Fisk Turned Away from US

From the Free New Mexican:
Lannan speaker delayed in Canada

"U.S. immigration officials refused Tuesday to allow Robert Fisk, longtime Middle East correspondent for the London newspaper, The Independent, to board a plane from Toronto to Denver. Fisk was on his way to Santa Fe for a sold-out appearance in the Lannan FoundationÂ’s readings-and-conversations series Wednesday night.

According to Christie Mazuera Davis, a Lannan program officer, Fisk was told that his papers were not in order."


And he's highly critical of many US moves in the Middle East and generally operates out of the sphere of Western media hypnosis, so of course we don't want him to speak in Santa Fe.

Don't Do Me Any Favors

From Cubs.com "I look at ourselves as trying to win ballgames and finish over .500," Baker said. "I do owe it to baseball and I do owe it to the Phillies, the Florida Marlins, Washington Nationals. I owe it to them to put my best lineup out there.

"Everybody says, 'Play the kids, play the kids.' But I've got seven games against Houston," Baker said. "Against Houston, I've got to play my best team. We could have a direct impact on who goes. There's always something to play for."

What favor does Baker think he's doing for Baseball and the other teams in the playoff race by playing the players that got a $100 million payroll team to 4 games under .500 after 152 games? What favor is he doing the fans who want to see the kids we've got coming up play against major league players?

PLAY THE KIDS and cut the BS, Dusty.

TSA Writes Back

Got this email back from our government at work. I particularly enjoy the assertion that "staff suggestions...will not result in a reduction in aviation security." How could sitting next to a person with a 4" blade NOT be a reduction in aviation security? Perhaps it is less likely that they will be able to commandeer a plane and fly it into a building than it was 4 years ago, but I fail to see how empowering someone to slaughter passengers and crew in the back of the plane is not a reduction in aviation security."

From: "TSA-Contact Center"
Date: September 20, 2005 2:22:46 AM CDT
Subject: Re: Relaxing Screening Procedures

Thank you for your email offering your comments and concerns regarding this issue. TSA receives many suggestions and recommendations for improving all facets of aviation security and all suggestions, such as yours, are taken into consideration.

Staff suggestions to Assistant Secretary Kip Hawley for possibly changing air passenger screening procedures will not result in a reduction in aviation security. Rather, they are part of a larger effort implemented by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to challenge measures now in place in order to ensure that security policies and procedures are based to threats, vulnerabilities and consequences.

The Department of Homeland Security and TSA are working closely together in this review in order to focus limited resources where the threat is greatest. After a thorough review of security and resource considerations, it will be decided whether to make policy and/or procedural changes. At this time, no decisions have been made.

TSA continues to raise the bar on security in several areas. They include deploying explosives trace portals in the nation's busiest airports, aggressively testing new screening technologies, and developing the Secure Flight prescreening system.

We are committed to excellence in both security and customer service and appreciate your taking the time to share your thoughts and suggestions with us.

TSA Contact Center

TSA Relaxing Screening Procedures?

Annie Jacobsen's latest entry in her "Terror in the Skies" series is even more hair raising than usual and includes an anecdote of a passenger being caught with a 4" drywall saw in his shoe, which was presumably confiscated, who was allowed to board his flight.

If you feel inspired, write the TSA here:
TellTSA@dhs.gov
tsa-contactcenter@dhs.gov

My letter to the TSA follows:

I have recently learned that TSA is considering relaxing the list of items that will be allowed onto airplanes. I fly regularly and screening can be a hassle on the traveler, however being dead is a much bigger problem than 15 minutes in line and a few questions.

While I understand that it may be more difficult for an attacker to gain entrance to the cockpit, I find it untenable that the lives of those passengers and crew outside the armored cockpit would now be put at risk in order to lessen the hassle of screening. My understanding is that all of the screening would still take place, just as it does now, but that a larger list of items would be allowed through the checkpoint and onto the plane. The screening will still happen. The lines will still happen. The searches will still happen.

The only person who will be inconvenienced a little less is the person that wants to board a plane with an ice pick, bow and arrow, or a throwing star. What percentage of the traveling public would that be exactly and why are we worried about making their travel experience more bearable?

If anything, I would urge added vigilance, not less. Do a better job screen for explosives AND remove potential weapons that can harm not only pilots but the crew and passengers in the back of the plane as well. Anything less and TSA is failing the public it was established to protect.

The Executioner's Last Songs

Was lucky and privileged enough to catch a performance of Jon Langford's multimedia show on Saturday night. Like his anti-death penalty benefit CD's, it is called "The Executioner's Last Songs." For this performance, the band consisted of longtime collaborator & Mekoness Sally Timms (vocals, ukelele) along with Tony Maimone (bass & bass banjo), Dan Massey (drums), Jean Cook (violin) and Barry Mills (video).

The real time video was a major component of the show, emphasized by the fact that Mills was up front stage left with keyboard trigger and powerbook mixing and matching on the fly, interspersing the scripted, chronological images with clips from Mills' 90's cable access show for which eye-patch sporting Pirate Langford read sea shanties while seated in a boat, floating in a bathroom sink, which were used to take Jonboy down a notch when he got a bit too full of himself. Worth the price of admission alone. Fortunately, there was much more.

The performance is an autobiographical survey of Langford's life from childhood, to the shock and release of art school for the kid from the country, to the liberating electricity of punk and the founding of the beloved Mekons, their courting & broken marriages to major labels Virgin and A&M, their influence by folk music, Langford's move to Chicago and his infatuation with American country music, especially Chicago's longtime kings of underground honky tonk, The Sundowners, Tony Fitzpatrick & the rebirth of his painting, and his work against the death penalty.

Songs from the Mekons' canon are interspersed with songs written for the show and covers and other snippets broken up with readings by Langford, Timms and Cook that range from the poignant to the absurd. While I didn't realize it at the time, the show was quite long; however, the only part that actually dragged for me was the intermission.

For Mekons fans, this is a must see. For fans of 70's punk, alt.country, social commentary, and performance art, there should be more than enough here to entertain. Unfortunately, you most likely won't be lucky enough to catch it in a bar, as the upcoming shows are at art museums. Shiner Bock can do nothing but help. Nonetheless, I'm sure they'll liven it up somehow and find some way to poke a hole in the over-reverent surroundings.

Upcoming performances:

In Chicago January 20+21, 2006 at the MCA

In Minneapolis Feb 10+11, 2006 at the Walker Art Center

Go.


high heat

Warnings on Top of Warnings

Today ABC News and Good Morning America aired a portion of a new video from California teenager turned Al Qaeda trained Islamist, Western mouthpiece of Sauron, and prized jumping monkey Adam Gadahn of Orange County, CA. Along with the video, chilling in its English presentation, ABC also released an "edited transcript" that appears to be that of the entire 11 minute video. I have no way of knowing what was edited out. The video makes explicit threats to LA and to Melbourne, Australia.

I have not yet dug for any analysis of this tape, and the ABC story is very dry and factual in its presentation; however, I can take a couple of not too giant leaps as to what intelligent and informed folks may say about it. Al Qaeda have now released the third video in two months, and the second in ten days' time, to both claim responsibility for recent attacks, and more urgently, I think, to warn the West that our time is up. It seems very important to their leadership that they not only score propaganda points with these videos, but that they also fill a religious obligation to warn the Infidel (that's us) to either convert, withdraw, or face the consequences of inaction on either of these fronts. It is a religious duty for Muslims to first warn the Infidel of their crimes and offer them a chance to repent and change their actions and apparently Al Qaeda took some grief from some quarters over the severity of the 9/11 attacks only because there was not sufficient warning before taking so many civilian lives. We have now received three (3) such explicit warnings in a very short amount of time.

What is most alarming to me is that this latest video by Gadahn appears to fulfill this obligation in such a way that it is undeniable that we could not now know Al Qaeda's intentions and the rationale behind their actions. And after an attack, even if our leadership is disingenuous enough to claim either ignorance or arrogant denial, the rest of the world now knows better. As that notorious hothead Mike Scheuer always says, never has America faced an enemy that was so direct in stating their desires, goals and intentions. Now to have them delivered on a platter in our own language, and by one of our own, there can be no doubt from either side that Al Qaeda has been heard and understood.

God help us, but when some WMD fires off in one or more American cities, no one will be able to say that "nobody imagined this" or that it came out of the blue. Though they will try, nor should anyone in power be able to pawn off the idea that " they hate our freedoms" here in the US. No, they hate our policies in the Middle East and South Asia, the governments we help prop up both directly and indirectly, and the perceived suffering of their fellow Muslims at the hands of the Israelis.

Say what you want about US and Western policies in each of these areas, debate them all until the harvest moon rises, but nobody should be able to say that we have no idea when or why these "Stone Age madmen" keep attacking us. They have told us why. They have told us it will be soon. And they have told us it will be big. By their accounts, they reckon they can take 3 million of ours for the estimated 3 million of theirs we have cost.

As we have seen from past attacks, "soon" is a relative term to the incredibly patient Al Qaeda leadership. Their long view appears almost geologic when compared to our short, sometimes almost nonexistent, Western time horizon. And if I were a thinking Jihadi with satellite internet access and a plan on the back burner, what better time to fire it off than when 30% of our National Guard are in Iraq now on extended deployment, 50% of the rest are down on the Gulf Coast along with a host of regular military, and we've increased our presence in Afghanistan to fight off the Taliban insurgency there in front of the September 18 parliamentary and provincial elections? Well, I can't think of many, really. And after three explicit warnings, I'm going to guess that they've warned enough and that we're due for something soon.

I'll go further out on a limb and predict that it won't be what we expect. I don't know what it will be, but something this long in the planning, and following a slew of warnings of increased pain for the next attack, well, it could get uglier around here than most folks have considered possible. And our ability to respond on a federal and state level is now severely compromised.

Our government had left us with what appeared to be the slimmest of margins to deal with any such emergency, and now Katrina seems to have destroyed even that wafer thin safety net, pulling it from under us like a birthday party magician removing the cheap, red table cloth from beneath an Italian dinner setting for two. I guess it is now debatable whether we ever even actually had a margin, but to mix the metaphor into a protein shake from Hell, THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES. We are hemorrhaging money. Our responders are stretched beyond breaking in some cases and/or are absent in others. We are half-fighting two wars overseas and thus losing both. By all accounts, outside that of the Whitehouse, the disbursed Al Qaeda is more dangerous now than prior to October 2001. Iraq fulfills Rumsfeld's worry that our actions are creating jihadis faster than we can kill them. One recipe for further and even greater disaster. Nothing up my sleeve....PRESTO!

Keith Olbermann hit the nail on the head last week with his Bloggerman entry about the mess in New Orleans. In that entry, he attributes a quotation to Winston Churchill that I can find nowhere else. I'll trust Olbermann on this one, but even if inaccurate, it gets to the heart of the matter with the current administration and I think speaks much more to the wider Bush Whitehouse paradigm for dealing with the world than just their inability to deal with Katrina and the Gulf Coast. If, as Churchill says, the prima facia responsibility of government is the public safety, the failure of Bush and Co. to provide for it is both laughable (considering that was the whole of their 2004 campaign platform) but also criminal. The current administration's failure is so far advanced that whether it is by idiotic negligence or willful malfeasance matters not. Whatever the cause, the end result is the same. I think and fear that many more chickens of failure are right now returning home to roost.

Soldier Speaks the Truth Politicians Deny

From Reuters:

One National Guard soldier who asked not to be named for fear of punishment from his commanding officer said of the lack of medical attention at the center, "They (the Bush administration) care more about Iraq and Afghanistan than here."

The Louisiana National Guard soldier said, "We are doing the best we can with the resources we have, but almost all of our guys are in Iraq."

Here's the link to the New Orleans Times Picayune story from 2002 detailing the fact that somebody could indeed "imagine this" exact problem that is happening right now in New Orleans.

Our National Shame

On Sunday I watched President Bush lean into the camera on one elbow, smile, and tell America not to worry about Hurricane Katrina because "We are ready." As the dangerous storm bared down on the Gulf Coast, I actually felt reassured that the federal government was mobilized and prepared to take care of what all the experts said would be a catastrophic situation.

Four days later, I have never been as embarrassed to be an American.

Four days after President Bush made his statement of preparedness, people are still dying all over the south coast of our country with no help or hope in sight. People on the ground have no information about attempts to help them, where to go, or what to do. In New Orleans, dead bodies pile up next to refuse and sewage at the Superdome and convention center. People desperate for food and water are told by the mayor to leave the places where they were originally directed because there is no food, water, or help where they were originally sent. Four days later, despondent doctors at New Orleans hospitals are calling news organizations begging for help of any kind and working without supplies, food, water, electricity or security. Patients die awaiting evacuation while medical personnel hand pump air into their lungs. Police officers must siphon gas from cars to power their vehicles. The only person "in charge" at the New Orleans convention center is Harry Connick, Jr., bless his heart, with no police, FEMA or National Guard assistance. The first small air drops of food and water to the center come on the afternoon of the fourth day.

The mayor of New Orleans feels so powerless and desperate that he publicly calls out for help in a "desperate SOS" and requests troops that should already be in place. Half of those National Guard troops he needs are fighting in a foreign country where they're not wanted and where 3 years later residents don't even have enough electricity to make ice cubes. The US House of Representatives waits until Friday to convene a special session to authorize extra funding to help the situation. Speaker of the House Hastert, (R.-Ill) not only conceives, but actually voices, the idea that rebuilding New Orleans "doesn't make sense to me." Rats eat bodies still lying on the ground in Biloxi. Rescue coordination is so tenuous that Houston must turn away refugees as the buses stack up because no one bothered to count how many people the Astrodome could hold and direct buses appropriately. Four days later, only 1 Navy vessel with 6 helicopters sits off the coast. Water continues to flow into New Orleans through breached levies while the Army Corps of Engineers tries to work out a solution to a problem of which everyone has been aware for years.

Billions of our tax dollars have been spent setting up the Department of Homeland Security. Tens of billions more have been spent on the war in Iraq. Fellow citizens in our own country wonder if they will have water or a meal today, waiting for any sign of help from a federal government unprepared to assist, led by a President out of touch with the real world.