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March 05, 2004

Kerry on homeland security
: John Kerry talks about terrorism and homeland security:

"And as we protect America from danger at home - we will protect this country from danger abroad. I do not believe George Bush has done too much in the war on terror. I believe he's done too little. He has failed to maintain our post-9/11 global coalition, left our troops unprotected, and thought too little about the challenges we face. As President, I will use every tool at our disposal -- not only a strong military, but renewed alliances, vigorous law enforcement, reliable intelligence, and unremitting effort to shut down the flow of terrorist funds -- to fight the war on terror."

Well, it's a start... But I'd still rather hear the firm conviction of Tony Blair.

"This is not a time to err on the side of caution; not a time to weigh the risks to an infinite balance; not a time for the cynicism of the worldly wise who favour playing it long," he said.

What he said.

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Salam reports
: Salam Pax resurfaces to report briefly on his trip to Karbala to make a video. He was there during the violence.

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Kidnapped
: This story in the Guardian said that gangs are kidnapping youth in Baghdad for ransom.
And now here's an Iraqi blogger saying that his cousin was kidnapped and his uncle had to pay $20k to get him freed. Of course, there's no way to confirm the story.

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Downshifting
: Many Americans are outsourcing their own careers, choosing to get out of the rat's maze and go their own way. Same thing in Australia in very large numbers.

But new quantitative research by The Australia Institute, obtained by The Weekend Australian, documents the shift in priorities that has driven nearly one-quarter of Australian adults to downshift in the past decade.
"It is a social force with far-reaching political implications," conclude authors Christie Breakspear and Clive Hamilton.

He did it. And he's happy.

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Early and often
: David's Medienkritik is asking all our help to stuff the ballotbox in a Spiegel poll on the Bush presidency. So far, thanks to David und Freunde, it appears that the German people think Bush is a quite excellent pres.

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Outrage
: I'm catching up on my blog reading (that seems to be my new Friday ritual) and I get to Zeyad a few days late on the terrorism in Iraq:

The shameful silence must end. Where are the cries of outrage from the Arab and Islamic world? Where is the condemnation and denunciation? Where are the fatwas? Where is the seething and shaking fists? Or are these preserved for other people?

And here are Zeyad's photos from the religious celebrations before the bombings.

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Warsaw
: Maciej Ceglowski returns home to Warsaw. Good reading. I'm a sucker for traveblogs.

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If a tree speaks in the forest...
: Now this is funny: Steve Case speaks at TED on the condition that it's off-the-record. Let's parse that. Assumption 1: That Steve Case has anything to say anyone could care about anymore. Assumption 2: That TED is where anyone who has anything to say goes.
What if they held a conference for has-beens?

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Howard, Howard
: Much discussion on Howard Stern over at Instapundit. Finally: Much discussion on the issue somewhere other than just here. I'm on dial-up speed now (on my Treo) and so I can't go into detail right now. But go over and take a look.

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Martha, Martha
: Well, prosecutors have now set their own bar sky-high after getting Martha Stewart. If she does two years, the Enron mob better do 200 each; ditto Worldcom; ditto Health South; ditto....

: The defense screwed up by not presenting a defense; it was another indiction of Martha hubris.

: John Cole:

The government had no case that Martha Stewart did what they actually accused her of, but was convicted of trying to keep the government from proving that she did nothing wrong, and for that she could spend the rest of her life in jail.

[via Donald Sensing]

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Democracy delayed
: The signing of Iraq's constitution -- the first truly democratic constitution in the Arab world -- has been delayed because Ayatollah Sistani thinks he's in charge:

Shia members of Iraq's governing council refused to sign the interim constitution at the last minute today, delaying a signing ceremony.
The delay came after Iraq's leading Shia cleric rejected parts of the document, Iraqi officials said.
The council agreed to the accord unanimously on Monday. But Ayatollah Ali Sistani rejected provisions put into the text at the Kurds' request to protect their self-rule area in the north, according to a source in the council.
Also in dispute was a clause outlining the nature of the presidency in the future government, a Shia official said. The Shia were reviving a demand that would allow them to dominate the presidency, he said.

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Vote for Blair
: Here's what I want to hear our leaders saying. It's what Tony Blair said today:

Tony Blair defended the doctrine of pre-emptive military action this morning, promising to "wage war relentlessly on those who would exploit racial and religious division to bring catastrophe to the world".
In a speech in his Sedgefield constituency, the prime minister warned of the "mortal danger" posed by Islamist terrorists and rogue states acquiring weapons of mass destruction, and insisted that "this is not the time to err on the side of caution".
"We surely have a duty and a right to prevent the threat materialising; and we surely have a responsibility to act when a nation's people are subjected to a regime such as Saddam's," he said.
Mr Blair called for the reform of international law and the UN to allow the elimination of rogue, repressive regimes which might supply terrorists with WMD....
He claimed the attacks of September 11 had "altered crucially the balance of risk", showing as they did that Islamist terrorists were prepared to wage "war without limit".
"From September 11 on, I could see the threat plainly," he said. "Here were terrorists prepared to bring about Armageddon.

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Public
: Leonard Witt puts up his presentation on the transformation of what was called public journalism into the public's journalism.

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The Bush ads and 9/11
: I've taken a day to post my view of Bush's use of 9/11 images in his campaign ads because I had to grapple with it.
On the one hand, the idea of exploiting those images is frightening to me -- because the images themselves still frighten me; they bring back sorrow and terror every time I see them.
But on the other hand, I believe it is vital that we remember the horror of that day and act on it.
If we forget what happened or shove those memories into a PC closet we're not supposed to open, then that is dangerous.
And if we do not admit that we are at war because of 9/11, then that, too, is dangerous.
So I believe that the war on terror must be a campaign issue. I want to see both candidates (but especially Kerry) pushed hard on what their continuing response will be to the attacks on us and the need to protect us. I fear that Kerry was so used to responding to Dean's attacks, representing a minority of the electorate, that he will go soft on terror. And that, is dangerous.
So, in the end, I think it is necessary to frankly, even bluntly, include the war on terrorism and terror's attack on America in the presidential campaign. I won't criticize the use of the images in the ads. Obviously, care needs to be taken not to exploit them and the suffering behind them. But it's more important that we make sure our government works hard to make sure that suffering does not come to our streets again.

: Matthew Yglesias and Kevin Drum can't get worked up over this either.

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On 'Passion'
: Father Andrew Greeley, Catholic priest and author, takes on Mel Gibson's Passion in an eloquent column:

'The Passion of the Christ'' is a celebration of the bloody suffering of Jesus, a fundamentalist interpretation by a man who rejects the Vatican Council. It is not, contrary to claims, a literal interpretation of St. John's Gospel but is based on the ''revelations'' of a 19th century mystic. It is a film about torture, legitimated because it is the torture of Jesus. ''Passion'' is a glorification of sado-masochism....
Gibson showed his hand in his interview with Diane Sawyer when he said that because the gates of heaven were closed by the sin of our first parents, Jesus had to suffer to open them again. This metaphor, which my generation heard often in grammar school, is a poor adaptation of the teaching of St. Anselm, who proposed that the suffering of Jesus paid the blood price to satisfy God and free us from our sins. Anselm's theology is not Catholic faith. It has caused a lot of misunderstanding among Catholics who absorbed it in their youth.
One may wonder what kind of God it would be who would demand such a price from his beloved son. Is this the same kind of implacably forgiving God whom Jesus preached about in his life?
We all must suffer; we all must die. Death, no matter how brief or how protracted, is horrible. Do those who die after a prolonged battle with cancer die any less horribly than Jesus? What does his death say to all of us who must die? One will watch ''The Passion of the Christ'' in vain for any hint of an answer to that question.
The lesson of Good Friday, properly understood, is that God suffers with us. Like every good parent, he suffers when his children suffer. When Jesus hung on the cross, God (the person was the Second Person of the Trinity) made common cause with the Iraqi peasant shot in the back and tossed into the pit to be consumed by fire. God cannot prevent our sufferings, but he suffers with us.

: I also happened upon an eloquent blog post on Passion by Debra Gallant, the NY Times NJ columnist (and blogger):

One day, when I was a kid, I was walking in my neighborhood in Northern Virginia, and some kid, who I didn’t even know, turned to me, fixed me with a look of pure hatred and sputtered, “You’re the one who killed Christ.” ...
Last night, watching “The Passion of the Christ,” I started getting that creepy feeling again. I shrunk down into my seat at the movie theater, wondering if people behind me could tell, from my body language or some other subtle sign (horns?), that I was a Jew. Partly, I was paranoid because early on in the movie whenever I moved my head to the left or the right to see better, the woman behind me sighed loudly, as if I were repositioning my head merely to inconvenience her. Nothing like having your every movement scrutinized. But the deeper fear, of course, was that this movie audience – if they knew I was Jewish - might tear me from limb to limb. If there’s anything “Passion” communicates – beyond blood – it’s the power of a mob....
The anti-Semitism angle? I’ve heard it said several times that Jews and Christians see two different movies when they view “Passion,” but in the movie I saw, there was scene after scene in which an angry mob of Jews demands that the Romans kill Jesus....
The one moment in which I was able to see “Passion” from a remotely sympathetic point of view, was when – in the theater – I thought, why make a movie about all this hatred and torture, instead of what Jesus was trying to teach? And then I thought of Holocaust movies. There is a need to document things that are awful, to remind the world of the evil it’s capable of. But this would be like a Holocaust movie with no plot, except for the systematic torture of a Jew. No Schindler. No pianist. No kooky Italian clown. In most of the Holocaust pictures I’ve seen, there are some particular shocking moments, which stand out like the sudden shot of a gun. In “Passion,” there’s not one or two shocking moments. It’s non-stop gruesome, like a horror movie.

She raises an important point and the comparison to the Holocaust on film is apt, for that raises the very challenge Gibson struggled with -- and failed.
Eli Wiesel has said, famously, that you cannot bring theater to the Holocaust or the Holocaust to theater. The reason: You simply never portray evil as evil enough. I pondered this many years ago at People when I wrote a review of a miniseries that included scenes of the Holocaust and there, the director clearly strugged with his effort to make it evil enough. It wasn't enough that the Nazis killed Jews. It wasn't enough that they buried them in mass graves. It wasn't enough that they had Jews dig up the corpses to hide their crime and burn them. The director had a Nazi piss on the funeral pyre. And still, it wasn't evil enough; it wasn't shocking enough; it couldn't be, could it?
Gibson told Diane Sawyer that he wanted his film to be shocking. And it seems clear that he was never satisfied; he couldn't make it shocking enough. Don't have the Romans just beat him with sticks. Have them beat him with nails. And beat him. And beat him.
Was Gibson trying to portray evil or suffering? I'm not sure -- and the answer matters. If it was Christ's suffering he was trying to portray, then he did not make clear why that suffering mattered (see Greeley, above). If it was evil he was trying to portray, then one has to fear that it was to whip up hatred (even to somehow balance those Holocaust films). I certainly hope it's not the latter (and were it not for the horrid, anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying rants of his own father I probably would dismiss that possibility). But one has to wonder.

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Stern bulletin
: Howard Stern said he found out last night that the FCC is going to levy record fines against him today.
I told you so.
The government is going after free speech.
More in a few minutes...

: UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal confirms.
Ditto UPI.

: OC Weekly hates Stern but tells its listeners to defend him:

You. Yeah, you—you NPR-lovin’, Daily Show-quotin’, Bush-hatin’ lefty, the kind who makes up the majority of the Weekly’s readership and staff. You’re probably delighted that massive Clear Channel booted radio personality Howard Stern from its stations...
Offended by Stern? Good for you—don’t listen.... Defend this man with the effort you protest the Iraq war ’cause the way this administration is going, your pinko screeds against Halliburton are next to go.

: Money where my mouth is: I just bought Sirius stock.

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Ralph, you shmuck
: Ralph Election Spoiler Nader could, indeed, do it again:

:In the first poll since John Kerry locked up the Democratic nomination, Kerry and President Bush are tied while independent Ralph Nader has captured enough support to affect the outcome, validating Democrats' fears.
The Republican incumbent had the backing of 46 percent, Kerry 45 percent and Nader, the 2000 Green Party candidate who entered the race last month, was at 6 percent in the survey conducted for the Associated Press by Ipsos-Public Affairs.

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Whereabouts
: Sorry for the light blogging. Spent all day yesterday in a board meeting; wife under the weather and so the kids had to eat my cooking; back momentarily. Going to listen to Stern now....

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