Iraq

The new Vietnam

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EDITORIAL And now, President George W. Bush wants to commit another 20,000 troops.

Twenty thousand more US kids, going to fight a war that can’t be won. Twenty thousand more lives in potential danger for no imaginable purpose. This isn’t the "surge" Bush has invoked; it’s an escalation, one reminiscent of the worst days of the Vietnam War, when Presidents Lyndon Johnston and then Richard Nixon sent more and more troops into a quagmire from which there was no good exit. If anything, Iraq is worse: when the United States fled Vietnam, there was at least a stable government to take over.

Bush has given the Democrats a huge opportunity here, a chance to create the sort of political sea change that only comes once or twice a decade. Watergate set the Republicans back for much of the 1970s. The energy crisis and the Iran hostage situation knocked the Democrats out of power in the 1980s, and Bill Clinton’s health care fiasco gave the GOP control of Congress in the 1990s. The Iraq War gave the House and Senate back to the Democrats last fall — and the Bush escalation could give them back the White House in 2008.

This is the end of the Bush presidency. Iraq will poison any Republican who sides with the president and supports the escalation. And it will be political gold for Democratic candidates and leaders — if they are willing to seize the opportunity.

That’s not by any means certain. Bush still has an ace in the perception hole: his spin team will insist that opposing funds for the increased military action will amount to a failure to support the troops. Democrats in Congress have refused to confront that line in the past — and with the party’s fear of being seen as soft on national security, it’s entirely possible that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will be outspoken in their criticism of the policy but cautious when it comes to cutting off funds.

That would be a serious mistake on every level.

Remember: the odds are very good that many of those 20,000 soldiers will never make it home and that many, many more will come home mutilated and maimed. The odds that this surge will succeed in controlling violence in Baghdad are next to zero. And since Bush is acting unilaterally, without congressional assent, the only way to stop this madness is to cut off funding.

Pelosi has been devoting most of her energy and political capital to the rather modest advances of the "100 hours" strategy. But frankly, nothing on her agenda is as important as ending the war. The House and Senate leadership need to move immediately to eliminate funding for any troop escalation. *

Barbara and Angela socked it to ’em! Keep it up!

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Last Thursday, Jan.llth, when Sen. Barbara Boxer confronted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice over the casualties in the Iraq War, the San Francisco Chronicle reported four more soldiers died in the civil war.

On Friday, when the right wing commentators yelled “slime” at Barbara and tried to change the subject by updating the swiftboat routine, the Chronicle reported “At least l9 people were reported killed or dead nationwide Friday, including l0 bullet-riddled bodies found in Baghdad and an Iraqi journalist who was killed in a drive-by shooting in the northern city of Mosul. KhudrYounis al-Obaidi was the second journalist killed this year.”

Meanwhile, even the Chronicle helped change the subject by playing the Boxer/Rice story big on on its Friday Jan. l3th front page. Carla Marinucci lead posed a naive and irrelevant question: Was Boxer’s “heated confrontation” with Rice “a case of ‘vicious feminine politics–as some critics have suggested–or merely the politics of frank talk in tough times?”

Marinucci wrote that Boxer, during her questioning of Rice, said she wanted to focus attention on the human consequences of the decision.

“Who pays the price? I’m not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young” to serve, Boxer told Rice. “You’re not going to pay a price, as I understand it, within immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families.”

Boxer’s statement was right on target, as were those of many other senators (Democrat and
Republican) who attacked the war and Bush when she appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
But the swiftboaters were out in gale force, not to discuss the Bush casualties or the issues of a war gone to hell, but to try to change the subject and attack Boxer, whose major sin it appears is that she happens to have been right about the war almost from the beginning. The New York Post/Murdoch called her comments “a low blow.” Tony Snow, the White House spokesman and former Fox News/Murdoch personality, said the comments were “outrageous” and said that Boxer had made “a great leap backward for feminism.” Fox News/Murdoch commentator Karen Hanretty whacked Boxer for talking about Rice’s “breeding history.”
Fox/Murdoch ran screaming heads all day Friday saying “Will Boxer Apologize?” and “Boxer slimes Rice.”
And Bill O”Reilly, the FoxNews/Murdoch star of slither and slime, took up the issue Friday night with Angela Alioto.

Boxer, to her immense credit, refused to apologize in the Marinucci story. “This is just typical of what they do…
the Bush administration always goes after me, and anyone who has been against the war from the start,” she said. “It’s ‘kill the messenger.'” Boxer said she will continue to be tough on the issue of the war because the “focus (on casualties) is crucial.”

Alioto, to her immense credit, stood up to Reilly on his Fox program, ably defended Boxer, got in some nice punches and kept making the casualties point by saying that “we fight wars with other people’s children” and “if everybody in Congress had a child in Iraq, we wouldn’t be in Iraq.”

The back and forth was delicious: O’Reilly: She (Boxer) denigrated Secretary Rice because Secretary Rice…

Alioto: That is not true.

O’Reilly: …doesn’t have any children.

Alioto: She would have said the same thing to a man. She would have said the same thing to a man. (See the full transcript below.)

Good for Barbara. Good for Angela. Keep it up. Keep the pressure on.

Meanwhile the Ballis report came in this morning with this count:

+U.S. Military killed in action in Iraq today (l/l5/O7): 2

+Current Total: 3,029

+Wounded total to (l/l0/07): 22,834

Wounded (l2/28 to l/l0/07): 120

See the Guardian editorial “Cut off the war money” in our current issue and on our website. We will regularly publish a snapshot of the statistics of military, civilian, and journalist casualties that tell this tragedy that grows grimmer by the day. B3

Boxer comments to Rice draw fire from the right – Senator says she won’t apologize for ‘strong message’

Friday Night Fights: Bill O’Reilly Takes on Liberal Extremists Over Boxer’s Statements | NewsBusters.org

Introducing the Edward R. Murrow of the Bush crisis in 2007: Keith Olbermann of MSNBC

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

The mainstream media who helped President Bush march us into war in Iraq have a lot to answer for.

One of the most eloquent answers these days comes from Keith Olbermann, who has become a passionate critic of the war and the Bush administration as the host of MSBNC’s “Countdown.”
He has night after night laid out some of the most scalding commentaries ever made on televsion by a major broadcast figure against a wartime president.

On Thursday night, after the President’s Wednesday night address to the nation on Iraq,
Olbermann rose to the occasion with an editorial titled “Bush’s Legacy: The President Who Cried Wolf,” with the subhead “Bush’s strategy fails because it depends on his credibility.”

For those of us who remember the way Edward R. Murrow started his War II radio broadcasts, “This is London,” Olbermann had the chilling ring of Murrow authority and credibility.

He started in on Bush with a lead that caught the essence of one of the most serious crises in American history: “Only this president, only in this time, only with this dangerous, even messianic certitude, could answer a country demanding an exit strategy from Iraq, by offering an entrance to Iran.”

And he ended with a flourish of trumpets, “You have lost the military. You have lost the Congress to the Democrats. You have lost most of the Iraqis. You have lost many of the Republicans. You have lost our allies.

“You are losing the credibility, not just of your presidency, but more importantly of the office itself.

“And most imperatively, you are guaranteeing that more American troops will be losing their lives, and more families their loved ones. You are guaranteeing it!

“This becomes your legacy, sir: How many of those you addressed last night as your ‘fellow citizens’ you just sent to their deaths.

“And for what, Mr. Bush?

“So the next president has to pull the survivors out of Iraq instead of you?”

Perhaps, as the crisis deepens by the day in Washington, Olbermann should start his evening commentaries by saying, “This is Washington.” Last night he ended his commentary with the trademark Murrow phrase, “Good night and good luck.” Let us wish all the good luck in the world to Olbermann and MSNBC in keeping him and his kind of distinguished commentary on the air. (This is the full text of his commentary, carried by truthout.org. Note also his other commentaries.) B3

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011207A.shtml

So Bush, like LBJ in Vietnam, is sending more troops into Iraq. So the Guardian will regularly print the surging casualty reports. How many more will die because of Bush’s mistakes?

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

On April 2, 2003, as Bush started a preventive war and invaded a small country that posed no danger to the U.S., the Guardian publshed a cover story predicting the U.S. would soon be mired down in the “The New Vietnam,” as our front page head put it. As our editorial warned at the time, “Taking Baghdad will afterward be difficult and bloody–and ruling the divided nation will be, to make a phenomenal understatement, something of a trick…All of this will only lead to increased anti-U.S. anger in the Arab world, more fertile ground for groups like Al-Qaeda to recruit new members, and less security for people in the U.S.”

In his television address Wednesday night, Bush virtually admitted that the horrors the Guardian (and many others) had predicted had come to pass and were “unacceptable” to the nation and to Bush.
Bush’s answer: send in more troops. This hasn’t worked in the past, it won’t work now, and it won’t work in the future. The U.S. can never be an occupying army in the middle of a brutal civil war. The electorate knows this and demanded a change in the polls and the November election. No matter.
Bush decided to escalate and war and the killing.

So the Guardian will regularly run the casualty reports and the statistics that demonstrate that we’ve lost the war, our only option is to accept defeat, and our only solution is a phased withdrawal that minimizes the military and diplomatic losses as quickly and as much as possible.

Meanwhile: to date, 3,020 U.S. military have been killed and 22,834 wounded because of Bush’s mistakes. (See the Maia and George Elfie Ballis report below and their web site for more (see http://www.sunmt.org/intro.html> link below). Specifically:

+U.S. Military killed in action in Iraq Wednesday:4

+Current Total: 3,020

+Wounded total (to l/10/07): 22,834

+Wounded (l2/28-l/l0/07): 120

To update John Kerry’s phrase during the Vietnam War, how many more soldiers will be killed and how many more soldiers will be wounded because of Bush’s mistakes? How many more lives and families of National Guardsmen will be disrupted because of Bush’s mistakes? How many more Iraqi civilians will be killed because of Bush’s mistakes? And who will continue to be the aiders and abetters and enablers as this Bush descent into the maelstrom continues? Keep the pressure on. B3

KILLED IN ACTION

Major Michael Lewis Mundell, 47, U.S. Army, Brandenburg, Kentucky
S/Sgt. Charles D. Allen, 22, U.S. Army, Wasilla, Alaska
Spec. Jeremiah Johnson, 23, U.S. Army, Vancouver, Washington
Petty Officer 3rd Class Lee Hamilton Deal, 23, U.S. Navy, West Monroe, Louisiana
S/Sgt. Alessandro Carbonaro, 28, U.S. Marine Corps, Bethesda, Maryland
S/Sgt. Emmanual L. Lagaspi, 38, U.S. Army, Las Vegas, Nevada
Cpl. Ross A. Smith, 21, U.S. Marine Corps, Wyoming, Michigan
PFC. Javier Chavez, Jr., 19, U.S. Marine Corps, Cutler, California
Lance Corporal Steven L. Phillips, 27, U.S. Marine Corps, Chesapeake, Virginia
Spec. Allan D. Kokesh Jr., 21, U.S. Army, Yankton, South Dakota
Spec. Patrick W. Herried, 29, U.S. Army, Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Cpl. Brandon S. Schuck, 21, U.S. Marine Corps, Safford, Arizona
PFC. Jacob D. Spann, 21, U.S. Marine Corps, Columbus/Westerville, Ohio
CPL. Orville Gerena, 21, U.S. Marine Corps, Virginia Beach, Virginia
Lance Corporal David S. Parr, 22, U.S. Marine Corps, Benson, North Carolina

Although it may not be immediately apparent, every action that we take brings about change. Every word of protest uttered, every letter written, every phone call made, every peace vigil attended; all have a cumulative effect and contribute to the desired result.

We hold the lives of our troops in Iraq in our hands.
We have the power to end this tragic war.
Stand up and speak out for peace at every opportunity.

Please redistribute these casualty reports to your friends, family, elected representatives, and e-mail list. Additional
e-mail recipients welcome.

From Jim Landis of Mariposa mailto:landis@yosemite.net

globalmilitaryspending.jpg

Smiling Seriously,
Maia & George Elfie Ballis
SunMt
559.855.3710

Clickhttp://www.sunmt.org/intro.html for latest SunMt dream and adventures.

Click mailto:mail@sunmt.org to send us roses, raspberries and/or questions.

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Bush is the kind of guy ‘who reserves a hotel room and then asks you to the prom’

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Maureen Dowd, in her Wednesday New York Times column, had a telling quote:

“With the surge, as with the invasion of Iraq, W. is like the presumptuous date ‘who reserves a hotel room and then asks you to the prom,’ as my friend Dana Calvo put it.”

On the eve of Bush’s speech to surge, escalate, and accelerate in Iraq, she ended her column with Ted Kennedy and his apt remarks after his speech Tuesday to the National Press Club about his legislation that would require Congressional approval before troop levels can be increased. (See previous blog.)

She quoted Kennedy as saying, “‘The horse will be out of the barn by the time we get there. The president makes his speech now. We’re going to get the appropriation request probably the end of January, early February.'”
He said it could take eight more weeks for Congress to act. “‘By that time, the troops will already be there. And then we’ll be asked, are we going to deny body armor to the young men and women over there?'”

In other words, Dowd points out, “the president will ask us to the prom once he reserves the hotel room.” B3

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

The biggest challenge facing Democrats in Congress this year is probably also the most boring. They’re going to have to deal with taxes.

I’m not the only one obsessed with this. Really, I’m not. Edmund L. Andrews got into it in the New York Times on Jan. 4, noting that the new Democratic leadership is utterly ducking the question of how to handle some of the major fiscal headaches that are going to rear their ugly heads.

Bear with me while we run some numbers.

The Iraq War is going to cost $100 billion in 2007, maybe more if Bush gets his troop "surge." Fixing the problem that causes more and more middle-class people to shoulder an extra tax burden under the alternative minimum tax will cost $50 billion. The Bush tax cuts — which the president wants to make permanent — are another huge-ticket item, maybe $170 billion a year (based on estimates from the Brookings Institution).

So that’s $320 billion to deal with — even before the Democrats spend a penny on any new initiatives or so much as talk about making Social Security solvent.

And, of course, there’s a $340 billion budget deficit, which keeps adding to the federal debt, which is a number so big that nobody can really comprehend it, so I won’t bother here except to say that the interest payments alone are $400 billion a year.

The Democrats have already announced they want to see any new spending come with a revenue source and any new tax cut proposals identify reductions in existing spending that would pay for them. All well and good — except that the Iraq War isn’t part of the federal budget. Bush just keeps coming back for money every few months, and Democrats who don’t want to be accused of refusing to support the troops in the field wind up voting to give him all of it.

Now let’s go to the political calculus, which is even uglier.

The only major politician I know of in the last electoral cycle who talked honestly about taxes and government spending was Phil Angelides, who (as some of you may remember) ran for governor of California. He was slaughtered.

That’s why the Times reports the following:

"Even as Democratic leaders continue to accuse Mr. Bush of having a reckless fiscal policy, they have refused to discuss dismantling his tax cuts or even to engage in a debate with him about the best way to stimulate economic growth.

" ‘It’s always the same old tired line with them — "Tax and spend, tax and spend, tax and spend," ‘ said Senator Kent Conrad, the North Dakota Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. ‘We’re not going there.’ "

No, so far they’re not. They’re just moving ahead, making promises and proposing policy, without saying either that spending on Iraq has to be cut dramatically or that somebody has to pay more taxes to fund it.

Even by Bush’s most optimistic projections, the national budget will be in the red until 2012. By then he and his crew will all be safe on the golf course, their retirements secure.

And apparently, the Democratic leaders are willing to continue to duck, continue to go into debt, continue to screw up the economy, and continue to burden our kids with the results of our greed, fear, and stupidity.

Nancy? *

A reporter stands up to the army

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Oakland freelance writer and radio journalist Sarah Olson has a tall, willowy frame; long silky hair; and a clearly articulated understanding of the reasons she believes that testifying against a source, First Lt. Ehren Watada, would turn her into an investigative tool of the federal government and chill dissenting voices across the United States.

Watada faces a court-martial in February; he’s charged with one count of missing troop movement and four counts of conduct unbecoming an officer — charges that stem from interviews he gave Olson along with other reporters in 2006 in which he openly criticized the Bush administration and the war on Iraq.

Olson faces her own legal nightmare: if she doesn’t testify against Watada, the government can charge her with a felony. That’s potentially more serious than the contempt of court charges against freelance videographer Josh Wolf and San Francisco Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada.

"My argument for being against having to comply with the subpoena is strictly journalistic, " says Olson, who has been covering the antiwar movement and the conscientious objector movement since 2003. "When the government uses a journalist as its eyes and ears, no one is going to talk to that journalist any more."

Beyond the fear that her own professional credibility will be eviscerated, the 31-year-old Olson objects to journalists, including herself, being asked to participate in the prosecution of free speech.

Although all the Army wants her to do is assert her stories quoting Watada are true, she’s not going along. "The problem I have with verifying the accuracy of my reporting is that in this case the Army has made speech a crime. Watada’s case raises incredibly important speech issues as to what is and isn’t legal for an officer to say. Can Watada’s defense put the war on trial? Can you bring the question of the legality of this war into the discussion? Normally, that wouldn’t be allowed into discussion in a military court, but since he’s been charged with speech issues, shouldn’t he be allowed to have the opportunity to put those statements in context?"

And while her stories and radio broadcasts are readily and publicly available to Army prosecutors, Olson points out, "Once they get you up on the stand, they can ask you anything."

What binds the Olson, Wolf, and Williams–Fainaru-Wada cases are the broader issues of press and speech freedom and the absence of a strong reporter’s shield at the federal level.

"The proposed federal shield laws offers poor protection to journalists, but they probably wouldn’t even cover me, and they probably wouldn’t cover bloggers ever," observes Olson, referring to the legislation currently under congressional consideration.

As for entering into a conversation about who is or isn’t a journalist (as the San Francisco Police Department and the District Attorney’s Office have sought to do in Wolf’s case), Olson says, "[That] is degrading for the whole profession. And what it doesn’t do is stand up for the civil liberties that are constitutionally afforded to everyone, nor does it protect a meaningful and independent press."

"My duty," Olson says, "is the public and its right to know and not to the government. I’m concerned that the Army is asking a journalist to participate in the suppression of free speech." *

Kennedy: “Is there any American in this country who thinks the United States Senate would vote to support sending American troops into a civil war in Iraq today?

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

This is a quote that makes the critical political point:

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), in an interview published in the New York
Times on Tuesday, continued, “Is there any American that believes this? I don’t think so, but that is what’s happening, and we have to do everything we can to to insist on accountability.”

Kennedy said he will introduce legislation on Tuesday to require the president to get new Congressional authority before sending more troops to Iraq, according to a story by Jeff Zeleny. Kennedy is proposing the first bill in the Senate that would prohibit paying for an increase in American troops over their level on Jan. l. The Kennedy plan is intended to provide Democrats with a road map on how to proceed in Iraq.

Kennedy said that Congress interceded during conflicts in Vietnam and Lebanon, and Democrats should not hesitate to do so in Iraq.

“By law,” the article said, “Congress can limit the nature of troop deployment, cap the size of military deployments and cut financing for existing or prospective deployments.” To those who claim Congress ought not to cut off funds or intercede, the article pointed out that “since l970, there have been dozens of occasions in which Congress has tried to step into military action, from Haiti to Bosnia to Kosovo,” and it pointed its source as a memorandum being circulated Tuesday to Congress by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.

The memorandum, linked below, cites specific examples of congressional intervention from the l970 Church-Cooper amendment that prohibited the use of any funds for the introduction of U.S. troops into Cambodia to the June l998 Congressional prohibition of funding for Bosnia after June 30, l998. It also included additional examples where congressional efforts to influence policy were not enacted into law, from a l994 move by then Senator Jesse Helms to prohibit funding for any U.S. military operations on Haiti to the prescient 2002 move by Rep. Spratt to require the president to seek congressional authority before using military force against Iraq without a UN resolution.

As the memo sums up, the “defeated provisions reflect attempts by Congress to shape the president’s policy on military deployments. Taken alongside the several examples listed above that were enacted into law, they demonstrate that the president should expect that Congress can and will shape U.S.
policy as it relates to military deployments.”

So: there is plenty of precedent and no excuse for Congress not to fight back fast and effectively to the president’s upcoming surge speech. Nancy? Nancy Pelosi to her credit is speaking up and rightlyi calling the surge “escalation” and proposing that Democrats consider blocking funds for any increase in troops. Keep it up. Support the Kennedy proposal or anything stronger. Keep the pressure on Nancy and the Congress. If these moves don’t work, as they probably won’t, then the question is: impeachment or continuing to waste the blood and treasure of the U.S. in a civil war without end. Alas, there is no other choice. B3

Center for American Progress: Congressional Limitations and Requirements for Military Deployments and Funding

The Off-Guard Awards

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

It was a bad year for Jesus. His most fanatical followers just couldn’t seem to keep their dicks out of trouble: a minister who was part of the religious right power circle — someone who routinely condemned gay marriage, gay sex, and homosexuality in general — was caught getting erotic massages from a gay hooker. A Republican congressional representative who was a loyal member of the bigoted majority had to resign after sending sexually explicit e-mails to page boys.

The Vatican announced that same-sex couples are no longer acceptable as adoptive parents and said that condoms are only OK (maybe) if used by married men with HIV but only to prevent disease (not to prevent conception).

And Ann Coulter said Bill Clinton was gay, and Rush Limbaugh got nabbed with illegal Viagra … and all I can say is, it was a banner year for the Offies.

WHAT DO YOU EXPECT? THEIR CANDIDATE WAS REAL ATTRACTIVE TOO.

Supporters of District 6 supervisorial candidate Rob Black tried to attack incumbent Chris Daly with campaign fliers featuring pee and poop.

THE GUYS WITH GUNS SHOULD HAVE DRESSED LIKE POLITICAL PROTESTERS; THE COPS WOULD HAVE BEEN ON THEM IN SECONDS.

More than 500 cops were on hand in the Castro on Halloween night, but nine people still got shot.

THE SANTA CLARA 49ERS. THAT HAS AN AUTHENTIC HISTORICAL RING.

San Francisco lost its Olympic bid when the 49ers without warning announced they would abandon plans for a stadium at Candlestick Point and move to Santa Clara.

TOO BAD THE MAYOR CUT WELFARE PAYMENTS; POOR ANNEMARIE MAY BE OUT ON THE STREETS AT ANY MOMENT.

Mayor Gavin Newsom blasted the SF supervisors for eliminating a $185,000-a-year job for former supervisor Annemarie Conroy, saying they were attacking her "livelihood."

THAT WORKED OUT WELL, DIDN’T IT?

Newsom said he would "run roughshod" over the San Francisco Police Department to find a way to identify problem officers.

HEY, THEY’RE ALL STONED UP THERE ANYWAY. NOBODY WILL NOTICE.

Newsom’s staff sent off 13 homeless people with one-way bus tickets to Humboldt County.

AND ALL ALONG HE’S DENIED HE’S SUPPOSED TO BE A GROWN-UP.

Newsom dated scientology fan Sofia Milos but denied he was a supporter of L. Ron Hubbard’s bizarre cult. Then he dated 19-year-old Brittanie Mountz but denied that he ever let her drink alcohol.

AND SUCH AN INTELLIGENT PEDOPHILE TOO.

Republican Mark Foley was forced to resign from Congress after he was confronted with sexually explicit e-mails he sent to underage male pages. "He didn’t want to talk about politics," one former page said. "He wanted to talk about sex or my penis."

HMMM … QUEER OR A DRUGGIE? QUEER OR A DRUGGIE? QUEER OR A DRUGGIE? GUESS I BETTER GO WITH THE DRUGS.

Rev. Ted Haggard, one of the nation’s leading Christian right evangelicals, was forced to step down from his ministry after evidence emerged that he had hired a gay hooker for regular trysts during which he snorted speed. Faced with the allegations, he denied the gay sex but copped to the meth.

THOSE CELL PHONE CONVERSATIONS BACK IN 1860 MUST HAVE BEEN PRETTY JUICY.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez defended the Bush administration’s secret electronic eavesdropping on private citizens by saying that Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt did the same thing.

AND IF YOU DON’T HAVE $10 FOR THE CAB, JUST WALK — WHAT ARE YOU WORRIED ABOUT?

Senator Joe Lieberman said he thinks it’s fine for Catholic hospitals in his home state to refuse to give contraceptives to rape victims because in Connecticut it’s only a short taxi ride to another hospital.

IT’S GOOD TO KNOW HE’S ONLY A HEARTBEAT AWAY FROM HAVING HIS HANDS ON THE NUCLEAR TRIGGER.

Dick Cheney accidentally shot a campaign contributor while hunting quail.

BUT WHAT ABOUT HIS TERM AS VICE PRESIDENT OF DRUNKEN QUAIL-HUNTING SHOTGUN BLASTS? WE’RE THINKING THAT MIGHT STILL BE RUNNING.

Cheney told reporters that his term as "vice president for torture" was over.

THE DEVIL, OF COURSE, IS IN THE DETAILS.

A Vatican commission has recommended that Catholics be allowed to use condoms — but only married Catholics and only if the man is HIV-positive and his wife is not and only if the intent is to avoid the spread of AIDS, not to prevent conception.

ALLOWING PEDOPHILIC PRIESTS TO WATCH OVER THEM IS JUST FINE HOWEVER.

The Vatican announced that it would no longer approve of gay families adopting kids.

WE SAW WAY TOO MUCH. NOW WE KNOW WAY TOO MUCH.

After Britney Spears flashed her crotch for photographers while partying with Paris Hilton, she posted a poem on her Web site apparently aimed at her ex-husband, which concludes:

"You trick me twice, now it’s three / Look who’s smiling now / Damn, it’s good to be me!"

REPUBLICAN FAMILY VALUES: $165,200 A YEAR. THREE-DAY WORKWEEKS. CUT WELFARE BENEFITS. THEN WHINE.

When Democrats in Congress suggested that the House actually schedule work five days a week, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Georgia) complained, "Keeping us up here eats away at families. Marriages suffer. The Democrats could care less about families — that’s what this says."

HE, ON THE OTHER HAND, WILL LOOK LIKE A @#$&!!!

Bush told CNN that same day: the war in Iraq will look like "just a comma."

WOW — THAT’S TWO CONFIRMED INCIDENTS OF ACTUAL READING. MAYBE THIS ONE WILL TURN OUT BETTER THAN MY PET GOAT.

Bush told reporters the Iraq Study Group report was so important that "I read it."

AND IF WE CAN’T EXECUTE EVERYONE WHO TRIES TO TELL THE TRUTH, THEN THE TERRORISTS WILL HAVE WON.

Attorney General Gonzalez told Sean Hannity that Bush is committed to bringing "the masterminds of the 9/11 Commission" to justice.

WE UNDERSTAND — THE REST OF THE COUNTRY HAS BEEN HAVING A LITTLE TROUBLE WITH THAT TOO.

Bush told Katie Couric that "one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror."

RELAX, LINDSAY — CHENEY SAYS HE’S GIVEN UP ON TORTURE.

Lindsay Lohan said she didn’t want anyone to know she was in favor of voting because "it’s safer that way."

SHE, ON THE OTHER HAND, MUST BE INTO ANAL — RAMPANT, UPTIGHT RIGHT-WING CHATTER DOES SHOW SOME LEVEL OF HAVING A STICK UP YOUR ASS.

Ann Coulter announced Bill Clinton was probably gay, since "that sort of rampant promiscuity does show some level of latent homosexuality."

COME ON, COULD THE LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD REALLY BE A DUMB FRAT BOY WHO NEVER GREW UP? NAH …

Bush addressed the prime minister of the United Kingdom as "yo, Blair."

ANOTHER DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS — BILL CLINTON KEPT THIS SORT OF STUFF SAFELY IN THE OVAL OFFICE.

At a G8 summit meeting Bush inexplicably began to grope the chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel.

POOR GUY — IF WE HAD PALS LIKE ANN COULTER, OUR DICKS WOULD BE LIMP TOO.

Rush Limbaugh was arrested at the Palm Beach airport when a search of his luggage revealed a jar of Viagra pills with someone else’s name on them. Limbaugh said he had them prescribed under his doctor’s name to avoid embarrassment.

THEY DODGE THE DRAFT, START IMMORAL WARS, AND GROPE FOREIGN DIGNITARIES. GLAD TO KNOW THEY FART A LOT TOO.

Former Republican senator and Iraq Study Group member Alan Simpson indirectly criticized the Bush administration’s refusal to compromise on anything: "A 100-percenter is a person you don’t want to be around. They have gas, ulcers, heartburn, and BO."

THE PASSION OF THE SHIT-FACED BIGOT

Mel Gibson was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving and told a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff that "the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." He later asked a female deputy, "What are you looking at, sugar tits?"

PROVING ONCE AGAIN THAT THE US SENATE HAS PLENTY OF ROOM FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE BOTH RACIST AND STUPID.

Virginia senator George Allen referred to a Virginia native of Indian descent as a "macaca."

OF COURSE, BACK WHERE HE COMES FROM, IT’S SO MUCH EASIER TO FIGURE OUT WHOM TO HATE.

Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi told reporters that it’s hard for Americans to understand "what’s wrong" with Iraqis: "Why do they hate the Israelis and despise their right to exist? Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference?"

NOW IF YOU COULD JUST GET YOUR FUCKING FOOT OUT OF YOUR MOUTH.

Comedian Michael Richards, who played Kramer in Seinfeld, denounced a heckler at an LA comedy club by calling him a "nigger" and saying that "50 years ago, we’d have had you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass."

PERFECT — NOW HE’S READY TO RUN FOR THE US SENATE.

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proclaimed that Cubans and Puerto Ricans were "very hot" because of their mixed "black blood" and "Latino blood." *

Is Nancy Pelosi up to it? Here are some telling details

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By Bruce B. Brugmann (B3)

“PELOSI TO BE PUT TO THE TEST,” trumpeted Tuesday’s Chronicle front page lead story.
The Guardian has been down on Pelosi ever since she led the campaign to privatize the Presidio
and then refused to debate the issue at the time or in subsequent campaigns. But
she is now in a key leadership spot, at a critical time in U.S. history with the crises of Iraq and Bush,
and we wish her well. We hope she rises to the occasion and at minimum satisifies her hometown dailynewspaper, if not the Guardian on the other end of town.
But there are many telling details, as I like to call them, that raise some doubts.

First, Maureen Dowd’s lead comment in her Dec. 20th New York Times column.
Dowd wrote, “The only sects that may be more savage than Shiites and Sunnis are the Democratic feminiist lawmakers representing Northern and Southern California.

“After Nancy Pelosi and Jane Harman had their final catfight about who would lead the House Intelligence
Committee, aptly enough at the Four Seasons hair salon in Georgetown, the new speaker passed over the knowledgeable and camera-eager Ms. Harman and mystifyingly gave the consequential job to Silvestre Reyes of Texas.” Dowd then polished off Reyes by pointing out that Reyes, when questioned by a reporter for Congresssional Quarterly, didn’t know whether Al Quaeda was Sunni or Shiite (he is “profoundly Shiite,” as Dowd said) and didn’t seem to know who the Hezbollah were. “‘Hezbollah,'” he stammered. “‘Uh, Hezbollah. Why do you ask me these questions at 5 o’clock? Can I answer in Spanish?” He couldn’t answer in either English or Spanish.

Second, Steve Lopez from the Los Angeles Time found a few days later that Pelosi’s office was annoyed when Lopez called her Washington office and asked if Pelosi was going to “correct her blunder and reverse the appointment” of Reyes, as Lopez put it in his Dec. 27th column. He quoted Jennifer Crider, the Pelosi spokeswoman,as asking why Lopez was still interested in the story.

“Well,” Crider wrote, “partly because the committee has the name INTELLIGENCE in it. And partly because I’m still embarrassed as a Californian to have a San Francisco representative pick the one guy fom Texas who seems to know less than Bush. Lopez continued, “Couldn’t Pelosi reconsider, I asked Crider, even if Pelosi and Harman have their political differences?” Crider replied that Reyes “misspoke.” Lopez wrote that, “in the interest of national security and in the Christmas spirit, I’m sending Reyes a book I found at Amazon.com. It’s called ‘The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Middle East conflict.'”

Third, Pelosi and her local and Washington office refuse to respond to the entreaties of the supporters of Josh Wolf, the journalist jailed on orders of the Bush administration for refusing to give up videotapes he took of a demonstration in San Francisco. She and her office refuse to meet with Josh’s mother and supporters and she refuses to respond to questions about the case from the Guardian beyond saying through a spokesperson that she can’t interfere because it is a “legal matter” (which is nonsense, it is a political hit on journalism and San Francisco by the Bush administration). Pelosi does say that she does support a federal shield law for reporters, which is fine as far as it goes but it is not on her first l00 hour agenda or any other visible agenda. Josh, let us emphasize, is a constituent of Pelosi’s, and he is the only journalist in jail in the U.S. for refusing to give up material to the government, and soon will have been in jail longer than any journalist ever’ Question: If Pelosi refuses to even meet with Josh’s mother on such a serious journalistic and public policy issue, how can she be expected to effectively lead the charge against Bush and the war?

Fourth, Pelosi gives every signal, publicly and privately, that she won’t be leading a strong charge against Bush and the war and the sudden surge and acceleration of more troops into Iraq. She has already made it clear she won’t use the only real levers of power the Democrats have (impeachment proceedings and the the power of the budget to defund the war) or even the bully pulpit of her new office. As her constituents in San Francisco and the voters in the last election have made clear, there’s a misbegotten war on and they want it stopped and they don’t want Bush to be following fellow Texan LBJ in Vietnam by sending in more troops, more troops, more troops, to surge and accelerate in Iraq. They want U.S. troops out of this relentless descent into civil war maelstrom.
So: keep the pressure on Pelosi to try to insure she represents the real San Francisco values. That starts with peace and dissent on the war and Bush. B3

Postscript: Meanwhile, the New York Times reports Tuesday in a story headlined, “A Party, with Pelosi Front and Center,” that her party schedule is a splash of “Pelosi-palooza.” Anne E. Kornblut writes that “In a three day stretch of whirlwind events beginning on Wednesday, Mrs. Pelosi will celebrate her heritage (at the Italian Embassy), her faith (in a Roman Catholic Mass), her education (at Trinity College), her childhood (in Baltimore) and her current home (in a tribute by the singer Tony Bennett of ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco fame.'”) Okay, okay, but the tantalizing question remains: Pelosi can throw a party but is she smart enough and tough enough to go up against Bush and the war gang at this critical juncture and represent the real San Francisco values of her constituency? Follow along at the Guardian, at sfbg.com, and on the Bruce blog.
B3

Nick Coleman of the Minneapolis Star Tribune is mad as hell and won’t take it any more. He writes, McClatchy’s profit-and-loss statement: They profit, we lose

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

For months now, as the Knight-Ridder/McClatchy/Hearst/Singleton/Gannett/Stephens debacle has unfolded, I have been looking in vain to see if a staff member on any of the papers of the nation’s biggest chains (reporter, columnist, editorial writer, editor, union spokesperson, ad salesman, letter writer, blogger, anybody) would beallowed to blast away at this deal of ultimate toxicity in their papers, on their websites, or in their blogs. (Note my postscript to the newspaper unions to this effect in my previous blog.)

The closest I have seen is an excellent First Amendment column by Thomas Peele in the Contra Costa Times/Singleton, raising the right issues about why his owner/publisher had moved to seal the court records in the Reilly vs. Hearst antitrust case in federal court. (See my earlier blog.) James Naughton, former editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and a K-R stockholder, and a gang of former Knight-Ridder staffers, mostly retired or off staff, also published online a sharp letter rebuke to K-R Chairman Tony Ridder and the K-R board for rolling over and refusing to fight it out with the dissident private equity stockholders.

Now, two days after McClatchy tossed the Star Tribune into the snow banks of Northern Minnesota, columnist Nick Coleman on Thursday wrote a classic column that ought to go into the journalist textbooks at the University of Minnesota and everywhere else. He lays out in a snapshot of what happens to the Twin Cities when McClatchy and Knight-Ridder conspire in a misbegotten deal that leaves St. Paul with Singleton and Minneapolis with, gulp, a one-year-old New York private equity group firm with no newspaper holdings nor experience. Ironically, perhaps the reason the Star Tribune ran his column was because McClatchy was beating it out of town, fast, at full gallop, and the paper was suddenly thrust under the new ownership of Avista Capital Partners, which hadn’t gotten the knack of monopoly press control and censorship. Chalk up one good mark for the new owner.

Coleman flashed his sword in his lead paragraphs: “When the McClatchy Co. got the keys to the Star Tribune in l998, McClatchy’s patriarch hailed the merger. James McClatchy called it a wedding of two newspaper traditions that shared “‘a deep-rooted commitment to building a just society.’

“You are now permitted to laugh derisively.

“Eight years later, hardly anyone in the newspaper business talks about anything other than building profit margins that would choke a robber baron.

“Mercifully, McClatchy passed away in May and did not live to see the Sacrmento-based company that bore his name disgrace his legacy by dumping its largest newspaper–the most important one between Chicago and the West Coast, the one that serves 5 million Minnesotans and that can be a conscience, a scold, a cheerleader and an interpreter of life on the tundra.”

Coleman ended with a scathing flourish: “McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt did not bother to come to Minnesota on Tuesday to say he surreptitously had sold the paper and to kiss us goodbye.

“But McClatchy brass gave us some nice parting shots from afar, complaining that the Star Tribune had lost value (and proving it in a secret auction at fire-sale prices), calling the flagship a drag on profits and sayiong McClatchy would have shown a one-percent increase in ad sales if the Star Tribune weren’t included. One per cent Huzzah!
Sound the trumpets!

“There’s the market for you: the Star Tribune held down ad sales one percent. So One-Percent Pruitt axed his best newspaper. Brilliant.

“‘The Star Tribune is one fo the best newspapers in this country,'” Pruitt said in l998. “‘The Twin Cities is one of the most attractive newspaper markets in the country. And it was a near perfect fit in terms of values and traditions.’

“We didn’t change. But you, Mr. Pruitt? We don’t recognize you anymore. So long.

“Don’t bother to write.”

I like that, and I’ll bet a lot of Minnesotans will like that. I can speak with authority because, as a native of Rock Rapids, Iowa, situated five miles from the Minnesota state line just south of Luverne, Minnesota, I grew up with the Star Tribune and its sister paper, the Des Moines Register, both highly respected papers who looked upon the entire states of Minnesota and Iowa as their beats. They were owned at that time by the Cowles family, who lived in Minneapolis and Des Moines, and cared deeply about journalism and Minnesota and Iowa. I spent many a Sunday morning back in the late l940s riding about town proudly delivering the Sunday Register. Everybody, it seemed, in Minnesota and Iowa, read and lived by the Star Tribune and Register. They were our friendly hometown papers.

Coleman has set the standard: The least newspaper owners can do these days of monopoly mayhem is to allow their staff members and readers to write openly and honestly as appropriate in their papers and websites about the way they and their communities are being treated by their owners and publishers. In the meantime, I toast with a Potrero Hill martini Nick Coleman and his editors who passed his story into print. Bravo! keep it up!

Lingering question: Why didn’t Tony Ridder fight like hell to keep his family heritage chain of papers? And why didn’t the Knight-Ridder board, or his key executives, push him privately or publicly to put up a fight. Every Knight-Ridder executive I run into, I ask the question: how in the world did this happen and why didn’t Tony and Knight-Riddger put up a fight? I have yet to get a satisfactory answer. I kept reading Tony’s comments at the time to the effect that he had no choice and that a sale would keep the peace and minimize the tumult in his chain papers.

How could there be more tumult and more damage than there is now? Did Tony and his board really think that McClatchy could swallow their entire chain of papers and not peddle any of them off in fire sales? Why didn’t they get solid pledges from McClatchy that would at minimum save their best papers (Philadelphia Inquirer, San Jose Mercury-News, Contra Costa Times, St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Minneapolis Star Tribune et al)? I believed then, and i believe now, that Tony and the Knight-Ridder people made a bad mistake by not putting up a big public fight and talking publicly, not just about its respectable 20 per cent profit margins, but also about its reputation for quality journalism, community involvement, the prestigious Knight Foundation, and major First Amendment and public access advocacy.

Moreover, while much of the mainstream press was marching us into Iraq and practicing stenographic reporting of the Bush administration, Knight-Ridder and its Washington bureau regularly did some of the most critical news reporting and editorial writing on Bush and the war of any of the major media. I assure you, Dean Singleton and Avista Capital partners aren’t about to pick up the slack, hit hard on Bush and the war, or even try to develop much original Washington and foreign news coverage. Alas. I hope I’m wrong. I refer you to Brugmann’s Law: once you damage quality papers like these, it’s tough as hell to bring them back. Alas. I hope I’m wrong.

Stay alert–we will keep running the major stories that the Hearst/Singleton monopoly papers refuse to print. B3

Nick Coleman: McClatchy’s profit-and-loss statement: They profit, we lose

More reporters facing jail

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Josh Wolf may soon have company: Two more reporters have been ordered to testifyin a court hearing, and neither one of them seems about to give in

Sarah Olson, an Oakland freelancer who writes for Truthout, and Dahr Jamail, who has done some amazing reporting from Iraq, both received subpoenas from Army prosecutors, who want them to testify against 1st Lt. Ehren Watadam who is charged with refusing to accept orders that he deploy in Iraq. He has been quoted as saying that he thinks the war is illegal, and prosecutors want the reporters to confirm their interviews with him.

Not likely.

The P-U-litzer prizes

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Competition has been fierce for the fifteenth annual P.U.-litzer Prizes. Many can plausibly lay claim to stinky media performances, but only a few can win a P.U.-litzer. As the judges for this un-coveted award, Jeff Cohen and I have deliberated with due care. (Jeff is the founder of the media watch group FAIR and author of the superb new book “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.”)

And now, the winners of the P.U.-litzer Prizes for 2006:

“FACT-FREE TRADE” AWARD — New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman

In a press corps prone to cheer on corporate-drafted trade agreements as the key to peace and plenty in the world, no cheerleader is more fervent than Tom Friedman. During a CNBC interview with Tim Russert in July, Friedman confessed: “I was speaking out in Minnesota — my hometown, in fact — and a guy stood up in the audience, said, ‘Mr. Friedman, is there any free trade agreement you’d oppose?’ I said, ‘No, absolutely not.’ I said, ‘You know what, sir? I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA,
the Caribbean Free Trade initiative. I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.’”

(Friedman may not have read even the pact’s title; CAFTA actually stands for the Central America Free Trade Agreement.)

LOCK UP THE FIRST AMENDMENT PRIZE — CNN’s William Bennett

Soon after being hired as a CNN pundit, Bennett went on his radio talk show and offered his views on freedom of the press — and on reporters who broke stories about warrantless wiretapping and secret CIA detention sites “against the wishes of the president, against the request of the president and others.” Bennett fumed: “Are they embarrassed, are they arrested? No, they win Pulitzer Prizes. I don’t think what they did was worthy of an award — I think what they did was worthy of jail, and I think this investigation needs to go forward.”

BROKE-BRAIN MOUTHING AWARD — MSNBC’s Chris Matthews

As the movie “Brokeback Mountain” (about a relationship between two cowboys) was gaining attention and audience in January, Chris Matthews appeared on the Imus show to hail “the wonderful Michael Savage” and the talk-show host’s nickname for the movie: “Bareback Mounting.” Matthews and Savage had been MSNBC colleagues until “the wonderful” Savage was fired — after referring to an apparently gay caller as a “sodomite” and telling him to “get AIDS and die.” Now that’s hardball.

CASUAL ABOUT CASUALTIES AWARD — Fox mogul Rupert Murdoch

Echoing an Iraq war talking-point heard regularly on Fox News, owner Murdoch said on the eve of the November election: “The death toll, certainly of Americans there, by the terms of any previous war are quite minute.” As FAIR noted, U.S. deaths in Iraq exceed those in the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War, not to mention the combined U.S. deaths of all this country’s other military actions since Vietnam — including Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, the first Gulf War, Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo and Afghanistan.

FRONT-PAGE PUNDIT AWARD — Reporter Michael Gordon and The New York Times

With many voters telling pollsters that they want U.S. troops to leave Iraq, the Times front-paged a post-election analysis by Michael Gordon — headlined “Get Out of Iraq Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say” — quoting three hand-picked “experts” who decried the possibility of troop withdrawal. Gordon didn’t tell readers that one of his “experts,” former CIA analyst Ken Pollack, had relentlessly promoted an Iraq invasion based on wildly false claims about an Iraqi threat. Gordon took off his reporter’s hat that night on CNN to become an unabashed advocate for his view that withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq would lead to “civil war” (as though civil war weren’t already underway).

“PROVE YOU’RE NOT A TRAITOR” PRIZE — CNN’s Glenn Beck

In November, Beck — an Islamophobic host on CNN Headline News — launched into his interview with Congressman-elect Keith Ellison, a Muslim American, this way: “I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, ‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.’” Beck then added: “And I know you’re not. I’m not accusing you of being an enemy, but that’s the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.” Is it possible that primetime bigots like CNN’s Beck have something to do with the prejudices “that a lot of Americans feel”?

GROUNDHOG DAY AWARD — Ted Koppel

One role of journalism should be to help the public learn from past government policy disasters in hopes of preventing future ones. But in a New York Times column on Oct. 2, former ABC News star Koppel wrote that Washington should tell Iran it is free to develop an atomic bomb — with a Mafia-like warning: “If a dirty bomb explodes in Milwaukee, or some other nuclear device detonates in Baltimore or Wichita, if Israel or Egypt or Saudi Arabia should fall victim to a nuclear ‘accident,’ Iran should understand that the United States government will not search around for the perpetrator. The return address will be predetermined, and it will be somewhere in Iran.” In other words, no matter what the evidence, Koppel urged our government to attack a predetermined foe, Iran. Didn’t that happen in 2003 with Iraq?

Hold your nose and prepare yourself for 2007.

Norman Solomon’s book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” is out in paperback. For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com

New generation, old joy

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Once upon a time movie men were expected to be all action — confidence, whether in the form of a swagger or saunter, being the mark of the leading man. Such virility was served up uncooked by method actors such as Marlon Brando and James Dean, but it wasn’t until the baby boom generation ushered in unlikely stars such as Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson that the archetype really turned over. Realism was the new fantasy, and these actors went to great lengths to convey hurt. This tendency reached a peak during the indie cinema boom of the ’90s, with male leads wearing their wounds with newfound openness, flailing — or as writer-director Noah Baumbach would have it, kicking and screaming — at posteverything angst and political correctness. Several of this year’s most indelible male characters were racked with similar inaction but were also fleshed out with an altogether tougher skin than were their ’90s predecessors. They still struggled to come to terms with the present tense but in a more reserved, reflective kind of way.

Even with the Zach Braff vehicle The Last Kiss failing to stir Garden State fans, 2006 was a good year for boy-men. The fact that Keanu Reeves (A Scanner Darkly) continues to win parts is surely proof enough, but there were three American indies — Ryan Fleck’s Half Nelson, Andrew Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation, and Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy — that most poignantly located ambiguity (and cultural malaise) in the troubled expressions of their male leads. Is it telling that women had a major hand in making two of these films, with director Reichardt adapting Jon Raymond’s story for Old Joy and Anna Boden teaming with director Fleck to pen the script for Half Nelson? Probably so, especially when you consider that it’s the male-helmed Mutual Appreciation (written, directed, and costarring Bujalski) that most resembles the talky Generation X pictures made 10 years ago, albeit realized with a formal tact and thematic subtlety largely missing in those now-dated chronicles of ennui.

The fact that each of these films frames its character studies in a different way — Half Nelson is a social drama, Mutual Appreciation a relationship movie, and Old Joy the closest thing to lyric poetry we’re likely to get from American narrative cinema — makes their overlaps all the more striking. All the central characters are, to be sure, of the same milieu (Half Nelson and Mutual Appreciation even share a Brooklyn setting), and one imagines they would get along fine at the right party — a conclusion we can draw from their record collections. It’s clear enough from Half Nelson‘s Broken Social Scene soundtrack and Old Joy‘s Yo La Tengo score but even more embedded in the casting of Will Oldham in Old Joy and as-yet-unknown rocker Justin Rice in Mutual Appreciation: a nod to ’70s cinema, when art directors like Monte Hellman found muses in musician-actors like Kris Kristofferson, Warren Oates, and yup, James Taylor.

These singer-songwriters are known for suggesting emotion without resorting to histrionic literalism, so it’s natural that filmmakers aiming for opaque characterizations took an interest in them. If casting provides clay to mold (even Half Nelson‘s Ryan Gosling — an established actor — is enough of a blank slate for these purposes), it’s the filmmakers who supply the films’ crucial senses of diffusion and displacement. All these films are, at base, about characters fundamentally unsure of their place in the world, so it makes sense that they share a common focus on environment and mise-en-scène. Old Joy ‘s overcast Oregon woods function in much the same way as Mutual Appreciation‘s crummy, minimalist flats and protagonist Dan Dunne’s shut-in apartment in Half Nelson. The two estranged friends in Old Joy take a camping trip to get away from their lives but end up considerably more cloistered, with the trash-strewn, damp woods hanging over their heads as much as their past-tense relationship does. One especially lyrical shot shows the woods’ reflection rotating in their car’s window as they U-turn, lost in more than one sense. Meanwhile, in several of Mutual Appreciation‘s key scenes, the figures involved in the central ménage à trois listlessly rock back and forth, the thrift furniture and frameless mattresses an extension of their essential fear of commitment. And then there’s Half Nelson‘s Dan, an anguished hero split between a passion for teaching and a drug addiction, his shuttered, bookish flat betraying self-entrapment and lapsed idealism.

Lapses are another common denominator here — many of these films’ most affecting images are the silent beats in which we see the actors registering a sense of loss, be it nostalgia (the pause in Old Joy following Mark and Kurt’s conversation about a favorite record store going out of business) or regret (Dan’s hollowed expression when caught smoking crack by a knowing student). Mutual Appreciation‘s characters have hardly started their adult lives, but when rocker Alan looks at himself in the mirror, in drag after a drunken odyssey, the seed is already there; 10 years down the line, his problems will be Mark’s and Kurt’s. Politics hang in the air like weather (Mark listens to Air America with a blank expression; Dan is distant while his parents discuss their bygone activism) as if preemptively remembering the present. Kicking and screaming, no: instead, as Kurt’s Old Joy tag goes, "Sorrow is nothing but worn-out joy." It’s hardly a sentiment to stake a straightforward portrait of a generation on, but while these films probably lose something in box office terms for not having the cachet of Reality Bites or, for that matter, The Graduate, they more than make up for it with their uncloying characterizations. Even Brando might find the roles opaque, but for these films it would be a mistake to confuse ambiguity with aimlessness. *

MAX GOLDBERG’S 10 FAVORITE THEATRICAL RELEASES (WITH A TWIST)

• Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt, US)

• L’Enfant (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium/France)

• Mutual Appreciation (Andrew Bujalski, US)

• The Intruder (Claire Denis, France)

• Iraq in Fragments (James Longley, US/Iraq)

• Flags of Our Fathers/Letters from Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood, US)

• Half Nelson (Ryan Fleck, US)

• The Proposition (John Hillcoat, Australia/UK)

• Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien, France/Taiwan)

• A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater, US)

Revenge of the sloth

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

Male malaise sure had a banner year in 2006 — at least as far as Hollywood was concerned. How many more times are we gonna have to sit through the same story about some supposedly endearing dude in his 20s or 30s whose quest to figure shit out exasperates everyone around him? And when I say "we," I’m implicating all y’all: The Break-Up made $114 million, and I’m guessing Vaughniston looky-loos shouldered only part of the blame.

While this brand of coming-of-age tale is nothing new — even when the age in question is decidedly postcollegiate — it’s never been so pervasive. Just rake your eyes over 2006’s top moneymakers: Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby; Failure to Launch; You, Me and Dupree; and thinly disguised variations on the theme like Cars — animated, sure, but fronted by man-child extraordinaire Owen Wilson. Even Superman Returns featured an emotionally stunted hero on the verge of a quarter-life crisis. (As did 2005’s top earner, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Noooo!)

Needless to say, none of the above really resemble similarly themed works of years past — say, The Graduate. These days, menfolk in the cinematic mainstream cultivate an I-don’t-wanna-grow-up attitude that’s less existential, more slothful. It’s a perfect match for a target audience that couldn’t care less about the war in Iraq but is willing to kill for a PlayStation 3. And while romantic comedies such as The Break-Up, Failure to Launch, and You, Me and Dupree are traditionally aimed at women, these particular films hit big because the male leads (Vince Vaughn, Matthew McConaughey, and Wilson again) were calcuutf8gly cast — they’re the kind of dudes that dudes can enjoy. The masculine ideal has definitely shifted. Why be suave when you can be a slob?

Naturally, these films all feature a buzzkill chick (Jennifer Aniston, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kate Hudson, etc.) who marches in and snatches away the remote control. Parker’s Failure to Launch character has actually made a career out of tricking ne’er-do-wells to move out of their parents’ homes. (The only time a male-female relationship isn’t a central component in these films is when you move into Jackass: Number Two territory, which focuses on dude-dude relationships amid 2006’s other chic craze: good old-fashioned torture.) Notably, in You, Me and Dupree, Matt Dillon’s character — newlywed, homeowner, tryin’ to get ahead at the office — is majorly emasculated at every turn by both his father-in-law boss and, of course, best bud Wilson.

There are ways to make this arrested-development story line fresh and interesting: Shaun of the Dead did it with zombies; The 40-Year-Old Virgin did it with the genius of Steve Carell (and his man-o’-lantern). And there’s hope on the other end of the spectrum: comedies may be populated by 35-year-old juveniles, but a film like The Departed proves that men grappling with maturity isn’t a topic forever bound to fart jokes. But then, of course, there’s 2006’s most freakish exploration of the trend: Little Man, the tale of a guy who literally inhabits a baby’s body. A more succinct (or crasser or more stupidly funny) deconstruction of contemporary male-centric romantic comedies would be near impossible to find. *

CHERYL EDDY’S TOP 10

(1) Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Larry Charles, US). Even if the whole movie were composed of that moment when Borat throws down his suitcase and the chicken lurking within gives out a sudden squawk, it would still be the funniest cinematic release of 2006. Possibly ever.

(2) The Host (Bong Joon-ho, South Korea). A politically conscious monster movie with bite, humor, quietly intense performances, and a lot of tentacles.

(3) The Descent (Neil Marshall, UK). A major leap forward for a young horror director who’s also a huge horror movie fan, this cave-set chiller with an outstanding (nearly all-female) cast melds Alien, The Shining, The Thing, Apocalypse Now, and Carrie.

(4) Half Nelson (Ryan Fleck, US). Proof that the American indie is still able to flourish without stooping to any clichés. Ryan Gosling’s heartbreaking lead performance is among the year’s standouts.

(5) Brick (Rian Johnson, US). High school hasn’t been this dark — or exquisitely vernaculared — since Heathers.

(6) Exiled (Johnny To, Hong Kong). Johnny To’s Sergio Leone–by–way–of–the–triads spectacular wields gun fu, spaghetti western ‘tude, and a never-better Anthony Wong.

(7) Red Road (Andrea Arnold, UK/Denmark). If you caught Andrea Arnold’s Oscar-winning short, Wasp, you knew she was headed for greatness; the stark, stunning Red Road bears this out.

(8) Lady Vengeance (Park Chan-wook, South Korea). Yeah, I had this on my list last year. But since it finally emerged in San Francisco in 2006, it’s back — and well worth a second mention.

(9) The Departed (Martin Scorsese, US). Sure, it’s got stars — Leo’s great, Matt’s good, Jack’s a wee bit self-indulgent — but the supporting players (Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen, Vera Farmiga, and especially Mark Wahlberg) are what really buoy Scorsese’s stylish triumph.

(10) Naisu no Mori: The First Contact (Katsuhito Ishii, Hajime Ishimine, and Shunichiro Miki, Japan). I quote an imdb.com user: "This movie melted my mind!" Show me your dancing!

Stop the Iraq escalation

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EDITORIAL The more the evidence shows the war in Iraq is a failure that’s only getting worse, the deeper the denial seems to be at the White House. Earlier this month President George Bush made clear that he wouldn’t follow the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations for a withdrawal deadline. Now he’s going a huge step in the opposite direction: he’s suggesting the United States send as many as 30,000 more troops to Iraq. This is insanity and another good reason why Congress needs to begin hearings on impeachment.


Almost everyone who is paying any attention to the situation thinks more US troops would be at best a waste of a lot of lives and money and at worst a cause of further instability in the region. General John Abizaid, the senior military commander in the Middle East, told the New York Times that bringing more soldiers into Iraq from abroad would only increase tensions. "[Abizaid] argues that foreign troops are a toxin bound to be rejected by Iraqis, and that expanding the number of American troops merely puts off the day when Iraqis are forced to take responsibility for their own security," the Times reported Dec. 19. General George W. Casey Jr., who commands the ground troops in Iraq, agrees with that assessment. According to the Washington Post, the Joint Chiefs of Staff do too — and are arguing against expanding the US force.


The clear majority of military leaders agree that the armed forces are stretched too thin by this war; that units being forced into repeated, longer deployments are coming unglued; and that there simply aren’t enough available troops to meet Bush’s goals. That means existing deployments would drag on even longer, more reservists would be called up, more National Guard units would be sent into a war they were never trained to fight — and it means more and more soldiers will be coming back in body bags.


But Bush (who has argued in the past against "politicizing" military decisions) doesn’t seem to care. He has asked the Pentagon to look at adding between 15,000 and 30,000 more troops to the quagmire and will likely announce in early January that he will escalate the war instead of moving to end it.

Not all the Democrats are standing in his way either: Sylvester Reyes, the new head of the Intelligence Committee, told Newsweek recently, "We’re not going to have stability in Iraq until we eliminate those militias, those private armies. We have to consider the need for additional troops to be in Iraq, to take out the militias and stabilize Iraq…. I would say 20,000 to 30,000 — for the specific purpose of making sure those militias are dismantled, working in concert with the Iraqi military."


That nonsense has to stop. The Democrats control the Senate and House today for exactly one reason: people in this country are sick of the war. If the Democratic Party wants to remain in power for more than two years and have any chance of recapturing the White House, incoming speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid need to immediately make clear that they won’t allow Bush’s plans to go forward.


Fiscal sanity alone makes a compelling argument: Bush’s escalation would bring the total cost of the war in Iraq to $600 billion — more than the United States spent in the entire Vietnam War (even adjusted for inflation).

The quickest way to end this madness is for Congress to cut off funding for any additional troops — and for the leadership to allow articles of impeachment to be introduced, debated, and voted on. *

Of Hearst, Singleton, the WLSBs, and the documents of collaboration

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

To get the citizen’s point of view, I have long maintained that every reporter and every editor and every publisher ought sooner or later to be the center of a story and see how the media works.

I found the exercise most instructive when the Media Alliance and the Guardian, represented by the First Amendment Project (Attys. James Wheaton, David Greene, and Pondra Perkins), went into federal court on Thursday to intervene and seek to unseal key records in the Reilly vs. Hearst/Singleton antitrust trial. Our three P.S. organizations put out a press release with the spokespersons listed for contact (Jeff Perlstein from the Media Alliance, James Wheaton and David Greene from FAP, and myself from the Guardian.)

I got several calls from the Associated Press (Terence Chea, who did an excellent story that ran around the country), Kate Williamson of the Examiner, James Allen from the alternative paper Random Lengths in San Pedro (who was rightly agitated about the Hearst/ Singleton deal to buy the Daily Breeze in Torrance and further encroach on his turf), Mark Fitzgerald of Editor and Publisher was in touch, and others. Significantly, even though Hearst and Singleton have a lock on the Bay Area press, not one of their many reporters nor editors contacted me. (Subtle point: that is the wave of the future with these folks). Nobody from Hearst or Singleton even called or checked in to try to make the point that, even though they have five law firms and l2 or so attorneys in federal court heaving and sweating mightily to argue they really aren’t collaborating, they don’t even have to make a show of doing the journalistic minimum of doing an honest story. More: they didn’t even have to put on a show even though the lawsuit was aimed at their Achilles heel: their secret documents of collaboration. And of course they didn’t quote me or, when they did in the case of the Examiner, they mangled my point about why we were suing.

For the record, I said in the press release and in interviews with reporters: “Our intent here is to ensure that the naton’s biggest chains (Hearst, Singleton, McClatchy, Gannett, Stephens), as they move to destroy daily competition and impose regional monopoly in the Bay Area, cannot do so in the dark of night with sealed records that set a terrible precedent for the free press, the First Amendment, and open government.”

And so the two big papers, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News, gave us two more wimpy little stories buried deep in their business section. Those who are attentive readers of the Bruce blog would know how to find them. For example, the Chronicle put its wimpy little story in the Daily Digest column just above the fold on page two of the business section under the rousing head, “Media groups want documents unsealed.”

Its last paragraph is classic monopolyese: “(Judge) Illston issued a preliminary injunction Wednesday barring MediaNews and Hearst Corp. from collaborating until at least April 30, when Reilly’s case is expected to go to trial. (B3: Is this premature collaboration? Is it like premature ejaculation?) Attorneys for MediaNews and Hearst have argued that no collaboration plan is in the works but that should one emerge in the future, it would not be illegal.” Repeating for emphasis: “Attorneys for MediaNews and Hearst have argued that no collaboration plan is in the works but that should one emerge in the future, it would not be illegal.”
Marvelous. Simply marvelous. That is Hearst boilerplate corporate policy and it is a classic of self-immolation. Compare it with AP’s version: “On Tuesday, Illston barred Bay Area newspapers owned by MediaNews and Hearst from consolidating some of their business operations until the lawsuit is resolved. When she issued a temporary restraining order against the alliance in November, Illston said she had been under the impression that Hearst’s investment was solely an equity stake, but an April 26 memo had surfaced suggesting it actually was a bid to merge some of their business operations.” Alioto got this scarlet letter in discovery and used it in his brief to show that Hearst was in effect lying in court about its documents of collaboration. The judge quoted from this critical letter, but it is still under seal and so are other key documents that would likely show the Hearst/Singleton plans for regional monopoly. Significantly, the AP story ran in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a Hearst paper.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the bay, the Mercury News
was doing its own wimpy little story in the “Business Digest” in its business section, a two paragraph story with the rousing head “Plaintiffs seek records in antitrust media case.” The story was not even a Merc story, it was pinched without attribution from the AP story (another wave of the future). From now on, I shall refer to these stories as WLSBs.

Over in the near East Bay, Josh Richman did a much better story that appeared in both the Oakland Tribune and the Contra Costa Times (a one reporter-covers-it-all concept that is another wave of the future.) Richman got some good quotes, including a notable one from Joseph Alioto, Reilly’s attorney.
“‘Oh, good, it’s about time,'” Alioto said of the lawsuit filing, adding that it was crucial for all details of an antitrust case. ‘It’s the archetypal example of hypocrisy when major newspapers take the right of the people to know applies to everyone except themselves.'”(Note the copy editing issues, another wave of the future with the staff cutbacks).

Significantly, none of the Hearst/Singleton reporters could get a single Hearst nor Singleton executive to comment on the lawsuit in their own papers. The ducking was delicious. Richman wrote: “Alan Marx, MediaNews’ attorney, declined comment. A Hearst spokesman could not be reached.” The Merc/AP reported: “Hearst officials were reviewing the motion and could not comment Thursday, said spokesman Paul Luthringer. Representatives at MediaNews did not immediately respond to a request for comment.” In short, the nation’s biggest chains are seeking to impose an ever more conservative news, editorial and endorsement line on one of the most liberal and civilized areas of the world, just as they ought to be raising holy hell about Bush, the Patriot Act, and the unending war in Iraq. And they are stonewalling like hell, in federal court and in their own papers, to keep secret the documents of collaboration.

And so there you have it: the state of daily journalism in the Bay Area, Friday, Dec. 22, 2007. There is much more to come. Follow our stories and editorials in the Guardian, on our website, and in the Bruce blog. Things of great moment are in the making.

P.S. Repeating: where the hell are the antitrust attorneys in the U.S. Justice Department? And where the hell is outgoing Attorney General Bill Lockyer and incoming Attorney General Jerry Brown? B3

A Day in the Life of Inmate # 98005-111 aka Josh Wolf

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By Sarah Phelan
San Francisco freelance journalist Josh Wolf has spent nearly four months in prison for refusing to surrender outtakes of videos he took at an anarchist protest turned violent. Recently, Wolf wrote a letter describing his typical day inside, which should be of interest to Oakland freelance journalist Sarah Olson and Honolulu Star-Bulletin journalist Gregg Kakesako, since they both just received subpoenas demanding testimony about quotes they attributed to 1st Lt. Ehren Watada, who faces a court-martial after denouncing the war in Iraq and refusing to deploy with his unit. Wolf’s letter should also be a source of useful tips for San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, who face up to 18 months inside for refusing to reveal the source of closed-door grand jury testimony by Barry Bonds and other athletes about drug use. For a transcript of the letter, keep reading…

Powell, Baker, Hamilton — Thanks for Nothing

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When Colin Powell endorsed the Iraq Study Group report during his Dec. 17 appearance on “Face the Nation,” it was another curtain call for a tragic farce.

Four years ago, “moderates” like Powell were making the invasion of Iraq possible. Now, in the guise of speaking truth to power, Powell and ISG co-chairs James Baker and Lee Hamilton are refueling the U.S. war effort by depicting it as a problem of strategy and management.

But the U.S. war effort is a problem of lies and slaughter.

The Baker-Hamilton report stakes out a position for managerial changes that dodge the fundamental immorality of the war effort. And President Bush shows every sign of rejecting the report’s call for scaling down that effort.

Meanwhile, most people in the United States favor military disengagement. According to a new Wall Street Journal / NBC News poll, “Seven in 10 say they want the new Congress to pressure the White House to begin bringing troops home within six months.”

The nationwide survey came after the Baker-Hamilton report arrived with great — and delusional — expectations. In big bold red letters, the cover of Time predicted that the report would take the White House by storm: “The Iraq Study Group says it’s time for an exit strategy. Why Bush will listen.”

While often depicted as a rebuff to the president’s Iraq policies, the report was hardly a prescription for abandoning the U.S. military project in Iraq — as Baker was at pains to repeatedly point out during a whirlwind round of network interviews.

Hours after the report’s release on Dec. 6, Baker told PBS “NewsHour” host Jim Lehrer that the blue-ribbon commission was calling for a long-term U.S. military presence: “So our commitment — when we say not open-ended, that doesn’t mean it’s not going to be substantial. And our report makes clear that we’re going to have substantial, very robust, residual troop levels in Iraq for a long, long time.”

Baker used very similar phrasing the next morning in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” — saying that the report “makes clear we’re going to have a really robust American troop presence in Iraq and in the region for a long, long time.”

That was 24 hours into the report’s release, when media spin by Baker and Hamilton and their allies was boosting a document that asserted a continual American prerogative to devote massive resources to war in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. And, in a little-noted precept of the report, it said: “The United States should assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise.”

In short, the Baker-Hamilton report was a fallback position for U.S. military intervention — and for using Pentagon firepower on behalf of U.S.-based oil companies. But the report’s call for tactical adjustments provoked fury among the most militaristic politicians and pundits. Their sustained media counterattack took hold in short order.

President Bush wriggled away from the panel’s key recommendations — gradual withdrawal of many U.S. troops from Iraq and willingness to hold diplomatic talks with Syria and Iran. War enthusiasts like Sen. John McCain denounced the report as a recipe for retreat and defeat. The New York Post dubbed Baker and Hamilton “surrender monkeys.” Rush Limbaugh called their report “stupid.”

By the time its one-week anniversary came around, the Baker-Hamilton report looked about ready for an ashcan of history. Bush had already postponed his announcement of a “new strategy for Iraq” until after the start of the new year — a delay aimed at cushioning the president from pressure to adopt the report’s central recommendations. Even the limited punch of the report has been largely stymied by the most rabidly pro-war forces of American media and politics.

But those forces don’t really need to worry about the likes of Colin Powell, James Baker and Lee Hamilton — as long as the argument is over how the U.S. government should try to get its way in Iraq.

“We are losing — we haven’t lost — and this is the time, now, to start to put in place the kinds of strategies that will turn this situation around,” Powell told CBS viewers on Dec. 17. That sort of talk stimulates endless rationales for continuing U.S. warfare and facilitates the ongoing escalation of the murderous U.S. air war in Iraq.

Powell’s mendacious performance at the U.N. Security Council, several weeks before the invasion of Iraq, is notorious. But an obscure media appearance by Powell, when he was interviewed by the French network TV2 in mid-September 2003, sheds more light on underlying attitudes that unite the venture-capitalist worldviews of “moderates” like Colin Powell and “hardliners” like Dick Cheney.

Trying to justify Washington’s refusal to end the occupation, Powell
explained: “Since the United States and its coalition partners have invested a great deal of political capital, as well as financial resources, as well as the lives of our young men and women — and we have a large force there now — we can’t be expected to suddenly just step aside.”

_____________________________

Norman Solomon’s book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” is out in paperback. For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com

A memo to constituents of Rep. Nancy Pelosi

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

To fellow San Franciscans:

Now that even the San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst has declared in a lead front page story that Pelosi will legislate
“from the middle,” the Guardian recommends at minimum three specific proposals for her constituents to push theincoming speaker of the house to do to seriously represent San Francisco values.

l. Pelosi needs to allow Congress to start impeachment proceedings against President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. Bush has rejected the modest recommendations of the Iraq Study Group and Friday’s New York Times reported in one story that Sen. John McCain as saying in Baghdad that the “military considers sending as many as 35,000 more U.S. troops to Iraq” and another story that “Top commanders appear set to urge larger U.S. military.” Only impeachment proceedings will provide the leverage to halt the terrible losses of blood and treasure. See current Guardian editorial link above “Impeachment is now the only option.”

2. Pelosi needs to use the power of her new office to help pass a federal shield law that would uphold the rights of journalists and news outlets to protect the identity of their sources and to keep possession of their unpublished/unaired material. In the meantime, she needs to help push the Bush administration to stop wrongfully persecuting Joshua Wolfe, a 24-year-old freelance videophotograher now in federal prison in Dublin for refusing to give up his unedited tapes of a 2005 demonstration in San Francisco. He is the only journalist in jail in the U.S., has been in jail longer than any U.S. journalist ever and may stay in jail until the new federal grand jury is impaneled next July. She ought to also help push the Bush administration to hold its fire against two reporters from the Chronicle who face l8 months in jail for refusing to reveal the sources of a grand jury investigation in the Balco scandal. My feeling is that these abusive actions against the press in San Francisco by the Bush adminstration have targeted our city because of its San Francisco values, in this case its tradition of dissent and anti-war activity. Pelosi could start on this issue and promote lots of good will by meeting with the mother and supporters of Wolf. (See link below.)

3. Pelosi needs to introduce and push a a bill to eliminate the Presidio Trust, return the land to the National Park Service where it belongs, and overturn the precedent that is leading to a conservative movement to privatize the National Park system. She made the original mistake of leading the move to privatize the Presidio, on the phony argument of saving it from the Republicans, but now her Democrats are in power and it is time for her to right the wrong. Otherwise, the private Presidio Trust will keep asking for and getting tens of millions of federal money to subsidize a private, commercially driven, ruinous park operation, without sunshine and accountability, without any city zoning control, in growing opposition to neighborhors. Most important, the Pelosi park principle will further fuel the move to privatize the national park system. In effect, Pelosi created the model for the theft of one of our greatest resources, the national park system. (See Guardian editorial link, “A key test for Pelosi.”)

These are some real San Francisco values for Pelsoi to support. If she doesn’t, she risks leaving a legacy for failing to stop the Iraq War and selling off the Presidio and establishing the precedent for selling of our national parks. B3, celebrating San Francisco values since l966

PS: How to help Josh after the jump

Impeachment is now the only option

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EDITORIAL We can all stop hoping and pretending now: the facts are in. No matter what anyone right, left, or center says, no matter what the truth is on the ground, no matter how clear and powerful public opinion has become, President George W. Bush isn’t going to change anything about the war in Iraq.
That’s what we saw from the president’s press conference with British prime minister Tony Blair on Dec. 7 and from his statements since. He’s not going to start withdrawing troops, and he’s not going to negotiate with other regional powers.
The Iraq Study Group report has its flaws. It talks about diplomatic discussions with Iran and Syria, but it stops short of describing the real reason the United States is bogged down in the Middle East (the lack of a coherent energy policy that doesn’t rely on foreign oil). It suggests that the United States should leave the job of rebuilding Iraq to Iraqis but fails to state that the country responsible for all the problems should play a role in paying for its solutions. And it would leave thousands of US soldiers in Iraq as advisers for the long term, putting them in serious jeopardy.
Still, it’s at least a dose of badly needed reality. The report acknowledges that the Bush administration’s current policies have made an awful mess of Iraq, that the situation is deteriorating, and that continuing the current path isn’t an acceptable option. And it recommends that all combat forces leave Iraq by 2008.
That such a broad-based, bipartisan panel would reach that conclusion unanimously isn’t really that much of a surprise. Everyone with any sense in Washington and around the world these days agrees that the United States needs to set a timetable for withdrawal. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist who initially supported the war and has long argued that some good could still come out of it, wrote Dec. 8 that the group’s recommendations “will only have a chance of being effective if we go one notch further and set a fixed date — now — for Americans to leave Iraq.” Even conservative syndicated columnist George Will noted the same day that “the deterioration is beyond much remediation.”
As long as the United States retains combat troops in Iraq, they will be the target of sectarian violence and the focus of that war. When they leave, the Iraqis will have no obvious villain, and there might be an actual hope for a long-term resolution.
The notion of an all-out Kurd versus Shiite versus Sunni civil war isn’t going to make anyone in Damascus or Tehran happy, since those two governments will be caught in the middle. And a clear statement from the United States that American troops will be leaving on a specific date not too far in the future is, the majority of experts agree, the only way to bring all the parties to the table for a serious and meaningful discussion.
And yet Bush and Dick Cheney remain alone, aloof, refusing to acknowledge that military victory in Iraq is utterly impossible and that the old mission of establishing a US client state in the Middle East will never be accomplished.
The death toll for US troops is approaching 3,000. The cost is running at $250 million a day. This simply can’t be allowed to continue. If Bush and Cheney refuse to begin a withdrawal program, then Congress needs to act decisively on two fronts.
The first is to inform the president that under the Constitution, Congress has the sole power to declare war and this Congress will no longer pay for Bush’s military adventure in Iraq.
But there’s a larger problem here. Bush and Cheney have lied to the American people, taken us into war on the basis of fraudulent information, and violated their oaths of office. Back in January we called on Congress to begin debating articles of impeachment; the GOP-controlled House wasn’t about to do that. But things are different now. The voters have made it very clear that they don’t like the president’s war, and the Democrats have a clear mandate for change.
Impeachment is serious business, but Bush has left us no alternative. We can’t simply allow the war to continue as it has been, year after bloody year, until Bush’s term expires.
The only thing holding up impeachment hearings is the word of the incoming speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who said during the campaign that option was “not on the table.” Well, it ought to be on the table now. Pelosi should publicly inform Democratic leaders in the House who support impeachment that she won’t block an impeachment effort. And her constituents in San Francisco need to keep the pressure on her to allow Congress to move forward on its most important responsibility in decades.
This isn’t going to be easy. Even the San Francisco Chronicle now acknowledges that Pelosi is governing like a moderate. It will take a reenergized peace movement and a huge new national mobilization to put pressure on her and every member of Congress. But the stakes are too high to wait. It’s time to start, today. SFBG

There’s nothing like the NY Post

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By Tim Redmond
I’m so happy that the New York Post is finally printing in San Francisco. There’s just nothing like it in this country. The front page of the Dec. 7th issue, containing a report on the Iraq Study Group, has pictures of the faces of Baker and Hamiliton pasted onto monkeys’ faces with the headline:

“Surrender Monkeys: Iraq panel urges U.S. to give up”

There really nothing in the story inside to justify that headline (although I wish there was; giving up at this point doesn’t seem like such a terrible option, compared to all the others) but the Post doesn’t care. It’s a great cover, making a political point.

Now why can’t the supposedly “liberal” dailies act like this?

{Empty title}

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We can all stop hoping and pretending now: The facts are in. No matter what anyone, right, left or center says, no matter what the truth is on the ground, no matter how clear and powerful public opinion has become, President Bush isn’t going to change anything about the war in Iraq.
That’s what we saw from the president’s press conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair Dec. 7th, and from his statements since. He’s not going to start withdrawing troops, and he’s not going to negotiate with other regional powers.
The Iraq Study Group report has its flaws. It talks about diplomatic discussions with Iran and Syria, but it stops short of describing the real reason the U.S. is bogged down in the Middle East (the lack of a coherent energy policy that doesn’t rely on foreign oil). It suggests that the U.S. should leave the job of rebuilding Iraq to Iraqis, but fails to state that the country that created all the problems should play a role in paying for their solutions. And it would leave thousands of U.S. soldiers in Iraq as advisors for the long term, putting them in serious jeopardy.
Still, it’s at least a dose of badly needed reality here. The report acknowledges that the Bush Administration’s current policies have made an awful mess of Iraq, that the situation is deteriorating, and that continuing the current path isn’t an acceptable option. And it recommends that all combat forces leave Iraq by 2008.
That such a broad-based, bipartisan panel, which includes hard-core conservatives like Edwin Meese III and Alan Simpson, would reach that conclusion unanimously isn’t really that much of a surprise. Everyone with any sense in Washington and around the world these days agrees that the U.S. needs to set a timetable for withdrawal. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist who initially supported the war and who has long argued that some good could still come out of it, wrote Dec. 8 that the group’s recommendations “will only have a chance of being effective if we go one notch further and set a fixed date – now – for Americans to leave Iraq.” Even George Will noted the same day that “the deterioration is beyond much remediation.”
Let’s face it: Iraq as a modern nation is entirely an artificial construct, lashed together by the British out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. There are bitter, ancient divisions between religious, ethnic and tribal groups, and it’s no surprise that once the dictatorial central government of Saddam Hussein was overthrown, the factions would have trouble working together. Now, through U.S. bungling, they are engaged in what can only be called a civil war.
As long as the United States retains combat troops in Iraq, they will be the target of sectarian violence and will be the focus of that war. When they leave, the Iraqis will have no obvious villain, and there might be an actual hope for a long-term resolution.
The notion of an all-out Kurd vs. Shiite vs. Sunni civil war isn’t going to make anyone in Damascus or Tehran happy, since those two countries will be caught in the middle. And a clear statement from the U.S. that American troops will be leaving on a specific date, not too far in the future, is, the majority of experts agree, the only way to bring all the parties to the table for a serious and meaningful discussion. That could lead to a United Nations conference, among all the regional powers; the final outcome might be a division of Iraq into several states, as Senator Joe Biden and others have suggested.
And yet, Bush and Cheney remain alone, aloof, refusing to acknowledge that military “victory” in Iraq is utterly impossible and that the old mission of establishing a U.S. client state in the middle east will never be accomplished.
The death toll for U.S. troops is approaching 3,000. The cost is running at $250 million a day. This simply can’t be allowed to continue. If Bush and Cheney refuse to begin a withdrawal program, then Congress needs to act, decisively, on two fronts.
The first is to inform the president that under the Constitution, Congress has the sole power to declare war, and this Congress will no longer pay for Bush’s military adventure in Iraq. Congress should set a deadline for troop withdrawal and announce that funds for the war will be cut off on that date.
But there’s a larger problem here. Bush and Cheney have lied to the American people, taken us into war on the basis of fraudulent information, perpetrated an unjust and unjustifiable war and violated their oaths of office. Back in January, we called on Congress to begin debating articles of impeachment; the GOP-controlled House wasn’t about to do that. But things are different now. The voters have made it very clear that they don’t like the president’s war, and the Democrats have a clear mandate for change.
Impeachment is serious business, but Bush has left us no alternative. We can’t simply allow the war to continue as it has been, year after bloody year, until Bush’s term expires.
The only thing holding up impeachment hearings is the word of the incoming speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who said during the campaign that that option was “not on the table.” Well, it ought to be on the table now. Pelosi should publicly inform Democratic leaders in the House who support impeachment know that she won’t block an impeachment effort. And her constituents in San Francisco need to keep the pressure on her to allow Congress to move forward on its most important responsibility in decades.
This isn’t going to be easy. It will take a re-energized peace movement and a huge new national mobilization. But the stakes are too high to wait. It’s time to start, today.

Starch Control

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› paulr@sfbg.com
While we wait to be instructed on the lessons of Iraq by James A. Baker III — the Bush family consigliere assigned the Mosaic task of leading us forth from the Mesopotamian desert — let us consider the lessons of the Thanksgiving meal just past.
The bane of all holiday cooking is starch, and the Thanksgiving meal is the apotheosis of holiday cooking. Therefore: Thanksgiving = starch. You have your mashed potatoes, your bread stuffing, your bread, your pie crusts. By some point late in the afternoon or early in the evening, you can’t believe you ate the whole thing.
How, then, to curb starch without being a killjoy? Other holiday meals will require other answers, but at Thanksgiving this year at our table, the answer was to serve succotash — the ancient Indian dish of corn and beans — instead of potatoes and stuffing. There were a few bleats about tradition, but the general feeling seemed to be that the succotash was wonderfully tasty and much less … stuffing. It was also a tip of the cap to the Indians and the immeasurable sorrows that overtook them. Thanksgiving really ought to be consecrated in their memory and honor; we need not be self-flagelutf8g or ostentatiously guilty to recognize that but for their horrendous loss, most of us would not be here. And we do right by them and ourselves, it seems to me, when we incorporate bits and pieces of Indian life into our own evolving traditions while remembering where they came from and what they meant. If we don’t do it, no one will.
As for the current fashion of brining the turkey: bah and humbug, I would say. My far simpler and less messy alternative is to rub the bird the day before with a couple tablespoons of kosher salt and a couple more of herbes de Provence. Before roasting, work some softened sweet butter and a few smashed garlic cloves under the skin at the breast, back, and legs. Roast breast side up in a hot (450 degrees) preheated oven for about 25 minutes, until the skin is golden. Flip the turkey over and reduce the heat to 350 degrees. Keep turning the bird every 30 minutes or so and allow about nine minutes per pound. No stuffing, of course, and let the turkey rest under aluminum foil before serving.

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