Senator Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat who sits on the committee and has been calling for Mr. Gonzales’s resignation for months, said this morning: “It has been a long and difficult struggle, but at last the attorney general has done the right thing and stepped down. For the previous six months, the Justice Department has been virtually nonfunctional, and desperately needs new readership.”
Wait -- wha? Has Chuck Schumer been watching Team America?
First of all, who knew that Woody Allen had his own talk show and second, that he once interviewed Billy Graham, whose charm and manner of speaking, by the way, reminds me of a certain Bill Clinton**...
(I love the part where Woody says he will try to convert Graham to agnosticism by the end of the show.)
There is apparently some controversy surrounding the Reverend 's depiction on the cover of TIME this week: See the horns? Though, I was expecting to learn that he was yet another hypocritical preacher but upon further research, he is remarkably unimpeachable. Quite an amazing guy. (He was even a registered Democrat, for what that's worth. He is apparently quite apolitical.)
* "Graham received assistance from powerful news mogul William Randolph Hearst, whose interest in Graham is a mystery; the two never met. Most observers believe that Hearst appreciated Graham's patriotism, appeals to youth, and thought that Graham would be helpful in promoting his conservative anti-communist views. Hearst sent a telegram to his newspaper editors reading "Puff Graham" during Billy Graham's late 1949 Los Angeles crusade. The result of the increased media exposure from Hearst's newspaper chain and national magazines caused the crusade event to run for eight weeks--five weeks longer than planned. Henry Luce put him on the cover of TIME in 1954. -- From the Wikipedia entry on Graham
** Speaking of Clinton, when then-First Lady of Arkansas Hillary Clinton invited him to lunch as he arrived in Little Rock for a crusade in 1989, Graham declined and said, "I don't eat with beautiful women alone" and met her in a hotel dining room instead.
At dawn on April 19, as he drove toward the Murrah Federal building, McVeigh carried with him an envelope whose contents included pages from The Turner Diaries, a fictional account of modern-day revolutionary activists who rise up against the government. He wore a printed T-shirt with the slogan Sic semper tyrannis ("Thus ever to tyrants", the phrase shouted by John Wilkes Booth immediately after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln) and "The tree of liberty must be refreshed time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" (from Thomas Jefferson). As the truck approached the building, at 8:57 a.m. CST, McVeigh lit the five-minute fuse. Three minutes later, still a block away, he lit the two-minute fuse. He parked the Ryder truck in a drop-off zone (incidentally situated under the building's day-care center), locked the vehicle, and headed to his getaway vehicle.
TIME: Were you then completely repulsed by the idea of war at that point?
MCVEIGH: I was taken aback by what I had been told. We all thought we were doing this for your country and these people are terrible, every single one of them. You get over there and you realize two things, they're not so terrible and how is this helping my country?
This Max Blumenthal, he's good. Don't know how long he can last since he gets thrown out of every right-wing conference he investigates (first the College Republican Convention, and below, at the Christians United for Israel's annual Washington-Israel Summit.) Awesome and scary.
This post began as three pieces I saw of a growing sentiment around an issue I felt needed to be heard. Namely, the tendency for college-educated Western liberals to act out of pity and (let's admit it) guilt, when most of the time, the people we think we are helping would rather not be pitied, would rather make their way on their own than be the instruments by which our consciences are cleansed. Plus, throwing dollar bills or GM corn out of a plane very likely does more harm than good.
1. "For God's sake, please just stop." James Shikwati is a 35 year old Kenyan economics expert. His interview in Der Spiegel begins thusly:
SPIEGEL: Mr. Shikwati, the G8 summit at Gleneagles is about to beef up the development aid for Africa...
Shikwati: ... for God's sake, please just stop.
His interviewer goes on to plead with him, half in jest (I think), saying "We just want to help!" The interviewer goes down the list: AIDS, poverty, hunger...who do we write the check to?
And Shikwati, speaking on behalf of an entire continent, says again and again, in so many words, that the artificial welfare mentality created by the NGOs and the Western development in Africa is paradoxically doing more harm than good. In example after example, he shows how compassion can kill: AIDS ("Africa's biggest business" and "a political disease here") , the United Nations World Food Program, ("a massive agency of apparatchiks" which actually puts African farmers out of business with cheap, subsidized corn), clothing (stop killing the African garment industry by sending those damn free t-shirts!), and on and on.
2. "Biogas" I was reading Harper's and came across this item by Binyavanga Wainaina (of whom I have become a newly minted fan), excerpted from the excellent new magazine, Bidoun:
I was twelve years old, in a small public school in Nakuru.
One day, the whole school was called out of class. Some very blond and very serious people from Sweden had arrived. We were led to the round patch of grass next to the parade ground in front of the school, where the flag was. Next to the flag were two giant drums of cow shit and metal pipes and other unfamiliar accessories. We stood around, heard some burping sounds, and behold, there was light.
This is biogas, the Swedes told us. A fecal matyr. It looks like shit-it is shit-but it has given up its gas for you. With this new fuel you can light your bulbs and cook your food. You will become balanced dieted; if you are industrious perhaps you can run a small biogaspowered posho mill and engage in incomegenerating activities.
We went back to class. Very excited. Heretofore our teachers had threatened us with straightforward visions of failure. Boys would end up shining shoes; girls would end up pregnant.
Now there was a worse thing to be: a user of biogas.
3. Investment is different from aid Here it is, phrased a little more politely to an audience of smart compassionate movers and shakers, some of whom might have been a little guilty of this mindset of victimizing Africa. Ngozi Okonji-Iweala was the first female Finance Minister in Nigeria, who fought against Nigeria's most damning stain, corruption. Here, she argues that reform is happening, and we in the west would do well to invest in Africa (rather than, say, unwittingly victimize it with "developmental aid").
4. China and Africa "An African revolution that needs noticing: 'The Chinese are the most voracious capitalists on the continent and trade between China and Africa is doubling every year.'" "We Love China," by Lindsey Hilsum, Granta 92: The View from Africa
"It seems that these days, wracked by guilt at the humanitarian crisis it has created in the Middle East, the West has turned to Africa for redemption."
"Never mind that the stars sent to bring succor to the natives often are, willingly, as emaciated as those they want to help."
Apparently, the Splasher reads Gothamist. And uses gmail (ifwedidit@gmail.com, a take off on the never published OJ Simpson tell-all). Still processing...
A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun
The above is Cheney's own special "secret" classification which applies to things that aren't TOP SECRET or CLASSIFIED, but that he still wants to keep under wraps.
Even talking points for reporters are sometimes stamped "Treated As: Top Secret/SCI." Experts in and out of government said Cheney's office appears to have invented that designation, which alludes to "sensitive compartmented information," the most closely guarded category of government secrets. By adding the words "treated as," they said, Cheney seeks to protect unclassified work as though its disclosure would cause "exceptionally grave damage to national security."
The Iraq Veterans Against the War, dressed in full uniform, engaged in a series of street theater actions around the New York City area yesterday. Actual veterans of the Iraq war played American service members and local volunteers played the civilians. The event was treated like a military operation with squad patrols, searches, detentions, and crowd control. An IVAW member, Adam Kokesh, said, "By reenacting what we've been through in Iraq, we hope to inspire more of our fellow Americans thttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifo act to end the war now."
Remember these guys? They now have a Wikipedia entry, which is illuminating as usual. (Heroes had an homage to them! That's it. I'm downloading all of the first season...)
