

Were Mr. Beck to set off on his own, it would be a landmark moment for the media industry, reflecting a shift in the balance of power between media institutions and the personal brands of people they employ.

[...]

Mr. Beck has been contemplating a cable channel of his own for more than a year, according to the people who have spoken with him about it, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Mr. Beck may not be able to actively pursue such an arrangement until his Fox contract is up.

Presuming he leaves, Mr. Beck could follow a road paved by Oprah Winfrey when she started OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network in January. He could schedule his own talk show and the shows of others on one of the many cable channels seeking a ratings jolt. Or, following Martha Stewart’s road to the Hallmark Channel, he could start smaller, taking over a few hours of a channel’s schedule.

But a cable channel takeover, even in part, carries enormous risk, as Ms. Winfrey and Ms. Stewart can attest — they have more real estate now, but the ratings comparisons are not favorable. For Mr. Beck, the risk may be heightened by the fact that many advertisers have shunned him on Fox, in part because of a boycott that started after he called President Obama racist in 2009.

Furthermore, having cable channel turf may carry less importance in the future as more people access TV shows online.

Mr. Beck’s other option is to expand Insider Extreme, the subscription portion of his Web site, glennbeck.com, by hosting an exclusive show there and by adding other content.

Insider Extreme already simulcasts Mr. Beck’s three-hour radio show; shows a fourth hour hosted by his sidekicks; shows a daily show hosted by S. E. Cupp, a conservative commentator; and occasionally features documentaries.
Mr. Beck is also in business with Dr. Keith Ablow, a well-known psychiatrist; they sometimes co-host free webcasts.

Mercury Radio Arts, which is privately held, has not released any figures for the $9.95 subscription service. Last April, one month after Insider Extreme started, Forbes magazine estimated that the Web operations earned Mr. Beck $4 million a year, twice as much as the $2 million he earned from Fox.

On the Web, unlike on television, Mr. Beck owns the data about his subscribers.

Italics mine. Glenn Beck is crazy, but he isn't stupid. Not about media and making money.

But let's say fare-not-well for now, and good riddance. In honor of Glenn Beck leaving Fox, the top 10 dumbass things he said about the environment:

What one man can accomplish in a few short years. Just let the crazy wash over you:

Bill McKibben's climate change activism group 350.org is a communist plot March 2011

Winter disproves global warming March 2010

Beck peddles 'food insurance' kits: "More than peak oil or financial crash, I fear angry men armed to the teeth." November 2010

Beck sneers at the food safety bill December 2010

Race-baiting Beck insists Van Jones is a communist ex-con on a mission to dispense reparations for slavery September 2009

Beck insists Van Jones is a black nationalist taking over the U.S. from the inside July 2009

Not content with Van Jones resignation, Beck targets 'other radicals' September 2009

Obama's clean energy agenda will destroy the economy, energy advisor Carol Browner is a socialist October 2009

Cap and trade will cost American families $1,761 a year September 2009

The smart grid is a socialist plot to steal our thermostats March 2009

Bonus! Here are a couple of clips charting the earliest evolution of Beck's denialism.

Cow farts produce more greenhouse gases than cars July 2007

Climate change is a complete and utter hoax, here are a bunch of denialists to prove it May 2007

Beck indicts himself:

Beck: Invisible Hand Of The Market Has Been Replaced By "The Invisible Hand Of George Soros," Obama, GE
3 hours and 31 minutes ago

Beck, Crew Repeat Widely Disputed Claim That Green Jobs Put Spanish Economy "On The Verge Of Collapse"
3 hours and 50 minutes ago

Beck Suggests DOJ, "State And Local Workers" Won't Safeguard Ballots In Likely WI Judicial Election Recount
4 hours and 26 minutes ago

Beck: Obama Is "Merely A Player" In Globalist, Islamist Show
April 05, 2011 7:49 pm ET

Beck Suggests New Conspiracy Theory: Maybe Obama Decided To Try Suspects At Guantanamo To Inflame The Islamic World
April 05, 2011 7:32 pm ET

Showing Images Of Obama, SEIU, And Others, Beck Says He "Would Put A Lot Of These People In Jail"
April 05, 2011 7:25 pm ET

Beck Predicts That This Will Be "The Summer Of Revolution"
April 05, 2011 6:58 pm ET

Beck: "How Can Anyone Deny" That Islamists/Communists Stoked Protests In Middle East And Are Now Destabilizing Europe?
April 05, 2011 6:52 pm ET

Beck Claims Violence "Come From ... Unions" Not The Right
April 05, 2011 6:20 pm ET

Beck Smears Students Protesting In Wisconsin As Lenin's "Useful Idiots"
April 05, 2011 6:01 pm ET

Beck On National Debt: The Earth Is "On Fire" And "Your Life ... [Is] About To Change" Just Like On 9-11
April 05, 2011 5:55 pm ET

Beck: Union Leaders Are Communists, Socialists, Or Revolutionaries Who Want Destruction Of "Western Way Of Life"
April 05, 2011 5:36 pm ET

[...]

Beck Proclaims His "Man-On-Man Love" For Rep. Paul Ryan And His Budget "Slash" Plan
April 05, 2011 12:34 pm ET

Beck: Soros Conference On Economy Is "Almost As Shady And As Wonderful As When The Fed Met At Jekyll Island"
April 05, 2011 11:03 am ET

Beck Somehow Links 9/11 To WI Election, Budget Cuts In Rant About How "The World Is On Fire"
April 05, 2011 7:54 am ET

Beck Declares Rep. Paul Ryan "One Of The Only Serious People In Washington" After Budget Proposal
April 05, 2011 7:51 am ET

Beck: WI Protests Part Of "A Global Movement To Destroy Capitalism And The Free Market System"
April 05, 2011 7:38 am ET

Beck: Obama Admin Has "Continued To Deny Everything" About Health Care "Proven On This Network" Like Rationing
April 05, 2011 7:38 am ET

Beck: It's "Absurd" To Say MLK Died While Fighting For Labor Rights
April 04, 2011 6:52 pm ET

The hits just keep on coming: Page 1 of 122. This is Glenn Beck, in his own words, unedited, not out of context. Did Media Matters collect them? Yes.

But watch the clips for yourself, as much as you want, and decide for yourself how accurate or not he is.

He can be good comedy if he weren't so dangerous.

The Worst of Glenn Beck

David Sirota: Glenn Beck's dangerous movement: It CAN happen here.

Cross-posted at Obsidian Wings.

ADDENDUM, 3:24 p.m.: Beck has always been a clown, by the way, as you can see from this clip of him literally monkeying around in his younger DJ days. Hat tip to Alex Lawson.

WHAT IS BEST IN ACADEMIC FREEDOM, CRONON? NOT TO CRUSH YOUR ENEMIES

2011-04-03T10:46:00.008-07:00

WHAT IS BEST IN ACADEMIC FREEDOM, CRONON? NOT TO CRUSH YOUR ENEMIES

The current attempt by the radical "conservative" Republican Party of Wisconsin, which is so typical of the national and other state Republican Party leadership, has met a roadblock.

But a reminder of what the philosophy of the GOP is, here:

Wisconsin Republic Party Leader: Hao! Dai ye! We won again! This is good, but what is best in life?
Cronan: The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons at your wrist, and the wind in your hair.
Wisconsin Republic Party: Wrong! Conan! What is best in life?
Wisconsin Republic Party Leader: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.
Wisconsin Republic Party Leader: That is good! That is good.

We have video of this meeting:

And thus the saga of Conan meets Cronan.

What's the latest development?

The Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, Biddy Martin, has issued a public statement:

Two weeks ago UW-Madison received an open records request from Stephan Thompson, deputy executive director of the state's Republican Party, for email records of Professor Bill Cronon.

Professor Cronon is the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography and Environmental Studies at UW-Madison. He is one of the university's most celebrated and respected scholars, teachers, mentors and citizens. I am proud to call him a colleague.

The implications of this case go beyond Bill Cronon. When Mr. Thompson made his request, he was exercising his right under Wisconsin's public records law both to make such a request and to make it without stating his motive. Neither the request nor the absence of a stated motive seemed particularly unusual. We frequently receive public records requests with apparently political motives, from both the left and the right, and every position in between. I announced that the university would comply with the law and, as we do in all cases, apply the kind of balancing test that the law allows, taking such things as the rights to privacy and free expression into account. We have done that analysis and will release the records later today that we believe are in compliance with state law.

We are excluding records involving students because they are protected under FERPA. We are excluding exchanges that fall outside the realm of the faculty member's job responsibilities and that could be considered personal pursuant to Wisconsin Supreme Court case law. We are also excluding what we consider to be the private email exchanges among scholars that fall within the orbit of academic freedom and all that is entailed by it. Academic freedom is the freedom to pursue knowledge and develop lines of argument without fear of reprisal for controversial findings and without the premature disclosure of those ideas.

Scholars and scientists pursue knowledge by way of open intellectual exchange. Without a zone of privacy within which to conduct and protect their work, scholars would not be able to produce new knowledge or make life-enhancing discoveries. Lively, even heated and acrimonious debates over policy, campus and otherwise, as well as more narrowly defined disciplinary matters are essential elements of an intellectual environment and such debates are the very definition of the Wisconsin Idea.

When faculty members use email or any other medium to develop and share their thoughts with one another, they must be able to assume a right to the privacy of those exchanges, barring violations of state law or university policy. Having every exchange of ideas subject to public exposure puts academic freedom in peril and threatens the processes by which knowledge is created. The consequence for our state will be the loss of the most talented and creative faculty who will choose to leave for universities where collegial exchange and the development of ideas can be undertaken without fear of premature exposure or reprisal for unpopular positions.

This does not mean that scholars can be irresponsible in the use of state and university resources or the exercise of academic freedom. We have dutifully reviewed Professor Cronon's records for any legal or policy violations, such as improper uses of state or university resources for partisan political activity.

There are none.

To our faculty, I say: Continue to ask difficult questions, explore unpopular lines of thought and exercise your academic freedom, regardless of your point of view. As always, we will take our cue from the bronze plaque on the walls of Bascom Hall. It calls for the "continual and fearless sifting and winnowing" of ideas. It is our tradition, our defining value, and the way to a better society.

Chancellor Biddy Martin

And there was much rejoicing in the quest for academic freedom.

The University's legal counsel has also responded:

[...] At our request, Professor Cronon immediately undertook a search of all of his accumulated e-mails for the specific words, terms and names as you stated them in your request. The university’s legal staff then reviewed all of the identified e-mails to determine which ones must be made available to you pursuant to the Wisconsin Public records law. Those determinations have been reviewed and approved by the appropriate university officials. Copies of the records determined to be available to you under the law are enclosed.

[...]

You should further note that the e-mails that we have reviewed contain absolutely no evidence of political motivation, contact from individuals outside normal academic channels or inappropriate conduct on the part of Professor Cronon. The university finds his conduct, as evidenced in the e-mails, beyond reproach in every respect. He has used his university e-mail account appropriately and legitimately. He has not used his university e-mail account for any inappropriate political conduct. In fact, none of the e-mails contained any reference whatsoever to any of the specific political figures that you identified (except Governor Scott Walker), nor do they in any way reference the proposed recall efforts.

ALEC, meanwhile, denies all, knows nothing.

[...]
Cronon's story generated a tenfold increase in traffic to ALEC's website that caused it to crash, leading to false accusations that ALEC shut it down "to hide what we're doing," says Weber. She said the group bolstered its internet capacity to handle the extra interest, "but we're running a little slow, so patience would be appreciated."

Weber says ALEC's goal is to promote policies in line with Thomas Jefferson's principles of limited government, free markets, and federalism. Two thirds of its members are Republican, but she said the group does not coordinate with any political party. It holds regular conferences for members and operates a legislative library that lets members from different states exchange ideas for legislation. The group boasts that it has written hundreds of model bills, resolutions, and policy statements.

Although most of the group's members are legislators, corporations also join. Members of ALEC's "Private Enterprise Board" include executives from Pfizer, AT&T Services, Koch Industries, Peabody Energy, ExxonMobil and Wal-Mart.
A report on the group compiled by Defenders of Wildlife and the Natural Resources Defense Council says corporate members foot most of ALEC's bills, and collaborate on drafting the legislation it suggests. The group's most recent publicly available 990 tax form doesn't list donors but says it has a yearly budget of around $7 million.

Weber says the group is funded through membership dues and by foundations. She denied that corporations set the group's agenda, and said that only its legislative members get to vote on the group's policies.

"The complexity and diversity of our public and private sector members suggest there are different opinions," says Weber. "With that many people, not everyone is going to agree on everything."

Weber says ALEC has not taken any position on most aspects of SB 5. The organization maintains that collective bargaining should be an open process, that binding arbitration should be used to resolve disputes, and that public pensions should be moved toward a defined contribution plan with contributions from both government and employees, she said.

"We only support two of the policies in there and just don't have a position on the rest of it," she says.

The author of SB 5, Republican Sen. Shannon Jones of Springboro, says she drafted the bill herself after a year of work, and is unaware of any coordinated effort by ALEC or anyone else to pass similar legislation elsewhere.

"To the extent that there are similarities between bills, that this is happening all over the country, it is because states have run out of money and we need to change the structure that drives the costs of government upwards," says Jones.
A spokesman for Gov. John Kasich, Rob Nichols, says Kasich was formerly active in ALEC, but stopped after leaving Ohio's legislature. The group's website says Kasich participated in the group during its formative years. [....]

The Wisconsin Republican Party leadership appears to be stymied and is shutting up on Cronon, for now, officially.

Mark Jefferson, executive director of the Republican Party, released this statement: “We thank the University for complying with the open records request relating to the email correspondence of Professor William Cronon, and we thank Chancellor Martin for her statement. We share her belief that University faculty are not above the rules prohibiting the use of state resources for political purposes. Like other organizations from across the political spectrum, the Republican Party of Wisconsin has a longstanding history of making open records requests, and we will continue to exercise our right to do so in the future.”

Jefferson did not say whether Thompson would appeal and seek the records UW withheld.

I commend to all this summary of Protests, debates & grace under pressure in Madison, WI, with videos and pictures which also cover the events I covered not just at GOP's Radical Breakage Continues, but also at: Winning Wisconsin, Pigs & Hippies Together: This is OUR HOUSE!, The New Republican Congressional Revolutionary Volunteers Of America, and Scott Walker Reports To The Boss, David Koch.

BadgerFutures may be a good place to follow some future developments.

And that's where it stands for now. What do you think?

Also, Susie Madrak:

In Fitzgeraldstan, Wisconsin Laws Are For The Little People

Crossposted at Obsidian Wings.

Go to previous post, April What?, with your silly April Fool's links.

APRIL WHAT?

2011-04-01T23:05:00.014-07:00

APRIL WHAT?

It's still April 1st on the Left Coast for another two hours and five minutes (when I started this post; an hour and ten minutes when I finished), no matter what date you read above this post.

Some foolish links are in order!

So, out of order!

Japan is on everyone's mind, but we need to remember than it's not all doom and gloom, and yet in the spirit of helping:

The Tactical Philanthropy Haiku Contest:

Donors want data
Nonprofits measure impact
Experts watch and smile

Hai, ku! Can you write techie Haiku? Win $50!

Some past winners I like include:

Chekov in the bay
searching hard for some space fuel
Nuclear wessels
-- Jay in Murfreesboro, Tennessee

I bit a zombie.
it was ironic but the
taste was terrible.
-- Blake in Tulsa, Oklahoma

Learn from the Jedi.
Discipline, control, respect.
Dangerous muppet.
-- Patrick in Anaheim, California

Packets of photons
Streaming by our planet's sky
their address divine
-- Michaline in Chicago Illinois

Eat Theobromine.
Drink methyltheobromine.
Heliophobe, I.
--Zach in Tyler, Texas

Why kill Wash and Book?
Are they thinking what I am?
Firefly Zombies!
--Barak from East Brunswick, New Jersey

Advice for commenters arguing with bloggers:

Don't argue with a
Mobius strip because it
Will be one-sided
--Jimmy from Poughquag, New York

Let there be peace:

Take me to the black
I am a leaf on the wind
My Serenity
--Jennifer in Dallas, Texas

And this speaks to, for, and sometimes it seems to be me:

I am all around,
Yet some can't seem to find me.
I am Internet.
--Terry in San Francisco, California

Read the rest! Funny!

Did I say "geeks"? Not yet! Let's read Henry Jenkins talk about gender and game design with James Paul Gee!

There's nothing bloggers like better than catching out the New York Times in embarrassing goofs!

I'm sorry I missed that press conference.

And srsly, nothing could be better news for bloggers than the NY Times digital subscriptions! Why?

Can I still access NYTimes.com articles through Facebook, Twitter, search engines or my blog?

Yes. We encourage links from Facebook, Twitter, search engines, blogs and social media. When you visit NYTimes.com through a link from one of these channels, that article (or video, slide show, etc.) will count toward your monthly limit of 20 free articles, but you will still be able to view it even if you've already read your 20 free articles.

So just read a blog to get your New York Times fix! How hard is that?

Meanwhile if you haven't heard of self-published fiction writerJacqueline Howett, here is how not to become a world famous author!

This set of classically badly written defensive responses from a writer of classic slush went immediately viral, and was linked by approximately one third of everyone connected to publishing or professional writing, on Twitter, with a blog, on Facebook, and every other online social medium on the planet, but maybe you haven't read her string of comments in the comment thread at Big Al's yet!

Stand back!

Kids, wannabe writers, don't try this at home! Or anywhere! This is how to kill your writing career for a long time. Not that the poor woman stood a chance of having one: the signs of classic slush, including the responses from her, are familiar to anyone who has ever read slush.

(But before another food fight breaks out, let me state clearly that I think self-publishing is also absolutely crucial to unlocking the world of publishing for many fine writers who fail to navigate their thread of superb writing through the eye of the needle of mass market publishing; crowd-sourced promotion will work to out quality; there will be gate-keepers, but e-publishing is a key to unlock a door you previously had to jigger at for a long time, or be very lucky with.)

Blog commenters, and fellow human beings, and any other life who might comprehend, might consider that we're all trapped in here.

Radiation or not.

For better or worse, xkcd is no longer 3D. Pshew!

You won't need De-3D Cinema Glasses. But today's ThinkGeek goodies were as awesome as ever.

Guess which of this year's will, due to demand, turn into a real product? For some value of "real."

This is what blogs are made of!

But you can still wish for a pony, thanks to Belle Waring!

Which is your favorite dictator's mustache?

Who doesn't love infographics?

Ward Shelley did an amazing history of science fiction.

An interview with Shelley about it.

Not an April Fool! The Forecasting World Events Project comes from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA).

For realz. @GaryFarberKnows.

Let's close with a movie. The Top 5 Viral Pictures of 1911.

But, wait, there's more! Libyan Jews and their recipes! Really!

And THE .DOC FILE OF J ALFRED PRUFROCK, by copperbadge, via the thoughtful Stef Maruch.

More April 1st roundup.

ADDENDUM, April 4th,, 7:18 a.m., PST:

Press Release
By Charlie Stross
Edinburgh, UK, April 1, 2011 — Cheezburger (www.cheezburger.com), the Internet publisher best known for popularizing LOLcats, FAILS, and other Internet memes, today announced it has acquired Charlie's Diary, the authoritative and amusing weblog of science fiction author Charles Stross.

Created by Hugo-winning SF author Charles Stross, Charlie's Diary is dedicated to giving people an overdose of the florid imagination of a science fiction writer who gets bored easily and has too much time on his hands.

Over the past decade Charlie's Diary has trolled the internet for lulz at the expense of space enthusiasts, trekkies, sad-faced clowns, and proletarian chew-toys, in the process delivering a spectacular Google pagerank and accreting a vibrant community of snarky nerds, general-purpose pedants and drive-by spammers.

"I'm excited to see the Charlie's Diary community joining the Cheezburger community," said Ben Huh, CEO and founder of Cheezburger. "Since Cheezburger is the playground of choice for millions of Internet culture fans, the addition of regular commenters such as Jonathon Vos Post and Heteromeles is a natural complement for our community.

Now, in addition to delivering 5 minutes of happiness through I Can Has Cheezburger?, FAIL Blog, Memebase, and The Daily What, we can host interminable flame wars about whether ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny and the prospects for saving the environment by installing a molten thorium salt reactor in every basement."

"Thanks to the amazing community, Charlie's Diary has become one of the Internet's top five science fiction weblogs," said Stross. "It's taken a decade and I'm all burned up, so I've finally decided to monetize you bitches and cash out."

To aid in this process Stross intends to throw the gates open for guest bloggers to contribute their content for a small consideration.

"Ben Huh is enthusiastic about providing user analytics and behavioural advertising for Charlie's Diary, and we expect this will enable us to recoup some of the investment in time and energy the blog has cost me during the ten year bootstrap process."

Charlie will continue to market his science fiction under the brand name Charles Stross™ for the next five years, at which point the Charles Stross™ brand will be wholly transfered to the Cheezburger Network intellectual property portfolio and the author formerly known as Stross will rebrand and launch under a non-conflicting identity.

More.

David Pogue's compilation of April Fool's links.

From here:

Here is the canonical list of April 1 news items that were not April Fools jokes, but might have been.

(Via Arthur D. Hlavaty)

Posted by: Firecat

Hollywood's allegedly funniest tweets, which include two from Nathan Fillion.

It's again clear why we have writers for actors.

Toshiro Mifune as Obi-Wan.

Abi Sutherland has a new blog! http://noise2sig.nl.

Allochthonia: Numen, Faith, Religion, and Lack Thereof is fine stuff, Abi, as I'd expect. Also: I agree!

And Abi, this is absolutely wonderful, and I intend to, ah, appropriate it, in some, um, appropriate way.

Cross-posted at Obsidian Wings.

Go to next post, WHAT IS BEST IN ACADEMIC FREEDOM, CRONON? NOT TO CRUSH YOUR ENEMIES.

GOP'S RADICAL BREAKAGE CONTINUES

2011-03-25T17:19:00.013-07:00

GOP'S RADICAL BREAKAGE CONTINUES

Who is "Wisconsin's most dangerous professor"? He's William Cronon. Who he? He's this incredibly threatening man:

[...] In 1991, Cronon completed a book entitled Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, which examines Chicago 's relationship to its rural hinterland during the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1991, it was awarded the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for the best literary work of non-fiction published during the preceding year; in 1992, it won the Bancroft Prize for the best work of American history published during the previous year, and was also one of three nominees for the Pulitzer Prize in History; and in 1993, it received the George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History and the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Award from the Forest History Society for the best book of environmental and conservation history published during the preceding two years.

[...]

In July 1992, Cronon became the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison after having served for more than a decade as a member of the Yale History Department. In 2003, he was also named Vilas [pronounced "Vy-lus"] Research Professor at UW-Madison, the university’s most distinguished chaired professorship.

Cronon has been President of the American Society for Environmental History, and serves as general editor of the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Series for the University of Washington Press. [...] He has served on the Governing Council of The Wilderness Society since 1995, and on the National Board of the Trust for Public Land since 2003. He has been elected President of the American Historical Association for 2011-12.

Born September 11, 1954, in New Haven , Connecticut, Cronon received his B.A. (1976) from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He holds an M.A. (1979), M.Phil. (1980), and Ph.D. (1990) from Yale, and a D.Phil. (1981) from Oxford University. Cronon has been a Rhodes Scholar, Danforth Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, and MacArthur Fellow; has won prizes for his teaching at both Yale and Wisconsin; in 1999 was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society' and in 2006 was elected a Fellow of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He is obviously a Maoist of the worst Marxist-Leninist sort!

How do we know? Because the Republican Party of Wisconsin wants him investigated.

The Republican Party of Wisconsin has made an open records request for the e-mails of a University of Wisconsin professor of history, geography and environmental studies in an apparent response to a blog post the professor wrote about a group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Professor William J. Cronon, who is the president-elect of the American Historical Association, said in an interview Friday that the party asked for e-mails starting Jan. 1.

The request was made by Stephan Thompson of the Republican Party of Wisconsin. In his request, Thompson asked for e-mails of Cronon's state e-mail account that "reference any of the following terms: Republican, Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union, Alberta Darling, Randy Hopper, Dan Kapanke, Rob Cowles, Scott Fitzgerald, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Glenn Grothman, Mary Lazich, Jeff Fitzgerald, Marty Beil, or Mary Bell."

Most of the names are Republican legislators. Marty Beil is the head of the Wisconsin State Employees Union and Mary Bell is the head of the Wisconsin Education Association Council.

Cronon said the university had not yet complied with the open records request. The e-mails would be subject to the state's open records law because they were written on an university e-mail account.

The university has an e-mail policy that states, "University employees may not use these resources to support the nomination of any person for political office or to influence a vote in any election or referendum.”

Cronon said he did not violate the policy in any way. "I really object in principle to this inquiry," Cronon said of the party's open records request.
Thompson was not available for comment. But in an statement, Mark Jefferson, the party's executive director, said, "Like anyone else who makes an open records request in Wisconsin, the Republican Party of Wisconsin does not have to give a reason for doing so. [...]"

What was Cronon's offense? He wrote an Op-Ed piece for the terrorist-loving New York Times.

Entitled "Wisconsin’s Radical Break," Cronan wrote:

NOW that a Wisconsin judge has temporarily blocked a state law that would strip public employee unions of most collective bargaining rights, it’s worth stepping back to place these events in larger historical context.
Republicans in Wisconsin are seeking to reverse civic traditions that for more than a century have been among the most celebrated achievements not just of their state, but of their own party as well.

You've heard of the states as laboratories of democracy. Cronon:

[...] Wisconsin was at the forefront of the progressive reform movement in the early 20th century, when the policies of Gov. Robert M. La Follette prompted a fellow Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, to call the state a “laboratory of democracy.” The state pioneered many social reforms: It was the first to introduce workers’ compensation, in 1911; unemployment insurance, in 1932; and public employee bargaining, in 1959.

University of Wisconsin professors helped design Social Security and were responsible for founding the union that eventually became the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Wisconsin reformers were equally active in promoting workplace safety, and often led the nation in natural resource conservation and environmental protection.

But while Americans are aware of this progressive tradition, they probably don’t know that many of the innovations on behalf of working people were at least as much the work of Republicans as of Democrats.

Although Wisconsin has a Democratic reputation these days — it backed the party’s presidential candidates in 2000, 2004 and 2008 — the state was dominated by Republicans for a full century after the Civil War. The Democratic Party was so ineffective that Wisconsin politics were largely conducted as debates between the progressive and conservative wings of the Republican Party.

Let's remember who led the "conservative wing" of the Wisconsin Republican Party in the Fifties: Senator Joseph Raymond "Joe" McCarthy was a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957.

You may have heard of him.

Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.

Cronon:

When the Wisconsin Democratic Party finally revived itself in the 1950s, it did so in a context where members of both parties were unusually open to bipartisan policy approaches. Many of the new Democrats had in fact been progressive Republicans just a few years earlier, having left the party in revulsion against the reactionary politics of their own senator, Joseph R. McCarthy, and in sympathy with postwar liberalizing forces like the growing civil rights movement.

The demonizing of government at all levels that has become such a reflexive impulse for conservatives in the early 21st century would have mystified most elected officials in Wisconsin just a few decades ago.

When Gov. Gaylord A. Nelson, a Democrat, sought to extend collective bargaining rights to municipal workers in 1959, he did so in partnership with a Legislature in which one house was controlled by the Republicans. Both sides believed the normalization of labor-management relations would increase efficiency and avoid crippling strikes like those of the Milwaukee garbage collectors during the 1950s. Later, in 1967, when collective bargaining was extended to state workers for the same reasons, the reform was promoted by a Republican governor, Warren P. Knowles, with a Republican Legislature.
The policies that the current governor, Scott Walker, has sought to overturn, in other words, are legacies of his own party.

But Mr. Walker’s assault on collective bargaining rights breaks with Wisconsin history in two much deeper ways as well. Among the state’s proudest traditions is a passion for transparent government that often strikes outsiders as extreme. Its open meetings law, open records law and public comment procedures are among the strongest in the nation. Indeed, the basis for the restraining order blocking the collective bargaining law is that Republicans may have violated open meetings rules in passing it. The legislation they have enacted turns out to be radical not just in its content, but in its blunt ends-justify-the-means disregard for openness and transparency.

This in turn points to what is perhaps Mr. Walker’s greatest break from the political traditions of his state. Wisconsinites have long believed that common problems deserve common solutions, and that when something needs fixing, we should roll up our sleeves and work together — no matter what our politics — to achieve the common good.

[...] Perhaps that is why — as a centrist and a lifelong independent — I have found myself returning over the past few weeks to the question posed by the lawyer Joseph N. Welch during the hearings that finally helped bring down another Wisconsin Republican, Joe McCarthy, in 1954: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

The Republican Party leaders of Wisconsin have no such sense of decency:

Cronon concluded his Leninist diatribe:

Scott Walker is not Joe McCarthy. Their political convictions and the two moments in history are quite different. But there is something about the style of the two men — their aggressiveness, their self-certainty, their seeming indifference to contrary views — that may help explain the extreme partisan reactions they triggered. McCarthy helped create the modern Democratic Party in Wisconsin by infuriating progressive Republicans, imagining that he could build a national platform by cultivating an image as a sternly uncompromising leader willing to attack anyone who stood in his way. Mr. Walker appears to be provoking some of the same ire from adversaries and from advocates of good government by acting with a similar contempt for those who disagree with him. The turmoil in Wisconsin is not only about bargaining rights or the pension payments of public employees. It is about transparency and openness. It is about neighborliness, decency and mutual respect. Joe McCarthy forgot these lessons of good government, and so, I fear, has Mr. Walker. Wisconsin’s citizens have not.

Executive Director of Wisconsin's Republican Party Mark Jefferson responded as I've written above, with a press release decrying:

“I have never seen such a concerted effort to intimidate someone from lawfully seeking information about their government.

“Further, it is chilling to see that so many members of the media would take up the cause of a professor who seeks to quash a lawful open records request. Taxpayers have a right to accountable government and a right to know if public officials are conducting themselves in an ethical manner. The Left is far more aggressive in this state than the Right in its use of open records requests, yet these rights do extend beyond the liberal left and members of the media.

“Finally, I find it appalling that Professor Cronin seems to have plenty of time to round up reporters from around the nation to push the Republican Party of Wisconsin into explaining its motives behind a lawful open records request, but has apparently not found time to provide any of the requested information.

“We look forward to the University’s prompt response to our request and hope those who seek to intimidate us from making such requests will reconsider their actions.”
Republican Party of Wisconsin | 148 East Johnson St. | Madison, Wisconsin 53703 p: 608.257.4765 | f: 608.257.4141| e: info@wisgop.org

What's going on here? Andrew Leonard of Salon explains:

[...] The obvious goal is to find something damaging or embarrassing to Cronon -- although judging by Cronon's account, smoking guns seem unlikely to be lying around in plain sight. (Eight of the names referenced in the request belong to the eight Republican state senators targeted by Democrats for recall.)

I can't do a better, more eloquent or more profound job of summarizing the issues at stake than Cronon himself does in a lengthy blog post that the professor posted Thursday night. Everyone should read it.

I agree. And read about ALEC.

Who’s Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere? (Hint: It Didn’t Start Here)
[...]
I don’t want this to become an endless professorial lecture on the general outlines of American conservatism today, so let me turn to the question at hand: who’s really behind recent Republican legislation in Wisconsin and elsewhere? I’m professionally interested in this question as a historian, and since I can’t bring myself to believe that the Koch brothers single-handedly masterminded all this, I’ve been trying to discover the deeper networks from which this legislation emerged.

Here’s my preliminary answer.

Telling Your State Legislators What to Do:
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)
The most important group, I’m pretty sure, is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which was founded in 1973 by Henry Hyde, Lou Barnett, and (surprise, surprise) Paul Weyrich. Its goal for the past forty years has been to draft “model bills” that conservative legislators can introduce in the 50 states. Its website claims that in each legislative cycle, its members introduce 1000 pieces of legislation based on its work, and claims that roughly 18% of these bills are enacted into law. (Among them was the controversial 2010 anti-immigrant law in Arizona.)

If you’re as impressed by these numbers as I am, I’m hoping you’ll agree with me that it may be time to start paying more attention to ALEC and the bills its seeks to promote.

You can start by studying ALEC’s own website. Begin with its home page at http://www.alec.org

First visit the “About” menu to get a sense of the organization’s history and its current members and funders. But the meat of the site is the “model legislation” page, which is the gateway to the hundreds of bills that ALEC has drafted for the benefit of its conservative members.

http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Model_Legislation1
You’ll of course be eager to look these over…but you won’t be able to, because you’re not a member.

Becoming a Member of ALEC: Not So Easy to Do
How do you become a member? Simple. Two ways. You can be an elected Republican legislator who, after being individually vetted, pays a token fee of roughly $100 per biennium to join. Here’s the membership brochure to use if you meet this criterion:

http://www.alec.org/AM/pdf/2011_legislative_brochure.pdf

What if you’re not a Republican elected official? Not to worry. You can apply to join ALEC as a “private sector” member by paying at least a few thousand dollars depending on which legislative domains most interest you. Here’s the membership brochure if you meet this criterion:

http://www.alec.org/am/pdf/Corporate_Brochure.pdf

Then again, even if most of us had this kind of money to contribute to ALEC, I have a feeling that membership might not necessarily be open to just anyone who is willing to pay the fee. But maybe I’m being cynical here.

Which Wisconsin Republican politicians are members of ALEC? Good question. How would we know? ALEC doesn’t provide this information on its website unless you’re able to log in as a member. Maybe we need to ask our representatives. One might think that Republican legislators gathered at a national ALEC meeting could be sufficiently numerous to trigger the “walking quorum rule” that makes it illegal for public officials in Wisconsin to meet unannounced without public notice of their meeting. But they’re able to avoid this rule (which applies to every other public body in Wisconsin) because they’re protected by a loophole in what is otherwise one of the strictest open meetings laws in the nation. The Wisconsin legislature carved out a unique exemption from that law for its own party caucuses, Democrats and Republicans alike. So Wisconsin Republicans are able to hold secret meetings with ALEC to plan their legislative strategies whenever they want, safe in the knowledge that no one will be able to watch while they do so.

(See http://www.doj.state.wi.us/dls/OMPR/2010OMCG-PRO/2010_OML_Compliance_Guide.pdf for a full discussion of Wisconsin’s otherwise very strict Open Meetings Law.)

If it has seemed to you while watching recent debates in the legislature that many Republican members of the Senate and Assembly have already made up their minds about the bills on which they’re voting, and don’t have much interest in listening to arguments being made by anyone else in the room, it’s probably because they did in fact make up their minds about these bills long before they entered the Capitol chambers. You can decide for yourself whether that’s a good expression of the “sifting and winnowing” for which this state long ago became famous.

Partners in Wisconsin and Other States: SPN, MacIver Institute, WPRI
An important partner of ALEC’s, by the way, is the State Policy Network (SPN), which helps coordinate the activities of a wide variety of conservative think tanks operating at the state level throughout the country. See its home page at http://www.spn.org/

Many of the publications of these think tanks are accessible and downloadable from links on the SPN website, which are well worth taking the time to peruse and read. A good starting place is:
http://www.spn.org/members/

Two important SPN members in Wisconsin are the MacIver Institute for Public Policy:
http://maciverinstitute.com/

and the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI):
http://www.wpri.org

If you want to be a well-informed Wisconsin citizen and don’t know about their work, you’ll probably want to start visiting these sites more regularly. You’ll gain a much better understanding of the underlying ideas that inform recent Republican legislation by doing so.

Understanding What These Groups Do
As I said earlier, it’s not easy to find exact details about the model legislation that ALEC has sought to introduce all over the country in Republican-dominated statehouses. But you’ll get suggestive glimpses of it from the occasional reporting that has been done about ALEC over the past decade.

Almost all of this emanates from the left wing of the political spectrum, so needs to be read with that bias always in mind.

Interestingly, one of the most critical accounts of ALEC’s activities was issued by Defenders of Wildlife and the Natural Resources Defense Council in a 2002 report entitled Corporate America’s Trojan Horse in the States. Although NRDC and Defenders may seem like odd organizations to issue such a report, some of ALEC’s most concentrated efforts have been directed at rolling back environmental protections, so their authorship of the report isn’t so surprising. The report and its associated press release are here:

http://alecwatch.org/11223344.pdf

http://www.nrdc.org/media/pressreleases/020228.asp

There’s also an old, very stale website associated with this effort at
http://alecwatch.org/

A more recent analysis of ALEC’s activities was put together by the Progressive States Network in February 2006 under the title Governing the Nation from the Statehouses, available here:

http://www.progressivestates.org/content/57/governing-the-nation-from-the-statehouses

There’s an In These Times story summarizing the report at
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2509/

More recent stories can be found at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miles-mogulescu/alec-states-unions_b_832428.htmlview=print

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/6084/corporate_con_game (about the Arizona immigration law) and there’s very interesting coverage of ALEC’s efforts to disenfranchise student voters at http://campusprogress.org/articles/conservative_corporate_advocacy_group_alec_behind_voter_disenfranchise/
and http://www.progressivestates.org/node/26400

For just one example of how below-the-radar the activities of ALEC typically are, look for where the name of the organization appears in this recent story from the New York Times about current efforts in state legislatures to roll back the bargaining rights of public employee unions:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/business/04labor.html

Hint: ALEC is way below the fold!

A Cautionary Note
What you’ll quickly learn even from reading these few documents is that ALEC is an organization that has been doing very important political work in the United States for the past forty years with remarkably little public or journalistic scrutiny. I’m posting this long note in the conviction that it’s time to start paying more attention. History is being made here, and future historians need people today to assemble the documents they’ll eventually need to write this story. Much more important, citizens today may wish to access these same documents to be well informed about important political decisions being made in our own time during the frequent meetings that ALEC organizes between Republican legislators and representatives of many of the wealthiest corporations in the United States.

Go access. Knowledge is our weapon in the fight to defend ourselves from what radical Teddy Roosevelt knew:

I am well aware that every upholder of privilege, every hired agent or beneficiary of the special interests, including many well-meaning parlor reformers, will denounce all this as "Socialism" or "anarchy"--the same terms they used in the past in denouncing the movements to control the railways and to control public utilities. As a matter of fact, the propositions I make constitute neither anarchy nor Socialism, but, on the contrary, a corrective to Socialism and an antidote to anarchy.

That was the progressive Republican Teddy Roosevelt who inspired George W. Bush, who John McCain so admires:

[...] the Times has the entire transcript. It’s worth quoting at length:

Q: How do you think of your self as a conservative? Do you think of yourself more as a Goldwater conservative or Reagan conservative or George W. Bush conservative?

Senator John McCain: A Teddy Roosevelt conservative, I think. He’s probably my major role model…. I think Teddy Roosevelt he had a great vision of America’s role in the 20th Century. He was a great environmentalist. He loved the country. He is the person who brought the government into a more modern – into the 20th century as well. He was probably engaged more in national security slash international affairs that any president [had] ever been. I understand that TR had failings. I understand that every one of my role models had failings…..
[snip]
Q: Roosevelt wasn’t really a small government person. He saw an active role for government what thing in your record in your record would you say are in a similar vein of using government to do things that…
Mr. McCain: Campaign Finance reform – obviously he was a great reformer — is one of them. Climate change is another. He was a great environmentalist
Q: You don’t believe in small government, the sort of classic conservative view of minimal government is not one you would necessarily share.
Mr. McCain: …I also believe there is a role for government. If there is abuses, TR was the first guy to enforce the Sherman anti-trust act against the quote trusts that were controlling the economy of America. Because I believe his quote was unfettered capitalism leads to corruption. So there certainly is a role for government but I want to keep that role minimal. And I want to keep it in the areas where only governments can perform those functions.

Government should take care of those in America who can’t care for themselves. That’s a role of government. It’s not that I’m for no government. It’s that I’m for government carrying out those responsibilities that otherwise can’t be exercised by individuals and the states — that’s the founding principles of our country — and at the same time recognizing there’s a role for our government and society to care for those who can’t care for themselves, to make sure there are not abuses of individual rights as well as the rights of groups of people and to defend our nation. And National Security is obviously No. 1.

So I count myself as a conservative Republican, yet I view it to a large degree in the Theodore Roosevelt mold.

The GOP now wants to break doyen professor of history William Cronon. They're attacking in full.

Read how and why. And study up on American conservatism:

[...]

An Introductory Bibliography on the Recent History of American Conservatism
John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, 2004 (lively, readable overview by sympathetic British journalists).
David Farber, The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism: A Brief History, 2010.
George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, 1976(one of the earliest academic studies of the movement, and still important to read).
Lee Edwards, The Conservative Revolution, 2002 (written from a conservative perspective by a longstanding fellow of the Heritage Foundation).
Bruce Frohnen, et al, American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, 2006 (a comprehensive and indispensable reference work).
Jerry Z. Muller, Conservatism, 1997 (extensive anthology of classic texts of the movement).
There are many other important studies, but these are reasonable starting points.

And, of course, Rick Perlstein. Knowledge is power. Knowledge is our weapon. Use it. Fight back. Defend William Cronon.

Cross-posted at Obsidian Wings.

Cross-posted at Dirty Hippies.

ADDENDUM, March 26th, 8:58 a.m., PST: Everyone and their dog has been blogging and tweeting about this, so a bazillion links, so I'll give few or none, but here is the NY Times editorial: "A Shabby Crusade in Wisconsin."

Fitzgerald, Barca disagree on whether law goes into effect Saturday:

Madison — In a stunning twist, Gov. Scott Walker's legislation limiting collective bargaining for public workers was published Friday despite a judge's hold on the measure, prompting a dispute over whether it takes effect Saturday.

The measure was published to the Legislature's website with a footnote that acknowledges the restraining order by a Dane County judge. But the posting says state law "requires the Legislative Reference Bureau to publish every act within 10 working days after its date of enactment."

The measure sparked protests at the Capitoland lawsuits by opponents because it would eliminate the ability of most public workers to bargain over anything but wages.

The restraining order was issued against Democratic Secretary of State Doug La Follette. But the bill was published by the reference bureau, which was not named in the restraining order.

Laws normally take effect a day after they are published, and a top GOP lawmaker said that meant it will become law Saturday. But nonpartisan legislative officials from two agencies, including the one who published the bill, disagreed. [....]

And: As well, I'll stress:

[...] In response, Cronon has posted a lengthy rebuttal on his own web site. In the post, Cronon states that he has committed no wrongdoing in terms of the use of his state e-mail account -- and also saying that it would violate federal law to reveal e-mail conversations with students that have touched upon these subjects.

Italics mine.

And: Collective bargaining law published despite court order blocking it.

This is quite the intriguing development. How lawless will the Wisconsin Republican Party become?

UPDATE, 3/26/11, 6:23 p.m. PST: Zeno is more than halfway to some interesting background. And PZ Meyers had thoughts on my ObWi iteration of this post.

Also, some past Wisconsin posts: WINNING WISCONSIN, PIGS & HIPPIES TOGETHER: THIS IS OUR HOUSE!; SCOTT WALKER REPORTS TO THE BOSS, DAVID KOCH; THE NEW REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL REVOLUTIONARY VOLUNTEERS OF AMERICA.

Go to previous post: PERSPECTIVE.

PERSPECTIVE

2011-03-22T22:40:00.003-07:00

PERSPECTIVE

5.6k Saturn Cassini Photographic Animation from stephen v2 on Vimeo.

Sometimes we all need it. This is the brain and emotion cleanser I needed to see right now.

And any time.

Beauty enriches all our souls.

As does perspective.

View The The Rest Scale: 5 out of 5. Wait for the color. Watch it all.

You won't be sorry.

Via John Robinson's site for Sore Eyes.

MICHAEL D. GLICKSOHN, 1946-2011, RIP

2011-03-18T15:22:00.039-07:00

MICHAEL D. GLICKSOHN, 1946-2011, RIP

Mike Glicksohn was possibly the second most famous letter of comment writer to fanzines in all of fanzine fan history, after Harry Warner, Jr.

Mike was a writer, a publisher, a personality, a math teacher, a good man, a great fan, beloved by many, friend to even more.

141 High Park Avenue, Toronto, is an address I'll never forget, I saw it so many times. Later Mike wrote from 508 Windermere Avenue, and earlier from 35 Willard St., and 267 St. George St., all famous fan addresses.

Although in early days, giants such as Rick Sneary reigned, for the Sixties and Seventies and longer, it was Glicksohn who took the mantle of Warner as letter writer to almost all fanzines.

His own primary fanzine, done with fellow Hugo-winner, both together, and on her own, was Energumen.

Complete run: http://efanzines.com/Energumen/index.htm

Go read, view, and admire what you can of it.

It was one of the most deserving Hugo-winning zines ever. The .pdfs can't begin to show the quality of production. Mike was one of the most meticulous of publishers, in every detail from that beautiful 24-lb blue bond paper, to doing one of the most beautifully illustrated and graphically well-designed fanzines ever, finding and publishing, many for the first time, some of the best fan artists, later pros, ever published, including more or less discovering Tim Kirk, Alicia Austin, James Shull, George Barr, Derek Carter, and so many more, including Connie (Reich) Faddis, Alexis Gilliland, Mike Gilbert, the list goes on on and on.

Less known was that he published some of Joe Haldeman's first fan art: http://efanzines.com/Energumen/Energumen01_s.pdf

He published Jack Gaughn, to whom the first issue in February of 1970 was dedicated, and a fold-out centerpiece of art was included, as well as that first cover. Many illos of that issue were by the great Alicia Austin. His longtime great friend, Joe Haldeman, also managed to have a letter in the first issue.

Jay Kinney, Bill Rotlser (of course!), Phil Foglio, Bernie Zuber, Jeff Schalles, Arthur Thomson (ATom), and many others were among the numerous artists Mike published so immaculately.

The writers he and Susan Wood (Glicksohn) published won Best Fan Writer Hugos, their artists, Best Fan Artist Hugos.

That was in no small part due to Mike Glicksohn.

Read The Rest Scale: if you're a science fiction fan, yes.

MidwestCon #28 1977

Mike Glicksohn sitting on the shoulders of the world. Among the other people visible in the photo are: Ross Pavlac, Moshe Feder.

Seacon 79: Opening Ceremony - in the audience Joe Haldeman, Gay Haldeman and Mike Glicksohn. Photo © by Debbie King

He published art by Sandra Meisel, Jonh Ingham, Alpajuri (Paul Novitski), Andy Porter, Jeff Cochran/Freff, Brad Balfour, Jeff Schalles, Grant Canfield, Bjo Trimble, Bill Kunkel, Dan Steffan, Randy Bathurst, Terry Austin, endless amounts of Bill Rotsler, Alex Eisenstein, Ken Fletcher, Steve Fabian, Eddie Jones, Vincent DiFate, Ron Miller, C. Lee Healey, Steve Stiles, Joe Pearson, and many divers hands.

The covers were beautifully off-set on the highest quality stock.

Writing, fannish and sercon alike, by Susan Glickson (Wood), Tony Lewis, Joe W. Haldeman, John R. Douglas, Greg Benford, Angus Taylor, Paul Walker, Ted Pauls, Arnie Katz, Bob Shaw, Terry Carr, reprints from Walter A. Willis, Bob Silverberg, Bill Rotlser, Dean Koontz, John D. Berry, andy offut, Rick Stooker, Ginjer Buchanan, Avram Davidson, Jerry Lapidus, Bob Toomey, Ted White, Harry Warner, Jr., Walt Liebscher, Darrell Schweitzer, Sandra Meisel and, again, many more.

Fans and pros of every persuasion could be found in 'Nerg, and no one could be found who didn't think the fanzine was of the highest possible quality. Major letterhacks there included Jerry Kaufman, Warner, Meisel, Lapidus, the unforgettable Dave Hulvey, Mike Deckinger, Mike O'Brien, Roger Bryant, Darrell Schweitzer, Grant Canfield, and the oft-quoted Aljo (Alva) Svoboda.

As a convention fan, Michael reigned supreme, smoothing With Bob Tucker and Beam's choice, found at just about every Midwestern sf convention there was, for decades, staying up at the parties until dawn, speaking articulately at panels, befriending neos, moving with ease among the great professional writers to the humblest of neofans, friend to nearly all. He was a major part of the Toronto in 1973 Worldcon bid, later one of the most successful Worldcons ever, Torcon II. He was a founder of OSFiC, the Ontario Science Fiction club that sponsored Torcon II and other sf cons. Another beautiful, more personal, zine of his, was Xenium.

From that first issue, Rosemary Uyllot's column, Kumquat May, done by a then unknown fan, earned enough attention to

The first four issues were published in memorable yellow: http://efanzines.com/Energumen/Energumen01PaperColour.jpg

But later, the far more indelible upon memory blue, which I cannot show you a sample of, alas, but Taral Wayne did make a CD-ROM: Strange Voyages is apparently still available from Taral Wayne, 245 Dunn Ave. Apt. 2111, Toronto Ontario, M6K 1S6 Canada. $15 (US or Canadian) covers shipping and handling as well as $1 to be donated to TAFF in Mike's name. For orders outside North America, please add $2 to cover the extra cost of postage, for a total of $17. So it says here.

Some notes on Awards and other links:

Glicksohn, Michael | permalink
Winner of 1 Hugo, 3 FAAn Awards
1970
[ fan writer ]
- 1971 Locus/12 (tie)
Energumen [MG & Susan Glicksohn]
- fanzine : 1971 Hugo
1971
[ fan writer ]
- 1972 Locus/8
Energumen [MG & Susan Glicksohn]
- amateur magazine : 1972 Hugo
1972
[ fan writer ]
- 1973 Locus/13
Energumen [MG & Susan Wood Glicksohn]
- amateur magazine : 1973 Hugo W
1975
[ letterhack ]
- 1976 FAAn W
1976
[ fan writer ]
- 1977 Hugo
[ letterhack ]
- 1977 FAAn W
1977
[ letterhack ]
- 1978 FAAn W

Ullyot, Rosemary — 2 nominations
fan writer : 1972
fan writer : 1973

FAN ARTIST - 1972

FAN WRITER -1972

1973 Fan Hugos:

AMATEUR MAGAZINE

Energumen, Michael Glicksohn & Susan Wood Glicksohn
Algol, Andrew Porter
Granfalloon, Ron & Linda Bushyager
Locus, Charles Brown & Dena Brown
SF Commentary, Bruce Gillespie

FAN WRITER

FAN ARTIST

1974 Fan Hugos

AMATEUR MAGAZINE (tie)

Algol, Andrew Porter
The Alien Critic, Richard E. Geis
Locus, Charles Brown & Dena Brown
Outworlds, Bill Bowers & Joan Bowers

FAN WRITER

FAN ARTIST

Many of those were due to Michael and/or Michael and Susan (Wood) Glicksohn.

More links of Mike's work are available at http://fanac.org/names-gl.html

Some include:

Aspidistra                                Archive                           FanHistorical Archive

AussieCon I Report                        Report                            AussieCon

AUSTRALIAN SF REVIEW (1st series)         Reference                         Fanzine Index

Canadian Fandom in the 1960s (GS)         Article                           Canadian History

Chicon IV - 1982 WorldCon - Photo ...     Report                            Chicon IV

Confederation Convention Report           Report                            ConFederation

DITTO                                     Fan Terms                         Dr. Gafia's Fan Terms

DUFF - Down Under Fan Fund - Winners

DUFF Ballot 2008 North America to ...

Fancyclopedia - Ditto Convention          Article                           Fancyclopedia III

Filght of the Kangaroo, The               Trip Report                       DUFF 1976

Kevin Smith, Mike Glicksohn, Jim ...      Photo                             Seacon '79
MagiCon (1992 Worldcon) Program and ...   Memory Book                       MagiCon

Mike Glicksohn & Susan (Photo by ...      Photo                             MidwestCon #43

Mike Glicksohn (Photo by Debbie ...       Photo                             Seacon '79

Mike Glicksohn and Susan Wood ...         Photo                             Canadian Fandom

Mike Glicksohn sitting on the ...         Photo                             MidwestCon #28

Mike Glicksohn talking with Bob ...       Photo                             Seacon '79

Mike Glicksohn with the '70s fan ...      Photo                             FanHistoriCon VIII

Mike Glicksohn, Steve Francis ...         Photo                             Rivercon

Mike Glicksohn, Steve Francis ...         Photo                             Rivercon

Opening Ceremony - in the audience ...    Photo                             Seacon '79

Panels - "Don't do any strange ...        Photo                             Chicon IV

Peter Weston at bat, Merv Binns ...       Photo                             Seacon '79

TAFF Publications and Stuff

Thanks                                    Compilation                       SFFY 10

THEN By Rob Hansen - Chapter 10 of ...    Fan History                       THEN

THEN By Rob Hansen - Chapter 11 of ...    Fan History                       THEN

Zinephobic Eye, The                       Reference                         Fanzine Index

Fan GoH Mike Glickson on the train ...    Photo                             AussieCon

Flophouse?, The                           All-New Continuing Feature        SFFY 5

Here is a partially fitting memorial: http://efanzines.com/Energumen/Energumen15.pdf

And this video from 1.28.11, made because Mike couldn't be at ConFusion, the Ann Arbor science fiction convention he'd never missed before.

I liked Mike. We were never close friends, but he was always kind and friendly to me. I haven't seen him in decades, heard varying bits and pieces about his illnesses and battles with cancer for many years now.

I'll still miss him. We'd not had any contact in decades, but he was a presence all over the sf fandom of my youth, a man who helped create much of the environment I grew up in, the culture that was so important to me for so long, and I'm very sorry he's gone.

RIP, Mike, and have a smooooth one with Bob Tucker.

More pictures of Mike here. Worldcon Fan Gallery entry.

[A variant edition of this is crossposted on Facebook, readable to everyone; both of these may be revised, almost surely not identically.] [UPDATE, 3.21.11, 6:24 p.m.: there seems to be a glitch keeping the FB post, which should be readable by everyone, and which no one has before informed me was not, but which I was just informed wasn't readable by those not on FB, and have checked myself, found this to be true for at least the moment, haven't been able to figure out why, and thus am now warning you until I see that the problem/glitch/whatever has passed, that you may not find that link operable unless you have an FB account, or... beats me, until such time as I find that it's definitely working for all again; my apologies to all and anyone who may have been affected, and any resulting confusion; this is the first time in a couple of years of using FB that this has ever happened, so I'm guessing it's just a temporary glitch, but I'm obviously in no position to say. Again: sorry about that!; these two posts are substantially the same, so mostly what you're missing are the many wonderful comments by other folks -- if those were visible anyway -- and a few minor variations.]

By Mike Glicksohn, a wonderful set of memories, and I'm... full of mixed emotion at rereading this, and realizing how I, too, have now been around for, gulp, about 40 years of activity in the sf field, even more than the 35 years Mike had when he wrote this, though Mike was understandably about 10,000 times justifiably more beloved than I am. But I couldn't identify more with those feelings of how one goes from awe at one's elders to finding that, hey, wait, I can't be an elder: I'm still just a kid!

And I've never been a thousandth the sf fan Mike was; I'm just...also older. You should read this piece.

ADDENDA: Geri Sullivan. Mike Glyer. Lots on Facebook and LJ and sff.net and all over. I'll add some of the more substantive to both my posts as I catch them, when time allows, if I can. People are encouraged to send me links, as always.

Some include:
http://www.soltys.ca/blog/2011/03/mike-glicksohn-r-i-p.html
http://t.co/uYq5xWd
http://cartoonhat.blogspot.com/2011/03/rip-mike-glicksohn.html?spref=tw
http://barondave.livejournal.com/279426.html

A ConFusion one-shot of great quality:

A One-Hour, One-Shot Fanzine from ConFusion 31 2-3pm, January 22, 2005

ConFusion history.

Digressively: Geez, that ConFusion one-shot, which includes pieces by Lenny Bailes, mentions Diane Drutowski in Fred Haskell's (as he was then) reprint piece, and, well, I could make a long list of Friends in it or part of it, reminds me of the 1977 ConFusion where I had a special ultra-cheap good-for-only-72-hours Greyhound bus ticket, and was lunatic to use it to go from NYC to Ann Arbor, MI, knowing I'd spend more time on the road than at the con.

Little did I know that that a massive snow storm would shut down the entire Ohio State thruway, and leave our bus and a couple of thousand stranded in -- was it Cleveland, or Cincinnati? -- where the Red Cross brought us cots and doughnuts and coffee, and I managed to get a phone call through from a phone booth (no cell phones in those days, children!) to the con suite, where someone desultorily took a phone call -- possibly Jack Chalker? -- and I later found that someone had scrawled a chalk message on a chalk board that "Gary Farber is trapped in a phone booth in Ohio in a blizzard."

Greyhound was nice enough to extend the ticket for a day.

Ah, yes, from that oneshot, and Fred Haskell's report of the time:

Oh, yes, by Fred Haskell: "Gary Farber called later in the evening to say he was stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again in a bus terminal in Cleveland or somesuch."

Joe Haldeman writes on the FB iteration of this:

This is what I wrote elsewhere --Our old friend Mike Glicksohn died today. He’d been ill with cancer for a long time, so no surprise. But always a shock, a blow. Our hearts are with Susan Manchester, whom he left behind, tonight.

A Facebook page about him notes that he published me before I was a professional, and it reproduces a page from his fanzine Energumen, with a poem and drawing I sent to him from Vietnam in 1968. I wasn’t much of a poet then, but the last couple of lines are poignant.

http://efanzines.com/Energumen/Energumen01_s.pdf

Gardner Dozois comments:

Poor Mike. I knew him mostly as a convention fan, when he used to hang out with me and Joe Haldeman and others at Disclaves and Midwestcons in the early '70s. A great guy. He'll be missed.

ADDENDUM, 11:40 p.m.: Taral Wayne remembers.

Also, apparently I didn't make it clear that Mike died earlier today; if he'd died on some previous day I'd have mentioned that. He died at 5:30 a.m. Eastern time according to Robert Sawyer who put it on Facebook and tweeted it within the hour.

I've also neglected to say here that I know that I first met Mike at the Aussiecon party at Discon II, in 1974, when I had been reading and loccing fanzines for a couple of years, but had just missed going to Torcon II, the year before, because I was still young and neoish enough to wave goodbye, literally, to a car full of NYC fans driving off to it, without realizing, as I subsequently did, that I could have have squeezed in, and, in those days, found crash space, eaten cheap food, and not missed that wonderful Torcon I heard so much about, while I was still 14 years old.

In 1974 I was still neoish enough as a con fan, and all around, to be awed to be among my fannish elders, and it was still a couple of months before I started reading slush for Lou Stathis (unbeknown to Ted White, I think, until later), and was even more awed to be a Galactic Observer, very quietly leaning against the walls of that Aussiecon party, listening and watching as Mike Glicksohn, and Robin Johnson, and Leigh Edmonds, and Susan Wood, and Valma Brown, and Joe Haldeman, and so many others, conversed, played cards, told stories, and I just soaked it all in, learning what The BNFs Were Like, and that not incidentally, in those days, as in the many decades previous, so many professional writers, editors, agents, and artists started in fandom, and the field was so small, that while there were always some pros who came from outside, and, of course, many fans who were awed by various pros, it was perfectly common -- as it still is today to some extent in at least some circles -- for there to be no social or other distinction between "pros" and "fans" since so many people were both.

(They certainly mixed it up in fanzines, and had ever since the Forties, as well, while, of course, some did maintain a distinction separation, as Robert Heinlein very much did, while yet others I'll leave nameless were more, um, variable, depending upon who they had in mind -- as well they might.)

UPDATE, March 19th, 9:20 p.m., PST: Taral writes in email of his Strange Voyages CD of Energumen and other zines that:

I wanted to point out, though, that I raised the cost of the CD to $20 plus $2 postage, even though I think it says $15 plus $2 on the disk. The actual costs ended up being a little higher than I originally expected, due to lavish packaging of the content. I doubt I'd do another with a label, for instance.

UPDATE: March 20th, 2001, 7:18: a.m., PST: Mike Glyer reports Mike's memorial service:

A service of remembrance for Mike Glicksohn will be held at Windermere United Church, 356 Windermere Avenue, Toronto ON, at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday March 23.

Also that:

Sara Stratton, a family friend, has also sent out a preview of the announcement that will appear in the Toronto Star next week:

Michael David Glicksohn (“Honey”), born May 20, 1946 in Portsmouth, England, died March 18, 2011 in Toronto after a lengthy illness. Amazing husband of Susan Manchester, he will also be missed by brother Manning (Louissa) and nephew Ray (Mary Ellen), cousins Dale (Petra), Jo (Howard) and Abby, great-nieces Willow and Jade, cousins Alison Purdy and Kevin Purdy (Rosemary), step-mother Hilary, and by many, many good friends. Predeceased by his parents, Paul and Ellen (nee Mullane). Mike taught mathematics at Humberside Collegiate Institute for 34 years. He was involved in science fiction fandom for many years and won a Hugo Award for best fan writer. Each Memorial Day weekend for more than 25 years, Mike and his friend Michael Harper hosted MikeCon, which was attended by hundreds of friends and fans from across Canada and the U.S. A service of remembrance will be held at Windermere United Church, 356 Windermere Avenue, on Wednesday, March 23 at 7 p.m. In lieu of flowers or donations, Mike would probably appreciate it if you raised a glass to him.

As Mike notes, the Star manages to get wrong which Hugo Award Mike won. It was the 1973 Best Fanzine Hugo:

Energumen ed. by Michael Glicksohn and Susan Wood Glicksohn

Best Fanzine

Winner: Energumen ed. by Michael Glicksohn and Susan Wood Glicksohn

2 Locus ed. by Charles N. Brown and Dena Brown

3 Algol ed. by Andrew I. Porter

Runners-up:

Granfalloon ed. by Ron Bushyager and Linda Bushyager

SF Commentary ed. by Bruce Gillespie

Best Fan Writer

Winner: Terry Carr

2 Susan Wood Glicksohn

3 Richard E. Geis

Runners-up:

Charles N. Brown

Sandra Miesel

Rosemary Ullyot

Best Fan Artist

Winner: Tim Kirk

2 William Rotsler

3 Grant Canfield

Runners-up:

James Shull

Arthur "ATom" Thomson

Gotta love newspapers when they get your obituary wrong. No, I don't know where “Honey” comes from. Anyone?

Yvonne Penney has also mentioned asking permission to start a scholarship in Mathematics in his memory at the school where he taught." Most who commented there and on my Facebook variant of this, and elsewhere thinks it's a fine idea. As I wrote:

[...] so many of Mike's famous writer friends, and so many well-known folks, would want to help out, that I'm sure something real could be worked out so long as there are people at the school willing to work on it, and someone local who knows what they're doing who is the same, and similarly handle the legal and administrative angles, which can be, to be sure, time-consuming, involving, ongoing, and something that would be apt to be a commitment of, well, as many years as people are willing to work on making it last.

There are ways to start talking endowments, but then you really need to bring in a good tax lawyer, and so on. Raising the money really wouldn't be the harder part, I think, if you want to go long term, but even as a commitment for a few years, or 5 years, say, it would be a wonderful thing.

Robert Sawyer suggests:

Robert J. Sawyer

Absolutely those of us in fandom should honor Mike's memory. But should we perhaps consider doing it in a way that will immortalize Mike's fannish contributions -- such as, for instance, endowing a fanzine collection at the Merril Collection, or endowing CUFF in his name? He had hundreds of teaching colleagues and thousands of former students who knew him in a capacity we did not. They, too, will be moved by his passing, and may well choose to do something at the school he taught at for three decades. Rather than duplicate their efforts, I suggest we find a way to commemorate the aspect of Mike that WE knew about. :)

I'm sure this will all be worked out in time.

Meanwhile, Mike's passing on has been commented on endlessly all over blogs, Facebook, LiveJournal, mailing lists, in endlessly more comment threads that I could list or be aware of or have access to, and I'm sure the same will be true in fanzines, and yet more comments and articles continue to pour in and will do so for years to come.

UPDATE, 3/20/11, 12:51 p.m, PST, more on memorial details. Word comes on Facebook that:

Murray Moore is putting together a memorial oneshot in memory of Mike Glicksohn. He's doing it for Mike's memorial service on Wednesday, so please mail him material ASAP. The memorial oneshot contributions eddress: murrayamoore AT gmail dot com

Chris Garcia is dedicating the next issue of Drink Tank to Mike. Anyone who has any memories they want to share, send them to Chris at - garcia AT computerhistory dot org

Hania Wojtowicz has mentioned compiling a document for Susan listing as many Facebook and LiveJournal links and quotes as she can; I've suggested making this publically available and linkable. [Update: she says she will. When/where she'll draw the line, I have no idea. Ruthlessly, I suppose. Probably in time for the Memorial Service.]

A memorial page by Mike's students:

Humberside Collegiate Alumni Association

Remembering Mr. (Mike) Glicksohn (1946-2011)

A service of remembrance will be held at Windermere United Church,
356 Windermere Avenue, on Wednesday, March 23 at 7 p.m.
Student's will remember him as "Mr.", his colleagues and family as "Mike or Michael", either way, the perennial favourite math teacher to thousands, and friend or family to many will be missed dearly as Mike passed away March 18th, 2011.

Lots and lots of tributes there.

I'm trying to remember in more than semi-coherent fashion this speech Mike gave at the first Autoclave, at the banquet, in which he told a Harlan story (back when they were still friends, obviously), which had to do with, um, (NSFW), the punchline being how a dick fell off. I wish Mike were around to remind me how it went. I'm half tempted to call Harlan up and see if he's feeling forgiving of Mike, now, given his own feelings of mortality, and ask him if he remembers his own story he told Mike, or some version.

I really am half-tempted, but not quite enough. At the moment. Besides, I'm sure Harlan will hear, and he'll do whatever it is he'll do.

Meanwhile I'm pondering if I have any Mike stories of my own really worth telling, but I feel like I couldn't possibly have any that really aren't just variants of everyone else's. Poker. Snake. Hair. Locs. Parties. Smoothing. Hat. Parties. Articles. Mimeography. Names of mutual friends, and his best friends. Everyone else can tell them better. The ones left alive, at least.

Also: Avedon Carol.

UPDATE, 3.22.11, 7:05 p.m., PST: Patrick Nielsen Hayden makes thoughtful remarks. One:

I’m sorry that my initial relationship to him was really with a version of him that I made up in my head. I’m glad we both lived long enough to actually relate as human beings.

We all tend to have versions in our heads of people if they're not in front of us recently, and with enough time to know who they really are at a given time. It's always a shame to miss out on relating to the actual person, and, I think, always a terrible thing when people die without ever having a chance to match reality with reality. Even letting years pass makes for lost years. I'm glad Patrick fixed things up with Mike eventually. Age and the greater wisdom and perspective it can bring can sometimes help with such issues.

UPDATE, 3.25.11, 11:14 a.m., PST: Murray Moore: Glicksohn Memorial Service Report. Excerpts:

"Mike was a twinkly child. “I don’t know anyone who twinkled like Mike did,” Manning Glicksohn, Mike’s older brother by 16 months, said. [...] Love was a word spoken often during the memorial service. Manning said of his brother, “Mike had a deep belief in the reality of love. Mike embodied it.” Mike loved and helped others love. Also “Mike really knew who he was and he refused to be anyone else.” [...] “He was an incredible man, a beautiful man to so many, my dear husband. Not a day went by that we did not say I Love You to each other. And what else is there to say?”

Yes. Read the Rest Scale: 5 out of 5. Sad again. But glad Mike was loved, and will be remembered.

SNOG IN THE FOG

2011-03-10T23:56:00.013-08:00

SNOG IN THE FOG

(Cross-posted at Obsidian Wings.)

If you happen to be in the environs of the San Francisco Bay Area from March 11th through 13th, I'll be here:

FOGcon: March 11-13, 2011, at the Holiday Inn Golden Gateway Hotel

Fogcon is this (links mine):

The Friends of Genre Convention (FOGcon) is a literary-themed San Francisco SF/F con in the tradition of Wiscon and Readercon. Each year we’ll focus on a new theme in speculative fiction and invite Honored Guests ranging from writers to scientists to artists. We will build community, exchange ideas, and share our love for the literature of imagination.

Theme for 2011: The City in SF/F

Honored Guests: Pat Murphy and Jeff VanderMeer; Honored Editorial Guest, Ann VanderMeer; Honored Guest (Posthumous) Fritz Leiber

“There is more than one road to the City.”—Ursula K. Le Guin

The theme of this, the first FOGCon is:

Whether a glass-edged utopia or a steampunk hell, the city plays a central role in many works of speculative fiction. It can be an arena for conflicts between cultures, a center of learning or vice, a court of power and corruption. In its gutters and government buildings, the city reveals the values a society claims and those it actually honors. Because the city is open to everyone, it’s a place where new things can happen. No wonder it is such a rich topic for so many writers.

Lots of other kewl people will be there. There will be programming!

I'm particularly, given the time-change, and our ability as science fiction people to slipstream, looking forward to these bits of programming:

Sunday Programming

Sunday, 2:00-3:00 A.M. (Interstitial Programming)
A Guided Tour of Veniss Underground
Boiler Room In The Basement

Honoured Guest Jeff VanderMeer leads interested parties down a specially dug tunnel beneath the Holiday Inn to explore the real-life location in which his fictional Veniss Underground was set. Warning: The con does not provide safety gear, weapons, or retrieval services for anyone lost on this expedition.

The Six Magic Words Of Guaranteed Publication
Gold Rush C

Ann VanderMeer will reveal the true secret of getting published: six words that will ensure that, if you include them in your story correctly, you will see print!

Fritz Leiber Reading/Q&A
Room 607, Rhodes Hotel

Fritz Leiber will be reading from his recently completed work, as well as answering audience questions.

Pat Murphy Teaches Wognax Zarbling and Alter-Ego Development
California Room, alter-ego overflow to Washington.

While she admitted in her program signup that she is not a professional Wognax zarbler, she aspires to be, and who doesn’t? She’ll provide her very skilled amateur guidance for those of us who have always wished to zarble Wognaxes (some Wognaxes provided, but feel free to bring your own). Once the Wognaxes are suitably zarbled, Pat will also advice people on how to develop their own alter-egos. Warning: Any alter-egos developed will not be allowed to attend Sunday programming unless they buy a day pass.

I'm particularly looking forward to Fritz Leiber's reading.

Leiber was one of the great s.

Some thoughts from Conjure, Wife:

What was life worth, anyway, if you had to sit around remembering not to mention this, that, and the other thing because someone else might be upset?

Chapter 11 (p. 116)

Things are different from what I thought. They’re much worse.

Chapter 20 (p. 209)

Other wisdom to keep in mind:

I abominate any organization that denies cats are people!

It was always worth everything to get away by himself, climb a bit, and study the heavens.

What do you care? You always liked loneliness better than you liked people.

No offence - liking yourself’s the beginning of all love.

And one I should always keep more in mind:

For that matter, where did I get off being critical of anyone?

But it's not just the dead who will be speaking, although you can also take a tour with Don Herron of Fritz Leiber's San Francisco. Don Herron's tours are legendary, and worth taking any time.

Pat Murphy is a great writer and fascinating person.

Pat Murphy has won awards for her science fiction and fantasy novels, as well her nonfiction science books. Her brilliant The City, Not Long After portrays a post-apocalyptic San Francisco populated by ghosts and artists.

Her second novel, The Falling Woman (1986), won the Nebula Award, and she also won a Nebula Award in the same year for her novelette, “Rachel in Love.”

Her short story collection, Points of Departure (1990) won the Philip K. Dick Award, and her 1991 novella, “Bones,” won the World Fantasy Award.
She lives in San Francisco and, for more than 20 years, when she was not writing science fiction, she worked at the Exploratorium, San Francisco’s museum of science, art, and human perception.

There, she published non-fiction as part of the museum staff. She is now an editor at Klutz Press in Palo Alto, where she is responsible for such wildly science-fictional publications as Invasion of the Bristlebots.

Together with Karen Joy Fowler, Murphy co-founded the James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 1991.

Ann VanderMeer is Very Busy.

Ann VanderMeer is the founder of the award-winning Buzzcity Press and currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief for Weird Tales, for which she has received a Hugo award.

Ann has partnered with her husband, author Jeff VanderMeer, on such editing projects as the World Fantasy Award–winning Leviathan series, The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, The New Weird, Steampunk, Steampunk Reloaded and Fast Ships, Black Sails.

She is also known for teaching writing workshops, including Clarion, Odyssey and Shared Worlds as well conducting creativity seminars for such varied audiences as the state of Arizona and Blizzard Entertainment.

Jeff VanderMeer is meanwhile here, there, and everywhere.

Award-winning writer Jeff VanderMeer’s final novel in his Ambergris Cycle, Finch, has just been published in the US, and will appear in the UK from Atlantic’s Corvus imprint.

His writer guide Booklife and associated Booklifenow website focus on sustainable creativity.

With his wife Ann, he recently edited the charity anthology Last Drnk Bird Head. His short fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Library of America’s American Fantastic Tales, and several year’s best anthologies. He has won two World Fantasy Awards and been nominated for many other awards.

He writes nonfiction for The Washington Post Book World, Omnivoracious, The New York Times Book Review, the B&N Review, and many others.

Since I blog here, though I'm just a tiny participant in this con, I'll mention that you can probably also find me hither and yon, at least:

Friday, 4:30-5:45 P.M.

No-Blah Blog
In 2011, many authors are not just writing stories, novels and articles. They’re blogging. How do you create a blog readers will want to return to again and again without sacrificing your other writing projects?
M: Amy Sundberg, Erin Hoffman, Gary Farber, Carolyn E. Cooper

Also:

Sunday, 9:00-10:15 A.M.

Power Structures in F/SF Cities
Who holds the power in the cities of alternate worlds? Are cities ruled by individuals, single organizations, or coalitions? How is power exercised: through religious, economic, legal, or other means? Can people move freely among classes? Does the nature of power held in a city influence the nature of the underclass? Take examples from modern and classic spec fic works and examine how these questions have been addressed over time.
M: Michele Cox, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Debbie Notkin, Gary Farber

And I'll be disappointed in myself if I don't show up at Saturday, 10:30-11:45 A.M. to kibitz at:

The Lightning Wrath of the Internet
From Cooks Source to RaceFail, the Internet “hivemind” gets angry very, very quickly. The speed of discussion in fandom is much faster than it ever has been before. How is this changing the conversations we have? Is it a good thing, a bad thing, or simply the way it is?
M: Lori Selke, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Nick Mamatas, Rachel Silber

Lots of other stuff will be going on, including a writer's workshop, and you kids interested in that would be well advised to play the home game with the:

Turkey City Lexicon – A Primer for SF Workshops
Edited by Lewis Shiner
Second Edition by Bruce Sterling

Elsewhere in skiffy news, there are always more Phil Dick movies coming:
Philip K. Dick, the sci-fi writer who fires Hollywood's imagination in film after film.

Yes, here comes The Adjustment Bureau.

Michael Chabon has a project on HBO, Hobgoblin:

Scribe Michael Chabon and his wife, author Ayelet Waldman, have set up an offbeat drama project at HBO that revolves around a motley group of conmen and magicians who use their skills at deception to battle Hitler and his forces during WWII.

No, you can never go wrong with Hitler!

Want some science fiction news? Try SF Signal and Locus Online.

You could even try File770.com, and watch folks take shots at me!

Or I've been known to blog about science fiction myself. Hey, read about me and Robert Heinlein. That's a bit of a story. Yikes.

But you need something to argue over! How about the perennial "what is science fiction?"

It's this!

Which is to say:

Ward Shelley
Artist, Teacher at Parsons the Newschool for Design, Easton, CT

“History of Science Fiction” is a graphic chronology that maps the literary genre from its nascent roots in mythology and fantastic stories to the somewhat calcified post-Star Wars space opera epics of today. The movement of years is from left to right, tracing the figure of a tentacled beast, derived from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds Martians. Science Fiction is seen as the offspring of the collision of the Enlightenment (providing science) and Romanticism, which birthed gothic fiction, source of not only SciFi, but crime novels, horror, westerns, and fantasy (all of which can be seen exiting through wormholes to their own diagrams, elsewhere). Science fiction progressed through a number of distinct periods, which are charted, citing hundreds of the most important works and authors. Film and television are covered as well.

The original is hand drawn and painted on Mylar. It has been exhibited at Teapot Gallery in Cologne and is part of an ongoing series. Other examples may be seen at: http://www.wardshelley.com

Wanna play science fiction bingo?

I'm with my friend, Samuel R. "Chip" Delany, myself.

Got any opinions about what the World Science Fiction Convention should be like? (I'm a footnote. In various places. Yeesh.)

Oh, yes, Fogcon?

You can be there!

    Adult Membership

    $75 after 2/1/10, including at the door
    Child and Youth Memberships

    Youth (ages 11 to age 17) $55 after 2/1/10, including at the door
    Child (ages 0 to 10) under constant direct parental supervision free

    Day memberships will be available at the door only.
    Friday: $40 (includes the Liftoff Party)
    Saturday: $35
    Sunday: $30
    Youth day rates
    Friday only: $25
    Sat only: $20
    Sun only: $15

Incidentally, you should all buy some fantastic books from Aqueduct Press. They're fabulous.

Tachyon Press also has a wonderful catalog.

And I'm not (full disclosure) saying this because I got a couple of review books; I could do that with endless crap; these are books really worth owning.

So does everything NESFA Press does, and they've never given me any review books!

And if you want your leftist press crossed with some sf stuff, try PM Press. If you don't know Terry Bisson's work, you're missing out.

And everyone should read Thog and David Langford's Hugo-winning Ansible.

Cheryls's Mewsings by Cheryl Morgan is another good site for sf con/fan news.

For more Science Fiction In San Francisco, try SF In SF.

And don't forget to patronize the fine sf bookstore The Other Change of Hobbit, in Oakland!

This is otherwise an Open Thread. Discuss!

BONUS VIDEO: Pat Murphy and her Talking Cats Explain Entropy And Chaos Theory!

Also the Convention Anti-Harassment Project and Open Source Women Back Each Other Up Project & Gentlemen's Auxiliary.

ADDENDUM, 3.14.11, 2:27 p.m.: Hey, thanks, PZ and John DeNardo at SF Signal!

It was a great con! Thanks so much to the concom! Everyone come next year!

Well, all you interesting people. But that means you!

One of the best-organized, best first cons I've ever been to, a great con, period, and all around Recommended! (And I'm a tough grader, as you know!)

And I have videotape (with permission to post) of most of that "Lightning Wrath of the Internet" panel. Now to decide if I want to risk the Lightning Wrath of the Internet....

WINNING WISCONSIN, PIGS & HIPPIES TOGETHER: THIS IS OUR HOUSE!

2011-02-26T17:32:00.007-08:00

WINNING WISCONSIN, PIGS & HIPPIES TOGETHER: THIS IS OUR HOUSE!

Crossposted at Obsidian Wings.

Don't tell me we can't win this. Wisconsin Police Have Joined Protest Inside State Capitol.
From inside the Wisconsin State Capitol, Ryan Harvey reports:

“Hundreds of cops have just marched into the Wisconsin state capitol building to protest the anti-Union bill, to massive applause. They now join up to 600 people who are inside.”

Ryan reported on his Facebook page earlier today [February 25th -- gf]:

“Police have just announced to the crowds inside the occupied State Capitol of Wisconsin: ‘We have been ordered by the legislature to kick you all out at 4:00 today. But we know what’s right from wrong. We will not be kicking anyone out, in fact, we will be sleeping here with you!’

Ryan Harvey's video from Friday:

My quotes:

[...] This is not a budget issue! This is a CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE! [...] Mr. Walker! [...] We know pretty well now who you work for! [applause] Let me tell you who WE work for! [points to self and police emblem] We work for all of these people! [applause] We are not here, Mr. Walker, to do your bidding! We are here to do their bidding! [...] Mr. Walker, this not your House! This is all of our House! [camera pans 360°]

I want to give this officer a big fat kiss on the mouth.

Pictures from Ryan Harvey, February 25, Occupied Capitol Building, Madison, WI:

Police:

Firefighters:

Hardhatted working class dreamers who lead us.

The people of Wisconsin.

All who stand of the people, by the people, for the people.

All photos (C) 2011 by Ryan Harvey. More from February 24th. Dispatches from the Madison Fight: #2, February 25th:

Walking into the occupied State Capitol of Wisconsin was more than mind blowing. I had imagined a small group of folks holding space in one area, confined by police lines.

And from what the news has been reporting, things were starting to die down here.

What I saw was quite different. Right inside the door, a huge poster hangs. “IN THE EVENT OF A GENERAL STRIKE, I VOW TO SUPPORT WORKERS”, it reads, and hundreds of signatures have been scribbled beneath.

The entire 4 or 5 story building is nearly completely occupied by union members, students, and people from across Wisconsin. There were literally hundreds of people here last night, and one or two hundred this morning that, like me, slept on the cold floor or on mats they had brought in.

The Capitol is covered in posters and signs reading things like “Hands Off Workers, Make the Banks Pay”, “Scott Walker is Robin Hood in Reverse”, and “Our Prayers to Libya – Power to the People”. A gigantic “Tax the Rich” banner hangs over the railing on one of the third floor walkway.

In the atrium at the center of the building, beneath a giant dome that peaks above Madison, an impromptu, all-day open-mic is hosted. Speakers announce their union or school, or where they came from. Drummers bang beats to massive chants that erupt every few minutes. “Beat The Bill!” the crowd says over and over, causing echoes throughout the space.

Firefighters, construction workers, steamfitters, cleaners, state workers, high school students, veterans, and police officers stood side by side in opposition to the Tea Party-backed Governor’s crazed anti-Union legislation being discussed around the corner.

Dotted among them were a few non-locals like myself, some who came from as far as Los Angeles to show support. When non-locals announced their presence, huge cheers erupted and people came to them to thank them. [more]

Governor Scott Walker was booed out of a restaurant.

Wisconsin blogger Naomi Houser reports tonight (via Howie Klein on Twitter):

The M******t [a restaurant] in Madison, WI confirms that on Friday night, ******* (one of the owners) politely asked Scott Walker to leave the establishment when other customers began booing him. A bartender at The M*****t said that ‘his presence was causing a disturbance to the other customers and management asked him to leave.’
Maybe he should have stayed home and ordered pizza instead? Okay, maybe not; there might be a long wait.

David Dayen reports, Saturday February 26, 2011 11:07 a.m.: PHOTOS, VIDEO: Massive Crowds – and Organizing – in Madison.

Rally.

MADISON, Wis. — Thousands of people took part in rallies in support of unions around the nation on Saturday, including here in the Wisconsin capital, where a political stalemate between the Republican governor and Democratic legislators over curtailing the power of unions led to similar battles in other states in the past week.

The tens of thousands of people who filled the square around the Capitol here Saturday rivaled the largest of the demonstrations that have taken place since Feb. 15 over Gov. Scott Walker’s effort to limit the collective bargaining rights of public sector unions and to require public workers to pay more for their health insurance and pensions.

“We’ve had bargaining for 50 years, and he’s trying to destroy it in a week,” said Al Alt, a teacher from Waukesha who was among the protesters. [...]
Under a light snow here on Saturday afternoon, demonstrators chanted “This is what democracy looks like” and “Scott Walker’s Got to Go!”

Many of the placards protesters carried were directed at Mr. Walker’s relationship with Charles G. and David H. Koch, the billionaire brothers who have bankrolled conservative causes and Republican politicians, including Mr. Walker’s election campaign last year.

“We will not tolerate Koch heads in Wisconsin,” read one of the signs.
In Miami, about 150 people took part in a rally at Bayfront Park in solidarity with public employees in Wisconsin and elsewhere.

Many picketers expressed concern that Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, might try to strip away the few protections unions have in Florida. A bill in the Legislature would block union dues from being automatically deducted from paychecks.

The protest in Madison on Saturday was loud but peaceful, and the police have described the demonstrators’ behavior as “exemplary” as protesters have gathered and slept throughout the public areas of the Capitol for days.
But the sleepovers will end on Sunday, when the Capitol Police say they will instruct demonstrators to leave at 4 p.m. for cleaning and maintenance of the building. Mattresses, chairs, cooking equipment and other gear the protesters have used are being removed.

Some demonstrators said they expected at least some protesters to resist having to leave the building, and union officials are unhappy with the decision. Alex Hanna, a co-president of the Teaching Assistants’ Association, called the moved “undemocratic and obviously politically motivated.”

In Illinois, Fraternal Order of Police Expresses Support for Wisconsin Protesters.

Illinois FOP is ready to stand with all Illinois labor organizations in support of unions facing threats similar to those in Wisconsin.

Midwestern states are standing together. Indiana Informs Wisconsin’s Push (these are selective quote's; I'm making an argument; for Governor Walker's and Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana's arguments, click through to the article:

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and other officials who are pushing to eliminate or weaken collective bargaining by government employees say their goal is to save millions of dollars and increase government’s flexibility to run its operations.

The experience of a nearby state, Indiana, where Gov. Mitch Daniels eliminated bargaining for state employees six years ago, shows just how much is at stake, both for the government and for workers. His 2005 executive order has had a sweeping impact: no raises for state employees in some years, a weakening of seniority preferences and a far greater freedom to consolidate state operations or outsource them to private companies.

[...]

For state workers in Indiana, the end of collective bargaining also meant a pay freeze in 2009 and 2010 and higher health insurance payments. Several state employees said they now paid $5,200 a year in premiums, $3,400 more than when Mr. Daniels took office, though there are cheaper plans available.

[...]

Andrea Helm, an employee at a children’s home in Knightstown, Ind., said that soon after collective bargaining was ended and the union contract expired, coveted seniority preferences disappeared. “I saw a lot of employees who had 20, 30 years on the job fired,” she said. “I think they were trying to cut the more expensive people on top to make their budget smaller.”

Mr. Walker is trying to persuade Wisconsin lawmakers not only to emulate Indiana at the state level, but also to extend the bargaining restrictions to local governments. He would allow bargaining on only wages, and he argues that, by banning negotiations on subjects like outsourcing, health coverage, workloads and seniority, his plan will be a boon for taxpayers at every level of government.

[...]

Teachers’ union officials said they had traded wage gains to keep their health plan, adding that districts could use cheaper plans, but that would result in worse coverage for teachers.

[...]

Union officials say that collective bargaining provides workers with important protections against retaliation, age discrimination and management decisions that sometimes change with the political winds.

“Layoffs may not be based on merit or effectiveness, but on anything management wants it to be,” said Mary Bell, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, which represents 98,000 public school employees.

Ms. Bell said that experienced, high-salary teachers would have targets on their heads and that class sizes would grow bigger without union prodding.

Jim Mills, a longtime welfare worker and union activist in New Castle, Ind., said a big problem with ending collective bargaining was that workers who had ideas to improve government agencies or services became scared to stick their neck out and make suggestions to their bosses.

“If we saw there was a bottleneck and something didn’t work and told them, it was ‘Get lost, you’ve got to do it the way we told you or you can leave,’ ” Mr. Mills said. He noted that after bargaining was banned, his union local dwindled to just 12 members from 260, partly because workers were scared management would know who still paid union dues.

Mike Huggins, the city manager of Eau Claire, Wis., said Mr. Walker’s push to curb bargaining could make management more difficult at the city level because it would hurt municipal employees’ morale and end the labor-management cooperation that he said had yielded excellent ideas to improve services to the public.

He cited a new effort in which Eau Claire saves money for itself and 11 surrounding communities by providing round-the-clock emergency medical service coverage. “All these practices and working relationships we’ve developed over the years would go away,” he said.

If there is one thing the two sides agree on, it’s that an end to collective bargaining will lead to far weaker public sector unions. Mr. Daniels said that after he banned bargaining, membership in the unions for state workers nosedived by 90 percent, with workers deciding it was no longer worth paying dues to newly toothless unions.

Los Angeles solidarity.

Avedon Carol writes that:

...let's not pretend the Republicans are in this alone. The Republicans didn't get where they are today without lots of help from the Democratic leadership. Dems at the state level may be acting courageously to prevent Republican legislators from doing more to wreck the states, but blaming "the Republicans" for everything, while it is what you can expect from MoveOn, is a dangerous illusion. TARP would have been dead in the water without the help of Senator Obama. The Bush tax-shift would have withered away had it not been for Obama and the Dem leadership. We might even have a decent health insurance option had Obama not worked so hard to prevent it. Don't just laugh at Republican voters who "vote against their own interests" for politicians who promise to help them and then spit in their faces when Democratic voters have been doing the same damn thing.

And she links to The Koch Brothers' End Game in Wisconsin.

1) Koch Brothers get their puppet Governor Walker in power
2) Governor Walker gins up a crisis
3) Democrats and Progressives take the bait and counter-protest on collective bargaining
4) Governor Walker will compromise on collective bargaining if the rest of the budget is passed as is
5) Bill passes, with trojan horse give-a-way to the Koch Brothers nested in
6) Koch Brothers will buy Wisconsin state-owned power plants for pennies on the dollar in closed unsolicited bids for which there will be no oversight
7) Koch Brothers get the best vertical monopoly in a generation

Who 'Contributes' to Public Workers' Pensions? Pulitzer Prize winning tax reporter, David Cay Johnston explains:

[...] Accepting Gov. Walker's assertions as fact, and failing to check, created the impression that somehow the workers are getting something extra, a gift from taxpayers. They are not.

Out of every dollar that funds Wisconsin' s pension and health insurance plans for state workers, 100 cents comes from the state workers. [....]

Fight on, Wisconsin. Keep badgering Governor Walker.

UPDATE, 8:47 p.m.: Madison police chief troubled by Walker's comments on protesters:

Madison Police Chief Noble Wray said Thursday that he found comments by Gov. Scott Walker made about protesters at the state Capitol during a prank phone call “very unsettling and troubling." [...] “I would like to hear more of an explanation from Governor Walker as to what exactly was being considered, and to what degree it was discussed by his cabinet members. I find it very unsettling and troubling that anyone would consider creating safety risks for our citizens and law enforcement officers,” the chief said. [...]
The Madison Police Department released a separate statement: “The men and the women of the Madison Police Department train for crowd situations where an agitator or provocateur may try to create safety risks for citizens and officers. During the demonstration around the Capitol Square no such situation has arisen. Crowd behavior has been exemplary, and thousands of Wisconsin citizens are to be commended for the peaceful ways in which they have expressed First Amendment rights.”
Walker spokesman Cullen Werwie had no immediate comment on Wray’s statements.
PolitiFact Wisconsin examines Walker's statement saying "almost all" of the protesters in Madison coming from outside of Wisconsin.

I would now like to, and will, point out Laws governing recall in Wisconsin:

The citizens of Wisconsin are granted the authority to perform a recall election by the Wisconsin Constitution, Article VIII, Section 12 to all elective officers after the first year of the term for which the incumbent was elected.

Scott Kevin Walker was sworn into office January 3, 2011.

Recent Wisconsin posts: THE NEW REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL REVOLUTIONARY VOLUNTEERS OF AMERICA, SCOTT WALKER REPORTS TO THE BOSS, DAVID KOCH.

THE NEW REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL REVOLUTIONARY VOLUNTEERS OF AMERICA

2011-02-25T13:41:00.003-08:00

THE NEW REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL REVOLUTIONARY VOLUNTEERS OF AMERICA

Variant cross-posted at Obsidian Wings.

Congressman stops short of calling for Obama assassination. Georgia Congressman Paul Broun's Tuesday night’s town hall meeting:

The first question of the night (confirmed by Broun’s office) was “when is someone going to shoot Obama?”

Broun’s response, Athens Banner-Herald (Georgia):

The thing is, I know there’s a lot of frustration with this president. We’re going to have an election next year. Hopefully, we’ll elect somebody that’s going to be a conservative, limited-government president that will take a smaller, who will sign a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare. He then segued into Republicans’ budget proposal.

Today: Loughner indictment expected by March 9, trial in Sept.:

Dylan Smith, TucsonSentinel.com

Prosecutors said they will indict Jared Lee Loughner on more federal charges by March 9, a court order said Thursday. U.S. District Judge Larry Burns said in the order that he expects a trial to begin before Sept. 20. Loughner, 22, is the alleged gunman in the Jan. 8 shooting that authorities call an assassination attempt on U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

[...] Six were killed and 13 wounded in the attack on a constituent meet-and-greet at a Northwest Side grocery store. Giffords remains in a Houston rehab facility, recovering from her wounds.

Georgia Congressman Paul Broun had best not hold town meetings on Obsidian Wings.

We would ban someone from there for such a statement.

But Republican Georgia Congressman Paul Broun lets it pass without a word and:

[...] Broun’s press secretary, Jessica Morris, confirmed that the question was indeed, who is going to shoot Obama? “Obviously, the question was inappropriate, so Congressman Broun moved on,” she said.

We wouldn't just move on, if we noticed that here.

But it's okay if you're merely a Republican Congressional Representative.

Move along. Nothing to see here.

In June, Greg Sargent wrote:

Sharron Angle floated possibility of armed insurrection:

Here's another one that could be tough for Sharron Angle to explain away: In an interview in January, Angle appeared to float the possibility of armed insurrection if "this Congress keeps going the way it is."

I'm not kidding. In an interview she gave to a right-wing talk show host, Angle approvingly quoted Thomas Jefferson saying it's good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years -- and said that if Congress keeps it up, people may find themselves resorting to "Second Amendment remedies."

What's more, the talk show host she spoke to tells me he doesn't have any doubt that she was floating the possibility of armed insurrection as a valid response if Congress continues along its current course.

Asked by the host, Lars Larson of Portland, Oregon, where she stands on Second Amendment issues, Angle replied:

You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said it's good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years.

I hope that's not where we're going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I'll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.
Larson says Angle was floating the possibility of armed insurrection if Congress keeps it up under Reid et al.

[look below jump]

I say:

Be a real volunteer. Rally to Save the American Dream.

Read The Rest Scale: 5 out of 5.

"If it continues to do the things it's doing, I think she's leaving open that possibility," Larson said. "And I think the founders believed that the public should be able to do that when the government becomes out of control. It just matters what you define as going too far."

Also last June, an ad from:

... Rick Barber, another Tea Partyer (surprise!) who is in a runoff to face Alabama Democratic Rep. Bobby Bright. The ad features Barber conferring with--well, ranting at--George Washington, Samuel Adams, and Ben Franklin.

He opens with talk of impeaching Obama and goes on about the IRS and the progressive tax code. Noting that the ghostly trio revolted over a tea tax, he says things have gotten much worse and that he won't "stand by while these evils are perpetrated." (At one point the former Marine points to a piece of parchment that he says he swore to defend with his life; presumably he's referring to the Constitution, but close examination reveals the document he's pointing to is the Declaration of Independence--oh well, close enough I suppose.)

The ad closes with his asking if the three forefathers are "with me?!?" The Washington characters responds: "Gather. Your. Armies."

Avedon Carol points out at The Sideshow:

Meanwhile, the GOP is still trying to kill women. People used to think I was a paranoid raving loony when I suggested this was how the anti-choicers rolled. Still waiting for those apologies.

That's New GOP Bill Would Allow Hospitals To Let Women Die Instead Of Having An Abortion:

[...] The controversy over "forcible rape" may be over, but now there's a new Republican-sponsored abortion bill in the House that pro-choice folks say may be worse: this time around, the new language would allow hospitals to let a pregnant woman die rather than perform the abortion that would save her life.

Some current GOP women's policies:

1) Republicans not only want to reduce women's access to abortion care, they're actually trying to redefine rape. After a major backlash, they promised to stop. But they haven't yet. Shocker.
2) A state legislator in Georgia wants to change the legal term for victims of rape, stalking, and domestic violence to "accuser." But victims of other less gendered crimes, like burglary, would remain "victims."
3) In South Dakota, Republicans proposed a bill that could make it legal to murder a doctor who provides abortion care. (Yep, for real.)
4) Republicans want to cut nearly a billion dollars of food and other aid to low-income pregnant women, mothers, babies, and kids.
5) In Congress, Republicans have a bill that would let hospitals allow a woman to die rather than perform an abortion necessary to save her life.
6) Maryland Republicans ended all county money for a low-income kids' preschool program. Why? No need, they said. Women should really be home with the kids, not out working.
7) And at the federal level, Republicans want to cut that same program, Head Start, by $1 billion. That means over 200,000 kids could lose their spots in preschool.
8) Two-thirds of the elderly poor are women, and Republicans are taking aim at them too. A spending bill would cut funding for employment services, meals, and housing for senior citizens.
9) Congress just voted for a Republican amendment to cut all federal funding from Planned Parenthood health centers, one of the most trusted providers of basic health care and family planning in our country.
10) And if that wasn't enough, Republicans are pushing to eliminate all funds for the only federal family planning program. (For humans. But Republican Dan Burton has a bill to provide contraception for wild horses. You can't make this stuff up).
Sources:

1. "'Forcible Rape' Language Remains In Bill To Restrict Abortion Funding," The Huffington Post, February 9, 2011
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=206084

"Extreme Abortion Coverage Ban Introduced," Center for American Progress, January 20, 2011
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=205961

2. "Georgia State Lawmaker Seeks To Redefine Rape Victims As 'Accusers,'" The Huffington Post, February 4, 2011
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=206007

3. "South Dakota bill would legalize killing abortion doctors," Salon, February 15, 2011
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2011/02/15/south_dakota_abortion_killing_bill

4. "House GOP Proposes Cuts to Scores of Sacred Cows," National Journal, February 9, 2011
http://nationaljournal.com/house-gop-proposes-cuts-to-scores-of-sacred-cows-20110209

5. "New GOP Bill Would Allow Hospitals To Let Women Die Instead Of Having An Abortion," Talking Points Memo, February 4, 2011
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=205974

6. "Republican Officials Cut Head Start Funding, Saying Women Should be Married and Home with Kids," Think Progress, February 16, 2011
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/02/16/gop-women-kids/

7. "Bye Bye, Big Bird. Hello, E. Coli," The New Republic, Feburary 12, 2011
http://www.tnr.com/blog/83387/house-republican-spending-cuts-pell-education-usda-pbs

8. "House GOP spending cuts will devastate women, families and economy," The Hill, February 16, 2011
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-a-budget/144585-house-gop-spending-cuts-will-devastate-women-families-and-economy-

9. "House passes measure stripping Planned Parenthood funding," MSNBC, February 18,2011
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/02/18/6080756-house-passes-measure-stripping-planned-parenthood-funding

"GOP Spending Plan: X-ing Out Title X Family Planning Funds," Wall Street Journal, February 9, 2011
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2011/02/09/gop-spending-plan-x-ing-out-title-x-family-planning-funds/

10. Ibid.

"Birth Control for Horses, Not for Women," Blog for Choice, February 17, 2011
http://www.blogforchoice.com/archives/2011/02/birth-control-f.html

Robert Kraig: Walker’s National Guard comments a thinly veiled threat against workers.

Who are these people?

They're the New Republican/Tea Party Volunteers Of America. The "Tea Party" name comes from a direct revolutionary action in the American Revolution.

Look what's happening out in the streets
Got a revolution Got to revolution

What can you do? Fight back. Don't mourn, organize.

Rally to Save the American Dream

On Saturday, February 26, at noon local time, we are organizing rallies in front of every statehouse and in every major city to stand in solidarity with the people of Wisconsin. We demand an end to the attacks on worker's rights and public services across the country. We demand investment, to create decent jobs for the millions of people who desperately want to work. And we demand that the rich and powerful pay their fair share.

We are all Wisconsin. We are all Americans.

This Saturday, we will stand together to Save the American Dream. Be sure to wear Wisconsin Badger colors—red and white—to show your solidarity. Sign up today to join in!

Be a real volunteer.

Recent Wisconsin labor post: SCOTT WALKER REPORTS TO THE BOSS, DAVID KOCH. Subsequently: WINNING WISCONSIN, PIGS & HIPPIES TOGETHER: THIS IS OUR HOUSE!

SCOTT WALKER REPORTS TO THE BOSS, DAVID KOCH

2011-02-24T07:40:00.003-08:00

SCOTT WALKER REPORTS TO THE BOSS, DAVID KOCH

Cross posted from Obsidian Wings, Feburary 23rd, 2011, at 02:13 PM. [Formatting here will be not quite right; see Obsidian Wings version for better.]

Don't believe how it works? Then listen for yourself.

Let's go with Adam Weinstein's take:

Is that really Scott Walker? [Update: Yep.] A New York-based alt-news editor says he got through to the embattled Wisconsin governor on the phone Tuesday by posing as right-wing financier David Koch...then had a far-ranging 20-minute conversation about the collective bargaining protests. According to the audio, Walker told him:

That statehouse GOPers were plotting to hold Democratic senators' pay until they returned to vote on the controversial union-busting bill.

That Walker was looking to nail Dems on ethics violations if they took meals or lodging from union supporters.

That he'd take "Koch" up on this offer: "[O]nce you crush these bastards I'll fly you out to Cali and really show you a good time."

Now check it out yourself:

The rest:

More?

According to his Wikipedia entry, Ian Murphy is a gonzo journalist and editor of the Buffalo Beast, an online mag that was founded in 2002 as an alternative biweekly by gonzo Matt Taibbi and a band of colleagues. Murphy's probably best-known for a tough read about America's war dead called "F*ck the Troops." But if his latest Beast post, "Koch Whore," is to be believed, it's likely to be read a lot more widely.

When Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tim Carpenter complained that Walker wouldn't return any of the Dems' calls, Murphy says he wondered: "Who could get through to Gov. Walker? Well, what do we know about Walker and his proposed union-busting, no-bid budget? The obvious candidate was "David Koch." Koch, of course, is one of the right-wing brothers behind Americans for Prosperity and a host of other GOP-friendly causes; MoJo's own Andy Kroll broke the news last week on the Koch brothers' past support for Walker and his agenda.

So, Murphy says, he managed to have a phone audience with the governor by posing as Koch. And he taped the whole thing, copied on the videos below. What Walker says on the tape is pretty convincing...and sweeping. There'll be no negotiations with the unions or their legislative supporters, he says; after all, he doesn't need them:

I would be willing to sit down and talk to him, the assembly Democrat leader, plus the other two Republican leaders—talk, not negotiate and listen to what they have to say if they will in turn—but I'll only do it if all 14 of them will come back and sit down in the state assembly…legally, we believe, once they've gone into session, they don't physically have to be there.

At one point in the tape, Walker dismisses the left-leaning MSNBC. "Who watches that? I went on Morning Joe this morning. I like it because I just like being combative with those guys, but, uh. You know they're off the deep end."

Greg Sargent:

UPDATE, 11:41 a.m.: A few items of note from the call:
* Walker doesn't bat an eye when Koch describes the opposition as "Democrat bastards."
* Walker reveals that he and other Republicans are looking at whether they can charge an "ethics code violation if not an outright felony" if unions are paying for food or lodging for any of the Dem state senators.
* Walker says he's sending out notices next week to some five or six thousand state workers letting them know that they are "at risk" of layoffs.
"Beautiful, beautiful," the Koch impersonator replies. "You gotta crush that union."
More soon...

UPDATE, 11:54 a.m.: In a key detail, Walker reveals that he is, in effect, laying a trap for Wisconsin Dems. He says he is mulling inviting the Senate and Assembly Dem and GOP leaders to sit down and talk, but only if all the missing Senate Dems return to work.
Then, tellingly, he reveals that the real game plan here is that if they do return, Republicans might be able to use a procedural move to move forward with their proposal.
"If they're actually in session for that day and they take a recess, this 19 Senate Republicans could then go into action and they'd have a quorum because they started out that way," he says. "If you heard that I was going to talk to them that would be the only reason why."
Then the fake Koch says this: "Bring a baseball bat. That's what I'd do."
Walker doesn't bat an eye, and responds: "I have one in my office, you'd be happy with that. I've got a slugger with my name on it."
12:09 p.m.: Another key exchange:
FAKE KOCH: What we were thinking about the crowds was, planting some troublemakers.
WALKER: We thought about that. My only gut reaction to that would be, right now, the lawmakers I talk to have just completely had it with them. The public is not really fond of this.The teachers union did some polling and focus groups...
It's unclear what Walker means when he says he "thought" about planting some troublemakers, but it seems fair to ask him for clarification.
UPDATE, 12:27 p.m.: One last fun tidbit: Walker appears to agree when "Koch" calls David Axelrod a "son of a bitch." Walker tells an anecdote in which he was having dinner with Jim Sensebrenner, and at a nearby table he saw Mika Brzezinski and Greta Van Susteren having dinner with David Axelrod. Then this exchange occured:

WALKER: I introduced myself.
FAKE KOCH: That son of a bitch.
WALKER: Yeah, no kidding, right?
UPDATE, 12:41 p.m.: Another great exchange:

FAKE KOCH: Well, I'll tell ya what, Scott. Once you crush these bastards, I'll fly ya out to Cali and really show you a good time.
WALKER: Alright. That would be outstanding. Thanks for all the support and helping us move the cause forward.

Reminder of how Jane Mayer develved into the Brothers Koch.

Now tell me again what a noble cause breaking unions is.

UPDATE, 6:43 p.m.: Sam Stein reports: Gov. Walker Informed That Bill Targeting Unions May Cost State $46 Million In Federal Funds.

[...] Wisconsin received $74 million in federal transit funds this fiscal year. Of that, $46.6 million would be put at risk should the collective-bargaining bill come to pass -- in the process creating an even more difficult fiscal situation than the one that, ostensibly, compelled Walker to push the legislation in the first place. The governor is certainly aware of this. While the potential loss of funds may have escaped the attention of many observers, sources familiar with the state's transportation policy tell The Huffington Post that Walker's office has been informed of the relevant legal language.

[...] Faced with the prospects of forfeiting $46.6 million in federal transit funds, Democrats in the Wisconsin House of Representatives have crafted an amendment to Gov. Scott Walker's anti-public union bill that would protect collective bargaining rights strictly for transit workers.

The amendment, authored by Reps. Tamara Grigsby (D-Milwaukee) and Penny Bernard Schaber (D-Appleton), would add transit employees to the list of "public safety employees" that are exempted from some of the harsher measures under Walker's bill.

While protecting the rights of only a small sliver of the union members -- Grigsby's office said she "would much rather maintain employee rights for all" -- the amendment could, nevertheless, be worth tens of millions of dollars for the state.

The full analysis document from the non-partisan Wisconsin State Fiscal Bureau, is included at the link.

Meanwhile: Koch brothers quietly open lobbying office in downtown Madison.

It's good to have $43 billion lying around. You can do all sorts of things with that kind of spare change.

Just for added fun, a crazy communist at Forbes.com writes: Koch Brothers Behind Wisconsin Effort To Kill Public Unions.

This includes:

[...]
The Americans for Prosperity group, a Tea Party group that is a Koch Brothers front, has put up a website and petition called www.standwithwalker.com. The website attacks all collective bargaining – not just for public employees’ unions. Americans for Prosperity is also organizing a rally tomorrow in Wisconsin to support Gov. Walker.
Why are the Koch Brothers so interested in Wisconsin? They are a major business player in the state.
This from Think Progress:

Koch owns a coal company subsidiary with facilities in Green Bay, Manitowoc, Ashland and Sheboygan; six timber plants throughout the state; and a large network of pipelines in Wisconsin. While Koch controls much of the infrastructure in the state, they have laid off workers to boost profits. At a time when Koch Industries owners David and Charles Koch awarded themselves an extra $11 billion of income from the company, Koch slashed jobs at their Green Bay plant:
Officials at Georgia-Pacific said the company is laying off 158 workers at its Day Street plant because out-of-date equipment at the facility is being replaced with newer, more-efficient equipment. The company said much of the new, papermaking equipment will be automated. [...] Malach tells FOX 11 that the layoffs are not because of a drop in demand. In fact, Malach said demand is high for the bath tissue and napkins manufactured at the plant.
You really have to wonder how long it will take for Tea Party devotees to realize just how badly they are being used.

Radical leftist Steve Forbes publishes this. At the WaPo, business columnist Steven Pearlstein writes:
[...]

a thought experiment that asks readers to consider the mirror image of what is going on. In this case, you'd be asked what the reaction would be from Republicans and business interests if a newly elected Democratic governor and legislature proposed to deal with a budget deficit by first raising unemployment benefits and then pushing through a big corporate tax increase for all but the Democratic-leaning tech sector. For good measure, the package would also contain a ban on corporations making political donations without getting the permission of each shareholder, lest they use their power to repeal the tax increase and push the budget out of balance.
This is analogous, of course, to what Gov. Scott Walker has proposed for dealing with Wisconsin's budget gap: the tax breaks for businesses, the benefit cuts for all state employees except Republican-leaning police and firefighters, the automatic decertification of all public-sector unions and the stripping of their right to bargain anything but wages. Looking at Walker's reflection in the political fun-house mirror makes it abundantly clear that the governor has a more ambitious agenda than merely closing a modest budget gap.

Gee, ya think?
That $43 billion can fund Americans for Prosperity.

Winner:	Energumen ed. by Michael Glicksohn and Susan Wood Glicksohn
2	Locus ed. by Charles N. Brown and Dena Brown
3	Algol ed. by Andrew I. Porter
Runners-up:
	Granfalloon ed. by Ron Bushyager and Linda Bushyager
	SF Commentary ed. by Bruce Gillespie

Winner:	Terry Carr
2	Susan Wood Glicksohn
3	Richard E. Geis
Runners-up:
	Charles N. Brown
	Sandra Miesel
	Rosemary Ullyot

Winner:	Tim Kirk
2	William Rotsler
3	Grant Canfield
Runners-up:
	James Shull
	Arthur "ATom" Thomson

Amygdala

TENTH BLOGIVERSARY

Being Suicidal: What it feels like to want to kill yourself

SAID THE RED QUEEN

PAPERS, PLEASE

OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!

YOU'RE ONLY AS SMALL AS YOUR DREAMS

ORBIT WITH ME

THE TERRORISTS WON

BARELY ALIVE

STAYING ALIVE

A GOOD COPYEDITING JOB, AND A BIG FAVOR TO ME

YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO FREEZE AND BE UTTERLY SILENT

BLOGGING IS LIKE A SIMILE

POTTERY BARN LIBYA, PT 2: ANTHONY CORDESMAN, ONE MAN ARMY, OR GIVE PEACE A CHANCE?

POTTERY BARN LIBYA, PART 1

HELLO, GOODBYE: YOU SAY GOODBYE, I SAY GO TO HELL, GLENN BECK

WHAT IS BEST IN ACADEMIC FREEDOM, CRONON? NOT TO CRUSH YOUR ENEMIES

In Fitzgeraldstan, Wisconsin Laws Are For The Little People

APRIL WHAT?

Press Release

By Charlie Stross

GOP'S RADICAL BREAKAGE CONTINUES

Who’s Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere? (Hint: It Didn’t Start Here)

Telling Your State Legislators What to Do: The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)

Becoming a Member of ALEC: Not So Easy to Do

Partners in Wisconsin and Other States: SPN, MacIver Institute, WPRI

Understanding What These Groups Do

A Cautionary Note

An Introductory Bibliography on the Recent History of American Conservatism

PERSPECTIVE

MICHAEL D. GLICKSOHN, 1946-2011, RIP

A One-Hour, One-Shot Fanzine from ConFusion 31 2-3pm, January 22, 2005

Best Fanzine

Best Fan Writer

Best Fan Artist

SNOG IN THE FOG

FOGcon: March 11-13, 2011, at the Holiday Inn Golden Gateway Hotel

No-Blah Blog

Power Structures in F/SF Cities

The Lightning Wrath of the Internet

Turkey City Lexicon – A Primer for SF Workshops

WINNING WISCONSIN, PIGS & HIPPIES TOGETHER: THIS IS OUR HOUSE!

THE NEW REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL REVOLUTIONARY VOLUNTEERS OF AMERICA

SCOTT WALKER REPORTS TO THE BOSS, DAVID KOCH

Telling Your State Legislators What to Do:
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)