Your Ad Here

I appreciate the Albuquerque Journal’s eulogy for Lady Bird Johnson. She tried very hard to get America to clean up its act and to recognize that beauty should be commonplace and vistas should not be ruined by billboards.

I understand a eulogy is not the best place for the truth, but an editorial is, and so I’m disappointed that the Journal’s ignores the truth: Lady Bird lost, as did we all. Start at the Big I and drive in any direction. You’ll see countless hideous billboards within yards of starting, each blocking the magnificent vista of the Rio Grande valley. You’ll see hundreds before you leave the city or reach the stateline. The winners are corporations like Clear Channel, which invoke sacred personal property rights as a shield for personal profit. Everywhere you look, someone sticks a thumb in your eye and deposits another dollar in his pocket.

Beauty is blocked by blight. Greed won. Lady Bird is already spinning in her grave. mjh

ABQjournal Opinion: Lady Bird’s Legacy
Friday, July 13, 2007
Remember Lady Bird Johnson as a reason more wildflowers bloom along highways lined by fewer junkyards and billboards.
Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson, the widow of President Lyndon B. Johnson, died Wednesday at 94.
Known as the Environmental First Lady of America, she did more than plant bluebonnets. She translated concerns about pollution, urban decay, recreation, mental health, public transportation and the crime rate into national policy.
The Beautification Act of 1965 called for control of outdoor advertising, including removal of certain types of signs along the nation’s interstate highways. It also required junkyards along primary highways to be relocated or screened.
Her vision is distilled to perfection at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, with its woodlands, sweeping meadows and public gardens filled with native flowers and plants.
But the seeds of her advocacy for beautification scattered far beyond Texas. Her legacy can be seen perennially flowering on roadsides across America.

http://www.abqjournal.com/opinion/editorials/578102opinion07-13-07.htm

A Thumb in Your Eye

I’ve written about this before and will again (talk about Sisyphus). See http://www.edgewiseblog.com/mjh/category/loco/albahquerque/ (scroll down for more stories and photos).

Update: Thanks to Coco on Dukecityfix for the link and taking the discussion to more of Albuquerque.

Mission? Bungled by Idiots!

Like a giant stung by a tiny bee, the US went into a rage after 9/11 and declared a war without end against a small, faceless group armed with box cutters and donkey carts. After spending a fortune and setting fire to two countries, we find our enemies are more numerous and stronger than ever. Oops! DUHbya! [spit on the ground]

When you take off your shoes at the airport or stand in line behind someone buying the common ingredients for explosives, ask yourself if we’re on the right path. Do we simply have to run out the clock on the Gang that Can’t Shoot Straight (but shoots every-which-way)? Is there no holding Duhbya and BushCo accountable for MASSIVE INCOMPETENCE that exceeds all belief? Time for early retirement — there’s brush to be cleared in Crawford, while someone with intelligence attempts to fix this horrible mess. You can’t spell Wrong without Duhbya (he always is). mjh

U.S. Warns Of Stronger Al-Qaeda – washingtonpost.com
Administration Report Cites Havens in Pakistan
By Spencer S. Hsu and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers

Six years after the Bush administration declared war on al-Qaeda, the terrorist network is gaining strength and has established a safe haven in remote tribal areas of western Pakistan for training and planning attacks, according to a new Bush administration intelligence report to be discussed today at a White House meeting.

The report, a five-page threat assessment compiled by the National Counterterrorism Center, is titled “Al-Qaida Better Positioned to Strike the West,” intelligence officials said. It concludes that the group has significantly rebuilt itself despite concerted U.S. attempts to smash the network.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/11/
– – – – –

Resolute Amid the Wreckage, By Eugene Robinson

Allowing himself to be forced to retreat from Iraq would ruin George W. Bush’s fantasy of someday being seen as a latter-day Churchill. Bush keeps a bust of the British leader in his office, and he has praised Churchill as being “resolute.”

I know he’s read a book or two about his hero, so I can’t help wondering: Hasn’t Bush gotten to the part about how Churchill, T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell created Iraq at the fateful Cairo Conference of 1921? And how the object was to get British forces out of Mesopotamia, leave the fractious locals to their own devices and wish them the best?

“Our object and our policy is to set up an Arab government,” Churchill told Parliament later that year, describing the new country he had helped design, “and to make it take the responsibility, with our aid and our guidance and with an effective measure of our support, until they are strong enough to stand alone, and so to foster the development of their independence as to permit the steady and speedy diminution of our burden.”

Bush’s contribution is essentially to have destroyed the Iraq that Churchill cobbled together.

I don’t see how anyone can realistically expect Bush to change course at this late date. It wouldn’t be “resolute,” in his understanding of the word, to acknowledge that he made a terrible mistake. What he can do instead is play for time and hope for some sort of deus ex machina that miraculously saves the day.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/09/AR2007070901398.html

Nobody Named Scooter Lasts Long in Prison

The Commuter in Chief, By Eugene Robinson

Let’s put this in perspective. Martha Stewart is convicted of conspiracy, making false statements and obstruction of justice, and soon she’s decorating a prison cell. Lil’ Kim is convicted of perjury before a grand jury and conspiracy, and off to the big house she goes. Paris Hilton commits a crime that could be described as “driving while blond, vapid and obnoxious,” and next thing you know she’s freaking out in solitary confinement.

But when Scooter Libby is found guilty of perjury before a grand jury, lying to FBI investigators and obstruction of justice — basically the same crimes that got Stewart and Lil’ Kim locked up, and miles beyond anything Hilton ever did — George W. Bush intervenes to save him from the indignity of spending a single night behind bars. No home confinement, no ankle bracelet, nothing. Now that he’s paid his $250,000 fine, Scooter is free to scoot on with his life. [mjh: Of course, Republican stalwarts paid the money, not Scooty. How much did Fred Thompson donate?]

The reason Bush gives — that he accepts the verdict against Libby but thinks the sentence was excessive — makes no sense either. The remedy in that case would be to wait until Libby served a non-excessive amount of time in prison and then commute the sentence. …

What does make sense is that the president would feel responsible for Libby’s plight. Libby’s criminal lies were about his part in discrediting claims that the administration’s rationale for invading Iraq was bogus. Bush might have decided that since this is his war, he, not Libby, should be the one held to account.

Then again, Bush might have worried that sitting in prison, with time on his hands, novelist Libby might turn his pen to a nonfiction memoir of his White House years. “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” would have been a good working title.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/05/AR2007070501823.html
– – – – –

Shankar Vedantam – Bush: Naturally, Never Wrong – washingtonpost.com

The different perceptions of victims and perpetrators in [social psychologist Roy] Baumeister’s experiment are a result of a phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance, [Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson] argue in a new book titled “Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me).”

Aronson said the bias toward self-justification explains the administration’s shifting rationale for the Iraq war and why Bush could not have allowed Libby to go to prison: “If Scooter Libby, working with the blessing of the vice president, lied about what he did in order to protect higher-ups, he is a good guy, he is loyal. It is an exquisite example of self-justification because the good guys are defined as those who are loyal to the cause even if the cause is wrong.”

For Bush to have allowed Libby to go to jail, he would have had to live with the idea that someone who he thought was a good and loyal soldier was being punished for being a good and loyal soldier — a fairly extreme form of cognitive dissonance. The only way to keep such cognitive dissonance at bay, the psychologists said, was for Bush to see Libby’s prison sentence as overly harsh and do away with it altogether, even though Bush, both as president and governor of Texas, has long prided himself on refusing clemency to felons.

“He sees no inconsistency, just as we cannot see our own inconsistencies even though they are strikingly clear to everyone else,” Tavris said. “He is protecting one of his own, but his reasoning is consistent with the way the mind works to preserve consistency.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/08/
– – – – –

Death in Texas, By Sister Helen Prejean – The New York Review of Books

Bush wrote in his autobiography that it was not his job to “replace the verdict of a jury unless there are new facts or evidence of which a jury was unaware, or evidence that the trial was somehow unfair”….

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17670
– – – – –

The Daily Dish

“I don’t believe my role is to replace the verdict of a jury with my own,” – George W. Bush on why he signed death warrants for 152 inmates as governor of Texas.

The quote is from his own book, “A Charge To Keep.” I think that’s a debate-ender, isn’t it?”

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/07/quote-for-the-5.html
– – – – –

ABQjournal Opinion: Letters to the Editor

This ‘Family’ Is Above the Law

THERE’S BAD news, good news and great news about President Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s jail time.

The bad news is that in taking care of Scooter, who took the fall for Bush and Dick Cheney, the White House is finally OK with being indistinguishable from a criminal mob.

The good news is for all those “Sopranos” fans who mourned the recent loss of their favorite show; now you can just watch the nightly news on the Bush administration for your crime-family fix.

The great news is that now our children know that any criminal in the land can be above the law, as long as he knows the right people. …

JIM MULLANY
Sandia Park

http://www.abqjournal.com/opinion/letters/576832opinion07-08-07.htm

In the News

Almost 20 years ago, I was accused by the then-Dean of UNM’s Division of Continuing Education of “biting the hand that feeds me.” It wasn’t the first or last time I was thus accused — I take it as a compliment. At the time, an article had appeared in the paper in which a UNMCE instructor — vital to the program and long since gone — raved about the value of classroom training for computer users. I wrote a letter to the editor (this was years before blogs) saying classroom training isn’t for everyone. Heresy, albeit true. (I’ve found no perfect means for learning or teaching.)

I dredge this up as I think about UNM as a community. UNMCE has really made me a professional computer trainer. Foremost, my students deserve the credit for enduring and improving me, but UNMCE gave me many opportunities. I certainly could not have enjoyed self-employment (or, in truth, long-term semi-retirement) without the continued support of my friends, colleagues and students at UNMCE.

Even though Wiley Publishing has given me new opportunities, UNM continues to make what I do possible. Already, UNM has been much more generous about spreading the word about the book than Wiley has. (Does Wiley feel a nibble on its fingers?) UNMCE’s blog was the first “press” (beyond advertising) the book received. Now Benson Hendrix on main campus has written a very generous story for UNM Today: UNM Continuing Education Instructor Pens First Book [emphasis added]. (I am half-amused and half-embarrassed to be compared to Sisyphus, who is still toiling, if you believe such stuff.) mjh

PS: It occurred to me today that people will soon be asking, “what have you done lately?” Then my 15MB of fame will be full. (I’m tech-editing someone else’s book.)

The Web That Joins Us

So much about Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the Web was brilliant, but perhaps especially so the use of the word “web.” This Web connects us through tools Tim couldn’t have imagined — like blogs.

I am happy to write and, if you are happy to read, everything is great. But unlike so much media, a blog provides easy means for feedback. You are welcome to write me directly (mark@mjhinton.com). You are welcome to comment publicly (see the link near the end of each entry). I understand the hesitation in commenting, but it is part of the process — it’s good for us all.

Now, you are also welcome to rate any entry. Ratings are averaged and highest and most rated (high or low) entries are highlighted to the left near the top of the sidebar. (WordPress users may want to know this involves a plugin: WP-PostRatings.)

I assume many entries won’t warrant any rating at all. I also assume few will merit 5 stars and I hope none will merit 1 star. But the system is in place for you to use, to help me and to show other readers those entries they shouldn’t miss. mjh

Cal Thomas Defends Liberals — Tomorrow: Hell Freezes Over

Patriotism, By Cal Thomas

As with religion, some people on the right have used patriotism, which should be a unifying theme, to divide Americans. My liberal friends love America as much as I do. They might disagree on some, or all, of my political and religious beliefs, but that does not make them less in love with America, much less un-American. …

Leaders of many nations, including America, have used patriotism to persuade citizens of policies that are not always in their country’s best interests. Hitler’s deputy, Herman Goering, cynically observed: “Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

And still we love America for opportunities that do not exist in such proportion in any other nation. A person who criticizes a particular policy does not necessarily love his country less than one who supports that policy. G.K. Chesterton said, “‘My country, right or wrong’ is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying ‘My mother, drunk or sober.'”

After 231 years, we still try to make wrong into right and cheer the right and the nation that makes change possible when we succeed. That’s patriotism.

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/thomas070307.php3

Calcified Cal is never your typical conservative. I do appreciate him coming to the conclusion that even liberals can be patriots. I only wish he had trotted out the Goering and Chesterton quotes during the build-up to the Invasion of Iraq (Operation Enduring Fuck-up). Clearly, Rove has studied Goering. Where was Cal when the Talk Radio Brownshirts were burning Dixie Chicks records? mjh

The Longest Daze

I was surprised to learn some years ago that the latest sunset does not occur on the Summer Solstice, nor the earliest sunrise. Curiously, the days grow shorter and the sunsets later. A similar discrepancy occurs with the Winter Solstice. I was doubly surprised that I could grow so old and pass so many solstices before learning that and never observe it myself. And I thought I was educated.

To those few readers who noticed a long pause in my entries, thank you for noticing and for coming back. Forgive me, but the next few entries may be downers. Stay with me. mjh

PS: Please look at my Flickr photos. I’m depressed that so few people have seen what I regard as one of the best pictures I’ve ever taken. I have many newer pix to post but can’t bare for this one to sink unseen. Yes, that’s my heart you see on my sleeve.