While We're On The Subject Of Paying For One's Crimes

Before attempting to remove the splinter from another nation's eye, we might consider addressing the two-by-four that's lodged in our own.

So they're going to hang Saddam Hussein. American talking heads, for the most part, give the impression that they believe justice is being served. And the comments around my house aren't much different: Commit a crime; face the time.

Still, you can't help but notice that American Justice and its entourage, media whores all, have had a little work done since the seventies. When President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon all those years ago, the notion of Justice, or Justice For All, anyway, underwent some shape-shifting. From HuffPo contributor Jonathan Tasini:

I think it is a fair argument to make that had Nixon been convicted and served a prison term--as he should have--the Iraq war might never have happened--and hundreds of thousands of people would not have died, we would not have squandered as much as $2 trillion on an insane war and we would not have opened up a huge rift in our relations around the world. Is it not likely and plausible that, with the precedent of a Nixon conviction and imprisonment very much branded in the consciousness of our elected leaders, the current president and vice president (particularly the latter who worked in the Ford presidency) might have paused for a moment, in their improper, fallacious and illegal pursuit of an immoral war and the evisceration of our civil liberties, to ponder whether they were committing acts that might land them in jail? Given the individuals, I'll concede that perhaps nothing would have deterred them from committing impeachable offenses, that in the words of the House, were "subversive of constitutional government," caused "great prejudice to the cause of law and justice" and brought "manifest injury to the people of the United States."

We can undo some of the damage that the Nixon pardon caused. And that task must be taken up by the incoming Democratic majority. Incoming Speaker Pelosi and incoming Majority Leader Reid, if you continue to refuse to hold the current Administration accountable, as set forth in our Constitution, for the breaking of our laws and the violation of their sworn oaths, you will only be prolonging our national nightmare for years and possible generations to come. Future presidents will not hesitate to repeat the behavior of the Nixon and Bush Administrations because they will see our track record--our unwillingness to hold our elected leaders accountable for laws they violate. Based on lies that they will cloak in their own justification and without the proper Constitutional authority, future presidents will embark on wars that will kill countless more young men and women.

If we are a nation of laws, then let no person consider himself above those laws. And let no penalty or sentence effectuated thereby be undermined, diluted, or waived--and Justice For All thus denied--simply because the ones who broke, and continue to break, said laws temporarily occupy the halls of power.

Meme Demystificatus

No-one took a shot at my stories here at The Last Duchess, but numerous readers at Shakespeare's Sister dove in, and quite a few were correct in their guesses, though they weren't all 100% sure. Which is why it's called a guess, no?

This little collection was great fun to put together though, and it confirmed my belief that I am a better storyteller than creator of flat-out fiction. On to the stories and their veracity (or lack thereof), then.

Story Number One, Final Exam Anxiety. True. I held on to the B, but suffered a nasty cold throughout my Christmas vacation.

Story Number Two, Motherf*cking Bomb Scares On A Motherf*cking Plane. True. The story of what I was doing in New York that particular time around is so unbelievable, I considered including it, but it's also a rather long and involved tale that would've consumed the whole post.

Story Number Three, Tea And Tyranny. False, but only the name of the leader: Idi Amin was indeed living in Saudi Arabia then, and I doubt I'd have run into him in Nassau, as Minstrel Boy pointed out. The tall, uniformed man who approached me at the harbor was actually a high-ranking Bahamian official, and he was very charming and proper--not at all despotic. And the tea and biscuit purchase, the setting, the car, the conversation, and the lunch were all recounted accurately. I simply thought that a hated, exiled criminal with an oddly fun-to-say name would make for a story so outrageous, it had to ring true.

Story Number Four, Brown M&M Blues. True. Furthermore, at an after party, Mr. Roth literally climbed over me, stepping onto and across my lap and bracing himself by placing one hand on the wall and one on my shoulder, in order to get to the other side of a fully-occupied sofa and sit closer to the bar. What a jerk.

Story Number Five, Yo, ho, ho...Fish Fingers! True. A while back, I wrote an e-mail to the parent company of Birdseye to ask if they had any of that year's ads in their archives. The correspondence went back and forth, with employees copying me at every turn, and then it all went silent. Oh well. The sounds, smells, and colors of the experience live on, in all their sunny accuracy, right here in my brain.

Thanks to all who hazarded a guess or two. What fun!

Happy Birthday, Queen Mum II!

Many happy returns to my elegant mother, Christine, to whom I owe my love of books, ballet, and handsome Italians--it was she who recommended I see Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon all those years ago because, as she put it then, "He is simply irresistible, what with those huge, dark eyes..."

See what you got me into, Mum?!

With hugs, kisses, endless admiration and appreciation, and of course, love,

Deborah
XXX

Meet The F*ckers

So, asks one reader, Is this Mr. Litbrit aka Robert person real? Or is he a figment of your imagination, a sort of literary device for your stories?

Gentle Reader, I assure you: with the exception of one small story in the Magical Mystery Meme post, everything I write here is non-fiction. If it's completely made-up, you'll know because the words WARNING! Fabrications ahead! will appear somewhere after Once Upon a Time... Robert is real, as are Sons One through Three, as are all furry, feathered, and scale-sporting friends, the adventures of whom are chronicled herein.

Anyway, another reader asked why I don't post some family photographs. I think most parents can understand my squickishness when it comes to putting pictures of my little ones on the Big Bad Intertubes. Shots of Robert, shots of me--no problem: we're grownups; we can properly consent to it. So can the boys, when they're grownups, too. In the meantime, however, I thought these South Park cariacatures of us, which I created at a totally cool South Park DIY site that Shakes turned me on to, would provide good visuals for my stories.

South Park Robert is so spot-on, he looks more like the actual man than Robert himself does.

Ah, you can say that about all of the characters in my life and stories, really. Check them out:

Son Three, the smallest and loudest.


Son Two, my clairvoyant little Cuddle Bunny.


Son One, The Dictator (and arbiter of All That is Cool).


Mr. Litbrit, also variously known as Robert, Roberto, and Dad.


Yours Truly, litbrit.

Meme Magicalis Mysteriosa, var. "litbrit"

I'd been laying low in my sparkly Christmas bunker, hoping to be overlooked. But no.

It appears silas216 of Outpost of the Empty Head has thrown the Magical Mystery Meme gauntlet down in my general direction.

So: five litbrit stories, one of which is either partially or completely untrue. Wherein resides the lie? Leave your guesses in comments!

Story Number One

It is December, in the late 1970's, and I'm in my sophomore year at the University of Florida. My last final exam that quarter is International Relations, and I'm going into the home stretch of a challenging course with a wobbly B average, so it's an important grade. I stay up all night studying--or, at least, I try to. Somewhere between four and five in the morning, my fatigue gets the better of me: I set my alarm clock for six and my head hits the pillow like a ton of bricks. Of course I sleep through the alarm, but all is not lost, since I awaken a full twenty minutes before the exam is to begin. We are having one of those sub-freezing cold fronts in Gainesville, but there is no time to choose clothes and dress myself, so I grab my maxi-length wool coat--one with a huge faux-fur collar and cuffs--and put it on over my undies and camisole as I run out the door, wriggling my feet into my sneakers as I went. I run across several blocks of the UF campus and arrive at my International Relations class just in time to see the professor handing out the exam papers.

The only empty desk is situated next to the radiator--which, like so many radiators in old, old buildings, worked on HIGH or not at all--and I am already quite hot, having run about a mile in what seemed to be no time flat. But I have no choice, so I sit down and set to work. As the hour wears on, I become soaked in sweat. The window next to me is painted shut. And I can hardly take the professor up on his repeated offers to take my coat, lest I be known forever after as the student who led not a Boxer Rebellion, but an Undies Uprising.

Story Number Two

It is fall, early eighties, and I am flying from New York to Tampa. About thirty minutes before we're due to arrive, the aircraft makes a sudden, steep descent. We land, and the pilot throws on the retros almost immediately; the plane practically screeches to a halt. A voice comes on the P.A.

"Ladies and gentlemen, you've probably noticed that we've landed a little early. We're actually in Jacksonville, and there has been a threat to the aircraft. Please leave all your belongings on board and exit as quickly as possible."

That's it. Exit as quickly as possible. My heart sinks and then begins to race. I'm not frightened, not exactly; instead, I feel an overwhelming and supernaturally potent urge to get away from whatever is about to explode. Somehow, we all remain calm and oddly silent as we skitter toward the emergency exit and jump onto the blow-up slide, which is as much fun to whip down as it looks, only you're so busy concentrating on not being blown up, you forget to enjoy yourself. There are flashing lights everywhere and a wide circle of police and firefighting vehicles is forming around the plane. As soon as my bare feet hit the ground, I run as fast as I can, bursting through the line of uniforms and cruisers and dogs and sirens.

Within moments, an officer grasps my arm and takes me indoors where other passengers are queuing up to use the pay phone (no-one has cell phones back then). After the bomb-sniffing dogs have done their thing, we board the same plane and continue home to Tampa. No-one ever tells us what the threat had been or why it was leveled against a routine New York-to-Florida flight. We are, however, offered a single cocktail "on the house". The elegantly-dressed retired man who is my seatmate is bent over, re-tying his shoes, when the flight attendant comes by; he looks up at her and says Courvoisier, please. A double, if possible.

Story Number Three

It is the early 1980's and I am in Nassau, Bahamas, for what is essentially a day-trip errand. It is my job to take a packet of legal papers and contracts to an attorney in this city, present them to him for his review and signatures, and bring them back to my boss in Florida later that day. I've already carried out my duties, and there are three hours to kill before my return flight leaves. I walk around a little, browsing the souvenier stands and t-shirt shops; eventually, I find a little grocery store that carries English sweets and teas, so I go inside and buy enough chocolate-covered Digestive Biscuits and boxes of TyPhoo to fill three bags. Then I continue my walk and head over to the harbor where all the cruise ships dock. I sit on a bench and am daydreaming away, enjoying the warm breezes. Suddenly, there is a throat-clearning noise behing me. I twist my torso and look over my shoulder: a tall, African man in a military uniform stands there.

"Are you enjoying yourself, Miss?" he says. His voice is basso profundo and heavily accented.

I tell him, "Yes, thank you, the Bahamas is a beautiful place to be today."

"Where are you on other days, then?"

"Florida," I reply. "I have to fly back in a couple of hours."

"Ah. So you don't live here," he said, gesturing toward my grocery bags.

"These are English, um, cookies and teas...things that are hard to find in the States."

The man turned and pointed to a black 7-series BMW. "You will come and have lunch with me, then, before you take your English cookies back to America."

And that is how I came to share conch salad and a couple of Kalik beers with exiled Ugandan president Idi Amin Dada.

Story Number Four

It is the early 1980's and I work as an assistant to a rock concert promoter. Our next show is a big one: The Rolling Stones, with Van Halen as the opening act. I am reviewing the concert riders, those attachments that specify things like what sort of food and beverages must be offered backstage and so forth. One odd request from Mr. Roth sends me to my boss for clarification: All brown M&Ms removed?

"Yes," says Boss. "Go to Albertsons, buy a dozen or so bags each of plain and peanut M&Ms, come back here, pour them into a couple of salad bowls, and pick out all the brown ones, please, Deborah. You can be sure the fucking caterers won't do it."

I go to Albertsons, and when I return, I set to work on the M&M-sorting while Boss fields call after call. He summons me again.

"Get Jeff (a PR guy and our contact at Disney World) on the phone. One of Mick's kids is having a birthday, and he wants to rent the Magic Kingdom for a night. Close the place to the public, but have all the main rides operational. Think they'll do it?" he said, knowing full well that anything, pretty much, is available for a price.

We secure the private Disney evening for Mick and his entourage, and since I'm finished taking care of the M&Ms, I start reading the Stones' rider. Among the requests is this: "One large bowl M&Ms; Mick will gladly accept any brown ones that David Lee Roth doesn't want."

Story Number Five

It is the late 1960's. My little brother and I attend a catholic convent in Barbados. Normally, the only adults we see are nuns who float around in head-to-toe white habits and the occasional priest, also in full garb. But one day, my history class is interrupted by a black-leather-bedecked and British-accented film crew and director: they are walking up and down the rows of desks, snapping photographs of my classmates and me and telling us to try to be natural. A few days later, half of us are called to the Headmistress' office and informed that we will be helping to make a television advertisement.

We spend the next week at the beach and on board a pirate ship called the Jolly Roger. Ashore, we dig up fake treasure chests, over and over, and feign excitement over what we find inside, which is the product for which we're making this advert: Birdseye Fish Fingers. The "captain" is a hilariously funny and foul-mouthed British actor who, every day, starts out sober but proceeds to get increasingly more drunk as the shoot wears on. When I mention that I don't think I can do another scene because I can't eat another bite of fish finger, he digs a little pit in the sand and whispers to me to spit into it between takes--it will be our secret.

None of us will see a penny of pay for our work; apparently, the ad agency paid a lump sum to the convent in exchange for the use of their little (Catholic) savages. And to this day, I cannot eat fish fingers, or fish sticks, or food that in any way whatsoever resembles a breaded piece of seafood product.

The Dead Don’t Give A Damn What We Call It

Once again, Frank Rich nails it:

In his classic study, “The Great War and Modern Memory,” Paul Fussell wrote of how World War I shattered and remade literature, for only a new language of irony could convey the trauma and waste. Under the auspices of Mr. Bush, the Iraq war is having a comparable, if different, linguistic impact: the more he loses his hold on reality, the more language is severed from its meaning altogether.

When the president persists in talking about staying until “the mission is complete” even though there is no definable military mission, let alone one that can be completed, he is indulging in pure absurdity. The same goes for his talk of “victory,” another concept robbed of any definition when the prime minister we are trying to prop up is allied with Mr. Sadr, a man who wants Americans dead and has many scalps to prove it. The newest hollowed-out Bush word to mask the endgame in Iraq is “phase”, as if the increasing violence were as transitional as the growing pains of a surly teenager. “Phase” is meant to drown out all the unsettling debate about two words the president doesn’t want to hear, “civil war.”

[...]

In the case of “civil war,” it fell to a morning television anchor, Matt Lauer, to officially bless the term before the “Today” show moved on to such regular fare as an update on the Olsen twins. That juxtaposition of Iraq and post-pubescent eroticism was only too accurate a gauge of how much the word “war” itself has been drained of its meaning in America after years of waging a war that required no shared sacrifice. Whatever you want to label what’s happening in Iraq, it has never impeded our freedom to dote on the Olsen twins.

I have not been one to buy into the arguments that Mr. Bush is stupid or is the sum of his “Bushisms” or is, as feverish Internet speculation periodically has it, secretly drinking again. I still don’t. But I have believed he is a cynic — that he could always distinguish between truth and fiction even as he and Karl Rove sold us their fictions. That’s why, when the president said that "absolutely, we’re winning" in Iraq before the midterms, I just figured it was more of the same: another expedient lie to further his partisan political ends.

But that election has come and gone, and Mr. Bush is more isolated from the real world than ever. That’s scary. Neither he nor his party has anything to gain politically by pretending that Iraq is not in crisis. Yet Mr. Bush clings to his delusions with a near-rage — watch him seethe in his press conference with Mr. Maliki — that can’t be explained away by sheer stubbornness or misguided principles or a pat psychological theory. Whatever the reason, he is slipping into the same zone as Woodrow Wilson did when refusing to face the rejection of the League of Nations, as a sleepless L.B.J. did when micromanaging bombing missions in Vietnam, as Ronald Reagan did when checking out during Iran-Contra. You can understand why Jim Webb, the Virginia senator-elect with a son in Iraq, was tempted to slug the president at a White House reception for newly elected members of Congress. Mr. Bush asked “How’s your boy?” But when Mr. Webb replied, “I’d like to get them out of Iraq,” the president refused to so much as acknowledge the subject. Maybe a timely slug would have woken him up.

[...]

The joke, history may note, is that even as Mr. Bush deludes himself that he is bringing “democracy” to Iraq, he is flouting democracy at home. American voters could not have delivered a clearer mandate on the war than they did on Nov. 7, but apparently elections don’t register at the White House unless the voters dip their fingers in purple ink. Mr. Bush seems to think that the only decision he had to make was replacing Donald Rumsfeld and the mission of changing course would be accomplished.

Tell that to the Americans in Anbar Province. Back in August the chief of intelligence for the Marines filed a secret report — uncovered by Thomas Ricks of The Washington Post — concluding that American troops “are no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar.” That finding was confirmed in an intelligence update last month. Yet American troops are still being tossed into that maw, and at least 90 have been killed there since Labor Day, including five marines, ages 19 to 24, around Thanksgiving.

Civil war? Sectarian violence? A phase? This much is certain: The dead in Iraq don’t give a damn what we call it.

All I can say is, since *ahem* George Bush is reportedly a reader, someone ought to slip a copy of today's New York Times next to the Virgin Mary and pretzels on his breakfast tray.

(Access to the full NYT piece today requires subscription; however Common Dreams usually publishes Rich's column a week post facto.)

UPDATE: The Minstrel Boy has posted the whole Rich column at his place.

Big Dog Blogging

Earlier today, The Minstrel Boy and I were discussing our dogs--big ol' dogs, most of them--and I mentioned that we ought to start a Big Dog Blogging tradition.

Not because we have anything against cats, you understand. We both love all versions of Feed Us Domesticus: the feline, the canine, and the equine alike. This summer, I posted about Maisy, the lovely little unwed teenage mother kitty who decided our house (my closet, specifically) was the spot to be when she brought her babies into the world.

But big dogs? They aren't exactly the stars of the Blogosphere, certainly not the way cats are. Well, Parity for Pooches, I say. Here is one of our gang, who arrived at the nursery property via his knocked-up Mama (yes, '05 was that sort of year). His name is Carmine, and he and his siblings Vito, Daxter, and Shnookums were born on Valentine's Day. Carmine and Vito are (mostly) a mix of Shepherd and Lab, and they're gigantic. At eighteen months, their respective weights are into the triple digits, as is that of black lab/pitbull Dax. Their lone sister, Shnookie, is (a bit) more compact.

Carmine says: Lead, follow, or get outta my way.
Be nice or he will come and lean on you.

Dying to Be Thin, Chapter XXVIXI

This is why I sometimes write about eating disorders and their relationship to the images of extreme female thinness that our print and electronic media fire at young people all day long.

SAO PAULO, Brazil - A 21-year-old anorexic model who weighed only 88 pounds has died of generalized infection, a hospital said. Ana Carolina Reston, who had worked in China, Turkey, Mexico and Japan for several modeling agencies, died Tuesday, according to Sao Paulo's Servidor Publico Hospital.

The hospital said the infection that killed the 5-foot-8-inch model was caused by anorexia nervosa, a disorder characterized by an abnormal fear of becoming obese, an aversion to food and severe weight loss.

[.....]

The world of high fashion and modeling has long been targeted by critics who say it encourages women and girls to emulate rail-thin models.

In September, a Spanish fashion show responded to such criticism by banning models with a body mass index of less than 18. Body mass index is a calculation doctors normally apply to study obesity, and anyone with an index below 18.5 is considered underweight.

Reston would have had a body mass index of 13.4 at the time of her death, according to a calculator on the Web site of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Squealing Swan Songs

I love Marty Kaplan's wry commentary on the newest publishing trend: self-indulgent criminals' confessions packaged as fiction.

But OJ's ruse puts a whole new ploy in play. Imagine Rumsfeld writing "If I Committed War Crimes, Here's How It Happened." Plenty of juice, but no risk of international prosecutions. Rove could get a ton of dough for "If Bush Had Been Impeached, Here's What For." George Allen would have a monster hit on his hands if he wrote, "If I Were An Asshat, Here I Am."

Heh.

It's All in the Family

Speaker Pelosi and newly-elected Dems take note: American families need, and deserve, your help. In her NYT editorial, Judith Warner writes about the sad and fractured condition of the much-lauded Family here in the land of opportunity.

WHILE the excitement over Nancy Pelosi, most likely to be our first female speaker of the House, is still fresh, and while those of us who care about these things are still bubbling over the election of the highest number of women to Congress in history, I’d like to issue a challenge: Ladies, step up to the plate on behalf of the rest of America’s women — and their families.

This shouldn’t be a radical idea. Ms. Pelosi has, after all, spent months now reminding us that she is not merely a capable leader, not just a whiz-bang political fund-raiser, but, first and foremost, “a mother and a grandmother.”

That’s lovely for her; but if Ms. Pelosi’s experience of motherhood is to have any meaning for the rest of us, or any relevance to her life as a politician, we’ve got to see some follow-through. Because if, as Ms. Pelosi has repeatedly said, she’ll be taking up the speaker’s gavel “on behalf of America’s children,” there’s a lot of work to do. For children can’t thrive if their families are stressed and, at every point on the socioeconomic spectrum now, it seems that American families are cracking at the seams.

The Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law released a study last month noting that “workplace inflexibility, the lack of family supports and workplace bias” are forcing American mothers out of the work force — whether they can really afford to “opt out” or not.

This comes on the heels of news articles showing how working-class moms are putting their youngsters in all-night child care, and how couples are increasingly enduring split-shift work schedules — putting their health and marriages at risk — to avoid the costs and anxieties of day care. All this paints a picture of family life in America that is very grim for all but the very privileged.

A picture of family life in America that is very grim for all but the very privileged. Finally, someone in the mainstream media has the nerve to say what many of us have been lamenting for years: we have lost sight of, and hope for, the notion that a normal, not-rich, American middle-class family can actually have time together, can actually enjoy their lives--and enjoy each other--on a daily basis as opposed to working nonstop all week, every week, and squeezing in bits and pieces of togetherness at holidays for the sake of the photo album. And we've abandoned the notion that getting sick or injured doesn't have to mean going bankrupt, along with the notion that being paid enough to support a family without both parents having to work 60-hour weeks is something realistic and healthy.

Worst of all, we've set aside the notion that there is something more to life than the Almighty Dollar, and we've had to do this. Not because we have coldly chosen the Almighty Dollar over the pleading eyes of kids who want an impromptu soccer game with Dad or a bedtime story from Mama, but rather, because the cost of living (rent or mortgage, food, health insurance, car payments, and clothing spring immediately to mind) in most metropolitan areas is so high, it simply isn't possible to support even a small family--hell, an individual, in many cases--on a single income any more. Forget six-week vacations every summer, something the middle-class French family takes for granted. American families consider themselves lucky if the repo man isn't darkening the door.

For years now, there have been murmurings — and more — from various corners of Congress in favor of change. Representative Lynn Woolsey’s Balancing Act bill, which calls for a wide array of measures to reduce the stresses on working families, has been languishing for years. Senators Christopher Dodd and Ted Kennedy have gestured toward legislation on paid family leave and guaranteed sick leave. There was even a much-overlooked bill introduced in the Senate by Hillary Clinton this summer (and in the House by Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut) to provide low-income parents with subsidies to stay at home and care for their infants themselves.

It’s time to light a fire under these kinds of initiatives. Ms. Pelosi’s current promises — to raise the minimum wage, cut the interest rates on student loans and make some college tuition tax deductible — are a laudable start, but American families, whose needs have been increasingly neglected since the early 1980s, need so much more: quality after-school programs; national standards for child care; voucher programs and tax subsidies to help pay for that care; universal, voluntary public preschool; paid family leave; and incentives for businesses to make part-time and flex-time work financially viable.

In short, we need to make the kind of glorious life that’s enjoyed by upper-middle-class mothers and grandmothers like Ms. Pelosi and her colleagues possible for everyone else.

This isn’t a radical leftist agenda. In fact, there’s no better antidote to the selfish individualism and empty materialism that Americans of all political stripes say is corrupting our country than policies that allow families to spend more, and better, time together.

In recent years, pro-family Democrats were out in the legislative wilderness. Now, there’s simply no excuse for inaction. It’s time to shoot for the moon. Risk a presidential veto. And let the proponents of “family values” show their true colors.

Speaker Pelosi, speak for us. Guide the next two years' legislation A La Famiglia.

Brava Nancy!

Congratulations to Nancy Pelosi, Italian-American mother, grandmother, and accomplished congressperson; and now, America's first woman Speaker of the House.

We will break open the good Brunello in your honor.

Watch it and Vote

I just watched this for the fourth time. It's a stunningly well-edited film short (about 4.5 minutes) that evokes a sense of seeing one's life flash before one's eyes when facing potential doom.

Only the images are of us, and it is America herself--the idea of her, the principles and soul of her--who confronts the abyss.

Or else Freedom.

Which is the film's title. It's gut-wrenching, then exhilarating. What's more, the images materialize in response to the song's lyrics, similar to the way pictures play in your mind when you listen to a favorite piece of music. Brilliant.

Watch it, share it (here's a permanent link), and of course, keep it in mind when you vote on Tuesday.

(A grand hat-tip to Shakespeare's Sister.)

When Progressives Police Their Own

Wingnuts are fond of throwing out the old equivalency argument: "Oh, both sides have their problem children...both sides have been mudslinging this election season...there is voting fraud on both sides."

As to that last one, I'm sure there are discrepancies, fraud, and outright criminal acts perpetrated by the Right and Left alike. The difference is, progressives not only care about fair, transparent, verifiable elections, they also police their own.

Four people have been indicted on charges of voter fraud in Kansas City, officials said Wednesday.

Investigators said questionable registration forms for new voters were collected by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a group that works to improve minority and low-income communities.

The four indicted -- Kwaim A. Stenson, Dale D. Franklin, Stephanie L. Davis and Brian Gardner -- were employed by ACORN as registration recruiters. They were each charged with two counts.

Federal indictments allege the four turned in false voter registration applications. Prosecutors said the indictments are part of a national investigation.

ACORN and Project Vote recruit and assign workers to low-income and minority neighborhoods to register people to vote.

The Kansas City Election Board told KMBC they found suspicious forms, such as seven applications from one person and an application for a dead man.

[.....]

ACORN officials in Kansas City said they turned in the four people who were indicted.

"We're very happy that they were indicted," said Claudie Harris with ACORN.

Harris said ACORN workers are paid by the hour and not by the number of voter registration cards they turn in. "When you fraudulently defraud this, that gives us a bad name and what we're trying to do a bad name," Harris said.

ACORN officials said the four indicted have been fired.

Bravo ACORN. May election workers and officials on both sides follow your example.

On Democracy's Greatest and Least-challenged Threat

"The bottom line of this whole problem is that if we don't have the ability to authenticate our own elections as citizens, we don't live in a democracy."
--Bev Harris
If you or a friendly neighbor get HBO, be sure to watch Hacking Democracy tonight (Thursday, November 2nd) at 9pm EST.

Electronic voting machines count about 87% of the votes cast in America today. But are they reliable? Are they safe from tampering? From a current congressional hearing to persistent media reports that suggest misuse of data and even outright fraud, concerns over the integrity of electronic voting are growing by the day. And if the voting process is not secure, neither is America's democracy. The timely, cautionary documentary HACKING DEMOCRACY exposes gaping holes in the security of America's electronic voting system.

In the 2000 presidential election, an electronic voting machine recorded minus 16,022 votes for Al Gore in Volusia County, Fla. While fraud was never proven, the faulty tally alerted computer scientists, politicians and everyday citizens to the very real possibility of computer hacking during elections.

In 2002, Seattle grandmother and writer Bev Harris asked officials in her county why they had acquired electronic touch screen systems for their elections. Unsatisfied with their explanation, she set out to learn about electronic voting machines on her own. In the course of her research, which unearthed hundreds of reported incidents of mishandled voting information, Harris stumbled across an "online library" of the Diebold Corporation, discovering a treasure trove of information about the inner-workings of the company's voting system.

Harris brought this proprietary "secret" information to computer security expert Dr. Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins University, who determined that the software lacked the necessary security features to prevent tampering. Her subsequent investigation took her from the trash cans of Texas to the secretary of state of California and finally to Florida, where a "mini-election" to test the vulnerability of the memory cards used in electronic voting produced alarming results.

Litbrit recommends mixing up a stiff batch of mojitos before settling in to view this important and terrifying documentary.

And yet you can claim that you and you alone can protect us from terrorism?

I am compelled to post Keith Olbermann's latest Special Comment. Its message could not be more timely, its delivery more powerful. Crooks & Liars also has the video along with the transcript in its entirety.

And over this weekend, they have found still more remains. And now this week will be spent looking in places that should have already been looked at a thousand times, five years ago.

For all the victims in New York, Mr. Bush, the living and the dead, it is a touch of 9/11 all over again. And the mayor of this city, who called off this search four and a half years ago, is a Republican. The governor, with whom he conferred, is a Republican. The House of Representatives, Republican. The Senate, Republican. The President, Republican. And yet you can claim that you and you alone can protect us from terrorism?

You can't even recover our dead from the battlefield. The battlefield in an American city. When we've given you five years and unlimited funds to do so.

While citing a Military Commissions Act so monstrous that it has now been criticized by even the John Birch Society, you told us, Mr. Bush, quote, "there is nothing we can do to bring back the men and women lost on September 11th, 2001, yet we'll always honor their memory and we will never forget the way they were taken from us." Except of course, for the ones that have been lying under a manhole cover for five years.

Setting aside the fact that your government has done nothing else for those five years but pat itself on the back about terror, while waging pointless war on the wrong enemy in Iraq and waging war on the cherished freedoms in America, just on this subject of counter-terrorism, sir, yours is the least competent government in time of crisis in this country's history.

Hear, hear.

BREAKING: Obama Considering Presidential Run

On this morning's Meet The Press (NBC), Illinois Senator Barack Obama acknowledged he is considering running for President in 2008.

WASHINGTON - Sen. Barack Obama acknowledged Sunday he was considering a run for president in 2008, backing off previous statements that he would not do so.

The Illinois Democrat said he could no longer stand by the statements he made after his 2004 election and earlier this year that he would serve a full six-year term in Congress. He said he would not make a decision until after the Nov. 7 elections.

[...]

On Sunday, Obama dismissed notions that he might not be ready to run for president because of his limited experience in national politics. He agreed the job requires a “certain soberness and seriousness” and “can’t be something you pursue on the basis of vanity and ambition.”

“I’m not sure anyone is ready to be president before they’re president,” Obama said. “I trust the judgment of the American people."

This bit of political news has certainly brightened my day--hell, make that my entire year. When one considers the possibility that an articulate, erudite, and blazingly intelligent person might occupy the White House again, everything is thrown into a different light. Anything seems possible. Human beings are capable of amazing feats when they put their minds to things, and given the magnitude of the chaos, the depth of the disaster, and the far-reaching stench of the squalor into which the next president will be walking come January '09, a brilliant mind is going to be job requirement Number One.

Author, attorney, and fellow Harvard Law alumnus Scott Turow wrote about Sen. Obama when he was running for Senate in 2004:

Having known Obama since the inception of his political career, I have watched his rise closely. We are hardly intimates, but we are certainly warm with each other, and I have been a political contributor and supporter of his. No one in these circumstances would regard himself as unbiased (except perhaps Justice Antonin Scalia). That said, I have many friends whose company I savor whom I would not commend for service in the U.S. Senate. Obama, though, has matured in plain view. He has gone from someone impatient with the legislative process to an effective and respected leader in the Illinois Senate, and from a candidate who once seemed to be getting ahead of himself politically, and whose base in the black community was shaky, to a figure who appeals to voters of all hues.

[...]

Obama's biography is both intriguing and inspiring, an American story for the 21st century. The résumé detail that initially caught wide attention was his election in 1990 as the first African-American president (that is, editor in chief) of the Harvard Law Review, the premier legal academic publication in the United States. Banish any lurking thought of an affirmative-action wind at his back. Exams at Harvard Law School are graded blind, and Obama graduated magna cum laude (also unlike me.) He has taught for many years at the University of Chicago Law School, along with many of the country's preeminent legal scholars.

But academic excellence is only one part of his story. "Dreams From My Father" is a beautifully crafted book, moving and candid, and it belongs on the shelf beside works like James McBride's "The Color of Water" and Greg Williams' "Life on the Color Line" as a tale of living astride America's racial categories. No other figure on the American political scene can claim such broad roots within the human community. Obama is the very face of American diversity.

I am still a die-hard Al Gore fan and I'd love to see him run for--and win--the office that was rightly his in 2000. That said, I am nothing less than thrilled that Sen. Obama might run.

Imagine the bumpersticker: Obama '08--Now can we go with the smart guy?

Taking Arms Against a Sea of Troubles

Ah hell, we've had a bit of a mad week here at Casa Litbrit. I say it's time for a little fun at the expense of the unfairly gorgeous Matthew McConaughey, whom I predict will soon be cast in the next Hollywood remake, which (also predicting here) will be Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

In the Paul Newman role, of course. *BIG sigh*

(Hat tip to Queen Mum 2)

Friday Photoblogging

Recently, we took the boys to Universal Studios Florida to celebrate Son Three's seventh birthday, now a week-long observance that netted him no fewer than three cake-munching/candle-extinguishing experiences this year.

Mr. Litbrit shows the boys one of the many giant black-trunk fishtail palms at Universal that came from his nurseries.

Entering Seuss Landing, my favorite part of the park.

Oh, the thinks you can think...

One Fish, Two Fish, Wheeeeee!

Look! There really is a Mulberry Street.

Mr. Litbrit took this one...hey, isn't this supposed to be a family amusement park?

Ah, they're street lights, not headlights.

Talk to the Bush

What a wonderful--and wonderfully simple--political ad.
(With thanks to Shakespeare's Sister.)

Five Things I've Learned in Forty-six Years

Litbrit right before the smoke alarm went off

1. God is in the details. You mustn't get so bogged down with quotidian concerns, pointless stress, and national crises you cannot possibly control that you fail to appreciate life's small and abundant beauties: the gorgeous smell of coffee as it brews; the perfect form of a curled, sleeping cat; the softness of children's hair; the cool, salt-tinged autumn winds now (finally!) arriving from the north, reminding you of home.


2. There is no such thing as a magic bullet, and there is no such thing as a side-effect-free antidepressant.


3. When your first baby emerges after hours of experiencing what it is to be drawn and quartered, you really do forgive your parents for everything, even the trauma-inducing short haircut at age six and the school with the power-crazed, strap-happy nuns.


4. Anger, sorrow, and fear are as natural as breathing; usually it's best to acknowledge the rogue wave and let it wash over you. Even if it means getting tossed about; even if it means wailing and crying for a while as you sort yourself out and relocate the shoreline.


5. All the new shoes, long-awaited books, and dark chocolate in the world won't make you as happy as the simple act of creating something will. In my case, I must remember this: Bad things happen when writers don't write.