Texas Congressman Chet Edwards Pivots Closer to V.P. Nomination

Posted on August 15, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Rep. Chet Edwards,D-Texas, at news conference on Capitol Hill in May. A likely veep pick for Barack? Photo by Lauren Victoria Burke / AP.

Powerful moderate Democrat:

‘Simply put, Edwards on the ticket would turn Texas purple in one cycle’
By Matt Glazer / August 14, 2008

The convention is less than two weeks away and the tension is mounting. Who will Barack Obama select to be his running mate? It is starting to look like George W. Bush’s congressman, Chet Edwards, is more and more likely.

Rep. Allyson Schwartz (PA-13) has joined Speaker Nancy Pelosi in singing the Edwards praise.

Certainly, Pennsylvania will be key to victory.

Women, older voters, and suburban voters will all be necessary to achieve this win … Chet Edwards would help Sen. Obama win in swing districts like mine and in states like Pennsylvania…

Chet Edwards would provide strong support to the new administration by engaging Members of Congress to pass critical legislation: health care for all Americans; comprehensive energy policy; new tax policy; and an end to war in Iraq, bringing our troops home safely and responsibly…”

Even as national bloggers like Chris Bowers and some inside the progressive community remain skeptical, the likelihood that Edwards maybe the Senator’s choice is increasing.

CQ Politics points to an interesting fact, most of the people rumored to be on Obama’s short list are slated for speaking times already, and unless they are scheduled to speak twice, the list is either shrinking rapidly or way off base.

As of yesterday, the only rumored candidates not slated to speak in Denver were, Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, Sen. Evan Bayh, Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, Texas Rep. Chet Edwards, and Gen. Wes Clark. With today’s announcement from the DNCC that both Joe Biden and Evan Bayh have been scheduled to speak at the convention on Wednesday, the list of 5 is down to 3.

This late afternoon announcement has led some to think Kaine is on the cusp of being announced as Obama’s V.P., but something appears to be off in that assessment.

Virginia is already in play. Mark Warner looks to be the heir apparent to John Warner’s vacated seat. Adding Kaine to the ticket doesn’t look to get Obama anywhere. Clark would be a solid choice, looking at a geopolitical question, what states will Clark move? Clark will also highlight the fact that Obama’s resume is focused on domestic policy. Plus, Clark is the only man in the world with a better title than President-Former Supreme Allied Commander. Why would you go from that to Vice President?

That leaves Rep. Edwards. He is a candidate who is a moderate. He is a Democrat who can win tough elections. He is dynamic and engaging. He appeals to independents and moderate Republicans. He expands the base and puts southern races in play on a state and congressional level. He can campaign in rural areas inside New Mexico, Colorado, Montana, Georgia, Virginia, and Ohio. Not to mention the fact he would force the Republicans and McCain to dump money and resources into protecting Texas (a state Obama has been organizing in since March).

The Dallas Morning News describes Edwards as a pivot.

Mr. Edwards, 56, is a moderate, a respected voice on veterans and military issues and well regarded across the political spectrum. Colleagues describe him as a pivot between liberals and Blue Dogs – the bloc of budget cutters and gun rights backers – so he could help Mr. Obama reach swing voters.

As chairman of a subcommittee that controls billions in annual spending, he’s already got more clout than most members of Congress. He’s one of a dozen “cardinals” who serve under the even more powerful Appropriations Chairman, David Obey of Wisconsin.

Mr. Obey called Mr. Edwards one of the “top five or 10 House members” he knows in either party, “an incredibly nice, decent human being” who is “very, very tough minded. … He is most definitely not a slashing partisan. He would be a very good salesperson for the president’s legislative package.”

Simply put, Edwards on the ticket would turn Texas purple in one cycle.

Source / Burnt Orange Report

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Shhhh! Don’t Tell! : The Couple Who Lived in a Mall

Posted on August 15, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Michael Townsend and Adriana Yoto at their secret diggs at Providence Place mall in Providence, R.I. Photo by Stephanie Ewens.

After Michael Townsend and Adriana Yoto found their skyline blighted by a colossal mall, they protested it in an unusual way — they moved in
By Lisa Davis / August 15, 2008

Monday night, millions gathered around the television to watch an event years in the making. No, I’m not talking about the Olympics. Rather, Monday night was the premiere of “The American Mall,” MTV’s “High School Musical” rip-off in which teenage dramas unfold under the dizzying fluorescents of a food court. It’s a story, so says the promo, about a place we all love, where everything is for sale but love and dreams.

Like “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” or “Mallrats,” “The American Mall” presents the enclosed shopping mall — America’s most iconic, infamous and replicated retail phenomenon — as the ultimate gathering place (which was, in fact, the intention of inventor Victor Gruen, the Holocaust survivor who created the first indoor shopping mall in Edina, Minn., in 1956). Funny thing, though: We all love the mall a little less right now. Retail vacancies have hit 6.3 percent in regional malls, the highest number in six years, and not a single new, enclosed shopping mall was built last year. As we hold tighter to our wallets, what’s going to become of all that empty consumer space?

Michael Townsend and Adriana Yoto have an answer.

The Rhode Island couple awoke one morning in 1998 to find the name of their street changed: Kinsley Avenue was now Providence Place, which happened to be the name of the 1.3 million-square-foot mall rising on 13 prime downtown acres. Townsend and Yoto were among the Providence residents objecting to the mall — the cost to taxpayers, the colonizing presence of the structure that dominated the skyline from the highway. But Yoto, a scholar, and Townsend, a public artist, expressed their outrage in an unusual way: They decided to live with the mall. Literally.

In 2003, inside a 750-foot storage space, abandoned since construction days, they crafted a secret apartment within the mall from which they could study its allure. Why do so many of us flock to the mall’s sanitized hallways? Why do we love the sameness of mall life, identical shops and structures across the country? Why is the mall the site of our grievances, the place where gunmen go to inflict maximum pain? Earlier this year, a man set off an explosion in a mall in Exeter, England. The week before, a woman was shot in one.

Clearly, we have complicated emotional relationships to malls, and Townsend and Yoto figured one way to comprehend all that they critiqued was to embrace it, to live it so they might understand it. The mall adventure was to last a week; it went on for four years. If Townsend hadn’t been nabbed by security and charged with criminal trespassing last October, they’d still be camping out there today.

The mall as we know it today — an enclosed concrete box of shops, connected by common space — is only 52 years old, created by Gruen, an Austrian Socialist Jew who thought he was inventing a utopian, community-oriented commercial center. The mall was meant to pull people together from disparate regional corners; instead, with the help of the trusty automobile, it drained those corners, dismembering many a downtown.

But Providence Place was Mall 2.0: four floors, 170 shops and eight restaurants and “entertainment venues” (we called those movie theaters when I was a kid), on the former site of the University of Rhode Island School of Continuing Education building, that were expected to draw people back to downtown, instead of pulling them away. This new breed of mall was not a hulking, ugly box of concrete plopped down among former farmland, but a camouflaged structure, clad in brick and placed at the city’s center.

“Almost no developer builds malls anymore,” said Paco Underhill, author of “Call of the Mall.” “They build ‘alls.'” Hotels, offices, libraries and, yes, residences are now folded into mall developments. Only one traditional enclosed shopping mall was built in 2006 and none last year. Many older structures are being “demalled,” in the language of the industry: razed and rebuilt as mixed-use, open-air facilities we call lifestyle centers — they’re not just shopping centers anymore.

For many people, especially outside America, malls represent a sunnier future, despite the lack of weather inside. The opening of a mall in Soweto, South Africa, for instance, prompted a citywide celebration with Nelson Mandela presiding. But because they are repositories of our aspirations — when you’re at the mall, the better you always hovers within reach — they’re also magnets for our frustration. Last November, a gunman killed eight people in an Omaha, Neb., mall, declaring, “Now I’ll be famous,” before killing himself.

The daughter of a Chinese economist and a fashionable Venezuelan beauty queen, Adriana Yoto, 30, grew up in Chappaqua, N.Y., obsessed with mall shopping. Michael Townsend, 37, came from God-fearing Christian parents in a suburb of Worcester, Mass., and played “Commando” at the mall arcade (he claims to have held the national record at one point). “Our mallifications were very different,” he said.

Shopping had been a point of contention in their marriage long before Providence Place became their neighbor. When she chose to marry Townsend, who makes his living crafting (quite beautiful) murals out of tape, Yoto’s folks told her, “Misery can only be your destiny,” because he couldn’t support her Nordstrom habit on an artist’s pay. She eventually recovered from shopoholism but was left with such passion for malls that she went on to study them, earning a master’s in international relations from the New School, where last year she proffered theories on malls as modern-day British colonies.

Four years after the mall opened, Yoto, Townsend and six friends in their art collective, called Trummerkind (“children of the ruins” in German), vowed to spend a full week at the mall that had transformed their city, to use the mall as an actual public space while surviving sans commerce.

“The mall has something really positive to offer, something that has nothing to do with shopping,” Townsend told me.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I don’t know — that’s what I moved there to find out.”

They never intended to undermine the mall or its corporate structure, or to make a spectacle of themselves. Townsend describes himself as “wired for happiness” and Yoto’s idea of a good time is cataloguing all the items in a store and rating their desirability from “gift-worthy” to “if-it-were-the-apocalypse-and-I-was-looting-I-would-take-it.” Which is precisely what they did during their stint living at the mall. Every day.

Each of them voted in one item (a flashlight, space blanket, sketchbook and facecloth) and accepted an allowance of $20. “I had a lot of tea,” said Yoto. They camouflaged themselves, carrying empty Nordstrom bags and wearing mall outfits — nice slacks and button-down shirts (more of a stretch for Townsend, who will happily wear the same pair of sneakers until they’re held together with tape). At night they had to skirt through a 2-foot-wide passage to the dark space Townsend had found, its walls and ceiling coated in what Yoto described as “opaque gray oatmeal mixed with the contents of a lint trap.” They made a bed of cardboard and insulation tiles where they spent cold nights, not risking capture by using the mall off-hours. They washed up — it was dusty — in mall bathrooms, while Yoto arrived at the porcelain sink in the Origins store each morning, sampling its face cleansers. Occasionally, they leafed through books at Borders.

They were, after four days, both completely bored and totally ecstatic. “I felt this vacation-like euphoria that I’ve never felt till then or since then,” Townsend said. “It was better for me than any nature walk I’ve every taken.” Let’s be clear: He’s not being ironic — this is wired-for-happiness talking. They felt they had subverted the mall’s reason for existence by not buying anything, yet they had achieved what it promised: a release from the burdens of everyday life, within walking distance.

“[The mall is] supposed to be an everyday vacation,” Yoto said. “But it only works if you don’t bring any money or your cellphone.”

The mall has always been much more than a place to shop. “For so many people, the mall was the first place they got to see the world,” said Underhill. “The first place they spent their own money, the first place they met somebody who wasn’t in their neighborhood, the first time they saw things from music to fashion that, previous to that, their only connection to it had been on TV.”

Malls became antidotes to the typically isolated and alienating spaces of suburbia: lonely stretches of highway and echoey McMansions. There we congregate and the worries of the world disappear into the thrum of Muzak and met expectations — they are their own gated communities.

“We’re living on a planet that’s going to hell in a handbag,” said architect and architectural critic Michael Sorkin. “At the mall, you enter a condition of perfect climate control, where it’s clean and orderly and you are not forced in any way to confront reality.”

After their experimental week, Yoto and Townsend returned regularly for four years, attempting to transform that storage space into a luxury apartment furnished by the mall. They built a wall with 39-pound cinder blocks that they hauled in themselves — there was plenty of hard physical labor involved in their attempt at the high life. They added sofas, tables, lamps, a TV, a china hutch and a Sony PlayStation (which was stolen while they lived there, which suggests their presence wasn’t entirely secret), and stayed for days at a time. They planned to install pre-laminated wood flooring and a portable toilet.

Yoto says they played house to submit to the “demands to hyper-stylize.” She’s referring to the visions of decorating perfection in the Pottery Barn catalogs or Domino magazine that make their way to our mailboxes, to the pressure some internalize to make our homes match those images, to have them always ready for inspection. “We’re all asked to be performance artists every day,” she says. “We’re all being watched.”

In the mall — perhaps the most heavily surveilled public arena we have, with security cameras and long lists of behavioral rules — she lived a parallel existence in which she realized those hyper-stylizing dreams, performed for that invisible audience by placing tiny jars of sand on a decorative shelf and a cloth runner on the dining room table, flourishes she would excoriate in her real life, in her own loft a mile away.

Yet while Yoto and Townsend critiqued the mall as an agent of surveillance, they worked hard to make sure they were surveilled. They scanned their sketchbooks’ pages onto their blogs. They uploaded handmade maps of the mall’s undefined spaces. They posted video of their mall apartment on their Web site, which began to appear near the top of Google searches for Providence Place. They assume that’s how security knew to search for them, finding Townsend one October afternoon behind the door they built. Townsend yelled “Surprise!” when they turned on the lights. He pleaded no contest, was sentenced to six months probation and was banned from the mall.

Townsend and Yoto maintain that they feel a real sense of loss that the apartment never reached shelter magazine heights — and that it’s gone.

“How long were you expecting it to go on?” I asked.

“Years. Forever,” Yoto said. “We wanted to bring our child to have its birthday there. We wanted to have the baby’s first steps in the mall.”

In some ways, the project didn’t end. After Townsend’s arrest, they experienced a flurry of fame, including a two-minute spot on “The CBS Early Show” and the coveted back page of the National Enquirer. The blogosphere erupted with cheers, and discussions emerged on the nature of public art. One blogger assessed the mall apartment as an adult version of a fort in the woods. The police, according to one newspaper report, were “so intrigued by the apartment that they went to see it themselves.”

Yoto and Townsend have given talks to law school audiences and art students, even re-created the mall apartment at a Providence gallery. (Yoto sent out the announcement with a picture of herself as the mall advertisement, in a slinky maroon dress and a sultry stare into the camera.) A literary agent signed them to work on a mall book. A producer invited them to pitch a reality show about squatting. (The premise they came up with was “Extreme Helping,” in which they would inhabit abandoned buildings and, in Townsend’s words, “just help the fuck out of people.”) Like the Omaha gunman, their actions inside the mall made them famous.

The management of the Providence Place Mall did not share the general public’s enthusiasm. They announced that the mall felt violated — which caused a predictable cackle in the blogosphere — and for months threatened to sue Yoto and Townsend.

Yoto and Townsend’s furnishings were returned — the property is legally theirs, no matter how illegal the act of putting it there — but an intellectual property scuffle continued. General Growth Properties, the mall’s owner, requested the physical possession and copyright of all of Townsend and Yoto’s images of the mall, including their wedding video, shot on the Woonasquatucket River as they paddled past. GGP has since dropped the suit, perhaps deterred by the continuing wave of positive press and the team of lawyers that sprang to the couple’s defense. (GGP declined to comment for this piece).

Yoto and Townsend’s great crime — what made the mall feel violated — was to make the mall an individual experience, to define the space themselves. They wanted to replicate what developers had done around them: declare an abandoned area blighted and then redevelop it, to make a tiny piece of the mall uniquely theirs. It was their own personal eminent domain.

But protest-through-squatting, it turns out, isn’t unique to them. The comedian Mark Malkoff lived inside a New Jersey IKEA for a week in January, citing the extensive selection of IKEA products in his own apartment, the slimming line between his space and theirs. Maybe the Swedes have a better sense of humor than Americans do, since they actually condoned his corporate colonization.

What most people praising Yoto and Townsend’s adventure miss is that living in the mall is not fringe. It’s the new standard. Forty-three miles away, in suburban Boston, a 1994 mall owned by the same company that built Providence Place added condominiums — real live luxury condominiums — inside. People are paying over a million bucks to live within the Natick mall. Maybe this is the answer to the subprime crisis: All those folks with foreclosed homes could move into shut-down Starbucks and Wal-Marts until the economy perks up.

Meanwhile, tourists trek thousands of miles to shop at Abercrombie or dine at the Olive Garden in New York City. Fifth Avenue is lined with the same shops found in Houston’s Galleria, and chain stores choke avenues once lined with local businesses. As our cities become more like suburbs, and vice versa, we’re all pretty much living at the mall, anyway. Funny, but nobody’s dancing in the food court.

Source / salon.com

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TECHNOLOGY : How I Became a Soldier in the Georgia-Russia Cyberwar

Posted on August 15, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Cyber Monster by TY Koh

An Army of Ones and Zeroes

‘In recent weeks, Georgia’s government Web sites have been besieged by denial-of-service attacks and acts of vandalism.’
By Evgeny Morozov / August 14, 2008

As Russian and Georgian troops fight on the ground, there’s a parallel war happening in cyberspace. In recent weeks, Georgia’s government Web sites have been besieged by denial-of-service attacks and acts of vandalism. Just like in traditional warfare, there’s a lot of confusion about what’s going on in this technological battle—nobody seems to know whether this is a centralized Russian attack, the work of a loose band of hackers, or something else. Having read so many contradicting accounts, I knew that the only reliable way to find out what was really happening was to enlist in the Russian digital army myself.

Don’t get me wrong: My geopolitical sympathies, if anything, lie with Moscow’s counterparts. Nor do I see myself as an Internet-savvy Rambo character. I had a much simpler research objective: to test how much damage someone like me, who is quite aloof from the Kremlin physically and politically, could inflict upon Georgia’s Web infrastructure, acting entirely on my own and using only a laptop and an Internet connection. If I succeeded, that would somewhat contradict the widely shared assumption—at least in most of the Western media—that the Kremlin is managing this cyberwarfare in a centralized fashion. My mission, if successful, would show that the field is open to anyone with a grudge against Georgia, regardless of their exact relationship with state authorities.

Not knowing exactly how to sign up for a cyberwar, I started with an extensive survey of the Russian blogosphere. My first anonymous mentor, as I learned from this blog post, became frustrated with the complexity of other cyberwarfare techniques used in this campaign and developed a simpler and lighter “for dummies” alternative. All I needed to do was to save a copy of a certain Web page to my hard drive and then open it in my browser. I was warned that the page wouldn’t work with Internet Explorer but did well with Firefox and Opera. (Get with the program, Microsoft!) Once accessed, the page would load thumbnailed versions of a dozen key Georgian Web sites in a single window. All I had to do was set the page to automatically update every three to five seconds. Voilà: My browser was now sending thousands of queries to the most important Georgian sites, helping to overload them, and it had taken me only two to three minutes to set up.

But now I knew that there must be other more sophisticated options out there. After some more investigation, I unearthed two alternatives, one creative and one emotional.

The creative option was to write my own simple program. Although my experience with software development is nonexistent, the instructions looked manageable. All I had to do was create a blank text file, copy and paste the URLs of any Web sites that I wanted to attack, specify how many times these sites should be pinged, and copy and paste a few lines of code from the original instructions. The last bit was to rename it with a .BAT extension, instantly converting it into a file that Windows recognizes as an executable program.

My e-Molotov cocktail was ready to go. I just had to double-click the file, and all those sites that I listed would be inundated with requests. The original blog post also encouraged me to run my program at certain times of the day to coincide with attacks launched by others, thus multiplying their effectiveness.

So far, it looked as if my experiment was succeeding. In less than half an hour, I already had two options that could potentially cause some damage, if I hadn’t stopped after the first few seconds of testing. What I found missing in my first two trials, though, was a sense of priorities. If I were truly interested in destabilizing the Georgian sites, how would I know whether to focus on the Ministry of Transportation or the Supreme Court? What if other volunteers like me were attacking one but not the other? Were my resources more vital on other e-fronts?

Faced with these dilemmas, I turned to the site StopGeorgia for help. This was the emotional option. Branding itself as a site by and for the “Russian hack underground,” StopGeorgia declared that it wouldn’t tolerate “aggression against Russia in cyberspace.” In addition to this militaristic rhetoric, the site offered a very convenient list of targets—Web sites that either belonged to Georgian government agencies or to potential friends of the country (including those of the U.K. and U.S. embassies in Tbilisi). This list included plus and minus signs to indicate whether the sites were still accessible from Russia and, for some reason, Lithuania. The sites with the plus signs were, logically, the primary target; there was no point in attacking the sites that were already down.

The administrators of StopGeorgia did not stop there; they also offered visitors a virtual present. The treat was a software utility called DoSHTTP, which the site encouraged all readers to download. DoSHTTP’s creators bill it as a program to “test” the so-called “denial-of-service attacks” that have become synonymous with modern cyberwarfare. But if you believe the rhetoric on StopGeorgia, its capabilities extend far beyond mere testing—the site encouraged all visitors to use the program to launch attacks, not test them.

After making sure that I wasn’t downloading a virus, I installed DoSHTTP and started playing around with it. Along with offering customizable options to advanced users, there was also a nice option for beginners like me. After entering a URL, I could initiate an attack by clicking something that said “Start Flood.” A flood did follow—war at the touch of a button.

In less than an hour, I had become an Internet soldier. I didn’t receive any calls from Kremlin operatives; nor did I have to buy a Web server or modify my computer in any significant way. If what I was doing was cyberwarfare, I have some concerns about the number of child soldiers who may just find it too fun and accessible to resist.

My experiment also might shed some light on why the recent cyberwar has been so hard to pin down and why no group in particular has claimed responsibility. Paranoid that the Kremlin’s hand is everywhere, we risk underestimating the great patriotic rage of many ordinary Russians, who, having been fed too much government propaganda in the last few days, are convinced that they need to crash Georgian Web sites. Many Russians undoubtedly went online to learn how to make mischief, as I did. Within an hour, they, too, could become cyberwarriors.

Source / Slate

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A Video Series on World Agriculture: Monsanto, Part 3

Posted on August 15, 2008 by RagBlog

The World According to Monsanto (Part 3 of 8)

Right now, there is probably no other company that is doing more to endanger the health of this planet, and it’s inhabitants, than Monsanto. With Nazi-like attitude, they are leading the world in shear destructive evil greed. First they were a drug company, and then they expanded to become a drugs and genetic engineering company, and now Monsanto is attempting to acquire water rights in countries with water shortages in a move to control the people’s basic means of survival, and production of the global food supply. Giant transnational corporations like Monsanto, in collusion with the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, seek to commodify and privatize the world’s water and put it on the open market for sale to the highest bidder. Millions of the world’s citizens are being deprived of this fundamental human right, and vast ecological damage is being wrought as massive industry claims water once used to sustain communities and replenish nature.

Click here for more information.

Thanks to Diane Stirling-Stevens / The Rag Blog

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The Age of Global Apartheid, Courtesy Uncle Sam

Posted on August 15, 2008 by RagBlog


A Story of U.S. Immigration In An Age of Global Apartheid
By Ben Terrall, August 14, 2008

In his 2001 book, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the ‘Illegal Alien’ and the Remaking of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (Routledge), Joseph Nevins focused on the Clinton Administration’s initiatives to heighten security at the U.S.-Mexico border.

That book showed how the alleged goal of reducing immigration to the U.S. by pushing potential migrants from “urban corridors” to remote regions only made the crossing more dangerous, and thus contributed to more needless deaths of poor Mexicans and Central Americans. It also made clear that previous to the 1970s, travel between Mexico and the U.S. was not a national issue.

Nevins’s new book, Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration In An Age of Global Apartheid (City Lights Publishers, 2008), continues his earlier examination of border policies, but personalizes its analysis by looking at the tragic story of one hard-working family man, Julio Cesar Gallegos, who died with five other men and one young woman in 1998 in Southern California’s Imperial Valley Desert.

Julio, although technically “illegal,” had been living and working in East Los Angeles since 1993. A family emergency drew Julio back to his hometown in central Mexico; he was attempting to return from there to his L.A.-based wife, a U.S. citizen, and their young son, when he and his traveling companions expired. When his body was found it was so mummified it appeared to be charred.

Dying to Live interweaves meticulously documented history of Mexican immigration to the U.S. with the story of the Gallegos family’s struggles. Nevins presents a record of racist legal and extra-legal harassment of Mexicans in the U.S., and stresses that territory which became part of ten states (Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Utah, Nevada, and California) was incorporated into the U.S. only after Washington attacked and occupied Mexico City.

Nevins lays bare the overheated demonization of foreigners that has dominated U.S. politics since the September 11, 2001 Al Qaeda attacks. Among the more disturbing quotes cited is a 2006 statement from Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado (who ran for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination): “Many who come across the border are workers. But among them are people coming to kill you and me and your children.”

The reality is that the people being killed are poor Latino travelers. Since the mid-1990s, more than 5,000 migrant corpses have been recovered from the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

Contrary to the impression fostered by Fox News, these people were not coming to the U.S. out of spite. They were fleeing an economic arrangement that had betrayed them. While the Clinton-backed North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was marketed in the 1990s as a pro-growth treaty that would “lift all boats,” time has shown that profits NAFTA generated for big business did not trickle down to poor and middle-class people on either side of the border.

In a recent interview, Nevins cited a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace study which found that “between the years 1994 and 2002, about 1.3 million Mexican farmers or farm laborers had been displaced by a trade deficit that had been brought about most significantly by NAFTA.”

Nevins asked, “Where do these people go? Well, they might try to go to Mexican cities, but the promise of NAFTA to greatly increase industrialization in Mexico never materialized. To the extent it materialized anywhere, it was in the border regions, but it didn’t materialize sufficiently. And at the same time, of course, many of these maquiladoras, the factories, are moving to China, so they end up coming to places like New York City, Oakland, California or rural areas of Wisconsin.”

Nevins’s text is complemented by Mizue Aizeki’s powerful photos, which emphasize the basic humanity of poor people targeted by xenophobic U.S. border militarization policies. This book is the perfect antidote to the mantras of hate heard round the clock on right wing AM radio. It artfully shows the importance of solidarity with poor populations who are paying the price for corporate profiteering in the age of NAFTA and other such misleadingly-labeled “free trade” agreements.

* * *

Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid
by Joseph Nevins, photography by Mizue Aizeki
Open Media Series/ City Lights Books

Excerpts posted here.

* * *

Source / Z-Net

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Steven Harper: Just Doing What Junior Would Want

Posted on August 15, 2008 by RagBlog


Canada to evict US deserter
by Nick Kyonka / August 14, 2008

First soldier to head north to avoid Iraq war loses refugee bid, mulls plea to Federal Court

American war resister Jeremy Hinzman has been ordered out of the country after a four-year legal battle to earn a home in Canada.

A U.S. Army deserter, Hinzman was the first post-Vietnam War resister to file for refugee status when he arrived in Canada in January 2004 while fleeing a scheduled deployment to Iraq.

Several bumps in the road later, he received a deportation order yesterday from the Canada Border Services Agency after an immigration officer rejected a pair of his last-ditch attempts to remain in the country.

He and his family have been ordered to leave by Sept. 23.

“I’m tremendously disappointed,” Hinzman said yesterday, apparently fighting back tears following the decision. “(But) life goes on and we’ll make the most of it wherever we end up.”

Friends and family joined Hinzman yesterday morning outside the Mississauga offices of the border services agency where he received the decision.

His wife, Nga Nguyen, cradled the couple’s three-week-old daughter, Meghan, while their 6-year-old son, Liam, smiled and ran around in circles as his father hugged crying supporters.

A native of Rapid City, S.D., Hinzman joined the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division in January 2001.

He fled to Canada in 2004, just weeks after learning of his scheduled deployment to Iraq to fight in a war he says is both illegal and immoral.

After his initial refugee application was denied in March 2005, Hinzman launched a series of court appeals, all of which were rejected. A bid to take his case to the Supreme Court was rejected in November 2007.

Yesterday’s decision slammed the door on two of his remaining options to stave off deportation – a pre-removal risk assessment and a humanitarian and compassionate review.

Either could have seen him granted permanent residency had the officer reviewing the case found he would face persecution, torture or otherwise unfair treatment if returned to the U.S.

If returned, he could face a return to his unit or a court martial for desertion – a felony offence that would come with possible jail time.

Despite his uncertain future, though, Hinzman said had no regrets about deserting his unit in the name of a principled stand.

“(Iraq) was an unjust war based on false pretenses,” he said.

“Every soldier who refused to fight has probably saved a lot of lives.”

He said he would now consider whether to appeal the decision, a path taken by fellow resister Corey Glass, whose deportation order is on hold while the Federal Court decides whether to review his case.

Meanwhile, Lee Zaslofsky, of the War Resisters Support Campaign, said his group would continue to fight for Hinzman and the estimated 200 other resisters living in Canada.

“We’re going to be appealing to all Canadians to let the government know that this kind of thing has got to stop,” he said, noting a non-binding opposition bill passed in Parliament earlier this year that called on the government to allow resisters such as Hinzman to stay.

A nationwide poll conducted in June found two-thirds of Canadians would support a decision to allow the resisters to stay.

“(The government) must implement the will of Parliament and the people of Canada,” Zaslofsky said.

© 2008 The Toronto Star

Source / Toronto Star

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Why McCain Would Be a Mediocre President

Posted on August 14, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

John McCain campaign staff and early model of the “Straight Talk Express.”

‘A careful look at McCain’s biography shows that he isn’t prepared for the job’
By Rex Nutting

WASHINGTON — In his frivolous Paris and Britney ad, Sen. John McCain has asked the right question: Is Barack Obama ready to lead this country?

Since last January, Sen. Obama’s fitness for the presidency has been the only question that matters in American politics. The pollsters and pundits agree that if Obama can show the voters that he’s up to the job, he’ll win. If not, he won’t.

But that begs another question: Is McCain fit to lead America?

That question hasn’t been asked, nor has it been answered.

The assumption seems to be that McCain’s years of experience in the military and in Congress of course give him the background and tools he’d need in the White House.

As Britney might say, “Duh! For sure he’s qualified!!! He’s Mac!!!”

But is that true? Does McCain have the right stuff?

A careful look at McCain’s biography shows that he isn’t prepared for the job. His resume is much thinner than most people think.

Here are some reasons why McCain would be a mediocre president.

Lack of accomplishments

Like the current occupant of the White House, McCain got his first career breaks from the connections and money of his family, not from hard work.

The son and grandson of Navy admirals, he attended Annapolis where he did poorly.

Nevertheless, he was commissioned as a pilot, where he performed poorly, crashing three planes before he failed to evade a North Vietnamese missile that destroyed his plane. McCain spent more than five years in a prison camp.

After his release, McCain knew his weak military record meant he’d never make admiral, so he turned his sights to a career in politics. With the help of his new wife’s wealth, his new father-in-law’s business connections and some powerful friends had made as a lobbyist for the Navy, he was elected in 1982 to a Congress in a district that he didn’t reside in until the day the seat opened up. A few years later, he succeeded Barry Goldwater as a senator.

McCain hasn’t accomplished much in the Senate. Even his own campaign doesn’t trumpet his successes, probably because the few victories he’s had still rankle Republicans.

His campaign finance law failed to significantly reduce the role of money in politics. He failed to get a big tobacco bill through the Senate. He’s failed to change the way Congress spends money; his bill to give the president a line-item veto was declared unconstitutional, and the system of pork and earmarks continues unabated. He failed to reform the immigration system.

Every senator who runs for president misses votes back in Washington, so it’s no surprise that McCain and all the others who ran in the primaries have missed a lot of votes in the past year. But between the beginning of 2005 and mid-2007, no senator missed more roll-call votes than McCain did, except Tim Johnson, who was recovering from a near-fatal brain aneurysm.

Shallow

McCain says he doesn’t understand the economy. He’s demonstrated that he doesn’t understand the workings of Social Security, or the political history of the Middle East. He doesn’t know who our enemies are. He says he wants to reduce global warming, but then proposes ideas that would stimulate — not reduce — demand for fossil fuels.

McCain has done one thing well — self promotion. Instead of working on legislation or boning up on the issues, he’s been on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” more than any other guest. He’s been on the Sunday talk shows more than any other guest in the past 10 years. He’s hosted “Saturday Night Live” and even announced his candidacy in 2007 on “The Late Show with David Letterman.”

McCain has not articulated any lofty goals. So far, his campaign theme has mostly been “McCain: He’s None of the Above.”

In the primaries, he campaigned on “I’m not that robotic businessman, I’m not that sanctimonious hick, I’m not that crazy libertarian, I’m not that washed-up actor, I’m not that delusional 9/11 guy.” In the general election, he’s emphasized that he’s not that treasonous dreamer.

No leadership

McCain has frequently taken on near-impossible missions that go against the grain of his party. It’s the basis of his reputation as a maverick. But McCain has never been able to bring more than a handful of Republicans along with him on issues such as campaign finance reform or immigration. Democrats on the Hill have accepted McCain’s help on some issues, but except for a few exceptions (John Kerry and Joe Lieberman), they’ve never warmed to him.

To achieve anything as president, McCain would have to win over two hostile parties: The Democrats and the Republicans.

Living in the Sixties

McCain is still fighting the Vietnam War. But he’s not fighting the real historic war, which taught us the folly of injecting ourselves into a civil war that was none of our business. We learned that, in a world where even peasants have guns, explosives and radios, a determined and popular guerrilla force can defeat a modern army equipped with the mightiest technology if that army has no vital national interest to protect.

Instead, McCain is fighting an imaginary Vietnam War, where a sure victory could have been achieved with just a little more bombing, just a little more “pacification,” just a little more will to win at home. This fantasy clouds McCain’s judgment on foreign policy.

Most of the other high-profile politicians who fought in Vietnam — Colin Powell, Chuck Hegel, John Kerry, and Jim Webb — aren’t stuck in the past, and they don’t view the Iraq War as a chance to get Vietnam right.

No principles

After years of honing a reputation as a guy who’ll say the truth regardless of the political consequences, McCain has crashed the Straight Talk Express. On almost every issue where he took a principled stand against the Republican line — taxes, immigration, oil drilling, the Religious Right — he’s changed his views.

We ought to like politicians who change their mind when the facts change; it shows maturity, judgment and flexibility. But politicians who change their mind to suit the prevailing winds show the opposite.

The bottom line

Successful presidents come from two molds: visionaries, or mechanics. The visionaries — think Reagan or FDR — see what others can’t and say ‘Why not?” to inspire the country. The mechanics — think LBJ or Eisenhower — know the ins and outs of government and are able to harness the power of millions of humans to accomplish great things, or at least keep the wheels from coming off.

McCain fits neither style. He’s neither a dreamer, nor a detail guy. His major accomplishment, in Vietnam and in the Senate, has been merely to survive.

Just surviving doesn’t make you’re a hero, or a decent president. America needs to do more than survive the next four years.

[Rex Nutting is Washington bureau chief of MarketWatch.]

Source / MarketWatch / Wall Street Journal / Posted August 7, 2008

Thanks to Ruth Roberts / The Rag Blog

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It Is the World That Junior Has Helped Build

Posted on August 14, 2008 by RagBlog

Vladimir Putin (right) of Russia and George W. Bush arrive at a summit on the Black Sea, April 5, 2008. Photo credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque.

Putin’s war enablers: Bush and Cheney
By Juan Cole

Russia’s escalating war on Georgia reveals the consequences of the Bush administration’s long assault on the international rule of law.

Aug. 14, 2008 The run-up to the current chaos in the Caucasus should look quite familiar: Russia acted unilaterally rather than going through the U.N. Security Council. It used massive force against a small, weak adversary. It called for regime change in a country that had defied Moscow. It championed a separatist movement as a way of asserting dominance in a region it coveted.

Indeed, despite George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s howls of outrage at Russian aggression in Georgia and the disputed province of South Ossetia, the Bush administration set a deep precedent for Moscow’s actions — with its own systematic assault on international law over the past seven years. Now, the administration’s condemnations of Russia ring hollow.

Bush said on Monday, responding to reports that Russia might attack the Georgian capital, “It now appears that an effort may be under way to depose [Georgia’s] duly elected government. Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century.” By Wednesday, with more Russian troops on the move and a negotiated cease-fire quickly unraveling, Bush stepped up the rhetoric, announcing a sizable humanitarian-aid mission to Georgia and dispatching Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the region.

While U.S. leaders have tended to back Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, there are two sides to every dispute, and in the ethnically diverse Caucasus it may be more like a hundred sides. Abkhazia and Ossetia are claimed by Georgia, but they have their own distinctive languages, cultures and national aspirations. Both fought for independence in the early 1990s, without success, though neither was Georgia able to assert its full sovereignty over them, accepting Russian mediation and peacekeeping troops.

The separatist leaders of South Ossetia and Abkhazia now speak of Saakashvili in terms reminiscent of the way separatists in Darfur speak of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. Sergei Bagapsh of Abkhazia and Eduard Kokoity of South Ossetia have come out against conducting any further talks with Georgia, calling instead for Saakashvili to be tried for war crimes. Kokoity told Interfax, “There can be no talks with the organizers of genocide.” The Russian press is full of talk of putting Saakashvili on trial for ordering attacks on Ossetian civilians.

All sides have committed massacres and behaved abominably. There are no clean hands involved, notwithstanding the strong support for Georgia visible in the press of most NATO member countries. (Georgia has been jockeying to join NATO, something Moscow stridently opposes.) Still, not everyone in NATO agrees that Saakashvili is a hero. While traveling with the negotiating team of President Nicolas Sarkozy, one French official observed that “Saakashvili was crazy enough to go in the middle of the night and bomb a city” in South Ossetia. The consequence of Russia’s riposte, he said, is “a Georgia attacked, pulverized, through its own fault.”

An emboldened Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin sarcastically likened Russia’s actions to Bush’s foreign policy. Pointing to the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Putin said, “Of course, Saddam Hussein ought to have been hanged for destroying several Shiite villages … And the incumbent Georgian leaders who razed 10 Ossetian villages at once, who ran over elderly people and children with tanks, who burned civilians alive in their sheds — these leaders must be taken under protection.”

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Bush officials repeated ad nauseam the mantra that Saddam Hussein had killed his own people. Thus, they helped create a case for unilateral “humanitarian intervention” of the sort Putin says Russia is now pursuing. Washington had failed to get a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing a war on Iraq, and Iraq had not attacked the United States, so no principle of self-defense was at stake. But since all governments (even the United States under Abraham Lincoln) repress separatist movements, often ruthlessly, Bush was turning actions such as Saakashvili’s attack on South Ossetia into a more legitimate cause for an outside power (especially one bordering it) to wage war against Georgia.

Indeed, Putin’s invoking Bush’s Iraq adventure points directly to the way in which Bush has enabled other world powers to act impulsively. With his doctrine of preemptive warfare, Bush single-handedly tore down the architecture of post-World War II international law erected by the founders of the United Nations to ensure that rogue states did not go about launching wars of aggression the way Hitler had. While safeguarding minorities at risk is a praiseworthy goal, the U.N. Charter states that the Security Council must approve a war launched for this purpose or any other, excepting self-defense. No individual nation is authorized to wage aggressive war on a vigilante basis, as Bush did in Iraq or Russia is now doing in the Caucasus.

Eight years ago, the United States would have been in a position to condemn Russia for its unilateral war without necessarily seeming hypocritical. After all, even the Korean War had been sanctioned by the United Nations, and President Dwight Eisenhower had condemned the 1956 tripartite attack on Egypt by Britain, France and Israel for violating the U.N. Charter.

Bush’s recent argument, that a democratically elected government should not be overthrown (no matter what its behavior, apparently), was intended to sidestep comparisons between his own unilateral wars of aggression and ones such as the current Russian intervention. He was implying that his invasion of Iraq toppled a government that lacked the legitimacy enjoyed by Saakashvili’s.

In fact, Bush’s foreign policy includes a long list of actions intended to undermine elected governments.

Whether the United States was actively involved in the attempted coup in 2002 against Hugo Chavez, the democratically elected president of Venezuela, or merely cheered it on, it is clear that Venezuelan popular sovereignty meant nothing to Bush if it resulted in a government unfriendly to and critical of Washington.

An even more egregious example came with the destabilization and overthrow of the Hamas government, which won control of the Palestine Authority in January 2006. Bush insisted on allowing the participation in elections of Hamas, a fundamentalist party with a covert paramilitary that has struck at Israeli targets, including civilians. When the party unexpectedly won, however, Bush refused to recognize the legitimacy of the new government, denying it funds and sympathizing with the Israeli attempt to overthrow it. Israeli security forces kidnapped elected Hamas representatives and cabinet ministers, and harmed civilians by blocking medical aid and food that might go to people via the Hamas government.

In 2007, Bush and the Israelis supported a takeover in the West Bank by forces of the Palestine Liberation Organization, lead by Palestine Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Similar attempts were made in Gaza, but they failed, leaving the elected Hamas government in charge of the small territory. Palestinian popular sovereignty, and Hamas’ victory in what were widely judged to have been relatively free and fair elections, were disregarded by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Bush.

Bush and Cheney also repeatedly sided with military dictator Pervez Musharraf against elected civilian politicians in Pakistan. Even when the Pakistani Parliament, elected in open polls last February, initiated impeachment proceedings against Musharraf earlier this week, the Bush administration came out against the idea of Musharraf’s going into exile if convicted, urging that he be allowed to stay “honorably” in Pakistan if he stepped down.

Bush’s exceptionalism, whereby he implicitly maintained that no international laws or institutions would be allowed to constrain U.S. actions taken in the name of national security, grew out of the sole superpower status of the United States after fall of the Soviet Union. A unipolar world is, however, an exceedingly rare circumstance in modern world history, and it was unlikely to last very long. China may soon have the economic and technological clout to go toe to toe with the United States; and Russia, fueled by the energy boom, is recovering from its economic disaster of the 1990s.

The collapse of the Soviet economy produced tremendous misery and downward mobility. Uncertainty made couples unwilling to risk having children. In one of the great demographic reversals in history, the Russian Federation’s population fell by 10 million in the years after 1991. Russian need for U.S. foreign aid and goodwill led Moscow to acquiesce for a time in the expansion of U.S. influence into Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Russia is now reemerging and flexing its muscles. The run-up in the price of oil and gas has filled Moscow’s coffers, since it is one of the great producers of natural gas in the world (prices of natural gas tend to track with those of petroleum). Russia has reasserted its influence in countries such as Uzbekistan, which had briefly licensed a base to U.S. forces but then kicked them out, and in Turkmenistan, which recently agreed to pipe its natural gas through Moscow. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin are increasingly acting like Gulf emirs, flush with petrodollars and assured of political leverage because of their control over energy resources.

In a unipolar world, the Bush doctrine of preemptive war allowed Washington to assert itself without fear of contradiction. The Bush doctrine, however, was never meant to be emulated by others and was therefore implicitly predicated on the notion that all challengers would be weaker than the United States throughout the 21st century. Bush and Cheney are now getting a glimpse of a multipolar world in which other powers can adopt their modus operandi with impunity. Bush’s rhetoric may have sounded like that of President Woodrow Wilson, but his policy has often been to support the overthrow or hobbling of elected governments that he does not like — and that has not gone unnoticed by countries that also count themselves great powers and would not mind following suit.

The problem with international law for a superpower is that it is a constraint on overweening ambition. Its virtue is that it constrains the aggressive ambitions of others. Bush gutted it because he thought the United States would not need it anytime soon. But Russia is now demonstrating that the Bush doctrine can just as easily be the Putin doctrine. And that leaves America less secure in a world of vigilante powers that spout rhetoric about high ideals to justify their unchecked military interventions. It is the world that Bush has helped build.

Source / Salon

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Maureen Dowd on Hillary and the Dem Convention : Yes She Can

Posted on August 14, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Hillary Clinton campaigning for Barack Obama August 8 in Henderson, Nevada.

‘She’s amazed at how easy it was to snatch Denver away from the Obama saps’
By Maureen Dowd / August 12, 2008

While Obama was spending three hours watching “The Dark Knight” five time zones away, and going to a fund-raiser featuring “Aloha attire” and Hawaiian pupus, Hillary was busy planning her convention.

You can almost hear her mind whirring: Like taking candy from a baby, except Beanpole Guy doesn’t eat candy. In just a couple of weeks, Bill and Hill were able to drag No Drama Obama into a swamp of Clinton drama.

Now they’ve made Barry’s convention all about them — their dissatisfaction and revisionism and barely disguised desire to see him fail. Whatever insincere words of support the Clintons muster, their primal scream gets louder: He can’t win! He can’t close the deal! We told you so!

Hillary’s orchestrating a play within the play in Denver. Just as Hamlet used the device to show that his stepfather murdered his father, Hillary will try to show the Democrats they chose the wrong savior.

Her former aide Howard Wolfson fanned the divisive flames Monday on ABC News, arguing that Hillary would have beaten Obama in Iowa and become the nominee if John Edwards’s affair had come out last year — an assertion contradicted by a University of Iowa survey showing that far more Edwards supporters had Obama as their second choice.

Hillary feels no guilt about encouraging her supporters to mess up Obama’s big moment, thus undermining his odds of beating John McCain and improving her odds of being the nominee in 2012.

She’s obviously relishing Hillaryworld’s plans to have multiple rallies in Denver, to take out TV and print ads and to hold up signs in the hall that read “Denounce Nobama’s Coronation.”

In a video of a closed California fund-raiser on July 31 that surfaced on YouTube, Hillary was clearly receptive to having her name put in nomination and a roll-call vote.

She said she thought it would be good for party unity if her gals felt “that their voices are heard.” But that’s disingenuous. Hillary was the one who raised the roll-call idea at the end of May with Democrats, who were urging her to face the math. She said she wanted it for Chelsea, oblivious to how such a vote would dim Obama’s star turn. Ever since she stepped aside in June, she’s been telling people privately that there might have to be “a catharsis” at the convention, signaling she wants a Clinton crescendo.

Bill continues to howl at the moon — and any reporters in the vicinity — about Obama; he’s starting to make King Lear look like Ryan Seacrest.

The way the Clintons see it, there’s nothing wrong with a couple making plans for their future, is there? That’s the American way and, as their pal Mark Penn pointed out, they have American roots while Obama “is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”

The Clintons know that a lot of Democrats are muttering that their solipsistic behavior is “disgusting.” But they’re too filled with delicious schadenfreude at the wave of buyer’s remorse that has swept the Democratic Party; many Democrats are questioning whether Obama is fighting back hard enough against McCain, and many are wondering, given his inability to open up a lead in a country fed up with Republicans, if race will be an insurmountable factor.

Some Democrats wish that Obama had told the Clintons to “get in the box” or get lost if they can’t show more loyalty, rather than giving them back-to-back, prime-time speaking gigs at the convention on Tuesday and Wednesday. Al Gore clipped their wings in 2000, triggering their wrath by squeezing both the president and New York Senate candidate into speaking slots the first night and then ushering them out of L.A.

Wednesday will be all Bill. The networks will rerun his churlish comments from Africa about Obama’s readiness to lead and his South Carolina meltdowns. TV will have more interest in a volcanic ex-president than a genteel veep choice.

Obama also allowed Hillary supporters to insert an absurd statement into the platform suggesting that media sexism spurred her loss and that “demeaning portrayals of women … dampen the dreams of our daughters.” This, even though postmortems, including the new raft of campaign memos leaked by Clintonistas to The Atlantic — another move that undercuts Obama — finger Hillary’s horrendous management skills.

Besides the crashing egos and screeching factions working at cross purposes, Joshua Green writes in the magazine, Hillary’s “hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency.”

It would have been better to put this language in the platform: “A woman who wildly mismanages and bankrupts a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar campaign operation, and then blames sexism in society, will dampen the dreams of our daughters.”

Source / New York Times

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Posted on August 14, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

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Source / jeffamandalayla

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SPORT : An Elegy for Skip Carey

Posted on August 14, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Atlanta Braves annuncer Skip Carey kissing a baby. Photo by jeffamandalayla.

‘There will be no more Skip Caray to bring me laughs and great baseball announcing in the summers’
By Gerry Storm / The Rag Blog / August 14, 2008

Back in the late ’70’s I was out every night on the music scene. When I would return home I would customarily turn on the TV to wind down for awhile before retiring. Not much on TV in the wee small hours so I started watching re-runs of Atlanta Braves games.

The team wasn’t much good but I really enjoyed the sharp wit of one of the Braves announcers, Skip Caray. So, night after night I would tune in the game and Skip and have some laughs. This became a habit. He was really good, irreverent and salty but quite knowledgeable. Definitely not your average sports announcer.

Ted Turner’s TV empire eventually grew to the point that it no longer needed to show all the Braves games twice to fill in air time, but it did show them nightly. I got a job which took me to the deep south for 5 years and took up temporary residence near Atlanta. I continued to listen to or watch the team and be entertained by Skip, even attended a few live games at the old stadium. Then the team got to be good, even won a World Series, with Skip and his sidekick Pete “The Professor” Van Weiren calling the shots, no longer from the cellar but from the top of the league. It was a grand time for Turnerville. The networks became first class, the team built a new stadium, winners every year, won their division 14 years in a row. I even wore a Braves cap for a few summers.

I wound up in deep New Mexico, still a Braves fan, but without a TV. Then the internet came along and sure enough, I could listen to the broadcasts through a stream broadcast. What a break! Skip and Pete were still at it and the Braves were a good team and these broadcasts became a regular part of my summer routine. Couple of years ago Skip got sick and missed several weeks. This was a void in my life. At the beginning of this season it was announced that he would no longer accompany the team out of town and no longer appear on TV, just radio for the home games. Last week he died, couple of years younger than me, salty and sharp to the end.

Now I definitely feel that the changes wrought by the passage of time are taking away my favorite people. There will be no more Skip Caray to bring me laughs and great baseball announcing in the summers. I will surely miss him, and suspect that this will be the last year I follow baseball, one of the joys of my life since age 8 or 9. So long, Skip, and thanks for 30 years of your wit and companionship

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Obama’s Hillbilly Half-Brother Threatening To Derail Campaign

Posted on August 14, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Cooter and Barack Obama. Photo courtesy The Onion.

‘Since Cooter’s emergence on the national scene, the Obama campaign has downplayed the brothers’ relationship’
August 14, 2008

BOONEVILLE, KY—Barack Obama’s once-commanding lead in the polls slipped to two points Monday, continuing a month-long slide that many credit to the recent appearance of the Democratic candidate’s heretofore unknown half-brother, Cooter Obama.

Long kept a family secret, the overalls-clad, straw-chewing Kentuckian first entered the public spotlight in July, when he drove his 1982 Ford flatbed pickup through the press corps at an Obama rally in order to inform his brother that he caught the skunk that had been living under his front porch. According to witnesses, Cooter’s skunk proceeded to spray Washington Post political reporter Michael D. Shear in the face.

Cooter Obama attempted to pay for damages to the Capitol lawn with homemade jerky.

“Sorry ’bout that, mister! Some tomater juice’ll take care of the stank,” Cooter said as his mortified younger brother led him off the stage. “Shoot, Barack, you didn’t tell me you was runnin’ for president!”

Since Cooter’s emergence on the national scene, the Obama campaign has downplayed the brothers’ relationship. A statement issued last week by Obama’s top adviser, David Axelrod, claimed that the two lived together only for a brief period in 1981, shortly before Barack left to attend Columbia University and Cooter had to drop out of chicken-killing school because an air conditioner fell on his head.

Nonetheless, political experts said Cooter’s increased visibility in recent weeks has hurt Obama’s polling among urban, upper-middle-class, non-straw-hat-wearing voters. The Obama camp has scrambled to control the damage caused by Cooter’s penchants for loudly practicing his banjo during Obama’s speeches, repeatedly referring to Barack by his childhood nickname, “Ol’ Jelly Legs,” and chasing his troublemaking pig, Mbogo, in the nude in the background of Obama’s CNN interview on the importance of education.

The problem came to a head last week, advisers said, when Cooter arrived unannounced at a $100-a-plate fundraiser, slipped past security, and proffered a jug of moonshine to the high-society donors, claiming it would “straighten their curlies.” In addition, dozens of would-be attendees at a Cedar Rapids, IA town-hall meeting Sunday were turned away at the door by the elder Obama, who was sitting at the entrance in a rocking chair and brandishing a double-barreled shotgun.

“What Sen. Obama’s half-brother meant to communicate was that he was pleased that the candidate’s message of change is fostering vigorous dialogue,” Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said following the incident. “In no way was his proposal to ‘fill y’all’s backsides with rock salt’ intended to be taken in any other way.”

In the past two weeks, Obama has lost support from such groups as PETA, which withdrew its endorsement when Cooter punched a swan in the face, claiming it was “one of them mean ones”; the Clean Energy Group, which protested Cooter’s recent attempt to fry a squirrel in a flaming 20-gallon barrel of diesel fuel; and Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), whom Cooter mistook for an outhouse Monday and urinated on for 35 seconds.

“I thought we would be able to escape controversy by leaving the country for a week and visiting Iraq and Europe,” an unnamed source in the Obama camp told reporters. “Little did we know that Cooter would command just as much attention back home by getting drunk with the Russian ambassador, lighting off fireworks, and crashing Obama’s campaign limo into a creek in the Ozark Mountains.”

Despite the setbacks he has caused, Cooter has secured a small but devoted following, and has occasionally managed to reflect well on the campaign. At a speaking engagement to which Obama arrived two hours late, Cooter kept the crowd’s spirits up by breaking out a washtub string bass and a washboard and holding an impromptu hoedown.

Although his primary focus has been to support his brother, Cooter Obama said he is not without political aspirations of his own.

“Shoot, I’m helpin’ because I love my brother,” Cooter said. “Maybe if he gets elected he can make me Secretary of Moonshine. Course, that don’t mean I ain’t votin’ for the other fella. Ol’ Jelly Legs wants to take my guns away.”

Cooter chases pig on White House lawn. Photo courtesy The Onion.

Source / The Onion

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