Eugene J. McCarthy (1916-2005)

Gene McCarthy should be best remembered not as a sardonic, enigmatic, poetic and sometimes moody antiwar activist, all of which he was, but as a man of principle who took on a hide-bound Democratic Party establishment in the midst of the Vietnam conflict and toppled a presidency with a war policy built on lies, deceit and hubris.

In 1968, McCarthy triggered one of the most tumultuous years in American political history by forcing a national debate over Vietnam and the unbridled power of the presidency. Against formidable odds, he challenged Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire presidential primary election. Alienated voters flocked to his candidacy and LBJ, facing almost certain defeat, withdrew from the race.

(As it was, the Democrats nominated Hubert Humphrey, like McCarthy a U.S. senator and a Minnesotan, but unlike him a fallen liberal and party suck-up. The Republicans nominated a guy by the name of Richard Nixon, who kicked Humphrey's ass in the general election.)

I have no idea what kind of presidency McCarthy would have fashioned had his candidacy stayed alive, but I suspect it would have been as problematic as the man himself could be. That, however, is beside the point, especially when one considers the not dissimilar situation in Washington today: Is there no one to take on the Republican Party leadership in the midst of another conflict and topple a presidency with a war policy built on lies, deceit and hubris?

Asked once why he challenged the Johnson presidency, McCarthy answered by quoting from W.B. Yeat's "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death":

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds.

Death of an American City

I'm not in the habit of reprinting news articles or editorials verbatim, but today's lead editorial in The New York Times on the agonizing death of New Orleans is too important to paraphrase or excerpt.

If you're an American visitor to Kiko's House, hide your head in shame. Then get angry. Really angry, and figure out what you can do to stop this madness. If you're visiting Kiko's House from another country, then you have every right to believe that the U.S. has become "a feeble giant," as The Times fears it has.

The editorial:

We are about to lose New Orleans. Whether it is a conscious plan to let the city rot until no one is willing to move back or honest paralysis over difficult questions, the moment is upon us when a major American city will die, leaving nothing but a few shells for tourists to visit like a museum.

We said this wouldn't happen. President Bush said it wouldn't happen. He stood in Jackson Square and said, "There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans." But it has been over three months since Hurricane Katrina struck and the city is in complete shambles.

There are many unanswered questions that will take years to work out, but one is make-or-break and needs to be dealt with immediately. It all boils down to the levee system. People will clear garbage, live in tents, work their fingers to the bone to reclaim homes and lives, but not if they don't believe they will be protected by more than patches to the same old system that failed during the deadly storm. Homeowners, businesses and insurance companies all need a commitment before they will stake their futures on the city.

At this moment the reconstruction is a rudderless ship. There is no effective leadership that we can identify. How many people could even name the president's liaison for the reconstruction effort, Donald Powell? Lawmakers need to understand that for New Orleans the words "pending in Congress" are a death warrant requiring no signature.

The rumbling from Washington that the proposed cost of better levees is too much has grown louder. Pretending we are going to do the necessary work eventually, while stalling until the next hurricane season is upon us, is dishonest and cowardly. Unless some clear, quick commitments are made, the displaced will have no choice but to sink roots in the alien communities where they landed.

The price tag for protection against a Category 5 hurricane, which would involve not just stronger and higher levees but also new drainage canals and environmental restoration, would very likely run to well over $32 billion. That is a lot of money. But that starting point represents just 1.2 percent of this year's estimated $2.6 trillion in federal spending, which actually overstates the case, since the cost would be spread over many years. And it is barely one-third the cost of the $95 billion in tax cuts passed just last week by the House of Representatives.

Total allocations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror have topped $300 billion. All that money has been appropriated as the cost of protecting the nation from terrorist attacks. But what was the worst possible case we fought to prevent?

Losing a major American city.

"We'll not just rebuild, we'll build higher and better," President Bush said that night in September. Our feeling, strongly, is that he was right and should keep to his word. We in New York remember well what it was like for the country to rally around our city in a desperate hour. New York survived and has flourished. New Orleans can too.

Of course, New Orleans's local and state officials must do their part as well, and demonstrate the political and practical will to rebuild the city efficiently and responsibly. They must, as quickly as possible, produce a comprehensive plan for putting New Orleans back together. Which schools will be rebuilt and which will be absorbed? Which neighborhoods will be shored up? Where will the roads go? What about electricity and water lines? So far, local and state officials have been derelict at producing anything that comes close to a coherent plan. That is unacceptable.

The city must rise to the occasion. But it will not have that opportunity without the levees, and only the office of the president is strong enough to goad Congress to take swift action. Only his voice is loud enough to call people home and convince them that commitments will be met.

Maybe America does not want to rebuild New Orleans. Maybe we have decided that the deficits are too large and the money too scarce, and that it is better just to look the other way until the city withers and disappears. If that is truly the case, then it is incumbent on President Bush and Congress to admit it, and organize a real plan to help the dislocated residents resettle into new homes. The communities that opened their hearts to the Katrina refugees need to know that their short-term act of charity has turned into a permanent commitment.

If the rest of the nation has decided it is too expensive to give the people of New Orleans a chance at renewal, we have to tell them so. We must tell them we spent our rainy-day fund on a costly stalemate in Iraq, that we gave it away in tax cuts for wealthy families and shareholders. We must tell them America is too broke and too weak to rebuild one of its great cities.

Our nation would then look like a feeble giant indeed. But whether we admit it or not, this is our choice to make. We decide whether New Orleans lives or dies.

A World of Music

I'm a music freak but not necessarily an audiophile.

There isn't a musical genre that I don't like, although a half hour or so of polkas every few months seems to leave me more than satisfied. When I hit the power switch on my pre-amp, classical competes with rock which competes with reggae which competes with jazz which competes with bluegrass which . . . well, you get the idea.

But I tend to go years without upgrading the gear through which I entertain my polyglot tastes. I bought myself a magnificent McIntosh tube amp and AM-FM receiver and a pair of recording studio-grade JBL monitor speakers in 1978 as a reward for enduring the months long trial in Delaware's Chancery Court to determine which of the competing wills said to be left by freakazoid gazillionaire Howard Hughes was genuine. The New York Times paid me major coin to be their on-the-scene eyes and ears, and I knew that I wouldn't have another opportunity to invest in a hot stereo system for a long time.

I was right. I finally mothballed the Macs in 1988. A friend inherited the JBLs, which have undergone unspeakable torture over the decades but soldier on. With the exception of the DVD player, the system filling Kiko's House with Ella Fitzgerald as I write this is reconditioned Sony gear, as are the Bose bookshelf speakers, the whole lot of them several years old but just fine for my needs.

The one problem has been getting decent FM radio reception. Kiko's house is in an area with notoriously awful reception, which means that picking up the great public radio stations at the left end of the dial, all weaklings in the wattage department, is difficult to impossible.

Which brings me to one of the few product endorsements you're ever likely to see here: A marvelous and marvelously inexpensive device called HiFi Link.

HiFi Link is an audio processor about the size of a small flashlight (as in the little guys with two AA batteries) that connects your computer to your stereo, enabling you to stream any radio station with an Internet presence right into your living room. For more info, click on this link:

http://www.xitel.com/product_hfl.htm

HiFi Link has been nothing less than liberating for me. I simply click on one of the radio stations that I've bookmarked and watch the station's website load either Windows Media Player or Real Player and sit back and enjoy. More and more stations -- including WBGO-FM in Newark, N.J., the greatest jazz radio station on the planet -- are now broadcasting in High Definition Radio, which like High Definition Television dramatically enhances the quality of the signal. I don't have an HDR, let alone an HDTV, and probably never will, but the difference is breathtakingly better when I blast 'BGO through my factory outlet Sony-Bose system.

HiFi Link will set you back only $50 US, or a bit less if you shop around. I haven't tried it with dial-up Internet, but would recommend that you have DSL or some other form of high-speed service for the best signal with the fewest dropouts.

HiFi Link is a perfect gift for that loved one. If it's too late for Christmas, there's always Tet.

PS: Here's a link to WBGO. If you love jazz, you'll dig it:

http://wbgo.org

Bonus Quote du Jour

A little levity from Dave Barry, the past and present comic master:

The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery. They're the kind of people who'd stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn't bother to stop because they'd want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club.

The Secret Lives of Labradors

A new Australian government study reaches the shocking conclusion that Labrador retrievers spend most of their time sleeping or just lazing about.

Yes, the occasion shoe got chewed or hole dug, but cameras set up by researcher Amanda Kobelt revealed that labs did very little or absolutely nothing about 65 percent of the time.

Kobelt conducted the study to see what could be done to prevent problem behavior in dogs confined in back yards.

"What we have found is quite surprising," she explained. "Neither the size of the back yard, the complexity of the yard, the presence of another dog, nor the time spent with people, on its own or out walking, were related to dog behavioral problems.

What did appear to matter was the type of relationship the owner and dog had.

Kobelt said her research suggested that dogs with a very strong attachment to their owner were often more stressed and anxious when left home alone. These dogs paced around the yard or waited at the back door to try to get as close as possible to their owner.

She said techniques recommended by vets and dog trainers to reduce separation anxiety were useful like making sure arrival and departure times were kept low key.

Quote du Jour

From Ken Connor, past president of the conservative Family Research Council:

Here's the sad truth about money and politics today: Special interests "invest" in political campaigns as a "cost of doing business," expecting that if they ride the right horse across the finish line, they will get a "return" on their investment. Often, that return comes in the form of tax breaks, government subsidies, or some other form of preferential treatment under the law. Campaign contributions are viewed as a mere "down payment." "Maintenance fees" are seen as a means of preserving one's asset once it is in place. Some politicians are higher maintenance than others. Some are content with box seats at the Super Bowl or the Kennedy Center. Others prefer junkets which include golfing at St. Andrews in Scotland. Still others, like Duke Cunningham, favor luxury accommodations on a yacht, rather than a hotel room in the District. Most of this is accomplished within the bounds of the law, the law having been drafted by the beneficiaries of the lobbyists' largesse. Of course some politicians remain above reproach, but they are few and hard to find. And some, like the "Duke," get greedy and go too far. He is Exhibit A to the fact that the truism heard often in the investment arena that "Pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered" applies with equal vigor in the political arena.

Epitaph for the Grand Trunk Road

India has begun a massive 15-year project to upgrade its decrepit national highway system that will render the historic Grand Trunk Road unrecognizable.

The Grand Trunk is a bustling 1,600 mile highway across the breadth of the Indian subcontinent. It has a rich history and, as many a commentator has noted, few roads anywhere can offer a better living snapshot of so many strata of society.

Rudyard Kipling, the British novelist and poet, challenges my sensibilities in two respects. He was a misogynist and unapologetic imperialist. But boy could he write!

For me, this passage from Kipling’s “Kim” on the Grand Trunk Road includes some of the most exquisitely descriptive prose in the English language. The hero, Kim, is traveling the road with a lama who has befriended him.

Take your time. Let the words and sights and sensations and smells roll through you mind. Enjoy.

“Now let us walk,” muttered the lama, and to the click of his rosary they walked in silence mile upon mile. The lama as usual, was deep in meditation, but Kim’s bright eyes were open wide. This broad, smiling river of life, he considered, was a vast improvement on the cramped and crowded Lahore streets. There were new people and new sights at every stride — castes he knew and castes that were altogether out of his experience.

They met a troop of long-haired, strong-scented Sansis with baskets of lizards and other unclean food on their backs, their lean dogs sniffing at their heels. These people kept their own side of the road’, moving at a quick, furtive jog-trot, and all other castes gave them ample room; for the Sansi is deep pollution. Behind them, walking wide and stiffly across the strong shadows, the memory of his leg-irons still on him, strode one newly released from the jail; his full stomach and shiny skin to prove that the Government fed its prisoners better than most honest men could feed themselves. Kim knew that walk well, and made broad jest of it as they passed. Then an Akali, a wild-eyed, wild-haired Sikh devotee in the blue-checked clothes of his faith, with polished-steel quoits glistening on the cone of his tall blue turban, stalked past, returning from a visit to one of the independent Sikh States, where he had been singing the ancient glories of the Khalsa to College-trained princelings in top-boots and white-cord breeches. Kim was careful not to irritate that man; for the Akali’s temper is short and his arm quick. Here and there they met or were overtaken by the gaily dressed crowds of whole villages turning out to some local fair; the women, with their babes on their hips, walking behind the men, the older boys prancing on sticks of sugar-cane, dragging rude brass models of locomotives such as they sell for a halfpenny, or flashing the sun into the eyes of their betters from cheap toy mirrors. One could see at a glance what each had bought; and if there were any doubt it needed only to watch the wives comparing, brown arm against brown arm, the newly purchased dull glass bracelets that come from the North–West. These merry-makers stepped slowly, calling one to the other and stopping to haggle with sweetmeat-sellers, or to make a prayer before one of the wayside shrines — sometimes Hindu, sometimes Mussalman — which the low-caste of both creeds share with beautiful impartiality. A solid line of blue, rising and falling like the back of a caterpillar in haste, would swing up through the quivering dust and trot past to a chorus of quick cackling. That was a gang of changars — the women who have taken all the embankments of all the Northern railways under their charge — a flat-footed, big-bosomed, strong-limbed, blue-petticoated clan of earth-carriers, hurrying north on news of a job, and wasting no time by the road. They belong to the caste whose men do not count, and they walked with squared elbows, swinging hips, and heads on high, as suits women who carry heavy weights. A little later a marriage procession would strike into the Grand Trunk with music and shoutings, and a smell of marigold and jasmine stronger even than the reek of the dust. One could see the bride’s litter, a blur of red and tinsel, staggering through the haze, while the bridegroom’s bewreathed pony turned aside to snatch a mouthful from a passing fodder-cart. Then Kim would join the Kentish-fire of good wishes and bad jokes, wishing the couple a hundred sons and no daughters, as the saying is. Still more interesting and more to be shouted over it was when a strolling juggler with some half-trained monkeys, or a panting, feeble bear, or a woman who tied goats’ horns to her feet, and with these danced on a slack-rope, set the horses to shying and the women to shrill, long-drawn quavers of amazement.

The lama never raised his eyes. He did not note the money-lender on his goose-rumped pony, hastening along to collect the cruel interest; or the long-shouting, deep-voiced little mob —still in military formation — of native soldiers on leave, rejoicing to be rid of their breeches and puttees, and saying the most outrageous things to the most respectable women in sight. Even the seller of Ganges-water he did not see, and Kim expected that he would at least buy a bottle of that precious stuff. He looked steadily at the ground, and strode as steadily hour after hour, his soul busied elsewhere. But Kim was in the seventh heaven of joy. The Grand Trunk at this point was built on an embankment to guard against winter floods from the foothills, so that one walked, as it were, a little above the country, along a stately corridor, seeing all India spread out to left and right. It was beautiful to behold the many-yoked grain and cotton wagons crawling over the country roads: one could hear their axles, complaining a mile away, coming nearer, till with shouts and yells and bad words they climbed up the steep incline and plunged on to the hard main road, carter reviling carter. It was equally beautiful to watch the people, little clumps of red and blue and pink and white and saffron, turning aside to go to their own villages, dispersing and growing small by twos and threes across the level plain. Kim felt these things, though he could not give tongue to his feelings, and so contented himself with buying peeled sugar-cane and spitting the pith generously about his path. From time to time the lama took snuff, and at last Kim could endure the silence no longer.

“This is a good land — the land of the South!” said he. “The air is good; the water is good. Eh?”

“And they are all bound upon the Wheel,” said the lama. “Bound from life after life. To none of these has the Way been shown.” He shook himself back to this world.

Imagine

JOHN LENNON
October 9, 1940 - December 8, 1980

Good News in Afghanistan

In marked contrast to the dreary outlook in the U.S., a new poll finds that Afghans are optimistic about the future of their country four years after the Taliban was ousted.

The ABC News poll found that 77 percent of Afghans say their country is headed in the right direction — compared with 30 percent in the vastly better-off U.S. Some 91 percent prefer the current Afghan government to the Taliban regime, and 87 percent call the U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban good for their country. Osama bin Laden, for his part, is as unpopular as the Taliban; nine in 10 view him unfavorably.

Progress is fueling these views: Despite the country's continued problems, 85 percent of Afghans say living conditions there are better now than they were under the Taliban. Some 80 percent cite improved freedom to express political views. And 75 percent say their security from crime and violence has improved as well.

Slang Primer No. 2

One of the reasons I started this blog was to be able to scratch my various itches in public. That includes an abiding interest in slang. So herewith the second in an ongoing series of entries, this one drawn from Robert L. Chapman's marvelous Dictionary of American Slang (Third Edition).

GOOSE

(1) verb: By 1881: To prod someone roughly and rudely in the anal region, usually as a course and amiable joke: "As she was bending over her lab table, a playful lab assistant goosed her." -- Max Shulman

(2) noun: "He threatened a goose, and I cringed."

(3) verb: By 1930s: To exhort strongly and irritably; goad harshly. " . . . and goosed the media into hyping them." -- Washington Post.; "Every once in a while goose it with defense spending" -- Village Voice

(4) noun: "The whole bunch needed a good goose."

(5) verb: By 1940s: To run an engine at full speed or with spurts of high speed. "Vroom-vroom-vroom, he goosed the engine to full-throated life" -- Earl Thompson

Is Your Car Gay?

You might want to ask yourself that question after the Ford Motor Company bowed to a right-wing conservative Christian group and announced that it was pulling ads from gay publications.

The story was first reported in the blogosphere, but in the time it takes to say "rear-ended Ford Pinto gas tank explosion," the story had catapulted into the big time, including CNN, which reported that the two Ford executives who cut a deal with the wingnut American Family Association (AFA) to pull the ads are former Bush administration officials with impecible right-wing credentials.

Ford, of course, is hemorrhaging hundreds of millions of dollars a year because Japanese and Korean cars are running circles around its own boring products. In this context, it may make more sense to pander to homophobes than to stand up to bigotry and intolerance.

Maybe, but Ford's capitulation to the AFA is all the more craven (and stoopid) because the organization has proven itself to be clumsily boycott happy.

The AFA launched a nine-year boycott of Disney that had absolutely no effect. It also boycotted Crest toothpaste, Volkswagen, Tide detergent, Clorox bleach, Pampers, MTV, Abercrombie & Fitch, K-Mart, Burger King, the Carl's Jr. hamburger chain, Kraft Foods, Mary Kay Cosmetics, Old Navy stores, NutriSystem, and American Airlines. Then there was the Target department store chain boycott because it didn't use the word "Christmas" in its advertising.

On the flip side, Wells Fargo Bank recently told Focus on the Family to take a hike when the AFA's far-right cousin announced it was closing all its accounts with the bank because it contributed to a gay-rights group. Wells Fargo made it clear that it will spend its money as it wishes and not as the right-wing dictates.

Quote du Jour

Michael Oates Palmer in The Huffington Post:

Well, we now have a Hillary Clinton record. Four years in the Senate. But I’m not asking you to tell me if that record's conservative or liberal. All I’m asking is for you to show me an instance when she has taken a policy stand that was courageous, not cautious. When she was willing to voice a position on any issue where her stance was brave, and not just following Penn and Schoen’s pulse-taking on the current vox populi. She sure hasn’t been doing it on gay marriage: I saw her on television recently explaining why she was against it – and the senator represents a state where gay-friendly Republican politicians may as well be the state bird. (And if she's suddenly going to come out for Iraq withdrawal now -- it's only a matter of time before that stance will be the equivalent of her wearing a mesh trucker hat in the East Village on Bridge and Tunnel night.)

If a Hillary supporter can point me to one decision or vote she's made in the last four years where she took a stand that went against her best political interests – I’ll buy the first beer.

The Future Iraqi Air War

As thoroughly reported as the long U.S. slog in Iraq has been, there’s been little coverage of the ongoing air war against the insurgency. Which begs a larger question: The slowly reemerging Iraqi military has no air force. What happens after U.S. troops withdraw?

The answer: American troops will be replaced by American airpower.

Veteran investigative ace Seymour M. Hersh addresses some troubling questions surrounding that probability in a New Yorker article.

Some excerpts:

Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.

* * *

Within the military, the prospect of using air power as a substitute for American troops on the ground has caused great unease. For one thing, Air Force commanders, in particular, have deep-seated objections to the possibility that Iraqis eventually will be responsible for target selection. “Will the Iraqis call in air strikes in order to snuff rivals, or other warlords, or to snuff members of your own sect and blame someone else?” . . . a senior military commander now on assignment to the Pentagon asked. “Will some Iraqis be targeting on behalf of Al Qaeda, or the insurgency, or the Iranians?”

* * * *

The insurgency operates mainly in crowded urban areas, and Air Force warplanes rely on sophisticated, laser-guided bombs to avoid civilian casualties. These bombs home in on targets that must be “painted,” or illuminated, by laser beams directed by ground units. “The pilot doesn’t identify the target as seen in the pre-brief” – the instructions provided before takeoff – a former high-level intelligence official told me. “The guy with the laser is the targeteer. Not the pilot. Often you get a ‘hot-read’” – from a military unit on the ground – and you drop your bombs with no communication with the guys on the ground. You don’t want to break radio silence. The people on the ground are calling in targets that the pilots can’t verify.” He added, “And we’re going to turn this process over to the Iraqis?”

Well, let’s hope not.

Recall that replacing boot power with air power didn’t work in Vietnam, where unlike the Iraqi Army, the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) was not beset with ethnic rivalries and had trained alongside American ground and air troops for years.

There are no best-case scenarios here: Don't expect air power to work in Iraq, either.

Quote du Jour

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen:

"Defeat" may be too strong a word [for the situation in Iraq], but if so, that's only for the moment. If, in fact, U.S. troops pull out of Iraq anytime before their mission is accomplished -- the plan of some Democrats and the wish of a few Republicans -- then defeat is surely what this debacle will be called. Even if that does not happen, any victory that comes three years and more than 2,000 U.S. military deaths later than promised cannot be considered a triumph. Call it what you will, but at the very least it's a tragedy.

Yet the man who has had prime responsibility for Iraq, for planning for the war, waging it and then occupying the country, remains precisely what he has been all this time -- the head of the American military, the secretary of defense, the very honorable (but not very capable) Donald Rumsfeld. His mistakes, miscalculations and arrogant dismissal of dissent have cost American (and Iraqi) lives and prolonged the conflict. If there has been a worse secretary of defense, it could only be Robert McNamara. History has hung Vietnam around his neck like a noose.

War on Terror: The Good, Bad and the Ugly

Herewith an update on news pertaining to the War on Terror.

The good:

* Hamza Rabia, a top Al Qaeda operative, apparently was killed when a bomb laden CIA remotely piloted Predator aircraft slammed into his tribal hideout in the remote North Waziristan region of Pakistan. Rabia was believed to be an Egyptian and head of Al Qaeda's foreign operations, possibly as senior as the No. 3 in the terrorist group, just below Osama bin Laden and his lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahri.

* The days of having to surrender eyeglass-repair screwdrivers or manicure scissors at airport security checkpoints will end Dec. 22. Striking a belated blow for common sense, the Transportation Security Administration found that its security inspectors were spending too much time searching bags for objects that did not pose a real threat of taking control of aircraft.

The bad:

* The FBI, our favorite dysfunctional law enforcement agency, mishandled a Florida terror investigation, falsified documents to try to cover mistakes and retaliated against an agent who complained about the problems. The case dates to 2002 when the FBI’s Tampa office opened a terror investigation into whether laundered money was being used to finance terrorists overseas.

* In a scene right out of “The Andy Griffith Show,” four of the most dangerous Al Qaeda terror suspects imprisoned at a supposedly super-secure U.S. detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan picked the lock on their cell, changed out of their bright orange prison uniforms and made their way through the heavily guarded military base under the cover of night. They then crawled over a section of unsecure fence where a getaway vehicle apparently was waiting for them. They remain at large.

And the ugly:

* The former 9/11 Commission gave dismal grades to the federal government’s efforts to shore up national security and prevent another terror attack on the U.S.

Members of the commission, the creation of which was adamantly opposed by the Bush administration, gave the government more “F’s” than “A’s” among 40 grades measuring progress on the security recommendations they issued last year.

The panel gave the government an “F” on homeland security spending for the cities most at risk, on improving radio communication for emergency agencies (a problem laid bare in the wake of Hurricane Katrina), on airline passenger prescreening and on standards for terrorist detention.

The sole “A” was on vigorous efforts against terrorist financing.

Overall, there was one “A,” 12 “B’s,” 9 “C’s,” 12 “D’s,” 4 “F’s” and two “Incompletes.”

Since the commission’s final report in July 2004, the government has enacted the centerpiece proposal to create a national intelligence director, but has stalled in many other areas.

Former commission Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, said that there are too many competing priorities, including waging three simultaneous wars – in Afghanistan, in Iraq and against terror – and that made it hard to keep people focused.

Former commission chairman Thomas Kean, a Republican and former New Jersey governor, was more to the point:

We’re frustrated, all of us – frustrated at the lack of urgency in addressing these various problems. We shouldn’t need another wake-up call. We believe that the terrorists will strike again, so does every responsible expert that we have talked to. And if they do, and these reforms that might have prevented such an attack have not been implemented, what will our excuse be?

I will be even more to the point:

Al Qaeda is more intent on attacking the U.S. than the U.S. is intent on preventing such an attack. Period.

The War on Xmas, er . . . Christmas

Blogmeister Andrew Sullivan tells it like it is:

Yes, the season of good will is at our throats once again. . . . The perspective-free purists who object to department stores saying “Merry Christmas” are about as likeable as the fish-in-a-barrel-AK47 bloviators like Bill O’Reilly. I just wish both groups would find a very small, soundproof room somewhere, shut the door tight and yell at each other for a while. The rest of us can continue to love Christmas or hate it for our own individual reasons. For my part, I pretty much hate it. But I sure as hell don’t mind seeing a crèche on public property. I mean, c’mon, ACLU. Get a grip.

Brother Why Art Thou?

Does it merely seem like many – too many – recent U.S. presidents have had wackadoo brothers?

There was Jimmy Carter’s brother, Billie, who when not cavorting with Libyan president and terrorist Moammar Qaddafi played the country bumpkin role, which included falling down drunk. (He later beat his alcoholism.)

There was Bill Clinton's brother, Roger, who has had his own drinking problems, spent a year in jail for cocaine possession and brokered presidential pardons in the waning days of his brother's second term.

Now comes George Bush's baby brother, Neil, who has been jetting around the Far East with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, self-proclaimed messiah and Washington Times owner, promoting a . . . (I'm not making this up) $200 billion, 51-mile underwater tunnel between Alaska and Russia.

Getting It Up Going Down

Defying expectations, the market for Viagra and other impotence drugs appears to be falling well short of predictions.

The New York Times reports that new prescriptions for the drugs have fallen steadily this year despite heavy advertising campaigns costing more than $400 million.

Some of the decline is a result of reports that link the drugs to a rare form of blindness, but the biggest reason is that many impotent men have chosen to not take the drugs even though they are proven to work about 70 percent of the time and have relatively few side effects.

The combined global sales of Viagra, and its newer competitors, Cialis and Levitra, reached about $2.5 billion last year.

The Times says the drop in prescriptions for the impotence drugs is part of a larger trend that has affected other heavily marketed medicines like antidepressants and may be a sign of the limits of consumer advertising to drive demand for drugs.

So-called recreational use of Viagra and its ilk by younger men also seems to have peaked.

Dr. Michael A, Perleman, a sexual medicine specialist in Manhattan, said the drugs make only a marginal difference in the quality of intercourse for most men under 40. Says Perelman:

In many ways, if you have a full tank of gas or half a tank of gas, your car runs equally well.

Oh, Deer

I'm back at Kiko's House after a sojourn to the mountains to hang out at the Dear Friend & Conscience's (DG&G) pad while she's traveling.

It's about 220 miles roundtrip to her place and back. It's also deer season, which is to say the males of two species are in rut: the white-tailed deer and its camouflaged, rifle toting human pursuer.

I've gotten into the habit of counting roadkill when I travel during rutting/hunting season. The number of dead deer -- including a fair number of Bambis who were trying to stay close to their mamas -- never ceases to amaze me. The count this trip was 22, about two thirds of them splattered on a turnpike with narrow shoulders. Definitely an invitation for the poor dears to become disoriented and panic. Which they usually do.

If you extrapolate out my count of 22 roadkill in a short trip over a short weekend, the number nationally must run into the hundreds of thousands.

The point of all this?

Uh . . . drive carefully.

Slang Primer No. 1

One of the reason's I started this blog was to be able to scratch my various itches in public. That includes an abiding interest in slang. So herewith the first in what will be an ongoing series of entries, this one drawn from Robert L. Chapman's marvelous Dictionary of American Slang (Third Edition). Can you dig it, man?

BOY-TOY

(1) noun: 1980s: A young woman used like the plaything of a man: " . . . when she plays boy-toy to all your crush objects" -- Seventeen magazine

(2) noun: 1980s: A young man used like the plaything of a woman: "Paul Newman's 69 now and thinks being the boy toy of yet another generation of women is 'undignified' -- New York Times; " . . . a has-been silent screen legend and her young screenwriter boy toy" -- Newark Star-Ledger

(3) modifier: " . . . the times Madonna has whipped her boy-toy dancers on stage" -- Los Angeles Times

Rebirth of a Legend

By the end of 1970, the hardscrabble nation-to-be of Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) had been brought further to its knees by floods, famine and a civil war that left 10 million people homeless – most of them women and children.

I was living in Tokyo, where I was a reporter, editor and sometime foreign correspondent, and tried to get into Bangladesh with a photographer to report first-hand on the ongoing disaster. But the Indian government was denying news media access to Bangladesh, which for all intents and purposes could only be reached by first flying into Calcutta.

My interest in the plight of Bangladesh was further piqued when George Harrison and Ravi Shankar organized the Concert for Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden on August 1, 1971.

The concert came at an especially opportune time for this rock music-starved expat. The Beatles, as well as the so-called Woodstock Nation, were goners. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison were dead. Bob Dylan was in seclusion following a crippling motorcycle accident.

I coughed up 2000 yen or so and purchased the rusty orange-colored three-record boxed album of the concert at a store in the Ginza the morning it went on sale, brought it back to my tiny apartment and played it endlessly on my Garrard turntable, which was plugged into a puny 50-watt Fisher amp, which in turn powered a pair of Acoustic Research bookshelf speakers. (An aside: I think AR may still be around, while Garrard and Fisher -- once consumer electronic standardbearers -- are but distant memories.)

Anyhow, I was back in the states when a movie of the concert was released. The performances of former Beatles Harrison and Ringo Starr, sitar master Shankar, Billy Preston and Leon Russell, as well as surprise guest Dylan, were even more stunning on the big screen. Only Eric Clapton disappointed, and it wasn’t until years later that he acknowledged that he was strung out on heroin at the time.

But the big downer of the movie was the quality of the 70mm film, which was quite grainy in an era when high-quality video recording in darkened venues was still a dream.

All that is now history with a newly released two DVD box set of (most of) the Concert for Bangladesh, as well as complimentary documentary footage, which includes interviews and a pre-concert press conference. The original film obviously has been remastered, or whatever film engineering geniuses do these days, and the improvement is just stunning. The same goes for the sound.

The concert raised $15 million for UNICEF, a staggering amount in those days, and a portion of the sales of the spinoff CDs and now DVDs goes to the George Harrison Fund for UNICEF.

But the biggest legacy of the Concert for Bangladesh is that it was “rock reaching for its manhood,” as Rolling Stone perfectly put it in the magazine’s five-star review of the original album.

The concert probably would have been spectacular in any event, but what set it apart was that Harrison and Shankar recognized that musicians have responsibilities beyond performing and selling albums, and they acted on those responsibilities. Without the Concert for Bangladesh, would there have been Band Aid, Farm Aid and Live Aid, to name but a few of the superstar fundraisers that followed?

It may seem a little corny, but the worthy cause that Harrison, Shankar and friends embraced that night nearly 35 years ago made the music even better -- then and now -- and to my ears imparted even deeper meaning to the already mystical lyrics of the songs performed from Harrison’s seminal “All Things Must Pass” album.

Shaking Up the Evolutionary Tree

As you may have gathered from the very first post on this blog, the folks at Kiko’s House are crazy about birds. Even really, really old birds.

So we’d be remiss to not post the fascinating news, as reported in New Scientist, that the newly found and exceptionally well preserved archaeopteryx fossil shown here reveals that the oldest known bird was much closer to a dinosaur than previously thought.

Some nine archaeopteryx specimens have been found, but this one includes a foot and skull more closely resembling those of two-legged predatory dinosaurs called dromeosaurs than modern birds. It was the flight feathers on archaeopteryx's long front limbs that originally led paleontologists to identify the critter as the oldest know bird species.

How old? About 150 million years ago, or the Late Jurassic (as in "Jurassic Park") period.

Crap and Corruption

From Michael Kinsley’s column in today’s Washington Post:

Like medieval scholastics counting the angels on the head of a pin, Justice Department lawyers are struggling with the question of when favors to and from a member of Congress or a congressional aide take on the metaphysical quality of a corrupt bribe. The brazenness of the [Tom] DeLay-[Jack] Abramoff circle has caused prosecutors to look past traditional distinctions, such as that between campaign contributions and cash or other favors to a politician personally. Or the distinction between doing what a lobbyist wants after he has taken you to Scotland to play golf and promising to do what he wants before he takes you to Scotland to play golf.

These distinctions don't really touch on what's corrupt here, which is simply the ability of money to give some people more influence than others over the course of a democracy where, civically if not economically, we are all supposed to be equal. So where do you draw the line between harmless favors and corrupt bribery?

It's not an easy question if you're talking about sending people to prison. But it's a very easy question if you're just talking: The answer is that it's all corrupt bribery. People and companies hire lobbyists because it works. Lobbyists get the big bucks because their efforts earn or save clients even bigger bucks in their dealings with the government. Members of Congress are among the world's greatest bargains: What is a couple of commodes compared with $163 million worth of Pentagon contracts?

Hypocrisy Be Thy Name

The collision between religious orthodoxy and social reality can be pretty darned ugly, but the mess the Roman Catholic Church has made of its two biggest 21st century controversies – pedophile priests and homosexual priests – is enough to make Job spin in his grave.

My primary concern here is gay priests, but you can’t discuss them without a stopover at the sordid sexual abuse scandal that has rocked the church to its very foundations in the U.S., Canada, Ireland and elsewhere.

The sexual abuse of children is a mortal sin for Catholics, of course, but it is difficult to judge which has been worse – the priests who have fondled, sucked and sodomized countless young innocents or the cover-up of and indifference to their behavior from local diocesesan administrators up through the church hierarchy to the Vatican itself.

Homosexuality also is a mortal sin for Catholics, but that sexual orientation is increasingly and rightfully accepted by the social mainstream, including the Catholic laity. This has not prevented the same Vatican that turned a blind eye to pedophile priests to make public on Tuesday a new policy that bars gay priests and gays who want to become priests.

The ostensible purpose of the policy is to take a strong stand against the church's gay subculture. But the policy will have a doubly negative effect -- driving out celibate gay priests who are a threat to no one while discouraging celibate gays from joining an already depleted priesthood.

I have no personal stake in this. I'm not gay. My father was a lapsed Catholic and my own view of the church is that it is an enormously powerful and obstructionist guilt machine that has done more harm than good, notably in the Third World.

I do acknowledge that there is a connection between pedophilia and homosexuality in some instances, but there have to be a whole lot of gay priests – and gays who would like to become priests – who are on Pope Benedict XVI’s hellbound train for the wrong reasons. Chief among those reasons is the Vatican's need to find scapegoats for the church's own despicable conduct in the sex abuse scandal.

All of this brings us to the story of Mychal Judge, a 68-year-old priest and New York Fire Department chaplain, or Father Mike as everyone called the beloved Benedictine.

Father Mike was uptown at the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, where he ministered to the wealthy and homeless alike, when the first plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. He donned his FDNY chaplain’s uniform and rushed to the towers, where he briefly paused to pray with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani before running over to a dead firefighter and a woman who had fallen on him after jumping from the North Tower.

Father Mike had removed his fireman's helmet to administer the last rites and was anointing Firefighter Danny Suhr and the woman with holy water when he was struck in the back of the head and mortally wounded by a chunk of falling debris.

You may not realize that you know who Father Mike was until you reflect on the image above. Reuters photographer Shannon Stapleton's photograph, one of the most gripping images to come out of that horrific day, is a modern day Pietá. Yes, that’s Father Mike on the makeshift gurney.

You probably also didn’t know that Father Mike was an acknowledged homosexual. And so beloved that his death certificate bears the number 00001 – the first official World Trade Center casualty.

But as inspiring as Father Mike’s life may have been, not to mention his bravery on 9/11, he would not have been welcome in today’s Roman Catholic Church, which according to its new policy believes that gays "have no social value" and, moreover, "no moral virtue."

That truly is a sin.

On Second Thought

Analysts for a number of major newspapers that have been sharply critical of the Iraq war seemed remarkably in step today when it came to one aspect of President Bush’s speech at the Naval Academy.

As Tyler Marshall and Mark Mazzetti put it in the Los Angeles Times:

After months of a lingering disconnect between the White House and senior military commanders, Bush's comments also seemed to bring him into line not just with America's military, but with the rest of his administration.

Repeatedly, military commanders have made the case that only a draw-down of U.S. troops would make Iraqi forces take control of their nation's security. They also argue that the very presence of American troops — viewed as occupiers by most Iraqis — helps drive the insurgency.

On Wednesday, Bush finally seemed to accept the argument.

And the always observant John Burns, reporting from Baghdad for The New York Times:

For anyone who has spent time in the field with American officers here, President Bush's speech on Wednesday was a watershed: for the first time in the two years since the conflict here turned brutal, the war Mr. Bush described sounded much like the one his generals grapple with every day. . . .

Mr. Bush, in some passages of his speech, came much closer than he has before to matching the hard-nosed assessments of the war that have long been made by American commanders here, at least among themselves. While maintaining a stoic confidence in public, many of these commanders, over the past 18 months, have pressed behind the scenes for the Pentagon to move toward a more realistic appraisal of the war than has been common among major administration figures in Washington.

So let’s give the president credit for finally saying out loud what his commanders in the field have been saying sotto voce for some time.

But beyond that – and this becomes even more obvious when one reads the text of the speech as opposed to watching Bush make google eyes at a Teleprompter – the president was long on details (like how the Iraqi Army is being built up to the point where it will be able to hold onto territory that insurgents in the past would retake), but short on substance (like how the hell we’re going to get out).

As one pundit put it, Americans are translating Bush’s “stay the course” rhetoric as meaning “stay forever.” His speech did nothing to disabuse an increasingly restive public of that notion.

This News is All Good

More today on the Pentagon’s covert campaign to pay Iraqi newspapers to print upbeat stories about the war. As is often the case, it’s even worse than was first thought.

The New York Times reports that as even as the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development are paying contractors millions of dollars to train journalists and promote an independent Iraqi media in the mold of the independent Western media, the Defense Department is paying millions more to a Washington, D.C.-based public relations firm to buy off Iraqi newspaper editors and reporters in violation of one of the most fudamental journalistic principals.

The PR firm, the Lincoln Group, is paying about a dozen Iraqi journalists each several hundred dollars a month to do its bidding. In some cases, Iraqi newspapers were given stories ghostwritten by military information specialists that and ran verbatim.

One such story cited by The Times, headlined "The Sands Are Blowing Toward a Democratic Iraq," was scornful of outsiders' pessimism about the country's future. The opening paragraph:

Western press and frequently those self-styled “objective” observers of Iraq are often critics of how we, the people of Iraq, are proceeding down the path in determining what is best for our nation.

If all of this has a familiar ring, recall that the Bush administration produced pseudo television news reports that were aired without any indication they had been prepared by the government. The practice was stopped after the Government Accountability Office found that the reports violated a law against covert propaganda. The law does not apply to such propaganda abroad.

A spokesman for the Lincoln Group refused to comment. (Got that? A PR firm refusing to comment?) What Lincoln might have said is that there is a place for propoganda in war, and that's absolutely true. But I would draw the line well short of using bribes to get unattributed stories full of happy talk planted in a media that needs to take seriously its role in an emerging democracy.

This is where Edelman PR group CEO Richard Edelman drew the line:

We don’t pay journalists to be on our side . . . If a free media is a central aspect of a democratic society, then we cannot allow our PR industry to impede its development. It’s a perversion of our business, an intentional blurring of a clear demarcation between paid and earned media.