Urban Vancouver

right about now kevin bacon is wishing he’d gotten royalties off the kevin bacon game.

don’tcha think?

i wonder if he’d like to be separating his fingers from bernie madoff’s throat…or maybe he’s too nice a guy for that sort of thing.

There’s a video that circulated on the interwebs, around the beginning of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, that still haunts me til this day. It was a clip from a seminar of sorts, exploring the varying business opportunities that could be had as a result of the war, both in terms of war support and reconstruction work.

And, while no amount of Googling helped me find the video clip, I did, in the process, find plenty to reassure me that I hadn’t imagined this sociopathic capitalist opportunism.

The invasion began on March 20th, and this was posted 6 days later on MSN Money:

Who’ll profit from rebuilding Iraq?

Billions will be poured into roads, bridges, schools, hospitals and oil fields, but picking which companies will benefit isn’t all that easy. Here are caveats for investors, plus some stocks with promise…

Less than a month later, this appeared on Entrepreneur.com

Iraq Reconstruction Spells Opportunity
Small businesses are lining up to win contracts for the rebuilding of Iraq. Have you taken a number yet?

Though the war in Iraq is still raging in parts of the country, the battle among companies to rebuild the shattered nation has already begun. And while the war riveted the world over a span of several weeks, the rebuilding will take much longer, and cost much more, than the conflict itself. At the same time, since the reconstruction will be an extremely costly and time-consuming affair, it could prove a boon to American companies that secure contracts to rebuild Iraq.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. We all know about Halliburton, Robert Greenwald tells us the gory details about Blackwater, and of course insult to injury: by January 2005 word got out that, “Almost $9bn (£4.7bn) of Iraqi oil revenue is missing from a fund set up to reconstruct the country.”

Some folks have made billions of dollars from our invasion and occupation of a country that was no real threat to us, while the conservative numbers of Iraqi civillian dead courtesy of Iraq Body Count are 90,249 – 98,517. (I say “conservative”, because the number (655, 000) from a study that came out over two years ago, is just so painful to think about, and I don’t want to believe it’s accurate.)

So, 2008 comes around, the U.S. faces it’s latest crisis, this time a financial markets meltdown so huge the country’s not seen anything like it since the Great Depression, and some folks are almost magically in a position to make a killing:

From TPM:

A short while back the Fed announced a new program to buy up to $600 billion worth of mortgage backed securities. Remember, this was what the TARP was originally supposed to do. But then Paulson decided to invest money directly into the banks to recapitalize them. And then the Fed decided on its own to do basically the same thing on its own. They’ve already bought up $100 billion worth and they’ve now hired BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, PIMCO and Wellington Management Company to purchase and manage $500 billion more worth of the stuff.

Why did these four companies get the contract? That’s none of your business. The Fed just decided.

There’s more here, and here.

Americans are being fleeced once again by big business.

Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism comes to mind. It’s a must read and explores in much more detail how this sick system is thriving while people suffer and die.

whew, i had a weird dream last night.

in it, alberto gonzales couldn’t find work due to his criminal and incompetent past in the bush administration, so he was reduced to wearing a rabbit costume for the forest service.

like i said, it was weird. i didn’t believe it was him, right up to the time he took off the giant rabbit head, out of sight of his many detractors. there he was, leaning wearily against a split rail fence on the edge of some pristine wilderness area he helped despoil, sighing deeply and bitterly at his fate.

“My whiskers and paws, what is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?”

it was all symbolism, i suppose. gonzales gone tharn, at the bottom of the food chain, ever proclaiming he’s late for a very important date.

in the light of day, it’s almost funny to see alberto playing the victim card. perhaps he’ll live out his days denying his clownish his behavior as attorney general, oblivious to the real grievances of people he helped torture and spy on and otherwise insult.

all the while, showing off his little purple heart that says “casualty in the war on terror.”

perhaps it’s because he spent so much time in the bubble. or maybe he just doesn’t have a moral center that would cause him nightmares about the horrors he helped facilitate. it could be that alberto is just not very bright.

maybe it’ll all come out in the tell-all book that gonzales says he’s writing (assuming he can find a publisher). it’s hard to imagine how he could gin up an entire book on his tenure in the bush administration, though, considering his congressional testimony in which he couldn’t recall anything about anything.

even if a.g. did suddenly have a moment of clarity about his actions as a.g., it doesn’t seem likely he would implicate himself or his employers. what’s more likely is that he’ll dream up an alternate history, cribbed from the same revisionist chimera recently floated by george, dick, condi and the rest of the land-of-nod squad.

poor, noble alberto. he gave his last full measure of disrepute in the war on terror.

and this is the thanks he gets.

All I can say is, keep the audacity coming. We need it.

It’s hard to imagine an incoming president inheriting a bigger mess than what Barack Obama will be having to deal with starting on the 20th.

I won’t list the now-familiar laundry list of problems facing the nation because I just can’t stomach it.

Suffice to say, I hereby re-pledge my support of Obama, and I challenge the rest of the country to do the same. He can’t succeed alone, so please consider letting go of your cynicism and doubt and party loyalty as best as you can and try cheering on our new leader rather than trashing him for a change.

Happy new year to all of our readers, friends, family.

every day it gets tougher to get into the republican tent.

just ask chip saltsman.

saltsman, who is/was a leading candidate to be chairman of the republican national committee, thinks one qualification is finding humor in “barack the magic negro”.

here’s hoping saltsman becomes the next rnc chair. he can stand on it and lead his teeny tiny party in song.

lots of people who thought sarah palin was ready to be president are now dissing caroline kennedy.

kennedy’s unqualified to be the next senator from new york, they say.

it’s funny, isn’t it?

calling the republican chick “unqualified” was sexist. calling kennedy unqualified is de rigueur.

key differences between the two: kennedy has a functioning cerebellum, and can answer simple questions.

note: many democrats also are questioning kennedy’s bona fides for a senate seat. she hasn’t run for office, and has sometimes declined even to vote. she’s not stood in line for this opportunity, but rather, has cut to the front on the basis of her family brand.

i’m not agitating for her. but i do enjoy the irony.

and i dig her little tattoo.

* * *

pakistani troops are massing on the border with india. this is bad.

for those of you scoring at home, india and pakistan loathe each other, and both flex nuclear arms. and india seems inclined to blame the pakistani military for the recent terror attack in mumbai.

everyone will have to hope the indian government doesn’t favor the bush doctrine of pre-emptive war…and attack guinea.

note: for those of you not scoring at home, blame google.

* * *

speaking of vp-wannabe palin, she may want to reconsider her daughter’s pending shotgun marriage into the johnston family.

it seems that soon-to-be granny sherry johnston was busted for trafficking in rush limbaugh’s drug of choice, oxycontin. the funny thing is, the alaska state police delayed acting on its investigation until after the election, allegedly out of political consideration for granny palin.

tsk, politics corrupting justice. how unseemly. right scooter?

* * *
final friday dialogue…

isaac toussie: “thanks for the pardon, mr. president.”

gwb: “psyche!”

rick warren is a right-wing evangelical zealot.

joe biden wants us to overlook that and say ‘hey, pastor rick’s entitled to his opinion. let us pray together at, say, the inaugural invocation!’

“Barack Obama said you’ve got to reach out. You’ve got to reach a hand of friendship across the aisle and across philosophies in this country.” — joe biden

reaching out to rick warren without purell? eewww.

over the past few years, the right’s idea of compromise was telling opponents to go fuck themselves.

fun fact: since democrats regained control of congress, republicans have set records for obstruction and filibuster. the stated goal of the gop is to prevent democrats from accomplishing anything.

the takeaway is that the right is unwilling to sit at the table in good faith. despite this, the obama administration wants to get all post-partisany and embrace an embodiment of right-wing antipathy in good ol’ pastor rick.

thanks, really, but no.

Warren doesn’t just oppose gay marriage, he’s compared it to incest and pedophilia. He doesn’t just want to ban abortion, he’s compared women who terminate pregnancies to Nazis and the pro-choice position to Holocaust denial.

Speaking of Jews, Warren has publicly stated his belief that they will burn in hell, presumably along with everyone else who hasn’t accepted his particular brand of Christianity (i.e., the vast majority of people in the world). And forget about evolution — the existence of homosexuals, he’s argued, disproves Darwin. And while we may not know how old the Earth is, the Saddleback website assures us that dinosaurs and humans coexisted.

warren’s beliefs are a provocation, not an invocation. asking him to speak at the inaugural isn’t reaching out: it’s heresy. the man has no business being in the same room with people who made an obama administration possible.

even if he were to renounce his most invidious views, warren would still be a poor choice for the role he’s been handed. there are people of faith — and goodwill — who would’ve been much better ambassadors of the spirit.

barack obama knows the power and importance of religious symbols. which makes his choice for this occasion all the more incongruous and dissonant.

nevertheless, joe biden wants us to like it.

sorry, once again. no.

“We’ve made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here. This far, no further.” — patrick stewart in some movie

according to lamar alexander, barack obama’s landslide victory wasn’t really a vote for change.

and the significantly larger democratic majorities in the house and senate? yeah, those weren’t a mandate for change, either.

no, according to lamar what america wants is more of the same, with different people managing the sameness.

quick quiz: is lamar alexander…

a. tone deaf
b. in denial
c. not very smart
d. a bad propagandist
e. all of the above, and a bad dresser to boot

lamar and his republican friends are working awfully hard to sell america that we’re a “right-of-center” nation, despite the recent blowout. despite the fact that republicans ran our collective train off the rails over the last 8 years, and americans repudiated the conductors accordingly.

lamar and co. are screeching desperately that obama and democrats are going to mess things up — apparently not noticing what a whoriffic mess the gop made of things during the bush administration. or are they just hoping we didn’t notice?

note to republicans: we noticed.

note to lamar: you and your sycophantic ilk are over. americans (for that matter, the entire world) are tired of your incompetence and your loathsome, unthinking support of the worst a rogue administration could cook up.

america voted for change.

and the question is, are you with us — or are you with the enemy?

Perhaps the best measurement of how over-the-top horrible the Bush II era has been is the number of times the stories in the news have risen to the level of farce, stories so outrageous that it is almost impossible to believe they are true. The infamous reading of The Pet Goat in a Booker Elementary classroom comes to mind as a very early example.

With less than a month left of the Bush administration, here’s the latest:

Bush assailant kick-starts sales for shoemaker

(CNN) — The shoes thrown last week at U.S. President George W. Bush have provided an unexpected windfall for the shoemaker who made them.

Sales of the shoes made famous by Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi have soared, with requests pouring in to the Turkish shoemaker from across the world, media reports said Monday.

As a result, Istanbul-based Ramazan Baydan has had to recruit an extra 100 staff to meet orders for 300,000 pairs of the “Model 271 brogues,” Britain’s Daily Mail said.

Bush, of course, might very well take credit for the 100 jobs created and say something like, “It’s just one of the many creative approaches we’re taking on economic stimulus.”

night has fallen on seattle, along with a thick blanket of snow.

the latest storm of the century blew through last night, into this morning, and according to the table on the back deck, we got 7 inches of snow.

that’s more than we’ve had at one time in the years since we moved back here.

if this were buffalo people would be saying, “what snow?” but it’s seattle, and people are saying, “what the hell?!?”

and it gets better. according to the national weather service, there’s a winter storm warning in effect for our little corner of puget sound, calling for another 3 to 6 inches tonight.

this in a town where drivers steer directly for the nearest telephone pole at the first sign of a snowflake.

the mechanical deer on the front lawn is struggling to keep its nose above the drift gathering at its feet. the front porch and sidewalk are covered again, after a major effort to de-snow them earlier today. in the morning we’ll do it all over again.

seattle schools are closed for the holidays. kids and parents are out and about, some on sleds, some on cross country skis. the few vehicles on the roads are moving slowly, awkwardly, trying not to hit anything.

businesses all over town will be short-staffed tomorrow. the department of transportation is not set up for this kind of thing.

for a little while, folks in this neighborhood don’t seem to mind.

I wrote a couple of days ago about how happy the snow makes me.

Well, it’s coming down again in voluminous, big flakes, and it is plenty cold, and it is sticking.

I’m so excited that I had to post this from my iPod Touch.

eugene robinson of the washington post neatly summarizes the argument for spending a few schillings on the u.s. auto industry…

“To recap: We’re in the midst of a global financial crisis. The housing bubble has burst and prices have collapsed. The economy has been in recession for a year. Unemployment has risen to 6.7 percent, and if “marginally attached” workers are included — those who have given up even looking for jobs — along with those who want to work full time but are forced to accept fewer hours, the rate is 12.5 percent.

“Even if the Big Three deserve to die, they shouldn’t die now. Economic theory notwithstanding, it would be insanity to throw hundreds of thousands of auto company employees, and maybe a few million others in the supply and sales chains, out of work — leaving them and their families at the mercy of an economy that has no replacement jobs for them. Public funds would end up supporting these people anyway, except that we would have lost our domestic auto industry — which, despite its many failings, is the only domestic auto industry we’ve got.”

the effects of bush administration “economic policies” are being felt across a broad swath of people who likely thought they’d never find themselves in such dire straits.

The cold logic of a ledger sheet is a poor reply to what Cooper sees in the city’s alleys and side streets.

“We were over by the Civic Auditorium,” Cooper said, “and there was a guy lying on the sidewalk with a blanket pulled over his head. I leaned down and asked him if he wanted something to eat. He pulled the blanket down and there was a 5-year-old little boy lying with him.”

It would be nice to say that is an isolated incident, but it is not. Twenty of 21 cities surveyed for a new report from U.S. Conference of Mayors reported an increase in requests for food, and 59 percent of those requests came from families. In addition, 16 of 25 cities reported a significant increase in homeless families…

“I think a lot of people think (being homeless) is going to be temporary,” Cooper said. “They think: I’ll be out for a week at most. But you lose your means of communication and your address.”

thanks, president hoover. heck of a job.

* * * * *

update: chrysler’s going to close up shop for a few weeks. just to see how it works out, maybe.

It is every Jew’s lot in life to cringe anytime a fellow Jew who happens to be filthy rich has the spotlight on them, particularly if said wealthy Jew has done something wrong.

It is the enduring nature of one of the primary negative stereotypes about Jews, and to Jews who know their history Bernard Madoff’s crimes come at the perfect time to fan the flames of anti-Semitism.

The economic depression in Germany in the 1930s, after the 1929 Wall Street crash, was worse than it was anywhere else in Europe, even worse than in the U.S., and scapegoating the Jews was central to the rise of the Nazis.

I originally was going to post something like a countdown to see how many days it would take before the exploitation of the fact that Madoff is Jewish makes it to the internet, but a simple Google search has already yielded stuff like this headline and lede from Friday:

Bernard Madoff (jew) arrested over $50 billion fraud

Apparently the assets of pension funds, mostly in the US and UK, were passed to Bernard Madoff by other jews for a massive Ponzi scheme.

It is unlikely he will go to prision or even be found guilty. jews never pay for their crimes in the USA (they own the USA).

I’d like to think that anti-Semites will never again be able to persuade millions of people to blame Jews for a nation’s economic woes, but all the evidence in the world that this won’t happen is still not enough to counter the post-traumatic fear response most Jews experience in situations like this.

Interestingly, Josh Marshall posted yesterday about Richard Whitney (decidedly NOT a Jew) whose story from the time of the Great Depression is similar to Madoff’s.

Does that bring me some kind of relief? Not really.

It took the Mars candy company to identify the REAL reason why I blog:

To get the girl:

This kind of thing happens to me all the time!

research indicates that the (r) after the name of a congressional republican stands for “reprobate.”

“Republican state lawmakers unveiled a set of budget fixes Monday worth $22 billion that would avoid raising taxes, cut deeply into education spending and dip into voter-approved funds intended to pay for mental health services and children’s health care.”

i swear, republicans would take alms from the blind and the crippled if they could.

“The plan also targets the state’s safety net of Medi-Cal and services for the needy, blind, aged and disabled.”

well, there it is.

we’ve known for a long time that republicans will cut the legs out from under those least able to help themselves, then sprint to the aid of corporate bailouteers.

but as the self-anointed representatives of the jesus industry, it seems like bad PR for them to enjoy it so much.

for anyone who enjoys the written word, this is a gorgeous piece of writing.

my compliments to roger cohen…

“…if this priest had the power to turn the wafer into the flesh and blood of God, and if the people gathered here believed that and were consoled, I was ready to bow my head in silence.

“That, it seemed, was why I had come to Guantánamo.”

Here in Bellingham, Washington we have great access to snow. Some say it’s the best of both worlds. Mild winters here in town and just an hour’s drive to great cross-country and downhill terrain.

For me, however, I get sad when we occasionally get some snow but it doesn’t stick because it’s not cold enough, or it turns to rain and the snow is washed away.

So when the temperature dropped into the twenties yesterday and the snow started coming down hard last night and I saw a forecast like this this morning:

I’m a happy camper.

To wake up to a neighborhood covered in that pristine, white powder that brings such quiet and tranquility, to bundle up with my wife and 11-year old son to head out with the sleds, to tear down a hill with the snow flying up in my face and the screams of delight from the playing children all around me, to return home after hours running up the hill and sledding down to enjoy a nice hot cocoa…

…well, it’s the kind of day that makes me happy on such a profound level, a happiness that merges with my newfound hope for the future, a future free from the deadly incompetent tyranny of the last eight years. It’s the kind of day that makes me feel so good that I’m not bothered by the usual annoyances we all face each day, not even when I check in here at the blog and see that we’re still being visited by rightwingnuts whom, incredibly, seem as wedded to their thoroughly disastrous political party as they did during the election.

I’ve gotten really angry at these rightwingnuts in the past. Today I just feel tremendously sorry for them…for a little while…and then I look out the window at my son packing up a supply of snowballs to pelt me with later and a huge smile is back on my face.

Oh the weather outside is frightful,
But the fire is so delightful,
And since we’ve no place to go,
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!

no one ducks trouble more adroitly than george bush.

the guy has tipped the world off its axis about as many ways as one person can, and yet he’s allowed to walk amongst respectable people. go figure.

still, he must’ve been surprised when he found himself staring down the barrel of twin loafers fired at him from close range.

On an Iraq trip shrouded in secrecy and marred by dissent, President George W. Bush on Sunday hailed progress in the war that defines his presidency and got a size-10 reminder of his unpopularity when a man hurled two shoes at him during a news conference.

“This is a farewell kiss, you dog!” shouted the protester in Arabic, later identified as Muntadar al-Zeidi, a correspondent for Al-Baghdadia television, an Iraqi-owned station based in Cairo, Egypt.

totally uncalled-for. i can’t imagine why the man would insult dogs this way.

In Iraqi culture, throwing shoes at someone is a sign of contempt. Iraqis whacked a statue of Saddam with their shoes after U.S. marines toppled it to the ground following the 2003 invasion.

throwing a shoe at someone is a sign of contempt pretty much anywhere, isn’t it? there aren’t many cultures that consider firing a pair of doc martins at someone a sign of affection.

Bush brushed off the incident, comparing it to political protests at home. “So what if a guy threw his shoe at me?” he said.

really? so, it’s okay with george if we americans put him behind a podium and throw our shoes at him? can we arrange a coast-to-coast tour here at home? where do i sign up? more importantly, where can i buy some track spikes?

* * * * *

update: a translation of what journalist muthathar al zaidi said…

First Shoe: “This is the gift from the Iraqis…this is the farewell kiss, you dog.

Second Shoe: “This is from the widows, the orphans and those killed in Iraq.”

so it turns out that in addition to being a complete failure at everything he’s ever done, george bush is also a serial liar about torture.

yes, i know, you’re shocked.

you didn’t see much about it in the “news,” but the senate armed services committee reported this week that the white house authorized torture of u.s.-held prisoners at abu ghraib, guantanamo bay, and who-knows-what other black prison hellholes bush is responsible for.

so, it wasn’t the work of a few bad apples. no one could’ve predicted that (if by “no one” you mean bush apologists and sycophants who think if the president does it, then it is not illegal).

more predictably, bush, dick cheney and the rest of the marquis de sade brigade lied from the get-go about these carefully premeditated war crimes.

i know, you are seriously scandal-fatigued where bush and his republican enablers are concerned. you’ve heard for years, over and over again, about the utterly appalling extremes to which this band of [insert epithet here] gleefully went. how eager they were to undermine the concept of american ideals, declaring all the while how much they loved their country.

and how those of us who couldn’t see that were in league with “the enemy.”

i know, you, like most americans, just want it to go away. so you can enjoy the promise of an administration, any administration really, that isn’t so obviously full of dark, poisonous sullage wrapped up in an american flag and sold to the lowest bidders.

but look — if we’re going to agree that some acts are so disagreeable that they warrant a landslide in favor of change, any change really, then we’re going to have to also agree that some acts are so profoundly vile that they warrant a reckoning.

a draining of the infectious wrongs still festering just beneath the collective consciousness.

a cathartic festivus, complete with a full prosecution of grievances.

we must agree that we aren’t simply going to say “mistakes were made, and now we’re looking forward, and i wonder what’s on my magnificent 42-inch plasma tv right now, because i’m bored with this subject.”

we can’t do that, see, if we intend to say, “never again” with a straight face — even though we know that, given our history, “never” really means “until the next time.” we need our illusions, after all.

Bush, on May 24, 2004, described what happened at Abu Ghraib as “disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values.”

dishonorable, yes. disgraceful, you bet. a few american troops? no, sorry, that fiction won’t mollify any more, if it ever did.

reconciliation is needed, if we americans ever hope to stand shoulder to shoulder on our storied high ground in the face of some future assault.

but before that, a requital is needed, if we americans ever hope to say, with a straight face, “there’s a difference between us and our adversaries. difference number one: we don’t torture.”