By The River

Obviously stung by the fictitious War on Christmas, Sen. John McCain and other warriors of the right have responded with a very real War on Woodstock. As in the Woodstock Music and Art Fair of Aug. 15-18, 1969. As in one of the central cultural events of the 1960s generation.

Sensing a new front in the culture wars, wanting to strike a blow against all the fun we had back then while trying to avoid getting sent to Vietnam, McCain and his ilk have launched a crusade against a $1 million earmark Sen. Hillary Clinton proposed for the Woodstock Museum in Bethel, N.Y. The way they tell it, this museum earmark represents Wasteful Federal Spending that they, as vigilant Republicans, must fight to the bitter end.

Wonder why they're fighting over this when a trillion dollars is going out the door to finance the Great
Leader's Iraq adventure? The clue is in McCain's TV commercial, in which he contrasts the young people having a great time at the Woodstock Festival in 1969 to his time in a North Vietnamese POW camp. This fight isn't about money. It's about striking a blow against the 1960s, that period of cultural revolution in America that began with the Kennedy assassination in 1963 and culminated with the Nixon resignation in 1974, while never truly ending. McCain's ad is an appeal to the folks--once known as the Silent Majority--who never grew their hair long, didn't particularly care for rock music, supported the Vietnam War, and in general never felt cool.

I didn't get to Woodstock, being just 14 at the time and living in Michigan. But like the vast majority of people in my generation, I attended the festival through the three-disk Woodstock album and the Woodstock movie, still not available in a good DVD transfer. Those, more than the festival itself, were critical reasons why Woodstock became a transcending American cultural moment and other festivals, like the one in the summer of 1973 at Watkins Glen racetrack in New York, despite its larger attendance (and equal chaos) did not. Heck, I can still recite the stage announcements on the record. Lotta freaks! And it's not just the Hog Farm either. We're all feeding each other!

And so forth. The right can no more undo the Woodstock Nation than the left can undo the Bush judicial coup in 2000. We have to live with the consequences, for better or for worse.

For those of you who can't get enough Woodstock, here is a recently compiled list of all the acts who performed at Woodstock and every song they played. Wow.

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It was trick-or-treat night in Shipoke last night, an occasion for both children and adults to have some fun. This never falls on official Halloween, but rather on the night designated by the city of Harrisburg, Pa., for the annual fun and frolics. Children like my daughters, seen above, gather vast amounts of candy from the neighborhood.

When I was a kid--here I go again--I was lucky to get a single mini-Tootsie Roll at houses in my neighborhood on Graafschap Road in Holland, Michigan. I eventually discovered that if I went to the upscale homes on South Shore Drive I'd get entire nickel candy bars. To my kids, this sounds like a "walked 10 miles to school" story, but it's true. Now they get entire handfuls of candy at some houses. I suspect candy is cheaper in real terms than it was in the 1960s. Seems that way anyway.

Some of my adult neighbors do "trick or drink," in which they go to certain houses where they know they'll be welcomed with a glass of wine. That segued into a party on Showers Street around the "stick burner," a portable fireplace I've written about previously. Scott Emery and I hauled it out and Jeff Duthie, after some patient work with damp wood, got a blazing fire going. The night was cool, as Halloween should be, but not too cold to be enjoyable.

Bill Cluck had the best story to tell. He told me he knows Valerie Plame Wilson, the CIA spy babe outed by the Bush White House. I don't doubt this, because Bill is a remarkably well-connected guy. Plame is a 1984 Penn State graduate--you can find that several places online. According to him, Plame was a sorority member at Penn State, worked on the business side of the Daily Collegian, and was not unknown in the downtown State College bars. He got to know her because she was the girlfriend of a guy who was working as his legal assistant (Bill is a lawyer) on matters regarding the Lock Haven, Pa., SuperFund site. It ended badly for the boyfriend, but Bill and Valerie keep in touch today with the occasional e-mail.

There are a million stories in the streets of Shipoke. Now comes the Halloween parade on Sunday and another, bigger party that evening.

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Although it seems of late that summer will never end--how many years can you comfortably wear shorts on Oct. 23--it inevitably will. Cold weather will follow, and it will be time to light the first fire in the fireplace.

I got a half-cord of split, seasoned oak delivered yesterday by Charlie Barlow. I've been buying from him for years. He lives in the backwoods of Perry County, and every couple of years I give him a call and he brings a load of wood down to my home in Shipoke. He and I unload the wood onto the sidewalk in front of my house, and then I get to lug it back four pieces at a time to the wood rack under the porch in the back of the house.

Charlie is a rarity--a Democrat in Perry County, where Republican registrations outnumber Democratic ones by 5-1. We talked about Hillary Clinton's chances. He thinks she's going to go all the way, but confesses to worries about what the other side will try to do to her. I agree that it's a worry, but note that she's been through 15 years of this and survived.

He nods and chuckles. "She's a tough old broad," he said.

Charlies has been in the firewood business all his life, as his father was before him. His own son is now into it, too. During the Depression, his father's sawmill kept local men working for $2 a day, enough to get by back then. During our visits, Charlie always mentions the development and population pressures in Perry County, both in terms of new houses and subdivisions built by "millionaires" and a much greater number of deer hunters in the fall. The backwoods is not so backwoods anymore.

"The more people you get, the more taxes go up," he said. "For schools."

Mexican immigrants concern him. There are more in Juniata County with its big poultry processing plants, he said, but Perry County gets its share. Their driving habits concern him the most. A friend's wife died in a collision with one of them, and there was no insurance, no license, no nothing. Just a junker car and a bad driver.

We finished unloading the truck and he was on his way back to Perry County. A couple of hours later, I had most of the wood stacked, having resold about a third of it to my neighbor, Bob Mummert. A full stack of firewood gives you a nice, secure feeling. I am ready for the cold winter nights when a blazing fire will feel comforting. I wonder if it was wise to buy so much firewood. What if I changes jobs and move in a few months? But I rationalize that whoever buys the house will be happy that it comes with free firewood. And in the meantime, we will enjoy the fire's warmth.

Posted by David at 07:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Think Hillary Clinton will be the next U.S. president? Like to place a little money on that?

Actually, there are at least two websites where you can do just that. Both Intrade and the Iowa Electronic Markets will let you bet real money on the prospects of Sen. Clinton or any of the other leading candidates for President in both parties. You can win or lose money. Just like in a real horse race!

Both these sites have Sen. Clinton, the Secretariat candidate, as the odds-on favorite to be our next President. At Intrade, which is a for-profit company, 47.6 percent of investors believe she will be elected President in 2008, compared to 26 percent for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and 16.8 percent for former New York mayor Rudolph Guiliani.

At the non-profit Iowa Electronic Markets, operated as an educational and research tool by the University of Iowa's Henry B. Tippie College of Business, 71.1 percent of participants say Hillary will get the Democratic nomination, while 40.4 percent say Guiliani will be the Republican nominee. In the actual election, IEM doesn't take bets on a Clinton-Guiliani matchup, but rather on a generic Democratic-Republican contest. It has the Dems willing with a 51.5 percent share of the total vote.

I'm amazed at the momentum of Sen. Clinton's campaign. She has made almost no serious mistakes. It has become popular of late to say, yes, but look at where Howard Dean was at this point four years ago. The difference is experience and the machine behind Sen. Clinton. She also has the benefit of 15 years of dealing with the rightwing attack machine and the polite disdain of conventional wisdom. She is far more liberal on social issues than many give her credit for. I still have reservations in the area of foreign policy. She needs to reassure liberal Democratic voters that she will remove U.S. troops from Iraq within a year after taking office, and engage Iran with diplomacy, not war.

I sense that Sen. Clinton will get many votes from women who, even if they disagree with her on some issues, are so pumped by the idea of a female President that they will put aside their reservations and vote for her.

Posted by David at 05:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Although the attempt in the House to override President Bush's veto of the expanded State Children's Health Insurance bill received a hefty majority vote, 273-156, it sadly fell 13 votes short of the two-thirds vote necessary for an override. I suspect there will be another vote in the next few weeks, since the program expires in November. Thirteen votes is in striking distance.

Kudos to Republican Congressman Todd Platts of York, Pa., for voting to override Bush. He was joined by fellow Pennsylvania Republicans Charles Dent, Phil English, Jim Gerlach, and Tim Murphy, plus Tim Holden and all the Democrats in the state delegation.

Hall of Shame: GOP Reps. John Peterson, Joe Pitts, and Bud Shuster, Jr. voted to sustain Bush's veto. I guess they don't have any poor children in their districts.

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With a new CBS News poll showing 80 percent of Americans favor an expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, and 74 percent willing to pay more in taxes to do so, it is time for Republicans to abandon the sinking SS Bush and give their constituents the lifeboat they so clearly want and need.

Override the President's veto of S-CHIP. Help more children from struggling families get the health care they need. You will reap political benefits if you do, and pay a political price if you don't.

This will be an easy vote for U.S. Rep. Tim Holden, the Democrat who represents the 17th Congressional District that includes Harrisburg. It will be a difficult one for U.S. Rep. Todd Platts, a Republican whose district is made up mainly of York and Cumberland counties in central Pennsylvania. Platts voted for the bill that Bush vetoed, and has increasingly shown a willingness to hew a more moderate course than the hardline conservatives would like. He needs to vote what the people want and let George W. Bush go hang.

Don't let "Texas mean" replace the liberal democratic values that have made America great.

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All of my adult life, strangers have stopped me and asked for directions. Everybody gets asked for help now and then, but I get this a lot. I'm not sure why. Maybe I look like I know where I'm going, or at least don't look threatening. Probably both are true. Most times this happens in Harrisburg, Pa., where I live. The most recent supplicant was a guy who pulled into the Patriot-News parking lot as I was crossing the entrance and asked me how to find 7th Street. Good question: unless he was careful, he would have trouble getting there from 812 Market Street unless he knew to take a detour off Walnut Street through what appears to be a parking lot.

I used to get a lot of requests for help finding the PennDOT building when it was still at the corner of Commonwealth and North Streets. A lot of out-of-towners, average folks for the most part, had to go there to renew licenses and registrations or what-not. With PennDOT's move to Front & Sycamore streets south of Shipoke, I don't get nearly as many of those anymore. But finding the new building can still be confusing, despite the signs. I live in Shipoke, and once in awhile someone will stop their car in front of my house with a befuddled look on their face. At least there's plenty of free parking at the new location.

I even get stopped and asked for directions in New York City, which makes me believe it's something about the way I look. I used to say, sorry, I'm a tourist, too, but now I've been there enough, at least to Manhattan, that I can often help them.

Even I get lost sometimes, and like most men, I don't like to ask for directions. In New York, figuring out which direction to walk when you exit a subway station can be a real challenge. Which way is east? which is west? Unless you've paid careful attention to the direction the train was traveling in relation to where you exited the station, it often falls into the "your guess is as good as mine" category. The two stations I use the most, Park Ave. at 28th St., and Spring Street, one of the SoHo stations, were particularly confusing in that respect, but I finally memorized enough mental cues that I could head in the right direction 90 percent of the time. At least if I was paying attention.

All of this was an introduction to a great idea New York City has some up with. They're going to place directional decals on sidewalks outside of subway stations. The decals will show north, south, east, and west and which direction to walk to get to a particular street. It's a great idea, at least until they're covered with snow and ice, but I do feel a small sense of personal loss.

After all, how often do you get an opportunity to tell a New Yorker where to go?

Posted by David at 07:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today is the fifth anniversary of the infamous Congressional resolution that was used by the Bush Administration as authorization to invade Iraq and commence our unending national nightmare. A dozen former Army captains who served in the war write in today's Washington Post that it is time to cut our losses and get out of Iraq. Not a slow, staged withdrawal, which they say will not prevent a civil war and result only in more American losses, but a load-the-planes-and-trucks now withdrawal. I agree. As I've said before, if we stay five more years the only difference we will see is the deaths of more American troops and more Iraqi civilians. Nothing else about the outcome will change.

On another war front, as it were, it was heartening to read in the Baltimore Sun today that the 75-member, Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church is being sued in U.S. District Court, Baltimore, by the father of a slain Marine at whose funeral the "God hates fags" church picketed.

This is believed to be the first lawsuit by a family against the church, which has drawn much ill-will across the nation by picketing soldier funerals to advance its anti-gay agenda. They carry signs that say a soldier's death was punishment from God to a nation that tolerates homosexuality. They are not "anti-war protesters" in any sense, a mistaken belief that seems to have taken hold in parts of the public.

Westboro Baptist Church members have picketed in central Pennsylvania, both at military funerals and at churches which are gay-friendly, such as St. Stephen's Episcopal Cathedral in Harrisburg. In other words, against anyone who doesn't share their belief that gays and lesbians are condemned spawn of Satan. They make Ann Coulter look like Mother Teresa. I'm frankly surprised, given the hatred the group arouses, that none of them have been seriously harmed or killed by an unhinged member of the public.

The judge in the Baltimore case ruled that some of what the group said at the Marine funeral or on its website was protected speech under the First Amendment, but that other things they said were not. So part of the suit is going forward. Much of the income of this "church" comes from suing critics, so I guess they can't protest too much.

Posted by David at 08:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Three Americans received the Nobel Prize in Economics today for their work in developing "mechanism design theory," which advances the heretical notion (at least to movement conservatives) that free markets don't always work well. They don't stop there, of course: their theory provides a way to predict how corporations will behave in the absence of a free market and determine whether government regulation (oh, the heresy!) might be needed.

To movement conservatives, the free market offers a solution to anything and everything. Most people know that's a bunch of bunk. Bought any free market health care or electricity lately? Or a copy of Microsoft Office? Thanks to the Nobel folks for sending another reality-based message to America.

Kudos to Leonid Hurwicz of the University of Minnesota, Eric S. Maskin of Princeton, and Roger B. Meyerson of the University of Chicago not for dealing with the world as it is, not as some ideological pipedream.

Posted by David at 09:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

That's the headline that should have run in November 2000.

Cheers to former Vice President Al Gore for winning a much-deserved Nobel Peace Prize. Gore was honored for his efforts, centered on the documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," to raise world awareness of the perils of global warming. He shares the award with a United Nations agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Screw you, bastards. You know who I mean.

Gore in once sense was the victim in 2000 of his own mistakes and bad advice from consultants, but every politician goes through that. Much more importantly, he was the victim of an ascendant American right wing, which was not about to let its "final victory" over the New Deal-progressive Democrat era be snatched away. Gore's foes used every technique, fair or foul, but mainly the latter, to give Republican George W. Bush the presidency. America has paid a terrible price, and there needs to be a reckoning.

I can only imagine how Gore feels today. Vindication, exultation, the sweet sense that he has whipped the people who tormented him. My fondest hope is that he will now enter the race for the 2008 Democratic nomination.

Posted by David at 07:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Unlike in my hometown of Holland, Michigan, where a search for a human body accidentally picked up as trash at a local funeral home and dumped in a landfill was called off quickly, this Downingtown family kept at it until they found their mother's missing jewelry. I guess when you're motivated, anything is possible.

Posted by David at 07:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As the George W. Bush enters his last year in office, I suppose we can expect ever more disgusting incidents like the vicious attacks on a 12-year-old Maryland boy, Graeme Frost, who gave the Democratic response to President Bush's weeklyradio address last week to voice support for the Democratic effort to expand the Children's Health Insurance Program, known as SCHIP. All he did was tell how S-CHIP, as it is known, saved his family after he and his sister were seriously injured in a car crash.

Rightwing bloggers trying desperately to prevent an override of President Bush's veto of the S-CHIP expansion reacted furiously. Young Graeme has been declared fair game by right wing bloggers like Mark Steyn of the National Review Online . They have harassed the Frost family, who live in Baltimore, with telephone calls. They thought they had found proof that young Graeme was the 21st century equivalent of Ronald Reagan's Cadillac-driving "welfare queen."

Oh, the whooping and hollering when the rightwing bloggers, especially the loathsome Michelle Malkin, "discovered" that the Frosts--get this--had granite countertops in their $400,000 home and sent Graeme and his sister to an expensive private school. The parents' wedding was in the New York Times in 1992, which meant, ipso facto, that they were fat cats. Gotcha! Just like we nailed Dan Rather, we nailed you lying liberals again! Read the back-slapping, congratulatory comments posted to one of the articles in Free Republic if you want to get a sense of the mentality behind the attacks.

Trouble is, none of the accusations against the Frosts, other than the wedding announcement in the Times, were accurate. As the New York Times reports today, the Frosts bought their home in a then-bad section of Baltimore for $55,000 in 1990 and is now worth $260,000. The countertops are concrete. Graeme gets a scholarship to the private school, and his sister's tuition is paid entirely by the state of Maryland because of her injuries. The Frost family income is about $45,000 a year. But In short, the Frosts are a classic example of people S-CHIP is designed to help.

The rightwing bloggers who thought they had nailed the Frost family failed the most basic tenet of journalism--check your facts. The granite countertop accusation, for example, was apparently based on one writer's judgment that in an online photograph, they looked like granite. This should be a cautionary tale the next time--and there will be a next time--the amateur journalists of the rightwing blogosphere engage in the politics of personal destruction.

And no, I can't think of a single instance when Democrats went after one of the many children President Bush has used to make a political point. Attacking a 12-year-old for simply stating his beliefs lacks class and common decency, two qualities in short supply among Graeme Frost's vicious critics.

Posted by David at 07:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Shipoke residents who received a letter from FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program in the past week may not realize the imporantance of the "Flood Insurance Claims Handbook" that was included.

FEMA has finally made public a no-fee administrative procedure that allows someone whose claim is denied by their flood insurance carrier (State Farm, Hartford, etc.) to appeal that denial to FEMA rather than go to Federal court, the only previous option. The process for filing an appeal is outlined on pp. 8-13 of the booklet.

The booklet doesn't say if FEMA has any statutory time limit for responding to an appeal, although you yourself have just 60 days from receipt of a denial letter to file one. The only mention of time periods comes in a paragraph that says the one-year period for filing a Federal court lawsuit, which begins when you receive a denial-of-claim letter from your insurance company, isn't extended by the administrative appeals process, which isn't a good sign. How well this works will depend greatly on the level of personnel resources FEMA devotes to appeals.

FEMA should have had an administrative appeals process in the flood insurance program years, if not decades, ago. Congress had to order them to create one in the last flood insurance legislation. Many people can't afford the expense of a Federal court appeal, which may well exceed the value of the denied claim. Unfortunately, the appeals process isn't retroactive to the 2004 flood. Many Shipoke residents, though not all, had bad experiences with insurance adjusters. State Farm sent us a former auto claims adjuster who had received a two-day crash course in flood claim adjustment. She came in with an attitude.

She and State Farm ultimately denied payment for damage the flood did to an outdoor patio plus a fence and support pillars to a second-floor porch. We were told none of that was covered, although a neighbor who had a different insurance carrier got his patio repaired. We ultimately paid the entire cost ourselves. I would have used this appeal process if it had existed then.

Still, I can't complain about State Farm completely, because they paid quickly for the rest of the claim. Another neighbor, who had flood insurance through the Hartford, waited nearly six months to get payment.

Posted by David at 08:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Nobel Prize in medicine today went to two Americans and one Briton for their use of embryonic stem cells to induce beneficial genetic changes in mice. Nice that the World has sent a reminder to George W. Bush about the importance of embryonic stem cell research, which he has done so much to try to end in America.

Does this mean Al Gore will win the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for his tireless work to alert the World about the dangers of global warming, as is widely predicted? That would really yank Bush's chain. Stay tuned.

Posted by David at 08:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Okay, I'll admit that fellow homey Erik Prince of Blackwater is a darkly fascinating figure, a right wing conservative Christian who has profited immensely ($1 billion in Iraq War contracts) from a business that frequently involves killing people, as Jon Stewart put it so well. But comparing him to Bruce Wayne of Batman? You be the judge in this new profile of Prince in today's New York Times. He may need to hide out in the Bat Cave now that Iraqi investigators have found no justification whatsoever for the Sept. 16 massacre of civilians by Blackwater mercenaries in Baghdad.

Not sure where he'd find a cave in our mutual hometown of Holland, Mich., anyway, but maybe the 7,000 acres of swamps in North Carolina that Blackwater calls home has one.

Posted by David at 07:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Even as George W. Bush and his people struggle to save the murderin' mercenaries of Blackwater, and new allegations arise about regular Army snipers being pressed to raise their kill numbers like salesmen told to sell more aluminum siding, comes word that the Worst President in History (WPIH) hasn't forgotten his critics.

The Toronto Globe and Mail reports this morning that two U.S. peace activists, Ann Wright and Medea Benjamin, were barred from entering Canada because the FBI had placed their names in the National Crime Information Center database. Canadian border guards interviewed by the Globe and Mail say merely being listed in the database means you won't get into Canada. The conservative Harper government in Ottawa denies this, but I tend to believe the border guards.

The thing is, the two women had a couple of misdemeanors on their record relating to their antiwar activities. You know, the usual stuff: trespassing, disorderly conduct, maybe even pouring blood on missile nosecones. Both had been to Canada several times before at the invitation of peace groups there.

Let us say from the start, before the excuses begin, that this was hardball politics by the Bush Administration. It didn't happen by accident. Someone decided that if Wright and Benjamin were going to mess with the Great Leader, the Great Leader was really going to mess with them. In this, Bush is no doubt channeling Erich Honecker, the late, unlamented, and bureaucratically ruthless former leader of East Germany. Watch the great film, "The Lives of Others," if you want to know more about what the East German communist government did to keep folks in line.

And of course, the WPIH's people would say, it was all perfectly legal. And it may have been. But there are laws and there are understandings, and a just, liberal society cannot exist without both.
There is a sense of proportion, of not going too far even agaist people who don't like you and would like to see you thrown out of office. Putting their names in the NCIC was meant to hurt them, to hamper their anti-war activities, to deny their constitutional right to travel.

I don't excuse Canada from this: the current prime minister is no Pierre Trudeau, who opened the borders of Canada to U.S. war resisters during the Vietnam War. I hear that Canada now allows U.S. investigators into the country to search for U.S. soldiers who have fled to Canada to avoid service in Iraq.

Canada has been the Great Safety Zone in the U.S. imagination for nearly three decades. I can't tell you how many times I heard fellow Americans say things like, "well, if Reagan tries to draft my kid to invade Nicaragua, I'm taking him to Canada," or, "if they ban abortions, I'll take my daughter to Canada if she needs one."

Perhaps it's still true for abortions and other things, but not for fleeing unjust and immoral wars of choice.

Posted by David at 07:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With every passing day, the private security firm known as Blackwater increasingly resembles an American version of the Nazi SS, namely a brutal, ideologically-driven private army outside the command and control structure of the regular U.S. Army. They are in Iraq at incredible expense to the U.S. taxpayer to provide security for U.S. State Department personnel. On Sept. 16, they killed 17 Iraqi civilians at an intersection in Baghdad, and the more journalists look into it, the worse it seems.

The latest investigation of the massacre is in today's Washington Post. The New York Times tracked down a former Blackwater mercenary in Seattle who is accused of murdering an Iraqi in a drunken rage, but who was spirited out of Iraq by the State Department and Blackwater. Perhaps Jon Stewart put it best on Comedy Central last night: Blackwater gets paid for killing people.

One of many differences between Blackwater and the SS is that it doesn't appear any Blackwater mercenaries face legal retribution for their alleged crimes. Not that Germany would have prosecuted SS members for their crimes if they hadn't lost the war, but America is supposed to be on a somewhat higher plane than Nazi Germany.

Congress is moving to remove the legal immunity of American private security firms in Iraq, but that probably won't affect the participants in the Sept. 16 massacre or the fellow in Seattle. They and their leaders, possibly including Erik Prince, the Blackwater owner, ought to be turned over to the United Nations for war crimes prosecutions, just as the Serbians were a few years ago. That will be a start toward restoring the image of America in the world. And whatever contracts Blackwater has for work in Iraq or elsewhere for the U.S. government need to be terminated forthwith.

Perhaps it isn't fair to compare Blackwater to the Nazi SS. Blackwater mercenaries don't wear the infamous double lightning bolt insignia. And as far as anyone knows, they don't swear a personal oath of loyalty to George W. Bush. As far as we know.

Posted by David at 08:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In 1995, an industrialist by the name of Edgar Prince dropped dead of a heart attack in my hometown of Holland, Michigan. Prince, who made his fortune selling lighted visor mirrors to the auto industry, was the largest employer in Holland and was respected by the community for his local redevelopment work--he saved downtown Holland--and overall philanthropy.

When he died, his widow and children sold Prince Corp., where my sister worked, to Johnson Controls, Inc., for $1.35 billion. In a rare gesture in the cutthroat corporate world, the Prince family gave sizeable payments to both managers and rank and file employees to thank them for their service. I never quite figured Ed Prince for a Democrat--they're exceedingly rare in Holland--but I thought he must at least be a moderate Republican, if he had any politics at all.

How wrong I was.

Let us start by looking at Ed Prince's son, Erik Prince . When his father died, I learned only today, Erik used his inheritance to found Blackwater, the private security firm that operates as a mercenary army for the U.S. State Department in Iraq. I'll spare you for now my thoughts on the need for higher, not lower inheritance taxes. Blackwater, on Sept. 16, killed at least 17 Iraqi civilians at an intersection in Baghdad. The incident apparently began when a Blackwater guard in a convoy shot and killed an Iraqi man driving his mother to pick up her husband at the hospital where he worked.

Accusations have since been leveled that Blackwater personnel have killed other Iraqi civilians. Blackwater, it seems, whisks the involved mercenaries out of Iraq and pays off the families of the victims. The killers are fired, but don't face legal prosecution.

Erik Prince testified yesterday before a House committee chaired by U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman. He defended his men, denied they were mercenaries, and even more corrosively funny, denied that political connections played any part in Blackwater's success in the no-bid world of Iraq War contracting.

Prince is about as connected as they come in the GOP and religious right, according to Media Mouse, a blog that tracks the religious right in West Michigan. His father, Ed Prince, was a backer of James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who wields major influence in today's Republican Party. In 1993, he provided seed money to start the anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-sex education Family Research Council and went on its board. Gary Bauer, the first head of the FRC, paid tribute to Ed Prince and outlined his role in this letter after his death. It makes interesting reading, and thanks to Media Mouse for putting it online.

But it doesn't stop there. Erik Prince's sister Betsy is married to Dick DeVos, Jr., son of the Amway/Quixtar co-founder Richard DeVos. DeVos, Jr., was the unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor of Michigan last year. Members of the DeVos family are likewise major backers of rightwing Republican candidates and causes. If there's anyone the Dick Cheney cabal would have listened to in handing out no-bid Iraq contracts, it's this bunch.

If there's any good side to this sordid tale for me, it's that Erik Prince isn't an alumni of Holland High School, where I went. He graduated from our Bible-thumping rival, Holland Christian High School. Nor did he attend Hope College, where I went, although his sister, Emilie Wierda, is on the board of trustees there. Sometimes I think Hope has been taken over by pod people--it was far less conservative when I was there.

Many in the Prince family are members of the ultra-conservative Christian Reformed Church that claims many, though not nearly all Holland residents as members. Erik Prince has since converted to Roman Catholicism, according to this article that originally ran in the Grand Rapids Press.

None of this should necessarily overshadow the considerable good that Ed Prince did for Holland. But since he helped in a major way to finance political activities I greatly oppose, I'll never think of him in quite the same way again.

Posted by David at 08:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've watched all of the episodes so far of "The War," Ken Burns' epic documentary on the American involvement in World War II.

And so far, I'd give Burns and his crew an 'A' for effort and a 'B' for content. I commend him for showing the brutal reality of the war and driving home the point that American soldiers, while overall disciplined and effective, were not always angels. Our side executed prisoners for convenience sake just as the Germans and Japanese did. It was not a "Good War," as Burns points out, but a necessary one.

Last night's episode on the Battle of the Bulge and the rescue of the American civilian internees in the Santo Tomas camp outside Manila was particularly good. In one of many examples of his overall fairness, Burns juxtaposes the little-known Japanese imprisonment of American civilians in the Philippines under increasingly brutal conditions with the American internment of Japanese civilians in the mainland U.S. That's progress; most documentaries on the war show only what we did to Japanese-Americans.

Yet Burns holds back on Santo Tomas. I know a lot about this because I researched it several years ago for a yet-unwritten book on the history of GPU, the company responsible for the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Harrisburg. GPU, then known as Associated Gas & Electric, owned Manila Electric Co. All the white collar workers at Meralco were Americans, many from Reading, Pa. William Snyder, who later supervised the early stages of construction of TMI-1 for Metropolitan Edison Co., was among the prisoners, although he was later moved to the Los Banos camp. I interviewed several of the GPU Santo Tomas survivors for the book and examined documents of the post-war war crimes trial of the Japanese officers who ran the camp.

Burns gets the increasing starvation right, but he never mentions that it was deliberate Japanese policy in the last months of the war. Many camp inmates believed that the Japanese Army was preparing to murder them outright. The very dramatic rescue of the Santo Tomas inmates didn't come across well in the documentary, but to be fair it was probably a matter of not having time to show everything. Burns does sort of link Gen. MacArthur's grandstanding visit to the camp to the decision of the Japanese to target the camp with their artillery, which killed several American civilians. Most of the former prisoners I talked to had little good to say about MacArthur personally.

My other complaint about the series is the repetitive footage of cannons and machine guns firing. The footage appears to be linked to specific battles on specific days, but the claim of direct link is never made and I wonder if a lot of generic war footage was used. Those army cameramen on both the American and German sides seem to have been everywhere.

And a final note: did anyone else notice how the volume of "The War" is noticeably higher than whatever show you were watching before it? I have to get up and turn it down when each episode starts. I guess Burns knew who his primary audience would be--older Americans who are increasingly hard of hearing. If it wasn't public TV and sponsored entirely by General Motors, I suspect Miracle Ear would have been right in there.

Posted by David at 08:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Former CBS News anchorman and reporter Dan Rather filed a $70 million lawsuit against his former employer charging that he was made a scapegoat and wrongfully discharged to placate the Bush White House after CBS 60 Minutes ran an accurate story in the fall of 2004 on the President's avoidance of his military obligations during the Vietnam War. The conventional wisdom at the time was that the broadcast was based on forged documents, but that may not have been the case.

Rightwing Republicans have long hated Rather, whom they view as a liberal enemy dedicated to exposing their bad policies and failed leaders, beginning with President Nixon. Actually, Rather is just a good journalist, one who like many journalists is drawn to stories about little guys afflicted by big guys, who tend to be wealthy and powerful Republicans, and about leaders with feet of clay. It's not liberal or conservative, it's just hardwired into a reporter's operating system.

Rather says he won't take a financial settlement to go away and shut up. His dearest wish is that the lawsuit proceed to trial so his lawyers can take depositions from the CBS brass and possibly from George W. Bush himself. The back story to the lawsuit appears to be that CBS kow-towed to the White House for business reasons and failed to stand behind their reporter. Lawsuits can be dangerous and unpredictable--just ask former President Clinton how that Paula Jones lawsuit went--and both the network and the Bush Administration may be in for some serious trouble.

Posted by David at 07:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)